ten times dafter than the last.
Turnbull was at home. Through her glasses she'd glimpsed him moving around inside. It had been early afternoon when she arrived, so whether he'd been out that morning or not, she had no way of knowing. Certainly there was only one digger remaining parked in the compound, so presumably the others were out on a job somewhere. Perhaps after the assault he didn't feel well enough to go out to the sites himself.
Fortunately Novello had had the sense to grab a prepacked sandwich and a bottle of water from the incident-room fridge. Even so, with the sun burning down and time ticking by, she guessed she was going to end up baked, parched, and hungered before the day was out. And still nothing happened. The good part of the nothing was that nobody was trying to raise her with angry queries as to what the hell she thought she was doing. The bad part was that after an hour or so without further sight of Turnbull through the wide-open windows of the bungalow, she began to fear that he might somehow have slipped out of the back and away across the fields. Had there been a rear gate in the compound security fence? She tried to recall, and failed.
Perhaps she should take a stroll. Even if he clocked her, he'd only seen her the once, no reason he should remember.
Except, of course, that he was Geordie Turnbull. She recalled that unashamedly appreciative gaze which flattered rather than offended. Part of its power was that it seemed to be registering you as an individual, not just as an arrangement of tits and crotch. Once your face was filed in Geordie's memory, she betted it was retrievable forever.
But just as she thought both professional necessity and personal comfort made such a stroll essential, something happened.
A vehicle transporter turned into the compound. A flabbily fat man slid out and sat on the running board, gasping with the effort. He was wearing football shorts and a string vest through whose meshes glowed diamonds of red flesh. Flayed, you could have used him to decorate an Indian restaurant. Finally he recovered enough to reach into the cab, take out a plastic carrier bag, and head to the bungalow, the door of which opened before him. He went inside. Twenty minutes later he reemerged, minus the bag and plus a can of lager. Novello watched in envy as he squeezed the last drops into his mouth and handed the can to Turnbull, who dropped it to the floor behind him. The two men now maneuvred the digger onto the transporter, made it secure, and shook hands. Turnbull watched as the vehicle drove out of the compound, then turned back into the bungalow.
Novello made a note of the transporter number, called up Control on her radio, and asked for a vehicle check. It was registered to Kellaway Plant Sales, proprietor Liberace Kellaway. Novello gave details of the transporter's likely present location and asked if it could be stopped, ostensibly for a check on stability or something, but in fact to find out anything they could about the origins of the digger. When the sergeant i.c. Control came on to inquire who it was requesting this misuse of hardworked car officers' time, with the implication that it had better not be anyone low as a WOULDC, Novello thought of sheep and lambs and said, 'Mr. Dalziel would be grateful.'
In Mid-Yorkshire police circles, this was the equivalent of a royal command, and half an hour later the word came back. The transporter, which was being driven by Mr. Kellaway himself (liberace! thought Novello. What a fan his mother must have been. What a disappointment little Lib probably was!) had passed all tests satisfactorily. As for the digger, it had just been purchased from the firm of G. Turnbull, Contractor, Ltd., of Bixford, and he had the papers to prove it.
Novello uttered her thanks, plus a request that no further reference be made to this matter on open air, hoping thus to delay the moment when the Fat Man discovered his name had been taken in vain.
Now she settled down again to wait, still hungry, still hot, but refreshed by hope as her mind began to get an inkling of what that smart-ass Pascoe had probably worked out several hours before.
In fact, Shirley Novello was both overestimating Pascoe, and underestimating Dalziel.
The former, it was true, had glimpsed the outline of a sketch of a cartoon of a possible picture when he advised her to follow her heart, but no more than that, and in the hours since he had found little leisure or inclination to essay bolder strokes and finer shadings.
The awaking of Rosie was both huge joy and piercing pain.
She had opened her eyes and been instantly aware of her parents. Initially she showed no curiosity about where she was but babbled on-not deliriously but merely out of her customary eagerness to tell everything at once-about caves and pools and tunnels and bats and nixes.
Then she paused and said, 'Where's Zandra? Is Zandra back too?'
That was the pain. The pain of her loss to come. And the infinitely greater pain of Derek and Jill Purlingstone's loss, which Pascoe shared by empathy as his heart and imagination showed him how he would have felt had it been Rosie, and which was joined by guilt as he found himself offering up thanks to the God he didn't believe in that it hadn't been her.
'It wasn't a choice, Peter,' urged Ellie when he explained this. 'There was no moment when someone, or something, decided, We'll take this one and let that one go.'
'No,' said Pascoe. 'But if it had been a choice, and I had to make it, this is what I would have chosen without a second's thought.'
'And that makes you feel guilty?' said Ellie. 'If you'd needed a second's thought, that would have been something to feel guilty about.'
Rosie had fallen asleep now, as if the excitement of recovery was as exhausting as the illness itself, but now her rest was recognizably the repose of sleep, with all the small grunts and changes of expression and shifts of position which her watching parents knew so well.
They sat by the bed hand-in-hand, sometimes talking quietly, sometimes in a shared silence full of pleasurable memory of times past, and in pleasurable anticipation of times to come; but always, if the silence went on too long, they would finally look at each other and register that each had drifted in his and her reverie to that other place in the hospital where a small form lay and two other parents sat in their own silence as profound and unbreachable as that beneath the sea.
As for Andy Dalziel, it was some time since he had turned his attention to the disposition of his troops and first of all he asked, 'What's Seymour on?'
Wield, who made it his business to find out in rapid retrospect what he had failed to know in long advance, said, 'He's at Wark House in case Lightfoot shows up there.'
'Oh, aye? I thought that were Ivor's assignment.'
'No. It were her idea to send Seymour.'
'Her idea?' said Dalziel making it sound oxymoronic. 'And where's she at?'
'She's watching Turnbull.'
'And whose idea were that?'
'She says the DCI'S.'
'She says! Meaning she's doing it off her own bat, I suppose. Dear God, Wieldy, you've got to watch these women. Give 'em an inch and they're black-leading your bollocks.'
'You want I should call her up?'
'Nay. Let her be. There's nowt for her to do here and if she turns summat up, she'll be a hero.'
'And if she doesn't?' said Wield.
'Then likely she'll be sorry she ever troubled the midwife,' said Dalziel balefully.
The superintendent was in a bad mood. So far the fresh lines of inquiry he'd anticipated from the finding of the body hadn't materialized. The postmortem had confirmed the on-the-spot diagnosis. Death following a skull fracture caused either by being hit by an irregular-shaped object, probably a piece of rock, or by falling heavily against same. No sexual assault. Forensic examination of the clothing had so far come up with nothing. In fact the only opportunities for Dalziel to exercize any of his many skills came from being required by first the chief constable and secondly the press to explain how come an extensive, and expensive, search over the same ground had failed to turn up the child's corpse.
Desperate Dan Trimble, the CC, had been relatively easy to deal with. Despite their occasional differences, they had a lot of respect for each other, which is to say Trimble accepted that Dalziel's regime was good for the area's crime figures, and Dalziel accepted that as far as was possible, Trimble protected his back. Also Dan liked the way Dalziel made no effort to offload responsibility onto Maggie Burroughs or any other of the officers on the ground. 'Shifting dead sheep and paying special heed to the area round about was my shout,' said the Fat Man. 'I missed it.' And the question rose in his mind as to whether he might have missed it fifteen years ago also. If this
