Arms and the Women (32 page)

He looked at them expectantly.

'. . .because they think they already know where she's heading,' said Pascoe.

'And they don't want us tracking her down and banging her up again with no possibility of bail this time,' added Wield.

The three men fell silent for a while, each turning the matter in his mind like a 3-D computer projection.

'So what do we do?' asked Pascoe finally.

'Well, me, I like to know what's what on my patch,' said the Fat Man. 'But no need for anyone else to risk getting their legs chopped off. What say you, Pete?'

'I won't be happy till I know that whatever links this business to what happened to Ellie and Daphne Aldermann is done and finished,' said Pascoe.

They both looked at Wield who shrugged and said, 'My legs were always my worst feature.'

'Thank God for long trousers,' said Dalziel fervently. 'OK, let's give it a go. But carefully, eh? Like we're just covering ourselves by going through the motions. So where do we start? Your call, Pete. It was you as got us into this mess to start with.'

Pascoe laughed aloud at the assertion. It was a sound that Wield realized he hadn't heard much for some little while.

'Well,' said the DCI, 'like you're always telling us, sir, only Chief Constables can vanish without trace. Don't suppose Sempernel gave any details of how or where she slipped the leash?'

'No. Except he did say something about the park. Charter Park, I think he meant.'

'Which is between her flat and the town centre. Right, Wieldy, you start there. See if anyone saw anything. Sir, one thing I wondered about a woman like Cornelius. With her abilities and personality, how come she ended up working for a small-scale set-up like Nortrust when the big financial world was her oyster? I didn't really get anywhere when I talked to people at the bank. It's like asking monks about their sex life, talking to bankers about fraud. You know everybody in this town, sir, including George Ollershaw. If he's seriously in the frame, maybe there's a personal connection there we don't know about. Anything you could prise loose could be helpful.'

'Oh aye. And what are you going to do?'

'I'll turn over her flat again. Plus, I've got details of all her credit cards and so forth. I'll check these out for activity since she got bail and follow up any leads. OK? It's tedious, I know, but like you're always telling us, sir, if you don't do the housework, you can't have the vicar to tea.'

He sprang to his feet and strode rapidly out of the room.

'Did I really say that, Wieldy?'

'Think it was summat about, you can't expect the vicar's wife to put out on the kitchen floor, sir,' said Wield.

'Sounds more like it,' said Dalziel. 'But it makes a change to see the lad so full of bubbles. He's not been a bundle of fun recently. What's happened? Got a new supplier, has he?'

'Rosie's illness and the Beulah case really knotted him up,' said the sergeant. 'Then just as they're getting over it, along comes this business to knock him back. I know that this morning he was really chuffed to think he'd got Ellie and Rosie well out of harm's way.'

'Aye, well, I can understand that. Hostages to fortune, eh? Who said that?'

'I think it were you, sir,' said Wield.

'Think I were right to send Ivor with them, Wieldy? Mebbe Seymour or Bowler would have been better.'

'Novello's fine, sir,' Wield reassured him. 'Tough as either of them, and a lot less noticeable. Any road, they're well away from the action out at Axness. Makes Enscombe sound like Piccadilly Circus. Last time there was any excitement out there was when they heard about Mafeking.'

'Is that right? How did that turn out, anyway?'

'All right, I think, sir.'

'That's a relief,' said Andy Dalziel. 'Let's hope this one's got a happy ending too.'

iii

the pavilion by the sea

'Stupid bloody woman. Stupid bloody woman. Stupid bloody woman,’ chanted Feenie Macallum in time with each impact as the Land Rover bounced over the field.

She kept up the mantra even when she reached the relative smoothness of the road, increasing the tempo as the vehicle hit the potholed gravel drive sweeping up to Gunnery House and bringing it to a climax as she drove through the doorway of a ramshackle barn.

'I hope,' said Kelly Cornelius, lying in the rear, 'you're not referring to me.'

'Of course not. That Aldermann woman turning up like that.'

'I thought you said it was her cottage?'

'What's ownership got to do with anything? Am I supposed to tell the sea I own this place? You stay here till I see what I can sort out.'

'Here?'

'There are worse places. As you should know.'

'Yes, I know, but I'm terrified of rats.'

'And there are worse things than rats. But have no fear. Most seem to have left. With the wisdom of their kind, they like to keep two steps ahead of the ocean. So just stay still.'

'Yes, but . . .'

'My dear, I am getting too old for this.
Bud' zticha!’
Which was
belt up!
in Czech, but she didn't need to translate. The tone did it all for her.

Every language has its strengths, and access to so many gave Feenie Macallum a very wide choice of
mots justes.

When she was eight years old, for example, she could tell her father to go to hell in six different languages, none of them English.

He'd had to hire a governess to teach her the language of her native country.

She had hated him, willing herself to believe that her mother was dying because she had come back to Gunnery, rather than that she had come back to Gunnery to die. But her mother's last words to her had been an instruction (in what language she couldn't recall) to love her father. And when the night before the funeral she had stolen into the room where the body lay and found Macallum weeping by the open coffin, obedience to this dying wish had seemed after all to be a possibility.

She had held his hand at the graveside, and that night when a loneliness more piercing than a Carpathian frost had gripped her heart, she had slipped out of bed and stolen into her father's room in search of warmth and comfort.

He was, she discovered, in no position to offer them. Indeed, as later (much later) reflection suggested to her, he was perhaps in search of them himself. But no such plea in mitigation rose in her mind as she watched him thrusting himself into the arched and eager body of the governess athwart the great double bed.

This set the pattern of their future relationship; reconciliations and armistices all ending sooner or later in new outbreaks of war.

The governess departed, to be replaced by a male tutor who presented a different kind of sexual problem. The arm around her shoulder as he sat by her side to help with her work could be put down to pedagogic familiarity. The hand sliding up her leg and the fingers trying to pry beneath her knicker elastic couldn't. She drove a fountain pen so hard into his forearm that she severed the radial artery.

He was taken to hospital and never returned. To her father's interrogation, Feenie only replied, 'Accidents happen.'

After that, he sent her to the local primary school. She was fluent in schoolyard English in a week and classroom English in a month.

And now all her memories were in English. As she grew older she was finding that the distant past projected itself on her mind with ever increasing clarity, but so far it still hit a barrier when it reached those non-English days before the return to Axness. There was something there, in fact a great deal, but all a blur of mingling colours and overlapping images. She looked forward to the time when her ageing memory eventually got these into focus, amusing herself with the thought that perhaps her dying words would be in a language unrecognizable to the attendant nurses. But until that breakthrough happened, even her image of her mother alive and well derived not from any firm recollection of those early years but from the portrait of Mr and Mrs Macallum at Home which hung above the fireplace in the Grand Hall of Gunnery House.

She paused before it now to gather her thoughts as she entered the house. It was the only painting left in the place. The rest were long gone to the salesrooms. Macallum, who had little time for art, had simply bought pictures of the size and style to fit the spaces on the walls of his newly acquired house. Some of the artists had, happily, come back into fashion and they'd brought a decent price.

The portrait was different. Macallum had enquired who was the best portrait painter around and on being told Augustus John, had pursued the artist with offers of a very large fee, though rumour had it that it was the exotic beauty of Feenie's mother that had made him accept the commission. It was probably worth more than most of the others put together, but Feenie had so far resisted the temptation to turn it into cash, justifying herself with the thought that at least its value was increasing. This justification she'd also applied to Macallum's well-stocked cellar, though in that case it had proven specious on account of the steady inroads she had made into it over the years, and some nights after a bottle or two, picked at random, she would stand before the painting, contemplating cutting it in half like an old photo and selling off her father while retaining her mother.

No such act of vandalism occupied her thoughts now, partly because sober she doubted if it would be financially very productive, but mainly because she knew the time was fast approaching (indeed, in the eyes of some had long past) when Gunnery House would be uninhabitable. She could camp out indefinitely in the back of her old Land Rover but it was no place for a full-length portrait.

'So it's the saleroom for you after all, my dears,' she said.

Her mother, whose high Slavic cheekbones and deep-grey expressive eyes had been splendidly caught by the artist, making it easy to believe she was the Russian aristocrat she claimed to be, looked out with the blase indifference of one to whom the vulgarities of money meant nothing. Beside her, Macallum's expression of grim satisfaction, though doubtless inspired by the notion of a common old working man hiring a famous artist to record for posterity his wife's great beauty and his own matching success, could easily be imagined to derive from a posthumous awareness that the artist's fee had also been a very productive financial investment.

Not that he would take any satisfaction from the use it would be put to. But by now he ought to have grown accustomed to that.

'Thank you,
oteko,'
said Feenie, using the Slovak diminutive which so much irritated him.

A discreet cough made her start.

She turned to see Wendy Woolley standing in the doorway.

Feenie frowned. After a lifetime of making her presence felt, she found it hard to understand how anyone could be so self-effacing. It ought to mean the woman was too unobtrusive to be a nuisance, but in certain circumstances, such negativity was a positive danger. For instance, she was so forgettable that when things had started getting complicated yesterday, it hadn't occurred to Feenie to give her a ring and postpone her visit to familiarize herself with the inner workings of the Liberata Trust. And typically just as things got worse this morning, there'd been a clang from the old sepulchral doorbell, and there she'd been, smiling nervously on the doorstep. Worse, she'd had a battered suitcase with her and a recollection not shared by Feenie of having been invited to spend the night.

Time had had to be spent showing her the office and also a bedroom, both in a sufficient state of chaos to put off any but the most devout of acolytes.

Perhaps, thought Feenie, she's come to offer her resignation. It was not a serious hope. Her long sight might be failing but faces she could read, and all she saw on the Woolley features was the determined dutifulness of the weak.

'I'm sorry to interrupt,' said Wendy.

'Interrupt? I am alone, so interruption can hardly come into it,' said Feenie.

'Yes, I see that now. But I thought I heard you talking . . . are these your parents, Miss Macallum?'

'Why do you ask? Do you catch a resemblance, perhaps?' said Feenie with an unnecessarily savage irony.

Wendy Woolley didn't seem to notice. She looked closely from the portrait to her hostess and said, 'About the jaw perhaps . . .'

Feenie examined the delicate fine-boned sweep of her mother's jaw and snorted derisively.

'It's a long time since I looked like her, if I ever did,' she said.

'No, I meant the gentleman's,' said Wendy.

Feenie's gaze switched to Macallum's square prize-fighter's jaw, then moved on to Mrs Woolley's face, where she saw nothing but an earnest desire to please.

'Yes, they're my parents,' she said abruptly. 'I'm sorry to have neglected you, but I had to go out. I ran into a woman who has one of my cottages. Ellie Pascoe was with her, you remember Mrs Pascoe whose house we had the meeting in the other night?'

'Yes, indeed. I look forward to meeting her again. A nice lady, I thought.'