Authors: Reginald Hill
'Then he got Waterson's address?'
'Of course he got his bloody address. Where the hell do you think we're going?'
He led the way to his car parked on a double yellow just outside the car park. The gatehouse was finished and now the final area of concrete was being laid across the entrance with Arnie Stringer supervising the work.
'Nearly done, are you?' bellowed Dalziel.
'Aye. Tomorrow we'll clear up and that's it.'
'Not before time. More tea-breaks than the Queen Mother, you lot. I'd like a word about your son-in-law, Tony Appleyard, some time.'
Stringer looked as if the Angel Gabriel had just announced his pregnancy over a tannoy. He came as close as he could without treading wet concrete.
'What about him?' he grated.
'Don't take on. Social Security inquiry, uniformed's job really, but as I was out at Moscow today I said I'd ask your girl, and she said she'd no idea where he was, but you'd gone south in January to look for him.'
'Did she now? Then likely she told you I didn't find him.'
'That's right. I just wondered if you got any clue where he might have gone?'
'Do you not think I'd have gone after him if I had?' demanded Stringer.
'Come on, Arnie. It sticks out a mile you didn't much like the lad,' said Dalziel insinuatingly. 'Can't blame you, getting your lass into trouble like that, then buggering off south. In your shoes, even if I did find him, I might be tempted to squeeze his goolies and tell him to stay down there among the yuppies. You can tell me, man. It'll go no further.'
Pascoe could see what the fat man was doing. There was little chance that Stringer was going to accept a genuine invitation to confide, so Dalziel was couching his pseudo-invitation in terms calculated to get under the other's skin. It certainly worked.
'No wonder the country's falling apart with things like you in charge of the law,' sneered Stringer. 'Seems like none of you have owt better to do than stand around here sticking your noses into other people's private business. There's drug-pushers out there, and muggers, and football hooligans, and child-molesters, and all the hordes of Gideon, and what are you two doing about it?'
'Well, thanks for the warning,' said Dalziel gravely. 'Watch your back for prowling Sodomites!'
He walked away with Pascoe at his heel.
'What was all that about?' he asked as he put on his seat-belt.
'Private business,' said Dalziel. 'Talking of football hooligans, I've not heard of many arrests. Throwing buggers off trains in Cambridgeshire's one thing. Duffing up landlords on my patch is getting serious!'
'Come on,' said Pascoe indignantly. 'I've had the lads doing what they can but that's not much. The only way you get anywhere with something like this is getting an undercover team into the gangs. That's a big operation, and the way things have gone in court recently, it's damned hard to get a result.'
'I only asked, lad. No need to get touchy,' said Dalziel. 'I've noticed you've been very sensitive since you got back. Still taking the tablets, are you?'
Pascoe did not rise to the provocation but asked brightly, 'Am I allowed to know where we're going, sir?'
'Messing about on a boat, lad. Hope you don't get seasick.'
'Not the
Bluebell?'
said Pascoe in disappointment. 'I told you I went down to Bulmer's Wharf and it wasn't there. Didn't you listen?'
'Aye. Thing is, you didn't ask hard enough or look far enough. Get that map out of the glove compartment. Now follow the cut out of town about half a mile north. It goes under an unclassified road near a place called Badger Farm, right?
That's where we'll find the
Bluebell,
Chief Inspector. And once aboard the lugger, Mr Gregory fucking Waterson is mine!'
Dalziel was half right. After no more than two misdirections they found the bridge, humped high to give maximum clearance to the canal traffic beneath. Evening was drawing on fast, the last rays of a cold-eyed sun turning the water into a mockery of a yellow-brick road and the black furrows of the huge field bordering the canal into a desolate seascape. The tow-path was puddled and muddy here, the bank crumbling and overgrown. The only sign of habitation was Badger Farm a couple of furlongs away, black against the skyline with a narrow skein of smoke rising from a lanky chimney stack as though its owner were burning one stick at a time.
It was not a place of obvious attraction to the pleasure craft which were the canal's main users these days, but moored almost under the bridge was a dilapidated boat on whose bow it was just possible to discern the word
Bluebell.
But there Dalziel's Tightness ended. Even to the landsman's eye the boat had the look of a deserted and vandalized house, and when Pascoe scrambled awkwardly on board, he realized quickly he had been right in both particulars.
'Jesus Christ,' said Dalziel, who had followed him with shame-making nimbleness.
Everything in the tiny cabin that could be broken had been broken. Smashed crockery lay among torn clothes and splintered wood from the destroyed bunk. A pair of waist-length waders, gashed with a knife, had been laid like a corpse across the debris and the contents of a chemical lavatory emptied over the lot.
'Harry Park's lesson?' wondered Pascoe.
'Aye. But where are Waterson and this Beverley King, that's the question?'
Pascoe looked over the side into the black water. The canal ran straight and dark and deep here.
'I don't think so,' said Dalziel at his side.
'No,' said Pascoe. 'On the other hand . . .'
'We'll have to look.' Dalziel sighed and leaned his head back to scratch beneath his chin. High above, a trio of unidentifiable birds beat silently across the darkening sky. He shuddered gelatinously.
'Cold, sir?' asked Pascoe.
'No, lad. It's just that I prefer my ceilings no more than four feet over my head and preferably nicely browned with nicotine. Come on. Let's get back to civilization before the vampire bats come out to play!'
CHAPTER
NINE
Seal-like, the police frogmen disported themselves in the canal's murky waters by the corpse light of a grey dawn. A broken wheelbarrow they brought up, a tractor tyre and half a scythe, plus sundry tins, jars, bottles, boxes, all suggestive of a systematic dumping of household detritus from the bridge. But the nearest they came to bodies was a fertilizer bag containing six drowned kittens.
The tenant of Badger Farm turned out to be as stingy with words as he was with fuel till Dalziel's threat of RSPCA and Environmental Health inspectors touched a lingual nerve. Then he recalled noting
Bluebell's
arrival some four weeks earlier. He kept a close eye on it for a while, suspicious that it should remain so long in such an unattractive mooring. But once assured that its sole occupants were a man and a woman with no kids, no dogs, and no desire to trespass on his land and bother him for milk, eggs or fresh water, he'd lost interest. He was a man of no curiosity and less sympathy. He remarked that he'd spotted the man wading around in the canal a couple of times with what he assumed was a fishing rod . . . 'though what the stupid sod was looking to catch, God alone knows. There's been no fish in that cut since the First War.'
'You likely pointed this out?' said Dalziel.
'Nay! Let folk find out their own errors, that's my way.'
It seemed a not unattractive philosophy, so Dalziel did not tell the farmer that he'd set the RSPCA and Environmental Health people onto him anyway.
Harry Park, given another sniff at the carrot of possible bail, came up with the address of an associate who might possibly have called on Waterson the morning after the meeting in the Sally. This man denied everything till Dalziel made him an offer he couldn't refuse, which Pascoe, who had come to recognize the signs, only just managed not to hear. Then he admitted he and his mate, Park's companions in the Sally, had called on Waterson with a view to persuading him that his sole hope of a happy future was total amnesia and he'd better not forget it. Finding the boat deserted, they had left a message to this effect.
'It's pretty clear what happened,' said Pascoe. 'Waterson must have spotted Wieldy that night, headed back to the boat, rousted out Beverley King and made off into the wild blue yonder.'
'You reckon?' said Dalziel. 'Likely you're right. Check out her parents' house in Monksley. Waterson doesn't sound the type to saddle himself with a woman once she'd stopped being useful and mebbe the lass has headed for home by herself.'
She hadn’t. Her parents who applied the epithet
god-fearing
to themselves five times in as many minutes, said they hadn't seen their daughter since the second Sunday in February when they'd had what sounded like the usual quarrel about money and lifestyle. The Kings showed some natural concern, though not a lot, and expressed the opinion that her sojourn in London had left her irremediably tainted. Recalling what Peter Coombes had said to him about her return north, Pascoe caused inquiry to be made at Chester Belcourt. The reply came very promptly, mainly because within thirty minutes of the Met ringing the firm to ask if someone could give them any information about Miss King, a middle-aged director with a wife and three children in Sevenoaks was round at the local station offering to cooperate fully in return for the utmost discretion. That he had been screwing Beverley King on a regular basis he did not seem to find at all reprehensible. Moral revulsion only appeared in his tone when he described his shock at finding her shooting up in a hotel bathroom prior to one of their sessions. Ultimately he had come to believe that it was in the best interests of both the girl and the company if she returned to the bosom of her family in the North. The sincerity of this belief was underlined by the large personal severance payment he made her and by his carefully worded letter of recommendation for future employment in Mid-Yorkshire.
'So. Another druggie,’ said Pascoe. 'Waterson seems to collect them.'
'If you bed down with foxes you'll end up with fleas,’ declared Dalziel, managing to make it sound like an old country saw, though Pascoe had his doubts. 'But it don't take us much further forward.'
'It's another piece in the puzzle, sir,' said Pascoe with a noble attempt at optimism.
Wield provided one more piece on his return the following day. Despite Dalziel's slanderous allegations, he looked terrible and Pascoe tried to urge him back to bed. They settled on a compromise which kept the sergeant safely seated at his desk, catching up with routine paperwork. There was no keeping his mind at rest, however, and half way through the morning he came into Pascoe's room.
'I got to thinking,' he said. 'Waterson's file, I studied it pretty closely, seeing it was me that lost him in the first place. I've been looking at the update and something struck me. That time he got done for taking off when the patrol car flashed him to stop, that was January thirtieth. Park doesn't give an exact date for that big deal he did with him, but he says it was the end of January. Suppose it was the same day?'
'Explain,' said Pascoe.
'He's driving home with a parcel full of dope. We flash him. He panics - that sounds in character. They pick him up half an hour later. He's all apologetic. He's also here.'
He pointed at a location to the north of the city on Pascoe's wall map.
'And he was flashed here, about two miles away. Now the car lads reported he took off along the bypass, so let's suppose he cut off here, took this fork, see where it'd take him?'
'Past Badger Farm,' said Pascoe.
'Right. He stops on the bridge. He's really on the boil. No lights in sight, but he doesn't know the moment when they'll appear, and they've probably got his number anyway. So what does a man who loses control like Waterson do now?'
'Tosses his parcel over the parapet into the canal, you mean? Why not just hide it in a ditch?'
'That'd be the sensible thing to do, but he's not got much talent for doing sensible things, has he?' said Wield. 'And a couple of days later
Bluebell
moves from Bulmer's Wharf to the bridge near Badger Farm.'
'And Waterson spends a lot of time wading around with a pole! Wieldy, you could be a genius. Let's see if we can find out!'
He picked up the phone and dialled.
'Joe, it's Peter Pascoe. All that rubbish your lads trawled up yesterday, what happened to it?'
He listened, replaced the receiver.
'We're in luck. They wanted to dump it back in the cut but Joe's got an environmental conscience and he made them stick it in rubbish bags and leave it at the farm for the bin man to collect.'
'We'd best get a move on, then,' said Wield, rising.
'I thought we'd agreed you were staying indoors today?'
'Not if I'm going to be a genius,' said Wield. 'You know what
he
thinks of geniuses.'
Pascoe laughed.
'All right. But don't blame me if you catch typhoid.'
Half an hour later, watched by the puzzled and suspicious tenant of Badger Farm, they began emptying the plastic rubbish bags. What precisely they were looking for Pascoe didn't know, but he saw it almost at once. A cardboard cylinder on whose water-stained and faded label he could just make out the words
Romany Rye Veterinary Products.
He opened it. Inside was a sealed plastic lining protecting about 500 grams of white powder. He pulled it open and tasted it gingerly.
'No wonder fleas hop so high,' he said.
They found three other containers and the frogmen were re-summoned to check for more. Wield wore his genius status modestly till Dalziel appeared to remind him modesty was no defence.
'So now we know why he got the lass to move the boat down here,' he growled. 'So what? It still doesn't move us much further forward.'
'It gives us a lot more clout in getting resources allocated to finding them,' protested Pascoe.
Dalziel shook his head more in sorrow than in anger. Had he taught this boy nothing? You didn't leave some faceless twat to decide what was important. You made up your own mind, and resources were then allocated not on the basis of argued priorities but by gentle vibrations sent out across a web of owed favours, or if that failed, by a not so gentle rattling of cupboarded skeletons. Appleyard, for instance, wouldn't even register on a scale of official priorities. But there was a Chief Superintendent in the Met who'd never have made it past constable if Dalziel hadn't lied him out of a gross indecency charge after a rugby team booze-up a couple of decades before. And there was a Mid-Yorks DHSS chief whose wife had tried to carve her own exit out of the car park after Ladies Night at the Gents. He did not doubt he would be able to deliver the errant husband to Shirley Appleyard within the promised week.