Good Morning, Midnight

12 (#ulink_bc9b3bd3-bb1e-5f47-b692-1135392e2920)

cold, strange world (#ulink_bc9b3bd3-bb1e-5f47-b692-1135392e2920)

Dalziel and Pascoe sat side by side at the head of the staircase.

‘Can’t credit you know nowt,’ said Dalziel. ‘Where were you ten years back?’

‘I don’t know. Where were you a week last Tuesday?’

‘Not the same thing,’ said Dalziel. ‘Anyone can lose a day, but I can tell you exactly where I was ten years ago.’

‘Bully for you. But hang about … Ten years … March … I remember! I was on my back in bed.’

‘Oh aye? Dirty weekend?’

‘No. Ellie and I had been away to Marrakesh and I picked up hepatitis.’

‘Like I said, dirty weekend.’

‘Ha. Anyway, that accounts for me for a month or more. So, where were you that you can be so exact about?’

‘Me?’ said Dalziel. ‘Easy. I were here.’

‘Here?’

‘Aye, lad. Don’t recollect sitting on the stairs, but I was certainly in this house. And for much the same reason. It’s ten years ago to this very day that Pal Maciver Senior, that’s the dad of this lot, him on the wall in the breeks and woolly hat, locked himself in his study, tied a bit of string round the trigger of a Purdy shotgun, looped the other end round his big toe, and blew his head to pieces.’

‘Ah,’ said Pascoe.

For a moment there didn’t seem anything else to say. Then there seemed to be so much that he took another moment to marshal his words.

‘In his study … that’s the same room … and he had an open book on his desk?’

‘That’s right. But as I’ve not seen it yet and Bonnick says it were too covered with blood and brain for him to read the title, I can’t say if it’s the same book.’

‘But if it were, by which I presume you’d mean the same title not necessarily the same volume, what would that be?’

‘Book of poems. Funny little things. Some Yankee bint. Eleanor Dickson, summat like that.’

‘Emily Dickinson?’

‘That’s the one. Bit weird. Might have guessed you’d know her.’

Ignoring this aspersion on his literary taste, Pascoe was running through what little he knew about the Maciver family history already. He’d met Cressida a couple of times, found her somewhat over intense, and when foolishly he’d wondered aloud how Ellie had come to make a friend out of an aggressive man-basher who, every time she got drunk, attempted to rape her, he’d been lectured on not judging by surfaces. Underneath it all, he was told, Cress was really dreadfully in need of reassurance, and love, probably due to childhood trauma caused by the early death of her parents, which she never talked about.

‘I think she was heavily dependent on her brother and they’re still very close, but when he got married, that left a gap in her life. She’s always looking for a strong man to lean on. Trouble is, the bastards always keel over!’

None of this seemed relevant, so he said to Dalziel, ‘This is a copycat suicide then? That’s what brought you running?’

‘Strolling,’ said the Fat Man. ‘Aye, you’re right. Lightning striking twice and all that. Idle curiosity.’

Liar, thought Pascoe, not knowing why he thought it, but knowing he was right.

‘But it can’t be exactly copycat, can it?’ he said. ‘This Pal Maciver, the father, I mean, must have been a good bit older – family established, second wife.’

‘Mid forties,’ agreed Dalziel. ‘His lad must be – must have been – barely thirty. At university when it happened, I recall.’

‘And Cressida?’

‘Boarding school. Final year. She were head girl.’

‘That figures. And the younger daughter, Helen?’

‘The mobile incubator? She’d have been about nine. She were away in the States with her stepmother. That’s her you saw out there, the classy one.’

Pascoe noted the epithet. In Dalziel’s word-hoard, it usually signified approbation. ‘She still lives round here?’

‘Aye.’

‘Kay Kafka, wasn’t it? That her own name?’

‘No. She got married again.’

‘To someone called Kafka? That would be one of the Mid-Yorkshire Kafkas?’

‘Don’t be racist,’ reproved Dalziel. ‘I once knew a family of Chekhovs, had a farm near Hebden Bridge. Mind you, owt’s possible near Hebden Bridge.’

‘This Kafka, was he from Hebden Bridge then?’ pressed Pascoe.

‘No. A Yank. Her boss,’ was the short reply.

There was definitely something here, thought Pascoe. Something not said. He recalled seeing the pair of them meeting beside the ambulance. If she weren’t so slim, he’d have guessed that Dalziel fancied her. But it had long since been established that Mid-Yorkshire CID’s answer to God liked women in his own image, which was to say, with more meat on them than a Barnsley chop.

He said, ‘So what was the verdict?’

‘Suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed.’

‘Disturbed by what?’

‘Summat at work they reckoned.’

‘And work was …?’

‘Ash-Mac’s, machine-tool factory on the Blesshouse Industrial Estate. Used to be Maciver’s. Pal Maciver’s dad, that’s our corpse’s granddad, founded it before the last war.’

‘Was he called Palinurus too?’

‘Liam. Came across from Ireland to make his fortune and didn’t do so badly.’