But just in case they hadn't . . .
So he fled from the library like the unmasked killer at the end of a Golden Age murder mystery, and let himself be caught at bay in the place where he could hurl the evidence of his innocence at the feet of his pursuer.
Who had seen it, and understood it, and for reasons he had never dared to understand, turned away.
It would be wrong to say that Dalziel's conscience had been agitated by Mickledore's execution all these years. The memory of the drowned girl had been a greater troubler of his sleep. Grown men, after all, were usually guilty of
something
, and if they weren't, it was more luck than virtue. In any case, a wise cop lets the courts resolve his doubts. It's when judges change their minds that old wounds get inflamed.
But now he knew he was right, had always been right, and would always be right whatever any judge might say. It was surprising how little satisfaction it gave him. For now he had other questions to bring a little colour to his white nights.
In his pursuit of justice, Tallantire had used Cissy just as ruthlessly as either Westropp or Mickledore. OK, so she'd been a willing victim, but weren't cops supposed to protect victims, even willing ones?
Was a guilty man's death worth an innocent woman's life? And how much difference would it have made to his own actions if he'd thought of Cissie as innocent all those years ago?
He opened the cardboard box on the table. It was full of old keys, the useless accumulation of years. He stared at but did not touch the one on the top, the one he'd been looking at the night before he went to America. The marks of a file were clearly visible on its teeth.
This was the key Mickledore had used in his charade outside the gunroom; the key whose existence Tallantire had deduced and whose absence he had explained by pressurizing Cissy into saying she'd thrown it into the lake; the key Mick had planted in Westropp's pocket to point the plodding police in the wrong direction.
What would Tallantire have done if Dalziel had given him the key?
Probably the same, which was why he hadn't bothered. It was his first command decision. Where the buck stops, there stop I.
And now it was history and therefore junk. There was only one place for junk. He picked up the box, took it out into the yard and dumped the lot into his wheelie bin. Then he headed upstairs to unpack.
As he passed through the hall he noticed among all the old papers and mail an envelope with his bank logo on it. It was hand addressed, which caught his attention. He tore it open. Inside was a computer flimsy and a note from the manager.
This confirms you now own £2,000 of shares in Glencora Distillery. I've just heard that Inkerstamm have taken them over which means you actually own £5,000 worth. Are you lucky or just a crook? Don't tell me!
God is good, thought Dalziel. I bet He even does plumbing on Sundays.
He ran lightly upstairs, and paused in his bedroom doorway.
God was very good indeed, or maybe just an old-fashioned thriller writer.
'Hi,' said Linda Steele. 'Hope you don't mind me stretching out, but I just landed a couple of hours back and I'm well and truly bushed.'
'I can see that,' said Dalziel, thoughtfully. 'You here on business?'
'Funny business, you mean? No, I'm out of that. Full-time hack, is me. I got to thinking, if a little grey-haired lady twice my age can walk through me like a cobweb, what's a real heavy going to do?'
'So you decided to start the rest of your life by visiting me?'
He didn't try to keep the doubt out of his voice. Never look a gift horse in the teeth, his old mam, who liked her maxims mixed, used to say. But when a gift horse had such perfect teeth, and everything else, as Linda Steele, it was hard for an old cop not to start looking.
'You got a problem with that, Andy?' she asked.
'Mebbe,' he said. Meaning, several. He wasn't much given to self-analysis. That was for poofs, wimps, and men with degrees. But when he did turn his eye inward, it was with the same brutal clarity of vision that he brought to bear on the outer world. He looked now and found uncertainty. How the hell could he credit that a lass like this would travel six thousand miles out of lust for a fat, balding, boozy, middle-aged bobby? No way!
Happily his doubt was a purely intellectual matter and had no channel of communication with his appetites. Even as his inner eye weighed his own attractions to the last scruple, his outer eye was totting up Linda's, and he felt his Y-fronts taking the strain.
He said, 'Rampling give you a leaving present, did he?'
She laughed and said, 'OK, Andy. I can see there's no fooling you. Never was. So here's the bottom line. I wanted out, that's true enough. But in that line of work, you don't just hand in your notice and walk away. Not if you want to be able to walk, that is. You part friends. I saw Rampling personally. He said, OK, if I didn't see my future with the Company, that was my business. But he'd esteem it a personal favour if I could contrive to run into you and check what you got up to, who you were talking to, since you got back home.'
'And you said yes.'
'People like me always say yes to people like Scott Rampling,' she said seriously.
'So you
are
here on business.'
'Yeah, but I wasn't lying, Andy,' she said. 'The only
reason
I'm here on business is because I was going to be here in the first place. I told Rampling I was planning to try my luck in the UK, meaning I wanted to put a whole ocean between his boot and my sweet butt. That's when he started talking about favours. What I hadn't told him was, I was going to look you up in any case.'
'Because of my bonny blue eyes, you mean?' said Dalziel cynically.
'No. Because I felt I'd like to be close to someone who did know how to say no to someone like Scott Rampling,' she said.
He looked down at her assessingly. The doubts were still there, but so was the pressure in his groin. Her gaze seemed to take in both.
She said, 'That's it, Andy. That's the best I can do. If it's not enough . . .'
'Nay, lass,' he said, holding up a forbidding hand as she made to slip off the bed. ‘It strikes me, as long as you're still connected to that lot, mebbe before you left, you remembered to collect my expenses?'
She relaxed and smiled wickedly.
'Do you take American Express?' she asked.
'That'll do nicely,' said Andrew Dalziel.
FOUR
'I carry about with me not a scrap of writing openly referring to it. This is a secret service altogether. My credentials, entries and memoranda, are all comprehended in the one line, "Recalled to Life", which may mean anything.'
So in the end it had been neither the best of crimes nor the worst of crimes, just another murder, ending nothing except a life.
The death of James Westropp's first wife hardly troubled his thoughts at all as he died in the arms of his second. Perhaps, indeed, for the first time he dimly acknowledged that, once the massive shock of events at Mickledore Hall Wad faded, he had been not unrelieved to have an excuse at last to back away from the tiresome trade of treachery. He had offered a defence to Dalziel, but to tell the truth he had long been perplexed to recall why he'd decided to betray his country at a time when it was a much nicer place to live than it had since become, when he felt no inclination to betray it at all.
He opened his eyes one last time to see the candid, loving, grieving face of Marilou, and suddenly knew that his silence on this subject which he'd always thought of as protective, was in fact the greatest betrayal of all. He opened his mouth to speak, but his life, so eager to escape, darted out, and his body had to be satisfied with the more general atonement of at last providing some genuine Hanoverian dust to mingle with the honoured remains of Williamsburg's patriotic martyrs.
It was a quiet funeral.
Westropp's family was represented, first, by his son, Philip (later to distinguish himself as a CIA operative specializing in destabilizing friendly regimes to keep them grateful); and, secondly, by a tasteful wreath of red and white roses, beribboned in blue, delivered via the British Embassy with an unsigned card inscribed
In One's Thoughts At This Sad Time.
Marilou's family was represented by her son, but not her daughter. To tell the truth, William was there only because he could fit it in as a legitimate expense en route to New York to try to interest his American publisher in
The Golden Age of Murder.
The book was completely free of any reference to Mickledore Hall, though the final chapter on the Chester Races case still opened with the words,
It was the best of crimes, it was the worst of crimes,
proving that in the desperate quest for publication, a writer will sacrifice anything except a nice turn of phrase.
Scott Rampling was there too. For years he had misused his authority by having Westropp's phone calls monitored and mail opened in the hope of getting a pointer to the whereabouts of the tell-tale photo. Now, finding himself appointed as executor to Westropp's will, he was able to go through all the man's papers with a fine-tooth comb. Nothing. Just when he was considering himself totally safe, a Presidential aide tossed the photo on to his desk and said, 'Thought you might like a look at that, Scott.'
He could not speak, his bowels felt loose, his bladder painfully full.
Then the man went on, 'Came over the fax a while back. Probably some joker, but we've shown it around and one or two people have a feeling there's something familiar about the guy with the tackle. Could be worthwhile getting your people to check it out.'
'I'll put someone on it,' said Rampling.
Shortly after this he began to wear spectacles and grow a moustache, and fellow members of his exclusive Washington sports club noticed that he no longer took his daily sauna and cold plunge.
Jay Waggs did not attend the funeral, nor send any flowers. A man whose muddled upbringing had left him permanently confused about his own motives and emotions, he had surprised in himself a fondness for Cissy Kohler which made him reluctant to subject her to the indignities of creative journalism. Yet, in the absence of her cooperation, there was no other way of giving Hesperides anything like their due, so he had retired to Canada till such time as his fertile mind would come up with an even more amazing story to placate his predators.
As for Cissy herself, she waited till the last black car crawled away before approaching the grave.
She was here, not because of what she felt but because of what she hoped she might feel. There had been a moment when she fumbled in her bag before Dalziel pushed her from the room which might have provided the cathartic climax she was seeking, but even now she wasn't sure if she would have pulled out the gun or her handkerchief.
The coffin was still visible beneath the obsequial scatter of earth. It was plain oak with dull brass handles. She nodded approvingly. An unostentatious man, Jamie would have wanted no more.
Then the nod changed to a wild shaking as she tried to dislodge this complacent assumption of knowledge. What the hell did she know about his likes and dislikes? What did she know about anything! She had loved with the total passion of first love. She had given herself without stint and without question, and because he had accepted the gift with such delight, she had assumed a commitment as complete as her own.
But it hadn't all been naive self-deception. When she ran into Mickledore as he came out of the gunroom and glimpsed behind him the bleeding body and staring eyes of her rival, it hadn't been simply the hyper-egotism of love which caused her unhesitating acceptance of his assertion, 'Cissy, it's terrible . . . Jamie's killed Pam . . . He did it for you!'
She had known it was true, because this was what she and Jamie had planned to do.
No. Not
planned.
That was too precise, too cold a word for what had passed between them as, drifting in those deliciously warm shallows left by the receding tide of ecstasy, she had whispered, 'If I died now, I'd be truly happy.' He laughed and said, 'It's not dying yourself that brings true happiness. Cissy. It's having the strength to will the death of others if they stand in your way.'
'I don't know if I've got that kind of strength.'
'Few people have. And few of those are willing to use it.'
'Are you one of the few, Jamie?' she asked, sensing a meaning, a commitment.
'Oh yes,' he said, pulling her to him and caressing her so that she felt the distant tide begin to surge back once more. 'I've got strength enough for both of us.'
He had been talking about Pam - what else? - and from that moment she had been warmed by the certainty that, one way or another, this sole obstacle to their permanent happiness would be removed.
Now it had happened. The bloody reality of the removal almost overwhelmed her, but strength returned as Mickledore urged the danger Jamie was in and told her of his own efforts to make the death look like suicide. If mere friendship could make a man act so nobly, how much further should love be able to go?