intention of going back to Headquarters. All he wanted to do was to catch a train to London.”
“But the Luftwaffe caught him.”
“They did indeed,” said Mr. Calder. “They caught him – and they set him free. Free of all possible suspicion. When he came out of that hospital six months later, he had a new face. M. He was a new man. If anyone asked him anything about his past, all he had to say was, `Oh, that was before I got blown up. I don't remember very much about that.`”
“But surely,” said Mr. Fortescue, “it wasn't quite as easy as that. Bessendine's family – was He stopped.
“You've seen it too, haven't you?” said Mr. Calder. “He had no family. No one at all. One brother was dead, the other was in a prison camp in Germany. I wonder if it was a pure coincidence that he should later have been shot when trying to escape. Or did Himmler send a secret instruction to the camp authorities? Maybe it was just another bit of luck. Like Mark's parents being killed in the same raid. His mother's family lived in Ireland – and had disowned her. His father's family – if it existed was in New Zealand. Mark Bessendine was completely and absolutely alone.”
“The first Hessel messages went out to Germany at the end of 1941,” said Mr. Fortescue. “How did he manage to send them?”
“No difficulty there,” said Mr. Calder. “The German short–wave transmitters were very efficient. You only had to renew the batteries. He'd have buried his in the wood. He only had to dig it up again. He had all the call signals and codes.”
Mr. Behrens had listened to this in silence, with a half–smile on his face. Now he cleared his throat and said, “If this – um – ingenious theory is true, it does – um – suggest a way of drawing out the gentleman concerned, does it not?”
“I was very interested when you told me about this dene–hole,” said Colonel Bessendine to Mr. Behrens. “I had heard about them as a boy, of course, but I've never actually seen one.”
“I hope we shan't be too late,” said Mr. Behrens. “It'll be dark in an hour. You'd better park your car here. We'll have to do the rest of the trip on foot.”
“I'm sorry I was late,” said Colonel Bessendine. “I had a job I had to finish before I go off tomorrow.”
“Off?”
“A short holiday. I'm taking my wife and daughter to France.”
“I envy you,” said Mr. Behrens. “Over the stile here and straight up the hill. I hope I can find it from this side. When I came here before I approached it from the other side. Fork right here, I think.”
They moved up through the silent woods, each occupied with his own, very different, thoughts.
Mr. Behrens said, “I'm sure this was the clearing. Look. You can see the marks of the workmen's tractors. And this – I think – was the stump.”
He stopped, and kicked at the foot of the elm bole. The loose covering pieces of turf on sticks, laid there by Arthur, collapsed, showing the dark entrance.
“Good Lord!” said Colonel Bessendine. He was standing, hands in raincoat pockets, shoulders hunched. “Don't tell me that people used to live in a place like that?”
“It's quite snug inside.”
“Inside? You mean you've actually been inside it?” He shifted his weight so that it rested on his left foot and his right hand came out of his pocket and hung loose.
“Oh, certainly,” said Mr. Behrens. “I found the body, too.”
There was a long silence. That's the advantage of having a false face, thought Mr. Behrens. It's unfair. You can do your thinking behind it, and no one can watch you actually doing it. The lips cracked into a smile.
“You're an odd card,” said Colonel Bessendine. “Did you bring me all the way here to tell me that?”
“I brought you here,” said Mr. Behrens, “so that you could explain one or two things that have been puzzling me.” He had seated himself on the thick side of the stump. “For instance, you must have known about this hideout, since you and Sergeant Brewer and Corporal Stubbs built it in 1940. Why didn't you tell me that when I started describing it to you?”
“I wasn't quite sure then,” said Colonel Bessendine. “I wanted to make sure.”
As he spoke his right hand moved with a smooth unhurried gesture into the open front of his coat and out again. It was now holding a flat blue–black weapon which Mr. Behrens, who was a connoisseur in such matters, recognized as a Zyanidpistole or cyanide gun.
“Where did they teach you that draw?” he said.
“In the Marineamt?”
For the first time he thought that the colonel was genuinely surprised. His face still revealed nothing, but there was a note of curiosity in his voice.
“I learned in Spain to carry a gun under my arm and draw it quickly,” he said. “There were quite a few occasions on which you had to shoot people before they shot you. Your own side, sometimes. It was rather a confused war in some ways.”
“I imagine so,” said Mr. Behrens. He was sitting like a Buddha in the third attitude of repose, his feet crossed, the palms of his hands pressed flat, one on each knee. “I only mentioned it because some of my colleagues had a theory that you were a German agent called Hessel.”
In the colonel's eyes a glint of genuine amusement appeared for a moment, like a face at a window, and ducked out of sight again.
“I gather that you were not convinced by this theory?”
“As a matter of fact, I wasn't.”
“Oh. Why?”
“I remember what your daughter told me. That you used to crawl up alongside a hedge running from the railway line to the private cricket ground at the big house. I went along and had a look. You couldn't crawl up along the hedge now. It's too overgrown. But there is a place at the top – it's hidden by the hedge, and I scratched myself damnably getting into it – where two bars are bent apart. A boy could have got through them easily.”
“You're very thorough,” said the colonel. “Is there anything you haven't found out about me?”
“I would be interested to know exactly when you started betraying your country. And why. Did you mean to do it all along and falling in with Hessel and killing him gave you an opportunity – the wireless and the codes and the call signs – ?”
“I can clearly see,” said the colonel, “that you have never been blown up. Really blown to pieces, I mean. If you had been, you'd know that it's quite impossible to predict what sort of man will come down again. You can be turned inside out, or upside down. You can be born again. Things you didn't know were inside you can be shaken to the top.”
“Saul becoming Paul, on the road to Damascus.”
“You are an intelligent man,” said the colonel. “It's a pleasure to talk to you. The analogy had not occurred to me, but it is perfectly apt. My father was a great man for disciplining youth, for regimentation, and the New Order. Because he was my father, I rebelled against it. That's natural enough. Because I rebelled against it, I fought for the Russians against the Germans in Spain. I saw how those young Nazis behaved. It was simply a rehearsal for them, you know. A rehearsal for the struggle they had dedicated their lives to. A knightly vigil, if you like. I saw them fight, and I saw them die. Any that were captured were usually tortured. I tortured them myself. If you torture a man and fail to break him, it becomes like a love affair. Did you know that?”
“I, too, have read the works of the Marquis de Sade,” said Mr. Behrens. “Go on.”
“When I lay in hospital in the darkness with my eyes bandaged, my hands strapped to my sides, coming slowly back to life, I had the strangest feeling. I was Hessel, I was the man I had left lying in the darkness at the bottom of the pit. I had closed his eyes and folded his hands, and now I was him. His work was my work. Where he had left it off, I would take it up. My father had been right and Hitler had been right and I had been wrong. And now I had been shown a way to repair the mistakes and follies of my former life. Does that sound mad to you?”
“Quite mad,” said Mr. Behrens. “But I find it easier to beli
eve than the rival theory – that the accident of having a new face enabled you to fool everyone for twenty–five years. You may have had no family, but there were school friends and Army friends and neighbors. But I interrupt you. When you got out of the hospital and decided to carry on Hessel's work, I suppose you used his wireless set and his codes?”
“Until the end of the war, yes. Then I destroyed them. When I was forced to work for the Russians I began to use other methods. I'm afraid I can't discuss them, even with you. They involve too many other people.”
In spite of the peril of his position, Mr. Behrens could not suppress a feeling of deep satisfaction. Not many of his plans had worked out so exactly. Colonel Bessendine was not a man given to confidences. A mixture of carefully devised forces was now driving him to talk. The time and the place; the fact that Mr. Behrens had established a certain intellectual supremacy over him; the fact that he must have been unable, for so many years, to speak freely to anyone; the fact that silence was no longer important, since he had made up his mind to liquidate his audience. On this last point Mr. Behrens was under no illusions. Colonel Bessendine was on his way out. France was only the first station on a line which led to Eastern Germany and Moscow.
“One thing puzzles me,” said the colonel, breaking into his thoughts. “During all the time we have been talking here – and I cannot tell you how much I have enjoyed our conversation – I couldn't help noticing that you have hardly moved. Your hands, for instance, have been lying cupped, one on each knee. When a fly annoyed you just now, instead of raising your hand to brush it off you shook your head
violently.”
Mr. Behrens said, raising his voice a little, “If I were to lift my right hand a very well–trained dog, who has been approaching you quietly from the rear while we were talking, would have jumped for your throat.”
The colonel smiled. “Your imagination does you credit. What happens if you lift your left hand? Does a genie appear from a bottle and carry me off?”
“If I raise my left hand,” said Mr. Behrens, “you will be shot dead.” And so saying, he raised it.
The two men and the big dog stared down at the crumbled body. Rasselas sniffed at it, once, and turned away. It was carrion and no longer interesting.
“I'd have liked to try to pull him down alive,” said Mr. Behrens. “But with that foul weapon in his hand I dared not chance it.”
“It will solve a lot of Mr. Fortescue's problems,” said Mr. Calder. He was unscrewing the telescopic sight from the rifle he was carrying.
“We'll put him down beside Hessel. I've brought two crowbars along with me. We ought to be able to shift the stump back into its original position. With any luck they'll lie there, undisturbed, for a very long time.”
Side by side in the dark earth, thought Mr. Behrens. Until the Day of Judgement, when all hearts are opened and all thoughts known.
“We'd better hurry, too,” said Mr. Calder. “It's getting dark and I want to get back in time for tea.”
Reginald Hill
(1936 – )
Superintendent Andrew Dalziel (pronounced Dee–ell) and Sergeant (later Inspector) Peter Pascoe are a pair of Yorkshire police detectives – ”two men who are absolutely contrasted in background, attitudes, and approach, but who are forced to admit grudging respect for each other,” in the author's own capsule description. Dalziel is a coarse, old–fashioned policeman whose stated philosophy is: “Life's a series of wrecks. Make sure you get washed up with the survivors.” The much–younger Pascoe is both well–educated (he has a degree in social science and is an omnivorous reader) and the possessor of liberal ideas about life, which he considers “a sorrow and a mystery,” and police work. Despite growth and change in both characters over the course of thirteen novels, their fundamental differences remain the same, and it is their sometimes prickly, sometimes comic relationship that forms the central appeal of the series.
Reginald Hill's adroit plotting skills are another strong point, which combined with a darkening vision of the world have kept him from writing the same book twice. His first novel and the first to feature Dalziel and Pascoe, A Clubbable Woman (published in England in 1970 but not in the United States until 1984), is a bawdily amusing look at the rugby world of northern England. In Exit Lines (1984), investigation into the deaths of three old men on the same winter night provides a forum for serious philosophical commentary on the aging process and the nature of life and death. Bones and Silence (1990), the recipient of a British Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger award for best novel of its year, is concerned with medieval Yorkshire mystery plays, in one of which Dalziel acts the part of God. The novelette that follows, one of five in the 1979 collection, Pascoe's Ghost and Other Brief Chronicles of Crime, also demonstrates Hill's shrewd characterizations and unique blend of comedy, tragedy, and philosophy. In addition to the Dalziel and Pascoe series, Reginald Hill has published two novels about black private detective Joe Sixsmith (Blood Sympathy and Born Guilt, 1994 and 1995, respectively); thrillers such as A Very Good Hater (1974), which deals with a pair of former servicemen who come upon a man they suspect is a Nazi war criminal whom they have sworn to kill, and which is distinguished by several surprising plot twists; and eight nonseries novels under the pseudonym Patrick Ruell, some lighthearted (Red Christmas, 1972) and some quite serious in tone (The Only Game, 1991).
DALZIEL'S GHOST
SUPERINTENDENT DALZIEL AND SERGEANT PASCOE
YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND 1979
“Well, this is very cosy,” said Detective–Superintendent Dalziel, scratching his buttocks sensuously before the huge log fire.
“It is for some,” said Pascoe, shivering still from the frosty November night.
But Dalziel was right, he thought as he looked round the room. It was cosy, probably as cosy as it had been in the three hundred years since it was built. It was doubtful if any previous owner, even the most recent, would have recognized the old living–room of Stanstone Rigg farmhouse. Eliot had done a good job, stripping the beams, opening up the mean little fireplace and replacing the splintered uneven floorboards with smooth dark oak; and Giselle had broken the plain white walls with richly coloured, voluminous curtaining and substituted everywhere the ornaments of art for the detritus of utility.
Outside, though, when night fell, and darkness dissolved the telephone poles, and the mist lay too thick to be pierced by the rare headlight on the distant road, then the former owners peering from their little cube of warmth and light would not have felt much difference. Not the kind of thoughts a ghost–hunter should have! he told himself reprovingly. Cool calm scepticism was the right state of mind.
And his heart jumped violently as behind him the telephone rang. Dalziel, now pouring himself a large scotch from the goodly array of bottles on the huge sideboard, made no move towards the phone though he was the nearer. Detective–Superintendents save their strength for important things and leave their underlings to deal with trivia.
“Hello,” said Pascoe.
“Peter, you're there!”
“Ellie love,” he answered. “Sometimes the sharpness of your mind makes me feel unworthy to be married to you.”
“What are you doing?”
“We've just arrived. I'm talking to you. The super's having a drink.”
“Oh God! You did warn the Eliots, didn't you?”
“Not really, dear. I felt the detailed case–history you doubtless gave to Giselle needed no embellishment.”
“I'm not sure this is such a good idea.”
“Me neither. On the contrary. In fact, you may recall that on several occasions in the past three days I've said as much to you, whose not such a good idea it was in the first place.”
“All you're worried about is your dignity!” said Ellie. “I'm worried about that lovely house. What's he doing now!”
Pascoe looked across the room to where Dalziel had bent his massive bulk so that his balding close–cropped head was on a level with a small figurine o
f a shepherd chastely dallying with a milkmaid. His broad right hand was on the point of picking it up.
“He's not touching anything,” said Pascoe hastily. “Was there any other reason you phoned?”
“Other than what?”
“Concern for the Eliots' booze and knick–knacks.”
“Oh, Peter, don't be so half–witted. It seemed a laugh at The Old Mill, but now I don't like you being there with him, and I don't like me being here by myself. Come home and we'll screw till someone cries Hold! Enough!”
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