Under World

And here he was, Colin Farr, in his early twenties, his fair clear complexion as yet hardly touched by the tell-tale blue scars marking the other faces, his golden hair springy with Grecian curls, his every movement informed with natural grace. Put him in a tasselled cap and a striped blazer and he’d not win a second glance as he strolled through the Enclosure at Henley, except of admiration and envy.

Oh shit! she thought desperately. How classist can you get? It was wrong to call him Judas. He had merely invited her to betray herself.

At first indeed he had seemed a saviour when, just as she felt herself drowning in the silence which followed her request for a volunteer, he had risen like Adonis from a grassy bank and begun to read. It had been gratitude which had trapped her into that patronizing praise, and guilt which had stung her into that equally patronizing rebuke.

She took a deep breath, decided between inhalation and exhalation that the time was not yet ripe for an open analysis of the group dynamic, and said, ‘Did you think it should have been said?’

‘Eh?’

The change of direction was right. It had taken him by surprise.

‘You said that perhaps it was wrong for someone to make that crack about the deputy’s wife. Is that what you think?’

Slowly Colin Farr smiled. It was a slightly lopsided, devastatingly attractive smile and it seemed to say he now saw exactly what she was doing.

‘What do I think?’ he said. ‘I think either a man can look after his wife or he can’t and it doesn’t matter what any other bugger says. Also I think that deputies deserve all the shit you can throw at them. Just ask these lads here what they reckon and you’ll soon see if I’m right.’

She saw, and that night at dinner (steak and mushroom pie with braised red cabbage, incontrovertibly home-cooked) she attempted to convey both her delight and her surprise, delight that the ice had been broken and surprise at the depth of feeling revealed in the ensuing discussion.

‘It’s positively atavistic,’ she said. ‘These are young men talking as if they were back in the nineteen-twenties.’

‘You always said the Strike had knocked industrial relations back a generation,’ said Pascoe, shovelling another huge forkful of pie into his mouth.

‘This is nothing to do with industrial relations,’ retorted Ellie. ‘It’s tribal. Peter, if you’re going to gobble your food and look at your watch at the same time, you’ll end up putting your eye out. What’s the rush anyway? Not another James Cagney film on telly?’

‘No,’ said Pascoe uneasily. ‘It’s just that I’ve got to go out.’

‘You didn’t say anything,’ said Ellie indignantly.

‘No? Well, I was going to tell you when I got home but somehow …’

‘You mean,’ said Ellie with detective sharpness, ‘that when you got home and instead of the fast food you’ve been moaning about, you saw I’d rushed back from my class and slaved away cooking your favourite dinner, you lost your nerve!’

Pascoe smiled placatingly and said, ‘Well, sort of. I was going to say something, but you were so keen to tell me about your interesting afternoon with the horny-handed sons of toil …’

‘My God, I know who you really are! You’re Indignant (name and address supplied), I recognize the style! So, tell me, what’s so important that you prefer it to your favourite nosh, not to mention my intellectual company?’

‘It’s Mr Watmough,’ said Pascoe.

‘Watmough? You mean that creepy sod who’s Deputy Chief Constable? I thought he was leaving?’

‘He is. That’s why I’ve got to go out. The brass will be laying on a farewell dinner, but tonight he’s popping into the Club for a presentation from the plebs. I feel I ought to be there out of courtesy.’

‘Courtesy? To a Social Democrat?’ said Ellie scornfully.

The announcement of Watmough’s resignation had been followed almost immediately by the leaked news that he was shortlisted as a possible SDP candidate for a winnable local seat. It was no secret that he had been bitterly disappointed when he failed to get the recently vacant Chief Constable’s job. He’d been everyone’s favourite, except for Detective-Superintendent Andrew Dalziel, who rated him, to quote, ‘lower than a duck’s arsehole and twice as wet’. How Dalziel could have influenced the result was not clear, but Pascoe had suspicions close to certainties that it had been the fat man’s spade-like hand that had dashed the foaming cup from Watmough’s foaming lips.

A period of dark brooding had followed. Watmough was already a small-time media personality with the assistance of Ike Ogilby, editor of the Sunday Challenger, flagship paper of the main Mid-Yorkshire news group. He had been hoping to become a big-time personality via the Chief Constableship, and thence launch himself into the political empyrean. Now, faced with the choice of looking for other Chief’s jobs outside the area where his power base lay, or attempting a low-level take-off, he’d opted for the latter.

‘Who’s making the presentation?’ asked Ellie.

‘Dalziel.’

Ellie began to laugh.

‘You’re quite right, Peter,’ she said. ‘You can’t miss that. It should be a night to remember. But first you’ll eat up your apple pie and custard. And you’ll sit there and look interested while I finish telling you about Colin Farr and his mates. Are you sitting comfortably?’

‘Yes, miss,’ said Pascoe.

‘Then I’ll begin.’

Chapter 2 (#ulink_1ba8b065-add4-58f5-9516-b951d59df9bc)

Colin Farr went to the bar and asked for another pint. It was his fourth since he’d come into the Welfare not much more than half an hour ago.

‘Thirsty work back at school, is it?’ said the steward. His name was Peter Pedley, but ever since he’d grown a bandido moustache to age his childishly young features when he first went down the pit, he’d been known as Pedro. His body had long ago thickened to a solid barrel which was eighty per cent muscle, and the childishness too had spread into a mature joviality, though the moustache remained. He was a man much respected both for his strength of body and his resilience of spirit. In his mid-twenties he’d been advised by the doctor that the bronchitis which had troubled him since childhood was rapidly worsening underground. With a wife and young family, he was unwilling to take the wage cut and poor prospects of surface work, so he’d taken a job as barman in a Barnsley pub, got to know the business inside out, and eventually returned to the place of his birth as the residential steward of the Burrthorpe Miners’ Social and Welfare Club. Two years later his resilience was tested to breaking-point when his youngest daughter, Tracey, aged seven, disappeared. The child had never been found. The consoling presence of and continued responsibility for three other children had kept Pedley and his wife from falling apart, but Mrs Pedley had aged a decade in the years since the disappearance and Pedro visited the whisky optic on his own behalf as frequently as on his customers’.

He rarely let it show, however, and he had a sharp eye for alcohol-based trouble in others.

Now Colin Farr supped two inches off the top of his pint and said, ‘University, not school, Pedro. But you’re right. It’s thirsty work, all that talking.’

‘Better than fighting,’ said Pedley, amiably but with a hint of warning. He knew most of his customers better than they knew themselves. Four pints in half an hour was par for the course in some; with young Farr it spelt trouble.

The young man heard the warning and drank again, regarding Pedley over the rim without resentment. The steward still wheezed through the winter, but when Pedro Pedley sallied forth to sort out trouble, those close to it scattered and those safely distant settled down to enjoy the show. When Colin Farr lowered the glass, it was more than half empty.

‘Where’s Maggie?’ he asked.

‘She’ll not be working tonight. She’s badly. This is the day it happened.’

Their eyes met: Pedley’s blank, Farr’s searching.

‘Is that right?’ said Farr. ‘Then naturally she’ll be upset.’

And he went back to his seat moving with easy grace.

He was alone at one of the round formica tables. The Club’s main public room was a cheerless place when almost empty. Full, you couldn’t see the brown and beige tiled floor, or the cafeteria furniture, or the vinyl-upholstered waiting-room bench which ran round the flock-papered walls. Full, the plaster-board ceiling, steel cross-girder and glaring strip-lights were to some extent obscured by the strato-cirrus layer of tobacco smoke. And best of all, full, the whisper of a man’s own disturbing thoughts was almost inaudible beneath the din of loud laughter, seamless chatter, and amplified music.

At the moment Colin Farr’s thoughts were coming through too loud, too clear. He’d gone into the students’ union bar at the University today. Its décor and furnishings had not been all that different from the Club’s. The atmosphere had been just as thick; the voices just as loud, the music just as raucous. Yet he had left very quickly, feeling alien. The reaction had troubled him. It was uncharacteristic. He was not a shy person; he’d been around and hadn’t been much bothered at entering some places where he’d been quite literally a foreigner. But the students’ bar had made him feel so uneasy that he’d fled, and the memory of this uneasiness wouldn’t leave him alone.

It had been self-irritation with his reaction that had made him so sharp with that Mrs Pascoe in the afternoon. Well, partly at least. And partly it had been her. Condescending cow!

He had finished his fourth pint without hardly noticing. He was thinking about getting out of his seat again, though whether to return to the bar or head out into the night he wasn’t sure, when the door burst open and two men came in. One was Farr’s age but looked older. They’d been in the same class at school, but, unlike Farr, Tommy Dickinson’s career down the pit had been continuous since he was fifteen. Chunkily built, he had the beginnings of a substantial beer-gut, and when his broad amiable face split into a grin at the sight of Farr, his teeth were stained brown with tobacco juice.

‘Look what’s here!’ he cried. ‘Hey, Pedro! I thought only working men could get served in this club.’

‘You’d best buy me a pint, then,’ said Farr.

While Dickinson was getting the drinks, the other man sat down at Farr’s table. He was Neil Wardle, in his thirties, a lean taciturn man. His face was as brown and weather-beaten as any countryman’s. In fact, like many of his workmates, as if in reaction against the underworld in which they earned their bread, he spent as much of his spare time as possible roaming the hills around Burrthorpe with his dog and a shotgun. He was charge-man of the team of rippers in which the other two worked.