Reginald Hill - Child's Play

Statement begins. But where? Two years is a long time in a cop’s life, almost as long as two minutes in politics. Better start with the Italians. Most things start there except for them as start with the Greeks. So. The Italians.

At the time, the Italians weren’t very happy about one of their nationals getting shot dead in England and no one getting his wrist slapped for it.

Dalziel said, ‘Tell ’em the silly bugger died of bad parking. They’ll likely understand that.’

The trouble was, Miss Keech ended up as one of Pottle’s patients in the Psychiatric Unit, far beyond confession or interrogation. We told the Italians that the bullets that killed Pontelli and Richard Sharman came from the same gun, but despite the condition of Venice, they obviously like things tidier than that. Perhaps in revenge, they pursued our initial request for information about Pontelli with slow thoroughness, and long after I’d forgotten all about the Huby will, a bulky envelope dropped on my desk.

It contained a detailed account of Pontelli’s life and activities. The curious thing about it was that to all intents and purposes it began in 1946 and didn’t thicken out till the mid-’fifties. Before that it was all hearsay — in other words, what other people had heard the not very forthcoming Pontelli say. On his childhood there was nothing, not even any documentary evidence to support his claim to have been born in Palermo, though the Sicilian investigator made the point that many records were destroyed during the German occupation and the Allied invasion.

I was getting the message now. Some Florentine joker was dropping a super-subtle hint that perhaps Pontelli really wasn’t their concern after all!

I went to Dalziel with the report.

He said, ‘It’s nearly eighteen months, Peter! I don’t have time to be bothered with things that happened eighteen days ago.’

‘What shall I do?’ I asked.

‘It’s dead,’ he said. ‘Bury it.’

Next day I went to see Eden Thackeray.

There was a new girl in his outer office, sleek, smart, elegantly made-up, sitting in front of a word-processor. The alterations extended into Thackeray’s own room. Dark oak and red leather were out. It was now a silky white and shiny chrome temple of hi-tech.

‘I thought, to hell!’ he explained rather shamefacedly. ‘If the old customers didn’t like it, I’d got newer richer ones who did!’

‘What about Lexie Huby? Didn’t she fit the new image?’

He grew indignant.

‘She’s doing a law degree at Leeds University! Do you know, she got A grades in all her advanced levels, doing them at nights without referring to anybody? I have high hopes of that girl, very high.’

I said, ‘Does she still see Rod Lomas?’

He shrugged and said, ‘How should I know?’

He always looked a bit embarrassed when the Lomas side of the family was mentioned. Rod and his mother had consistently denied any knowledge of Pontelli’s trip to England or his plans to claim the estate, though acknowledging that the late Arthur Windibanks might have put him up to it. As for the woman’s firm identification of the maple-leaf birthmark, she had become very vague about that, smiling sweetly at Dalziel and saying, ‘One sees so many behinds that they all begin to blur into one, don’t they?’

Our hopes of getting them on a fraud charge arising out of their misappropriation of the rental from the Villa Boethius vanished when Eden Thackeray refused to cooperate.

‘We have the reputation of the estate to consider,’ he said primly to Dalziel in my presence. ‘Full restitution has been made.’

The fat man just regarded him closely for a moment, then said, ‘You randy old bugger! I never knew what restitution was till now!’

And poor Thackeray, attempting to look indignant, could only raise a blush.

I showed him the papers from Florence and said he was welcome to them if they were any use.

He thanked me gravely and said he would keep them safely filed though he could see no way in which they could be helpful.

‘There’s still a couple of things unexplained,’ I said provocatively.

‘And so they shall remain,’ he said. ‘This business has brought farce where there should have been decorum, and tragedy where there should have been delight. Soon there shall be an end.’

‘Soon?’ I said. ‘The Court of Chancery’s still considering the case, isn’t it? Doesn’t that mean another ten years at least?’

‘The days of Jarndyce and Jarndyce are long past,’ he said. ‘It will be months at most; perhaps even weeks.’

I smiled disbelievingly. On my way out I waved dashingly at the new girl, who nodded back as coolly unimpressed as Lexie Huby had always been. I was glad to see one of her long eyelashes fall off and come to rest like a weary earwig on her damask cheek.

That night I had a confused dream about that eyelash and Thackeray’s office and the whole Huby affair. It was silly. It was ancient history. The intervening months had been crammed with all the long tedium and sharp excitements which make up a CID man’s work. But it was only this case which invaded my dreams. I told Ellie. She said, ‘Guilt.’ I said, ‘What?’ She said, ‘You’re a sucker for it. It’s people like you that make repressive religious regimes possible. You’re always like this when you reckon you’ve missed something.’

She was, of course, right. She usually is. It’s one of her least attractive characteristics. But she compensates by going wildly wrong when she tries to be too clever.

‘The earwig on the damask cheek is the clue,’ she said in her best Freudian manner. ‘It’s the worm in the bud, you see. Conscience, the curious mole, nibbling away. Something you’ve left undone.’

‘Bollocks,’ I said with confidence, for suddenly I knew all about the earwig on the damask cheek. Or thought I did. I had to send for Seymour the next day to be sure. He thought I was mad but was bright enough not to let it show too much. Also under pressure he turned out to have something like perfect recall. I’d noticed this before when he made reports. I complimented him fulsomely and he went away bewildered but content.

Now I had a theory but nothing to test it in. Then three months or so later, I read in the Post that the Chancery judge had indeed pronounced as quickly as Thackeray had forecast. He had ruled that the waiting period in the Huby will was inequitable. PAWS, CODRO and WFE could have their money instantly.

Ellie went into her indignant harangue about the iniquities of giving vast sums to cats, officers’ widows, and fascists. I made a few phone calls and a week later I was sitting in a small stuffy room next to the office of George Hutchinson, general manager of the Leeds Head Branch of the Yorkshire Commercial Bank.

I felt curiously nervous and when the door opened, I jumped to my feet like a twenty-year-old in search of a loan for a motorbike.

Hutchinson said, ‘Would you mind stepping in here, Miss Brodsworth? There’s someone who’d like a word.’

A young woman stepped inside and regarded me incuriously with hard blue eyes. Behind her, Hutchinson caught my eye and beckoned, but I didn’t want to be diverted at that moment and I closed the door firmly in his face.

Then I faced Sarah Brodsworth. With her tight blonde curls, rosebud lips and blouse-straining bosom, she should have been very attractive, but I did not find her so.

I reached forward and gently squeezed her left breast.

‘Hello, Lexie,’ I said.

The breast felt very real and for one awful moment I thought I’d got it wrong. My mind was already accelerating through apologies to Brodsworth, explanations to Ellie, and pleas in mitigation to the judge, when the girl replied, ‘Hello, Mr Pascoe. And what can I do for you?’