Reginald Hill - Midnight Fugue

‘There may have been some overlaps,’ said Glendower reluctantly.

‘Oh, Hooky, Hooky. First rule of the game is pay for your own naughties else you really will end up paying for them. Listen, I’ve got to go. Got a murder case to investigate, remember?’

‘Of course you have. Best of luck with that. I hope you catch the bugger. And, Andy, thanks again. Like I say, I thought that…well I thought some pretty uncharitable things…sorry. I’ll not forget this.’

‘Good luck, Hooky,’ said Dalziel. ‘By the by, signing in for your mucky weekend as Mr and Mrs Rowan Williams-loved it!’

He glanced at Pascoe again, looking to share a smile, but the DCI’s face could have belonged to a Scottish Nationalist at the Glasgow Empire listening to an English comic telling kilt jokes on a Saturday night.

‘So that’s how you guessed the dead man might be a Welsh journalist,’ he said.

‘Aye,’ said the Fat Man. ‘Remember that bint in the white Mondeo? I clocked it had the same registration letters as Hooky’s tank. So I checked if there were a wedding on at the Keldale over the weekend. There weren’t. And when I saw there was no Glendower in the registration book, just a Mr and Mrs Rowan Williams, I rang our Control and put out a call on Hooky here and in Lancs. Guessed he’d be heading west.’

‘You wanted to warn him,’ said Pascoe accusingly.

‘Aye. Why not?’ said Dalziel. ‘I’d do the same for you, and hope you would for me.’

‘Maybe,’ said Pascoe. ‘But this is really going to turn a spotlight on us. The press will love it. Top cop’s dirty weekend gets teenage reporter killed. Jesus.’

‘It’s not Hooky’s fault,’ protested Dalziel. ‘Any more than it’s my fault for getting him bumped off that table. Any more than it’s your fault for not checking up on me yesterday like you promised Cap you would.’

Pascoe looked at him in alarm and puzzlement.

‘Did she tell you that she’d asked me?’

‘No, but I’d lay money on it she did. You were too busy, though. Right?’

‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact. But I don’t see what on earth this has to do with anything.’

Dalziel thought of explaining that if he hadn’t spent such a miserable Saturday he might not have woken on Sunday thinking it must be Monday…but it didn’t seem worth the effort.

He said, ‘All I mean is, if there’s only one guy this is all down to, I reckon it has to be yon Tory milch-cow, Goldie Gidman.’

Before Pascoe could deconstruct this, his phone rang.

He said, ‘Hi, Wieldy,’ listened, said, ‘OK. I’ll let you know what we find,’ and switched off. Dalziel wasn’t surprised. A Wield call to give information was inevitably compact and comprehensive.

Pascoe said, ‘Gwyn Jones has turned up. That idiot Watkins managed to give him the bad news before Wieldy could get to him. He’s gone from being shattered to screaming that it’s all down to Goldie Gidman and why aren’t we sticking red-hot needles under his nails to get him to talk?’

‘Don’t often agree with a journalist, but maybe he’s got something,’ said Dalziel. ‘Here we go!’

He swung across the carriageway to a fanfare of horns from the oncoming traffic and turned eastward down a narrow unclassified road.

‘You’re sure this is right?’ said Pascoe a few minutes later, after he’d recovered his composure sufficiently to speak without a tremolo.

‘When I were a young cop, you had to do the Mid-Yorkshire Knowledge,’ said Dalziel. ‘Find your way to every pub within twenty miles of the town centre. There. Told you.’

Ahead they saw a roadside pub with a sign swinging in the evening breeze. On the sign was painted a dejected-looking figure sitting at the foot of a bald hill.

‘The Lost Traveller,’ Pascoe read. ‘After Blake, do you think?’

‘As in, “I’ve lost me way, send for Sexton Blake,” you mean?’ said Dalziel.

Pursuit of this interesting literary divagation was prevented by the sight of a red car parked at the bottom of the steep hill that fell away from the pub.

Dalziel pulled in to the side and dug up a pair of binoculars from the clutter on the back seat.

‘No sign of life,’ he said.

He let the car roll down the hill and braked a few yards short of the Nissan.

The two detectives got out and approached cautiously.

The car was unlocked and empty, a mobile phone sat in its holder.

They looked at each other then went round to the rear.

Pascoe opened the boot and they both let out a sigh of relief when they saw nothing but luggage.

Dalziel headed back to his car while Pascoe got on the phone to Wield and told him what was happening. As they spoke, his eyes were on the Fat Man who was studying a map. Suddenly he nodded, hurled the map unfolded into the back of the car and called, ‘Right, come on!’

‘Where? Why? Andy, we should wait here. The ARU will be here in a couple of minutes…’

The Fat Man ignored him and bellowed in the general direction of the phone, ‘Wieldy, tell ’em to follow us. Straight on down past the red car, T-junction, turn left, quarter mile on right, small quarry.’

When the flow turns into a tsunami, you’ve no choice but to go with it.

‘Wieldy, you get that?’ said Pascoe.

‘Think they likely got it in Shetland,’ said Wield.

The car was moving already as Pascoe scrambled in.

‘Andy, where are we going?’ he gasped.

‘The sort of nice quiet spot a pair of psychos might take a woman to ask her some personal questions,’ said Dalziel, leaning his considerable weight on the accelerator. In a less solid car, his foot might well have gone through the floor and hit the road.

‘We can’t know for sure the Delays have got her, and even if they have, they’re certainly not going to hang around here,’ protested Pascoe.

‘Wrong,’ said Dalziel. ‘They’ll be in a hurry, no time for subtlety. It’ll be water-boarding from the start, or if they’re short of water, they’ll slap her around a bit to show they’re serious, then stick a gun up her jaxy and start counting down from ten.’

Pascoe still looked dubious.

‘You don’t even know what direction they went in,’ he said.

‘They didn’t drive back, else we’d have seen them. No, this is where they’ll be, mark my words.’

He spoke with all the oracular authority of his prime, that long period during which his judgments, though often cloudily mysterious, almost inevitably turned out to be correct, a period that some posited had come to an end when he walked with godlike certainty straight into the blast of a terrorist explosion.

Pascoe felt the man’s old power, but he also recalled the moment not long before when his legs had given way on hearing the news of Novello’s recovery. That burden of responsibility had clearly weighed heavy. Was he now feeling the same sense of having let the Wolfe woman down? And was it himself he was trying to reassure by this assertion of confidence in what at best had to be a fairly wild guess?

The next few minutes would tell.

And which would be worse? Dalziel proved wrong and the quarry empty?

Or Dalziel proved right and the two unarmed policemen confronted by a killer with a shotgun?

Though perhaps, thought Pascoe with a kind of hysterical merriment as they approached the T-junction with no perceptible diminution of speed, perhaps the fat bastard’s driving will kill us both first!

I’m not thinking straight, thought Fleur Delay. Too much pressure, too many pills.

The laptop had shown the Nissan standing still on an unclassified road.

A rendezvous, she’d decided. If they got there in time, they’d find the Wolfes sitting together in the car, talking. Or maybe in his car. When they separated, follow him and grab him. She didn’t want any truck with the woman. Disappearing a guy who has already disappeared was no problem. Disappearing the blonde was going to raise complications.