Death Comes for the Fat Man (26 page)

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 193

“So will you go?” she asked.

“Probably. There is another of our guys in there I ought to look in on.”

“Not another in a coma, I hope?”

He smiled and said, “Well, there are different opinions about that.

Happily our Constable Hector is notoriously a hard man to infl ict serious damage on and I gather that he is conscious and reasonably well and likely to make a full recovery.”

“It’s a dangerous profession,” she said. “What happened to this one?”

“Nothing exotic. Accident. Hit-and-run. We’re still looking for the bastard.”

“And will you get him?”

“I expect so. We’ve a pretty good idea about the car, and as it’s a black Jag and it’s bound to have a large dent in it, that makes things easier.”

She picked up the camera and asked, “Mind if I take your picture?”

“Not in the least. That looks an expensive bit of kit.”

“Never stint when it’s your livelihood. No, don’t pose, just carry on scoffi ng.”

All the time as she talked she was taking snaps.

“So you’re still shooting for the rag trade then?”

“Not really. But I may sell this to the
Police Gazette:
‘What the well dressed copper is eating this season.’ Do you like being a policeman?”

“Yes, I suppose I do,” he said. “Do you like being a photographer?”

“It’s OK.”

“That doesn’t sound terribly positive.”

“No? What I mean is, yes, I like doing it well enough. But you need more, don’t you? I think you implied that. You feel being a cop’s a job worth doing, right?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And you like doing it. That’s what makes life worth living, isn’t it? Finding something you feel’s worth doing, and something you get a kick out of doing.”

“I hope you fi nd it.”

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

“I think I’m moving in the right direction,” she said with a smile.

“There, that will do for capturing your likeness. Now I think I might be tempted to a sliver of apple tart.”

“Good choice,” he said.

They sat in silence for a while, one of those silences which can steal upon two people unawares, not a universal silence but one peculiar to them alone and their situation, a silence not broken but intensifi ed by the totally separate existence of background noise, music playing, people laughing, and which for a moment seemed to encompass the whole of the sunlit field where the fete was taking place. The silence might be called companionable, but there was nothing sexual in it, at least nothing which would require action and the expense of energy and sweat. Indeed the feelings Pascoe felt rising within him had less to do with erotic fantasy than sentimental patriotism.

This is England, he found himself thinking. This is what Englishness means. Sitting at a village fete on a warm day of summer in pleasant company, eating Victoria sponge beneath a blue sky spotted with little white clouds, this is worth fighting for . . .

And then the idyll was shattered by a distant cacophony of barking and the din of human voices upraised in alarm and in command.

“What on earth is happening?” wondered Kilda.

“I think,” said Pascoe, sinking lower in his chair and reaching for another cream éclair, “I think that my daughter’s terrier may be introducing his fellow competitors to his totally original handicap system.”

11

F O R G O T T E N D R E A M S

Pascoe awoke suddenly.

There was a hooded figure standing over him, one hand on his shoulder, the other swinging a gleaming cleaver at his vulnerable neck.

He closed his eyes and tried to roll away. The hand held him more firmly. He opened his eyes once more, and this time found he was looking up into the anxious face of his wife. The bedside clock said it was five to two.

He struggled upright and said, “What?”

“You were rolling around and muttering.”

“Was I?”

He realized he was hot and sweaty and nauseous.

He rolled out of bed and just made it to the bathroom before he was sick.

“Pete, are you OK?” said Ellie, in the doorway.

“I’ll survive. Must have been something I ate.”

“Like all those cakes,” she said. “And how much did you drink with Wieldy?”

When they got home from the fete and he recalled he’d promised to meet the sergeant for a drink, he hadn’t wanted to go. But Ellie, who was very protective of Wield, had stopped him from ringing to cancel, saying, “Half an hour while I make the dinner won’t hurt.”

He should have followed his instinct. It hadn’t been a very successful meeting.

He’d laid out his theories about what had actually happened in Mill Street with what had seemed to him pellucid eloquence and irrefutable logic. Instead of applause what he got from Wield was 196 r e g i n a l d h i l l

the blank stare a probationer might have received who’d just made a botched report.

“So what do you think?” he’d demanded.

“Let’s be clear,” said Wield. “Your theory is that these Templars who murdered Mazraani and Carradice were responsible for the Mill Street bang. They were interrupted by Hector after one of them fi red a gun presumably to put the frighteners on the Arabs. They then made their escape via the roof space to the end house, number six. They knew the police were in the vicinity because of Hector’s intervention.

Nevertheless they recklessly detonated by remote control the bomb they’d left in number three. But when they heard that you and Andy had been hurt in the explosion, they decided to keep quiet about their involvement because they didn’t want to start their campaign with a botched op that could turn out to have killed a copper.”

“Right,” said Pascoe, wondering why his recent lucidity now seemed so opaque.

“And you’re also saying that these Templars who made such a cock-up aren’t just a bunch of gung-ho vigilantes but a well-organized cell of conspirators who have probably got someone in CAT feeding them info and running protection.”

“That’s how it seems to me,” declared Pascoe. “Look at the evidence!

The bullet, the post-mortem reports, the cover-up of Freeman’s surveillance op, the reaction from CAT when I seem to be stirring things—”

“Pete, if you heard one of our DCs reaching for conclusions like yours from evidence like this, you’d slap him down and send him to bed without his supper. Even if there’s more to Mill Street than CAT are letting on, maybe they’re simply keeping quiet about their suspicions because it gives them a bit of an edge in the investigation.

Maybe they found a lot more stuff when they were running the crime scene there and they just don’t want to let the perps know they’re coming at them from that particular direction.”

Pascoe considered this. There was a disturbing amount of sense in it.

“So why keep me on the outside?” he asked.

“Because that’s what you are, Pete. An outsider. They’re worried about you, not because there’s stuff to hide, but because after your d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 197

own experience and with Andy lying in a coma, you’re a loose cannon.

Likely that’s why Glenister got you attached to her team in the fi rst place, so she can keep a close eye on you. You said yourself you’d been given a non-job.”

He’d had another couple of drinks with the sergeant to show he wasn’t put out at this demolition of his carefully constructed hypotheses. And he was nearly an hour late for his dinner, which he didn’t fancy anyway but which uxorial diplomacy made him eat.

And this had been the result. A nightmare he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, recall. And a stomach like the Red Sea after the application of Moses’s rod.

He immersed his head in cold water, brushed his teeth, gargled, and felt a little better. By the time he emerged from the bathroom, Ellie had made a hot milky drink.

She’d also unearthed the tablets prescribed by John Sowden when Pascoe left hospital. He’d stopped taking them after a few days and had left them at home when he went to Manchester. Now he looked at them with distaste.

“They make me drowsy,” he objected.

“You’re in your pajamas, it’s two o’clock in the fucking morning,”

said Ellie. “Take them.”

Pascoe’s fairy godmother had been more generous than poor Hector’s, but they did to some extent share the gift of survival, though the Pascoe version was rather more specialized. He knew when not to argue with his wife.

He climbed back into bed.

“Feeling a bit better now?” she asked.

“Yes. Much. Thought I might go along to visit Andy in the morning.

And Hector too.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” she said.

She leaned over to kiss him. He turned his mouth away because despite the toothpaste, gargle, and milky drink, he still had a faint aftertaste of vomit at the back of his throat. But she kissed him on the lips anyway.

Then they both lay there, side by side, simulating sleep while their open eyes stared uncertainly into the dark.

12

T H E M A N O F M Y D R E A M S

Next morning when Rosie heard about the proposed hospital visit she said, “I’ll come too.”

“No,” said Pascoe more shortly than he intended. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Uncle Andy’s very ill. Very ill indeed.”

“That’s why I want to see him.”

“But he still hasn’t woken up, he won’t know you’re there.”

“He won’t know you’re there either and that doesn’t stop you from going.”

But it didn’t make it easy, thought Pascoe. Was he just transferring to Rosie his own unhappiness at the prospect of sitting at the Fat Man’s side, murmuring a few awkward self-conscious phrases in his ear, but the growing conviction that if this unresponsive hulk could hear anything, it was only the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of that same tide of life which had beached him here?

“OK,” said Pascoe. “If Mum says it’s OK, you can come.”

He looked at Ellie. She gave him the look she usually gave him when he wished a decision about Rosie on to her, but her voice was even and pleasant as she said, “Of course you can go, darling, if that’s what you want.”

“Yes, that’s what I want,” said the girl. “What time shall I be ready?”

She spoke with great aplomb, but as they approached Dalziel’s room, Pascoe was able to gauge from the increased pressure of her fingers around his that she was as nervous as he was.

When he pushed open the door, it was a relief to see Cap Marvell sitting by the bedside.

She was talking to the recumbent figure, naturally, easily, with none of the self-consciousness of his own attempts. Indeed, as if in d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 199

the middle of a real conversation, she gave them a welcoming smile but didn’t break off till she’d finished what she had to say.

“ . . . and the bastard said I was trespassing and if I didn’t get off his land, he was in his rights to throw me off, and I asked if he could drive a tractor one-handed, because if he laid a finger on me I’d break his arm. Then I rang the RSPCA. Had to wait an hour till they got there, but I didn’t trust him not to blow the poor beast’s brains out and drag it off and hide the body if I left. Now here’s Peter and Rosie to see you.

Hello, you two. Rosie, how are you? It’s been an age since I saw you.

You’re still awfully thin, my dear. I hope you’re eating properly. How’s school?”

Amanda Marvell had shed much of the conditioning of her upbring-ing, but in her attitude to children the spirit of nanny and nursery still clung close.

“Fine,” said Rosie.

She began to walk slowly round the bed as if determined to get the fullest possible view of the Fat Man.

Cap had a small bottle in her hand which she now held beneath Dalziel’s nose.

“Smelling salts?” inquired Pascoe.

She smiled and moved the bottle beneath his nose.

A peaty, spirituous aroma floated out of it.

“Lagavulin,” she said. “Very distinctive.”

“Good Lord. Do you think it does any good?” said Pascoe doubtfully.

“Watch this.”

She produced another small bottle, removed the stopper, and held that under Dalziel’s nostrils, which immediately crinkled in seeming distaste.

“Gin,” said Cap. “Which Andy thinks is only fi t for disinfecting urinals.”

“What do the staff here think of your . . . treatment?”

“The staff ?” she said, puzzled. “How on earth should I know?”

She was truly formidable. Pascoe wasn’t absolutely certain how much he liked her, and though always friendly toward him, he occasionally got the feeling that she regarded him as a Leporello to the great Don.

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

In build she was Wagnerian rather than Mozartian, in this at least a fi t consort for the Fat Man. In background (landed gentry), education (St.

Dorothy’s Academy), and beliefs (animal rights, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth), she was a Scots mile away from him. In bed . . . the collective imagination of the Mid-Yorkshire constabulary had become considerably overheated fantasizing on their carnal relationship. “Whales do it,”

PC Maycock had said. “Yes, but they do it in water,” PC Jennison had responded. On land or in sea, the Fat Man and his buxom leman seemed to be managing very well, thank you.

Rosie meanwhile had settled herself on a chair on the other side of the bed, leaning forward. Her eyes were wide open and fi xed unblinkingly on Dalziel’s face.

Pascoe said, “Any change?”

“I got the impression he was getting bored with the Big Bands, so I’ve changed the tape,” said Cap. “Thought he’d like this.”

She showed him a cassette box which advertised that it contained the perfect music to turn your dull Anglo-Saxon New Year into a hoo-tenanny Hogmanay ceilidh.

“Good, good,” said Pascoe, thinking, The world is full of seriously weird people. And I should know, living with two of them.

He said, “Look, we won’t interrupt. There’s another of our offi cers in hospital. I think I’ll pop along and see him. Rosie, you want to come and say hello to Constable Hector?”

The girl didn’t respond. She was leaning so far forward now, her face was almost touching the Fat Man’s. She’d had to move some of his tubes and wires to get so close.