Death of Dalziel - Dalziel & Pascoe 22

by Reginald Hill

  For a moment she thought his lips were coming round to her mouth. Then over his shoulder reflected in the glass of one of the pub windows on the far side of the road half hidden by a parked car she saw a figure she recognized.

  'There's Kilda,' she said, breaking away. 'She must have come looking for you.'

  She turned to wave, and felt her face adjusting into an expressive mode she couldn't immediately identify. Then she got it. This was the look of wide-eyed innocence she used to adopt whenever her mother almost caught her reading a magazine that didn't have the parental seal of approval. Jesus! she thought, forcing her features into a neutral mask. It isn't like I had my hand down the guy's trouser front or something!

  For a second the woman behind the car didn't move and Ellie thought. Maybe it isn't her. Or maybe she's had a few and doesn't care to meet me.

  Then she moved forward across the road towards them.

  If she'd been hitting the bottle, there was no sign of it in either her appearance or her speech. She flashed a brief formal smile at Ellie then said, 'Maurice, I finished earlier than I expected so thought I might still catch you here. Hello, Ellie.'

  'Hello,' said Ellie. 'We were just saying goodbye.'

  'That sounds a bit final,' said the woman.

  Ellie detected a note of mocking satisfaction which she found provocative.

  'Not really,' she said. 'In fact, I was just going to ask Maurice here if he fancied coming to lunch with us at the weekend? Peter will be back by then and I know he'll be sorry to have missed you. You too, of course, Kilda.'

  There you are, dear, thought Ellie, feeling back in control of the situation. Let's see just how possessive you are!

  The Kentmores looked at each other, deciding which of them would formulate the refusal, guessed Ellie.

  Then Maurice said, 'It would have to be Saturday for me.'

  'Fine.'

  'Then that would be lovely. Wouldn't it, Kilda?'

  'Great,' said the woman.

  'Oh good,' said Ellie. 'I'll look forward to seeing you then. Shall we say round about twelve? Thanks again for lunch, Maurice.'

  'Thanks for coming. I enjoyed it. See you Saturday then.'

  The pair of them walked away, close but not touching. As soon as they were out of earshot an animated conversation broke out between them. It didn't look too friendly.

  Just what is the relationship between them? wondered Ellie as she watched them go.

  And how the hell am I going to explain to Peter that I've asked them for lunch?

  2

  promotion

  Back in the Lubyanka, Pascoe found that attitudes had changed.

  The first person he'd seen when he arrived at eight forty-five was Freeman, who'd glanced at his Patek Philippe watch with a smile and said, 'What kept you?'

  'My ten-mile run before breakfast,' said Pascoe. 'Is Sandy in yet?'

  'Of course she is. You know the old Jacobite tradition: no breakfast till you've killed an Englishman. But you'll have to wait. She's upstairs with Uncle Bernie.'

  'Killing him?'

  ‘I hope not. I'll let her know you're here, shall I? Where will you be?'

  Pascoe said, 'In the cellar, I suppose. I don't want to get myself arrested by showing up anywhere else.'

  Freeman seemed to find this very witty.

  'Good to have you back, Pete,' he said, sounding as if he meant it.

  Pondering these things, Pascoe descended to the room where he'd worked so boringly the previous week. Here he found Tim and Rod already engaged in their seemingly endless task of record trawling.

  When they saw him, they both rose with expressions of delight and greeted him like a returned prodigal. News of his role in the Youngman affair had clearly reached them and they were eager for details. Suspecting some kind of confidentiality test, he only confirmed what they already knew. Unsatisfied, they insisted he join them in the staff canteen for further debriefing and morning coffee. The few people already there and others who came later also gave him the big welcome, confirming what he'd already begun to feel, that he had moved, or been moved, from outsider to one-of-us.

  Still he looked for hidden motives, for mocking irony. But quickly he began to realize how much his sense of being kept out of the loop and his suspicion that the Templars had an informant in CAT had coloured his feelings about the whole of the unit. Now he was reminded what he shouldn't have forgotten, that these people too - even the spooks - were policemen, and cops don't like vigilantes. If, as occasionally happens, there is dirty work to be done, then you consult your conscience and, if you get a green light, you do it yourself. What you never do is let civilians trespass on your turf, even if they seem to be giving you a helping hand. And when the vigilantes in question not only blow up a cop, but then compound what was presumably an accident by trying to kill another who might be a witness, any ambiguity about their status evaporates completely.

  As a natural team-player, it was good to feel that at last he was truly in the squad. This sense of belonging saw him return to the basement full of confidence that Glenister wouldn't let him fester down here for long. He offered to help Tim and Rod in their work but they said, 'No no, this is only for us menials. You take the weight off your feet, Peter, and rest up till you are summoned.'

  He sat at his desk and opened Death in the Desert, the first of Youngman's books, both of which he'd bought on his way to the Lubyanka that morning. It was hailed by its publisher as a new form, the docu-novel, in which a factual skeleton was fleshed with fiction. Bugger new forms, what they needed was a new copy-writer, thought Pascoe. It was dedicated To Q, leader of men. Its back cover was crammed with snippets of praise extracted from reviews of the hardback. Pascoe was unimpressed. He and Ellie, finally realizing that two paragraphs in the local evening paper and three lines in the 'Other New Books' section of a Sunday national was all the notice her novel was going to attract, had spent a tipsy evening extracting from this critical molehill an encomiastic mountain. He started to read.

  Youngman's narrative style was raw and unsophisticated but Pascoe could see its appeal. His hero was, unsurprisingly, an SAS sergeant. Called William Shackleton, universally known both by his officers and his men as Shack, he was brutal, amoral and pragmatic. His motto was Make it happen. His men didn't like him much but followed him unquestioningly because he got them through. When someone in his hearing said the problem with guerrilla warfare was identifying the enemy, he said, 'No problem. They're all the fucking enemy.' He referred to the population of the Middle East in general as 'Abdul'. When he needed to individuate, he called them 'Abs'. His sexual philosophy was as basic as his military. He made no pretence of the nature of his interest. If a woman didn't respond, he moved on. If she did respond, she got no promise of commitment. But most of his conquests remained as loyal as his men. In a rare moment of openness he explained his technique to one of his few friends. 'If you fuck a woman five times in a night, she knows she'd be crazy to imagine she's going to be the only one. Most of them don't mind not being the only one so long as they think they're the best. When I'm with a woman I make no secret there's plenty of others. But I tell her, honey, whenever I'm fucking them, I'm thinking of you.' Shortly after this conversation, as usually happened to any man he got close to, the friend got blown away.

  Was all this wishful thinking, or did Youngman actually practise what he preached? wondered Pascoe as he worked his way through the book. Maybe he should have asked Ffion, wherever she was. The thought made him feel guilty.

  He'd just finished the last chapter and was thinking of lunch when the phone rang.

  Rod picked it up, listened, and said, 'Big Mac would like to see you.'

  'Big Mac?'

  'You know, the North-British lady with the knockers,' he said, cupping his hands.

  In Glenister's office he was slightly taken aback to find not only the chief superintendent but Bloomfield and Komorowski. They were drinking coffee. Perhaps they'd had lunch already. His stomach
rumbled as if to say, Well, I haven't!

  'There you are, Peter. How nice,' said Bloomfield, as if this were a chance encounter. 'Just talking about you. Read your wife's book over the weekend. Jolly good. You must be proud of her.'

  'Yes, I am,' said Pascoe, wondering where this was going.

  'And she of you, I don't doubt. Not without cause. That was a sharp piece of work at the hospital. Very sharp. So what did you make of it all?'

  As if Sunday's events hadn't been analysed down to their quarks, thought Pascoe.

  But he replied in measured tones, 'I think that these Templars, though they have not laid claim to it, were responsible for the Mill Street explosion. Concerned that PC Hector might be able identify one of them, they decided to take him out. The first attempt with the hit-and-run having failed, they planned to complete the job in the hospital.'

  'Sounds about right to me. Lukasz?'

  Komorowski said in his chalk-dry voice, 'Their reluctance to claim Mill Street because Superintendent Dalziel got seriously injured doesn't quite fit with their apparent readiness to murder Constable Hector.'

  'Down to perceptions,' said Glenister. 'Mill Street was their opening salvo, so to speak, and they didn't want the bad press associated with injuring a policeman. On the other hand offing Hector to protect themselves is fine, so long as it looks accidental. Which makes them almost as ruthless as the bastards they're killing.'

  'So it does,' said Bloomfield. 'They right to worry about this man Hector, Peter?'

  Pascoe, still uneasy that somehow his previous defence of Hector might have triggered the attack, shook his head.

  'No,' he said firmly. ‘I don't think we're going to get anything more from him.'

  'But it was his drawing of his attacker that put you on to Youngman, wasn't it?'

  'Yes, by an indirect route,' said Pascoe. 'But he'd had a clear view of him in the car, whereas the man in the video shop was deeply obscured by shadow.'

  'Still, to capture such a good likeness from a face glimpsed only for a split second moving towards you at sixty miles an hour takes a special talent,' said Komorowski. 'Which, incidentally, I don't find any reference to in Constable Hector's file.'

  Been studying that, have you? thought Pascoe.

  He said, 'Probably because no one was aware of it.'

  'Ah,' said Komorowski, in a tone so neutral it said clearly, If he'd been one of mine, I'd have been aware of it.

  'Ah, indeed,' rejoined Pascoe, in a tone which he hoped conveyed just as clearly that Komorowski, not having to deal daily with the loose amalgam of incompetences which was Hector, was talking through his arsehole.

  'We are well pleased with the work you did here, Peter,' declared Bloomfield somewhat regally, bringing this polite confrontation to a close. 'How do you feel about following it up? Strictly speaking, it's not within our brief, which is counter-terrorism. To be frank, we're pretty over-stretched as it is, and it would be a great help if you could take this on. I can spare Chetwynd and Loxam to work with you. What do you say?'

  Pascoe was momentarily dumbstruck. To be offered the chance to do officially what he was in fact trying to do surreptitiously seemed too good to be true. Already his suspicious mind was suggesting that making his unofficial activities official was the perfect way for the Templar mole to keep close track of what he was up to.

  Whose idea was it? he wondered. Pointless asking. It could well be that the person who thought it was his or her idea had had it planted there by someone else anyway.

  He said, 'Chetwynd and Loxam . . . ?'

  'Tim and Rod, the guys you've been doing such sterling work with in the cellar,' said Glenister, frowning as if surprised he didn't know their surnames, which indeed she was right to be. 'Dave Freeman will help you settle in and act as your link to me.'

  That cleared up one thing, thought Pascoe. Freeman's sudden friendliness was presumably explained by foreknowledge of this promotion, it that's what it was.

  But, promotion or not, he could hardly say, No, I'd prefer to carry on sneaking around behind everyone's backs.

  He said, 'To do this properly, I'd need to have full access to all available records and other material.'

  'Of course. On tap. Not, I suspect, that an ingenious chap like you would have any problem finding less conventional modes of access,' said Bloomfield, smiling.

  Shit, thought Pascoe. Somehow the old sod knows that last time I was in this office, I was rifling through Glenister's desk in search of information!

  'So we can take it that's settled?' said Bloomfield. 'Yes, sir. Thank you.'

  'Good. Sandy, you'll see Peter gets everything he needs? Excellent. Come on Lukasz. Work to do.'

  He headed for the door, where he paused and looked up at the ceiling.

  'Sandy, that security camera, you ever get it fixed?'

  'Yes, sir. It's working fine now,' said Glenister.

  'Good. Place like this, you need to be able to see what's going on everywhere, Peter. Downside is, you get to know who picks their nose a lot.'

  He looked at Pascoe as he said this, and smiled, and it might have been that his left eye-lid drooped in a slow wink or it may have been just a natural blink.

  3

  melodious twang

  Cap Marvell was not a devout woman. Her father was a tribal Anglican who regarded the Church as God's way of affirming the Tories' right to rule even when Labour was in power, while her mother was a devout Roman Catholic who made sure little Amanda was brought up in all the proper Romish observances and insisted she went to her own old school, St Dorothy's Academy for Catholic Girls, which she regarded as the only doctrinally sound school in the country.

  Yet despite all these attempts to establish lines of control from the Holy See, it was the dear old domestic C of E which retained a niche in Cap's affections when mature scepticism swept all other religious debris away, a fondness based almost entirely on childhood memories of her father's insistence that his pack of assorted hounds, terriers, pointers and retrievers should join him in the family pew at the village church. She hated the use they were put to, but she loved their company,

  and a heavenly kingdom without animals was not one she had any interest in entering.

  Andy Dalziel reckoned that if there were a God, He should be done for dereliction of duty, letting His Creation get into such a mess and relying on folk like A. Dalziel Esq. to pick up the pieces.

  This did not prevent him from being on good terms with the odd cleric, particularly if they shared his interest in the really important aspects of the human condition, such as where do you find the best whisky, and who would you pick for your eclectic all-time XV?

  Such a one was Father Joe Kerrigan, a parish priest of indeterminate age, with a creased and crumpled leathery face like an old deflated rugby ball. Sport and whisky had brought them together, and once they'd established the ground rule that Kerrigan didn't try to solve crimes and Dalziel didn't try to save souls, they had become good friends who many a night tired the moon with talking and sent her down the sky.

  Cap, true to her own unbelief, and knowing Dalziel's considered view that most religious ceremonies were balls, and them as weren't balls were bollocks, had placed a strict interdict on admission to his room of any of the pack of spiritual predators who roam the corridors of modern multi-faith hospitals looking for their defenceless prey.

  Joe Kerrigan, however, was an exception. His distress at Andy's plight was personal rather than professional, and he won her imprimatur as a friend, not as a priest.

  But the leopard cannot change his spots, and that afternoon Father Kerrigan, visiting the Central to administer the last rites to a dying parishioner, was very much in professional mode when he decided to look in on Dalziel on his way out.

  The guardian constable placed outside the room since the events of Sunday recognized the priest and let him in without demur. For the first time Father Joe found himself alone with his friend, and now the prayers which previously in deference to an
d, it must be said, in fear of Cap Marvell, he had offered silently from within now poured spontaneously from his lips, 'Dear Jesus, Divine physician and Healer of the sick, we turn to you in this time of illness . . .'

  As he spoke the priest's words, through his mind ran the friend's thought, 'Where are you, Andy, me dear? Is it living you still are, or am I talking to a lump of flesh in which the heart still beats but out of which the mind and the soul have long fled?'

  In fact, Dalziel is both closer than Kerrigan can guess and further than he can imagine. Living he still is, but that point of awareness in which his being is now entirely focused has drifted back to the far edge of darkness, close up against the wafer-thin membrane which separates him from the white light of elsewhere.

  He's here partly through necessity in that, whenever the will to survive grows weary, this is where he automatically drifts, but also in some part through choice, because he is essentially a social animal and while his comatose limbo is filled with shadows of his consciousness, he is unable to truly communicate with any of them. Here, however, just beyond the membrane, there is possibly something distinct from himself.

  ‘I know you're in there,' says Dalziel. 'We've got you surrounded. If you come out with your hands up, we can all go home.'

  This approach is as unsuccessful as it was in Mill Street.

  'If my lad Pascoe were here,' says Dalziel, 'he'd soon talk you out. He's been on a course.'

  There is a something. Not a response. Something like that lightest breath of wind in a forest on a still day which reminds you of the huge canopy of foliage under which you stand. But it is enough for Dalziel.

  'You are there then,' he says triumphantly. 'Grand. Now we're getting somewhere. Next off is find a name, that's what the manuals say. I'm Andy. What shall I call you? God, is it?'

  Again the breeze in the trees, and this time he thinks he gets a meaning.

  Why don't you come through and see for yourself

  'Nay,' says Dalziel. 'Last time I tried that, I got blown up. Hang about. What's going off?'

  Apart from his brief out-of-body experience, which had come to a sudden end when his unexpected glimpse of Hector lying in bed had driven him back to the security of his coma, he has no sense of external context. All he knows is that at the end of the darkness furthermost from the membrane separating him from the white light of Elsewhere lies another Elsewhere from which derive those fragments of sensation which still have the power to call him back.