He said, “Sorry. Got nowt there. Turned up unannounced like you suggested. She didn’t look busy but soon as she got a whiff what I were talking about, she suddenly became far too busy to talk. When I pressed her, I got a reminder that I was nowt but a sergeant and mebbe ought to have a word with my superiors afore I bothered her again.”
“Stuck-up cow!” said Pascoe. “And I thought she was OK the only time I met her.”
“Nay, Pete,” said Wield. “I reckon she’s running scared. She’s been seriously warned off talking about the Mill Street bodies.”
“Yeah? I’d have liked to see them warn Troll Longbottom off. He’d have got so mad, he’d have called a press conference.”
“Maybe. But being mad only lasts till bedtime. Being scared is what’s waiting for you when you wake up alone in the middle of the night.”
There was a personal note here that Pascoe on another occasion might have wanted to examine more closely, but at the moment he had no time for distractions. At least this confirmed his reading of the CAT report. There really was something to hide.
“So, anything else, Wieldy?” he said.
“Not really. No change on Andy. And I saw Ellie this morning. We bumped into each other and had a coffee.”
“Bumped like a real shunt or like on the dodgems?” said Pascoe suspiciously.
“I think she was glad to have a chat,” said Wield. “I reckon she’s worried about you. We all are. Pete, where the hell is all this going?”
“I’m just earning my pay, Wieldy. Which incidentally wouldn’t run to staying in this place. I’ve got a bathroom here bigger than our sitting room!”
Wield, recognizing this as a cutoff, said, “Listen, Pete, don’t get too used to the high life. We’ve got Ernie Ogilby sitting in Andy’s office. If you could solve crimes by studying traffic flow, we’d have the best clear-up rate in the UK!”
“Inspector French solved a lot by studying train timetables,” said Pascoe.
“French? Don’t know him. What’s his patch?”
“The past,” said Pascoe. “They did things differently there. Cheers.”
He put the phone down, wondering what had brought Inspector French into his mind. It was years since he’d read any of the books.
He went downstairs and enjoyed his excellent dinner. He didn’t mind dining alone in a restaurant. There was an infinity of entertainment to be derived from working out the relationships between and backstories of the other diners.
Afterward he took a turn round the block then went up to his room, climbed into his emperor-sized bed, imagined what it would be like if Ellie were there to explore it with him, rang her and shared his imaginings, remarked but did not remark upon the fact that she didn’t mention her meeting with Wield, then switched on the TV and watched one of those English-heritage movies which drifts like a slow cloud across a summer landscape till at some point indistinguishable from any other point he mingled with the movie and fell fast asleep.
5
ALL THE WAY HOME
Hugh.”
“Bernard.”
“De Clairvaux.”
“De Payens.” one thousand two thousand three thousand
“Hugh, have you heard? Someone took a potshot at the Sheikh.”
“Yes, it was on the news. Nothing to do with us, unless of course we’ve inspired some right-thinking but inept copycat.”
“A copycat using one of Andre’s guns, from the look of it.”
“What?”
“It’s not absolutely sure. The round our persistent friend Pascoe dug out of Mill Street was very badly damaged, but what few scorings were detectable coincide precisely with those on the Sheikh’s bullet. Can Andre be freelancing?”
“Not his style. Also, if he’d decided to grandstand, the Sheikh would be dead. But I’ll check it out.”
“Do. Al-Hijazi is on our list, but after this he’s likely to take a lot more care. Another possibility is one of the Geoffreys.”
“Perhaps. But Andre’s well trained. All weapons back to the armorer. Certainly with Bisol so uptight about the wounded pig, I doubt if he’s going to go around blasting off wildly.”
“Perhaps not. Talking of pigs, anything yet on that other one?”
“Yes. Word is he’ll be going wee-wee-wee all the way home tomorrow morning.”
6
AN URBAN FOX
Adolphus Hector woke up.
They say Fortune picks its favorites, but it also picks its fools. Hector had been on its hit list ever since his premature birth and instant christening.
What caused his mother to pick the name Adolphus is not known. Perhaps some passing imp of mischief whispered it in her ear as the hospital chaplain asked her what she would like to call her son. Certainly the newborn had seemed such a weak and ailing child that no one present felt the name had other than a soteriological significance.
Perhaps the child’s early arrival had caught his fairy godmother out too. Arriving at the christening too late to dispense the traditional baptismal presents, all she’d managed to slip under his pillow was the one gift without which all the others are useless anyway.
The instinct for survival.
Despite all pessimistic prognoses, Adolphus refused to die. When against all the odds he reached school age, he rapidly discovered the disadvantages of being called Adolphus. So when the first of many moves took him to a new school where his second name was assumed to be his first, he bore the mockery of its silliness with equanimity. At least Hector, as one kind teacher pointed out, was a hero and could be shortened to the very acceptable Hec, while Adolphus shrank only to the even less desirable Adolf.
If these bailiff-inspired moves were bad for his education, they did at least mean he was able to carry the lessons taught by peer persecution from one institution to the next. He even learned to hide the only skill he had that got within spitting distance of a talent, which was making recognizable portrait sketches in pencil. A child psychologist might have identified this as being associated with a relatively mild form of autism, but he rarely stayed anywhere long enough to be more than a flicker on a psychologist’s laptop screen. Resenting equally his fellow pupils’ efforts to involve him in producing caricature or pornography, and his teachers’ efforts to persuade him to sketch subjects of their choice, he soon learned to conceal this tiny talent also. So it remained hidden and unexplored, personal, private, and a comfort only to himself.
Perhaps this ability to catch significant detail on paper was part of his equally hidden talent for survival. Like his pencil, it was a blunt instrument, consisting of little more than the capacity to select what was useful from what anyone said to him and ignore the rest. His choice of career arose from the baffled flippancy of a careers master who’d said, “I don’t know what to recommend, Hector. A life of petty crime perhaps, only you’re not qualified. Maybe you should try for the police!”
So he did. And his application, coming at a low point in recruitment figures, was accepted even though his academic qualifications were at the stretch mark of minimal, his verbal skills were risible, and his self-presentation swung between the ridiculous and the pathetic. Marked down as a certain failure the instant most instructors set eyes on him, this certainty in fact protected him. Being convinced that the rigors of the course would by themselves cause him to drop out, they took no positive steps to get rid of him. This showed that they missed the essence of Hector. Show him the door and he would have gone. But not being shown the door he took as a positive, and not even being knocked back to redo most of his courses with the following intake could make him relent his first avowed intent to be a policeman. Eventually, in a prefiguration of his subsequent career, like a persistent mouse who survives both trap and poison, he ceased to be a pest in the college and became something of a pet. No one wanted to be known as the man who gave the coup de grace to Hector.
And so, to everyone’s amazement except his own, eventually he passed out of the training course and into M
id-Yorkshire legend.
That morning, as always after waking, Hector lay in bed for five minutes precisely. Then he arose. He did not need an alarm clock any more than did a bird. He was on early turn this week, and this was the time he got up on earlies, and he would have been bewildered by any suggestion that he might awake earlier or later than he did.
Thirty minutes later, washed, fed, and clothed, he opened the front door of the terrace in which he rented a bed-sitter with kitchenette and shared bathroom, and stepped out onto the pavement of the narrow suburban street which some civic ironist had christened Shady Grove. Despite the absence of trees, birds were singing, as yet unchallenged by traffic noise, and at the end of the long terrace the tail of an urban fox, on its way home after a pretty successful night scavenging the discarded take-away trail from the Chinese chippie half a mile away, flounced round the corner.
The air held promise of another glorious summer day and Hector, not insensitive to natural impulses, had a Monsieur Hulot spring in his step as he strode along the pavement.
At some point he heard a car behind him, some distance away and traveling slowly, but unusual enough at this hour for Hector’s well-tuned ear to detect it. Ahead at a T-junction, Shady Grove joined a slightly busier street with the equally unlikely name of Park Lane. At the junction, Hector turned as always to cross the Grove and proceed along the Lane. Normally this did not involve a pause, just a right turn of almost military precision, but today, aware of the car, he halted on the pavement to check its position.
It was a black Jaguar, only about twenty yards away now, but as it had come to a halt, it offered no danger. Indeed, he saw the driver behind the tinted glass smile at him and with a gloved hand gesture him to cross.
He nodded acknowledgment and stepped out onto the roadway.
The car engine roared, the wheels spun, rubber burned, and in a moment far too short for even a mind far sharper than Hector’s to register alarm, the Jaguar had covered the twenty yards and flipped him so high into the air, it passed beneath him before he came crashing to the ground.
The car braked, slewing to a halt across Park Lane. The driver looked back at the inert figure through his rear window. It twitched. He engaged reverse gear. But before he could start reversing, a milk float came into view at the far end of Shady Grove.
Banging it into first, he sent the Jag racing away down Park Lane.
7
SAURON’S EYE
Across the Pennines in Lancashire, which hates to be outshone in any way by its eastern neighbor, the day dawned with the same bright promise that had greeted Hector.
Back in Yorkshire, such promises were usually kept, and when after allowing himself an extra hour in bed, Pascoe finally strolled out of his hotel in search of the sights Glenister had advised him to see, he ignored Manchester’s reputation for meteorological fickleness and didn’t bother to carry a coat.
He was still looking for the first of the promised sights when a totally unharbinged volley of rain sent him diving into a doorway in search of cover.
He found himself at the entrance of what turned out to be a secondhand bookshop. Prominent in its dusty window display was a hefty leather-bound volume entitled The Templar Knights. The rain showing little sign of abating its attack, he went inside. At a rickety table sat a Woody Allen look-alike immersed, not too happily, in entering figures in a ledger. To Pascoe’s request to take the book from the window he replied with the perfunctory nod of one whose mental addition has been interrupted.
Pascoe did a quick skip through the volume. An introductory chapter gave the background to the Order’s foundation in a style even more pedagogic than Lukasz Komorowski’s. The sumptuously illustrated book then went on to describe how the Order evolved into a fighting force of such wealth and resource, it came to be seen as a threat by many European states. The vows of poverty and obedience were self-evidently shattered, and rumor alleged that the vow of chastity was even more comprehensively disobeyed by acts of what were coyly described as “unnatural congress.”
“Very nice volume that,” said a voice which was so George Formby that Pascoe had difficulty ascribing it to Woody Allen.
“Yes, indeed,” he said. “How much is it?”
“Think I’ve marked it up at one seven-five. You’re not trade, are you?”
“Oh no,” said Pascoe, taken aback. “Bit rich for my blood, I’m afraid.”
“I could let me arm be twisted for one fifty.”
“No, really, it’s the subject matter I’m interested in more than the volume.”
“Oh yes?” said the man sniffily. “Lot of interest in that kind of stuff since that geezer Tom Brown became all the rage.”
“Dan Brown, I think you mean.”
“Do I? Anyway, result is there’s any amount of paperbacks come out on the Templars and such like, there’s a box over there, one quid fifty each or three for a fiver.”
“I think your mathematics may have gone astray,” said Pascoe smugly.
“Don’t think so. Folk daft enough to buy three ought to pay more,” said the man.
Unwilling to be relegated to this group, Pascoe said, “Actually I do do a bit of collecting. Crime novels. I inherited several first-edition Christies a few years back, and I try to fill in the gaps when I can.”
“Is that right? Sorry, don’t think I’ve anything of the old lady’s that might interest you, but I do have a Freeman Wills Crofts. Death of a Train. First edition, Hodder and Stoughton, 1946, fine, with a fine jacket, just a couple of tiny nicks, nothing more. Snip at two fifty. Like a look?”
He didn’t wait for an answer but, something in Pascoe’s reaction clearly giving him hope of a sale, he went to fetch the volume.
Pascoe stared down at the picture of a locomotive and a railway-man, which formed the cover design, but what he was really looking at, and what had caused him to react, was the name. Or rather the names. Particularly in conjunction with the title.
Freeman. Wills. Crofts.
Death of a Train.
The firm of patent agents at number 6 Mill Street had been Crofts and Wills.
And of course there was Dave Freeman…
Coincidence? What was it the Gospel According to St. Andy said?
Bump into your best mate coming out of the Black Bull, that’s coincidence. Bump into him coming out of your wife’s bedroom, that’s correspondence.
“Yes, it’s a really nice volume,” said Woody Allen, mistaking his raptness for interest in the book. “Could cut my own throat and do it for two.”
“No, I’m sorry, I’m really just a Christie man,” said Pascoe. “Thanks anyway.”
Pausing only to purchase a paperback on the Templars from the bargain box (which as an act of atonement the proprietor clearly rated on a par with Becket’s murderers dropping a couple of groats into the poor box as they left the cathedral), he resumed his drift round the city. A shaft or two of watery sunlight tried to lure him into the middle of a park, far from shelter, but he was too smart for that and when the next downpour came, he was only a dash away from the Café Mozart where Glenister had arranged to meet him. There was a good hour to go before the appointment, but his bad leg was twingeing and a sit-down with a drink seemed very attractive.
The place had gone for an old-fashioned Central European feel—waiters with long aprons, newspapers in wooden holders, lots of urns and ferns to hide behind, the air filled with Viennese waltz muzak which probably had Mozart turning in his pauper’s grave.
Spooks must feel very much at home here, he thought as he helped himself to a Guardian, sank into a low sofa, and ordered a coffee.
The thought seemed to act as a conjuration.
“Pascoe, that you? Thought it was.”
He looked up to see Bernie Bloomfield staring down at him. Perhaps the lowness of his seat exaggerated the man’s height, but he felt like a wandering hobbit who has inadvertently attracted the attention of Sauron’s distant eye. At a more accessible level he could see
Lukasz Komorowski loitering in the background.
“Hello, sir,” he said.
Bloomfield folded himself onto the sofa and became Alastair Sim again.
“How are you, Peter?” he asked solicitously. “Looking a bit peaky, if you don’t mind me saying. That was a terrible ordeal for you. You sure you’re over it?”
“I’m fine, sir,” said Pascoe firmly.
“Good, good. And Andy Dalziel, anything new there?”
“Not yet.”
Komorowski, he noted, had found another table and was examining a potted fern with a phytographic intensity, or perhaps he was just checking for concealed mikes.
“Never despair. If I know my Andy he’ll open his eyes one of these days and start demanding to know what’s been done about finding the bastards who put him there.”
“And we’ll be able to give him the good news that they’re all dead,” said Pascoe.
“That’s right. Regrettably, of course.”
“Regrettably?”
“No intelligence from dead bodies, Pascoe. I’m sure you understand that. Andy certainly would.”
“Yes, sir. Though he might find it a bit harder to understand why Dave Freeman had been allowed to set up a covert surveillance operation in Mill Street without tipping him the wink. He’s very territorial.”
If Bloomfield had reacted with Alastair Sim’s expression of polite bafflement, Pascoe would have had a lot of backtracking explanation and apology to do.
Instead he didn’t know whether to feel pleased or fearful when the man nodded and murmured, “Sandy told you about that, did she?”
Finessing the Commander might be clever, but he doubted if it was wise. And a direct lie was certainly a folly too far.
“I half-worked it out myself, sir,” said Pascoe with cautious ambiguity. “Crofts and Wills. Not the smartest of cover names.”
“One of young Dave’s whims. He quite likes Willis and Hardy too. I must have a word with him. But before you start getting hot under the collar, remember I’m still a cop. I know how important to morale these things are, so it’s rule number one on my watch, the local force must always be kept in the loop. On a need-to-know basis of course. In this instance, Dan Trimble needed to know, but for the moment Andy didn’t.”
Death Comes for the Fat Man Page 12
