Under World. Reginald Hill

Dickinson was getting the drinks, the other man sat down at Farr’s table. He was Neil Wardle, in his thirties, a lean taciturn man. His face was as brown and weather-beaten as any countryman’s. In fact, like many of his workmates, as if in reaction against the underworld in which they earned their bread, he spent as much of his spare time as possible roaming the hills around Burrthorpe with his dog and a shotgun. He was charge-man of the team of rippers in which the other two worked.

      ‘All right, Col?’ he said.

      ‘All right,’ said Farr.

      ‘Your mam all right?’

      ‘Aye. Why shouldn’t she be?’

      ‘No reason. She didn’t say owt about anyone coming round, asking questions?’

      ‘No. What sort of questions?’

      ‘Just questions,’ said Wardle vaguely. Before Farr could press him, Dickinson returned, his broad hands locked round three pint glasses.

      ‘It’s no use, Col,’ he declared in the booming voice which was his normal speech level. ‘Tha’ll have to play hookey from that school. They sent us that Scotch bugger again today. He can’t even speak proper! Three times he asked me for a chew of baccy and I thought the sod were just coughing!’

      Farr’s absence meant that his place had to be filled for that shift by someone ‘on the market’, and men used to working in a regular team did not take readily to a newcomer.

      ‘There’s worse than Jock,’ said Wardle.

      Dickinson rolled his eyes in a parody of disbelief, but he did not pursue the subject. In matters like this, Wardle had the last word, and in any case, most of Dickinson’s complaints were ritualistic rather than real.

      ‘Teacher didn’t ask you to stay behind to clean her board, then?’ he asked slyly.

      Farr wished he hadn’t let on that one of his lecturers was a woman. His friend’s innuendo was not masked by any great subtlety.

      ‘Not today,’ he said. ‘I’m building up to it.’

      ‘All right, is she?’

      He thought about Ellie Pascoe. A condescending cow was how he’d categorized her to himself earlier. But that had been as ritualistic as Tommy’s pretence that he couldn’t understand Jock Brodie’s accent. However, in-depth analysis was not what Dickinson was after.

      ‘She’s got nice tits,’ he said. ‘And she doesn’t wear a bra.’

      ‘Hey up! That’s half the battle, then! Hey, did you hear the one about the lass who’d just got married and next time she met her old dad, he asked her, “What fettle, lass?” and she said, “Dad, can I ask you a question? That bit of skin at the end of my Jack’s thing, what do you call that?” …’

      Colin Farr’s mind drifted away from the joke as his gaze drifted round the rapidly filling room. He knew all the men here by face, and most of them by name. Some there were who’d been young men when he’d been a boy. Some had been middle-aged then who were old now. And one or two had always been old and were now much much older. He knew them all, and their wives and their families, to the second and sometimes the third generation. He was looking at the past of a whole community here, traced in lined and scarred faces, in shallow breathing and deep coughs. Was that what was worrying him? He didn’t think so. It was not the fact that he was looking at the past, he suddenly realized. It was rather that he could be looking at the future! It was here, in this room, in this loud talk, and laughter, and argument, in these wreaths of tabacco smoke and these rings of foam on straight glasses.

      The bar in the students’ union, there’d been foam rings there too, and tobacco wreaths, argument and laughter and loud talk. What there hadn’t been was any sense that this was anyone’s future. It had been here and now; fun and finite; a launching-pad, not an endless looped tape. No sense there of raising a glass at eighteen and setting it down at eighty with nothing changed except your grey hair, gapped gums and wrinkled genitals!

      In his ear Tommy’s voice rose to its triumphant climax.

      ‘“’Ee, lass,” said her dad. “Ah diven’t know what thy Jack calls ’em, but ah calls ’em the cheeks of me arse!”’

      Colin Farr laughed, loud and false and desperate, and rose to his feet.

      ‘Good one, Tommy,’ he proclaimed. ‘Good one. Let’s have another pint!’

       Chapter 3

      The Police Club functions room was crowded, noisy and full of smoke. There was a sound like a spade flattening the last sod on a pauper’s grave. It was Andy Dalziel’s huge hand slapping the bar. Immediately the noise faded and even the miasma seemed to clear for a space of a couple of feet around the massive grizzled head.

      The Detective-Superintendent, Head of Mid-Yorks CID, looked round the room till heavy breathers held their heavy breath, then he opened his speech with the time-honoured Yorkshire formula.

      ‘Right, you buggers,’ he said. ‘You know what we’re here for tonight.’

      His audience sighed in happy anticipation. It occurred to Sammy Ruddlesdin of the Evening Post that his report (written in advance so that he wouldn’t have anything to distract him from the boozing) was more than usually dishonest. In it he’d said that the crowded room bore eloquent witness to the high regard in which DCC Watmough was held by his fellows, while in truth, it bore eloquent witness to the low regard in which they knew that Dalziel held him. Most were here in the simple hope of being entertained by a valedictory vilification!

      They were sadly disappointed. After a few ancient but warmly received anecdotes, Dalziel launched on a meandering and mainly complimentary account of Watmough’s career. There were a few hopeful signs (‘I knew him in them early days with Mid-Yorks. There were some as said he got a bit over-excited under pressure but I always said, you’ve got to flap a bit if you want to be a high flier!’) but they never came to anything. Perhaps Dalziel was saving himself up for the Pickford case? This was Watmough’s finest hour, occurring during a brief sojourn as Assistant Chief Constable in South Yorkshire when he had masterminded the hunt for a child killer. A salesman, Donald Pickford, had obliged by asphyxiating himself in his car and leaving a note of confession. Somehow Watmough, with media support, had turned this into a triumph of detection with himself modestly wearing the bays. He had returned rapidly on the crest of this wave to Mid-Yorks as Deputy Chief and had looked to have enough momentum left to carry him all the way to the Chief’s office only three years later, till a malevolent fate had intervened.

      This same malevolent fate was now approaching his peroration.

      ‘We’ll not soon forget what you’ve done for us in these past few years,’ declaimed Dalziel. ‘Like the man said, you touched nowt you didn’t adorn. Now the time has come for you to move on to fresh fields and pastures new. And the time has come for me, Neville – and it’s good to be able to call you Neville again after these past few years of having to call you sir …’

      Pause for laughter, especially from Peter Pascoe, who recalled Dalziel’s more usual forms of reference, such as Shit-head, Lobby Lud, Her Majesty, Nutty Slack and Rover the Wonder Dog.

      ‘… the time has come for me to present you with this token of our esteem.’

      He picked up a box from the bar.

      ‘Rumour has it you’re thinking of going into politics, or at least into the SDP, so we thought this’d be a suitable gift.’

      From the box he took a clock, turned the hands to twelve and set it on the bar. A moment later a peal of Westminster Chimes began to sound.

      ‘We reckoned that with this, Nev, if you ever do get into Parliament, it won’t matter whose bed you’re ringing