'Good God! The bull's-eyes. It's you . . . only there's a lot more of you.'
'Aye, well, like they say, the merrier, the more. You've not stayed still yourself. I'd not have known you from yon skinny little kid. Is there owt to put in this?'
'Milk, you mean?'
Dalziel frowned and said, 'I'd not advise milk to a man in your condition. It curdles the stomach. Me, I'm all for this homosexual medicine.'
Stamper stared, then said, 'Homeopathic, you mean?'
'Aye, that's the lad. Hair of the dog. It's all right, I see it.'
If he did, it was with some strange Celtic third eye, for he now strolled into the living-room and set the mugs on a pile of typescript on a desk, one of whose drawers he opened to reveal a half-filled bottle of Teacher's. He poured a carefully judged measure into each mug.
'Enough to taste but not to waste,' he said. 'Well, how have you been, young William?'
Stamper drank and shook his head, not negatively but in search of clear thought.
He said slowly, 'Hold on. I stopped being young William God knows when, and you were never Uncle Andy. So let's get things in their right perspective. What the hell do you want, Superintendent?'
'Not sure. I got off at King's Cross, wanted somewhere for a coffee and a crap, and you were handiest.'
'How did you happen to have my address?'
Dalziel said, 'Have you not been getting my Christmas cards, then? No, seriously, that programme you did on the murder, it were good. Only, you were still accepting the verdicts then. Now Cissy Kohler's gone free.'
'So?'
'So, did it surprise you? I mean, you must've done a lot of research on the case. Did you turn up anything that made you think, hello, that's funny?'
Stamper shook his head, winced, and said, 'No, but it was a retrospective, not an investigation.'
'Oh aye? Well, now you know you missed summat. That must nark you a bit.'
'Not a lot,' said Stamper. 'OK, when Waggs contacted me, I admit I did wonder if I'd missed an opportunity for a bit of media glory, but I couldn't honestly make out a case for getting the scent first.'
'So you talked to Waggs? I didn't see you on his telly show.'
'No point,' said Stamper. 'There was nothing I had to contribute.'
'Little lad hiding behind a curtain and nebbing on the mouldy oldies? Same little lad who spotted Kohler wandering around with blood dripping from her hands? Come on! With credentials like that, these telly people would likely have paid good money to hear you fart! How's your dad, by the way?'
'What?'
'Arthur Stamper.
Sir
Arthur, I beg his pardon. One of Maggie's knights. Service to industry, weren't it?'
'Service to self,' snarled Stamper. 'As to how he is, I wouldn't know. I haven't seen him since ... for a long time.'
'No? Aye, well, that figures, hating his guts like you do . . .'
'Now hold on . . .'
'No need to be coy,' said Dalziel. 'If you want to keep a secret, you shouldn't take advertising space on the airwaves.'
Stamper drank again and said, 'It showed that much?'
'Not so a deaf man in a smithy would have noticed,' comforted Dalziel. 'What did he ever do to you?'
'Fed me, clothed me, paid for my education, gave me all the advantages he lacked, and never forgave me for not becoming in fact what he was in fantasy. I could have been an utter wastrel as long as I did it in the right way - sacked from Eton, rusticated from Oxford, cashiered from the Guards, that sort of thing. Then he'd have been delighted with me. Instead I moped at boarding-school and went into such a decline that the staff were glad when my mother took me away. I was frightened of horses, hated hunting, cried if I saw anything being shot, and hid behind my mother's skirts whenever he came near me. So he took it out on her instead. If I hate him, it's for her sake as much as my own. But I hope I stop some way short of hatred. Let's call it a vigorous contempt.' He laughed. 'God knows why I'm telling you all this.'
'Father figure,' said Dalziel complacently. 'You're hoping I'll give you a cuddle and a bull's-eye. And your mam? How's she?'
'She divorced him, as I guess you know,' said Stamper shortly.
'When was that?'
'Middle of the 'seventies.'
'Oh aye. Saw her little Willie through college, did she? Then took off.'
'Something like that. She's a very remarkable woman. What the hell is all this about, Mr Dalziel? I know they've released Kohler. Does that mean they reckon Mickledore was innocent too and the case is being reopened?'
'I wouldn't know owt about that,' said Dalziel. 'Like I said, I'm just off the train, and had a bit of time to kill, and thought I'd renew an old acquaintance, seeing you were so handy. Now I'd best be on my way. How do I get to Essex from here?'
'Essex?'
'Aye. It's near London, isn't it? Can I get a bus?'
'Essex is a large county,' he began to explain. 'It depends which . . .'
His voice tailed off in face of Dalziel's expression of bucolic astonishment at the extent of his wisdom.
'I think you can find your own way to Essex, Superintendent,' he said.
'Nay, lad, I thought you were building up to offering me a lift. You've got a car, I dare say.'
'Right. But not a taxi.'
'I weren't thinking of paying. Still, if you aren't coming, I'd best be off. No telling how long she'll be at this address. Got any message for her? From what you said in your talk, you seemed quite struck.'
Stamper said quietly, 'Who is it you're going to see, Mr Dalziel?'
'Didn't I say? Cissy, of course. Cissy Kohler.'
Stamper rubbed his hand over his stubble.
'I'll need to shave and shower,' he said.
'Aye, it'd be best, especially if it's a small car. No mad rush. We're not expected.'
He picked up his coffee mug, noticing that it had left a brown ring on the typescript. From the other side of the wall, he heard a shower start up. Immediately he started opening drawers in the writing desk. An address book held his attention for a while. He made a couple of notes, then dug deeper till he found a bundle of letters all in the same gracefully flowing hand.
He picked one out at random. Like most of the others it was headed
Golden Grove
, and it bore the date January 3rd, 1977.
Dear Will, it was such a joy to get your Christmas card and letter. If you knew how much I look forward to hearing from you, I know you'd write more often, but at least now I can feel sure it's just natural laziness that keeps you from writing, not as I feared resentment. I wish you'd come to see us. I know that, even if there was just the teeniest bit of resentment there, once you saw how truly happy I am, it would vanish right away . . .
The shower stopped. Dalziel skipped to the end.
... So do try to come. And if you see Wendy, give her my love. I write, of course, but she was never a good correspondent and since I married again last summer, she hasn't written at all. There's no repairing the past, is there? But that shouldn't stop us spinning a better future. Do I sound folksy? Well, what do you expect? We're both content to sit in our rockers out on the porch for the next thirty years (God spare us) and watch the tourists go by! Take care and write soon. A very happy New Year to you from your loving Momma.
He heard the bathroom door open.
When Stamper came back into the room, Dalziel was leaning back in the office chair with his feet on the desk, studying the coffee-stained typescript.
'You don't write this stuff under your own name, do you?' he asked.
'I could get to seriously dislike you, Dalziel,' said Stamper.
'Only joking,' said Dalziel, it's quite interesting. This is the Chester Races case, isn't it? The one that ended with Lord Emtitrope hanging himself in the stables? You're not still on this Golden Age of Murder thing, are you?'
My agent got me a commission to turn the series into a book,' said Stamper, taking the script from Dalziel and looking angrily at the coffee stain.
'Is that right? Nice,' said Dalziel. 'All the work done and paid for by the BBC and now you're going to get paid for it all over again.'
‘It makes up for all the times you work for nothing,' said Stamper.
'It also explains why you'd not be so keen to help Waggs,' grinned Dalziel. 'I mean you'd done all the graft, why hand everything you'd got over to a gabby Yank?'
'He was welcome to it,' said Stamper. 'As you know, if you heard the programme, I found nothing which made me doubt the verdict.'
Dalziel thought, people told you things by the way they didn't tell you things.
He said, 'You got warned off, didn't you? Don't talk to Waggs.'
'What? Why do you say that?' demanded Stamper with a force that didn't quite come over as indignation.
'Because the Chester Races case happened in nineteen sixty-one,' said Dalziel, it's your new last Golden Age murder case, isn't it? They've leaned on you to drop Mickledore Hall from your book too.'
He knew he was right and knew too why Stamper had proved so ready to join him on his hunt for Cissy Kohler. A man who feels he's behaved shabbily will often then behave irrationally in an effort to get right with himself.
'Rubbish,' said Stamper. 'My publisher merely felt that with all the current uncertainty, the Mickledore case was best left out.'
Another thing Dalziel knew was when to let a man save his face and when to kick him in it.
He said, 'Ever hear of Ongar?' syllabling the word sceptically as if in doubt such an outlandish sounding spot could really exist.
'Of course. Is that where she is?'
The Fat Man grinned and said, 'Little boys should be seen and not heard. Just you drive, sunshine, and leave the thinking to your Uncle Andy!'
THREE
'We have lost many privileges, a new philosophy has become the mode and the assertion of our station in these days might. . . cause us real inconvenience.'
One of the real privileges of wealth is that you don't have to keep people standing on your doorstep to show them what you think of them.
You can direct them to another door. Or you can admit them and choose which of your many rooms makes the appropriate statement.
Peter Pascoe on arrival at Haysgarth had been shown by an androidal retainer into a small twilit chamber which he, as a chronic paronomasiac, soon characterized as an anti-room.
It was anti-heat, anti-light, anti anything that might have leavened the load of a man who had dared to be late for a lord.
Perched on the edge of a chair which made the thought of a misericord seem like a dream of Dunlopillo, he tried to distract his mind usefully by researching Partridge, or at least culling what he could about him from the dust jacket of
In A Pear Tree.
From what he read, he was soon (he hoped) to be in the presence of a paragon. His glittering if untimely curtailed political career apart, he had innumerable other claims to distinction: in agriculture, he led the list of great landowners who had moved over to organic farming; in the
arts, he was patron of the Yorkshire Chamber Music Festival, sponsor of the Haysgarth Poetry Prize, collector and exhibitor of modern British painting (himself an accomplished water-colourist), as well as being an active director of Centipede Publishing and a member of the management board of Northern Opera: in charity, he was patron and co-director of the Carlake Trust for Handicapped Children, in sport, he was on the British Winter Olympics committee, the Board of Sport for the Handicapped, the sub-committee on Natal Qualification for Yorkshire Cricket . . .
Pascoe gave up, surfeited with worthiness. Where did these sods get the time? His own corresponding entry would read something like: he worked so hard he hardly had time to neglect his family.
Shying back from the tempting darkness of introspection, he flipped through the pages till he hit the chapter on the events at Mickledore Hall.
It made interesting if florid reading. Somehow the impression was given that with a nobility outwith the job description of one not yet elevated to the Lords, Partridge had chosen to sacrifice his own reputation rather than obstruct justice by providing Mickledore with a false alibi.
His description of the whole weekend was coated in the same golden varnish. The theme was the fall of innocence, the breaking up of the Round Table, and it was played through all its variations. The Hall itself became a symbol of that Merrie England so beloved of Tory elegiasts, where everyone was happy in that estate, whether council or country, ordered for them by God and a benevolent government. The description of the shooting party that first afternoon was pure pastoral, though with the 'Glorious Twelfth' still more than a week away, there hadn't been much to destroy but a few pigeons, crows and rabbits. Yet Partridge cast an autumnal glow over the proceedings, with the bronze harvest rippling through the fields, the sighing trees heavy with fruit, the shot birds tumbling through the air in balletic slow motion. And beneath it all, like thunder distantly heard on a clear day, rolled the note of approaching doom.