Arms and the Women. Reginald HillЧитать онлайн книгу.
in the Gateway car park?’ she asked.
‘Not on the car, but one of the two men, the one in the pub, we got a print off his newspaper.’
‘That’s good. Known, sir?’
He hesitated. Wondering whether he wants to share this with underlings, thought Novello resentfully. But when he did reply, her resentment quickly faded.
‘Yes. Patrick Ducannon. He’s IRA, got a twelve-year stretch but out in two after the Good Friday Agreement. Word is he’s given up the cause. Certainly he’s blotted his copybook in Republican circles.’
‘Jesus,’ said Novello. ‘This is serious stuff. And the other guy…?’
‘Nothing. Doesn’t fit any known associate, at least not on our books.’
Meaning it might on somebody else’s? Like the security services whom all regular cops regarded as anal-retentive gits.
‘So this guy parks at the pub because he doesn’t want to be spotted sitting in his car, watching your house, and takes a stroll, thinking he’s safe, only Mrs Aldermann spots him…’
‘That’s how it looks,’ said Pascoe, suddenly impatient. ‘OK, Shirley, you can clock off now.’
‘Sir? I mean, I’m on till eight, then Seymour…’
‘I’ve cancelled Dennis already,’ said Pascoe firmly. ‘When I’m home, I’ll take care of things.’
Things being your wife and daughter, thought Novello. Then told herself, Stop that, Shirley! Why do you find it so hard to be nice to one of the few guys in the Force who’s gone out of his way to see you get an even break?
Answer: because anyone who has to think about treating you equally is treating you differently.
In other words, I’ll only accept help from people who don’t offer it. Which makes me nana of the month!
She said hesitantly, ‘Maybe I should check that out, sir.’
He said, ‘I don’t think so,’ very pleasantly, but with a finality that brooked no denial.
Please yourself, she thought, getting back into her car. Means I can get to the club all that earlier and stop anyone else trying to put a brand on my hunk of beef.
But best to play it safe, and as she drove away, she called Control and put it on record that she was abandoning her watch in response to a direct order from the DCI.
And finally, because she was a good cop as well as an ambitious one, she made a mental note to check out if possible what made the old bag lady so unsurprised to find herself, as she imagined, under surveillance. Probably a waste of time. What could someone as comically decrepit as Feenie Macallum have to do with the real world that a smart young cop lived in? But she’d noticed the DCI’s flicker of amusement when she’d talked about a prayer meeting, and certainly she couldn’t see religion playing a large part in La Pascoe’s profile.
Then she closed her mental notebook, hit the accelerator, and as the tiny engine shook and roared, she gave herself entirely to a matching anticipation of the delights which lay ahead.
Feenie Macallum…
A blast from the past. Dear old Feenie, whose first entry was probably made with a quill pen on parchment. Box file, card index, microfiche, this Serafina has flown through the lot and here she is, wings neatly folded, sleeping in my casket waiting for the kiss of Sir Gawain to awaken her.
fighting the world with a protest that no one will heed…
except those in need…
What does Daddy think as he looks down upon, or perhaps up at, his beloved daughter? Mungo Macallum, whose Celtic beginnings not even my little electronic moles have been able to dig up. The working classes of the nineteenth century still offered that option which all classes of the twenty-first century would give their eye teeth for – impenetrable obscurity.
But there he was, an exile in Yorkshire at the turn of the century, already a man of brass, busy turning himself into a man of steel.
But not knives and forks and spoons for Mungo. Oh no. He didn’t let himself be dazzled by the bright dawn of this new Edwardian age, he looked beyond that last long garden party of privilege and class, he saw the approaching darkness and knew that this was to be the century of the gun.
Mungo Macallum, the armaments king.
There are some who say that you were the model for Undershaft in Major Barbara, Mungo. Great wealth from a morally dubious source, yet not without your own moral concerns. Poverty you saw as a cause of evil, not an effect. You paid, by the standards of the time, fair wages, and you underwrote the establishment of a savings bank to encourage providence among your workers, and a building society to give those who desired it the chance of buying their own homes.
And you led by example, showing the world how money wisely invested was the basis of prosperity.
In 1914 you were already rich. By 1918 you had wealth beyond computation.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
While westward eighty miles or so,
In England’s fields the profits grow.
And in a Yorkshire field, in that remote and peaceful wedge of coastal land called Axness, you found Granary House, a bat-infested, rat-infested ruin of a mansion looking out across the sea, far far away from the glow of the furnaces and the dust of the spoilheaps. Not that you were ever ashamed of the source of your wealth. And when you heard as you rebuilt and refurbished Granary House that your mocking friends were referring to it as Gunnery House, that’s what you officially renamed it.
Here at Gunnery you hoped to found a dynasty in a world which your own weaponry had made safe for your descendants. Lord Macallum of Axness. Oh, your title was all chosen, your coat of arms prepared. Cleverly you forbore to stoop for the windfalls the dying storm of war shook from the many branches of the new and Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. The golden fruit you wanted was not to be scabbed with war-profiteering sneers. Through the twenties you paved the way with charitable deeds. But you could not forbear to make assurance doubly sure by crossing the palms of those who claimed to be able to tell your noble future with gold and silver, and all your hopes died in the Honours for Sale scandal of 1933.
One plan had failed. Another looked like to fail. Three wives (by death, not divorce) had left you with a single child. But not the son you needed to lead off your dynasty.
Yet a man may do something, may do much, with a biddable daughter.
Alas, poor Mungo, what you had was not a biddable daughter.
What you had was Serafina, born as one war ended to come of age as another began.
Serafina, the passionate one.
And, for a while, Serafina, one of us.
For they were all ours for a while, those brave boys and girls who played their merry games in the enemy’s own yard. So many going, so few returning. But for that few, such a bright future, such a world of profit and delight lay ahead in those years after the shooting stopped and the real war, our kind of war, began.
But by that time you, Serafina, had been too long away, had caught a foreign infection, had gone native.
What you saw was not a world in the glorious turmoil of necessary recreation, with populations shifting, new battle lines being drawn up, new alliances formed, a glorious