Reginald Hill - Good Morning, Midnight

We didn’t go into this detail with Kay, of course, but she did appreciate the need to authenticate the death in all ways possible and rather than run the risk of a forged suicide note, it was she who, at Kafka’s prompting, suggested the use of the Dickinson poem.

She had her cases already packed and her stepdaughter’s. I now instructed her to take them with her when she went to pick up Helen from school but instead of bringing her home as planned, tell her that a severe frost was forecast for that night which would make the cross-Pennine roads very dicey early in the morning, so they were going straightaway and would spend the night in an airport hotel.

Once in the States, we told her to hire a car and get lost. The longer it took to find her with the sad news, the more time she’d have to get herself together.

Kafka had no doubts from the start about her ability to cope and the more I saw of her, the more impressed I was. Once motivated, she moved with speed and determination and soon she was on her way to pick up Helen. Kafka and I agreed it would be best to put as much space as possible between Kay’s departure and Maciver’s death to dilute any suspicion of cause and effect. We fixed on March the twentieth. Kafka undertook to provide evidence of Maciver making increasingly agitated attempts to contact him during this period, while I set about applying my specialist skills to stage-managing the fake suicide.

The mechanics of how I set it all up you have of course already worked out, including no doubt the burning of paper in the waste bin to help cover any traces of ash left by the burnt threads. What I actually burnt was his son’s letter-I didn’t want that lying about-plus several more sheets of writing paper, to give the impression he’d tried to compose a farewell note but found it beyond him, and opted for the poem.

It was all rather Agatha Christie, I fear, but I had to extemporize. Given a little more time and with the aid of a fully equipped technical team, I would have done things very differently, but it is only in the never never world of the movies and television that such expertise can be conjured up at the drop of a hat. In any case the English suburbs have a thousand eyes and the less activity there was around the house, the better. As it was there was a close scrape. With everything done, I let myself out of the house after of course checking there was no sign of activity outside. I had just closed the door when I heard a noise and I turned to see a woman coming through the shrubbery. It was, I found out later, Miss Lavinia Maciver. Her greeting was, I felt then, eccentric, though as I came to know her better, I realized it was in fact typical.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m so glad to see the green woodpeckers are still here.”

“Are they?” I said.

“Oh yes. Come and see.”

And I found myself led across the garden to peer into a hole in a semi-decayed beech tree and invited to admire the allegedly clear signs of new nesting activity.

I expressed interest and admiration and eventually managed to establish who she was. Myself I introduced in my role as VAT inspector. I said I’d been ringing the bell for some time but had got no reply. We returned to the house and tried again. Finally, and without anything more than a natural exasperation at a wasted journey, she bade me good day and set off down the drive. Her MS had barely got a hold back then and she could still stride out, but it was just beginning to drizzle and when I overtook her in my car, I halted to ask if she needed a lift. She replied no, she’d come by taxi from the bus station and would walk to the nearest phone box and call up another to take her back. I of course insisted that she got in and when I discovered that her journey home involved catching a bus which didn’t depart for another ninety minutes, and then, after a roundabout journey of over an hour, being dropped in a small village from which it was forty minutes’ walk to her house, I ignored her protests and drove her there myself.

My motives were mixed, I admit. She was a possible loose end which I wanted to be sure was tied up. But also I found myself intrigued by her. She seemed, I don’t know, to have a kind of independence of spirit, to be free of any agenda, or at least any I recognized. I don’t meet many people like that.

My first reaction when I saw her cottage, with doors unlocked, windows open, and birds flying in and out at will, was disappointment. Perhaps after all she was simply mad!

But there was nothing mad about the way she invited me to sit down and then provided tea and the most delicious scones.

Curious that. A man in my line of business not infrequently has his loyalty tested by the offer of bribes. But the only time I ever bent the rules, it was done for little more than a buttered scone. Could Mr Dalziel’s fall be occasioned by something so slight, I wonder?

I am not unadept at oblique questioning and once Miss Mac got used to my presence she treated me rather like one of the birds with whom she shares all her thoughts and feelings.

It appeared that her brother had called to see her the previous week in a somewhat agitated frame of mind which seemed to have something to do with Kay and Helen’s imminent trip to the States. He didn’t seem altogether happy about it and was particularly concerned that urgent business in London meant he would have to go away for a couple of days and wouldn’t get back till the day before their planned departure. He seemed to be asking if it would be possible, should the need arise, for Lavinia to come and look after his household for a while, as she had done when his first wife died. But when she attempted to get details out of him, he backed off, changed direction, and spent the rest of his visit talking about their childhood at Moscow House, when the family firm was flourishing and the future lay before them like a sunlit beach. Her words. Or perhaps his words.

It was this harking back to the days when they had been most at ease with each other, before his growing irritation at her growing dottiness, as he saw it, came between them, that bothered her in the following days and she was concerned sufficiently to make the effort of this rare visit to Moscow House to see for herself how things stood there.

I reassured her as best I could, surprising in myself a certain discomfiture amounting almost to guilt at the thought that her brother’s body was growing cold in his study as we talked. But not too cold. To confuse the issue of time of death, I’d programmed the central heating to stay on at full blast for the next couple of days until the twenty-second, the day before his son in his letter had said that he’d be coming home. Later I visited Tony Kafka at Ash-Mac’s to give him an update, and also to check the measures he’d taken re Maciver’s alleged contacts. I needn’t have worried. He was so thorough he’d thought of details I wouldn’t have bothered with myself. But he didn’t fall into the trap of being over-fussy. He could have been one of the great illusionists, I think. The only thing that bothered me slightly was that his main concern seemed to be for Kay Maciver. His attitude to her was protective to a degree almost paternal, with Ash-Mac’s interests a poor second. He it was who drew my attention to Kay’s special relationship with your Mr Dalziel and suggested this might come in useful in smoothing out any snags in the investigation, as indeed proved to be the case.

Did I have any guilt feelings about letting the son find the body? Not really. I had no way of assessing the truth of the letter he’d written to his father, but from what Gallipot had told me of Kay’s proclivities, it seemed at least possible that it wasn’t righteous indignation at an attempted seduction which motivated him but injured pride in being, as the chambermaid put it, chewed up and spat out.