Exit Lines

Pascoe was congratulating himself on having evaded any head-on conflict. He guessed that after Sowden had enjoyed a few hours’ sleep, he would relegate the road accident to that deep-delved and well-locked chamber where doctors and policemen alike try, usually successfully, to store yesterday’s horrors as they relax and prepare themselves for today’s.

But this one was not yet ready for inhumation. With no great pleasure he recognized a lanky figure chatting intimately to a nurse outside the doctor’s office. It was Sam Ruddlesdin, the Post reporter.

Inclination told him to keep walking by with a cheerful wave of the hand. Instinct, however, told him that Ruddlesdin would only have returned to the hospital if he had some mischief in hand, and it might be well to get a scent of it. So when Ruddlesdin greeted him with a cheerful, ‘Hello, Mr Pascoe. How are you?’ he stopped and said, ‘As well as can be expected, in this place, at this time. What brings you here?’

‘Same as you, I dare say,’ said Ruddlesdin with a saturnine grin. He had a good line in saturnine grins to go with a nice line in scurrility, which made him an entertaining companion for about two and a half pints, and generally speaking his relationship with the police was finely balanced on a fulcrum of mutual need.

Pascoe said, ‘You mean the Welfare Lane killing? Mr Deeks?’

‘That too,’ said Ruddlesdin. ‘I was down there earlier, before you in fact. Talked to Sergeant Wield. He seemed to think Mr Headingley would be on the case. But when I was here earlier, I gathered from Dr Sowden that he’d just left with Superintendent Dalziel and that you were taking over. The murder specialist. Is that an official designation in Mid-Yorkshire now, Inspector?’

‘It doesn’t carry any extra money if it is,’ said Pascoe, looking at Sowden, who returned his gaze defiantly with just a hint of guilt. ‘Anyway, you’ve caught up with me now. Shall we talk on our way out to the car park?’

Ruddlesdin said, ‘I’d certainly be glad of the chance to talk with you, Mr Pascoe, but I’d really like a quick word with Dr Sowden first.’

He looked at Sowden, who made no move to invite him into the office; then at Pascoe, who made no move to take his leave. Ruddlesdin let another saturnine grin slip down from beneath the brim of his slouch hat.

‘It was really just to check again on what you thought Mr Westerman said before he died, Doctor,’ he said.

‘Look,’ said Sowden, suddenly uneasy. ‘I’m not sure I should really be talking about this with you. A patient’s dying words, I mean, in a sense they’re, I don’t know, confidential, I suppose.’

‘Like in confession?’ said Ruddlesdin, swapping the grin for a parody of piety. ‘Yes, I can see that. And I’m not going to quote you, Doctor. Well, probably not. But something else came up. You see, after I talked to you earlier, I did a little bit of research on the ground. Paradise Road runs past The Duke of York where Mr Westerman had been drinking, past The Towers, the old folks’ holiday home, which was where he was heading, and then past nowhere at all for another three miles till you arrive at Paradise Hall Hotel. I can’t afford their restaurant prices very often myself, but I have been there. Very nice. Excellent menu, top class clientele. Just the place for a pair of distinguished citizens to eat, I thought. And I was right! Mr Charlesworth and Mr Dalziel ate there tonight.

‘Mr Abbiss, the owner, was very discreet, but I got just a hint that Mr Dalziel had been a trifle the worse for wear when he left. Not that that signifies, as he was the passenger, of course. Only…’

Pascoe refused to be the one who said, ‘Only what?’ but Sowden was less resilient.

‘Only what?’ he said.

‘Only when I called in at The Towers just to get some background on the poor old chap who’d died, I got talking to a Mrs Warsop who is by way of being their bursar. Quite by chance it seems that she too was dining at Paradise Hall tonight. Now, she doesn’t know Mr Dalziel from Adam, but she is acquainted with Mr Charlesworth by sight. And as she was leaving the Hall, she saw them in the car park together, getting into a car. And the strange thing is, she’s quite adamant about it, that it wasn’t Mr Charlesworth, but the (I quote) fat drunk one who got into the driver’s seat and drove away!’

Chapter 6 (#ulink_2408fcdf-94cd-5ae7-9ecc-e94b998814bd)

‘I think I could eat one of Bellamy’s veal pies.’

Andrew Dalziel awoke to sunlight and birdsong, both of which filtered softly through grey net curtains. It was almost a month since, following his usual habit on bad mornings of hauling himself upright with the help of the hideous folk-weave drapes which were a sort of memorial to his long-fled wife, he had pulled the curtain rail right off the wall. Time had not yet effected any great healing, and now only the flimsy net and an erratic window-cleaner maintained the decencies. There was no way, however, that the net could maintain his weight, so now, belching and breaking wind, he pursued his alternative levée strategy of rolling sideways till he hit the floor, then using the bed for vertical leverage.

Upright, he had the misfortune to glimpse himself in a long wall mirror. Clad in a string vest and purple and green checked socks, it was an image to engage the unwary eye like a basilisk. He approached closer and addressed himself.

‘Some talk of Alexander,’ he said softly, ‘and some of Hercules.’

Slowly he peeled off the vest. The string had printed a pattern of pink diamonds over his torso, from broad shoulders down to broader belly. He scratched the pattern gently as a musician might run his fingers over harp strings. His head felt heavy, his tongue felt furry, his legs…it occurred to him that he couldn’t feel his legs at all.

He nodded his huge head, like a bear who sees the dogs circling and, though chained to a post, yet believes that the sport may still be his. His strength he did not doubt. Nothing was wrong with him physically that a scalding shower and an even scaldinger pot of tea had not a thousand times already set to rights. But his mind was troubled by something like the sound of a bicycle wheel whistling round in the rain.

The shower and the tea had to be negotiated with care, but they allayed the basic physical symptoms sufficiently for him to risk a small Scotch to calm the mind. And now, he told himself with the assurance of one who believed in a practical, positive and usually physical response to most of life’s problems, all he needed to complete this repair of normality was a platterful of egg, sausage, bacon, tomatoes and fried bread. Bitter experience had taught him in the years since his wife’s departure to eschew home catering. It wasn’t that a basic cuisine was beyond his grasp; it was the cleaning up afterwards that defeated him. And while a man could live with a broken curtain rail, only a beast would tolerate fat-congealed frying-pans. Fortunately the police canteen did an excellent breakfast. Gourmet cooking they might not provide, but what did that matter to a man who – for Pascoe’s benefit anyway – affected to believe that cordon bleu was a French road-block? And a slight blackening round the edge of a fry-up was to a resurrected copper what the crust on old port was to a wine connoisseur – a sign of readiness.

His ponderous jowls shaved to danger point, his few sad last grey hairs brushed to a high gloss, his heavy frame clad in an angel-white shirt and an undertaker-black suit, with knife-edge creases breaking on mirror-bright shoes, he set off at a stately though deceptively rapid pace towards the city centre.

He was, of course, carless. His reason for being carless he continued to keep carefully out of his mind. Nor did he in any way appear to register the momentary lull in noise as he entered the canteen. To Edna, the weary siren behind the counter, he said, ‘Full house, love.’

Under his approving gaze, she filled his personal willow-patterned plate till the pattern disappeared. Seizing a bottle of tomato sauce from the counter, he made for an empty table, sat down and began to eat.

It was here that George Headingley found him. He sat down on the opposite side of the table, himself a large man, but dwarfed by Dalziel, an effect intensified by something in his demeanour of the schoolboy waiting to be noticed before the headmaster’s desk.

‘Sir,’ he said.

‘’Morning, George,’ said Dalziel. ‘This murder in Welfare Lane – Deeks, is it? – how’re we doing?’

‘Well, Pascoe’s handling that, sir,’ said Headingley, slightly taken aback. Of course, Dalziel had been in the station for an hour or so last night, but he hadn’t given the impression he was taking anything in.

‘So you said. What made you dig him out? Weren’t it his lassie’s birthday yesterday?’

Headingley decided that straightforward was the best route.

‘The DCC’s just come in, sir. He’d like a word if you don’t mind.’

‘Is that what he said? If I don’t mind?’ said Dalziel disbelievingly.

‘Well, not exactly,’ admitted Headingley.

‘Oh aye. Well, you go and tell him, George; you tell him…’

Dalziel paused, attempted to spear a rasher of bacon, was defeated by its adamantine crispness and had to scoop it up and crunch it whole: ‘You tell him I’ll be along right away.’

Three minutes later, his plate clean and his mouth scoured with another cup of red-hot tea, he made his way upstairs.

The Deputy Chief Constable was not a man he liked. It was Dalziel’s not inaudibly expressed view that he couldn’t solve a kiddies’ crossword puzzle and had only been promoted out of Traffic because he couldn’t master the difference between left and right. More heinously, he rarely dispensed drink and when he did it tended to be dry sherry in glasses so narrow that it was like reading a thermometer looking for the bloody stuff, which in any case Dalziel regarded as Spanish goat-piss.

‘Andy!’ said the DCC heartily. ‘Come you in. Sit you down. Look, I’m sorry, thing is this, we have got ourselves a bit of a problem.’

This recently developed speech style, modelled on that of a Tory cabinet minister being interviewed on telly, was taken by many as confirmation of rumours of the DCC’s political ambition. A desirable stepping-stone to becoming first a personality, then a candidate, was the acquisition of the office of Chief Constable when the present incumbent, Tommy Winter, retired in nine months’ time. Winter, who had never shown a great deal of enthusiasm for his right-hand man, had none the less given him a late opportunity to shine by suddenly deciding to take a large accumulation of back-leave visiting his daughter in the Bahamas. The DCC had decided the old boy was at last getting demob-happy, but now, regarding the menacing bulk of his head of CID, he began to wonder uneasily if Winter could have had some presentiment of this potentially scandalous development.

‘You’ve got a problem, you say?’ said Dalziel, leaning forward. ‘How can CID help? Something personal, is it? Someone putting the black on, eh? Photos, mebbe? You can rely on me, sir.’

The man was bloody impossible, thought the DCC wearily. Impossible. It was a small consolation that no television interviewer in the world could even approach his awfulness!

Like Headingley before him, he decided to ignore dangerous side-roads and press straight on.

‘You were involved in a car accident last night,’ he said.

‘I was in a car that was involved in an accident, that’s right,’ said Dalziel.

‘It was your car,’ said the DCC flatly. ‘So you were involved whether you were driving or not.’

‘Whether?’ said Dalziel wonderingly. ‘There’s no whether about it! I wasn’t, and that’s that!’

‘I’ve had the editor of the Post on to me,’ pursued the DCC. ‘One of his reporters has unearthed a witness who says she saw you getting into the driver’s seat of your car outside the Paradise Hall Restaurant and driving away.’