Читать книгу On Beulah Height - Reginald Hill - Страница 21

Monday dawned, the sun rising into the inevitable blue sky with the radiant serenity of Alexander entering a conquered province.

Its soundless reveille against the leaded light of Corpse Cottage in Enscombe did not disturb the deep slumber of Edwin Digweed, antiquarian bookseller and founder of the Eendale Press, but not for nothing had Edgar Wield been nicknamed by a previous lover, Macumazahn, He Who Sleeps With His Eyes Open.

He answered the summons immediately, taking care to make as little noise as possible. Edwin was not at his best if woken too early, one of the many adjustment-necessitating discoveries made during their first year together.

Downstairs, Wield brewed his morning coffee (two spoons of instant and three of white sugar in boiling milk, not the cafetière of freshly ground Colombian Edwin insisted on at all times of day) then went on his morning visit.

This took him via the churchyard into the grounds of Old Hall, home of the Guillemard family, by permission squires of Enscombe for nearly a thousand years. Falling on hard times, the family had been preserved by the acumen of its present commercial head, Gertrude (known, misleadingly, as Girlie), who had lured visitors to the estate by all manner of attractions, including a Children’s Animal Park. Here, in pens or roaming free as their nature required, could be found calves, lambs, kids, piglets, fowl (domestic and game), dormice, harvest mice, field mice, and a rat called Guy. But it was not on any of these that Wield was making his morning call.

He made for a lofty oak which held the remains of a tree house in its fork and whistled gently.

Instantly a small figure appeared and dropped with scarcely more than a token touch to trunk or branch the thirty feet into his arms.

‘Morning Monte,’ said Wield. ‘What fettle?’

Monte was a monkey; a marmoset, the local vet had informed him when he’d taken the animal for a comprehensive check – a necessary precaution in view of its origins. For Monte was an escapee from a pharmaceutical research lab who’d taken refuge in Wield’s car. The sergeant had smuggled it out, assuring himself this was a decision postponed, not a decision made.

It had been the first real test of his new relationship. Edwin Digweed, though fond enough of animals, made it clear that he had no intention of sharing his home with a free-roaming primate. ‘A ménage à trois may have its attractions,’ he said. ‘A ménagerie à trois has none.’

There had been a moment, as Wield’s unblinking eyes in that unreadable face regarded him calculatingly, that Digweed had recalled an anecdote told of John Huston. Required by his current mistress to choose between herself and a pet monkey of peculiarly disgusting habits, the film director had thought for thirty seconds, then said, ‘The chimp stays.’

Digweed held his breath, suddenly fearful that his world might be about to dissolve beneath his feet.

But what Wield had said was, ‘He’s not going back there. He escaped.’

Hiding his relief, Digweed exclaimed, ‘He … it … is a monkey, not the Count of bloody Monte Cristo. All right, we can’t send him … it … back to that place, but the proper place for him … it … is a zoo.’

‘Monte. That’s what we’ll call him,’ said Wield. ‘As for the zoo, I know just the spot.’

He’d taken Monte to see Girlie Guillemard. Much impressed by the little animal, and having established he was marginally less inclined to bite, scratch or otherwise assault ill-behaved children than herself, she’d offered him refuge in the Animal Park.

The move had worked surprisingly well. Wield visited every morning he could, bearing gifts of peanuts and fruit. There’d been an early crisis when duty had prevented his visit for nearly a week. Finally, Monte had gone looking for him at Corpse Cottage. Finding only Edwin there, asleep in bed, Monte had awoken him, presumably to make enquiries, by pushing up his eyelids.

‘Naturally, my first thought was, I’m being raped by an ape,’ said the bookseller. ‘So I lay back and thought of Africa.’

Now Wield gently removed the beast from his head where it was searching diligently for nits. He regarded the little animal with great affection. He’d tried to explain to Edwin that it wasn’t just sentimentality. In fact, of all 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 into Dendale still filling with pearly light.

It seemed to him that he saw far below a shadowy figure who peered up towards the fell’s gilded rim, then threw up its arms in welcome or derision, before slipping silent and naked into the still dark waters of the mere.

Daylight visions now, he thought. Were they better or worse than waking in the dark and still smelling the mud of Passchendaele?

‘Peter!’ said Ellie in a tone that told him she’d spoken his name already.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Miles away.’

‘Yes, I’ve noticed. Peter, don’t you think …’

But the moment wasn’t ripe. A voice said, ‘Lovely morning again, sod it!’ and they saw the postman coming up the drive. He handed Pascoe two packages, one small, one large. Both were addressed to Ellie, but when he proffered them, she took the small one and ignored the other.

‘Oh, good,’ she said, tearing it open. ‘That Mahler disc.’

‘Songs for Dead Children. Just the stuff for a summer’s day,’ he said, taking it from her hand and replacing it with the other package which bore a well-known publisher’s logo. ‘What about this?’

‘If I want cheering up, I’ll listen to Mahler,’ she said.

‘Perhaps they’ve just sent your script back to ask you to make a few minor revisions?’ he offered.

‘Bollocks,’ said Ellie. ‘I’ve got these Braille-sensitive fingers. They can read “get stuffed” through six layers of wrapping. Weird design.’

She was determined not to talk about the novel. He looked down at the disc which bore a silhouette drawing of a girl’s or cherub’s profile, spouting a line of music. He found himself thinking of Dendale, though the connection seemed slight. Then he spotted what it was. In the bottom right corner, as on the map from the Dendale file, were the initials E.W. Not of course Edgar Wield this time, but, as was confirmed when he turned the disc over and read the small print on the back, Elizabeth Wulfstan.

‘Does the translation, sings the songs, designs the cover; I wonder if she plays the instruments in the orchestra?’ he said.

‘Very likely. Some people get all the talent, which is why there’s so little left over for the rest,’ said Ellie, dispiritedly.

‘It’ll happen, love. Really. You’ve got more writing talent in your little finger than any of those London creeps licking each other’s bums in the Sunday reviews,’ he said loyally, putting his arms round her.

They clung together as if he were going back to the Front after all too short a leave.

Then he got into his car and drove away.