Arms and the Women. Reginald Hill

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       ix

       bag lady on a bike

      Shirley Novello lay back in the front seat of her Fiat Uno.

      Well, maybe lay back was stretching it a bit, which was more than even a medium-sized woman like herself could comfortably manage in such a small car. At least she could drive it comfortably, which longer legs would have made difficult. Mind you, a bit of discomfort would have been a cheap price to pay for longer legs. She looked down at hers with a critical eye. Even with ninety-five per cent of them visible as they emerged from a leather skirt hardly broader than a lumberjack’s belt, they couldn’t be termed long. What they could be termed was muscular. And what the hell was wrong with muscular? Muscularity was a quality she greatly admired in men. She found it a turn-on, and saw no reason to bother with people who didn’t return the compliment. Anyway, above the waist she could compete with anyone, she thought complacently, raising her eyes to the straining buttons of her sun top. Not many of those in a kilo ho ho, as the wet wankers in the canteen would say if they ever got wind of the battened-down bounty lurking beneath the sack-like muddy-brown T-shirts she favoured at work. These, plus a matching selection of baggy trousers, had dampened down awareness of her as a woman to the point where the sexist cracks were conventional rather than focused. A cop-out? Not really. A cop-in, more like it; meaning you sussed out the best way to permit yourself to function most efficiently as a cop. Like Sergeant Wield. There were still plenty of mutt-headed myopes around the station who didn’t realize he was gay, and were ready to give you an argument about it. How could anyone who looked like him and talked like him and put the fear of God into you like him be gay? Stands to reason. Wankers!

      It was because of Wield that she was here on duty now, dressed in play gear rather than her workaday drabs. She’d been clocking off at four when he’d grabbed her.

      ‘Shirley, I need a body to spell Seymour watching Mrs Pascoe. Any chance?’

      At least he framed it as a question.

      She said, ‘Sarge, I’ve got plans for tonight that it’ll cost hearts to break. I can give you till eight if that’s any good.’

      ‘That’ll do fine. Thanks,’ he’d said.

      So he was grateful which was nice. But was he trustworthy? She was due to meet a new boyfriend at a new club, both of which she had high hopes of, at eight thirty. Thirty minutes wasn’t much to get home and changed in even if her relief turned up on time. So, working on the principle that she wasn’t going to be under the gaze of the station neanderthals, she’d come on duty dressed for partying.

      Privately she thought this watch on the Pascoe house was overkill. Chummy, who was probably this lad Roote, wasn’t likely to come back for a third go. She’d dug up the case file and he sounded a real nut. It had been back when Pascoe was still an unmarried sergeant and La Pascoe was teaching at a college where the Principal had been topped. Roote had evidently assaulted both Pascoe and the Fat Man, breaking a bottle of Scotch over the latter’s head. Just went to show there was good even in the worst of us! So, bang him up and fix for a patrol car to crawl past maison Pascoe every couple of hours!

      Still, overtime was overtime. She turned on Radio One full blast and settled back to fantasize about the muscular young man who was her escort that night.

      Then, just before seven, she saw the bag lady.

      She was on a bicycle, but she was undoubtedly a bag lady. There were three plastic carriers dangling from the handlebars and another two either side of the saddle. The woman herself was something the far side of seventy, maybe the far side of eighty, with a round leathery face like an under-inflated football and wispy white hair escaping from beneath an unravelling straw hat whose brim looked like a horse had dined on it. Her ample body was draped in several layers of clothing that it would have taken an archaeologist to date. The bike itself was coeval with its rider, or perhaps a little older, its flaking khaki paint suggesting it might have seen service in the Great War.

      Novello watched with mild amusement as this figure creaked towards her, then with heightened interest as the machine scraped to a halt, and finally with active alarm as the dismounted woman began to open the Pascoes’ gate.

      It was hard to leave the car with dignity, but practise had enabled her to emerge from it with speed. The woman saw her coming and paused by the open gate. It occurred to Novello that if any, or all, of the carriers contained a deadly weapon, she was presenting a pretty unmissable target. A low ornamental wall to her right offered the only real cover and she flinched towards it as the old woman dipped her hand into one of the bags. But all she came out with was a large magnifying glass which she raised to her eyes, the better to study the approaching DC.

      ‘Excuse me, madam,’ said Novello, pulling out her ID. ‘Detective Constable Novello, Mid-Yorkshire CID. Do you mind telling me who you are and what you’re doing here?’

      ‘If you experience difficulty in answering these questions yourself, then perhaps you have strayed into the wrong employment, my girl,’ said the woman, in a voice rich with the kind of orotundity Novello only ever heard when she chanced on some ancient actress being interviewed on the telly.

      She’ll probably turn out to be the DCI’s gran, she thought, but she persisted. ‘Please, madam. If you could just answer the question.’

      ‘Very well. I am Serafina Macallum, founder and life president of the Liberata Trust, and I am here to attend, nay, to chair, a meeting of our local group. For the record, and I assume we are being recorded though where the necessary apparatus might be concealed in such a deshabille as yours I cannot imagine, I would like to say that though long resigned to having my phone tapped and my mail interfered with, I had not thought that this so-called democracy of ours had degenerated to such open interference with the free movement of its citizens twice in the space of fifteen minutes.’

      ‘Twice?’ wondered Novello.

      ‘When I left my vehicle in the car park of the Gateway public house, I was accosted by a child in uniform under the pretext that he wished to know if I had been there earlier in the day.’

      That figured. She’d heard that the landlord of the Gateway had spotted a white Mercedes parked there about midday with a driver fitting Daphne Aldermann’s description of the perp. Wield would have made sure someone went back there to check if any of this evening’s customers had been there at lunchtime and seen or heard anything.

      ‘And were you?’ asked Novello.

      ‘Certainly not. You think I do not have better things to do with my time СКАЧАТЬ