D&P20 - Death's Jest-Book

by Reginald Hill

  He hadn't meant to say any of this, or at least he hadn't planned to say it in this way, but to keep as long as he could the advantage of knowing more than she did.

  'I liked her.'

  'Me too,' admitted Dalziel. 'I know how she felt. I'm not mad about sitting around doing nowt while you snuff it.'

  'Unless you plan to hold me down while you operate, I don't see there's much you can do about it,' she said, smiling.

  'What about young Bowler? How's he going to feel?'

  'As bad as anyone can feel and still go on living,' she said sombrely. 'But he will go on living. I'm glad you know the truth, Mr Dalziel, because you'll be ready to help Hat. You and Mr Pascoe. He thinks you're both marvellous. This is your chance to prove he's right.'

  He thought of all the arguments he could put forward to make her change her mind, and dismissed them. In the interrogation room, he generally knew after a couple of minutes when there was no point going om.

  He knew that now.

  He said, 'You'll do what you want, lass. In my experience that's what lasses usually do. One thing, but - are you planning to leave any little billy-doos behind you?'

  'In my experience, you can be a bit more direct than that’ she said.

  'All right. There's buggers like Charley Penn and maybe others who don't think the Wordman's dead. I'm not interested in what you and Dee were getting up to that day out at the Stang. But I'd like to know what you think. Is the Wordman dead?'

  She thought about this long enough to make him feel uneasy. Then she said in a low voice, 'Yes, I believe he is. And I'm sure that when he looks back at what he did, whatever pleas there might be in mitigation, he is filled with a horror that makes death welcome. But Charley Penn is right. Dick Dee was a lovely man. Charley's right to remember him like that. When we die I don't think anything matters much, but if anything matters a little, it's how our friends remember us. Goodbye now, Mr Dalziel.'

  She watched him go. And Pascoe through his feverish gaze watched him go too at the end of his sick-room visit and found he was watching through Rye Pomona's cool brown eyes and thinking what she was thinking, which was so unthinkable that he twisted in his turbulent thoughts like a drowning man and struck out wildly for some impossible shore and found himself in the middle of Edgar Wield's pain .. .

  * * *

  'I'm sorry’ Wield said. This is stupid. I shouldn't be like this. It's worse than stupid, it's unfair. I shouldn't be doing this to you.'

  'And who else should you be doing it to?' said Digweed. 'So shut up and eat your frikadeller. They are, though I say it myself as shouldn't, being the one who has slaved away in the kitchen to produce them, quite perfect.'

  Wield, who found them indistinguishable from frozen meatballs cooked in the microwave, dutifully put one in his mouth.

  'I don't know why I should feel like this,' he said, chewing. There really was nothing between us, Edwin, you know that, don't you?'

  'Oh yes there was,' said Digweed. 'He must have been a remarkable child. I told you at Christmas he was looking for a dad, and, against all the odds, I think he succeeded. You're not acting like a bereft lover, Edgar, but a bereaved father. Which is fine. Odd but fine. But for once I agree with that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox, Superintendent Dalziel. What you mustn't act like is an avenging fury. No man can profit from assaulting a lawyer. Besides, from what I know of Marcus Belchamber, he seems unlikely to have countenanced this brutal assault.'

  'He's countenancing what could turn out to be a brutal assault on some security guards,' retorted Wield.

  Usually he was as discreet as a confessor about the details of his job, but grief and anger had unlocked his lips.

  'At a distance, in pursuit of an obsession, and on people he doesn't know’ said Digweed. 'I dare say this has given him pause. Shock at Lee's death plus fear of what he may have revealed to you could well result in the whole thing being cancelled.'

  'I hope not’ said Wield. 'Because if we can't get him for this, I'll need to go round to his office and punch his lights out.'

  He spoke tough but he didn't feel tough. Vengeance was for heroes. He did not feel heroic. Nothing he could do to anyone was going to remove either of those memories which would forever have the power to leave him feeling weak as a tired child trying to weep away this life of care. The first was of that other tired child's battered, drowned face looking up at him on the canal bank. The second was of that same face, smiling encouragingly, lovingly, as it belted out the words of the song on the karaoke screen.

  I really need you tonight . . . forever's going to start tonight...

  Perhaps Pascoe had picked this up from Wield's monosyllabic references . .. perhaps the sergeant had opened up to Ellie with whom he'd always been very close . .. but there were other projections which were much harder to explain . . .

  In the comfortable study where Lee Lubanski had visited him so often, Marcus Belchamber sat and tried to recapture the sublime thrill he had felt when he held the serpent crown. And failed. All he could see was Lee's slim body being hauled out of the cold murky waters of the Burrthorpe Canal. He had never felt anything for the boy. He was a whore. You rented his body like a hotel room, looked to find everything there that you'd paid for, made yourself perfectly at home in it, but you never thought of it as home. At the end of each rental period you left without a backward glance. And yet...

  If the boy had died in a road accident, he wouldn't have thought of it other than as an inconvenience. Like your hotel burning down. You have to find another place to stay.

  This was different. Though he refused to accept responsibility, he could not deny that between himself and that sordid death ran an unbroken chain of causality. It was not his fault that the boy was dead. But he was attainted by the death in too many ways.

  His first reaction had been to talk of cancelling the whole job.

  Polchard had smiled his cold smile and made it clear that he and his team would still require payment in full. Already because Linford in his grief had reneged on the further payments which had fallen due, Belchamber had had to promise Polchard a large portion of the monies projected from the sale of the disposable part of the Hoard. That was bad enough, but worse was the fear that now that the initial agreement had been broken by Linford's default, Polchard might simply take the lot, ruthlessly melting down individual items to make them more easily disposable.

  Or perhaps the crown would suffer the fate of so many stolen works of art and end up as permanent collateral in a series of squalid drug deals.

  He couldn't bear the thought of that.

  In the end he had to accept Polchard's assurance - no; not assurance; the man didn't feel the need to reassure, simply to assert - that all he wanted was his agreed cut. Which made it easier to accept his further assertion that Lee's death had been caused by an overenthusiastic minion and that to the end the youth had insisted that his relationship with the ugly cop was purely professional. In other words, the dirty little scrote had been giving freebies in return for protection. So fuck him. No problem.

  So he gave the go-ahead, trying to retain the illusion that he was still in charge. And he sat in his study trying to recall the thrill he had felt when he held the serpent crown.

  And failed . . .

  Death is a very great adventure, but to many people, especially to those who find the experience of going on a package holiday traumatic enough, the idea of embarking on an adventure is completely horrifying. Yet with holiday trips, most of us enjoy ourselves when we get there. And at a distance, are we not all full of delighted anticipation?

  An unexpected visitor to Pascoe's sickbed had been Charley Penn, or rather he'd come to see Pascoe not knowing he was sick. Why he came wasn't clear .. . something to do with Rye Pomona ... or maybe with Mai Richter ... or maybe because his search for answers had left him uncertain of the original questions he'd been asking...

  Charley Penn sat in the library and tried to concentrate on the po
em he was working on.

  It was called Der Scheidende, literally 'The Parting One' which he'd translated as 'Man on his way out', though perhaps he should try to preserve that idea of parting in the sense of division, which he was sure must have been in the mind of dying Heine with his doppelgdnger obsession.

  He'd done the first six lines while Dick Dee was still alive.

  Within my heart, within my head

  Every worldly joy lies dead, And just as dead beyond repeal

  Is hate of evil, nor do I feel

  The pain of mine or others' lives,

  For in me only Death survives.

  But since Dick's death, he hadn't been able to return to the poem. Not till now.

  Why had Mai gone so abruptly?

  She'd said it had all been a waste of time, there was nothing to find, he should forget his obsession and get on with life. But it hadn't rung true.

  Somehow Pomona had magicked her. Mai was the clearest-minded woman he knew. He respected her hugely, which came as close to love as he'd ever felt for a woman. But she'd let herself be magicked.

  He twisted in his seat and looked towards the desk.

  She was there in her usual place, apparently absorbed in whatever she was doing. But after only a second she raised her eyes to meet his. Once he had been proud of what he thought of as his ability to make her aware of his accusatory gaze, but in the past few days he had found himself wondering if perhaps these eye encounters might not owe more to some power she had of precognition rather than any he had of will. He broke off contact and returned to the second part of the poem.

  The curtain falls, the play is done,

  And, yawning, homeward now they've gone

  My lovely German audience.

  These worthy folk don't lack good sense.

  They'll eat their supper with song and laughter

  And never a thought for what comes after

  A bit free but it got the feel, which in a poem is the greater part of sense. He looked at his draft of the final six lines. Did it matter that he'd changed Stuttgart to Frankfurt because the Main suited his rhyming better than the Neckar? He hadn't been able to find any evidence that the inhabitants of Stuttgart had any particular reputation for Philistinism. Frankfurt on the other hand was certainly a great German metropolis even in the 1850s. Goethe called it 'the secret capital', though Heine's short work experience there, in banking then grocery, hadn't been very happy. What the hell, if some scholar somewhere wanted to write to him after the book's publication and explain the special significance of Stuttgart, it would give the pedant pleasure and himself enlightenment!

  He made a couple of minor changes then began to write a fair copy.

  He got it right that man of glory

  Who said in Homer's epic story

  'The least such thoughtless Philistine

  Is happier living in Frankfurt am Main

  Than I, dead Achilles, in darkness hurled,

  The Prince of Shades in the Underworld.'

  He turned and looked towards Rye again. This time she was watching him already. Her face was surely a lot paler than it had been, even the natural Mediterranean darkness of her colouring couldn't disguise that, and her eyes, always large and dark, now looked even larger and darker. But this seemed less the pallor of sickness than that cool radiance the Old Masters gave to saints at their moment of martyrdom.

  Or something, he added to himself in reaction against the weirdly fanciful thought. But there was something about the girl that encouraged a man's mind down such exotic avenues, an otherness, a sense of disjunction giving you vistas over altered landscapes which returned in a blink to what they'd always been, leaving you doubtful of the experience.

  What the future might hold for her and Hat Bowler, who struck him as an uncomplicated young man inhabiting a world of straight lines and primary colours, he could not guess. He had a feeling that they were players in some drama in which his own pain at Dick Dee's death no longer had a major role.

  She had a faint gentle sweet smile on her lips. Was it for him?

  He wasn't sure, but he found himself hoping so.

  Perhaps he was being magicked too?

  Mist rolling down the hills, a still sea silvered by a rising moon, silence and loneliness in a populous city, eyes meeting strange eyes in the Tube then breaking off but not before a moment of recognition, the feeling of what now?after the applause for your greatest achievement has died, your dog suddenly no longer a puppy, a line of melody which always twists your heart, a ruined castle, casual farewells, plans for tomorrow: the list could go on forever of the prompts to think of death that life never tires of giving us. Don't ignore them. Use them. Then get on with living.

  Late on the evening of Friday January 25th Peter Pascoe broke the surface of the surging ocean of strange dreams and visions he had been floundering in for three days and thought of a hot Scotch pie with peas and Oxo gravy and, for a whole five minutes before he closed his eyes again, wondered, almost disappointedly, if perhaps he wasn't going to die after all.

  13

  Judgment Day

  On Saturday the twenty-sixth of January, Rye Pomona woke on the floor of her bathroom. She recalled feeling sick in the night and climbing out of bed, but she recalled no more. She stood up and realized she had fouled herself. Stripping off her nightgown, she stepped into the bath and turned the shower full on.

  As the icy blast slowly turned warm, she felt life return to her limbs and her mind. She found herself singing a song, not the words but the catchy little tune. This puzzled her, as recently she'd found no problem in recalling anything, even things from her very earliest years.

  Then it came to her that she couldn't recall these words because she'd never known them. Even the tune she'd only heard once. It had been sung by the boy with the bazouki in the Taverna, the Greek restaurant in Cradle Street. Of all the songs he had been asked to sing that night, this was the only one which sounded authentically Greek. The words she didn't understand, but the rippling notes created an impression eidetic in its intensity of blue skies, blue waters and a shepherd boy sitting under an olive tree on a sun-cracked hillside. She got dressed, tidied up, left everything as she would have liked to find it on her return, locked the door carefully behind her.

  Mrs Gilpin was coming up the stairs with her morning milk.

  'Off to work then’ she said.

  'No, I'm not working today’ said Rye smiling. 'I've been admiring that lovely window box of yours. It's so clever of you to get such colours in the middle of winter, and I thought I'd drive out to that big garden centre at Carker and see if I could pick up anything as nice.'

  Mrs Gilpin, unused to her neighbours being happy to exchange more than the briefest of greetings with her, flushed at the compliment and said, 'If you want any help, donlt hesitate to ask.'

  'Thank you. I won't’ said Rye.

  She ran down the stairs, happy in the knowledge that every word of the exchange would be imprinted on the magnetic tape of Mrs Gilpin's mind, and a little bit sorry that she had never gone out of her way to show the woman a friendly face before.

  Until she met her neighbour, she hadn't had the faintest idea where she was going, but now she knew. And she knew why, though it wasn't till she crossed the town boundary and set her car climbing sedately up the gentle slope which led to the brow of Roman Way that she formulated the knowledge. At the top, she pulled on to the verge and waited.

  Below her stretched the old Roman road, running arrow straight down an avenue of ancient beeches for nearly all of the five miles to the village of Carker. Down there she had sat in wait for the boy with the bazouki, watching as the light of his motorbike raced towards her, then switching on her own headlights and driving into his path.

  Of all her victims, he perhaps was the one she regretted most. He had been young, and innocent, with no guile in his heart, and music at his fingertips. She hadn't killed him, but she had caused his death and in her madness read that as her licen
ce to kill.

  If she could bring someone back to life .. .

  The thought made her feel disloyal to Sergius, her brother whom she'd also killed with her driving, though not deliberately, simply by selfishness and neglect.

  But he would understand.

  She waited till the road ahead was empty. In her mirror she saw a distant vehicle coming up behind her. Could it be . . . ? Yes, it was!

  A yellow AA van.

  What more fitting witness could she ask!

  But a witness to what? Here was a problem. How could you have an accident on a perfectly straight and traffic-free stretch of road?

  Yet somehow it didn't feel like a problem.

  She set off down Roman Way, her foot hard on the accelerator.

  As her speed increased, she felt time slowing, so that the beech trees which should have been blurring by her were moving in sedate procession. This was part of that aura which had preceded her terrible deeds, the same kind of aura which in clinical terms often preceded the onset of epilepsy or other kinds of seizure. In her present case it could be either, the tumour at its destructive task or the harbinger of her final killing. She would on the whole prefer her medical condition not to be a factor in her death. She couldn't imagine it being a comfort to Hat to know he would have lost her anyway, and she could imagine how he would feel to learn she had been hiding the truth about her health from him.

  But if it had to be, it had to be.

  Then she saw the deer heading towards the road across the field to her left.

  It was, she presumed, moving very fast, but to her leisurely gaze it advanced at a slow lope.

  She recalled driving with Hat to Stang Tarn when a deer had appeared on the road ahead of them, sending his little MG skidding on to the grass verge and triggering memories which had come bubbling out, bringing her and Hat dangerously close, making her contemplate for the first time ever - and already too late - the possibility of happiness.

  Happiness she had had, however brief, however t tainted. A deer had started it and now a deer would end it.