On Beulah Height (30 page)

He said, "Looks like being a nice day."

She said, "In our house, the wet days are the nice ones."

She looked totally wrecked.

He said, "Didn't know you smoked."

"I gave up when I found I was pregnant."

Superstitiously, he thought, Then this is a bad time to start again.

She said defensively as if he'd spoken, "I need something, and getting smashed didn't seem a good idea."

"It has its attractions, though," said Pascoe.

He liked Jill. She was so determinedly down to earth in face of all temptations to soar. She and her husband came from the same lower-middle-class background, but their newfound wealth (no myth this; the salaries and share options of all the MY Water directors had been frequently listed in the local press in various articles critical of their performance) had changed her very little. Derek Purlingstone, on the other hand, had recreated himself, either deliberately or instinctively, and was now a perfect son-of-privilege clone.

Pascoe, Ellie, and Jill had spent the night at the hospital. There was a limited supply of "guest" beds, and the pressure had been for the men to go home, the women to stay. Purlingstone had let himself be persuaded. Pascoe hadn't even listened. "No," he'd said, and walked away.

"Sunday was such a nice day," said Jill. "You know, one of those perfect days."

Why the hell was she talking about Sunday? wondered Pascoe. Then he got it and wished he hadn't. She was looking for fragments to shore against her ruin, and Sunday, the last day before the illness struck, was being retouched into a picture of perfection.

"Everything went so right, you know how it sometimes does," she continued, after she'd lit a cigarette from her old one. "We got up early, packed the car, I was setting the table for breakfast when Derek said, "No, don't bother with that, we'll eat on the way," so we just chucked everything in, milk, cornflakes, orange juice, rolls, the lot, and we stopped after a while and had a picnic breakfast, sitting on the grass, and we saw an eagle through Derek's glasses, well, it wasn't an eagle really, Derek said it was a peregrine but the girls were so excited at seeing an eagle it seemed a shame to disillusion them, and you could see for miles, miles, I'd have been happy just to spend the whole day there, but the others were so keen to get on, and they were right, we hardly saw any traffic along the back roads and we got this lovely spot in the dunes--"

"I think I'd better head back," said Pascoe. "Let Ellie take a rest."

He saw from her face he'd been more abrupt than he intended, but he couldn't stand here letting a watch over the living turn into a wake for the dead.

Or was it just that this day she was reshaping was a day he had no part in? How far back would he need to go in search of such a perfect day, a day he had spent entirely with his family without any interruption of work? Or why blame work? Interruption from himself, his own preoccupations, his own hang-ups? In fact even when he was with Rosie, was most enjoying her company, wasn't there something of selfishness even in that, a use of her energy and joy as therapy for his own beleaguered mind ...?

He raced down the stairs as if running from something. The anger inside which had been his companion for so long now had an object, or rather a twin object--the world in which his daughter could fall so desperately ill, and himself for letting it happen. But there was still no way he could let it out. He reached his right hand in the air, as if it had somehow escaped and he was trying to claw it back inside of him.

A figure was standing on the landing below, looking up at him. Embarrassed, he tried to pretend he was doing a one-armed yawn. Then he saw who it was and stopped bothering.

"Wieldy!" he said. "What brings you here?"

This was probably the stupidest question he'd ever asked, but it didn't matter because now he had reached the landing and he did not resist as his impetus took him into the other's waiting embrace.

They held on to each other for a long moment, then Wield broke away and said, "I saw Ellie. She said she thought you'd be up on the roof. Pete, I'm sorry I didn't get here last night. ..."

"Christ, you must have left last night to get here so early this morning."

"Yeah, well, I'm an early riser. Ellie says there's no change."

"No, but there was definitely something last night. Ellie was out of the room and I was talking to Rosie and just for a moment I thought she was going to come out of it. ... I wasn't imagining it, really I wasn't ... she definitely reacted. ..."

"That's great," said Wield. "Listen, everyone's ... well, you know. Andy's really cut up."

"Yes. We spoke on the phone. He sounded ... angry. Which was how I felt. Still do. I've been feeling angry for a long time now, you know, a sort of generalized anger at ... things. What I had at home was my refuge from that. Now I've got something specific to be angry about, but it's taken my refuge too. ..." He rubbed his hand over his thin, pale face, and had a sudden certainty that that other Peter Pascoe had made the same gesture as he waited for the light to break for the last time on that gray morning in 1917.

"Pete, listen, I almost didn't come, don't ask me why, it was stupid, I felt scared. ..."

"That's okay. I hate these places too," Pascoe assured him.

"No. Look, only reason I'm mentioning it is, now I'm glad. Because I think it will be all right. Since I got here, that's how I've felt. I'd not say it else."

They stood and looked at each other for a moment, then, embarrassed, looked away.

Pascoe said, "Thanks, Wieldy. How're things going, anyway--with the case, I mean? Andy said something about you bringing in a possible."

"Aye. Fellow called Geordie Turnbull. Has a contracting business. If you read the Dendale file, you might recall he was a possible back then too. So, big coincidence, but I doubt if it's going to come to anything this time either."

"No. Pity," said Pascoe, unable to drum up a great deal of interest. Then, ashamed, he said, "Do you know if Andy did anything about my appointment with Jeannie Plowright this morning?"

"Aye. He's put Novello on it."

Pascoe smiled wanly.

"Oh, well. It wasn't such a good idea anyway."

"Sounds a bit sexist, that," said Wield.

"No, she's a good cop. I just think Andy would have gone himself if he'd felt there was the faintest hope of turning anything up."

"Andy's going to be too busy turning the thumbscrews at Danby, which is where I'm on my way to."

"You've taken the long way round. Thanks a lot, Wieldy."

"Aye well. I'll keep in touch. Keep your chin up. Cheers."

"Cheers."

He touched the younger man's arm, then turned and walked away.

Pascoe watched him go. There had been comfort in the contact, no denying it. But now he was alone again, looking for something to blame. What had he narrowed it down to as he ran down the stairs? Oh, yes. The world and himself.

He went back into the ward.

"You saw Wieldy?" asked Ellie.

"Yes."

"It was good to see him," she said.

"Yes."

He looked from her face to Rosie's, from the blossom to the bud, and felt that if anything happened here, there was no way to duck responsibility, and no way to bear it either. The world was safe. His rage would have to strike where its shadow began.

"Why don't you take a walk?" he said gently. "Jill's up on the roof, having a smoke. Or get yourself a coffee. Go on. I'll stay."

"Okay," she said, unable to resist the gentle force of his will. "I won't be long."

She went out of the room like a woman sleepwalking.

Shit, he thought. She blames herself too. Which is crazy, when it's all my fault. Everything's my fault.

"Even England not winning the Test is my fault," he said out loud. "You hear that, kid? Your father may not have a million in share options, but probably even the water shortage is down to him as well."

This old technique of exaggerating fears till they reached absurdity seemed to work. He sat down by the bed and took his daughter's hand.

"That's right, it's me, dear," he said. "But you'd know that anyway. My smooth, soft concert pianist's fingers are completely different from those rough, calloused stumps of your mum's. But she will spend all day up to the elbows in soapy water when she's not outside picking sisal."

He paused. They'd asked if talking to Rosie would help and got a noncommittal "Can't do any harm." Great. But could she hear? That was what he needed to know. No. Not needed. While there was the faintest chance of the sound of his voice having any effect, he would talk till his larynx was raw. But what to say? He doubted if his introspective ramblings could be all that therapeutic. How could it help for Rosie to know that her dad was a self-absorbed neurotic?

He looked around for the pile of stuff they'd brought in for Rosie, favorite dolls, clothes, books--a great pile to reassure themselves she would soon be convalescent.

At the top was Nina and the Nix. He picked it up, opened it, and began to read aloud.

"Once there were a nix lived by a pool in a cave under a hill. ..."

Hattersley proved to be a large, sprawling development on the southwest fringe of Sheffield. Its design made Hampton Court Maze look like a short one-way street, and confusion was further confounded by the use of the Bronte family as the sole source of street names. Even the inclusion of Maria and Elizabeth, the two sisters who died in childhood, meant there were only seven names to play with, and this deficiency had been overcome by applying each to a street, a road, a way, a crescent, an avenue, a grove, a place, a lane, a boulevard, and a close.

It was, decided Novello, the place that delinquent postmen got sent to.

It took her half an hour to find her way to Branwell Close and when she did, she didn't get out of the car straightaway, not because she was hot and flustered (which she was), but because of the nature of No. 9.

Her job had often taken her to houses which looked so neglected, it came as a surprise to discover people were actually living there. The Fleck bungalow produced the same effect by opposite means. It looked more like an architect's model than the real thing, with its paintwork so bright, its brickwork so perfectly pointed, its little lawn such an exact square of emerald green, its borders so carefully combed, its flowers so precisely planted, its windows so gleamingly polished, its lace curtains so symmetrically hung, and its wrought iron gate so brightly burnished, that when she finally plucked up courage to make an approach, she hesitated to touch the shining latch and tread on the pastel pink flags of the arrow-straight path.

Then a lace curtain twitched and the spell was broken.

The front door opened before she reached it, presumably to save the doorbell from the danger of an alien print.

Winifred Fleck was the kind of thin, straight, pared-down woman who cannot be said to have reached fifty but rather looks as if she has always been there. She wore a nylon overall as sterile as a surgeon's smock, and her right hand held a duster of such a shocking yellow, dust probably flew away at the very sight of it.

"Mrs. Fleck?" said Novello.

"Yes."

"I'm Detective Constable Novello, Mid-Yorkshire CID," she said displaying her warrant card. "It's about your aunt, Mrs. Agnes Lightfoot. I believe she used to live with you."

She used the past tense almost without thinking. The glimpse of the interior through the open door confirmed that the gods of geometry and hygiene ruled inside also. No way was an elderly relative being cared for within these walls, not unless she was moribund and pinned down in a straitjacket of starched white sheets.

"Yes," said Winifred Fleck.

Words, too, were contaminants, it seemed. The fewer you used, the less the risk.

"So what happened? Did she die, Mrs. Fleck?"

Novello tried to infuse a suitable degree of sympathy into her tone but felt that she wasn't altogether successful. Sympathy seemed a commodity which would be wasted here. Also, if truth were told, she couldn't help hoping that the old lady had passed peacefully away. Then she could abandon this wild goose chase and get back to the real work going on around Danby without her.

"No," said Mrs. Fleck.

"No?" echoed Novello. This woman clearly needed some form of accelerant to get her going. Coldly she considered the possibilities, carefully selected the best.

"Perhaps we could talk about this inside? It's so warm out here, I'm sweating cobbles. I'd give my right arm for a cold drink and a fag."

Novello didn't smoke. But the threat of her presence in this temple of hygiene, spraying perspiration and ash all over the place, must be good for a trade-off.

It was.

"She's at Wark House."

"Sorry?" said Novello mishearing workhouse, and thinking this was a bit blunt, even for South Yorkshire.

"Wark House. The nursing home."

"Ah, yes. But she did live with you?"

"For a while. Then she got to be too much. With my back."

"I see. How long was it she lived here, then?"

"Four years, nigh on."

"Four years. And then she got to be too much?"

Mrs. Fleck glared as if sensing a slight.

"She had another stroke. We couldn't manage her. Not with my back."

We. So there was a Mr. Fleck. Probably hanging up in a cupboard so's not to crease the antimacassars.

"And she's still alive?"

"Oh, yes."

That sounded certain, if unenthusiastic.

"You visit her?"

"I look in if I'm up there. I help out sometimes. Just the light work now. With my back."

Plowright had said she'd been a care assistant in a nursing home. With her back!

Novello reproached herself for lack of charity. The woman had, after all, taken her aunt in when there was no one else to look after her. And it was one thing taking care of an old lady who was a bit doddery, but quite another nursing a bedridden invalid. Novello wondered how she'd cope, shuddered at the thought, and gave Mrs. Fleck a guilt-inspired smile as she said, "If you'd give me the address, I'll not take up any more of your time."