3 kaffee-klatsch

      Two days after Pascoe had gone west, Ellie Pascoe and Edgar Wield met outside the Arts Centre. Wield knew it wasn’t by chance when Ellie, uncomfortable with deception, over-egged her look of surprised pleasure.

      She wants to talk about Peter, he guessed, but is worried about looking disloyal.

      ‘How do, Ellie?’ he said before she could speak. ‘Fancy a coffee at Hal’s?’

      He saw he’d stolen her line, and she’d been married to a detective long enough to work out why by the time they climbed up to the mezzanine café-bar in the Arts Centre.

      With relief, because she hated masquerade, she took this as an invitation to cut straight to the chase as soon as they’d got their coffee.

      ‘Have you heard from Peter?’ she asked.

      ‘Aye.’

      ‘And what’s he say?’

      ‘This and that,’ he answered vaguely. ‘Have you not heard yourself?’

      ‘Of course I have,’ she said indignantly. ‘He rings me every night.’

      Every night seemed a large term for the two nights Pascoe had been away.

      ‘Rings me during the day,’ said Wield. ‘Don’t expect he misses me at night.’

      They smiled at each other like the old friends they were.

      ‘So what’s he talk to you about?’ said Ellie.

      ‘That and this,’ repeated Wield. ‘Work stuff. You know Pete. Thinks the place is going to fall apart if he’s not there to keep an eye on things.’

      Ellie saw that he might have opened things up for her, but he had his loyalties too. This was her call.

      She said, ‘I’m a bit worried about him, Wieldy. More than a bit. A hell of a lot. I think he’s got really obsessive about this bomb investigation.’

      ‘Came close to killing him,’ said Wield. ‘Enough to make you both obsessive.’

      ‘Meaning, how clear’s my own judgment here?’ interpreted Ellie. ‘Wieldy, if you can put your hand on your heart and tell me he’s fine, that’ll do the trick for me.’

      He drank his coffee. His face was as unreadable as ever, but Ellie knew because she’d known it from the start that she wasn’t going to hear much for her comfort.

      He said, ‘Wish I could. But it’s not so odd that I can’t. Being close to something like Mill Street doesn’t just go away. I reckon it shook Pete up more than he’ll admit. Since it happened, he’s definitely not been himself. Trouble is, from what I’ve seen of him, what he’s trying to be is Andy Dalziel. The way he deals with people, the way he talks, even, God help us, the way he walks, it’s like he feels he’s got to fill in for Fat Andy. But likely you’ll have noticed?’

      ‘I noticed something,’ said Ellie unhappily. ‘But he’s a great bottler-up. Stupid sod imagines he’s protecting me and Rosie by clamping down the hatches. He said an odd thing when he went back to work that first time. He said he felt he had to, as if him not being there would lessen the chances of Andy recovering. A sort of sympathetic magic.’

      ‘Very like,’ said Wield. ‘Look, luv, I don’t think you should worry too much. Either Andy’ll make it and we’ll all get back to normal, or he won’t, and we’ll all get back to normal then too, only it’ll take a bit longer and normal will have changed.’

      She’d wanted honesty before comfort. This sounded to her reasonably close to the former and a long way short of the latter.

      She said, ‘I just wish he hadn’t gone to Manchester. I suppose we should be grateful to Sandy Glenister for seeing how much it meant to him to stay involved, but I don’t really see how he can be of any use to those CAT people across there…What?’

      Wield knew that in the innermost reaches of his mind he had grunted sceptically, but he was certain that nothing in his larynx had uttered even the ghost of an echo of that grunt. Also he had the kind of face which made the Rosetta Stone seem as easy to read as the back of a cornflake packet. ‘Watch his left ear,’ advised Andy Dalziel. ‘It doesn’t help, but it means you don’t have to look at the rest of his face.’

      Yet despite all this, perhaps because over the years he and Ellie Pascoe had got very close, and in matters relating to her family she was supersensitive, somehow the grunt had reached her ears telepathically.

      ‘I said nowt,’ he said.

      She said nowt too, which made her point very effectively.

      ‘All right,’ he said, pushed another step towards honesty. ‘I reckon maybe Mrs Glenister didn’t take Pete with her team just so he could help pursue their investigations over there, she took him to make sure he wasn’t sticking his nose in back here.’

      ‘But why should she do that? I thought she’d fallen over herself to make sure Mid-York CID were fully involved?’

      ‘Oh aye, she did,’ agreed Wield. ‘I’m not suggesting owt sinister. It’s just that, once you get into Security, you’ve got to tread very carefully. It were all right long as she were around, but likely she could see Pete were so obsessive, he wasn’t going to stop picking away at things just because the CAT team had moved on.’

      Ellie sipped her cappuccino. It left a smudge of creamy brown foam along her lip. She had the kind of strong facial structure which age only improved and the kind of figure which only strong will power in the matter of cream doughnuts and buttered crumpets kept this side of orientally voluptuous. Looking at her, Wield thought of the old gay joke—doesn’t it sometimes make you wish you were a lesbian?

      She licked her lip and said, ‘This have anything to do with that bullet Tig found? Pete seemed to think that was a bit of a mystery.’

      ‘A mystery susceptible of more than two explanations can hardly be deemed mysterious,’ said Wield.

      He caught Pascoe’s intonation so perfectly that Ellie laughed out loud.

      ‘That’s what he decided, was it?’ she said.

      ‘He certainly got his two explanations,’ evaded Wield. ‘Look, Ellie, I really don’t think there’s owt much to worry yourself about. Give it time. He’ll be back soon—when he rang through yesterday he said he felt he were superfluous to requirements…’

      ‘Hanging around like a yard of foreskin at a Jewish wedding, was how he put it to me,’ said Ellie.

      Wield grinned.

      ‘Me too. Another one from the wit and wisdom of Fat Andy, I think. Anyway, like I say, he’ll be back in a day or two. And when he is, there’s such a backlog of stuff piling up, he’ll not have time to worry about owt else.’

      ‘I hope you’re right, Wieldy,’ said Ellie. ‘But all this Templar stuff in the papers today…do you think that it could be connected with the Mill Street explosion?’

      The papers had all been running the Mazraani killing on their front pages for a couple of days now. Several of them had used blurry images taken from the video, though none had gone so far as to show the severed head. The Voice had gone as far as showing the moment of first impact, and the same paper had come closest to expressing approval of the killing with the headline NOW IT’S YOUR TURN!

      Reaction in the Muslim community, already heated by news of the murders, was brought to boiling point by this and other ultra-nationalist responses.