Reginald Hill - Under World

She didn’t belong here. She was an Easterner, visiting the ‘Romantic’ West to collect experiences for her dinner-parties back home, and the dusty, violent, uncompromising reality was proving too much for her delicate stomach.

‘You OK, love?’ said Marion anxiously.

‘Yes. Sorry.’

‘Poor lass is probably starving,’ said Wendy. ‘Have you seen the time?’

‘Bloody hell! It’ll be shut.’

‘Not if we hurry. We usually go down the Club on Wednesdays and have a pie or something,’ explained Wendy. ‘We’ll need to get our skates on. You’ll come, won’t you?’

Suddenly they were just women again, reachable, vulnerable, lovable, not inhabitants of another and frightening world.

‘Yes, please,’ she said.

She felt quite euphoric as they hurried out of the back door and along the narrow alleyway running between the fences of the rear gardens of the parallel rows of houses. They came to a cross alley where Marion guided Ellie left towards the road. Wendy however went straight on.

Ellie paused and said disappointedly, ‘Isn’t Wendy coming with us, then?’

‘Aye,’ said Marion. ‘She’ll not be a second.’

Ellie could see the skinny young woman over the corner of the gardens. Then she stopped momentarily out of sight, reappeared clutching something in her hand and hurled whatever it was in the direction of the nearest house.

There was a loud splintering of glass, then Wendy came running back towards them.

‘What’s she doing?’ demanded Ellie, amazed.

‘Scab,’ said Marion. ‘Me, I can’t be bothered any more. But Wendy, every time she comes this way, she puts a brick through his window or something.’

Wendy rejoined them breathless.

‘Right through the lavvy window,’ she boasted. ‘I hope the bugger were sitting on it. He always spent a lifetime in there studying the horses.’

‘You know him, then? Well, I mean,’ said Ellie.

‘I should do,’ said Wendy. ‘He used to be my sodding husband.’

Suddenly Ellie felt an alien once more and found herself longing for the comfort of a familiar face.

When they reached the Club, far from meeting the lunch-time exodus as Marion had feared, they found the club room bursting at the seams with bodies, smoke and conversation.

‘What’s going off?’ Marion asked the steward after they fought their way to the bar. ‘You got an extension, Pedro?’

‘Sort of,’ said Pedley.

‘What do you mean, sort of? Either you have or you haven’t.’

‘Let’s put it this way,’ said Pedley. ‘I stay open as long as he stays open.’

He nodded directionally. The women turned and looked. And Ellie found that her wish had been granted, in part at least. There rising through the swirling tobacco mists was a most familiar headland, but she could take no homecoming voyager’s comfort from this first glimpse across a table arctic with glasses of the five-acre face of Andy Dalziel.

Dalziel felt he had earned his money already that day and when Ellie Pascoe came into the bar, he reckoned he was into overtime.

It wasn’t that he disliked her. On the contrary, he found her a bloody sight more appealing than the majority of his colleagues’ spouses, most of whom were too thick to even notice when he was taking the piss! At least you could have a laugh with Ellie, trade insults, talk straight and not give offence, and give offence but not provoke hysterics.

Nor could he get too upset at the thought that she might be putting it about. It’d hurt the boy, Pascoe, and that would be a pity, but it wouldn’t be — shouldn’t be — the end of the world. One thing his wide experience of life had taught him was that if a woman was inclined to put it about, you couldn’t stop her, not even with an Act of Parliament. Christ, you’d have to work hard with an act of God! Better then to find out sooner rather than later, while you were still young enough to enjoy your retaliation.

But there were limits. As far as such things are negotiable, a woman had a duty not to put it about in such a way as to embarrass her husband in his workplace. And for a detective-inspector’s wife to be screwing around with a boy miner who was also chief suspect in a murder inquiry over-stepped these limits by a long, long way. He’d hoped he’d given her a big enough hint in the hospital car park to keep her neb out of things but clearly he’d been too subtle. It was always his chief failing.

He sighed and said, ‘Whose shout is it? A man could die of thirst in a place like this.’

He’d been drinking pints with whisky chasers since his arrival. Not to be outdone, Tommy Dickinson had followed suit. Ten or more pints was a normal evening’s consumption for Tommy but the spirit had changed the name of the game. Several times Neil Wardle had tried to urge him to stop or at least to stick to beer. On each occasion Dalziel had added his voice to Wardle’s with the inevitable result that the stout youth had indignantly rejected the advice.

There’d been others at the table too, a steady flow and ebb as curiosity or a desire to bait this constabulary bear overcame the miners’ distrust and dislike. He’d fended off attacks with equanimity, traded insults with good-natured vigour, even proffered advice to those still at loggerheads with the law. And, as Neil Wardle, still on only his second pint after all this time, noted with grudging admiration, there was scarcely a one of them who got away without answering some pertinent questions. He did his best to pre-empt the grosser indiscretions by interruption or change of subject and each time felt Dalziel’s undulled gaze touch upon him with amused acknowledgement before the talk was rediverted into its previous channel by a nudge which should have been blatant but was merely irresistible.

‘You’re a clever sod, I’ll give you that,’ said Wardle in a quiet interlude shortly after Ellie’s arrival.

‘There’s some as thinks so,’ said Dalziel complacently. ‘But I’m glad to have your endorsement.’

‘I didn’t mean it as a compliment.’

‘I didn’t take it as one, so no harm done.’

‘When are you going to let Colin out? You’ve got nothing on him, have you?’

‘No,’ said Dickinson, suddenly reviving from a cat-nap. ‘There’s nowt on Col, not even them foreskin scientists can pin owt on Col.’

‘I hope he means forensic,’ grinned Dalziel.

‘Listen,’ said Wardle, very intense. ‘You can get Tommy drunk, but don’t you patronize him, all right?’

‘I’d not even dream of it,’ said Dalziel. ‘I’ve grown very fond of Tommy. He’s a lovely lad.’

‘Now listen,’ began Wardle angrily.

‘Nay, Neil, shut tha gob, it’s not a Union meeting,’ said Tommy Dickinson. ‘And I’m not a little lad needing looked after. Andy here’s all right. If we’d had more like Andy policing the pickets, we’d not have had half the bother we did, isn’t that right, Andy?’

Dalziel looked at Wardle and smiled evilly.

‘Oh aye, Tommy. I think you can safely say that. Not half the bother.’

A worried-looking man of about sixty approached the table and said, ‘Excuse me, Superintendent, but I’m Chairman of the Club Management Committee and it’s long past our closing time. Our steward reckons you said something about it being OK, but I’m not sure the licence magistrates will see it that way if they get wind of it. So unless we can have something in writing …’

Dalziel looked at his watch.

‘By God, is that the time? You should have been shut half an hour back! Hasn’t time been called? That’s bad, that. You’ll really have to tighten up, mister, else you could lose your licence, you know that?’