Reginald Hill - Bones and Silence

‘Bats,’ said the girl.

‘What?’

‘Bats. Pipistrelles, I think they call them.’

He took an involuntary step backwards. Dark places he’d never cared much for, even less since his experience down the mine. And the creatures of darkness, in particular bats, made him shudder. Ellie, in whom he detected a definite green shift in recent months, had become a member of a local Bat Preservation Group. Had she opted for whales or wild orchids, he could have gone along with her in passion, perhaps even in person; but while intellectually one hundred per cent in favour of the rights of bats, the thought of actually touching them filled him with horror.

‘It’s all right. They’re hibernating,’ said Shirley Appleyard.

Ashamed of being detected in this unmanly behaviour, Pascoe said brusquely, ‘Why’s this place not used for anything?’

‘Don’t know. There was some talk of Mrs Swain turning it into an indoor shooting gallery.’

‘And what happened?’

‘Came to nowt. Mebbe because of the bats. You can’t disturb them, you know. Or mebbe Mr Swain didn’t like the idea because of his brother.’

‘His brother?’

‘The one who used to own this place. Tom Swain.’

It rang a faint bell.

‘Didn’t he …?’

‘Shot himself a few years back. In here,’ said the girl, deadpan.

‘In here? Not very lucky with guns, the Swains, are they?’

The girl didn’t reply. Pascoe looked around the barn. Bats and a ghost. He couldn’t blame Swain for objecting to his wife’s proposal.

He said, ‘It looks as if someone’s got some plan for it now.’

‘Because it’s been cleared out?’ The girl shrugged. ‘There was nothing but a load of rusty old farm stuff here. Mr Swain got rid of it a couple of weeks back.’

‘So he is planning to use it?’

‘Mebbe. I think he were more interested in the money he got for the scrap.’

‘Really?’ said Pascoe, alert to this hint of financial problems. ‘Money a bit short, is it?’

‘You’d need to ask Mr Swain or my dad about that,’ said the girl.

‘Sorry. I’m not going behind their backs, but you did mention the scrap,’ he said conciliatorily.

‘Yes, I did,’ she admitted. ‘It were just that it amused me at the time.’

She looked the kind of person who might well treasure up anything which proved a source of amusement.

‘What was funny about it?’ he asked.

‘Just the name of the dealer, that was all. They called him Swindles.’

‘Joe Swindles?’ said Pascoe.

‘That’s right. You know him? That figures.’

It was true that the police and Joe Swindles were long acquainted, but the old boy had gone for some years now without overstepping the mark, and in fairness Pascoe said, ‘Just socially. There’s nothing against him.’

‘Too clever, is he?’

Pascoe laughed, then stopped as he was sure he heard a respondent squeaking from up in the rafters.

He said, ‘Well, that’ll do, I think,’ and stepped out into the sunlight.

The girl took this as her dismissal and went back up the stairway to her office without saying anything more.

He watched her, frowning, then went back into the house.

Seymour was on his knees in the kitchen with his head in the electric oven.

‘If you’re trying to kill yourself,’ said Pascoe, ‘I’d opt for gas. If not, then pack up. I’ll just ring in, then we’re on our way to the gun club.’

He dialled the station and got through to Wield.

‘Is he in?’ he asked.

‘Eden Thackeray’s turned up to see Swain,’ said the Sergeant. ‘The Super’s taken him upstairs for a chat and a drink.’

‘Will he be long?’

‘Depends,’ said Wield. ‘You know he fixed up for Swain to be checked out for drugs? Well, the doctor’s been held up on some emergency and the Super won’t be wanting to let old Eden at his client before he’s been given the once over. Is it anything important?’

‘Just a negative on drugs at Moscow,’ said Pascoe. ‘But the business doesn’t look too healthy financially. Send him a note in, will you? How’d you get on?’

Wield gave him a brief account of his interview with Mrs Waterson. As he listened Pascoe flicked through the pages of the wedding album which he’d laid on the table by the phone. Shirley Appleyard had been a little ungenerous. Certainly at the time she was married, Gail Swain had been rather more than all right. He paused at an all-female group photograph by the side of a palm-fringed swimming pool. Even among those tanned and cosseted women she stood out, slim, radiant, her fair hair glowing like a candle flame.

But as he drove away from Moscow Farm a few moments later it was an image of a stocky, unkempt, pale-faced woman reading Jane Eyre that he took with him.

‘Philip Swain is an interesting, not to say complex character,’ said Eden Thackeray. ‘I’m surprised you were not previously acquainted, Andrew.’

‘We were. He’s the jobbing builder mucking up our car park,’ said Dalziel.

‘I mean socially. As twin luminaries in our great social galaxy, I would have expected your orbits to cross before now.’

Dalziel grinned. He enjoyed Thackeray’s gentle pisstaking in much the same way as the solicitor enjoyed his more gamesome assaults. Superficially everything about the two men was different, but it was mainly a difference of style. Beneath his bland exterior, the senior partner of Messrs Thackeray, Amberson, Mellor and Thackeray was as sharp, ruthless, and even anarchic as Dalziel himself.

‘They’ve crossed now,’ said the fat man. ‘And they used to build gibbets at crossroads. So why’s he interesting, apart from having shot his missus?’

‘Andrew, please. A slip of the tongue, I realize, but you really should be more careful.’

‘I’m the most careful bugger you’ll meet in a summer day at Scarborough Fair,’ said Dalziel. But he smiled as he spoke. Information came before provocation. He had said nothing yet about the content of his own witness statement. On the other hand, to balance matters, he hadn’t mentioned Waterson’s either, nor the latter’s defection.

‘Mrs Swain’s suicide is part of a long tragic history for that family,’ resumed Thackeray. ‘He’s a Swain of Currthwaite, you knew that, of course?’

‘I know he lives out there. I thought he’d be just another townie with a daft American wife playing at country living.’

‘Not entirely unjust,’ admitted Thackeray, holding his glass to the light to admire the crystal facets and also, apparently fortuitously, to point its emptiness. Dalziel groaned satirically and refilled it with the twelve-year-old Islay he’d dug out of his desk on the lawyer’s arrival.

‘How kind. Yes, Swain is by education and, I suspect, inclination, a townie. But there have been Swains at Currthwaite since Elizabeth’s day. Minor country gentry rather than good yeoman stock, I’d say. Indeed, they have usually appeared if not reluctant, certainly rather feckless farmers. But with a great sense of loyalty to the place. They were forever getting into debt, and on many occasions even lost the farm, but somehow they always contrived to get it back. Their saving grace has been that, despite the fact that few of them have shown any talent for safe investment and humdrum business, there is a consistently recurring strain of ingenuity and opportunism which has hitherto pulled them back from the brink of complete disaster.’

‘Good con-men, that’s what you mean?’ said Dalziel.

Thackeray sighed and said, ‘What I mean is what I say, Andrew. To continue, Philip is the product of the family’s last period of prosperity in the post-war years.’