He was an imposing figure, broad-shouldered, grey-haired, with a Roman emperor’s head and a nose to match.
‘How do, Hooky!’ boomed Dalziel. ‘Long time no see!’
Pascoe was a good reader of reaction and it struck him that this Roman emperor was reacting to Dalziel’s approach as if he’d just noticed Alaric the Visigoth trotting up the Appian Way.
Conclusion: he was a crook whose acquaintance with the Fat Man was purely professional. Question: what kind of crook was he, and could his presence here have anything to do with Gina Wolfe?
But even as the question formed in his mind he was revising his conclusion as Dalziel took the man by the hand and shook it vigorously.
‘So what are you doing here, Hooky? Bit off your patch. Can’t be official, else we’d have baked a cake or summat.’
The man managed a wan smile and said, ‘No, just a visit. Old chum’s daughter got married.’
‘Oh aye? Job, is he?’
‘No, no. Some of us do have friends outside the Force,’ said the man, his eyes straying to Pascoe, who coughed in the Fat Man’s ear.
‘Oh aye, I’m forgetting me manners. Hooky, this is Peter Pascoe, my DCI. Pete, drop a curtsey, this is Nye Glendower, king of the Cambrian cops!’
‘Good to meet you, sir,’ said Pascoe. ‘I’ve heard of you, of course.’
Aneurin Glendower, Chief Constable of the Cambrian Force. Not a household name outside of Wales, but one well known in police circles as a man of strong views who might rise even higher if he could find a PM on the same wavelength.
They shook hands and Glendower said, ‘You boys got something going on here? I noticed a bit of activity in the hotel.’
Seymour and a WPC. They couldn’t have caused much of a stir, but you didn’t get to be CC without having well-tuned sensors, thought Dalziel. He opened his mouth to reply, but Pascoe cut in.
‘Just a little local difficulty,’ he said breezily. ‘But we’d better get it sorted. Good to meet you, sir. Andy, when you’re ready…’
The bugger’s worried in case I shoot my mouth off! thought the Fat Man indignantly.
He said, ‘With you in a minute, lad. Us old buggers need the young ’uns to keep us on our toes, eh, Hooky? Sorry I didn’t know you were here. We could have cracked a bottle and had a chat about the good old days when we mattered.’
‘Yes. Would have been nice, Andy-not that I had much spare time. Got to shoot off now and burn a bit of midnight oil when I get home so that I’m up to speed when I hit the desk in the morning. Good to see you. Nice to meet you, too, Pascoe.’
He slammed his boot, got into the X5 and accelerated out of the car park.
‘He’s in a hurry to get home,’ said Pascoe.
‘Well, it’s Wales,’ said Dalziel. ‘Probably shuts at half past seven. Here, watch out!’
He pulled Pascoe out of the way of a white Mondeo backing out of its parking spot at speed. The middle-aged woman driver scowled at them, then sped off towards the exit.
‘Bloody women drivers,’ said the Fat Man, shaking his fist after it. ‘Most on ’em couldn’t push a pram straight.’
Racist and sexist in the same ten seconds, thought Pascoe. Nothing new there then, except it came across rather mechanically, as if the old sod were becoming a parody of himself. And all that stuff about the good old days when he mattered! He really should have taken a few more weeks convalescent leave. Or maybe months.
Or am I just behaving like Henry the Fifth looking for arguments to invade France?
But Glendower’s reaction had certainly contained something of the embarrassment of the successful man on meeting the one-time equal he’d left behind. In the past their leader’s national reputation had always been a source of pride to his colleagues in Mid-Yorkshire CID. Could the truth really be that he was regarded as a bit of a joke by the upwardly mobile, a cop who’d found his relatively low level, a grampus puffing his way around a small provincial pond?
Pascoe shook away the disloyal thoughts.
‘Let’s find Seymour,’ he said.
16.35-17.05
It had been a funny kind of day, thought Edgar Wield.
The unexpected appearance of Dalziel early that morning should have rung a warning bell. Looking back now, it seemed that there had been something a touch manic about the fat sod’s speech and demeanour, and there was that business about the old lady, Mrs Esme Sheridan, ringing in with a complaint about a kerb-crawler, and giving a car number and description that pointed the finger at the Fat Man. But on the whole Wield had been happy to accept his arrival as evidence that normal service was about to be resumed.
That the superintendent had come back too early from convalescent leave the sergeant did not doubt. But when others, including Pascoe, had expressed concern as to whether the great man could ever truly get back to where he had been before, Wield had kept his counsel. In his eyes it was just a matter of time. The others saw it in terms of a champion boxer trying to make a come-back. He saw it in terms of Odysseus come to reclaim his kingdom.
He had sufficient self-awareness to acknowledge he might be emotionally biased.
Pascoe was very close to the Fat Man. Romantics-there are a few of those even in the modern police force- analysed this as a vicarious father/son relationship. Dalziel had no children, or at least none he acknowledged, and years ago Pascoe’s father had confirmed the distance between himself and his son by opting to emigrate to Australia with his eldest daughter and her family.
The Romantic analysis of the D and P relationship went something like this: as initial distrust and dislike had moderated, via reluctant acknowledgement of detective skill and technique, to mutual respect and even affection, the residual ability to get up one another’s noses had been rendered innocuous by subsumption into a quasi-familial mode. You may at times loathe your parents or kids, but that doesn’t get in the way of loving them.
Wield felt it was maybe a bit more complicated than that. What he was certain of was that he owed his own progress, perhaps even survival, to the Fat Man. He had congratulated himself for many years on the skill with which he’d concealed his gayness from his institutionally homophobic employers. It was only late on, around the time he decided-without marking the occasion with a ticker-tape parade-to come out, that he realized he’d never fooled Andy Dalziel. Looking back, he began to understand how much he’d benefited from the Fat Man’s protection. Nothing obvious involving civil rights and liberal declarations and such. Just an invisible circle drawn round him which said, He’s in here with me, touch him at your peril.
He’d never said thank you because he knew if he had, all he’d have got back was, For what? And indeed, for what? The right to function like any other copper? Surely he had that anyway. So, no thank yous. But what he did give the Fat Man was unconditional trust that, whatever he was, so would he always be.
Trust was one thing, reality another. There was no getting away from it, the way things had turned out today meant there was a big dark cloud hanging over Dalziel, and Wield doubted it was about to burst in blessings on his head. Nowt he could do but get on with his job.
He had disposed of the Duttas as the superintendent had suggested and now he was sitting collating statements from the other Loudwater Villas tenants.
The sound of a rackety engine caught his ears and he looked out of the caravan window to see a dusty white Bedford van pull up in front of the building.
A young man got out, early twenties, dressed in baggy jeans and a red T-shirt. He stretched his arms and yawned, then pulled a grip off the passenger seat and headed into the Villas.
Wield frowned. He’d set up a checkpoint on the approach road. They couldn’t keep people out who had a genuine reason for going in, such as, they lived here. But where there was doubt, the officer on duty would ring in to check; and where there was no cause for doubt, he would make a note and ring in with the details to indicate
