Under World

‘Is that right?’ said Farr. ‘Then naturally she’ll be upset.’

And he went back to his seat moving with easy grace.

He was alone at one of the round formica tables. The Club’s main public room was a cheerless place when almost empty. Full, you couldn’t see the brown and beige tiled floor, or the cafeteria furniture, or the vinyl-upholstered waiting-room bench which ran round the flock-papered walls. Full, the plaster-board ceiling, steel cross-girder and glaring strip-lights were to some extent obscured by the strato-cirrus layer of tobacco smoke. And best of all, full, the whisper of a man’s own disturbing thoughts was almost inaudible beneath the din of loud laughter, seamless chatter, and amplified music.

At the moment Colin Farr’s thoughts were coming through too loud, too clear. He’d gone into the students’ union bar at the University today. Its décor and furnishings had not been all that different from the Club’s. The atmosphere had been just as thick; the voices just as loud, the music just as raucous. Yet he had left very quickly, feeling alien. The reaction had troubled him. It was uncharacteristic. He was not a shy person; he’d been around and hadn’t been much bothered at entering some places where he’d been quite literally a foreigner. But the students’ bar had made him feel so uneasy that he’d fled, and the memory of this uneasiness wouldn’t leave him alone.

It had been self-irritation with his reaction that had made him so sharp with that Mrs Pascoe in the afternoon. Well, partly at least. And partly it had been her. Condescending cow!

He had finished his fourth pint without hardly noticing. He was thinking about getting out of his seat again, though whether to return to the bar or head out into the night he wasn’t sure, when the door burst open and two men came in. One was Farr’s age but looked older. They’d been in the same class at school, but, unlike Farr, Tommy Dickinson’s career down the pit had been continuous since he was fifteen. Chunkily built, he had the beginnings of a substantial beer-gut, and when his broad amiable face split into a grin at the sight of Farr, his teeth were stained brown with tobacco juice.

‘Look what’s here!’ he cried. ‘Hey, Pedro! I thought only working men could get served in this club.’

‘You’d best buy me a pint, then,’ said Farr.

While 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 home from, you can always convince your missus you’re at an all-night sitting in the House. Goodbye to you, and good … luck!’

And that was it. Not yet nine o’clock and the action over with not a bloodstain to be seen. The DCC, as relieved as his audience was disappointed, repaid Dalziel’s moderation with a fulsomely sentimental tribute to his colleagues at all levels.

‘Brings tears to your eyes, doesn’t it?’ said Pascoe.

Sergeant Wield, whose shattered visage looked as if it would absorb tears like dew off the Gobi Desert, said, ‘De mortuis.’

‘Well, stuff me,’ said Sammy Ruddlesdin behind him. ‘Once through these hallowed portals and it’s goodbye to all that ’ello, ’ello, ’ello, stuff and it’s out with the Latin tags and literary quotes. Even Fat Andy was at it.’

It was clear Ruddlesdin had been enjoying the hospitality. Beside him was a short, stoutish man smartly dressed in a black worsted three-piece suit, a sartorial effect somewhat at odds with the handrolled cigarette drooping beneath a ragged and nicotine-stained moustache.

‘I dare say you lads know my friend and colleague, Mr Monty Boyle of the Sunday Challenger, the famous Man Who Knows Too Much.’

‘I think we’ve met in court,’ said Pascoe. ‘I didn’t think our little occasion tonight would have had much in it for the Challenger.’

‘The passing of a great public servant?’ said Boyle with a W. C. Fieldsian orotundity. ‘You surprise me. Dignity needs its chroniclers as much as disaster.’

He’s winding me up, thought Pascoe. He opened his mouth to inquire what hitherto hidden connection with dignity the Challenger was planning to reveal when Ruddlesdin said, ‘Careful, Peter. Our Monty Knows Too Much because he’s got an extra ear.’

He drew back the Challenger man’s jacket to reveal, hooked on to the third button of his waistcoat, a slim black cassette recorder, almost invisible against the cloth.

‘Just a tool of the trade,’ said Boyle indifferently. ‘I don’t hide it.’

‘Voice sensitive too, and directional. If he’s facing you in a crowded bar, it’ll pick you up above all the chatter, isn’t that right, Monty?’

There was not a great deal of love lost between these two, decided Pascoe.

‘It’s not switched on,’ said Boyle. ‘Mr Dalziel’s valediction is, of course, printed on my heart. And I’d never attempt to record a policeman without his knowledge.’

He smiled politely at Pascoe.

Ruddlesdin said, ‘Especially not in their club where visitors can’t buy drinks,’ and stared significantly into his empty glass.

Wield said, ‘Give it here, Sammy. Mr Boyle?’

‘No more for me,’ said the crime reporter, glancing at his watch. ‘I have some driving to do before I get to bed.’

‘What’s that mean? Farmer’s wife or kerb crawling?’ said Ruddlesdin.

Boyle smiled. ‘In our business, Sammy, you’re either pressing forward or you’re sliding backward, have you forgotten that? Once you start just reporting news, you might as well bow out for one of these.’

He tapped the cassette on his chest before buttoning his jacket.

‘Good night, Mr Pascoe. I hope we may meet again and be of mutual benefit soon.’

He made towards the door through which the DCC and his party were being ushered by Dalziel.

‘Jumped-up nowt,’ said Ruddlesdin. ‘I knew him when he couldn’t tell a wedding car from a hearse. Now he acts like the bloody Challenger were the Sunday Times.’

‘Very trying,’ sympathized Pascoe. ‘On the other hand, tonight is very wedding and hearse stuff, isn’t it? A column filler for the Evening Post perhaps, but lacking those elements of astounding revelation which set the steam rising from the Challenger.’

‘When you buy a whippet you keep your eye skinned to see no one slips it a pork pie before a race,’ said Ruddlesdin.

‘Riddles now? You’re not moving to Comic Cuts, are you, Sammy? What is it you’re saying? That Ike Ogilby’s put his minders on Watmough till he gets into Parliament?’

Ogilby was the Challenger’s ambitious editor, linked with Watmough ever since the Pickford case in a symbiotic relationship in which a good press was traded for insider information.

‘No,’ said Ruddlesdin confidentially. ‘What I’ve heard, and will deny ever having said till I’m saying, “told you so”, is that yon clock’s the nearest Watmough’s likely to get to Westminster. This SDP selection he thinks he’s got sewn up – well, there’s a local councillor on the short list, a chap who’s owed a few favours and knows where all the bodies are buried. Smart money’s on him. And Ike Ogilby’s got the smartest money in town.’

‘Another rejection will drive the poor devil mad,’ said Pascoe. ‘But if it’s not a personal leak in the Chamber that Ogilby’s after, why keep up his interest in Watmough once he’s resigned from the Force?’

Ruddlesdin tapped his long pointed nose and said, ‘Memoirs, Pete, I’m talking memoirs.’

‘Memoirs? But what’s he got to remember?’ asked Pascoe. ‘He thinks a stake-out’s a meal at Berni’s.’

Ruddlesdin observed him with alcoholic shrewdness.

‘That sounded more like Andy Dalziel than you,’ he said. ‘All I know is that Ogilby’s not interested in buying pigs in pokes, if you’ll excuse the metaphor. Mebbe my dear old jumped-up mate, Monty, is living up to his byline for once. The Man Who Knows Too Much. Wieldy, I thought you’d fallen among thieves! Bless you, my son.’

Wield had returned with a tray on which rested three pints. The reporter took his and drained two-thirds of it in a single swallow. Pascoe ignored the proffered tray, however. He was looking across the room to the exit through which Dalziel was just ushering the DCC and his party. Before he went out, Watmough paused and slowly looked around. What was he seeing? Something to stir fond memories of companionship, loyalty, a job well done?

Or something to stir relief at his going and resentment at its manner?

And how shall I feel when it’s my turn? wondered Pascoe.

He too looked round the room. Saw the mouthing faces, ghastly in the smoke-fogged strip-lighting. Heard the raucous laughter, the bellowed conversations, the eardrum-striating music. He felt a deep revulsion against it all. But he knew he was not applying a fair test. He was not a very clubbable person. His loyalties were individual rather than institutional. He distrusted the exclusivity of esprit de corps. Not that there was anything sinister here. This scene was the commonplace of ten thousand clubs and pubs the length and breadth of the island. Here was the companionship of the alehouse, nothing more.

But suddenly he felt hemmed in, short of air, deprived of will, threatened. He looked at his watch. It was only five to nine.

‘Time to go,’ he said. ‘I promised not to be late.’

‘But your beer …’ said Wield, taken aback.

‘Sammy’ll drink it. See you.’

In the small foyer he paused and took a deep breath. The door leading to the car park opened and Dalziel came in.

‘Well, that’s the cortège on its way,’ he said rubbing his hands. ‘Now let’s get on with the wake.’

‘Not me,’ said Pascoe firmly, adding, to divert Dalziel’s efforts at dissuasion, ‘and don’t be too sure he won’t be back to haunt you.’

‘Eh?’

He repeated Ruddlesdin’s rumour. Rather to his surprise, instead of being abusively dismissive, Dalziel answered thoughtfully, ‘Yes, I’d heard summat like that too. Makes you think … Ogilby … Boyle …’

Then he roared with laughter and added, ‘But who’d want to buy memoirs from a man who can scarcely remember to zip up after he’s had a run-off? It’d be the sale of the sodding century!’

Still laughing, he pushed his way back into the smoke- and noise-filled room while Pascoe with more relief than he could easily account for went out into the fresh night air.

Chapter 4

By half past nine, Colin Farr was moving between his seat and the bar with a steady deliberation more worrying to Pedro Pedley than any amount of stagger and sway.

‘Young Col all right, is he?’ he asked Neil Wardle as the taciturn miner got another round in.

‘Aye,’ said Wardle, apparently uninterested.

But when he got back to the table, he repeated the question as he set pints down before Farr and Dickinson.

‘All right, Col?’

‘Any reason I shouldn’t be?’

‘None as I can think of.’

‘Right, then,’ said Farr.

‘What’s that, Neil? A half? You sickening for something?’ said Tommy Dickinson, his face flushed with the room’s heat and his vain efforts to catch up with his friend’s intake.

‘No, but I’m off just now to a meeting,’ said Wardle.

Wardle was on the branch committee of the Union. During the Great Strike there had been times when his lack of strident militancy and his quiet rationalism had brought accusations of ‘softness’. But as the Strike began to crumble and the men began to recognize that no amount of rhetoric or confrontation could bring the promised victory, Wardle’s qualities won more and more respect. There’d only been one ‘scab’ at Burrthorpe Main, but many who had weakened and come close to snapping knew that they too would now be paying the price of isolation if it hadn’t been for Wardle’s calm advice and rock-like support. Since the Strike he’d been a prime mover in the re-energizing of the shattered community. And it was Wardle who’d pushed Colin Farr into seeking a place on the Union-sponsored day-release course at the University.

‘Bloody meetings!’ said Dickinson. ‘I reckon committee’s got a woman up there and they take a vote on who gets first bash!’

Wardle ignored him and said, ‘There’ll be a full branch meeting next Sunday, Col. You’ll be coming to that?’

‘Mebbe,’ said Farr indifferently. ‘They’ll likely manage without me, but.’

‘Likely we will. But will you manage without them?’

‘Union didn’t do my dad much good, did it?’ said Farr savagely.

‘It did the best it could and he never complained. Col, you were grand during the Strike. It were a miracle you didn’t end up in jail, the tricks you got up to. Nothing seemed too much bother for you then. But the fight’s not over, not by a long chalk. The Board’s got a long hit list and only them as are ready and organized will be able to fight it.’

‘Oh aye? Best day’s work they ever did if they put a lid on that fucking hole!’ exclaimed Farr.

‘You fought hard enough to keep it open in the Strike,’ said Wardle.

‘I fought. But don’t tell me what I fought for, Neil. Mebbe I just fought ’cos while you’re fighting, you don’t have time to think!’

Wardle drank his beer, frowning. Dickinson, who hated a sour atmosphere, lowered his voice to what he thought of as a confidential whisper and said, ‘See who’s just come in? Gavin Mycroft and his missus. They’re sitting over there with Arthur Downey and that cunt, Satterthwaite. Right little deputies’ dog-kennel.’

‘I saw them,’ said Farr indifferently.

‘Here, Col, you still fancy Stella?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Come on, Col, you were knocking her off rotten when you were a lad, up in the woods by the White Rock. By God I bet you made the chalk dust fly! And don’t say it weren’t serious. You got engaged when you went off, and you didn’t need to, ’cos you were stuffing her already!’

He smiled at the perfection of his own logic.

‘That’s old news, Tommy,’ said Farr.

‘And you were well out of that,’ said Wardle. ‘Marrying a deputy in middle of the Strike and going off to Spain on honeymoon while there were kids going hungry back here! That’s no way for a miner’s daughter to act.’

‘What did you want her to do?’ exclaimed Farr. ‘Spend her honeymoon camping on a picket line?’

‘See! You still do fancy her!’ crowed Dickinson.

‘Why don’t you shut your big gob, Tommy, and get some drinks in?’ said Farr.

Unoffended, the young miner rose and headed for the bar. Wardle called after him, ‘No more for me, Tommy. I’ve got to be off and look after you buggers’ interests.’

He stood up.

‘Think on, Col. If you’re going to stay on round here, make it for the right reasons.’

‘What’d them be?’

‘To make it a place worth staying on in.’

Farr laughed. ‘Clean-up job, you mean? Justice for the worker, that sort of stuff? Well, never fear, Neil. That’s why I’ve stayed on right enough.’

Wardle looked at the young man with concern, but said nothing more.

‘Bugger off, Neil,’ said Farr in irritation. ‘It’s like having me dad standing over me waiting till I worked out what I’d done wrong.’

‘He were a clever man, old Billy,’ said Wardle.

‘If he were so bloody clever, how’d he end up with his neck broke at the bottom of a shaft?’ asked Farr harshly.

‘Mebbe when he had to transfer from the face, he brought some of the dark up with him. It happens.’

‘What the hell does that mean, Neil?’ said Farr very softly.

‘Figure of speech. See you tomorrow. Don’t be late. Jock never is.’

Left to himself, Colin Farr sat staring sightlessly at the table surface for a while. Suddenly he rose. Glass in hand, he walked steadily down the room till he reached the table Dickinson had called the deputies’ dog-kennel.

The three men seated there looked up as Farr approached. Only the woman ignored him. She was in her mid-twenties, heavily made-up, with her small features diminished still further by a frame of exaggeratedly bouffant silver-blonde hair. But no amount of make-up or extravagance of coiffure could disguise the fact that she had a lovely face. Her husband, Gavin Mycroft, was a few years older, a slim dark man with rather sullen good looks. Next to him, in his forties, sat Arthur Downey, also very thin but tall enough to be gangling with it. He had a long sad face with a dog’s big gentle brown eyes.

The third man was squat and muscular. Balding at the front, he had let his dull gingery hair grow into a compensatory mane over his ears and down his neck.