Asking For The Moon dap-16

by Reginald Hill

  'Let's see. Yes, there it is, down there, in the Sea of Tranquillity.'

  'Those pimples? Looks like an outbreak of chicken pox.'

  Dalziel wasn't altogether wrong. The Village, a complex of sealed domes linked by corridors, covering about five acres, did indeed resemble a patch of blisters on the lunar skin till their third braking orbit brought out the scale of the thing. Next time round, one of the domes loomed large before them, threatening collision, and then they were slipping smoothly into a docking bay, and suddenly the stars were out of sight.

  The Commander of the Lunar Village was waiting to greet them. He was a small balding astrophysicist with a nervous manner who reminded Dalziel of a snout who'd been foolish enough to feed him duff information twenty years earlier. With good behaviour the man should be getting out shortly.

  The Commander passed them over with speed and unconcealable relief to his Head of Security, Colonel Ed Druson, who was a lean and wiry black man with the stretched look of an athlete who has carried his twenties training schedules into his forties.

  'Welcome to the moon,' he said, offering his hand. 'Hope* you had a good trip.'

  'Aye, it were grand,' said Dalziel, bouncing gently up and down to test the effect of low gravity on his gouty foot. Delighted to feel no pain, he went on, 'Only thing is, that space ship of thine didn't seem to have a bar, and it's thirsty work travelling.'

  'Andy,' said Pascoe warningly. 'Should you, with your gout?'

  'Bugger the gout,' said Dalziel. 'I've got a throat like a spinster's tit. I could even thole bourbon if you've not got the real stuff.'

  Til see what we can do,' said Druson, clearly wondering what the hell the Brits were up to, filling valuable shuttle space with an overweight, geriatric alcoholic who had gout.

  He went on, 'Like we told your people, Europa's in a parking orbit with one of our guys acting nightwatch. We've got the crew in our new accommodation dome. We're expanding our technical staff and they don't start arriving till the weekend.'

  'We should be finished well before then,' said Pascoe confidently.

  'Yeah? Well, you sure ought to be,' said Druson. 'Looks like an open and shut case. Could have saved yourselves the bother of a trip, I reckon. You've seen our file on the German? Jesus, you Euros surely know how to pick 'em!'

  To Dalziel it sounded like a just rebuke. Pascoe had provided him with copies of all the astronauts' files plus the American incident report. This contained statements from the Europa crew, setting out where they were and what they were doing at the time of the fatality, plus Druson's own analysis and conclusions. He saw little reason to look further than Kaufmann as culprit, and offered two pieces of concrete evidence and a motive.

  The first pointer was an entry in Lemarque's private journal, removed from his locker in a search of doubtful legality. Several of the astronauts kept such journals with an eye to a literary future after their flying days were over. Lemarque's consisted mainly of fluorescently purple prose about the beauties of space with mention of his colleagues kept down to a dismissive minimum. Then at the end of a much polished speech in which he told the world of his sense of honour at being the first Euro, and more importantly, the first Frenchman, to step out on to the moon's surface, he had scribbled almost indecipherably, Ka s'en fache. Gardes-toi!

  Ka is getting angry. Watch out!

  Was Ka Kaufmann? Druson had asked. And the discovery during the same illegal search of a microprobe in the German's locker had deepened his suspicions. A gloss for the non-technical pointed out that a microprobe was a kind of electronic screwdriver which would have been necessary in the readjustment of the TEC circuits.

  But there was still the question of motive. And why was Ka getting angry?

  'Blackmail,' Druson replied promptly. 'You've read the file. It's obvious.'

  It certainly appeared so. The major part of the American report was a digest of a CIA investigation which concluded that Captain Dieter Kaufmann of the Eurofed Air Corps had been acting as an agent for the Arab Union and passing them secret NATO technology for a decade at least.

  It was detailed and unanswerable. And it hadn't been compiled overnight.

  'It would have been neighbourly to pass this information on a little earlier,' suggested Pascoe mildly. 'Say three years earlier.'

  It was three years since Kaufmann had joined the Europa crew.

  'We like to be sure of our facts in such a serious matter," said Druson.

  Also, thought Pascoe, Kaufmann's full-time transfer into the Eurospace programme had removed him from access to NATO information and left him with nothing to pass on but European astro-technology which in American terms was yesterday's news. With no threat to themselves, the Americans had decided to keep their information under their hat till they could make maximum profit from it.

  Now that moment had come.

  'Can we look at the body?' said Pascoe. 'Just for the record.'

  'Sure. But it ain't very pretty.'

  Dalziel had seen a lot worse.

  'Not very big, is he?' said Pascoe.

  'Depends where you're looking,' said Dalziel.

  He turned away from the body and picked up the Frenchman's TEC which was also on display.

  'I bet he fancied himself too,' he said. 'These little fellows often do.'

  'Why do you say that, Andy?' asked Pascoe.

  'His name tag for a start.'

  Instead of following a horizontal line, the adhesive name strip had been adjusted to a jaunty thirty degrees angle echoing the shoulder seam.

  'Used to get buggers in the Force who tried to tart up their uniforms like that,' said Dalziel, sniffing at the headpiece. 'And they usually wore aftershave that'd kill mosquitoes too.'

  'Seems he did have a reputation for being a cocky little bastard,' said Druson, looking at Dalziel with a new respect.

  Pascoe said, 'And the circuitry was definitely interfered with?'

  'Oh yeah. Clear as a fox among chickens. Rush job by the look of it. Well, it would have to be, in the Europa's hold. No time for finesse.'

  'No,' agreed Pascoe. 'Seen enough, Andy?'

  'More than enough. I'd got to thinking the next dead 'un I saw would be me.'

  'Good Lord,' said Pascoe. 'When did you start believing in an afterlife?'

  'Man who lets himself be talked into flying to the moon to stare at a dead Frog's got no right to disbelieve anything,' said Dalziel. 'Did someone say something about a room with a bed in it?'

  'Let's go,' said Druson.

  He led them to their quarters, two small bedrooms with a shared living-room. When the door had shut behind him, Dalziel said, 'OK, lad. What do you reckon? Still a fit-up by the Yanks?'

  'Open mind,' said Pascoe. 'They've certainly put a reasonable case together. Maybe Kaufmann did do it.'

  'Mebbe. I'd trust 'em a lot more if yon black bugger hadn't managed to forget that Glenmorangie he promised me!'

  Pascoe grinned and said, 'A good night's sleep will do you more good, Andy. Nothing more to be done till the morning or whatever they call it up here. Then it'll be straight down to the interrogations.'

  'Hold on,' said Dalziel. 'Scene of the crime, remember? That's why you said we had to come here, and you were dead right. Only this isn't the scene, is it? The Frog dropped dead somewhere out there. And the actual scene of the real crime is floating around somewhere up there. Shouldn't we fix up to visit the Europa before we do owt else?'

  'Don't worry,' said Pascoe. 'I'll be arranging a trip as soon as possible. But time's too short to waste, so in the morning let's get on with talking to the crew, shall we? Now I thought we'd work individually. I'll take three and you take three, then we'll swap over like a sort of reverse singles…'

  'It's not bloody tennis!' said Dalziel obstinately. 'I'll need to ask what these sods got up to on Europa and unless I've seen Europa, what they say won't make bloody sense, will it?'

  There was a tap at the door. Pascoe didn't move. Dalziel scowled at him and went to ans
wer it.

  A smiling young man handed him two litre-sized bottles saying, 'There you go, pops.'

  'Pops!' said Pascoe as Dalziel closed the door. 'You must be mellowing, Andy. Time was when you'd have nutted anyone who spoke to you like that.'

  'That was when I was young and daft,' said Dalziel, removing the seal from one of the bottles. 'At my age, anyone who gives me two litres of Glenmorangie can call me Mavis if he likes. You want a splash?'

  'Only water,' said Pascoe. 'I'll have a shower. Then I'll work out a schedule for the interrogations before I go to bed. OK?'

  He spoke defiantly. Dalziel stared at him for a moment, then shrugged.

  'Fine,' he said. 'You're the boss now.'

  'So I am,' smiled Pascoe as he left. 'So I am.'

  'And I'm to be Queen of the May, Mother,' murmured Dalziel raising the bottle to his lips. 'I'm to be Queen of the May!'

  Dalziel had a bad night. He dreamt he challenged Nurse Montague to the best of three falls and lost by a straight submission. It wouldn't have been so bad if the dream had been erotic but it was merely humiliating and he woke up dry and droopy as a camel's tail. Whisky only washed his black thoughts blacker and when finally there came a tap on the door and Pascoe's voice invited him to go to breakfast, he snarled, 'Sod off!' He was still not washed or dressed half an hour later when Pascoe returned with a cup of coffee and a chocolate doughnut, and, even worse, the kind of sympathetic smile usually reserved for tedious old relatives in twilight homes. Only the younger man's offer to call the Village medics and have someone check him out got Dalziel out of bed. He was still running his portable electric razor over the shadowy planet of his face as they made their way to the Europa crew's dome, and this at last provoked an honestly irritated response from Pascoe.

  'For heaven's sake, Andy, put that thing away. We are representing the Federal Justice Department, after all!'

  With his first twinge of pleasure of the day, Dalziel slipped the slim plastic razor case into his breast pocket and followed Pascoe into the dome.

  The six survivors of the Europa crew were an interesting assortment. It was almost possible to identify them by racial characteristics alone.

  The two women were easiest. The Dane, Marte Schierbeck, was pure Viking, long-bodied, long-faced, and grey-eyed, with hair so fair it was almost silver. By contrast the Spaniard, Silvia Rabal, was compact and curvaceous, with huge dark eyes, full pouting lips, and a rather prominent, slightly hooked nose. Her jet black hair was razored back above her ears and sculpted into a rose-tipped crest. The total effect was arrestingly beautiful, like some colourful exotic bird.

  Of the men, a rather spidery figure with a face crumpled like an old banknote and eyes blue as the lakes of Killarney had to be the Irishman, Kevin O'Meara, while a Rembrandt burgher, solid of frame and stolid of feature, was typecast as the Dutchman, Adriaan van der Heyde. Only the German and the Italian ran counter to type with the six-foot, blue-eyed blond turning out to be Marco Albertosi, which meant the black-haired, volatile-faced, lean-figured gondolier was Dieter Kaufmann.

  Pascoe introduced himself formally, explaining Dalziel simply as his assistant. He made heavy weather of insisting on the serious nature of the affair and the absoluteness of his own authority, and by the time he finished by saying, 'The investigation will be carried on in English since, perhaps regrettably, neither Mr Dalziel nor myself are fluent in any of your languages,' he had succeeded in relaxing the crew into a union of mocking anglophobia, which was precisely what he intended. In his own case the linguistic disclaimer was a downright lie. He was fluent in French, German and Italian, and could get by in the rest. In Dalziel's case… well, he'd learned a long time ago that it was dangerous to assume his ignorance about anything*.

  'We will start with individual interviews,' said Pascoe. 'Herr Kaufmann, would you come with me? Mr Dalziel…'

  Pascoe had already decreed the order of interview, but Dalziel let his eyes slowly traverse the group with the speculative gaze of a sailor in a brothel. Then, with a macho aggression which should have sat ill on a man of his age, but didn't, he stabbed a huge forefinger at Silvia Rabal and said, 'I'll have furl'

  Space was short for special interview facilities so the interrogations took place in the newcomers' rooms. Rabal sat on the bed without being asked. Dalziel eased himself carefully on to a frail-looking chair and began to open the second bottle of malt.

  'Drink?' he said.

  'No. Why have you picked me first?' she asked in a rather harsh voice.

  'Well, I said to myself, if she's the one who killed the Frog, mebbe she'll try to seduce me to keep me quiet.'

  The woman's huge eyes opened even wider as she ran this through her mental translator to make sure she'd got it right. Then she drew back her head and laughed, no avian screech but a full-throated Carmen laugh, sensual, husky, sending tremors down her body like the inviting ripples on a jungle pool.

  'Perhaps I will have that drink, Dalziel,' she said.

  'Thought you might,' he said, handing her a glass.

  She held it close to her breast so he had to lean over her to pour. She looked up at him and breathed, 'Enough.' Her breath was honeyed, or more precisely spiced as if she had been eating cinnamon and coriander. Such perfumes from a restaurant kitchen would have alarmed Dalziel, who liked his food plain dressed, but from the warm oven of this woman's mouth, they were disturbingly appetitive, setting juices running he thought had long since dried to a trickle.

  He sat down heavily and the frail chair spread its legs, but held.

  'Cheers,' she said, lifting her glass to her lips.

  'Cheers,' he answered. It was time to grasp the initiative.

  'Look, love,' he said. 'Cards on the table, that's the way I work. That Pascoe, now, he's different, a right sly bugger, you'll need to keep an eye on him. Me, though, I'm not clever enough to be cunning. But God gave me a fair share of good Yorkshire common sense, and that tells me you're about the least likely suspect of the lot, and that's the real reason I picked you first. So I can get some answers I can be sure are honest.'

  She said, 'Thank you. I am nattered. But how do you work this out?'

  'For a start, you weren't on the module, were you? You stayed on Europa to look after the shop, you and the Eyetie. So while the module party all had plenty of reason to be mucking about with their TECs in the hold, you didn't.'

  'And this is when this interference was done, you think?'

  'Has to be, hasn't it?'

  'I suppose. This fault in Emile's suit, could it not be just a fault? That American tells us nothing, just makes hints.'

  'No. It were deliberate interference, no doubt,' said Dalziel with the technological certainty of a man who used to repair police radios with his truncheon. 'Must've been done in a hurry. I mean, given time, I expect you lot are all clued up enough to have covered your tracks.'

  'Oh yes, I think so.' She regarded him thoughtfully. 'So I am in the clear because I stay on the ship? Then Marco who stayed with me must be clear too?'

  'That depends if his legs are as pretty as yours,' leered

  Dalziel. 'But why do you ask? Would it surprise you if Marco was innocent?'

  'No. I do not say that.'

  'But he didn't get on with Lemarque, is that it?'

  'They were not good friends, no. But not so bad that he would kill!'

  'How bad does that have to be for an Italian?' wondered Dalziel. 'Why'd they not like each other? Rivals, were they? Or maybe they had a lovers' tiff?'

  'I'm sorry?'

  'You know. If they had something going between 'em, and they fell out…'

  He made a limp-wristed rocking gesture.

  'What do you say?' she cried indignantly. 'That is not possible!'

  'No? Well, there's things in these files as'd amaze you,' he said, patting the pile of folders on the floor next to him. 'Do you not have fairy tales in Spain, then? Kiss a frog and you get yourself a princess, that sort of thing?'

  Pu
zzlement, irritation, and something else besides were chasing each other across that expressive face.

  'You are mistaken, I think,' she said, recovering her poise. 'They were rivals, yes. Each wanting to be the most macho, that is all.'

  'You reckon? Mebbe they didn't bother you much. I'll be interested to hear what that Danish lass made of them. She's a lot more boyish than you, might have turned them on a bit more…" •

  She looked ready to explode, recovered again and said, 'Yes, if you are interested in low-temperature physics, go to her.'

  'No, thanks. Me, I prefer the high-temperature Latin type,' he said lecherously.

  She gave him a thin smile and said, 'You talk a lot, Dalziel. Can you, I wonder – what is the phrase? – put your money where your mouth is?'

  'Depends where you want me to put my mouth,' said

  Dalziel negligently. 'Thanks for the offer, but. Mebbe later when I've' a minute to spare, eh?' Or a week, he thought ruefully. Though there had been a time… At least his diversionary tactics had worked.

  'Offer? What offer? You do not think…' Suddenly she broke into indignant Spanish.

  Dalziel yawned and said, 'Stick to English, luv. If a man's worth swearing at, he's worth swearing at in his own language. Now, I've read all the statements but I'm not much good at technical stuff, so mebbe you can give us a hand. First, these TECs, once they were activated in the module, you could monitor their circuits on Europa, is that right?'

  'Yes.'

  'And from Europa this info would go back to Earth Control?'

  'Yes. There is non-stop transmission of pictures and technical data from Europa to Earth.'

  'Aye,' scowled Dalziel. 'Made me miss Star Trek. But weren't there a transmission blackout from Europa as the module went down?'

  'That is right. There was an electrical storm.'

  He whistled and said, 'That must have been scary.'

  'No,' she said with professional indifference. 'It happens often. Fortunately it did not last long and we got pictures back in time for the big event. Emile stepping on to the moon, I mean, not…'

  She shuddered. A sympathetic smile lit Dalziel's face like a wrecker's lantern and he said, 'Don't take on, lass. Now, let's see. It were just Europa's Earth transmissions that were affected? You still kept your contact with the module?'