Death's Jest-Book

by Reginald Hill

  Clearly the version of the incident which Penn would have been urging on his tabloid accomplice was that, having been led to the very brink of passion’s pool by this prick-teasing tart then told he couldn’t drink, Dee had reacted like any normal stallion and kicked out in fury and frustration. Enter jealous boyfriend, and battle was joined. As for Dee’s knife, well, he was going to make toast, wasn’t he? And when the big boys arrived on the scene and realized that one of their own had been in a fight and a member of the public lay dead, they’d set about rearranging the facts to make it look like a good killing.

  Dalziel was uncomfortably aware that the tidying up he’d done both of the scene and of both Rye’s and Hat’s account of events would provide some sustenance for Penn’s version. His motive had been to protect his young officer from accusation of undue force and the girl from any hint that she was no better than she ought to be, and everything that he’d said or done had been underpinned by his utter conviction that Dick Dee was the Wordman. But he didn’t think the tabloids would be much interested in making fine distinctions between a tidy-up and a cover-up.

  So, apart from Hat and Rye, what would an investigative journalist go after?

  The transcript of the inquest proceedings was in the public domain, so they’d already have that. But there were other things the bastard would be eager to get his hands on. Like police and medical records, particularly the PM on Dee. And CPS records. Dan Trimble, ever a belts-and-braces man, had wanted a CPS opinion to back up the assumption of Dee’s guilt. What the CPS had replied was that their business was with realities not hypotheses, but all things being equal maybe there was just a chance that a prosecution could possibly have been successful … perhaps …

  Par for the course, Dalziel had growled. And now he groaned at what the Sunday Smear or the Daily Dirt might make of all those hesitations and qualifications.

  Frankly, but, it didn’t matter what they made of it. It was, from their point of view, such a very good case, weird, bloody, baffling, terrifying and at times grimly comic, that even though the dust had hardly settled, already it must feel ripe for a re-run, and if some smart hack could make a story out of Penn’s half-baked allegations, let’s go for it!

  So, how to proceed? Cover everything was the textbook policy. He’d worked out the road he thought this still-hypothetical hack would take, so warn those who needed warned, and send one of your own down the same road. Preferably a new face, fresh eyes.

  He picked up his phone, pressed a number, said, ‘Ivor there? Send her in, will you?’

  Detective Constable Shirley Novello had been hors de combat during most of the Wordman investigation. When she returned, Bowler had been on convalescent leave. Now he was back too, it was evident to the Fat Man’s sharp eye that a healthy rivalry for top DC status existed between them. Meaning, given the right direction, both would go the extra mile in the hope of impressing their lord and master.

  Yes, Ivor would do very nicely as a key figure in defence.

  But this didn’t affect Dalziel’s gut feeling that this wasn’t one to counter with subtle defensive tactics, this was one to hit in mid-flight with a hospital tackle!

  Such was the conclusion he reached after long dark brooding, and now the light of action came back to his eyes, and he rose like that famous bull from the sea summoned by Theseus to destroy his own son as he fled from the scene of his monstrous crime.

  Of course, Hippolytus was completely innocent, but Theseus didn’t know that, and it made not a jot of difference to the bull.

  Peter Pascoe had pondered long and hard Ellie’s well-reasoned assertion that the best way to deal with his Franny Roote ‘obsession’ was to test it to destruction.

  His own conclusion, reached with impeccable male logic, was that when the woman whose body you worship and whose wisdom you respect above all others takes time off to analyse your problems, the only thing to do is prove she is completely wrong.

  Roote, he told himself, was not a problem either to resist or resolve. He was a minor irritation which if ignored would eventually go away.

  On the twenty-sixth he returned to work, refreshed and ready to make huge inroads into the paper mountain that towers on the desk of most modern CID officers. He did well and didn’t think about Roote more than three times. Or four if you counted the time the phone rang and for nearly a minute he didn’t pick it up, convinced it was Franny ringing from Switzerland, but it turned out to be DI Rose from South Yorkshire just wondering if maybe he’d got a whisper about the Big Job which he was sure was on, not because he’d heard anything more but because his snout had mysteriously gone missing …

  Of course while Rose wasn’t Roote, the connection was there (making a fifth time) and had to be broken again after he’d assured the DI that Edgar Wield was burrowing away on his behalf even as they spoke.

  But he went home pretty pleased with himself on the whole and he woke up the following morning convinced he’d heard the last from Roote and certain that today would see him well on the way to that most desirable of states – a clear desk for a New Year.

  Then in the hall he saw the envelope with the familiar handwriting and a Swiss stamp.

  From the car on the way to work he rang Dr Pottle to make an appointment and was told he could come instantly as the doctor’s first two patients that morning had cancelled as a result of a Yuletide suicide pact.

  Pottle, Head of the Central Hospital Psychiatric Unit, part-time lecturer in Mid-Yorkshire University and adviser to the police on matters where his discipline and theirs overlapped, was Pascoe’s occasional analyst and sort of friend, meaning Pascoe liked him on the possibly irrational ground that he resembled the kind of psychiatrist you might meet in a Woody Allen film, with sad spaniel eyes and explosive hair whose luminous greyness was in fetching contrast to an Einstein moustache stained a gingery brown as a result of the endless chain of cigarettes depending from his nether lip.

  Patients who objected were told, ‘I’m here to help with your problems. If my smoking figures among them, leave now and I’ll bill you for solving one of them.’

  Pascoe showed him the letters. He didn’t have to explain about Roote. They’d talked about him before.

  Pottle read the letters as he read everything at an amazing speed which Ellie suspected was spoof and done simply to impress. But Pascoe knew she was wrong. Pottle in his consulting room was the Sibyl in her cave, a mortal conduit for the voice of a god, and it was the god’s eyes that scanned the words at a rate beyond a human’s.

  ‘Should I be worried?’ asked Pascoe.

  ‘Should you be asking me that question?’ said Pottle.

  Pascoe considered, rephrased.

  ‘Is there anything in the letters which you would interpret as concealing, or containing, or implying a threat to me or to mine?’

  ‘If you are threatened by mockery, certainly. If you are threatened by dependency, perhaps. If you are threatened by sheer incomprehension, I can’t help you, as I do not have sufficient data fully to understand the letters myself.’

  ‘Yes, but should I be worried?’ repeated Pascoe impatiently.

  ‘There you go again. Do you want me to try to understand you, Peter, or do you want me to try to understand Mr Roote?’

  Another pause for reflection then Pascoe said, ‘Roote. Me I can cope with. Him I’ve no idea about, except that I don’t think he’s up to any good.’

  ‘So what do you think he’s up to?’

  ‘I think he’s enjoying trying to screw up my mind. I think he’s probing all the time for weak points. And I think he’s getting off on telling me about illegalities he’s involved with in such a way I can’t do anything about them.’

  ‘Examples?’

  ‘The assault in the shower at Chapel Syke, he admits to that. And then at St Godric’s, I think he set fire to the Dean’s Lodging, and I’ve got a strong suspicion he assaulted Dean Albacore and left him to die.’

  ‘Good lord. When I read about it, I saw no r
eference to the possibility of foul play.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t. That’s my point.’

  ‘Sorry, I missed that. Evidence?’

  ‘Nothing outside the letters, except a bit of circumstantial with regard to Albacore.’

  He spelt out his theory.

  ‘And is this suspicion shared by your colleagues in Cambridge?’

  ‘They’re thinking about it,’ said Pascoe evasively.

  ‘I see. This probing for weak points – what would they be exactly?’

  ‘He’s telling me that maybe I took the wrong path becoming a cop instead of heading into academe. He’s showing me that time in jail can move you on a lot further than time in the police force. He keeps drumming on about me being a sedate old married man whose willpower he admires and whose advice he desires while all the time he’s trying to make me envious of him being fancy-free, with girls falling into his bed more or less ad lib.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Pottle. ‘And does he make you envious?’

  ‘Of course not. Most of the stuff he writes is fantasy anyway.’

  ‘Except the bits you want to believe where he seems to be admitting to some crime?’

  ‘No, I mean yes … Look, I thought you were going to concentrate on Roote not me?’

  ‘It’s proving hard to separate the two. Anything else you want to tell me, Peter?’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Anything about this vision of you he claims to have had, for instance?’

  Pascoe blinked then said quietly, ‘Why do you ask that?’

  ‘Because the letters are full of interesting things, but not many truly odd ones. The vision, however, was very odd indeed. And the omission of it from your catalogue of complaints strikes me as odd too. I mean, you clearly want to think that Roote is mentally unhinged, yet you make no reference to the only piece of prima-facie evidence that he may be two groats short of a guinea. So?’

  Another blink, then Pascoe said helplessly, ‘I saw him too.’

  He told the tale. Pottle said, ‘Interesting. Let’s turn to his sessions with Ms Haseen.’

  ‘Hey, what happened to my visionary moment?’

  ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereon one must keep silent. You’ve read her book?’

  ‘Yes; well, the relevant bits.’

  ‘The relevant bits,’ echoed Pottle. ‘Indeed. Interesting how our friend gave you the precise reference to save you the bother of ploughing through all that clayey prose and making educated guesses. Let me see …’

  He reached to the bookcase behind him and plucked a black-jacketed volume which Pascoe recognized off a shelf. Then, without reference to the letters, he flicked to what Pascoe could see upside down was the right page and did his speed-read trick again.

  ‘Poor Amaryllis,’ he said. ‘She is pretty well the opposite of dear Goldsmith who, you recall, according to Garrick, wrote like an angel and talked like poor Poll.’

  ‘You know her,’ said Pascoe, interested.

  ‘We have met professionally. Indeed, should be doing so again next month when the Winter Symposium of the Yorkshire Psychandric Society, of which I am the current Chair, takes place in Sheffield. Amaryllis Haseen is scheduled to give a paper.’

  ‘But surely in view of what happened, she’ll be cancelling?’

  ‘I suggested so in my letter of condolence. She has replied that on the advice of her analyst she is minded to keep the date. She is a woman of great resilience.’

  ‘Evidently,’ said Pascoe. ‘So how do you rate her? I mean, if you’ve invited her to address your society, I presume you don’t think she’s a dud?’

  ‘Far from it,’ said Pottle. ‘What you’re really asking is how much notice you should take of what she says about Roote in her book. I would advise you not to disregard it. She is, as you would see if you’d read the whole book rather than just the bits Roote directed your attention to, a meticulous worker, capable of great insight and not easily fooled.’

  ‘And yet,’ said Pascoe, ‘in the question of Roote’s relationship with his father, she has had the wool pulled completely over her eyes. The man died while he was still a babe in arms. All these so-called memories are pure invention.’

  ‘Is that so? You surprise me.’

  ‘If you’d met Roote you wouldn’t be surprised,’ said Pascoe fervently. ‘He’s the great deceiver.’

  ‘Except in your case? Perhaps, Peter, you should retrain as a psychiatrist.’

  ‘Maybe I will. And maybe I’ll come along to your Symposium if I’m free.’

  ‘Be my guest,’ said Pottle. ‘Indeed it might be doubly worth your while for, by one of those coincidences which people only object to in detective novels, another of our speakers is this chap Frère Jacques that your friend Roote refers to.’

  ‘I didn’t think your members would have much interest in all that hippy-happy stuff.’

  ‘Peter, I hope you won’t be offended if I point out that from time to time you sound disturbingly like your lord and master, Mr Dalziel. Man’s relationship with death is a very proper area of study for people in my profession. Indeed you might argue that in some ways it is the only thing that we study. Frère Jacques, though far from free of religion’s tendency to poetic waffle at the expense of systematic rigour, has many interesting things to say. We are fortunate to get the chance to listen to him. Also, as he’s touring the country promoting the book, we are fortunate to get him for free and his publishers even cough up for a small amount of relaxing booze.’

  ‘Cheap and cheerful then,’ said Pascoe. ‘So when exactly is this knees-up?’

  ‘Saturday January nineteenth,’ said Pottle. ‘Your motive in attending would be … ?’

  ‘To see for myself a couple more experts whose strings Franny Roote is pulling.’

  ‘Ah. I see. The open-mind approach then. Peter, don’t rush to judgment. Read Frère Jacques’ book. He has a fine perceptive mind, not easily fooled, I’d say. And, like I said before, read Haseen’s book all the way through.’

  ‘And if I do, will I find any mention of the way he more or less blackmailed this objective professional into recommending his transfer to Butlins?’ asked Pascoe cynically.

  ‘Peter, once again you’re cherry-picking. If you distrust parts of Roote’s letters then you must distrust the whole, until you have evidence to the contrary. A common feature of the obsessive personality is a belief that everybody else has got everything wrong.’

  Pascoe’s face assumed what Ellie called his sulky look, which he himself, if pressed, might have described as the politely stoical expression of one who has heard all the arguments to the contrary but prefers to trust his own judgment.

  He glanced at his watch. He should have been at work fifty minutes ago.

  ‘So, bottom line, how do you read Roote’s motives in writing these letters?’ he asked.

  Pottle did the little piece of legerdemain which turned the glowing cinder at his lip into a whole new cigarette and said, ‘Difficult. I think he has motives which he knows, and motives which he believes he knows, and motives which he is only dimly aware of. Perhaps your best approach is to simplify matters. To this end, I would advise that you ask yourself why he wrote to you in the first place. Then ask yourself why he wrote to you in the second place. And then in the third place. And so on, till the picture is complete.’

  He clapped his hands together then threw them apart in a gesture which momentarily cleared the veil of smoke that hung before his face.

  Pascoe knew from old experience that this signalled the end of the session and for a second he felt some sympathy with Andy Dalziel’s most printable reaction to trick cyclists and their works. ‘Any other bugger made my brain hurt like that, I’d kick him in the goolies till his eyes popped out of their sockets.’

  But only for a second.

  ‘Thank you kindly, Doctor,’ he said. ‘That’s been a great help. I think.’

  ‘Good. Till next time then, when perhaps we can start looking at you.’
/>   8

  The Queen

  After its terrible start, Hat Bowler’s Christmas had really taken off.

  He had rung Rye later on Christmas Day as promised, expecting to find she’d taken to her bed once more. To his surprise and delight, she greeted him brightly and in the background he could hear music and voices.

  ‘You having a party?’ he asked.

  She laughed and said, ‘No, idiot, it’s the TV movie. It turned out Myra was on her own too, so when she said she’d better be getting back to her own flat, I asked her what she was going to do, and she said watch the movie probably, so I said … Why on earth am I going on like this? I think it’s just because I feel so much better.’

  ‘Great. You had anything to eat?’

  ‘God, you’re a real mother hen, aren’t you? Yes, I have. We each applied our special talents to preparing a Christmas meal. To wit, I opened a bottle of wine, two in fact, and Myra made cheese omelettes, really great, the best I’ve had in ages, so you needn’t worry that I’m dying because I turned down your offer of beans on toast.’

  Hat didn’t recall specifying beans on toast, but he was too glad at the improvement in Rye to protest. With Myra Rogers on one side and Mrs Gilpin on the other, Rye now had a double line of defence in the event piss-artist Penn returned to the fray.