REGINALD HILL
UNDER WORLD

A Dalziel and Pascoe novel

Copyright

Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers 1988

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Reginald Hill 1988

Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

The quotations on pages 1, 9, 125, 329 and 421, are from

Dante’s Inferno translated by Dorothy L. Sayers and published by Penguin Books Ltd.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN 9780586204528

Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN 9780007380305

Version 2015-06-22

Epigraph

Hear truth: I stood on the steep brink whereunder

Runs down the dolorous chasm of the Pit,

Ringing with infinite groans like gathered thunder.

Deep, dense, and by no faintest glimmer lit

It lay, and though I strained my sight to find

Bottom, not one thing could I see in it.

Down must we go, to that dark world and blind.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Part Two

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Part Three

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Envoi

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

‘Another fine mess you’ve got me into,’ said Detective-Superintendent Andrew Dalziel.

In his mind’s eye, Peter Pascoe could see his superior’s broad slab of a face twisted into a mock exasperation intended to be reassuring. The picture had to be mental because he’d lost his torch in the roof fall which held him pinned helpless from the waist down, and Dalziel only used his light fitfully as he dug at the debris with his bare hands.

Mental or not, the picture was not to Pascoe’s liking. In sick-bed terms, comfort from Andy Dalziel was like seeing the doctor edged aside by the priest. He tried to move again and felt pain run up his legs like fire up a fuse, exploding him to full consciousness.

‘Jesus!’ he gasped.

‘Hurting? That’s a good sign.’

‘That’s your expert fucking opinion, is it?’ grated Pascoe. ‘Where’d you pick up that priceless gem? Bart’s, was it? Or the interview room?’

‘Watch it, lad,’ warned Dalziel. ‘I’ll make allowances for delirium but I’ll not stand insubordination. Any more of that and I’ll …’

He hesitated.

‘You’ll what?’ demanded Pascoe. ‘Get me posted to traffic? Don’t bother. I’ll volunteer.’

‘No,’ said Dalziel. ‘What I was going to say was, any more of that and I’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks.’

There was a silence between the two men for a moment, and the moment was long enough to remind them that in this place there was no such thing as silence. Water dripped, earth dribbled, pebbles clinked, and from time to time there were creaks and groans as a hundred thousand tons of ancient rock tried to close this wound savagely ripped along its guts.

Then a new sound joined the others, almost but not quite the rattle of pain.

‘Like a ton of bricks,’ moaned Pascoe. ‘Oh Christ, don’t make me laugh.’

‘Ton of bricks!’ said Dalziel beginning to splutter. ‘Ton of …’

He let out a bellow of laughter which ricocheted off the pile of rubble under which Pascoe lay and rolled down the old roadway behind them.

‘Don’t,’ pleaded Pascoe. ‘Please don’t …’

But it was too late. The contagion of laughter was upon him and for a good half-minute the two policemen gave themselves over to hoots of merriment all the stronger because of the pain and fear they so inadequately masked.

Finally the merriment faded. Pascoe tried to keep it going a little time after it was completely dead. The alternative tenant of his imagination was a mouse voice squeaking that he was trapped in a dark confined space with no hope of rescue. It was, to misuse a phrase, a dream come true, his dream of the worst fate that could befall him. He closed his eyes, though in that place there was no need, and tried to win his way back to unconsciousness. He must have half succeeded, for he heard a distant voice gently calling his name and when his eyes opened, he was dazzled by a disc of white light which he tried desperately to confuse with the moon riding high above the lime tree in his garden on one of those rare nights when work and weather conspired to permit an al fresco supper and he and Ellie sat, wine-languid, in the summer-soft, flower-sweet, velvet-dark air.

It was a vain effort, a lie which never came close to being a delusion. The voice was Dalziel’s, the light his torch.

‘What?’ he demanded.

‘Nowt. Just thought there weren’t much point ruining me fingernails digging if you’d snuffed it,’ said Dalziel. ‘How are the legs? Still hurting?’

‘The pain seems to be getting further away,’ whispered Pascoe. ‘Or perhaps it’s just the legs that are getting further away.’

‘Jokes, is it? What are you after, lad? The fucking Police Medal?’

‘No joke, sir. More like despair.’

‘That’s all right, then. One thing I can’t stomach’s a bloody hero.’

Dalziel belched as though in illustration and added reflectively, ‘I could stomach one of Jack’s meat pies from the Black Bull, though.’

‘Food,’ said Pascoe.

‘You peckish too? That’s hopeful.’

‘Another good sign?’ whispered Pascoe. ‘No. I meant there wasn’t any. Back at the White Rock. Did you see any?’

‘Likely he’d not unpacked it. Well, he wouldn’t have time, would he?’

‘Perhaps not … there was someone in there, you know …’

‘In where? The White Rock? In a cave, or what?’

‘Back there … the side gallery … someone, something … I can’t remember …’

‘In there, you mean? Of course there was. Young bloody Farr was in there, which is why we’re in here, up to our necks! Well, back to work.’

It wasn’t the answer or at least only part of it, but his mind seemed to be refusing to register much since they had so foolishly left that marvellous world of air and trees and space and stars. He gave up the attempt at recall and lay still, listening to the fat man’s rat-like scrabblings. Was it really worth it? he wondered. He didn’t realize he’d spoken his thought, but Dalziel was replying.

‘Likely not. They’re probably out there already with their shovels and drills and blankets and hot soup and television lights and gormless interviewers practising their daft bloody questions. Nay, I’m just doing this to keep warm. Sensible thing would be to lie back and wait patiently, as the very old bishop said to the actress.’

‘How will they know where we are?’

‘You don’t think them other buggers got stuck like us? Pair of moles, them two. Born with hands like shovels and teeth like picks, these miners. I can’t wait to get my hands on that young bastard, Farr. This is all down to him, running off down here. Bloody Farr. He’ll wish he were far enough when I next see him.’

Pascoe smiled sadly at the fat man’s attempted cheeriness. He didn’t believe that he and Colin Farr would ever meet again. His mind burrowed into the huge pile of earth and rock which held him trapped and his heart showed him Colin Farr trapped there too. Or worse. And if worse, how to explain it to Ellie in the unlikely event he ever got the chance? Any explanation must sound like justification. He would, of course, deny any imperatives other than duty and the law. Up there you had to keep things simple. There was no other way to survive.

But down here survival was too far beneath hope to make a motive, and the darkness was fetid with doubt and accusation. Time for the bottom line, as the Yanks put it. Place for a bottom line too. And the bottom line read like this.

Colin Farr. Trapped by the pit he hated. Driven into that trap by a man who hated him.

Colin Farr.

Part One

And see! not far from where the mountain-side

First rose, a Leopard, nimble and light and fleet,

Clothed in a fine furred pelt all dapple-dyed,

Came gambolling out, and skipped before my feet.

Chapter 1

‘… the paddy broke down and we had to walk nearly the full length of the return to pit bottom and there was a hell of a crowd there already and tempers were getting frayed. They usually do if you’re kept waiting to ride the pit, especially when other buggers push into the Cage ahead of you because they’ve got priority. It’s not so bad when it’s the wet-ride – that’s men who’ve been working in water – though even then there’s a lot of complaining and the lads yell things like, “Call that wet? I think tha’s just pissed on tha boots!” But worst of all is when a bunch of deputies get to ride ahead of you which is what happened to us, and the sight of all those clean faces, grinning like they were getting into a lift in a knocking shop, really got our goat. As the last one got in, someone yelled, “That’s right, lad, hurry on home to your missus. But you’ll not get to ride there before the day-shift!” The deputy’s face were white before, but now it got even whiter and he set off back out of the Cage like he was going to grab whoever it was that called out and start a rumpus, but some of the other officials got hold of him and the grille clanged shut and the Cage went up. Mebbe it shouldn’t have been said, but first thing you learn down pit is not to bite when someone tries to rile you, and it certainly cheered up most of the poor sods still left waiting.

‘I rode up with the next lot and that was the end of my shift and this is the end of my homework.’

‘Thank you, Colin,’ said Ellie Pascoe. ‘That was really very good.’

‘Ee, miss, tha don’t say? Dost really think there’s hope tha can learn an ignorant bugger like me to read and write proper?’

Colin Farr’s accent had broadened beyond parody while his mouth gaped and his eyes bulged into a mask of grotesque gratitude. The others in the group roared with laughter and Ellie found herself flushing with shame at the justified rebuke; but because she was by nature a counter-puncher, she replied, once again without thinking, ‘Perhaps I’ll settle for learning you to stop feeling insecure in unfamiliar situations.’

Farr’s features tightened to their usual expression of amused watchfulness.

‘That’ll be grand,’ he said. ‘As soon as you’ve found the secret, be sure to let me know.’

He’s right, thought Ellie miserably. I’m as insecure as any of them!

She hadn’t anticipated this three weeks earlier when Adam Burnshaw, director of Mid-Yorks University’s extra-mural department, had rung to ask if she could help him out. One of his lecturers had contracted hepatitis in the Urals (Ellie had observed her husband teeter on the edge of a Dalzielesque joke), leaving a gap in a union-sponsored day-release course for miners. Ellie, politically sound, with years of experience as a social science lecturer till de-jobbed by childbirth and redundancy (both fairly voluntary), was the obvious stop-gap. No need to worry about her daughter, Rose. The University crèche was at her disposal.

Ellie had needed little time to think. Though far from housebound, she had started to feel that most of her reasons for going out were short on moral imperative. As for her reason for not going out, the great feminist novel she was supposed to be writing, that had wandered into more dead ends than a walker relying on farmers to maintain rights-of-way.

Preparation had been a bit of a rush, but Ellie had not stinted her time.

‘This is something worthwhile,’ she assured her husband. ‘A real job of real education with real people. I feel privileged.’

Peter Pascoe had wondered over his fourth consecutive meal of tinned tuna and lettuce whether in view of her messianic attitude to her prospective students, she might not be able to contrive something more interesting with leaves and fishes, but it was only a token complaint. Lately he too had started noticing signs of restlessness and he was glad to see Ellie back in harness, particularly in this area. During the recent year-long miners’ strike, when relations between police and pickets came close to open warfare, she had kept as low a profile as she could conscientiously manage. This had cost her much political credibility in her left-wing circles, and this job-offer from academic activist, Burnshaw, was like a ticket of readmittance to the main arena.

But there’s no such thing as a free ticket. The dozen miners who turned up at her first class on Industrial Sociology seemed bent on confirming the judgement of Indignant (name and address supplied) in the letter columns of the Evening Post, that such courses were little more than subsidized absenteeism.

At the end of an afternoon of monosyllabic responses to her hard prepared but softly presented material, she had retired in disarray after issuing a schoolmarmly invitation to write an account of a day at work before the next encounter.

That night she served frozen pizza as a change from tuna.

‘How’d it go, then?’ asked Pascoe with a casualness she mistook for indifference.

‘Fine,’ she grunted with a laconicism he mistook for exclusion.

‘Good. Many there?’

‘Just twelve.’

‘Good number for a messiah, but watch out for Judas.’

And here he was, Colin Farr, in his early twenties, his fair clear complexion as yet hardly touched by the tell-tale blue scars marking the other faces, his golden hair springy with Grecian curls, his every movement informed with natural grace. Put him in a tasselled cap and a striped blazer and he’d not win a second glance as he strolled through the Enclosure at Henley, except of admiration and envy.

Oh shit! she thought desperately. How classist can you get? It was wrong to call him Judas. He had merely invited her to betray herself.

At first indeed he had seemed a saviour when, just as she felt herself drowning in the silence which followed her request for a volunteer, he had risen like Adonis from a grassy bank and begun to read. It had been gratitude which had trapped her into that patronizing praise, and guilt which had stung her into that equally patronizing rebuke.

She took a deep breath, decided between inhalation and exhalation that the time was not yet ripe for an open analysis of the group dynamic, and said, ‘Did you think it should have been said?’

‘Eh?’

The change of direction was right. It had taken him by surprise.

‘You said that perhaps it was wrong for someone to make that crack about the deputy’s wife. Is that what you think?’

Slowly Colin Farr smiled. It was a slightly lopsided, devastatingly attractive smile and it seemed to say he now saw exactly what she was doing.

‘What do I think?’ he said. ‘I think either a man can look after his wife or he can’t and it doesn’t matter what any other bugger says. Also I think that deputies deserve all the shit you can throw at them. Just ask these lads here what they reckon and you’ll soon see if I’m right.’

She saw, and that night at dinner (steak and mushroom pie with braised red cabbage, incontrovertibly home-cooked) she attempted to convey both her delight and her surprise, delight that the ice had been broken and surprise at the depth of feeling revealed in the ensuing discussion.

‘It’s positively atavistic,’ she said. ‘These are young men talking as if they were back in the nineteen-twenties.’

‘You always said the Strike had knocked industrial relations back a generation,’ said Pascoe, shovelling another huge forkful of pie into his mouth.

‘This is nothing to do with industrial relations,’ retorted Ellie. ‘It’s tribal. Peter, if you’re going to gobble your food and look at your watch at the same time, you’ll end up putting your eye out. What’s the rush anyway? Not another James Cagney film on telly?’

‘No,’ said Pascoe uneasily. ‘It’s just that I’ve got to go out.’

‘You didn’t say anything,’ said Ellie indignantly.

‘No? Well, I was going to tell you when I got home but somehow …’

‘You mean,’ said Ellie with detective sharpness, ‘that when you got home and instead of the fast food you’ve been moaning about, you saw I’d rushed back from my class and slaved away cooking your favourite dinner, you lost your nerve!’

Pascoe smiled placatingly and said, ‘Well, sort of. I was going to say something, but you were so keen to tell me about your interesting afternoon with the horny-handed sons of toil …’

‘My God, I know who you really are! You’re Indignant (name and address supplied), I recognize the style! So, tell me, what’s so important that you prefer it to your favourite nosh, not to mention my intellectual company?’

‘It’s Mr Watmough,’ said Pascoe.

‘Watmough? You mean that creepy sod who’s Deputy Chief Constable? I thought he was leaving?’

‘He is. That’s why I’ve got to go out. The brass will be laying on a farewell dinner, but tonight he’s popping into the Club for a presentation from the plebs. I feel I ought to be there out of courtesy.’

‘Courtesy? To a Social Democrat?’ said Ellie scornfully.

The announcement of Watmough’s resignation had been followed almost immediately by the leaked news that he was shortlisted as a possible SDP candidate for a winnable local seat. It was no secret that he had been bitterly disappointed when he failed to get the recently vacant Chief Constable’s job. He’d been everyone’s favourite, except for Detective-Superintendent Andrew Dalziel, who rated him, to quote, ‘lower than a duck’s arsehole and twice as wet’. How Dalziel could have influenced the result was not clear, but Pascoe had suspicions close to certainties that it had been the fat man’s spade-like hand that had dashed the foaming cup from Watmough’s foaming lips.

A period of dark brooding had followed. Watmough was already a small-time media personality with the assistance of Ike Ogilby, editor of the Sunday Challenger, flagship paper of the main Mid-Yorkshire news group. He had been hoping to become a big-time personality via the Chief Constableship, and thence launch himself into the political empyrean. Now, faced with the choice of looking for other Chief’s jobs outside the area where his power base lay, or attempting a low-level take-off, he’d opted for the latter.

‘Who’s making the presentation?’ asked Ellie.

‘Dalziel.’

Ellie began to laugh.

‘You’re quite right, Peter,’ she said. ‘You can’t miss that. It should be a night to remember. But first you’ll eat up your apple pie and custard. And you’ll sit there and look interested while I finish telling you about Colin Farr and his mates. Are you sitting comfortably?’

‘Yes, miss,’ said Pascoe.

‘Then I’ll begin.’

Chapter 2

Colin Farr went to the bar and asked for another pint. It was his fourth since he’d come into the Welfare not much more than half an hour ago.

‘Thirsty work back at school, is it?’ said the steward. His name was Peter Pedley, but ever since he’d grown a bandido moustache to age his childishly young features when he first went down the pit, he’d been known as Pedro. His body had long ago thickened to a solid barrel which was eighty per cent muscle, and the childishness too had spread into a mature joviality, though the moustache remained. He was a man much respected both for his strength of body and his resilience of spirit. In his mid-twenties he’d been advised by the doctor that the bronchitis which had troubled him since childhood was rapidly worsening underground. With a wife and young family, he was unwilling to take the wage cut and poor prospects of surface work, so he’d taken a job as barman in a Barnsley pub, got to know the business inside out, and eventually returned to the place of his birth as the residential steward of the Burrthorpe Miners’ Social and Welfare Club. Two years later his resilience was tested to breaking-point when his youngest daughter, Tracey, aged seven, disappeared. The child had never been found. The consoling presence of and continued responsibility for three other children had kept Pedley and his wife from falling apart, but Mrs Pedley had aged a decade in the years since the disappearance and Pedro visited the whisky optic on his own behalf as frequently as on his customers’.

He rarely let it show, however, and he had a sharp eye for alcohol-based trouble in others.

Now Colin Farr supped two inches off the top of his pint and said, ‘University, not school, Pedro. But you’re right. It’s thirsty work, all that talking.’

‘Better than fighting,’ said Pedley, amiably but with a hint of warning. He knew most of his customers better than they knew themselves. Four pints in half an hour was par for the course in some; with young Farr it spelt trouble.

The young man heard the warning and drank again, regarding Pedley over the rim without resentment. The steward still wheezed through the winter, but when Pedro Pedley sallied forth to sort out trouble, those close to it scattered and those safely distant settled down to enjoy the show. When Colin Farr lowered the glass, it was more than half empty.

‘Where’s Maggie?’ he asked.

‘She’ll not be working tonight. She’s badly. This is the day it happened.’

Their eyes met: Pedley’s blank, Farr’s searching.

‘Is that right?’ said Farr. ‘Then naturally she’ll be upset.’

And he went back to his seat moving with easy grace.

He was alone at one of the round formica tables. The Club’s main public room was a cheerless place when almost empty. Full, you couldn’t see the brown and beige tiled floor, or the cafeteria furniture, or the vinyl-upholstered waiting-room bench which ran round the flock-papered walls. Full, the plaster-board ceiling, steel cross-girder and glaring strip-lights were to some extent obscured by the strato-cirrus layer of tobacco smoke. And best of all, full, the whisper of a man’s own disturbing thoughts was almost inaudible beneath the din of loud laughter, seamless chatter, and amplified music.

At the moment Colin Farr’s thoughts were coming through too loud, too clear. He’d gone into the students’ union bar at the University today. Its décor and furnishings had not been all that different from the Club’s. The atmosphere had been just as thick; the voices just as loud, the music just as raucous. Yet he had left very quickly, feeling alien. The reaction had troubled him. It was uncharacteristic. He was not a shy person; he’d been around and hadn’t been much bothered at entering some places where he’d been quite literally a foreigner. But the students’ bar had made him feel so uneasy that he’d fled, and the memory of this uneasiness wouldn’t leave him alone.

It had been self-irritation with his reaction that had made him so sharp with that Mrs Pascoe in the afternoon. Well, partly at least. And partly it had been her. Condescending cow!

He had finished his fourth pint without hardly noticing. He was thinking about getting out of his seat again, though whether to return to the bar or head out into the night he wasn’t sure, when the door burst open and two men came in. One was Farr’s age but looked older. They’d been in the same class at school, but, unlike Farr, Tommy Dickinson’s career down the pit had been continuous since he was fifteen. Chunkily built, he had the beginnings of a substantial beer-gut, and when his broad amiable face split into a grin at the sight of Farr, his teeth were stained brown with tobacco juice.

‘Look what’s here!’ he cried. ‘Hey, Pedro! I thought only working men could get served in this club.’

‘You’d best buy me a pint, then,’ said Farr.

While Dickinson was getting the drinks, the other man sat down at Farr’s table. He was Neil Wardle, in his thirties, a lean taciturn man. His face was as brown and weather-beaten as any countryman’s. In fact, like many of his workmates, as if in reaction against the underworld in which they earned their bread, he spent as much of his spare time as possible roaming the hills around Burrthorpe with his dog and a shotgun. He was charge-man of the team of rippers in which the other two worked.

‘All right, Col?’ he said.

‘All right,’ said Farr.

‘Your mam all right?’

‘Aye. Why shouldn’t she be?’

‘No reason. She didn’t say owt about anyone coming round, asking questions?’

‘No. What sort of questions?’

‘Just questions,’ said Wardle vaguely. Before Farr could press him, Dickinson returned, his broad hands locked round three pint glasses.

‘It’s no use, Col,’ he declared in the booming voice which was his normal speech level. ‘Tha’ll have to play hookey from that school. They sent us that Scotch bugger again today. He can’t even speak proper! Three times he asked me for a chew of baccy and I thought the sod were just coughing!’

Farr’s absence meant that his place had to be filled for that shift by someone ‘on the market’, and men used to working in a regular team did not take readily to a newcomer.

‘There’s worse than Jock,’ said Wardle.

Dickinson rolled his eyes in a parody of disbelief, but he did not pursue the subject. In matters like this, Wardle had the last word, and in any case, most of Dickinson’s complaints were ritualistic rather than real.

‘Teacher didn’t ask you to stay behind to clean her board, then?’ he asked slyly.

Farr wished he hadn’t let on that one of his lecturers was a woman. His friend’s innuendo was not masked by any great subtlety.

‘Not today,’ he said. ‘I’m building up to it.’

‘All right, is she?’

He thought about Ellie Pascoe. A condescending cow was how he’d categorized her to himself earlier. But that had been as ritualistic as Tommy’s pretence that he couldn’t understand Jock Brodie’s accent. However, in-depth analysis was not what Dickinson was after.

‘She’s got nice tits,’ he said. ‘And she doesn’t wear a bra.’

‘Hey up! That’s half the battle, then! Hey, did you hear the one about the lass who’d just got married and next time she met her old dad, he asked her, “What fettle, lass?” and she said, “Dad, can I ask you a question? That bit of skin at the end of my Jack’s thing, what do you call that?” …’

Colin Farr’s mind drifted away from the joke as his gaze drifted round the rapidly filling room. He knew all the men here by face, and most of them by name. Some there were who’d been young men when he’d been a boy. Some had been middle-aged then who were old now. And one or two had always been old and were now much much older. He knew them all, and their wives and their families, to the second and sometimes the third generation. He was looking at the past of a whole community here, traced in lined and scarred faces, in shallow breathing and deep coughs. Was that what was worrying him? He didn’t think so. It was not the fact that he was looking at the past, he suddenly realized. It was rather that he could be looking at the future! It was here, in this room, in this loud talk, and laughter, and argument, in these wreaths of tabacco smoke and these rings of foam on straight glasses.

The bar in the students’ union, there’d been foam rings there too, and tobacco wreaths, argument and laughter and loud talk. What there hadn’t been was any sense that this was anyone’s future. It had been here and now; fun and finite; a launching-pad, not an endless looped tape. No sense there of raising a glass at eighteen and setting it down at eighty with nothing changed except your grey hair, gapped gums and wrinkled genitals!

In his ear Tommy’s voice rose to its triumphant climax.

‘“’Ee, lass,” said her dad. “Ah diven’t know what thy Jack calls ’em, but ah calls ’em the cheeks of me arse!”’

Colin Farr laughed, loud and false and desperate, and rose to his feet.

‘Good one, Tommy,’ he proclaimed. ‘Good one. Let’s have another pint!’

Chapter 3

The Police Club functions room was crowded, noisy and full of smoke. There was a sound like a spade flattening the last sod on a pauper’s grave. It was Andy Dalziel’s huge hand slapping the bar. Immediately the noise faded and even the miasma seemed to clear for a space of a couple of feet around the massive grizzled head.

The Detective-Superintendent, Head of Mid-Yorks CID, looked round the room till heavy breathers held their heavy breath, then he opened his speech with the time-honoured Yorkshire formula.

‘Right, you buggers,’ he said. ‘You know what we’re here for tonight.’

His audience sighed in happy anticipation. It occurred to Sammy Ruddlesdin of the Evening Post that his report (written in advance so that he wouldn’t have anything to distract him from the boozing) was more than usually dishonest. In it he’d said that the crowded room bore eloquent witness to the high regard in which DCC Watmough was held by his fellows, while in truth, it bore eloquent witness to the low regard in which they knew that Dalziel held him. Most were here in the simple hope of being entertained by a valedictory vilification!

They were sadly disappointed. After a few ancient but warmly received anecdotes, Dalziel launched on a meandering and mainly complimentary account of Watmough’s career. There were a few hopeful signs (‘I knew him in them early days with Mid-Yorks. There were some as said he got a bit over-excited under pressure but I always said, you’ve got to flap a bit if you want to be a high flier!’) but they never came to anything. Perhaps Dalziel was saving himself up for the Pickford case? This was Watmough’s finest hour, occurring during a brief sojourn as Assistant Chief Constable in South Yorkshire when he had masterminded the hunt for a child killer. A salesman, Donald Pickford, had obliged by asphyxiating himself in his car and leaving a note of confession. Somehow Watmough, with media support, had turned this into a triumph of detection with himself modestly wearing the bays. He had returned rapidly on the crest of this wave to Mid-Yorks as Deputy Chief and had looked to have enough momentum left to carry him all the way to the Chief’s office only three years later, till a malevolent fate had intervened.

This same malevolent fate was now approaching his peroration.

‘We’ll not soon forget what you’ve done for us in these past few years,’ declaimed Dalziel. ‘Like the man said, you touched nowt you didn’t adorn. Now the time has come for you to move on to fresh fields and pastures new. And the time has come for me, Neville – and it’s good to be able to call you Neville again after these past few years of having to call you sir …’

Pause for laughter, especially from Peter Pascoe, who recalled Dalziel’s more usual forms of reference, such as Shit-head, Lobby Lud, Her Majesty, Nutty Slack and Rover the Wonder Dog.

‘… the time has come for me to present you with this token of our esteem.’

He picked up a box from the bar.

‘Rumour has it you’re thinking of going into politics, or at least into the SDP, so we thought this’d be a suitable gift.’

From the box he took a clock, turned the hands to twelve and set it on the bar. A moment later a peal of Westminster Chimes began to sound.

‘We reckoned that with this, Nev, if you ever do get into Parliament, it won’t matter whose bed you’re ringing home from, you can always convince your missus you’re at an all-night sitting in the House. Goodbye to you, and good … luck!’

And that was it. Not yet nine o’clock and the action over with not a bloodstain to be seen. The DCC, as relieved as his audience was disappointed, repaid Dalziel’s moderation with a fulsomely sentimental tribute to his colleagues at all levels.

‘Brings tears to your eyes, doesn’t it?’ said Pascoe.

Sergeant Wield, whose shattered visage looked as if it would absorb tears like dew off the Gobi Desert, said, ‘De mortuis.’

‘Well, stuff me,’ said Sammy Ruddlesdin behind him. ‘Once through these hallowed portals and it’s goodbye to all that ’ello, ’ello, ’ello, stuff and it’s out with the Latin tags and literary quotes. Even Fat Andy was at it.’

It was clear Ruddlesdin had been enjoying the hospitality. Beside him was a short, stoutish man smartly dressed in a black worsted three-piece suit, a sartorial effect somewhat at odds with the handrolled cigarette drooping beneath a ragged and nicotine-stained moustache.

‘I dare say you lads know my friend and colleague, Mr Monty Boyle of the Sunday Challenger, the famous Man Who Knows Too Much.’

‘I think we’ve met in court,’ said Pascoe. ‘I didn’t think our little occasion tonight would have had much in it for the Challenger.’

‘The passing of a great public servant?’ said Boyle with a W. C. Fieldsian orotundity. ‘You surprise me. Dignity needs its chroniclers as much as disaster.’

He’s winding me up, thought Pascoe. He opened his mouth to inquire what hitherto hidden connection with dignity the Challenger was planning to reveal when Ruddlesdin said, ‘Careful, Peter. Our Monty Knows Too Much because he’s got an extra ear.’

He drew back the Challenger man’s jacket to reveal, hooked on to the third button of his waistcoat, a slim black cassette recorder, almost invisible against the cloth.

‘Just a tool of the trade,’ said Boyle indifferently. ‘I don’t hide it.’

‘Voice sensitive too, and directional. If he’s facing you in a crowded bar, it’ll pick you up above all the chatter, isn’t that right, Monty?’

There was not a great deal of love lost between these two, decided Pascoe.

‘It’s not switched on,’ said Boyle. ‘Mr Dalziel’s valediction is, of course, printed on my heart. And I’d never attempt to record a policeman without his knowledge.’

He smiled politely at Pascoe.

Ruddlesdin said, ‘Especially not in their club where visitors can’t buy drinks,’ and stared significantly into his empty glass.

Wield said, ‘Give it here, Sammy. Mr Boyle?’

‘No more for me,’ said the crime reporter, glancing at his watch. ‘I have some driving to do before I get to bed.’

‘What’s that mean? Farmer’s wife or kerb crawling?’ said Ruddlesdin.

Boyle smiled. ‘In our business, Sammy, you’re either pressing forward or you’re sliding backward, have you forgotten that? Once you start just reporting news, you might as well bow out for one of these.’

He tapped the cassette on his chest before buttoning his jacket.

‘Good night, Mr Pascoe. I hope we may meet again and be of mutual benefit soon.’

He made towards the door through which the DCC and his party were being ushered by Dalziel.

‘Jumped-up nowt,’ said Ruddlesdin. ‘I knew him when he couldn’t tell a wedding car from a hearse. Now he acts like the bloody Challenger were the Sunday Times.’

‘Very trying,’ sympathized Pascoe. ‘On the other hand, tonight is very wedding and hearse stuff, isn’t it? A column filler for the Evening Post perhaps, but lacking those elements of astounding revelation which set the steam rising from the Challenger.’

‘When you buy a whippet you keep your eye skinned to see no one slips it a pork pie before a race,’ said Ruddlesdin.

‘Riddles now? You’re not moving to Comic Cuts, are you, Sammy? What is it you’re saying? That Ike Ogilby’s put his minders on Watmough till he gets into Parliament?’

Ogilby was the Challenger’s ambitious editor, linked with Watmough ever since the Pickford case in a symbiotic relationship in which a good press was traded for insider information.

‘No,’ said Ruddlesdin confidentially. ‘What I’ve heard, and will deny ever having said till I’m saying, “told you so”, is that yon clock’s the nearest Watmough’s likely to get to Westminster. This SDP selection he thinks he’s got sewn up – well, there’s a local councillor on the short list, a chap who’s owed a few favours and knows where all the bodies are buried. Smart money’s on him. And Ike Ogilby’s got the smartest money in town.’

‘Another rejection will drive the poor devil mad,’ said Pascoe. ‘But if it’s not a personal leak in the Chamber that Ogilby’s after, why keep up his interest in Watmough once he’s resigned from the Force?’

Ruddlesdin tapped his long pointed nose and said, ‘Memoirs, Pete, I’m talking memoirs.’

‘Memoirs? But what’s he got to remember?’ asked Pascoe. ‘He thinks a stake-out’s a meal at Berni’s.’

Ruddlesdin observed him with alcoholic shrewdness.

‘That sounded more like Andy Dalziel than you,’ he said. ‘All I know is that Ogilby’s not interested in buying pigs in pokes, if you’ll excuse the metaphor. Mebbe my dear old jumped-up mate, Monty, is living up to his byline for once. The Man Who Knows Too Much. Wieldy, I thought you’d fallen among thieves! Bless you, my son.’

Wield had returned with a tray on which rested three pints. The reporter took his and drained two-thirds of it in a single swallow. Pascoe ignored the proffered tray, however. He was looking across the room to the exit through which Dalziel was just ushering the DCC and his party. Before he went out, Watmough paused and slowly looked around. What was he seeing? Something to stir fond memories of companionship, loyalty, a job well done?

Or something to stir relief at his going and resentment at its manner?

And how shall I feel when it’s my turn? wondered Pascoe.

He too looked round the room. Saw the mouthing faces, ghastly in the smoke-fogged strip-lighting. Heard the raucous laughter, the bellowed conversations, the eardrum-striating music. He felt a deep revulsion against it all. But he knew he was not applying a fair test. He was not a very clubbable person. His loyalties were individual rather than institutional. He distrusted the exclusivity of esprit de corps. Not that there was anything sinister here. This scene was the commonplace of ten thousand clubs and pubs the length and breadth of the island. Here was the companionship of the alehouse, nothing more.

But suddenly he felt hemmed in, short of air, deprived of will, threatened. He looked at his watch. It was only five to nine.

‘Time to go,’ he said. ‘I promised not to be late.’

‘But your beer …’ said Wield, taken aback.

‘Sammy’ll drink it. See you.’

In the small foyer he paused and took a deep breath. The door leading to the car park opened and Dalziel came in.

‘Well, that’s the cortège on its way,’ he said rubbing his hands. ‘Now let’s get on with the wake.’

‘Not me,’ said Pascoe firmly, adding, to divert Dalziel’s efforts at dissuasion, ‘and don’t be too sure he won’t be back to haunt you.’

‘Eh?’

He repeated Ruddlesdin’s rumour. Rather to his surprise, instead of being abusively dismissive, Dalziel answered thoughtfully, ‘Yes, I’d heard summat like that too. Makes you think … Ogilby … Boyle …’

Then he roared with laughter and added, ‘But who’d want to buy memoirs from a man who can scarcely remember to zip up after he’s had a run-off? It’d be the sale of the sodding century!’

Still laughing, he pushed his way back into the smoke- and noise-filled room while Pascoe with more relief than he could easily account for went out into the fresh night air.

Chapter 4

By half past nine, Colin Farr was moving between his seat and the bar with a steady deliberation more worrying to Pedro Pedley than any amount of stagger and sway.

‘Young Col all right, is he?’ he asked Neil Wardle as the taciturn miner got another round in.

‘Aye,’ said Wardle, apparently uninterested.

But when he got back to the table, he repeated the question as he set pints down before Farr and Dickinson.

‘All right, Col?’

‘Any reason I shouldn’t be?’

‘None as I can think of.’

‘Right, then,’ said Farr.

‘What’s that, Neil? A half? You sickening for something?’ said Tommy Dickinson, his face flushed with the room’s heat and his vain efforts to catch up with his friend’s intake.

‘No, but I’m off just now to a meeting,’ said Wardle.

Wardle was on the branch committee of the Union. During the Great Strike there had been times when his lack of strident militancy and his quiet rationalism had brought accusations of ‘softness’. But as the Strike began to crumble and the men began to recognize that no amount of rhetoric or confrontation could bring the promised victory, Wardle’s qualities won more and more respect. There’d only been one ‘scab’ at Burrthorpe Main, but many who had weakened and come close to snapping knew that they too would now be paying the price of isolation if it hadn’t been for Wardle’s calm advice and rock-like support. Since the Strike he’d been a prime mover in the re-energizing of the shattered community. And it was Wardle who’d pushed Colin Farr into seeking a place on the Union-sponsored day-release course at the University.

‘Bloody meetings!’ said Dickinson. ‘I reckon committee’s got a woman up there and they take a vote on who gets first bash!’

Wardle ignored him and said, ‘There’ll be a full branch meeting next Sunday, Col. You’ll be coming to that?’

‘Mebbe,’ said Farr indifferently. ‘They’ll likely manage without me, but.’

‘Likely we will. But will you manage without them?’

‘Union didn’t do my dad much good, did it?’ said Farr savagely.

‘It did the best it could and he never complained. Col, you were grand during the Strike. It were a miracle you didn’t end up in jail, the tricks you got up to. Nothing seemed too much bother for you then. But the fight’s not over, not by a long chalk. The Board’s got a long hit list and only them as are ready and organized will be able to fight it.’

‘Oh aye? Best day’s work they ever did if they put a lid on that fucking hole!’ exclaimed Farr.

‘You fought hard enough to keep it open in the Strike,’ said Wardle.

‘I fought. But don’t tell me what I fought for, Neil. Mebbe I just fought ’cos while you’re fighting, you don’t have time to think!’

Wardle drank his beer, frowning. Dickinson, who hated a sour atmosphere, lowered his voice to what he thought of as a confidential whisper and said, ‘See who’s just come in? Gavin Mycroft and his missus. They’re sitting over there with Arthur Downey and that cunt, Satterthwaite. Right little deputies’ dog-kennel.’

‘I saw them,’ said Farr indifferently.

‘Here, Col, you still fancy Stella?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Come on, Col, you were knocking her off rotten when you were a lad, up in the woods by the White Rock. By God I bet you made the chalk dust fly! And don’t say it weren’t serious. You got engaged when you went off, and you didn’t need to, ’cos you were stuffing her already!’

He smiled at the perfection of his own logic.

‘That’s old news, Tommy,’ said Farr.

‘And you were well out of that,’ said Wardle. ‘Marrying a deputy in middle of the Strike and going off to Spain on honeymoon while there were kids going hungry back here! That’s no way for a miner’s daughter to act.’

‘What did you want her to do?’ exclaimed Farr. ‘Spend her honeymoon camping on a picket line?’

‘See! You still do fancy her!’ crowed Dickinson.

‘Why don’t you shut your big gob, Tommy, and get some drinks in?’ said Farr.

Unoffended, the young miner rose and headed for the bar. Wardle called after him, ‘No more for me, Tommy. I’ve got to be off and look after you buggers’ interests.’

He stood up.

‘Think on, Col. If you’re going to stay on round here, make it for the right reasons.’

‘What’d them be?’

‘To make it a place worth staying on in.’

Farr laughed. ‘Clean-up job, you mean? Justice for the worker, that sort of stuff? Well, never fear, Neil. That’s why I’ve stayed on right enough.’

Wardle looked at the young man with concern, but said nothing more.

‘Bugger off, Neil,’ said Farr in irritation. ‘It’s like having me dad standing over me waiting till I worked out what I’d done wrong.’

‘He were a clever man, old Billy,’ said Wardle.

‘If he were so bloody clever, how’d he end up with his neck broke at the bottom of a shaft?’ asked Farr harshly.

‘Mebbe when he had to transfer from the face, he brought some of the dark up with him. It happens.’

‘What the hell does that mean, Neil?’ said Farr very softly.

‘Figure of speech. See you tomorrow. Don’t be late. Jock never is.’

Left to himself, Colin Farr sat staring sightlessly at the table surface for a while. Suddenly he rose. Glass in hand, he walked steadily down the room till he reached the table Dickinson had called the deputies’ dog-kennel.

The three men seated there looked up as Farr approached. Only the woman ignored him. She was in her mid-twenties, heavily made-up, with her small features diminished still further by a frame of exaggeratedly bouffant silver-blonde hair. But no amount of make-up or extravagance of coiffure could disguise the fact that she had a lovely face. Her husband, Gavin Mycroft, was a few years older, a slim dark man with rather sullen good looks. Next to him, in his forties, sat Arthur Downey, also very thin but tall enough to be gangling with it. He had a long sad face with a dog’s big gentle brown eyes.

The third man was squat and muscular. Balding at the front, he had let his dull gingery hair grow into a compensatory mane over his ears and down his neck.

This was Harold Satterthwaite. He regarded Farr’s approach indifferently from heavily hooded eyes. Mycroft glowered aggressively, but Arthur Downey half rose and said, ‘Hello, Col. All right? Can I get you a drink?’

‘Got one,’ said Farr. ‘Just want a word with Stella.’

The woman didn’t look up, but her husband rose angrily, saying, ‘Listen, Farr, I’ll not tell you again …’

Downey took his sleeve and pulled him down.

‘Keep it calm, Gav. Col’s not looking for bother, are you, Col?’

Farr looked amazed, then said with an incredibly sweet smile, ‘Me? Nay, you know me better than that, surely? It’s just that me mam wants Mrs Mycroft’s receipt for potato cakes. It’s all right if your missus gives me a receipt, isn’t it, Mr Mycroft, sir?’

Mycroft was on his feet again, his face flushed with rage. Then Pedro Pedley was between the two men, collecting empty glasses from the table.

‘Everything all right, gents?’ he said pleasantly.

‘Nowt we can’t take care of ourselves, Peter,’ said Satterthwaite, staring with cold dislike at Colin Farr. He was Pedley’s brother-in-law and shared with his sister the distinction of using the steward’s real name.

‘Not in here, you can’t,’ said Pedley. ‘Down the hole or in the street, you do what you like. In here you do what I like. Arthur, you’ve got some sense …’

He jerked his head towards the door. Downey gently took Farr’s elbow.

‘Come on, Col,’ he said coaxingly. ‘Let’s go and sit and have a chat. It’d be like old times for me. Your dad and me had some good nights in here …’

‘Not that many, Arthur,’ sneered Satterthwaite. ‘He didn’t dare show his face in here much at the end. I’ll give you that, Farr. You’ve got real nerve. I’d not have thought even you would have had the brass balls to come in here tonight of all nights.’

Farr swung towards him. His glass fell from his hand and crashed to the floor, scattering beer and splinters. Downey flung his arms round the youth to restrain him. Pedley said, ‘Belt up, Harold! Col, you get yourself out of here else you’re banned. Now!’

Farr was trying to struggle free from Downey’s restraint, then suddenly he relaxed.

‘You know what, Harold?’ he said. ‘You’re full of shit. It’s time somebody took you apart but who wants to get covered in shit?’

Tommy Dickinson arrived from the bar, his face wreathed with concern.

‘What’s going off, Col?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got you a beer.’

‘I think mebbe Col’s had enough,’ said Pedley.

‘You’re right there, Pedro,’ said Farr. ‘More than bloody enough!’

He pulled free from Downey, seized the glass from Dickinson’s hand, drained it in a single draught and banged it down in front of Satterthwaite with a crash that almost shattered it.

‘Take it easy, Col,’ said Downey.

‘You can fuck off too,’ snarled Farr. ‘Call yourself a friend? What did you ever do for my dad? What did any of you ever do?’

He pushed his way past Dickinson and headed for the exit door.

Dickinson slurped hastily at his pint and said, ‘I’d best go after him.’

‘He’ll be better left,’ advised Downey.

‘What the fuck do you know?’ said Dickinson rudely. But when Pedley said, ‘Arthur’s right, Tommy. Best leave him for a bit anyway,’ the chubby miner allowed himself to be led back to the bar where he was soon retailing a lurid version of the incident to eager ears.

Downey resumed his seat, looking anxiously towards the door.

‘For Christ’s sake, Arthur, why do you get so het up over a loonie like yon bugger?’ demanded Satterthwaite.

‘His dad were my best friend,’ said Downey defensively.

‘So you keep telling us when most’d keep quiet about something like that. Or is it just that you think mebbe May Farr’ll become your best friend too if you wet-nurse her daft bloody son?’

Downey’s long face went pale but Stella Mycroft said slyly, ‘Arthur just likes helping people, don’t you, Arthur? Then mebbe they’ll help him.’

‘Oh, you can talk, then?’ said Mycroft. ‘I didn’t hear you say much when that bastard were talking to you.’

‘No need, was there?’ said Stella. ‘A lady doesn’t need to open her mouth, or anything, when she’s got three old-fashioned gentlemen around to defend her honour, does she?’

Satterthwaite snorted a laugh. Downey looked embarrassed. And Gavin Mycroft regarded his wife in baffled fury.

Outside the Welfare, Colin Farr had paused as the night air hit him, taking strength from his legs but doing little to cool the great rage in his head. He looked around as if he needed to get his bearings. The Club was the last building at the western end of the village. After this the road wound off up the valley to a horizon dimly limned against the misty stars. But there were other brighter lights up there, the lights of Burrthorpe Main.

Farr thrust a defiant finger into the air at them then turned towards the town and began to stagger forward.

Soon the old grey terrace of the High Street was shouldered aside by a modern shopping parade. Business, badly hit by the Great Strike, was picking up again, as evidenced by the brightly lit supermarket window plastered like a boxer’s face with loss-leader Special Offers. Farr pressed his forehead against the glass, enjoying its smooth chill against his fevered skin.

A car drove slowly by, coming to a halt before the Welfare. A stout man got out. He stood on the Club steps rolling a thin cigarette, then instead of going in, he walked along the pavement towards Colin Farr.

‘Got a light, friend?’ he asked.

‘Don’t smoke. Bad for your health,’ said Farr solemnly.

‘You’re an expert, are you?’ laughed the man. He was studying Farr’s face closely in the light from the supermarket window. ‘It’s Mr Farr, isn’t it? From Clay Street?’

‘Depends who’s asking.’

‘Boyle’s the name. Monty Boyle. You may have heard of me. Here’s my card.’

He undid his jacket and took a card out of his waistcoat pocket.

‘I was thinking, Mr Farr,’ he went on. ‘We may be able to do each other a bit of good. I’m supposed to be seeing someone at your Club, but that can wait. Is there somewhere quiet we can go and have a talk, and a coffee too? You look like a man who could use a coffee.’

‘Coffee,’ said Farr, studying the card closely. ‘And somewhere quiet. It’s quiet here. And lots of coffee too.’

Boyle followed his gaze into the supermarket where a pyramid of instant coffee dominated the window display.

‘Yes,’ he said with a smile. ‘But I don’t think they’re open.’

‘No problem,’ said Colin Farr.

And picking the man up as if he weighed fifteen pounds rather than fifteen stone, he hurled him through the plate-glass window.

Fifty yards away the doors of a parked car opened and two uniformed policemen got out. The younger, a constable, ran towards the supermarket. Behind him at a more dignified pace walked a sergeant. The constable grabbed Colin Farr from behind as he stood laughing at the man sprawled amidst the wreck of the coffee pyramid. Farr drove his elbow back into the policeman’s belly and turned to grapple with him.

‘Now then, young Colin, behave yourself,’ said the sergeant reprovingly.

‘That you, Sergeant Swift? Don’t go away. I’ll sort you out after I’m done with this bugger.’

So saying, Farr lifted the constable in the air and hurled him after Monty Boyle.

Sergeant Swift sighed and raised his night stick.

‘Sorry, lad, I can’t wait,’ he said and brought it down with moderate force and perfect aim on the base of Farr’s neck. Then he held out his arms to catch the young man’s body as he fell into a darkness deeper and blacker than riding the pit.

Chapter 5

‘And how was the people’s poet today?’

‘Sorry?’

‘The young man in your class whose literary style you so admired.’

‘He wasn’t there,’ said Ellie.

‘Oh dear. A drop-out. I wondered why I found you so glum. Hello, Rosie, my love! How’s life in the University crèche? Have they got you on to nuclear physics yet?’

Pascoe picked up his daughter and held her high in the air to her great delight.

‘No, not a drop-out,’ said Ellie. ‘He couldn’t be there because he’s in jail.’

‘Jail? Good Lord.’

Pascoe replaced Rose on the sofa and sat down beside her.

‘Tell me all,’ he said.

‘He was in some kind of fracas with a policeman. I assume it was the kind of horseplay which, if indulged in with another miner, would have got his wrist slapped. With a cop, of course, it amounts to sacrilege.’

‘You assume that, do you?’ mused Pascoe. ‘Is it an assumption based on evidence? Or, like that of the Virgin Mary, on faith and a dearth of eyewitnesses?’

Ellie’s indignation was not to be diverted to the conspiracy of clerics, attractive target though it was.

‘An educated guess,’ she retorted. ‘As for evidence, I rather thought you might have mentioned the case to me before this, or does it come under Official Secrets?’

‘On the contrary. Assaults on police officers are, alas, so commonplace that they can go pretty well unnoticed, even in the Force. Like accidents to miners. As long as they don’t put a man in hospital for more than a few hours, who cares? But you must have had his mates’ version?’

‘Not really,’ admitted Ellie. ‘He’s the only one from his pit, so the others have only known him since he came on the course. One of them saw a paragraph about the case in his local paper.’

‘So where is he from, this whatsisname?’

‘Farr. Colin Farr. He works at Burrthorpe Main.’

‘Burrthorpe. Now that rings a bell. Of course. Both mysteries solved.’

‘I didn’t know there was even one.’

‘Mystery One. Why did it ring a bell? That was where one of the kids went missing that Watmough put in the Pickford frame. And our beloved ex-DCC never missed a chance of dragging the Pickford case into his many farewell speeches.’

‘You mean this man Pickford murdered a Burrthorpe child?’

‘Possibly. They never found her body. But Pickford’s suicide gave Watmough the chance to load several unsolved child-molestation cases on to him, plus the Pedley girl’s disappearance. Must have helped the serious-crime statistics a lot.’

‘Jesus!’ said Ellie. ‘How comforting! And what was the other mystery? You said there were two.’

‘Oh yes. Mystery Two. Why don’t I know about the assaulted copper? Because Burrthorpe’s in the South Yorks area, that’s why! Only just, mind you. Another quarter-mile and it would be on our patch, but as it is, the battered bobby is not one of Mid-Yorkshire’s finest, therefore I know nothing.’

‘How typically parochial!’ mocked Ellie. ‘How far is it? Twenty miles?’

‘Nearer thirty, actually. That’s quite a long way for your lad to come, isn’t it? He must be very keen to get out of Burrthorpe Main once a week.’

‘He’s certainly found an ingenious way of staying out even longer, hasn’t he?’ said Ellie, a little over-savagely.

‘Yes, dear. You don’t know anywhere round here where a hungry policeman could get a meal, do you?’

Ellie rose and went to the door.

‘It’s salad,’ she said as she passed through. ‘I was a bit pushed.’

Pascoe leaned over and looked down at his daughter who returned his gaze from wide unblinking blue-grey eyes.

‘OK, kid,’ he said sternly. ‘Don’t play innocent with me. You’re not leaving this sofa till you tell me where you’ve hidden the rusks.’

Next morning Pascoe, finding himself with a loose couple of minutes as he drank his mug of instant coffee, dialled the number of South Yorkshire Police Headquarters, identified himself and asked if Detective-Inspector Wishart was handy.

‘Hello, cowboy!’ came the most unconstabulary greeting a few moments later. ‘How’s life out on the range? Got running water yet?’

It was Wishart’s little joke to affect belief that Mid-Yorks was a haven of rural tranquillity in which the only crimes to ruffle the placid surface of CID life were rustling and the odd bit of bestiality. Any note of irritation in Pascoe’s response would only result in an unremitting pursuit of the facetious fancy, so he said amiably, ‘Only downhill. In fact things are so quiet here I thought I’d give myself a vicarious thrill by talking to a real policeman about some real action.’

‘Wise move. Anything in particular, or shall I ramble on generally while I’m beating up these prisoners?’

‘You could fill me in on one Colin Farr, of Burrthorpe. He got done for thumping one of your finest last week.’

‘Oh. Any special reason for asking, Peter?’ said Wishart suspiciously.

‘It’s all right,’ laughed Pascoe. ‘I’m not doing a commando raid. It’s personal and unofficial. My wife knows him, in a tutorial capacity, I hasten to add. She was concerned that he’d missed one of her classes, that’s all.’

‘Blaming it on the police in general and you in particular, eh?’ said Wishart, who had the shrewdness of a Scots lawyer which is what his family would have preferred him to be. ‘Burrthorpe, you say? Indian territory that. It was almost a no-go area during the Strike. You’ll remember the great siege? They just about wrecked the local cop-shop. I believe they’ve rebuilt it like a fortress. There’s a sergeant there I’ve known for years. I’ll give him a buzz if you can hang on.’

‘My pleasure,’ said Pascoe.

In the ensuing silence Pascoe cradled the phone on his shoulder and burrowed in the bottom drawer of his desk in search of a packet of barley sugars he kept there. Man could not live on health food alone. When he surfaced, he found himself looking into the questioning gaze of Andrew Dalziel. Usually the fat man came into a room like an SAS assault team. Occasionally, and usually when it caused maximum embarrassment and inconvenience, he just materialized.

‘Busy?’ said Dalziel.

‘Yes,’ said Pascoe, carefully letting the barley sugar slip back into the drawer.

‘Won’t bother you, then. I just want a look at your old records. Mine are a mess.’

He peered towards Pascoe’s filing cabinets, with the combative expectation of a new arrival at the Dark Tower. Pascoe, who knew why his superior’s records were in a mess (if he couldn’t find anything, he shook the offending file and shouted threats at the resultant shower of paper), rose in alarm. The phone was still silent.

‘Was it something in particular, sir?’ he said.

‘I’m not just browsing if that’s what you mean,’ growled Dalziel. ‘The Kassell drugs case will do for starters. I know you weren’t concerned directly but I know too you’re a nosey bugger, so what have you got?’

What’s he doing digging up old bones? wondered Pascoe as he put the phone on the desk and went to the cupboard in which he stored his personal records.

‘Thanks, lad. I’ll keep an ear open for you, shall I?’

Sticking his head out of the cupboard, Pascoe saw that Dalziel was in his seat with the telephone at his ear, taking the paper off a barley sugar.

‘That’s OK,’ he said with studied negligence. ‘It’s not really important.’

‘It better had be, lad,’ said Dalziel sternly. ‘Official phones these are. Some bugger rang Benidorm last week and no one’s confessing. Wasn’t you, was it? No. Not cultural enough for you, Benidorm. Can you find it?’

Pascoe resumed his search, spurred on by the need to get Dalziel out before the need arose to explain his query to South.

‘Got it,’ he said in dusty triumph a moment later. But it was too late.

‘Hello,’ said Dalziel in a neutral voice which, probably deliberately, might have passed for Pascoe’s. ‘Go ahead.’

He listened for a moment then exploded. ‘Ripper! What do you mean he’s a ripper? No, this isn’t Peter. This is Dalziel. And who the fuck are you? You’re not speaking from Benidorm, are you?’

He listened a while longer then passed the phone to Pascoe.

‘Inspector Wishart from South,’ he said. ‘Says your man’s a ripper down Burrthorpe Main. Gave me a nasty shock, that. This the Kassell stuff? I’ll take good care of it, lad.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Pascoe, who foresaw already the dog-eared, beer-stained state in which his lovely records were likely to return to him. ‘Official inquiry, is it, sir?’

From the door Dalziel flashed him a smile as reassuring as a crack in new plaster.

‘As official as yours, I expect, lad.’

He went out. Pascoe said, ‘The coast’s clear.’

‘Jesus,’ said Wishart. ‘You might have warned me Geronimo had broken out again; let’s do this quick, eh? Here’s what the record says.’

That night he said to Ellie, ‘I picked up some info on your protégé, if you’d like to hear.’

‘Official version, you mean? Go on. I like a well-crafted tale.’

‘Simply, he got drunk, took offence at something a stranger in the street said to him, got into a fracas and pushed the man through a shop window. That may have been an accident. Certainly, it turned out the man didn’t want to bring charges. Which was odd. As evidently he turned out to be a journalist, one Monty Boyle, chief crime reporter on the Challenger. Makes you think …

Ellie was not in the least interested in what it made him think.

‘But the good old fuzz persuaded him to change his mind,’ she said angrily.

‘Not really. A couple of local cops witnessed the incident. When they approached, Farr attacked one of them, throwing him through the window too, and had to be restrained by the other. That was the assault he was charged with.’

‘Now I’ve got it,’ cried Ellie in mock delight. ‘A bit of drunken horseplay, the kind of thing that passes for high spirits at Twickers or Annabel’s, is escalated to a criminal assault by heavy-handed police intervention.’

‘It’s a point of view,’ said Pascoe gravely. ‘It’s certainly true that if he hadn’t assaulted the constable, the whole thing might have been smoothed over with a police caution.’

‘But you can’t turn a blind eye to saying boo to a bobby,’ said Ellie.

‘Not when he needs seven stitches in his hand,’ said Pascoe. ‘Incidentally, since you don’t ask, the Challenger reporter was hardly damaged at all. It appears that Burrthorpe’s not the kind of place you encourage cop-bashing. They had a full-scale riot there during the Strike and the police station was just about wrecked.’

‘So a young man goes to jail and gets a permanent criminal record pour encourager les autres?’

‘The record was there already,’ said Pascoe. ‘He had several counts against him during the Strike …’

‘Who the hell didn’t? And they can’t have been all that serious, otherwise he wouldn’t have kept his job under the famous victimization scheme!’

‘True. But beyond and outside the Strike, he’s obviously been a wild lad. Most serious was when he got done for assaulting a Customs officer at Liverpool. Before you ask, no, he wasn’t coming back from holiday. He was a merchant seaman, didn’t you know that? A good teacher should know all about her pupils. Anyway, it didn’t amount to too much, I gather. Farr felt he was being unduly delayed by officialdom and threw the man’s hat into the ocean, then offered to send the man after it. He’s very fond of throwing people around, it seems. But you can see why the magistrate wouldn’t think a mere fine was enough in this last case.’

‘Oh yes,’ grunted Ellie. ‘I suppose he was lucky to escape the strappado.’

‘He only got a week. Five days with remission. He’ll be back for your next class. What’s the topic to be? Law and Order?’

‘Peter, that’s not funny, merely crass,’ snarled Ellie.

Pascoe considered.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said quietly. ‘It may not be terribly funny but I don’t think it’s at all crass, not between consenting adults in domestic bliss. As a professional communicator, you should be more careful. Intemperance of language is to thought what drunkenness is to courage: it makes a little go a long way.’

‘Is that original? Or is it a quote from some other prissy, pusillanimous time-server?’

‘Is that live? Or are you miming to the latest hit on the Radical Alliterative label?’

Ellie smiled, with only a little effort.

‘I’ll let you be original if you let me be live,’ she said.

‘Deal.’

He smiled back and went upstairs to see Rose, who was also smiling as she slept.

The difference was, her smile looked as if it went all the way through.

Chapter 6

‘Carry your bag, miss?’

For a sliver of a second Ellie’s hand started to proffer the battered old briefcase. She had felt unusually drained after today’s class and had taken her time packing her papers while the cheerful chatter and clatter of the young miners faded down the corridor. When she finally followed them, Colin Farr had emerged from the door of the Gents as she passed. He was dressed in motorcycle leathers and carried a helmet.

‘Real offer or just winding me up, Colin?’ she said.

He fell into step beside her.

‘Depends, miss.’

‘On what?’

‘Whether you think it’s real or winding you up.’

‘But which depends on which?’ she wondered.

She also wondered, but this to herself, if Farr had emerged coincidentally or if he’d been lurking in that doorway.

‘Don’t follow you, miss.’

‘Yes, you do, Colin,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘That’s one game you can stop playing. Another is calling me miss all the time. I told the others last week that if I was going to use their first names, they’d have to use mine. Even though you seemed a little abstracted today, you may have heard one or two of them call me Ellie.’

‘Ell ee. Thought them were your initials, miss. Or mebbe a title.’

He grinned openly as he spoke.

They had reached the central landing. They were on the fourteenth floor of the Ivory Tower, a glass and concrete monument of the expansive and affluent ’sixties whose gnomonic shadow marked the passage of epochal as well as diurnal time on the scatter of redbrick buildings which had survived from the old civic university. Descent was by stair, conventional lift, or paternoster. The stairs were long and exhausting and the lift took an age to arrive, but Ellie usually preferred one or the other.

Farr, however, had made straight for the paternoster. The moving platforms were just large enough for two. He glanced at her, touched her elbow, and stepped forward. She stepped with him but as always the sense of the floor sinking away beneath her was so disconcerting that she gave a slight stagger and leaned against Farr whose arm went round her waist to support her.

‘I’m all right,’ she said, trying to disengage herself. But there was little spare room on the platform and he made no effort to move away.

‘You’d not do to ride the pit,’ he observed.

‘Ride the pit?’ she said brightly, aware of the closeness of his body and aware also that she was slipping beneath a protective carapace of schoolmarminess. ‘Let me see. That means go down the shaft in the Cage, doesn’t it?’

‘Aye. Down or up,’ he said, smiling slightly.

He knows how uncomfortable he’s making me feel, thought Ellie.

She said dismissively, ‘At least the Cage is standing still when you get in.’

‘You’re right. And when it starts going down, you wish it’d stood still for ever.’

His tone was so intense that she forgot her discomfiture and said curiously, ‘You hate it that much, do you?’

Strangely this shift towards conversational intimacy seemed to affect him as the physical contact had affected her. He removed his arm and swayed away from her and said in a much lighter voice, ‘Energetic buggers, these students,’ nodding at the graffiti-scrawled interstitial floor beams. ‘They must’ve had to go round three or four times to get them written.’

‘That sounds like a considerable misdirection of effort,’ said Ellie.

‘Most things are when you look at them straight,’ said Colin Farr. ‘This is us.’

His hand grasped her elbow lightly, its touch chivalric rather than erotic, and they stepped out in a unity of movement worthy of Astaire and Rogers.

Outside in the cool air of the shadowy side of the Ivory Tower, they paused.

‘I’m going over to the crèche,’ said Ellie.

‘The what?’

‘The nursery. Where staff can leave their children while they’re teaching. And students too.’

‘Very democratic. I’m off to the car park. Where staff can leave their cars. But not students.’

‘That’d be a male decision,’ said Ellie. ‘It’s a wonder the attendant doesn’t get you. He’s a terror. It took three phone calls to persuade him I was entitled first time I came.’

‘You should try a motorbike,’ said Farr. ‘You can be round the back of his hut before he notices.’

They stood in silence for a moment. Ellie glanced at her watch.

‘See you next week, then.’

‘Likely,’ said Farr. ‘If I can manage.’

‘Colin, I was sorry to hear about your bit of trouble.’

She did not care to hear herself using the euphemism, but she was treading carefully. No one had mentioned the young man’s week in jail today and she’d taken this as a signal that he didn’t want it mentioned.,

Now he gave her his crooked little near-smile and said, ‘It were nowt. I’ve been in worse places.’

‘The pit, you mean?’

‘Oh aye. That’s worse. But I meant worse jails.’

He grinned openly at her look of surprise.

‘I’ve not just been a miner,’ he said. ‘I’ve been a sailor too. Did you not know that?’

‘How could I?’ prevaricated Ellie. ‘I mean, you’re so young!’

‘Old enough. I went down pit at sixteen like all me mates. But I got a bit restless after a bit and when I was nineteen I jacked it in and went and joined the Merchant Navy. I were in for nearly four years. I came back to Burrthorpe just in time to go on strike for a year!’

‘And will you go back? To sea, I mean.’

‘Mebbe. I can’t say.’

There was another silence.

Ellie said, ‘I’ve really got to go and pick my daughter up. Till next week, then. Goodbye.’

‘Aye. See you.’

She walked away. He watched as she passed from the shadow of the Tower into the sunlight before disappearing into one of the two-storey red-brick buildings on the scattered and disorganized campus.

He checked the car park was clear before loping towards the gleaming Suzuki 1100 which cost him more than he ever dared tell his mother in monthly payments. But it was money he didn’t grudge. As he started her up, the attendant rushed from his hut shouting, ‘I want a word with you!’

Farr waited till he was about thirty feet away, then opened up the throttle and sent the bike leaping forward towards the man.

‘Jesus Christ!’ he cried, jumping aside.

‘See you next week!’ yelled Farr over his shoulder.

He wove his way at a steady pace through the city traffic but once out on the open road he rapidly took the powerful machine up to the speed limit and held it there for a while. Then as the exhilaration of the streaming air, the blurring hedges and the throbbing metal between his legs got to him, he gave it full power and was soon cracking the ton on the straights.

It couldn’t last long. Soon his eye registered the brief image of a police car sitting in a lay-by, waiting for just the likes of himself, and a couple of minutes later it was in his mirror, too distant to have got his number which in any case he always kept as muddy as he could get away with, but not receding. Ahead the road wound down a shallow hill to a small township which seemed to pride itself on having traffic lights every ten yards. Also there was a police station there, easily alerted by the car radio.

There were no turn-offs before he hit the town. He was travelling very fast downhill towards a sharp left-hand bend. Straight ahead was a tall hawthorn hedge with woodland behind it. There was a gap or at least a thinness in the hedge where it met a wall at the apex of the bend.

Instead of slowing for the turn, he twisted the throttle to full open. There might be something coming the other way; he might find the hedge more solid than it looked; even if he got through, the close clustering trees would be almost impossible to avoid.

He went straight across the road.

The hedge parted like a bead-curtain. He felt its branches scrabble vainly to get a hold on his leather jacket, then he was among the trees, bucketing over exposed roots, leaning this way and that as he twisted through the copse, decelerating madly. His shoulder grazed bark, a low bough almost took his helmet off. Finally he mounted the steep mossy bank of a drainage ditch, let the bike slide from between his legs and lay on the ground, his ragged breath drawing in the odour of leaf-mould and damp earth while his pounding heart settled back into the monotonous rhythms of safety.

Distantly he heard the police car go by. He sat up and removed his helmet. He was hot in his leathers and he took them off too. Almost without thought, he continued undressing, peeling off shirt and trousers till he stood naked among the trees feeling the cool air playing on his feverish flesh. He was sexually aroused. He thought of Stella Mycroft. And he thought of Ellie Pascoe. His hand moved to his groin, but a sudden gust of wind heavy with a chilling rain got there first.

Like a pail of cold water over a rutting dog, he told himself sardonically, Thanks, God!

He pulled on his clothes and protective gear, pulled the bike upright and set out across country easing the bike along ploughed furrows but opening it up across pasture land. Sheep scattered; cows regarded him with gentle curiosity. A man on a tractor stood up and waved an angry fist, mouthing inaudible abuse. Colin Farr waved back.

Ultimately he hit a farm lane which took him out on to a minor road he did not know. Using the declining sun, he turned to the south-west and soon was back on a main road he recognized.

When he reached the outskirts of Burrthorpe, he stopped at a telephone box, went in and dialled.

The number rang a while, then the phone at the other end was lifted and the pips demanded his money before he could be heard, like ghosts gibbering for blood. He pressed in his coin.

A woman’s voice said, ‘Hello? Burrthorpe 227.’

He didn’t speak.

‘Hello?’ Impatient now. ‘Who’s there?’

Still he kept silent.

And now the voice changed, the pitch lower, the tone anxious.

‘Colin, is that you?’

But still he did not reply and the woman cried out angrily, ‘Get stuffed!’ and banged the phone down.

Colin Farr left the receiver dangling and went home.

Chapter 7

Ex-Deputy Chief Constable Neville Watmough awoke on the Friday morning after the SDP candidate selection meeting with that dull ache of the heart which warns the mind of a disappointment before the mind itself has recollected it.

He had been rejected. Again. The local councillor had won the nomination after a period of debate so short that in a jury it must have meant one show of hands in the corridor outside the court-room. The bastard was a car salesman, for God’s sake, fit enough no doubt to sort out local problems of street-lighting and refuse-collection, but with little grasp of national or international affairs. As for his person – the suede boots, the two-tone shirt, the thin moustache which he kept on touching nervously while the anaemic tongue lubricated the narrow lips in preparation for yet another ingratiating smile – what kind of image was this for a Party with any real belief in its right to govern? Not that the selection committee itself had inspired any confidence. Schoolteachers, small businessmen, a solicitor’s clerk, a token manual worker, and in the chair, that fat female JP who never missed any opportunity of scolding the police like a stern aunt from the Bench. At least in court you didn’t have to look at her huge splayed legs.

Perhaps he had picked the wrong Party. Perhaps he should have listened to the frequent overtures from local Conservatives to become a bulwark of their Law and Order lobby.

But Watmough was not a stupid man any more than he was immoral or opportunist, and over breakfast he settled down to sorting things out into their true relations in the chain of causality.

‘It looks as if it could be nice enough to finish tidying up the garden today, dear,’ said his wife brightly.

He smiled and grunted and sipped his coffee. It might have been pleasant to discuss things with her, but after three decades of conditioning to regard her husband’s professional affairs as unapproachable, it would be as difficult for her to listen as for him to speak. Fleetingly he wondered if he had been altogether wise to treat, say, Mid-Yorkshire’s traffic flow problems as confidential within the bounds of the Official Secrets Act. But he had made that decision and now must live with its loneliness.

At least, he told himself with some complacency, he did not blame his wife. She had accompanied him dutifully the previous night and said all the right things on cue. He guessed that he alone had detected her mighty relief when the chance that they might have had to move to London had been trampled on by those suede boots.

No, the cause of his disappointment had been bad timing. He had come too late into the race. Or rather, he had come too early. And the cause of that was his failure to get the Chief’s job. Now that had been a real shock. No waking up the next morning then to the dull ache of disappointment, for he had been kept awake all night by its searing pain. It had shattered his hopes and scattered his plans, and worst of all, it had clouded his judgement. It had seemed a cleverly contemptuous act to chuck in his own resignation so quickly afterwards. He would have been wiser far, he now realized, to hang on and look around for a Chief’s job in another part of the country. The local man, because he was known and taken for granted, was always at a disadvantage in such matters – except in the case of car salesmen, it seemed. No, he should have withdrawn, regrouped …

A clock chimed. Ding dong ding dong. Ding dong ding dong. Dong ding ding dong. Ding dong ding dong.

The sound filled him with sudden fury. He counted himself back to control with the hours … seven, eight, nine.

‘I find those chimes a little irritating,’ he said mildly.

‘Do you dear? I’m sure they can be turned off. Most things can.’

Was this irony? he asked himself in amazement. A glance across the table reassured him and he let his mind count another link back in the chain of causality.

The support of his colleagues, their simple loyalty, that too had been missing. That cunning old bastard Winter, the outgoing Chief, had never liked him. God knows what he’d said to the Committee. And as above, so below. That gross grotesque, Dalziel …

He shuddered at the memory.

At least he was now free of them, free to make his own decisions. Free to set the record straight.

There was his book, a serious review of the problems and future of modern policing, based on his own experience and observation, and leavened with accounts of some of the more famous cases he’d been involved with. It was a long way from being finished, of course, but he’d shown an outline and some draft sections to Ike Ogilby.

What was it Ike had said as he returned them?

‘Very interesting, Nev. Should rouse a lot of interest in the so-called quality papers and heavy chat shows. But a lot of it would be above our readers’ heads. It’s not as if you’re claiming you get your ideas from God or anything really wild like that, is it?’

‘I didn’t show you the drafts with a view to Challenger publication, Ike,’ he’d replied, genuinely surprised.

‘Of course not. But I was thinking, Nev, in the remote circumstance things don’t go right for you politically, this time. I mean – you could do worse than keep yourself in the public eye with a series of pieces in the Challenger …’

‘But you said that your readers …’

‘No, I wasn’t meaning the main meat of your book, Nev. You wouldn’t want to show your hand too early there, would you? I’m afraid the country’s too full of unscrupulous senior cops who aren’t above nicking a good idea. No, I was thinking of the more popular market. Memoirs of famous cases. Telling it like it was. We wouldn’t need to take up all that much of your creative time either. I took the liberty of showing your draft to Monty Boyle, our chief crime man. He was most impressed. Monty could work with you. He’d do the leg work and stitch it all together. You’d have copy approval, of course, but this way it wouldn’t interfere with your serious writing.’

‘Interesting idea,’ he’d replied. ‘But hardly the thing for a parliamentary candidate.’

‘Perish the thought,’ said Ogilby. ‘But have lunch with Monty anyway. Never any harm in having lunch, is there?’

So he’d had lunch, and found the journalist a civilized and entertaining companion. The man had asked if he’d mind if he ran his cassette recorder as they talked. ‘It’s best to keep a record, especially when it’s informal. Things get missed. Or misunderstood. This keeps us both straight.’

‘No, I don’t mind,’ said Watmough. ‘Though it seems a waste of your batteries as I really don’t envisage writing anything other than campaign speeches in the near future.’

‘No, of course not. But as a crime reporter, I’m always keen to pick the brain of an expert.’

They had spent a fascinating hour talking about famous cases, then, as they parted, the journalist had said, ‘By the way, I know it’s unlikely to happen, but if Ike ever does sign you up, don’t settle for less than …’ and he had named a quite surprising sum.

Since then, Ogilby hadn’t referred to the matter. Would he bring it up again when news of last night’s débâcle reached him? It wasn’t that Watmough needed the money – there were any amount of run-of-the-mill security adviser jobs he could have if his excellent pension and good investments needed topping up – but he did need to make sure he maintained his public profile in preparation for the next selection short list.

If Ogilby didn’t contact him it shouldn’t be too difficult to contrive an accidental meeting. But he mustn’t appear to be pressing …

In the hall, the telephone rang. He rose and went to answer it.

‘Neville? It’s Ike.’

He glanced at his watch and smiled. Ten past nine. These newsmen didn’t let the grass grow under their feet when they really wanted something! Now what was that figure that Monty Boyle had said he should go for?

It was good to feel back in control again.

‘Hello, Ike,’ he said. ‘And what can I do for you?’

Chapter 8

Peter Pascoe was getting used to going to work on Tuesdays in a bad temper. And an opinion pollster catching him en route would also have detected a marked swing to the right, at least as far as mining communities were concerned.

This morning at breakfast, Ellie had announced that she was planning to go down a mine. ‘An experience shared is a gap bridged,’ she declared. Pascoe, dismayed by the idea for a pudder of reasons, none of which he could identify reasonably, wondered whether this meant he was likely to find himself going to bed with a miner. Ellie informed him coldly that while reason was occasionally democratic, ridicule was always élitist. This, coming from a woman who fell off her chair at the ranting of radical comedians, had to be challenged. One thing led to another and the other led to the usual, which was Pascoe sitting at his desk in a bad temper on Tuesday morning.

After an hour of tedious paperwork, he had declined from a boil to a simmer when his door burst open with a violence worthy of the Holy Ghost fresh from Philippi jail. It was, however, no paraclete who entered.

‘He’s done it!’ exclaimed Dalziel. ‘I knew it’d happen. Reason said no, but me piles told me different.’

‘Who’s done what, sir?’ asked Pascoe, rising to place himself defensively between the fat man and his records cupboard which Dalziel had taken to rifling at will during the past few days.

‘It’s Wonder Woman’s memoirs. The Challenger’s going to publish them!’

‘Good Lord. I heard he didn’t get the nomination …’

‘He’d as much chance of being nominated as an aniseed ball on a snooker table,’ snarled Dalziel. ‘We all knew that. But Ogilby was going around saying he’d read some of the memoirs in draft and it were like eating cold sago with a rusty spoon, so no one reckoned the Challenger could really be interested. But it was funny, the more folk said it were impossible, the more my piles ached.’

Pascoe was singularly uninterested in Dalziel’s haruspical haemorrhoids but he found himself marvelling as often before at the extent of his personal intelligence service. If it happened in Mid-Yorkshire, he knew it in hours; anywhere else in the county and he might have to wait till the next day.

‘But if it’s as bad as that, why should Ogilby be interested?’

‘Christ knows! But he must reckon there’s enough dirt in there to be worth digging for! They can make silk knickers out of a pig’s knackers, them bastards! That Leeds vicar last week. Caught two youngsters nicking candlesticks and by the time Monty Boyle were finished, he had Headingley sounding like a mix of Salem and Sodom!’

‘Monty Boyle!’ exclaimed Pascoe. ‘Of course!’

‘You know something I don’t?’ said Dalziel incredulously.

Pascoe explained.

‘It fits, doesn’t it? The Pickford case was Watmough’s finest hour. And it was during South’s investigation of that Burrthorpe girl’s disappearance that it all came to a head and Pickford topped himself, leaving a note confessing all. So if Boyle was sniffing around so that he could collaborate with Watmough on a tell-all series, he’d not want to draw rival attention to it by getting involved in a court case. Only, this was before the selection meeting, so Ogilby must have been pretty sure what the result would be.’

‘I told you, everyone was. And if he hadn’t been, he would likely have fixed it.’

‘I’d better give Alex Wishart a buzz and warn him what’s happening,’ said Pascoe.

‘Let Wishart take care of himself,’ said Dalziel. ‘You concentrate on looking after those nearest and dearest. Like me.’

‘But Watmough was mainly admin after he came back to us,’ pointed out Pascoe. ‘Not even the Challenger can make his time here interesting.’

‘I wish I could be as sure, lad,’ said Dalziel. ‘But forewarned is forearmed …’

‘That’s why you’ve been ruining my records!’ exclaimed Pascoe.

‘They were a bit mixed up,’ said Dalziel reprovingly. ‘You want to watch that. Well, mebbe you’ll turn out to be right and it’ll all be a storm in a piss-pot after all. But one thing I know for sure. If Lobby Lud says anything out of place about me, I’ll hit him so hard with his clock, his head’ll chime for a fortnight!’

He left like a mighty rushing wind.

Behind him Pascoe sat down and mused a little space. There were tiny clouds no bigger than a man’s hand on several of his horizons. They might of course come to nothing or even break in blessings on his head. But when Dalziel got nervous, his colleagues did well to twitch.

And when Ellie started talking about going down mines, it was perhaps time to start looking beneath the surface himself.

First, though, he owed Alex Wishart a phone call.

The Scot listened in silence, then said, ‘Well, I don’t see how he can harm us by anything he says. He would hardly want to, would he? It was his triumph and you don’t rain on your own parade. You’re worried in case he takes a little side-swipe at Fat Andy, is that it? Mind you, from what I’ve heard, he’s got it coming to him. Watmough’s no genius, but he always struck me as a decent kind of man and an efficient enough cop.’

‘Dalziel took against him. I think Watmough dropped him in the mire way back when they were both sprogs.’

‘Doesn’t just look like an elephant, eh? Well, I wasn’t on the Pickford case myself, but perhaps I’ll have a wee glance through the records just in case. Thanks for tipping me the wink, Peter. I’ll be in touch.’

He kept his word quicker than Pascoe expected. Early the same afternoon the phone rang.

‘Peter, I’ve been looking at the Pickford files. You’ve probably worked out yourself that your own involvement is only through the Tweddle child.’

Annie Tweddle, aged seven, had been found strangled and assaulted in a shallow grave in a wood about ten miles from the Mid-Yorks village in which she lived. There were no leads, and the case had been shelved for eighteen months when Mary Brook, eight, had been abducted from a park in Wakefield in South Yorkshire and later found buried on the Pennine moors. She too had been strangled after being sexually assaulted. A few months later, little Joan Miles of Barnsley had gone missing and the worst was feared. But now there was a common factor. Among the reams of statements taken in both cases there were references to a blue car, probably a Cortina, being seen in the vicinity. All similar cases over the past few years were reactivated. South, under Watmough, began to go through the computer print-outs of all registered owners of blue Cortinas in the area.

Then Tracey Pedley, the Burrthorpe child, had vanished too. Once more a blue car figured in the witness statements. And a week later a blue Cortina was found in a country lane near Doncaster with a length of washing-machine hose running from the exhaust into the rear window.

Inside was the body of Donald Pickford and a long incoherent letter in which he confessed by name to several killings and by implication to several more. Clinching evidence that this was not just some compulsive confessor driven by his madness to the ultimate authentication came in a set of detailed directions which led to the grave of Joan Miles in a marshy nature reserve only a mile away. Annie Tweddle was mentioned by name. Tracey Pedley wasn’t. But once it was established that Pickford was likely to have been in the area at the time she vanished, she was put down with a few others as a probable victim.

‘We did have to establish Pickford’s alibi, or rather the lack of it, in the Pedley case, I think.’

‘Yes, but that was hardly important,’ said Wishart reprovingly. ‘I was just trying to sort out where, if anywhere, you might be vulnerable to a bit of criticism.’

‘I suppose Watmough could make a few snide remarks about us having got nowhere with the Tweddle investigation,’ said Pascoe dubiously. ‘But in fairness to the man, he never made any such cracks when he was here, and God knows, he was provoked enough!’

‘So, no need to lose any beauty sleep, eh? Or ugly sleep in Andy’s case. Before you ring off, Peter, there was one other thing. Insignificant, I’m sure, but it might interest you. I gave my old mate, Sergeant Swift, a ring. He was at Burrthorpe all through the Pedley case and through the Strike too, so what he doesn’t know about the place isn’t worth knowing. It was Swift who had the doubtful pleasure of arresting that lad, Farr, you were asking about. Now, when I told him about the Challenger printing Mr Watmough’s memoirs, he told me that our friend Monty Boyle hadn’t been put off by his encounter with that window. He’d been back a couple of times, buying drinks and asking questions, though he’s given a wide berth to the Farr boy!’

‘Asking questions about the Pedley girl, you mean? Well, that figures. Incidentally, was there any special reason why he should have approached Farr or was it pure accident?’

‘He claimed it was just an accident at the time, but now Swift knows what he’s up to, he reckons different.’

‘But Farr can’t know anything about the girl’s disappearance or the Pickford case,’ said Pascoe. ‘You said he was away at sea till the Christmas before the Strike and the Pickford business blew up that September, didn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Wishart. ‘He was away, but his father wasn’t. Billy Farr was the last person to see, or admit seeing, Tracey alive. In fact, he was in the frame for a bit. He was an old friend of the Pedleys, it seems, and had taken a real shine to the little girl. He often used to take her off for walks, him, her, and his dog. They’d gone brambling that day up in … let’s see, here it is … Gratterley Wood, that runs along a ridge to the south of the village and there’s a track runs up to it behind the Miners’ Welfare Club where Tracey’s father was – still is – steward. Mrs Pedley expected them back about five for the little girl’s tea. But, according to Farr, Billy Farr that is, they were back within half an hour, about four o’clock. He said he wasn’t feeling too well, and that’s why instead of taking the girlie in as he usually did, he left her in the lane at the back of the club, just a few yards from the kitchen door. Trouble was, no one else saw her and there was no sighting of Billy Farr himself till he got home just before six, by which time the Pedleys were getting a bit agitated. Farr said he’d just been walking around by himself. Evidently he was like a man demented when he heard the girlie was missing, though demented with what wasn’t clear to a lot of people.’

‘Guilt, you mean?’

‘There’s nowhere like a mining village for gossip,’ said Wishart. ‘Naturally there was a big search for the girl. They found her bramble pail in the woods on a path running down to the road about a quarter-mile outside the village. There were a couple of sightings of a blue car parked off the road, but one of them was by Billy Farr’s best friend, so that didn’t carry all that much weight. Watmough certainly looked long and hard at Farr for a couple of days, then Pickford topped himself, and it was roses, roses, all the way for Mr Watmough and his modern investigative techniques which, we were assured, had pressurized Pickford into his suicide.’

‘So it was merely Pickford’s death that took the spotlight off Farr?’

‘To be fair, I don’t think so,’ said Wishart. ‘Watmough seems to have lost interest in him before Pickford killed himself. At least that’s how I read the file.’

‘And was there any doubt locally?’

‘It seems so, though probably not a lot. Billy Farr was well thought of, a quiet fellow and a bit of a loner, especially since his accident which left him too lame to work underground, but much respected. Most people were happy to accept that Pickford was responsible. It had all the marks of one of his killings – except that they never found the body. But two child killers in the same neck of the woods on the same day was unlikely, wouldn’t you say? And Watmough wasn’t averse to clearing up as many cases as he could in one triumphant swoop.’

‘And the few who didn’t accept this?’

‘Swift tells me that before Pickford died they got the usual rash of anonymous calls and notes, pointing in every possible direction from the vicar to the NUM. Afterwards there was only one, a note, printed in block capitals. It said, YOU GOT THE WRONG MAN FOR TRACEY. DON’T WORRY. WE WON’T.’

‘And how did Swift interpret this?’

‘Sergeants don’t interpret, they file, have you forgotten? But he recalled it on Boxing Day three months later when Billy Farr went missing and they found him at the foot of a sealed-off shaft in the old workings along the same ridge that Gratterley Wood stands on. Inquest brought in a verdict of accident. His wife said he’d gone out for a walk with his Jack Russell. There was no sign of the dog. Theory was that it had got into the old workings somehow and when Farr realized it was lost, he’d started looking down the old shaft, the cover was rotten, it broke, he slipped, and bingo! A day or two later there was another note arrived at the station. It said, CASE CLOSED.’

‘It’s a sick world,’ said Pascoe. ‘And this is why young Farr came back to Burrthorpe?’

‘That’s it. And he’s been a bloody nuisance ever since.’

‘To the police?’

‘To every bugger as far as I can make out. Perhaps not the kind of company an ambitious young policeman’s wife ought to be keeping.’

‘Thanks for the “young”, Alex,’ said Pascoe. ‘As for the rest, get knotted. But let’s keep in touch over this one, shall we?’

‘Take care, Peter,’ said Alex Wishart.

Pascoe replaced the phone. The clouds on his horizons were still just the size of a man’s hand. Only now the man seemed to have hands the size of Andy Dalziel’s.

Chapter 9

Colin Farr awoke with a splitting head. The alarm clock by his narrow bed told him it was past eleven. He was on ‘afters’, the 1.0 P.M to 8.0 P.M shift. Last night he had started drinking as soon as he finished. There’d been some bother at the Club and he’d left. He couldn’t remember much after that but there was the aftertaste of greasy chips in his mouth which suggested he hadn’t come home to eat the supper his mother would have cooked for him.

Groaning, he rose, washed, dressed, and went downstairs to face the music.

His apologetic mood evaporated when he went into the kitchen and saw Arthur Downey there, sitting at the table drinking a mug of tea.

‘’Morning, Col,’ the deputy said, smiling rather uncertainly.

‘It’s you,’ said Farr. ‘Run out of tea, your sister?’

‘Colin, don’t be rude. After last night, you should be ashamed to show your face in this kitchen. I had to throw his supper out, Arthur.’

His mother was standing by the stove from which came a smell of rich meat pastry. May Farr was in her forties, a tall, good-looking woman whose face and body could have done with putting on a bit more weight, and the rather becoming dark shadows around her eyes had not been put there with a brush.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Farr sitting down.

Downey seemed ready to accept that the apology included him.

‘I just brought your mam some vegetables, Col,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to go to sea to get scurvy, do you?’

‘Don’t you? Mam, I hope you’re not making that pie for me. I couldn’t face owt more than a cup of tea and mebbe a sandwich.’

‘You missed your supper last night and I’ll not have you going to work on an empty stomach.’

‘They don’t need their meals regular like us old ones, May,’ said Downey. ‘I bet you often got dragged out of your bunk in the middle of the night when you were at sea, Col, and had to work all day with next to nowt.’

‘It weren’t the bloody Cutty Sark I were on!’ exclaimed Farr. ‘All right, Mam, I’ll have some, but not too much, mind.’

‘Don’t you miss it, the sea?’ said Downey. ‘I sometimes wish I’d given it a try when I were younger.’

‘You’re not old now, Arthur,’ said May Farr, bringing a flush of pleasure to the lanky man’s cheeks.

‘No, you ought to sign on as a cabin boy,’ said Farr. ‘Or better still, stow away.’

Downey laughed and finished his tea.

‘I’d best be off,’ he said. ‘See you down the hole, Col. Thanks for the tea, May.’

After the door closed behind him, May Farr said, ‘Right, my lad, before we go any further, I’ll not have you being rude to Arthur Downey or anyone else I care to invite into my house. Understood?’

‘The bugger’s always sniffing round here …’ protested her son.

‘You listen, Arthur were a good mate of your dad’s and he’s been good to me since … it happened. He’ll always be welcome in this house as long as I’m here, understand? Besides, he grows best veg in Burrthorpe on that allotment of his.’

She offered this lightening of tone by way of truce which Colin Farr was happy to accept.

‘Aye, it’s not many lasses round here who get bouquets of broccoli,’ he said slyly. ‘You best be careful else you’ll have folk talking.’

‘What do you mean?’ she said indignantly as she took the pie from the oven. ‘Has someone been saying something?’

Her son smiled sweetly.

‘There’s not many round here would dare say owt like that to me,’ he said with an easy confidence she found more dismaying than comforting.

She heaped the pie on to a plate which she set before him. As he ate, he asked casually, ‘Do you think you will get married again, Mam?’

‘How should I know? I’ve no one in mind, if that’s what you mean. But this is wrong way round. It’s me as should be asking you when you’re going to get wed and settle down.’

‘Me?’ he laughed. ‘Who would I marry when all the best ones are gone?’

‘You’re not still moping after Stella, are you?’ she asked in alarm.

‘Me run after a married woman? What a thing to say about your own son!’ he mocked. ‘All I meant was, you’re the best, Mam, and they don’t make ’em like you any more.’

She sat down and regarded him seriously, refusing to respond to his sentimentality.

‘What does keep you here then, Col, if you’ve no plans for settling? I know you hate it, always did. And don’t say it’s for my sake. I’m all right now. I’ve got friends, real friends …’

‘You mean Red Wendy and her mates in the Women’s Support Group?’ he laughed. ‘With friends like yon, you need a man around the place to keep an eye on you.’

‘You see, there you go again, Col, trying to put it down to me. Don’t do that. Don’t keep things hid deep inside you like he did. Yes, Wendy and the others are my friends. It may have ruined the Union, but there’s me and a lot like me who can say thank God for the Strike. It showed me a road I’d not have found on my own. And you, Col; I thought when you started getting involved that mebbe you’d found a road too …’

‘Me? Oh, I liked the action and the fighting well enough, but the only road I hope to find in Burrthorpe is the road out of it.’

‘Then why don’t you go?’ she asked passionately. ‘And don’t pretend to be hurt, I know all your little acts, remember? You know what I’m saying. I wept the first time you went, after your dad hurt his leg. And I’ll weep if you go again. But I were glad then too, glad that now neither of my men was going to be killed down that hole … Well, I were wrong about one of them, though God knows how …’

‘There’s more than God knows,’ interrupted her son fiercely.

‘Is that it, Col? Listen, son, he’s dead, he’s gone, does it matter how or why? There’s nothing any of us can do will bring him back, so why waste your life boozing and fighting and causing trouble in the Club, and wandering round them old workings looking for God knows what …’

‘Who’s been gabbing? That old woman Downey, is it?’ Farr interrupted once more. ‘Jesus Christ, it’s like living in a fish tank, this place! What do you have to do to get a bit of privacy?’

‘Try living quiet, not raising hell wherever you go,’ suggested his mother.

Colin Farr pushed his plate away and stood up.

‘No one ever lived quieter than my dad and they didn’t let him alone, did they?’

‘Col, don’t talk like that. What do you mean? What are you trying to do? Col, please, you’ve no idea how it upsets me to see you this way.’

There were tears on her cheeks. He put his arms round her shoulders and kissed them away. It was a gesture neither awkward nor theatrical. He had a natural grace in his movements which had made him stand out even as a child. He drew back and smiled at her, the smile which had so often won forgiveness instead of punishment, and complicity instead of accusation. Billy had sometimes said she was spoiling him but she knew how deep her husband’s love went too.

‘I’ll go soon, Mam,’ he promised. ‘Once I’m sure you’re OK and … once I’m sure. Now I’d best be off to work.’

She watched him walk away down Clay Street, marvelling as always that from Billy Farr’s seed and her womb a creature of such grace and beauty could have sprung. At the corner he turned and smiled and waved his snap tin. She waved back, then went inside and began to clear the dishes.

Colin Farr walked on, no longer smiling. The long brick terraces opening directly on to the pavement frowned back at him. They had been built a hundred years ago when Burrthorpe had suffered its first expansion from rustic hamlet to mining village. Perhaps they had looked more cheerful then. He doubted it. There had been other expansions since, most affluently in the late ’sixties and early ’seventies. The low hills to the east, the end furthest from the pit, were chequered with owner-occupied boxes. There were modern shops in the High Street (one with a new plate-glass window) plus a bank and two building societies. The Strike had hit hard, but the natives of Burrthorpe were used to taking and giving hard blows, and they would bring the good days back, if the pit survived.

Here was the irony which Farr felt every day of his life. It was like being fed by a tyrant you hated, yet if you slew him, you would starve.

He was in the High Street now, heading west towards the Welfare. The village was built in a blank valley running east to west. It was along the densely wooded southern ridge that the sweet infection of coal had first been detected. Here due to some geological fault the veins were broken and often near the surface, and possibly the uprooting of some ancient tree in a storm revealed the symptoms. There were records at the end of the eighteenth century of frequent disputes between the Burr estate which owned most of the land hereabouts and the locals who, delighted at having such a ready supply of fuel on their doorstep, ran drifts into the scrubby common land which abutted Lord Burr’s woods, and didn’t much care if they trespassed underground. At first His Lordship’s care was all for his trees, the game they harboured and the income they promised. But a new lord, the first one born in the nineteenth century, caught on that industrial progress simply meant a new system of serfdom to replace the old which had run its course. He initiated a series of fairly haphazard explorations of the south ridge, ravaging much fine woodland principally on the village side, out of sight of his country house. At last an engineer was employed who knew what he was doing. He looked at the mish-mash of workings on the south ridge, shuddered, turned to the north and after several months of exploration recommended that here was where the next generation of Burrs would earn the necessities of life such as London Seasons, Grand Tours, four shirts a day, and the most up-to-date treatment of their social diseases.

He proved right. Deep beneath the northern ridge rich new seams were found, running north and west. The pitheads which rose here were completely invisible from His Lordship’s house, and the remnants of Gratterley Wood still crowned the southern ridge to provide a nice bit of rough shooting for a couple of chaps on a morning stroll.

But that was long ago, aye, ages long ago, thought Colin Farr as he approached the Welfare Club. The mine belonged to the people now, the Burr estates had contracted, and you could walk freely through Gratterley Wood with more risk of having your head blown off by some poaching miner than an angry gamekeeper. Even the Burr mansion had declined to the clubhouse of the Burr golf club (miners welcome to join the Artisan Section), and all was well with the world.

Except that he was still walking up the long hill to clock on for his shift.

He needed a drink. He glanced at his watch. There was plenty of time for a leisurely pint in the Club, but he wished now that he’d come on his bike instead of walking so that he would have had the option of going to a pub outside the village.

Then, annoyed with himself for his weakness, he turned up the steps of the Welfare.

Pedro Pedley watched him enter the bar with a studiously neutral expression. Farr smiled with all his charm and said, ‘Pedro, I’m sorry if I were a bit obstreperous last night.’

Before the steward could reply, another voice said, ‘You’re not obstreperous, Farr. You’re just not fit to be around decent people. Peter, I thought this trouble-maker were banned.’

It was Harold Satterthwaite who spoke. He was sitting close to the bar in company with a dark-suited, red-faced man, with a ragged moustache and an alderman’s belly. Farr turned to face them as Pedley said, ‘I decide who’s banned in this bar, Harold. What is it, Col? A pint?’

‘In a minute, Pedro. I just want a word with these decent people.’

He strolled towards the two men with a friendly grin on his face.

‘Hello, Mr Satterthwaite, sir,’ he said. ‘And I know you too, don’t I? You’re that journalist I dumped through the shop window.’

‘That’s right, Mr Farr. Monty Boyle’s the name,’ said the stout man, returning the grin. ‘Let me buy you a drink to show there are no hard feelings.’

‘Thanks, Mr Boyle, but no, thanks. I think I was right about you first time we met. You come near me or my mam asking any of your nasty little questions and it’ll be a brick wall I throw you through next time.’

‘You hear that, Peter? Do you still say he shouldn’t be banned, threatening members’ guests like that?’ demanded Satterthwaite.

Pedley, who’d come from behind the bar, put a restraining hand on the young man’s arm. He shook it off and said, ‘No sweat, Pedro, I’m not threatening this gent, just giving him some local colour, that’s what newspapers like, isn’t it? As for you, Mr Satterthwaite, sir. I’d not dream of threatening you because I just don’t have the time to wait in the queue. But I’ll tell you this for nothing. Sure as eggs, you’ll be standing on your ownsome deep in-bye some shift, with nothing but the mice for company, or so you’ll think, only someone will be creeping up behind you with a shovel to bash your thick skull in and toss you into the gob with all the rest of the shit!’

‘You heard that?’ exclaimed Satterthwaite looking round. ‘All of you here heard that: By God, you’ll not get away with threats like that, Farr!’

‘Threats? Who’s making threats?’ said Farr all injured. ‘I went out of my way to say I weren’t threatening you, didn’t I? No, it’s all right, Pedro, I’m just going. Mustn’t be late for shift, must I? Best sup up, Mr Satterthwaite, sir. Up to you important officials to set an example in timekeeping.’

Shaking himself loose from Pedley’s renewed grip, he turned and walked out of the bar.

In the fresh air he took several deep breaths. Ahead stretched the road which led up to the top of the valley and the pit. There were men walking along it to clock on. He didn’t feel ready for company and on impulse he turned off the road into the unmetalled driveway which ran up the side of the Welfare. This was the nearest way from the village up into Gratterley Wood. It was up this driveway, which became a lane and then a track, that Billy Farr and Tracey Pedley and Billy’s dog, Jacko, had walked to go brambling that bright autumn afternoon.

And presumably too it was up here that Billy Farr had made his own last journey, that crisp Boxing Day morning three months later. The ridge was honeycombed with workings, their entrances sealed off by anxious man and heartless nature. There’d been many accidents over the years, the last during the Strike when shortage of fuel (and the irony was that the striking miners were the only people in the country short of fuel that winter) had led a team of youths to open an old drift. There’d been a roof fall which had almost killed one of them and for the rest of the Strike the ridge and woods had been more sternly policed than they had since the eighteenth century. Such was progress.

The subsequent sealing-off process had been declared comprehensive and foolproof. But there still remained entrances to that dark world which childhood memory and adult ingenuity made accessible, and Colin Farr’s ramblings, which so disturbed his mother, had not been all overground.

But today it was peace and oblivion he sought. Soon after the lane became a track, it unravelled into half a dozen green paths and he chose the one which led him into the heart of the wood. Here there was a large outcrop of creamy limestone, known simply as the White Rock. It had been a popular trysting-place long before the locals penetrated the earth any further than a ploughshare’s depth, and the surrounding area provided any number of nooks and dells where a man and a maid could lie, safe from casual gaze.

Colin Farr settled beneath the White Rock and recalled those days when, a schoolboy still, he had first come here hand in hand with a girl. He’d felt little of the usual adolescent awkwardness in his relationship with girls. In fact, all of life had seemd easy in those days. You did what you wanted and if you wanted to do something else, you did that instead. No one made your choices for you. It was only later that he began to realize how much ignoring other people’s choices limited your own.

He pushed the darkening thought away from him and tried to focus on brighter things. Mrs Pascoe, for instance. He couldn’t make his mind up how he felt about her. It was different being with her, that was certain, she made him feel livelier somehow, sent bubbles streaming through his imagination. But at the same time she made him feel uncertain of himself, as if that adolescent awkwardness he’d never experienced had merely been lying in wait for him. He didn’t like that. He found he was scowling again.

‘Stupid cow,’ he said out loud in an attempt to exorcize the image.

Suddenly he sat up. He had a feeling that he had been heard, as if someone stealthy enough to stalk him unobserved had been startled into movement by his unexpected outburst. And now he felt watched also, but his eyes gave him no support for the feeling.

He rose. It was time to go anyway. He set off along the crest of the ridge so that he remained in the world of trees and leaves and earth and sky for as long as possible, but all too soon he emerged at the head of the valley where the ground fell away to the road, then rose up again to the north ridge. Here they were, graffiti on the blue sky, the dark tower of the winding gear, the conveyor like a ramp into the bowels of a convict ship, the scatter of low sullen buildings all squatting amid mounds of their own waste. The pit-head, whose ugliness only hinted at the vileness of the organism beneath.

One of these buildings was the Deployment Centre where men coming on shift went to report for work. It was still impossible for Colin Farr to come in here and not see his father. This was where Billy had been put after his accident. This was the last place they had seen each other at the end of the young merchant seaman’s final leave.

They’d said goodbye the previous night as Billy would have to be up at five to go on shift, but after breakfast Colin had been overcome by an urge to see his father again and had made his way up to the Deployment Centre. Spotting his father through one of the hatches, he called, ‘Hey, mister, can you set a young lad on?’

His father had looked up anxiously and said, ‘Is something wrong at home?’

‘No. I just thought I’d see if this place had improved with age.’

‘You needn’t have bothered. It’ll improve wi’ nowt short of bombing.’

‘Well, I’ll say cheerio, then.’

‘Right. Take care of yourself, son.’

‘You too, Dad.’

They’d regarded each other for a moment, then turned away in unison. As he strode back down the hill he was full of anger with himself. He was far from clear what he’d hoped to do by going up to the pit, but he knew he hadn’t done it.

Four months later as his ship wallowed in the Bay of Biscay against a Force Five which had stopped them from getting home for Christmas, the news had come over the ship’s radio. His father was dead.

It was his last voyage. The pressures to stay in Burrthorpe were great. His mother was breaking under the strain. He was engaged to Stella Gibson. Neil Wardle had told him he’d got management agreement that Farr’s old job would be available. Good will, it was called. Guilt, was what Farr called it. So he stayed. Within weeks his engagement was off. Within months his mother was improving and his pay was stopped for the duration of the Strike. But still he stayed, and still whenever he collected his ‘checks’, the metal discs with his number stamped on, he saw his father, framed in the hatch of the Centre and in his mind for ever.

‘Come on, dreamer,’ said Tommy Dickinson. ‘Last as usual. Anyone’d think you didn’t enjoy coming to this place!’

Together they went into the ‘clean lockers’ where they stripped and hung up their clothes. Then naked they walked through into the ‘dirty lockers’ where the miners kept their working clothes known as ‘pit-black’. It was no misnomer, thought Colin Farr as he took out the trousers, waistcoat and football shirt which he were underground. Their original colour was beyond detection. Dampened by sweat and pit-water, smeared with oil and grease, impregnated with coal dust, to put them on was an act as symbolic in its way as the priest’s assumption of the chasuble, the novice’s of her veil. Only, what these stiff and stinking garments signalled was no embracing of a higher will, no movement to a higher plane, but the exchange of light for darkness, fresh air for foul, sky for earth. Their clammy touch was the embrace of the pit itself.

‘You all right, Col? I’m not keen on working with buggers so hung-over they’re only half conscious.’

Neil Wardle was sitting next to him, struggling into a pair of boots which had set like concrete since his last shift.

‘I’m grand,’ said Farr. ‘You know me. Naturally quiet.’

‘That’s not what Satterthwaite says. He says you’ve been threatening him,’ said Wardle. ‘He’d like you out, Col. Permanent.’

They rose together and made for the lamp room.

Farr halted at the turnstile and turned to face the other.

‘And what did you say?’ he asked.

‘I said bloody good riddance, what do you think?’

Colin Farr grinned.

‘Thanks, Neil.’

‘Aye but watch him, Col. He’s after your blood.’

‘Is that all? He can have that any time he likes.’

Farr went through the turnstile into the lamp room, so called because here the lamps were ranged in racks to be recharged during shifts. Each lamp had a numbered check on a hook above it. The safest way of passing a message to a miner was to hang it with his check. A man could ride the pit without many things, but never without his lamp.

There was a piece of paper hanging on his hook. He pulled it off, unfolded it, read it.

Crudely printed in block capitals, it read:

SG LOVES HS. TRUE. POOR YOU.

‘Love-letter, is it?’ asked Tommy Dickinson, coming up behind him.

Farr crumpled the paper in his fist, then tore it into little pieces and scattered them on the floor.

‘Sort of,’ he said. And went to ride the pit.

Chapter 10

It was Sunday morning. The ten churches were almost empty, the cells not much fuller. But when Dalziel addressed his one-man congregation, it was with a passionate sincerity which seemed capable of ameliorating both deficiences.

‘I swear to God I’ll murder the bastard,’ he said.

Pascoe lowered the Challenger and asked politely, ‘Don’t you want to hear this, sir?’

‘Not as much as you do,’ said Dalziel malevolently. ‘Don’t think I’m not noticing how well you control yourself every time I get insulted.’

‘It’s not easy,’ admitted Pascoe.

He was reading from the trailer to ex-DCC Watmough’s memoirs in which Ace Crime Reporter, Monty Boyle (The Man Who Knows Too Much) was promising a feast of sex, violence, blood, guts, and Amazing Revelations. Nowhere was Dalziel mentioned by name, but Pascoe couldn’t feel his boss was being unduly sensitive.

He had just read: ‘… Nev Watmough told me that after his South Yorks triumph, returning to Mid-Yorks was like travelling back from the Twenty-first Century to the Dark Ages. “The South was forward-looking, eager to keep pace with the technological revolution,” he said nostalgically. “In Mid-Yorks they still preferred to fly by the seats of their broad and often very shiny pants. I’ve always believed that trouble starts at the top. And that’s certainly where I found it in my efforts to drag my new command screaming and kicking into the Twentieth Century.” …’

‘Get on with it,’ commanded Dalziel through gritted teeth.

‘There’s not much more,’ edited Pascoe. ‘Like we thought, he’s starting with a bang on the Pickford case next Sunday. And in future editions we’re promised such treats as The Kassell Drug Ring – The Royal Connection? Who Killed Dandy Dick? and The Choker: Cock-up or Cover-up?’

‘Jesus! What did he have to do with any of them cases? What’s he ever had to do with real police work? When he were a sprog constable, he couldn’t write a report without stapling his tie in with it …’

‘Don’t be too hard on him,’ said Pascoe provocatively. ‘He’s probably not writing much of his stuff either, not with Monty Boyle at his side. It’ll all be ghosted …’

‘Ghosted!’ exclaimed Dalziel. ‘I’ll make a ghost of that moth-eaten string vest if ever I get my hands on him!’

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