Bones and Silence

truce was rudely shattered when they entered the theatre foyer and the first person they saw was Philip Swain.

'What's this? Have you got me here for more games, Peter?' snarled Dalziel, stopping dead.

Pascoe, with cause enough for guilt at entrapping the fat man, could only stutter a most unconvincing denial which Dalziel brushed aside as he advanced towards Swain and demanded, 'What the hell are you doing here?'

Swain, who had paused at the cloakroom to remove an elegant overcoat, lost none of his composure.

'Superintendent, good evening,' he said. 'What am I doing here? My wife was something of a patron of the drama and I feel I owe it to her memory to keep up that support. More to the point, what are you doing here? I shouldn't have thought it was your scene.'

He let his gaze drift across a poster advertising Hedda Gabler, which had just finished, to one advertising a post-London one-woman show based on Virginia Woolf which was opening next day, then back to Dalziel.

'Oh, I like a bit of good acting as well as the next man,' said Dalziel.

'What on earth is all this about?' Ellie whispered in Pascoe's ear.

That's this guy Swain Dalziel's so het up about.'

'Oh, Peter, you didn't arrange for him to be here, did you?' she said in a tone of indignation which, considering the conspiracy she and Chung had embroiled him in, took Pascoe's breath away.

Swain moved away up the stairs to the bar area where the party was being held and the Pascoes joined Dalziel to hand their topcoats in. He glowered at Pascoe and said, 'Is that it for the evening, lad? Or is Desperate Dan waiting up there to tell me I've been busted back to the beat?'

'Ha-ha,' laughed Pascoe inanely. Ellie dug her elbow in his ribs and led Dalziel forward to where at the head of the stairway Chung was receiving her guests.

'Ellie, darling, glad you could come. And Pete, honey, you too. And who is this? Is this he, the one, the only? O brave new world that has such creatures in it!'

'How do, missus,' said Dalziel. 'By God, you're a big 'un!'

'I love him already,' said Chung. 'Andy, may I call you Andy? You haven't got a drink. There's plonk for the herd, but you don't look like a plonk man. Won't you join me at the bar?'

'Depends on the price of admission,' said Dalziel, heavily jocular.

'Only your soul,' she said. 'But you get to drink Highland Park. Incidentally they've got spirit glasses like eggcups here. Can you make do with a half-pint tumbler?'

'I can mebbe force myself,' said Dalziel.

'Putty in her hands,' said Ellie as Dalziel was led away.

'She'll need big hands, that's a lot of putty,' said Pascoe. 'She seems to have been well briefed, though. I wonder who her mole can be?'

Ellie said defensively, 'It's common knowledge he likes his Highland Park.'

'Try telling that to the judge! I notice it doesn't seem to be common knowledge that I too would not object to a spot of the Highland Park.'

'Better stick to the Highland Spring,' Ellie advised. 'Remember, it's your turn to drive home. That fellow Swain certainly seems to know everybody.'

Pascoe followed her gaze. Swain was talking very much at home with a group among whom Pascoe recognized the President of the Chamber of Commerce, the Council Leader, and their wives.

'Old family,' he said, echoing the awful Mitch.

'Do you think he killed his wife?' asked Ellie.

'There's no hard evidence,' said Pascoe. 'In fact no evidence at all except what Andy says he saw.'

'Which you were trying to explode earlier? Well, I'd say he looks to me the type who might well have killed his wife, but he's quite dishy in a dangerous kind of way. Poor chap, I feel quite sorry for him.'

Pascoe sighed and said mildly, 'I should have thought you might have targeted your sorrow on the wife.'

'Oh, her. I think I remember her vaguely now I come to think of it. She must have been the one who came to a couple of Arts Committees. American. Pushy. Capitalist. Neurotic. Always bound for a bad end.'

The Resistance always saved its most unremitting hate for collaborators, Pascoe reminded himself.

He said, 'I still don't see why you feel sorry for him.'

'Well, whether he killed her or not, he's here not because he wants to be, but to brazen it out, isn't he? Perhaps he even got word Fat Andy might be here. Either way, he's jumping from a great height on all the nasty rumours that must be running around. But he can't be enjoying it.'

The trouble with Ellie was that there was always a mad logic behind her apparently most irrational assertions.

Pascoe spent the next half-hour mingling, but finally his leg began to ache and he made the fatal error of seeking support and respite in a corner. Within two minutes he found himself trapped there by two of the most boring men he'd ever met. One was Professor Unstone, an opinionated mediaevalist who used his bloated belly to ram home arguments; the other was Canon Horncastle, pale, bespectacled, his flesh honed almost to the bone by sanctity, but no less assertive in debate. Pascoe, feeling he could contribute little to their discussion of the social significance of the Mysteries, twice attempted exodus and was thwarted first by the mediaeval belly then by the clerical elbow. Their only point of accord seemed to occur whenever they glanced towards the bar where the granite of Dalziel's and the gold of Chung's foreheads still formed an excluding arch over the Highland Park. Then, quite clearly across the disputants' features he saw written in letters of fire and letters of ice the same emotion -