An April Shroud

Dalziel felt impelled to defend Bonnie Fielding.

‘The man, Pappy, has been warned to keep look-out. The lad took the boat, it seems.’

‘Worse and worse,’ said the old man angrily. ‘That fool Papworth is totally unreliable. Let’s go and find him and you’ll see.’

He drained his glass and led the way out at a pace which had Dalziel’s borrowed carpet slippers flip-flopping on the uncarpeted floor.

Dalziel paused in the hallway as he heard the sound of raised voices drifting down the stairs. Someone, it sounded like Bertie, was shouting angrily and other voices mingled in the background.

‘Come on!’ commanded Fielding, irritated by the delay, and obediently Dalziel followed him through a door which led into a new complex of meaner corridors running through what presumably had once been the servants’ quarters.

Fielding strode on ahead till he reached a door on which he rapped imperiously. Then without waiting for a reply, he flung it open with an aplomb which won Dalziel’s professional admiration.

The room looked as if it had been furnished from an army surplus sale. The metal bed was made up with a neatness that invited inspection and the objects on the bedside locker – ashtray, alarm clock and a box of matches – were placed at the corners of an isosceles triangle.

Pappy was not there and in an almost unconscious reflex Dalziel stepped into the room and opened the metal wardrobe. It contained a couple of jackets and an old but well preserved black suit.

Glancing round, he realized that Fielding was regarding him strangely. Bursting into a servant’s room was evidently OK, but searching it was something else.

‘He’s not here then,’ said Dalziel.

‘No. I doubt if he spends a great deal of time in the wardrobe.’

‘Perhaps he’s out looking.’

‘Hah!’ snorted Fielding, setting off again. Dalziel followed after glancing out of the window. It was still raining and the cobbled yard which lay outside was inches deep in water so that it looked like a sea of semolina. For the second time since coming into this house, Dalziel felt a sense of physical belittlement.

Fielding was knocking on another door now, more gently this time and without trying the handle. A woman’s voice answered from within.

‘Who is it?’

‘Mr Fielding. Sorry to trouble you, Mrs Greave, but I’m looking for Papworth. Do you know where he is?’

After a short interval, the door was opened by a bright-eyed woman of about forty, whose magenta-tinted hair and green dressing-gown wound tight around her body gave her the look of a cornfield poppy. She was not unattractive in a bold and brassy kind of way.

‘I was having a nap,’ she said with more of accusation than explanation in her voice.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Fielding. ‘Do you know where Papworth is?’

‘No,’ said the woman yawning, showing good teeth in a moist pink mouth. Her glance flickered towards Dalziel who looked her up and down from her bare feet to the untidy brightness of her hair and leered grotesquely at her. Dalziel’s leer was so unambiguous that it was like a lesser man exposing himself. Mrs Greave screwed up her mouth in distaste and said, ‘Sorry, I’ve no idea. I’d better start thinking about dinner, I suppose, so if you’ll excuse me.’

She began to close the door but Dalziel leaned forward so that his belly curved into the doorway. It was more subtle than putting your foot in the jamb.

Sniffing noisily, he said, ‘Is something burning?’

The woman half turned, then swung back again to prevent Dalziel from entering the room.

‘No,’ she said, and swung the door to so violently that he had to skip back to avoid a collision. But he smiled to himself as they moved on. He had penetrated far enough to see a man’s suede shoe lying on the floor. It looked wet.

‘So she’s the cook, is she?’ he asked.

‘So rumour has it,’ said Fielding drily. ‘It was probably the dinner you smelt burning.’

Dalziel laughed. It was turning out to be a very interesting household, this. It had to be Papworth who was in the woman’s room. Perhaps he was just taking evasive action. With this old fusspot on the prowl, who could blame him? Though, of course, you didn’t need to take your shoes off to hide.

‘Papworth’s knocking her off, is he?’ he said, voicing his thought.

‘Who?’

‘Mrs Greave. The cook.’

Fielding laughed again.

‘I hope not,’ he said. ‘She’s his daughter!’

‘His daughter?’ echoed Dalziel. ‘You’re sure?’

‘No one can ever be sure of their father,’ said Fielding. ‘We believe what we’re told, don’t we? Come on. We might find him in the Hall.’

It seemed that this hunt for Papworth was becoming an obsession with the old man. Dalziel’s own enthusiasm had waned, partly because he still had not discarded his theory about Papworth’s whereabouts (a man could visit his daughter in her bedroom, couldn’t he?) but mainly because Fielding now proposed that they should go out into the rain-filled yard.

‘Hold on,’ he said at the door. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Just over there,’ said Fielding, pointing to a long high-roofed building which ran out from the main house. It looked as if it might once have been a stables, but surprisingly, in this neglected house, this particular block looked as if someone had been working on it fairly recently, an impression confirmed by the wording on a sign propped against the wall. Gibb and Fowler, Building Contractors, Orburn.

‘It joins up with the house,’ said Dalziel reasonably. ‘Can’t we get into it without going outside?’

‘If you must,’ said the old man crossly, shutting the door.

Their route this time took them through a new world in the form of a large room (or perhaps two or three rooms knocked into one) where the old stone walls had been plastered and painted a brilliant blue. On one side were a pair of large freezers and on the other, gleaming in silver and white, a row of microwave ovens. It was like stepping out of a bus shelter into a space ship.

‘What’s all this?’ asked Dalziel in bewilderment.

‘We drink a lot of soup,’ said Fielding, not stopping to offer further explanation but pressing on through the room with unflagging speed.

Dalziel followed down another short corridor, then into the building which was the object of Fielding’s forced march.

Here he halted and let his eyes get used to the dim light filtering through the narrow arched windows. If the microwave ovens had been a step forward out of the nineteenth century, what was going on here was just as determined a step back.

The building had been a stables, he reckoned, with an upper floor used perhaps as a hay-loft. This floor had now been removed with the exception of a small section at the far end which had been transformed into a kind of minstrels’ gallery. The joists supporting the arched roof had clearly lacked something in antiquity and they were being supplemented by a new fishbone pattern of age-blackened beams, standing out starkly against the white-washed interstices. Dalziel rapped his knuckles against one of these beams which was leaning against the wall, prior to elevation. It rang hollowly and felt smooth and cold to the touch. Dalziel was not repelled. He had nothing against plastic. He would as lief eat off colourful Formica as polished mahogany. Nor did it seem distasteful to him that the panes of stained ‘glass’ which were being fitted into the windows were plastic also. His reaction was one of simple puzzlement.

To what end would the Fieldings be transforming an old stables into something that looked like a set for a remake of Robin Hood?

Old Fielding, having peered into various recesses and through various doors, now abandoned his search for Papworth and returned to enjoy Dalziel’s bewilderment.

‘What do you think of this?’ he asked, gesturing with a flamboyance more in keeping with his surroundings than his person. ‘Is it not a fit monument for our times? What would Pope have had to say?’

‘Monument?’ said Dalziel, wondering momentarily if the old man was being literal and this place was indeed intended to be some sort of mausoleum, a kind of bourgeois Taj Mahal. But what about the ovens?