Reginald Hill - Bones and Silence

Wield found Pamela Waterson’s room on the third floor. When she opened the door she regarded him blankly for a second, then said, ‘Oh, it’s you,’ and turned away.

He followed her into the room where she flopped wearily into a chair. Her long blonde hair was loose now, its bright tresses about her face accentuating the dark shadows under her eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I can see you’re very tired.’

‘You don’t have to be a detective to work that out,’ she answered bitterly. ‘I was tired when I came off my last shift two hours late because my relief had a car accident. Then I only managed an hour’s sleep before I was due on again –’

‘Why was that?’ interrupted Wield.

‘Nothing special,’ she said, lighting her third cigarette since his arrival. ‘Life goes on, all the ordinary tedious things that take a few minutes when you’re on top of them. Shopping, paying bills, washing, ironing –’

‘Do you have a family, Mrs Waterson?’ he interrupted again.

‘Do I look like I have a family?’ she said, gesturing around.

Presumably she simply meant that a bedsitter in a nurses’ block was not a place to bring up a family, but Wield seized the opportunity for an open examination of the room.

There was little to be learned from the mainly institutional furniture. On the wall above the bed there was a little wooden crucifix; on another wall above a small bookcase hung a charcoal sketch of a female head whose laughing vitality delayed identification with the weary woman before him. He let his gaze fall to the books. Pascoe laid great store on books as revealers of personality. Mrs Waterson’s choice ran mainly to biography and her taste was wide. There were a couple of Royals, Charles and Earl Mountbatten; several showbiz, including Monroe, Garland, the Beatles and Olivier; one political, Lloyd George; and a scattering of literary, ranging from Byron and Shelley through Emily Brontë and Oscar Wilde to Sylvia Plath and Simone de Beauvoir.

Looking for the meaning of her own life in other people’s patterns was the way Pascoe would probably see it. Dalziel on the other hand would say, ‘Sod the books! Poke about behind them, see what she’s hiding!’

Wield knew all about hiding, knew also that we hide far less than we think. For years he had hidden his true sexual identity behind the dustjacket of a straight, middle-of-the-road, unemotional cop. But when he finally decided to come out, no delicate glowing butterfly emerged. He was still the same old lumpy green caterpillar nibbling systematically at the leaf till the holes joined up and he could see clear to the other side.

He returned now to his nibbling and pointed at the crucifix.

‘You’re a Catholic, are you, Mrs Waterson?’

‘What? Oh, I see. And that means I should be producing every year like a brood mare?’

‘I didn’t say that. But there could be kids who stayed with their dad or went to gran when the bust-up happened.’

‘Well, there weren’t. And what do you know about my bust-up? Who’ve you been talking to? Some tittle-tattle at the hospital? God, if they worked as hard as I do, they’d have no time to gossip!’

She spoke with a fervour which brought colour to her wan cheeks. Wield, who had been trying to apportion the turmoil he discerned here between concern for her work and other causes possibly linked to his investigation, pushed a large emotional counter towards the job.

‘Do you like being a nurse?’ he asked with deliberate fatuity.

‘Like? You mean, is it a vocation? Or, do I go around the wards singing?’

‘Bit of both, I suppose. I mean, you must be good at it. How old are you, twenty-six, twenty-seven? And you’re a ward sister already.’

She laughed and lit another cigarette.

‘I’m twenty-four, Sergeant, and when I came here three years ago, they said I looked sixteen. And as for being a sister, I’m that because these days nurses are coming in in dribs and leaving in droves. Me, I reckon I didn’t have half the experience necessary for it, and sometimes when I’m alone on the ward in the middle of the night and it’s all quiet except for the odd groan and fart, and I can hardly keep my eyes open, I get to thinking that if something happens, some life or death emergency, I’m the one who’ll be making the decisions till they rouse some poor bloody doctor who can probably hardly keep his eyes open either. Then I start shaking, partly with fear and partly with anger, at the sheer unfairness of expecting me to do the job at all.’

How relevant was all this? wondered Wield. It might have something to do with the case in terms of the break-up of the Waterson marriage. Or it might be a deliberate tactic of diversion. But this he doubted. There was too much genuine passion not to mention desperation for this outburst to be tactical.

It was time to get back to the point.

‘So,’ he said, ‘when you came on shift today you were told your husband had been admitted.’

‘Not straight away,’ she said. ‘Not for a couple of hours. It was Dr Marwood who told me.’

‘What was your reaction?’

‘Well, I wanted to know if he was all right, naturally. And when Ellison … Dr Marwood said it was just some kind of nervous tension and he’d been sedated but seemed fine this morning, I got worried in case it had something to do with me.’

‘Would that have surprised you?’

She thought about this, then said, ‘Yes, it would. He could get very emotional, Greg, you know, fly off the handle, have a fit of what they’d call hysterics in a woman. But it was always at something specific. Often it was completely illogical, but there had to be something, not just sitting at home brooding about things that had happened. And in any case, I doubt if he did much brooding about what had happened to us.’

‘What had happened to you, Mrs Waterson?’ asked Wield.

‘I don’t see that that has anything to do with you,’ she retorted. ‘Look, what you’re here for is to find if I can help you track down Greg, right? Well, I can’t. I walked out on him three weeks ago and till this morning I’d not seen him since.’

‘Mrs Waterson, when I arrived this morning, you didn’t look like, well, like a woman separated from her husband.’

‘Because I was letting him kiss me and feel me up?’

‘That’s right.’

She smiled and drew on her cigarette, both with visible effort.

‘Sergeant, I went to see him in my break. I was exhausted. You can’t imagine what a relief it was to talk to someone who wasn’t talking to me professionally. And when he got hold of me, well, at least he wasn’t grabbing at me to complain about a pain or ask for a bedpan. It was nice and soothing when he started stroking me, like a massage. Oh yes, when you arrived I probably looked as if I was ready to get into bed with him, and I was. But not to make love, just to sleep … sleep … sleep …’

She leaned back and closed her eyes. Wield felt very sorry for her but not so sorry that he was going to return to Dalziel with questions unasked.

He said, ‘What did you and your husband talk about this morning?’

She opened her eyes with difficulty and looked at him blankly.

‘What did he say about the reasons for him being there?’ he pressed.

‘What makes you think he said anything?’ she evaded.

‘Well, so far you’ve not asked me a single question about it, luv,’ he said. ‘And that sounds like a lack of curiosity which could be a record.’

‘You’re not daft,’ she said wearily. ‘All right. He told me everything. He’d written it all down. Did he not show it to you? Why’d that fat bobby, Dalziel, not come himself?’

That fat bobby . Wield liked it. But Waterson hadn’t mentioned Dalziel in his written statement. Significant?