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? 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,
