Читать книгу An April Shroud - Reginald Hill - Страница 9

The general atmosphere of resigned annoyance told Dalziel he was in the middle of a routine upset rather than a major disaster. Nigel, it seemed, had left home to seek his fortune on several previous occasions. Looking at the flaking paint and faded wallpaper around him, Dalziel felt that perhaps the boy had a point. It would take a fool or a clairvoyant to seek a fortune here.

The current weather, however, added a new dimension of concern to this latest escape, for his mother at least. His brother and sister seemed completely unworried, though the Uniffs whether out of sympathy or politeness were much more helpful.

‘He can’t have gotten far,’ said Hank. ‘Poor kid. He’ll soon have his bellyful of this rain.’

It was not the most diplomatic use of the idiom. Quickly Mavis stepped in.

‘Hank, take a look outside. He might be sheltering quite close. If not, we’ll take a run down the road in the car.’

Hank left, and Mrs Fielding sat down at the table. She appeared quite composed now.

‘Lou, darling,’ she said. ‘How’s the soup? Nigel will be freezing when he gets back.’

‘There’s oodles left,’ said Bertie. ‘We’re hardly down below yesterday’s tide mark.’

‘I like it best when we reach that ox-tail we had at New Year,’ said Louisa. ‘That was my favourite.’

Indifferent to this family humour, Dalziel picked up the note which Mrs Fielding had dropped on the table.

I am leaving home because (1) my plans for the future don’t coincide with yours (2) I have no desire to live off money coined by my father’s death and (3) there are some people I don’t care to have near me. Nigel. PS. I don’t mean you. I’ll write when I’m settled.

He turned it over. It was addressed to the boy’s mother.

Hank returned.

‘Any sign?’ asked Mavis.

‘No. But the rowing-boat’s gone.’

‘He always threatened to run away to sea,’ said Louisa.

‘Lou, shut up, will you?’ said Mrs Fielding. ‘Oh damn. I wish he hadn’t taken the boat. I don’t like the thought of him on the water.’

‘Shall I go after him in the punt?’ volunteered Tillotson, a suggestion which drew derisive groans from everyone except Mrs Fielding and Mavis. And Dalziel too, though he groaned internally.

‘Thank you, Charles, but no,’ said Mrs Fielding. ‘Hank, did you see Pappy out there?’

‘Not a sign,’ said Uniff.

‘See if you can find him and tell him Nigel’s loose again. Then perhaps you’ll join us in the study. It’s time to talk.’

Uniff left and the other young people drifted out after him. When Mrs Fielding spoke, Dalziel noted approvingly, the others jumped. He liked a strong leader.

‘I’m sorry to leave you alone, Mr Dalziel,’ she said. ‘But we have to have a business conference. Make yourself at home.’

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep the soup hot for Nigel.’

‘That boy. You must think us very odd.’

Dalziel did not deny it.

‘He sounds a sensible lad,’ he said, indicating the note.

‘You think that’s sensible?’ she asked, surprised.

‘Well, it’s neatly laid out. One, two, three. I like that,’ he said with the authority of one whose own official reports were infamous for their brevity. I came, I saw, I arrested was the Dalziel ideal according to Pascoe.

‘It’s possible to be methodical and still find trouble,’ she answered. ‘There’s probably a cold joint in the pantry if you’re hungry. We usually eat on our feet during the day and sit down for a meal about six-thirty.’

She left and Dalziel glanced at his watch. It was one o’clock. Five hours.

He went into the kitchen in search of food. There was a small deep freeze into which he peered hopefully. It contained very little and nothing of particular appeal. He shuffled the contents around in the hope of coming across one of his favourite frozen dinners-for-two, but there was no sign of such delights. One foil-wrapped package caught his eye. The remnants of a cold joint perhaps. He unwrapped it.

‘Well bugger me!’ said Dalziel.

Inside the foil, sealed in a transparent plastic bag, was a dead rat.

These sods might be hard up but there were limits, he told himself. Gingerly he re-interred the corpse in its icy tomb and closed the lid.

His appetite had left him for the moment so he lit a cigarette and sat down once more to muse upon this odd household.

Just how odd was it? he asked himself. Well, the atmosphere for a start. It didn’t feel very funereal. Not that that signified much. He’d been at funerals where by the time the poor sod was planted, half the mourners were paralytic and the rest were lining up for the return to the loved one’s house like homesteaders at the start of a land-race.

Anyway atmosphere was too vague. You could breakfast on atmosphere, but you’d better make your dinner out of facts.

Fact one was the age of the non-Fieldings. Coeval with Bertie and Louisa, they were hardly the mourners one would expect at the funeral of a man of Fielding’s assumed age.

Fact two was this business conference going on. What were they doing – reading the will? Not likely these days. Then what?

Fact three was the lad, Nigel. His farewell note hinted at household relationships more turbulent than the usual teenage antipathies.

Fact four was the enigmatic remarks people kept dropping about Fielding’s death.

And fact five was a freezer with a dead rat in it.

He stood up and dropped his fag end into Bertie’s mug. When it came down to it, he distrusted facts almost as much as atmosphere. He knew at least three innocent men who would be bashing their bishops in Her Majesty’s prisons for many years to come because of so-called facts. On the other hand, on other occasions other facts had saved all three from well-deserved sentences. We are in God’s hands.

So he abandoned facts and set off on a walkabout of the house hoping to encounter truth.

He strolled along the brown horror of the entrance hall opening doors at random. One room contained a full-size billiard table, presumably the one on which the coffin had rested. There were two or three balls on the table and a cue leaned up against a pocket. Someone had not waited long to resume playing.

Dalziel moved on and reached the next door just as a telephone rang inside.

‘Hello!’ said old Fielding’s reedy but still imperious voice. ‘Yes. This is Hereward Fielding speaking.’

So that’s what ‘Herrie’ was short for. Jesus wept!

He remained at the door. He was firmly of the conviction that if you didn’t have enough sense to lower your voice, then you either wanted or deserved to be overheard.

‘No, I will not change my mind,’ said Fielding. ‘And I am too old to be bribed, persuaded or flattered into doing so. Now please, leave me alone. I have just buried my son today, yes, my son. Spare me your sympathy. You may come tomorrow if you wish, but I make no promises about my availability. Good day.’

The phone was replaced with a loud click. Dalziel pushed open the door and entered.

The room was large and ugly, its furnishings and decoration old enough to be tatty without getting anywhere near the ever-shifting bourne of the antique. Fielding had turned from the telephone to a wall cabinet, the door of which seemed to be jammed. He glanced up at Dalziel.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said, heaving. The door flew open and a glass unbalanced and fell to the threadbare carpet. He ignored it, but plucked another from inside and with it a bottle. Dalziel fixed his gaze on this. It took a strong man to stand with a bottle in one hand, a glass in the other, and not offer him a drink.

‘Can I help you?’ asked Fielding.

‘No. The others seem to be in conference and I was just having a look around,’ said Dalziel.

‘Were you? Well, this room, by general consensus the coldest and draughtiest in this cold and draughty house, is sometimes regarded as my sitting-room. Though naturally should anyone else wish to eat, drink, sleep, play records, make love or merely take a walk in it, my selfish demands for privacy are not allowed to get in the way.’

‘That’s good of you,’ said Dalziel heartily, closing the door behind him. ‘Terrible, this weather. I pity all the poor sods on holiday.’

‘I understood you were on holiday,’ said Fielding, filling his glass.

‘So I am,’ said Dalziel, mildly surprised at the idea. ‘Pity me then. Yes, it’s still chucking it down. I hope your grandson’s all right.’

‘What?’

‘Your grandson. He’s run away, I believe. I’m sorry, didn’t you know?’

The old man took a long swallow from his glass. What was it? wondered Dalziel. He couldn’t see the label which was obscured by Fielding’s long bony fingers, but the liquid was an attractive pale amber.

‘It would be too optimistic to hope you might mean Bertie?’ said Fielding.

‘No. The lad. Nigel.’

‘I feared so. It was ever thus. Wilde was wrong. You don’t have to kill the things you love. Just wait long enough and they’ll go away.’

‘Who?’ said Dalziel, pouncing on this further reference to killing and wanting to get its provenance right.

‘Who? You mean, who … Oscar Wilde. The Ballad of Reading Gaol.’

‘Oh, the poof,’ said Dalziel, his interest evaporating.

Unexpectedly Fielding laughed.

‘That’s the one,’ he said. ‘Will you have a drink, Mr …?’

‘Dalziel. Yes, I will.’ Here’s another one who thinks he’s summed me up and can start patronizing me, thought Dalziel as his huge hand held the glass he had retrieved from the floor steadfastly under the bottle till the meniscus touched the rim and Fielding said ironically, ‘Say when.’

It was brandy, a cheap brand Dalziel suspected, not from any connoisseurship of the liquor but by simple taste-bud comparison with the smoothness of his own favourite malt whisky. Something of his reaction must have shown and he realized he had inadvertently got back at Fielding for his suspected condescension when the old man said, ‘I’m sorry, it’s not good, but these days we all have to make sacrifices.’

‘It’s fine. Just the job for this weather,’ said Dalziel, emptying his glass and proffering it for a refill.

‘The weather. Yes. That foolish boy. I hope he will be all right. He never goes far, at least he didn’t when Conrad – that’s his father, my son – was alive.’

‘Fond of his dad, was he?’

‘Very,’ said the old man firmly.

‘But he still ran away, even then?’

‘Certainly. It’s in the family. Conrad was always taking off when he was a boy. I myself ran off to join the Army in 1914. I was sixteen at the time.’

‘Did they take you?’ asked Dalziel.

‘Not then. I looked very young. We were younger then, you know. Balls dropping, menstruation, it all happened later in my generation. But now they seem to need jockstraps and brassieres in the cradle.’

Fielding laughed harshly.

‘Anyway, it was a blessing I see now. I went legally and forcibly in 1916 and within six months I was ready to run away again, home this time.’

‘It must have been terrible,’ said Dalziel with spurious sympathy. ‘All that mud.’

‘Mud? Oh no. I didn’t mean the trenches. I never really saw the trenches. It was just the sheer boredom of the whole thing that made me want to run away. Very unfashionable. I wrote a book about my experiences a few years after the war. A light, comic thing, it went down well enough with your general reader, but it put me in bad with the intelligentsia for the next decade. But then I did a bit of Eliot-bashing and that was a help. Even so, I still got the cold shoulder, more or less, until the fifties. After that it was just a question of survival. Hang on long enough and you’re bound to become a Grand Old Man. Like the essays Paul Pennyfeather set in Decline and Fall. The reward is for length, regardless of merit.’

He laughed again, a series of glottally-stopped cracks, like a night-stick rattling along metal railings. Dalziel contemplated making him laboriously explain what he had just said, sentence by sentence, but decided against it on the grounds that the poor old sod probably couldn’t help himself.

‘So you’re not too worried about the boy?’

‘In the sense that he is too sensible to contribute willingly to his own harm, no. But as you say, the weather is appalling and, in addition, we live in troubled times, Mr Dalziel. The post-war period is an age of unbalance, of violence. Women and children cannot wander around with impunity as in my boyhood. Even the police seem more likely to be a source of molestation than a protection against it.’

‘They’ve a hard job,’ said Dalziel mildly.

‘I dare say. They certainly make hard work of finding an answer to the crime wave.’

‘Oh, the answer’s simple,’ said Dalziel. ‘Charge two guineas a pint for petrol, have a dusk to dawn curfew, and deport regular offenders to Manchester.’

It was a Yorkshire joke. Fielding was not very amused.

‘It’s in man’s mind, not his motorways, that the answer lies,’ he said reprovingly. ‘Has Bonnie organized a search for Nigel? No, you said they were in conference, didn’t you? Conference! You see how this house is run, Mr Dalziel!’

Dalziel felt impelled to defend Bonnie Fielding.

‘The man, Pappy, has been warned to keep look-out. The lad took the boat, it seems.’

‘Worse and worse,’ said the old man angrily. ‘That fool Papworth is totally unreliable. Let’s go and find him and you’ll see.’

He drained his glass and led the way out at a pace which had Dalziel’s borrowed carpet slippers flip-flopping on the uncarpeted floor.

Dalziel paused in the hallway as he heard the sound of raised voices drifting down the stairs. Someone, it sounded like Bertie, was shouting angrily and other voices mingled in the background.

‘Come on!’ commanded Fielding, irritated by the delay, and obediently Dalziel followed him through a door which led into a new complex of meaner corridors running through what presumably had once been the servants’ quarters.

Fielding strode on ahead till he reached a door on which he rapped imperiously. Then without waiting for a reply, he flung it open with an aplomb which won Dalziel’s professional admiration.

The room looked as if it had been furnished from an army surplus sale. The metal bed was made up with a neatness that invited inspection and the objects on the bedside locker – ashtray, alarm clock and a box of matches – were placed at the corners of an isosceles triangle.

Pappy was not there and in an almost unconscious reflex Dalziel stepped into the room and opened the metal wardrobe. It contained a couple of jackets and an old but well preserved black suit.

Glancing round, he realized that Fielding was regarding him strangely. Bursting into a servant’s room was evidently OK, but searching it was something else.

‘He’s not here then,’ said Dalziel.

‘No. I doubt if he spends a great deal of time in the wardrobe.’

‘Perhaps he’s out looking.’

‘Hah!’ snorted Fielding, setting off again. Dalziel followed after glancing out of the window. It was still raining and the cobbled yard which lay outside was inches deep in water so that it looked like a sea of semolina. For the second time since coming into this house, Dalziel felt a sense of physical belittlement.

Fielding was knocking on another door now, more gently this time and without trying the handle. A woman’s voice answered from within.

‘Who is it?’

‘Mr Fielding. Sorry to trouble you, Mrs Greave, but I’m looking for Papworth. Do you know where he is?’

After a short interval, the door was opened by a bright-eyed woman of about forty, whose magenta-tinted hair and green dressing-gown wound tight around her body gave her the look of a cornfield poppy. She was not unattractive in a bold and brassy kind of way.

‘I was having a nap,’ she said with more of accusation than explanation in her voice.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Fielding. ‘Do you know where Papworth is?’

‘No,’ said the woman yawning, showing good teeth in a moist pink mouth. Her glance flickered towards Dalziel who looked her up and down from her bare feet to the untidy brightness of her hair and leered grotesquely at her. Dalziel’s leer was so unambiguous that it was like a lesser man exposing himself. Mrs Greave screwed up her mouth in distaste and said, ‘Sorry, I’ve no idea. I’d better start thinking about dinner, I suppose, so if you’ll excuse me.’

She began to close the door but Dalziel leaned forward so that his belly curved into the doorway. It was more subtle than putting your foot in the jamb.

Sniffing noisily, he said, ‘Is something burning?’

The woman half turned, then swung back again to prevent Dalziel from entering the room.

‘No,’ she said, and swung the door to so violently that he had to skip back to avoid a collision. But he smiled to himself as they moved on. He had penetrated far enough to see a man’s suede shoe lying on the floor. It looked wet.

‘So she’s the cook, is she?’ he asked.

‘So rumour has it,’ said Fielding drily. ‘It was probably the dinner you smelt burning.’

Dalziel laughed. It was turning out to be a very interesting household, this. It had to be Papworth who was in the woman’s room. Perhaps he was just taking evasive action. With this old fusspot on the prowl, who could blame him? Though, of course, you didn’t need to take your shoes off to hide.

‘Papworth’s knocking her off, is he?’ he said, voicing his thought.

‘Who?’

‘Mrs Greave. The cook.’

Fielding laughed again.

‘I hope not,’ he said. ‘She’s his daughter!’

‘His daughter?’ echoed Dalziel. ‘You’re sure?’

‘No one can ever be sure of their father,’ said Fielding. ‘We believe what we’re told, don’t we? Come on. We might find him in the Hall.’

It seemed that this hunt for Papworth was becoming an obsession with the old man. Dalziel’s own enthusiasm had waned, partly because he still had not discarded his theory about Papworth’s whereabouts (a man could visit his daughter in her bedroom, couldn’t he?) but mainly because Fielding now proposed that they should go out into the rain-filled yard.

‘Hold on,’ he said at the door. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Just over there,’ said Fielding, pointing to a long high-roofed building which ran out from the main house. It looked as if it might once have been a stables, but surprisingly, in this neglected house, this particular block looked as if someone had been working on it fairly recently, an impression confirmed by the wording on a sign propped against the wall. Gibb and Fowler, Building Contractors, Orburn.

‘It joins up with the house,’ said Dalziel reasonably. ‘Can’t we get into it without going outside?’

‘If you must,’ said the old man crossly, shutting the door.

Their route this time took them through a new world in the form of a large room (or perhaps two or three rooms knocked into one) where the old stone walls had been plastered and painted a brilliant blue. On one side were a pair of large freezers and on the other, gleaming in silver and white, a row of microwave ovens. It was like stepping out of a bus shelter into a space ship.

‘What’s all this?’ asked Dalziel in bewilderment.

‘We drink a lot of soup,’ said Fielding, not stopping to offer further explanation but pressing on through the room with unflagging speed.

Dalziel followed down another short corridor, then into the building which was the object of Fielding’s forced march.

Here he halted and let his eyes get used to the dim light filtering through the narrow arched windows. If the microwave ovens had been a step forward out of the nineteenth century, what was going on here was just as determined a step back.

The building had been a stables, he reckoned, with an upper floor used perhaps as a hay-loft. This floor had now been removed with the exception of a small section at the far end which had been transformed into a kind of minstrels’ gallery. The joists supporting the arched roof had clearly lacked something in antiquity and they were being supplemented by a new fishbone pattern of age-blackened beams, standing out starkly against the white-washed interstices. Dalziel rapped his knuckles against one of these beams which was leaning against the wall, prior to elevation. It rang hollowly and felt smooth and cold to the touch. Dalziel was not repelled. He had nothing against plastic. He would as lief eat off colourful Formica as polished mahogany. Nor did it seem distasteful to him that the panes of stained ‘glass’ which were being fitted into the windows were plastic also. His reaction was one of simple puzzlement.

To what end would the Fieldings be transforming an old stables into something that looked like a set for a remake of Robin Hood?

Old Fielding, having peered into various recesses and through various doors, now abandoned his search for Papworth and returned to enjoy Dalziel’s bewilderment.

‘What do you think of this?’ he asked, gesturing with a flamboyance more in keeping with his surroundings than his person. ‘Is it not a fit monument for our times? What would Pope have had to say?’

‘Monument?’ said Dalziel, wondering momentarily if the old man was being literal and this place was indeed intended to be some sort of mausoleum, a kind of bourgeois Taj Mahal. But what about the ovens?

The answer was obvious.

‘It’s a café,’ said Dalziel.

This solution sent the old man into paroxysms of laughter which modulated into a coughing bout from which it seemed unlikely he would recover. Dalziel watched for a moment coldly, then administered a slap between his shoulder-blades which brought the dust up out of the old man’s jacket and sent him staggering against a section of stone reproduction wall which gave visibly.

‘Thank you,’ said Fielding. ‘Though I fear the cure was more dangerous than the disease. Well now. A café. Yes, that’s the word. Not the word that will be used, of course, should this sad enterprise ever come to fruition. No. Then this place will be called a Banqueting Hall. My daughter-in-law is too careful, I think, to risk the penalties prescribed under the Trades Descriptions Act by calling it a Medieval Banqueting Hall, but the word “medieval” will certainly appear somewhere on the prospectus.’

‘People will eat here,’ said Dalziel.

The prospect did not displease him. Eating was one of the Four Deadly Pleasures. Though he could not see the necessity for all these trappings. A meal was a meal.

‘That’s right. A dagger and a wooden platter. At a given signal, chicken legs will be thrown over the right shoulder. It’s a pastime very popular I believe in the North-East where the past is still close and tribal memories are long. My foolish family believe the inhabitants of Orburn and district will be equally gullible. The dreadful thing is, they may be right.’

‘There’s still a bit of work to be done,’ observed Dalziel. ‘Where are the builders today?’

‘They would not come today,’ said the old man significantly.

‘No? Oh, of course. Sorry. The funeral.’

Fielding laughed again, but this time, with a wary eye on Dalziel’s hand, he kept it to a controlled barking.

‘Builders are not noted for their delicacy, Mr Dalziel, not here, anyway.’

Dalziel ran his mind’s eye down a list of building contractors working in his area and had to agree.

‘What then? The weather?’

‘Money, Mr Dalziel. When the head goose has been killed, you make damn sure someone else is going to start dropping the golden eggs.’

‘Ah,’ said Dalziel. ‘Then this business conference …?’

But his cross-examination was interrupted.

‘You are looking for me, Mr Fielding?’ said a voice from above.

They looked up. Leaning over the rail of the minstrels’ gallery was Papworth.

‘There you are,’ said Fielding. ‘About time too. Have you seen anything of my grandson yet? Young Nigel?’

‘No,’ said Papworth. ‘Should I have done?’

‘Don’t you know he’s missing? Hasn’t anyone told you?’ demanded Fielding.

‘No,’ said Papworth. ‘I’ve been busy. What’s the fuss?’

‘The boy’s run off again. It seems he’s taken the rowing-boat and naturally we are all very worried.’

‘The rowing-boat,’ said Papworth thoughtfully.

‘That’s right, man. Aren’t you going to do anything? You can take the punt out and scout around, if you are not too busy, that is.’

You didn’t have to be a detective to spot the dislike the old man felt for Papworth, thought Dalziel. If only all relationships were so clear!

‘No. That’s just what I was going to do when I heard you wanted me,’ said Papworth.

‘But you said you didn’t know the boy was missing,’ interjected Dalziel.

‘No. But the boat is. Or was.’

‘Was?’

‘Yes. I can see it drifting out beyond the island. But one thing’s certain. There’s no one in it.’