shouldn’t they?’ he asked aggressively.
He feels protective, thought Headingley. Mustn’t say anything against his precious whizz-kid, must we?
Absurdly, he realized he felt jealous.
Downing his drink, he pushed himself out of the chair.
‘No reason,’ he said. ‘Must be off now, sir. Quiet or not, some of us will be back at work tonight.’
‘This is the first holiday I’ve taken in God knows how long,’ answered Dalziel. ‘I’ll be back in a fortnight today.’
There was a plaintive note in his voice which alarmed Headingley more than aggression.
‘Have you decided what you’re doing yet?’ he asked cautiously.
‘No.’ The grizzled head shook ponderously. ‘I’ll just drive around a bit. Look at the countryside if I can see it for this bloody rain.’
‘Oh.’
Headingley’s voice was studiously neutral, but Dalziel shot him a malicious glance.
‘Of course, if I get bored, I might just come back early. Take you all by surprise. Give you all your sticks of rock where you’re not looking for them.’
‘That would be nice,’ said Headingley. ‘Enjoy yourself, sir. See you the week after next.’
Dalziel slowly screwed the top back on his bottle after Headingley had gone. Next he rose, not unsteadily but with a slowness which in another man might easily have become unsteadiness. He had taken the precaution of booking in at Orburn’s main hotel, the Lady Hamilton, situated only a couple of hundred yards from the Three Bells. A short brisk walk was just what he needed now. It would blow, or in this weather wash, the stuffiness out of his mind, set him up nicely for a good solid meal. These buffets were all right but they didn’t give a man anything to get his teeth into, especially a man who had resolved to forget his diet while on holiday.
But at the hotel he met a set-back.
‘The restaurant does not open for another hour, sir,’ said the shiny under-manager who to Dalziel’s jaundiced eye looked as if he had been anointed with Mansion Polish. ‘It is, after all, barely five-thirty.’
‘Is that so?’ said Dalziel. He stepped close to the under-manager and bared his teeth in a humourless smile. ‘In that case, there’ll be time for me to take a good look round your kitchens, won’t there?’
Despite this inauspicious start the meal turned out to be almost as good as had been promised by the hotel publicity. And afterwards in the bar just to add a little spice to the evening there was a scene.
A tall blonde girl, who had caught Dalziel’s attention in the restaurant because she wore a deep plunging dress without showing the slightest evidence that she had breasts, punched one of her two male companions on the nose. It was no mere feminine slap, nor even a piece of robust horse-play, but a whole-hearted punch, starting from behind the girl’s right ear, ending with a squelchy thump on the point of the man’s nose. It was a good blow for such a skinny fighter and it drove the recipient backwards over his tall bar-stool, setting up an interesting chain reaction along the whole length of the bar.
Dalziel sitting at a table by the door grinned with delight. The girl, who looked nineteen or twenty at the most, now casually picked up her bag and walked away from the bar. Dalziel stood up and opened the door for her.
‘Well done, lass,’ he said, genially peering down her dress. ‘I really enjoyed that.’
‘Did you?’ she said. ‘Let me double the pleasure.’
Dalziel was on his feet and much more solidly built than her first antagonist. Nevertheless the blow drove him backwards on to his table, shattering his glass and spilling the ashtray to the floor.
‘Jesus!’ he said, gingerly feeling his nose and looking after the girl’s disappearing back.
He glowered round the room, defying anyone to be amused by his discomfiture, but most eyes were focused on the attempts to restore order at the bar. The floored young man was bleeding slightly but looked more puzzled than pained. He was in his early twenties, fair-haired, tall, athletically slim, a type Dalziel associated with the three-quarter lines of fashionable rugby teams composed mainly of young men called Bingo and Noddy. His companion was of an age, but shorter and stouter, in fact far too stout for someone so young.
He seemed to be the only person at the bar who had preserved his drink intact and he surveyed the others with a faintly complacent grin.
‘Charley,’ he said. ‘You really ought to buy all these people a drink.’
‘You buy them a drink,’ said Charley. ‘She’s your bloody sister.’
Someone came through the door behind Dalziel.
‘What seems to be the trouble?’ said a voice in his ear.
He turned and looked at a small middle-aged man wearing an old pin-stripe suit of such hideous cut that it could not even be said to have seen better days.
‘Trouble?’ said Dalziel.
‘I was in the restaurant. One of the waiters said something about a fracas.’
‘Did he?’ said Dalziel. ‘I saw nowt.’
He turned and left, pleased for once in his life to have been a sufferer of, rather than from, witness blindness. No one but a sadist or a newspaper reporter would have let a rumour of a fight drag him out of the Lady Hamilton’s dining-room and Dalziel had no wish to start his holiday as a comic paragraph in some local paper. Come to think of it, he had pretty little wish to start his holiday at all. It was supposed to do him good, to rid him of the irritability and fatigue which had begun to dominate his working life in the last few months. But it was the time away from work, the time he spent by himself, which he feared most, and all a holiday would do was give him more of that. But it had to be tried, he recognized that. Otherwise … well, there was no otherwise he cared to contemplate.
Tomorrow he would set off like a good tourist to explore the highways and byways of the Lincolnshire countryside. Peace and quiet away from the mainstream of traffic, and in a fortnight he could return to work revitalized. Perhaps.
Meanwhile, as he had done for many nights now, he set about postponing the moment of switching off his bedroom light until he was on the very brink of sleep. He poured himself a carefully measured dose of scotch and put it on the bedside table. Next, clad in pyjamas suitable in pattern and size for the fitting of three or four deckchairs, he climbed into bed, placed his reading spectacles gingerly on his still throbbing nose and picked up his book. It was Bulwer Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii, which he had stolen from the hotel where he spent his honeymoon and had been reading and re-reading off and on now for thirty years.
The countryside was brimming. The rain had continued all night and he had woken several times to hear its monotonous pizzicato on the tiny metal balcony which some ironical builder had positioned outside his unopenable window. It had taken several medicinal malts to get him a couple of hours of dreamless sleep and he had been packed and ready for breakfast by eight o’clock.
He collected his bill at reception just as the under-manager passed without speaking. Dalziel, however, was not a man for childish grudges and he addressed the other cheerfully.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Two things I don’t do. I don’t pay VAT on a service-charge and I don’t pay a service-charge on VAT. You get it sorted.’
It took a little time to get it sorted but he was still on his way shortly after nine-thirty.