Death's Jest-Book

by Reginald Hill

  I can hear shouting outside, perhaps they’ve found him, I hope to God they have.

  This is truly dreadful. I went out and saw that the disturbance was coming from the lake shore. Jacques was in the water up to his waist and the forestry men were having a hell of a job to drag him out.

  It seems one of the men spotted tracks leading out on to the ice and, without a thought for his own safety, Jacques had rushed out there. The ice, weakened by the thaw, soon gave way. Jacques, thank heaven, is safe and well. We got him into the chalet and dried him off. Half an hour later the police arrived with proper equipment. As they started work, the snow stopped and the clouds thinned enough for the dying rays of the declining sun to cast a sickly pink patina across the lake’s surface. Blutensee, I thought. At that moment I knew the worst, and a minute or two later, the cries of the leading policeman confirmed it.

  A little beyond where Jacques had reached, only a few inches beneath the water, rested the body of Frère Dierick.

  What had induced him to walk on the lake we can only surmise. Perhaps in the swirling snow he wasn’t even aware he was walking across ice. I feel full of guilt lest it was the sight of Mouse and myself naked on the bed which had so distracted him he did not pay heed where he was going. But I comfort myself with the memory of his smile, and his careful closing of the door, neither of which suggested any great mental distraction.

  Whatever, it is another tragedy. How they seem to follow me around. Or perhaps it is Thomas Lovell Beddoes they follow. Remember Browning’s strange superstitious fear at the prospect of opening the Beddoes box? Perhaps he was right. Could it be that Death, who was such a close and well-loved companion of Beddoes for so many years, still stays close to those who would uncover his friend’s secrets, and that his company is the price that must be paid for understanding?

  But enough of horrors. There will be an enquiry, of course, and we shall all have to make written statements, but I do not doubt that the combined weight of authority to be found in Linda and her guests will expedite matters and we should all be on our way tomorrow at the latest.

  I’ll write again soon. And, by the way, if you get any enquiries from the CIA or FBI or whoever does the immigration checking at the US Embassy, I know I can rely on you of all people to assure them that I’m leading a blameless life!

  Yours fondly,

  Franny

  Ellie Pascoe didn’t know whether to feel happy or sad as she opened her front door. January 7th, first day of waking to a Christmas-free house after the traditional Twelfth Night clearance, and also the first day of the new term. So now the place felt empty in every way as she returned from dropping Rosie off.

  She stooped to pick up the mail from the hall floor and sorted through it quickly. There was one with a Swiss postmark. She made a face as she put it on the hall table with the rest of Peter’s mail. Despite her public indifference to, tinged with amusement at, the Roote letters, she wished they would stop. To see a rational man irrationally troubled was a trouble. Plus, the longer they went on, the more she began to question Franny’s motivation.

  What was he getting out of writing them? At first she’d seen them as a snook-cocking joke. But now the joke was wearing thin, and when Roote talked about the correspondence becoming a necessary part of his life, she half believed him. So now she had two cases of obsessive behaviour to be concerned about.

  Perhaps, being further removed from it, she would have a better chance of understanding Roote’s than her husband’s.

  She looked down at the letter, felt tempted to open it, resisted. Women who opened their husband’s mail deserved everything they read. She knew how she’d react if she found Peter had been at hers. If she were going to do anything, best to throw it in the fire. But no doubt there’d be more and there was no way to guarantee she’d get to the others first.

  In any case, that was almost as bad as opening them.

  She checked her own three letters. Two were charity follow-ups. Nowadays no one wrote just to say thanks, they wrote to say thanks but it’s not enough.

  The third had an official but non-charitable look.

  She opened it as she went through into the kitchen, read it quickly on the move, then sat down and read it more slowly a second time.

  Her intermittent researches into Roote’s genealogy had quickly run into the sand. Using as a starting point Franny’s assertion in his first letter that he had been born in Hope, she had looked up the name in her Ordnance Survey atlas and been a little taken aback to discover half a dozen places called Hope and as many again which had enough of Hope in their name to make the young man’s jest allowable. She’d written to all the relevant registrars’ offices with the information she had and their replies had been trickling in over several days. They ranged from the formal to the friendly with one thing in common: no child with the name Francis Xavier Roote had been registered inside the given time-frame.

  Soon she was down to her last Hope, a Derbyshire village in the Peak District, not far out of Sheffield, and it was the County Registrar’s letter she had in her hand now.

  She read it a third time. Yes, it said, there was an entry for the name and date specified. Address 7 Post Terrace; mother Anthea Roote née Atherton, housewife; father Thomas Roote – and here came the bit that made her sit and read it a third time – police officer.

  She reached for the phone to ring Peter. But to tell him what? Surprise surprise … but being surprising wasn’t the same as being helpful. Did it really matter? Wasn’t she by doing this merely feeding his obsession when she should have been starving it?

  She went back into the hall and looked again at the letter with the Swiss stamp.

  Sod it, let Roote decide. If this was as innocuous as the last with its account of Christmas fun, why keep the pot boiling? It might even be a farewell … Dear Mr Pascoe, my New Year resolution is to write to you no more. Sorry for any trouble I’ve caused. Yours etc.

  She ripped it open. No point pussyfooting. If a woman was going to open her husband’s mail, sod steaming kettles. Let him see you might be nosey but at least you weren’t sneaky!

  When she’d read it, she said, ‘Oh shit.’

  Another death. Another death which advantaged Roote. Truly the guy was either very lucky or … No! That was like jumping into quicksand to save a sinking man.

  But she could almost hear Peter’s reaction to the account of Frère Dierick’s death.

  Knowledge is power. She’d let herself be talked once again into going shopping in Estotiland with Daphne Aldermann. Daphne, an unrepentant shopaholic, had a theory that the first Monday in January was the time to go to the post-Christmas sales. ‘In the early days,’ she said, ‘there are so many people, they turn into a kind of lynch mob and you can wake up next morning aghast at the memory of what you did the day before. So wait till the crowds have gone, bearing with them most of the chronic sales junk, and step in when they’re putting out real bargains to tempt the discerning customer.’

  Ellie had let her arm be twisted and now she was glad. Estotiland was a large step on the way to Sheffield, the other side of which lay Hope. So an hour’s shopping with Daphne, then off south, and tonight with luck she’d be able to amaze Peter with more than a mohair sweater in the kind of bold design she loved but he hated.

  In fact the visit to Estotiland was quite useful for another reason. In a couple of weeks’ time Rosie was going to her friend Suzie’s birthday party in the Junior Jumbo Burger Bar. Ellie had promised she’d help. At the same time her early-warning system had gone on to red alert at the mention of burgers and this trip today gave her the chance to check the kitchens for potential sources of salmonella, E. coli, and CJD.

  Daphne gave a long-suffering sigh, but as she’d resolved long ago never to let Ellie have the satisfaction of seeing her embarrassed, she strode boldly with her into the kitchen where they were greeted with great courtesy and invited to examine whatever they wanted to examine and ask any questions they wanted to ask. A
ll the meat was local, they were assured, an assurance backed up with written details of provenance. Standards of hygiene were exemplary, and supervision of the young staff was militarily strict.

  ‘Told you,’ said Daphne as they left. ‘Estotiland is Paradise Regained. Now, let’s go and pluck ourselves some apples!’

  A couple of hours and as many mohair sweaters later, they reached the upper retail floor and Daphne turned instinctively towards the lingerie department. Whether it was Daphne or her husband, Patrick, who got off on silk next to the skin, Ellie didn’t know, but she saw that glazed look come into her friend’s eyes as they entered. Then she paused, wondering if the condition was contagious, as everything seemed to tremble in front of her as though somewhere deep beneath them an underground train had gone rushing by.

  ‘You OK?’ said Daphne.

  ‘I think so. Just something walking over my grave, you know. Something big.’

  ‘Probably that fat bastard poor Peter works for. Let’s go and find a seat, get a coffee, or take lunch early. Did you eat any breakfast this morning?’

  Touched by her friend’s willingness to turn away even from the gates of Paradise to offer comfort, Ellie said, ‘No, really, you go on. But I think maybe I have had enough. I’ll skip lunch, if that’s OK, and head off. I’ve got something I need to do in Sheffield.’

  For some reason she didn’t want to give chapter and verse on Roote, maybe because it would have been hard to explain without inviting comment on Peter’s obsession.

  An hour later she found herself standing on the doorstep of 7 Post Terrace in Hope talking to a woman called Myers who’d bought the house three years ago from a couple called Wilkinson and had never heard of anyone called Roote.

  As Ellie turned away in disappointment, she heard an eldritch screech. She’d often wondered what one of these would sound like, but she recognized it as soon as she heard it. Its source seemed to be a neighbouring window, which Ellie had noticed was wide open despite the cold, dank weather.

  Peering in, she discovered that the reason for the open window was to ensure as little as possible of anything interesting was missed by an aged crone in a rocking chair who without preamble told her that Mrs Atherton-who-used-to-live-there-before-the-Wilkinsons’ daughter Anthea had married a man called Roote and, if Ellie cared to step inside, all would be made clear.

  Ellie was in like a shot and soon discovered that her informant wasn’t quite so ancient nor so crone-like as at first appeared. Her name was Mrs Eel and she made a nice cup of tea and a lovely Victoria sponge, and what was more she’d lived there all her life and what she didn’t know about Hope simply wasn’t knowledge.

  From a somewhat rambling narrative Ellie extracted a classic plot line.

  Anthea Atherton’s parents had skimped and saved to give their attractive daughter the kind of education which fitted her to move in circles full of rich young men who spoke proper, lived in big houses, drove Range Rovers, and wanted only the company of a beautiful and intelligent young spouse to make their comfortable lives complete.

  Then she’d thrown it all back in their faces and married a cop.

  Mrs Eel pronounced this punchline with all the revulsion of Tony Blair discovering that one of his cabinet was a socialist.

  ‘How dreadful!’ said Ellie. ‘I knew a girl who did the same. It never works. And this policeman, was he local then?’

  ‘Oh no. That would have been bad enough. But this ‘un worked down South.’

  More shock-horror. Ellie tried for detail but it soon emerged that while Mrs Eel was needle-sharp on Hope, she was a bit vague on South, which began immediately after Bradwell two miles away. But she knew the cop’s name was Tommy Roote and he was a sergeant and how they’d met was there’d been some bother at the posh boarding school Anthea went to, and the sergeant had been part of the investigating team, and Anthea was only seventeen then.

  ‘Taking advantage of a child, there should be laws against it,’ concluded Mrs Eel.

  ‘I think there are,’ said Ellie.

  ‘Likely, and him being a cop, he’d know about ’em, which is why the cunning devil waited till Anthea reached eighteen afore he married her.’

  News of this event was greeted by such cries of rage and despair from the Atherton household they were, according to Mrs Eel, audible in Bradwell if not Beyond.

  The story now skipped a couple of years to the day when Anthea returned home for the first time since the wedding, pregnant and alone. Her parents took her in and after a while gave out the story that her husband was engaged in some special operation and that Anthea was very keen her child should be born a Hopeite. Mrs Eel was not deceived. Her diagnosis, borne out by subsequent events, was a deep malaise in the marriage.

  The child was born prematurely before Anthea could be loaded into the ambulance summoned to take her to hospital (so Franny was being strictly accurate when he said he was born in Hope, thought Ellie). Shortly afterwards. Sergeant Roote appeared on the scene and bore off child and wife to his den in the South, thus apparently confirming the official version of events. But Mrs Eel still was not deceived.

  ‘I knew it ’ud end in tears,’ she declared. ‘The lass kept coming back more and more frequent, always with the lad, but never with the policeman. I think she wanted a divorce early on, but her mam and dad were dead against it.’

  This puzzled Ellie until Mrs Eel revealed the Athertons belonged to some fairly fundamental nonconformist sect to whom a foolish marriage might be an offence against your family, but a fractious divorce was an offence against God. So now it was the parents who attempted to keep things going. All the reward they got was that when some professional disaster hit Sergeant Roote’s career, their daughter had to share in it. Exactly what form it took Mrs Eel had to admit she didn’t know, but she knew it was bad enough to get him chucked out of the Force without a pension, after which it was all downhill, and when in a short time he died (drink or suicide, Mrs Eel theorized) Anthea was left destitute.

  At this point Mrs Eel’s direct knowledge of what happened became fragmentary, but she was clearly a great snapper-up of indiscreet trifles and she was able to provide Ellie with enough bits and pieces to add to her own knowledge of the subsequent course of Franny Roote’s life for the construction of a convincing mosaic.

  She laid this out before Pascoe that night, jumping straight in once the anticipated explosion of ‘The bastard’s been at it again!’ after he read the letter had faded away.

  He had listened with close attention but without any of the ooh’s and ah’s of wonderment and admiration she felt her researches deserved.

  But in for a penny, in for a pound.

  ‘I’ll leave you to find out what this career-ending disaster might have been,’ she said. ‘What I think happened after his death was that Anthea, faced with the prospect of vegetating gently in Hope, decided to put the expensive education her parents had given her to practical use. She re-established contact with old school-friends. I would guess that to them the sight of a beautiful, wilful, and probably rather condescending old school chum being forced to admit she’d got it all wrong and her life was an unmitigated disaster was irresistible. Soon she was moving once more in their elevated circles. Mrs Eel certainly recalls young Fran (whom she describes as a strange, solemn child, a bit fey) being looked after for increasingly long periods by his grandparents. Ultimately of course Anthea showed her friends the error of their charitable ways by plucking from under their noses the prize plum of the rich and attractive American bachelor who became her second husband. But it seems that Franny did not form part of the deal. He looked like becoming a permanent fixture at his grandparents’ house in Hope, then Mrs Atherton died of cancer leaving Mr Atherton too frail and distraught to look after the boy alone. And so, I surmise, began that long involvement with the British boarding school system which has produced such a fine crop of crooks, psychotics and prime ministers.’

  ‘Roote did well then. Two out of three’s not bad
,’ said Pascoe. ‘Your conclusions? I can tell by your flaring nostrils that you have conclusions.’

  ‘Surely here we have the perfect explanation of Franny’s love/hatred relationship with his father? He’s a hero to the boy – that story of the attack in the park is almost certainly based on truth, if perhaps a little coloured by memory. But his failure to provide for his family led to Fran’s neglect and stressful upbringing. He tried to write him out of his life by claiming almost complete ignorance of the man, but Ms Haseen got through his guard. And his obsessive relationship with you derives largely from the fact that you are another cop who has had a tremendous influence on his life, bad in that you got him locked up in the Syke, but good in that everything now seems to be falling right for him. Also he’s desperately in need of a living father-figure. And of course your obsession with him must have made him believe that you too felt a special relationship here.’

  ‘The bastard’s got that right then,’ said Pascoe feelingly.

  ‘Come on, Pete. Give him a break. I’m not denying there’s an element of mockery and teasing in these letters, but can’t you see there’s much more?’

  ‘Like threats, you mean? And hints at crimes committed which I can’t touch him for?’

  ‘No. Like … need.’

  ‘Ellie, if you’re going to say they’re a cry for help, I may puke.’

  ‘Shut up and open the prezzies I bought you in the sales,’ she commanded.

  He tore open the tissue paper and looked in horror at the mohair sweaters in the bright colours and bold designs she believed suited him.