D&P21 - Good Morning, Midnight

by Reginald Hill

  I was there in five minutes.

  I found Gallipot in the lounge with Kay. She was in a semi-catatonic state, sitting bolt upright, pale as death. Looking utterly beautiful. Yes, that struck me very forcibly. Tragedy often destroys female beauty. Not in her case. Quite the opposite, she seemed made for grief.

  Upstairs in the study I found Maciver. He was dead with a deep wound on the top of his head. On the floor close by was a bloodstained ice axe, the one which you will recall seeing mounted on the wall alongside the portrait of Mr Maciver in outdoor mode.

  There was a letter on the desk. I read it.

  It was from his son and it accused Kay of attempting to seduce him during a recent visit home, an attempt which was the culmination of a whole series of incidents of sexual harassment ever since his stepmother had come into the house.

  The sequence of events seems to have been that Maciver was returning from London where he had been attempting to interest a newspaper in his campaign. Their response had been cautious. They get this kind of thing all the time and they aren’t interested in committing time, money or personnel unless there’s some real evidence there’s something in it for them.

  But Maciver, ready to take any interest as encouragement, was much enthused, and he’d rung Gallipot on his way back to fill him in and demand a progress report. Gallipot, wanting to get a fuller picture of just what the paper had promised, arranged to call at Moscow House for a consultation. In the meantime—we pieced this together later—Maciver got home, read the letter, and confronted his wife with its contents. She denied it, blaming the son. Maciver, his mind already dark with suspicion, did not know what to believe. In any case, there was no comfort to be found in any version of the truth. But one thing he was certain of. He wasn’t going to let Kay out of the country with his daughter. They were due to fly out from Manchester the following morning. Maciver told her the trip was off. Kay protested. Maciver got angry, and I do not doubt his anger made him talk as if absolutely persuaded that his wife was totally to blame for the situation. He told her that she should go to America herself, that he didn’t care if she never came back, and that in any event he didn’t want her anywhere near his family, and in particular Helen, ever again.

  For this and for what happened next we have only Kay’s account. She said that when she reacted strongly to this threat—she seems to have been genuinely, indeed almost obsessively, attached to the girl—he became physical and tried to manhandle her out of the room, perhaps intending to throw her right out of the house.

  They struggled and crashed against the wall with such force the ice axe became dislodged from its mounting and came tumbling down, unhappily landing point first on her husband’s balding skull.

  Now though it is certainly possible that a violent collision with the wall could have disturbed the display mounted there, whether an axe falling a matter of a few feet could attain a momentum sufficient to cause this damage I cannot say. A proper forensic examination would doubtless have established this one way or the other.

  But it did not seem to me that this was either necessary or desirable. I deal in facts and practicalities. The way I looked at it was that, no matter how sceptical their initial response, any newspaper which had just been offered the kind of story Maciver was touting around was going to sit up and take notice when they heard that, a few hours after he left their offices, he’d died in very suspicious circumstances.

  My first concern was Kay Maciver. It was no use doing anything if she proved hellbent on ringing the police and telling them all. But as she came out of her initial shock, I realized that here was a woman of extraordinary mettle. She didn’t know who the devil I was, of course, but I’d rung Tony Kafka and explained the situation and he came straight round to talk to her.

  Mr Kafka is a man of rapid thought and ingenious device and finding he shared my appraisal of the situation we rapidly worked out what had to be done to protect the interests of all involved.

  We were completely open with Mrs Maciver. There was no other way. I told her that we had to devise an explanation of her husband’s death which did not involve her. She said again that it was an accident and I said it didn’t matter. His death in unusual circumstances so soon after his attempt to persuade the newspapers that something fishy was going on at Ash-Mac’s was bound to arouse their suspicions. She appreciated the undesirability of this, being, of course, privy to all the firm’s officially unofficial dealings, but I think it was her awareness of how the truth could affect her relationship with Helen that made her co-operate so fully with our proposals for a cover-up.

  Suicide was the obvious solution. Jumping from a high place might account for the damage to the head, but that involved getting him out of the house and taking him to the high place. Also it made it more difficult to make the tragedy unexceptionable even to the most sceptical tabloid eye. No, it had to be in situ, behind a locked door. The shotgun cabinet in the study provided the obvious weapon, and careful channelling of the shot would provide a means of obliterating the earlier head damage.

  We didn’t go into this detail with Kay, of course, but she did appreciate the need to authenticate the death in all ways possible and rather than run the risk of a forged suicide note, it was she who, at Kafka’s prompting, suggested the use of the Dickinson poem.

  She had her cases already packed and her stepdaughter’s. I now instructed her to take them with her when she went to pick up Helen from school but instead of bringing her home as planned, tell her that a severe frost was forecast for that night which would make the cross-Pennine roads very dicey early in the morning, so they were going straightaway and would spend the night in an airport hotel.

  Once in the States, we told her to hire a car and get lost. The longer it took to find her with the sad news, the more time she’d have to get herself together.

  Kafka had no doubts from the start about her ability to cope and the more I saw of her, the more impressed I was. Once motivated, she moved with speed and determination and soon she was on her way to pick up Helen. Kafka and I agreed it would be best to put as much space as possible between Kay’s departure and Maciver’s death to dilute any suspicion of cause and effect. We fixed on March the twentieth. Kafka undertook to provide evidence of Maciver making increasingly agitated attempts to contact him during this period, while I set about applying my specialist skills to stage-managing the fake suicide.

  The mechanics of how I set it all up you have of course already worked out, including no doubt the burning of paper in the waste bin to help cover any traces of ash left by the burnt threads. What I actually burnt was his son’s letter—I didn’t want that lying about—plus several more sheets of writing paper, to give the impression he’d tried to compose a farewell note but found it beyond him, and opted for the poem.

  It was all rather Agatha Christie, I fear, but I had to extemporize. Given a little more time and with the aid of a fully equipped technical team, I would have done things very differently, but it is only in the never never world of the movies and television that such expertise can be conjured up at the drop of a hat. In any case the English suburbs have a thousand eyes and the less activity there was around the house, the better. As it was there was a close scrape. With everything done, I let myself out of the house after of course checking there was no sign of activity outside. I had just closed the door when I heard a noise and I turned to see a woman coming through the shrubbery. It was, I found out later, Miss Lavinia Maciver. Her greeting was, I felt then, eccentric, though as I came to know her better, I realized it was in fact typical.

  “Hello,” she said. “I’m so glad to see the green woodpeckers are still here.”

  “Are they?” I said.

  “Oh yes. Come and see.”

  And I found myself led across the garden to peer into a hole in a semi-decayed beech tree and invited to admire the allegedly clear signs of new nesting activity.

  I expressed interest and admiration and eventually managed to establish wh
o she was. Myself I introduced in my role as VAT inspector. I said I’d been ringing the bell for some time but had got no reply. We returned to the house and tried again. Finally, and without anything more than a natural exasperation at a wasted journey, she bade me good day and set off down the drive. Her MS had barely got a hold back then and she could still stride out, but it was just beginning to drizzle and when I overtook her in my car, I halted to ask if she needed a lift. She replied no, she’d come by taxi from the bus station and would walk to the nearest phone box and call up another to take her back. I of course insisted that she got in and when I discovered that her journey home involved catching a bus which didn’t depart for another ninety minutes, and then, after a roundabout journey of over an hour, being dropped in a small village from which it was forty minutes’ walk to her house, I ignored her protests and drove her there myself.

  My motives were mixed, I admit. She was a possible loose end which I wanted to be sure was tied up. But also I found myself intrigued by her. She seemed, I don’t know, to have a kind of independence of spirit, to be free of any agenda, or at least any I recognized. I don’t meet many people like that.

  My first reaction when I saw her cottage, with doors unlocked, windows open, and birds flying in and out at will, was disappointment. Perhaps after all she was simply mad!

  But there was nothing mad about the way she invited me to sit down and then provided tea and the most delicious scones.

  Curious that. A man in my line of business not infrequently has his loyalty tested by the offer of bribes. But the only time I ever bent the rules, it was done for little more than a buttered scone. Could Mr Dalziel’s fall be occasioned by something so slight, I wonder?

  I am not unadept at oblique questioning and once Miss Mac got used to my presence she treated me rather like one of the birds with whom she shares all her thoughts and feelings.

  It appeared that her brother had called to see her the previous week in a somewhat agitated frame of mind which seemed to have something to do with Kay and Helen’s imminent trip to the States. He didn’t seem altogether happy about it and was particularly concerned that urgent business in London meant he would have to go away for a couple of days and wouldn’t get back till the day before their planned departure. He seemed to be asking if it would be possible, should the need arise, for Lavinia to come and look after his household for a while, as she had done when his first wife died. But when she attempted to get details out of him, he backed off, changed direction, and spent the rest of his visit talking about their childhood at Moscow House, when the family firm was flourishing and the future lay before them like a sunlit beach. Her words. Or perhaps his words.

  It was this harking back to the days when they had been most at ease with each other, before his growing irritation at her growing dottiness, as he saw it, came between them, that bothered her in the following days and she was concerned sufficiently to make the effort of this rare visit to Moscow House to see for herself how things stood there.

  I reassured her as best I could, surprising in myself a certain discomfiture amounting almost to guilt at the thought that her brother’s body was growing cold in his study as we talked. But not too cold. To confuse the issue of time of death, I’d programmed the central heating to stay on at full blast for the next couple of days until the twenty-second, the day before his son in his letter had said that he’d be coming home. Later I visited Tony Kafka at Ash-Mac’s to give him an update, and also to check the measures he’d taken re Maciver’s alleged contacts. I needn’t have worried. He was so thorough he’d thought of details I wouldn’t have bothered with myself. But he didn’t fall into the trap of being over-fussy. He could have been one of the great illusionists, I think. The only thing that bothered me slightly was that his main concern seemed to be for Kay Maciver. His attitude to her was protective to a degree almost paternal, with Ash-Mac’s interests a poor second. He it was who drew my attention to Kay’s special relationship with your Mr Dalziel and suggested this might come in useful in smoothing out any snags in the investigation, as indeed proved to be the case.

  Did I have any guilt feelings about letting the son find the body? Not really. I had no way of assessing the truth of the letter he’d written to his father, but from what Gallipot had told me of Kay’s proclivities, it seemed at least possible that it wasn’t righteous indignation at an attempted seduction which motivated him but injured pride in being, as the chambermaid put it, chewed up and spat out.

  Human motivation remains a mystery to me, Mr Pascoe. Including my own.

  I called again on Miss Maciver the following day on the pretext, to her, of checking whether I’d left my gloves there, and to myself of keeping an eye on a possible loose end.

  The true reason was I wanted to go back. She fascinated me. You may find this odd in a man of my professional background, but consider again the spell Kay Maciver has clearly cast over your own Mr Dalziel. Is my deep affection for Miss Mac any odder than that?

  I should, of course, have kept well away. The more she saw of me, the more likely she was to mention our encounter at the house to one of your colleagues. No harm in that, of course, as it was soon established that Mr Maciver had been alive and well for at least another twenty-four hours. But mention of a Customs and Excise investigator might arouse the interest of a coroner concerned with establishing the deceased’s state of mind, and my masters do not like their officers to tread the public stage, no matter how good their cover.

  But I ignored best practice. Worse still, after the discovery of the body, I waited till mention of it had been made on the local news, then went out myself to Blacklow Cottage so that she would hear about it from my lips rather than from, saving your presence, some tongue-tied bobby.

  As it turned out, I was never mentioned so I never put myself in the way of a reprimand. The inquest went exactly as planned. The only possible fly in the ointment was young Mr Maciver. His changing of the locks at Moscow House so that his stepmother couldn’t get back in took me by surprise but gave me warning that he could cause some real trouble. Not that it would have affected our preferred scenario, of course. Indeed it might have helped it, distracting attention from his father’s relations with Ash-Mac’s and focusing it on family problems. My masters were of a mind to encourage him in his revelations and accusations. But the thought of the effect of such a scandal on Kay, on the daughter Helen, and above all on Miss Maciver disturbed me considerably and I was already examining contingency plans for keeping him quiet when it turned out that Kay had made her own arrangements.

  It was now that the real value of Kay’s friendship with Mr Dalziel became apparent. It was, I believe, a spin-off from an earlier operation undertaken by my department in relation to Ash-Mac’s security, though I am not sure precisely how Kay used it to get Mr Dalziel so deeply in her debt. I do know, however, that having him in charge of the enquiry made everything so much easier, and it was something of a relief to be able to stand back and see the unpleasant young Maciver silenced without having to dirty my own hands.

  I have talked long enough. You will have to be content with a mere digest of the next ten years.

  I left Mid-Yorkshire, not without regrets, and returned to my daily toil. Very soon afterwards I was involved in an altercation which left me with a gunshot wound to my leg. On the road to recovery, I chose to return here for a convalescent holiday and of course to renew my acquaintance with Miss Mac, which was absolutely against the rules. I found her condition had begun to deteriorate noticeably but, as is her nature, she was struggling gamely and uncomplainingly on. I was able to help in various ways, one of which that pleasant young man, Mr Bowler, has clearly brought to your notice. My reward has been to see her enter the long period of remission which she is still enjoying. Incidentally, she never let her family know the seriousness of her condition, and they are all too self-absorbed to have noticed anything more than could be put down to the debilities of age.

  My own condition, it became
clear, was going to leave me with impaired movement in my leg, which I may have exaggerated slightly, so that I was informed I would not be returning to field work. On hearing this, I looked suitably disappointed, refused the offer of a routine desk job, and opted instead for what we call sleep mode. No one ever really retires from our business, Mr Pascoe. And resignation is the agency’s euphemism for death!

  Normally an operative in sleep mode is able to pass the rest of his life in what seems to the outside world a normal state of retirement from whatever job he may claim to have had. But in times of need, you are always likely to be reactivated.

  When I heard of young Maciver’s death, I went straight round to Blacklow Cottage, bearing the sad news purely as a friend. But I was duty bound to report the odd circumstances of the death to my masters, since when I admit I have been acting as their ears here in Mid-Yorkshire. My conclusion about the affair is I am sure the same as yours, Mr Pascoe. Young Pal came across something which made him think again about the circumstances of his father’s death. Perhaps it was simply a record of his dealings with Gallipot. Pal followed his father’s road pretty exactly here too, hiring the man ostensibly for one purpose then gradually bringing him round to the other. How he did it I’m not sure—bribery, alcohol, drugs, perhaps a combination—but eventually he got Gallipot to reveal all, or at least as much as he knew or suspected, of the true circumstances of his father’s death. You would of course have a much fuller picture if it were not for the tragic accident which deprived you of a chance to question Gallipot. Strange are the workings of fate.

  This information must have been shocking to young Pal, but I cannot believe it overthrew his reason to the point where he decided to take his own life. That decision must surely have had some other much closer occasion—I see from your face, Mr Pascoe, that I am right—but once taken, his mind was quite clearly so deranged that he opted to repeat the circumstances of the paternal death as closely as possible, using whatever garbled version Gallipot had fed him as a template.