D&P20 - Death's Jest-Book

by Reginald Hill

  Our first few sessions therefore were in the nature of preliminary skirmishes whose main function in his eyes was to establish that he was in charge while I endeavoured to persuade him that I was unaware of his efforts so to do. Once past that point, though he always remained on a high level of vigilance, I was able to utilize his greater relaxation to make contact with him at a deeper level than hithertofore.

  Hithertofore! He smiled, then, recalling what a sad Christmas this must be for the woman, he stopped smiling and read on.

  Lot of background stuff. No names or identifying details, of course, but he fitted these in from his own researches.

  Family background: mother and stepfather; the latter a well-heeled businessman called Keith Prime who married Mrs Roote when Franny was six and clearly didn't take long to decide it was worth spending a little of his wealth on keeping his stepson out of his hair.

  Boarding schools from age seven - first a prep school, then Coltsfoot College, a progressive public school near Chester. At some point, apparently for business reasons, the Primes had set up home in the Virgin Isles and most of young Franny's vacations were spent staying with friends in England, a practice continued when he went to Holm Coultram College of Liberal Arts where his and Pascoe's paths had first crossed.

  Thereafter the vacation problem was solved by residence at HMP Chapel Syke.

  His mother, according to Pascoe's own records, had visited her son once during pre-trial custody, thereafter pleading poor health as reason for not attending the trial. Prime had never appeared. There was no record of the mother ever visiting her son in the Syke, but her claim to physical debility was supported the hard way when she died during his second year of detention. She was buried in the Virgin Isles. No application was made by Roote to attend the funeral. No contact with Keith Prime was recorded.

  It was evident that Amaryllis Haseen had been fascinated by the relationship between Roote and his mother and father and stepfather, which must have made it easy for him to jerk her around with fictitious memories of the father he couldn't recall at all.

  XR was clearly father-fixated to a degree which must have been psychologically disabling till he developed techniques of control, though not without detriment to other more conventional emotional procedures. His obviously enhanced memories of incidents involving his father all tended to stress qualities which made the dead man a worthy object of admiration and affection, yet underpinning them always was that syndrome in which the subject's sense of being abandoned by the object, even though the cause of abandonment is death, manifests itself in angry and abusive resentment.

  An example of the exaggerated memory was the following, being an account of an incident when the subject was four or five years old.

  XR: we were walking through the park one day, me and my dad, when this big guy jumped out of a bush brandishing a knife. He grabbed me by the hair and put the knife to my throat and said to my dad, 'Here's the deal, give me your wallet and the kid lives.'

  And my dad reached into his jacket and pulled out this huge pistol and he said, 'No, here's the deal, let go the kid and you live.'

  And the big guy said, 'Hey man, no need to get heavy,' and let me go. And my dad jumped forward and smashed him across the side of his head with the gun, and when he fell down my dad stamped on the hand carrying the knife till he dropped it.

  And the big guy lay on the ground screaming, 'I thought we had a deal, man!'

  And my dad said, 'The deal was, you get to live, but I didn 't say anything about you living healthy.'

  That an incident occurred in which the subject as a small boy was frightened in a park and was defended by his father is possible. In this and other recollections the father is always referred to as 'my dad', the possessive and the familiar abbreviation being together indicative of a deep sense of loss and an almost painful desire for repossession. The gun-toting Dirty Harry accretions have probably been developed over many years of creative recollection and it is likely that the subject is by now completely persuaded of the truth of this version. It is interesting to note that the qualities this embellished narrative stresses have less to do with the kind of story-book heroism which might have appealed to a young boy and more to a cold and calculating self-sufficiency. It would have been interesting to hear the version of this story that the subject was telling at the ages of, say, ten, and then again at fifteen. Alongside this let us set the subject's response when it was suggested to him that he must have missed his dead father greatly.

  'Miss him? Why the fuck should I miss him? He never earned any more than kept us out of the gutter. Useless bastard, getting himself killed like that. We were better off without him even though he didn't even leave us a pension. Fortunately Mother found herself this drooling dickhead who was so loaded we could afford to buy ourselves all the stuff we wanted.'

  Subject's attempts to reduce his bereavement to economic terms are a typical grief-controlling stratagem in which the discomforts of poverty are substituted for the pain of loss. Accusations of selfishness aimed at the dead for dying appear in this light to have a real and computable base, and the return of prosperity can then be projected on to the subject's ego-view as a healing of any wounds the bereavement may have caused.

  At the same time the source of the new prosperity is likely to be viewed with suspicion, or indeed as in this case contempt verging on hatred. I could discern little trace here of any Oedipal jealousy - subject always refers to his mother simply as 'mother', never using 'mum' or any other diminutivization, or employing the possessive pronoun, and never offering any anecdotes in which she features other than as a functional presence - so the unfailing choice of pejorative descriptions for his stepfather must be ascribed to subject's appreciation of his stepfather's wealth as a criticism of his real father's failure to provide for his family and his determination that the newcomer is never going to get close to taking the dead man's place.

  There was a lot more like this and soon Pascoe was yawning. What was it the blurb had said? Be prepared to be shocked, to be scandalized, to be terrified. It hadn't mentioned the danger of being bored out of your skull.

  The author blurb seemed to indicate that Haseen had a good track record as a serious academic psychologist, but even this seemed non-proven to Pascoe in the light of the way she swallowed hook, line and sinker everything that Roote dangled in front of her about his memories of his father.

  'I'm glad to see that at least one of my gift choices has not been in vain’ said Ellie, who'd returned undetected.

  'It would be a comic masterpiece if it wasn't dull’ said Pascoe. 'How's your mum?'

  ‘Fine. At least she says she is. Celebrating Christmas surrounded by people most of whom can't even remember who they are let alone what day it is can't be a bundle of fun.'

  'It's happening all over the country’ said Pascoe. 'Sorry. You're right. It can't be. Still, she'll be with us tomorrow. We'll see she has a great time. Your dad, is he . . . ?'

  'No miracle cures, Pete’ she said. 'Or, if there are, they're going to be too late for him, I fear. It's really pissy, isn't it? Losing someone without being able to grieve properly because they're not officially dead.'

  'I know, I know’ said Pascoe. He stood up, poured a drink and took it to Ellie. But before he gave it to her, he put his arms round her and pulled her close. After a while she moved away, took the glass and said, 'Thanks. That helped. This too.'

  'Part of the service’ he said lightly. 'But do me a favour, any time you think of getting real help, don't apply to Ms Amaryllis Haseen!'

  'No? And apart from her sex, what objective evidence do you have for that slur on a well-respected professional woman's competence?'

  Pascoe tried to detect how much self-mocking irony there was in Ellie's reaction, found no clue in her expression and decided to play it straight.

  'Maybe I'm being a bit hard’ he said. 'Lots of bright people have been given the run around by our Franny. Listen to this.

  Subject
evinced a comprehensive mental blink-ering with regard to interpretation of his father's evidently increasingly eccentric behaviour. He said, 'Mother never gave my dad credit for anything he did, in fact she 'd deliberately take things the wrong way. When he was away from home on dangerous missions he couldn 't tell us about, she got very angry and talked about him going off and enjoying himself boozing with his fancy woman. She even refused to go down to London with him when he was being awarded a medal. He wanted to take me but she wouldn't let him, I don't know why.'

  And Ms Haseen takes all this as gospel! I know how good Roote is at pulling people's strings, but surely a pro should be able to see through him.'

  'But what makes you so sure he's pulling her strings?' asked Ellie.

  'What? Ah, you think that Roote Senior might indeed have been an MI5 undercover agent who died bravely in the line of duty? Well, let me disenchant you.'

  He picked up his file and riffled through the papers.

  'Here we are, Roote's father was a civil servant who died when his son was two years old. Confirmation of what Roote himself says in his letters several times, that he lost his father so early he has no memories of him whatsoever.'

  'What is that, Peter?' said Ellie, staring at the file.

  ‘This?' said Pascoe, suddenly remembering that Dalziel's were not the only sharp eyes it was sometimes wiser to keep things hidden from. 'Oh, just some notes about Roote I had lying around. Seemed a sensible place to keep these letters in.'

  'Looks a bit bulky for just some notes’ said Ellie. 'And that note you were extracting that stuff about Roote Senior from . . . ?'

  'Well, actually it's a copy of Roote's college file, just background details

  'Holm Coultram College, you mean?' said Ellie. 'Those files were confidential!'

  'Come on! He was a suspect in a serious investigation.'

  'Oh yes. You don't happen to have a copy of my file there too, do you?'

  'No, really subversive material I keep in a safe down the nick,' said Pascoe.

  She smiled, with just the slightest sign of effort as if it had occurred to her that it was after all Christmas Day.

  'Enough shop talk,' she said. 'I thought we'd get the troughing over early so that we can walk it off together while there's still some light in the sky, OK?'

  'Fine,' said Pascoe. 'I'll pop out and work up an appetite with our two monsters.'

  Take Rosie a woolly, will you? She's beginning to look quite blue out there, but don't tell her that or she'll just insist on stripping off to show she doesn't feel the cold.'

  'Can't think who she gets it from,' said Pascoe.

  He rose with Dark Cells in one hand and in the other the file which he shook at her as he headed for the door, saying, 'See? Next to nothing in it. I know I may be just a bit obsessive about the guy, but doesn't it make sense to keep some sort of track on him now he's elected me his number one correspondent?'

  To his surprise, Ellie said, 'You may be right, love. Listen, last word on the subject today, OK? Either drop the whole thing or do the job properly. Dig deep as you can into Roote's roots; and while you're at it, before you go around badmouthing Ms Haseen, why not check her out professionally with someone like Pottle? Rosie, luv, what's up?'

  Their daughter had burst into the room wearing her best exasperated look.

  'It's this whistle,' she said. 'I think it's broken.' . 'Why's that?'

  'I can't hear it.'

  'But you're not meant to be able to hear it.'

  'But I don't think Tig can hear it either. I blow and I blow and he pays no heed at all.'

  Ellie shot a warning glance at her husband, who was grinning broadly, and said, 'I know exactly what you mean, darling. But it doesn't mean Tig can't hear it. It's just that male dogs can be very stubborn, and sometimes you've got to work really hard to get them to do the simplest things. Why don't you get your dad to help you? I think you'll find he's a bit of a specialist.'

  Hat Bowler, not being a particularly literary sort of chap, though he was making efforts in that direction to keep pace with Rye Pomona, might have found it hard to offer a detailed gloss of the phrase hoist with his own petard, but he knew exactly what it meant. Christmas had posed a problem. His parents were expecting him home. The only unmarried one of four children, he'd been looking forward to at last quieting their unease at his continued lack of attachment by showing off Rye, who, admitting to no family of her own, might have been expected to jump at the chance of Yuletide with the Bowlers.

  Instead she had turned down the invitation flat. At first he had taken her refusal as tactical, a (he hoped) Parthian shot in the bad time she had given him for going against her wish not to make the break-in official. So he had waited till they were emerging from a moment of maximum closeness and repeated the invitation.

  She rolled away from him and said, 'Hat, don't you listen? I said, no thanks, I'm just not up for a big family Christmas, OK? But I understand how much your parents and your brothers and sister and their offspring will be looking forward to seeing you. And I'll look forward just as much, or even more, to seeing you when you get back. Don't try to turn me into a little Orphan Annie out in the snow while everyone else is in the warm having a good time. I shall be perfectly happy celebrating Christmas by myself.'

  He was corning to recognize the note of finality in her voice and he'd protested no more. But he had gone away and brooded and determined that it was time she too discovered he could take a stand. Take away one member of a large family having a good time and what was left was still a large family having a good time. Take away one lover from a pair of lovers and what was left was two unhappy people.

  So he crossed his fingers and, before he could change his mind, pausing only to check that he had the CID room to himself, he took out his mobile and rang his parents' number.

  As he spilled out his carefully prepared lie about losing out in the Christmas leave lottery, he could feel his mother's huge disappointment even before she tried to hide it, and by the time he put down the phone, he felt like the worst kind of criminal low-life who deserved everything a gouty judge could throw at him.

  And it seemed that God agreed.

  'Well, that's good,' said Sergeant Wield's voice behind him. 'Here's me just heard Seymour's down with flu, so having to decide whether it's you or Novello gets pulled in to fill the gap on the Christmas roster, and what do I find but a volunteer? Well done, lad.'

  'Come on, Sarge,' said Hat desperately. 'At least ask Novello. She might prefer New Year.'

  'Nay, good Catholic girl like her 'ull want to be off at Christmas.'

  'Good Catholic! You know she's been going out with that big bearded sergeant in the Transport Police and he's married with four kids.'

  That's between her and Father Kerrigan, who no doubt gets a blow-by-blow account at confession, so let's not be having any religious prejudice here, eh?'

  'But, Sarge . . .' Hat began to plead. Then he looked into that rocky landscape of a face and realized there was nothing for him here but a hard landing.

  He kept his come-uppance to himself, accepting DC Novello's gratitude at his reported volunteering with a self-deprecating grimace and Rye's sympathy with a philosophic shrug. For a moment when she pulled him down on the sofa to show how far her sympathy went, he started feeling guilty again, but not for long.

  Christmas morning itself was so quiet that he didn't even have the consolation of usefulness to salve his disappointment at not being with Rye.

  About eleven o'clock Dalziel came wandering in, softly whistling 'God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen'. He nodded approvingly when he saw the amount of paperwork Hat had shifted and said, 'That's it, lad. Improve the shining hour.'

  'Yes, sir. Nothing for us yet then?'

  The Fat Man laughed, scratched his crotch like a boy scout trying to start a fire, and said, 'Don't worry, lad. Early days. There's lots of folk out there have travelled many a weary mile just to put themselves in striking distance of their nearest and deare
st, and it's getting near kick-off time. Prezzies opened, irritations building, down the pub for a few soothing bevvies, back an hour later full of good cheer, turkey burnt, pudding hard-boiled, kids fratching, in-laws sniping - it's a powder keg, and anything can be a spark. Had a chap couple of years back slit three throats with the carving knife just because his missus told him he were making a mess of the bird and why didn't he let her dad do it?'

  'Even that's not exactly demanding, is it? I mean, it doesn't take much real detective work.'

  'Like in the whodunnits? Shouldn't pay too much heed to them poncy writers, lad. What do they know? Most on 'em 'ud honk their rings if they saw a bit of real blood.'

  Hat's acquaintance with poncy writers was limited to Ellie Pascoe and Charley Penn. His dislike of the latter was strong enough to discount his liking for the former, so he nodded enthusiastic agreement which probably wasn't a bad career move anyway.

  It occurred to him to wonder how come the Fat Man, who cracked the whip and sent all the animals galloping round the ring, should have ended up stuck in the empty Big Top on Christmas Day. A disaster in his private life? Or a sudden rush of altruism to the head? On the whole, Hat thought it wise not to push his luck by asking.

  In fact neither mischance nor nobility had played a part in the Fat Man's decision to take Christmas duty. Amanda 'Cap' Marvell, his inamorata, was spending the holiday with her son, Lieutenant Colonel Pitt-Evenlode MC (the Hero, as Dalziel called him), who had finally found himself a woman sufficiently unimpressed by his heroics to contemplate becoming his wife. Dalziel wasn't invited.

  'Worried I'll frighten her off?' Dalziel had asked.

  'More likely worried I'll drink too much bubbly and start feeling you up under the table and that frightens her off,' said Cap, who had a nice way of putting things.

  'Save the bubbly for Boxing Day,' he'd replied, then told his senior officers they could spend Christmas with their families as he was coming in and he was worth any six of them.

  He returned to his office now, opened the huge jar of pickled walnuts he'd found in one of his socks that morning, poured himself a healthy slug from the bottle of Highland Park he'd found in the other, and settled down with The Last Days of Pompeii, with his radio monitor bubbling softly in the background. The minutes ticked by, the pages turned, the whisky and the walnuts sank, and, as he'd forecast, the radio-recorded tide of merry Christmas mayhem rose as the Queen's Speech sailed majestically nearer.