Kitabı oxu: «Recalled to Life»
REGINALD HILL
RECALLED TO LIFE
A Dalziel and Pascoe novel
Copyright
Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsPublishers in 1992
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Copyright © Reginald Hill 1992
Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN 9780586217320
Ebook Edition © MAY 2013 ISBN 9780007386239
Version 2015-06-23
Epigraph
‘You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?’
‘Long ago.’
‘You know that you are recalled to life?’
‘They tell me so.’
‘I hope you care to live?’
‘I can’t say.’
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Author’s Note
PART THE FIRST: Golden Age
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
PART THE SECOND: Golden Bough
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
PART THE THIRD: Golden Apple
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
PART THE FOURTH: Golden Grove
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
PART THE FIFTH: Golden Boy
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
Keep Reading
About the Author
Also by the Author
About the Publisher
Author’s Note
The epigraph and all chapter headings come from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.
PART THE FIRST Golden Age
ONE
‘I tell thee that although it is a long time on the road, it is on the road and coming.’
It was the best of crimes, it was the worst of crimes; it was born of love, it was spawned by greed; it was completely unplanned, it was coldly premeditated; it was an open-and-shut case, it was a locked-room mystery; it was the act of a guileless girl, it was the work of a scheming scoundrel; it was the end of an era, it was the start of an era; a man with the face of a laughing boy reigned in Washington, a man with the features of a lugubrious hound ruled in Westminster; an ex-Marine got a job at a Dallas book repository, an ex-Minister of War lost a job in politics; a group known as the Beatles made their first million, a group known as the Great Train Robbers made their first two million; it was the time when those who had fought to save the world began to surrender it to those they had fought to save it for; Dixon of Dock Green was giving way to Z-Cars, Bond to Smiley, the Monsignors to the Maharishis, Matt Dillon to Bob Dylan, l.s.d. to LSD, as the sunset glow of the old Golden Age imploded into the psychedelic dawn of the new Age of Glitz.
It was the Year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and sixty-three, and it is altogether fitting that this crime of which we speak should have been committed in one of Yorkshire’s great country houses, Mickledore Hall, and that its dénouement should have taken place in that most traditional of settings, the Old Library …
The library door burst open. A man came running out. For a second he paused. The main doors stood ajar, spilling golden sunlight across the old flagged floor. He took a half step towards the light, a voice called, ‘Get him!’ and he turned and started up the broad sweeping staircase. He was beautifully balanced, with the tapering figure of an athlete, and his long, easy stride devoured three treads at a time.
A second man came out of the library now, almost as tall as the other, but dark where he was fair, burly and muscular where he was rangy and loose-limbed. He too glanced at the sunlit doorway for a moment. Then with unhurried pace he began to climb the stairs, taking one at a time, heavy lips pulled back from yellowing teeth in the anticipatory rictus of a hungry bear.
On the first-floor landing the fleeing man turned right without hesitation, then right again into the first room he reached. Moments later the burly man arrived in the doorway. The room led through into another, through whose open door a double bed was visible. The fair man made no effort to go any further but stood defiantly by a huge mahogany wardrobe, his shoulders tensed for battle.
‘Nay, Sir Ralph, no more laking. Your fancy woman’s waiting. Murder’s one thing, but you’ll not want accused of bad manners too.’
‘What would a neanderthal like you know about manners?’ sneered the fair man.
‘You’re dead right. Pig ignorant, that’s me. This’d be what you call a dressing-room, is it? I’ll take your word for it, though a dressing-room don’t seem right to me without mud on the floor and a pile of old jockstraps heaving in the corner.’
As he spoke the burly man was moving slowly forward. Suddenly reacting to the danger, the other seized a linen basket which stood by the wardrobe and raised it high as if to hurl it. The top came off, spilling items of male clothing over his head and shoulders.
‘Trying to make me feel at home, Sir Ralph? That’s right good of you,’ the burly man said, grinning.
This gibe finally broke the other’s control. Screaming with rage, he flung the wardrobe door open to impede the burly man’s approach and started dragging clothes off their hangers and hurling them like palms before the advancing feet. Chunky tweeds, elegant evening wear, wool, cotton and finest silk, all alike were crushed beneath that implacable tread till finally the two men stood inches apart.
A hand like a contractor’s grab fell upon the fair man’s shoulder. Instantly, as if its touch were anæsthetic, all life and energy seemed to drain from his limbs and the tense straining body went slack.
‘Walkies,’ said the burly man.
At the foot of the stairs, an older grey-haired man with a lantern jaw was waiting.
‘Well done, lad,’ he said.
‘Shall I cuff him, sir?’
‘I doubt we’ll need to go as far as that, though if he gives any more bother, you can mebbe box his ears.’
The burly man laughed. The old jokes were best, especially when your boss made them.
Outside, the sun was low in the sky but still warm. It cast long shadows from the three police cars standing on the white gravel beneath the terrace. In the rearmost car’s shady interior the pale face of a woman could be seen, wedged between two WPCs. She looked straight ahead, showing no more animation than a death mask.
The uniformed officers took charge of the fair man and led him down from the terrace into the second car. He turned before he got in and looked back, not at the figures above him, but at the house itself, his gaze moving slowly along the whole façade. Then he let himself be pushed into the rear seat.
On the terrace the man with the jaw spoke a few words to his burly subordinate before running lightly down the steps and getting into the leading car. He held his arm aloft through the open window, like a waggon master preparing his train. Then he let it drop forward, the cars began to crunch gravel, and at the same time their bells started to sound and their lights to flash.
Smiling broadly, the burly man stood on the terrace till he could no longer see the flashing lights nor hear the sounding bells.
Then he turned his back on the sun and slowly re-entered the house.
TWO
‘You can bear a little more light?’
‘I must bear it if you let it in.’
Lights.
Some hot, harsh and constant. Others driven at her like snow against a stove-pipe, melting soon as touching.
A shallow platform, one step up.
She takes it, pauses, sways, hears the pause and the sway in the watcher’s breath.
She thinks: So it must have felt for Mick, that first step on to the scaffold.
A hand steadies her. No executioner’s hand, but her saviour’s, Jay’s, cousin Jay Waggs, though she cannot yet think of him as saviour. She clutches her old leather-bound Bible to her skinny breast. He smiles at her, a warm smile in a young face, and a memory is touched of faraway times, faraway places. He urges her forward.
There is a chair. She sits. To her left, a pitcher of water with a glass. To her right, a small vase out of which a spray of freesia raises its hand of glory. Before her, a posy of microphones offering some protection from the flashing bulbs and probing gazes but none from the TV cameras covering her every move, like guns on a prison watchtower.
Mr Jacklin is speaking. Her solicitor. A small grey man who looks so dry that a very little pressure might crumble him to dust. But it is a dryness which kindles to fire at the spark of injustice.
He says, ‘Let me rehearse the situation in case anyone has strayed in from another planet. My client, Miss Cecily Kohler, was tried for the murder of her employer, Mrs Pamela Westropp, in nineteen sixty-three. She was found guilty and sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. Almost from the start, doubts were expressed in some quarters about the safeness of the verdict, but circumstances conspired to make a re-examination of the case virtually impossible until, two years ago, Miss Kohler’s kinsman, Jay Waggs, began to interest himself in the fate of his distant kinswoman, Cissy Kohler. The new evidence he uncovered was first presented to the public in the Ebor television programme Doubt last spring. Now the Home Secretary has at last accepted that there are serious grounds for believing there may have been a gross miscarriage of justice and he has issued a release order pending consideration of the new evidence by the Court of Appeal.
‘Until the decision of that court is officially made public, I cannot of course comment on the legal implications of what has happened. But I can point out the obvious. My client has spent a longer period in jail than any other woman in the annals of English penology. It goes without saying that she will need a proportional period of readjustment to the rigours of freedom. But being aware of the great public interest in the case, she has accepted the recommendation of her advisers that she should attend this press conference in the hope that thereafter she will be permitted a long breathing space free from the importunities of the media.’
‘Does that include Jay Waggs and Ebor television?’ calls a sharp-faced young woman.
Jay Waggs smiles at her and says, ‘One question per paper was the agreement. Is that yours, Sally?’
‘No! Miss Kohler, I’m Sally Blindcrake, Daily Sphere. How did it feel when you heard you were getting out?’
Cissy Kohler speaks so softly not even the posy of mikes can pick it up.
‘Sorry? I couldn’t catch that.’
‘She says she felt nothing,’ says Waggs. ‘Next question.’
‘Nothing?’ insists Blindcrake incredulously. ‘After all those years you’re told you’re innocent, and you feel nothing?’
Kohler raises her head and speaks again, this time loud enough to be heard.
‘I knew it already.’
A pause, then laughter, a ripple of applause.
‘Next,’ says Waggs.
‘Martin Redditch, BBC television. Miss Kohler, you didn’t apply for parole until nineteen seventy-six, though you could have applied earlier. Why was that?’
She frowns and says, ‘I wasn’t ready.’
‘Ready for what?’ shouts someone, but Redditch is pressing on, regardless of the one question limit.
‘But you were ready in ’seventy-six, right. And it looked like you were getting out, till you attacked and killed Officer Daphne Bush in Beddington Prison. At least, you got tried and sentenced for killing her. Or are you claiming to be innocent of that killing too?’
She takes her time, not as if the effort of remembering is painful so much as if the machinery of memory is rusty.
Finally: ‘I killed her,’ she says.
Redditch tries to follow up once more but now Waggs cuts him off.
‘OK, Martin, you got two in. We’ll call it one for each channel. Next!’
‘Norman Proudfoot, Church Times. Miss Kohler, the TV programme mentioned the Bible your mother gave you as a child. I presume it’s that same Bible you’re carrying now. Can you tell us what comfort you have drawn from it during your long imprisonment?’
She looks down at the book still clutched tight against her breast.
‘It helped me look in at myself. Without it, I don’t think I’d have survived.’
This is the longest answer she gives. The questions come thick and fast, some aggressive, some insinuating, some simply inane. All receive the same treatment – a pause followed by a short reply in a soft monotonous voice. Soon Waggs ceases to intervene and relaxes, faintly smiling as the cohorts of the Press dash themselves vainly against the walls of her solitude.
At last the room is silent. Waggs asks, ‘All done?’
Sally Blindcrake says, ‘I know I’ve had my question but it was so long ago I’ve forgotten what it was. How about me closing the circle?’
‘In the interests of balance? Well, that’s certainly a novelty in the Sphere, Sally. OK. Last question.’
‘Miss Kohler. Cecily. Cissy. If you were innocent, why did you confess?’
This time the preliminary pause goes on and on.
Blindcrake says, ‘OK, let me rephrase the question. Not only did you confess, but your alleged confession implicated Ralph Mickledore to such an extent that, along with the other evidence against him, it sent him to the gallows. Was he innocent too?’
Waggs says, ‘OK, Sally, I should have known better. That does it, folks …’
‘No! Hold on. I need an answer, Jay. It was your telly programme that suggested she was so smashed up by little Emily’s drowning that she was fair game for anyone. If she’s innocent, then who’s guilty? And I don’t just mean of the murder. Who was it who twisted her arm till she stuck it up?’
Now Waggs is on his feet, drawing Kohler upright too.
Jacklin leans over to the mikes and says, ‘I cannot allow my client to answer that question outside of a courtroom. We must remember the law of defamation …’
‘Defamation nothing! You can’t defame the dead,’ yells Blindcrake. ‘And isn’t the guy most likely the late Detective-Superintendent Walter Tallantire, then Head of Mid-Yorkshire CID?’
Waggs is urging Kohler off the platform. Any discipline the press conference might have had is rapidly disappearing. Cameramen and reporters jostle each other in their efforts to get near the woman. They spill out of the body of the hall and get between her and the door. The air is filled with a blizzard of flash bulbs and a babble of voices.
‘… What about compensation? … Will you go back to the States? … Are you suing the police? … Is it true you’ve written your memoirs? … How much are they paying? … Have you heard from James Westropp? … What’s his son Philip doing now? … Did you mean to drown the kid? … Is it true you’re going into a nunnery? … Was Daphne Bush your lover? …’
Three uniformed policemen have appeared. They clear a path to the door. One of them flings it open. A camera peers through, momentarily revealing a long corridor in which several men are standing. Then Kohler and Jacklin are through. Waggs turns in the doorway, helping the police to block pursuit. Someone shouts, ‘Hey, Jay. When they make the movie, how about Schwarzenegger playing you?’
Waggs grins and says, ‘Thank you for your courtesy, gentlemen, and ladies. That’s it. End of story.’
He steps back through the door. A policeman pulls it shut behind him.
The scene fades, to be replaced by a close-up of a woman with dead eyes and a mobile lower lip who says, ‘The rest of our programme will be running approximately forty minutes late because of that news conference. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause to viewers …’
THREE
‘Come on, and have it out in plain words! You hate the fellow.’
Detective-Superintendent Andrew Dalziel of Mid-Yorkshire CID stabbed the off-button of the video remote control as if he wanted to drive it through his knee.
‘Bastards!’ he said. ‘Bitch!’
‘The poor woman,’ said Maudie Tallantire.
‘Poor nowt. She were guilty as hell,’ said Dalziel. ‘Three people are dead because of her. I’d have thrown away the key! You save your sympathy for yourself, Maudie. You heard what that newspaper cow said about Wally?’
‘Wally’s been dead nigh on twenty years,’ said Maud Tallantire as if explaining something to a simple child. ‘He’s past harm now and who’d want to harm an old woman like me? Oh, I know the times have changed, and I reckon us old ’uns had the best of it, war and all. Everyone knew where they were going then, and in the years after. But it all went wrong somewhere, Andy. But human nature doesn’t change. At heart people are still as good as ever they were. They’d rather do you a good turn than a bad one. Look at you, Andy, coming all this way just ’cos you got to worrying about me, and no need at all!’
Dalziel shook his head in affectionate exasperation. Anyone who could cite himself as evidence of the basic goodness of human nature was clearly beyond hope. Maudie was over seventy now, grey-haired, slightly lame, but she hadn’t changed in essence from the pretty, amiable and rather vague woman he’d met more than thirty years ago, and very little, if report were true, from the wide-eyed lass who’d married Wally Tallantire back in the ’thirties.
‘Copper’s wife has got to be either tough as old boots to put up with the life, or live in a world of her own so she don’t notice,’ Wally had once confided in him when time and alcohol had matured their relationship. ‘That’s my Maudie. A rare orchid, Andy. She’ll need looking out for if anything ever happens to me. You’ll do that for me, won’t you, lad? Do I have your word on that?’
Dalziel had given his word gladly, but in the event, when Tallantire died of a heart attack shortly before he was due to retire, Maudie proved quite capable of looking out for herself. Within a year she’d moved back to her native Skipton and quickly gathered up the threads of her young life, broken when she’d moved from West to Mid-Yorkshire all those years ago.
Dalziel visited regularly for a while, then intermittently, and in recent years hardly at all. But when he saw the Kohler press conference on the telly, he knew the time had come for another visit.
He’d been going to suggest that Maudie might like to think about staying with friends for a couple of days just in case the Press came prying, but he wasn’t a man to waste breath. Instead he ran his video back a little way, restarted it, and pressed the freeze button when he reached the shot of the corridor through the open door.
‘That fellow there remind you of anyone, Maudie?’
‘The tall one?’ she said looking at the two men touched by his broad forefinger. ‘He’s a bit like Raymond Massey.’
‘No. Someone you know. And I mean the other one. I know who the tall fellow is. Chap called Sempernel. He came sniffing around at the time. Said he were Home Office but he were a funny bugger, no question. You’d not have seen him. But the other one, the skinny runt, remind you of anyone? And don’t say Mickey Rooney, luv!’
‘He doesn’t look a bit like Mickey Rooney,’ said the woman, examining the man closely. ‘He doesn’t really look like anybody, but he does look familiar.’
‘Remember a sergeant called Hiller? Adolf, we used to call him? Wally didn’t care for him and got shut of him.’
‘Vaguely,’ she said. ‘But what would Sergeant Hiller be doing there?’
‘That’s what I’d like to know,’ said Dalziel grimly. ‘And he’s not a sergeant now. Deputy Chief Constable down south, last I heard. Well, the higher the monkey climbs, the more he shows his behind, eh?’
Maudie Tallantire laughed. ‘You don’t change, do you, Andy? Now how about a cup of tea?’
‘Grand. By the way, Maudie, do you still have any of Wally’s personal papers? I seem to recall you said you’d put a lot of stuff together when you moved here just in case there were anything important …’
‘That’s right. And you said you’d look through it some time when you had a moment. But that was donkey’s years ago, Andy. And you never had a moment, did you?’
‘Sorry,’ he said guiltily. ‘You know how it is. But if you’ve still got it, I might as well take a look now.’
‘I’ve probably thrown it out long since,’ she said. ‘It were in an old blue suitcase, one of them little ones which was all we used to need once when we went away. Now it takes a cabin trunk! It’ll be in the boxroom if I’ve still got it, but it’s dusty up there and you don’t want to spoil that nice suit.’
‘I’ll take care.’
She was right about the dust but he spotted the blue case without any difficulty. He picked it up, blew gently, coughed as a dust cloud arose, and went to open the window.
Below in the street, a car drew up. There were two men in it. The one who got out of the driver’s side was youngish, dressed in designer casuals, and his elegantly coiffured head moved watchfully this way and that, as though he had debouched in Indian territory rather than suburban Yorkshire.
But it was the other who held Dalziel’s attention. Thin-faced, bespectacled, dressed in a crumpled black suit a size too large, he stood quite still looking up at the house like a twice repelled rent-collector.
‘Bloody hell. It is Adolf!’ exclaimed Dalziel, stepping back from the window. ‘I should’ve known that bugger’d move quick.’
Shaking the remaining dust from the case, he went quickly and quietly downstairs. Just inside the front door was a small cloakroom. He slipped the case under the hand-basin, closed the door and returned to the living-room as Maudie came out of the kitchen carrying a laden tray.
‘Find what you were looking for, Andy?’
‘No, not a sign,’ he said, removing the video from the recorder and fitting it into a capacious inner pocket. ‘I reckon you must have chucked it out without noticing. No matter. Are them your Eccles cakes I see? You must’ve known I was coming. What was it Wally used to say? Never say nowt good ever came out of Lancashire till you’ve tasted our Maudie’s Eccles cakes!’
He seized one, devoured it in a couple of bites, and was on his third when the doorbell rang.
‘Who can that be?’ said Maudie, with the ever fresh surprise of the northern housewife that someone should be at her door.
She went out into the hallway. Dalziel helped himself to another cake and moved to the lounge doorway to catch the conversation.
‘Mrs Tallantire, you may not remember me, but we have met a long time back. Geoffrey Hiller. I was a sergeant up here for a while when your husband was head of CID.’
‘Hiller? Now isn’t that odd? We were just talking about you. Won’t you step inside, Sergeant? And your friend.’
‘Thank you. Actually, it’s Deputy Chief Constable now, Mrs Tallantire. Of the South Thames force. And this is Detective-Inspector Stubbs.’
‘Ooh, you have done well. Come on through. Andy, it never rains but it pours. Here’s another old friend of Wally’s come visiting.’
Dalziel, back in his chair, looked up in polite puzzlement as the dark-suited man stopped short in the doorway, like a parson accidentally ushered into a brothel. Then the fat man’s face lit up with the joy of a father at the prodigal’s return and he said, ‘Geoff? Is that you? Geoff Hiller, by all that’s holy! How are you, lad? What fettle? By God, it’s good to see you.’
He was on his feet shaking the newcomer’s hand like a bushman killing a snake. Hiller had recovered from his shock and was now regarding Dalziel with wary neutrality.
‘How are you, er, Andy?’ he said.
‘I’m grand. And who’s your friend?’
‘This is Detective-Inspector Stubbs. Stubbs, meet Detective-Superintendent Dalziel, Head of Mid-Yorkshire CID.’
Hiller’s tone underlined the title.
Stubbs held out his hand. ‘Hi. Glad to meet you, Supe.’
‘Supe?’ echoed Dalziel. ‘Up here we drink supe. Or if it’s homemade, we chew it. Will you be staying in West Yorkshire long enough to learn our little ways?’
Stubbs glanced at Hiller, who said, ‘Actually, er, Andy, we’re on our way to your neck of the woods. This is just in nature of a courtesy call on Mrs Tallantire in passing.’
‘I see. In passing Skipton? On your way to Mid-Yorks HQ? From South Thames?’
As he spoke, Dalziel’s finger traced two sides of a rectangle in the air, and he smiled an alligator’s smile.
‘Now that’s what I call courtesy! Maudie, isn’t it nice of Geoff here to come so far out of his way just for old time’s sake? Incidentally, Geoff, I presume you’re expected at my shop? I was talking to the Chief yesterday afternoon and he said nowt.’
‘The Home Office should have phoned Mr Trimble this morning,’ said Hiller.
‘That explains it. It’s my day off, which is why I’m here. Social call on an old friend. Mebbe it’s your day off too?’
‘No,’ said Hiller. ‘Not really. I’m afraid there is a business element to my call, Mrs Tallantire. You may have heard that some question has arisen as to the safety of the verdict in the Mickledore Hall murder case. In fact, Cecily Kohler has been released and the Home Office has ordered an inquiry into the affair. Your late husband, Detective-Superintendent Tallantire, conducted the original investigation and will naturally figure in the inquiry which I have been instructed to take charge of.’
‘Now isn’t that funny? Andy and I were only just now talking –’
‘And you’ve come to warn Maudie that the Press will probably be sniffing around,’ intervened Dalziel. ‘Now that is kind. I leave you in good hands, Maudie. Me, I’d best be off. Geoff, I know it’s not a nice job you’ve got, poking around in other buggers’ rubbish bins, but where’d we be without the garbage collectors, eh? I promise you, you’ll get nowt but cooperation from my department. I’ll see you tomorrow, likely.’
Hiller tried to look suitably grateful but couldn’t get beyond the expression of a postman assured the Rottweiler is just a big softy.
‘Actually, er, Andy, we hope to be in situ later today.’
‘You can be up to your necks in situ for me, Geoff, but it’s my day off, remember? What did you think I was going to do? Head straight back and start shredding the files?’
He laughed, kissed Maudie on the cheek and said, ‘Take care, luv. I’ll see myself out. See you soon.’
He went out, closing the lounge door firmly behind him. As he opened the front door noisily, he reached into the cloakroom, picked up the suitcase and exited with a slam that shook the stained glass panel.
Separating Maudie’s driveway from her neighbour’s was a low brick wall. He leaned over and placed the case behind it. As he reached the gate, he heard the front door open behind him. He turned to see Stubbs coming out. He’d always been a distrustful bastard, that Hiller. It was good to know some things didn’t change.
‘Need something from the car,’ said Stubbs as he joined him.
‘Oh aye? Hair curlers, is it?’ said Dalziel.
As he drove away he saw the inspector return to the house without opening his car. He drove slowly round the block, parked outside Maudie’s neighbour’s and walked briskly up the drive. A window opened as he retrieved the suitcase and he looked up to see a woman viewing him with grave suspicion.
‘Yes?’ she called sharply.
Dalziel pulled the video out of his pocket, and held it up like a votive offering.
‘Are you on line with the Almighty, sister?’ he intoned. ‘Are you plugged in to the Lord? I’ve got a video here that’ll turn your telly into the Ark of the Covenant!’
‘No, thank you!’ she cried in alarm and slammed the window shut.
Shaking his head, he returned to the car.
It was like he’d always thought.
There was no love of religion in West Yorkshire.
FOUR
‘I am not surprised; I knew you were here … if you really don’t want to endanger my existence – go your way as soon as possible and let me go mine. I am busy. I am an official.’
‘An habitual criminal is easy to spot. Ask him, “Where were you when President Kennedy was shot?” and he’ll say, “I was at home in bed reading a book. I can bring six witnesses to prove it.”’
There was a dutiful titter. Perhaps it’s the way I tell them, thought Peter Pascoe.
He looked at the twenty young faces before him. Children of the ’seventies. Adolescents of the ’eighties. Lawmen of the ’nineties. God help them.
He said gently, ‘Who was President Kennedy?’ Pause. A lowering of eyes to avoid catching his. Make the question easier. ‘What country was he president of?’
An uncertain hand crept up.
‘America, sir?’
‘That’s right. Would that be North or South America?’
The irony of superiors is unfair because it forces you to take it literally.
He went on quickly before anyone could try an answer, ‘What happened to him? Well, I told you that. He got shot. Does anyone know the year?’
They probably didn’t know this year! No. That was unfair. He was confusing truth and truism. Everyone remembers what they were doing when Kennedy died. Everyone except a few billion who weren’t born; or didn’t know of his existence, or didn’t give a toss that it was over. Everyone in America, then? Maybe. Probably their kids had the date and data drummed into them with the Pledge of Allegiance. But this lot, why should they be expected to know anything about other people’s myths?
‘Was it nineteen sixty-three, sir?’
‘Yes. Yes, it was.’
He looked at the speaker with disproportionate pleasure. Another hand was waving urgently. Perhaps the floodgates had opened and all his cynical doubts about the ignorance of this generation were going to be washed away. He pointed at the hand-waver, nodded, waited to be amazed.
‘Sir, it’s half past. We’re due in the gym with Sergeant Rigg.’
He knew Sergeant Rigg. A no-neck Welshman with a black belt and a short way with latecomers.
‘You’d better go, then.’
He looked at his notes. He still had three sides to go. Before she left, Ellie had warned him to go easy on the midnight oil. (Trying to offer a pastoral substitute for scarcer emotional goods?) He pushed the distasteful thought away and concentrated on her words.
‘You start by thinking if you speak very slowly you might spin it out for five minutes. You end by gabbling so fast you’re incomprehensible, and even then you’ve still got bucketfuls of pearls left uncast.’
He poured them back into his briefcase and followed the cadets from the room.
‘Pete, how’d it go?’
It was Jack Bridger, the grizzled Chief Inspector in charge of Mid-Yorkshire cadet training programme.
‘So-so. I didn’t find them very responsive.’
Bridger regarded him shrewdly and said, ‘They’re just ordinary lads, not post-grad students. At that age all you think about is fucking and football. Secret is to ask the right questions. Talking of which, sounds like they’re going to be asking some funny questions about this Mickledore Hall business.’
‘They’ve started. Full inquiry. Fellow called Hiller, Deputy Chief from South Thames, is leading it. Turned up yesterday even though the official announcement of the inquiry hasn’t been made yet.’
‘Hiller? That wouldn’t be Adolf Hiller, would it?’
He pronounced the name with a long A.
‘This one’s called Geoffrey, I think. Smallish fellow with crooked teeth. Looks as if he’s stolen his suit.’
‘That’s him! Adolf was just his nickname. He were a sergeant here way back, but not for long. Too regimental for old Wally Tallantire. That’s how he got his nickname. Some joker started changing his name on notices and lists to Hitler, and it soon caught on.’
‘But he couldn’t have been here during the Mickledore Hall case, surely, or he’d not have got this job?’
‘No, it was after that. He got moved around like pass the parcel. He were one of those fellows, you couldn’t fault his work, but you couldn’t thole his company.’
Pascoe said, ‘I never knew Tallantire. What was he like? Cut a few corners, would he?’
‘That’s the way the wind blows, is it? Well, it figures. Scapegoats are like lawyers. The best ’uns is dead ’uns. As for cutting corners, well, Wally would certainly go the shortest way, once he got a target in his sights. And the Mickledore Hall case was his golden hour by all accounts, the one he reckoned he’d be remembered for. But there’s a difference between cutting corners and carving people up.’
‘So you reckon he was straight?’
‘On the whole, I’d say so. I’ll tell you one thing, but. Fat Andy won’t take kindly to anyone casting aspersions. Wally was his big hero, he took Andy under his wing, and it needed a pretty broad wing, believe me!’
Pascoe grinned and said, ‘A bit wild, was he?’
‘Wild? He’s a dormouse to what he were! He’d still be pounding a beat if it weren’t for Wally. But Wally was flying high after the Mickledore case, and Andy flew with him.’
Pascoe mused on these things as he headed back to Headquarters. He tried to imagine Dalziel as a wild young thing in need of protection but all he could get was Genghis Khan in short pants. The image made him smile. The sky was blue, the sun was shining, he felt good.
He turned a corner. Ahead, rearing out of a rough sea of rooftops, he glimpsed the huge grey front of the cathedral tower. His mouth felt dry. He tried to make spittle and swallow but couldn’t. The palms of his hands were sweating so that the wheel felt slimy against them. The tower seemed to be swelling to fill the sky, while the car shrank around him to a biscuit tin. He braked hard, pulled in to the side, felt the wheels hit the kerb. His heart was racing like an engine with a stripped gear. His left hand fumbled for the seat-belt release, his right for the door handle. His fingers felt weak and unconnected with his mind, more vegetable than flesh, but somehow the door was open, the belt released and he swung his legs out of the car. An overtaking cyclist had to swerve sharply to avoid collision. She went on her way, swearing over her shoulder. Pascoe paid no heed. He forced his head between his knees and drew in great ragged breaths. After a while he managed to get some rhythm into his breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth, long, slow inhalations and exhalations. His heart too was slowing, his salivary glands resumed a limited service, and his hands began to feel less like a bunch of radishes bound loosely to his wrists.
When strength returned to his legs, he stood up and walked unsteadily around the car. He forced himself to think about his lecture to the cadets, what he should have told them about criminal investigation, what he shouldn’t have wasted time telling them. The sun was pleasantly warm on his skin, the air tasted good. At last he felt able to get back in and drive away. But he didn’t let his gaze drift up to the skyline again.
A mile away, a van was backing into Pascoe’s spot in the HQ car park. The driver got out and went into the building. Sergeant George Broomfield on the desk said, ‘Can I help you?’
‘Why not? Sergeant Proctor, South Thames. I’m with Mr Hiller’s mob. Got some gear outside in the van. Any chance of a lift?’
His cockney chirpiness grated on Broomfield’s ear, which would have surprised Proctor who came from Ruislip.
‘Doubt it,’ he said. ‘Not for a while, any road. I don’t think I’ve got a body free.’
Suddenly Dalziel was there. How a man of his girth could be sudden, Broomfield never knew, but when he wanted he could lurk like a Brazilian striker.
‘George, what are you saying? Cooperation’s the key word here. Isn’t that young Hector I see through there playing with himself? Send him out to help. Fragile stuff, is it, Sergeant?’
Proctor, recognizing the weight of authority, said, ‘Yes, sir. Couple of computers, software, hardware, that sort of thing.’
Broomfield was looking alarmed. Not even a cockney deserved PC Hector, who didn’t break cups when he washed up, he broke sinks.
‘Computers, eh?’ said Dalziel. ‘Then Hector’s your man. Strong as an ox. Hector! Come on out here!’
He stood by the desk till Proctor and the bewildered-looking constable had gone into the car park. Then he said very seriously to Broomfield, ‘These people are our guests, George. We’ve got to take care of them,’ and set off up the stairs.
He’d reached the first landing when he heard the first crash, and its accompanying cry of anguish followed him all the way up to the second.
He smiled and went on his way to Sergeant Wield’s room.
‘Don’t get up,’ he said to the Sergeant who hadn’t moved. ‘The lad not back yet?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Bloody nuisance. I wish he’d not volunteer all the time for these skives.’
Wield, who knew very well that it was Dalziel who had volunteered Pascoe for the cadet lecture (‘right up your street, being a Master of Ceremonies or whatever it is you are’), said nothing.
‘Tell him to drop in when he gets back, will you?’ Dalziel hesitated at the door, then went on, ‘Matter of no importance, but how’s he been looking to you lately?’
‘Bit rough,’ said Wield. ‘He’s not really been himself since that lass jumped off the cathedral tower. It seemed to knock all the stuffing out of him, somehow.’
‘Certainly knocked the stuffing out of her,’ said Dalziel.
He stared hard at Wield’s inscrutably craggy features as though challenging him to reprove his callousness, but the Sergeant just held his gaze unflinchingly.
‘Right,’ said Dalziel. ‘Well, keep an eye on him, eh? I know I can rely on your feminine intuition.’
He went on to his own office, opened a drawer, and took out the glass of Scotch he’d been drinking when he’d noticed the South Thames van pulling into the car park below his window. He was just finishing it when the door burst open and Hiller came in.
‘Well, come on in, Geoff,’ said Dalziel pleasantly. ‘Have a seat. Getting settled in, are you?’
Hiller remained standing.
‘I think it’s time to lay a few ground rules,’ he said. ‘First, in front of other officers, I think we should observe protocol. That means “sir” not “Geoff”, OK?’
‘Fair enough. No Geoffing around,’ said Dalziel.
‘Secondly, Inspector Stubbs tells me he found you in the room allocated to us by your man Pascoe.’
‘Just checking you had everything you need, Geoff. Pascoe’s a good lad but a bit rough at the edges. He might have overlooked a few of the refinements.’
‘I found Mr Pascoe very helpful and obliging,’ said Hiller. ‘But I want to make it clear that my inquiry room, especially now I’ve got my equipment here, is off-limits to all Mid-Yorkshire staff. That includes you, Andy. And especially it includes that moron, Hector. Is he brain-damaged or what?’
‘Hector? He’s reckoned to be one of our high fliers.’
‘He’ll fly high if he comes within kicking distance of my boot,’ said Hiller.
A joke, thought Dalziel. Adolf had really come a long way.
‘That all, is it?’ he inquired politely.
‘Just one more thing. While I was talking to Mrs Tallantire yesterday, she let slip that you’d been asking her about Wally’s personal papers.’
‘Oh aye? Then she’ll have told you that there weren’t any,’ said Dalziel.
‘Yes, that’s what she said you said,’ replied Hiller.
‘You’re not implying I’d try to hide summat as important as that?’ said Dalziel indignantly.
‘I’m implying nothing. I’m saying loud and clear that if I get any proof that you’re attempting to interfere with or obstruct my inquiry in any way, I’ll bury you, Andy.’
‘You’d need to scratch a big hole, Geoff,’ said Dalziel, his fingers mining his groin as if in illustration.
Hiller smiled thinly.
‘I don’t do my own digging any more,’ he said. ‘By the way, I’ve asked Mr Trimble if your DCI Pascoe can act as liaison between us. Like I said before, he seems a sensible sort of fellow, and I think it’s in all our interests to keep things on an even keel.’
‘Right,’ said Dalziel. ‘Pascoe’s your man for even keels. Full of ballast. It’ll be plain sailing with him.’
‘Plain sailing’s what we all want, isn’t it?’ said Hiller.
Dalziel showed him out with all the surface regret of a society host losing a favourite guest. He watched him out of sight along the corridor then he said, ‘You can come out now.’
The door to the storeroom opposite opened and Pascoe emerged.
‘Saw you lurking a few minutes back,’ said Dalziel. ‘Hear all that, did you?’
‘The door was open,’ said Pascoe defensively.
‘Don’t apologize. There’s three things a good copper never passes up on, and one of ’em’s a chance to eavesdrop.’
Pascoe didn’t care to inquire as to the other two. He followed Dalziel into his room and said, ‘In this case, eavesdropping hasn’t left me much the wiser. I’d appreciate being told what’s really going off here.’
‘You’ve stopped reading the papers and watching the telly, have you?’
‘I’ve not had much time recently.’
‘Oh aye? Family all right, are they?’
Why was it so hard to tell Dalziel anything without getting the sense he knew it already? Pascoe said as casually as he could, ‘Fine. Well, in fact, Ellie’s away visiting her mother for a couple of days. And Rosie too, of course. The old girl’s been a bit under the weather. The strain of looking after Ellie’s father. He’s got Alzheimer’s, remember? He’s gone totally now, no memory, never speaks, incontinent, the works. So they got him into a home last month and now Ellie’s gone down just to check her mum’s coping …’
He was talking too much.
Dalziel said, ‘OK, is she?’
‘Yes. I think so. I mean, Ellie rang just to say they’d got there OK …’
A message on his answering machine. ‘Peter, we’ve arrived safely. Rosie sends her love. I’ll ring again tomorrow.’ He hadn’t tried to ring back.
‘Well, it’s an ill wind,’ said Dalziel. ‘Lots of time on your hands now to catch up with what’s going off. You must’ve seen that telly programme yon Yank, Waggs, made, a while back? The one that caused the big stink?’
Pascoe shook his head.
‘Well, no great loss. Them TV twats get carried away. Funny angles, fancy music, all film festival stuff without the titties in the sand. I’ve got a video of it I’ll show you some time, but best for background is this radio thing they did a couple of years back before they started this miscarriage of justice crap. I don’t suppose you heard that either?’
He rummaged in a drawer, brought out an audio cassette.
‘You listen to that. That was the truth for twenty-five years. Now they’re telling us it’s a load of lies.’
Pascoe took the cassette and said, ‘I gather you know Mr Hiller from way back.’
‘Oh aye. He got dumped on us but Wally soon saw him off. I reckon that’s how he’s got on so well. Everyone he worked for’d be so keen to get shot of the bugger, they’d give him a glowing testimonial to get him on his way! Big mistake. You don’t get rid of a snake by pushing it into someone else’s garden. You keep it close where you can stamp on it.’
‘It’s a nice theory,’ said Pascoe. ‘But he must have some ability.’
‘Too true. The ability to dig up whatever bones the Emmies have buried for him and come running back with them, wagging his tiny tail behind him.’
‘I’m sorry?’ said Pascoe, baffled. ‘Emmies? I don’t quite follow …’
‘Emmies!’ said Dalziel in exasperation. ‘MI this, MI that. The funny buggers.’
‘The Security Services, you mean? Come on, sir! Why the hell should Security be interested in Mickledore Hall?’
Dalziel shook his head. ‘You’d be better off sniffing glue than going to them colleges. Do they teach you nowt? Think about it! There was a government minister there that weekend, Partridge, Lord Partridge now. And the dead woman’s husband was one of their own. And there was a Yank, Rampling, he’s something important over in the States, and getting more important, by the sound of it. And there was Noddy Stamper, top industrialist, Sir Noddy now, Maggie gave him a knighthood soon as she got in, so you can see what he was made of. Just listen to the tape. It’s all there. Well, soon after it happened this long thin fellow, all sweet and pink, like a stick of Edinburgh Rock, turned up. Name of Sempernel, he said. Osbert Sempernel. Pimpernel, we called him, he were so hard to pin down. Said he was from the Home Office but I reckon if I could have snapped him in half, I’d have found dirty tricks printed all the way through. I saw him again this morning when I were watching the press conference on the box. Hanging around outside with Adolf. It all made sense.’
‘Not to me,’ said Pascoe, sceptically but not overly so. Dalziel’s delusions had an X-certificate habit of fleshing themselves out into reality. ‘Are you saying that Hiller will heap all the blame on Wally Tallantire just because this chap Sempernel tells him to?’
‘Certainly. He’d hang his own granny if the orders came from high enough, especially if it meant getting up another rung of the ladder.’
‘Adolf Eichmann rather than Adolf Hitler, then?’
‘Both,’ said Dalziel. ‘And the bugger’s taken a fancy to you, so mebbe you should start asking questions about yourself. Any road, you’re to act as liaison. Now, you’ll get nowt out of Adolf, but yon primped-up fancy pants might start yapping after a couple of port-and-lemons.’
‘Stubbs? He seems a decent sort of chap.’
‘SS was full of decent sorts of chap,’ said Dalziel. ‘You just keep your ears flapping.’
‘You mean spy?’
‘If that’s what you like to call it.’
Pascoe wrinkled his face in distaste and said, ‘At least I should be glad there’s not a war on. They shoot spies in wartime, don’t they?’
He left, closing the door quietly behind him.
Dalziel reached into the drawer for his whisky, shaking his head sadly. Under his tutelage Pascoe had taken long strides towards becoming a good cop, mebbe even a great one.
But if he didn’t know there was always a war on, he still had a long way to go.
FIVE
‘I am like one who died young. All my life might have been.’
Cissy Kohler lay on a patchwork quilt and thought: The way I feel, this ought to make me invisible. Bits and pieces of past lives, some hers, some not, stitched together in a show of wholeness. Through the chintz curtains she could see the branches of a wych elm swaying in the wind. In the room below she could hear voices but she didn’t strain her ears, for she knew they couldn’t be saying anything that mattered.
‘Charming place,’ said the tall man in the dark suit whose impeccable cut was a foil to a stringy tie which looked as if it had been dropped in a bowl of Brown Windsor and wrung out by hand.
‘Yeah, very quaint,’ said Jay Waggs. ‘How can I help you, Mr Sempernel?’
‘Belongs to Jacklin, I gather? Decent of him to let you have it.’
‘I figure it’ll be on his bill.’
‘What? Oh, quite. These solicitors. But it’s ideal. Good security. Just the one track down. And that wall behind. Perfect.’
He was looking out of the window into the small rear garden.
The cottage stood in the U-shaped nook which some peasant who knew his rights had indented in the twelve-foot boundary wall of an extensive country estate.
‘Perfect,’ agreed Waggs. ‘The wall and the guard, they make Cissy feel really at home.’
‘Ha-ha. Droll. Though the guard, as you call him, is of course positioned here to keep the media hounds out, not to keep Miss Kohler in.’
‘So she’s free to come and go.’
‘But naturally. Within the limits of our agreement, of course, which I do not doubt that Mr Jacklin has spelt out in tedious detail. Nevertheless, let me recap. Miss Kohler’s early release –’
‘Early!’
‘Indeed. HM Government has agreed for humanitarian reasons to anticipate the proper legal process, but not without undertakings on your part. These are principally that Miss Kohler has agreed that neither she nor her advisers will make any public comment, nor publish any form of memoir of this unhappy business, without the approval of the authorities. In return for this undertaking, HM Government has indicated it will offer no resistance to any legitimate claim for compensation.’
‘Big of them.’
‘I think so. Also Miss Kohler has agreed to remain in this country until the completion of the official inquiry into the circumstances leading up to this unfortunate miscarriage.’
‘Which could take years!’
‘No. I assure you matters are moving fast. Deputy Chief Constable Hiller whom you have met has the business in hand and we anticipate a speedy conclusion. Incidentally, Mr Hiller tells me that if by chance Miss Kohler had kept any written record of the events at Mickledore Hall, sight of it, on loan of course, might speed matters up and obviate the need of any further interview with her.’
Waggs laughed.
‘Come on, Sempernel! You know there’s no record. You guys went through her cell like a pack of rats before she got out.’
The long man smiled thinly.
‘The papers seem to think she may have had some ally through whom such a memoir may have been smuggled out to a place of security.’
‘Like me, you mean? Well, I don’t deny that, given the chance, I’d have been glad to help. But I wasn’t and I didn’t.’
‘I’m happy to accept your word on that, Mr Waggs,’ said Sempernel. ‘There are other possible sources of assistance, of course. She was after all inside for a long time, and could hardly avoid forming relationships. The unfortunate Miss Bush, for instance …’
‘That was long before my time,’ said Waggs. ‘The only memoir I’m aware of is in Cissy’s head and I don’t know how easy it’s going to be to pry that out.’
‘No? You’ve met with quite a lot of success so far,’ murmured Sempernel. ‘Rest, quiet, and above all time are great healers. They are all at your disposal here. Enjoy them.’
He made for the door, stooping to avoid the sagging lintel. Beneath it he paused, looking like Alice in the White Rabbit’s house.
‘One last thing,’ he said, ‘Jacklin has, I hope, made it clear that any grant of a Free Pardon will be in respect of the Mickledore Hall affair only. In respect of the killing of Daphne Bush, there is no doubt about Miss Kohler’s culpability. Her release from that sentence is therefore merely under licence which may be revoked in the event of any breach of its terms. You follow me, Mr Waggs?’
‘You mean you’ve got a string you can twitch whenever you feel like it? I follow.’
‘Good.’ Sempernel passed through the doorway and straightened up so that his face was visible only from the long nose down. ‘I’ll say cheerio, then.’
Protected from the Englishman’s watery gaze, Waggs pushed his middle finger into the air as he said, ‘Yeah. Goodbye.’
He watched from the window till he saw the lanky figure negotiate the muddy path, then he picked up the phone and dialled.
‘Mr Jacklin, please. It’s Jay Waggs. Jacklin? Hi. How’re you doing? We’re fine. Yeah, she’s resting. Listen, Sempernel’s been here. Lots of that slippery Whitehall stuff, but all he’s doing is making sure my thick American mind understands the ground rules. Just thought I’d let you know. How are things your end? No change? That’s good. Well, keep in touch. Ciao.’
He listened for a while longer before putting the receiver down. It might be mere neurosis to imagine he heard significant clicks, but Sempernel struck him as a good man to be neurotic around. And if the phone, then why not everywhere?
He went into the kitchen, blew a kiss at the kettle and switched it on.
A few moments later he tapped on the bedroom door and entered with a cup of coffee.
Cissy Kohler had sat up on the bed and was reading her Bible.
‘Thought you might like this,’ he said. ‘It’s not home style, but near as I can get. How’re you feeling?’
She closed the book, laid it on her lap and took the cup.
‘I’m OK.’
‘Sempernel was here.’
‘Who?’
‘The one like a straightened out hairpin. He was just checking we knew the rules.’
She drank her coffee with her eyes closed as though taking in visions with the steam. He studied her face and wondered just how much of what was happening she really grasped. At least, if there were listening ears, it made role-play that much easier.
He said, ‘He was asking about your memoirs, Cissy.’
She opened her eyes.
‘Memoirs?’
‘Yeah. There are these stories in the Press that you wrote up everything that happened at Mickledore Hall, everything that happened afterwards in jail. Somehow you got them smuggled out and they are waiting to be picked up somewhere.’
He knew what the answer would be. They’d had this conversation before.
‘It’s not true,’ she said without heat. ‘They’re making it up.’
‘That’s what I told him. But if there were any memoirs, Cissy, it’d make things a lot easier for me. The book, the film …’
‘Which book? Which film?’ She regarded him blankly.
‘We’ll talk about it later,’ he said gently. ‘It’s early days. We’ll talk when you’re rested.’
‘How long will we stay here, Jay?’ she asked suddenly. ‘You said we’d go home soon. You said –’
This was dangerous. He cut her off, saying, ‘We will, Cissy, I promise. Just as soon as Mr Sempernel says it’s OK. Don’t you like it here?’
She shook her head and said, ‘Not much.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘I don’t know. It feels so old … so English …’
‘Yeah. It shouldn’t be for long. You rest now, OK?’
Her cup was empty. He took it from her hands and she lay back on the patchwork quilt, with her hands crossed over the old leather Bible on her stomach. Her eyes were still open but he got no impression that they were seeing him. In fact he had a strange feeling that if he stayed here much longer he would stop seeing her.
He turned and left the room.
Pulsuz fraqment bitdi.
