Dialogues of the Dead

by Reginald Hill

  287 yourself scarce. The super has a tendency to count days spent on sick leave as normal rest days.' All this Hat now told Rye who frowned and said, 'He does sound a bit weird.' 'Roote?' 'No. This Pascoe. I thought when I met him that this was one tightly held together guy.' 'Perhaps he needs to be. He feels threatened.' 'That's it, isn't it? He feels threatened. From what you say, there haven't actually been any threats, have there?' 'No. But this Roote's something else. I can see how he could threaten you without actually threatening you, if you know what I mean.' She looked at him quizzically and said, 'You're a loyal man, Constable Bowler. Decided what you're going to do about Georgie Porgie yet?' That had been something else Wield had said. There'd been two or three more phone calls from Angela Ripley. Wield himself had taken one and, according to him, she didn't sound altogether persuaded that Hat was really sick. The sergeant paused to allow explanation but when it didn't come, he didn't press. And he'd said absolutely nothing about talking to Rye about Charley Penn. Discretion or distrust? 'Cat got your tongue?' said Rye. 'Sorry. Nothing is what I'm going to do about the DI,' said Hat defiantly. 'Angela Ripley will be on her way back to the States today. I don't see any reason to muck up George's retirement party.' Suddenly she kissed him again. 'And you're a very nice man too,' she said. 'Let's go and look at some birds.' It was a day of sun and light showers with a brisk west wind driving clouds down the sky and swirling leaves across the road in the MG's path. He'd kept the hood up because of this but Rye had said, 'Can't we have it down?' and now as they sped along, she pulled off her beret and leaned her head back with eyes closed and such an expression of sheer delight on her face that now the dancing leaves seemed to Hat like rose petals scattered before a marriage procession. Watch it, son, he mocked himself, or she'll have you writing poetry next, you whose appreciation of verse never got much beyond 'The Good Ship Venus'. The thought was mother to a couplet.

  / went out with Raina. By God, you should have seen her.

  He laughed to himself but she noticed. 'Come on,' she said, having to shout above the rushing air. 'Today we share.' He told her. It didn't sound all that fanny but it got a fullthroated laugh. Encouraged, he said, 'Seeing it's share time, how about the story of your life? How come you're a librarian?' 'What's wrong with librarians?' she demanded. 'Nothing,' he assured her. 'Bit of an image problem, maybe. All I meant was you, with your background and looks and everything, how come you didn't end up in the theatre? I mean, Raina Pomona, if ever a name looked custom-built for bright lights, that must be it!' She said something but the wind caught it and whirled it away. 'Sorry?' he shouted. 'I said, once upon a time, maybe . .. but that was in another country and besides, the wench is dead.' She laughed as she said this, not like before, but this time with an edge as bright and sharp as the wind that was rippling the silver blaze in her hair like a pike in a dark mere. 'You OK?' he said. 'Do you want the hood up?' 'No,' she cried. 'Of course not. Doesn't this thing go any faster?' He said, 'How fast do you want to go?' 'Fast as you like,' she said. 'OK.' They were off the main road now and on to narrow country byways. He leaned his weight into the accelerator and sent the hedgerows blurring by. He was a good driver, good enough to know that he was driving too fast, not for the bends in the road - those his technique could deal with - but for the unexpected which might lie in wait around any one of them. But Rye was leaning against him, her right arm round his shoul 289 ders, her left hand gripping his forearm tight, her mouth so close to his cheek that he could feel the warmth of her breath mingling in the cold blast of air which their speed was driving in their faces. He took a long left-hand curve, shallow enough to present no problems or even require any diminution of speed, but as the car came out of the bend, a deer jumped over the hedgerow on the right, paused long enough to register their approach, then bounded effortlessly into the field on the left. Probably there was no risk of collision but instinctively his foot hit the brake, only for a second, but with the car still off-line and a scatter of wet leaves on the road, it was enough to set up a skid. As skids go, it was nothing, the kind of thing he could control in his sleep. But the road was narrow and the offside wheels were on to the grass verge in the brief moment before he regained full control. Fortunately the ground wasn't boggy and there was no ditch, but it did make the whole thing a little more dramatic as hawthorn branches whipped across the windscreen and their faces before he brought the car to a halt which threw them forward against the seat belts. 'Well, that was fun,' said Hat. 'Thank you, Bambi. Shit! Rye, are you OK?' For the girl's response to his attempted lightness was to let out a piercing cry of pain and collapse forward, sobbing convulsively. He released his seat belt and turned to her. 'What's happened? Where's it hurt?' he demanded, looking for but not finding any signs of bleeding. 'It's all right,' she gasped. 'Really ... there's nothing...' Gently he raised her head and looked into her face. There was no colour in her cheeks and her eyes were full of tears, but he felt no physical response as his fingers touched her neck and collarbone in search of damage. She took several deep breaths, knuckled the tears from her eyes, and said, 'Honestly, before you start getting too gynaecological, I'm OK.' 'You didn't sound OK.' 'Shock.' 'Yeah?' He looked at her doubtfully. What?' 'A little skid. Over in a second. You don't seem ...' 'The type?' she completed. 'So suddenly you know all about me, do you, Detective?' 'No. But I'd like to. After all, it was you who said that today was for sharing.' 'I said that? Yes, I believe I did.' She opened the door and got out and stood there, stretching as if it were bed she'd just got out of. Then she turned to him and said, 'Didn't you promise to provide the provisions for this expedition? Would that include coffee? Because if it does, that's certainly something I've no objection to sharing.'

  291 Chapter Thirty-two

  They climbed through the hedge into the little copse that the deer had emerged from and sat drinking their coffee with the gnarled bole of a beech tree between them and the wind. Hat said nothing, but suddenly she started to talk as if in response to a question. 'Yes, I did want to be an actress. Like you said, what else would I want to be, you know, born in a trunk, all that crap? Serge my twin Sergius - he reacted the other way. He wanted to be a lawyer. All the drama, he used to say, and twenty rimes the money. I suppose I looked at the great stars while he just looked at Mum and Dad.' 'They weren't all that successful, then?' said Hat. 'They seemed to work pretty steadily while we were young. And they always talked about the past as if they'd been really big once and, with a bit of luck, would make it to the top again. But by the time I got into my teens, even the steadiness was going. There were long periods of resting, which they seemed to do best with a glass in their hands. Every couple needs a common interest to keep them together. Theirs was drinking.' 'Seriously?' 'They were drunks,' she said flatly. 'It was good in one way. Being neglected by your parents simply because they're so self-centred you don't rate is hard for a kid to take. But being neglected because they've got a drink problem makes some kind of sense. Anyway, I was stage-struck and planning to go to drama college after I left school, and I did a lot of amateur stuff and I even got a toe-hold on the pro theatre, crowd scenes and walk-on juvenile parts. What I thought of as my really big break came when I got the part of Beth in a stage version of Little Women being done as a summer show in Torquay which was where my parents were resting at the time.' 'A big break?' said Hat. 'How big?' 'I was only fifteen, for God's sake,' she snapped. Then, realizing belatedly his query rose from genuine interest and had nothing of sneer in it, she smiled apologetically and said, 'I mean, it seemed huge to me. And it was a nice part, long way off a lead, but I got to be interestingly ill.' 'I can vouch you're pretty hot stuff at that,' said Hat, recalling her opening the door to him when he paid his sick-visit. 'Thank you kindly,' she said. 'Anyway, my big opening night came and my father was supposed to be driving me to the theatre but he suddenly announced that he couldn't make it and my mother would have to take me instead. Serge got into a shouting match with him, asking him what the hell could be more important than
going to my first night and Dad gave him some hammy speech about how nothing but the most urgent business affecting the prosperity of the whole family could make him miss such an occasion and if there was any chance of his getting away to catch even the briefest glimpse of his little girl on the stage, he would do it. Then he was gone.' 'That must have made you happy.' 'To tell the truth, Serge was a lot more fired up about it than I was. I wasn't going on the stage to impress my dad, it was all those other people, those strangers, that I wanted to bowl over with my talent. But I did need a lift, and when the time came and I found Mum stoned out of her mind, then I really blew my top. Serge calmed me down and rang a mini-cab. The time came, and it didn't. We rang again. There'd been some kind of traffic hold-up, it would be with us soon. It wasn't. Now I was getting hysterical. And Serge appeared with my mother's car keys and said, no problem, he'd drive me.' Hat began to see where the story was going. He said softly, 'He was how old? Fifteen?' 'That's right. My twin and by coincidence the same age. You ought to be a detective.' 'Sorry. I meant, he couldn't have a licence. Could he drive?' 'Like all fifteen-year-old boys, he thought he could,' said Rye. 'We set out. I was late, not so late it was a real problem, but in my state of mind I played up like I was some prima donna late for a Royal Command Performance. I yelled at him to drive faster.

  293 It was a wet murky evening. Faster, I screamed, faster. He just grinned and said, 'Fasten your seat-belt, Sis. It's going to be a bumpy night.' Those were the last words I heard him say. We went round a bend too fast, got into a skid ... it all came back just now when you had to brake . ..' Hat put his arms around her and held her. She leaned into him for a while then straightened up determinedly and pushed him away. 'We went straight into a car coming the other way,' she said in a flat voice, speaking very quickly as if this was something she had to say but wanted to get over. 'There were two people in it. They were both killed. Serge died too. As for me, I remember the skid, and I remember lying there on a pavement - outside a churchyard, would you believe? - looking up at the night sky .. . then I don't recall another thing till I woke up in hospital over a week later.' Hat whistled. 'A week? That must have been heavy damage you took.' 'Yeah. Broken this and that. But it was my head that caused the most concern. Fractured skull, pressure on the brain. They had to operate twice. By the time they got that sorted, the rest of me was just about knitted together.' As she spoke her hand had gone involuntarily to the silver blaze in her hair. Hat reached out and touched it. 'Is that when you got this?' he asked. 'Yes. I was shaved completely bald, of course, but they assured me it would all grow back. Well, it did. Except that for some reason which they explained without explaining their explanation, if you know what I mean, the hair over the scar came out like this. They suggested I should dye it, but I said no.' Why?' asked Hat. 'Because of Serge,' she said flatly. 'Because I hate visiting grave yards, all that morbid crap, but as long as I've got eyes to see myself in the mirror. I'll never forget him.' Hat looked at her with troubled eyes and she said, 'I'm sorry, I'm mucking up our day. I shouldn't have told you any of this, not now anyway. I've never talked about it to anyone else, except Dick.' Even in the midst of her unhappiness and his empathy, some selfish gene felt that as a blow. He said, 'You told Dick?' 'Yes. He's like you, not pushy. Questions are easy to duck, but the weight of non-questions from people you like becomes unbearable. He just listened, and nodded, and said, "That's hard. I know about losing someone young, you're never happy again without recalling they're not there to share your happiness." He's very wise, Dick.' Me too, thought Hat. Wise enough not to let my jealousy show! But he must have looked pretty unhappy because suddenly she smiled broadly and said, 'Hey, it's OK. That little skid back there shook me up a bit, but really, I'm fine now. My own fault for showing off to myself that fast cars don't bother me. Which they don't. And to prove it, let's get going before all those birds head south for the winter.' She stood up, reached down her hand and hauled him to his feet too. He didn't let go of her hand but held it tight and said, 'You're sure? We can easily head back to town, spend the day watching telly or something.' 'I won't ask you to interpret or something,'1 she said. 'No, I promised to twitch and twitch I will, as soon as I get my hand back.' They got back into the car. As they pulled away, Hat said, 'So what did happen to the acting career?' 'Career's putting it a bit strong,' she said. 'Thing was, when I finally got back to normal after about six months, I found it had all gone, all that ambition, all those dreams. I'd lost Serge and now I could see beyond all doubt what a sad pair my parents were. Incidentally, it came out later that the urgent business my father had to attend to that night was banging away with some stage-struck groupie who believed all his name-dropping big-time luwie stories. It wasn't a life I wanted to have anything to do with any more.' He said, 'So this is why you sounded so cynical when you were telling me about your name?' 'About finding out they'd lied about the parts they were playing?

  295 Yeah, that just seemed to confirm it. Even their real life was an act and the only way they could deal with their children was by making them bit players.' 'So you chose another role entirely.' 'Sorry?' 'Librarian. Traditional image is about as anti-luwie as you can get, isn't it? Quiet, demure, rather prim, glaring at noisy readers over horned-rim specs, staidly dressed, a bit repressed . ..' 'This is how you see me, is it?' He laughed and said, 'No. All I mean is, if that was what you were aiming at, someone ought to tell you you've missed by a Scots mile.' She said, 'Hmm. I'll take that as a compliment, shall I? So now we've got me sorted, let's turn the spotlight on your interesting bits.' 'I'll look forward to that,' he said. 'But tell you what, we're nearly there. So rather than risk frightening the birds, let's leave my interesting bits till after lunch, shall we? Then I'll be happy to let you pick over them to your heart's content.' 'OK, but just tell me one thing first,' she said as the car turned down a track marked by an ancient finger post which read Stang Tarn. 'Do you cops learn innuendo during your probationary year or is it a prerequisite of joining?' Chapter Thirty-three

  'Andy, you look like you've just come back from a trip to the underworld in every sense. Hard night on stake-out, was it?' 'You could put it like that,' said Andy Dalziel. It was a hard thing to admit, but the days were past when he could drink and dance till dawn, take a taxi home, live up to his vainglorious sexual promises, snatch an hour or so's sleep and be in The Dog and Duck at opening time without some evidence of his energy-sapping activities being inscribed upon his face. 'But it's nowt that another pint won't put right. How about you, Charley?' 'Nay, but I've just come in. Give us a chance to wash my teeth with this one,' said Charley Penn. Dalziel went up to the bar, noting with approval that the barman, observing his approach, stopped serving another customer to pull the anticipated pint. Marvellous what a few kind words would do to set a man on the straight and narrow, thought Dalziel complacently. He returned to the table and sank a gill. 'That's better already,' he said. 'So what's going off?' enquired Penn. 'Eh?' 'Come on, this isn't your usual watering hole,' sneered the writer. 'You're here for some special reason.' 'I hope there's not a pub in this town where I'm not known and welcome,' said Dalziel in an injured tone. 'You've got that half-right,' said Penn. 'Last time I saw you in here, it was definitely business. Me and that lad, Roote, and Sam Johnson .. .' His face clouded as he spoke of Johnson and he said, 'Last Sunday. Christ, it's hard to credit it were only last Sunday. And

  2^7 now the poor sod's in the ground. That felt like indecent haste. What happened, Andy? Loopy Linda jerk your wires?' 'She's a strong woman, Charley, hard to gainsay,' said Dalziel. 'Or so I gather. Never met her myself.' 'I noticed you weren't at the funeral,' said Penn. 'Well, bury one you've buried them all,' said Dalziel. 'Went OK, did it? I gather young Roote did a turn.' 'He spoke from the heart, nowt wrong with that,' said Penn. 'Oh aye, most things he does come from the heart, I don't doubt it,' said Dalziel. 'You sound impressed, Charley.' 'He seems a good lad. He's put the past behind him. Something a lot more of us should try to do, maybe. And he's got talent.
You heard he won the short story competition?' 'Aye.' There'd been a message, or rather a series of messages on Dalziel's answering machine, in which Pascoe had brought him up to speed on the events of the night. 'Good story, was it?' 'About the only one,' grunted Penn, who was notorious for stinting praise. 'When I saw some of the crud on the short list, I was glad I hadn't had to read the stuff that didn't make it. But Roote's story would have shone in any company. It was a good night for the lad, pity your lackeys had to try and spoil it for him.' 'Lackeys? Don't recall noticing I had any lackeys last time I looked. Must have drunk some genetically modified ale.' 'Yon DCI, Ellie Pascoe's man. She's a grand lass. You'd've hoped, being wed to her, he'd know better. And that one with the face. God, take him round the maternity ward, you'd not have to waste time and drugs inducing labour.' 'You should be careful what you say, Charley. Likely there's an Ombudsman and a tribunal I could report you to for nasty remarks like that.' 'I'd not be surprised. Anyway, Andy, shall we get down to it, then you can go home and crawl back into bed which is what you shouldn't have got out of?' ' Dalziel finished his pint and looked with surprise into the empty glass. With a sigh, Penn finished his drink and went to the bar for replacements. 'That's kind,' said Dalziel. 'Self-interest. You'd not arrest a man who'd just bought you a drink. Would you?' 'Well, I'd be mad to arrest the bugger afore he bought it, wouldn't I?' said Dalziel. 'Charley, I want you to think hard before you answer this. Last Sunday you said you had to go off because on Sundays you always went to visit your old ma. When you were asked later in the week where you'd been that's what you said, visiting your ma. And that's more or less what your ma said too.' 'You've been talking to my mother?' exclaimed Penn. 'Nay, Charley, did you think we wouldn't check up? We check out everything anyone tells us, especially if they make their money inventing things.' 'And my mother, what does she say?' 'She says her Karl is a good boy, a perfect son.' 'There you go then,' said Penn. 'So what are you saying, Andy?' 'I'm saying I can see where you got your talent for fiction from,' said Dalziel. 'Where were you last Sunday afternoon, Charley?' Penn took a long slow draw on his beer. Wondering whether I'm bluffing, thought Dalziel. Wondering whether he should call it. 'Is this about Sam Johnson?' said Penn, postponing the moment. 'What else?' 'You think mebbe I'm this Wordman?' 'Well, it sounds like a trade description of your job, Charley.' 'You think I may have murdered - how many is it? - five people, and you can still sit there having a drink with me?' 'Love the "how many is it?", Charley. Innocent, guilty, you know exactly how many it is. Writer like you's probably got a little notebook where you jot down owt of interest that comes up. Unless you're not interested in murder.' 'Only as a fine art,' said Penn. 'That a confession? 'Cos I get the impression that's how this lunatic keeps himself going, got his head bent round some daft idea or other in which killing isn't wrong, or at least is necessary for the sake of something more important.' 'No, it's not a confession. But yes, you're right, I've been keeping a close eye on these killings. That's what writers do. Bit like