Death's Jest-Book

by Reginald Hill

  But nails rust and wood rots, and when two hardy Sunday anglers whose boast it was that not even the foulest January weather could keep them from their sport saw the skies darken and the rain come down at a rate beyond even their tolerance, they pulled aside a dislodged board and stepped into the tunnel for shelter.

  When their eyes had adjusted to the gloom, one of them noticed a rope floating in the water. To an angler any line is an object of interest, particularly if one end dives steeply into the depths. Using his rod, he hooked the rope to the edge and began to haul it in.

  After a while it stuck.

  ‘Gie’s a hand here,’ he said to his friend.

  And together they hauled at the rope.

  Whatever was on the end of it was heavier even than a big carp.

  And certainly heavier than a pair of trainers, which were the first things they saw breaking the surface.

  Then another heave revealed that the trainers still contained feet, and the feet were attached to legs …

  At this point one of them let go and the other made only a token effort to retain his grip. Heedless now of the rain they hurried out of the tunnel to ring the police.

  An hour later, with several police cars and an ambulance pulsing their lights into the teeming rain on the road a hundred yards away, the body of what looked at first glance like a child was laid on the canal bank. The rope was bound tight around his ankles.

  The police doctor declared what no one doubted, that death had taken place. Photo flashes lit up the scene both inside and outside the tunnel. Radios crackled. Rain hissed.

  Then a new sound was heard, the roar of a powerful motorbike engine being pressed hard.

  It skidded to a stop on the wet road, the rider dismounting as it did so and letting the machine come to rest against a hedge. He pulled his helmet off and at the sight of his face the officers advancing to remonstrate fell back.

  He pushed his way past them, slithered down the slope into the field and stumbled across the tussocky grass to the canal bank.

  There he stood for a moment looking down at the small young face at his feet.

  Then he moved through the broken board into the tunnel and a second later all work stopped as a cry like the rage of a wounded Minotaur came trailing out of the dark.

  It was not till the following morning that Pascoe learned of the grim discovery. Sunday he’d spent down in Lincolnshire on a visit to Ellie’s mother. He’d faxed in a digest of the official part of his Sheffield visit to the Fat Man and suggested they meet first thing on Monday morning to examine the implications. A trip into outer space wouldn’t have prevented Dalziel from tracking him down if he’d wanted an earlier consult, but the discovery of the body had kept that great mind occupied.

  ‘Definitely Lubanski,’ said Dalziel. ‘Dead for a couple of days at least. Being in the water makes it hard to be precise.’

  ‘How’d he die?’ asked Pascoe.

  ‘Drowned. But there’s evidence he took a beating first. After that it looks like someone tied the rope round his ankles and tossed him into the cut, then dragged him along a bit afore hauling him out. Several times maybe.’

  Pascoe grimaced, then said, ‘Asking questions, you reckon?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘So it could be they didn’t mean to kill him, just went too far?’

  ‘Or that they heard all they wanted to hear, so dropped him in and left him to drown. Either way, it’s murder in my book.’

  ‘Mine too. How’s Wieldy taking it?’

  ‘How do you bloody think?’ snarled Dalziel. ‘I just about had to tie him down to stop him heading straight off to kick the shit out of Belcher.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound such a bad idea,’ said Pascoe.

  ‘Oh aye? Old Mr Human-rights Pussyfoot has suddenly become an expert on kicking shit, has he? Well, I’ve got gold medals and, believe me, this isn’t an option. Belchamber gets warned off, Wieldy gets locked up, how’s that help anything?’

  ‘If they made Lubanski talk, won’t they be warned off anyway?’

  ‘Depends. If all he knew was what he told Wieldy, that was fuck all, wasn’t it? Any road, from what Wieldy said about the lad, I wonder if he told them owt, except maybe that Wieldy was a punter after his arse. Easy enough to credit. I don’t doubt Belchamber knows Wield’s gay. Gay cop in tight black leathers rides into Turk’s with a rent boy in tow, what’s the criminal mind to think but he’s a bent cop in every way, using his clout to get freebies. No, I reckon that’s the tale the lad would stick to.’

  ‘You think someone like Lubanski was capable of that sort of resolution?’

  ‘Someone like Lubanski? Hark at you, Chief Inspector. OK, if you won’t give the little scrote credit for any noble feelings, how about self-interest? Some psycho’s asking you if you’ve been grassing him up to the pigs. Tell him yes, and you’re absolutely certain you’re going to die. Keep telling him no, and perhaps, just perhaps, you’ll make it. Didn’t work out, that’s all. Either the psycho miscalculated or he’s a real psycho. Either way, it don’t matter. Here’s how we play it. For the papers, body found in the cut, identification difficult because of deterioration in the water, enquiries proceeding.’

  ‘And Wieldy, is he going to play along?’

  ‘He’d better. I sent for yon Digweed to take him home and keep him there for now, even if it means chaining him to the bed. Yon old fart’s likely got the chains anyway.’

  Did he actually say that to Digweed? Pascoe decided he didn’t want to know and remarked, ‘Wieldy won’t be happy.’

  ‘Don’t want him happy. Just don’t want him doing owt that’ll make him look like anything but a bent cop shit scared ’cos this lad he’s been forcing to give him freebies has turned up dead. That should convince Belcher’s boys that Lubanski’s told us nowt.’

  Pascoe considered then said, ‘You’ve been persuaded that this idea that Belchamber’s planning to heist the Elsecar Hoard’s got legs, have you? You were a bit sceptical on Friday. My trip to Sheffield persuaded you, did it?’

  Dalziel grinned.

  ‘It helped, but it was the phone ringing with news of a definite ident on the body that did it. There’s an upside to everything, Pete. Lubanski alive and feeding Wieldy with titbits because he liked to see him smile meant nowt. Lubanski tortured and dead means there’s definitely something going off and most likely it’s Belchy trying to get his hands on the Hoard. So God bless the lad, eh? But don’t tell Wieldy I said that!’

  Pascoe looked at his boss with a distaste he made no effort to disguise. From time to time he had tried to persuade Ellie that most of the Fat Man’s callousness, not to mention his occasional racism, sexism, and general political incorrectness, was deliberately provocative rather than deep engrained.

  ‘Or maybe it’s a safety valve to help him deal with the crap, like a surgeon making bad jokes as he carves open a patient,’ he theorized.

  ‘Or maybe you thinking like that is your technique for stopping you kicking the fat bastard in the balls,’ said Ellie.

  ‘Probably break my foot if I did,’ said Pascoe.

  But listening to the Fat Man now made him think it might be a risk worth taking.

  On the other hand, his own reaction might have less to do with the natural sensitivity of his soul than with (a) guilt that his own attitude to Wield’s relationship with the youth had been pretty ambivalent, and (b) the fact that he’d had a lousy night and was feeling a bit under the weather. It was two days since his trip to fluey Sheffield, just about the right incubation time, and he’d breakfasted on orange juice and some proprietary brand anti-flu capsules which consumer tests showed were less effective than simple aspirin, though costing six times as much, but in whose efficacy he had an almost superstitious trust.

  Dalziel glowered back at him and said, ‘What’s up wi’ thee? Ellie kick you out of bed last night?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ snapped Pascoe. ‘By the way, am I ever going to get to hear what’s going off in r
egard to that German journalist and Rye Pomona? Or is it a national security matter, for your eyes only?’

  ‘Could be. Like you and Roote maybe.’

  It was a telling counterpunch. He’d kept very quiet about his continued concern with and about Franny Roote, and he was sure that Wield wouldn’t have engaged in a deliberate act of delation over his researches into ex-Sergeant Roote’s background. But it was difficult to do anything in this building without twanging one of the threads that ran straight to Shelob’s lair.

  ‘If you show me yours, I’ll show you mine,’ he said.

  ‘You think that’ll be a fair swap?’ said Dalziel doubtfully. ‘I reckon I’d need change. But all right. Two cocks are better than one, as the actress said to the Siamese twins.’

  Despite his show of reluctance, it was, Dalziel had to admit to himself, a relief to share the details of his interview with Mai Richter. In the week since, he’d looked at what he’d learned from every which side and found he’d no idea what it meant. He’d already contemplated laying it out before Pascoe, but whenever he thought he’d made up his mind, the counter-argument had come surging back, that this was merely the indulgence of weakness, off-loading on to someone else a burden he’d wilfully hoisted on to his own shoulders, and anyway the woman was long gone back to the land of Siegfried and Lorelei.

  But one of his strengths was he was aware of his weaknesses, which happily were to some degree Pascoe’s strengths. All right, sometimes he went out of his way to get up that narrow sensitive nose, like when he’d sounded off about Sore Arse and Rusty Bum and the Aral Sea. The difference was that while he knew poetry by rote, he knew nowt about poetry, what made it work, what it was for. Pascoe knew these things. Sensitivity, intuition, imagination, these were the gifts tossed into the infant Pascoe’s cradle which had maybe been crushed in his own by the weightier prezzies of a cast-iron gut and sledge-hammer will. No escaping it, Pascoe was a useful, perhaps a necessary complement. Thank God after a sticky start, he’d actually grown to like the bugger!

  So now it was with relief that he shared everything he’d done and discovered.

  Pascoe listened intently. Physical unwellness, as long as it didn’t involve active pain, always seemed to hone his mind to a more than usually keen edge. The Fat Man offered little explanation of his own thought processes, but Pascoe filled out the bald description of events easily, recognizing and being touched by his boss’s willingness to accept total responsibility for the ‘tidying-up’ (or ‘cover-up’ as it would no doubt have appeared in the tabloid headlines) of Dick Dee’s death, both at the scene and in the subsequent witness statements. But the risk of that kind of accusation seemed to have passed, leaving a very different problem, and Dalziel’s implied acknowledgement that he needed help and perhaps comfort here was even more touching.

  Not that it came very close to being openly implied.

  ‘So there it is,’ he growled in conclusion. ‘What do you make of that, clever clogs?’

  ‘Forget it,’ said Pascoe.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s the clever clogs answer. Be ready to collect Bowler’s pieces and try to put them back together when Rye dies, but till then forget it. There’s going to be grief to spare when that happens. Why go looking for more in advance?’

  Tables turned, he thought. Here’s me being pragmatic, down-to-earth. And there’s him, wrestling with doubt and maybe even conscience!

  But he knew what Dalziel was really wrestling with because it was the thing which, despite all differences, united them – the need to know the truth.

  ‘Except …’ he said.

  ‘Might have known there’d be an except,’ said Dalziel.

  ‘Except it’s no use us forgetting it unless everyone else is forgetting it too. This woman, Rogers/Richter, how’d she look to you?’

  ‘Nice tits,’ said Dalziel reminiscently.

  Pascoe resisted the bait and said, ‘You think she’s going to drop it?’

  ‘Aye. Not her cup of tea. Also she got to like Pomona and started feeling guilty. Plus there’s this feminist solidarity thing, sisters, sisters … weren’t there a song?’

  Fearful that Dalziel was about to burst out singing once again, Pascoe hurried on.

  ‘Tick her off then. Charley Penn?’

  ‘Charley ’ull never shut up, but he’s like a clock. People will only take notice when he stops ticking.’

  ‘Which still leaves the other eavesdropper. The second bug, remember? Where was it by the way?’

  ‘In the bedroom behind the headboard. I went in and had a look afore I left Church View. According to what Lilley told Richter, it was self-powered, voice-activated, range of mebbe fifty yards tops, and likely to have run out of gas after a fortnight. So the bugger could listen in from a car parked in Peg Lane. Or, if he didn’t want to sit around there all night, he could have had a radio cassette tuned in and left somewhere handy. There’s St Margaret’s churchyard opposite, lots of nice overgrown tombstones to hide summat like that under. I had a poke around but didn’t find owt. What’s up wi’ thee?’

  Pascoe had jumped up and grabbed at the phone on the desk between them.

  He dialled, listened, said, ‘Hi, it’s Chief Inspector Pascoe. I need to speak to Dr Pottle. Yes, urgent police business. Or clinical business, whatever gets him to the phone.’

  A pause, then Pascoe spoke again, ‘Yes, sorry, I’m making a habit of it, aren’t I? Listen, all I want is Haseen’s mobile number. No, I won’t tell her how I got it.’

  He scribbled on the desktop, dialled again.

  ‘Ms Haseen, hi. It’s DCI Pascoe, we met in Sheffield on Saturday. Sorry to trouble you again, but there was something you said when we were talking about Franny Roote …’

  Dalziel groaned, rolled his eyes and generally did his How long, o lord, how long? act.

  ‘No,’ said Pascoe. ‘Nothing personal or private. It was just that you said when talking about listening to him delivering Johnson’s paper on the laughs in Death’s Jest-Book, it wasn’t worth spoiling your lunch for. But in the conference programme, Roote was scheduled for nine o’clock on Saturday morning … yes … yes … that’s fine. Very helpful. Thank you very much, sorry to have troubled you.’

  He put the phone down and turned triumphantly to Dalziel, who said, ‘Don’t tell me. You’ve found a way of dragging Roote into this. Jesus, Pete, you’ll be telling me next he were Jack the Ripper, after he finished killing the princes in the Tower, that is.’

  ‘His conference session was rescheduled from nine a.m. at his request because he developed terrible toothache the evening before and managed to arrange an emergency appointment for first thing on Saturday morning. Professor Duerden, who had the one thirty session, was pleased to do a swap. I bet Roote was touchingly grateful! But Amaryllis was pissed off because in order to hear Roote, which she wanted to do either for her own professional reasons or because hubby wanted her expert opinion on his state of mind, she had to duck out halfway through a posh lunch someone else was paying for.’

  ‘Pete, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,’ said Dalziel.

  ‘I saw him that morning, in St Margaret’s Churchyard. Bang on nine. I thought it was some kind of optical delusion, or even worse, some kind of psychic apparition when I got that letter in which he claimed he’d had a vision of me as he started to give his address at nine a.m. But the bastard was just covering his tracks, don’t you see?’

  ‘Hang about. You’re saying that Roote were here early that morning … how?’

  ‘He drove.’

  ‘Weren’t one of them letters you got written on a train? And weren’t his car in dock?’

  ‘You do pay attention, sir,’ said Pascoe. ‘So he hired a car … no, wait a sec, Blaylock, that Cambridge DI, he said something about some absent-minded academic reporting his car stolen that morning then finding he’d parked it on the other side of the college. Roote stole it, drove up, got here about half seven maybe, did what he h
ad to do, drove back … he could make it by half ten or eleven, plenty of time to show his face and be ready for his post-lunch session.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Dalziel.

  ‘Because he’s listened to Penn banging away so much about Dick Dee being innocent that he’s begun to wonder if maybe he could be right, maybe the guy who really killed his chum Sam Johnson is walking free. So he decided to check out Penn’s theory of a police cover-up himself. He knew Rye was away that night, he realized being down at the conference gave him an alibi if anything went wrong, so he thought, here’s a great chance to have a poke around her flat and also to plant a bug. He must have just hidden the cassette when I saw him. He probably picked it up last time he came back. It all fits!’

  Except for one or two holes, such as, why did he turn the place upside down when bug planters traditionally took care to leave no trace of their passage?

  Dalziel didn’t look for holes, merely shook his head wonderingly, and said, ‘Don’t know if you’re right or wrong, lad, but it makes no difference. What you’re saying is, if there’s some other bugger out there still sniffing around, it’s up to us to find out afore he does where the smell’s coming from.’

  ‘Or put him somewhere that his nose can’t bother us,’ said Pascoe.

  He related his latest discoveries in Sheffield.

  ‘So he killed this Frobisher ’cos he were jealous of his relationship with Johnson?’

  ‘He’s killed before. For less reason.’

  ‘Mebbe,’ said Dalziel. ‘And your evidence for this is what? Something a nurse going on early shift might have seen? After a night spent on the nest, she were probably too knackered to tell which way were up on a bedpan!’