Under World

Chapter 9

Dan Trimble, Chief Constable of Mid-Yorkshire, was a small man with a sharp face and prominent ears. He was still very new in the job. His predecessor, Tommy Winter, had tended to let things slide in his final phase, preferring to deal with trouble by devolution and absence. Trimble, by contrast, preferred to meet problems face to face, and one of them was facing him now.

‘I reckon it’s like mineral rights,’ declared Dalziel.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The bloody coal doesn’t belong to the farmer whose field’s up above, does it? It belongs to them as mines it, which in this case is the Coal Board as represented by Burrthorpe Main, which is South’s baby.’

‘A body is not coal,’ said Trimble.

‘Tin.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You’d be more used to tin, sir, coming from Cornwall,’ said Dalziel with the benevolent beam of a man willing to make allowances.

In fact Dalziel quite approved of Trimble whom he’d backed very profitably in the selection stakes. But neither professional approval nor personal profit could be allowed to obscure basic issues such as who ran what in Mid-Yorks. He knew he couldn’t win this present argument but he also believed there was nowt like a few teeth marks in the ankle to make a postman tread carefully next time he came bearing bad news.

‘We’ve got to learn to bow gracefully to the inevitable, Andy,’ Trimble said.

Aye, but you’ve not so far to bow as me, thought Dalziel with the amiable scorn of the large for the small. That he didn’t say it out loud was a measure of his relative respect for the man.

‘And this is what’s been decided,’ continued Trimble. ‘The investigation of Harold Satterthwaite’s death will be a joint operation. It makes sense even if there hadn’t been this absurd complication of whose body it really is. It makes sense because South’s Head of CID is currently on special assignment in Ulster and Chief Inspector Wishart is a little junior for what looks like a potentially troublesome case; it makes sense because we’ve already become involved to some extent; and in the opinion of some of the policy makers, it makes sense to provide a buffer between a highly sensitive community and a local force they haven’t yet re-learned to trust.’

‘So we’re a buffer now?’

‘Well, you certainly have the build for it, Andy,’ smiled the Chief Constable, running his gaze up the CID man’s mountainous frame. Supposedly, one of the privileges of rank was not having to worry about what you said, but when Trimble peeked at Dalziel’s face, he saw his remark registered there like a price in a till.

‘I’m not altogether convinced of all these arguments myself, Andy,’ he went on hastily. ‘But I am convinced of the overall usefulness of a joint approach. I hardly need tell you that this involves two basic principles. One is to solve the crime. The other is to make sure we get our share of the credit. OK?’

‘Aye,’ grunted Dalziel without enthusiasm. ‘One more thing, sir: I understand there’s a promotion meeting later today. My lad, Pascoe: what’s holding up his promotion to CI? There’s buggers I’d not trust to come in out of the rain leapfrogging ahead of him.’

‘Rain is the favoured environment of frogs,’ said Trimble mildly.

‘You what?’

‘Nothing. Andy, you must know that promotion is not in my gift. Mine is merely one voice among many, and as a comparatively new off-comer, it’s not even a particularly strong voice. But if there’s any special case you wish me to advance at the meeting …’

‘Aye, there is. Mebbe you can pass this on to the many,’ said Dalziel.

A quarter of an hour later, on his way to his office, he met Wield.

‘’Morning,’ he grunted. ‘You look bloody rough.’

‘I had a disturbed night, sir.’

‘Oh aye. Anything I ought not to know about?’

From a lesser man there might have been a hint of sexual innuendo. From Dalziel the signal flashed like the lamp on a police car.

‘I was looking after Mr Pascoe’s kiddie.’

‘You’ll know all about this Burrthorpe business, then. Well, it’s our business too, as from now. Come on. Let’s get the ground cleared, then mebbe we can make a start.’

Dalziel’s approach to ground-clearing made more use of the bulldozer than the hoe. He rang Burrthorpe, asked for Wishart, requested a progress report, listened yawningly for thirty seconds, then said, ‘In other words, nowt? What’s the matter with this lad, Farr? It’d save me a drive down there if you could charge him in the next couple of hours.’

‘There’s nothing concrete to tie him in,’ said Wishart. ‘We haven’t found the weapon. And no one in Burrthorpe’s saying anything, at least not to us.’

‘What about his clothes?’

‘He changed and showered before he left the pit, so we went to collect his pit-black, that’s the gear he wears to work in. Only it wasn’t there.’

‘Sod me. There you are! What do you buggers in South want? Doves and a voice from a cloud? Find it and you’ve likely got the sod!’

‘We’re looking. The gateman remembers him going out on his bike, but reckons he wasn’t carrying anything like a bundle of clothes and a pair of boots, so we’re concentrating on the yard itself. I think our best bet could be an admission when Farr’s fit enough to talk. The hospital’ll be checking him over shortly.’

‘Oh aye! In that case, I’d best come down myself. When? Oh, any time, lad. Any time at all.’

He put down the phone, grinned at Wield and said, ‘That’ll be something for ’em to look forward to. Now, Wieldy, what went off last night?’

‘I think you ought to ask Mr Pascoe that, sir,’ said Wield.

‘All right! If the bugger’s got in yet.’ He picked up the internal phone, pressed a couple of buttons, and said, ‘Peter! You’ve never got out of bed? See if you can manage to stagger up here. Wieldy thinks there’s one or two things I should ask you about last night.’

He banged the receiver down and glared at the sergeant as if daring an objection. But Wield’s mouth stayed shut and his face remained as unreadable as the weathered inscription on a tombstone.

Pascoe entered without knocking.

Dalziel said, ‘You look worse than he does and he’s got a head start. I get landed with someone else’s case on someone else’s patch, and I’m supposed to be helped by the living dead! Questions, Peter. Your missus, what’s Farr to her?’

‘A student.’

‘And her to him?’

‘A lecturer.’

‘Oh aye? Me, I was never at college, so you tell me, Peter. Did you ring up a lot of your lecturers when you got pissed and fell off your bike?’

‘No. But this is different. A different kind of course, a different relationship. These are mature students, the course is developmental rather than academic.’

‘Not much mature about this lad, Farr, from the sound of him,’ growled Dalziel. ‘How’d you feel when Ellie shot off to pick him up?’

Pascoe rubbed his thin features with his hand, like a man who has just walked through a cobweb.

‘Why are you asking these questions?’ he asked.

‘Just so I’ll know whether I can use you on this case or not,’ said Dalziel. ‘Can I?’

Pascoe said softly, ‘The reason I was late this morning was I took Ellie’s own blood sample to the hospital to be tested. I’m happy to say it came out well below the limit. That, as far as I’m aware, disposes of the only possible objection to me assisting on the case.’

‘That’s all right, then,’ said Dalziel genially. ‘Why’d you and the sergeant not say that to start with and save us all this idle chatter? Right, Peter, I want you to get hold of Boyle and Watmough. I recall asking you to have a word with Boyle earlier in the week, but I suppose you’ve done bugger-all, as usual.’

‘He’s never in. But why do you want me to see Mr Watmough?’

‘Because he claims in the Challenger that there are people in Burrthorpe who know exactly what happened to Tracey Pedley and to her killer. One of them’s quoted as saying, “We never trusted the law much here in Burrthorpe, not even before the Strike. What’s a child killer get these days? A few years inside with good grub and colour telly, then he promises to behave and they turn him loose till next time! No, it’s best if you take care of your own, the good and the bad. We learned that a long time since.” I want to know who, if anyone, said anything remotely like that. I want to know who’s been hinting all this time that Colin Farr’s father did that poor lassie in, and I want to know in particular if the name of Harold Satterthwaite comes up in connection with this or any other rumour. Oh, and you might ask Mr Watmough politely if he could let us have sight of any personal notes he may have made relating to the disappearance.’

Pascoe knew he should never be surprised by Dalziel, but he constantly was. Of course, he might already have had a long chat with Wishart and been thoroughly briefed on Farr’s background. But it was more likely, he told himself bitterly, that the fat bastard had tapes of all his phone conversations with Wishart.

But even that didn’t explain the full extent of Dalziel’s apparent knowledge.

He said, ‘I don’t recall reading anything like that in Mr Watmough’s article last Sunday, sir. He hinted he was going to prove it probably couldn’t have been Pickford who abducted Tracey Pedley. And he mentioned a rumour in Burrthorpe that the killer was local and had himself committed suicide. But all this stuff about local vigilantes, where does that come from?’

‘Next Sunday’s piece, lad,’ said Dalziel softly.

‘Next Sunday …?’

‘You didn’t think I was going to sit on my arse while that long streak of owl-shit smeared my name and do nowt, did you?’ said Dalziel, his face set in a mask of malevolence that made Wield look like a matinee idol. ‘Forewarned is forearmed. But I didn’t reckon on the Good Lord dropping him quite so plumb into my lap.’

‘You think the Good Lord killed Harold Satterthwaite then, sir?’

Dalziel regarded Pascoe for a moment, then decided to accept this as a joke rather than a reproach and let out a snort of laughter.

‘Mysterious ways, right enough!’ he said. ‘Mysterious bloody ways. Me and God both!’

Pascoe didn’t push any further. In fact, there was nowhere to push. Whatever Dalziel’s personal motives, interviewing Watmough was a necessary step.

He said, ‘One thing, it may be a bit hard not to let on that I’ve got advance knowledge of next Sunday’s article.’

‘No, it won’t,’ said Dalziel. ‘Because you haven’t! You don’t think Ogilby’s lawyers are going to let him print a word of this once they hear what went off last night? No, before he’s through, he’ll be down to reminiscing about his exciting days in traffic. Where they’re always looking for lively ex-CID men. So let’s start acting like real detectives, eh?’

Pascoe smiled wanly and left. Behind him Dalziel and Wield exchanged glances which to the casual eye might have looked like a freeze-frame from Frankenstein Meets Godzilla but in which they registered their mutual concern.

‘He’ll be all right,’ said Dalziel. ‘Wieldy, I want Farr’s movements after he left the pit. Best to backtrack him from that phone box. Check where they found his bike, then get your legs across that phallic symbol of yours and track him back to Burrthorpe.’

‘Yes, sir. But won’t Mr Wishart …’

‘Mr Wishart reckons Farr’s going to tell him all. Me, I reckon he’s over-optimistic. Farr talks body-language to cops, I gather. He throws them through plate-glass windows. I want to sort this one out proper, for all our sakes. Especially for … Just get to it, Wieldy!’

And back in his own office Pascoe was trying to ring Ellie as he had done from the hospital lab, as soon as he got the news about her blood sample. Now as then the phone rang and rang.

He went to see ex-DCC Watmough.