Dalziel 04 An April Shroud

by Reginald Hill

  She strode away, long firm strides stretching her simple denim skirt taut against her thighs. Tillotson hesitated a moment before following. One thing about your posh upbringing, thought Dalziel. Properly done, it instilled good manners. Their fatal weakness.

  'What about you?' he said to Mavis.

  'I never go into shops if I can help it,' she replied. 'Especially supermarkets. I'll show you the sights if you like.'

  'That's kind,' said Dalziel, which it was. It was also a bloody nuisance. Time was short and he didn't want the girl hanging around.

  'But it's shopping I'm after, too,' he went on. 'Just bits and pieces, but the sights'll have to wait till another time.'

  'You are staying long enough for another time then?' she asked. 'Should I welcome you to the club?'

  'We'll see. Thanks for your offer anyway.'

  'That's all right. I'll go and brood on nature.'

  She smiled at him and walked slowly away. He crossed the road and went into the chemist's where he watched Mavis out of sight while the assistant wrapped a bottle of aspirin.

  'Anything else, sir?' asked the girl.

  'Yes,' said Dalziel. 'Where's the police station?'

  Fortunately it turned out to be in the direction opposite to that taken by Mavis and with the other two trapped in the canyons of the supermarket, Dalziel was able to enter the single-storied building which was the local station with minimum furtiveness.

  'Yes, sir?' said the uniformed constable seated at a typewriter resting on a paper-littered desk.

  'Always stand up for the public, son,' said Dalziel, producing his warrant card. 'Who's the boss here?'

  ‘Inspector Grantley, but he's not in just now, sir,' said the constable standing at a curious semi-attention occasioned by the fact that he had eased one foot out of its boot and was unable to fully re-insert it.

  ‘CID?'

  'That's Detective-Sergeant Cross. He's in his office. Shall I ring him?'

  'No, it can't be far in a place this size. Which one? Second on the left. Thanks. You haven't got a rupture, have you, son?'

  'No, sir!'

  ‘If you stand like that much longer, you'll likely get one.'

  Dalziel rapped sharply on the indicated door and entered.

  The sole occupant of the room was not a pretty sight. He looked as if in the best of circumstances he would have been unprepossessing; unshaven, haggard from fatigue, his shirt collar open, feet on his desk, a still steaming mug of coffee propped perilously on his belly, he was quite revolting. Dalziel regarded him with vast approval. This was how a hard-working Detective Sergeant ought to look at least once a day.

  'Who the hell are you?' said the man with semi-somnolent irritation.

  Dalziel reached forward and plucked the threatening mug from his lap.

  'Embarrassing that,' he said. 'Scalded cock. Makes the nurses wonder about you. I'm Dalziel.'

  His fame clearly had not penetrated to these dim recesses of the land and though the production of his warrant card set Cross struggling to his feet, it was a Pavlovian reaction to the rank rather than a spontaneous tribute to the reputation.

  'Sit down,' ordered Dalziel, 'before you fall down. Hard night?'

  'A bit,' said Cross, running his fingers through black spiky hair which might have been petrified for all the effect this had on it. 'Eight hours in a hen battery. God, the stink!'

  'I thought there was something,' said Dalziel, sniffing. 'Anything to show for it?'

  'No, sir,' said Cross gloomily. 'A waste of time. I've got my report here if you're interested.'

  He proffered a sheaf of typewritten papers which Dalziel waved aside.

  'No, thanks, Sergeant. I see enough of those on my own patch. This is unofficial. I'm on holiday in the district, so I thought I'd drop in and pay my respects.'

  Cross looked at him with the utter disbelief of one who had seen enough of detective superintendents to know that courtesy calls on sergeants belonged with Father Christmas and the fairies.

  'Thank you, sir,' he said. 'Nice to see you. Can I show you round?'

  'I don't think so,' said Dalziel. 'Seen one, you've seen 'em all as the actress said. But you might be able to help me on another matter.'

  He pulled up a chair and sat opposite Cross who smiled slightly. Dalziel decided this wasn't insubordinate and grinned back.

  'Family by the name of Fielding,' he said. 'They live about ten miles out of town near a village called Low Fold.'

  'I know them,' said Cross. 'A big house; Lake House it's called. They're converting part of it to a restaurant. Mr Fielding died recently. That the one?'

  'That's it,' said Dalziel.

  'Ah,' said Cross.

  Dalziel watched and waited for a moment scratching his left buttock vigorously, a luxury he had been consciously eschewing in the company of Bonnie Fielding.

  'I'm a stranger here,' he said after a while. 'I don't understand all the dialect. Ah. What does that mean? Nice weather we've been having? Or hello cheeky, give us a kiss? It's important I know.'

  'Sorry, sir,' said Cross. 'I was just wondering; I mean are you a friend, or what?'

  ‘It makes a difference? That's a start. I never knew these people existed till yesterday when they helped me after my car broke down. Now I'm curious. That help you?'

  'Thank you, sir,' said Cross, rising and going to a filing cabinet. 'They're well known in the locality, the Fieldings. They've been around for about eight years now, and, of course, Mrs Fielding was here before that when her first husband was alive. Here we are.'

  He extracted a file and returned to the desk.

  'The house belonged to Mr Percival, of course.'

  'Who?'

  'The first husband. The Percivals were very well known. Been around a long time. Not your aristocracy though they made some claims, but comfortably off. Their money came from trade, I believe.'

  He said the word as though it still had a definite pejorative meaning in these parts.

  'Trade?' echoed Dalziel.

  'That's right, but distant enough to be all right. Too distant, perhaps. It was cotton mainly and the Percivals were worse hit than most during the slump. I don't know the ins-and-outs but by the end of the war, I get the impression they were pretty well finished financially. And as a family too. The war saw three of 'em off, two in action, one in the blitz. The older survivors dropped off pretty rapidly afterwards, and Michael Percival, your Mrs Fielding's first, got what little survived of the family fortune all concentrated in his own bank balance. It seems to have been enough for him to live modestly on - by his standards - and his wife too, when they got married in 1954. The girl, Louisa, was born the following year and a couple of years later, Percival died. Six months after that, Mrs Percival married Mr Fielding.'

  'The father of her eldest son, you knew that?' said Dalziel.

  'Oh yes. She made no secret of it. The local gentry didn't like it. They prefer to hide their bastards. But she didn't care. They weren't around much for a few years in any case. The house was let and the Fieldings, according to best report, were living it up in swinging London. But money doesn't last forever and they'd spent so little of it on maintaining the house that it became unlettable. Also the marshlands where the tenants used to go shooting were drained and reclaimed in the mid-sixties and no one was interested in the place any more. So they came back to live in it. By this time, they had had the youngest boy, of course, and they brought Mr Fielding's father along, to help pay the rates, I suppose. He's some kind of writer, they tell me.'

  He spoke, Dalziel noted approvingly, as if to be some kind of writer was the equivalent of being physically handicapped.

  'You know a lot about these people, Sergeant,' he said.

  'I did a bit of research when this last business occurred,' said Cross. 'You heard about it?'

  'You tell me,' said Dalziel.

  Cross opened his file.

  'The deceased, Conrad Fielding, was discovered by his wife in what they're cal
ling the Banqueting Hall at Lake House. Unfortunately by the time we became involved the body had been moved, but according to Mrs Fielding's statement the man was lying on the floor there - ' he passed over a glossy half-plate print of the Hall floor on which an outline of a body had been chalked ' - with his chest pierced by the bit of an electric drill. The drill was still switched on. There was a ladder lying alongside the body, and there were drill marks in the wall about twenty feet up. It seems that the building contractors had packed up work till they got paid and Mr Fielding had been trying to do it himself. The coroner decided that the ladder had slipped, he'd fallen down with the drill in his hand with the switch locked on, and unfortunately had fallen right on to the bit. Three-eighths doing two thousand four hundred revs. It makes a hole like that.'

  'I'd have expected it neater,' said Dalziel, looking at the close-up of the naked chest on a mortuary slab.

  'The bit stayed in the wound after death,' said Cross. 'The weight of the drill would force the bit sideways through the flesh till an equilibrium was reached. That's what the doctor said. Here's the p.m. report.'

  Dalziel scanned it quickly, expertly. He usually left it to his subordinates to extract what was important from technical reports and relay it to him succinctly and accurately. But Cross had not been moulded on the master- potter's wheel.

  'So,' he said. 'Accident. What's your interest?'

  'We've a duty to investigate all sudden deaths, sir,' said Cross blandly.

  'Get knotted,' said Dalziel amiably, ‘If I fell off this chair and broke my neck, you wouldn't dig into my family history for the past thirty years. So?'

  'There were a couple of things,' said Cross slowly. 'First, the way they all behaved. They're an odd lot up at Lake House, you may have noticed, but you'd have expected a bit of, well, respect. Instead they all chattered away, ten to the dozen, and seemed bent on carrying on just as normal, except that they were a bit annoyed at the disturbance. Mark you, I didn't see any of them till some time after the death, so I can't report on immediate reactions. Mrs Fielding seemed a bit distressed, but very much in control, and the boy, Nigel, seemed genuinely upset. But the others . . . well!'

  'Even the old man?'

  'Old Hereward? He was the oddest of all. No sign of grief but he said, "I told him no good would come of it. I told him," and that was all. Not another word.'

  Dalziel glanced at his watch. He was running out of time.

  'You said there were a couple of things which aroused your interest. What else besides the family reaction?'

  'There was a phone call,' said Cross. 'Not to us, but to the insurance company carrying Fielding's policies. One of their investigators, Spinx they called him, came round to tell us. Co-operation, he called it. What he was after was for us to tell him they needn't pay up! Evidently someone rang up their office the day after the death and said they should look very closely at the circumstances before handing out any money. Well, we have to take notice.'

  'Male or female?' demanded Dalziel.

  'A woman, they think, though it could have been a male falsetto. Look, sir, can I ask if you're on to something? I mean, I don't want to sound as if I'm telling you your job, but it is my case.'

  Cross stared at him defiantly. He's quite right, thought Dalziel. Being his superior gives me no right to act in a bullying, arrogant way.

  'Just curiosity, lad,' he said with a disarming grin, showing teeth which were as perfect and as reassuring as a shark's. 'I might be spending a couple of days with these people and I wanted to know what I was getting into. From what you tell me, there's nothing to worry about. There's always someone ready to make nasty phone calls. And as for their reactions, well, we're all entitled to be different, aren't we? It'd be a grey place if all folks were the same.'

  With these tolerant, liberal colours tacked to his masthead, Dalziel prepared to set sail through the door.

  Cross reassembled his file and said casually. 'You don't happen to know if they are still going to open the restaurant a week on Saturday, sir?'

  'No. I'm sure they'll do their best,' said Dalziel, never less sure of anything in a life of certainties.

  'I hope so. I'm in the local Bowls Club and we've got a booking. There's ten quid of my hard-earned cash in that concern.'

  'There's better things to do with your money,' said Dalziel reprovingly. 'But I'm sure Mrs Fielding will try to honour all commitments.'

  He must have sounded a little defensive. Cross looked at him and said neutrally, 'She's a fine-looking woman, Mrs Fielding.'

  Dalziel felt his tolerant, liberal colours slipping.

  'What's that got to do with anything?' he said.

  'Nothing at all, sir. Just thinking it's a pity her life should have been so full of tragedy. Two husbands, both lost in such nasty circumstances.'

  It was a question he should have asked. Had he been in Cross's position investigating the business from scratch, it was one of the first things he would have looked to discover.

  'How did Percival die?' he asked.

  'An accident on the lake, sir,' said Cross. 'He fell out of a punt and was drowned.'

  9

  The Setting of Riddles

  Dalziel moved swiftly once he had left the police station. There was one more call he had to make and he was short of time. Fortunately his destination was only round the corner from the station as he had ascertained in the chemist's.

  He glanced quickly around when he reached the entrance to Gibb and Fowler's builders yard. The street was deserted except for a man entering a telephone-box about thirty yards behind him, and he pushed open the rickety wooden gates and went in.

  It would have been simpler and more professional to get Sergeant Cross to do this, but for reasons he was still keeping obscure from himself, he did not wish to alert the local force more than he had done. Basically, he assured himself, it was just his own curiosity that was driving him on.

  He was lucky to find the small, lop-sided and halitotic Mr Gibb in, or so the small, lop-sided and halitotic Mr Gibb assured him. Dalziel expressed his joy at such good fortune and tried to arrange Mr Gibb and himself in one of these curiously oblique conversational tableaux so favoured of television drama directors. Mr Gibb, however, would be satisfied with nothing less than confrontation so Dalziel produced his warrant card and came quickly to the point.

  'Mr Gibb, why did your firm stop work on the job at Lake House?'

  'It's no secret,' said Gibb. 'They'd got no money. We're not a charity, Superintendent. When I found out they couldn’t pay for what we'd done so far (which was nearly the whole job, I might add), I saw no reason to chuck good money after bad.'

  'I see that,' said Dalziel. 'But you were so near finished, why not complete the job and give them a chance to make some money? You must have known they were short of capital for a long while.'

  'You're right, we did. And that's the way we were thinking until, well, we got information suggesting that even if the place was finished, they didn't have a cat in hell's chance of getting the business under way. It would just mean they had a better-looking concern to sell off when the official receiver got to them, and I saw no reason why I should spend more time and materials just so other creditors could get a better dividend! So I said, if you don't pay now, that's it.'

  'I see,' said Dalziel, releasing his held breath. 'You say you got information. How did you get it?'

  Gibb looked uncomfortable, then said aggressively. 'It was a phone call. Some woman, anonymous. I wouldn't take notice of such a thing normally, but we'd been worried about that Fielding fellow for some time. You know the type, good talker, very convincing, gets you full of confidence till you go away and think things out a bit later. Know what I mean? So I thought I'll put him to the test, ask for a payment on account. Well, he started his usual patter. Mind you, it wasn't up to his usual standard. I mean, normally he could have talked the pants off a nun, but this time he seemed stuck for words. Perhaps it was his conscience.'

  'Pe
rhaps,' said Dalziel thoughtfully. 'So you stopped work. Would you start again if there was some money forthcoming?'

  'Yes,' said Gibb without hesitation. 'Like a shot. We’re short of work just now. It's general. Six weeks ago, I was never in the office. Now, I'm never out of it.'

  'You said I was lucky to catch you,' said Dalziel slyly.

  'I thought you might be a customer then,' grinned Gibb through his ruined teeth. 'What's this all about anyway? Is there something up?'

  'Not really,' assured Dalziel. 'Do me a favour, Mr Gibb, and don't let on I've been asking questions. You never know, you might be back on the Lake House job sooner than you think.'

  That should keep him quiet, thought Dalziel as he left. The poor devil was probably down to his last Rolls-Royce. He strode back along the street, moving quickly for a man of his bulk.

  I'm far too fat, he thought. I've let myself go. This belly's obscene. They'll need a domed lid on my coffin, like a casserole.

  But it did have its uses sometimes. Like now, for instance, he thought, as he opened the door of the telephone-box and stepped inside, pinning the slightly built middle-aged man in the ill-fitting suit against the coin box.

  'Right now,' said Dalziel. 'Who the hell are you?'

  Even as he spoke he recognized the man. On the night he had been assaulted by Louisa in the Lady Hamilton it was this fellow who had come into the bar, asking about the disturbance. He had placed him then as a journalist. Whatever he was, it was probably this brief encounter which had made him familiar enough to stick out when Dalziel had got out of Bonnie's car in the square. Dalziel did not believe in coincidence and when the same man had been hanging around near the police station and subsequently near the builders yard, it bore investigation.

  'What the blazes are you doing?' demanded the man. 'Let me out at once, or I'll call the police.'

  'I am the police,' said Dalziel. 'So you needn't call too loud. Why're you following me? Come on, quick as you can!'

  'The police? So it's you. I didn't realize. My name's Spinx. Hold on.'

  Spinx tried to reach into his top pocket but Dalziel never took chances and his great paw closed firmly on the man's wrist.