“But the actual slicing, any problems there?”
“No. It’s pretty inert stuff.”
Pollock was now regarding Pascoe with grave suspicion.
In an effort to put him at ease, Pascoe said, “So, getting back to the report, what you’re saying is, the bomb that went off, the small lump with the detonator in it, was made from Semtex of exactly the same type as a shipment the security forces had intercepted a few months earlier?”
He could tell his effort at reassurance had met with only limited success.
Pollock chewed this over for a moment then said, “No. I’m saying nowt.”
“I mean, the report is saying it?”
Pollock smiled. Not a friendly smile but the faintly mocking smile of a hard-nosed Yorkshireman who’s listened to your sales pitch and isn’t going to buy.
He took out a large gray handkerchief and carefully wiped round the edges of the sheets of paper. Then, still holding them in the cloth, he handed them back to Pascoe.
“Report? What report, sir?” he said.
Pascoe had lived in Yorkshire long enough to know the end of a lane when he saw one.
“You must have misheard me,” he said. “Who mentioned a report? But thanks for your help anyway.”
“Don’t follow you,” said Pollock, who’d retrieved the bullet analysis and was busy giving that the handkerchief treatment too. “You’ve asked me nowt and I’ve told you nowt. And I’ll thank you not to tell any bugger different, Mr. Pascoe, else I might have to resort to words of one syllable again. Now I’ve got work to do.”
He turned and left.
He’s right, thought Pascoe, feeling reproached. You shouldn’t get other people involved in your mess unless they knew what they were getting into. Which, as he still had little idea what he himself might be getting into, was rather hard to explain.
It was now he rang the Central to check that Mary Goodrich was around. On reaching the hospital, he parked in the space allocated to the Senior Gynecological Consultant who he knew would be on or about the ninth green at this time on a Friday.
He found Goodrich in her office and was greeted by the welcoming smile which was the response of most young women to Pascoe in the boyish-charm mode which came so naturally to him. But the moment he mentioned Wield’s visit, her face blanked over and she said, “Wield? Oh yes, the ugly one. Yes, he did call, but things were so hectic…in fact, I’m still up to my eyes, so unless it’s urgent…”
She was trying to usher him through the door. Not so long ago it might have worked, but now the only effect was that Pascoe felt himself inflating into Mid-Yorkshire’s version of the Incredible Hulk.
He stood before her planted as firm as a full-grown tree and said heavily, “All right, luv, so you’re too busy to talk to the police about the Mill Street corpses? In that case, it’ll be a doddle dealing with the gents of the Press when they come looking for the medical spokesman who’s the source of the information they’re shortly going to get.”
“Is that some sort of threat?” she said wonderingly.
Pascoe held up his forefinger.
“Is that a finger?” he replied.
He could tell she was thrown by his manner and trying to reconcile it with the gently amiable Pascoe she’d encountered previously.
“So what kind of information might that be?”
“Information about the mouth-box contents and about the disposition of the corpses’ limbs,” he said.
That got her interest.
She said, “If you know so much, why do you need to come here bullying me?”
Sensitive to the justified accusation, he said, “Look, I’m sorry about that, but I’ve just got the outline, what I need are the details. OK, I’m pretty sure you’ve been advised not to discuss the matter with anyone else, but that hardly applies to me, does it?”
He saw at once he’d made a mistake.
When the CAT people warned her off, they’d probably been very precise. Talk to no one, and no one included everyone in Mid-Yorkshire CID. The consequence of disobedience had been made clear. She was young, her career was just taking off. Step out of line here and the whole fascinating area of Home Office–sponsored forensic pathology would be closed to her. At best she might be allowed to confirm that corpses from the geriatric ward hadn’t received a helping hand in passing though death’s door.
She believed the CAT people in their threats. By relaxing his manner, all he’d done was confirm her instinct that he didn’t have it in him to carry his threat through.
He took out his mobile and dialed.
“Give me Sammy Ruddlesdin, will you? Thanks, I’ll hold.”
He said to Goodrich, “You know Sammy? The News’s ace reporter. Loves a good story, especially one he can sell on to the nationals.”
“So what’s the story you’ve got for him?” she said, still unimpressed.
“Mill Street bombings. Examination of the corpses. Findings concealed. Was there more going on here than a simple accident among some cack-handed terrorists?”
“Sounds a good story,” she said.
“It gets better when I tell him I got the basic facts from the only person to examine the bodies before the Security Services whisked them away,” he said.
“And I’ll deny it,” she said spiritedly. “Why believe you and not me?”
He smiled a smile he’d learned from Dalziel.
“Because I’m an honest upstanding cop that Sammy’s known for a long long time and from whom he’s never had an iota of dud information. Because we sometimes have a drink together and we trust each other. Because you’ve only been here two minutes and you’re young and you’re a woman. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what Sammy believes, does it? Your friends in Security—was it a nice young chap called Freeman, by the way?—they’ll have no problem believing the story because it will give them me as well as you, and they’ll be only too delighted to get me by the short and hairies. They’ll just fuck your career up as an afterthought.”
She was regarding him with bewildered loathing.
“But if they can harm you as well, then why…?”
“Why?” he interrupted. “Because whatever happened in Mill Street has left someone very important to me lying in a coma and God knows if he’s ever going to come out of it, and I’m not going to rest till I find out why. Not the probable story, or the official story, but the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the fucking truth. Sammy, hi. Peter Pascoe here. Yeah, I’m fine. Listen, Sammy, can you hold on just a second?”
He pressed the phone to his chest and looked at Mary Goodrich.
She said, “So what do you want to know?”
Once she’d made up her mind to talk, she gave the facts in a detailed, orderly manner that Edgar Wield would have approved of.
Two of the bodies had been completely blown apart by the explosion and the fragments roasted by the fire till not much was left but bone. She reckoned it would take days of slow and detailed examination to get any meaningful results from them. The vagaries of blast are such, however, that one body had more or less held together though it had suffered equally from the heat of the fire. This was where Goodrich had concentrated her attention in the couple of hours she had before the CAT removal men arrived. In particular she’d started making notes on the jaw because she reckoned that dental identification was going to be the best bet. All her notes had been removed, but she recalled being surprised by the amount of ash in the mouth cavity.
“Why should that surprise you?” inquired Pascoe. “I reckon I had to be hosed down when they got me to hospital and I wasn’t in the middle of it.”
“It was the nature of this ash,” she said. “Tongue, plate, all the soft-tissue stuff had been burnt off or melted down. But mixed in with the fatty residue you’d expect, there was this fine ash. Like you might get if you burned cloth. And there was a fragment of what looked like thread between one of the incisors and the canine next to it.”
“What makes you
think it was the remains of cloth?” he asked.
“I’ve examined fire victims before,” she said.
“But never found anything like this in their mouths?”
“No.”
“The thread you found in the teeth, what happened to it?”
“I handed it over to your friends,” she snapped. “Why not ask them?”
He ignored this and said, “So what about the disposition of the limbs?”
“In most cases when a body is recovered from a serious fire, there is a characteristic fetal configuration of the torso and limbs. You’ve probably seen it. In this case, though the legs had come up toward the chest in the typical manner, the arms for some reason hadn’t come forward but seem to have remained behind the back.”
“You mean, as if there’d been something preventing the natural forward movement? As if the arms had been tied behind the back, for instance? With a gag in the mouth producing the cloth ash?”
“That’s your area of expertise, not mine,” she said. But he could tell that she’d made the speculation.
“Yes, it is,” he said. “Anything else you can tell me?”
“Apart from go screw yourself? No.”
It would have been nice to let her have the last word, but for her sake as well as his own, he couldn’t do that. She was mad now. Mad enough maybe to open her mouth to someone who might open their mouth to someone…
For both their sakes, he needed to remind her of what Wield had told him.
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.
He took a step toward her.
“Then hear this,” he said. “You were warned before to keep quiet. I’m warning you again. This time I’d listen.”
As he left her office, he felt powerful, positive. But within half a dozen steps he felt so guilty that it was all he could do to stop himself from turning round to apologize.
Even now, sitting in his own living room, the memory made him feel bad. Hectoring bright young women didn’t come easy to him.
Hectoring…
He let himself be diverted by the word.
How had Hector, the great hero, the personification of Trojan nobility, declined by the seventeenth century into a contemptuous term for a swaggering bully? Was it the same in any other language, or was it only the English with their tabloid instinct to look for feet of clay who deconstructed old heroes thus?
Not that a swaggering bully was the term’s lowest deep, not in Mid-Yorkshire anyway. He tried to imagine a confrontation between Prince Hector in all his pomp and Constable Hector in all his pathos. It would have made stepping in front of a car seem like a friendly embrace! Ultimately, however, it was the pathetic constable not the proud prince he might have to use to buttress the still flimsy hypothesis he was erecting on the ruin of the Mill Street terrace.
Don’t do Hector down, he reproved himself. Somehow whenever the earth stopped shaking and the dust settled, Hector was still there. Maybe someone up there liked him enough to steer him clear of harm. After all, Homer tells us that the Olympians all had their favorites whom they did their best to protect. He recalled enviously how Paris, who started it all, having lost a titanic battle with the vengeful Menelaus, had found himself lying at the cuckold’s mercy, till suddenly Aphrodite whirled him away from the battlefield and deposited him alongside his gorgeous mistress in his own scented bedroom.
So it was with Troy very much in his mind that Pascoe fell asleep on the sofa, but he did not dream of battles. Instead his punning subconscious placed him on the sinking Titanic from which he looked shoreward to where Helen, looking very like Ellie, stood topless on one of the towers of Ilium.
4
TROY
Hector too was preoccupied with Troy.
Of course his tutelary spirit who dwelt a little lower than Olympus hadn’t managed to whirl him away from danger and deposit him in a scented bedroom with the loveliest woman on earth. On the other hand Hector was very willing to settle for a hospital bed and a bunch of sympathetic nurses.
On first arrival in hospital they’d placed him in intensive care and he’d awakened to find himself sprouting a variety of wires and tubes. His first words being a request for his breakfast, the doctors had feared there might be serious head trauma as well as the various bruises and breakages already diagnosed, but when X-rays showed no brain damage and his visiting colleagues confirmed normalcy, they had removed him from IC, transferred him to a small side ward, and given him a tranquilizing shot.
Here he had slept the sleep of the drugged for some hours.
Opening his eyes and seeing Dalziel floating under the ceiling might have put another man into shock, but for Hector it was simply a mild surprise.
This acceptance of whatever happened without any inclination to analyze either an event or his own reactions to it was an essential element of the talent for survival that was the sole gift of his tutelary spirit. It meant that as the growing Hector made his pinball progress from one disaster to another, he never absorbed the damage into himself by dwelling on it.
If Hector had analyzed his vision (which of course he didn’t), he might have said that it wasn’t so much that he actually saw the Fat Man floating above him, it was more that he felt as he would have felt had he in fact seen this phenomenon. But though not a shock, the surprise itself was enough to wake him to full consciousness, and after a few moments he sought for and found a bell push that summoned a nurse to whom he reiterated his earlier demands for solid food.
A doctor was consulted. On the diagnostic basis that if Hector had suffered any significant internal injury, his reaction to the insertion of a hospital meat pie would be as good a diagnostic tool as anything, he gave the go-ahead. When Hector survived and asked for another, he was downgraded even further off the critical list.
Replete, he lay back in bed, and this was where Troy came in. His mind, usually a comfortable blank in moments of repose, turned into a screen on which strange images were being played.
He saw a figure he recognized as himself emerge from a small copse to stand on the edge of a white plain stretching to infinity. He glanced to his right. About twenty yards away stood a chariot just like the chariots they used in Troy, one of his favorite videos, which he’d watched only a couple of nights ago. The only difference was that it was pulled not by a horse but by some sort of cat the size of a horse.
The charioteer raised the visor on his helmet and Hector was a bit disappointed to see it wasn’t Brad Pitt. But whoever it was smiled at him and with a gauntleted hand motioned him to continue to advance.
Hector managed a nod of acknowledgment and took a step forward.
And that was that. No sense of impact, flying through the air, hitting the ground. He opened his eyes and found himself in bed and the picture was simply cut off.
But it was easy to replay it. All he had to do was close his eyes again. He did this two or three times in the hope that it would move on, then he found himself distracted by a sudden burst of activity in the room.
A nurse explained that because he was so much improved and they were really short of space, they were moving another patient into the room. This turned out to be a man in late middle age with no outward sign of his condition. He showed little interest in his roommate but brusquely supervised the positioning of a small TV set at his bedside. Hector could see the screen at an angle but there was no disturbing noise, as the man was listening through a headset.
Normally a devotee of TV so long as the programs contained a maximum of action and a minimum of talk, Hector felt too tired to be envious. He fancied a little sleep, but irritatingly, every time he closed his eyes, the sequence with the cat-drawn chariot still kept running.
It did occur to him to wonder if there might not be something of memory in it. If so, he knew he ought to pass it on to his colleagues. But he couldn’t see a way to share his vision without its oddities leaving him open to pr
ofessional mockery. Just because he was used to mockery did not mean he was inured to it. Hector was proud of being a policeman. In a low-orbiting life, getting through the training course and surviving his probation period marked points of apogee. Much of his hesitancy in reporting and giving evidence derived from a desire to be sure he got it right, and if in the end he’d adopted the maxim When in doubt, leave it out, the fault lay as much in the attitude of colleagues as in himself.
His assertion, which Pascoe had found so amazing, that Dalziel had been good to him, derived principally from a sense that the Fat Man didn’t single him out. Yes, he made him the butt of his jokes, but then he made everyone the butt of his jokes, even the perfect Pascoe. Yes, he laid on the tongue-lashings with great vigor, but when did he ever hold back? Yes, he treated everything Hector said with great caution fading into outright skepticism, but at least he always insisted on hearing that everything. Don’t tire thy brain out trying to separate wheat from chaff, he’d once said. Tell me the lot, son, and I’ll do the sorting. And on another never-to-be-forgotten occasion Hector had overheard him bellow at a DI who’d fallen short of the Fat Man’s high standards, Thinking for tha self, were you? By God, I’d sooner have someone like Hector who knows his limitations than buggers like you who fancy they’re twice as clever as they really are!
So there it was. If Dalziel were around it would be easy. He’d let him know about the chariot sequence running through his mind and rest happy that the Fat Man would do the sorting.
But he wasn’t around, except in the sense that his body was lying unresponsively in a nearby ward and his spirit might be floating equally unresponsively beneath the ceiling. So the sorting was down to Hector.
He opened his eyes and tried to let his sideways glimpse of the TV screen blot out the chariot. To his surprise there was a face on it he thought he recognized. Could be wrong—he was used to being wrong—and the angle made things look sort of squashed and long at the same time. But the face definitely had a look of DCI Pascoe’s missus.
He shifted his position to try to get a better view and the other patient glanced angrily toward him like one of those guys on a bus who don’t like you reading their newspaper over their shoulder.
Death Comes for the Fat Man Page 15
