Good Morning, Midnight
The brilliant new crime thriller featuring Dalziel and Pascoe from the Top Ten Bestseller, Reginald HillThe locked-room suicide of Pal Maciver exactly mirrors that of his father ten years earlier. In both cases, Pal’s stepmother Kay Kafka is implicated. But Kay has a formidable champion in the form of Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel…An obstructive superior is just the first of DCI Peter Pascoe’s problems. Disentangling the tortured relations of the Maciver family is any detective’s nightmare, and the fallout from Pal’s death reaches far beyond Yorkshire. For some, it seems, the heart is a locked room where it is always midnight…
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REGINALD HILL
GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT
A Dalziel and Pascoe novel
Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain in 2004 by HarperCollins
This edition published in 2010.
Copyright © Reginald Hill 2004
Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007123438
Ebook Edition © JULY 2015 ISBN: 9780007370306 Version 2015-06-22
For Max and Mattie
and in memory of Pip and all those other companions of creation right back to Pangur Ban
messe ocus Pangur Bancechtar nathar fira saindan:bith a menmasam fri seilgg,mu memna cein im saincheirdd.
Good Morning â Midnight â
Iâm coming Home â
Day â got tired of Me â
How could I â of Him?
Sunshine was a sweet place â
I liked to stay â
But Morn â didnât want me â now â
So â Goodnight â Day!
EMILY DICKINSON (1830 â 86)
The war had been over for three weeks. Eventually the process of reconstruction would begin, but for the time being the ruins of the plant remained as they had been twenty-four hours after the missiles struck. By then the survivors had been hospitalized and the accessible dead removed. The smell of death rising from the inaccessible soon became intolerable but it didnât last long as the heat of the approaching summer accelerated decay and natureâs cleansers, the flies and small rodents, went about their work.
Dust settled, sun and wind airbrushed the exposed rawness of cracked concrete till it was hardly distinguishable from the baked earth surrounding it, and a traveller in this antique land might have been forgiven for thinking that these relicts were as ancient as those of the great city of Babylon only a few miles away.
Finally, with the smells reduced to a bearable level and the dogs picking over the ruins showing no signs of turning even mangier than usual, some bold spirits living in the vicinity began to make their own exploratory forays.
The new scavengers found a degree of devastation so extensive that even the most technically minded of them couldnât work out the possible function of the plantâs wrecked machinery. They gathered up whatever might be sellable or tradable or adaptable to some domestic purpose and left.
But not all of them. Khalid Kassem, at thirteen counting himself a man and certainly imbued with a sense of adventure and ambition which was adult in its scope, hung back when his father and brothers departed. He was small for his age and slightly built, factors usually militating against his efforts to be taken seriously. In this case, however, he felt they could work to his advantage. Heâd noticed a crack in a collapsed wall which he felt he might be able to squeeze through. Earlier while scavenging in the ruins of an office building he had come across a small torch, its bulb miraculously unbroken and its battery retaining enough juice to produce a faint beam. Instead of flaunting his find, he had concealed it, and when he spotted the crack and shone the light through it to reveal a chamber within, he began to feel divinely encouraged in his enterprise.
