Death's Jest-Book

by Reginald Hill

  And Pascoe, after sinking his face briefly in his daughter’s hair, left her to her mother and went straight to Franny Roote.

  He put his arm round him to make him more comfortable and felt the warm blood oozing between his fingers.

  ‘Medics!’ he screamed. ‘Get some help here, for fuck’s sake!’

  ‘Made up your mind yet, Mr Pascoe?’ said the youth in a voice scarcely louder than a whisper. ‘Going to put me on trial? No, of course you’re not. It’s not in you …’

  ‘Don’t be too sure. I can be a right bastard when I try,’ said Pascoe with an effort at lightness. ‘We’ll talk about it when you’re convalescing.’

  ‘Convalescing? I don’t think so.’

  His eyes clouded for a moment then cleared again and he seemed to take in his surroundings and began to laugh, painfully.

  ‘Remember that inscription I told you about? Need a change now. Franny Roote … Born in Hope … Died in Ladies Underwear … even better, eh?’

  A paramedic arrived and knelt down beside the wounded man. Pascoe tried to move aside but Roote’s fingers found strength from somewhere to hold him back.

  ‘Know what the date is?’ he said. ‘January the twenty-sixth. Same day Beddoes died. Funny that.’

  ‘Don’t talk about dying,’ said Pascoe sharply. ‘You can’t die yet. It’s not your time.’

  ‘Want to keep me alive, Mr Pascoe? It would be a good trick. For all his talk of death, I sometimes think Beddoes would have liked to master it. But why should you want me alive if you’re not going to try me?’

  ‘So I can thank you, Franny,’ said Pascoe desperately. ‘So you can’t die.’

  ‘You know me, Mr Pascoe … always looking for someone who’d tell me what to do,’ said Roote smiling.

  The paramedic was doing what he could, all the while talking urgently into his lapel radio, demanding to know where the hell the stretcher was and saying they needed a chopper here, an ambulance would be too slow. Franny showed no reaction to the sound of his voice or the touch of his hands or the prick of his needle. Still he kept tight hold of Pascoe’s hand and never once took his eyes off his face, and Pascoe locked on to the young man’s gaze as if by sheer force of will he could hold it steady and bright.

  All around them was noise and bustle, people moving swiftly, men shouting orders, radios crackling, distant sirens wailing; but for all the heed either of them took of this, they might have been a pair of still and isolated figures sitting under the solitary moon in the hush’d Chorasmian waste where the river Oxus flows on his long and winding journey to the Aral Sea.

  Imagined Scenes

  from

  AMONG OTHER THINGS:

  The Quest for Thomas Lovell Beddoes

  by Sam Johnson MA, PhD

  (revised, edited and completed by Francis Xavier Roote MA, PhD)

  It is January 26th, 1849. In the Town Hospital of Basel, Thomas Lovell Beddoes awakes. It is early. The large garden overlooked from his window is still in darkness and the birds that winter there have not yet unlocked the first notes of their aubade.

  He feels a stab of pain in his right leg, just beneath the knee joint. He grimaces, then smiles as the pain fades. The ghost of a poem in the comic macabre style flits through his mind. In it the amputated limbs tossed into the furnace of the hospital mortuary sing their resentment at this enforced exile from their proper sphere and send farewell messages to the bodies that have betrayed them.

  He shifts in his bed and a book falls to the floor. He shares his bed with numerous volumes which range across all his interests, from medical treatises through modern German novels and translations of the classics to a new collection of Goethe’s letters to Frau von Stein. Absent only are the radical tracts of earlier days. He has said goodbye to all that.

  He lies there with his eyes staring into the dark until light begins to seep through the edges of the heavy curtains, then he throws back the coverlet in a torrent of books and rolls out of bed.

  With the aid of a crutch he has achieved an agility which is the wonder of Dr Ecklin and Dr Frey and all the hospital attendants. His generally lively demeanour gives them hope of a matching mental recovery and if his jokes have something of a macabre cast, then they always did.

  Later in the day, as he moves rapidly out of the hospital grounds, he returns cheerful greetings to those he encounters who often pause to watch his progress with admiration.

  On his way into town he passes the house where Konrad Degen is lodged but he does not pause. That too is over. Degen has been persuaded by mutual acquaintance to return from Frankfurt to Basel to aid his old patron’s recuperation. But a true friend would have needed no persuasion. And a son would have crawled over hot coals to comfort his stricken father.

  In a quiet side street he pauses a while to make sure he is unobserved by anyone of his acquaintance. Then he enters an apothecary’s shop where he is greeted deferentially as Herr Doktor Beddoes and offered a chair in which he sits and chats about his medical researches while his required prescriptions are made up.

  Back at the hospital, he tells his attendant that his excursion, though enjoyable, has fatigued him and he is now going to rest for a few hours.

  Locking his door, he takes from his pocket the drugs he has obtained. Only one of them does he have any use for. He mixes it in a glass of heavy Rhenish wine, sips, makes a wry face, adds a little more wine, sips again, then sits down at the table which stands before the window and sharpens a pen. His mind meanwhile is running through a list of possible correspondents. His sense of drama, though it falls well short of that necessary to a practical rather than a literary playwright, is refined enough to know that more than one last letter is a profligacy which risks touching the absurd.

  His choice is made. Phillips, a good and noble man, head of a happy family and a pattern for fathers everywhere.

  He scrawls across the head of his paper To Mr Revell Phillips, The Middle Temple, London, and begins to write, pausing from time to time to sip his wine.

  Outside the day is dying young.

  My dear Phillips,

  I am food for what I am good for – worms.

  Food for … good for … I could use that. Make a note? Hardly worth it! The echo of Hotspur’s dying speech makes him think of Konrad. He pushed the thought aside.

  I have made a will here which I desire to be respected, and add the donation of £20 to Dr Ecklin, my physician.

  W. Beddoes must have a case (50 bottles) of Champagne Moet 1847 to drink my

  He pauses. My health? Hardly. Then he smiles and starts writing again.

  death in.

  Thanks for all kindness. Borrow the £200. You are a good & noble man & your children must look sharp to be like you.

  Yours,

  if my own,

  ever,

  T. L. B.

  He throws down his pen.

  It is over.

  But the retiring actor does not leave the stage without many a backward glance and the retiring singer can never resist one last reprise, and no real writer ever truly retires.

  So he takes up his pen again and scribbles a few more lines.

  Love to Anna, Henry, the Beddoes of Longvill and Zoe and Emmeline King –

  Anyone missed out? Of course, the most important of them all.

  also to Kelsall whom I beg to look at my MSS and print or not as he thinks fit. I ought to have been among other things a good poet. Life was too great a bore on one peg and that a bad one.

  Bit self-pitying that? Perhaps. End on a jest, that’s the true way of death! He winces as he feels a spasm in his gut from the poison. Then he smiles again. A little medical joke to finish with.

  Buy for Dr Ecklin above mentioned one of Reade’s best stomach-pumps.

  Perhaps he should elaborate on this but now the pen feels heavy in his hand and his lids feel heavy on his eyes.

  He sets the pen down, takes up the note and carefully pins it to his shirt. He drains the wineglass and
hops across to his bed across which he sprawls supine.

  By now it is quite dark outside. Or is the darkness his alone? He does not know. His mind ranges across his life, his huge hopes – for himself, for mankind – and their huge failure, which somehow at this moment of departure does not seem quite so huge. Fantastic images spin across his brain and instinctively he reaches out to them and tries to trap them in a net of words. Now he is seeing death, not on the slab, not on the stage, not on the printed page, but real and active and standing before him, rendering all those thousand of words he has used to describe it sadly inadequate – shards of a broken glass, ashes of an incinerated painting, echoes of a distant music. If only he could raise his pen now, he might after all be more than a good poet, he might be a great one.

  Is it too late? Who knows? Can death take a joke as well as make one?

  His lips part, his collapsing lungs strive to uncrease themselves and take in that rich and healing air which he knows can revive him, but his strength has gone. Death’s jest is complete.

  So Thomas Lovell Beddoes exhales his last breath bearing his last words.

  ‘Fetch the cow … fetch the cow …’

  The End

  If you enjoyed Death's Jest-Book, read the next book in the Dalziel & Pascoe series

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  Read on for the first chapter now.

  March 1991

  1

  by the waters of Babylon

  The war had been over for three weeks. Eventually the process of reconstruction would begin, but for the time being he ruins of the plant remained as they had been twenty-four hours after the missiles struck. By then the survivors had been hospitalized and the accessible dead removed. The smell of death rising from the inaccessible soon became intolerable but it didn’t last long as the heat of the approaching summer accelerated decay and nature’s cleansers, the flies and small rodents, went about their work.

  Dust settled, sun and wind airbrushed the exposed rawness of cracked concrete till it was hardly distinguishable from the baked earth surrounding it, and a traveller in this antique land might have been forgiven for thinking that these relicts were as ancient as those of the great city of Babylon only a few miles away.

  Finally, with the smells reduced to a bearable level and the dogs picking over the ruins showing no signs of turning even mangier than usual, some bold spirits living in the vicinity began to make their own exploratory forays.

  The new scavengers found a degree of devastation so extensive that even the most technically minded of them couldn’t work out the possible function of the plant’s wrecked machinery. They gathered up whatever might be sellable or tradable or adaptable to some domestic purpose and left.

  But not all of them. Khalid Kassem, at thirteen counting himself a man and certainly imbued with a sense of adventure and ambition which was adult in its scope, hung back when his father and brothers departed. He was small for his age and slightly built, factors usually militating against his efforts to be taken seriously. In this case, however, he felt they could work to his advantage. He’d noticed a crack in a collapsed wall which he felt he might be able to squeeze through. Earlier while scavenging in the ruins of an office building he had come across a small torch, its bulb miraculously unbroken and its battery retaining enough juice to produce a faint beam. Instead of flaunting his find, he had concealed it, and when he spotted the crack and shone the light through it to reveal a chamber within, he began to feel divinely encouraged in his enterprise.

  It was a tight squeeze even for one of his build, but eventually he got through and found himself in what looked to have been a basement storage area. There was blast damage here as there was everywhere and much of the ceiling had been shattered when the floors above had come crashing down, but no actual explosion seemed to have occurred in this space. Among the debris lay a scatter of metal crates, some intact, one or two broken open to reveal cuboids of some kind of lightweight foam cladding. Where this had split, Khalid’s faint beam of light glanced back off dully gleaming machines. He broke some of the cladding away to get a better look and discovered the machine was further wrapped in a close-clinging transparent plastic sheet. Recently on a visit to relatives in Baghdad, he had seen a refrigerator stacked with packets of food wrapped like this. It was explained to him that all the air had been sucked out so that as long as the package remained unopened the food inside would remain fresh. These machines too, he guessed, were being kept fresh. It did not surprise him. Metal he knew was capable of decay, and machinery was, in his limited experience, even harder to keep in good condition than livestock.

  There was unfortunately no way to profit from his discovery. Even if it had been possible to recover one of these machines, what would he and his family do with it?

  He turned to go, and the faint beam of his torch touched a crate rather smaller than the rest. A long metal cylinder had fallen across it, splitting it completely open, like a knife slicing a melon. It was the shape of its contents that caught his eye. Obscured by the cylinder resting on the broken crate, this lacked the angularity of the vacuum-packed machines. It was more like some kind of cocoon.

  He put his torch down and, by using both hands and all his slight body weight, he managed to roll the cylinder to one side. It hit the floor with a crash that raised enough dust to set him coughing.

  When he recovered, he picked up his torch and directed the ever fainter beam downward, praying it might reveal some treasure he could bear back proudly to his family.

  The light glanced back from a pair of staring eyes.

  He screamed in terror and dropped the torch, which went out.

  That might have been the end for Khalid, but Allah is merciful and bountiful and permitted two of his miracles together.

  The first was that as his scream died away (for want of breath not want of terror) he heard a voice calling his name.

  ‘Khalid, where the hell are you? Come on, or you’re in big trouble.’

  It was his favourite brother, Ahmed.

  The second miracle was that another light came on in the storeroom to replace his broken torch. This light was red and intermittent. In the brightness of its flashes he looked again at the vacuum-packed cocoon.

  It was a woman in there. She was young and black and beautiful. And of course she was dead.

  His brother shouted his name again, sounding both anxious and angry.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he called back impatiently, his fear fading with Ahmed’s proximity and of course the light.

  Which came from … where?

  He checked and his fear came back with advantages.

  The light was coming from the end of the metal cylinder he had so casually sent crashing to the floor. There were Western letters on the metal which made no sense to him. But one thing he did recognize: the emblem of the great shaitan who was the nation’s bitterest foe.

  Now he knew what had come crashing through the roof but had not exploded.

  Yet.

  He scrambled towards the fissure through which he’d entered. It seemed to have constricted even further, or fear was making him fat, and for a moment he thought he was caught fast. He had one arm through and was desperately trying to get a purchase on the ruined outer wall when his hand was grasped tight and next moment he was being dragged painfully through the gap into Ahmed’s arms.

  His brother opened his mouth to remonstrate with him, saw the look on his face and needed no further persuasion to obey when Khalid screamed. ‘Run!’

  They ran together, the two brothers, straining every sinew forward, like two champions contesting the final lap in an Olympic race, except that in this competition whenever one stumbled, the other reached out a steadying hand.

  The tape they were running to was the Euphrates whose blessed waters had provided fertility and sustenance to their ancestors for centuries.

  Time meant nothing, distance was everything.

  The only sound was their labou
red breathing and the swish of their limbs through the waist-high rushes.

  Their eyes stared ahead, to safety, to their future, so they did not see behind them the ruins begin to rise into the air and be themselves ruined.

  But they knew instantly there were now other faster competitors in the race.

  The sound overtook them first, rolling by in dull thunder.

  And then the blast was at their heels, at their shoulders, picking them up and hurling them forward as it raced triumphantly on.

  Down they crashed, down they splashed. They were at the river. They felt its blessed coldness sweep over them. They let the current roll them at its own sweet will. Then they rose together, coughing and spluttering, and looked at each other, brother checking brother for damage at the same time as the impulses signalling the state of his own bone and muscle came pulsing along the nerves.

  ‘You OK, little one?’ said Ahmed after a while.

  ‘Fine. You?’

  ‘I’m OK. Hey, you run well for a tadpole.’

  ‘You too, for a frog.’

  They pulled themselves on to the bank and sat looking back at the column of dust and fine debris hanging in the air.

  ‘So what did you find in there?’ asked Ahmed.

  Khalid hardly paused for thought. He had no explanation for what he’d seen, but he was old enough to know he lived in a world where knowledge could be dangerous.

  Later he would say a prayer for the dead woman in case she was of the faith.

  Or even if she wasn’t.

  And then a prayer for himself for lying to his brother.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just the rocket. Otherwise nothing at all.’

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  About the Author

  Reginald Hill, who died in 2012, was a native of Cumbria and former resident of Yorkshire, the setting for his novels featuring detectives Andy Dalziel and Peter Pascoe. Their appearances won him numerous awards including a CWA Gold Dagger, the Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement and the Theakstons Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award. The Dalziel and Pascoe novels have also been adapted into a hugely popular BBC TV series.