An April Shroud. Reginald Hill
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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,