Death's Jest-Book

by Reginald Hill

  She’d said it had all been a waste of time, there was nothing to find, he should forget his obsession and get on with life. But it hadn’t rung true.

  Somehow Pomona had magicked her. Mai was the clearest-minded woman he knew. He respected her hugely, which came as close to love as he’d ever felt for a woman. But she’d let herself be magicked.

  He twisted in his seat and looked towards the desk.

  She was there in her usual place, apparently absorbed in whatever she was doing. But after only a second she raised her eyes to meet his. Once he had been proud of what he thought of as his ability to make her aware of his accusatory gaze, but in the past few days he had found himself wondering if perhaps these eye encounters might not owe more to some power she had of precognition rather than any he had of will.

  He broke off contact and returned to the second part of the poem.

  The curtain falls, the play is done,

  And, yawning, homeward now they’ve gone

  My lovely German audience.

  These worthy folk don’t lack good sense.

  They’ll eat their supper with song and laughter

  And never a thought for what comes after

  A bit free but it got the feel, which in a poem is the greater part of sense. He looked at his draft of the final six lines. Did it matter that he’d changed Stuttgart to Frankfurt because the Main suited his rhyming better than the Neckar? He hadn’t been able to find any evidence that the inhabitants of Stuttgart had any particular reputation for Philistinism. Frankfurt on the other hand was certainly a great German metropolis even in the 1850s. Goethe called it ‘the secret capital’, though Heine’s short work experience there, in banking then grocery, hadn’t been very happy. What the hell, if some scholar somewhere wanted to write to him after the book’s publication and explain the special significance of Stuttgart, it would give the pedant pleasure and himself enlightenment!

  He made a couple of minor changes then began to write a fair copy.

  He got it right that man of glory

  Who said in Homer’s epic story

  ‘The least such thoughtless Philistine

  Is happier living in Frankfurt am Main

  Than I, dead Achilles, in darkness hurled,

  The Prince of Shades in the Underworld.’

  He turned and looked towards Rye again. This time she was watching him already. Her face was surely a lot paler than it had been, even the natural Mediterranean darkness of her colouring couldn’t disguise that, and her eyes, always large and dark, now looked even larger and darker. But this seemed less the pallor of sickness than that cool radiance the Old Masters gave to saints at their moment of martyrdom.

  Or something, he added to himself in reaction against the weirdly fanciful thought. But there was something about the girl that encouraged a man’s mind down such exotic avenues, an otherness, a sense of disjunction giving you vistas over altered landscapes which returned in a blink to what they’d always been, leaving you doubtful of the experience.

  What the future might hold for her and Hat Bowler, who struck him as an uncomplicated young man inhabiting a world of straight lines and primary colours, he could not guess. He had a feeling that they were players in some drama in which his own pain at Dick Dee’s death no longer had a major role.

  She had a faint gentle sweet smile on her lips. Was it for him?

  He wasn’t sure, but he found himself hoping so.

  Perhaps he was being magicked too?

  Mist rolling down the hills, a still sea silvered by a rising moon, silence and loneliness in a populous city, eyes meeting strange eyes in the Tube then breaking off but not before a moment of recognition, the feeling of what now? after the applause for your greatest achievement has died, your dog suddenly no longer a puppy, a line of melody which always twists your heart, a ruined castle, casual farewells, plans for tomorrow: the list could go on forever of the prompts to think of death that life never tires ofgiving us. Don’t ignore them. Use them. Then get on with living.

  Late on the evening of Friday January 25th Peter Pascoe broke the surface of the surging ocean of strange dreams and visions he had been floundering in for three days and thought of a hot Scotch pie with peas and Oxo gravy and, for a whole five minutes before he closed his eyes again, wondered, almost disappointedly, if perhaps he wasn’t going to die after all.

  13

  Judgment Day

  On Saturday the twenty-sixth of January, Rye Pomona woke on the floor of her bathroom. She recalled feeling sick in the night and climbing out of bed, but she recalled no more.

  She stood up and realized she had fouled herself.

  Stripping off her nightgown, she stepped into the bath and turned the shower full on.

  As the icy blast slowly turned warm, she felt life return to her limbs and her mind. She found herself singing a song, not the words but the catchy little tune. This puzzled her, as recently she’d found no problem in recalling anything, even things from her very earliest years.

  Then it came to her that she couldn’t recall these words because she’d never known them. Even the tune she’d only heard once. It had been sung by the boy with the bazouki in the Taverna, the Greek restaurant in Cradle Street. Of all the songs he had been asked to sing that night, this was the only one which sounded authentically Greek. The words she didn’t understand, but the rippling notes created an impression eidetic in its intensity of blue skies, blue waters and a shepherd boy sitting under an olive tree on a sun-cracked hillside.

  She got dressed, tidied up, left everything as she would have liked to find it on her return, locked the door carefully behind her.

  Mrs Gilpin was coming up the stairs with her morning milk.

  ‘Off to work then,’ she said.

  ‘No, I’m not working today,’ said Rye smiling. ‘I’ve been admiring that lovely window box of yours. It’s so clever of you to get such colours in the middle of winter, and I thought I’d drive out to that big garden centre at Carker and see if I could pick up anything as nice.’

  Mrs Gilpin, unused to her neighbours being happy to exchange more than the briefest of greetings with her, flushed at the compliment and said, ‘If you want any help, don’t hesitate to ask.’

  ‘Thank you. I won’t,’ said Rye.

  She ran down the stairs, happy in the knowledge that every word of the exchange would be imprinted on the magnetic tape of Mrs Gilpin’s mind, and a little bit sorry that she had never gone out of her way to show the woman a friendly face before.

  Until she met her neighbour, she hadn’t had the faintest idea where she was going, but now she knew. And she knew why, though it wasn’t till she crossed the town boundary and set her car climbing sedately up the gentle slope which led to the brow of Roman Way that she formulated the knowledge. At the top, she pulled on to the verge and waited.

  Below her stretched the old Roman road, running arrow straight down an avenue of ancient beeches for nearly all of the five miles to the village of Carker. Down there she had sat in wait for the boy with the bazouki, watching as the light of his motorbike raced towards her, then switching on her own headlights and driving into his path.

  Of all her victims, he perhaps was the one she regretted most. He had been young, and innocent, with no guile in his heart, and music at his fingertips. She hadn’t killed him, but she had caused his death and in her madness read that as her licence to kill.

  If she could bring someone back to life …

  The thought made her feel disloyal to Sergius, her brother whom she’d also killed with her driving, though not deliberately, simply by selfishness and neglect.

  But he would understand.

  She waited till the road ahead was empty. In her mirror she saw a distant vehicle coming up behind her. Could it be … ? Yes, it was!

  A yellow AA van.

  What more fitting witness could she ask!

  But a witness to what? Here was a problem. How could you have an accident on a perfectly straight an
d traffic-free stretch of road?

  Yet somehow it didn’t feel like a problem.

  She set off down Roman Way, her foot hard on the accelerator.

  As her speed increased, she felt time slowing, so that the beech trees which should have been blurring by her were moving in sedate procession. This was part of that aura which had preceded her terrible deeds, the same kind of aura which in clinical terms often preceded the onset of epilepsy or other kinds of seizure. In her present case it could be either, the tumour at its destructive task or the harbinger of her final killing. She would on the whole prefer her medical condition not to be a factor in her death. She couldn’t imagine it being a comfort to Hat to know he would have lost her anyway, and she could imagine how he would feel to learn she had been hiding the truth about her health from him.

  But if it had to be, it had to be.

  Then she saw the deer heading towards the road across the field to her left.

  It was, she presumed, moving very fast, but to her leisurely gaze it advanced at a slow lope.

  She recalled driving with Hat to Stang Tarn when a deer had appeared on the road ahead of them, sending his little MG skidding on to the grass verge and triggering memories which had come bubbling out, bringing her and Hat dangerously close, making her contemplate for the first time ever – and already too late – the possibility of happiness.

  Happiness she had had, however brief, however tainted.

  A deer had started it and now a deer would end it.

  This was good. Hat would remember, and such patterns of fate are a comfort to the stricken. We grasp at anything to give us evidence that what seems meaningless has meaning, what seems final is only a pause before a new beginning.

  The deer reached the hedgerow and flew over it in a movement of such beauty her heart stopped at the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

  Then it was on the road. She swung the wheel over, touched the brake lightly to give a touch of evidential authenticity to the AA man who was now within sight, and careered towards the far side of the road with scarcely any loss of speed. Yet in her time-out world, the approach to the tree that was to kill her felt so slow that she could make out clearly its bruised and scarred trunk and knew with a burst of joy that here was the very same beech beneath which the bazouki boy had died.

  Even the dying which the coroner would describe as instantaneous took long enough for her to see the line it was necessary to cross. On one side knelt Hat looking pale and stricken and on the other stood Sergius and the bazouki boy, overlapping and melding, smiling in welcome.

  Then it was dark, and in the control room of Presidium Security where Hat had been posted to follow the progress of the van dispatched to collect the Hoard, everything went dark too.

  ‘What’s up with you?’ demanded Berry, the manager, looking with concern at the young DC who had risen from his chair and was clasping both hands to his pallid face.

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing. Didn’t the power fail?’

  ‘Eh? I think I’d have noticed.’

  ‘No, look there was something … see there! The signal’s gone.’

  Berry glanced at the computerized map, smiled and started counting.

  ‘… fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen … there it is!’

  A flashing light had appeared on the screen heading south.

  ‘It’s the Estotiland underpass,’ he said. ‘Shields the signal. Usually takes between twelve and twenty seconds, depending on traffic. Any road, no need to get your knickers in a twist. It’s on the way back with the Hoard on board that these master criminals of thine are going to strike, not on the way down with an empty van. Didn’t they teach you owt at police college?’

  Hat didn’t answer. It felt like something had been snuffed out in his mind. Was it possible to have a stroke at his age? But there was no paralysis of one side of his body, no twisting of his mouth, no sense that the link between thought and speech had been lost.

  Yet something had been lost.

  ‘You don’t look so grand,’ said Berry, observing him more closely. ‘Sit down, lad, and I’ll bring you a cup of tea. You’ve not been near anyone with this Kung Flu, have you?’

  ‘What? Yes. The DCI’s got it.’

  ‘That’ll likely be it then. How old’s your DCI? I’ve heard it can be a killer.’

  But Peter Pascoe in fact was feeling much much better.

  For the first time in five days he’d woken up without feeling he had been unwillingly summoned from the grave, and the only trace his mind held of the troubled visions of the past few days had something to do with a Scotch pie.

  He had been sleeping alone, for his comfort and Ellie’s protection. He pushed back the duvet and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. Excellent. No dizziness, no sudden overheating of the body.

  The door opened and Ellie came in with a tray.

  ‘Well, hello, Lazarus,’ she said. ‘What’s this? Urgent call of nature?’

  ‘Something like that. What did you feed me last night? I’ve got dim recollections of a Scotch pie. I think there’s been a miracle cure.’

  ‘Scotch pie? No, you’re still delirious. Stand up.’

  He stood up and fell over.

  ‘Just a little miracle then. Do you want a lift into bed or are you going to levitate?’

  Sulkily he crawled back beneath the duvet.

  ‘But I really do feel much better,’ he protested.

  ‘Of course you do. Why is it your bouts of illness always follow such a hyperbolical parabola? A simple cold takes you from death’s door to the Olympic stadium in one mighty leap.’

  ‘A simple cold? Bollocks. And hyperbolical parabola sounds tautologous to me.’

  ‘I know you’re getting better when you start sneering at my style. And I’m glad of it,’ said Ellie, setting down the tray. ‘It means I can leave you with a clear conscience.’

  ‘Leave me? I know you writers are sensitive, but that’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?’

  ‘Leave you to your own devices while I try to stop your power-mad child from hijacking Suzie’s birthday party at Estotiland.’

  ‘Typical. Gadding off enjoying yourself while I’m lying on a bed of pain,’ said Pascoe.

  ‘What happened to the miracle? And if you really want to change places …’

  Pascoe closed his eyes, imagined the party – the noise, the violence, the vomit – and said, ‘I think I’m having a relapse.’

  But later, after he’d heard the front door close behind Ellie and his wildly excited daughter, he climbed out of bed again and this time, not needing to impress with his returned athleticism, he was able to stand upright and take a few tentative steps with little more counter-effect than a drunken stagger.

  He put on his dressing gown and went downstairs. As he made himself a cup of coffee he switched on his official radio. He no longer took sugar, but what better sweetener does a man at home need than to eavesdrop on his colleagues hard at work?

  Not a lot on the general frequency. Shoplifting in the town centre. Bit of strife outside the railway station as visitors arriving for that afternoon’s football match were fraternally greeted by home supporters. And an accident on Roman Way. Only one car involved and they were still cutting the victim out of the wreckage.

  He tried the frequencies that CID normally occupied and on the second of them heard Dalziel’s voice asking for a report from Serpent 3. Operation Serpent. He’d forgotten all about that. Funny how a virus could reduce matters of seemingly vast importance to vanishing point. Bowler, who must be in the Praesidium control room, reported that the pick-up van was inside the Sheffield city boundary. Pascoe felt a pang of guilt. It should have been his job to make sure that Mid-Yorkshire’s share in the operation was trouble free. At the very least he ought to have rung Stan Rose and wished him luck. He could remember his own first big job after he’d been promoted to DI, how eager he’d been to get things right, to reassure everyone – and in particular Fat Andy – that he could
hack it. Too late to get involved now, but he’d make a determined effort to be first with his congratulations.

  The telephone rang.

  He went through to the lounge and picked it up.

  ‘Pascoe,’ he said.

  ‘Mr Pascoe! How lovely to hear your voice!’

  He sat down. It wasn’t a voluntary movement and fortunately there was a chair conveniently placed for his buttocks, but he’d have sat down anyway.

  ‘Hello? Hello? Mr Pascoe, you still there?’

  ‘Yes, I’m still here.’

  ‘Oh good, thought I’d lost you for a moment there. It’s Franny, Mr Pascoe. Franny Roote.’

  ‘I know who it is,’ said Pascoe. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Just to talk. I’m sorry. Is this a bad time?’

  To talk to you? Every time is a bad time!

  He said, ‘Where are you, Mr Roote? America? Switzerland? Germany? Cambridge?’

  ‘Just outside Manchester. I got back from the States this morning. Plane was late. I felt a bit knackered, so I hung around and had a shower and a hearty breakfast, and now I’m on my way home. Look, Mr Pascoe, I wanted first of all to say sorry about all these letters I’ve been bombarding you with. I hope you haven’t found them too much of a nuisance, but I realize I’ve never given you the chance to say so. Maybe I was scared to. I mean, if you didn’t tell me direct that you were pissed off with getting letters from me, then I could imagine maybe it was OK, maybe you even quite enjoyed reading them and looked forward to them … OK, that’s probably going too far, but writing them has been important to me and I’m sure you can’t do your job without understanding how ingenious human beings are at justifying doing the things that seem important to themselves.’

  ‘I understand that very well, Mr Roote,’ said Pascoe coldly. ‘I think the most persuasive line in self-justification I ever heard came from a man who had just dismembered his wife and two children with a meat cleaver.’

  There was a pause. Then Roote said, ‘Oh shit. You really are pissed off, aren’t you? I’m sorry. Listen, no more letters then, I promise. But won’t you at least talk to me?’