She didn’t have a choice.
She had never been a subservient wife. She’d once told Alex, if he wanted instant obedience, he should have become a dog-handler. But now she saw no way forward but to assume it was his voice she’d heard and to obey his instructions. The only way to settle all doubts was to see him face to face. To do anything that might drive him back into his hidey-hole, whether it were mental or physical, was not an option. She’d lived through uncertainty into certainty once. It had been a slow painful journey and it wasn’t one that she wanted to have to start making again.
She rang Reception, told them she was checking out and asked them to charge everything to the credit card they’d swiped on her arrival. Then she got dressed, bundled the rest of her stuff into her case and headed out, descending by the service lift that deposited her next to a door opening on to the car park.
She slotted her mobile into the Bluetooth connection and drove away from the hotel. He’d said drive north so she turned right to keep the sun on her left. At last her Brownie days were coming in useful!
After a few minutes the phone rang.
‘Where are you?’ he said.
It was Alex. She was sure of it. Wasn’t she?
She said, ‘I’m on the outskirts of town. There’s a roundabout ahead. Left is Leeds and Harrogate, right Scarborough, straight on Middlesbrough.’
‘Carry straight on. Don’t disconnect.’
Other instructions followed at regular intervals. Soon she was off the main highway into a maze of narrow country roads passing through hamlets whose names meant nothing to her. She would have been completely lost had not her Brownie fix on the sun told her she was now to the east of her starting point and heading south. Finally after three quarters of an hour she was told to turn west on to a road which ran arrow-straight between low hedges of burnished hawthorn. By her rough geographical calculations, if she carried on in this direction for four or five miles, she would intersect with the main north-south motorway she’d started out on. She’d worked out that the purpose of all this meandering was to shake off any possible pursuit. Well, she hadn’t seen another car either in front or behind for miles, so perhaps now he was simply directing her back to town.
A mile or so ahead the narrow road breasted a steep hill on whose summit silhouetted against the declining sun she could see a building. As she got nearer she could see an inn sign swaying in a gentle breeze.
At the foot of the hill he told her to stop and wait.
She obeyed.
Time passed. Five minutes. Ten. Half an hour. Nothing happened. No traffic overtook her, none came towards her. With each passing minute her certainty that it was Alex’s voice faded. She wound down the window. There was no sound except for the call of a single bird, far away, repeating the same phrase over and over again. She tried to analyse it musically but it defied annotation. It had no connection with humanity. It belonged in a world where all the humans were dead. She felt totally alone. Abandoned.
It hadn’t been Alex. It was nobody. And nobody was going to call.
She would sit here till it got dark, and then she would…
She didn’t know what she would do.
16.35-16.41
Once more Andy Dalziel drove into the car park of the Keldale Hotel but this time his mood was very different. Last time he’d been anticipating a leisurely al fresco lunch with a good-looking woman who’d presented him with an intriguing little mystery, just the right size to take his mind off his own troubles.
He’d felt completely justified in keeping the whole daft business to himself. Involving an off-duty Novello had seemed harmless enough. Of all his DCs, she was the one whose discretion he most trusted. She was very ambitious and therefore unlikely to risk his wrath by shooting her mouth off. The same could be said of the lads, when sober, but after a few jars down the Black Bull he wouldn’t trust any of them to keep their mouths shut about their boss’s dalliance with a beddable blonde!
Before the bomb, it wouldn’t have bothered him. A man with a hide like a rhinoceros doesn’t fear pinpricks of laughter. A rhino might look a bit comic wandering around among all them elegant antelopes, but let him turn his sagacious eye in your direction, and you soon stop smiling.
On his return to work, however, he found that Mid-Yorkshire, which had once stretched around him like the wild savannah, had contracted to an enclosure at the zoo. People were now looking at the beast with curiosity, or, worse, with pity.
So they had to be re-educated.
Back to basics first; keep them guessing what you’re up to, make them jump a bit, remind them you’re answerable to nobody but yourself. Respect! Wasn’t that the cant word these days? Get some respect!
After this morning’s visit to the Station, he felt he’d taken a good stride in the right direction. He’d come to the Keldale at midday feeling more like his old self than he had for a long time.
And now as he drove into the car park, he felt like a petty recidivist crook returning to the scene of his pathetic crime.
Pascoe was certainly treating it as a crime scene. He’d upgraded the search of Gina Wolfe’s room to full SOCO examination.
‘You sort that, Wieldy,’ he’d commanded as if his commanding officer were not present. ‘But first off, get on to Seymour and tell him to make sure Mrs Wolfe’s room is left untouched. Don’t want a chambermaid getting in there and stripping the bed, do we?’
Stripping the bed? Was that a crack? wondered Dalziel.
‘You’re still giving the room the once-over, are you, Pete?’ he said. ‘Mebbe I should take a look first afore SOCO gets to work.’
‘Why’s that, Andy?’
‘Because I’ve been there, remember? Could be I’d spot summat.’
It had sounded weak and Pascoe hadn’t bothered to try and smooth over the fact.
‘Oh, I see. Maybe you’d notice a subtle change out of the corner of your eye, some slight discrepancy that would eventually turn out to be the clue that cracks the case, like in one of Agatha’s novels? No, I think on the whole it might be best for all our sakes if you weren’t around when the CSIs start poking about.’
Best for all our sakes? That was definitely a crack!
‘Why? What do you think they’re going to find? Semen stains on the sheets?’
Pascoe shrugged and said, ‘I just need to be sure there’s nothing to find, OK?’
‘Listen,’ said Dalziel, ‘I told you, I were knackered. Not fit to drive. I dossed down by myself. For Christ’s sake, if Gina had been there, whatever else I gave her, I’d have given her an alibi, wouldn’t I? And you’d not be wasting time with this daft notion that she might have blown Watkins’s face off and put Novello in hospital.’
Pascoe had looked at him with half a smile and said, ‘No need to get your knickers in a twist. All right, if you’re so desperate to go back, let’s go. Wieldy, you keep an eye on things here, OK? Anything comes up, ring me.’
‘As opposed to keeping it all to myself, you mean?’ said the sergeant ironically.
‘Why not? Seems to be in fashion nowadays,’ said Pascoe.
They weren’t going to leave it alone, thought Dalziel. And he couldn’t complain, he had it coming.
Pascoe, who’d parked alongside him, was out of his car already and opening his boss’s door for him.
‘Come on, Andy,’ he said impatiently. ‘Work to do.’
This was too much. Pascoe had followed him to the hotel. Followed, not led the way, thought Dalziel. Like he was scared I was going to do a runner. Time he had a little reminder of the divine order of things.
God seemed to agree. Even as the Fat Man looked for a way to slow things to his own pace, the good Lord sent him one.
‘Here,’ he said, looking across the car park to where a man was putting a suitcase into a BMW X5, ‘I know yon face.’
He set off with Pascoe in close attendance. As they approached, the man straightened up and looked round.
