‘Come on, and have it out in plain words! You hate the fellow.’
Detective-Superintendent Andrew Dalziel of Mid-Yorkshire CID stabbed the off-button of the video remote control as if he wanted to drive it through his knee.
‘Bastards!’ he said. ‘Bitch!’
‘The poor woman,’ said Maudie Tallantire.
‘Poor nowt. She were guilty as hell,’ said Dalziel. ‘Three people are dead because of her. I’d have thrown away the key! You save your sympathy for yourself, Maudie. You heard what that newspaper cow said about Wally?’
‘Wally’s been dead nigh on twenty years,’ said Maud Tallantire as if explaining something to a simple child. ‘He’s past harm now and who’d want to harm an old woman like me? Oh, I know the times have changed, and I reckon us old ’uns had the best of it, war and all. Everyone knew where they were going then, and in the years after. But it all went wrong somewhere, Andy. But human nature doesn’t change. At heart people are still as good as ever they were. They’d rather do you a good turn than a bad one. Look at you, Andy, coming all this way just ’cos you got to worrying about me, and no need at all!’
Dalziel shook his head in affectionate exasperation. Anyone who could cite himself as evidence of the basic goodness of human nature was clearly beyond hope. Maudie was over seventy now, grey-haired, slightly lame, but she hadn’t changed in essence from the pretty, amiable and rather vague woman he’d met more than thirty years ago, and very little, if report were true, from the wide-eyed lass who’d married Wally Tallantire back in the ’thirties.
‘Copper’s wife has got to be either tough as old boots to put up with the life, or live in a world of her own so she don’t notice,’ Wally had once confided in him when time and alcohol had matured their relationship. ‘That’s my Maudie. A rare orchid, Andy. She’ll need looking out for if anything ever happens to me. You’ll do that for me, won’t you, lad? Do I have your word on that?’
Dalziel had given his word gladly, but in the event, when Tallantire died of a heart attack shortly before he was due to retire, Maudie proved quite capable of looking out for herself. Within a year she’d moved back to her native Skipton and quickly gathered up the threads of her young life, broken when she’d moved from West to Mid-Yorkshire all those years ago.
Dalziel visited regularly for a while, then intermittently, and in recent years hardly at all. But when he saw the Kohler press conference on the telly, he knew the time had come for another visit.
He’d been going to suggest that Maudie might like to think about staying with friends for a couple of days just in case the Press came prying, but he wasn’t a man to waste breath. Instead he ran his video back a little way, restarted it, and pressed the freeze button when he reached the shot of the corridor through the open door.
‘That fellow there remind you of anyone, Maudie?’
‘The tall one?’ she said looking at the two men touched by his broad forefinger. ‘He’s a bit like Raymond Massey.’
‘No. Someone you know. And I mean the other one. I know who the tall fellow is. Chap called Sempernel. He came sniffing around at the time. Said he were Home Office but he were a funny bugger, no question. You’d not have seen him. But the other one, the skinny runt, remind you of anyone? And don’t say Mickey Rooney, luv!’
‘He doesn’t look a bit like Mickey Rooney,’ said the woman, examining the man closely. ‘He doesn’t really look like anybody, but he does look familiar.’
‘Remember a sergeant called Hiller? Adolf, we used to call him? Wally didn’t care for him and got shut of him.’
‘Vaguely,’ she said. ‘But what would Sergeant Hiller be doing there?’
‘That’s what I’d like to know,’ said Dalziel grimly. ‘And he’s not a sergeant now. Deputy Chief Constable down south, last I heard. Well, the higher the monkey climbs, the more he shows his behind, eh?’
Maudie Tallantire laughed. ‘You don’t change, do you, Andy? Now how about a cup of tea?’
‘Grand. By the way, Maudie, do you still have any of Wally’s personal papers? I seem to recall you said you’d put a lot of stuff together when you moved here just in case there were anything important …’
‘That’s right. And you said you’d look through it some time when you had a moment. But that was donkey’s years ago, Andy. And you never had a moment, did you?’
‘Sorry,’ he said guiltily. ‘You know how it is. But if you’ve still got it, I might as well take a look now.’
‘I’ve probably thrown it out long since,’ she said. ‘It were in an old blue suitcase, one of them little ones which was all we used to need once when we went away. Now it takes a cabin trunk! It’ll be in the boxroom if I’ve still got it, but it’s dusty up there and you don’t want to spoil that nice suit.’
‘I’ll take care.’
She was right about the dust but he spotted the blue case without any difficulty. He picked it up, blew gently, coughed as a dust cloud arose, and went to open the window.
Below in the street, a car drew up. There were two men in it. The one who got out of the driver’s side was youngish, dressed in designer casuals, and his elegantly coiffured head moved watchfully this way and that, as though he had debouched in Indian territory rather than suburban Yorkshire.
But it was the other who held Dalziel’s attention. Thin-faced, bespectacled, dressed in a crumpled black suit a size too large, he stood quite still looking up at the house like a twice repelled rent-collector.
‘Bloody hell. It is Adolf!’ exclaimed Dalziel, stepping back from the window. ‘I should’ve known that bugger’d move quick.’
Shaking the remaining dust from the case, he went quickly and quietly downstairs. Just inside the front door was a small cloakroom. He slipped the case under the hand-basin, closed the door and returned to the living-room as Maudie came out of the kitchen carrying a laden tray.
‘Find what you were looking for, Andy?’
‘No, not a sign,’ he said, removing the video from the recorder and fitting it into a capacious inner pocket. ‘I reckon you must have chucked it out without noticing. No matter. Are them your Eccles cakes I see? You must’ve known I was coming. What was it Wally used to say? Never say nowt good ever came out of Lancashire till you’ve tasted our Maudie’s Eccles cakes!’
He seized one, devoured it in a couple of bites, and was on his third when the doorbell rang.
‘Who can that be?’ said Maudie, with the ever fresh surprise of the northern housewife that someone should be at her door.
She went out into the hallway. Dalziel helped himself to another cake and moved to the lounge doorway to catch the conversation.
‘Mrs Tallantire, you may not remember me, but we have met a long time back. Geoffrey Hiller. I was a sergeant up here for a while when your husband was head of CID.’
‘Hiller? Now isn’t that odd? We were just talking about you. Won’t you step inside, Sergeant? And your friend.’
‘Thank you. Actually, it’s Deputy Chief Constable now, Mrs Tallantire. Of the South Thames force. And this is Detective-Inspector Stubbs.’
‘Ooh, you have done well. Come on through. Andy, it never rains but it pours. Here’s another old friend of Wally’s come visiting.’
Dalziel, back in his chair, looked up in polite