He listened for a moment then exploded. ‘Ripper! What do you mean he’s a ripper? No, this isn’t Peter. This is Dalziel. And who the fuck are you? You’re not speaking from Benidorm, are you?’
He listened a while longer then passed the phone to Pascoe.
‘Inspector Wishart from South,’ he said. ‘Says your man’s a ripper down Burrthorpe Main. Gave me a nasty shock, that. This the Kassell stuff? I’ll take good care of it, lad.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Pascoe, who foresaw already the dog-eared, beer-stained state in which his lovely records were likely to return to him. ‘Official inquiry, is it, sir?’
From the door Dalziel flashed him a smile as reassuring as a crack in new plaster.
‘As official as yours, I expect, lad.’
He went out. Pascoe said, ‘The coast’s clear.’
‘Jesus,’ said Wishart. ‘You might have warned me Geronimo had broken out again; let’s do this quick, eh? Here’s what the record says.’
That night he said to Ellie, ‘I picked up some info on your protégé, if you’d like to hear.’
‘Official version, you mean? Go on. I like a well-crafted tale.’
‘Simply, he got drunk, took offence at something a stranger in the street said to him, got into a fracas and pushed the man through a shop window. That may have been an accident. Certainly, it turned out the man didn’t want to bring charges. Which was odd. As evidently he turned out to be a journalist, one Monty Boyle, chief crime reporter on the Challenger. Makes you think …
Ellie was not in the least interested in what it made him think.
‘But the good old fuzz persuaded him to change his mind,’ she said angrily.
‘Not really. A couple of local cops witnessed the incident. When they approached, Farr attacked one of them, throwing him through the window too, and had to be restrained by the other. That was the assault he was charged with.’
‘Now I’ve got it,’ cried Ellie in mock delight. ‘A bit of drunken horseplay, the kind of thing that passes for high spirits at Twickers or Annabel’s, is escalated to a criminal assault by heavy-handed police intervention.’
‘It’s a point of view,’ said Pascoe gravely. ‘It’s certainly true that if he hadn’t assaulted the constable, the whole thing might have been smoothed over with a police caution.’
‘But you can’t turn a blind eye to saying boo to a bobby,’ said Ellie.
‘Not when he needs seven stitches in his hand,’ said Pascoe. ‘Incidentally, since you don’t ask, the Challenger reporter was hardly damaged at all. It appears that Burrthorpe’s not the kind of place you encourage cop-bashing. They had a full-scale riot there during the Strike and the police station was just about wrecked.’
‘So a young man goes to jail and gets a permanent criminal record pour encourager les autres?’
‘The record was there already,’ said Pascoe. ‘He had several counts against him during the Strike …’
‘Who the hell didn’t? And they can’t have been all that serious, otherwise he wouldn’t have kept his job under the famous victimization scheme!’
‘True. But beyond and outside the Strike, he’s obviously been a wild lad. Most serious was when he got done for assaulting a Customs officer at Liverpool. Before you ask, no, he wasn’t coming back from holiday. He was a merchant seaman, didn’t you know that? A good teacher should know all about her pupils. Anyway, it didn’t amount to too much, I gather. Farr felt he was being unduly delayed by officialdom and threw the man’s hat into the ocean, then offered to send the man after it. He’s very fond of throwing people around, it seems. But you can see why the magistrate wouldn’t think a mere fine was enough in this last case.’
‘Oh yes,’ grunted Ellie. ‘I suppose he was lucky to escape the strappado.’
‘He only got a week. Five days with remission. He’ll be back for your next class. What’s the topic to be? Law and Order?’
‘Peter, that’s not funny, merely crass,’ snarled Ellie.
Pascoe considered.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said quietly. ‘It may not be terribly funny but I don’t think it’s at all crass, not between consenting adults in domestic bliss. As a professional communicator, you should be more careful. Intemperance of language is to thought what drunkenness is to courage: it makes a little go a long way.’
‘Is that original? Or is it a quote from some other prissy, pusillanimous time-server?’
‘Is that live? Or are you miming to the latest hit on the Radical Alliterative label?’
Ellie smiled, with only a little effort.
‘I’ll let you be original if you let me be live,’ she said.
‘Deal.’
He smiled back and went upstairs to see Rose, who was also smiling as she slept.
The difference was, her smile looked as if it went all the way through.
‘Carry your bag, miss?’
For a sliver of a second Ellie’s hand started to proffer the battered old briefcase. She had felt unusually drained after today’s class and had taken her time packing her papers while the cheerful chatter and clatter of the young miners faded down the corridor. When she finally followed them, Colin Farr had emerged from the door of the Gents as she passed. He was dressed in motorcycle leathers and carried a helmet.
‘Real offer or just winding me up, Colin?’ she said.
He fell into step beside her.
‘Depends, miss.’
‘On what?’
‘Whether you think it’s real or winding you up.’
‘But which depends on which?’ she wondered.
She also wondered, but this to herself, if Farr had emerged coincidentally or if he’d been lurking in that doorway.
‘Don’t follow you, miss.’
‘Yes, you do, Colin,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘That’s one game you can stop playing. Another is calling me miss all the time. I told the others last week that if I was going to use their first names, they’d have to use mine. Even though you seemed a little abstracted today, you may have heard one or two of them call me Ellie.’
‘Ell ee. Thought them were your initials, miss. Or mebbe a title.’
He grinned openly as he spoke.
They had reached the central landing. They were on the fourteenth floor of the Ivory Tower, a glass and concrete monument of the expansive and affluent ’sixties whose gnomonic shadow marked the passage of epochal as well as diurnal time on the scatter of redbrick buildings which had survived from the old civic university. Descent was by stair, conventional lift, or paternoster. The stairs were long and exhausting and the lift took an age to arrive, but Ellie usually preferred one or the other.
Farr, however, had made straight for the paternoster. The moving platforms were just large enough for two. He glanced at her, touched her elbow, and stepped forward. She stepped with him but as always the sense of the floor sinking away beneath her was so disconcerting that she gave a slight stagger and leaned against Farr whose arm went round