Death's Jest-Book (63 page)

'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 poem 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.