One Small Step

by Reginald Hill

  ‘Let’s not split hairs,’ said Dalziel.

  ‘You’re right. Many things I am, but not a hair-splitter. Do I get a choice of wearing the cuffs in front or behind? And what happens if I want to go to the little boys’ room while I’ve got them on?’

  ‘You pray no one’s been mucking about with your wiring. This sick leave you had, exactly what was it that was supposed to be wrong with you?’

  ‘Oh, women’s trouble, you know the kind of thing.’

  Dalziel slapped the file down on his knee with a crack that made the Irishman flinch.

  ‘End of happy hour,’ he snarled. ‘Let’s have some straight answers, right?’

  ‘Oh God!’ cried the Irishman, clenching his fists in a parody of a boxer’s defences. ‘You don’t mean you’re after fighting with the gloves off, is that it? I never could abide bare fists. Bare anything else you care to name, but not the bare fists!’

  Dalziel looked at him thoughtfully and said, ‘Yes, I’d heard summat about you being a boxer. And about the little Frog taking the piss.’

  ‘Now that’s what I call an unfortunate choice of phrase,’ said O’Meara.

  ‘I told you, lad. Cut the comedy! Let’s just talk about you and Lemarque and the boxing ring, shall we?’

  ‘I thought we agreed to whip this lot through double quick,’ said Pascoe irritably.

  ‘Sorry. He bothered me, that one. Something not right.’

  ‘Ah, the famous nose again. What kind of not-rightness?’

  ‘Too many jokey answers and I got the feeling he was trying to steer me around all the time.’

  ‘So what did you end up not getting answers about that you asked questions about?’

  Dalziel considered, then said, ‘Hard to say exactly. One thing was why he got sick leave after his wife snuffed it, but that can’t have owt to do with anything, can it?’

  ‘Unlikely. What was wrong with him, anyway?’

  ‘Don’t know. That’s the point I’m making,’ said Dalziel heavily.

  ‘There should have been a medical report in his file. Hang about, I’ve still got it here. Sorry. Let’s see. Emotional trauma, blah blah; physical symptoms, insomnia, slight hypertension blah blah; treatment, counselling and unpronounceable drugs; passed fit for duty, 7.10.06. Nothing there that’s relevant, I’d say. Maybe he just doesn’t like talking about that time. Stick this in his file, will you?’

  Dalziel glanced at the medical report, shrugged and said, ‘The bugger’s still not right. How’d you do with Danish bacon? Fancy a slice?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You don’t fancy her or you don’t think she’s in the frame?’

  ‘I don’t think that Miss Schierbeck would judge any man worth killing,’ said Pascoe. ‘So. One each left. We’re not doing too well, Andy.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Dalziel. ‘You’ve scuppered the Yanks’ motive for Kaufmann being the killer, haven’t you?’

  ‘Because he’s a double? We knew that before I left earth. It would still be very embarrassing to have to make that public in his defence. No, the only thing that’s going to please my masters and cut the ground right from under the Americans’ feet is for us to come up with the undeniably genuine perpetrator. There can’t be any cover-up or fit-up. We need the real thing and we need it fast!’

  After thirty minutes with Adriaan van der Heyde, Dalziel was convinced that either the Dutchman wasn’t the real thing or if he was, it would take thumbscrews, rack and Iron Maiden to prise it out of him. He’d heard Pascoe’s door open and shut after only ten minutes, signalling that the Commissioner was following his own precept of speed. It annoyed Dalziel to be accused of dragging his feet, annoyed him even more to suspect that perhaps it was age that was making him take so long.

  ‘Look,’ he said in desperation, ‘let’s say you’re in the clear, right? Which of the others do you reckon most likely?’

  The stolid Dutchman scratched his nose, then said very definitely, ‘Albertosi.’

  ‘What?’ It occurred to Dalziel that, though it seemed unlikely, it would be nice to pin this on the Italian, not least because Pascoe obviously felt able to dismiss him so quickly.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ he asked. ‘You reckon mebbe he was jealous of Lemarque?’

  ‘Jealous? Sexually, you mean?’ The Dutchman shook his head. ‘That’s all the British can think of. Sex!’

  ‘Must be something to do with living above sea-level,’ said Dalziel. ‘All right, tulip. What do you say his motive was?’

  ‘Revenge.’

  There was an unnerving certainty about the man’s manner and delivery.

  Even Dalziel who was not easily impressed by the trappings of honesty couldn’t help feeling he had better pay close attention here.

  ‘You’d best explain,’ he said.

  The Dutchman nodded, took a deep breath and began to speak in a measured didactic tone which for a while disguised the incredible content of his allegations.

  ‘Lemarque was approached by a consortium who wanted his help to take over the holy water bottling business in Lourdes. It is a multi-million-franc industry, you understand. He pretended to agree but went to the police. Unfortunately behind this consortium are people who decree that the price of betrayal of their confidence is death. Marco Albertosi was instructed to carry out the sentence.’

  For a second Dalziel was reduced to a rare speechlessness. Then he burst out, ‘For Christ’s sake, are you telling me Albertosi is a Mafia hit man?’

  ‘His family is Sicilian, did you know that?’

  ‘No, I bloody didn’t! Come on, lad, where’s your hard evidence for all this? For any of it!’

  ‘Lemarque’s last words. They were incomplete.’

  ‘Oh mer … So?’

  ‘He was trying to say Omertà!’ said the Dutchman. ‘The Mafia’s code of silence.’

  For a long moment Dalziel stared into van der Heyde’s grave, unyielding face.

  Finally he said, ‘Are you taking the piss?’

  Another long moment, then …

  ‘Yes,’ said van der Heyde. And his face crazed like an overfired Delft plate into a myriad lines of laughter.

  vii

  The pod spun round the moon in a climbing orbit and earth swam into view like a schoolroom globe. It was easy for Dalziel to pick out Africa and India, but Yorkshire was invisible under a cloud. He felt a sharp pang of homesickness.

  ‘Long way back, huh?’ said Druson, observing him sympathetically.

  ‘Long way to come just to hear a Dutchman crack a joke, right enough,’ said Dalziel.

  He had rewarded van der Heyde with a glass of Scotch. One glass led to another and he’d finally emerged from the interview with a feeling of childish self-satisfaction at having so blatantly ignored Pascoe’s repeated instruction to hurry things along. Logically he had no cause to feel irritated when he found that Pascoe had joined Silvia Rabal in the pod taking her up to Europa, but he did. Even the return of Druson with the nightwatch and the message that his ‘boss’ wanted him up there too didn’t mollify him.

  ‘Boss’. He couldn’t recall the last time he had acknowledged a boss, and he certainly wasn’t about to start with a jumped-up detective-sergeant who’d struck lucky!

  Mistaking his irritation, Druson said, ‘Don’t take it to heart, Andy. So the German still looks the man most likely, so what? Let the politicians work it out.’

  ‘Eh? What makes you think I give a toss about politics?’

  ‘You don’t?’ Druson looked at him shrewdly and said, ‘I almost believe you, Andy. So what do you care about?’

  ‘A fair measure in a clean glass,’ said Dalziel. ‘That’ll do me.’

  ‘And Commissioner Pascoe, is that how he feels too?’

  ‘Peter? Straight as a donkey’s shaft,’ said Dalziel. ‘Too honest for his own good sometimes.’

  He spoke with a force he didn’t quite understand the need for.

  ‘He’s done well for an honest man,
’ observed Druson neutrally. ‘But at least he brought you along, so that’s a point in his favour, I’d say.’

  Dalziel tried to work out the drift of Druson’s comments as they came in to dock with Europa, but once aboard he needed all his concentration to keep him from bouncing around like a ball in a bingo jar. On the US lunar shuttle he had been safe in the embrace of his wrap-around couch, so this was his first true experience of untrammelled weightlessness. Pascoe watched with open amusement, but Silvia Rabal showed a deal of concern which Dalziel found flattering till he realized she was more worried about her delicate instruments than his delicate body.

  Finally, having discovered that the basic art was to reduce his energy output by ninety per cent, he gained sufficient control to follow Pascoe on a tour of the ship.

  The fact that every dimension was usable made it feel surprisingly large. There were three main compartments: the bridge, which was the principal control area in the bow; the deck, which was the large central section housing most of the accommodation facilities; and the hold. This was basically a narrow cylinder walled by storage lockers, seven of which had the crew’s names stencilled on them.

  Dalziel almost filled the central space.

  ‘You’d need to be a bloody contortionist to muck around with one of them TECs down here,’ he said, pulling at the door marked van der Heyde. ‘Locker’ proved a misnomer. It was held shut only by a magnetic catch and flew open. A framed photo came floating out and he grabbed it.

  ‘These people are highly trained pros,’ said Pascoe, behind, or above, or underneath him. ‘Also they’re very fit and fairly thin. What’s that you’ve got?’

  ‘Family snap,’ said Dalziel, passing back a photo of two very plain girls and a scowling woman. ‘You can see why he took to space. They’re allowed personal stuff, then?’

  ‘Within reason. Weight’s not the problem it was.’

  ‘Not for some,’ said Dalziel. ‘Let’s have a shufti.’

  He began opening other lockers. This felt more like real police work! But he soon began to feel that these souvenirs of earth were better material for a psychiatrist than a simple bobby.

  Surprisingly, only the Dutchman had brought a family photo. Perhaps he didn’t trust his memory and was insuring against the shock of reunion. Marco Albertosi obviously felt he could not live without a set of AC Milan’s European Cup Programmes. Silvia Rabal’s trust in technology did not extend to nourishment and her talisman was a soft leather bag containing sachets of camomile tea and various other pods, seeds, and dried herbs. Dalziel recalled her spicy breath and inhaled deeply. Marte Schierbeck’s memento was more mysterious. An old tinder-box. Perhaps she was worried about being marooned? He opened it and found it contained a small tube of contraceptive pills. Perhaps it was who she was marooned with that bothered her! Kaufmann had brought with him a miniature score of Beethoven’s Emperor concerto. Dalziel marvelled that these squidges could echo as music in some men’s minds. Or perhaps it was just a spy’s code book after all. The only other book he found was in O’Meara’s locker, an ornately bound New Testament with a brass catch.

  ‘Didn’t strike me as religious,’ observed Dalziel.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Pascoe.

  ‘New Testament in O’Meara’s locker.’

  ‘Oh, you know the priest-ridden Irish. Never shake it off. Bring it out anyway.’

  ‘Hang on. Just one to go.’

  It was Lemarque’s and it was completely empty. Presumably it had contained nothing except the journal and that had been removed as evidence.

  He gave a gentle push and floated backwards out of the hold into the deck area.

  ‘So. One New Testament. Not quite the kind of testament I was hoping for,’ said Pascoe glumly.

  Dalziel undid the catch and opened the book. On the fly leaf, a book-plate had been stuck headed Holy Cross Youth Club: Award for service. Under this was a handwritten inscription To Kevin (K. 0.) O’Meara. Western District featherweight champion, 1993, 1994. Well done! It was signed, Father Powell (1 Tim vi, 12).

  ‘All his success since, and this is what still matters to him!’ said Pascoe reflectively.

  ‘You reckon?’ said Dalziel, turning to the First Epistle to Timothy.

  The page containing Chapter 6 verse 12 was folded in half and when he straightened it out he saw that either deliberately or by chance some flakes of white powder had been trapped there. Some of them floated free. Dalziel licked his finger and stabbed at them, then cautiously put it to his mouth.

  ‘What are you after, Andy? Coke? Forget it. Druggies don’t make it on to the space programme, believe me!’

  ‘Why not? They let in spies and killers,’ said Dalziel. ‘It’s not coke anyroad. But I know that taste …’

  ‘Probably dandruff. Sorry. All right, pass it here and I’ll take it back for analysis just to keep you quiet.’

  Dalziel, who didn’t think he’d been making any unusually loud fuss, folded the page back to retain the rest of the powder. As he did so he glanced at Verse 12. Fight the good fight of faith. No wonder young K. O. O’Meara had won his titles; he’d had the referee in his pocket. His eye strayed a few verses up the column. For we brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out. Now there’s where Paul had got it wrong. He hadn’t given God credit for space travel. Unless, as seemed not improbable, it wasn’t a work of God after all.

  He fastened the catch and gave Pascoe the book. The taste was still in his mouth, its source both figuratively and literally on the tip of his tongue.

  Druson, who was reclining or hanging on the deck, depending how you looked at it, said, ‘You guys gonna be much longer?’

  ‘As long as it takes,’ said Pascoe with an authoritative snap which made Dalziel smile and Druson look sour.

  ‘What’s in here?’ asked Dalziel, examining a couple of doors in the bulkheads.

  ‘Galley and the heads,’ said Pascoe.

  ‘Heads?’

  ‘Loos.’

  ‘Oh, the karzies. That’s right. You said they just went normal here.’

  ‘Not exactly normal,’ said Pascoe, opening a door. ‘With no gravity, you need a suction system, otherwise you could be in deep trouble.’

  Dalziel examined the apparatus.

  ‘Do yourself a nasty injury with that,’ he opined.

  He floated above the open door in silence for a while.

  ‘Penny for them,’ said Pascoe.

  ‘Still charge a penny, do they,’ said Dalziel. ‘No, I was just thinking. The Frenchie was so chuffed at being the first to land, and he’d got his little speech ready and all; and he’d not been too long gone from Europa where he had summat like a proper bog …’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So how come he got so desperate he had to take a leak on the ladder with the eyes of the universe on him?’

  ‘No one would know,’ pointed out Pascoe.

  ‘He’d know,’ said Dalziel grimly. ‘And the data would register on the monitors up here, so they’d know. And then it would be transmitted back to Control on earth so everyone there’d know. And you can bet your bottom dollar someone would leak the leak to the tabloids, so every bugger in the universe would know! So why’d he do it?’

  ‘Stage fright? Or perhaps he drank something. Didn’t someone mention something about coffee?’

  ‘Aye. The Dane said he’d been moaning on about how bloody awful it was.’

  ‘There you are, then,’ said Pascoe dismissively. ‘Coffee’s supposed to be pretty diuretic, isn’t it?’

  And the word switched on a light in Dalziel’s lingual memory.

  ‘Bugger me!’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ said Pascoe with unusual facetiousness.

  ‘That powder in the Testament, I know what it is. It’s ground-down Thiabon tablets!’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Thiabon. Trade name for the latest thiazide drug. Quack put me on ’em last year for me blood pressure. They work by releasing sodi
um from the tissues and stimulating the kidneys to wash it out. In other words, they make you pee!’

  ‘A lot?’

  ‘Worse than draught lager,’ said Dalziel. ‘In coffee, I reckon they’d have most men going in half an hour. And the build-up’s constant. No use crossing your legs. You’ve got to go!’

  ‘What are you saying, Andy?’ asked Pascoe with a frown of concentration.

  ‘No use fixing Lemarque’s suit unless you can be sure he’s going to trigger the short circuit, is there? So you feed him a diuretic which you know about because you’ve been prescribed it yourself!’

  ‘Hey,’ interposed Druson. ‘You’re not confessing, are you, Andy? It’ll take more than that to get Kaufmann off the hook.’

  ‘No,’ said Dalziel. ‘But I know someone else who suffered from mild hypertension a while back and could have been put on these pills. Hey, lass. Got a minute?’

  Silvia Rabal came down from the bridge. Hair piled up in its comb and wearing a silkily thin leotard in yellow and green, she hovered before them like some tropical bird.

  Dalziel said, ‘Before word came through that Lemarque was to be first out, who’d won when you drew lots?’

  She thought, then said, ‘Kevin. But I do not think anyone really believed they would let us decide ourselves …’

  ‘Believing the impossible’s never bothered the Irish,’ said Dalziel. ‘So in O’Meara’s mind, he should have had the honour of being first out. And beside getting the Freedom of Dublin city and draught Guinness for life, it’d mean money in the bank when it came to writing his memoirs!’

  Pascoe was shaking his head, unimpressed.

  ‘It’s a pretty feeble motive for killing a man,’ he said. ‘Now if you were saying it was a daft Irish joke …’

  ‘Why not?’ exclaimed Dalziel, now in full flow. ‘Why not that too? There’s nothing he can do about stopping Lemarque, but he can ruin his big moment. If the timing’s right, there he’ll be, standing on the ladder with all eyes on him, just about to launch into his big speech when suddenly he’s got to pee. All right, he may have the nerve to carry that off, but not if his suit’s been fixed to give him a short sharp shock along the dong? Man’d need to be Christian martyr material not to register that! In fact with a bit of luck, he might even fall off the ladder! Great gag, eh? Only without realizing, O’Meara had fixed it so that all the electronics in the TEC would jam, and the joke goes sour, and the poor bloody Frog is lying dead.’