Bones and Silence

'But . . .'

'No buts. Work stops now. If I hear those drills again, you're suspended. You'd better believe me.'

He strode away. Five minutes later he reappeared in the silent car park with Swain and his solicitor, a bat-faced man with a switched-on memo-cassette in his hand. Trimble was at his most man-of-the-world conciliatory, but Swain didn't look as if he needed his feathers smoothed.

'Please,' he said. 'Don't forget, I'm here because I've committed an offence and I know I shall have to answer for it. I can well understand Mr Dalziel's keenness to make sure there were no more unpleasant surprises in store. No, no need of a lift. I came in my own car. Fortunately I didn't leave it in here.'

He looked around the devastated car park and smiled in Dalziel's direction. Pascoe felt the fat man's tension. Please don't say anything actionable, he prayed, not with Trimble and this mechanized scion of Dodson and Fogg in earshot.

Trimble must have felt the danger too. He said sharply, 'Mr Dalziel, I'd like to see you in my office in ten minutes, please.'

'Sir!' barked Dalziel, then turned on his heel like a dismissed soldier and marched away. Pascoe smiled a conciliatory smile at Swain and followed. He caught up with his boss in the first garage, staring gloomily into the hole from which Tony Appleyard had been lifted.

'I had him, Peter,' he said. 'I had him by the short and curlies! What went wrong? Three bloody corpses, and still the bastard's walking away with a million quid in the bank and Desperate Dan dusting off his jacket like an Eyetie barber! What in the name of God went wrong?'

This appeal to the heavens touched Pascoe beyond mere rhetoric. This was Gotterdammerung, this was old Saturn in his branch-charmed forest acknowledging that the time of the Titans was past.

He said, 'Perhaps nothing went wrong, sir. Perhaps Swain's been telling the truth all along, in which case everything's gone right, hasn't it?'

It was, he acknowledged later, an attempt at comfort on a par with assuring Mrs Lincoln she'd have hated the rest of the show. Dalziel's face glowed like a nuclear pile and a hand like a mechanical shovel seized Pascoe's arm. Perhaps foolishly, he opted for rational argument rather than kneeing the fat man in the crotch. Urgently he said, 'Swain's cooperated all down the line, you've got to admit that. All right, he changed his statement a bit, but Waterson's backed him up. And he volunteered all that info about Appleyard's death, and he brought us straight to the spot...’

The nuclear glow faded and the grip on his arm relaxed enough for his arteries to resume a limited service.

'Aye, he did too. And he even drew us a diagram, didn't he? Whose chalk did he use, Peter?'

'Sorry?'

'The chalk he marked the spot with! Were you the clever little boy scout who came all prepared?'

'No, sir. All I recall is Swain drawing the outline and saying we should drill here.'

'And he was spot on, wasn't he? And if it weren't your chalk, and it weren't my chalk, then it must've been his chalk, mustn't it?'

'I suppose so. Perhaps builders carry chalk around with them,' suggested Pascoe, uncertain why Dalziel was labouring the point. 'Tool of the trade.'

'Mebbe. In his overalls. In his working gear. But Swain had got changed since we saw him at the hospital. He was in one of them fancy blazers with the bullet-proof badges. Not the kind of thing a man of taste wants a cloud of chalk dust billowing out of every time he blows his nose!'

'Sir, I don't see that it matters. Main thing is that he did show us exactly where Appleyard was buried. Think of the mess we could have made of Mr Trimble's car park if Swain had been vague!'

It was less provocative than his earlier attempt at comfort but not much more effective.

'Mebbe I should write a thank-you note,' growled Dalziel.

Pascoe was saved from having to answer by the appearance of Sergeant Broomfield in the doorway.

'Mr Swain gone, has he?' he asked.

'If you hurry, you might still catch the Chief kissing his arse across the road in the public car park,' said Dalziel.

Broomfield turned away, but Dalziel called him back.

'What's up? Why do you want him?' he demanded.

'Nowt really. He left his pen, that's all. Looks a bit pricey and I didn't want him thinking it'd got lifted while he were here.'

'Careless bugger. Hold on, George, don't rush off. Peter, you're a clever sod, what's it the head bangers say about leaving things?'

'What? Oh, you mean that you don't leave things by accident really, but because you want to come back to the place you leave them? Of course, that's only a simplified version of -'

'It'll do for a simplified copper,' said Dalziel.

'Now why should Swain want an excuse to come back here?'

'I don't think that anyone says that every act of forgetfulness fulfils some subconscious purpose -'

'Who's talking subconscious?' snarled Dalziel. 'That bastard'd be wide awake sleepwalking. An excuse to come back tonight. Why? Only one thing. To make certain we'd not started drilling again! George, those drillers, are they still here?'