doing up there,’ says Dalziel, squinting at it. ‘I’m not a fucking statue.’
The bird’s beady eyes fix on his. With its smooth gleaming head hunched down between its folded wings, it reminds him of…Hector!
‘Sod off!’ commands Dalziel. ‘I’m not dead!’
The bird’s gaze communicates an indifference worse than mockery.
The Fat Man feels his gut twist and tauten.
The pressure becomes intolerable.
He breaks wind.
The relief is huge and more than physical.
‘Dead men don’t fart!’ he cries triumphantly.
The starling rises from off his shoulder and flutters before his face as though contemplating sinking its arrowhead beak into his eyes.
Dalziel breaks wind again, this time with such force he gets lift-off and accelerates into the bright blue yonder like a Cape Canaveral rocket. Soon the startled starling is nothing more than a distant mote, high above which an overweight, middleaged detective superintendent at last realizes the Peter Pan fantasy of his early childhood and laughs with sheer delight as he tumbles and soars between the scudding clouds of a Mid-Yorkshire sky.
The following day, Pascoe was back at work.
Ellie, as omnivident as Wield had feared, did not take long to find out about the expedition to Mill Street.
She’d been too deeply immersed in her writing to pay much heed when Pascoe and Tig returned from their walk. A swim in the river had removed all the ashy evidence from the dog’s coat and Ellie’s creative absorption had given Pascoe plenty of time to brush the tell-tale dust from his shoes and turn-ups. But when she came down from Parnassus to find him in the garage, carefully sawing a bolus of melted plastic in half, her suspicions were instantly roused and a very little application of that wifely knife, deep questioning, soon probed the truth out of him almost at the same time as he probed a small lump of impacted metal out of the plastic.
‘Wait till I see Edgar!’ she threatened, her anger evidenced by her use of the sergeant’s first name instead of the usual Wieldy.
‘Not his fault,’ said Pascoe loyally. ‘I’m his superior officer. I ordered him.’
‘Hah!’ said Ellie, conveying her low estimate of the authority of orders from such a tainted source. Then, sensing that her husband was less concerned about her wrath at the discovery of his perfidy than he ought to be, she said, ‘So what have you got there?’
‘I would say it’s probably a bullet,’ said Pascoe, holding the distorted sphere of metal to the light. ‘From a gun.’
‘I know where bullets come from.’
‘I’m sure you do. But this is a rather special gun. It’s invisible to a CAT’s eye, you see. Of course, it might just be a metal spool in a cassette, melted by the heat.’
She detected that this rider owed more to superstition than to doubt.
‘So what does it mean?’ she said.
‘I’ve no idea. But it could prove something which in the past only the most fanciful of speculators have even dared hint the possibility of. Hector might have got something right. What’s for tea?’
Next morning he was up at his normal time. Ellie like a master tactician knew when protest was pointless and fed him his breakfast without comment, except to say as he kissed her goodbye, ‘Pete, you’re not going to do anything silly, are you?’
‘Good Lord, no,’ he said. ‘This could be evidence. I’ll hand it over to Glenister.’
But not, he added silently to himself, before I’ve made sure it really is evidence!
Which was why his first call was not at the Station but at the Police Laboratory, where he made it monosyllabically clear to Tony Pollock, the head technician, that he didn’t want it done soon, he wanted it done now.
As a life-long Leeds United supporter, Pollock was well equipped to deal with whatever crap life could hurl, but even he remarked to his assistant, ‘With that fat bastard in a coma I thought we might get a bit of peace and quiet from CID.’
‘Aye,’ said the assistant. Adding, not unimpressed, ‘Never would have thought the DCI knew words like that.’
The result was what Pascoe had hoped for, what he’d expected.
He found Sandy Glenister once more sitting behind Dalziel’s desk.
‘Peter!’ she said with the warm smile. ‘I wondered if we’d see you today. Dave mentioned seeing you in Mill Street and he thought you looked really well.’
‘Yes, I’m feeling much better,’ said Pascoe. ‘Look, something a bit odd. My dog was rooting around in the debris…’
He contrived to suggest that Tig had carried the melted plastic all the way home and chewed the bullet out of it.
‘Interesting,’ said Glenister. ‘Probably nothing, but if you leave it with me, I’ll have our people check it out at the lab.’
‘Been there, done that, got the report,’ said Pascoe. ‘Definitely a bullet. In fact almost certainly 9 x 19 mm NATO parabellum, possibly fired from a Beretta semi-automatic pistol, 92 series.’
He opened his briefcase, took out the evidence bag containing the bullet and the envelope containing the lab analysis and set them neatly on the desk before her.
She looked down at them but didn’t touch them.
‘I see,’ she said slowly. ‘Well, you have hit the ground running, haven’t you? So what do you make of it?’
She hadn’t invited him to sit but he did so now while it was still a matter of choice rather than necessity caused by his dicky knee.
‘It’s obvious. A gun was fired, Hector heard the shot, the round finished up in one of the video cassettes. The big question is, what happened to the gun?’
Glenister sat back and steepled her fingers against her nose. Then she opened her hands and put them behind her head, the movement raising her pompion breasts in a manner which Pascoe had to make an effort not to find distracting.
She smiled at him and said, ‘Perhaps the big question should be left till we’ve looked at the wee ones. Firstly I’ll need to get our CAT experts to confirm the findings of your local technicians. No reflection on their ability, you understand, but we’ve all got our specialisms…Having established it is a bullet, I will want them to look at this piece of plastic you say it came out of. You still have it, I take it?’
‘Yes, it’s at home…’
‘So you didn’t take it to your lab? Perhaps as well. Our people prefer to start from
