Reginald Hill

“I’m sorry,’ said Pascoe. ‘, please.” “I said, if you were due on a flight at midnight and shortly after midnight the mid-day flight finally got away - to your destination of course - you’d obviously be interested in getting a seat on it. Or you might even take a flight to another airport and hope to move on from there.”

There wouldn’t be any record kept of people changing flights?” “Oh no. Not now,’ said Grummitt with a laugh.

Pascoe scowled back at him. But a new idea was forming.

“What about baggage? Your baggage is checked in for one flight. You change to another. Does your baggage get shifted automatically?”

“Yes. Of course. It’s a matter of weight, old boy. Someone may pick up the ticket you’ve vacated and he’ll have baggage too.”

“Oh,’ said Pascoe, disappointed.

“Mind you, I’m not saying that baggage and passengers never get separated. Especially in conditions like the ones we’re talking about, anything’s possible. But they’d end up at the same destination. Unless the passenger changes destination as well as flight.”

He laughed again. His cheerfulness was beginning to get on Pascoe’s nerves.

“So you can’t help?’ he shouted through the incipient uproar of another jet.

“Afraid not, old boy. Have you tried the Austrians? They probably keep lists for ever. Very thorough fellows. Or travel agents?”

“What?’ screamed Pascoe.

“Travel agents. Probably someone fixed it all up for her. It might even have been a charter. Perhaps they had a courier running around, ticking off names.”

The noise became bearable. It’s too early in the morning, thought Pascoe. What else haven’t I done?

“You’ve been very helpful,’ he said to Grummitt as they walked out together through the reception area.

“Sorry I couldn’t be more useful,’ said Grummitt. ”s it all about?

Or must I just watch the papers?” “I wish I knew what it was all about,’ said Pascoe. I’ll watch the papers with you.”

They passed the Giant Super-Size Unrepeatable Offer. Grummitt nudged him.

“No wonder they built Jumbo jets, eh?’ he said.

“You can say that again,’ said Pascoe lasciviously.

Grummitt with a look of polite resignation began to say it again.

Superintendent Dalziel had breakfasted early and well. Unless the college domestic staff were putting on a special performance for his benefit, they did themselves rather well here, he thought. As he was still segregated from the communal breakfasters in the dining-hall, he had no chance to make comparisons. And, a cause of relief, no need to make conversations.

Perhaps this was the reason why his wife had left him. Often breakfast was the only waking period they spent together during the whole day, and try as he might (which hadn’t been very hard) he could not force himself to be sociable.

Unwilling to cause offence by leaving anything (there was another school of working class gentility which believed that something always should be left, but not in his family, thank Heaven!) he took the last slice of toast from the rack, spread the remaining butter on it to a thickness of about a quarter-inch, scraped his knife round the sides of the cut-glass marmalade dish, and took two thirds of the resulting confection into his mouth at one bite.

The door opened and the pretty young girl in the blue nylon overall entered. She seemed to have been told by the powers that were in the kitchen to look after his needs. Dalziel approved. Paternally, of course, he assured himself, dismissing a mental image of himself slowly unbuttoning the overall which in the height of summer was probably over very little. His fingers compensated by unbuttoning his waistcoat, leaving dabs of butter on the charcoal grey cloth.

“Are you finished, sir?’ she asked.

He swallowed mightily.

“I think I am, my dear. My compliments to whoever prepared it.”

She began to gather together the dishes.

“Tell me,’ he said, ”s your name?” “Elizabeth,’ she said. ‘ Andrews.”

“Well, Elizabeth, have you been here long?” “Over a year,’ she said.

“Do you like it?” “It’s all right,’ she said.

“It’ll fill in the time till you find a lad and get married, eh?’ said Dalziel jovially. If they’re going to regard you as a bloody uncle, you might as well act like a bloody uncle, he thought.

The girl didn’t reply. Slightly flushed, she swiftly piled the remaining dishes on her tray and moved gracefully out of the room.

Even in his faint surprise, Dalziel was able to admire her figure in retreat, which was more than he could do for the advancing form of Detective-Inspector Kent which appeared through the door before the girl could close it.

“Lovely morning, sir,’ said Kent happily, peering through the window at the sun-drenched garden, whose border and rockeries were ablaze with colour. The winds of the previous day had quite abated and only the canvas cover over the hole left by the base of Miss. Girling’s statue obtruded into the pastoral idyll which lay without.

Had things gone according to Landor’s plans, the garden would by now have been trenched and torn by foundations for the new laboratory.