Bones and silence, p.15
Bones and Silence, page 15
‘You sound very … Euro-minded,’ said Pascoe cautiously.
‘What dat you say, my man?’ mocked Chung. ‘Don’t let the slanty eyes fool you, my boy. My daddy brought my mummy back from Malaya with him and this little girl was brought up in would you believe Birmingham?’
She laughed joyously at the idea. Why it should seem so incongruous Pascoe wasn’t sure, but he found himself laughing too.
By now they had passed his car park and were at the entrance to the close. Pascoe halted and said firmly, ‘I am not going any further. You can spike your Canon without my moral support.’
‘Hey, if I need a policeman, I’ll blow my whistle,’ said Chung. ‘But don’t go. Come into the cathedral with me, let me show you something.’
Once more he was whirled along, this time out of the chill winter air into the chiller aseasonal atmosphere of the great church. It was empty except for a couple of shadowy figures, which Pascoe hoped were human, gliding along a side aisle. His agnosticism was not proof against the humbling power of these vibrant spaces but Chung’s flame burnt bright enough to meet whatever occupied them on level terms. She led him to the choir and made him stoop to look at the woodcarvings beneath the misericords. They consisted of figures, some individual, some in small groups, but all finely differentiated, of men at their trades and at their play. Here were tanners, tinkers, herds and hunters; here were men playing pipes and tabors, shawms and citoles; here were dancers, dicers, tumblers and mummers.
‘The guy who carved these knew those people, he’d seen them, he knew they were as important and everlasting as anything else in this place. I’m not doing any prissy historical reconstruction, Pete. I’m plugging into the continuum. Come on, there’s some more in the Pliny Chapel.’
But when they reached the chapel they found it was occupied. Named after Sir William de Pliny, whose tomb stood here, topped by a full-size brass effigy of himself and his wife, with a small dog at their feet, this tiny chapel was set aside for private prayer. Standing at the foot of the tomb with her head bowed was a woman. Pascoe paused on the threshold but Chung went straight in. For a second he thought this was crass insensitivity, then she spoke and he realized it was quite the opposite.
‘Mrs Horncastle, are you all right?’
He didn’t recognize the woman till she looked up. But in the brief moment before she re-organized her features to a social smile, he recognized Chung was right to be concerned.
‘Miss Chung. How are you?’ she said.
‘I’m fine. Like I say, how are you?’
‘Oh, don’t worry about me. Really I’m fine too.’
‘You looked upset,’ said Chung bluntly.
‘Did I? Perhaps I did. It’s silly. Don’t laugh, but it’s the dog.’
‘The dog?’
‘Yes.’ She set her hand on the little brass dog’s head and stroked it.
‘I used to have a dog very like this, a little terrier, Sandy, I called him. He got on Eustace’s nerves. Well, he could be naughty, I suppose. And whenever he wanted a walk, he used to jump up and lick my face, then run to the door and leap up at the handle as if he were trying to open it. Sometimes he scratched the paint and Eustace became really furious. But it was only paint, wasn’t it?’
‘I’d say so,’ said Chung gravely. ‘What happened to Sandy?’
‘He died. He somehow got out by himself and wandered out of the close into the main road and got knocked over. People said I should get another, but Eustace said I would be foolish to risk getting so upset again over a dumb beast so I never did. I’d often noticed how like Sandy the Pliny dog was – at least I thought so, though Eustace said I was imagining the resemblance. But they were alike.’
Suddenly she laughed and said, ‘Do you have dreams, Miss Chung?’
‘You mean, like ambitions?’
‘Oh no. I gave those up long ago. I mean dreams, while you’re asleep. I expect you do. Who doesn’t? They mean nothing. Well, I had a dream, only I’ve had it two or three times and repetition suggests significance, doesn’t it? I dreamt I woke up but couldn’t move and after a while I realized that I was made of brass, like Lady de Pliny here, lying on top of our tomb with a brass Eustace by my side. And even though I was brass, it was so cold, so bitterly cold, I could feel my whole being contracting with the chill of it, and I wanted to scream out in agony, only I couldn’t, being brass. Then I felt a movement against my legs, and on and on, higher and higher, till suddenly there was the touch of something warm and moist on my face and I realized the little dog at my feet was licking me. Gradually the warmth of his tongue began to spread through my body till finally I was able to move. What pain those first movements cost me! I was like an old arthritic woman, tottery, weak, uncertain. I looked around and my little strength failed again. I wasn’t just on a tomb, I was in a tomb, surrounded by solid walls running with damp and unbroken except by a huge metal door. It had a handle, but even when I crawled across to the door and pulled myself up by the handle, putting my full weight on it, I couldn’t feel the slightest movement. Full of despair, all I could think of was to stagger back to my plinth and lie down again alongside Eustace, this time for ever. But when I set off back, the dog rushed by me and began leaping up at the handle, just like Sandy used to when he wanted to go for a walk. Of course, at home he could never reach it and even if he could, he could never have turned it. There I stood by my brass husband, watching the poor little beast leaping higher and higher, but always in vain, and do you know, I felt sorrier for him than I did for myself. So I determined to stagger back to the door and have one more try, when suddenly he gave a mighty bound and his teeth caught around the handle and for a moment he hung there, feet scrabbling at the door, and he looked so pathetic I could have wept. Then slowly the handle began to move. I couldn’t believe it. Lower and lower he pulled it, lower and lower. Then there was a loud grating noise and the door swung slowly open, and through it I could see a sunlit lawn and hear birds singing. And Sandy let go and dropped to the ground and stood outside in the sunlight, barking at me to join him.
‘Now wasn’t that a silly dream, Miss Chung? A silly woman’s dream?’
She tried for the bright tone of one who is amused at her own absurdity but Chung did not respond in kind.
‘Oh no, Mrs Horncastle,’ she said. ‘I don’t see anything silly in it. Nothing at all.’
She put her arm round the woman’s shoulders as she spoke and Pascoe, who had been edging further and further back as the story progressed, turned and hurried from the gloomy cathedral alone and felt a quite illogical relief to find himself out in the chill winter daylight once again.
In fact it wasn’t just the contrast which made the day seem brighter. Winter had threatened to deceive once more, and a pallid sun was giving the storm clouds a pewter lining. Dan Trimble would be pleased. A couple more days of decent weather should see the car park and garage complex completed well within its funding schedule. And it would be nice to be able to park near the rear door again instead of across the street.
The builders were hard at it erecting the small gatehouse modern security concerns made almost obligatory. It would be annoying to be checked in and out of your own backyard, but better than the risk of some madman driving in at will with a truckload of Semtex. He glimpsed Arnie Stringer but there was no sign of Swain though he’d noticed him on arrival that morning. Perhaps now his financial problems were likely to be over, he didn’t feel the need to soil his own hands for more than a couple of hours each day.
As he passed the desk, Sergeant Broomfield looked up and said, ‘Any luck?’
‘Not yet. Any word on the yobboes who did Wieldy?’
‘Nothing. But talking of yobboes, the Post has been at us about that barney in the Rose and Crown. They’re doing a feature evidently. You can guess the sort of thing. The football might be lousy, but City supporters are after promotion to the hooligans’ first division.’
‘Shit. That’s just putting ideas into their tiny minds,’ groaned Pascoe. The landlord of the Rose and Crown was still in hospital with a serious eye injury. The eyes of all the potential witnesses seemed to have been damaged also for no two of them gave corresponding descriptions of any of the brawlers.
‘Seymour back yet?’ he asked.
‘Don’t be silly. It’s only ten-fifteen. Send young Dennis into a nurses’ home and you can’t really expect him to surface for at least twenty-four hours! The Super’s back though.’
‘How’d he look?’
‘Not happy. I asked him if he’d had any luck at the Sally and he said the landlord was as helpful as a knitted noddy, and his ale was lousy too.’
‘Bad as that! I’ll let him alone for a bit, I think.’
‘He’s got company anyway,’ said Broomfield.
‘Oh? Who?’
The sergeant shrugged and said, ‘Who knows? He was on the desk when they turned up.’
He nodded towards the inner office where PC Hector sat, his head bowed over a typewriter with the rapt concentration of a chimpanzee wondering how best to start Hamlet.
Pascoe sighed and went on his way.
He was mildly curious as to the identity of Dalziel’s visitors, though it wasn’t an itch that required immediate scratching. But as he reached the CID floor he heard the cry of a wounded mastodon. His expert ear identified its root emotion as rage. Normal procedure was to lock yourself in a cupboard until you knew its object, but for once feeling safe, he indulged his curiosity by tapping at the Superintendent’s door, sticking his head inside and asking, ‘Did you call, sir?’
The mystery of the visitors was solved. They were Philip Swain and Eden Thackeray. The solicitor smiled at him. Swain, who looked pale and haggard, ignored him. And Dalziel snarled, ‘No, I bloody didn’t, but now you’re here, you’d best come in. I’d like a witness if, as seems bloody likely, I’m about to be slandered!’
‘Please, please,’ said Thackeray suavely. ‘There can be no slander because there are no accusations. To clear the air, let me say at the outset that we do not dispute that my client gave his statement voluntarily, there was no question of coercion, and everything was done according to the rules.’
‘Thank you very much,’ growled Dalziel.
‘Now all he wants to do, voluntarily, without coercion, and strictly following the rules, is modify that statement slightly,’ continued the solicitor.
‘Is that all?’ said Dalziel with heavy sarcasm.
‘I have here copies of his revised statement. Perhaps I should read it to you so that any problems of comprehension or interpretation may be ironed out.’
The solicitor put on a pair of hornrimmed spectacles and coughed drily behind his hand. It was clear to Pascoe that besides serving his client’s needs, he was really enjoying himself.
He began to speak.
‘I should stress in preamble that the statement is exactly as Mr Swain dictated it, free from my own or anyone else’s emendation or intervention.’
He coughed once more and began reading.
‘“When Superintendent Dalziel brought me to the station on the night Gail died, I think I was in a state of shock. Everything felt so unreal, distant, unimportant. Everything except Gail’s death, that is. This state of shock continued for some time after that night but it wasn’t till I went to see my doctor on Mr Thackeray’s advice that it was diagnosed.
‘“I shall always feel I bear some guilt for Gail’s death. Somehow I must have failed her. And perhaps if I hadn’t rushed round to Waterson’s house that night, things could have been worked out. Whatever the truth of the matter, I now see that in my first statement these feelings warped my judgement and my memory to the point where I wanted to assume total guilt, even stretching beyond the moral and psychological to the physical, and claim that my hand was actually on the gun when it went off. Now I can recollect and more importantly admit what really happened.
‘“When Gail started waving the gun around, it was Waterson not me who made a grab at it. Perhaps he felt threatened, perhaps his sole concern was to prevent her from doing herself harm. I don’t know. All I know is that the gun went off and Waterson seemed to go to pieces. He staggered away from Gail with the gun in his hand. I took it from him for fear he might inadvertently fire it again and cause further harm. He collapsed against the wall and I remained where I was, clearly in a state of shock, till Mr Dalziel arrived.
‘“I am not attempting to evade responsibility by modifying my original statement, merely to record the exact truth, for I now see this must be the first step in my attempt to come to terms with my loss, my grief, my guilt.”’
Thackeray stopped reading and said, ‘That is my client’s revised and movingly frank statement, which I am sure you will accept in the spirit in which it is offered.’
Dalziel, who had listened like a country squire at a Lenten sermon, yawned widely and said, ‘Aye, I think I can promise that much.’
‘Thank you,’ said Thackeray. ‘No doubt the other witness, Mr Waterson, will confirm this version of events in his statement when it becomes available.’
Oh, you cunning old devil! Pascoe thought admiringly. Somehow you’ve got wind of Waterson’s statement, or perhaps you’ve simply made an inspired guess. Here was an adversary truly worthy of Dalziel!
‘We’re still trying to locate Mr Waterson,’ said Dalziel evasively.
‘Strange what heavy weather you’re making of it,’ said Thackeray. ‘And I fail to see why Mr Waterson’s absence, however motivated, should further delay an early settlement of this matter. Common humanity cries out for the inquest to be resumed and the remains to be released to next-of-kin. My client has suffered too much already.’
‘Not at our hands,’ said Dalziel. ‘You said yourself, everything were by the book.’
‘Indeed it was,’ agreed the solicitor. ‘Nothing was missed. Except perhaps a few opportunities. For instance, when you called in your doctor to look at Mr Waterson on the night of the accident, you didn’t ask him to examine Mr Swain too.’
‘No need. Waterson were a nervous wreck. Mr Swain here were fine. He looked a sight better than he does now, if you don’t mind me saying.’
Swain, who hadn’t opened his mouth since Pascoe arrived, glared angrily at Dalziel but Thackeray patted his arm soothingly and said, ‘Yes, I recall you mention in your own statement how calm and collected Mr Swain appeared to be. And you stressed this again the following day when we first discussed the case. I got the impression then that you were drawing inferences from your observation which were not to my client’s advantage.’
‘I just state the facts as I see ’em, nowt more.’
‘Of course. What you didn’t see was the possibility that this apparent control of my client’s emotions might in fact be symptomatic of the shock which has since been diagnosed and whose delayed and more obvious physical manifestations are, as you have just observed, only now becoming visible. What a pity with a doctor on the spot that night that you didn’t …’
‘He were examined the next day,’ interrupted Dalziel.
‘Indeed,’ said Thackeray. ‘But we must ask ourselves, Superintendent, what were the instructions you gave the examining doctor on that occasion. Incidentally, my acceptance that things were done according to the rules on Tuesday night does not of course extend to include that examination on Wednesday afternoon. Where consent is obtained by deception, there is no legality.’
Dalziel was slumped low in his chair, a posture which pushed his embonpoint into corrugations along whose valley bottoms beneath his shirt his fingers scraped glacially. He was beginning to look defeated. It was not an edifying sight.
‘If you want to tell the world I had Mr Swain examined because his missus were a junkie, go ahead,’ he snapped. ‘Seems to me all this fine talk amounts to is instead of one statement from your client, we’ve got two. More the merrier, say I.’
It was an untypically feeble counter, underlined by Thackeray’s formally polite appreciative chuckle.
‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Let’s think of them as rough draft and fair copy. It’s so easy to get things wrong the first time, isn’t it? You of all people should understand that, Mr Dalziel.’
‘Eh?’
‘Your own statement, I mean. Don’t look so alarmed. I haven’t been burgling your office. I was talking to Mr Trimble about another matter, and I happened to mention my concern at these delays, and in particular at the distress it must be causing Mrs Delgado who is too ill to travel and who is naturally impatient for her child’s body to be released to the States for burial. And Mr Trimble, though sympathetic, told me that where witnesses clashed, and one of them was a senior police officer, he must obviously place a strong reliance on that man’s version of things.’
‘That was nice of him,’ said Dalziel savagely.
‘Indeed. I drew the assumption that it must be yourself he was referring to, and I wonder now whether you might not care to take a long look at the detail of your own statement. No one is perfect. I’m sure your own vast experience contains many instances of a highly trained observer proving to have been deceived.’
Dalziel shot Pascoe a glance of promissory malice. Surely he can’t think I’ve been talking to Eden about my little experiment!
Thackeray had risen and stood with his hand on Swain’s shoulder as he spoke. Now he exerted a gentle pressure and the man rose.
‘That’s good,’ said Dalziel. ‘You can hardly see the strings!’
‘I’m sorry?’ said Thackeray with dangerous mildness.
Pascoe tried to telepath a warning to his chief. This was a lost battle. Nothing to do but keep your head down and regroup. Pointless to stand up in the trenches and hurl clods at the triumphant tanks.
But Dalziel wanted a medal more than his supper.
‘I just meant, funny thing, this shock. Takes away the power of speech, does it, unless someone else writes the lines?’
Swain looked ready to retort angrily, but Thackeray was swift with a palliative misunderstanding.
‘If you’re referring to my client’s decision to take part in the forthcoming production of the Mystery Plays, certainly this has been recommended as a useful therapy. Role-playing has an honourable history in psychological rehabilitation and what better way of coming to terms with guilt than exploring the greatest guilt of all?’
