D&P21 - Good Morning, Midnight

by Reginald Hill

  “How would you apply that in your first husband’s case?” enquired Pascoe. “I hope you don’t mind me asking.”

  “No, I don’t mind. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot. Pal Senior was very different from his son. He found the striking of poses offensive. He prided himself on his matter-of-factness. He was a man of business and proud of it, and he believed that once you set your mind to a task, you carried it through, no second thoughts allowed. So he wouldn’t need a dramatic structure. He had a shotgun. He used it.”

  “Yet there was some artistic presentation involved,” insisted Pascoe. “The volume of Emily Dickinson’s poetry on the desk, the particular poem it was open at. How did it go? He scanned it—staggered—dropped the Loop to Past or Present …”

  “Past or Period,” she corrected. “Caught helpless at a sense as if His mind were going blind—”

  “Doesn’t sound very matter-of-fact to me,” said Pascoe dubiously. “Sounds like a man who feels things slipping out of control. Yet he seemed to do everything very methodically. Why do you think he left the book on his desk?”

  This was dangerous ground, he realized. He was questioning a woman about the way her first husband had killed himself with her second about to return any moment. From what little he’d seen of Kafka he didn’t seem like a man who’d react kindly if he found someone had reduced his wife to a tearful breakdown.

  But Kay didn’t look as if she was about to weep. Her expression was gravely compassionate rather than sorrow-stricken. It suited her. She was, he acknowledged yet again, and almost with a shock as if he’d somehow missed it before, a truly beautiful woman.

  She said, “The poem was a message to me. I gave him the book, and because he knew it was important to me, he really worked hard to come to terms with Emily. But often I’d catch him reading it with a look of exasperated bafflement on his face, like a child asked to study what is yet beyond his ken. He once told me it troubled him that such short poems, often just a scatter of lines, a handful of words, should leave him groping after meaning.”

  “Groped up, to see if God was there—Groped backward at Himself,” said Pascoe softly.

  She smiled at him, briefly, then went on, “I think that what he was saying to me by leaving the volume open at this poem was, Listen, love, I got this one right in the end. Now I know what this one means. He was offering the only kind of comfort he could think of. I believe he tried to write me a note explaining what was going on in his mind, saying how sorry he was, but found the only words he could use were inadequate. So he chose instead to let Emily describe how he felt for him and, by using her poem, he said he loved me.”

  She fell silent. Pascoe was deeply moved. All the nasty things that had been said about this woman sounded in his head now like mere snarls of envy and resentment. Oh yes, she was a pretty good magicker all right.

  Time to pull something out of the hat himself, if he could.

  He produced his wallet and from it took the sheet of paper on which he’d copied poem no. 870.

  “I wonder if you recognize this,” he said.

  She took the paper from his hand, unfolded it, placed it on the table to smooth it out, then read it without any change of expression.

  Finished, she said, “It’s Emily Dickinson, of course. I’ve read it but I wouldn’t say I know it.”

  “Sorry, I thought being an expert …”

  She smiled and said, “I’m only expert enough to know how hard she can be. What’s your reading of it? Andy Dalziel tells me you’re a grad, and bright with it.”

  He liked the easy way she brought her acquaintance with the Fat Man in and the mischief in her eyes which suggested that what Dalziel had said was something like, Clever bugger, yon Pascoe. Went to college but he’s turned out not a bad cop despite that.

  He said, “It seems to me it’s about delusion, deceit, loss. She seems to be saying that we invent quests for ourselves to give our existence meaning but that the only result of this is to make ourselves as fallacious as the invention.”

  She said, “Wow. I see what Andy meant.”

  “But I know so little about her,” he went on. “Is she the kind of writer whose references need close exploration? For instance, does she want us to be thinking about Ino who hated her stepchildren so much that they could only escape her wrath by fleeing on a golden ram with wings? Or Medea who killed the kids she’d had with Jason after he betrayed her? Or … well, you see what I’m getting at.”

  “She certainly knew all about the complexities of family relationships,” she said. “Mother, brother, sister, sister-in-law—enough material for several Greek tragedies there, with maybe the odd comedy thrown in. She had a wry sense of humour, did you know that? It’s always worth recalling before you take everything she says too seriously.”

  She paused, fixing a wide candid gaze on him, then asked, “Why are you so interested in this particular poem anyway?”

  “I just happened across it,” he said, meeting the gaze unblinkingly. “You know how it is. Something comes up—some name, some place, something you haven’t thought about for years, if at all—and suddenly you happen on references almost anywhere you look.”

  “Yes, I know the feeling. Life’s all about patterns, I sometimes think. Patterns imposed upon us, patterns we impose upon ourselves. Ah, here’s Tony.”

  Kafka came back into the room with a tray.

  “One espresso-if-at-all-possible,” he said. “Mr Pascoe, you want to talk to me for any reason?”

  “I can’t think of any reason offhand,” said Pascoe. “So unless you can suggest one, then no.”

  “Good. It’s just that I’m heading down to London shortly. Got a plane to catch first thing in the morning so I’ll be staying out at Heathrow.”

  “I haven’t forgotten I’m driving you to the station,” said Kay. ‘But we don’t have to go for an hour at least.”

  “Hey, I’m not trying to break up your tête-à-tête,” said Kafka. “In fact it can go on long as you like. Just got a call, I need to get back to the plant. Sod’s law, I’m there all morning, nothing happens. Soon as I come away, I’m needed. It’s OK, I’ll drive myself and leave my car in the station park.”

  He spoke perhaps just a shade too casually.

  “You sure?” said Kay. “I can easily …”

  “No problem,” he said. “Goodbye, Mr Pascoe. Don’t get up.”

  He offered his hand again. Then he went to his wife, bent to her, kissed her lightly on the cheek and said, “I’ll ring you from the hotel.”

  He went out. After a moment of silence, Kay said, “Excuse me just a moment, Mr Pascoe. Something I forgot.”

  She rose and went out after her husband. Watching her move was worth paying money for, thought Pascoe. A grace so understated you hardly noticed it till you realized you were holding your breath.

  Outside, Kay caught up with her husband as he tossed his grip into the boot of his car.

  “Tony,” she said, “is everything OK?”

  “It will be,” he said lightly.

  “I wish I were coming with you.”

  “To the plant?”

  “To the States.”

  “Yeah?” he said. “And miss seeing the twins every day?”

  “I didn’t mean for good. I meant so that I’d be around when you meet Joe and the others.”

  “Honey, there’s nothing to worry about. Like I told you last night after I talked to Joe, he was OK with the way I felt. He said the time had come for a rethink, this wasn’t just about politics any more, this was about patriotism.”

  “No. With Joe it will always be about profit, however you spell it.”

  “Hey, I thought I did cynicism in this family. I’ll be fine. You stay here, make sure Helen turns into the kind of mom you’d have been. Things are going to be OK.”

  “And if they’re not? If Joe won’t listen?”

  Kafka’s expression became hard.

  “Then it’s golden handshake time. An
d maybe I’ll crush a few fingers while we’re at it.”

  She shook her head as if acknowledging that there was nothing more she could say. Then she put her hands round his neck and drew his head down to hers and kissed him long and passionately.

  “Goodbye, Tony,” she said.

  He drew back and viewed her quizzically.

  “Wow,” he said. “Maybe I should go away more often.”

  She turned from him and went back into the house.

  Pascoe, who had been watching from the window, hastily resumed his seat.

  A moment or two later Kay came back into the room.

  “Everything all right?” said Pascoe.

  “Why shouldn’t it be?”

  “No reason. I just thought Mr Kafka seemed a little … rushed?”

  “Tony is a good man. He wants to be a good American,” she said, as if this answered him. “Now, Mr Pascoe, where were we?”

  “I think somehow we’d got on to critical interpretation of Emily Dickinson,” he said with a smile. “If we could return to the sad matter in hand, I’ll try not to keep you much longer. How would you describe your relationship with your stepson, Mrs Kafka?”

  She showed no surprise at the question but after a pause for consideration replied, “It ended better than it started. Though I’m not sure I understand the relevance …?”

  “Just looking for details in a picture,” he said. “From what I’ve learned from Mr Dalziel, it seems on occasion to have been a little fraught.”

  Let her know that Fat Andy’s my colleague as well as her buddy.

  “As a boy he resented me taking his mother’s place. As an adolescent, I think these feelings of resentment got muddled with the kind of sexual fantasies young men have about any personable female within easy reach. Guilt feelings after his father’s death brought everything to a climax and for several years I think his easiest solution was to condemn me as the cause of everything disturbing and distressing in his life.”

  “How did this manifest itself?”

  “By barring me from re-entering Moscow House. By making allegations about my conduct which I might have had to answer in the courts if he hadn’t been brought to see the foolishness, and the danger to himself, of his actions. By instituting legal proceedings to remove Helen from my custody.”

  “But that never came to court?”

  “Thanks mainly to Tony. Pal’s objections were based on me being American and the lack of blood relationship. What, he asked, if I decided to return to the States? His father wouldn’t have wanted his daughter brought up out of the UK. Or what if I remarried and my new husband didn’t care for the child? With no blood relationship between us, wouldn’t it be easy for me simply to dump her? Tony listened to my troubles and said, ‘Let’s get married and officially adopt the kid.’ That, plus undertakings to have her educated wholly in the UK no matter what happened to Tony in his job, cut the ground from under Pal’s feet. But I guess you know most of this already, Mr Pascoe.”

  Her smile was ironic.

  He said, “Detective work is all about hearing the same things again and again and looking for new angles, or discrepancies, Mrs Kafka.”

  “You spotted any yet?”

  “Nothing that can’t be explained by forgetfulness, natural bias, or inadvertence. But things got better, you say. Why was that?”

  “Time, maturity, perspective. A recognition that the situation as it was now wasn’t going to change.”

  “The situation being that you had succeeded in bringing Helen up in Mid-Yorkshire, she was now legally of age, not to mention married and pregnant. And he had accepted this, I understand. There’d been a rapprochement as evidenced by his playing squash with his brother-in-law.”

  “So it would appear.”

  “Which makes it a strange time to decide to commit suicide. If he’d hung on another day, he would have been an uncle. As it was, he was sounding a new note of family tragedy at the very time when the Macivers should have been popping corks to celebrate the start of the next generation.”

  “Pal was never a man to let the needs or wishes of others take priority over his own.”

  “You mean he might have chosen this time deliberately to upstage his own sister?” said Pascoe incredulously.

  “I don’t say that. I just mean that all potential suicides must develop some form of tunnel vision; with Pal the tunnel was always there.”

  His mobile rang. Mouthing an apology, he took it out and read the number.

  Dalziel.

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  He stepped out into the hall and took the call.

  “Pascoe.”

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “I’m at Cothersley,” he said. Then, annoyed at his own circumspection he added, “Cothersley Hall.”

  “Oh aye. Best get back here.”

  “What’s up, sir? Developments?”

  “You could say. Meeting, my room, thirty minutes. And that’s an order.”

  He went back into the room and said, “Thank you for your time, Mrs Kafka.”

  “Does that mean we’re done? Or have you merely been interrupted?”

  “Who knows?” he said. “Oh, by the way. Your husband, your first husband I mean, he owned two shotguns, I believe?”

  “I seem to recall so.”

  “The one he used is still in police hands. The one your stepson used seems to be the other half of the pair. Any idea where it’s been for the last ten years?”

  “I don’t know … in Moscow House I presume.”

  “Perhaps. Certainly not in the gun case in the study, which only has room for one gun and shows no sign of having had a weapon in it for some considerable time.”

  “Then I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”

  Can’t you? he wondered. I think perhaps you can.

  But he said nothing, took his leave and went out to his car.

  As he drove away he glanced towards the window.

  And was rather disappointed this time to find no one watching him.

  19 • confessional

  There had been a time in Pascoe’s career in Mid-Yorkshire when he would as soon have thought of wearing a dress to the Police Ball as of disobeying a Dalziel order. But those days were long past, though on the whole being caught doing the former was likely to be less painful than being caught doing the latter. So it was not without qualms that he diverted to the police lab on his way back.

  Here he handed over an evidence bag with a scribbled note:

  You’ll find my prints on this and one other set with, hopefully, a palm print. Check ’em out against the prints on the study door at Moscow House.

  “How’s it going?” he asked the technician he spoke to.

  “Very interesting. Why don’t you come up and have a word with Dr Gentry?”

  Dr Gentry was the head of the lab, a man famous for many things, among which wasn’t an inclination to brevity.

  “No time. Mr Dalziel’s waiting for me. And you might like to tell Gentry he’s also waiting for the results.”

  There was never any harm in threatening the workforce with the bogeyman.

  Not of course that it was an empty threat, as evidenced by his own unease at finding himself already ten minutes late as he entered the station. He found the way ahead blocked by Joker Jennison, which meant it was substantially blocked.

  “Sir, I were looking for you,” said Jennison.

  “Not now, Joker,” he said, attempting to squeeze past.

  “Sir, I think I saw that Dolores.”

  That stopped him in his tracks.

  “You think …?” he said.

  “Well, I were sure at first. It were when she bent down. I may not be too hot on faces but I never forget a nice bum.”

  “That’s great, Joker,” said Pascoe. “Have you spoken to her? Is she here?”

  “No, sir. Thing is, when you seemed to know her, and her with her hair all different and looking such a bonny girl, not all white like a v
ampire on short rations, and when I told Alan, that’s Maycock, he said I were mad, but the more I’ve thought about it …”

  “What the hell are you rambling about, man?” demanded Pascoe, glancing at his watch. “Come on. Spit it out.”

  “That lass you were talking to outside the church at Cothersley,” said Jennison unhappily. “I’m certain that were Dolores. Like I say, when she bent down …”

  “Miss Upshott, the vicar’s sister, you mean?” said Pascoe incredulously.

  “Is that who she is?” said Jennison, looking even unhappier. “Look, sir, maybe it’s mistaken identity, but I felt I had to say summat …”

  “Yes, yes, quite right. Listen, Joker, we’ll talk about this later, OK?”

  He was now fifteen minutes late. But at least the mind-boggling improbability of what he’d just heard squeezed the fear out of his system as he tapped lightly on the door to the monster’s lair and slipped inside.

  It was not often that the atmosphere in Andy Dalziel’s office could be described as religious but this was like stepping into a Quaker meeting.

  The Fat Man sat behind his desk, head bowed, eyes closed. Sitting in front of the desk were Sergeant Wield and Shirley Novello and Hat Bowler (what the hell was he doing here?) The silence was total, not just the absence of speech but the absence of any sense of relationship between these people and their physical surroundings. Their minds and spirits were focused on something within, as if no one was going to break that silence till the Inner Light guided them to utter what was in their heart.

  Like a mourner arriving late at a funeral, Pascoe glided silently to an empty seat.

  “He comes, he comes,” said the Fat Man suddenly. “At last he comes. I feel his presence among us, the one who started all this crap.”

  Somehow Pascoe didn’t think he was referring to the Paraclete.

  “Sir,” he said. “Sorry I’m late. Traffic.”

  “On the high intellectual fast track?” said Dalziel with mock incredulity. “Is it possible? Right, recap for the DCI. Wieldy, you first. Don’t worry I’ve heard it all before. It might sound better second time round.”

  The sergeant glanced at Pascoe ruefully, then with a clarity and brevity so familiar you hardly noticed them any more, gave an account of his visit to Jake Gallipot, concluding, “Confirmed DOA at the hospital. We’ll need to wait for the PM, but nothing at first glance to contradict death by electrocution. Contusion on back of skull consistent with striking head against something sharp, like the corner of a desk, after being thrown there by the shock.”