'Oh, you're still a copper then. I thought they all retired at forty.'
'Not quite,' he said. 'And you. What're you doing?'
'Oh, this and that,' she said vaguely.
'Grand,' he beamed. 'Well, I'll tell 'em all at the club I saw you. I'd best be off. I'm just on my way back to my hotel. Usually there's a pot of tea going about now. Cheerioh then.'
He shook her hand again and turned away. If she didn’t call him back by the third step, he'd have to think again.
It was on the fourth step that she said, 'Look, if you've got a moment, why not come up and have a cuppa with me?'
'Now that's nice of you,' he said, turning. 'As long as it's no bother. That would be really nice.'
The flat was comfortable without being luxurious, the flat of an active woman who expected to spend more time out of it than in.
Dalziel relaxed in a deep armchair and watched Penny Highsmith bustling around making the tea. Minus her jacket, her generous figure showed to even greater advantage beneath a translucent silk blouse with a high collar which concealed any giveaway wrinkling of the neck. Certainly there was precious little else which put her in her mid-fifties rather than early forties. It wasn't fair, thought Dalziel. Men were supposed to age gracefully, but the same years which had merely rounded Penny's bust had positively billowed his belly.
Still, he wasn't here to seduce her, though once upon a time, once upon a time . . .
There'd been a dance in the clubhouse. It had been the usual thrash with the beer as important as the dancing. He'd hardly moved away from the bar except to go to the Gents. It was as he returned from such a visit that he ran into Penny Highsmith coming out of the Ladies. Distantly a smoochy slow waltz had begun to play. He had danced her along the corridor, then through the door which led to the changing-rooms. There in the darkness in an atmosphere laced with the perfume of liniment and sweat they had embraced passionately and there had been little resistance to his investigating fumbles, till all at once a cry went up outside, 'Andy! Andy Dalziel. Where the hell is he? Andy! They want you back at the cop-shop, chop-chop!' He'd been willing to go on, but Penny had whispered, 'No, they'll be coming in here next. Later. There'll be another time.'
There never had been. The demands of his job had not only destroyed his marriage, he thought bitterly; they had destroyed a lot of his chances of a bit on the side too.
'Here. You once nearly screwed me in the changing-room, didn't you?'
Her voice, intersecting so neatly with his thoughts, made him start guiltily as though he'd been thinking aloud.
She put a tray down before him and sat on a low pouffe beside his chair.
'Sorry. Did I shock you?' she said. 'I didn't know you could shock cops.'
She grinned at him. The grin brought her back completely as she'd been then. Lively, easy-going but with a mind of her own, capable, independent, pleasure-loving, undemanding herself and refusing to be tied down by others. And very, very attractive.
'Not shocked,' he said. 'Just regretful. By God, you've weathered well, Penny Highsmith!'
'You've filled out,' she said. 'And the booze and the late nights have left a few high-tide marks I can see. But you still look basically the same, Andy Dalziel. Hard, fast, and brutish!'
She laughed to take the sting out of her comment. Dalziel laughed too. He felt it as a compliment.
'You went away,' he said. 'One moment there, next gone.'
'It wasn't quite as quick as that,' she said. 'I was always going to go. Yorkshire was all right, but I missed being down here. I only went up for a few weeks to look after my Aunt Florence in the first place. Then she died and I got the house and the money. Well, I got it eventually. And by the time all that was settled, my boy was at school. He liked it there. I suppose we'd led a rather unsettling life before that. Anyway it seemed a shame to disturb him, so I settled down to it for a few years. But a few years was more than enough, begging your pardon. Help yourself to tea. I'm not very domesticated, I'm afraid.'
Dalziel obeyed, restricting himself to his dietary two heaped spoonfuls of sugar.
'You never married then?' he said.
'No. Why should I?'
'Good-looking lass like you, you must've had offers,' he said.
'Oh, yes.' She grinned. 'When you stop getting offers you know the auction's ended. Then it's going, going, gone! No, I always liked my independence. Most people do, you know, only they're not certain they can manage it. I was lucky that way. I had Patrick young and I brought him up by myself, so I learned all about being independent. It was hard at times, but it was a lesson worth learning.'
'Patrick. That's your boy?' said Dalziel, sipping his tea.
'Boy! He's been fully grown longer than I care to think.'
'Still living up our way, is he? Or did he move too?'
'No, he's still in the old house,' said Penny. 'He's really crazy about that place, always has been. I think it'd take dynamite to shift him.'
'Do you get up there to see him at all?'
'Not much,' said Penny. She eyed him shrewdly and added, 'Why so interested?'
Dalziel usually preferred frontal attack to creeping about the bushes but he sensed that he was going to do more good by stealth here than by confrontation.
He winked lecherously and said, 'Just wondering if you'd fancy a sentimental rendezvous in yon changing-room,
