Bones and Silence

'So. Another druggie,’ said Pascoe. 'Waterson seems to collect them.'

'If you bed down with foxes you'll end up with fleas,’ declared Dalziel, managing to make it sound like an old country saw, though Pascoe had his doubts. 'But it don't take us much further forward.'

'It's another piece in the puzzle, sir,' said Pascoe with a noble attempt at optimism.

Wield provided one more piece on his return the following day. Despite Dalziel's slanderous allegations, he looked terrible and Pascoe tried to urge him back to bed. They settled on a compromise which kept the sergeant safely seated at his desk, catching up with routine paperwork. There was no keeping his mind at rest, however, and half way through the morning he came into Pascoe's room.

'I got to thinking,' he said. 'Waterson's file, I studied it pretty closely, seeing it was me that lost him in the first place. I've been looking at the update and something struck me. That time he got done for taking off when the patrol car flashed him to stop, that was January thirtieth. Park doesn't give an exact date for that big deal he did with him, but he says it was the end of January. Suppose it was the same day?'

'Explain,' said Pascoe.

'He's driving home with a parcel full of dope. We flash him. He panics - that sounds in character. They pick him up half an hour later. He's all apologetic. He's also here.'

He pointed at a location to the north of the city on  Pascoe's wall map.

'And he was flashed here, about two miles away. Now the car lads reported he took off along the bypass, so let's suppose he cut off here, took this fork, see where it'd take him?'

'Past Badger Farm,' said Pascoe.

'Right. He stops on the bridge. He's really on the boil. No lights in sight, but he doesn't know the moment when they'll appear, and they've probably got his number anyway. So what does a man who loses control like Waterson do now?'

'Tosses his parcel over the parapet into the canal, you mean? Why not just hide it in a ditch?'

'That'd be the sensible thing to do, but he's not got much talent for doing sensible things, has he?' said Wield. 'And a couple of days later Bluebell moves from Bulmer's Wharf to the bridge near Badger Farm.'

'And Waterson spends a lot of time wading around with a pole! Wieldy, you could be a genius. Let's see if we can find out!'

He picked up the phone and dialled.

'Joe, it's Peter Pascoe. All that rubbish your lads trawled up yesterday, what happened to it?'

He listened, replaced the receiver.

'We're in luck. They wanted to dump it back in the cut but Joe's got an environmental conscience and he made them stick it in rubbish bags and leave it at the farm for the bin man to collect.'

'We'd best get a move on, then,' said Wield, rising.

'I thought we'd agreed you were staying indoors today?'

'Not if I'm going to be a genius,' said Wield. 'You know what he thinks of geniuses.'

Pascoe laughed.

'All right. But don't blame me if you catch typhoid.'

Half an hour later, watched by the puzzled and suspicious tenant of Badger Farm, they began emptying the plastic rubbish bags. What precisely they were looking for Pascoe didn't know, but he saw it almost at once. A cardboard cylinder on whose water-stained and faded label he could just make out the words Romany Rye Veterinary Products.

He opened it. Inside was a sealed plastic lining protecting about 500 grams of white powder. He pulled it open and tasted it gingerly.

'No wonder fleas hop so high,' he said.

They found three other containers and the frogmen were re-summoned to check for more. Wield wore his genius status modestly till Dalziel appeared to remind him modesty was no defence.

'So now we know why he got the lass to move the boat down here,' he growled. 'So what? It still doesn't move us much further forward.'

'It gives us a lot more clout in getting resources allocated to finding them,' protested Pascoe.

Dalziel shook his head more in sorrow than in anger. Had he taught this boy nothing? You didn't leave some faceless twat to decide what was important. You made up your own mind, and resources were then allocated not on the basis of argued priorities but by gentle vibrations sent out across a web of owed favours, or if that failed, by a not so gentle rattling of cupboarded skeletons. Appleyard, for instance, wouldn't even register on a scale of official priorities. But there was a Chief Superintendent in the Met who'd never have made it past constable if Dalziel hadn't lied him out of a gross indecency charge after a rugby team booze-up a couple of decades before. And there was a Mid-Yorks DHSS chief whose wife had tried to carve her own exit out of the car park after Ladies Night at the Gents. He did not doubt he would be able to deliver the errant husband to Shirley Appleyard within the promised week.

As for Waterson, no need to call in favours here and even less to throw up road blocks and alert airports! Flushed out of his lair, short of cash, and with a deprived druggy in tow, how could a man with his track record avoid drawing attention to himself? A week was too long for him. Dalziel gave him three days, four at the most.

Eight days later both his certainties were beginning to feel slightly worn, and when Dan Trimble summoned him, he knew he was like a batsman walking out, unhelmeted and boxless, to face the West Indian attack.

It started with a head-high bouncer.