Читать книгу The Death of Dalziel: A Dalziel and Pascoe Novel - Reginald Hill - Страница 10

Ellie Pascoe was asleep in the garden hammock so reluctantly vacated by her husband when the explosion occurred.

The Pascoe house in the northern suburbs was too far from Mill Street for anything but the faintest rumour of the bang to reach there. What woke Ellie was a prolonged volley of barking from her daughter’s mongrel terrier.

‘What’s up with Tig?’ Ellie asked yawning.

‘Don’t know,’ said Rosie. ‘We were playing ball and he just started.’

A sudden suspicion made Ellie examine the tall apple tree in next-door’s garden. Puberty was working its rough changes on her neighbour’s son and a couple of times recently when the summer heat had lured her outside in her bikini, she’d spotted him staring down at her out of the foliage. But there was no sign, and in any case Tig’s nose pointed south towards the centre of town. As she followed his fixed gaze she saw a long way away a faint smudge of smoke soiling the perfect blue of the summer sky.

Who would light a fire on a day like this?

Tig was still barking.

‘Can’t you make him shut up?’ snapped Ellie.

Her daughter looked at her in surprise, then took a biscuit off a plate and threw it across the lawn. Tig gave a farewell yap, then went in search of his reward with the complacent mien of one who has done his duty.

Ellie felt guilty at snapping. Her irritation wasn’t with the dog, there was some other cause less definable.

She rolled out of the hammock and said, ‘I’m too hot. Think I’ll cool down in the shower. You OK by yourself?’

Rosie gave her a look which said without words that she hadn’t been much company anyway, so what was going to be different?

Ellie went inside, turned on the shower and stepped under it.

The cool water washed away her sweat but did nothing for her sense of unease.

Still nothing definable. Or nothing that she wanted to define. Pointless thinking about it. Pointless because, if she did think about it, she might come up with the silly conclusion that the real reason she was taking this shower was that she didn’t want to be wearing her bikini if bad news came…

Andy Dalziel’s partner, Amanda Marvell, known to her friends as Cap, was even further away when Mill Street blew up.

With her man on duty, she had followed the crowds on the traditional migration to the coast, not, however, to join the mass bake-in on a crowded beach but to visit the sick.

The sick in this instance took the form of her old headmistress, Dame Kitty Bagnold who for nearly forty years had ruled the famous St Dorothy’s Academy for Catholic Girls near Bakewell in Derbyshire. Cap Marvell had ultimately made life choices which ran counter to everything St Dot’s stood for. In particular, she had abandoned her religion, divorced her husband, and got herself involved in various animal rights groups whose activities teetered on the edge of legality.

Yet throughout all this, she and Dame Kitty had remained in touch and eventually, rather to their surprise, realized they were friends. Not that the friendship made Cap feel able to address her old head by her St Dot’s sobriquet of Kitbag, and Dame Kitty would rather have blasphemed than call her ex-pupil anything but Amanda.

A long and very active retirement had ground Dame Kitty down till ill health had finally obliged her to admit the inevitable, and two years earlier she had moved into a private nursing home that was part of the Avalon Clinic complex at Sandy-town on the Yorkshire coast.

At her best, Dame Kitty was as bright and sharp as ever, but she tired easily and usually Cap was alert for the first signs of fatigue so that she could start ending her visit without making her friend’s condition the cause.

This time it was the older woman who said, ‘Is everything all right, Amanda?’

‘What?’

‘You seemed to drift off. Perhaps you should sit in this absurd wheelchair while I go inside and order some more tea.’

‘No, no, I’m fine. Sorry. What were we saying…?’

‘We were discussing the merits of the govern-ment’s somewhat inchoate education policy, an argument I hoped your sudden silence indicated I had won. But I fear my victory owes more to your distraction than my reasoning. Are you sure all is well with you? No problems with this police officer of yours, whom I hope one day to meet?’

‘No, things are fine there, really…’

Suddenly Cap Marvell took her mobile out.

‘Sorry, do you mind?’

She was speed-dialling before Kitty could answer.

The phone rang twice then there was an invitation to leave a message.

She opened her mouth to speak, closed it, disconnected, and stood up.

‘I’m sorry, Kitty, I’ve got to go. Before the mobs start moving off the beaches…’

This effort to offer a rational explanation produced the same sad sigh and slight upward roll of the eyes brought by feeble excuses for bad behaviour in their St Dot days.

‘OK, that’s not it. Sorry, I don’t know why,’ said Cap. ‘But I’ve really got to go.’

‘Then go, my dear. And God go with you.’

Normally this traditional valediction would have won from Cap her equivalent of the old headmistress’s long-suffering expression, but today she just nodded, stooped to kiss her friend’s cheek, then hurried away across the lawn towards the car park.

Dame Kitty watched her out of sight. There was trouble there. Despite the bright sun and the cloudless sky, she felt it in the air.

She stood up out of the wheelchair which the staff insisted she should use on her excursions into the gardens, gave it a whack with her stick, and began to make her slow way back to the house.