the decisions he’d made as a gay man, of all the small steps he’d taken towards his present state of ‘outness’, none – not even his acceptance of Digweed’s suggestion that they set up house together – seemed more significant than his rescue of Monte.
It had been theft, no matter how you looked at it. It had put his career on the line. Would he have done it before he took up with Edwin? He doubted it. It was as if his own pool of contentment had filled to such an unanticipated level there was a constant overspill which could no more let him ignore the monkey’s plight last November than his sense of duty could have permitted him to steal it a year earlier.
Edwin, who, as he listened to his partner’s untypically hesitant self-analysis, had been preparing huevos a la flamenca, remarked acidly, ‘Do let me know when you go soft on unborn chickens.’ Thereafter, however, whenever Monte came searching for the absent Wield, he was greeted with great kindness and given a lift back to Old Hall.
Dalziel did not know, at least not officially, about Monte. ‘Keep it that way,’ advised Pascoe, who’d got the full story, ’else some day when you think you’re out of reach, he’ll use the beast to track you down.’
The previous day, the Fat Man had had to rely on the telephone. When Wield and Digweed got back from their book-buying foray into the Borders, the former had found what the latter called an HMV message on the answering machine. After a terse outline of the situation, Wield had been invited with satirical courtesy to put in an appearance at the incident room in Danby first thing the following morning, weather and social calendar permitting.
It was not a prospect that pleased. Wield, too, remembered Dendale. Like the Fat Man said, it wasn’t your collars kept you awake, it was the ones that got away, and Dendale rated high on that insomniac list. OK, Danby was different, thriving, pushing up from village to township, nowhere near as enclosed, and certainly not doomed the way Dendale had been. But it was just a couple of miles west, just a short walk over the Corpse Road …
‘But a man’s gotta do … something,’ said Wield. ‘Don’t crap on too many kids, kid. See you.’
He threw the monkey up into the lower branches of the oak and walked away.
Half an hour later, as he freewheeled his old Thunderbird down the track from Corpse Cottage in order not to disturb Edwin, he was still thinking how pleasant it would be to be still lying abed on such a morning as this. But Danby called. And Dalziel.
He switched on the ignition and kicked the starter and, as the engine roared into life, he cried to a surprised cat on the hunt for early birds, ‘Hi-yo Silver. Away!’
In the Pascoe household, too, there was reluctance at all levels.
Pascoe himself, after rising early and settling down to read the Dendale file, had fallen asleep in his chair, and wasn’t aroused till Ellie started the morning bustle of getting Rosie ready for school.
His first instinct as he bestirred himself ere well awake was to rush off unshaven and unfed, but Ellie’s cooler counsel had brought him to his senses and when he rang St Michael’s Hall at Danby and was assured by the duty officer that the only thing disturbing the peace was the approaching roar of Sergeant Wield’s motorbike, he had relaxed in the certainty that on the ground organization was in the best possible hands.
So he had sat down to the relatively rare pleasure of taking breakfast with his daughter.
It did not seem to be a pleasure shared. Rosie blinked her eyes irritably against the sun streaming in through the kitchen window and announced, ‘I’m feeling badly.’
Her parents exchanged glances. Peter, left in sole charge some weeks earlier, had been targeted by his daughter at breakfast with little sighs and sobs as she bravely forced her branflakes down, till, always a soft target, he had caved in and said, ‘Are you feeling badly or something?’
‘Yes,’ she’d replied. ‘I’m feeling very badly.’
‘Then perhaps you’d better not go to school,’ he’d replied, secretly glad of an excuse to keep her at home all day with him.
In the event, by halfway through the morning she’d recollected that her class was going out on a bird-spotting expedition that afternoon, so made a rapid recovery and nobly insisted it would be wrong of her to remain at home under false pretences.
But the phrase, ‘I’m feeling badly,’ was thereafter used as a formula to unlock her father’s heart when necessary.
Ellie Pascoe, however, was made of sterner stuff.
‘I told you to keep your sunhat on yesterday,’ she said indifferently.
‘I did,’ retorted Rosie. ‘All the time.’
‘Of course you did,’ said Pascoe. ‘Even when you were swimming underwater.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she snapped. ‘It would float away. Do I have to go to school?’
‘Oh, I think so,’ he said. ‘I think I saw Nina waiting at the gate for you just now.’
‘No, you didn’t. I told you. She got taken again. By the nix. I saw her get taken.’
Pascoe looked at Ellie, who made an I-forgot-to-mention-it face.
‘Perhaps her dad’s rescued her again,’ he said.
‘Not yet he won’t have. It was only yesterday. You’ll be sorry if I get taken too.’
Not so much a conversation-stopper as a heart-stopper.
‘Well, try to hang around as long as you can,’ he said lightly. ‘It’s the same for me too, you know. I’d rather stay at home.’
‘Not the same,’ she said sullenly. ‘You haven’t got a stiff neck.’
‘And you have? Like the people of Israel,’ he laughed. ‘We should have called you Rose of Sharon.’
Being a curious child, she usually insisted on explanations of jokes she didn’t understand, but this morning all she did was repeat with great irritation, ‘Don’t be silly.’
‘I’ll try not to,’ said Pascoe, rising. ‘See you tonight.’
Her skin was warm to his kiss.
At the front door he said, ‘She does look a bit flushed.’
‘You would too if you’d been running around in the sun all day,’ said Ellie.
‘I was,’ he said. ‘And no doubt will be again.’
‘Well, keep your sunhat on,’ said Ellie, determinedly cheerful. She had listened to his weary account of the day’s frustrations when he got home the previous night, held him close for a while, then poured him a large whisky and talked brightly about Rosie’s trip to the seaside. At first he thought her motive was purely distraction, but after a while he became aware that it was her own mind she was distracting too, from her unbearable empathy with Elsie Dacre. So he had switched on the TV allegedly in search of the news and instead had got a late-night discussion on the growing problem of juvenile runaways. A psychiatrist called Paula Appleby whose strong opinions, linguistic fluency and photogenic features had got her elected ‘the thinking man’s thinking woman’ was saying, ‘When a child disappears, rather than simply looking for the child, we should be looking at first the parents, who are often the cause, then the police, who are more likely to be part of the problem than its solution.’
‘Time for bed,’ Pascoe had said, switching off.
Now he looked up at the perfectly laid blue wash of the sky and guessed that hours earlier the Dacres’ dark-rimmed, sleepless eyes had watched it pale from black to grey and then to pink and gold, and sought in the returning light and the rising birdsong some hint of that freshness and hope that had always been there before, but was now nowhere to be found.
And then his mind’s eye ran up the Corpse Road and over the sun-rimmed Neb and looked down