Death's Jest-Book

by Reginald Hill

  Belchamber pursed his lips and said, ‘This is a conversation I shall of course need to report to your superiors and the CPS, Chief Inspector.’

  ‘What conversation, Mr Belchamber? I heard no conversation. You hear any conversation, Constable Novello? Sergeant Wield?’

  His colleagues shook their heads.

  ‘There you are. Three to two. In a democracy, we must be right. So watch it, Wally. After all your big-time stunts, it would be a shame to go down for a domestic, wouldn’t it?’

  After the lawyer and his client had left, Novello said admiringly, ‘Nice one, sir. That made the bastards squirm. Real hairy-chested stuff.’

  It was a genuine compliment. Novello liked her men muscular and hairy. The willowy Pascoe-type did nothing for her.

  ‘Not the point,’ said Pascoe wearily. ‘I just wanted to warn them off Oz and his family. And talking of hairy chests, that trick of yours with the CS-spray, I’ve written it up as reaction to direct and sudden threat, which is the only way to justify it when you hadn’t told them you were a police officer and issued a warning. The only true words Belchamber spoke were when he said they could be entitled to bring an action against you. What were you thinking of? You didn’t even try to sound threatened on the tape!’

  ‘Well, I felt it. And it wasn’t my fault the case burst open,’ protested Novello.

  ‘Fault doesn’t come into it. Cop on the spot gets the glory and the crap. All we’ve got is a couple of guys impersonating police officers. No threats, no holding against your will, no direct link with either Linford. I’m very doubtful we’ll have enough to persuade the beak to turn down Belchamber when he requests a review of the remand in custody order. So we’ll have Liam out and about, all down to you, Novello. Take heed. You’ve been backed up once. Don’t expect it again.’

  With the blank expression which conceals high dudgeon, Novello left.

  ‘Was I too hard, Wieldy?’

  ‘On Linford and Belchamber? Not enough. On Novello? Just about right.’

  ‘Thanks. So, this informant of yours came up trumps. Looks like you’ve got yourself a winner there. Better sign him up official, quick as you can.’

  ‘Not interested,’ said Wield.

  ‘Who? Him or you?’

  ‘Him, of course,’ said Wield, meeting Pascoe’s eyes straight on.

  ‘Fine. But be careful.’

  It was conventional CID wisdom that there was no such thing as a free tip-off.

  ‘Yeah. So we’ll be taking this Praesidium thing a bit more seriously now?’

  ‘I expect so. Let’s go and see the Mighty Kong.’

  ‘OK. But, Pete …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’d like to keep in the background on this one. I mean, sitting in on the interview with Linford’s one thing, but I don’t think I should be in the front line if we set up an op on the Praesidium tip.’

  ‘You think it might help someone make a connection between your informant and us if it looks like you’re calling the shots here?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘OK. No problem. You’ll miss out on the glory though. Could tell against you when you’re on the short-list for Commissioner.’

  ‘It’s a risk I’ll just have to take,’ said Wield.

  In the criminal’s Advent calendar, each window opens on a new opportunity.

  Huge truckloads of consumer desirables crowd the road en route for city centres. Shop shelves groan with goodies. The malls are packed with shoppers whose purses are packed with cash. The tills ring merrily all day and much of the night and large sums of money have to be transferred with forecastable regularity to the banks. The average house soon has several hundred pounds’ worth of easily portable presents ‘hidden’ in the garage or the cupboard under the stairs. In the non-average house, their value might run into thousands. The party season starts, at home and in the workplace. The provident smuggler is ready to supply the huge appetite for cheap booze and fags, while the happy toper is morally susceptible to a whole range of no-questions-asked deals and physically susceptible to anyone who fancies his wallet.

  To an ambitious policeman, keen to pack his CV with collars felt and cases solved. Advent windows also open upon golden opportunity. Here is the devil’s plenty. Here is the year’s late harvest. The art is to recognize what’s ripe for reaping and what’s going to prove indigestible, and with resources stretched to the limit, there is little time for careful consideration. So Pascoe found he had all the encouragement in the world to pursue his resolve to put Franny Roote out of his mind and get on with the job of making sure the better part of Mid-Yorkshire had a happy and crime-free Christmas.

  But God’s a merry fellow who once He has set a jest in train doesn’t care to see its object drift off the pre-ordained path.

  After the accuracy of Wield’s information in the Linford case, it had been decided to take the Praesidium tip seriously. This didn’t mean they could offer blanket coverage, but everyone agreed with the sergeant’s assessment that the small firms wages delivery was the most likely target, so that’s what they focused on. When told of Wield’s desire to keep in the background to protect his snout, Dalziel had taken a deep breath, raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips, giving the effect of a monkfish that had just swallowed an electric eel, but he hadn’t argued, and it was Pascoe who found himself put in charge.

  ‘Thanks, Pete,’ Wield said. ‘Not that it should cause you much bother. My estimate is they’ll hit it early while it’s still carrying most of the cash and you’ll have the rest of the day to do the paperwork and still be home in time for a late tea.’

  Of course it hadn’t worked out like that.

  The DCI and his team had crawled along the narrow country roads after the van all morning, their hearts sinking with each delivery, for they knew that as the money went down, so did their chances of getting a result. A less conscientious officer might have called things off with a couple of calls still remaining. The villains would not only have to be unambitious, they’d need to be downright stupid to risk hitting the van with a prospective share-out of only a few hundred pounds. But Pascoe had stuck it out to the bitter end. Only when the last drop had been made on the northernmost boundary of his patch did Pascoe say to his dispirited men, ‘Right, that does it. Let’s go home.’

  Half a day wasted with no result. These things happened, policemen got used to them, but such philosophy did not dilute his intention of being seriously sarcastic with Wield.

  He saw him on the phone as he entered the CID room. The sergeant made a summoning gesture, then said into the phone, ‘He’s just come in.’

  ‘Who?’ mouthed Pascoe as he approached.

  ‘Rose,’ mouthed Wield in return, giving Pascoe a moment of fright as he wondered what crisis had got his young daughter ringing him at work. Then Wield, who missed little, saw the reaction and expanded, ‘DI Rose.’

  This, though a relief, meant nothing, till he took the phone and said, ‘Pascoe.’

  ‘Hi there. Stanley Rose.’

  ‘Stanley … ? Stan! Hello. And DI! When did this happen? Many congratulations.’

  The last time he’d talked to Rose, the man had been a DS in South Yorkshire and the occasion had been the case which brought Franny Roote back into his life.

  Looking at people who might think threatening Ellie was a good way to pay old scores, he’d liaised with Rose when he discovered Roote was living in Sheffield. It had all been done by the book, but when Pascoe had turned up to interview Roote, he’d found him lying in his bath with his wrists cut. In fact, the cuts were not very deep and he was more likely to have died from hypothermia than blood loss, but naturally rumours of undue pressure had circulated and for a while both Rose and Pascoe looked susceptible to charges of harassment. But Roote was (in Pascoe’s eyes) far too subtle a serpent to risk all on a single strike. So he had made no complaint, but his silence was, (to Pascoe’s ears) the silence of the snake lurking in the long grass.

 
; So, no official action or come-back. But in the ledgers of CID, to go on to someone else’s patch and cause them embarrassment left you with a debt to pay, and Pascoe guessed it was being called in now.

  ‘Beginning of the month,’ said Rose. ‘They must have been wondering what to give me for Christmas and I’d been dropping hints all year.’

  ‘I’m delighted. Long overdue,’ said Pascoe. ‘Remind me to buy you a drink next time we meet. So what can I do for you, Stan?’

  On the surface it was a simple request for liaison and co-operation. Rose had got a whisper from a snout of a job that was being planned in the New Year. The information was vague. The forward planning suggested it was big, as did the fact that it involved the recruitment of a top driving and muscle team – which was how the snout had got the whisper. And though the organizational nerve centre was in South, word was that the job itself could be over the Mid-Yorkshire border.

  ‘Sorry it’s all so waffly,’ concluded Rose. ‘But it occurred to me that you might spot a few straws in the wind your side, and they might not seem worth much by themselves, but together … well, maybe we could make a brick.’

  So, there it was, a more or less token request, a formality which if not quite empty would in the vast majority of cases prove lamentably unproductive.

  But Pascoe, because he owed Rose and because he could recall those early days after he had taken that large step from sergeant to DI, read the sub-text.

  Rose wanted to make a good early impression. He’d been delighted when his snout was the first with this sniff. Probably he’d made rather more of it than it merited at that stage and when, after a couple of weeks, nothing more had been forthcoming, he’d begun to feel rather foolish. Certainly his colleagues in the rough and ready ethos of the CID wouldn’t be backward in asking him how the great crime of the new century was coming on! Perhaps he’d been provoked into once more overselling what remained an insubstantial maybe. So he looked around for help. Who owed him? DCI Peter Pascoe, one of the famous Andy Dalziel’s brightest and best, who happened to work on the patch mentioned as a putative location for the putative job, that was who!

  So it was worth a punt calling in that debt which, furthermore, would be understood to include the major share of credit should anything ever come of this business.

  Pascoe asked questions, made notes and encouraging noises.

  ‘OK,’ he said finally. ‘I’ll pull out all the stops, Stan, believe me.’

  ‘I’m grateful,’ said Rose. ‘This is really good of you.’

  ‘Self-interest,’ laughed Pascoe. ‘If we don’t help each other, we’ll be a long time waiting for any other bugger. You see a Samaritan coming towards you these days, it’s probably because he fancies putting the boot in.’

  These were Dalziel’s views rather than his own; indeed it was possibly the Fat Man’s very phraseology. But he felt few qualms about voicing them. Just as Wield had kept his gayness under wraps in order to survive in his chosen profession, so Pascoe had recognized early on that educational achievement and liberal humanism were not exactly episematic qualities in the still very traditional police force. A common soldier may have a field marshal’s baton hidden in his knapsack, but he was never going to get the chance to wield it if he didn’t learn the language of the barrack room.

  ‘You’re right there,’ said Rose. ‘Things don’t go away either. I was just telling your Sergeant Wield, that student he was asking about a while back in connection with a possible suicide …’

  ‘Sorry?’ said Pascoe. ‘I don’t recall …’

  But of course he did. Roote’s tutor at Sheffield University, Sam Johnson, had (according to rumour) made his move to Mid-Yorkshire as a result of his reaction to the sudden death of Jake Frobisher, a student he’d put under pressure to bring his work up to date or be sent down. When Johnson himself died in suspicious circumstances, Pascoe had used the possibility that he’d committed suicide to instruct Wield to check up on Frobisher’s death, allegedly with a view to providing the coroner with a full picture of the lecturer’s state of mind. But he knew, and Wield had guessed, that his real hope had been to find some link, however remote, between Franny Roote and both tragedies.

  ‘Jake Frobisher. Some link with that lecturer who was one of your Wordman victims.’

  ‘Of course. Yes, I remember. Turned out he was popping pills to keep himself awake to meet some work deadline, wasn’t that it?’

  ‘That’s right. Accidental death, clear cut. Only complication was, when his gear was sent to his family, his sister started asking questions about some expensive watch she said was missing, implication being that one of our lot had nicked it. Well, it all got sorted, no evidence, no case, his mum didn’t want a fuss, in fact she didn’t even recollect the watch in question. End of story, right?’

  ‘Should be,’ said Pascoe neutrally, letting his gaze drift towards Wield, who was peering into a screen as if he saw his future there. ‘But I’m not going to bet on it.’

  ‘Wise man,’ said Rose. ‘Sophie, that’s the sister, started here as a student in September, and lo and behold, end of last term she got pulled in with a bunch of other kids all high as kites on speed. Must run in the family, eh? We found a great stash of the stuff in her room, which incidentally is in the same house her brother died in – how’s that for morbid? Anyway, the little cow, instead of putting her hand up, starts claiming it was planted there so we could get our own back for her daring to accuse us of nicking her brother’s watch! Case came up yesterday. The bloody magistrate lets her ramble on through the whole sad story, wipes a tear away from his eye, glowers at me on the witness bench, and gives her a conditional discharge! I told her afterwards she was lucky and she’d better be careful or she’ll end up like her brother. Having my watch nicked, you mean? she says, and gives me the finger, then takes off with her mates, laughing. It’s a great job we’ve got, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pascoe thoughtfully. ‘Yes, I believe it is. I’ll be in touch, Stan.’

  He put down the phone and stared at Wield until the sergeant’s head turned, as if compelled by the force of Pascoe’s gaze.

  The DCI jerked his head in summons and went through into his office.

  The sergeant followed, closing the door behind him.

  Succinctly, Pascoe filled him in on the day’s debacle.

  ‘So thanks a lot for that, Wieldy,’ he concluded. ‘Nothing I like better than a scenic tour of the county in mid-winter instead of wasting my time doing useful things.’

  ‘Pete, I’m sorry. I’ll talk to my informant and see …’

  ‘Yeah yeah,’ said Pascoe impatiently. The failed job had dropped a long way down his priority list of things to be pissed off with Wield about. ‘Forget it. But there’s something else. Remember when Sam Johnson died, I asked you to check out that student death in Sheffield, boy called Frobisher, the one people seemed to think had upset Johnson so much he made the move here to MYU?’

  ‘I remember,’ said Wield.

  ‘And you told me it was all done and dusted, accidental overdose, no loose ends.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What about this missing watch? I don’t recollect you mentioning that in your report. That not a loose end?’

  ‘Didn’t look like one to me,’ said Wield. ‘In fact it looked like it was probably nowt at all, not worth mentioning, just a young lass being silly.’

  ‘Even young lasses get over being silly,’ said Pascoe. ‘Not this one though, eh?’

  He hadn’t wanted to sound confrontational, but the sheer unreadability of the sergeant’s face was a provocation to provocation. For the first time he understood how it must feel to be sitting opposite Wield in the interrogation room.

  The reply came in the quiet reasonable voice of a patient father explaining life to a recalcitrant son.

  ‘If you remember, the reason you gave for being interested in Frobisher was it might be relevant to Johnson’s state of mind if it turned out he’d t
opped himself. By the time I got the details of Frobisher’s accidental overdose, we knew that Johnson had been murdered by the Wordman, so there was no way for the lad’s death to be relevant, not even if it had had more loose ends than you’d find at a monk’s wedding.’

  The tone remained constant throughout, but the concluding Dalzielesque image sent a message of strong feeling which Pascoe gleefully registered as a minor victory, of which he was almost simultaneously ashamed. Wield had been then, and was now, trying to save him from what he and probably everyone else regarded as a dangerous obsession.

  But they were wrong, Pascoe assured himself. Not that he was absolutely, bet-the-deeds-of-the-ranch certain he was right. But obsessions were irrational and as he wasn’t going to do anything that couldn’t be tested by reason, this was no obsession. As for danger, how could this particular pursuit of truth be more dangerous than any other?

  The only real danger he would admit was that of falling out with those he loved most.

  He said gently, ‘Sorry, Wieldy. I’m being a plonker, but everyone’s entitled this time of year. Rose tell you what he was after? No? Ah, well, it’s me he feels owes him.’

  He quickly ran through Rose’s request for help.

  ‘Not much,’ said Wield.

  ‘Not much is overstating it. Still, he’s a good cop, so let’s pull out the stops. Any sniff of anything big going down on our patch, I want to know. Pass the word.’

  ‘Even to Andy? He’ll not be chuffed at you paying off old debts on company time.’

  ‘He’s going to be even less chuffed if something big did happen and South were sitting there smugly saying, “Well, we did warn you!”’

  Wield gave a small nod which might have meant anything from he was totally convinced to he was totally unpersuaded, but Pascoe watched him go, certain that his instructions would be carried out to the full.