He didn't like the middle much. Who the hell was William? The only William he'd come across in the case so far was Stamper and what would he be doing over here? Unless he'd come to see his mother ... or this mysterious male Bellmain who was terminally ill in the Allerdale Clinic.
A Bellmain of Virginia.
Where the hell was Virginia anyway? For all he knew, New York was in Virginia. He should've paid more attention in Geography instead of letting himself be distracted by little Lettie Lovegrove whose thirteen-year-old tits stuck out like a pair of rugby balls under her sweater.
He'd noticed a travel desk in the hotel foyer. They ought to know.
He went down. A young woman with sinus block smiled gamely through her pain and said reedily, 'Can I help you, sir?'
'Mebbe. Where's Virginia?'
'You mean generally? Here, let me show you.' She produced a map. 'This is New York. And down here's Virginia.'
His heart sank. There looked a lot of it and by British standards it looked a long way away.
'Well-populated, is it?' he asked, thinking that maybe it was mainly desert or something and the first village post office you went into, they'd point you to the Bellmain residence straight away.
'All the space you'd want, sir, but with plenty of big cities too. Is it business or holiday you're thinking of?'
'If there's that much of it, it's academic,' he said.
'Academic? In that case what you're probably interested in is historic Virginia. There's so much to see. Mount Vernon. Fredericksburg. Jamestown. Williamsburg. Appomattox - '
'Hold on,' said Dalziel. 'That last but one, Williamsburg, was it? There's a place called Williamsburg down there?'
'Yes, sir. Very famous, it's where - '
'Aye, aye,' he said impatiently. 'I had a friend, name of Bellmain. Marilou Bellmain. I think she came from Williamsburg. House called Golden Grove. How could I set about finding if she were still down there?'
The woman said, 'One moment,' turned to a phone behind her, dialled and began a murmured conversation.
Dalziel took his notes out of his pocket and studied them.
The woman wrote something down on a pad, said, 'Thanks a lot,' turned back to him and pushed the pad towards him.
'Would this be your friend, sir? It's a very good address, if you're thinking of paying a visit. Right in the historic area. We'd be happy to make all your travel arrangements . . .'
Dalziel wasn't listening. He was hearing different words.
Ciss, you could've ruined everything. I came back to tell you they're moving him to Williamsburg this afternoon.
You're sure? He's going home today?
Sure I'm sure. Grab some stuff quick. I want to be half way to Williamsburg when this guy wakes.
'Sir, sir,' said the woman, a note of impatience at last creeping into her voice. 'Would you like our assistance or not?'
'Of course I would, missus,' said Dalziel in an injured tone. 'What else do you think I'm here for?'
NINE
'All here is so unprecedented, so changed, so sudden
and unfair, that I am absolutely lost.'
Pascoe awoke.
There was sunlight across the bed and for a moment, as he opened to its touch like the lesser celandine, he felt as he'd felt in childhood when sleep swept away all yesterday's woes and each new morning's prospect was bright and serene.
Then he saw the clock and flower turned to flesh.
It was five to nine and he was due in Trimble's office at nine-thirty.
He walked through a cold shower and shivered into his clothes in two minutes flat. He noticed there were a couple of messages on his answer machine, recorded while he lay senseless under his pall of pills and booze. He listened to them as he drank coffee and ate a crust of dry bread dunked in the marmalade jar.
The first was from Ellie, timed at a quarter to ten the previous night.
'Hi, where are you? Walking the mean streets protecting us all? Or out on the bash with the other top guns? Sorry. I know you'd ring if you could. Anyway, Rose is fine and I'm fine and Mum is . . . well, I think it's worse than I imagined, only, after what she went through with Dad, she doesn't want to know, so she hides it from herself by hiding it from me. I noticed she was going to bed later and later, and when I nagged her into talking about it, it came out that often when she wakes up in the morning, she doesn't know where she is or even who she is, and that's making her scared to go to sleep. I tried talking to that adolescent doctor again but all I got was a shrug of her skinny shoulders, so in the end I went along to the hospital and asked
to see the geriatric consultant. Christ, you'd have thought I was an Irishman trying to deliver a package to the Home Secretary, they got so defensive! In the end I lost all patience . . . OK, I mean I started shouting at them! Well, there was this bloody staff nurse . . . for God's sake, I've stood on picket lines to get them more pay! I'm sorry. You're probably getting the message that diplomacy failed. So here's what I've decided to do. I'm booking Mum in for a full-scale check at the Lincolnshire Independent Hospital. Yes, that's right, I'm going private, and you know what I feel about that, but I've got to be sure everything that can be done is getting done. She was surprisingly easy to persuade once she heard the magic word
Private.
First time I've ever been pleased about her middle-class conditioning! In a way I'm glad you're not in, Peter. It means you'll have time to practise a completely neutral tone of voice because I swear that if I get even the ghost of a whiff of ho-ho-ho-I-told-you-so from you . . . Anyway, I know that all I'm probably doing is postponing the admission that she's irreversibly on the same route as Dad, but I've got to try. All my principles for a moment of time, eh? Peter, ring me. And ignore what I said about the ho-ho-ho. I could do with a good laugh with you, even if it's on me. 'Bye.'
Shit shit shit! He looked at his watch. He was going to need St Christopher on his side already. No time for the second message even if it were the voice of God . . . Oh Christ, it was! He paused in the door-way and listened.
'Where're you at, you dirty stop-out? Listen, I'm off to a place called Williamsburg in Virginia tomorrow. I'll be staying at the Plantation Hotel, don't know the number but you can easy find it. Give us a ring and let's know what's going off. If you see Dan Trimble give him a big wet kiss from me. And if you see Adolf, try a quick goosestep up his backside. Cheers!'
He switched off and went out of the house at a run.
St Christopher and the green god of traffic lights conspired to get him into Trimble's office only eight minutes late, but in any case the Chief was sitting behind his desk with the defeated look of a man to whom time and space had come to mean very little.
In front of him on the desk was a tabloid newspaper.
'Sorry, sir, but the traffic was jammed solid,' lied Pascoe ungratefully.
'What? Oh yes. We'll need to . . .' He took a deep breath, then said, 'What the hell do I care about traffic? My daughter's been on a trip to the States, Mr Pascoe. She got back home last night. She brought me a litre of very old cognac which didn't get much older, as she also brought me this.'
He turned the tabloid round and pushed it across the desk. Pascoe saw the headline CROCODILE DALZIEL. Uninvited, he sat down to read the rest. It didn't take long. It was the kind of paper which assumed in its readers the attention span of a lively four-year-old.
'Is it really that bad, sir?' he said in the bright tone of a ship's surgeon asking Lord Nelson what a man with only one arm wanted with two eyes anyway. 'If anything, it reflects rather well on Mid-Yorkshire.'
Trimble said, if you work it out, you'll see this has all taken place in his first twelve hours on American soil. What will he do in a week?'
'End organized crime by the sound of it,' said Pascoe. They may want to keep him.'
Trimble smiled wistfully, then composed his face to an official coldness as he said, 'You may be wondering why I'm not ordering your instant reduction to the ranks. The first reason is that my daughter's thoughtful gesture has reminded me that you are still the lesser of two evils. The second is that Mr Hiller seems to feel that he may not have made it as clear as he should have done that he did not require your assistance. This I find puzzling, having heard him in my presence address you on the subject in terms so pellucid that a backward sports commentator could have understood him. But it does give me an excuse, if not a reason, for letting you yet again off the hook.'
'I'm sorry,' said Pascoe.
'No, you're not. Not yet. But you will be if you disobey instructions once more.
My
instructions, whose clarity is not in doubt. You will not make contact, in person, by phone, by proxy, or by any other means, with anyone connected with Mr Hiller's inquiry. If any such person should contact you, you will immediately refer them to Mr Hiller. Do I make myself clear?'
'Yes,' said Pascoe. 'And no.'
'I'm sorry?'
'Yes, you make yourself clear, sir,' said Pascoe. 'But no, I can't undertake to follow these instructions.'
Trimble passed a hand over his face.
'Did I really hear you say that?' he asked wonderingly.
'What I mean is, I need reassurances. When all this started, I admit I was out of line. Because of loyalty - misplaced loyalty, you might say - to Mr Dalziel, I bent the rules. I was probably wrong, I was certainly professionally wrong because I didn't have any good professional reasons. But now it's different. To put it starkly, I think there's a chance that Mavis Marsh's death was arranged because of her connection with the Mickledore Hall affair. Before I can agree to follow instructions to
stay away from the case, I need to feel sure that it's going to be properly investigated. If you can give me that assurance, sir, and the same assurance about all aspects of this business, and that all relevant findings will be published, then fine, I'll get back to bringing CID records up to date, and very glad about it too.'
'Oh dear,' said Trimble, looking down at the American tabloid. 'I may have got you and Andy Dalziel in the wrong order after all. Let me, without prejudice to my right to throw you out of here and suspend you without pay, make a couple of points. One is, Marsh's death
is
being treated as suspicious by our colleagues in West Yorkshire, mainly I gather at your instigation. The other is that I, as a man as well as a policeman, resent your implication that I would let myself or anyone under my command be diverted from the strictest observation of proper legal procedures.'
Pascoe felt reproved but unrepentant. No point in changing your mind once you'd dived off the high board.
'I'm sorry, sir. I didn't mean to imply you would. But I do wonder, just how much is Mr Hiller under your command?'
For a moment he thought he'd gone too far but after a long silence Trimble said mildly, 'That you must judge for yourself. In fact, in the whole of this business, judging for yourself might not be such a bad thing.' There was a knock at the door. 'That will be him now. Come in!'
Hiller entered. He seemed to have shrunk even further into his suit. Adolf after a week in the bunker, thought Pascoe unkindly, then recalled a little guiltily that in this business at least, Hiller had not yet given him cause for unkindness.
Trimble said, 'I've just been talking to Mr Pascoe about his involvement in the Marsh case. Do we know any more yet?'
Hiller sat down heavily and said, 'DCI Dekker rang me ten minutes ago. He'd got the pathologist's report.'
'And what's the verdict?' prompted Trimble.
‘Indeterminate. She suffered from arhythmia, some kind of fibrillation, that's when the heart beats too fast, and she was taking a digitalis-derived drug. An overdose of this, or even a build-up through taking prescribed doses, can evidently lead to heart block. That means the heart rate drops too low to feed the required amount of blood to the brain, inducing dizziness and fainting. Sometimes the heart stops altogether for a few seconds. Sometimes, without outside aid, it won't start again. And, of course, during such an attack it would not be difficult to make sure it didn't start again.'
'Are you saying this is what happened?' demanded Trimble.
'I'm saying that evidently it could have happened,' said Hiller irritatedly. 'There is no evidence either way. Unless we take as evidence the fact that the pathologist found only five currants in her stomach?'
'I'm sorry?' said Trimble.
'I gather Mr Pascoe can explain.'
Pascoe explained. He kept on explaining. He wasn't yet sure how they were going to react, but at least he would know that they knew everything there was to know. He laid out the facts without comment until Trimble, with the reluctance of a hypochondriac asking his doctor to tell him the worst, said, 'And what is your interpretation of these facts?'