Death's Jest-Book (6 page)

As he stood upright and looked
towards the church, the clock's ninth strike sounded.

The churchyard was empty.

He went through the gate and
hurried down the path past the white cross to the rear of the church.

Nothing. Nobody.

He returned to the cross and
checked the ground. The grass was still laced with morning frost and
showed no sign of any footprint.

He raised his eyes to look at the
inscription carved on the cross.

It was dedicated to the memory of
one Arthur Treebie who quit this vale of tears aged ninety-two,
grievously deplored by his huge family and armies of friends.
Possibly Treebie himself, anticipating the gap he was going to leave,
had chosen the consoling text:

'Lo,
I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.'

Pascoe read it, shivered, glanced
once more around the empty churchyard, and hurried back to the
comfort of his car.

Earlier
that same Saturday morning, Detective Constable Hat Bowler had awoken
from a dream.

Ever since the incident in which
he sustained the serious head injury he was officially still
recuperating from, his sleep had been broken by lurid nightmares in
which he struggled once more with the naked blood-slippery figure of
the Word-man. The difference from the reality was that in his dreams
he always lost and lay there helpless while his towering assailant
clubbed him again and again with a heavy crystal dish till he slipped
into unconsciousness with the despairing screams of Rye Pomona
echoing through his broken head. And when he awoke into a tangle of
sweat-soaked sheets, it was the memory of those screams as much as
his own pain and fear that he brought with him out of the dark.

This morning he woke once more
into a tangle of sheets and a memory of Rye calling out, but this
time there was nothing of fear or pain in his memory, only love and
joy.

In his dream he'd been lying in
his hotel bed, his body a burning brand in a cold, cold waste of
circumspection, wondering whether he was a wise man or an idiot not
to have pressed his suit with Rye to either a conclusion or a
rejection, when he had heard his door open and next moment a soft
naked body had fused its warmth with his and a voice had murmured in
his ear, Thank God for equal opportunities, eh?' And after that she
had spoken no more till those final wordless but oh so eloquent cries
which had climaxed their passionate coupling.

He groaned softly at the sweet
memory of the dream, tried to relax once more into that happy
slumber, rolled over in the broad bed, and sat up wide-awake.

She was there. Either he was
still dreaming, or ...

Her arms went round him and drew
him down.

'How's your head?' she whispered.

'I don't know. I think I'm having
delusions.'

'So why don't we delude ourselves
again?'

If this was dreaming, he was
happy to sleep forever.

Afterwards they lay intricately
twined together, listening to the hotel coming to life around them
and the birds, later than the humans on these dark mornings,
beginning to waken outside.

'What's that?' she said.

'Goldfinch.'

'And that?'

'Mistle thrush.'

'I like a man who knows more than
I do’ she said. 'Hungry?'

'What had you in mind?'

'Sausage, bacon and egg, for
starters.'

She rolled away from him, picked
up the bedside phone and dialled.

He listened as she ordered the
full English for two in his room.

'Have you no shame?' he asked.

'Just as well I haven't,' she
said. 'Or were you planning to surprise me last night?'

He shook his head and said, 'No.
I'm sorry. I wanted to, Jesus, how I've been wanting to! But I just
lost my bottle

'Why?' she said curiously.
'You've never struck me as the retiring virgin type, Hat.'

'No? Well, usually . .. not that
there's been a lot ... but in most cases it didn't matter, being
turned down, I mean. Some you lose, some you win, that sort of thing.
But with you I was terrified I'd lose everything by pressing too
hard. I had to be sure you really fancied me.'

'Girl fixes up a three-night
break in a romantic country hotel and you're not sure?' she said
incredulously.

'Yeah, well, I thought. . . then
we got here and you'd booked separate rooms.'

‘Fail-safe in case . . .
anyway, you had the cue to look disappointed and say, "Hey, do
we really need two rooms?'"

'Oh, I was disappointed,' he said
with a grin. 'If I'd been on duty, I'd have gone out and arrested the
first ten people I saw smiling and charged them with being happy. So,
disappointed yes, but maybe not altogether surprised.'

'Meaning?'

'Meaning that during these past
few weeks you've been concerned and caring and great fun to be with,
all those things, but I always felt there was some kind of limit, you
know: this far is fine but one more step and it's on your bike,
buster! Am I making sense?'

She was listening to him with a
frowning intensity.

She said, 'You think I was
playing hard to get?'

'Crossed my mind’ he
admitted. 'But it didn't seem your style. Though a couple of weeks
back when things seemed to be going really well ... do you remember?
And I was thinking, this is the night! Then you got a headache!
Jesus! I thought. A headache! How unoriginal can you get?'

'You've been mixing with too many
dishonest people, Hat’ she said. 'If I say I've got a headache,
I mean I've got a headache. So you thought because I didn't jump into
bed with you the first time you got horny, I must be ... what? What
have you been thinking these past few weeks, Hat?'

He looked away then looked back
straight into her eyes and said, 'I sometimes thought, maybe you're
just grateful because of what happened. Maybe that's the limit,
whatever gratitude can give but no more. Well, I couldn't have put up
with that forever, but I wasn't ready yet to take the risk of making
you say it. So that's the kind of wimpish wanker you've got yourself
mixed up with.'

'Wimp you may be, but you can
give up the wanking, eh, Constable?' she said, drawing him close to
her. 'I love you, Hat. From now on in, you're safe with me.'

Which seemed to Hat even in these
days of equal opportunity a slightly odd way of putting it, but he
wasn't about to complain, and indeed in her arms he felt so utterly
invulnerable to anything fate could hurl against him, even if it took
the form of Fat Andy Dalziel in berserker mode, that perhaps she had
the right of it.

A
blizzard rages across a desolate landscape, thunder rolls, wolves
howl. Away in the distance there is movement. Gradually as the
swirling snow parts the viewer sees that it's a horse, no, three
horses, pulling a sleigh. And as it gets nearer the passengers became
visible, a man and a woman and two children, and they are all
smiling, and as the din of the raging storm dies to be replaced by
the swelling strains of Prokofiev's 'Troika' music, the viewpoint
swings round to show over the horses' tossing heads the turrets and
towers of what looks like a small city emerging from the white plain,
above which arcs with a brilliance like the Northern Lights the word
ESTOTILAND.

'Christmas starts in Estotiland,'
intones a voice like the voice of a transatlantic God. 'Here in
Estotiland you'll get so much fun out of shopping you'll never think
of dropping. And don't forget, Estotiland is open from eight a.m. to
ten p.m., and all day Sunday. So all you kids, git your mom and pop
to hitch up the pony to the sleigh and head out here first thing
tomorrow. But be careful. You may never want to go home again!'

Music climaxes as the sleigh,
which is now seen to be the point of a broad arrow of many other
sleighs, leads them all into the shining city.

'What a load of crap’
observed Andy Dalziel from his sitting-room door.

'Andy. Didn't hear you come in.'

'Not surprised, with that din on.
Do I get a kiss or will that make you miss your favourite
commercial?'

He leaned over the sofa and
pressed what a less welcoming and resilient recipient than Cap
Marvell might have felt as a blow rather than a buss on her lips.

The advertising break was ending
and the presenter of Ebor TV's early evening show was revealed
half-engulfed in a deeply yielding armchair.

'Welcome back,' he said. 'Just to
remind you, my guest tonight is that man of many hats, lawyer,
campaigner, charity worker and historian, Marcus Belchamber.'

The picture changed to a shot of
a man of early middle age, wearing a dinner jacket of immaculate cut,
who was sitting in a sister chair to the presenter's, but with no
threat to his steadiness of posture or alertness of mien. Steady grey
eyes looked out of the head of an idealized Roman senator topped by
lightly greying locks so immaculately groomed that they might indeed
have been set there by a maestro's chisel rather than a barber's
craft. This was a gentleman in whom you could place an absolute
trust.

Dalziel made a farting noise with
his lips.

'Mind if I watch this item,
love?' said Cap.

'I'll get us a drink,' said the
Fat Man, heading for the kitchen.

He and Cap Marvell didn't
cohabit, but as their relationship matured, they'd exchanged keys,
and now one of the delights of returning home for Dalziel was the
possibility of finding a light on, a fire burning and Cap sitting on
his sofa, or sleeping in his bed. She assured him that she felt the
same, though he'd exercised his privilege of entry to her flat with
great care after the occasion on which he'd been woken, stark naked
on her hearth rug, by the scream of a campaigning nun who was her
house guest.

From the sitting room he could
hear the presenter's voice.

'Before we talk more about the
Round Table Disadvantaged Children's Christmas Party which you're in
charge of this year, Marcus, I'd like to have a word with you about
another treat for both adults and kids which you've helped make
available for us over the next few weeks. This is the chance,
possibly for most of us the last chance, to see the Elsecar Hoard.
For anyone out there that doesn't know it, I should say that under
one of his many hats, Marcus is President of the Mid-Yorkshire
Archaeological Society and is acknowledged nationally, indeed I might
say internationally, as one of the country's foremost experts on
Yorkshire during the Roman occupation.'

'You're too kind,' said
Belchamber in that rich timbred voice which some had compared not
unfavourably with that of the late Richard Burton.

'Perhaps you'd give us a bit of
background just in case there's anyone left in the county who hasn't
been following the saga?'

'Certainly. The Elsecar Hoard is
perhaps Yorkshire's most precious historical treasure, though
strictly - and herein lies the nub of the problem which emerged about
a year ago - it doesn't belong to Yorkshire but to the Elsecar
family. The first Baron Elsecar emerged as a power in the county at
the end of the Wars of the Roses and the family flourished for the
next three centuries, but a natural conservatism, with a small c,
left them ill-prepared for the industrial revolution and by midway
through Victoria's reign they had fallen on hard times. The greater
part of their land, much of which later proved to be rich in minerals
and coal, was sold at depressed agricultural prices to pay off their
debts.

'In 1872, the eighth baron was
draining a boggy section of one of the few remaining estates, in what
any competent geologist could have told him was a vain hope of
finding coal, when his workers hauled up a bronze chest.

'When opened, it proved to
contain a large quantity of Roman coinage mainly of the fourth
century, plus, more importantly, numerous ornaments of widely varied
provenance, ranging from native Celtic designs to Mediterranean and
Oriental. Particularly striking was a golden coronet formed of two
intertwining snakes -'

'Ah yes’ interrupted the
presenter, who had the TV personality's terror that if left out of
shot long enough he would cease to exist. 'This is what's known as
the serpent crown, right? Isn't it supposed to have belonged to some
brigand queen?'

'A queen of the Brigantes, which
is not quite the same thing’ murmured Belchamber courteously.
'This was Cartimandua, who handed over Caractacus to the Romans, but
her connection with the crown is tenuous and owes more, I believe, to
Victorian sentimental horror at the betrayal than any historical
research. Snakes in our Christian society have come to be linked with
treachery and falsehood. But, as you know, in the symbolism of Celtic
art they have quite a different significance

'Yes, of course’ said the
presenter. 'Quite different. Right. But this Hoard, where did it
actually come from? And was it simply a question of finders keepers?'

'In law, there is no such thing
as a simple question’ said Belchamber, smiling.

'You can say that again, you
bastard’ muttered Dalziel in the kitchen.

'Scholars theorized that the
Hoard was probably the collection of an important and well-travelled
Roman official who found himself, either through choice or accident,
isolated in Britain when the Roman rule broke down early in the fifth
century. The big legal question was whether the chest had been
deliberately hidden by its owner, thinking it prudent to conceal his
treasure till quieter times came, in which case it would have been
treasure trove and the property of the Crown; or whether it had
simply been lost or abandoned, in which case it was the property of
the land-owner. Fortunately for the Elsecars, the matter was settled
in their favour when further drainage revealed the remains of a
wheeled vehicle, suggesting the chest was being transported somewhere
when accident or ambush had caused the carriage to overturn and sink
in the swamp.'