Good Morning, Midnight

7

“Well,” said Pascoe. “And what do you make of that, Shirley?”

“Sir?”

“Of the tape. You were listening?”

“Sorry, sir. My mind went wool-gathering. I didn’t really take it in.”

Meaning- if you want to say negligently, “No matter, it was pretty dull anyway,” and toss the cassette into your wastepaper basket, you’ll get no quarrel from me.

“I see. Shall I play it through again then?”

Meaning- thank you, but that’s not the way I want to play this, not yet anyway.

“No need, sir. I reckon I got the gist. Pal Maciver Junior blamed his stepmother for his father’s suicide.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” said Pascoe. “Anything more?”

She shrugged as if to say, OK, you keep asking for it, you’re going to get it.

“And he also seemed to be suggesting that Mr Dalziel was far from objective in his attitude to said stepmother and might be disinclined to take these accusations seriously.”

“Which would, if true, be a serious matter,” said Pascoe, curious to see how the young DC was going to deal with this.

“Yes, sir. Though there did seem to be mitigating circumstances.”

“Did there? Such as?”

“Well, it was getting on to closing time,” said Novello very seriously. “And he was worried about his meat pie.”

Pascoe stared at her. She stared back. Then his face cracked in a grin and after a moment she grinned back.

“However,” he resumed, “it would seem that mitigation is unnecessary as, if your digest of the investigation is accurate, nothing of Pal Junior’s accusations against his stepmother or insinuations against Mr Dalziel ever troubled the official record.”

“No, sir. There’s certainly nothing in the file, no signed transcript of the tape and no reference to it, and there was no mention of any of this at the inquest either.”

“No problem then,” said Pascoe briskly. “So here’s what we’re going to do. If you’re agreeable, that is. You’re going to forget you heard this tape. Both times.”

Just a little reminder that the Fat Man didn’t have a monopoly of divine omniscience.

“Which tape?” she asked.

“Don’t jump the gun,” he said. “Before amnesia sets in, I’d be interested to hear your reactions to it. Anything at all.”

She shrugged.

“I’ve met none of these people. I can’t even make an educated guess as to whether there’s anything in what Maciver said. As to why he changed his mind about hurling all these accusations around, well, in a straight fight, Cambridge undergrad versus the Super, I know where my money would be. But how about you, sir? Weren’t you around at the time?”

Pascoe shook his head.

“Sick leave. We established that last night when it became apparent that this latest suicide was a carbon copy of the old one.”

“That’s you off the hook then, sir.”

Pascoe opened a drawer and slid the cassette into it.

“What hook would that be, Detective?” he said briskly.

“Hook, sir?” said Novello, interpreting the signal. “Who said anything about a hook? Shall I take this stuff back down to the store now?”

“No,” said Pascoe. “Stick it in that cupboard there. I’ll pass it on to Mr Ireland later.”

“Mr Ireland?”

“Yes. Once we’re completely satisfied no crime’s been committed, a suicide, copycat or not, becomes Uniformed’s baby.”

“And are we completely satisfied, sir?”

Pascoe hesitated his answer. The trouble was he still didn’t know if his reluctance to say yes was caused by anything more than an objection to the Fat Man steamrollering him off the case.

But he didn’t doubt that in the apophthegms of the wise from Confucius to Rochefoucauld he could find many variations on the theme that men who try to stop steamrollers end up flat. Presumably Pal Maciver Junior too had tasted the sadness of Dalziel’s might. All that passion and hate in his recorded statement, yet none of it had ever got on to the public record.

So what did he do now? He suspected-no, he was certain-that he’d already stepped over the line drawn by Dalziel’s instruction to tidy this up and dump it on Paddy Ireland. There was danger in probing further, but was there any point?

Novello was watching him closely. He got the feeling she was following his thought processes even more closely. He remembered as a teenager climbing up on to the high board at the municipal swimming pool and changing his mind when he realized just how high it was. Then his nervous eye had spotted a couple of girls he knew who’d just come in and were looking up at him. So he’d dived.

Happily he was long past such adolescent needs to prove himself.

He said, “You know what? I think it might be useful to have a look at the scene by daylight.”

She smiled secretly but he saw it. And he recalled that when, after a descent which seemed to go on forever, he’d hit the water in a belly flop that almost stunned him, one of the girls had dived in and helped him to the side.

No use showing off unless you could carry it off.

He said, “It would be useful to have a fresh pair of eyes along…” paused, then went on, “I’ll just see if Sergeant Wield is in,” and reached for his phone.

“Not till later, sir,” said Novello. “I told you he’d got the morning off.”

“So you did,” said Pascoe. “In that case, I suppose you’d better come along, Shirley.”

Already he was feeling ashamed of his pettiness.

“OK,” said Novello. “Shall I drive?”

This was a telling riposte, thought Pascoe as he blew his nose to conceal his alarm. He recalled the one previous time he’d travelled, folded like a foetus, in the front seat of Novello’s Fiat Uno. She’d driven like Jehu on a bad prophet day and his abiding memory was of being far too close both to the road and to God.

Self-preservation overcame political correctness. He said firmly, “No, we’ll go in my car.”

And got that secret thought-reading smile again.