Child's Play

by Reginald Hill

  ‘No,’ said Wield.

  ‘No time to do anything. And a lot of what he did do wasn’t what you’d call good, was it?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘I did right to let him be buried up here, didn’t I, Sergeant Wield?’ She sought reassurance.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Wield.

  ‘And they’ll put his dad alongside him?’

  ‘I’ll make sure they do.’

  ‘Yes. Well, Mr Dalziel says he’ll see to it too. He’s a nice man, Mr Dalziel, isn’t he?’

  The idea was startling enough to penetrate the carapace of self-absorbed melancholy Wield had grown around him in the past few days.

  ‘What? Oh yes.’

  ‘And clever with it. He worked it all out, you know. He was telling me all about it, Dicky working at that same hotel and all.’

  It had indeed been a small triumph of ratiocination which Dalziel had only mentioned to all those who had the ears to hear without the legs or the rank to run away.

  With Commander Sanderson’s help he had pursued Miss Keech through Army Records, Richard Sharman through tax returns and Mrs Huby through London hotel registers.

  Miss Keech, now in hospital, had said nothing since the night she almost shot Lexie, so all scenarios were circumstantial. But the facts were that she had been an ATS corporal in 1944 posted to Maidstone, that there’d been an American negro unit stationed close by, that she’d married Sergeant Sharman and given birth to her black baby only six months later.

  ‘She must’ve worked fast when she realized she was pregnant,’ theorized Dalziel. ‘Caught the poor sod desperate for a bit of romance before he went overseas. Did he really believe his divorce was final? Who knows? In them days, who cared!’

  So had begun the course of events which was to start gathering its final momentum three years before when Richard Sharman, arriving one morning for his job as a relief barman at the Remington Palace Hotel, had glimpsed Miss Keech getting into a taxi with Mrs Huby after breaking their journey in London on their return from Italy. He thought he recognized his mother. Checking with the hotel register would have given him the women’s names plus their Troy House address.

  A man of action and impulse, he had caught a train north later that same day. By the time he found out where Troy House was, it was late evening. In any case, the women would have gone to bed early after their travels. Getting into the house would pose little difficulty as the animals had to be permitted almost total freedom of movement.

  And so poor Sharman had wandered into someone else’s receiving fantasy, just as Pontelli three years later was to be the victim of a situation he had neither created nor comprehended. It was a sad irony that he had almost certainly gone to Troy House in search of Rod Lomas, whose presence there had been revealed to him that same afternoon by John Huby, and who was at that moment keeping a vain vigil outside the Highmore Hotel.

  Now Wield gently turned Mrs Hornsby away from the grave and together they walked back towards the chapel where the single funeral car waited. As they approached another car drew up behind it and Dalziel got out.

  ‘Hello there. Everything go all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, thank you, Andy,’ said the woman. ‘It was nice of you to send them flowers.’

  ‘Think nothing of it. Will you excuse me and the sergeant here a mo?’

  He took Wield a few steps into the chapel porch.

  ‘You all right?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, sir. Look, I want to talk …’

  ‘Not here, lad! Show some respect. You won’t mind going back by yourself in that thing, will you?’

  ‘No. But what about …’

  ‘I’ll look after Mrs Hornsby,’ said Dalziel firmly. ‘I thought I’d take her out, cheer her up a bit. Spend my winnings.’

  ‘Winnings?’

  ‘Oh aye. Haven’t you heard. I collected from Broomfield. Dan Trimble from Cornwall got the job like I said he would.’

  ‘And Mr Watmough?’

  ‘Well, he didn’t get the job,’ explained Dalziel patiently. ‘Seeing as there’s only one Chief Constable at a time, I should’ve thought even a detective-sergeant could’ve worked that out.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I meant, what happened…?’

  ‘I think the Committee got the notion he had some funny hang-ups about gays,’ said Dalziel.

  Wield considered this, then said angrily, ‘You’re not saying that he didn’t get it because they thought he was gay, are you?’

  Dalziel regarded him curiously.

  ‘That’d bother you, would it, lad?’

  ‘From now on, that kind of crap’ll bother me a lot,’ said Wield grimly.

  ‘Easy,’ said Dalziel. ‘Two things for you to remember, sunshine. Coming out the way you did doesn’t qualify you to be a hero. What are you going to do? Wear red feathers and a tu-tu and demonstrate outside County Hall? Not your style, Wieldy. Second, it wasn’t because someone thought Watmough was a cryptoqueer he didn’t get the job. Oh no. He sticks out a mile as a cryptoqueer-basher, doesn’t he? But he didn’t know his committee! All these directives on cooperation and information, and he knew bugger all about Councillor Mottram, the chairman!’

  ‘You mean Mottram …?’ Wield looked at him in disbelief. ‘But he’s got a wife and two kids!’

  Dalziel shook his head in sorrow.

  ‘So had Oscar Wilde,’ he said. ‘Don’t be so square, lad. And keep your mouth shut about Mottram. Just because you’ve come up on deck, don’t rock the boat for them as prefer to remain down in the hold. You didn’t exactly make it with one mighty leap yourself, did you? Now I’d better not keep poor Mrs Hornsby waiting. There’s a lot of comforting needs done there.’

  He moved away, then paused and turned.

  ‘By the by, your sick leave’s over, as of today. I’ll expect you at your desk tomorrow morning. Don’t be late!’

  He glanced towards Mrs Hornsby and grinned ferociously.

  ‘On the other hand, don’t start ringing the hospital if I am!’

  Pascoe nursed Rosie in his arms.

  ‘It’s all over, kid,’ he said. ‘All done. All sorted out. With precious little help from me, I might add. I mean, what did I do? Like the Fat Man said, I got absorbed with peripherals, with intellectual speculation, moral problems and the romantic past. Only he didn’t put it like that, did he? What he said was … No, I won’t tell you, kid, even though you’ve got your eyes shut and you’re snoring. You never know about subliminal hearing and I reckon between us, me and your mum will do enough to mess you up without feeding you the gospel according to Andy Dalziel at such a tender age. Not that I think he was totally right. Once or twice I got close to things, once or twice I got close to being the wise, witty and wonderful dad you’re going to imagine I am till one day it hits you that really I’m as much of a child as you are, and then suddenly the child is truly father to the man and you’ll rather sadly leave me to my silly play and sally forth yourself to save the universe.’

  His perambulations with the sleeping baby had brought him before a dressing-table mirror, up-tilted so he could look down at his reflection.

  He regarded himself seriously, then said, ‘Excuse me, Inspector, there are still a couple of things I don’t understand …’

  Epilogue

  Spoken by Peter Pascoe

  The child is father to the man

  Wordsworth: My heart leaps up

  Statement made by Detective Chief Inspector Pascoe P. on the something of whatsit in the presence of a cassette-recorder and a bottle of Scotch, half full or half empty depending which way you’re going. Statement made voluntarily, without duress or Dalziel, which some allege are indistinguishable at dusk with the light behind them.

  Statement begins. But where? Two years is a long time in a cop’s life, almost as long as two minutes in politics. Better start with the Italians. Most things start there except for them as start with the Greeks. So. The Italians.

  At the time, the Italians weren
’t very happy about one of their nationals getting shot dead in England and no one getting his wrist slapped for it.

  Dalziel said, ‘Tell ’em the silly bugger died of bad parking. They’ll likely understand that.’

  The trouble was, Miss Keech ended up as one of Pottle’s patients in the Psychiatric Unit, far beyond confession or interrogation. We told the Italians that the bullets that killed Pontelli and Richard Sharman came from the same gun, but despite the condition of Venice, they obviously like things tidier than that. Perhaps in revenge, they pursued our initial request for information about Pontelli with slow thoroughness, and long after I’d forgotten all about the Huby will, a bulky envelope dropped on my desk.

  It contained a detailed account of Pontelli’s life and activities. The curious thing about it was that to all intents and purposes it began in 1946 and didn’t thicken out till the mid-’fifties. Before that it was all hearsay - in other words, what other people had heard the not very forthcoming Pontelli say. On his childhood there was nothing, not even any documentary evidence to support his claim to have been born in Palermo, though the Sicilian investigator made the point that many records were destroyed during the German occupation and the Allied invasion.

  I was getting the message now. Some Florentine joker was dropping a super-subtle hint that perhaps Pontelli really wasn’t their concern after all!

  I went to Dalziel with the report.

  He said, ‘It’s nearly eighteen months, Peter! I don’t have time to be bothered with things that happened eighteen days ago.’

  ‘What shall I do?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s dead,’ he said. ‘Bury it.’

  Next day I went to see Eden Thackeray.

  There was a new girl in his outer office, sleek, smart, elegantly made-up, sitting in front of a word-processor. The alterations extended into Thackeray’s own room. Dark oak and red leather were out. It was now a silky white and shiny chrome temple of hi-tech.

  ‘I thought, to hell!’ he explained rather shamefacedly. ‘If the old customers didn’t like it, I’d got newer richer ones who did!’

  ‘What about Lexie Huby? Didn’t she fit the new image?’

  He grew indignant.

  ‘She’s doing a law degree at Leeds University! Do you know, she got A grades in all her advanced levels, doing them at nights without referring to anybody? I have high hopes of that girl, very high.’

  I said, ‘Does she still see Rod Lomas?’

  He shrugged and said, ‘How should I know?’

  He always looked a bit embarrassed when the Lomas side of the family was mentioned. Rod and his mother had consistently denied any knowledge of Pontelli’s trip to England or his plans to claim the estate, though acknowledging that the late Arthur Windibanks might have put him up to it. As for the woman’s firm identification of the maple-leaf birthmark, she had become very vague about that, smiling sweetly at Dalziel and saying, ‘One sees so many behinds that they all begin to blur into one, don’t they?’

  Our hopes of getting them on a fraud charge arising out of their misappropriation of the rental from the Villa Boethius vanished when Eden Thackeray refused to cooperate.

  ‘We have the reputation of the estate to consider,’ he said primly to Dalziel in my presence. ‘Full restitution has been made.’

  The fat man just regarded him closely for a moment, then said, ‘You randy old bugger! I never knew what restitution was till now!’

  And poor Thackeray, attempting to look indignant, could only raise a blush.

  I showed him the papers from Florence and said he was welcome to them if they were any use.

  He thanked me gravely and said he would keep them safely filed though he could see no way in which they could be helpful.

  ‘There’s still a couple of things unexplained,’ I said provocatively.

  ‘And so they shall remain,’ he said. ‘This business has brought farce where there should have been decorum, and tragedy where there should have been delight. Soon there shall be an end.’

  ‘Soon?’ I said. ‘The Court of Chancery’s still considering the case, isn’t it? Doesn’t that mean another ten years at least?’

  ‘The days of Jarndyce and Jarndyce are long past,’ he said. ‘It will be months at most; perhaps even weeks.’

  I smiled disbelievingly. On my way out I waved dashingly at the new girl, who nodded back as coolly unimpressed as Lexie Huby had always been. I was glad to see one of her long eyelashes fall off and come to rest like a weary earwig on her damask cheek.

  That night I had a confused dream about that eyelash and Thackeray’s office and the whole Huby affair. It was silly. It was ancient history. The intervening months had been crammed with all the long tedium and sharp excitements which make up a CID man’s work. But it was only this case which invaded my dreams. I told Ellie. She said, ‘Guilt.’ I said, ‘What?’ She said, ‘You’re a sucker for it. It’s people like you that make repressive religious regimes possible. You’re always like this when you reckon you’ve missed something.’

  She was, of course, right. She usually is. It’s one of her least attractive characteristics. But she compensates by going wildly wrong when she tries to be too clever.

  ‘The earwig on the damask cheek is the clue,’ she said in her best Freudian manner. ‘It’s the worm in the bud, you see. Conscience, the curious mole, nibbling away. Something you’ve left undone.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ I said with confidence, for suddenly I knew all about the earwig on the damask cheek. Or thought I did. I had to send for Seymour the next day to be sure. He thought I was mad but was bright enough not to let it show too much. Also under pressure he turned out to have something like perfect recall. I’d noticed this before when he made reports. I complimented him fulsomely and he went away bewildered but content.

  Now I had a theory but nothing to test it in. Then three months or so later, I read in the Post that the Chancery judge had indeed pronounced as quickly as Thackeray had forecast. He had ruled that the waiting period in the Huby will was inequitable. PAWS, CODRO and WFE could have their money instantly.

  Ellie went into her indignant harangue about the iniquities of giving vast sums to cats, officers’ widows, and fascists. I made a few phone calls and a week later I was sitting in a small stuffy room next to the office of George Hutchinson, general manager of the Leeds Head Branch of the Yorkshire Commercial Bank.

  I felt curiously nervous and when the door opened, I jumped to my feet like a twenty-year-old in search of a loan for a motorbike.

  Hutchinson said, ‘Would you mind stepping in here, Miss Brodsworth? There’s someone who’d like a word.’

  A young woman stepped inside and regarded me incuriously with hard blue eyes. Behind her, Hutchinson caught my eye and beckoned, but I didn’t want to be diverted at that moment and I closed the door firmly in his face.

  Then I faced Sarah Brodsworth. With her tight blonde curls, rosebud lips and blouse-straining bosom, she should have been very attractive, but I did not find her so.

  I reached forward and gently squeezed her left breast.

  ‘Hello, Lexie,’ I said.

  The breast felt very real and for one awful moment I thought I’d got it wrong. My mind was already accelerating through apologies to Brodsworth, explanations to Ellie, and pleas in mitigation to the judge, when the girl replied, ‘Hello, Mr Pascoe. And what can I do for you?’

  I said, ‘Let’s sit down.’

  We sat opposite each other on either side of a small desk.

  I said, ‘Lexie, I’m sorry.’

  I don’t know why I said it, but it was what I felt.

  She said, ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I should have known two years ago, I ignored evidence.’

  ‘What evidence?’

  ‘The evidence of my own eyes, for a start. First time I saw your sister, Jane, she was wearing a low-cut sweater. What I saw down there had to be real! Then my constable found the wig and the falsies …’

  ‘
He was in my room? Illegally, of course,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s say accidentally. And he thought it was Jane’s room. But I should’ve known when he said he’d found the stuff behind some books. Jane doesn’t look the booky type to me.’

  ‘That sounds a bit élitist,’ she said. ‘Everyone reads.’

  ‘Milton, Byron, Blake, Wordsworth, a History of Grand Opera?’ I said. ‘My constable was amazed at what he could recall when I prodded him. I could have checked with Jane, of course. But I didn’t want to worry her.’

  ‘Instead you lay in wait for me here today and squeezed my tit? That was brave of you.’

  I said, ‘Do you want to tell me about it, Lexie.’

  She shrugged and said, ‘If you want to hear. I had a poke around Thackeray’s not long after I started there. They thought I was a bit of an idiot, so no one took much notice if I popped up in odd places. Just thought I’d got lost. I went through Aunt Gwen’s file. I’d been hearing about her fortune all my life so I thought I’d take a look and see how much there really was. I was amazed, I’ve got to admit. I’d thought there’d be a few thousand, but I could see at a glance there must be over a million! Then I saw where it was going. PAWS, CODRO, WFE. It didn’t seem fair somehow. In fact it seemed wrong. Especially WFE. I’d heard Aunt Gwen mention them and I knew what they were about.

  ‘I thought about it a long time. Then I rang Mrs Falkingham. I invented the name Sarah Brodsworth and told her I was a student and that I’d heard about WFE and thought it sounded interesting. She was delighted to have someone to talk to and invited me to tea. It struck me I’d better change my appearance. It’d be daft to find that Aunt Gwen had shown her a photo of me or something. Not that that was very likely, but it was silly taking risks. All I did that first time was to clip dark lenses over my specs, put on a lot of make-up, wear a beret and stick a lot of tissues into my bra! I felt really stupid! But as things developed between me and Mrs Falkingham, I started to do the job properly. I even got tinted contact lenses, which I realized after was silly as I couldn’t use them normally. But at least there wasn’t much chance of my being recognized, was there?’