Arms and the Women (31 page)

She resumed her unpacking, whistling, rather off key, 'In A Mountain Greenery'.

ii

drudgery divine

Philosophy rarely survived Andy Dalziel's presence for long without cheerfulness breaking in or wind breaking out.

This morning, however, when on a summons which lacked much of its customary force, being audible no more than half a furlong, Pascoe and Wield attended their prince's matutinal levee, they found him apparently as subdued in spirit as he was in voice, chins on his chest, eyes hooded, and in a curiously contemplative frame of mind.

'Kelly Cornelius,' he said in an incantatory tone, like a Buddhist priest, or in profile Buddha himself, proclaiming the morning's mantra.

Pascoe, fresh from seeing Ellie and Rosie off to Axness under the, to him, reassuring tutelage of Shirley Novello, flashed a grin at Wield, and echoed with a mocking sonority, 'Kelly Cornelius.'

'That's right,' said the Fat Man, nodding slowly as if the DCI had made some profound observation. 'It's all in the way you look at things. Seeing what's really there.'

'A man that looks on glass,' said Pascoe, 'on it may stay his eye, or if he pleaseth, through it pass, and then the heav'n espie.'

The eyes unhooded and moved round to rest on him, balefully.

'You going religious, or wha'?'

'Just trying to demonstrate how, as so often, you are in accord with other fine minds of the past.'

'Well, don't bother. And that's not what I meant anyway. Not see
through
summat, but see what it really is even though it doesn't change.'

'Hope till hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates?'

The eyes closed again and the Fat Man sighed deeply.

'Can you cover its cage, Wieldy?'

'What you mean is, know what ought to be there and look till you see it?' said Wield.

'No. Not that either. That's just the same as seeing what you want to see, and that's the road to all kinds of trouble. Like marriage, for instance. No, I mean, knowing what has to be there, and going on as if you can see it even though you can't.'

'Like walking across an invisible bridge?' suggested Wield.

Dalziel considered this then his eyelids flicked up like the headlight covers on a sports car and the great face lit up.

'That's more like it. Aye. Though mebbe not completely invisible, mebbe what you can see is like a thread of cotton, and you've got to say to yourself, it's a bridge, and step out on it.'

'And if you're wrong?' said Pascoe.

'You're in the clag but at least that's a soft landing,' said Dalziel. 'Now what I see here is, Kelly Cornelius has got summat to do with what's been going off with your missus.'

'Well, maybe,' said Pascoe, surprised. 'As you know, I always had it down as a possibility, though I seem to recollect you weren't all that convinced...’

'You're missing the point, lad. You're seeing what's there, or at best what you'd like to be there; that someone's trying to frighten you into letting Cornelius out onbail. But no one ever tried to suggest you should do this, did they?'

'No, but she's out, isn't she?'

'Aye, because of me, not you. And no bugger tried to twist my arm either.'

'That's right, sir,' said Pascoe, accepting this as a clear admission of what he'd suspected, that the Fat Man's cock-up had been deliberate. 'So why did you do it, sir?'

'I did it because of you, lad. Nay, don't go all gooey-eyed, I don't mean 'cos I thought it 'ud get Ellie off the hook. I mean, because when all this crap started happening, the Cornelius case came out top of your list of possible connections. Why?'

'Sorry? We've just been through all this . . .'

'Aye, but ask yourself - all this stuff about someone out there wanting Kelly loose so's they could have a pop at her, how convincing does it really sound to you?'

'Not very, maybe, but a long way from impossible,' said Pascoe defensively.

'Oh aye? Listen to yourself. You'd not convince a barman you were old enough to serve shandy, sounding like that. But the fact remains, you still had this notion that the Cornelius case figured here somehow. So I got to thinking, mebbe there's more to it than you're saying. No, don't start pursing your lips, I don't mean you're deliberately holding summat back. It's just that you've always been a bit inclined to go wandering off in a world of thy own, and sometimes I've had to nudge you back onto the straight and narrow, and it could be I've nudged so hard in the past that this time you started making up the kind of reasons you thought I'd want to hear.'

Pascoe regarded Dalziel doubtfully. Introspection on this scale unprefaced by a skinful (which in the case of this skin was at least two gallons of bitter beer) was rare if not unique. And as their morning confab was taking place in Dalziel's office rather than the Black Bull, unless the Fat Man was pouring whisky on his cornflakes, he was stone-cold sober.

Only thing to do was take him seriously. There were men staring vacantly at whitewashed walls because they had not taken Dalziel seriously.

Also, he got the impression that the Fat Man knew more than he was saying. This didn't bother him. Dalziel was his own interpreter and he would make things plain when it suited him. That was how it had always been and always would be, world without end, amen.

He said, 'Give us a moment.'

He thought about Kelly Cornelius from the time of their first encounter at the accident on the Snake. He was gifted with great clarity of recall, and when someone made a strong impression on him, the recollected image could be eidetic in its intensity. Cornelius had certainly made that kind of impression. It wasn't just sex, though sexuality definitely had a part in it. It was an emanation of vitality, a sense of her feeling her life in every limb. She was the kind of woman who could light up a morgue, the kind of person it felt good to be around. This quality, plus her evident top-grade computer skills, must surely have given her an entree to the most glitzy and glamorous circles of high finance, and he wondered now as he'd wondered before how she'd ended up working in a relatively small-scale operation like Nortrust, having to bob and curtsey to provincial plonkers like George Ollershaw.

He set the thought aside as irrelevant to present purposes and ran on fast-forward through his subsequent encounters with the woman, up to and including the last time he'd opposed bail in court. When the magistrate had rejected the application, he'd looked across to the dock and she'd given him a thousand-watt don't-worry-about-it smile and he'd realized he was giving her a hey-I'm-really-sorry-about-it grimace.

He smiled now at the recollection and Dalziel said, 'Summat?'

'Sorry.'

And there wasn't likely to be any
summat,
he thought. Looked like the Fat Man had over-reached himself, and in the weirdest direction for a man whose usual attitude to psychology was to hate it as an unfilled can.

One more try before he told the silly old bugger he was slipping.

He turned down the brightness on Kelly Cornelius's image and ran the sequence once again.

And then, as when a man dazzled by the full moon turns his gaze aside and in the corner of his eye glimpses what was always there though unregarded, a star, and has to blink and quarter the sky several times before he finds it again, so now he saw a
summat
and looked again and saw it again, and still had to look a third time before he could acknowledge what he was looking at.

'What?' said Dalziel.

'When you were in court yesterday, you say you saw Superintendent Hubbard from Fraud?'

'Aye,' said Dalziel with retrospective relish. 'Saw him and spoke to him.'

'And was there someone with him?'

'Aye.'

'What did he look like?'

'Stocky. Dark hair, thinning. Mouth like a rusty hinge, take a crowbar to open it. Grey suit, good worsted, nice cut, but he stuffed his pockets like a greedy poacher.'

'So, not thirtyish, fair-haired, nice smile, Prince of Wales check and expensive dark-tan moccasins?'

'Not unless he'd had a nasty shock since you saw him .. hey, but, hang about!' The Fat Man riffled through the papers on his desk. That's Ellie's description of the guy who tried to snatch her! Are you saying . . . ?'

'Last time I was at court it was also the description of the man sitting with Hubbard,’ said Pascoe. 'And I saw them outside, getting into a BMW. Shit! You're right, sir. I must have made a sort of subliminal connection. But it wasn't just wanting to please teacher that made me look for better reasons for picking on the Cornelius case. I mean, for God's sake, even now I think you may be right, I still can't see that it makes any kind of sense.'

'Just coincidence, you think?'

'Why not? It happens. Unless you know something we don't,' said Pascoe.

'Day when I don't, I'll resign,' said the Fat Man. 'What's the time?'

'Quarter to one,' said Wield.

'Past Kelly Cornelius's check-in time, only she won't have shown and she's not going to show,' said Dalziel.

'Oh? And how do you know that?'

'She skipped yesterday. Jumped her keeper.'

'Her keeper?' said Pascoe. 'You were having her watched?'

'Not me.'

'Fraud, then?'

The great grey head shook ponderously.

'Who, then?'

'You recall a few years back coming to meet me at Heathrow and us ending up supping very old malt in some fancy VIP room with a long streak of evasiveness called Sempernel? Well, he came to see me last night.'

Pascoe said disbelievingly, 'But I thought he was Intelligence?'

'He'd not disagree.'

'You saying there's some kind of security angle here?' cried Pascoe, now thoroughly alarmed. 'Jesus! I thought it was just decent old-fashioned thugs we had to be worried about!'

'Oh, I don't think our Kelly need worry about old-fashioned thugs. Take a look at this. One of them e-mail things, came for me yesterday.'

He tossed Pascoe the print-out. He read it with Wield looking over his shoulder.

When he finished he said urgently, 'What the hell's going on, Andy? What's all this got to do with Ellie?'

'Wish I knew, lad. Wasn't dead sure it had anything till you made the connection with Hubbard's buttie in court.'

'But if Sempernel came to see you . . . ? What did he want?'

'Find out what I were up to fucking about with the Cornelius case. Plus he wanted to let me know in advance she'd flown the coop.'

'So that you could help to get her back?'

'Just the opposite. He ended up putting down a very serious warning that from now on in, I should keep my neb out. Go through the motions, but keep my distance. I got the same message from Desperate Dan when I arrived this morning, only without the menaces.'

'Menaces?'

'Oh aye. Old Pimpernel talks polite, but he laid it on the line. Any interference and they'll chop off my legs. For starters.'

'So you're going to steer clear, are you?' said Pascoe disbelievingly.

'Think I should have a bit more bottle, do you, lad?' asked Dalziel. 'Mebbe before you start sounding the charge from the rear, you should know that Sempernel made it clear it weren't just my legs on the block. Friends and colleagues got the black spot too. You fancy mixing it with the Funny Buggers, do you?'

'I fancy finding out why they started mixing it with Ellie in the first place,’ retorted Pascoe.

'That's reasonable. Wieldy, you got owt to say?'

The sergeant said, 'I'm just wondering why they've warned you off, sir. Don't make sense. All right, you stuck your neb in and she got bail then took the chance to do a runner. I can see how they'd be a bit pissed off with you, but I can't see why they wouldn't be glad of any local help they could get to track her down. That's cutting off your nose to spite your face.'

Dalziel looked at his sergeant and Pascoe read his thought.
In your case, lad, likely no bugger would notice.
But happily it remained unspoken.

Instead, the Fat Man said, 'Good point. I got to thinking about it last night.'

In fact, it was Cap Marvell who'd got to think about it, poking him in the middle of the night to at the same time make the point and offer a solution. Then, like the sensible lass she was, she'd suggested that with them both being awake they might as well improve the shining hour.

He smiled reminscently, caught Pascoe's curious gaze, frowned and said, 'I think I did them a favour. I reckon Cornelius caught them on the hop when she did her first runner and headed off to the airport. It was you that sorted that out by getting suspicious after the accident. Past couple of weeks they've been rethinking the situation and wondering how to play it. Letting her think she'd got away from them again was one option, but she's bright enough to twig if they made it too obvious. So when I came along and did it for them they were probably chuffed to buggery. Which means they don't want our help in finding her because . . .'