An April Shroud Page 3

  He grinned amiably, apparently unresentful of the task. Dalziel could guess who had elected him to it. Anyone who let a woman punch him on the nose without setting matters right between them very quickly was saddling himself up for a hag-ride.

  The boatman was casting off already.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Dalziel. ‘I’ll get my stuff.’

  The level of the water seemed perceptibly higher as he waded back to the car and unloaded his old cardboard suitcase. As he returned cautiously to the dry road, he saw to his chagrin that the rowing-boat was already on its way, leaving him to the uncertain mercies of the punt.

  ‘He’s in a hurry,’ he grunted as he placed his case carefully on one of the seats. The floor looked as if a halfpenny dropped from three feet would blast a hole through it.

  ‘A devoted retainer,’ said the other with enough of mockery in his voice to give Dalziel some hope for him. ‘I’m Charles Tillotson, by the way.’

  ‘Andrew Dalziel.’

  ‘Dee-Ell,’ echoed Tillotson. ‘Dee-Ell. Spelt D-A-L-?’

  ‘Z-I-E-L,’ finished Dalziel.

  ‘How impressive to be pronounced differently from the way you are spelt,’ said Tillotson, flourishing the pole. ‘It’s sort of a test for people, isn’t it? Perhaps I should drop the ILL, Totson. What do you think?’

  ‘How about Tit?’ said Dalziel. ‘Are we going to move or shall we sit here getting wet all bloody day?’

  Gingerly he seated himself next to his case and closed his eyes as Tillotson thrust off stylishly, got the pole stuck instantly and almost dislodged himself in his efforts to pull it out.

  By the time they had followed the bend of the road and got the rowing-boat back in sight, it had reached the new landing-point and the rest of the party were already embarking. To Dalziel’s dismay the funeral car then began to move off.

  ‘Hey!’ he bellowed, drawing the attention of the mourners and frightening a small batch of teal who were exploring their new-found territory. But the black limousine purred disdainfully on its way and was soon out of sight.

  ‘Sod the bastard!’ said Dalziel savagely.

  ‘Pappy must have forgotten,’ surmised Tillotson.

  ‘Sod him too.’

  Some explanation of his presence must have been required and given on the rowing-boat for when they drew level, no one showed much curiosity about him.

  The woman, Mrs Fielding he presumed, was sitting in the stern with the old man. The stout youth had taken an oar and was seated alongside Pappy who returned Dalziel’s accusing gaze blankly. The boy was in the bows, curled up like the Copenhagen mermaid. And the other three were crowded in the flat-bottomed boat lately occupied by the coffin.

  ‘I think some of you must go back with Charley,’ said Mrs Fielding in a firm, rather deep voice. Her veil was lifted now, revealing a strong almost masculine face which grief and hard weather had only been able to sting to a healthy flush.

  ‘Oh no,’ protested the thin girl, Louisa. ‘Bertie’s rowing too, and we can’t weigh much more than a coffin.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ insisted her mother.

  ‘I’ll go,’ said the dark hairy man who was taking some shots of the floods with an expensive-looking camera. He stood up and stepped into the punt with the ungainly ease of a sailor.

  This seemed to satisfy Mrs Fielding’s distribution problems for the moment. She now addressed Dalziel.

  ‘I’m sorry the car went before Pappy could speak with the driver. If you’d care to come to the house, you can phone from there. Alternatively, we can leave you here and phone on your behalf.’

  The man called Pappy started rowing and Bertie quickly picked up the stroke as Dalziel considered the alternatives. The rain was coming down harder. The occupants of the rowing-boat were concealed almost completely by a carapace of umbrellas which brought to mind the shield-wall of a Viking ship.

  Dalziel turned to Tillotson.

  ‘Follow that boat,’ he said.

  3

  A Nourishing Broth

  The teal had dropped back to the surface and followed at a safe distance.

  ‘I had a friend,’ said the ugly man in a pseudo-American accent, ‘got badly hurt trying to screw a duck.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘Yeah. He had this thing, you know, about having relationships with the whole of creation. But the duck didn’t see it that way. Took half his nose off. After that he changed his scheme, went for the spiritual communion thing more, you know.’

  ‘Just as well perhaps,’ said Dalziel. ‘He might have had trouble with ants.’

  The other laughed approvingly.

  ‘That’s true, man.’

  He thinks he’s tested me, thought Dalziel. Now I’ve passed his little shock test, he’ll try to patronize me.

  ‘Charley there, the boy with the wooden whanger, now he goes in more for this kind of kick.’

  He squatted behind the punt gun and made firing noises more appropriate to a howitzer.

  ‘No, Hank, you’ve got it wrong,’ protested Tillotson amiably. ‘I like a bit of sport, that’s all. I say, these floods are rather jolly though. I bet a lot of birds will come back. It must have been fine fowling country, this, before they drained it.’

  ‘See what I mean?’ said the other. ‘He’s just aching to get this old phallic symbol jerking off again.’

  At last Dalziel had penetrated through the pseudo-mid-Atlantic flip speech style to a couple of recognizable vowels. He liked to know where he was with people and basic information about background was a good place to start. It gave him something to occupy his mind, to keep out the greyness which threatened to seep in whenever he relaxed.

  ‘Not many ducks in Liverpool,’ he said. ‘My name’s Dalziel. Who’re you?’

  The dark man looked at him assessingly before replying, ‘Hank Uniff.’

  Dalziel laughed, a short sharp offensive bark which acknowledged that there hadn’t been much chance of his interlocutor being called Jim Smith or Bill Jones.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said. ‘How was the funeral?’

  ‘Full of images, man,’ said Uniff. ‘Hey, Charley, great funeral, huh? I mean, when they dropped the coffin in the hole, well, it was just about waterlogged. Cheerist, what a splash!’

  ‘Yes,’ admitted Tillotson as he passed them in practice of his new technique which involved thrusting the pole into the water off the bows and walking the whole length of the punt. It was inevitable, thought Dalziel, that one so obviously born a victim would sooner or later step over the side.

  ‘Yes,’ repeated Tillotson, ‘it was rather like a burial at sea. Full fathom five, Tom Bowling, all that. Did you get some good pictures, Hank?’

  ‘I shot off a whole roll,’ replied Uniff. ‘But did I get the light right? It wasn’t easy to judge and that creepy preacher man didn’t help by complaining.’

  He cradled his camera protectively as if an attempt were being made to wrest it from his hands.

  ‘Didn’t Mrs Fielding object?’ queried Dalziel.

  ‘Bonnie? Hell, no. I mean, why, man?’

  ‘Hank’s an artist,’ explained Tillotson, passing them again at a smart trot. His new technique was certainly moving the punt along much faster, but at the expense of direction if one assumed that the rowing-boat was taking the shortest route home. It was now almost out of sight and several points to the nor’-east.

  Dalziel pulled his coat collar more tightly round his neck and resisted the temptation to take charge of the vessel. He was the super-cargo, not the captain. But something of his feelings must have shown to Uniff who grinned maliciously at his discomfiture and began to whistle ‘The Skye Boat Song’.

  ‘What kind of artist are you, Mr Uniff?’ asked Dalziel.

  ‘What kinds of artist are there, man?’ replied Uniff.

  ‘Well,’ replied Dalziel, irritated, ‘there’s con-artists, and there’s shit-artists, and there’s …’

  But his catalogue of abuse was interrupted by the
forecast disaster. Tillotson drove the punt forward into a half-submerged hedge, the bows rose in the air, Tillotson screamed and went over the side, Uniff and Dalziel fell together in a tangled heap from which Dalziel recovered just in time to see his suitcase slowly toppling into the water.

  Furious, he rose and put his huge hand into the face of Tillotson who was trying to clamber back on board.

  ‘My case!’ he yelled. ‘Get my bloody case!’

  Recognizing that this was an essential condition of readmittance, Tillotson pursued the case which had floated only a few feet but was sinking fast. Dalziel took it out of his hands and tried to drain it as, unassisted, the blond youth dragged himself on board, his exertions freeing the punt from the hedge. Uniff all the while took pictures, including one of the pole which for once had not become embedded in the mud but was floating away at a distance of some twenty feet.

  Dalziel banged his case down with a force that nearly brought on a new disaster.

  ‘Mr Dalziel, sir,’ said Uniff, still photographing. ‘By the ancient laws of the sea, I elect you captain. What now, man? Are you going to run a tight ship?’

  Dalziel swallowed the anger which he realized would not be particularly productive at the present time.

  ‘I might just marry you to this goon,’ he said, ‘and see if you could fuck some sense into him.’

  Instead he swung his wellingtoned foot at the narrow planks which formed the cross seat and his fierce onslaught quickly loosened one sufficiently for it to be torn free. Then, using this as a paddle, he sent the punt in pursuit of the pole.

  Uniff now put away his camera and rescued the pole from the water. Tillotson with the natural gallantry of the aristocrat offered to resume his post, but Dalziel with the equally natural bluntness of the peasant told him to keep his hands on his knees and his bum on the floor and not to move on peril of his manhood.

  Uniff stepped to the back of the punt and with a vigorous driving stroke, which more than made up in efficiency what it lost to Tillotson’s in style, he sent the punt scudding over the surface at such a rate that they were only fifty yards behind the rowing-boat as it reached the farther boundary of the water.

  There was a lake here, Dalziel surmised, which had overflowed its banks and joined its waters with those of the stream running parallel to the road more than a quarter of a mile behind them. A small landing-stage, waterlogged by the rise in the level of the lake, led to some steps set into a steep sloping garden which rose to a substantial nineteenth-century house in a state of dilapidation not wholly explained even by three days of incessant rain. It was the house he had noticed earlier from the bridge to nowhere and, though close to it lost most of its fairy-tale-castle quality, it still had a solid, fortified look about it.

  The other party had disappeared into the house by the time the punt reached the landing-stage and Dalziel did not stand upon ceremony but, using Tillotson’s head as a support, he stepped ashore, strode grimly up the garden steps and entered the house without waiting for an invitation. Now he paused, not because of any late revivings of social courtesy but because it was far from clear to him where everyone had disappeared to.

  A large entrance hall stretched before him. What might have been elegant wood-panelling had been ruined by the application everywhere of dark brown paint. It was to Dalziel like a nightmarish blow-up of the narrow lobby of his grandmother’s house which family loyalties had required must be visited every Sunday although the Presbyterian conscience forbade that anyone should gain pleasure from such a visit. Momentarily he felt like Alice, reduced in scale to a position of total vulnerability.

  A door opened. Instead of a monstrous grandmother, Mrs Fielding emerged and made for the staircase.

  Dalziel coughed and she stopped.

  ‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Oh, it’s you. There’s the telephone. Help yourself.’

  She turned to go but Dalziel detained her with another thunderous cough.

  ‘I’d like to dry my things,’ he said. ‘Get changed. A hot bath would be welcome too.’

  She looked at him with puzzled, rather disdainful eyes.

  ‘Look, we’re all wet, but this isn’t a hotel,’ she said. ‘You might find a towel in the kitchen.’

  Again she turned.

  ‘Hold on,’ said Dalziel.

  She ignored him and started climbing the stairs.

  ‘Look!’ he bellowed after her, losing his patience. ‘I’ve been punched on the nose by your daughter, I’ve been stranded by your boatman, and I’ve had my case dumped in the water by that long streak of nowt you left in charge of the punt!’

  She stopped four stairs up. He couldn’t see her face in the shadows, but he got the impression that she was smiling.

  ‘It was your choice to accept the lift,’ she said reasonably.

  ‘Lady,’ he answered, ‘I didn’t know what I was doing. But you did. You must have known I’d have had more chance of getting here safely if I’d set out to walk across the blasted water.’

  Now she laughed out loud.

  ‘We’re warned about turning away angels unawares,’ she said. ‘I see how easy it could be. Come along, Mr …?’

  ‘Dalziel,’ said Dalziel and followed her upstairs, his case leaving a trail of drips which ran parallel to that cast by his sodden coat.

  On the landing she paused uncertainly.

  ‘We’re a bit crowded at the moment,’ she explained. ‘It’s a big house, but half the bedrooms haven’t been used for years. I wonder …’

  She opened a door and went in. The room was in darkness but a couple of moments later she opened wide the curtains and beckoned Dalziel in from the threshold.

  ‘You’re not superstitious, are you?’ she asked. ‘This was my husband’s room. Well, it’s got to be used again, I suppose. You don’t mind?’

  The last question might have been ironical as Dalziel had already opened his suitcase and begun to empty its damp contents on to the bed.

  ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Very kind.’

  ‘There’s a bathroom through that door. It communicates with my room, so if it’s locked, it’ll be because I’m in there.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, starting to remove his coat. But she did not leave immediately.

  ‘You said something about being punched on the nose,’ she prompted.

  ‘It was nothing,’ he said generously. ‘A misunderstanding.’

  ‘I see. Well, our children seem determined to be misunderstood, and usually it’s someone else who gets hurt. Don’t you agree, Mr Dalziel?’

  ‘I’m not married,’ said Dalziel, unpeeling his huge sports jacket and revealing broad khaki braces. ‘And I’ve no kids.’

  ‘Oh. The last of the line, Mr Dalziel?’ she said.

  ‘Aye. You could say. Or the end of the tether.’

  With neat efficient movements she gathered the damp clothing from the bed, an act of conservation as well as kindness.

  ‘I’ll see to these,’ she said. ‘You look as though you could do with a hot bath straight away.’

  Dalziel was touched by this concern with his health till he saw her gaze fixed on his right hand which had unconsciously unbuttoned his shirt and was presently engaged in scratching his navel.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said and began to take off his shirt.

  The water in the antiquated bathroom was red hot both to the touch and to the sight. Having seen the brown peat water used in the manufacture of the best whisky, Dalziel did not anticipate harm from a little discoloration and wallowed sensuously in the huge marble tub, his feet resting on brass cherubim taps which time and neglect had verdigrised to a satyric green.

  From what he had seen so far of the house, he surmised that the Fielding family had been going through bad times. You needed a lot of cash to keep up a place like this these days. This didn’t necessarily mean they were poor, not by his standards. It did mean that probably they had been living beyond their means, or rather that as far as the house was concerned their means had lag
ged behind their rapidly growing expenditure. He was rather surprised to find himself being so charitable towards the idle rich but whatever the failings of the younger members of the household, Mrs Fielding had struck him as a pleasant intelligent woman. And handsome with it. Not a word much used of female attractiveness nowadays. You couldn’t call loose-haired kids with consumptive eyes and no tits handsome. But Mrs Fielding was. Oh yes.

  One of the cherubim seemed to leer at him with unnecessary salaciousness at this point. A trick of the steam. He got out and towelled himself vigorously.

  Back in the bedroom he discovered that his tin of foot powder had become a runny blancmange, so he opened the bathroom cabinet in search of a substitute. There was a mixture of male and female cosmetics and a variety of pill bottles. Either Mrs Fielding or her late husband was a bit of a hypochondriac, thought Dalziel. It was difficult to tell from the scrawl on the labels. Even the printed words were difficult. Boots of Piccadilly he could manage. But Propananol … could that be for athlete’s foot? Piles, more likely. There was a tap on the communicating door.

  ‘Just finishing,’ he called.

  ‘Your trousers were soaking,’ Mrs Fielding answered, ‘so I’ve put them with the rest to dry. You’ll find some things in the wardrobe to wear for the time being if you like. There’re hot drinks downstairs.’

  ‘Ta,’ he called. A kind and thoughtful woman, he decided. Once she had made up her mind to be welcoming she carried it through.

  Mr Fielding had clearly not been as fat as Dalziel but he had been tall and broad-shouldered. The trousers wouldn’t fasten at the waist, but a long nylon sweater stretched over the cabriole curve of his belly and covered the shameful schism. An old sports jacket, also unfastenable, and a pair of carpet slippers completed the robing and it was time to descend.

  Downstairs no sounds offered him a clue to the location of the hot drinks, but after three false starts he at last opened a door into an inhabited room.

  ‘Who the devil are you?’ demanded the old man, glaring at him through the steam rising from a mug held at his thin bluish lips.