Midnight Fugue

by Reginald Hill

  He had offered no proof of identity, but even that was a kind of proof.

  Yet he didn’t seem to know anything about the photo.

  So that was a maybe.

  Second, why had he told her to check out?

  She recalled Dalziel’s suggestion that maybe someone else had a reason for getting her up here. She hadn’t taken it all that seriously, but now…

  That might explain Alex’s alarm, his desire to get her out of there.

  Or could it be that someone else was keen to get her out in the open?

  She thought of ringing Mick, but what good would that do? She could formulate his response without bothering with the conversation. Don’t so anything, stay put, contact Andy Dalziel, he’ll know what to do.

  Perhaps he would. But she didn’t need external input into her decision. Which in fact wasn’t a decision.

  She didn’t have a choice.

  She had never been a subservient wife. She’d once told Alex, if he wanted instant obedience, he should have become a dog-handler. But now she saw no way forward but to assume it was his voice she’d heard and to obey his instructions. The only way to settle all doubts was to see him face to face. To do anything that might drive him back into his hidey-hole, whether it were mental or physical, was not an option. She’d lived through uncertainty into certainty once. It had been a slow painful journey and it wasn’t one that she wanted to have to start making again.

  She rang Reception, told them she was checking out and asked them to charge everything to the credit card they’d swiped on her arrival. Then she got dressed, bundled the rest of her stuff into her case and headed out, descending by the service lift that deposited her next to a door opening on to the car park.

  She slotted her mobile into the Bluetooth connection and drove away from the hotel. He’d said drive north so she turned right to keep the sun on her left. At last her Brownie days were coming in useful!

  After a few minutes the phone rang.

  ‘Where are you?’ he said.

  It was Alex. She was sure of it. Wasn’t she?

  She said, ‘I’m on the outskirts of town. There’s a roundabout ahead. Left is Leeds and Harrogate, right Scarborough, straight on Middlesbrough.’

  ‘Carry straight on. Don’t disconnect.’

  Other instructions followed at regular intervals. Soon she was off the main highway into a maze of narrow country roads passing through hamlets whose names meant nothing to her. She would have been completely lost had not her Brownie fix on the sun told her she was now to the east of her starting point and heading south. Finally after three quarters of an hour she was told to turn west on to a road which ran arrow-straight between low hedges of burnished hawthorn. By her rough geographical calculations, if she carried on in this direction for four or five miles, she would intersect with the main north–south motorway she’d started out on. She’d worked out that the purpose of all this meandering was to shake off any possible pursuit. Well, she hadn’t seen another car either in front or behind for miles, so perhaps now he was simply directing her back to town.

  A mile or so ahead the narrow road breasted a steep hill on whose summit silhouetted against the declining sun she could see a building. As she got nearer she could see an inn sign swaying in a gentle breeze.

  At the foot of the hill he told her to stop and wait.

  She obeyed.

  Time passed. Five minutes. Ten. Half an hour. Nothing happened. No traffic overtook her, none came towards her. With each passing minute her certainty that it was Alex’s voice faded. She wound down the window. There was no sound except for the call of a single bird, far away, repeating the same phrase over and over again. She tried to analyse it musically but it defied annotation. It had no connection with humanity. It belonged in a world where all the humans were dead. She felt totally alone. Abandoned.

  It hadn’t been Alex. It was nobody. And nobody was going to call.

  She would sit here till it got dark, and then she would…

  She didn’t know what she would do.

  16.35–16.41

  Once more Andy Dalziel drove into the car park of the Keldale Hotel but this time his mood was very different. Last time he’d been anticipating a leisurely al fresco lunch with a good-looking woman who’d presented him with an intriguing little mystery, just the right size to take his mind off his own troubles.

  He’d felt completely justified in keeping the whole daft business to himself. Involving an off-duty Novello had seemed harmless enough. Of all his DCs, she was the one whose discretion he most trusted. She was very ambitious and therefore unlikely to risk his wrath by shooting her mouth off. The same could be said of the lads, when sober, but after a few jars down the Black Bull he wouldn’t trust any of them to keep their mouths shut about their boss’s dalliance with a beddable blonde!

  Before the bomb, it wouldn’t have bothered him. A man with a hide like a rhinoceros doesn’t fear pinpricks of laughter. A rhino might look a bit comic wandering around among all them elegant antelopes, but let him turn his sagacious eye in your direction, and you soon stop smiling.

  On his return to work, however, he found that Mid-Yorkshire, which had once stretched around him like the wild savannah, had contracted to an enclosure at the zoo. People were now looking at the beast with curiosity, or, worse, with pity.

  So they had to be re-educated.

  Back to basics first; keep them guessing what you’re up to, make them jump a bit, remind them you’re answerable to nobody but yourself. Respect! Wasn’t that the cant word these days? Get some respect!

  After this morning’s visit to the Station, he felt he’d taken a good stride in the right direction. He’d come to the Keldale at midday feeling more like his old self than he had for a long time.

  And now as he drove into the car park, he felt like a petty recidivist crook returning to the scene of his pathetic crime.

  Pascoe was certainly treating it as a crime scene. He’d upgraded the search of Gina Wolfe’s room to full SOCO examination.

  ‘You sort that, Wieldy,’ he’d commanded as if his commanding officer were not present. ‘But first off, get on to Seymour and tell him to make sure Mrs Wolfe’s room is left untouched. Don’t want a chambermaid getting in there and stripping the bed, do we?’

  Stripping the bed? Was that a crack? wondered Dalziel.

  ‘You’re still giving the room the once-over, are you, Pete?’ he said. ‘Mebbe I should take a look first afore SOCO gets to work.’

  ‘Why’s that, Andy?’

  ‘Because I’ve been there, remember? Could be I’d spot summat.’

  It had sounded weak and Pascoe hadn’t bothered to try and smooth over the fact.

  ‘Oh, I see. Maybe you’d notice a subtle change out of the corner of your eye, some slight discrepancy that would eventually turn out to be the clue that cracks the case, like in one of Agatha’s novels? No, I think on the whole it might be best for all our sakes if you weren’t around when the CSIs start poking about.’

  Best for all our sakes? That was definitely a crack!

  ‘Why? What do you think they’re going to find? Semen stains on the sheets?’

  Pascoe shrugged and said, ‘I just need to be sure there’s nothing to find, OK?’

  ‘Listen,’ said Dalziel, ‘I told you, I were knackered. Not fit to drive. I dossed down by myself. For Christ’s sake, if Gina had been there, whatever else I gave her, I’d have given her an alibi, wouldn’t I? And you’d not be wasting time with this daft notion that she might have blown Watkins’s face off and put Novello in hospital.’

  Pascoe had looked at him with half a smile and said, ‘No need to get your knickers in a twist. All right, if you’re so desperate to go back, let’s go. Wieldy, you keep an eye on things here, OK? Anything comes up, ring me.’

  ‘As opposed to keeping it all to myself, you mean?’ said the sergeant ironically.

  ‘Why not? Seems to be in fashion nowadays,’ said Pascoe.

 
They weren’t going to leave it alone, thought Dalziel. And he couldn’t complain, he had it coming.

  Pascoe, who’d parked alongside him, was out of his car already and opening his boss’s door for him.

  ‘Come on, Andy,’ he said impatiently. ‘Work to do.’

  This was too much. Pascoe had followed him to the hotel. Followed, not led the way, thought Dalziel. Like he was scared I was going to do a runner. Time he had a little reminder of the divine order of things.

  God seemed to agree. Even as the Fat Man looked for a way to slow things to his own pace, the good Lord sent him one.

  ‘Here,’ he said, looking across the car park to where a man was putting a suitcase into a BMW X5, ‘I know yon face.’

  He set off with Pascoe in close attendance. As they approached, the man straightened up and looked round. He was an imposing figure, broad-shouldered, grey-haired, with a Roman emperor’s head and a nose to match.

  ‘How do, Hooky!’ boomed Dalziel. ‘Long time no see!’

  Pascoe was a good reader of reaction and it struck him that this Roman emperor was reacting to Dalziel’s approach as if he’d just noticed Alaric the Visigoth trotting up the Appian Way.

  Conclusion: he was a crook whose acquaintance with the Fat Man was purely professional. Question: what kind of crook was he, and could his presence here have anything to do with Gina Wolfe?

  But even as the question formed in his mind he was revising his conclusion as Dalziel took the man by the hand and shook it vigorously.

  ‘So what are you doing here, Hooky? Bit off your patch. Can’t be official, else we’d have baked a cake or summat.’

  The man managed a wan smile and said, ‘No, just a visit. Old chum’s daughter got married.’

  ‘Oh aye? Job, is he?’

  ‘No, no. Some of us do have friends outside the Force,’ said the man, his eyes straying to Pascoe, who coughed in the Fat Man’s ear.

  ‘Oh aye, I’m forgetting me manners. Hooky, this is Peter Pascoe, my DCI. Pete, drop a curtsey, this is Nye Glendower, king of the Cambrian cops!’

  ‘Good to meet you, sir,’ said Pascoe. ‘I’ve heard of you, of course.’

  Aneurin Glendower, Chief Constable of the Cambrian Force. Not a household name outside of Wales, but one well known in police circles as a man of strong views who might rise even higher if he could find a PM on the same wavelength.

  They shook hands and Glendower said, ‘You boys got something going on here? I noticed a bit of activity in the hotel.’

  Seymour and a WPC. They couldn’t have caused much of a stir, but you didn’t get to be CC without having well-tuned sensors, thought Dalziel. He opened his mouth to reply, but Pascoe cut in.

  ‘Just a little local difficulty,’ he said breezily. ‘But we’d better get it sorted. Good to meet you, sir. Andy, when you’re ready…’

  The bugger’s worried in case I shoot my mouth off! thought the Fat Man indignantly.

  He said, ‘With you in a minute, lad. Us old buggers need the young ’uns to keep us on our toes, eh, Hooky? Sorry I didn’t know you were here. We could have cracked a bottle and had a chat about the good old days when we mattered.’

  ‘Yes. Would have been nice, Andy–not that I had much spare time. Got to shoot off now and burn a bit of midnight oil when I get home so that I’m up to speed when I hit the desk in the morning. Good to see you. Nice to meet you, too, Pascoe.’

  He slammed his boot, got into the X5 and accelerated out of the car park.

  ‘He’s in a hurry to get home,’ said Pascoe.

  ‘Well, it’s Wales,’ said Dalziel. ‘Probably shuts at half past seven. Here, watch out!’

  He pulled Pascoe out of the way of a white Mondeo backing out of its parking spot at speed. The middle-aged woman driver scowled at them, then sped off towards the exit.

  ‘Bloody women drivers,’ said the Fat Man, shaking his fist after it. ‘Most on ’em couldn’t push a pram straight.’

  Racist and sexist in the same ten seconds, thought Pascoe. Nothing new there then, except it came across rather mechanically, as if the old sod were becoming a parody of himself. And all that stuff about the good old days when he mattered! He really should have taken a few more weeks convalescent leave. Or maybe months.

  Or am I just behaving like Henry the Fifth looking for arguments to invade France?

  But Glendower’s reaction had certainly contained something of the embarrassment of the successful man on meeting the one-time equal he’d left behind. In the past their leader’s national reputation had always been a source of pride to his colleagues in Mid-Yorkshire CID. Could the truth really be that he was regarded as a bit of a joke by the upwardly mobile, a cop who’d found his relatively low level, a grampus puffing his way around a small provincial pond?

  Pascoe shook away the disloyal thoughts.

  ‘Let’s find Seymour,’ he said.

  16.35–17.05

  It had been a funny kind of day, thought Edgar Wield.

  The unexpected appearance of Dalziel early that morning should have rung a warning bell. Looking back now, it seemed that there had been something a touch manic about the fat sod’s speech and demeanour, and there was that business about the old lady, Mrs Esmé Sheridan, ringing in with a complaint about a kerb-crawler, and giving a car number and description that pointed the finger at the Fat Man. But on the whole Wield had been happy to accept his arrival as evidence that normal service was about to be resumed.

  That the superintendent had come back too early from convalescent leave the sergeant did not doubt. But when others, including Pascoe, had expressed concern as to whether the great man could ever truly get back to where he had been before, Wield had kept his counsel. In his eyes it was just a matter of time. The others saw it in terms of a champion boxer trying to make a come-back. He saw it in terms of Odysseus come to reclaim his kingdom.

  He had sufficient self-awareness to acknowledge he might be emotionally biased.

  Pascoe was very close to the Fat Man. Romantics–there are a few of those even in the modern police force–analysed this as a vicarious father/son relationship. Dalziel had no children, or at least none he acknowledged, and years ago Pascoe’s father had confirmed the distance between himself and his son by opting to emigrate to Australia with his eldest daughter and her family.

  The Romantic analysis of the D and P relationship went something like this: as initial distrust and dislike had moderated, via reluctant acknowledgement of detective skill and technique, to mutual respect and even affection, the residual ability to get up one another’s noses had been rendered innocuous by subsumption into a quasi-familial mode. You may at times loathe your parents or kids, but that doesn’t get in the way of loving them.

  Wield felt it was maybe a bit more complicated than that. What he was certain of was that he owed his own progress, perhaps even survival, to the Fat Man. He had congratulated himself for many years on the skill with which he’d concealed his gayness from his institutionally homophobic employers. It was only late on, around the time he decided–without marking the occasion with a ticker-tape parade–to come out, that he realized he’d never fooled Andy Dalziel. Looking back, he began to understand how much he’d benefited from the Fat Man’s protection. Nothing obvious involving civil rights and liberal declarations and such. Just an invisible circle drawn round him which said, He’s in here with me, touch him at your peril.

  He’d never said thank you because he knew if he had, all he’d have got back was, For what? And indeed, for what? The right to function like any other copper? Surely he had that anyway. So, no thank yous. But what he did give the Fat Man was unconditional trust that, whatever he was, so would he always be.

  Trust was one thing, reality another. There was no getting away from it, the way things had turned out today meant there was a big dark cloud hanging over Dalziel, and Wield doubted it was about to burst in blessings on his head. Nowt he could do but get on with his job.

  He had disposed of the Du
ttas as the superintendent had suggested and now he was sitting collating statements from the other Loudwater Villas tenants.

  The sound of a rackety engine caught his ears and he looked out of the caravan window to see a dusty white Bedford van pull up in front of the building.

  A young man got out, early twenties, dressed in baggy jeans and a red T-shirt. He stretched his arms and yawned, then pulled a grip off the passenger seat and headed into the Villas.

  Wield frowned. He’d set up a checkpoint on the approach road. They couldn’t keep people out who had a genuine reason for going in, such as, they lived here. But where there was doubt, the officer on duty would ring in to check; and where there was no cause for doubt, he would make a note and ring in with the details to indicate there was somebody new to interview.

  None of the caravan phones had sounded in the last five minutes.

  The sergeant said, ‘Smiler, who’s on the checkpoint?’

  The constable so addressed, glanced at a list and said, ‘It’s Hector, Sarge. Everyone got called in for this one.’

  The last sentence was significant.

  In a case of murder accompanied by a serious assault on an officer, everyone was expected to turn out and help. Indeed, everyone wanted to turn out and help. But if Wield had been consulted, he’d have advised that the best way Police Constable Hector could help was to continue to devote himself to whatever unimaginable activity occupied his mind on his day off.

  The sergeant rose and opened the caravan door. From this elevated position he could see down to the checkpoint quite clearly.

  There was no one there.

  The air was very still and a distant splash drew his attention down to the river bank. There he was, that unmistakable figure, lanky and skinny, with a head set slightly beneath the level of the shoulders, as though like a terrapin’s it could fully retract in time of trouble.

  He was throwing stones into the water. No, on closer observation of the throwing style, it seemed likely he was trying to make stones skip across the surface of the water, only they never rose out of the initial splash.