Reginald Hill - An April Shroud

‘It's about language,' explained Uniff. 'Mave does the animations. Not bad, eh? No sound yet. That's a problem. What do you think? Do we need those O's vocalized?'

The film ran on. Eventually a stone age doctor presented his stone age patient with a bill. The mouth rounded to an O, the eyes to two more, then they all expanded and exploded into a torrent of letters.

'How'd you like that?' asked Uniff as the film ran to an end. 'Commerce is the mother of language. Not love, hate, religion, sex. But money.'

'Well,' said Dalziel. ‘It's not very long is it?'

'Hell, man, that's just the opening sequence. Next we go on to a historical survey. The letters and words are the characters, you dig? All languages, all literatures. It's very funny, Mave's done marvels. All the time there's a struggle between the different functions of language. Finally figures start coming in until at the end we get nuclear physics formulae dominating, then the whole thing goes bang and we're back to O.'

'Interesting,' said Dalziel. 'I like a good cartoon. Cheaper to make than a real film, I suppose?'

He was just fishing for some indication of where the finance for the project came from, but Uniff pulled up the blinds angrily, seized a large envelope from a shelf and spilled a dozen or more glossy half-plate prints into Dalziel's lap.

'Those more in your line, Superintendent?'

Dalziel studied them gravely. He was not one of those who found the vagina in close-up a particularly appealing sight, not even when its owner appeared to have a traffic no entry sign tattooed on the inner thigh.

'In a way,' he said. 'Professionally speaking.'

Uniff retrieved the photographs hastily and returned them to their envelope. His anger had quickly vanished.

'They're harmless,' he said. 'I was just showing them to you, not asking you to buy them.'

'No need to get legalistic, Mr Uniff,' said Dalziel. 'Though you ought to know that under the Obscene Publication Acts, publication (that is, simply showing someone your dirty pictures) is an offence, whether done for gain or not. But you're in luck. I doubt if anything you've got here is liable to deprave or corrupt me. So let's forget I ever saw them, shall we, and try to remember where you went last night.'

According to Uniff he had simply gone into Orburn for a drink and stayed on after hours as a guest of the landlord. He coyly refused to give the name of the pub on the grounds that he didn't want to risk spoiling a good drinking place. Dalziel found this quite reasonable and, in any case, he had no real authority for, or purpose in, questioning the man, so he didn't press matters.

He went downstairs again and as he reached the hallway, the door to the servants' quarters opened and Arkwright emerged. Dalziel had never seen a pale Negro before and the sight touched him.

'Morning, Mr Arkwright,' said Dalziel with the jovial sympathy of one hard-drinking man for another. 'How are you feeling?'

'Terrible,' said Arkwright. 'Listen. I'm very sorry about all this, I don't know what happened.'

'Something you ate I should think,' said Dalziel, but observing that the man seemed genuinely distressed at what had passed he put on his avuncular air and added, 'Think nowt of it. They're all silly buggers here, you wouldn't be noticed.'

A little comforted by this, Arkwright let himself be led to coffee which comforted him even more.

'Penitent left, I suppose?'

'Yes, I think so.'

'Shithead,' said Arkwright. 'I hate that bloody man. He always wants me on a job with him. I'm his liberal credential.'

'I think he'll be after a divorce this morning,' said Dalziel.

Arkwright laughed, regretted it, suddenly sat upright as though at a memory returned and said, 'You put me to bed? Whose bed was I in?'

'Why?' asked Dalziel. 'Have you spewed or something?'

'No. It's just, I remember now, some time in the night, I was woken up. Some guy was pulling at the blankets and saying, "Annie, Annie." So I sat up and said, "Sir, you are mistaken," and this guy shrieked like he was wetting his pants and ran.'

Dalziel thought about it for a moment, then as the image of Arkwright's coal black face emerging from the blankets sharpened in his mind he began to laugh. After a while with great care, Arkwright began to laugh too.

'This man,' said Dalziel finally, wiping his eyes with the khaki awning he used as a handkerchief. 'Did you recognize him? Was he one of the men you met yesterday afternoon?'

'I can't say,' said Arkwright. 'Might be. But it was dark and I was still very drunk. It must have been pretty early. He sounded urgent. I suppose I was lucky he didn't just climb in and get on with it.'

Dalziel smiled and nodded. The obvious interpretation of the intrusion would do for Arkwright, but he was by no means sure that the intruder's purpose had been sexual.

But the more interesting question was, who in this house had not heard last night of the discovered theft and Annie Greave's disappearance?

Cross arrived shortly before ten bearing with him a preliminary autopsy report which indicated that Spinx had died from drowning and that the injury on his head was consistent with his having struck the wooden support as he fell. With grim amusement Dalziel recognized in Cross the mixture of relief and disappointment an over-worked, middle-aged but still ambitious detective sergeant ought to feel.

'Never mind, lad,' he said. 'Perhaps there'll be an outbreak of double parking in the town square. No sign of Mrs Greave?'

'No, sir. Nor of Papworth either. Do you reckon they might have gone off together?'

'Without his clothes?' said Dalziel. 'I doubt it. And I can't see 'em as the great lovers somehow. Where'd they go anyway? He'd be as out of place in the middle of Liverpool as she was in the country.'

'That's what I thought,' said Cross. 'Makes you wonder how they met.'

'It does that,' agreed Dalziel who had been wondering this same thing for two days.

'I wonder if Mrs Fielding could help us there,' said Cross diffidently. 'She'd be the one who hired her, I suppose. What do you think, sir, knowing her as you do?'

Dalziel shot him a sharp glance. Christ! he thought. Could the rustic tom-toms work this quick? What did they do round here? Hide seismographs in the mattress?

'Why not ask her, Sergeant,' he said. 'And less of the us. I'm on holiday, remember?'

'Yes, sir,' said Cross.

Dalziel left him and strolled out of the room trying to look like a man whose only care in the world was whether to have one or two double scotches before lunch.

He met Bonnie in the hallway.

'Can we have a word together, Andy?' she asked. She looked very attractive in pea-green slacks and a tight silk blouse which would have gone seven times round Louisa and left enough to blow your nose on.

'Sergeant Cross is in there,' said Dalziel with a jerk of his head. 'I think his need's greater than mine.'

Again his rudeness only seemed to amuse her.

'I didn't realize you were a once-a-month man,' she said. 'Later then. Say in an hour? In my room.'

She brushed by him. The brief contact disturbed him more than he would have thought possible.

He wandered into the back of the house and looked in Papworth's room. Still empty, but now it bore signs of having been searched. Cross obviously didn't mind leaving traces of his passage.

Dalziel mused on Cross as he continued his stroll. He looked a good competent man, perhaps a bit long in the tooth for a sergeant but not yet hopeless of promotion. Perhaps he himself might put in a word …

Christalmighty! he suddenly laughed at himself. Lord sodding Dalziel dispensing bounty to the plebs! No. Cross could find another fairy godmother. Middle-aged superintendents needed belated christening gifts just as much as sergeants, though the one Dalziel wanted most of all just now had in fact been bountifully bestowed all those grey years ago and was only now beginning to run short.