Your Lady of Pain
Good Morning, Midnight (Reginald Hill Edition)“Your Lady of Pain” is the self-description in Dolores’s answering-service greeting. Its playful, sexually suggestive promise of pleasure and delay becomes more than a memorable flourish when Andrew Dalziel uses the recording to confront Jason Dunn about calls made around the time Palinurus Maciver Junior failed to appear.
The greeting
The phrase comes in a recorded message that Andrew Dalziel plays aloud to Jason Dunn. Dolores introduces herself as “your Lady of Pain,” apologizes for having her hands and perhaps her mouth full, invites the caller to leave a message, and adds, “And remember—anticipation can be part of the pleasure also.” The greeting turns waiting into a coyly erotic joke: a caller is told that delay may itself be part of the promised pleasure.
From performance to evidence
After playing the message, Andrew Dalziel asks Jason Dunn whether Dolores is right about anticipation, then remarks that he himself never cared to be kept waiting. The teasing question gives way to the point of the recording. Jason had told Peter Pascoe that, when Palinurus Maciver Junior did not turn up, he tried calling him on his mobile, at his shop, and at home. Andrew Dalziel says the records for those three phones show only one number at that time; dialling it leads to Dolores’s answering service. Jason blusters and asks what the message has to do with him, but the greeting has been placed beside his account as a discrepancy to explain.
Recurrence and consequence
The recording returns when Andrew Dalziel listens to the answering service again. He identifies the number as the only one attempting to contact Palinurus Maciver Junior’s shop, home, and mobile around seven o’clock, and credits Hat Bowler with spotting it in the phone records. The repeated greeting thus changes function: first an incongruous, intimate performance, it becomes the audible endpoint of a trace through the call evidence. Its distinctive wording makes the number recognizable, while the records give the joke an investigative consequence.
