Good Morning, Midnight

8

The fog had lain thick on Enscombe village all night but it hadn’t inhibited the dawn chorus, and Detective Sergeant Edgar Wield had been further cheered by the returning memory that he wasn’t due in at work till after lunch. It would have been nice to share a lie-in with his partner, Edwin Digweed, but that was not to be. The Yorkshire Antiquarian Bookdealers Association’s annual symposium was starting at the Golden Fleece Hotel that evening and, as the member closest to the action, Digweed had taken on the job of making sure that everything was ready for the delegates’ arrival.

Observing that Wield’s good cheer seemed to have declined a little over breakfast and putting it down to his own unavoidable absence on his friend’s morning off, he apologized again before he left, adding, “Look, you pass the road end. Why don’t you call in and we’ll have lunch together? My treat.”

“And my pleasure,” said Wield.

In fact his apparent depression of spirits had had nothing to do with Edwin’s absence, but was merely a retrospectively pensive mood provoked by the news on local radio of Palinurus Maciver’s death in Moscow House the previous night.

By midday, with the sun soaring high in an almost cloudless sky, and the fog and the chill of the previous night vanished like a dream, he was in no mood for retrospection, and as he rode his Thunderbird along the narrow road that led out of Eendale, he sang in a voice to make a rook wince, “The flowers that bloom in the spring, Tra la, Breathe promise of merry sunshine.”

Normally his speed of choice would have blown the words back down his throat, but today he was moving at a pace sedate enough, if not to let him enjoy the scent of the flowers as he passed, at least to take in the full beauty of the landscape which in a single night seemed to have shrugged off the debilitations of winter and risen refreshed to garb itself in the clean bright fabrics of spring.

Eventually the road emerged from the steep-sided valley into a flatter, more conventionally pastoral landscape still very attractive in its variety of vernal greens. A couple of miles ahead lay the junction with the main east-west arterial, the fastest way into town for a man in a hurry, which was what Wield usually was as he found himself increasingly reluctant to leave Enscombe village of a morning. Today, however, he turned off to the left about a mile before the arterial junction, entering what to the casual tourist looked like a pleasant minor country road. But this too had once enjoyed the hustle and bustle and self-importance of a major thoroughfare before the road improvers of the sixties discovered a better, more Roman line for the main east-west route.

Those with farms or houses along the old main road had been mightily relieved to learn that the new highway wasn’t going to affect them except by rendering their everyday lives a lot more peaceful. Only the owner of the Golden Fleece, the old coaching inn at Gallow’s Cross, had been dismayed, and rightly so. With the passing trade which had been the Fleece’s life blood for a century and a half now coursing with ever-increasing force two miles to the south, the Fleece had rapidly declined to a run-down country pub with only its incongruous dimensions to remind anyone of the glory days.

Then, just as rumours gathered strength that it was to be demolished completely to make way for an intensive pig farm, it was bought in the eighties by a national hotel chain specializing in establishments that could combine the snobbish attractions of the country house hotel and the corporate attractions of the conference centre plus health and leisure club.

The old coaching inn was completely refurbished and extended to provide all the necessary concomitants of hospitality in the late twentieth century, and though the result might not have satisfied Prince Charles, with its ease of access to the fleshpots of urban Mid-Yorkshire in one direction and the beauties of rural Mid-Yorkshire in the other, it succeeded in satisfying the demands both of those in search of peace and quiet and those intent on expense-account conviviality.

As a coaching inn, the Golden Fleece had naturally had an entrance straight off the road under an archway into its courtyard, but that was impracticable in days when they might be expecting several dozen cars and now you approached along a sweeping driveway through pleasant parkland under whose scattered trees sheep paused in their grazing and lambs in their gambolling as a leather-clad figure rode by, carolling, “We welcome the hope that they bring, Tra-la, Of a summer of roses and wine…”

There were plenty of spaces in the car park but Wield’s eye was caught by a station wagon so long unwashed that its colour was hard to determine. He parked the Thunderbird next to it, dismounted and peered through the grubby window.

The rear seats were covered with a familiar strew of clothing, maps, empty takeaway cartons plus a Spanish onion and a half-full bottle of Highland Park-the famous emergency rations.

Wield was not much given to flights of fancy but for a moment his mind scrabbled for a parallel among the nasty shocks of fact and fiction-Friday’s footprint, Amundsen’s flag fluttering over the Pole, Pearce’s missed penalty in the ’90 World Cup-and found none.

This was Andy Dalziel’s car.

On the other hand, even devils must dine, and there was no rational explanation for the deep sense of foreboding the discovery roused in him.

He set off for the hotel entrance. The car park was discreetly screened from the building complex by a box hedge. As he passed through this he came to a sudden stop. A mock Victorian conservatory had been built on the end of the hotel. Through the glass under a potted palm he saw two heads-one fine-boned, short black hair elegantly coiffured; the other solid as an ancient weathered boulder-leaning close together over a wrought-iron table, like a tableau set up by a nineteenth-century narrative painter working on a canvas entitled The Assignation.

The woman looked in his direction and said something; the big grey head opposite her began to turn, and Wield took a hasty step backwards with the roar of Teutonic cheers and Antarctic winds echoing in his ears.

Back in the car park, he got on his bike and went looking for a space as far from Dalziel’s car as he could get and closer to the path round to the front of the hotel which would keep him out of view of the conservatory.

The cheers and the winds had been replaced by the song he’d been singing all the way from Enscombe, but now he’d moved on to the second verse.

“The flowers that bloom in the spring, Tra la, Have nothing to do with the case…”