Death's Jest-Book

by Reginald Hill

  Pascoe was used to listening to Wield’s cool, detailed analyses of situations and cases, but though the tone was as dispassionate as ever, there was some pulse running beneath the surface here that he’d rarely detected before.

  Dalziel said, ‘Another possibility. We’re sure, are we, that this kid, as well as sucking Belchamber’s plonker, isn’t pulling yours?’

  For a moment Pascoe thought the Fat Man was questioning Wield’s relationship with Lubanski, then he made the shift from the literal to the figurative.

  ‘Certain, sir,’ said Wield. ‘And after the Linford case and the Praesidium thing, he’s got the track record to back it.’

  ‘The security van thing, tell us about that again. Seems funny for old Belchy to be mixed up with such a bunch of losers.’

  ‘They may be losers, sir,’ said Pascoe. ‘But we haven’t had a sniff of them since. Even the van’s vanished off the face of the earth.’

  ‘They’d want something for their efforts, wouldn’t they?’ growled Dalziel. ‘Either it’s being gutted and the bits sold off through some dodgy dealer, or maybe they shipped the whole thing across to Ireland and it’s running around Dublin as we speak. But what’s Belchamber’s connection?’

  ‘Don’t know. Lubanski came in from the shower – Belchamber likes him clean and smelling of carbolic soap – and just caught the end of a conversation. Belchamber said, “and the Praesidium van?” and the other guy said, “we’ll hit it Friday”.’

  ‘Not a lot,’ said the Fat Man. ‘Was this other voice the same as the man in Sheffield?’

  ‘I asked. Lee couldn’t say.’

  ‘Could be the aim of the Praesidium job was to bankroll the big job,’ said Pascoe.

  ‘Failed miserably then.’

  ‘So maybe Polchard’s had to go elsewhere for the money, which might explain how Belchamber got involved.’

  ‘No, he must’ve been involved already if he were talking to someone about the van before it got hit,’ objected Dalziel. ‘Look, until we’ve got a better idea what we’re dealing with – and it could turn out to be a bag of bones after all – let’s proceed with caution. Wieldy, I’ll leave this lad in your tender loving care for the time being, but if ever I feel the need, I’ll pick the young sod up myself and shake him around till I’m sure there’s nowt else to come out. Now bugger off, the two of you. We’ve got nowt but mustard seeds here. I’m relying on you pair either to water them or piss on them pretty damn quick.’

  At the door Pascoe paused.

  ‘Sir,’ he said.

  ‘What? Unless it’s about Roote, in which case sod off, I’m busy.’

  ‘What’s Novello doing with her nose stuck in the Wordman file?’

  ‘She’s doing what she’s been told off to do, lad, and a bit more besides. I’d watch that lass. I reckon she’s after your job.’

  ‘And welcome to it most days. Shall I ask her direct then?’

  With a sigh, Dalziel explained what he was up to, most of it anyway.

  ‘So how’s she doing so far?’

  ‘She’s spoken to Pomona, put her on guard.’

  He gave Pascoe a quick summary of Novello’s account of her visit to the library.

  ‘And Penn was showing Rye bits of the “Lorelei” poem? Isn’t that as good as an admission he was the one did the break-in?’

  ‘Not so. I’d mentioned Lorelei to him and he’s sharp at putting things together, is Charley. Couldn’t resist stirring the pot a bit, but I reckon the significant thing is Charley apologizing and being what passes for conciliatory in a tyke-bred Kraut. I reckon that Christmas Day really was just down to too much sauce and he regretted it later. He wants Pomona lulled so’s his tabloid wolf can gobble up little Red Riding Hood unawares.’

  ‘I see,’ said Pascoe. ‘Sir, it is going to be all right, isn’t it?’

  Pascoe, though he hadn’t opposed them, had never been totally happy about the liberties they’d taken with the official version of events that day out at Stang Tarn.

  ‘Worried about your pension?’ laughed the Fat Man. ‘No need. If it comes to that, you can share mine.’

  The laughter still echoing in his ears, How come it’s only my pension that’s at risk? wondered Pascoe.

  Down in the canteen, Shirley Novello and Hat Bowler were looking into the future but with no thought of pensions.

  It had been Novello who proposed a chat over a cup of coffee and it hadn’t started well.

  ‘I was at the library this morning,’ said Novello. ‘Had a talk with your girl.’

  ‘What the hell for?’ said Hat fiercely.

  ‘Just to see she was all right.’

  ‘Oh yes? And what business is that of yours? Mebbe you should keep your nose out.’

  Oh shit, thought Novello. When love came in the window, reason went out the door. Time to summon the bogeyman.

  ‘It was Mr Dalziel’s idea. You want I should tell Mr Dalziel to keep his nose out? Or would you rather do it yourself?’

  For a moment Hat looked as if he might be seriously contemplating this, then reality set in and he said, ‘So what did he tell you to do?’

  Novello explained. She held nothing back. Dalziel had told her to handle things in her own way and that didn’t include risking alienation of a colleague she might have to depend on at some future juncture.

  Bowler seemed determined to be stupid.

  ‘So he thinks that Penn’s trying to get the papers interested in a scandal, only there’s no scandal to get them interested in, is there? How much time and money are they going to waste on that, do you think? No story, end of story.’

  ‘You’re not looking at this straight on, Hat,’ she said. ‘Think of it this way. We collect evidence of what we think is a crime and we send it off to the CPS and half the time they look at what we think is a water-tight case and send it back saying, “Sorry no can do, won’t stand up in court.” So, a good case to us looks like crap to them, right?’

  ‘Yeah but …’

  ‘The newspapers are to us what we are to the CPS. What looks like crap to us can look like a good case to them. They don’t have to worry about proving things in court. Hints, allegations, lots of stuff in quotes, given half a chance they can probably make us look like we’re doing more covering up than a drag queen.’

  ‘Yeah, but if no one’s done anything wrong, they can’t hurt us, can they?’

  Could he really be so naive? wondered Novello.

  ‘If they find a story to run they’ll run it hard,’ she said patiently. ‘There’ll be questions, maybe another enquiry. You’ve been through one already, one that was on your side, and you came out a hero. The papers loved you. But love dies. Another scenario, another role. You may come out clean again, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be damaged. You know how it works, nothing on the record, but at every promotion board, someone asks, wasn’t he the one … ? Same with Rye. Yes, on paper she’s good, but do you recall …’

  ‘They still need a story to run,’ he said obstinately.

  ‘OK, try this. Librarian screws boss in country cottage. Jealous lover catches them at it. There’s a fight. Lover stabs rival to death. Thirteen times.’

  ‘That’s a load of garbage!’

  ‘Not the thirteen stabs. I’ve read the PM report.’

  Hat said, ‘Listen, Novello, don’t you think I haven’t been through all this? I was on my back with that bastard on top of me. He’d stabbed me already, would have killed me if Rye hadn’t hit him with a bottle. That must’ve made him drop the knife and he started hitting me with this heavy glass dish and would probably have finished the job with that if I hadn’t got hold of the knife somehow and stabbed him with it.’

  ‘Yeah. Thirteen times. Mainly in the back, though you did manage to get him a good one under the ribs too. That would probably have been enough without the other dozen.’

  For a moment it looked as if he was going to explode in resentful anger. Instead he closed his eyes tight and knotted his fists t
ighter, then slowly forced himself to relax.

  ‘We were fighting, him for his freedom, me for my life,’ he said quietly. ‘We rolled around a bit, I suppose, but mainly he was on top of me with my arms round him, so his back was the easiest target. I don’t remember much. I was losing consciousness. All I knew was while I still had an ounce of strength left, I had to use it against him.’

  ‘And of course you were defending your girl’s honour,’ said Novello lightly. ‘Real picture-book heroics.’

  To her surprise he grinned at her mockery.

  ‘That’s how it started maybe, but not how it finished. In the end it was all about me being scared shitless. Literally, I gather. I was convinced I was going to die and I was terrified. You must know the feeling, Novello. You’ve been there.’

  Her hand went to the shoulder where she’d taken the bullet that had come close to killing her.

  ‘Not straight off,’ she said. ‘For a time I was out of it. Still breathing, still moving, but too shocked to feel much. Later though, when it looked like all of us were going to end up dead and I was too weak even to think about resistance, then I got scared.’

  ‘Shitless?’ he said.

  ‘I may have pee’d myself, but we ended up so wet there was no way of telling,’ she said, smiling at him in a sharing moment. Then the smile faded and she said in a businesslike voice, ‘OK, however you finished, you started off being a hero. In your statement you say that when you burst into the cottage, you found Rye and Dee struggling, both naked, lots of blood. And you assumed …’

  ‘I assumed nothing! I saw he was attacking her. And it wasn’t just sexual, though that was bad enough. The bastard was trying to kill her!’

  ‘Because of the knife, you mean? And because you’d worked out that all the evidence pointed to Dee being the killer known as the Wordman? If there hadn’t been a Wordman connection and you’d come across the same scene, what would you have thought?’

  ‘The same,’ he said promptly. ‘OK, different motivation. He’d wanted sex, she’d turned him down, he’d got nasty, tried to force her, and when she fought back, he lost it.’

  ‘Right,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘But even given his sole aim was to kill her, there must have been some sexual element in the attack all the same. I mean, in your hospital statement you say she was naked, right?’

  ‘Yeah. He must have torn her clothes off her, obvious.’

  ‘Fair enough. No mention of this in the inquest evidence though.’

  ‘No need. It wasn’t down as an attempted rape.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘Then there’s Rye’s injuries. It’s on record she needed treatment, but mainly for shock. Physically there was nothing but a few scratches and a little bruising. No need for this to figure in the inquest record either, nor in the enquiry report. She was attacked, she was terrified, that was enough.’

  ‘What’s your point?’ said Hat. ‘In fact, what’s the point of any of this? Like I say, I’ve been through it all before, with Mr Dalziel and with the enquiry. So why the hell do I have to sit here being interrogated by someone who knows nothing about the case and whose only claim to seniority is that she’s been a DC a few months longer than me?’

  ‘Do I have to explain it all again?’ she said wearily. ‘Mr Dalziel, and the enquiry team too, they had the same aim, to clarify the truth, but they had a bloody good idea what the truth they wanted to clarify was. Dee, the psychopathic serial killer, had been prevented from carrying out his last murder by the intervention of Bowler, the modest young hero. That is the gospel truth in the authorized version. Only there’s Penn’s revised version, which Fat Andy thinks he’s persuaded the forces of Anti-Christ, better known as the tabloid press, to take an interest in. We can assume the cunning bastards will get hold of everything I’ve got hold of. And what we’ve got to ask ourselves so that we can be ready for it, is what are they likely to make of things like the thirteen stab wounds on Dee’s body? The fact that they were made by the deadly weapon with which he was attacking Rye, indicating clearly that he’d been disarmed when he was killed? The absence of any significant and life-threatening wounds on Rye’s body?’

  She could have added Rye’s nudity and the lack of any forensic evidence indicating that her clothes had been removed by force, but she felt she’d gone far enough. Hat, she observed with a pang, was looking worse than he had at any time since his return to duty. Then, apart from a little pallor, he had shown no signs of his illness, but had moved and behaved with all his old ebullience. Now he looked careworn and a decade older.

  ‘So what do you make of it, Shirl?’ he asked.

  She hated Shirl, didn’t much care for Shirley, was happy to be simply Novello which had a neutrality to match her work clothing. But Bowler’s rare use of her first name signalled dependency rather than condescension.

  ‘Not much, and I doubt they’ll make much either, not without they get something else, like a few good quotes from you or from Rye,’ she said reassuringly. ‘So take care.’

  ‘You bet,’ he said, getting up. ‘Back to the grind. See you upstairs.’

  She watched him go. She had no special feeling for Hat, but there was a quality of brightness and bounce about him which it was hard to resist, and she wasn’t happy to have a part in snuffing it out. She hoped she’d been telling the truth about the likely tabloid reaction, but she doubted it. If, as Dalziel suspected, one of the papers had already committed an undercover investigative reporter to the case, they weren’t going to step away from it without at the very least a mud-stirring article. There was enough material here already for that and she’d barely got going on her devil’s advocate assignment. But of course, it wasn’t just that which would be bothering Bowler. He too was a detective and she doubted if she’d asked any questions he hadn’t already asked himself. She just hoped to God that he’d have the nous not to ask Rye. She herself hardly knew the woman, thought her interesting, and was certain there was a lot more to her than met the eye. If that lot more had included opening her pages to her librarian boss, that was her business and Hat would be well advised not to make it his.

  But if it made a tabloid headline, it would take a stronger will than she guessed he possessed to keep his lips glued.

  Letter 7. Received Mon Dec 31st. P.P

  Fichtenburg-am-Blutensee

  Aargau

  Wed Dec 26th

  My dear Mr Pascoe,

  Have you had a good Christmas? I have, in fact so good that only now does it seem I’ve had time or energy to sit down and write to you. Perhaps you’d have preferred it if I hadn’t bothered? I hope not, but in any case it’s no longer a matter of choice. They say in China that if you save someone’s life then it becomes your responsibility. In a way you may have saved mine by putting me in the Syke, so now you’re having to pay the price.

  Last time I wrote I was on my way to Zurich.

  God, what a wonderful city! You can almost smell the money! But that I know will be of little interest to one so unmaterialistic as yourself, so let me hasten to matters more to your taste, such as art, history, and the pursuit of knowledge.

  From the point of view of new material, my short stay was as unproductive as I anticipated. To dig up anything new from ground already carefully riddled by Sam and Albacore, I would have needed a vast supply of serendipity, and I’d already used mine in making a possible connection between Beddoes and Fichtenburg. But good biography is as much concerned with getting inside the mind of its subject as establishing external facts about him, and I think I got a great deal out of simply strolling around the city, imagining I was that other lonely, disaffected and unattached exile, Thomas Lovell Beddoes.

  You, of course, by instinct and training, are expert at tracking motives. How much easier would it be with you at my side for me to understand what made Beddoes, shortly before his twenty-second birthday and shortly after having taken his degree at Oxford where he had begun to establish a reputation as a poet, decide to leave Eng
land and spend nearly all the remainder of his life in Germany and Switzerland? In particular, how could someone who so clearly loved the English tongue as much as he did have pretty well relegated it to his second language by the time he died?

  Sam’s theory is that everything can be traced to the boy’s early exposure to the brutal realities of death, and to the devastatingly early loss of his powerful father. If we look at the three main energy centres of Beddoes’ life, we can see how they all relate to his father, and how they’re all preoccupied with man’s struggle against the ultimate enemy.

  Through medicine he seeks for ways to understand and conquer it while at the same time looking for any evidence in flesh, blood and bone of the existence of the soul. While he does not seem inclined to follow his father in channelling his medical skills into improving the health of the underprivileged (Beddoes Sr founded the quaintly named Institute for the Sick and Drooping Poor!), Thomas Lovell actively supports – sometimes at personal risk – what today we would call human rights movements throughout Germany. And, of course, through the creative power of his imagination he attempts to grapple hand to hand with the Arch-Fear.

  So why come to Germany? The answer lies in what I’ve just written. Here he could be at the cutting edge (ho ho) of medical research; here there were strong undercurrents of social revolution such as only rarely made themselves felt in dull, complacent little England; and here with its dark forests and dramatic castles and sweeping rivers and turbulent mythology lay the true Gothic heart of Europe which, since the Jacobeans, the British had only dabbled their toes in.