Bones and Silence

'Yes, of course. My God. What's that?' exclaimed Pascoe.

In the first floor of the house immediately behind a light had come on in a room with the curtains open. A man stood before the open window, brandishing something in his right hand.

'Bloody hell!' said Dalziel. 'What the fuck's going on?'

Pascoe opened the kitchen door and both men pressed out into the yard. A second man appeared. There seemed to be a brief struggle and he was pushed away.

'Come on,' said Dalziel, setting off down the yard. Distantly Pascoe heard a muffled bang and he went after the fat man, cursing as he hit obstacles that Dalziel seemed able to plough through.

Out of the gate, across the alley, into the garden of the house on Hambleton Road; the back door was unlocked; through the kitchen, up the stairs; Pascoe's leg was aching badly and it was all he could do to keep up, but he was close behind as the Super burst into the bedroom.

A man in a dark blue blazer with a starting pistol in his hand stood by the window. Another man in a black roll neck sweater crouched by the wall. And on the bed, imperturbable as ever, sat Sergeant Wield.

Dalziel spun round to face Pascoe.

'What's this, lad?' he said softly. 'Games evening, is it?'

Pascoe smiled wanly. In the five days since Swain's release, nothing had happened. Dalziel was unrelenting in his belief that Swain was involved in his wife's death far beyond the admission of moral responsibility made in his statement. While not denying a strong intuitive antipathy for the man, he claimed his conviction was based firmly on the evidence of his own eyes. The fact that Waterson's statement in so far as it differed from Swain's tended to place even less blame at his door didn't impress Dalziel in the least. Give him ten minutes with Waterson, he said, and he'd soon alter that. But, perhaps fortunately, Waterson had managed to disappear without trace, and the daily sight of Swain supervising the car park extension was clearly such an irritant that Pascoe had begun to fear his superior might say or do something more than normally outrageous.

Thus it had seemed a good idea to see if he could provoke bit of self-doubt in the fat man by staging this 'reconstruction'.

Now all at once it didn't seem like such a good idea after all.

'Just a bit of reconstruction, sir, to get timings right,' he said brightly.

'Reconstruction? Then you ought to do it properly. I didn't see any tart flashing her tits in the moonlight.'

'No. Sorry, sir. Short on tarts. But in other respects, how was it?'

Dalziel looked at him with speculation edging anger out of his eyes. Then he let his gaze drift from the man with the gun to the man by the wall.

'You want me to say that Constable Clark there with the gun was the man I saw first, don't you? But I don't think he was. I think it was the other way round, it was Billings I saw first and they've switched the gun. Right?'

'Sorry, sir. But no, it was Clark.'

'But it was me you saw with him, not Billings,' said Wield.

Dalziel stared at the sergeant, who was wearing a dark grey leather bomber jacket.

'And it wasn't a gun Clark was carrying but this.'

Pascoe picked up a pipe from the bed.

'Clever,' said Dalziel. 'But neither Swain nor Waterson smoke pipes, do they? And I still heard the gun go off after I saw Swain holding it.'

Pascoe thought: This is one step forward, two back! He said, 'Like tonight?'

'Aye, the same sequence.'

'Yes, sir. Only they fired the starting pistol before Clark appeared at the window. The bang we heard afterwards was Dennis Seymour with a paper bag in the garden shed.'

There was a long and dreadful silence.

'All right, you buggers,' said Dalziel finally. 'So you reckon you've proved I'm as unreliable as any other witness, eh? Well, prove away, but I know what I know. This was your idea, was it, Peter? I always had you down as clever but I never had you down as unkind. No need to make a fool of people when all you've got to do is ask.'

Oh Christ, thought Pascoe. Vicious anger he'd been prepared for but not pained reproach.

He said, 'I'm sorry, sir, but I thought the element of surprise

'Oh, it's a surprise right enough, Peter. I'll remember you like surprises. And I'll tell you another thing you got wrong.'

He swung to face Wield.

'That tart on the bed even with her face shot off was a bloody sight prettier than him!'

He left, banging the door behind him.

Wield looked at Pascoe, then began to smile.

'Thought we'd really upset him there,' he said.

'Me, too,' said Pascoe. 'But I'll tell you what. I'm not going to stand near the edge of any station platforms for a bit!'

By the time they got to the Kemble, Dalziel's good humour was almost completely restored by Ellie's sympathetic hearing of 'the daft tricks that clever bugger she'd married had been up to'. But the