Death's Jest-Book

by Reginald Hill

  He took off his overcoat, hung it up, then sat at his desk and on a piece of paper wrote Sophie Frobisher. Then he added a question mark.

  What the question was he wasn’t certain, nor indeed whether he’d ever ask it.

  One thing was certain, thank God, and that was that he needn’t make any decision about it till next month when the new university term began.

  Perhaps by then Roote would have faded to distant irritation. Perhaps the last letter in which he said goodbye to England would prove to be a farewell letter in every sense.

  And perhaps Christmas would be cancelled this year!

  Pascoe laughed.

  Dalziel said, ‘Glad to see you’re in such a good mood.’

  Shit! Is there a secret passage he uses to get into my room? wondered Pascoe.

  ‘I was just coming to see you, sir. Dud tip, I’m afraid, complete waste of time …’

  ‘Half right,’ said the Fat Man. ‘About the waste of time, but not the tip.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I’ve just had an angry call from Berry at Praesidium. Says he thought we were taking care of his wages van today.’

  ‘Yes, sir, and we did until it made its last drop … Shit, you’re not saying … ?’

  He was.

  The Praesidium security men, after a day spent in the expectation of imminent attack, had felt they deserved a soothing cup of tea on the way back, to which end they had pulled into the lorry park of a roadside cafe on the bypass just north of town. As they got out of the van, they were jumped on by a bunch of masked men armed with baseball bats and at least one sawn-off shotgun. Surprised in every sense, they put up no resistance and were left unharmed, locked in a white transit van, tucked away in a remote corner of the lorry park where they might have remained a lot longer if Morris Berry, the Praesidium boss, hadn’t noticed his van suddenly vanish from the screen. He’d sent someone to investigate at the last known location and they’d heard noises from the transit. By the time Pascoe arrived on the scene, he found the security men enjoying their now even more necessary soothing cup of tea and sufficiently recovered to be much amused at the image of the thieves’ gobsmacked expressions when they found they’d got a vanload of nothing.

  Pascoe didn’t share their amusement. This might be a cock-up for the crooks, but he knew that it was going to register as a cock-up for the cops also. When the story was told in the canteen and the papers, the joke was going to be on him. And in the annual list of crime statistics, this day’s work would show as a security van hijacked despite a tip-off and an expensive escort operation.

  Suddenly Franny Roote was relegated to the very bottom of his piled-up troubles and when at last he returned to his office, he swept the piece of paper bearing Sophie Frobisher’s name into his waste bin without even reading it.

  7

  The Temptation

  Letter 5. Received Mon Dec 24th. P.P

  Fichtenburg-am-Blutensee

  Aargau

  Monday Dec 17th (Midnight!)

  Dear Mr Pascoe,

  My mind’s in a turmoil so here I am writing to you once more. Let me skip over my nightmare journey here. Suffice it to say that my efforts at economy were rewarded by two train breakdowns and I ended up reaching Manchester Airport only five minutes before my departure time, and I still had to collect my ticket! No way could I do that and run the gauntlet of baggage and security checks in less than half an hour, I thought. Oh dear. Linda, who likes her arrangements to stay arranged, would not be pleased.

  But I needn’t have worried. Even Linda’s organization is like a dry reed beneath the brutal tread of the airlines.

  My flight was delayed … And delayed … And delayed …

  Finally we took to the air. Clearly they hadn’t let the delay interfere with their catering schedule. What arrived on my plate made the Chapel Syke cuisine look attractive. And I was seated next to a fat talkative estate agent with a bad cold.

  Nor did my problems end when we landed in Zurich.

  My case was the very last to appear on the carousel, a neanderthal customs officer could not be persuaded that I wasn’t a Colombian drugs baron, and when I finally emerged into the public concourse, nowhere amongst all the attendant banners bearing strange devices did I see one with my name on it.

  Some time later, I almost literally stumbled across my taxi driver snoozing in the coffee bar. Only the fact that he’d placed the sheet of paper bearing an approximation of my name (Herr Rutt) over his eyes to keep the light out gave me the necessary clue. He seemed to resent being woken and set off into what looked to me like an incipient blizzard without more than a guttural grunt in my direction, but after the estate agent’s mucous maunderings, I was not too sorry about this.

  (I seem to recollect saying I was going to skip over all this, but it’s too deeply impressed on my psyche to dismiss so easily! Sorry.)

  Linda had assured me that Fichtenburg was within easy driving distance of Zurich but not, I felt, in this weather or with this driver. It seemed to take forever. In the end my fatigue overcame my fear and I dozed off. When I was awoken by the car coming to a halt with a suddenness which threw me forward quite violently, my first thought was we’d had an accident. Instead, as I recovered my senses, I realized the driver had placed my luggage outside the taxi and was standing holding the passenger door open, not, I hasten to add, in any spirit of flunkeydom but merely to expedite my exit.

  Still half asleep, I staggered out, he slammed the door, climbed into the driver’s seat, slammed that door also and roared off into the night without so much as a Leb’wohl!

  It was snowing gently. I strained my eyes to pierce the curtain of flakes. All I could make out in vague outline was rank upon rank of tall fir trees.

  The bastard had dropped me off in the middle of a forest!

  Alarmed, I span round. And with infinite relief my eyes, now adjusting to the darkness, this time made out the solid-faced and sharp angles of a building. I let my gaze run to the left and couldn’t find its limit. To the right the same. I leaned backwards to look up and through the floating veils of snowflakes I glimpsed turrets and battlements.

  Fichtenburg!

  ‘Oh my God!’ I said out loud.

  My school German has almost vanished, but I seemed to recollect that Fichten meant pine trees and I was certain Burg meant castle.

  I had assumed this was just some fancy name Linda’s chums had given to their holiday chalet. I should have known better.

  Fichtenburg was exactly what its name stated – a castle among the pines!

  And, what was worse, apparently a deserted castle.

  Feeling like Childe Roland when he finally made it to the Dark Tower and started to wonder if it had been such a great idea after all, I advanced towards what looked like the building’s main door. Constructed of heavy oak planks bound together with massy plates of iron, it had clearly been designed by a man who didn’t care to have his relatives dropping by unexpectedly.

  A bolus of metal attached to a chain hung from one of the granite doorposts. I seized it and pulled. After a while, somewhere so distant it might have been in another world, a bell rang.

  In a Gothic novel, or a Goon Show script, the next sound effect would have been a slow shuffle of dreadful feet growing louder as they approached.

  I was almost glad when my straining ears detected nothing.

  Almost, for now the possibility that there’d been some misunderstanding and I wasn’t expected and there was no one here to greet me began to loom frighteningly large. My knowledge of Switzerland derives largely from early nineteenth-century literature in which it figures as a confusion of towering mountains, huge glaciers and snowy wastes. Since the airport, I had seen little to correct that impression. Even when I turned my back on imagination and applied to common sense, the answer I got was scarcely more reassuring. People who built castles rarely did so within striking distance of neighbours to whom they could apply for the loan of a barrel of boiling oil if ev
er they ran short.

  The alternative to trudging off into the snow in search of help was to break in.

  Now with your average suburban house, this (my acquaintance at the Syke assured me) normally involves little more than putting your elbow through a pane of glass and unlatching a downstairs window.

  Your average castle, however, is a horse of a different colour. For a start, and indeed for a finish, the only windows I could see through the drifting snow were well out of my elbow’s reach and protected by bars.

  It would be easier to break into Chapel Syke!

  My one remaining hope was that in a building of this size, there might be a servants’ quarter round the back, full of life and warmth, with a TV set playing so loud that the doorbell went unnoticed. Such hopeful fantasies crowd thick upon a desperate man. In any case, any movement seemed preferable to standing here and freezing to death.

  I set off along the front and then down the side of the castle, following the twists and turns of its coigns and embrasures, till I had no idea whether I was still at the front or the side or the back! The snow had stopped falling and slowly the cloud was beginning to break up, allowing occasional glimpses of a nearly full moon. But its beams brought little comfort, showing the solid unwelcoming stonework broken only by barred and darkened windows.

  In despair, I turned my back on the castle and strained my eyes outwards into the crowding forest.

  Was it rescue? Was it an evil delusion? For a second, I was sure I saw a distant light! Then it was gone. But welcome or will-o’-the-wisp, it was all I had and I rushed in the direction I’d seen it, even though it meant leaving the guiding wall of the castle behind me and heading into the forest, all the while slipping and floundering in deep folds of snow, and shouting, ‘Help! Help!’ then, recalling where I was, ‘Zur Hilfe! Zur Hilfe!’

  Finally and inevitably, I fell flat on my face in a drift. When I pushed myself upright and looked around me (the breaking of the clouds giving me the full benefit of the moon at that moment), I saw that I was in a clearing in which stood a building. For a second I had hope that this might be the source of the light I had seen, but as I moved nearer, I saw that it was a ruined chapel. Strange how powerful the human imagination can be, isn’t it? You’d think that sheer physical fright at the prospect of dying from exposure in this cold and inhospitable terrain would have left little room for any more metaphysical fear. But as I examined that place, all my awareness of mere bodily discomfort and peril was subsumed in superstitious terror! It wasn’t just the post-Romantic knee-jerk reaction to a Gothic ruin in a wild and remote setting. No, what really broke me out in a sweat despite the temperature was what I saw painted on the chapel’s internal walls. The plaster had fallen completely in many areas and where it remained it was cracked and flaking, but I had no doubt what it was the artist had depicted there.

  It was the Dance of Death.

  A grisly enough subject, you are probably thinking, and not one a chap in young Fran’s situation would wish to dwell upon, but why should it affect him so strongly?

  The answer is this. In Beddoes’ Jest-Book, that most terrifying scene in which the Duke, hoping to raise his wife from the dead instead resurrects the murdered Wolfram, is set before a ruined Gothic church on whose cloister wall is depicted the Dance of Death. My quest for Beddoes had brought me to this place, and now he seemed to be saying in that typically sardonic way of his, If you want to see me plain, this way lies your route!

  I know it sounds silly. After all, unlike the Duke, I have no murdered rival whose resurrection I need fear, have I?

  And in any case my God-given reason tells me, as it told Beddoes, there are no ghosts to raise, Out of death lead no ways. Oh, that there were! How I would labour to raise dear Sam. But what horror if instead of Sam I found myself confronted by … some less welcome revenu!

  What nonsense this seems in broad daylight.

  But there in the dark forest close by the ruined chapel, I have to admit, Mr Pascoe, that both innocence and rationality failed me and I closed my eyes and said a prayer.

  When I opened them, I saw that some god had heard me, but whether in the Christian heaven or some darker colder Nordic place, I wasn’t yet ready to say. The light I had seen before showed itself again, much nearer this time, and approaching! I could see it intermittently among the trees, moving with a serpentine motion, now visible, now masked by the long straight trunks of the pines, a circle of brightness growing larger as it neared, putting me in mind of that shining sphere which marks the arrival of Glenda in The Wizard of Oz.

  It was a happy comparison, for as – guided I presume by my almost hysterical shouting – it emerged from the forest into the clearing, I saw that it was the headlight on one of those snow buggies, and though the goggled and furred creature that bestrode it was sexless to the eye, I knew she was my Good Fairy when she spoke and said, ‘Herr Roote? Willkommen in Fichtenburg.’

  This, God bless her, was Frau Buff, the housekeeper, a woman it emerged of few words, and all of those German, but one whose good sense and ratiocinative powers make you understand why the Swiss lead the world in the manufacture of timepieces.

  Mind you, it did occur to me as she indicated I should climb up behind her (she’d already found my luggage at the castle entrance) and we set off along a winding track through the dark pine trees, to wonder if she might not be a good fairy after all but the Snow Queen, and I, like little Kay, was being abducted to her ice palace at the North Pole.

  No ice palace this, I’m glad to say, but a warm and comfortable and roomy cabin with all mod cons! This was the chalet Linda had referred to, belonging to the castle and used, I presume, to accommodate visitors like myself who for whatever reason were best kept separate from the beau monde in the big house. Frau Buff had been waiting for me here. When I didn’t arrive at the expected time she’d made enquiries and discovered my plane was delayed. When I still hadn’t appeared by the revised expected time, she contacted the taxi company and was told their driver had reported dropping his passenger at the castle some minutes earlier. She, deducing that the Dummkopf had dumped me at the wrong place, had come looking for me.

  All this I pieced together with my slowly resurrecting schoolboy German and her sparing replies.

  She was, God bless her, much more interested in feeding me than conversing with me. Fortunately, what she’d been preparing was one of those all-inclusive casserole dishes which, unlike airline food, only gets better the longer it stays in the oven.

  Once she saw me tucking in, she indicated apologetically that she was leaving me to my own devices. I tried to say that it was me who should apologize for taking up so much of her free time, and I must have got my message across because as she furred herself up preparatory to stepping out into the cold night, she seemed to my slowly adjusting ear to say it wasn’t her own pleasure which was taking her away but getting rooms ready in the castle for Frau Lupin.

  Thinking I’d got her wrong, I said in my fractured German, ‘But Frau Lupin isn’t coming till next week.’

  And as she went out of the door she tossed something over her shoulder which froze my forkload of delicious stew in mid-air.

  ‘Nicht Frau sondern Fräulein Lupin. Ihre Tochter.’

  Not Mrs but Miss Lupin. Her daughter.

  Perhaps I had misheard!

  I broke the spell and rushed out after Frau Buff. She was already on the snow buggy.

  ‘Fräulein Lupin,’ I cried to her. ‘Wann kommt sie?’

  ‘Morgen,’ she called. ‘Um Schnittschuhlaufen!’

  That baffled me. What in the name of hell was Schnittschuhlaufen?

  ‘Was ist das?’ I shouted as she started up and began to move away.

  She pointed away from the chalet with her right hand.

  ‘Auf dem See!’ she tossed over her shoulder. Then she was gone.

  On the sea? I stood there baffled. Then for the first time I noticed the snow had stopped, the clouds were breaking up and going about
their business, leaving the sky to a scatter of diamond dust such as those of us in city pent never see, and a slice of moon hung there, bright enough to light up before me a level meadow almost perfectly round.

  Except it wasn’t a meadow! It was a small lake. Idiot! This must be the Blutensee which Fichtenburg was am, frozen over and besprinkled with snow. (See only means ‘sea’ when it’s feminine; I once got my knuckles rapped for forgetting that!)

  Skating. Schnittschuhlaufen was skating. Emerald was coming here in the morning for the skating!

  Now my ever-optimistic mind was racing. Was this coincidence, I asked myself, or was it planned? Could Emerald have learned her mother’s plans for me and decided to cut in? Or was I being absurdly arrogant to even imagine that it might be so?

  These things distracted me so much that on my return inside I hardly noticed the delights of Frau Buff’s casserole or the smoothness of the bottle of excellent burgundy I had chosen from a well-stocked wine rack. And I have even postponed the plateful of scrumptious-looking Sahnetorte the good woman has left for pudding so that once more I can write to you, my friend, my spiritual father, to clear my mind and remind me that in the midst of no matter what fiery turbulence of spirit I can always find a small circle of coolness and calm, like the lake outside my window, to bring me peace.

  Well, it’s worked. Now I feel ready to face the future – and to enjoy my Sahnetorte.

  Thank you.

  Franny

  In England on the whole even criminals celebrate Christmas, but rest for the wicked does not automatically mean rest for the law’s guardians also. The crimes of greed which are proper to Advent may fade to nothing on the day itself, but they are more than compensated for by those crimes of new rage and old resentment which spring naturally from the close confinement, with large supplies of alcohol, of blood relations who have had the good sense to keep far apart for the previous three hundred and sixty-four days.