Open Writing

But Hartley also had many friends in low places whom he turned to when he needed help. He looked up one that afternoon.

Tom Driscoll was a drifter. He’d been born in Keighworth, served in the forces, but couldn’t cope when he came out. He’d never married.
He spent his life tramping round the Ridings, keepnig to familiar patches and holing up every winter in the doss-house at Keighworth. Pithon Hall was a stop-over on his run, which he passed on his way home from Halifax. He was one of the dossers Blackwell had whinged about.

He knew where to find Tom. Thursday would find him in The Squeaking Rat behind Keighworth market. It had escaped demolition in the 1960s when it had become the haunt of dossers and petty thieves. Run-down and badly needing a lick of paint, it stood for some years in a wilderness of derelict land awaiting re-development. Yet it survived. When the new market was built in the 1970s, it squeezed itself between two glass-and-concrete superstores and became decidedly up-market. Only then did Keighworth wake up to the fact it had an eighteenth century coaching inn still intact, so Bradford Met slapped a preservation order on it and the brewery tarted it up. Overnight it became all beams, bullseye windows and brass hangings.

A new clientele moved in. Shop managers called in for lunch. So did the office staff from the nearby banks and building societies; Keighworth’s bright youg things drank there at night. But, last of the old regulars, Tom stayed put. The new landlord tried to oust him, but without success. Tom stuck. He hogged the corner next the fireplace in the snug and in the end was left to drink alone. He became, in time, a kind of fixture the new customers joked about and warmed to, occasionally bought a drink for. As long he made no bother he was left to himself.

Ibrahim Khan accompanied his boss, chatting about Arthur Donaldson as they strolled across town: how Kemsworth had taken on responsibility for the new drugs unit, how Donaldson was keen to button up this case. Inspector Hartley was worried about that. He hated having a case taken out of his hands. It had happened once or twice before and it had gone deep. Always it had happened when Donaldson had panicked when one of his high-up acquaintances was involved. “He’ll pass us up as sure as eggs is eggs,” said Hartley, dolefully. “Once he gets wind of the Cairo connection, he’ll poop himself and bring in the Met. This not his scene at all. Specially now Whitcliff’s involved.”

They walked in silence a while enjoying the pale winter sunshine while it lasted. Like Hartley’s mood, the sky was steadily blackening. Then suddenly the inspector brightened and said aloud, more to himself than his companion, “ ‘Auribus teneo lupum.’ ”

His sergeant looked up. “ ‘We have the wolf by the ears’. An old Roman motto. ”

His sergeant looked perplexed.

“Our Arthur,” explained Hartley, who was becoming more enthusiastic by the second. “Look. If we put it to him that by solving this case he’s sure to get promotion, perhaps he’ll hang on. Promotion means everything to him. He’s like a rat in a trap, stuck here in Keighworth and we’re getting bitten by him.” He nodded at the pub sign they were approaching and grinned. “Nowhere near as pleasant as the rats which squeak here. Come on. I’m dying for a pint.”

The Squeaking Rat was a traditional Pennine inn. Low, with stone-slabbed roof and millstone walls and tall chimneys, it. Built to lean into the weather when it once stood adjoining green fields on the boundary of the old town. Built to keep rawness out. No tarting up could change that.

The superstores, though they’d been up less than a decade, looked the worse for wear already. They’d never really mellowed. They’d gone from a trumpeted start eight years before, when they’d won some prestigious prize for looking like a pile of glass and concrete boxes, to something already waiting for the demolishers.

The pub roof shone rawly and its walls were streaked from a recent shower of sleet. Its windows were small and mullioned Some had had bullseyes installed to make the place look more olde worlde. They needn’t have bothered. The originals had been authentic and looked more attractive. They’d knocked down the old stabling round the back and the outside was a beer-garden in summer; that is, when summer decided to put in an appearance. Most pubs in the area had beer-gardens now. They were used about five days a year, when folk drank themselves daft out of doors and pretended they were on the Costa Brava.

Inside they’d dug up the old stone flagsand put down a wooden floor and carpets. The original bars with their hand-pumps had disappeared, too; replaced with slick measuring taps and lit-up adverts for foreign lagers. But they still served the traditional ale Hartley had been raised on, King’s Old Peculiar.