quite a different kettle of fish! Not all the rotten wood in the world would have bridged the doubts in Dalziel's mind.
Something clicked close by and he looked up to see Uniff towering above him with a smile on his face and a camera in his hand.
'What a shot!' he said. 'The great detective at work! What were you thinking of, man? A single-handed trip round the world?'
'I thought you were short of film,' said Dalziel, stepping up on to the landing-stage.
'There are some things too good to miss,' said Uniff. 'Say, that could be dangerous.'
He pointed to the broken treads and Dalziel recalled his late return the previous night. Presumably he had not yet met, anyone who had told him about Spinx.
‘It was,' said Dalziel. 'Oh shit!' He was looking at the sleeve of his jacket which was smeared with oil. He traced its source very quickly to the punt. Someone had been trying to clean up the duck gun.
'Tillotson!' he groaned. 'I'll kill him!'
‘If he tries to fire that antique, he'll kill himself,' observed Uniff. 'What were you doing down there, anyway, man?'
As they walked back to the house, Dalziel filled him in on the discovery of Spinx's body.
Uniff was incredulous.
'That little creep? I can't believe it! His kind live for ever.'
'You didn't like him?' said Dalziel.
'What? No, I didn't say that. Some of my best friends are insurance creeps. Anyway, I wasn't around last night, not after nine. So it's no use grilling me.'
His Americanisms were sometimes venerably antique and in his initial surprise at Dalziel's news, he had sounded very like his sister. But the fat detective's mind had seized upon points of other than linguistic interest.
'I'm not grilling you, Mr Uniff,' he said. 'But I'd be interested to know why you think I might be.'
'Well, hell, sudden death, the fuzz start asking questions all round. I know, we've had some, remember?'
'I remember,' said Dalziel. 'Point two, why should nine strike you as being a significant time? There's nothing yet that says Spinx didn't take his bath earlier.'
'It wasn't meant to be significant,' said Uniff. ‘It was just the time I left, that's all.'
The uniformed constable came out of the front door as they reached it. He had a half-eaten bacon sandwich in his saluting hand and treated Dalziel to a distant and fatty wave.
'Which brings us to where you went last night, Mr Uniff,' said Dalziel heavily.
Uniff laughed as he ushered Dalziel into the house ahead of him.
'Now you are grilling me,' said Uniff.
The door which led to the kitchen opened at the other end of the hallway and Mavis appeared.
'OK,' said Uniff. if that's how it's gotta be, come on up to my pad. I got the equipment there.'
He steered Dalziel up the stairs at a speed which left him short of breath by the time they reached the first landing. Looking back, he saw Mavis standing at the foot of the stairs watching their ascent with the impassive intensity of a totem mask.
The room Uniff led him to was huge. The design of the faded and torn wallpaper suggested it had once been a nursery, though no other evidence survived. There were no broken rocking-horses, no disfigured Teddy-bears, just a huge table littered with paper and film equipment, and at the farthermost end of the room surrounded by spot lamps a rostrum camera set-up.
'Here we are,' said Uniff proudly. 'What do you think, man?'
'They must have had bloody huge families in them days,' said Dalziel.
'What? Oh, yeah. It was probably those long winter nights when the magic lantern broke down.'
Uniff wandered across to the camera, turned one of the lamps so that it pointed full in his face and switched it on.
'OK, captain. But I tell you again, I don't know nothing.'
'This your film then?' asked Dalziel peering without comprehension at a huge sheet of card pinned to the wall. On it were pasted a series of drawings, about fifty in all, like a strip cartoon except that the sequence of events escaped Dalziel.
'I thought you'd never ask,' said Uniff, switching off his light. 'Yeah, that's my story board. I've got some rushes here. You want to see them?'
Like all obsessives, he could not doubt the answer but quickly drew down the black-out blinds and set the projector rolling. On the screen appeared the letter O. It turned into a man's head. A stone age club appeared and hammered down on the skull. The mouth opened and out came a strip cartoon balloon containing the letter O which in its turn became a breast. A hand caressed it. The response again was O; and in sequence every part of the human body was represented by the letter, then assaulted or stimulated in some fashion more or less appropriate, always with the same response. The animation was clever, often wittily obscene, though Dalziel doubted if in these blatant days it was actionable.
‘It's about language,' explained Uniff. 'Mave does the animations. Not bad, eh? No sound yet. That's a problem. What do you think? Do we need those O's vocalized?'
The film ran on. Eventually a stone age doctor presented his stone age patient with a bill. The mouth rounded to an O, the eyes to two more, then they all expanded and exploded into a torrent of letters.
'How'd you like that?' asked Uniff as the film ran to an end. 'Commerce is the mother of language. Not love, hate, religion, sex. But money.'
'Well,' said Dalziel. ‘It's not very long is it?'
'Hell, man, that's just the opening sequence. Next we go on to a historical survey. The letters and words are the characters, you dig? All languages, all literatures. It's very funny, Mave's done marvels. All the time there's a struggle between the different functions of language. Finally figures start coming in until at the end we get nuclear physics formulae dominating, then the whole thing goes bang and we're back to O.'
'Interesting,' said Dalziel. 'I like a good cartoon. Cheaper to make than a real film, I suppose?'
He was just fishing for some indication of where the finance for the project came from, but Uniff pulled up the blinds angrily, seized a large envelope from a shelf and spilled a dozen or more glossy half-plate prints into Dalziel's lap.
'Those more in your line, Superintendent?'
Dalziel studied them gravely. He was not one of those who found the vagina in close-up a particularly appealing sight, not even when its owner appeared to have a traffic no entry sign tattooed on the inner thigh.
'In a way,' he said. 'Professionally speaking.'
Uniff retrieved the photographs hastily and returned them to their envelope. His anger had quickly vanished.
'They're harmless,' he said. 'I was just showing them to you, not asking you to buy them.'
'No need to get legalistic, Mr Uniff,' said Dalziel. 'Though you ought to know that under the Obscene Publication Acts, publication (that is, simply showing someone your dirty pictures) is an offence, whether done for gain or not. But you're in luck. I doubt if anything you've got here is liable to deprave or corrupt me. So let's forget I ever saw them, shall we, and try to remember where you went last night.'
According to Uniff he had simply gone into Orburn for a drink and stayed on after hours as a guest of the landlord. He coyly refused to give the name of the pub on the grounds that he didn't want to risk spoiling a good drinking place. Dalziel found this quite reasonable and, in any case, he had no real authority for, or purpose in, questioning the man, so he didn't press matters.
He went downstairs again and as he reached the hallway, the door to the servants' quarters opened and Arkwright emerged. Dalziel had never seen a pale Negro before and the sight touched him.
'Morning, Mr Arkwright,' said Dalziel with the jovial sympathy of one hard-drinking man for another. 'How are you feeling?'
'Terrible,' said Arkwright. 'Listen. I'm very sorry about all this, I don't know what happened.'
'Something you ate I should think,' said Dalziel, but observing that the man seemed genuinely distressed at what had passed he put on his avuncular air and added, 'Think nowt of it. They're all silly buggers here, you
