Reginald Hill - Exit lines

The investigation had been conducted, he was told.

There would be no proceedings.

Did this mean that there had been no irregularities?

'It means,' said his informant, not without a touch of acidity, 'that there has been no evidence. Mr Charlesworth's records are so clean you'd think they'd been done only yesterday.'

This sounded like good news to the DCC till he incautiously requested complete assurance.

'You mean that Mr Charlesworth has committed no crime.'

There was a pause before the acid voice said carefully, 'I mean that Mr Charlesworth is either the single most conscientious bookmaker we have ever dealt with or that he knew we were coming.'

It emerged that the investigation had been timed to coincide with the final meet of the flat racing season, at Doncaster the weekend before last. Charlesworth's was very much a Yorkshire firm with betting shops all over the county and a large presence at all northern race meetings, so Charlesworth himself would be down at Doncaster on this day and his head office ought to have been particularly vulnerable. Instead they found things here and in all the shops raided in perfect order. Even those natural daily errors caused by human fallibility under pressure were absent. And the painstaking examination, point by decimal point, of his records which had just been concluded the previous week had produced nothing further.

'And when did Mr Charlesworth get the good news?' asked the DCC.

'Oh, he'll just get his records returned some time this week. When we don't slap him in irons, he'll know he's all right.'

'And us: have we been officially informed?'

'I don't think we'd bother unless there were some irregularities,' said the voice.

At least it wasn't a celebration dinner! thought the DCC with relief.

'Though we liaise very closely, of course,' resumed the voice as if sensing a criticism. 'CID knows what we're up to. Your Mr Dalziel insists on that.'

The DCC's heart slipped a notch.

'So we'd probably know sort of casually that the Charlesworth books were in order?'

'Oh certainly. Mr Dalziel was very interested in the whole business from the start. In fact, now I think of it, when we were talking last week on another matter, this investigation came up and he was most sympathetic when he learned that we'd been wasting our time.'

The voice was quite triumphant as if saying There! you knew all the time!

The DCC's heart was beginning to pick up speed in its descent.

He said, 'Of course. Mr Dalziel would have been talking with you about your airport check on Saturday morning.'

'That's right. We've got full powers, of course, but we like to make it a joint venture when it's something like this. So I'm afraid we wasted your time as well as ours on this occasion.'

The apology sounded rather like a compliment, but the DCC wasn't concerned with nuances.

He said, 'This was a routine check, was it?'

'No,' said the voice, hardly bothering to conceal its irritation now. 'It wasn't routine, as I'm sure Mr Dalziel's files will tell you. We are not so foolish as to risk irritating William Pledger just for the sake of routine, and very irritated he has been! There'd been a tip-off that the Van Bellen plane was bringing in a load of heroin.'

'Heroin?' said the DCC faintly.

'Yes,' said the voice. 'But it was clean as a whistle. Clean as a whistle.'

The tone was one of savage disappointment, inviting deep condolence, but the DCC's only response was a subdued farewell as he quietly replaced the phone and sat contemplating the new deeps into which his heart was plummeting.

That Dalziel should have been dining with Charlesworth, whose books had proved clean, and Major Kassell, whose employer's aeroplane had proved clean, was surely not so outrageous a coincidence?

He picked up his phone and dialled Dalziel's number. He whistled quietly to himself as it rang for the usual preliminary minute. But still no one replied. Suddenly he felt the beginnings of anger. Slowly its mists rose, obscuring the idea of coincidence, turning it into a shape, vague and absurd and not to be taken seriously. The phone kept on ringing. Why didn't he answer? He sat back in his chair, listening to the tinny double-noted summons and, quite forgetting that only twenty-four hours before he had been urging Dalziel to make himself scarce, he demanded angrily of the unresponsive air, 'Where, where, where has the bloody man got to?'

But, had the air miraculously responded, it would not have helped the DCC's temper one bit.

'Mr Dalziel, Andy, glad to see you. Barney said you might be turning up and I said, just the job, another English speaker, great. How's your Frog? Never mind. Mostly they speak better English than me, only they don’t think in English, that's where it shows. I must've met a million foreigners, it's my work, I get on well with 'em, that's my work too, but I've never met one I could make a real pal of, know what I mean? And that's because they don't think in English, leastways that's what I put it down to.'

Sir William Pledger was a surprise even for one of Harold Wilson's knights. Short, stout, round and red-faced with huge thick-lensed glasses that magnified his slightly pop eyes, bald except for a few long, ginger hairs which trailed over and indeed out of his jug-ears, he talked in a high-pitched rush, slowed only by his long native Oxfordshire vowel sounds and accompanied by a wild semaphore of both his upper and nether limbs, none of which fortunately was long enough to imperil more than his immediate neighbourhood.

If Dalziel, who had been met at Haycroft Grange by Barney Kassell and driven out in a Range Rover to join the party for lunch, had been self-conscious about his balding corduroy trousers and scene-of-the-crime gum-boots, he might have been put at ease by Sir William's overlarge camouflage jacket and paint-stained grey flannels tucked into a pair of old wellies, which contrasted strangely with the elegant plus-foured tweediness of everyone else.

As it was, Dalziel observed and approved the difference. The top man was the one who didn't need to give a fuck about the niceties.

An early lunch was being taken among the ruins of a building too tumbledown to be identifiable but with sections of irregular stone wall high enough to break the keen north wind. The views were spectacular, the cold collation excellent. Dalziel was introduced vaguely and generally to the six or seven shooters present, most of whom seemed to be foreign.

There was wine to be drunk, but Dalziel gratefully accepted the alternative of coffee with a shot of Scotch.

'Keeps the cold out,' said Sir William. 'Let that lot swill back the vino, mother's milk to most of them, so that's all right, Barney keeps it in bounds, don't you, Barney?'

'That's right,' said Kassell. 'I've developed an eye for that if nothing else. Too much booze and shotguns don't mix. The biggest proportion of accidents happen during the after-lunch drives.'

Kassell looked very much at home in this environment, his face healthily flushed by the boisterous wind which winnowed his hair as though to show how thick it still was. His clothing, though it lacked the evident newness of the guests', gave away nothing in terms of cut and fit.

'Do you get a lot of accidents, then?' asked Dalziel, chewing voraciously at a cold leg of something.

'Not here we don't,' said Kassell. 'But on some of the estates where they let out shooting to syndicates, you can get too many clowns and not enough ringmasters. Result is, often they shoot more dogs than birds.'

'This your first time, Andy?' said Pledger.

'That's right. I said to Barney I fancied giving it a go and he said I should try half a day to see how I liked it. It's good of you to let me come.'

'Always happy to have the law along,' said Pledger. 'Old Tommy Winter's a fair shot, as you probably know. I bet he'd rather be here than burning up on some Caribbean beach. And we usually have one or two of the boys in blue at the other end of the stick too.'