Bones and Silence

real work, lad. I want you back down at the Infirmary really leaning on Mrs Waterson, and I don't mean feeling her up like young Seymour! So don't hang about. It's not long to opening time and we've done bugger-all yet. Thank God Wieldy will be back tomorrow. Have you seen him yet? Sixteen stitches he had on his face last night, and I tell you, you could hardly notice the difference. If anything, it was a slight improvement!'

His laughter followed Pascoe down the corridor.

Perhaps after all there were worse things than the dullness of defeat.

Pamela Waterson was not pleased to be disturbed by her second policeman that morning, but when she heard what Pascoe had to say, her resentment turned to something more guarded, less readable.

'Who told you this?' she asked quietly.

Pascoe shrugged and watched her trying to work out either the informer or her response to the information.

'Yes, it's true,' she said finally. 'A few weeks back, before our final split, he asked me if I could steal some drugs. I said no. End of story.'

'You didn't mention this to my colleagues.'

'Why should I? There wasn't any crime, was there?'

'Come on, Mrs Waterson. He wasn't asking you for aspirin for his headache, was he? Did he specify?'

'No. He didn't get the chance. It was the last straw for me. One of the last straws. I choked him off, told him we were through and left.'

She hadn't asked Pascoe to sit down. People often thought that keeping a cop standing got rid of him quicker. It didn't. He leaned against the back of a chair and studied the woman. She looked calm and controlled, the kind of face you would want to see from your vulnerable hospital bed. But he could sense something beneath it - what was it Seymour had said? - she was very unhappy; yes, that was it, but more too; last straws were still being loaded on her, he suspected. He knew from experience that physical suffering makes you selfish, but there were kinds of mental and spiritual suffering in which the woes of others beat on you like hammer blows, and in that state a nurse might easily feel each death, each decline, in her ward as a personal defeat.

He said, 'Is your husband an addict, Mrs Waterson?'

She said, 'He doesn't inject, didn't anyway, I'd have known when we were together. Hash, yes. Who doesn't? Amphetamines sometimes, and I don't doubt if there's coke to be sniffed, he'll sniff it. But I'd not have called him an addict.'

She sounded defensive. Both Wield and Seymour had felt that her feelings for her estranged husband were ambivalent. Being a Catholic provided acceptable reasons for avoiding a divorce. Even God was sometimes usable.

'When he asked you to steal the drugs, did you understand they were for his personal use?'

'Yes, of course. What else? Oh hell, you're not wondering if he's a dealer, are you? For God's sake, he can't organize his own life, let alone a drug ring! If you gave him an hour glass, it'd lose time. If he was pushing the stuff himself, he'd have it on tap and he wouldn't be hard up, would he?'

She was echoing Dalziel's logic. Pascoe smiled ruefully at finding himself on the receiving end of the same put- down twice in an hour.

Then, resuming his most serious expression, he said, 'Your husband's hard up, you say? Didn't he get any severance pay when he left his job?'

'As a matter of fact he did. He wasn't entitled as he walked out of his own accord, but they gave him a generous ex gratia payment, I suppose because they liked him. Couldn't stick him, but they liked him.' She laughed humourlessly. 'Like me.'

'So where's that gone?'

'God knows. That studio conversion he had done in the attic must have cost. He couldn't work in the spare room, not Greg. Always the grandiose ideas. Had to have his own studio . . .'

Her voice tailed off. Pascoe followed her train of thought ... if Greg hadn't got Swain to build his studio, he'd not have met Gail Swain and she wouldn't be dead and Greg wouldn't be . . .

What the hell was Waterson doing?

He said, 'All right, so you can't see your husband as a pusher. But try this. If someone your husband wanted to impress found themselves short of whatever turned them on, wouldn't he like to project himself as Jack the Lad, Mr Fixit, the man with the best connections?'

She explored her hollowed cheeks with her fingertips, deep blue eyes directed at without being focused on his face. Then she gave a parody of a smile and said softly, 'I thought you said you didn't know my husband.'

'You think I'm right, then?'

'That's the way he is. Especially with the blondes.'

Whatever she said, in the Irish stew of reasons for leaving her husband, sexual jealousy was the red meat. It made the next question easier.

He said, very brisk and businesslike, 'We'd like to talk with anyone who may have had a relationship with your husband. Discreetly as we can, of course. We wouldn't want other families getting hurt.'

He felt a pang of shame at his slyness in offering her at the same time a conscience-salver and an incentive. Which weighed the stronger he couldn't guess, but she replied without hesitation, 'Christine Coombes. Beverley King.'

'Only two?' he said, recognizing his Dalzielesque crassness even as he spoke.

'Two I'm certain of,' she said without apparent resentment. 'Lots of strong suspicions but I'm not turning you loose on suspicions.'

So that was her conscience taken care of. He asked, 'This certainty . . . ?'