Deadheads

this upstart occupation of their personal bench.

'At what stage,' enquired Ellie casually, 'did it seem better for your financial deliberations to be carried on in bed.'

The two old women moved on, one indignantly, one reluctantly.

'I don't know. It just happened. I suppose I drank a lot. I know I talked a lot. It was funny; as I talked, I began to see what Patrick had meant. Things had tended to fall his way, if you looked back. He could almost be forgiven for his stupid optimism. I started off by wanting to complain about him, yet I ended up half defending him!'

'But not yourself?'

'Evidently not. I don't recollect much about getting undressed. I remember the actual event all right. Well, he was, after all, the only other man I'd ever been with. It was quite pleasant, I suppose, but it felt very different. I mean felt physically, that is. He was very bony. Even his muscles felt hard and knotted and bony. And he seemed very big, you know, there. I'm no expert, but he did seem to be disproportionately large.'

'Big for his size, you mean?' said Ellie.

Daphne giggled.

'Yes, that's it, exactly. Afterwards he said it had been great, but I'm not sure he really meant it. I don't think his mind was really on it either. I'd worried him, I realize now. I'd no idea! Somehow he got the idea I was warning him that Patrick contrived to dispose of everyone who got in his way! So he went running off to the police like a terrified hamster! It's laughable, really. These men who call us neurotic and fanciful, give them half the chance and they're standing on their executive desks, screaming at imaginary mice!'

'You're learning,' approved Ellie. 'They're a laugh a minute.'

'Not quite so frequent, perhaps, when they're policemen, and they start chasing the mice,' said Daphne.

There followed a long silence in which they studied the blurred and mildewed tombstones visible through the green-painted railings that had been put up when the churchyard wall had been declared dangerous. The tombstones themselves looked well decayed, their ranks crooked, their heights irregular and their stances awry and stooping, like a rabble of aged veterans drawn up on a last parade.

'Well?' said Daphne.

'Well what?' said Ellie. 'I don't particularly want to attack Peter for doing his job. And if I defend him, I might seem to be implying that your husband may have a case to answer. You see my dilemma?'

'Not really. Surely Peter can't really think Patrick may have a case to answer? I haven't met this husband of yours, but he sounds a pleasant rational man.'

'I haven't met this husband of yours either,' evaded Ellie. 'You'll have a chance to meet mine soon. He'll want to see you and Patrick before you go off next Monday.'

'Well, it'll have to be lunch-time on Saturday at the earliest,' said Daphne.

'I'll tell him. Come on, Rosie, time we were moving. I suspect we're preventing these two old dears from enjoying their daily contemplation of last things.'

She rose, feeling like a coward, but not knowing what else to say or do, and organized the baby into her papoose-basket.

As they moved away, the two old women took over the bench with the speed of legal tenants moving in behind the bailiffs.

'I always thought it was the young who took the place of the old,' said Daphne, not resisting Ellie's flight.

'Never believe it,' said Ellie. 'We're turning into a geriatric society. The old are fighting back. They have the great advantage of an irresistible recruitment programme. It's called living.'

They walked away together, two tall women, one dark, one fair, in a state of friendship which they both knew might well turn out also to be a state of truce.

9

 

PENELOPE

(Hybrid musk. Tall-growing, prodigal of bloom, pale-pink while young, but fading almost to white in age, good hedger, heavily scented.)

Penny Highsmith was a good drinker but she was no match for Dalziel in whom ancestry, employment and inclination had combined to form a true professional, who never acknowledged a master and rarely a peer. Prolonged bouts of reunion drinking had taken a toll, however, and Dalziel was getting most of his sleep by cat-napping blatantly through the conference sessions. He had borne a distant headache with him, like a thunderstorm in the next valley, to his rendezvous with Penny. But a couple of pints of watery London beer at the simple steak house she suggested they visited had washed his mental heavens clear and he had kept the carafes of red wine coming at a rate which had the Maltese waiters exchanging suggestive grimaces.

They were wrong, of course. Dalziel did not rate wine as a drink in the drinker's sense of the word, and his purpose was simply hospitable rather than amatory or even interrogative. Also he was enjoying himself, just sitting here, eating the biggest steak they had been able to produce and talking to a lively, intelligent and attractive woman.

He said as much to Penny, who had by this time wisely asked for a bottle of mineral water to cut the wine. ‘I’m glad you're having a good time, Andy,' she said. 'You know, after you left the other night, I got to thinking how strange it was that you should just be happening to stroll by my place as I came home. And I began to wonder if there might be more in it than mere coincidence.'

'Fate, you mean?' said Dalziel. 'Written in the stars? That sort of stuff?'

'Not exactly,' said Penny. 'More like, ambush. Written in the CID notebook.That sort of stuff. But now I see how much you're enjoying yourself, I think, no, he couldn't be putting this on. Could you?'

'Don't be daft,' said Dalziel. 'This is the best time I've had since they banned hanging.'