Sins of the Fathers (27 page)

‘He'd had a fall off the rock and broken his leg, hadn't he?' Paniatowski asked.

‘That's right. And Pine had fashioned some rough splints for it, from the frame to his rucksack.'

‘Had Hawtrey sustained any other injuries?'

‘Wouldn't they be in the autopsy report?' Brian asked, with a hint of suspicion again.

‘I suppose they would be, but I was just wondering if you'd noticed anything yourselves.'

‘He'd injured his arm,' Craig volunteered. ‘It was quite a nasty wound as well.'

‘Did you see it yourself?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Not personally, no.'

‘Then how do you know it was nasty?'

‘I could tell from the amount of blood there was on his trousers and his boots.'

‘But that could have come from anywhere,' Paniatowski pointed out. ‘How can you be so sure the wound was in his arm?'

‘Because that's where he was bloodiest of all. The blood on his boots and trousers was just spattered, but on his arm – where it had soaked through the sleeve of his jacket – it was a thick stain.'

Paniatowski lit a cigarette, to give herself time to think.

‘If he was still wearing his jacket, how was it possible that some of the blood had spattered on other parts of his body?' she asked, once she'd inhaled.

‘It probably happened when they stripped off his jacket in an attempt to staunch the wound,' Craig replied.

‘This is getting
less
like an interview, and
more
like an interrogation,' Brian said.

Paniatowski laughed. ‘Sorry! I do tend to get carried away, don't I? I'll be asking you if you've paid your television licence fee next!'

Craig joined in her laughter, but Brian just said, ‘I have paid it. I can show you, if you like.'

‘What sort of state were Pine and Tully in when you found them?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Pine had frostbite in one hand, but otherwise he didn't seem too bad,' Brian said. ‘And he was certainly glad to see his mate.'

‘It's sometimes better to give way in these matters,' Brian Steele told Paniatowski. ‘I was right, wasn't I, in assuming that, as a serving police officer, Marlowe would have kept himself up to date with the latest First Aid techniques?'

‘Undoubtedly,' Paniatowski replied, with as straight a face as she could muster.

‘And when a patient is as distressed as Pine obviously was, you can often do more harm than good by forcing the issue.'

‘What state was Tully in?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Tully was a mess,' Brian replied. ‘Not physically – he was in better shape than Pine, in that respect – but mentally.'

Tully's eyes are wide and wild and filled with pain. He looks as if he were watching his own ghost walk before him. He doesn't even seem to realize that anybody else is there.

‘We're the mountain rescue team. We're here to help you,' Brian Steele informs him.

‘Asperges me,' Tully intones. ‘Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor: lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.'

‘You're not making any sense, man,' Brian tells him.

‘Ab homine iniquo, et doloso erue me,' Tully says, and it is clear that it is not his rescuer he is speaking to.

‘Pull yourself together!' Brian says sharply. ‘When you've been through an ordeal like yours, you've got to pull yourself together as soon as possible. You've got to come back to the real world.'

‘Munda cor meum ac labia mea, omnipotens Deus, qui labia Isaiæ Prophetæ calculo mundasti ignito,' Tully replies.

‘Most of what he said was in a foreign language,' Brian Steele told Paniatowski. ‘German or French, or something like that.'

‘It was Latin,' Craig corrected him.

His uncle looked at him sharply, as if annoyed that Craig knew something that he didn't.

‘Who told you that?' he demanded.

‘Tommy O'Donnell,' Craig said. He turned to Paniatowski. ‘Tommy was another member of the team,' he explained.

‘And how would somebody like
Tommy O'Donnell
know whether it was Latin or just gobbledegook?' Brian asked scornfully.

‘He's a Catholic,' Craig said.

‘Oh, is he?' Brian said. ‘Well, that would explain it, I suppose. Is this Tully feller a Catholic, an' all?' he asked Paniatowski.

‘I believe he is.'

Brian sniffed. ‘Well, there you are, then. People are entitled to follow any faith they choose, even if it is Papist.'

‘Did he say anything that
wasn't
in Latin?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Not that I heard. But then I didn't have much opportunity to hear it, did I? Because that's when your Mr Marlowe decided to stick his oar into the proceedings again.'

‘I thought he was taking care of Bradley Pine.'

‘He had been. But he seemed to lose any interest in Pine, and from then on, all he cared about was Tully.'

Marlowe has stuck close to Tully all the way down from the mountainside, and now, when the ambulances arrive at the rescue centre, he announces that he will travel in the same ambulance as the man.

‘You'll be in the way of the paramedics,' Brian Steele says.

‘I'll be
assisting
the paramedics,' Marlowe tells him.

‘Have they agreed to it?'

‘They will. And anyway, what happens between them and me is no concern of yours. Your part of the rescue operation is over.'

‘I don't want people falling down and kissing my feet for what I do for them, but I don't like being spoken to like that, either,' Brian Steele said. ‘If the bugger hadn't been a policeman, I'd have dropped him where he was standing.'

‘I wish you had,' Paniatowski said.

‘Pardon?'

‘I wish you had … had pointed out to him how ungrateful he was being,' Paniatowski quickly corrected herself. ‘But there's one thing I still don't understand about this whole affair.'

‘And what might that be?'

‘I don't understand why I've never heard anything about any of this before today. Surely, if Mr Marlowe had rung the papers, as Craig says he did, his part in the rescue would have been splashed all over them.'

‘So it would,' Craig agreed, ‘if he hadn't had second thoughts about the whole thing on the way back to town.'

The ambulance carrying Jeremy Tully arrives at the hospital ahead of the one carrying Bradley Pine, and Marlowe is the first person to climb out of it. He sees the half a dozen news photographers who are gathered around the door which leads into the main hospital building, and visibly blanches.

The paramedics are already in the process of lifting Tully's stretcher out of the vehicle when Marlowe swings round to face them again.

‘Wait!' he says.

‘What do you mean?' one of the paramedics asks.

‘Isn't plain English good enough for you?' Marlowe demands. ‘I want you to wait until I tell you it's all right to bloody-well unload him.'

‘Now just a minute—' the paramedic begins.

‘And if you don't do exactly what I say, I'll personally ensure that the local police make your life a bloody misery from now on,' Marlowe hisses.

The mountain rescue Land Rover and Superintendent Springer's car pull up behind the ambulance. Craig Steele gets out of the one, and Springer out of the other. They reach the ambulance at roughly the same time.

‘What's the delay?' Springer asks.

‘Get rid of them,' Marlowe says, gesturing towards the pressmen.

Superintendent Springer looks puzzled. ‘But I thought you told me that you wanted them to—'

‘I want them out of here!'

Springer walks over to the reporters, and explains that his colleague has decided that it would be best for the injured men if they weren't bothered by reporters at this point. He apologizes for the inconvenience, and promises them he'll find a way to make it up to them in the near future.

The journalists readily agree – this is, after all, nothing more than a common or garden mountain rescue, and now Springer's in their debt, he'll throw them something really juicy next time.

Marlowe waits until the reporters are well clear of the area, and only then does he allow the paramedics to get on with their job.

‘So why do you think there was a sudden about-face on Mr Marlowe's part?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Who knows?' Craig Steele replied. ‘I was right there, and I certainly don't. Maybe it was something that Mr Pine had said to him. Or maybe it was what Mr Tully wanted.'

‘I thought you said Tully was speaking in
Latin
!' said his uncle, still smarting over the earlier revelation of his ignorance.

‘Perhaps he'd switched back to English,' Craig suggested. ‘Or perhaps Mr Marlowe knows Latin.'

Mr Marlowe doesn't know his arse from his elbow most of the time, Paniatowski thought, but she kept it to herself.

‘What happened after that?' she asked.

‘We wouldn't know,' Brian Steele told her. ‘Our job was done. And unlike your Mr Marlowe, we didn't want to get in the way of other professionals who were trying to do theirs.'

‘So we all went straight to the pub and got absolutely legless,' his nephew said.

‘So we stood down from duty,' Brian Steele corrected him.

‘But I do know that Mr Marlowe didn't leave immediately, because I saw him in town the next day,' Craig said.

‘T
hey may well be livin' in the so-called “Permissive Society” down in London, an' possibly they are in Manchester an' all,' Woodend said, gazing into his pint of bitter as if he suspected that the answer to all the mysteries of the world were contained in a single glass, ‘but the idea of “doin' your own thing” is still an alien concept to Whitebridge.'

Bob Rutter grinned. ‘And what do you think the reason for that is, sir?' he asked.

‘It's because the glue that's always held industrial towns like this one together is
conformity
. The mills dictated the pattern of life, you see, lad. Everybody started work at the same time, everybody left work at the same time – and everybody went on holiday at the same time, usually to the same place, while all the mills were closed down for maintenance. An' even though the mills have gone, we're still livin' in their shadow.'

‘I don't see that should necessarily stop the
middle
class from “doing their own thing”,' Rutter said.

‘That's where you're wrong, lad. They don't have to conform to the same things as the workers, but they still
do
have to conform. There's as much a proper way to dress – an' a proper way to behave – up at that Golf an' Country Club as there is down in the cobbled streets. There's rules which are not written down, but everybody still knows. An' if you want a good example of what happens when you break the rules, you've only got to look at the case of Alec Hawtrey.'

‘Yes, I can imagine he was somewhat shunned by some of his old Catholic friends, because they didn't recognize that his second marriage was—' Bob Rutter began.

‘From what I've heard up at the Golf Club, he was shunned by nearly every bugger – because if you can't fit in with one part of the Establishment, you'll find yourself unwelcome in
any
part of it.'

‘Poor devil,' Rutter said.

‘Poor devil, indeed,' Woodend agreed. ‘Alec Hawtrey seems to have sacrificed a great deal by givin' into the temptations of the—' He stopped abruptly, and made great show of checking his watch. ‘I wonder where the devil young Monika's got to?' he continued. ‘She should have been back from her trip to the Lakes by now.'

‘He sacrificed a great deal by giving into the temptations of the
flesh
,' Rutter completed. ‘Isn't that what you were about to say?'

‘Aye, I was,' Woodend admitted. ‘However careful I try to be, I always seem to be puttin' my foot right in it on that particular question, don't I? I'm really very sorry, lad.'

‘There's no need to apologize. We can't make what's happened go away by just ignoring it.'

‘Monika said pretty much the same thing to me. An' you may well both have a point. On the other hand, there isn't much to be gained by constantly draggin' it into the spotlight, is there?'

‘As a matter of fact, there is,' Rutter said. ‘It's only by frankly and openly confessing our sins that we can ever hope to put them behind us. That's why I'm seriously considering Elizabeth's idea of—'

He stopped himself speaking mid-sentence, just as the chief inspector had done earlier.

‘What was that?' Woodend asked.

‘Nothing.'

‘Which Elizabeth are we talkin' about? Do I know her?'

‘Let's change the subject,' Rutter suggested forcefully. ‘What do you make of what the old colonel told me this afternoon?'