Death Comes for the Fat Man (20 page)

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 fl imsy 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 battlefi eld and d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 149

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 sub-conscious 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

T R O Y

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 d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 151

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 infi nity. 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, fl ying 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.

152 r e g i n a l d h i l l

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 professional 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 fl oating 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 d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 153

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.

He turned away and closed his eyes and tried to sink into an image-less sleep.

He was almost there when suddenly he was jerked back to the surface by an exclamation from the other bed.

“Bloody hell!” cried the grumpy man. “Did you see that? Did you see that?”

Someone with a greater mastery of repartee might have responded,

“No, because when I tried to see it, you gave me a piss-off look!”

But for Hector even
esprit d’escalier
required a staircase like Mount Niesen’s.

He sat up in bed and looked toward the other patient.

He too was sitting bolt upright, staring aghast at his now blank TV

screen.

“What?” said Hector.

“Did you not see it? You should have seen it! Is this what they call reality TV then—shooting buggers dead afore your eyes? Nurse!

Nurse! Bloody hell!”

5

F I D D L E - D E - D E E

Talking of tutelary spirits, there is one—much overworked—

whose job it is to save men from sins of omission that involve forgetting birthdays and anniversaries and other signifi cant events in the lives of their loved ones. Its intervention can take many forms, from an efficient secretary to a reminder stapled to your briefs by a distrusting wife.

In Pascoe’s case it took the form of Tig jumping onto the arm of the sofa and starting to lick his idle servant’s eyes open.

Pascoe awoke with a jerk. It took a moment to realize the folly Tig had saved him from. In reward he opened the French window to let the dog out then switched on the TV set. The timing was close. The opening titles of
Fidler’s Three
were just coming to an end, and here was young, cool Joe Fidler himself, immaculately casual in a designer sports shirt and crotch-clinging slacks.

“Hi!” he cried, his mouth curving to show teeth from which gleamed a light that never was on sea or land. “My guests tonight are local lad, Maurice Kentmore . . . ”

The screen filled with the face of a man in his late thirties with tousled brown hair, candid blue eyes, and a determined jaw, smiling rather nervously at the camera. “ . . . whose family have been farming at Haresyke Hall in the lovely dale country near Harrogate for at least fi ve generations.”

Hardly local to Middlesbrough then, thought Pascoe. But doubtless to these southern media types, Yorkshire was like Watford, with fewer takeaways.

“Which makes you a bit of a local squire, is that right, Maurice?”

continued Fidler.

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 155

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”

“But you do host the local village fete on your land, don’t you? I know that because you asked me for a plug at dinner. So anyone in search of a nice day out for gran and the kids, look no further than the Haresyke village fete at Haresyke Hall near Harrogate tomorrow Saturday. There you are, Maurice. You can slip me the fi ver later.”

Funny face, pause for laughter. If you didn’t laugh at Fidler’s jokes, you probably found your car clamped, thought Pascoe.

“Maurice is a man of many talents,” resumed Fidler. “Keen moun-taineer, expert horseman, he is also a powerful and infl uential voice in the National Farmers’ Union and the Countryside Alliance. Nor does he hesitate to put his principles into practice. During the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak, he resisted attempts to slaughter his livestock when his land came within the designated distance of a confi rmed infection. Despite the authorities’ calculations being proved wrong, Maurice was put on trial for threatening behavior with a fi rearm, but was triumphantly acquitted. If he’ll go to those lengths to protect his rare-breed pigs, I shouldn’t care to cause offense to his friends and family.”

Another knowing grimace, another laughter pause.

“Alongside him,” resumed Fidler, “we have another man who has triumphed against adversity, Kalim Sarhadi, who comes from Bradford.”

The name rang in Pascoe’s ears like a warning bell.

Sarhadi was in his late twenties, slimly built, darkly handsome.

He grinned broadly at the camera, lounging at ease in his swivel chair.

(Fidler liked swivels, it was said, because they permitted his guests to really get in each other’s faces.)

The presenter continued, “Eighteen months ago Kal was in Pakistan, visiting relations, when he got picked up by the security police. After a week of isolation and assault, he was interviewed fi rst by three Americans, then by two Englishmen, none of whom ever identified himself and all of whom claimed to believe he was a terrorist.

Happily for Kal, back home a huge campaign orchestrated by the editor of the
Bradford News
put such a firecracker under the backside of our beloved leader that finally the government intervened and after a month of incarceration Kal was fi nally released.”

156 r e g i n a l d h i l l

Yes, it was that Sarhadi. Shit, thought Pascoe.

“Very active in that campaign was his fiancée, Jamila, who is in the audience tonight. Yes, there she is. Give her a big hand.”

A camera focused on a young Asian woman sitting at the back. For a moment she looked confused and turned to a slightly older woman sitting next to her, who squeezed her arm reassuringly. Then, recovering, she smiled and waved her hand to acknowledge the applause. She was very pretty but it was her companion Pascoe’s eyes were drawn to.

With a narrow, almost emaciated face whose pallor was accentuated by jet black hair cropped so short it might almost have been painted on, her striking looks would not have been out of place on a wall painting in an Egyptian tomb.

The camera returned to Fidler, who said, “I think you said it’s a week tomorrow that you’ll be giving up your freedom again, Kal?”