As soon as it was a reasonable working hour, Dalziel rang the garage.
Yes, they remembered talking to Mrs Fielding. Yes they hoped to send someone out for the car that day. No, they didn't think it would take long to put it right, just a drying-out job. In fact if they'd realized it was so urgent, they'd have brought it in yesterday afternoon. Of course (full of rural indignation) their breakdown truck could get through the floods if it had to.
Dalziel arranged to ring them later in the day and replaced the phone thoughtfully. At that rate, he could be on his way by tea-time. In fact it sounded as if he could have been on his way the previous day.
He was in Hereward Fielding's room and as he left the old man met him at the door.
'I was just using the phone,' Dalziel felt constrained to explain.
'There are other phones in the house,' snapped the old man. 'But feel free. Feel free. It's Liberty Hall here.'
'Are you better?' asked Dalziel.
'Better than what? I was never unwell, if that's what you mean. I've been wet before, I'll be wet again before I go. You'll see.'
'There you are, Herrie. Why on earth have you got out of bed? You are being very silly.'
It was Bonnie, looking very stern and disciplinarian.
'You must allow me to judge what is best,' said Fielding. 'I am perfectly well. In any case those Gumbelow people are likely to turn up today and I've no intention of letting a lot of damned Americans find me in bed.'
'They may not come,' said Bonnie. 'Even if they do, you could have waited till they'd rung and said definitely.'
'The phones in this house are in such constant use that it may prove impossible for them to get through,' said Fielding, glowering at Dalziel.
'Well, sit down in here. I'll put the electric fire on and get Mrs Greave to bring you some breakfast.'
'Coffee only and a slice of toast,' said Fielding. 'That woman's not to be trusted with anything else. That meal last night. Vile!'
'The sausages weren't bad,' said Dalziel.
'You had sausages? I was given some nauseating stew of a kind hitherto undescribed in prose or poetry, unless on the occasion that Dr Henry Spooner recited the opening lines of 'The Burial of Sir John Moore'.'
'It was chicken fricassee and it came out of a tin,' said Bonnie. 'Now go and sit down.'
She spoke in a stern schoolmistressy tone and Fielding obeyed. Dalziel felt he too might have obeyed if addressed in such a way, but her voice when she spoke to him after closing the door behind her father-in-law was humorously long-suffering.
'No wonder Herrie and Nigel got on so well! They're both at the awkward age.'
'Don't you think you ought to try to find where the boy went?' suggested Dalziel diffidently.
'I'll make some discreet enquiries round his friends,' she answered with an unworried smile. 'Boys of that age are very contrary. Any hint of a search would just make him burrow deeper. Did Herrie say you'd been telephoning?'
Dalziel considered.
'No. No, he didn't,' he said. 'But I have. I rang the garage.'
'What do they think?' she asked.
'They're not certain. I'm going to ring later.' The lie came easily.
'Well, you're welcome to stay as long as you need to,' said Bonnie, if you can stick us, that is.'
'I'll bear it,' said Dalziel. 'Tell you what. I'd like to go into Orburn if anyone's going that way. One or two things I'd like to get.'
'There's a shop in the village,' said the woman.
'Do they make up prescriptions?' asked Dalziel.
'No.'
'Well then. Perhaps I can phone a taxi if no one's going that way.'
'Don't be silly. I'll drive you myself. There's always some shopping to get.'
Any hopes Dalziel had of another solitary excursion with Bonnie disappeared when he met the car outside the house at the prearranged time of nine-thirty. It was an old Rover with what looked like the remnants of a nest in the radiator grille. In the front passenger seat was Tillotson and when Dalziel opened the rear door he found himself looking at Mavis Uniff.
Bonnie drove with considerable panache, passing through the flooded bottom end of the drive with an angel's wing of water arcing away on either side. Dalziel hoped the undercarriage was in better repair than the bodywork, but no harm seemed to be done. The suspension felt as if it had given its best and was now in decline, a state understandable if corners were always taken like this. The humped railway bridge where they had stood the previous night provided another interesting obstacle, but the Rover took it like a thoroughbred 'chaser which was more than Dalziel's stomach did.
They slowed to a sedate fifty to pass through Low Fold village, which was a cluster of cottages, a Post Office, a pub and a church. A thought occurred to Dalziel as they passed this last building.
'Why didn't they bury him there?' he asked Mavis sotto voce.
'I don't know,' she replied and, leaning forward to tap Bonnie on the shoulder, asked, 'He wants to know why you didn't bury Conrad in Low Fold?'
Dalziel shook his head reprovingly at the girl but Bonnie seemed happy to answer.
'Lake House dead have always been buried in High Fold churchyard. You see, Low Fold's high and High Fold's low, if you follow me. Mike, my first husband's, there as well, so it's convenient for all the family.'
Dalziel glanced surreptitiously at his companion but no one seemed to find the comment either amusing or odd. He scratched his left armpit thoughtfully and the rest of the journey was completed in silence.
Orburn appeared to him as a town he'd visited many years ago in his youth rather than one he had left just the previous morning. The main street widened into a kind of square, or rather an ovoid, as if someone had pressed his thumb on the narrow thoroughfares which ran out of it and the street had blebbed to four times its normal width. At one end of the bleb was the Lady Hamilton. Bonnie parked a little farther along, next to a marble statue which age or modesty seemed to have rendered anonymous.
'There's a chemist's over there,' said Bonnie. 'I'll make for the supermarket first, I think. What are you two going to do? Labour for me or your own thing?'
Tillotson and Mavis seemed uncertain of their respective plans and in the end Bonnie said to Dalziel, 'See that baker's over the road? There's a little cafe behind it. We'll have a coffee there in about forty-five minutes. All right?'
She strode away, long firm strides stretching her simple denim skirt taut against her thighs. Tillotson hesitated a moment before following. One thing about your posh upbringing, thought Dalziel. Properly done, it instilled good manners. Their fatal weakness.
'What about you?' he said to Mavis.
'I never go into shops if I can help it,' she replied. 'Especially supermarkets. I'll show you the sights if you like.'
'That's kind,' said Dalziel, which it was. It was also a bloody nuisance. Time was short and he didn't want the girl hanging around.
'But it's shopping I'm after, too,' he went on. 'Just bits and pieces, but the sights'll have to wait till another time.'
'You are staying long enough for another time then?' she asked. 'Should I welcome you to the club?'
'We'll see. Thanks for your offer anyway.'
'That's all right. I'll go and brood on nature.'
She smiled at him and walked slowly away. He crossed the road and went into the chemist's where he watched Mavis out of sight while the assistant wrapped a bottle of aspirin.
'Anything else, sir?' asked the girl.
'Yes,' said Dalziel. 'Where's the police station?'
Fortunately it turned out to be in the direction opposite to that taken by Mavis and with the other two trapped in the canyons of the supermarket, Dalziel was able to enter the single-storied building which was the local station with minimum furtiveness.
