Bones and Silence. Reginald Hill

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       CHAPTER ONE

      Peter Pascoe’s return to work was not the triumphal progress of his fantasies. First he found his parking spot occupied by a heap of sand. For a fraction of time too short to be measured but long enough to excoriate a nerve or two, he read a symbolic message here. But his mind had already registered that the whole of this side of the car park was rendered unusable by a scatter of breeze blocks, hard core, cement bags, and a concrete mixer.

      Behind him a horn peeped impatiently. It was an old blue pick-up, squatting low on its axles. Pascoe got out of his car and viewed the scene before him. Once there had been a wall here separating the police car park from the old garden which had somehow clung on behind the neighbouring coroner’s court. There’d been a tiny lawn, a tangle of shrubbery, and a weary chestnut which used to lean over the wall and drop sticky exudations on any vehicle rash enough to park beneath. Now all was gone and out of a desert of new concrete reared a range of unfinished buildings.

      The pick-up’s peep became a blast. Pascoe walked towards it. The window wound down and a ginger head, grizzling at the tips, emerged above a legend reading SWAIN & STRINGER Builders, Moscow Farm, Currthwaite. Tel. 33809.

      ‘Come on,’ said the ginger pate, ‘some of us have got work to do.’

      ‘Is that right? I’m Inspector Pascoe. It’s Mr Swain, is it?’

      ‘No, it’s not,’ said the man, manifestly unimpressed by Pascoe’s rank. ‘I’m Arnie Stringer.’

      ‘What’s going on here, Mr Stringer?’

      ‘New inspection garages. Where’ve you been?’ demanded the man.

      ‘Away,’ said Pascoe. ‘Not the best time of year to be working outside.’

      It had been unseasonably mild for a couple of weeks but there was still a nip in the air.

      ‘If bobbies with nowt better to do don’t hold us back talking, we’ll mebbe get finished afore the snow comes.’

      Mr Stringer was obviously a graduate of the same charm school as Dalziel.

      It was nice to be back.

      Retreating to the public car park, Pascoe entered via the main door like any ordinary citizen. The desk area was deserted except for a single figure who observed Pascoe’s entry with nervous alarm. Pascoe sighed deeply. While he hadn’t really expected the Chief Constable to greet him with the Police Medal as journalists jostled and colleagues clapped, he couldn’t help feeling that three months’ absence to mend a leg shattered in pursuit of duty and a murderous miner deserved a welcome livelier than this.

      ‘Hello, Hector,’ he said.

      Police Constable Hector was one of Mid-Yorkshire’s most reliable men. He always got it wrong. He had been everything by turns – beat bobby, community cop, schools’ liaison officer, collator’s clerk – and nothing long. Now here he was on the desk.

      ‘Morning, sir,’ said Hector with a facial spasm possibly aimed at bright alertness, but probably a simple reaction to the taste of the felt-tipped pen which he licked as he spoke. ‘How can we help you?’

      Pascoe looked despairingly into that slack, purple-stained mouth and wondered once more about his pension rights. In the first few weeks of convalescence he had talked seriously about retirement, partly because at that stage he didn’t believe the surgeon’s prognosis of almost complete recovery, but also because it seemed to him in those long grey hospital nights that his very marriage depended on getting out of the police. He even reached the stage where he started broaching the matter to Ellie, not as a marriage-saver, of course, but as a natural consequence of his injury. She had listened with a calmness he took for approval till one day she had cut across his babble of green civilian fields with, ‘I never slept with him, you know that, don’t you?’

      It was not a moment for looking blank and asking, ‘Who?’

      ‘I never thought you did,’ he said.

      ‘Oh. Why?’ She sounded piqued.

      ‘Because you’d have told me.’

      She considered this, then replied, ‘Yes, I would, wouldn’t I? It’s a grave disadvantage in a relationship, you know, not being trusted to lie.’

      They were talking about a young miner who had been killed in the accident which crippled Pascoe and with whom Ellie had had a close and complex relationship.

      ‘But that’s not the point anyway,’ said Pascoe. ‘We ended up on different sides. I don’t want that.’

      ‘I don’t think we did,’ she said. ‘On different flanks of the same side, perhaps. But not different sides.’

      ‘That’s almost worse,’ he said. ‘I can’t even see you face to face.’

      ‘You want me face to face, then stop whingeing about pensions and start working on that leg.’

      Dalziel had come visiting shortly after.

      ‘Ellie tells me you’re thinking of retiring,’ he said.

      ‘Does she?’

      ‘Don’t look so bloody betrayed else they’ll give you an enema! She doesn’t want you to.’

      ‘She said that to you?’

      Dalziel filled his mouth with a bunch of grapes. Was this what Bacchus had really looked like? AA ought to get a picture.

      ‘Of course she bloody didn’t,’ said Dalziel juicily. ‘But she’d not have mentioned it else, stands to reason. Got any chocolates?’

      ‘No. About Ellie, I thought …’ He tailed off, not wanting a heart to heart with Dalziel. About many things, yes, but not about his marriage.

      ‘You thought she’d be dying to get you out of the Force? Bloody right, she’d love it! But not because of her. She wants you to see the light for yourself, lad. They all do. СКАЧАТЬ