No point shaking your head at me like that, Superintendent. I’ve got a witness. Me!
Almost from the first moment she came to Moscow, she started flaunting herself at me. She never missed a chance to give me a show. I’d go past her bedroom and the door would happen to be wide open and she’d be lying naked on the bed, smiling at me. Or she’d come out of the bathroom in her robe and it wouldn’t be fastened properly. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I was completely confused. I was only fifteen when they got married, for God’s sake. Still a minor. Doesn’t that make it sexual abuse? That’s a crime, isn’t it? You can go to jail for that, can’t you? You’ll have to investigate that, won’t you?
Saying anything when Dad was alive was always going to be hard. In the end I did it, but maybe I left it too late, maybe I did it the wrong way. Some things you’ve got to stand up and shout out loud to the world, no matter who it hurts. Well, he’s gone now, he’s beyond hurt, and it’s all that bitch’s fault and now I’m ready to stand up in any court in the country and tell them the truth about her.
Let’s try it out on you for a start, Mr Dalziel, and see how you like it.
The first time, I was having a shower when suddenly the door slid back and it was her. She was naked. I started to ask her what she wanted but she stepped in beside me and put her arms round me and kissed me. It was disgusting, she was like an animal. I thought she was going to eat me alive. I felt like a mouse when a cat’s got its teeth into it! The more I resisted, the closer she seemed to wrap herself around me till it seemed I could feel every bit of her. The trouble was that, though I knew it was terribly wrong, I was a healthy adolescent and I spent a lot of time dreaming about girls like most boys do at that age. I’d had no experience beyond a bit of heavy snogging at parties. This was the first time I’d been up close against a naked female, and while my mind was saying No! my body was reacting the way you’d expect. I got hugely excited. She put her hand down to get hold of my prick and as soon as she touched it, I came. She held on for a bit, then said, “That was a waste, wasn’t it? Still, there’s always next time.” And she left.
I’ve never felt so guilty about anything in my life. It felt like it was all my fault. Or if not all, at least fifty per cent. Maybe it was because of the pleasure I’d felt. I was convinced that God was going to punish me. I didn’t know what to do except keep out of her way as much as I possibly could. And from then on I always made sure the bathroom door was firmly locked, and my bedroom door too. I was too ashamed to try and talk to anyone. Except Cress. She never liked Kay from the start, you see, and I needed her to help me in keeping guard against her in case she tried anything again.
But she didn’t, not at first anyway. What she did was worse. She acted like we had some private understanding, giving me secret smiles, brushing up against me, that sort of thing. But she never actually came on to me in the same blatant fashion, mainly of course because I never gave her the opportunity.
So time went by, years, till I might have begun to think I’d imagined it all if it hadn’t been for the way she kept up this we’ve-got-a-secret thing. Plus I could see that Dad wasn’t happy. That bothered me as much as anything. He’d married her to be happy again, and he wasn’t. But I was young and I was selfish and all I felt when it came time for me to go to university was relief to be away from her sphere of influence. I went off happy as a sandboy with no thought for poor old Dad.
Then a couple of weeks ago, just before she took off to America, things must have reached some sort of climax. Cress had been home for half-term and when she got back to school she rang me to say Dad was looking like hell. She sounded so worried I took the first chance to duck out of college and head home. I should have checked first. When I got back, I discovered that Dad was away for a couple of nights. I almost went straight back to Cambridge, then I thought, Why the hell should I let this cow keep me out of my own home? We were very polite to each other and of course Helen was there too. She was nine now, old enough to take notice, and she made a good chaperone. One thing Kay didn’t want was to risk losing the halo Helen had put round her scheming head.
That night I went out to a pub to eat with some old chums and when I got back, Kay had gone to bed. I went to my room and made sure I locked the door. After a couple of hours I had to get up for a pee. As I came out of the bathroom, I heard a noise downstairs. Someone was playing the piano in the music room. We’d all had lessons, but with Cress and me it never took. Dad, who loved music, was disappointed, but Mother didn’t really care so we soon gave it up. Helen was different. She had some talent and Kay, who played a bit herself, kept her at it, which really pleased Dad. One of the first pieces she’d learned, a tune from Schumann’s Childhood Scenes, became a sort of signature tune with her. This was what I heard now so I thought she must have sneaked out of bed. Naturally I did the big brother thing and went downstairs to sort her out.
I pushed open the music-room door. It was pitch-black inside, curtains drawn, no light on. I stepped inside saying, “OK, Sis, time for little girls to be in bed.”
A voice said, “Suits me fine,” and I switched on the light and saw it was Kay on the piano stool. She was stark naked.
I should have just turned and got out of there but I was so angry I advanced instead and began to yell at her. She span round on the stool and faced me, legs splayed, that smile on her face, the one that says, I know more about you than you know about yourself, and she said, “Got any requests, Pal?”
I grabbed her by the shoulders. I think I meant to drag her out of there by main force, but she just let herself come forward without resistance and next thing I was on my back with her on top of me. I was only wearing shorts so it was bare flesh to bare flesh just like last time, and like last time I could feel myself being aroused. But I wasn’t an inexperienced adolescent any more. I tried to push her away but she clung on, wrapping her legs and arms round me, nails digging into my back, laughing like it was a game, and all I managed to do was roll her over so I was on top. By now I admit I wanted to fuck her, I wanted to fuck her so hard it really hurt her. Like rape, I suppose I mean. Not for pleasure but for power.
But I knew that was what she wanted too. For every reason. To satisfy her own depraved needs. For pleasure, and for power too. Once get me inside her and she knew she’d be inside me for evermore.
What would have happened, I don’t know. But at that moment I heard a voice calling her name. It was Helen on the stairs. She must have woken and gone to Kay’s room and when she found she wasn’t there, she came looking for her.
I don’t think any other voice could have put the brake on Kay’s lust. Dad, the Archbishop of Canterbury, anybody else and she’d have just clung the tighter and revelled in being caught in flagrante with her stepson.
But not Helen. If in that whole mass of self-centred, self-indulgent, self-advancing, self-pleasuring impulse which makes up her being there is a single spark of unselfish feeling, it’s struck by Helen.
She pushed me off, stood up and slipped into her robe, which had been draped across the piano. Then she smiled that smile at me again and said, “Maybe it will be third time lucky, eh, Pal?”
She went out. I heard her greeting Helen in the hall, her voice perfectly normal, for all the world as if nothing had happened. Jesus, what an actress she would have made! But she’s more than an actress, she’s Lamia. She uses enchantment to hide the fact that she is really a serpent. I told her that once and she smiled as if I’d complimented her and said she could see from the start that a love of poetry was another thing we had in common. God, she knows how to get under your skin.
Next morning I got up early and packed my bag. I didn’t want to be there when my father returned. I needed time to work out how to deal with this situation. She greeted me in the hall nice and easy, as if nothing had happened. She was so convincing that for a moment I began to doubt my own memory! Then I remembered the scratches I’d got on my back where she’d dug her claws into me.
/> I told her I was seriously thinking of telling my father everything. She just laughed and said, “In that case, perhaps I shall tell him how you’ve been lusting after me all these years, which I could just about put up with when you were a spotty little adolescent. But trying to force me to have sex with you now that, on paper at least, you’re a grown man is something different. That’s attempted rape.”
I got out then. No point in doing anything else. All the way back to Cambridge, I debated how I should tell Dad. This time I knew I had to say something. The bitch was taking Helen on a trip to the States in a couple of days and I suspected that, fearful of what Cress and I might reveal to Dad when we had him to ourselves during the Easter vac, she might try to get in first. I couldn’t bear the thought of telling him such stuff face to face, so first of all I rang him in London. But I felt such a coward, and he was so distant and distracted, that I got to the end of our conversation without saying a word. It wasn’t till later that I got to thinking maybe the reason he sounded so distracted was that the bitch had already started poisoning his mind against me. I had to do something. I should have been there to meet him when he got back—oh, how I wish I’d gone to meet him—but I chickened out again and wrote a letter. He should have got it the day before Kay and Helen were due to fly to America.
I thought he would ring me straightaway. He didn’t. I gave him a day then rang him. There was no answer.
So I left it. It was end of term, I’d be home in a few days anyway. We could talk then.
Instead I found him. Well, you know that. God help me, I found him.
Did he get my letter? I believe so. I think that was what he’d been burning in his wastepaper bin.
Did he have time to say anything to Kay before she left? My bet is he did. But that bitch would have been ready for it. Perhaps she’d already pre-empted my accusation with her own version. So there he was, faced with having to accept either that his wife was a dissolute bitch who’d tried to force herself on his son, or that his son was a depraved monster who’d tried to rape his wife.
Either option was hell. His mind snapped and he took what must have seemed the only other option. And it’s all down to that bitch!
She may not have been in the study with him and she may not have pulled the trigger, but she drove him to it and I don’t doubt that she did it deliberately. I think she could see he was on the edge and she pushed him as close as she could get, then left. I think she probably told him that if he didn’t get things sorted, she was going to go public with her version, accuse me of attempted rape, call in the police. She wanted him to see that, whatever he did, his family was going to be blown apart. Except if he blew himself apart first.
Then she headed for the States. She wanted to be long gone if and when it happened. She must have jumped for joy when she heard the news. Now she’d got it all. My sister, Helen. A huge chunk of Dad’s estate. And now she could spend all the time she wanted with her fancy man, that greasy Yank, Kafka.
You’ve got to admit she’s been quite blatant about it. Soon as she realized she wasn’t going to get back inside Moscow House, where does she head? Out to his pleasure palace at Cothersley Hall!
But she’s miscalculated badly if she thinks I’m going to take this lying down.
No need to keep glancing at your watch, Superintendent. I won’t keep you from your lunch any longer. This is my statement. You get it typed up and whatever else you do to make it official and I’ll sign it. But I wanted you to hear it first, just so that you’ll know what you’re dealing with next time you go smarming round that bitch. And just in case she’s got you so magicked you think you might do her a favour by forgetting about this tape, I shouldn’t put your career at risk. I’m going to say it all again at the inquest, and the coroner might be very curious indeed to know why nothing in the police records has prepared him for this evidence.
End of statement. This is Palinurus Maciver Junior speaking. The time is one fifty-three p.m. on March 27th, 1992.
7 • amnesia
“Well,” said Pascoe. “And what do you make of that, Shirley?”
“Sir?”
“Of the tape. You were listening?”
“Sorry, sir. My mind went wool-gathering. I didn’t really take it in.”
Meaning—if you want to say negligently, “No matter, it was pretty dull anyway,” and toss the cassette into your wastepaper basket, you’ll get no quarrel from me.
“I see. Shall I play it through again then?”
Meaning—thank you, but that’s not the way I want to play this, not yet anyway.
“No need, sir. I reckon I got the gist. Pal Maciver Junior blamed his stepmother for his father’s suicide.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” said Pascoe. “Anything more?”
She shrugged as if to say, OK, you keep asking for it, you’re going to get it.
“And he also seemed to be suggesting that Mr Dalziel was far from objective in his attitude to said stepmother and might be disinclined to take these accusations seriously.”
“Which would, if true, be a serious matter,” said Pascoe, curious to see how the young DC was going to deal with this.
“Yes, sir. Though there did seem to be mitigating circumstances.”
“Did there? Such as?”
“Well, it was getting on to closing time,” said Novello very seriously. “And he was worried about his meat pie.”
Pascoe stared at her. She stared back. Then his face cracked in a grin and after a moment she grinned back.
“However,” he resumed, “it would seem that mitigation is unnecessary as, if your digest of the investigation is accurate, nothing of Pal Junior’s accusations against his stepmother or insinuations against Mr Dalziel ever troubled the official record.”
“No, sir. There’s certainly nothing in the file, no signed transcript of the tape and no reference to it, and there was no mention of any of this at the inquest either.”
“No problem then,” said Pascoe briskly. “So here’s what we’re going to do. If you’re agreeable, that is. You’re going to forget you heard this tape. Both times.”
Just a little reminder that the Fat Man didn’t have a monopoly of divine omniscience.
“Which tape?” she asked.
“Don’t jump the gun,” he said. “Before amnesia sets in, I’d be interested to hear your reactions to it. Anything at all.”
She shrugged.
“I’ve met none of these people. I can’t even make an educated guess as to whether there’s anything in what Maciver said. As to why he changed his mind about hurling all these accusations around, well, in a straight fight, Cambridge undergrad versus the Super, I know where my money would be. But how about you, sir? Weren’t you around at the time?”
Pascoe shook his head.
“Sick leave. We established that last night when it became apparent that this latest suicide was a carbon copy of the old one.”
“That’s you off the hook then, sir.”
Pascoe opened a drawer and slid the cassette into it.
“What hook would that be, Detective?” he said briskly.
“Hook, sir?” said Novello, interpreting the signal. “Who said anything about a hook? Shall I take this stuff back down to the store now?”
“No,” said Pascoe. “Stick it in that cupboard there. I’ll pass it on to Mr Ireland later.”
“Mr Ireland?”
“Yes. Once we’re completely satisfied no crime’s been committed, a suicide, copycat or not, becomes Uniformed’s baby.”
“And are we completely satisfied, sir?”
Pascoe hesitated his answer. The trouble was he still didn’t know if his reluctance to say yes was caused by anything more than an objection to the Fat Man steamrollering him off the case.
But he didn’t doubt that in the apophthegms of the wise from Confucius to Rochefoucauld he could find many variations on the theme that men who try to stop steamrollers end up flat. Presumably Pal Maciver Junior too ha
d tasted the sadness of Dalziel’s might. All that passion and hate in his recorded statement, yet none of it had ever got on to the public record.
So what did he do now? He suspected—no, he was certain—that he’d already stepped over the line drawn by Dalziel’s instruction to tidy this up and dump it on Paddy Ireland. There was danger in probing further, but was there any point?
Novello was watching him closely. He got the feeling she was following his thought processes even more closely. He remembered as a teenager climbing up on to the high board at the municipal swimming pool and changing his mind when he realized just how high it was. Then his nervous eye had spotted a couple of girls he knew who’d just come in and were looking up at him. So he’d dived.
Happily he was long past such adolescent needs to prove himself.
He said, “You know what? I think it might be useful to have a look at the scene by daylight.”
She smiled secretly but he saw it. And he recalled that when, after a descent which seemed to go on forever, he’d hit the water in a belly flop that almost stunned him, one of the girls had dived in and helped him to the side.
No use showing off unless you could carry it off.
He said, “It would be useful to have a fresh pair of eyes along …” paused, then went on, “I’ll just see if Sergeant Wield is in,” and reached for his phone.
“Not till later, sir,” said Novello. “I told you he’d got the morning off.”
“So you did,” said Pascoe. “In that case, I suppose you’d better come along, Shirley.”
Already he was feeling ashamed of his pettiness.
“OK,” said Novello. “Shall I drive?”
This was a telling riposte, thought Pascoe as he blew his nose to conceal his alarm. He recalled the one previous time he’d travelled, folded like a foetus, in the front seat of Novello’s Fiat Uno. She’d driven like Jehu on a bad prophet day and his abiding memory was of being far too close both to the road and to God.
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