Midnight Fugue

by Reginald Hill

  Behind her, Vince noticed the stagger. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen it. Not so nimble on her pegs as she used to be, he thought. With anyone else he’d have suspected too much booze, but not Fleur. Probably her age; she was in her forties now. Probably a woman’s thing, that stuff that happened when they stopped having their periods.

  It would pass, he told himself confidently. One thing you could be sure of with Fleur, she wouldn’t go funny with it like some women did. No, not good old Fleur. She’d deal with it, take it in her stride. He hadn’t learned much in his life, but one thing he had learned.

  No matter what shit came at him, he could always rely on Fleur.

  16.41–17.15

  When Dalziel and Pascoe entered the Keldale, they found Seymour waiting for them.

  Clearly not certain who he should be reporting to, he diplomatically aimed at a spot midway between their heads and said, ‘It’s Room 25, sir. I’ve got it sealed off like you said till the SOCO team gets here. Talking of which, the manager would like a word. Think he’s a bit worried about SOCO worrying the guests.’

  ‘You’d best see to that, Pete,’ said Dalziel. This was ambiguous, both deferring and commanding. It was also suspicious as Lionel Lee, the manager, was, like most men in charge of premises licensed to sell intoxicating liquor, a close acquaintance of the Fat Man’s. But the suspicion didn’t really surface till Pascoe emerged from Lee’s office to find Seymour alone.

  ‘Where is he?’ he demanded.

  ‘The Super took the key and said he’d go on up,’ explained the DC nervously. The Dalziel/Pascoe relationship was a much-favoured subject for analysis among the intellectuals of the locker room, but the favoured conclusion was they didn’t know what the fuck was going on.

  Pascoe bit back an irritated response. How could he expect a lowly DC to exert control where chief constables had failed? A moment later he was glad of his restraint when Seymour said, ‘By the way, sir, when I did a quick check round the room, I came across this tucked behind the pillows.’

  He took a small evidence bag out of his pocket and handed it over, his face a mask of studied neutrality.

  Pascoe examined it for a moment then said, ‘Thanks, Dennis. You wait in the car park for SOCO. Take them up in the service lift; let’s keep the management happy, eh? I may want to buy you a drink here some day.’

  Which, interpreted, meant, You’ve done well, but this is between us, OK?

  He found Dalziel standing in Gina Wolfe’s room looking pensively at the bed.

  Pascoe said, ‘No, she didn’t find it, Andy. Seymour did.’

  He held up the plastic bag.

  It contained a note scrawled in a hand as familiar to members of Mid-Yorkshire CID as their own.

  It read Sorry to pass out on you, put it down to old age. Next time I’ll try to stay awake! I’ll be in touch. A.

  ‘I did wonder,’ said Dalziel, apparently unfazed. ‘Was a time when Dennis would have handed it over to me.’

  ‘Tempora mutantur,’ said Pascoe, who often armoured himself with pedantry in anticipation of a verbal skirmish with the Fat Man. ‘So you thought you’d get up here first just in case it was still lying around. And your exquisite reason, knight?’

  ‘Nowt that you’d call exquisite, but reason enough,’ said Dalziel. ‘It’s nothing to do with the case, but it could be misinterpreted.’

  The two men stood and looked at each other. Dalziel was not used to feeling vulnerable but he felt vulnerable now. That his unofficial activities might have put a junior officer at risk was bad enough. The fact that he admitted to sleeping off an excessively vinous lunch in a suspect’s hotel room made matters worse. But the inference drawable from the note that he had passed out as he attempted to have sex with Gina, still giving her the time to head out to Loudwater Villas and confront her errant husband, added an element of black farce that he might find hard to survive both personally and professionally.

  To a ruthless rival to his throne, this was a perfect opportunity to achieve his goal with the gentlest of pushes. Even someone as upright and decent as Peter Pascoe had to do nothing but play things by the book to make his boss’s position very difficult.

  Pascoe put the bag back in his pocket and said wearily, ‘From now on, just talk to me, Andy, OK? One more time I’m left not knowing what’s going on will be one time too many. Now bugger off out of here. I’ll see you downstairs.’

  Dalziel left. He felt good, not because of what he’d done–nothing to feel good about there–but because of his part in making Pascoe what he’d become. It was going to be hard, but it was time to let go. Not step aside, that would be too easy. And in any case, he was far from ready to step aside. This too would pass and the tempora would bloody well mutantur back again! But his first task once he was safely back on the throne must be to make sure his loyal lieutenant got lift-off.

  Meanwhile he was a cop and he was still on the case.

  He went downstairs to reception and asked the woman on duty to get hold of the car-park security video for that afternoon. While she was sorting that, he checked the record of incoming phone calls and made a couple of notes. The receptionist then took him into her inner office where she’d linked the car-park video to her computer. It was a good system. When they’d had their bit of bother a year back, he’d read the riot act to Lionel Lee. ‘You’d not give your guests nylon sheets and scratchy bog-paper, would you? So why sell ’em short with cheap security?’ It was a message Lee had taken to heart. There’d been an attempt to break into the hotel office only last weekend, but it had been thwarted by the new levels of security installed since Dalziel’s lecture.

  First he checked the period immediately after Gina had thrown him out of her bedroom. It didn’t take long to spot her departure less than thirty minutes after he’d left. Then he went right back to lunchtime and studied what he found there with great interest.

  ‘Anything else I can help you with, just ask, won’t you?’ murmured the receptionist in his ear. She was keen to know what was going on.

  ‘Can I print some stills from this video?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course. Like me to do it for you?’

  She leaned over him, her soft bosom resting on his broad shoulder.

  ‘There,’ she said huskily. ‘Anything else you want?’

  She were either very nosy or she liked the cut of his rig. Odds on the former, but he didn’t have time to find out.

  ‘Aye,’ said Dalziel. ‘That lad, Pietro, who were in charge of the terrace this lunchtime, he still around?’

  While the woman was checking that, he helped himself to the guest registration book. One thing he found there made him laugh out loud, causing the receptionist to glance at him curiously. Get a grip! he admonished himself. This is serious business.

  Pietro arrived and Dalziel sat down with him in the reception lounge. As he sank into the chair, his elephantine buttocks obliterated the imprint left by Vince Delay a little time before.

  ‘Right,’ said the Fat Man. ‘I’ve got a lot of questions and not much time, so let’s not bugger about. Answer me straight and you and me will stay friends, and I’m a good friend to a likely lad. But fuck me around and tha’ll be on an early boat back home to sunny Italy, OK?’

  ‘Bus, sir.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘It ’ud be a bus back home to ’uddersfield.’

  His accent had changed from Mediterranean mandolin to Yorkshire tuba.

  Dalziel laughed out loud.

  ‘I think thee and me are going to get along famously,’ he said. ‘First, who does the table selection on the terrace at lunchtime?’

  ‘That would be me, sir. Guests state their preference and I try to oblige them.’

  ‘So how come I got the best table overlooking the garden even though it weren’t booked till this morning?’

  ‘That were Mr Lee, the manager. He told me to change it.’

  ‘That must have meant you bumping some poor sod.’

  �
�Yes, sir. A Mr and Mrs Williams. They’re staying at the hotel.’

  Dalziel nodded, unsurprised, and said, ‘Take a look at these pictures. Recognize any of ’em?’

  He showed him the photos he’d printed from the security video.

  Pietro picked out three faces he recognized as belonging to hotel guests.

  ‘Any of them on the terrace at lunchtime?’

  ‘The only one I can be sure of is Mr Delay,’ said Pietro. ‘Him and his sister.’

  ‘Have they been staying here long?’

  ‘A week, I think.’

  ‘Oh aye?’ said the Fat Man, rather disappointed. ‘But they were definitely around at lunchtime?’

  ‘Yes, sir. On the upper terrace. They left without having their puddings.’

  ‘More fools them, Notice a young lass by herself? Brown hair, nice knockers.’

  Pietro grinned.

  ‘Yes, I did. She were another one who shot off before her order came.’

  They spoke a little longer, after which Dalziel took out his mobile and began making calls.

  When Pascoe joined him a few minutes later, Dalziel said, ‘Gina Wolfe had a call fifteen minutes after I left. I’ve checked the number. Unregistered pay-as-you-go. A few minutes later she rang down to say she were leaving. She used their express check-out which meant she didn’t have to come down to the desk. Security video shows her in the car park at twenty past four. She seems to be checking around like she’s worried someone might be watching her. Then she drives away.’

  ‘But where to? No word that she’s been spotted yet?’

  ‘If she stays on the main roads, we’ll soon have her,’ said Dalziel confidently.

  ‘Fine. Anything else?’

  ‘Mebbe.’

  Pascoe gave him his more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger look and the Fat Man said, ‘Nay, lad, I’m not holding out on you. Just I don’t want to waste time chatting about stuff that may be owt or nowt till I’m sure of it.’

  Pascoe was saved from having to decide whether to make a stand or not by his phone ringing.

  He looked at the display and saw it was Wield.

  ‘Pete,’ said the sergeant, ‘we’ve got a problem.’

  Pascoe listened for a while, then said, ‘He’s talking, you say?’

  ‘Real gabby. It’s shutting him up that’s going to be hard.’

  ‘Let him talk all he wants. I’ll be back soon as I can.’

  He switched off and said, ‘We’re needed back at Loudwater. It looks like our corpse is neither Watkins, the flat tenant, who has appeared on the scene, nor indeed a Wolfe in borrowed hair. Andy, have you been practising not looking surprised?’

  ‘No. Just comes natural, specially when I’m not.’

  ‘Is that so? I thought we’d entered on a new era of transparency.’

  ‘Nay, lad,’ protested the Fat Man, ‘I’m not holding owt back. I can’t help it if occasionally I make a lucky guess.’

  ‘And in this case, what might your guess be?’

  ‘About the dead ’un? I’d say, Welsh and a journalist. Nay, don’t lose your rag, Pete. You know me, always a lucky guesser.’

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing, Andy, much more of this and your luck is really going to run out,’ said Pascoe in a low, hard voice.

  ‘Pete, trust me. I’ll never keep owt from you that I think you need to know, OK? Now you’ll be wanting to get back there quick to talk to this Watkins. I’ll join you soon as I can. Couple of things I need to check first. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ said Pascoe reluctantly. ‘But don’t make me come looking for you, Andy.’

  The two men stood staring at each other for a long moment.

  It was Dalziel who turned away.

  16.42–18.05

  Nye Glendower drove westward along the roads of Mid-Yorkshire at a moderate speed in keeping with his standing as a respected Chief Constable and pillar of a community that expected its pillars to be strong and upright and based on good Welsh granite. After a few minutes his mirror showed him a white Mondeo coming up fast behind him.

  He gave a wave and for an hour they drove in close convoy. Finally, with the Yorkshire border behind him and the declining sun beginning to be a trouble to his eyes, he signalled left to pull into a lay-by separated from the main road by a line of scrubby trees.

  The Mondeo drew in behind him. Its driver got out. Glendower followed suit and stood by the X5 as she came towards him.

  Myfanwy Baugh, Chief Executive of the Cambrian NHS Trust, a solidly built woman in her early fifties with a natural authority and unbending will that made many a man who’d tasted the sadness of her might say grudgingly, ‘That Myfanwy, she’s got balls.’

  But Nye Glendower knew she hadn’t.

  She opened her mouth to speak. He took her in his arms and stopped her tongue with his.

  After a long moment she pushed him away and said, ‘Somebody might see us.’

  ‘All racing home,’ he said, indicating the traffic flashing past beyond the trees. ‘Anyway, who’s to know who we are round here?’

  ‘That fat slob you were talking to, for one. It was that cop who ruined our lunch, wasn’t it?’

  ‘The same. Bad luck he should have been in the car park just then. Could have been worse, though. He could have seen the two of us together. You did well to hang back, Myfi.’

  ‘Is that meant to flatter me? Nye, the point of going to that dump was that nobody knew either of us there and we’d be able to relax for a change. Instead of which we end up doing a runner like a couple of petty crooks!’

  ‘Hey, we didn’t do a runner, I paid the bill, girl!’ he laughed. ‘Listen, there’s nothing to worry about. Just a precaution once I got a sniff there was some sort of op going on round the hotel. Anyway, the fat bastard’s just filling in time till he gets his pension, so forget him. Point is, we’ve still got a night in hand. I was thinking maybe head down into the Peak District? Should get in somewhere nice, Sunday evening, lot of weekenders will have checked out. And it’s on our way home, more or less.’

  She was shaking her head emphatically.

  ‘I think we should head home now, Nye. We’ve got away with one close encounter. Let’s not push our luck.’

  He didn’t argue. Myfanwy Baugh hadn’t got where she was without being able to signal when she’d made up her mind and wasn’t to be budged.

  But he too had had to fight his way up the rocky promotion mountain, and he hadn’t got to the top without learning that the way to deal with immoveable obstacles was to push them in a new direction.

  He opened the rear door of the X5.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘But get in. Let’s at least say goodbye properly.’

  She said, ‘Here? You must be mad!’

  But she wasn’t resisting as he put his arms round her thighs, lifted her up and laid her across the back seat, in the process forcing her short skirt up around her buttocks.

  He said, ‘See you’re wearing my favourites, girl. You know what the red silk does to me. What were you thinking when you put them on, eh?’

  ‘For God’s sake get in and close the door,’ she said hoarsely. ‘And we’ll have to make it quick.’

  He smiled as he pulled the door to behind him. He knew his Myfi. Once they got started, goodbye caution. She’d want it to last as long as he could make it last.

  For a brief moment his mind went back to his meeting with Andy Dalziel. They were of an age and there had been a time when Dalziel was regarded as the sharpest knife in the box, the man with the starry future. But you never knew what time was going to do to a man. It had been a shock to see what he’d become–a grampus puffing around in a very small pond, a ready-to-be superannuated superintendent who let himself be bossed around by his pushy young DCI. What a contrast with his own continuing rise to the stellar heights! What pain it must have caused Dalziel to come across his contemporary in the car park of a posh hotel, stacking designer luggage into an expensive car, and looking at least a decade younger than the poo
r fat sod!

  And if he could see me now, he thought triumphantly, still getting it on in the back seat with a sexually rampant woman, he’d probably have a heart attack!

  Then the red silk panties slid down to Myfi’s ankles and Aneurin Glendower erased all thought of Andy Dalziel from his mind forever.

  Or at least for a minute and a half.

  For it can’t have been much longer than that before the rear door was pulled open and a polite but forceful cough halted him in mid-stroke with Myfanwy’s legs round his neck, one of her feet waving the red panties like a May Day banner.

  He turned his head, not without difficulty–she was a strong woman–and managed to bring one angry eye to bear on the intruder.

  He saw a uniformed constable standing to attention, his gaze firmly fixed somewhere above the car roof. Behind him alongside a police Range Rover stood another constable, his face bearing the emotionless unfocused look that can only be put there by a waxwork sculptor, or by the awareness that, if you let it relax for a millisec, you will collapse to the ground and roll around in fits of ungovernable laughter.

  ‘Chief Constable Glendower, sir?’ said the first constable in a broad Lancashire accent. ‘Sorry to bother you, sir, but there’s an urgent message from Detective Superintendent Dalziel of Mid-Yorkshire CID. He’d like for you to ring him. As soon as it’s at all convenient. I’ve got his number here. If you’ve got a pen handy. Sir.’

  Behind him the other constable gave up, did a smart right turn and marched away, stuffing his fist into his mouth. Out of the gathering dusk came a noise like the hoarse barking of a hyena.

  At last Glendower found his voice.

  ‘Shut…the…fucking…door!’ he said.

  17.35–17.55

  When Mrs Esmé Sheridan opened her door, the sight that met her eyes made her recoil in shock. But indignation triumphed over fear and, pausing only to select a walking stick from the elephant-foot umbrella stand in her hallway, she began to advance, crying, ‘You vile creature. Not content with making our pavements unsafe to walk along, you now dare to defile our very doorsteps! Go away or I shall summon the constabulary.’