Exit Lines

‘And I’ll have a quick word with our lad out there,’ said Headingley.

It took Sowden a couple of minutes to ascertain that the pathologist was not in the hospital. He got the exchange to dial Longbottom’s home number and as it rang, he called, ‘Inspector!’

Headingley returned from his conversation with the uniformed policeman looking very pensive.

‘They’re ringing Mr Longbottom at home,’ said Sowden. ‘You take over. It’s not part of my remit to disturb consultants at this time of night.’

He smiled as he spoke, but Headingley did not respond.

The pathologist himself answered the phone and condescended to be available at 10.30 the following morning. Rather to Sowden’s admiration, Headingley responded to brusqueness with brusqueness. After he had replaced the phone he said, ‘The constable said you said something about even a dying man smelling whisky, sir.’

‘That’s right. Last words that poor devil uttered were, let me get it right, driver, fat bastard, pissed. That’s a pretty straightforward death-bed declaration, wouldn’t you say?’

‘It would seem so,’ said Headingley. ‘Look, would you mind if I used your phone again?’

‘Be my guest.’

‘Er, privately, if I may.’

‘Why not?’ said Sowden. ‘They’ll be reporting me for malingering if I stay here much longer anyway.’

He left. As he walked down the corridor which led past the waiting-room, its door opened and the two men emerged. Suddenly Sowden’s absurd buried guilt feeling about Westerman’s death came surging to the surface.

‘Hold on a second,’ he called.

The men stopped and turned.

‘Yes?’ said the cigar smoker.

Sowden looked around. At the end of the corridor he saw the uniformed constable. Waving an imperious summons, he said, ‘I think the police might like a word before you go.’

The men exchanged glances.

‘Oh aye?’ said the fat one.

The constable approached.

‘Officer,’ said Sowden, ‘I just wanted to be quite sure for my own peace of mind that you had in fact administered a breathalyser test.’

The constable was nonplussed.

The fat man belched and said, ‘Who to, friend?’

‘I should have thought that was obvious,’ said Sowden.

He heard footsteps hurrying behind him and turned to see, not without relief, Inspector Headingley approaching fast.

‘I was just inquiring about the breathalyser test, Inspector,’ he said.

‘Yes. All right. Sorry, sir,’ said Headingley.

It may have been that the man was out of breath but there seemed to be in that ‘sorry, sir’ addressed to the fat man something more than mere constabulary courtesy.

‘Excuse me, but just who are you?’ said Sowden. ‘Don’t I know your face?’

The fat man looked at him speculatively.

‘Mebbe you do and mebbe you don’t,’ he said. ‘Dalziel’s the name, Detective-Superintendent Dalziel if you want the whole bloody issue. And you’re Doctor Livingstone, I presume.’

Light dawned.

‘My God! I get it now!’ said Sowden triumphantly.

‘Get what, Doctor?’

‘Why all the fuss and keep it quiet! It’s a nice little cover-up.’

‘Cover-up?’ echoed Dalziel softly. ‘Of what? By who?’

‘Of drunken driving causing death,’ said Sowden challengingly. ‘And by the police of the police.’

It was a dramatic little confrontation beginning to attract some distant notice from nurses and other personnel.

The cigar-smoking man intervened.

‘No one’s asked me who I am.’

‘All right. Let’s have your name and rank too,’ said Sowden.

‘No rank. Plain Mr Charlesworth. Arnold Charlesworth,’ said the man. ‘I’m not a policeman. I’m a bookmaker. And I’m more than happy to be breathalysed. Again.’

Sowden ignored the last word and said, ‘Why should anyone want to breathalyse you, Mr Charlesworth?’

‘It’s the law, Doctor,’ said Charlesworth in a friendly tone. ‘You see, it was me that was driving the car that killed that poor sod back there. The Superintendent here was just my passenger. And my breath test was negative.’

He puffed a wreath of cigar smoke about Sowden’s head.

‘So stuff that in your stethoscope and diagnose it,’ he said.

Chapter 4 (#ulink_371b539c-7a22-5306-82f0-b80a380af6bf)

‘Either this wallpaper goes or I do.’

Mrs Tracey Spillings was in her forties, all the way down. She had a boldly handsome, no-nonsense kind of face, but her brusque manner did not mean she was entirely bereft of empathy, for, seeing the anguish on Pascoe’s face (Pascoe’s because it took more than mere noise to limn any detectable emotion on Wield’s features), she gestured towards what looked like an empty armchair and said, or rather shouted, ‘She means no disrespect, it’s her only pleasure, switch it off and God knows what she’d be up to, ain’t that right, Mam?’

A step nearer the chair revealed that curled up in its huge chintzy arms was a wizened old lady who reminded Sergeant Wield of a picture in his illustrated H. Rider Haggard showing what happened to Ayesha after her second immersion in the Flame of Life. That this frailness should at one time have contained this vastness was a concept requiring a greater effort of lateral thinking than he was inclined to make.

Pascoe showed why he was an Inspector by shouting, ‘How do you do?’ to the old lady whose eyes never left Dallas. Nor, from the size of the stack of tapes standing next to the VCR, did it look as if they would ever need to.