his secretary. The bleep had come with their puddings, the meal already having begun to stretch, but the loss of a crème brûlée seemed a small price to pay for an early escape. He made a brief phone call, put on a concerned look, then explained with much apology that urgent business required his instant return to his office. ‘No need for you to rush, Andy,’ he said as he rose. ‘Enjoy your pudding. Have a drink with your coffee. I’ll leave the bill open.’
Trimble was a decent man and it was guilt that made him utter these words, but the guilt even of a decent man is a delicate flower and his had faded before he reached his car, leaving him asking himself, aghast, ‘Did I really say that?’
Behind him Dalziel finished his bread and butter pudding, sampled the Chief’s crème brûlée, ordered two more with the comment, ‘Tell the chef this is nice nosh, only he don’t give a man enough to put in his eye!’ then, washing down his Stilton with a large port, he applied himself to the serious business of choosing what malt to drink while his coffee went cold.
Despite this he was on his way back to the station at half past two, which was a lot earlier than he’d anticipated. He was in a taxi, having gone to the restaurant in the Chief’s official car, and thinking it a shameful thing for a man to have no better place to go to on an afternoon he’d regarded as taken care of than his place of work, he commanded the driver to divert to the Black Bull.
He paid off the cab with a generous tip which went down on the receipt he collected to send to Trimble’s office for reimbursement. The thought of the Chief’s face when he saw it (hopefully at the same time as he registered the extra crème brûlées and the malts) had filled him with a delight which had bubbled over into his somewhat over-effusive reaction at the sight of Hat Bowler.
‘What did I say, Wieldy?’ he went on. ‘Out of his hospital bed and into his lass’s, he’ll be so full of vim, he’ll not be able to wait to get back to work! Isn’t that what I said?’
‘Not as such,’ said Wield, observing that young Bowler, once Dalziel’s bête noir, did not seem delighted at his apparent upgrading to palace favourite, even though it was in the presence of Novello, his main rival for the spot. She had returned from the bar with Dalziel’s drink. To get Wield’s, she’d had to wait her turn, but at the sight of Dalziel, Jolly Jack, the lugubrious landlord, had pulled a pint in a reaction worth a Pavlovian paper.
‘There’s that not as such again, Wieldy,’ reproved the Fat Man, sinking into a chair and taking his glass from Novello.
He drank half of it like a traveller in an antique land who hadn’t seen liquid for many a hot day, and said, ‘Thanks, Ivor. Now what’s the crack?’
Wield hesitated. He’d already begun to suss there was something not quite right about this burglary report. The youngster had escorted his girlfriend home after what had been (if Wield read the signs right) a sexually and emotionally successful holiday and had found her flat had been burgled. Naturally, being a DC, the boy would have promised to kick-start a thorough CID investigation. Which a phone call would have done. Instead of which Bowler had turned up at the Bull and, what was even odder, a couple of hours must have lapsed since the burglary.
There were other things too, and Wield would have been happy to let the full story emerge at the DC’s own pace. But now the case was altered.
He said, ‘DC Bowler was just reporting a burglary to me, sir.’
‘Ee, that’s champion. On the job, off the job, back on the job, all in the twinkle of an eye. That’s the stuff a good detective’s made of. So, fill me in, lad.’
With all the enthusiasm of a politician admitting a bribe, Hat began his story again.
Dalziel soon interrupted, picking up points Wield had not yet commented upon.
‘So nowt taken. She says. You believe her?’
‘Of course.’ Indignantly. ‘Why should she lie?’
‘Summat she was embarrassed by. Sex aids. Pictures of her six illegitimate kids. Summat she didn’t care to tell a cop about. Bag of shit. Bundles of used notes she’d got on the black and wasn’t going to let on to the Revenue about. Summat she didn’t want her employers to hear about. Expensive books she’d liberated from the reference library. Why should a woman lie about anything, lad? Mebbe just because they’ve got a talent for it! Am I right or am I right, Ivor?’
Shirley Novello said, ‘You know I think you’re always right about everything, sir.’
Dalziel looked at her suspiciously, then his face lit up and he exploded into laughter.
‘There, young Bowler, see what I mean! Fortunately us fellows have got a talent for sussing out lies, or ought to have. So, I’ll ask you again. You believe your lass?’
‘Yes,’ said Hat sullenly.
‘That your head or your hormones speaking?’
‘My head.’
‘Grand. No sign of forced entry, you say?’
‘Couple of little scratches round the lock, but nothing positive.’
‘Never mind, we’ll know for sure when we take the lock to pieces.’
Hat looked even more unhappy, but the Fat Man was in full spate.
‘So, just this message on her computer then. OK, what’s it say?’
‘Bye bye Lorelei.’
‘Lorelei? What’s that? Hang about. Weren’t Lorelei the name of someone in a film …’
‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Marilyn Monroe,’ said Wield.
‘You been checking on the opposition, Wieldy? Lovely girl. Shame about yon fellow.’
Whether Dalziel’s objection was to baseball players, playwrights or Kennedys wasn’t clear, nor about to be made so as he pressed on. ‘So what’s its significance here? Come on, lad. Don’t tell me you’ve not got a theory. When I were your age I had as many theories as I had erections, and I couldn’t go upstairs on a bus without getting an erection.’
Hat took a deep breath and said, ‘Well, sir, Lorelei’s a sort of water nymph in this German fairy tale. There’s this big rock or cliff on the Rhine, that’s called the Lorelei too, and she sits there singing, and it’s so beautiful that fishermen sailing by get distracted listening to her and run their boats on the rock and drown.’
‘Used to feel like that about Doris Day,’ said Dalziel. ‘Sounds like one of them sirens.’
‘They’re Greek I think, sir,’ said Wield.
‘All in the bloody European Union, aren’t they?’ said the Fat Man, his geniality beginning to fade like morning dew. Airy-fairyness he could put up with from his DCI when more down to earth approaches were looking unproductive, but it wasn’t something he encouraged in DCs making preliminary reports about burglaries. ‘So we’re into a German fairy tale now. Hope it’s got a happy ending, lad.’
Bowler, who was beginning to learn that life with Dalziel meant having to put up with four injustices before breakfast, pressed on manfully.
‘I looked
