Dalziel awoke to sunlight and birdsong, both of which filtered softly through grey net curtains. It was almost a month since, following his usual habit on bad mornings of hauling himself upright with the help of the hideous folk-weave drapes which were a sort of memorial to his long-fled wife, he had pulled the curtain rail right off the wall. Time had not yet effected any great healing, and now only the flimsy net and an erratic window-cleaner maintained the decencies. There was no way, however, that the net could maintain his weight, so now, belching and breaking wind, he pursued his alternative levée strategy of rolling sideways till he hit the floor, then using the bed for vertical leverage.
Upright, he had the misfortune to glimpse himself in a long wall mirror. Clad in a string vest and purple and green checked socks, it was an image to engage the unwary eye like a basilisk. He approached closer and addressed himself.
‘Some talk of Alexander,’ he said softly, ‘and some of Hercules.’
Slowly he peeled off the vest. The string had printed a pattern of pink diamonds over his torso, from broad shoulders down to broader belly. He scratched the pattern gently as a musician might run his fingers over harp strings. His head felt heavy, his tongue felt furry, his legs…it occurred to him that he couldn’t feel his legs at all.
He nodded his huge head, like a bear who sees the dogs circling and, though chained to a post, yet believes that the sport may still be his. His strength he did not doubt. Nothing was wrong with him physically that a scalding shower and an even scaldinger pot of tea had not a thousand times already set to rights. But his mind was troubled by something like the sound of a bicycle wheel whistling round in the rain.
The shower and the tea had to be negotiated with care, but they allayed the basic physical symptoms sufficiently for him to risk a small Scotch to calm the mind. And now, he told himself with the assurance of one who believed in a practical, positive and usually physical response to most of life’s problems, all he needed to complete this repair of normality was a platterful of egg, sausage, bacon, tomatoes and fried bread. Bitter experience had taught him in the years since his wife’s departure to eschew home catering. It wasn’t that a basic cuisine was beyond his grasp; it was the cleaning up afterwards that defeated him. And while a man could live with a broken curtain rail, only a beast would tolerate fat-congealed frying-pans. Fortunately the police canteen did an excellent breakfast. Gourmet cooking they might not provide, but what did that matter to a man who – for Pascoe’s benefit anyway – affected to believe that cordon bleu was a French road-block? And a slight blackening round the edge of a fry-up was to a resurrected copper what the crust on old port was to a wine connoisseur – a sign of readiness.
His ponderous jowls shaved to danger point, his few sad last grey hairs brushed to a high gloss, his heavy frame clad in an angel-white shirt and an undertaker-black suit, with knife-edge creases breaking on mirror-bright shoes, he set off at a stately though deceptively rapid pace towards the city centre.
He was, of course, carless. His reason for being carless he continued to keep carefully out of his mind. Nor did he in any way appear to register the momentary lull in noise as he entered the canteen. To Edna, the weary siren behind the counter, he said, ‘Full house, love.’
Under his approving gaze, she filled his personal willow-patterned plate till the pattern disappeared. Seizing a bottle of tomato sauce from the counter, he made for an empty table, sat down and began to eat.
It was here that George Headingley found him. He sat down on the opposite side of the table, himself a large man, but dwarfed by Dalziel, an effect intensified by something in his demeanour of the schoolboy waiting to be noticed before the headmaster’s desk.
‘Sir,’ he said.
‘’Morning, George,’ said Dalziel. ‘This murder in Welfare Lane – Deeks, is it? – how’re we doing?’
‘Well, Pascoe’s handling that, sir,’ said Headingley, slightly taken aback. Of course, Dalziel had been in the station for an hour or so last night, but he hadn’t given the impression he was taking anything in.
‘So you said. What made you dig him out? Weren’t it his lassie’s birthday yesterday?’
Headingley decided that straightforward was the best route.
‘The DCC’s just come in, sir. He’d like a word if you don’t mind.’
‘Is that what he said? If I don’t mind?’ said Dalziel disbelievingly.
‘Well, not exactly,’ admitted Headingley.
‘Oh aye. Well, you go and tell him, George; you tell him…’
Dalziel paused, attempted to spear a rasher of bacon, was defeated by its adamantine crispness and had to scoop it up and crunch it whole: ‘You tell him I’ll be along right away.’
Three minutes later, his plate clean and his mouth scoured with another cup of red-hot tea, he made his way upstairs.
The Deputy Chief Constable was not a man he liked. It was Dalziel’s not inaudibly expressed view that he couldn’t solve a kiddies’ crossword puzzle and had only been promoted out of Traffic because he couldn’t master the difference between left and right. More heinously, he rarely dispensed drink and when he did it tended to be dry sherry in glasses so narrow that it was like reading a thermometer looking for the bloody stuff, which in any case Dalziel regarded as Spanish goat-piss.
‘Andy!’ said the DCC heartily. ‘Come you in. Sit you down. Look, I’m sorry, thing is this, we have got ourselves a bit of a problem.’
This recently developed speech style, modelled on that of a Tory cabinet minister being interviewed on telly, was taken by many as confirmation of rumours of the DCC’s political ambition. A desirable stepping-stone to becoming first a personality, then a candidate, was the acquisition of the office of Chief Constable when the present incumbent, Tommy Winter, retired in nine months’ time. Winter, who had never shown a great deal of enthusiasm for his right-hand man, had none the less given him a late opportunity to shine by suddenly deciding to take a large accumulation of back-leave visiting his daughter in the Bahamas. The DCC had decided the old boy was at last getting demob-happy, but now, regarding the menacing bulk of his head of CID, he began to wonder uneasily if Winter could have had some presentiment of this potentially scandalous development.
‘You’ve got a problem, you say?’ said Dalziel, leaning forward. ‘How can CID help? Something personal, is it? Someone putting the black on, eh? Photos, mebbe? You can rely on me, sir.’
The man was bloody impossible, thought the DCC wearily. Impossible. It was a small consolation that no television interviewer in the world could even approach his awfulness!
Like Headingley before him, he decided to ignore dangerous side-roads and press straight on.
‘You were involved in a car accident last night,’ he said.
‘I was in a car that was involved in an accident, that’s right,’ said Dalziel.
‘It was your car,’ said the DCC flatly. ‘So you were involved whether you were driving or not.’
‘Whether?’ said Dalziel wonderingly. ‘There’s no whether about it! I wasn’t, and that’s that!’
‘I’ve had the editor of the Post on to me,’ pursued the DCC. ‘One of his reporters has unearthed a witness who says she saw you getting into the driver’s seat of your car outside the Paradise Hall Restaurant and driving away.’
‘She?’
‘She. A lady of unimpeachable character and, as far as I know, excellent eyesight.’
‘She saw me driving away from Paradise Hall?’
‘So she alleges.’
Dalziel scratched his armpit thoughtfully.
‘Had she been drinking, mebbe?’ he said finally.
‘Not so that anyone noticed,’ said the DCC acidly. ‘Though you apparently had.’