He felt he might be going to need them.
Gentry went to the door, opened it, then turned back.
“I nearly forgot. You’ll recall there was a partial, not the deceased’s, on the study key. Not really significant forensically speaking as there aren’t enough points of comparison to put before a court. But, for what it’s worth, it also seems to match a print we found on your sheet of paper, Peter. Thank you for the drink, Andy. Now I really must dash to my appointment.”
“Aye, bugger off to Samarra,” snarled Dalziel after him. “Well, Pete, you who don’t have secrets, are you going to tell me what the hell all that was about?”
“It sounded to me as if Gentry was suggesting the possibility that someone went to considerable trouble to fix things to create the illusion that Maciver locked himself in the study then shot himself,” said Pascoe.
“Aye, that much I got. What I’m talking about is these prints.”
“Ah. Those. Yes, they seem to suggest that whoever it was that set up this rather Heath Robinson apparatus to make it appear like suicide inadvertently left a partial on the key. Then, as they knelt outside to light the thread running to the gramophone after they’d heard the lock click shut, they leaned against the door with the palm of their hand.”
“I know that, I’ve worked all that out too. How to see the fucking obvious is the first lesson they learn you at superintendents” school. It’s the name I want, the fucking name.”
Pascoe said, “I think you’ve probably worked that out too, sir. We’ll need to take her prints properly to get absolute confirmation, but this, plus what Novello found out from the Avenue girls, makes it pretty clear Kay Kafka was in Moscow House at or about the time Maciver died.”
Dalziel nodded.
“Then we’d best talk to her,” he said.
“We?” said Pascoe.
“It’s your case, Pete. But it’s been my call. If I’ve got it wrong, do you not think I’m entitled to be around to see for myself?”
Pascoe nodded.
“That sounds fair. Do you want to do it now?”
The Fat Man looked at his watch.
“No. Cap’s due back tonight, if she’s not been arrested, that is. She’s been away on one of her demo’s. Don’t ask me what, sometimes she tells me, sometimes she doesn’t, and it’s the times she doesn’t that worry me most.”
“I know the feeling,” said Pascoe. “When then, sir?”
“First thing tomorrow. And it’ll give us time to think a bit. There’s a lot going off here we need to think about, Peter. That OK by you?”
Pascoe hesitated. His instinct was to head straight out to Cothersley. On the other hand, it was Friday night and he and Ellie were due at a school concert where Rosie would be playing the clarinet in public for the first time. It was his private opinion that his daughter’s playing should be an experience reserved for consenting adults in a large empty desert, but while admitting he understood little about the complexities of the female mind, he understood enough not to even hint a hint of this.
Mistaking the cause of the hesitation, Dalziel said, “She’s not going anywhere, lad, not with them new babbies gurgling away in the maternity ward. And if you’re worried I’m going to be ringing her, forget it. I’ll be too busy discussing American foreign policy or summat with Cap.”
“That what you call it these days?” said Pascoe, smiling. “I assume this means that my twenty-four-hour deadline has been expunged?”
“Aye. Wiped out like someone’s peed on it from a great height,” said Dalziel. “Like I’m beginning to feel someone has.”
“Till tomorrow then,” said Pascoe. “See you here at nine?”
“Suits me,” said Dalziel with an affectation of indifference that didn’t quite come off.
Pascoe went in search of Wield and found him at his desk behind a mountain of paper.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“Edwin’s book-dealing chums have their big thrash tonight. Thought I’d take the chance to get the department records in sight of the millennium.”
“Not invited then?”
“In-house only. You’ve got to be two hundred years old and leather bound. Something you want, Pete?”
“Maybe. But it could turn out even more boring than paperwork and probably less productive.”
“Try me,” said Wield, pushing his paper mountain aside.
22 WALKING ON WATER
As the last drinkers began to drift away from the Dog and Duck, St Cuthbert’s clock struck eleven.
It was a rather splendid chime, fit for a cathedral or a town hall, the old Cothersleyans used to boast. A man a mile or more away, tending a sick beast in the dead of night or ploughing a heavy field in heavy mist, need never be uncertain of the right time with Cothersley clock to set him true. But one man’s boast is another man’s burden and a couple of years earlier after petition from light-sleeping incomers, outvoting the native opposition by five to one, the quarters had been silenced between the hours of ten in the evening and seven in the morning. The objectors would have been glad to silence the hours too, but David Upshott (it was the first big test of his ministry) had offered this compromise, saying that anyone who could not get to sleep within an hour ought to consult his doctor or his conscience.
Dolly Upshott, rather to the surprise of the pub regulars who weren’t used to seeing her so late and alone, had come in at ten, ordered a large vodka and tonic and sat in a corner, nursing her drink and her mobile phone. She had replied politely but shortly to attempts at conversation and shown no desire to have company at her table. So the regulars had returned their attention to the less edifying but more entertaining sight of Sue-Lynn Maciver, who was more than happy to share the sorrows of her new widowhood with anyone who cared to buy her a drink.
Dolly was the last to leave the pub.
“You all right, Miss Upshott?” enquired the Captain, who was in a benevolent mood brought on by the realization that, far from being a turn-off, the presence of the grieving widow had actually bumped his takings right up.
“Yes, thank you. Fine,” said Dolly, looking across the green to where the bulk of the church stood black against a gloriously star-spattered sky.
The church getting in the way of the heavens. It was a conceit that pleased her.
But the stars were out of her reach and in times of trouble we turn to whatever comfort is most readily to hand.
When the pub door was closed behind her, she walked over the green and up the path towards the church.
Moscow House too loomed dark against the sky as Kay Kafka walked up the drive. She recalled taking the same walk two nights before. She hadn’t been frightened then and she wasn’t frightened now. She had surfeited on fear all those years ago when she’d gone running to the creche with Emily’s poem beating through her mind and by the time she stood two days later looking down at the still form of her daughter, so incredibly small it seemed impossible that life had ever informed those tiny limbs, those of her neural circuits that recorded fear had been burnt out.
Only on very few occasions since then had they shown any flicker of life. Once when after her first husband’s death it had seemed possible they might find a way to take Helen away from her. A second time when Helen had shyly but at the same time so hopefully confided in her that she was desperately in love with Jason Dunn. And yet again, here at Moscow House when Helen went into labour.
But such conventional terrors as might be expected to accompany a solitary visit to a house which held the memories this one did had no power over her.
