A Cure for All Diseases

by Reginald Hill

  Her shriek of indignation when I told her about Novello passing my emails to all & sundry had to be explained to Tom. He was less openly indignant - saying - if youd told me why you wanted to use the printer Charley I think I would have advised against it -

  When we came in sight of the hotel - & Minnie ran ahead as if she hoped Sidney might be waiting for her in reception - Tom went back to the subject saying - re those emails Charley - it might be well to think carefully in future about what you say to your sister -

  Behind all his sometimes daft optimism - Tom Parker is pretty sharp! - you mean theyd hack into my computer? - I said - horrified! He didnt answer direct but said - tell me about your security setup - So I did. When I told him that Id kept on getting blue screen which the accompanying message blamed on my firewall - so Id disabled it - he groaned.

  - Im going to get it sorted - I assured him.

  I didnt tell him that I was so nontech that in fact it had been loathsome Liam who disabled it when I mentioned my problem. Hed been going to download another firewall for me - but that went out of the window when I caught him poking my ex-pal up against that tree!

  - meanwhile youre an easy target - he said - for anyone! - Would the bastards really do that? - I wondered. Of course they would! I almost hope they do read this. BASTARDS! BASTARDS! BASTARDS! There - now I feel better!

  In reception we found Minnie chatting to the girl at the desk - who was telling her that she knew Sid wasnt in his room cos hed told her if anyone wanted him hed be in the Recreation Centre.

  As we approached the pool area we could see a towel spread out on one of the luxurious sunbeds the hotel supplies for its well heeled clients but no sign of Sid.

  Then Min screamed - there he is! Not in delight - but horror! Lying on the water - facedown - quite still - arms & legs spread wide - was a pale naked body.

  Before we could stop her - Min had run forward & jumped straight in. I think Tom might have followed - but as the shock waves from the splash reached the body - it turned slowly over - & Sid Parker - shaking the water from his head - said - well hello young Minnie! - havent you forgotten something? - like taking your clothes off? -

  Cradling Min in his arms - he waded to the side. The girl was choking with relief - or maybe shed just swallowed a lot of water. I realized now Sid wasnt in fact nude - but wearing a pair of trunks - creamy coloured like his skin - & tight enough to leave little to the imagination.

  Not that the sight engaged mine anyway. Suddenly Sid was no longer an object of my lustful fantasy. Indeed - memory of its enough to make me cringe with embarrassment! What an idiot I am Cass! - seeing everything - understanding nothing - but always 100 percent certain Im right.

  What Im 150 percent certain Im right about now is that those long white limbs Id glimpsed in the cliff cave - spread-eagled beneath the barts bouncing buttocks - hadnt belonged to Clara Brereton - but to Sidney Parker!

  Now I recalled him walking away from me at Denham Park - his arm draped round Ted Denhams shoulders. Oh God! Me thinking the only reason for them to be closeted together was to hatch some cunning financial plot - then trying to decide which one of them I found the more gorgeous! Twit twit twit!

  & Esther, welcoming me into the house & flinging open doors. Bet she hoped she might let me catch them at it! Maybe it was her way of being kind. Cow!

  Well, I did catch them at it, didnt I? Only as usual my mind wouldnt let me compute what it didnt want my eyes to see.

  Didnt stay long at the pool. Tom was insistent on talking to Sid - & the pair of them went off to his room. Minnie not pleased - started a sulk - but Sid knows how to smooth her feathers - promised her he wouldnt be leaving Sandytown for at least another two or three days - & hed take her for a drive in the Maz. Gave me a sort of rueful glance - like hes caught on Ive caught on! At a guess Id say Sids dedicated High Church gay while Teds a lot more ecumenical. Not that that makes any difference to the way I feel about him now. Dont mind a boyfriend who thinks my lovely sisters a knockout - but I couldnt put up with one who started making eyes at George!

  Somehow neither me nor Min were in a mood for swimming - so after a few lengths we were both ready to head back home. More chance of getting updates here than at the hotel anyway - & if something interesting happens you dont want to be caught lying around in a wet swimming cozzie!

  Gap there. Minnie came bursting in at speed of sound - meaning I didnt hear her knock! She gasped the police were here - asking for me again. I said - who? - Novello? - & she said - no - a big fat man - could be Shreks brother if you painted him vomit green.

  Has to be Mr Deal - however you spell it. Whats he want? Minnie didnt know - so I chucked her out - said Id be down in a moment. But with him sniffing around - not to mention the rest of his gang - Im not risking leaving this around for anyone to see. Send & delete! You do the same, OK? Thatll show the bastards!

  Love

  Charley xxx

  VOLUME THE FOURTH

  My feelings tell me too plainly that in my present state, the Sea air would probably be the

  death of me.

  1

  "Peter! Salvere iubeo! Willkommen! Bienvenu! In any language, I am glad to see you!"

  Franny Roote was sitting in his wheelchair on the threshold of his cottage, so for a moment as Pascoe swivelled his legs to get out of the car, they were face-to-face and eye to eye.

  From many a mouth, such a greeting would have seemed over- effusive, even synthetic. But the glow of pleasure on the young man's face was beyond fabrication.

  Wasn't it?

  Pascoe said, "Good to see you, Fran."

  He meant it, but with reservations.

  He'd been genuinely concerned to lose touch with Roote, and his relief at discovering he was alive and relatively well was equally genu- ine. But to see that slight figure sitting there in a wheelchair sent a pang through his heart at the memory of how he had got there. And then there were the circumstances of their meeting.

  He'd listened to Wield's account of his interview with the man and read his witness statement, and with some relief had found nothing to suggest that Roote was anything more than a peripheral witness in the case.

  But now that he laid eyes on him again, for some reason there popped into his mind the famous response of the great Bill Shankly when asked if in his opinion a player who was not interfering with play could be judged offside.

  If a player's not interfering with play, he ought to be!

  Around a crime - and Pascoe's encounters with Franny always seemed to take place around a crime - somehow it was hard to believe he wasn't interfering with play.

  He got out of the car and they shook hands, each bringing the free hand to intensify the greeting, both apparently reluctant to break the contact.

  Finally Roote said, "I thought we'd sit outside and enjoy the air, if that's all right?"

  There was a rustic table with a bench set against the cottage wall. On the table stood a coffeepot, two mugs, and a cake on a plate.

  He was expecting me, thought Pascoe. Interesting.

  "Maisie's Madeira, I presume," he said.

  "I'm impressed. Sergeant Wield, of course? If I read him right, no detail of my simple life here will have gone unrecorded or unre- ported."

  "That's Wieldy," agreed Pascoe. "Anything he misses won't be missed."

  "I see you still love a paradox," said Roote.

  "In the abstract. But in reality, they can be a problem. For exam- ple, the paradox of why you, having made so much more progress than seemed likely, and knowing how concerned I was to keep track of this progress, should apparently have vanished off the face of the earth. And on top of that, why you finally should have settled down within a short car ride of where I live and never made contact."

  Roote poured the coffee and cut the cake.

  Then he said, "Maybe I wanted to walk into your office one day under my own steam and say, 'Hi! Here I am! Good as new!' And lift the guilt from your shoulders."

 
; "Guilt? You think I feel guilty?"

  "Sorry. Wrong word. Responsibility? Something like that. What- ever it is you feel whenever you see me. I wanted to take that away. And having got that scenario in my mind, I couldn't settle for less. Sorry. It was silly. Egotistical, even."

  "Seems pretty unegotistical to me," said Pascoe. "Even Mr. Dalziel was impressed."

  "Dear Andy! What a joy it was to see him again. I couldn't believe my eyes when I rolled into the pub that day. Do you know, I was so pleased to see his face, at first I didn't notice he was wearing a dress- ing gown and slippers - sorry - one slipper! "

  Pascoe murmured, "He'll be flattered to know he had that effect on you."

  "He's one of the great originals, isn't he? But part of my pleasure, a large part, was knowing that chance had done what I myself should have done months earlier. To see him was at one remove to see you, and whatever I said, I knew it could not be long before that remove was removed."

  Pascoe took a large bite out of his slice of the cake because he had no idea how to respond to this intensity. Was there a homosexual ele- ment in it? There were so many ambiguous areas in Roote's personal- ity that it wouldn't be surprising . . .

  "Peter, just for the record, I don't fancy you," said Roote. "Not touchy-feely fancy, so no need to worry lest I might leap from firm handshakes to slobbery kisses."

  Pascoe swallowed a large bolus of Madeira and washed it down with coffee. He should have remembered that talking with Roote could be like having your mind scanned.

  "I never imagined . . . well, maybe I did wonder . . . look, I'm sorry, but to be honest, when you first started writing those letters to me, I thought you were taking the piss! "

  Roote grinned.

  "Maybe I was, a little. But that's what friends do to each other, isn't it? Listen, I think it's your job that gets in the way. Imagine we'd just met, on a campus, say, at a gallery, in a theatre, anywhere. You might have found me a touch eccentric, but amusingly so. And I might have found you a touch buttoned up, but intriguingly so. And if we met again a couple of times, I reckon we'd have drifted into being friends, which is how friendship happens, isn't it?"

  "But . . . ?"

  "But we met in circumstances which demanded you saw me as a suspect. And when the vagaries of English law saw me sent down, that initial relationship was frozen, apparently beyond all hope of dissolution. Myself, I soon realized that I needed to move on from any feelings of resentment and blame. But when I met you again, I saw that it was going to be much harder for you to move on from suspicion and distrust."

  "So you thought, Hey, I can change this guy!" said Pascoe, trying to lighten things up. "Was that because of some evangelical impera- tive, or simply as an entertaining intellectual exercise?"

  "Bit of both," said Roote. "Then I began to realize this was really important to me. Without getting anywhere near slobbery-kiss terri- tory, I found I really did like you, and it's a shit feeling when you know someone you really like regards you as the pits."

  "You're saying what you did for Rosie you did to make me like you? " said Pascoe.

  "No," said Roote. "I did it because that's what friends do. And hey! Let's not make too big a thing of this. I didn't know that part of the deal was a madman with a shotgun who hated my guts! "

  "But when you found out, you still put Rosie first," said Pascoe. "She talks about you, you know."

  "Does she? I'd rather she forgot me. That's another reason I didn't want to roll in on you. Bad enough having you look at me with those big guilty eyes. No reason to load that stuff on a kid."

  They sat and drank their cooling coffee in silence for a few min- utes.

  Pascoe thought, Please God, don't let me find that Franny Roote has anything to do with this case. Don't face me with that choice!

  Which he knew wouldn't be a choice.

  He set down his mug and said, "Tell me about your wanderings and how you came to settle in Sandytown. I got an outline from Wieldy, but I always prefer original sources."

  "You and I both," said Roote.

  He started talking. The style was anecdotal, the tone light and amusing. It was, thought Pascoe, like listening to a young gent of an earlier age just back from doing the Grand Tour. Where the reason for his journey was touched upon, it came over as hardly weightier than a visit to various spas to take the waters.

  Pascoe finally interrupted.

  "So in the end, there was nothing that gave any hope?"

  He hadn't meant to be quite so blunt, but that was how it came out.

  Roote's eyes widened in a parody of shock.

  "Do you think you might be spending too much time with dear Andy, Peter? I should watch that. In answer to your question, hope never dies, though sometimes it changes. I have the consolation of philosophy, of course."

  "This Third Thought stuff? Andy told me you tried it on him."

  "Did he indeed? Perhaps the seed has found a crack in even that stony ground. Yes, that was something else I approached not alto- gether seriously but which has since proved stronger than I imagined. Like my friendship with you. Whoops, sorry, I don't want to embar- rass you again. Getting back to hope, Peter, there was something which I'm reluctant to share with anyone, yet you of all people deserve to share it. Not hope exactly, but hope of hope. I hardly dare think about it, let alone talk about it."

  He paused as if marshalling his words, then resumed.

  "In terms of care and consideration, the Avalon Clinic at Davos was by far the most comfortable institution I visited. I don't mean just physically, but psychologically. I felt at home there, but of course I didn't want to feel at home in a clinic, so eventually I moved on, al- ways searching. One man's name kept cropping up - a Dr. Hermann Meitler. I found him in a small research establishment near Dresden. His official area of expertise was sports injuries, would you believe? If you recall, the old Democratic Republic had a rather dubious repu- tation for their attitude to performance-enhancing treatments. In terms of medals, they were always looking for the philosopher's stone which would turn everything to gold. And they didn't let consideration of things like casualties along the way hinder their research."

  "Sure this guy was called Meitler, not Mengele?" said Pascoe with distaste.

  "Behind his back, possibly," laughed Roote. "He was certainly a man who regarded humans as problems to be solved rather than indi- viduals to be cared for. The demolition of the Berlin wall and the in- vasion of Western standards of accountability had deprived him of his endless supply of experimental material. Once he got the idea that in me he'd found someone ready to go the extra mile, and willing to pay for the privilege, we got on famously."

  "But he didn't do the miracle," said Pascoe.

  "No," said Roote. "And yes. He treated me in ways that would cer- tainly have got him struck off in the UK. I didn't mind. And I was right not to mind. For eventually he made me feel again, Peter. I'd always kept up the electrical toning routines even though I couldn't feel a damn thing. I was determined that if the miracle ever did happen, I wasn't going to fall over because my muscles had completely atrophied. Then one day, I felt a tingle. A comic word, tingle, isn't it? Certainly made me laugh with joy. I felt a tingle where I had felt nothing since I got shot."

  "But that's marvellous!" exclaimed Pascoe. "So what happened?"

  "Nothing happened. I spoke with Meitler. He made it clear there was a choice involved. Not be killed or cured. That I'd have gone for, no hesitation. No. It was between the possibility of cure and the equal possibility of being left as a thinking vegetable. That gave me pause. Was I ready to take that risk? "

  "And you weren't? "

  "I needed time to think before I took it. I went away, and spent the next six months making up my mind and changing it. Eventually I returned to the Davos Avalon where my previous stay had suggested I might find a solution to my problems. When I got back there, I discovered my old mentor, Dr. Alvin Kling, had done a six-month exchange with Lester Feldenhammer of the Sandytown Ava
lon. Happily, Lester and I soon found we were on the same wavelength and I struck up an even closer relationship with him than I'd had with Alvin."

  "So you asked for his advice?"

  "No," said Roote. "Shortly after I met him, I read in the papers that Dr. Meitler was dead. He'd been under investigation by the German medical authorities for some time. It seems that finally the police were getting involved. One night Meitler's laboratory went up in flames. His body was found in the ashes. Accident, suicide, it was impossible to tell. All his research records were destroyed, among them, I assume, mine."

  Fleetingly the thought that death seemed to follow Franny Roote around drifted across Pascoe's mind, but there was no room for it to lodge there alongside this hint of a possibility of further recovery.

  "That must have been a terrible shock, Franny!" he exclaimed.

  "I think I'm beyond shock now, Peter," said Roote.

  "But this tingle, is it still there?" demanded Pascoe.

  "Ah, the tingle! Is it the real tingle of renewal or just the delusory tingle of hope? Peter, perhaps I shouldn't have spoken to you. Third Thought has taught me to deal with hope, but now I fear I've set all its chimeras loose to trouble you."

  "I just don't see how you can feel this tingle and not do anything about it! "

  "Let myself be poked and prodded and X-rayed and analyzed again? I would need to think long and hard about that. What if they told me nothing has changed? Good-bye hope. Or what if they confirmed there has been a change? Wouldn't I once again be faced with some form of the choice Meitler spelt out to me?"

  "At least you could talk to this Dr. Feldenhammer. Or isn't this his field?"

  "In fact, Lester specialized in neurology before turning to psychia- try. He would be the perfect man to consult. Indeed, as I hesitate to decide my future, Lester is one of the best of my reasons for remain- ing here in Sandytown."

  "Just one of the reasons?"

  Roote smiled and said, "Oh yes, there were many others. Lester told me about Tom Parker and his plans for the town. He was confi- dent that my Third Thought ideas would be greeted enthusiastically by Tom, and he was certainly happy to let me have the chance to air them in the clinic to those who wanted to hear. In addition, I found after my long sojourn abroad, I was homesick for England, and especially for Yorkshire, where so much significant in my life has happened. So when he returned to Sandytown at the end of his six months, I came with him."