Asking For The Moon dap-16

by Reginald Hill

  Dalziel was standing by the desk. Against the window leaned the long painting of the pre-Raphaelite girl, face to the glass. Where it had hung on the wall was a safe, wide open and empty. On the desk under the sharply focused rays of the desk lamp lay what Pascoe took to be its contents.

  'What the hell's going on?' demanded Pascoe, half relieved, half bewildered.

  'Tell you in a minute,' said Dalziel, resuming his examination of the papers.

  'No, sir,' said Pascoe with growing anger. 'You'll tell me now. You'll tell me exactly what you're doing going through private papers without a warrant! And how the hell did you get into that safe?'

  'I've got you to thank for that, Peter,' said Dalziel without looking up.

  'What?

  'It was you who put Eliot in touch with our crime prevention officer, wasn't it? I did an efficiency check the other morning, went through all the files. There it was. Eliot, George. He really wanted the works, didn't he? What's he got out there? I thought. The family jewels? I checked with the firm who did the fitting. I know the manager, as it happens. He's a good lad; bit of a ladies' man, but clever with it.'

  'Oh God!' groaned Pascoe. 'You mean you got details of the alarm system and a spare set of keys!'

  'No, I didn't!' said Dalziel indignantly. 'I had to work it out for myself mainly.'

  He had put on his wire-rimmed National Health spectacles to read the documents from the safe and now he glared owlishly at Pascoe over them.

  'Do you understand figures?' he asked. 'It's all bloody Welsh to me.'

  Pascoe consciously resisted the conspiratorial invitation.

  'I've heard nothing so far to explain why you're breaking: he law, sir,' he said coldly. 'What's George Eliot supposed •o have done?'

  'What? Oh, I see. It's the laws of hospitality and friendship you're worried about! Nothing, nothing. Set your mind at rest, lad. It's nowt to do with your mate. Only indirectly. Look, this wasn't planned, you know. I mean, how could I plan all that daft ghost business? No, it was just that the Fletcher business was getting nowhere…'

  'Fletcher?'

  'Hey, here's your income tax file. Christ! Is that what your missus gets just for chatting to students? It's more than you!'

  Pascoe angrily snatched the file from Dalziel's hands. The fat man put on his sympathetic, sincere look.

  'Never fret, lad. I won't spread it around. Where was I? Oh yes, Fletcher. I've got a feeling about that fellow. The tip-off sounded good. Not really my line, though. I got Inspector Marwood on the Fraud Squad interested, though. All he could come up with was that a lot of Fletcher's business interests had a faint smell about them, but that was all. Oh yes, and Fletcher's accountants were the firm your mate Eliot's a partner in.'

  'That's hardly a startling revelation,' sneered Pascoe.

  'Did you know?'

  'No. Why should I?'

  'Fair point,' said Dalziel. 'Hello, hello.'

  He had found an envelope among the files. It contained a single sheet of paper which he examined with growing interest. Then he carefully refolded it, replaced it in the envelope and began to put all the documents read or unread back into the safe.

  'Marwood told me as well, though, that Fletcher and Eliot seemed to be pretty thick at a personal level. And he also said the Fraud Squad would love to go over Fletcher's accounts with a fine-tooth comb.'

  'Why doesn't he get himself a warrant then?'

  'Useless, unless he knows what he's looking for. My tipster was too vague. Often happens with first-timers. They want it to be quick and they overestimate our abilities.'

  'Is that possible?' marvelled Pascoe.

  'Oh aye. Just. Are you going to take that file home?'

  Reluctantly, Pascoe handed his tax file back to Dalziel, who thrust it in with the others, slammed the safe, then did some complicated fiddling with a bunch of keys.

  'There,' he said triumphantly, 'all locked up and the alarm set once more. No harm to anyone. Peter, do me a favour. Put that tart's picture back up on the wall. I nearly did my back getting it down. I'll go and mend the fire and pour us a drink.'

  'I am not involved in this!' proclaimed Pascoe. But the fat man had gone.

  When Pascoe came downstairs after replacing the picture, Dalziel was not to be found in the living-room. Pascoe tracked him to the kitchen, where he found him on his hands and knees, feeding pressed calves-tongue to the kittens.

  'So you found 'em,' said Dalziel. 'That's what brought you back. Soft bugger.'

  'Yes. And I take it I needn't go out again. There's no snout'll be ringing at one o'clock. That was you while I was freezing outside, wasn't it?'

  'I'm afraid so. I thought it best to get you out of the way. Sorry, lad, but I mean, this fellow Eliot is a mate of yours and I didn't want you getting upset.'

  'I am upset,' said Pascoe. 'Bloody upset.'

  'There!' said Dalziel triumphantly. 'I was right, wasn't I? Let's get that drink. These buggers can look after themselves.'

  He dumped the rest of the tongue on to the kitchen floor and rose to his feet with much wheezing.

  'There it is then, Peter,' said Dalziel as they returned to '. he living-room. 'It was all on the spur of the moment. When Mrs Eliot suggested we spend. a night here to look for her ghosts, I just went along to be sociable. I mean, you can't 3e rude to a woman like that, can you? A sudden shock, and: hat dress might have fallen off her nipples. I'd no more. mention of really coming out here than of going teetotal! But next morning I got to thinking. If we could just get a bit of i pointer where to look at Fletcher… And I remembered you saying about Eliot doing your accounts at home.'

  'Income tax!' snorted Pascoe. 'Does that make me a crook? Or him either?'

  'No. It was just a thought, that's all. And after I'd talked to Crime Prevention, well, it seemed worth a peek. So come down off your high horse. No harm done. Your mate's not in trouble, OK? And I saw nowt in his safe to take action on. So relax, enjoy your drink. I poured you brandy, the scotch is getting a bit low. That all right?'

  Pascoe didn't answer but sat down in the deep old armchair and sipped his drink reflectively. Spur of the moment, Dalziel had said. Bloody long moment, he thought. And what spur? There was still something here that hadn't been said.

  'It won't do,' he said suddenly.

  'What's that?'

  'There's got to be something else,' insisted Pascoe. 'I mean, I know you, sir. You're not going to do all this just on the off-chance of finding something to incriminate Fletcher in George's safe. There has to be something else. What did you expect to find, anyway? A signed confession? Come to that, what did you find?'

  Dalziel looked at him, his eyes moist with sincerity.

  'Nowt, lad. Nowt. I've told you. There'll be no action taken as a result of anything I saw tonight. None. There's my reassurance. It was an error of judgement on my part. I admit it. Now does that satisfy you?'

  'No, sir, to be quite frank it doesn't. Look, I've got to know. These people are my friends. You say that they're not mixed up in anything criminal, but I still need to know exactly what is going on. Or else I'll start asking for myself.'

  He banged his glass down on the arm of his chair so vehemently that the liquor slopped out.

  'It'll burn a hole, yon stuff,' said Dalziel, slandering the five-star cognac which Pascoe was drinking.

  'I mean it, sir,' said Pascoe quietly. 'You'd better understand that.'

  'All right, lad,' said Dalziel. 'I believe you. You might not like it though. You'd better understand that.'

  'I'll chance it,' replied Pascoe.

  Dalziel regarded him closely, then relaxed with a sigh.

  'Here it is then. The woman Giselle is having a bit on the side with Fletcher.'

  Pascoe managed an indifferent shrug.

  'It happens,' he said, trying to appear unsurprised. In fact, why was he surprised? Lively, sociable, physical Giselle and staid, self-contained, inward-looking George. It was always on the cards.

 
; 'So what?' he added in his best man-of-the-world voice.

  'So if by any chance, Eliot did have anything which might point us in the right direction about Fletcher…'

  Pascoe sat very still for a moment.

  'Well, you old bastard!' he said. 'You mean you'd give him good reason to do the pointing! You'd let him know about Giselle… Jesus wept! How low can you get?'

  'I could have just let him know in any case without checking first to see if it was worthwhile,' suggested Dalziel, unabashed.

  'So you could!' said Pascoe in mock astonishment. 'But you held back, waiting for a chance to check it out! Big of you! You get invited to spend the night alone in complete strangers' houses all the time! And now you've looked and found nothing, what are you going to do? Tell him just on the off-chance?'

  'I didn't say I'd found nothing,' said Dalziel.

  Pascoe stared at him.

  'But you said there'd be no action!' he said.

  'Right,' said Dalziel. 'I mean it. I think we've just got to sit back and wait for Fletcher, to fall into our laps. Or be pushed. What I did find was a little anonymous letter telling Eliot what his wife was up to. Your mate knows, Peter. From the postmark he's known for a few weeks. He's a careful man, accountants usually are. And I'm sure he'd do a bit of checking first before taking action. It was just a week later that my telephone rang and that awful disguised voice told me to check on Fletcher. Asked for me personally. I dare say you've mentioned my name to Eliot, haven't you, Peter?'

  He looked at the carpet modestly.

  'Everyone's heard of you, sir,' said Pascoe. 'So what happens now?'

  'Like I say. Nothing. We sit and wait for the next call. It should be a bit more detailed this time, I reckon. I mean, Eliot must have realized that his first tip-off isn't getting results and now his wife's moved back into town to be on Fletcher's doorstep again, he's got every incentive.'

  Pascoe looked at him in surprise.

  'You mean the ghosts…'

  'Nice imaginative girl, that Giselle! Not only does she invent a haunting to save herself a two hours' drive for her kicks, but she cons a pair of thick bobbies into losing their sleep over it. I bet Fletcher fell about laughing! Well I'm losing no more! It'll take all the hounds of hell to keep me awake.'

  He yawned and stretched. In mid-stretch there came a terrible scratching noise and the fat man froze like a woodcut of Lethargy on an allegorical frieze.

  Then he laughed and opened the door.

  The black cat looked up at him warily but her kittens had no such inhibitions and tumbled in, heading towards the fire with cries of delight.

  'I think your mates have got more trouble than they know,' said Dalziel.

  Next morning Pascoe rose early and stiffly after a night spent on a sofa before the fire. Dalziel had disappeared upstairs to find himself a bed and Pascoe assumed he would still be stretched out on it. But when he looked out of the living-room window he saw he was wrong.

  The sun was just beginning to rise behind the orchard and the fat man was standing in front of the house watching the dawn.

  A romantic at heart, thought Pascoe sourly.

  A glint of light flickered between the trunks of the orchard trees, flamed into a ray and began to move across the frosty lawn towards the waiting man. He watched its progress, striking sparks off the ice-hard grass. And when it reached his feet he stepped aside.

  Pascoe joined him a few minutes later.

  'Morning, sir,' he said. 'I've made some coffee. You're up bright and early.'

  'Yes,' said Dalziel, scratching his gut vigorously. 'I think I've picked up a flea from those bloody cats.'

  'Oh,' said Pascoe. 'I thought you'd come to check on the human sacrifice at dawn. I saw you getting out of the way of the sun's first ray.'

  'Bollocks!' said Dalziel, looking towards the house, which the sun was now staining the gentle pink of blood in a basin of water.

  'Why bollocks?' wondered Pascoe. 'You've seen one ghost. Why not another?'

  'One ghost?'

  'Yes. The mill-girl. That story you told me last night. Your first case.'

  Dalziel looked at him closely.

  'I told you that, did I? I must have been supping well.'

  Pascoe, who knew that drink had never made Dalziel forget a thing in his life, nodded vigorously.

  'Yes, sir. You told me that. You and your ghost.'

  Dalziel shook his head as though at a memory of ancient foolishness and began to laugh.

  'Aye, lad. My ghost! It really is my ghost in a way. The ghost of what I am now, any road! That Jenny Pocklington, she were a right grand lass! She had an imagination like your Giselle!'

  'I don't follow,' said Pascoe. But he was beginning to.

  'Believe it or not, lad,' said Dalziel. 'In them days I was pretty slim. Slim and supple. Even then I had to be like a ghost to get through that bloody window! But if Bert Pocklington had caught me, I really would have been one! Aye, that's right. When I heard that scream, I was coming out of the alley, not going into it!'

  And shaking with laughter the fat man headed across the lacy grass towards the old stone farmhouse where the hungry kittens were crying imperiously for their breakfast.

  ONE SMALL STEP

  FOREWORD

  to the original edition, published in 1990

  We've been together now for twenty years. That's a lot of blood under the bridge. Sometimes 1970 seems like last weekend, sometimes it seems like ancient history. Famous men died – Forster who we thought already had, and de Gaulle who we imagined never would; Heath toppled Wilson, Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Tony Jacklin won the US Open, and in September, Collins published A Clubbable Woman.

  All right, so it wasn't the year's most earth-shaking event, but it meant a lot to me. And it must have meant a little to dial hard core of loyal readers who kept on asking for more.

  And of course to Andy Dalziel and Peter Pascoe, it meant the difference between life and death!

  If time moves so erratically for me, how must it seem to that intermittently synchronous being, the series character? I mused on this the other day as I walked in the fells near my home. I'm not one of those writers who explain the creative process by saying, 'Then the characters take over.' On the page I'm a tyrant, but in my mind I let them run free, and as I walked I imagined I heard the dull thunder of Dalziel's voice, like a beer keg rolling down a cellar ramp.

  'It's all right for him, poncing around up here, feeling all poetic about time and stuff. But what about us, eh? Just how old are we supposed to be anyway? I mean, if I were as old as it felt twenty years back when this lot started, how come I'm not getting meals-on-wheels and a free bus pass?'

  'You're right," answered Peter Pascoe's voice, higher, lighter, but just as querulous. 'Look at me. When A Clubbable Woman came out, I was a whizzkid sergeant, graduate entrant, potential high-flier. Twenty years on, I've just made chief inspector. That's not what I call whizzing, that's a long way from stratospheric!'

  It was time to remind them what they were, figments of my imagination, paper and printers' ink not flesh and blood, and I started to formulate a few elegant phrases about the creative artist's use of a dual chronology.

  'You mean,' interrupted Peter Pascoe, 'that we should regard historical time, i.e. your time, and fictive time, i.e. our time, as passenger trains running on parallel lines but at different speeds?'

  'I couldn't have put it better myself,' I said. 'A perfect analogy to express the chronic dualism of serial literature.'

  'Chronic's the bloody word,' growled Dalziel.

  'Oh, do be quiet,' said Pascoe, with more courage than I ever gave him. 'Look, this is all very well, but analogies must be consistent. Parallel lines cannot converge in time, can they?'

  'No, but they can pass through the same station, can't they?' I replied.

  'You mean, as in Under World, where the references to the recent miners' stride clearly set the book in 1985?'

  'Or 1986
. I think I avoided that kind of specificity,' I said.

  'You think so? Then what about Bones and Silence in which I return to work the February after I got injured in Under World, making it '87 at the latest, yet that book's full of specific dates, like Trinity Sunday falling on May 29th, which set it quite clearly in 1988?'

  'You tell him, lad,' said Dalziel. 'Bugger thinks just because he's moved from Yorkshire into this sodding wilderness, he can get away scot-free with stunting our growth.'

  'Think of your readers,' appealed Pascoe. 'Don't you have a duty to offer them some kind of explanation?'

  'Bugger his readers!' roared Dalziel. 'What about us? Do you realize, if he dropped down dead now, which wouldn't surprise me, he'd leave you and me stuck where we are now, working forever? Is that fair, I ask you? Is that just?'

  Lear-like, I was beginning to feel that handing over control wasn't perhaps such a clever idea, but I knew how to deal with such imaginative insurrection. I headed home and poured myself a long Scotch, and then another. After a while I let out an appreciative burp, followed by a more genteel hiccup.

  Now I could ponder in peace the implications of what I had heard.

  There's no getting away from it – in twenty years, Dalziel and Pascoe have aged barely ten. But the readers for whom Pascoe expressed such concern don't seem to find it a problem. At least, none of them has mentioned it in their usually very welcome letters.

  On the other hand a flattering and familiar coda to these letters on whatever topic is a pleasurable anticipation of further records of this ever-diverse pair. But if we are all ageing at twice their rate, there must come a time when…

  But suddenly I jumped off this melancholy train of thought. Time can be speeded up as well as slowed down. I write, therefore they are! And what better birthday gift can I give my loyal readers than a quick trip into the future, nothing too conclusive, nothing to do with exit lines and bones and silence, but a reassuring glimpse of Pascoe when time has set a bit of a grizzle on his case, and of Dalziel still far from going gentle into that good night?

  So here it is, my birthday gift. 'Bloody funny gift,' I hear Andy Dalziel mutter deep within. 'Have you clocked the price? And look at the length of it! There's more reading round a bag of chips.'