Читать книгу Midnight Fugue - Reginald Hill - Страница 11

For the first couple of miles, Andy Dalziel’s reaction to the surprisingly light traffic had been relief. He should get to the meeting in plenty of time and without use of what clever clogs Pascoe called son et lumière.

But by the time he approached the town centre, he was beginning to find the absence of other vehicles suspicious rather than surprising. This after all was Monday morning, when traffic was usually at its worst.

Couldn’t be a Bank Holiday, could it? Hardly. September had just turned into October. Last Bank Holiday, spent in a sea-side convalescent home, had been at the end of August. No more till Christmas, by which time the rest of the European Union would have had another half-dozen. Faintest sniff of no matter how obscure a saint’s day, and them buggers were parading idols, wrestling bulls and throwing donkeys off the Eiffel Tower. No wonder we had to win their wars for them!

He came out of his Europhobic reverie to discover that, despite being well ahead of the clock, his automatic pilot had directed him via his usual short-cut along Holyclerk Street in defiance of the sign restricting entry ‘within the bell’, i.e. into the area immediately surrounding the cathedral, to residents and worshippers. And now his suspicions about the lightness of traffic began to take on a more sombre hue.

There were people walking towards the cathedral with that anal-retentive demeanour the English tend to adopt when trying to look religious; not great numbers, but a lot more than he’d have expected to see at this time on a Monday morning. Mebbe during his absence there’d been a great conversion in Mid-Yorkshire. In fact, mebbe his absence had caused it!

Slowing to the pace of a little old lady clutching a large square volume bound in leather, its corners reinforced by brass triangles that gleamed like a set of knuckle-dusters, he leaned over to the passenger side and wound down the window.

‘How do, luv. Off to church, are you? Lovely morning for it.’

She turned, fixed him with a rheumy eye, and said, ‘My God, how desperate must you be! I’m seventy-nine. Go away, you pathetic man!’

‘Nay, luv, I just want to know what day it is,’ he protested.

‘A drunkard as well as a lecher! Go away, I say! I can defend myself.’

She took a swing at him with her brass-bound book which, had it connected, might have broken his nose. He accelerated away, but doubt was now strong enough to make him turn into the cathedral car park a hundred yards on.

A sporty red Nissan pulled in behind him. Its driver, a blonde in her late twenties, got out the same time as he did. She was wearing wrap-around shades against the autumn sunlight. She eased them forward on her nose, their eyes met and she gave him a smile. He thought of asking her what day it was but decided against it. This one might have hysterics or spray him with mace, and in any case back along the pavement the little old lady was approaching like the US cavalry. Time to talk to someone official and male.

At the cathedral’s great east door he could see a corpse-faced man in a black cassock acting as commissionaire. No backward collar, so a verger maybe. Or a cross-dressing vampire.

Dalziel moved towards him. As he entered the shadow of the great building his mind drifted back to a time when he’d been hauled along this street as God on top of a medieval pageant wagon and something like an angel had come floating down from the looming tower…

He pushed the disturbing memory from his mind as he reached the holy doorman.

‘So what’s on this morning, mate?’ he asked breezily.

The man gave him a slightly puzzled look as he replied, ‘Holy Communion now, matins at ten.’

Meant nothing, he reassured himself without conviction. The God-squad had services every day, even if all the congregation they could muster was a couple of geriatrics and a church mouse.

‘Owt special?’ he said. ‘I mean, is it a special Sunday, twenty-second afore Pancake Tuesday or summat?’

He hoped to hear something like, ‘Sunday? You must have had a good weekend. This is Monday!’ But he no longer expected it.

‘No, nothing special, sir. If you want it spelled out, it’s the twentieth after Trinity in Ordinary Time. Are you coming in?’

Rather unexpectedly, Dalziel found he was.

Partly because his route back to the car would mean passing the old lady with the knuckle-duster prayer book, but mainly because his legs and his mind were sending from their opposite poles the message that he needed to sit down somewhere quiet and commune with his inner self.

He passed through the cathedral porch and had to pause to let his eyes adjust from the morning brightness outside to the rich gloom of the interior. Its vastness dwindled the waiting worshippers from a significant number to a mere handful, concentrated towards the western end. He turned off the central aisle and found himself a seat in the lee of an ancient tomb topped with what were presumably life-sized effigies of its inmates. Must have been a bit disconcerting for the family to see Mam and Dad lying there every time they came to church, thought Dalziel. Particularly if the sculptor had caught a good likeness, which a very lively looking little dog at their feet suggested he might have done.

His mind was trying to avoid the unattractive mental task that lay before him. But he hadn’t got wherever he’d got by turning aside when the path turned clarty.

He closed his eyes, rested his head on his hands as if in prayer, and focused on one of the great philosophical questions of the twenty-first century.

Didn’t matter if it was Ordinary Time or Extraordinary Time, the question was, how the fuck had he managed to misplace a whole sodding day?