Reginald Hill: Recalled to Life

'She's not staying in, then?' 'What? Do you know what these places charge per night? It's bloody extortionate!' exclaimed Ellie, her old antipathies fully reactivated. 'They'll want to monitor her progress but I can fetch her back to outpatients for that. Now tell me how you've been, Peter. I mean really. You're looking pale. That fat bastard working the guts out of you with me out of the way, is he?'

There would come a time to tell her about his sessions with Pottle, but not here, not now. 'The fat bastard is at this moment sitting outside in my car,' he said. 'You'd better say hello and ask him yourself.' They walked across the car park together, Rose swinging happily between them, chattering away in a seamless monologue which bound them like a current of electricity. Pascoe led them confidently to where he had parked, then slowed into uncertainty. 'Where's the car, Daddy?' asked Rose. 'It's there… I think… Between that green van and..’ But it wasn't. The space was empty. Except for his overnight grip which had been neatly deposited between the white lines. 'The bugger's stolen my car!' exclaimed Pascoe. 'In that case,' said Ellie, 'you'd better come back with us and spend the night.' Thus casually are armistices offered. 'All right.' And thus casually accepted. Rose had broken free and run to the bag. The top half was unzipped and she pulled something out. It looked like a plastic boomerang, pimpled in purple and gleaming with gold. 'Good God,' said Ellie. 'I'm away for a few days and you're into appliances!' 'What is it, Daddy?' asked his daughter. 'I've no… Hang on! Of course.

It's for you, love. It's a present from Uncle Andy.' 'I might have known,' said Ellie. 'It's lovely,' said the little girl, examining the garish object closely. 'But what's it for?' Pascoe said gravely, 'I do not doubt that, like Columbus, Uncle Andy has brought back much that is strange and exotic from the New World, but nothing to equal this.

You are holding a musical banana without which, I believe, no American home is complete. You blow into it. But be careful before you accept such a rare gift. It may change civilization as we know it.' Rose nodded, as if registering the full implications of the warning, and examined the strange object with a grave fearlessness that reminded Pascoe so much of her mother that he felt tears prickle his eyes.

Then, dauntless, the banana to her lips she set, and blew. Dalziel had been right. It made a bloody awful noise.

'It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.' The door jammed on a pile of junk mail and uncancelled papers, and there was a taint of decay on the dank air. As Dalziel squeezed his belly over the threshold, one of his favourite precepts fluttered batlike into his mind. A man got the welcome he deserved. He shook the thought from his head. What the fuck had he expected? The kind of old-fashioned thriller ending yon bugger Stamper might have scripted, with a fire burning in the grate, a stew bubbling on the stove, and Linda Steele, hotter than both, lying open-legged across his bed? He went into the kitchen. On the table was a dusty cardboard box, unearthed from the junk room just before his departure, and half a pork pie with a fungus-fuzzed bite out of it. Gingerly he picked it up, opened the back door and lobbed the pulsating pie into his wheelie bin. Then he sat down at the table and stared at the cardboard box.

Outside a cloud passed and a shaft of pale sunlight fell through the open door across the vinyl tiles. Slowly, heliotropically, Dalziel's head turned. And he saw again Mickledore bursting out of the library and pausing for a moment as he too looked towards freedom and the sunlit doorway, before turning to the stairs. A choice had been made, that much Dalziel had registered, but he'd been a young detective then, ambitious and eager, well able to put one and one together to make three, but not yet aware how much more important it was to put halves and quarters and thirds together till you got one. So he'd gone in pursuit, and only fractionally registered as odd that Mickledore had turned at bay not in his own but in James Westropp's dressing-room. Fractions. He had no thought of anything except the brightness of his own future under Tallantire's patronage as he advanced, equally indifferent to both the clothing and the abuse which Mickledore hurled at him. Nor did the speed with which the man calmed down at his first touch strike him as anything other than part of that smoothing of the way which the divine crossing-sweeper had ordained for him lately. Having to fetch the little girl's body up from the lake bottom had been a hiccup in that progress, but they had the bitch who'd done it safely stowed in a car outside, and this condescending, self-inflated prat was soon going to join her. That task accomplished, he had rejoined Tallantire on the terrace. 'Nicely done, lad. You've handled yourself well all through this, and it'll not be forgotten. I reckon we could be into the big black headlines tomorrow.' 'I'd not be so sure, sir,' warned Dalziel. 'There's plenty as'll want to put the mufflers on this one, double wrapped.' 'You reckon? You could be right, Andy. Mind you, it wouldn't surprise me if there'd been a serious leak, and the Press and telly boys knew I'd be bringing someone in this afternoon,' said Tallantire, his eyelid drooping in the hint of a wink. 'Now, I'm off. You tidy things up here. It'll be good practice for you. But don't worry, I'll see you get your share of the credit. And I'll make sure the buggers know the circus is coming to town!' A few moments later the little procession took off with bells sounding and lights flashing. Grinning, Dalziel went back into the house, thinking nothing of fractions, nothing of anything except short-term celebration and long-term promotion. What took him back into Westropp's room he did not know. This was not the kind of tidying up that Tallantire meant. This should have been left to the labour of house-keeper or butler, manservant or maidservant. Perhaps it was because something about the very idea of servants got up his nose that he found himself hanging up the clothes Mickledore had dragged from the wardrobe. Or perhaps after all his mind was already developing its sensitivity to fractions. But his mind stuck at whole numbers when he noticed the faint flecks of colour, grey and brown, on the cuffs of the soiled dress shirt which had fallen from the linen basket. He sniffed at the flecks, convinced himself they had no smell, looked further in hope of finding nothing, found instead a handkerchief, crumpled now but with folds that suggested it had adorned a breast pocket, and marked with streaks of what might have been oil. Such streaks as you might get if you rubbed the cloth along the barrel of a newly cleaned gun. He turned to the wardrobe. The dark cloth of the dinner jacket showed nothing around the cuffs, though of course darkness would be no protection against a paraffin test. It was all guesswork, not even that, for he refused to let his mind make such dangerous guesses. It was not as if there were anything of real substance here, anything solid… then his fingers had felt the shape of the key in the jacket pocket. No reason why Westropp shouldn't have such a key. It was a common enough design. Of course, if it turned out it was almost exactly the same as the gunroom key, yet wouldn't open the lock… Only one way to find out. If he wanted to find out. Slowly he stood upright. Behind him a voice said, 'Excuse me, but there is a situation downstairs which I think you should deal with.' It was Gilchrist the butler, his voice despite everything still pitched at exactly that level of courteous neutrality which placed policemen somewhere between tradesmen and gamekeepers.

Leaving Gilchrist looking in distaste at the untidy room, Dalziel descended to the hallway. It was at once clear that Tallantire's leak had been too successful, and if the main circus was opening in town, a substantial sideshow was developing here. The Partridge family, en route to their car, had been ambushed on the terrace by a media mob and beaten an inglorious retreat to the library. Here, with curtains drawn to deter prying cameras, in the vigorous language of both the stable and the hustings, Dalziel was commanded to do something. It took an hour of threats, lies, and promises, to persuade the journalists that there was nowt for their circulation here and they were missing the real story back in town where even now Ralph Mickledore was being paraded through the streets in a gilded cage.