On Beulah Height

EIGHT

Dalziel dipped his biscuit into his post-coital tea, got it to his mouth before it collapsed, bit it, and said, ‘Bloody hell,’ soggily.

‘Bad tooth?’ said Cap Marvell sympathetically.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘This is a Grannie’s Golden Shortie.’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘It were for my dad,’ said Dalziel. ‘It were his recipe.’

It occurred to Cap she knew nothing of Dalziel before he became a policeman, and very little of him before he became the Detective Superintendent who had incredibly eased his bulk into her bed and her affections.

He was back in the former now because when he’d turned up at her flat door earlier that evening, she’d realized he’d never left the latter.

He’d been to the hospital to visit his colleague’s sick daughter. There’d been some sort of crisis that afternoon but the child was stable again. The parents had naturally been in a state and Dalziel, she guessed, had exerted all his energies in the line of optimistic reassurance. Standing on her doorstep, he looked absolutely drained, which was as shocking as visiting Loch Lomond and finding it empty. He’d talked about the sick child, talked about the missing child, talked about the Dendale children, in an uncharacteristically disconnected way, till it was difficult to separate one from the other. What was clear was that he seemed to feel responsible in some way for all of them, and the pain of their parents weighed so heavily that even those broad shoulders were close to bending.

She’d given him whisky, refilling his glass three times as he talked, and it wasn’t till the third glass was emptied that he paused, licked his lips, sniffed, and said accusingly. ‘This is Macallan. Twenty-five-year-old Anniversary.’

‘That’s right.’

During their old itemization, a major point of friction had been her indifference to the subtleties of single malts and her predilection for the purchase of what he termed ‘rubbing whisky’.

‘You got someone important coming?’

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘But a girl can hope.’

Upon which double entendre Dalziel had acted.

It had been an encounter more marked by ferocity than tenderness, but that had suited her to such a degree that when he got his breath back and said with passionate longing, ‘Ee, I could murder a cup of tea,’ she had slipped meekly out of bed and mashed it for him.

There were times even in the best regulated of households when the Old Adam got the vote over the New Man.

The Golden Shortie had been a treat which looked like paying dividends.

‘Your father was a baker, then?’ she said.

‘Aye. Master. Came down from Glasgow for his health, got took on at Ebor.’

The Ebor Biscuit and Confectionery Company was one of Mid-Yorkshire’s principal businesses.

‘For his health? He was an invalid?’

‘Don’t be daft,’ said Dalziel, scornful at the idea that the loins whose fruit he was could be in any fettle but fine. ‘He fell out with some folk in Glasgow it wasn’t healthy to fall out with. Misunderstanding about a loan. He were just a lad. If it weren’t for gravity, he’d not have known to crap downwards, that’s what he used to say.’

‘I see where you got your silver tongue,’ observed Cap. ‘So what about the Golden Shorties?’

‘He used to make his own shortbread at home from his gran’s recipe and often took a piece in his snap. One day the general manager stopped for a chat during tea break. He noticed Dad eating this shortbread and he said, “That’s not ours, is it?” sort of reproachful. My dad, being a cheeky bugger, said, “No, it’s not, and I doubt you could afford it.” Manager broke off a bit and et it. Then another bit. And another. Then he said, “Right, lad, why don’t you tell me just how much it is you think I can’t afford?” Dad, knowing all his mates’ lugs were flapping, thought he’d pitch it real high and said, “Next bit’ll cost you five hundred nicker,” which were a lot of money in them days. “In that case,” said the manager, “you’d best come to my office.” And fifteen minutes later, Dad were back with his mates, flashing the biggest bundle of notes most on ’em had ever seen.’

‘So, a happy ending,’ said Cap.

Dalziel sucked in the rest of his biscuit.

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Made him a big man on the bakehouse floor right enough. And when the first batch of Grannie’s Goldens came out, he felt right proud. Then it became Ebor’s best-selling line. And forever after when he went into a shop, and saw the packs piled high, he felt sick to his stomach. He were an easy-going man, my dad, but whenever he’d had a couple of drinks and started on about selling his birthright for messy porridge, us kids ’ud take cover ’cos he were likely to start breaking things. It all came back just now when I took a bite.’

‘So, more than just a biscuit,’ said Cap, mentally noting us kids for future investigation. ‘A madeleine. Now all you’ve got to do is write a novel about your life and loves in seven volumes.’

‘Not enough,’ said Dalziel. ‘And what’s Madeleine got to do with it? Weren’t she the lass who got bedded in that mucky poem?’

‘I don’t think I recall the mucky poem in question.’

‘Course you do. If I did it at school, every bugger did it. By that pair of puffs, Sheets and Kelly — one of ’em anyway. Sort of poem you had to work at afore you realized just how mucky it was.’

‘That is an incentive to learning I don’t think they’ve grasped at Cheltenham Ladies,’ said Cap, who suspected that much of Dalziel’s philistinism was a bait to lure her into the trap of patronage.

Or perhaps not.

She observed him carefully and found herself carefully observed in return.

As they were both in that state most perilous to the consumer of crumbly biscuits and hot tea, and both in a condition which marked them as enthusiastic consumers, there was much to observe.

‘So what’s to become of us, Andy?’ she asked.

Dalziel shrugged, and said, ‘You screw a bit, scream a bit, then you die.’

‘Thank you, Rochefoucauld,’ she said. ‘I was meaning specifically rather than generally.’

‘Me, too. No one I’d rather do both with than you, lass.’

‘Is that a compliment?’

‘You need compliments?’

‘Like, yes. Need, no.’

‘Then it’s a compliment. Oh, fuck, where’d I leave me trousers?’

This was in response to a muffled shrilling he recognized as coming from his mobile phone.

‘I think we started in the kitchen,’ said Cap. ‘I hate those things.’

‘Could have been worse. Could have rung fifteen minutes back,’ said Dalziel, rolling off the bed.

She watched him pad out of the room and recalled a monograph she’d read in one of the Sunday supplements on ‘The Sumo Wrestler as Sex Object’. She hadn’t taken it very seriously at the time, but maybe after all …

In the kitchen, Dalziel was listening to Wield’s account of Novello’s latest finding with the unenthusiasm she had foreseen.

‘So this means the bugger could have had nigh on fifty thou in his pocket when he took off finally. Great!’

‘Gets better, or worse,’ said Wield. ‘I thought about this camper van that was seen at Wark House. We’ve been trawling all the hotels and B and B’s in the area with no luck. But if he’s camping … so I took a trip into Dendale.’

‘No camping, caravans, or unauthorized motor vehicles on Water Board land in Dendale,’ quoted Dalziel. ‘They don’t like the idea of folk pissing in our drinking water.’

‘Yes, I know, sir. But back a ways down the valley, there’s a farmer lets out a field to campers and such. Fellow called Holmes. Wild-eyed bugger with a tangle of beard like a briar patch, he’d as lief shot me as helped me, I reckon. But his wife’s a tidy body and she sent him to muck out the pigs or something while she told me, yes, there was a camping van, and the fellow on it spoke with what could have been an Aussie twang …’

‘These Holmeses, they local?’

‘Meaning, would they have known Lightfoot? Holmes, yes, but he never saw this guy. Camping’s his wife’s business, nowt to do wi’ him, long as they shut his gates and don’t scare his stock. Wife’s an offcomer from Pateley Bridge.’

‘So when did matey with the twang arrive?’

‘Late last Friday. Left yesterday morning.’

‘Damn,’ said Dalziel. ‘Bloody cool if he’s our man, but. Owt else, Wieldy? Van number’s a bit much to hope for, I suppose?’

‘Mrs Holmes thought the plate had a C and a 2 and a 7 in it. Not much, but I’ve got Traffic working on it. But she did get a name for the guy. Slater.’

He said it with unnecessary significance. Dalziel was there instantly.

‘As in Marion Slater, you mean. Benny’s mam’s new married name when she took off to Oz? You ever get a reply to your enquiries to Adelaide?’

‘Nothing yet.’

‘Well, let’s not get excited. It’s a common enough name.’

‘Yes, sir. Not all that common a face, but.’

‘What do you mean? You said this Holmes woman were an offcomer …’

‘That’s right. But I got an old photo of Benny from the file, ran it through the copier, touched it up a bit to put a few years on in, and showed her that.’

‘And?’

‘And she said it were him. Mr Slater. No doubt at all.’

Cap watched Dalziel come back into the bedroom carrying an armful of clothes which he dumped on the bed prior to starting dressing.

‘You’re going then? I hoped you’d stay the night.’

‘Me too. Sorry. Something’s come up.’

‘Something you can tell me?’

‘Nowt to tell really. Just a possible.’

‘And you’ve got him?’

‘No. Bugger’s still out there somewhere. But if he’s the one, we will get him, never have any doubt about that!’

He spoke with such vehemence, she had a vision of being pursued with extreme prejudice by this relentless man, and shuddered.

He observed the effect of the shudder on her breasts with undisguised interest.

She said, ‘Well, take a key, just in case you feel like dropping in later.’

‘I’ll see what I can manage,’ he said.

After he left, she put on a robe and poured herself a scotch, digging out the bottle of supermarket blended she’d hidden in the kitchen. It was a gesture. No getting away from it, the single malt was infinitely superior, but sometimes gestures needed to be made.

Things were moving faster than she’d anticipated — the bedding, the key. Too fast? How to say? She was playing this by ear and her ear was not as reliable as once it had been. What she needed was a sign, or better still a sound, something for her to fix her fine-tuning by.

The telephone rang.

Well, that was a sound. Was it an answer?

She picked it up and said, ‘Hello? Beryl, hi! Yes, it’s fine. No one here, not at the moment. No, that doesn’t mean … well, perhaps it does … My God you’ve got a disgusting mind … but if you’ve got an hour to spare, and as you’re paying for the call, relax, and I’ll tell you all about it.’