Uzbekistan. No idea where it is. Been there once, I think, some fact-finding tour-they do like a jaunt, these ministers-didn’t take much notice, but there’s a chap in my office always going on about it. In the end I had to listen or send him to Easter Island, and you know, it rather sounds our sort of place. What do you think, Tony? Uzbekistan. Got a real Harry Potter ring to it, hasn’t it?”
He smiled like a benevolent uncle at a favourite nephew’s birthday party and refilled Kafka’s glass.
I mustn’t let him do this to me, thought Kafka. He’s trying to get me thinking he’s Bertie Wooster and I can run rings round him! Remember, over the past fifteen years, this asshole has made A-P huge profits and almost certainly made himself a millionaire into the bargain.
But what made the fat bastard tick? Could it actually be some form of patriotism? There were guys back home who did stuff ten times more outrageous and still claimed they were flying the flag.
More importantly perhaps, what was Gedye doing here with his undertaker’s eyes?
“Uzbekistan,” he said cautiously. “Sounds interesting for the future. But right now it seems to me we need to look at our Gulf shipments. There’s one due out of the plant this weekend and I’ve been wondering whether maybe we should put it on hold.”
“Now why on earth should we do that?” asked Warlove, apparently amazed.
“Because sooner or later there’s going to be another goddamn war out there,” said Kafka. “And it’s not going to look good if the place is littered with Ash-Mac gear.”
“Hardly likely. Lessons have been learnt, old boy. They could follow the paper chase we lay nowadays twice round the globe without coming close to Ash-Mac’s.”
“That’s not my point. It’s whether we should be doing this at all with a war on the cards. In a lot of people’s eyes, it’s a war that’s started already.”
“My dear chap, don’t get so upset. You take these things far too seriously. What was it Aristotle said? War is just a marketing campaign pursued by other means.”
“Aristotle said that?”
“Onassis,” laughed Warlove. “Let’s have a toast!”
He raised his glass so that the blood-red wine caught a dim ray of sunshine which had somehow sneaked in through the high dusty casement.
“The toast is war,” he declared. “Gentlemen, I give you war!”
As they drove away from Moscow House, Pascoe and Novello exchanged notes.
“The aunt is a few twigs short of a tree, but she’s not a nut,” said Novello.
“Nutty enough to go hunting green woodpeckers in the garden of the house where her nephew has just topped himself,” said Pascoe.
“Yeah, that was a bit tedious,” said Novello with the distaste of an unreconstructed townie for rural pursuits that didn’t involve taking your clothes off. “Would have suited Hat Bowler down to the ground. Any word when he’ll be giving us the benefit of his expertise again, by the way?”
“When he’s ready,” said Pascoe shortly, detecting a certain lack of sympathy for her absent colleague. “But given that your ornithological small-talk is indeed small, what did you find to chat about?”
Novello noted the shortness and was tempted to be short in reply. Doing extra work because a colleague was injured in the course of duty was one thing. She’d been there herself. But finding your recreational time eaten into because same colleague’s girlfriend had died in a motor accident two months ago was a pain. Whoever started these New Men getting in touch with their feelings had a lot to answer for. The only feelings she wanted her men to get in touch with were…
She shoved the thought to the back of her mind for later delectation and said, “Well, that’s what I was going to say. OK, we crawled through the undergrowth, looking for birdshit and such, but in between all the twitter, I got the feeling I was getting a good quizzing. Like they felt having little junior me away from big important you was a good chance to find out what was really going on.”
“They?” said Pascoe.
“Yes. If anything, the old geezer was worse. She asked questions direct. He was much more oblique. Wouldn’t surprise me if he’d done a bit of this before.”
“He was a VAT investigator,” said Pascoe. “Did he go for a pee at any time?”
She hid her surprise and said, “No. I think I’d have noticed.”
Pascoe drove in silence for a while. He’d been pleased to get Cressida separated from the others, but it had never occurred to him that they too might be pleased to get Novello to themselves. He recalled an early warning the Fat Man had given him. “I can see you’re a clever bugger, lad. But are you clever enough to see there’s other buggers cleverer? Present company not excepted.”
He said, “So what did they want to know?”
“The bird lady just wanted details. How exactly had her nephew died? Just how similar was it to her brother’s death? The old boy seemed more interested in checking if we thought there was anything dodgy about the business.”
“To which you were suitably noncommittal, I trust.”
“Couldn’t tell him what I don’t know, sir,” she said spiritedly. “But he struck me as bright enough to wonder without encouragement why a DCI and DC are sniffing around the locus in quo.”
Give him his poncy Latin back.
“Could be,” said Pascoe. “Check him out, but don’t waste time on it.”
“What about the sister-Cressida, is it? Anything there, sir?”
“A trip down memory lane. Thinks her brother was some sort of closet saint. Confirms most of what he said on tape after their father’s death. If there were a tape, of course.”
“Seems like every time there’s a death in Moscow House, someone points a finger at the stepmother.”
“Yes. Though I suppose to make the copycat exact, it ought to be Sue-Lynn Maciver the finger’s pointed at this time.”
“We going to see her too, sir?”
He noted the we. Despite herself Novello was getting interested.
“Oh yes. When she rises from her bed of grief. And little sister when she gets over giving birth. More visits to look forward to than a Jane Austen heroine newly arrived in Bath! But our first call is on Jason Dunn who got stood up.”
Novello yawned, a Pavlovian reaction to mention of Austen, who’d been a favourite of her convent-school teachers, the lack of Roman doctrine being more than compensated by the equal lack of sex, violence, bodily functions and male interiorization. To the young Novello, all these dull women seemed to do was visit other dull women and have dull conversations with them. By contrast, discovering the Brontes had been like a pubescent lad chancing on his father’s copy of Playboy. OK, the books were a bit long-winded in places, but if you persevered, you soon realized that, even though hairy chests were never actually mentioned, Heathcliff and Rochester certainly had them, while it was hard to believe Mr Darcy had any body hair at all.
Her flagging interest in the case was hugely revitalized when they arrived at the Dunn’s house and she saw the hunk who opened the door. This was serious sex on the hoof, about six feet four of it, gorgeous to look at with the kind of body that tapers down from broad shoulders to a dinky waist then broadens out just enough to give promise of a deliciously compact ass. Though her own preferences generally ran more to the solid weight-lifting type, she didn’t mind making an exception in the event a Greek discus thrower came along, especially unshaven and looking like he’d slept in the clothes he wore.
His eyes ran over her as she guessed they did over any new woman. Nor, she assessed, was he put off by her bromidic clothing. To see the choc bar not the wrapping was one of her own talents. But what conclusion he came to wasn’t on offer today. His main focus of interest was the DCI.
“Mr Dunn!” said Pascoe. “DCI Pascoe. We met at Moscow House. Hello again. And many congratulations.”
“Thank you,” said Dunn, returning his smile.
“I wonder if I can have a quick word.”
The smile faded.
