Reginald Hill - An April Shroud

'Thank you, sir,' he said. 'Nice to see you. Can I show you round?'

'I don't think so,' said Dalziel. 'Seen one, you've seen 'em all as the actress said. But you might be able to help me on another matter.'

He pulled up a chair and sat opposite Cross who smiled slightly. Dalziel decided this wasn't insubordinate and grinned back.

'Family by the name of Fielding,' he said. 'They live about ten miles out of town near a village called Low Fold.'

'I know them,' said Cross. 'A big house; Lake House it's called. They're converting part of it to a restaurant. Mr Fielding died recently. That the one?'

'That's it,' said Dalziel.

'Ah,' said Cross.

Dalziel watched and waited for a moment scratching his left buttock vigorously, a luxury he had been consciously eschewing in the company of Bonnie Fielding.

'I'm a stranger here,' he said after a while. 'I don't understand all the dialect. Ah. What does that mean? Nice weather we've been having? Or hello cheeky, give us a kiss? It's important I know.'

'Sorry, sir,' said Cross. 'I was just wondering; I mean are you a friend, or what?'

‘It makes a difference? That's a start. I never knew these people existed till yesterday when they helped me after my car broke down. Now I'm curious. That help you?'

'Thank you, sir,' said Cross, rising and going to a filing cabinet. 'They're well known in the locality, the Fieldings. They've been around for about eight years now, and, of course, Mrs Fielding was here before that when her first husband was alive. Here we are.'

He extracted a file and returned to the desk.

'The house belonged to Mr Percival, of course.'

'Who?'

'The first husband. The Percivals were very well known. Been around a long time. Not your aristocracy though they made some claims, but comfortably off. Their money came from trade, I believe.'

He said the word as though it still had a definite pejorative meaning in these parts.

'Trade?' echoed Dalziel.

'That's right, but distant enough to be all right. Too distant, perhaps. It was cotton mainly and the Percivals were worse hit than most during the slump. I don't know the ins-and-outs but by the end of the war, I get the impression they were pretty well finished financially. And as a family too. The war saw three of 'em off, two in action, one in the blitz. The older survivors dropped off pretty rapidly afterwards, and Michael Percival, your Mrs Fielding's first, got what little survived of the family fortune all concentrated in his own bank balance. It seems to have been enough for him to live modestly on – by his standards – and his wife too, when they got married in 1954. The girl, Louisa, was born the following year and a couple of years later, Percival died. Six months after that, Mrs Percival married Mr Fielding.'

'The father of her eldest son, you knew that?' said Dalziel.

'Oh yes. She made no secret of it. The local gentry didn't like it. They prefer to hide their bastards. But she didn't care. They weren't around much for a few years in any case. The house was let and the Fieldings, according to best report, were living it up in swinging London. But money doesn't last forever and they'd spent so little of it on maintaining the house that it became unlettable. Also the marshlands where the tenants used to go shooting were drained and reclaimed in the mid-sixties and no one was interested in the place any more. So they came back to live in it. By this time, they had had the youngest boy, of course, and they brought Mr Fielding's father along, to help pay the rates, I suppose. He's some kind of writer, they tell me.'

He spoke, Dalziel noted approvingly, as if to be some kind of writer was the equivalent of being physically handicapped.

'You know a lot about these people, Sergeant,' he said.

'I did a bit of research when this last business occurred,' said Cross. 'You heard about it?'

'You tell me,' said Dalziel.

Cross opened his file.

'The deceased, Conrad Fielding, was discovered by his wife in what they're calling the Banqueting Hall at Lake House. Unfortunately by the time we became involved the body had been moved, but according to Mrs Fielding's statement the man was lying on the floor there – ' he passed over a glossy half-plate print of the Hall floor on which an outline of a body had been chalked ' – with his chest pierced by the bit of an electric drill. The drill was still switched on. There was a ladder lying alongside the body, and there were drill marks in the wall about twenty feet up. It seems that the building contractors had packed up work till they got paid and Mr Fielding had been trying to do it himself. The coroner decided that the ladder had slipped, he'd fallen down with the drill in his hand with the switch locked on, and unfortunately had fallen right on to the bit. Three-eighths doing two thousand four hundred revs. It makes a hole like that.'

'I'd have expected it neater,' said Dalziel, looking at the close-up of the naked chest on a mortuary slab.

'The bit stayed in the wound after death,' said Cross. 'The weight of the drill would force the bit sideways through the flesh till an equilibrium was reached. That's what the doctor said. Here's the p.m. report.'

Dalziel scanned it quickly, expertly. He usually left it to his subordinates to extract what was important from technical reports and relay it to him succinctly and accurately. But Cross had not been moulded on the master- potter's wheel.

'So,' he said. 'Accident. What's your interest?'

'We've a duty to investigate all sudden deaths, sir,' said Cross blandly.

'Get knotted,' said Dalziel amiably, ‘If I fell off this chair and broke my neck, you wouldn't dig into my family history for the past thirty years. So?'

'There were a couple of things,' said Cross slowly. 'First, the way they all behaved. They're an odd lot up at Lake House, you may have noticed, but you'd have expected a bit of, well, respect. Instead they all chattered away, ten to the dozen, and seemed bent on carrying on just as normal, except that they were a bit annoyed at the disturbance. Mark you, I didn't see any of them till some time after the death, so I can't report on immediate reactions. Mrs Fielding seemed a bit distressed, but very much in control, and the boy, Nigel, seemed genuinely upset. But the others… well!'

'Even the old man?'

'Old Hereward? He was the oddest of all. No sign of grief but he said, "I told him no good would come of it. I told him," and that was all. Not another word.'

Dalziel glanced at his watch. He was running out of time.

'You said there were a couple of things which aroused your interest. What else besides the family reaction?'

'There was a phone call,' said Cross. 'Not to us, but to the insurance company carrying Fielding's policies. One of their investigators, Spinx they called him, came round to tell us. Co-operation, he called it. What he was after was for us to tell him they needn't pay up! Evidently someone rang up their office the day after the death and said they should look very closely at the circumstances before handing out any money. Well, we have to take notice.'

'Male or female?' demanded Dalziel.

'A woman, they think, though it could have been a male falsetto. Look, sir, can I ask if you're on to something? I mean, I don't want to sound as if I'm telling you your job, but it is my case.'

Cross stared at him defiantly. He's quite right, thought Dalziel. Being his superior gives me no right to act in a bullying, arrogant way.

'Just curiosity, lad,' he said with a disarming grin, showing teeth which were as perfect and as reassuring as a shark's. 'I might be spending a couple of days with these people and I wanted to know what I was getting into. From what you tell me, there's nothing to worry about. There's always someone ready to make nasty phone calls. And as for their reactions, well, we're all entitled to be different, aren't we? It'd be a grey place if all folks were the same.'