An April Shroud

‘Dalziel. Yes, I will.’ Here’s another one who thinks he’s summed me up and can start patronizing me, thought Dalziel as his huge hand held the glass he had retrieved from the floor steadfastly under the bottle till the meniscus touched the rim and Fielding said ironically, ‘Say when.’

It was brandy, a cheap brand Dalziel suspected, not from any connoisseurship of the liquor but by simple taste-bud comparison with the smoothness of his own favourite malt whisky. Something of his reaction must have shown and he realized he had inadvertently got back at Fielding for his suspected condescension when the old man said, ‘I’m sorry, it’s not good, but these days we all have to make sacrifices.’

‘It’s fine. Just the job for this weather,’ said Dalziel, emptying his glass and proffering it for a refill.

‘The weather. Yes. That foolish boy. I hope he will be all right. He never goes far, at least he didn’t when Conrad – that’s his father, my son – was alive.’

‘Fond of his dad, was he?’

‘Very,’ said the old man firmly.

‘But he still ran away, even then?’

‘Certainly. It’s in the family. Conrad was always taking off when he was a boy. I myself ran off to join the Army in 1914. I was sixteen at the time.’

‘Did they take you?’ asked Dalziel.

‘Not then. I looked very young. We were younger then, you know. Balls dropping, menstruation, it all happened later in my generation. But now they seem to need jockstraps and brassieres in the cradle.’

Fielding laughed harshly.

‘Anyway, it was a blessing I see now. I went legally and forcibly in 1916 and within six months I was ready to run away again, home this time.’

‘It must have been terrible,’ said Dalziel with spurious sympathy. ‘All that mud.’

‘Mud? Oh no. I didn’t mean the trenches. I never really saw the trenches. It was just the sheer boredom of the whole thing that made me want to run away. Very unfashionable. I wrote a book about my experiences a few years after the war. A light, comic thing, it went down well enough with your general reader, but it put me in bad with the intelligentsia for the next decade. But then I did a bit of Eliot-bashing and that was a help. Even so, I still got the cold shoulder, more or less, until the fifties. After that it was just a question of survival. Hang on long enough and you’re bound to become a Grand Old Man. Like the essays Paul Pennyfeather set in Decline and Fall. The reward is for length, regardless of merit.’

He laughed again, a series of glottally-stopped cracks, like a night-stick rattling along metal railings. Dalziel contemplated making him laboriously explain what he had just said, sentence by sentence, but decided against it on the grounds that the poor old sod probably couldn’t help himself.

‘So you’re not too worried about the boy?’

‘In the sense that he is too sensible to contribute willingly to his own harm, no. But as you say, the weather is appalling and, in addition, we live in troubled times, Mr Dalziel. The post-war period is an age of unbalance, of violence. Women and children cannot wander around with impunity as in my boyhood. Even the police seem more likely to be a source of molestation than a protection against it.’

‘They’ve a hard job,’ said Dalziel mildly.

‘I dare say. They certainly make hard work of finding an answer to the crime wave.’

‘Oh, the answer’s simple,’ said Dalziel. ‘Charge two guineas a pint for petrol, have a dusk to dawn curfew, and deport regular offenders to Manchester.’

It was a Yorkshire joke. Fielding was not very amused.

‘It’s in man’s mind, not his motorways, that the answer lies,’ he said reprovingly. ‘Has Bonnie organized a search for Nigel? No, you said they were in conference, didn’t you? Conference! You see how this house is run, Mr Dalziel!’

Dalziel felt impelled to defend Bonnie Fielding.

‘The man, Pappy, has been warned to keep look-out. The lad took the boat, it seems.’

‘Worse and worse,’ said the old man angrily. ‘That fool Papworth is totally unreliable. Let’s go and find him and you’ll see.’

He drained his glass and led the way out at a pace which had Dalziel’s borrowed carpet slippers flip-flopping on the uncarpeted floor.

Dalziel paused in the hallway as he heard the sound of raised voices drifting down the stairs. Someone, it sounded like Bertie, was shouting angrily and other voices mingled in the background.

‘Come on!’ commanded Fielding, irritated by the delay, and obediently Dalziel followed him through a door which led into a new complex of meaner corridors running through what presumably had once been the servants’ quarters.

Fielding strode on ahead till he reached a door on which he rapped imperiously. Then without waiting for a reply, he flung it open with an aplomb which won Dalziel’s professional admiration.

The room looked as if it had been furnished from an army surplus sale. The metal bed was made up with a neatness that invited inspection and the objects on the bedside locker – ashtray, alarm clock and a box of matches – were placed at the corners of an isosceles triangle.

Pappy was not there and in an almost unconscious reflex Dalziel stepped into the room and opened the metal wardrobe. It contained a couple of jackets and an old but well preserved black suit.

Glancing round, he realized that Fielding was regarding him strangely. Bursting into a servant’s room was evidently OK, but searching it was something else.

‘He’s not here then,’ said Dalziel.

‘No. I doubt if he spends a great deal of time in the wardrobe.’

‘Perhaps he’s out looking.’

‘Hah!’ snorted Fielding, setting off again. Dalziel followed after glancing out of the window. It was still raining and the cobbled yard which lay outside was inches deep in water so that it looked like a sea of semolina. For the second time since coming into this house, Dalziel felt a sense of physical belittlement.

Fielding was knocking on another door now, more gently this time and without trying the handle. A woman’s voice answered from within.

‘Who is it?’

‘Mr Fielding. Sorry to trouble you, Mrs Greave, but I’m looking for Papworth. Do you know where he is?’

After a short interval, the door was opened by a bright-eyed woman of about forty, whose magenta-tinted hair and green dressing-gown wound tight around her body gave her the look of a cornfield poppy. She was not unattractive in a bold and brassy kind of way.

‘I was having a nap,’ she said with more of accusation than explanation in her voice.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Fielding. ‘Do you know where Papworth is?’

‘No,’ said the woman yawning, showing good teeth in a moist pink mouth. Her glance flickered towards Dalziel who looked her up and down from her bare feet to the untidy brightness of her hair and leered grotesquely at her. Dalziel’s leer was so unambiguous that it was like a lesser man exposing himself. Mrs Greave screwed up her mouth in distaste and said, ‘Sorry, I’ve no idea. I’d better start thinking about dinner, I suppose, so if you’ll excuse me.’

She began to close the door but Dalziel leaned forward so that his belly curved into the doorway. It was more subtle than putting your foot in the jamb.

Sniffing noisily, he said, ‘Is something burning?’

The woman half turned, then swung back again to prevent Dalziel from entering the room.

‘No,’ she said, and swung the door to so violently that he had to skip back to avoid a collision. But he smiled to himself as they moved on. He had penetrated far enough to see a man’s suede shoe lying on the floor. It looked wet.

‘So she’s the cook, is she?’ he asked.

‘So rumour has it,’ said Fielding drily. ‘It was probably the dinner you smelt burning.’

Dalziel laughed. It was turning out to be a very interesting household, this. It had to be Papworth who was in the woman’s room. Perhaps he was just taking evasive action. With this old fusspot on the prowl, who could blame him? Though, of course, you didn’t need to take your shoes off to hide.

‘Papworth’s knocking her off, is he?’ he said, voicing his thought.

‘Who?’

‘Mrs Greave. The cook.’

Fielding laughed again.

‘I hope not,’ he said. ‘She’s his daughter!’

‘His daughter?’ echoed Dalziel. ‘You’re sure?’

‘No one can ever be sure of their father,’ said Fielding. ‘We believe what we’re told, don’t we? Come on. We might find him in the Hall.’

It seemed that this hunt for Papworth was becoming an obsession with the old man. Dalziel’s own enthusiasm had waned, partly because he still had not discarded his theory about Papworth’s whereabouts (a man could visit his daughter in her bedroom, couldn’t he?) but mainly because Fielding now proposed that they should go out into the rain-filled yard.

‘Hold on,’ he said at the door. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Just over there,’ said Fielding, pointing to a long high-roofed building which ran out from the main house. It looked as if it might once have been a stables, but surprisingly, in this neglected house, this particular block looked as if someone had been working on it fairly recently, an impression confirmed by the wording on a sign propped against the wall. Gibb and Fowler, Building Contractors, Orburn.

‘It joins up with the house,’ said Dalziel reasonably. ‘Can’t we get into it without going outside?’

‘If you must,’ said the old man crossly, shutting the door.

Their route this time took them through a new world in the form of a large room (or perhaps two or three rooms knocked into one) where the old stone walls had been plastered and painted a brilliant blue. On one side were a pair of large freezers and on the other, gleaming in silver and white, a row of microwave ovens. It was like stepping out of a bus shelter into a space ship.

‘What’s all this?’ asked Dalziel in bewilderment.

‘We drink a lot of soup,’ said Fielding, not stopping to offer further explanation but pressing on through the room with unflagging speed.

Dalziel followed down another short corridor, then into the building which was the object of Fielding’s forced march.

Here he halted and let his eyes get used to the dim light filtering through the narrow arched windows. If the microwave ovens had been a step forward out of the nineteenth century, what was going on here was just as determined a step back.

The building had been a stables, he reckoned, with an upper floor used perhaps as a hay-loft. This floor had now been removed with the exception of a small section at the far end which had been transformed into a kind of minstrels’ gallery. The joists supporting the arched roof had clearly lacked something in antiquity and they were being supplemented by a new fishbone pattern of age-blackened beams, standing out starkly against the white-washed interstices. Dalziel rapped his knuckles against one of these beams which was leaning against the wall, prior to elevation. It rang hollowly and felt smooth and cold to the touch. Dalziel was not repelled. He had nothing against plastic. He would as lief eat off colourful Formica as polished mahogany. Nor did it seem distasteful to him that the panes of stained ‘glass’ which were being fitted into the windows were plastic also. His reaction was one of simple puzzlement.

To what end would the Fieldings be transforming an old stables into something that looked like a set for a remake of Robin Hood?

Old Fielding, having peered into various recesses and through various doors, now abandoned his search for Papworth and returned to enjoy Dalziel’s bewilderment.

‘What do you think of this?’ he asked, gesturing with a flamboyance more in keeping with his surroundings than his person. ‘Is it not a fit monument for our times? What would Pope have had to say?’

‘Monument?’ said Dalziel, wondering momentarily if the old man was being literal and this place was indeed intended to be some sort of mausoleum, a kind of bourgeois Taj Mahal. But what about the ovens?

The answer was obvious.

‘It’s a café,’ said Dalziel.

This solution sent the old man into paroxysms of laughter which modulated into a coughing bout from which it seemed unlikely he would recover. Dalziel watched for a moment coldly, then administered a slap between his shoulder-blades which brought the dust up out of the old man’s jacket and sent him staggering against a section of stone reproduction wall which gave visibly.

‘Thank you,’ said Fielding. ‘Though I fear the cure was more dangerous than the disease. Well now. A café. Yes, that’s the word. Not the word that will be used, of course, should this sad enterprise ever come to fruition. No. Then this place will be called a Banqueting Hall. My daughter-in-law is too careful, I think, to risk the penalties prescribed under the Trades Descriptions Act by calling it a Medieval Banqueting Hall, but the word “medieval” will certainly appear somewhere on the prospectus.’

‘People will eat here,’ said Dalziel.

The prospect did not displease him. Eating was one of the Four Deadly Pleasures. Though he could not see the necessity for all these trappings. A meal was a meal.

‘That’s right. A dagger and a wooden platter. At a given signal, chicken legs will be thrown over the right shoulder. It’s a pastime very popular I believe in the North-East where the past is still close and tribal memories are long. My foolish family believe the inhabitants of Orburn and district will be equally gullible. The dreadful thing is, they may be right.’

‘There’s still a bit of work to be done,’ observed Dalziel. ‘Where are the builders today?’

‘They would not come today,’ said the old man significantly.

‘No? Oh, of course. Sorry. The funeral.’

Fielding laughed again, but this time, with a wary eye on Dalziel’s hand, he kept it to a controlled barking.

‘Builders are not noted for their delicacy, Mr Dalziel, not here, anyway.’

Dalziel ran his mind’s eye down a list of building contractors working in his area and had to agree.

‘What then? The weather?’

‘Money, Mr Dalziel. When the head goose has been killed, you make damn sure someone else is going to start dropping the golden eggs.’

‘Ah,’ said Dalziel. ‘Then this business conference …?’

But his cross-examination was interrupted.

‘You are looking for me, Mr Fielding?’ said a voice from above.

They looked up. Leaning over the rail of the minstrels’ gallery was Papworth.

‘There you are,’ said Fielding. ‘About time too. Have you seen anything of my grandson yet? Young Nigel?’

‘No,’ said Papworth. ‘Should I have done?’

‘Don’t you know he’s missing? Hasn’t anyone told you?’ demanded Fielding.

‘No,’ said Papworth. ‘I’ve been busy. What’s the fuss?’

‘The boy’s run off again. It seems he’s taken the rowing-boat and naturally we are all very worried.’

‘The rowing-boat,’ said Papworth thoughtfully.

‘That’s right, man. Aren’t you going to do anything? You can take the punt out and scout around, if you are not too busy, that is.’

You didn’t have to be a detective to spot the dislike the old man felt for Papworth, thought Dalziel. If only all relationships were so clear!

‘No. That’s just what I was going to do when I heard you wanted me,’ said Papworth.

‘But you said you didn’t know the boy was missing,’ interjected Dalziel.

‘No. But the boat is. Or was.’

‘Was?’

‘Yes. I can see it drifting out beyond the island. But one thing’s certain. There’s no one in it.’

5

A Pleasant Surprise

For the second time that day, the three men got soaking wet. Papworth seemed impervious to the rain as he propelled the gun-punt over the water with strong economical strokes, but Dalziel was concerned about the old man who had rejected all attempts to make him stay ashore. His clothes were clinging to his body, accentuating its frailty, and the skin of his face seemed to have shrunk in the downpour and be clinging almost transparently to his patrician skull.

Dalziel himself drew comfort from the thought that this time at least it was not his own clothes that were getting wet. There was a philosophy in there somewhere if he had the time or energy to winkle it out. Or a rule of life at least. He was dimly aware that his blacker moments were often survived only because he had certain usually unspecified and often arbitrary rules of life to cling on to, though whether these added up to the weight and dignity of something called a philosophy he did not know. Duty was one of them, or at least the notion that a man got out of bed and went to his work no matter what he felt like, and saw the job through if he could manage it without collapsing. It had proved a useful and necessary rule in recent weeks.

The rowing-boat was drifting with one oar missing and the other trailing from the rowlock. The island referred to by Papworth was, Dalziel realized, a real island in the real lake, with water lapping shallowly at the roots of the trees growing there. It would be possible to land here still at the expense only of getting your feet wet, and he scanned the trees closely. They were willows mainly, packed tight together as though drawing back from the threatening waters, but the total area of the island couldn’t have been more than a quarter-acre and he felt pretty certain that Nigel was not lurking there, watching them pass.

Nor was the boy in the boat. Papworth had asserted it was empty from the start, but Dalziel had not been so positive. You could lie in the bottom of a boat and not be seen from the shore, he suspected. But the boy was not in it and suddenly the dimensions of the problem had changed.

Papworth jumped lightly into the boat and pulled the trailing oar inboard. From the punt Dalziel examined the rowing-bench closely, looking for he did not know what.

‘Where’s it come from?’ he demanded.

‘God knows,’ said Papworth with a shrug.

‘Can’t you tell?’ said Dalziel.

‘They don’t leave tracks,’ said Papworth. ‘And there’s no regular currents, tides, that sort of thing here. No, the wind’d move it most, and you tell me which quarter that’s in.’

He was right. What wind there was gusted fitfully from no constant direction.

Old Fielding who had been uncharacteristically quiet ever since they had left the shore now said, ‘There’s an oar missing. Surely if we can find that, it will give us a clue.’

‘Mebbe,’ said Papworth laconically. ‘But to what?’

‘Listen,’ said Dalziel, glowering at the impassive boatman. ‘There’s three things. The boat could have drifted back from wherever Nigel got off; or it could just have drifted away from the landing-stage in the first place and the boy’s on the road; or if he did have a spot of trouble he could be stranded on a tree or on top of a hedge or something. He can swim, can’t he?’

‘Like a fish,’ said Fielding.

‘Right then,’ said Dalziel, standing so that the punt rocked dangerously. He ignored the movement and scanned the waters. It was pretty obvious where the lake proper ended and the floods began. A line of trees and half-submerged undergrowth delineated the sweep of the farther bank and, beyond this, the geometric outlines of fields were marked where their hedges broke the surface of the water.

‘OK,’ said Dalziel. ‘Shout.’

‘What?’

‘Shout,’ he said. ‘If he is stuck somewhere, he’ll answer.’

They started to shout, sometimes separately and sometimes with Fielding’s reedy tenor, Papworth’s strong baritone and Dalziel’s totally unmusical bellow blending into a single dreadful cry. The damp air absorbed all their effort with indifferent ease and returned nothing.

‘Let’s try a bit farther out,’ said Dalziel finally, reaching for the punt pole. But as he did so, he realized their yellings had not gone entirely unheard. Standing in the garden near the flooded landing-stage were the rest of the Fieldings and Tillotson. He guessed what anxieties were swarming through Bonnie’s mind and spoke to Papworth.

‘We’d best let Mrs Fielding know what’s going on,’ he said. ‘Can you scout a bit farther in that thing while I take the punt back?’

‘If you like,’ said Papworth. He removed the oar from the thole-pin and using it as a rather cumbersome paddle began to move away.

‘Where’s that fellow going?’ demanded Fielding. He looked to be in the extremities of distress, both physical and mental. Even without his daughter-in-law’s right to an explanation, it would have been necessary to get him back to the house soon.

‘He’s going to search,’ said Dalziel, wielding the pole inexpertly and for the first time feeling some sympathy for Tillotson. ‘We’d better get back to the house and organize things there.’

Mrs Fielding remained controlled when she heard what Dalziel had to say, but he sensed a strong underlying concern.

‘Let’s get inside,’ she said. ‘Herrie, you’re soaking! What possessed you to go out in only your jacket?’

She gave a half-accusing glance at Dalziel. She had the kind of solid, bold-eyed face much admired by the Edwardians and which had still stared provocatively at an adolescent Dalziel from Scarborough What-the-Butler-Saw machines a couple of decades later. He felt an in the circumstances incongruous urge to wink invitingly.

Surprisingly in the light of her earlier indifference, Louisa was outwardly the most agitated.

‘We can’t just hang about, doing nothing,’ she cried. ‘Let’s get something organized.’

Her urgency seemed to infect the others and her mother and brother began to move back to the house at an accelerated pace almost beyond the means of the old man who hung on to his daughter-in-law with the stoic look of one who is ready at a moment’s notice to make his final exit.

Dalziel followed, eager to get out of the rain but without any feeling of urgency. He doubted whether speed was going to contribute much to Nigel Fielding’s safety now. Either the lad was safe or his body was waiting to be grappled from the water by a boat-hook. But the illusion of great activity was a useful anodyne.

The Uniffs who had had enough sense to stay out of the wet met them at the door and received explanations in the hall.

Mavis displayed the same calm competence as before and even Hank made conventional soothing noises, putting his arm round Louisa’s thin shoulders and pressing his University of Love T-shirt (the same one? or did he have duplicates?) against her soaking sweater whose new skin-clinging properties managed the merest hint of a female figure.

‘We must ring the police,’ she said. Dalziel sighed and prepared to step forward to reveal himself. It would be unprofessional to let this short-tempered girl give her unstructured and semi-hysterical account of the situation to the local bobby when he could get things moving in half the time.

‘Perhaps,’ he began. And the telephone rang. For a moment they all froze. It was Bonnie Fielding who was quickest off the mark, heading for the room which old Fielding claimed as his own.

They heard her pick up the phone.

‘Nigel!’ she exclaimed.

‘Yes,’ she said, as the rest of them crowded into the room. ‘Yes. Look, Nigel, where are … no … oh, damn!’

It was clear from her face that the boy had rung off.

‘Where is he?’ demanded Fielding.

‘I’m sorry, Herrie,’ said the woman. ‘But he didn’t say. Just that he wanted us to know he was OK. He saw the boat go adrift after he’d abandoned it and thought I’d be worried. Anyway, thank God he’s safe. Now, Herrie, let’s see about you before you get pneumonia.’

She ushered the old man out of the room, and though the news of his grandson’s safety revived him enough to snap a token protest at this unwanted solicitude, he let himself be led upstairs with no physical demur.

‘End of crisis,’ said Uniff cheerfully. ‘All’s well etcetera.’

The telephone rang again and the bearded man picked it up.