Thus casually are armistices offered.
'All right.'
And thus casually accepted.
Rose had broken free and run to the bag. The top half was unzipped and she pulled something out. It looked like a plastic boomerang, pimpled in purple and gleaming with gold.
'Good God,' said Ellie. 'I'm away for a few days and you're into appliances!'
'What is it, Daddy?' asked his daughter.
'I've no . . . Hang on! Of course. It's for you, love. It's a present from Uncle Andy.'
'I might have known,' said Ellie.
'It's lovely,' said the little girl, examining the garish object closely. 'But what's it for?'
Pascoe said gravely, 'I do not doubt that, like Columbus, Uncle Andy has brought back much that is strange and exotic from the New World, but nothing to equal this. You are holding a musical banana without which, I believe, no American home is complete. You blow into it. But be careful before you accept such a rare gift. It may change civilization as we know it.'
Rose nodded, as if registering the full implications of the warning, and examined the strange object with a grave fearlessness that reminded Pascoe so much of her mother that he felt tears prickle his eyes.
Then, dauntless, the banana to her lips she set, and blew.
Dalziel had been right.
It made a bloody awful noise.
THREE
'It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever
known.'
The door jammed on a pile of junk mail and uncancelled papers, and there was a taint of decay on the dank air.
As Dalziel squeezed his belly over the threshold, one of his favourite precepts fluttered batlike into his mind.
A man got the welcome he deserved.
He shook the thought from his head. What the fuck had he expected? The kind of old-fashioned thriller ending yon bugger Stamper might have scripted, with a fire burning in the grate, a stew bubbling on the stove, and Linda Steele, hotter than both, lying open-legged across his bed?
He went into the kitchen.
On the table was a dusty cardboard box, unearthed from the junk room just before his departure, and half a pork pie with a fungus-fuzzed bite out of it. Gingerly he picked it up, opened the back door and lobbed the pulsating pie into his wheelie bin.
Then he sat down at the table and stared at the cardboard box.
Outside a cloud passed and a shaft of pale sunlight fell through the open door across the vinyl tiles.
Slowly, heliotropically, Dalziel's head turned.
And he saw again Mickledore bursting out of the library and pausing for a moment as he too looked towards freedom and the sunlit doorway, before turning to the stairs.
A choice had been made, that much Dalziel had registered, but he'd been a young detective then, ambitious and eager, well able to put one and one together to make three, but not yet aware how much more important it was to put halves and quarters and thirds together till you got one.
So he'd gone in pursuit, and only fractionally registered as odd that Mickledore had turned at bay not in his own but in James Westropp's dressing-room.
Fractions.
He had no thought of anything except the brightness of his own future under Tallantire's patronage as he advanced, equally indifferent to both the clothing and the abuse which Mickledore hurled at him. Nor did the speed with which the man calmed down at his first touch strike him as anything other than part of that smoothing of the way which the divine crossing-sweeper had ordained for him lately. Having to fetch the little girl's body up from the lake bottom had been a hiccup in that progress, but they had the bitch who'd done it safely stowed in a car outside, and this condescending, self-inflated prat was soon going to join her.
That task accomplished, he had rejoined Tallantire on the terrace.
'Nicely done, lad. You've handled yourself well all through this, and it'll not be forgotten. I reckon we could be into the big black headlines tomorrow.'
'I'd not be so sure, sir,' warned Dalziel. 'There's plenty as'll want to put the mufflers on this one, double wrapped.'
'You reckon? You could be right, Andy. Mind you, it wouldn't surprise me if there'd been a serious leak, and the Press and telly boys knew I'd be bringing someone in this afternoon,' said Tallantire, his eyelid drooping in the hint of a wink. 'Now, I'm off. You tidy things up here. It'll be good practice for you. But don't worry, I'll see you get your share of the credit. And I'll make sure the buggers know the circus is coming to town!'
A few moments later the little procession took off with bells sounding and lights flashing.
Grinning, Dalziel went back into the house, thinking nothing of fractions, nothing of anything except short-term celebration and long-term promotion.
What took him back into Westropp's room he did not know. This was not the kind of tidying up that Tallantire meant. This should have been left to the labour of house-keeper or butler, manservant or maidservant. Perhaps it was because something about the very idea of servants got up his nose that he found himself hanging up the clothes Mickledore had dragged from the wardrobe. Or perhaps after all his mind was already developing its sensitivity to fractions.
But his mind stuck at whole numbers when he noticed the faint flecks of colour, grey and brown, on the cuffs of the soiled dress shirt which had fallen from the linen basket. He sniffed at the flecks, convinced himself they had no smell, looked further in hope of finding nothing, found instead a handkerchief, crumpled now but with folds that suggested it had adorned a breast pocket, and marked with streaks of what might have been oil. Such streaks as you might get if you rubbed the cloth along the barrel of a newly cleaned gun.
He turned to the wardrobe. The dark cloth of the dinner jacket showed nothing around the cuffs, though of course darkness would be no protection against a paraffin test.
It was all guesswork, not even that, for he refused to let his mind make such dangerous guesses. It was not as if there were anything of real substance here, anything solid . . . then his fingers had felt the shape of the key in the jacket pocket.
No reason why Westropp shouldn't have such a key. It was a common enough design. Of course, if it turned out it was almost exactly the same as the gunroom key, yet wouldn't open the lock . . .
Only one way to find out. If he wanted to find out.
Slowly he stood upright.
Behind him a voice said, 'Excuse me, but there is a situation downstairs which I think you should deal with.'
It was Gilchrist the butler, his voice despite everything still pitched at exactly that level of courteous neutrality which placed policemen somewhere between tradesmen and gamekeepers.
Leaving Gilchrist looking in distaste at the untidy room, Dalziel descended to the hallway. It was at once clear that Tallantire's leak had been too successful, and if the main circus was opening in town, a substantial sideshow was developing here. The Partridge family, en route to their car, had been ambushed on the terrace by a media mob and beaten an inglorious retreat to the library. Here, with curtains drawn to deter prying cameras, in the vigorous language of both the stable and the hustings, Dalziel was commanded to
do
something.
It took an hour of threats, lies, and promises, to persuade the journalists that there was nowt for their circulation here and they were missing the real story back in town where even now Ralph Mickledore was being paraded through the streets in a gilded cage.
After that, the grounds had to be combed to make sure that a guerrilla force hadn't been left behind, before Partridge would expose his family to the open air.
As he watched the politician's car disappear, the phone rang.
It was a CID colleague.
'Andy, you still there? You want to get your arse back here, else you'll miss the party. The Black Bull. Wally's treat. He said to make sure you knew. Right little golden boy, aren't you?'
'Things went OK, did they?' asked Dalziel.
'Like a bomb. Press and telly boys everywhere, and the Chief Constable crapping himself with rage and wanting to know who'd tipped 'em off. But Wally handled it all beautifully. I reckon he's going to come out of this like a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Bobby Charlton.'
Suddenly the key weighed like a rock in Dalziel's pocket.
He put the phone down and slowly, reluctantly, he went back upstairs. Feeling like a man who drops his wife's favourite ornament, and closes his eyes, and opens them again, hoping against hope that the scatter of fragments will somehow not be there, he pushed open Westropp's door.
For a glorious moment he thought it had worked. The room was perfectly tidy and when he looked in the wardrobe, it was Mother Hubbard bare. But Yorkshire detectives are not allowed to wake up and find it has all been a dream. He ran downstairs, calling Gilchrist's name.
The butler appeared, radiating disapproval.
'Westropp’s clothes, what's happened to them?'
‘
Mister
Westropp, understandably, will not be returning to the house,' said Gilchrist icily. 'We have been asked to pack his things and send them to his London apartment.'
'They can't have gone already?'
'Certainly not, sir,' said Gilchrist, scandalized into according him a courtesy title. 'We would not deliver a gentleman's clothes unlaundered.'
'You mean you're doing it
now?
You're doing it
here?'
Gilchrist obviously felt Dalziel's dismay was caused by the shock of learning that a butler had so demeaned his great office.
'Normally the maids would see to it,' he said defensively, 'but they are both . . . indisposed. Besides, Mrs Gilchrist and myself are both happy to keep our minds and hands occupied in these tragic times. And though I say it myself, Mrs Gilchrist is the best starcher of a gentleman's shirt that I know, and I am still able to sponge and press a suit till it looks like new.'
It occurred to him to wonder why he was talking thus intimately to a policeman.
'There isn't a problem with the clothes, is there?'
Dalziel thought.
He thought of the brown flecks on the cuffs which could have been gravy, and the key in his pocket which could be Westropp's latch-key. He thought of Kohler's confession, and Wally's unchanging certainty that Mickledore was his man. He thought of banner headlines and TV pictures and golden boys. He thought of the built-in safe-guards of the English jury system and of the mystery man, Sempernel, who had appeared like a ghost and said very little before vanishing into the thin air he seemed to have emerged from in the first place.
He thought of the party getting under way in the Black Bull.
He said, 'No problem.'
And of course there hadn't been. Not then. Not now. Just a slight rearrangement of the facts.
Had Mickledore drugged Westropp? Perhaps a little something in his brandy to make sure he fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow and didn't awake when Mick entered his dressing-room, slipped out of his shirt and jacket and into Westropp's before heading for his rendezvous in the gunroom. Entering as the stable clock gathered its strength for the midnight chime. Pamela sitting there, glowering, resentful, uncertain how this meeting was going to go, uncertain too what her lover was doing as with practised ease he slipped the cartridges into the shotgun. Then the first note struck. His finger on the trigger. She probably never heard the second. Now the wire round the vice, the gun wiped with Westropp's handkerchief, Pam's hands pressed around the barrel, the note culled from the longer note with which she summoned him to this fatal meeting, dropped on to the table. And by the time the twelfth stroke was sounding, he was stepping out of the door.
And running into Cissy Kohler.
You had to admire a man who could think on his feet and Mickledore now proved he could do that.
First thought must have been to say he'd just found Pam and she'd killed herself. But he couldn't afford to raise a general alarm yet. Others, less overwrought than Kohler, might wonder why he was wearing a dinner jacket and dress shirt both manifestly far too small for him. He had to get back to Westropp's room to change. Wearing his friend's clothes had been both personal protection and a fail-safe. He didn't intend to frame Westropp unless it was absolutely necessary. But now his fail-safe proved perfect for ensuring Cissy Kohler's silence, as he used his knowledge of her love for Westropp to make her his accomplice.
Later when he muddied the waters even further by letting himself be found trying to cover up the suicide, he must have thought he was home and free. Then, in the face of Tallantire's persistent scepticism and after Emily's death, having Cissy as his accomplice suddenly turned difficult. But not yet deadly. In the end surely she would tell what she thought of as the truth? And surely these bumbling policemen would come upon the evidence he had planted against Westropp?