Jacques had come to London to help promote the English version of his new book propounding the Third Thought philosophy. He presented me with a copy complete with a nattering inscription, which I let Emerald see in the hope that she'd dilute her bad opinion, but she didn't seem impressed. Can't say I blame her. Authors give away their books like drug barons give free snorts, hoping to start an expensive addiction.
So it was settled. Jacques would remain in situ while Emerald went off to a friend's.
'But what about you, Franny?' said Jacques. 'Perhaps we can squeeze you in here?'
The thought of a night spent in close proximity to Dierick didn't appeal, so I said that if I hurried I could execute Plan B, which was catching the last train back to Mid-Yorkshire from King's Cross.
'I'm heading up to Islington,' said Emerald. 'I can give you a lift.'
She's warming to me! I thought. Or she just wants to make sure I catch my train!
I accepted, Jacques said he'd come along for the ride, Dierick was told firmly by Emerald there wouldn't be room for him in her small car, and the three of us set off. On the stairs, I excused myself, saying I'd meant to use the loo and now it was urgent.
The tiny loo was off the bedroom. I really did want to use it, believe me, but I couldn't help noticing as I passed the bed that the coverlet was pretty crumpled. OK, so Jacques had had a lie-down. I did what I had to do and came out. Perhaps there is a bit of the detective in me too, Mr Pascoe, which is why I feel such an affinity with you, but I found myself crouching to look under the bed. And there I found – I know this sounds squalid – a used condom! I felt no shock or surprise, only a little envy.
'What are you doing?' asked a cold voice. I looked up to see Frere Dierick standing over me.
I have no excuse for what I did then. I should have told a lie about dropping some money or something. Instead I stood up with the condom between finger and thumb, pulled open the pocket in his robe where he kept his notebook, and dropped it in, saying, 'There you go, Dierick. Make sure you put that in your notes.'
Then I trotted off to join the others.
At King's Cross, Jacques said he would see me on to my train. Emerald, illegally parked, had to stay with the car. Not that she'd have wanted to come anyway, I thought disconsolately. But to my surprise, as I stooped to say my thanks, she gave me a peck on the cheek and wished me safe journey.
And as we walked to my platform, Jacques took the chance to fill me in on Emerald.
I knew no more of Linda's family background than that she'd once been married to Harry Lupin, the cut-price airline entrepreneur. After the divorce, Linda got custody of the two children, Emerald, then aged eight, and her sister Musetta, seven. (The latter, it seems, takes after her mother. All the gorgeous genes in the family came Emerald's way.)
Emerald after a couple of years got fed up of coming second to politics and decided she wanted to live with Daddy. Six months later, realizing she was now coming third to business and bimbos, she returned to her mother, and thereafter shuttled between both parents and the country's top boarding schools, each of which in turn declared her uncontrollable and ineducable. Now at twenty she is in her final year at Oxford.
Meanwhile Musetta, known to her intimates as Mouse, lived down to her sobriquet by keeping very quiet and only emerging from her nest for food. She's some kind of teacher in Strasbourg, and, as Jacques put it, working on the principle that we love most the apple that falls closest to the tree, she is the pippin of her mother's eye.
Emerald on the other hand seems to have bounced and rolled a long long way.
Without saying anything which would have stood up in a court of law, Jacques conveyed a strong warning that if I wanted to maintain my good relationship with Linda, I should adopt a rigorous hands-off approach to either or both of her daughters.
You old hypocrite! I thought, recalling the condom.
But then I looked into those bright blue eyes in that most open and attractive of faces, and I felt ashamed. How could I condemn him for doing what I longed to do?
We embraced with real feeling. It's been a long time since someone hugged me in that affectionate familial way. I don't recall my father, and my mother was never a hugger. But my thoughts as I sat on the train were all of Emerald. I clung desperately to that final peck on the cheek she'd given me. Wasn't there something of affection in that too? Perhaps she's screwing Jacques merely as an act of defiance against her mother?
I needed help, I needed reassurance. For want of anything else, I dug Jacques' book out of my bag to see if his words could bring me any peace of mind and body.
I let fate open the pages, and lo! the first paragraph my gaze fell upon was this.
To say that man must die alone is a trite and fallacious cynicism. Find if you can a man or woman -friend, guru, mentor, father-figure, mother-figure, use what term you will – but someone you can view as the still centre of all your turbulent thoughts -someone before whom you can pour out unstintingly and without reserve all your hopes and fears and passions and desires – and you will have taken a large step towards that peace of mind which is the end of all our endeavours.
And it hit me, this is what I have found in you, dear Mr Pascoe! This is what I am doing now, writing another letter to you on this oh so slow train journey north. Out there night presses on the grimy window. Lights move by – traffic, street lamps, urban houses, isolated cottages – all indicative of human presence, I know, but not of human community; no, they might as well be will-o'-the-wisps flitting across some dreary bog for all the comfort they bring. And my fellow passengers, each cocooned in that private time capsule we enter on a long train journey, might as well be alien beings from a distant galaxy.
But I have you, and it hardly matters if I think of you as guru or friend or even, despite your youth, the father-figure I never knew. What does matter is my awareness now that whatever my initial motivation in writing, I am using you as a Third Thought Therapy! I hope you don't mind. Perhaps you might find it in you to reply to me, or even (dare I ask it), call round to see me now I'm back in Mid-Yorkshire? Which is where, incredibly, the Dalek in control of the train intercom system has just announced that shortly we will be arriving.
Oh dream of joy! is this indeed The light-house top I see? Is this the hill? Is this the kirk? Is this mine own countree?
I do believe it is. I'll finish this tomorrow.
Hello again! How quickly things change. Just in case you did think of dropping in on me over the next few days, don't bother, I'm not here. Or rather, not there!
Here's what happened. I awoke this morning quite early – Syke conditioning! I'm not due back at work till tomorrow and my renewed hopes that I might once more be able to find a publisher for Sam's Beddoes biography made me keen to get back to work on it. I headed straight out to the university library, planning to spend the day there, probably without a break, which is the way I like to work once I've got my teeth into something.
But I'd hardly started work before I was interrupted by the arrival of Charley Penn.
Charley has many excellent qualities and he has been most helpful in encouraging my literary ambitions, giving me many tips both creative and practical. In all of us there is both light and shade; in some one predominates, in others, the other. But in Charley there is a darkness which sometimes blots out the brightness altogether. Where does it spring from? Perhaps it's part of the German psyche. Though he has taken on much colouring from his Yorkshire upbringing, he is in many ways a true scion of his Teutonic ancestry.
It was Charley who drew my attention to a poem of Arnold's called 'Heine's Grave'. Fine poem, a moving tribute to the dead poet and a sharp assessment of what made him tick. In it Arnold speculates that it was Heine that Goethe had in mind when he wrote that some unnamed bard had 'every other gift but wanted love'.
So it seems to me with Charley. The one person who drew love out of him and returned it to him was Dick Dee. Dee's death and the revelation that he was probably
the killer of so many people, including, God damn his soul, my beloved Sam, has quite overthrown Charley. Oh, for much of the time he seems the same, saturnine, savagely humorous, unblinkingly perceptive, but that darkness which always exists in the depths of a pine forest has in his case now spread out to envelope even the crowns of the trees.
Evidence of this came when I asked him what brought him here away from his usual perch in the town reference library.
'She's away on holiday, so I thought I'd take a break too,' he said laconically.
I didn't need an explanation. She is Ms Pomona who came so close to being the Wordman's final victim. Charley is so convinced of his friend Dee's innocence that he has persuaded himself there must have been a conspiracy to conceal the truth. But I'm sure that you know all about this already, Mr Pascoe, as you and Rumbleguts, who were first on the scene after Dee's death, are marked down as the head conspirators! Charley, I think, has the Gothic fancy that his accusing presence in the Reference when Ms Pomona is on duty will eventually wear her down and bring a confession.
I can't say that I was too pleased to see him as my head was full of ideas, but I owe him a lot for recent kindnesses and could not decently refuse his invitation to pop out for a coffee and a chat.
As we drank our coffee, I told him about my excitements in Cambridge, which he found mildly entertaining, but I could tell his mind was elsewhere.
Finally I said, 'Charley, you seem a bit down. Book going badly?'
'No, that's going fine, except I sometimes wonder, what's the point? Heine, Beddoes, we work our knackers off to produce "the definitive work", except of course it never is. At best it replaces the last definitive work and with a bit of luck we may pop our clogs before it gets replaced by the next one. Why do we do it, Fran?'
'You know why,' I said rather pompously. 'We pursue the Holy Grail of Truth.'
'Oh yeah? Well there's only one truth I want to pursue and I've been getting nowhere.'
Oh God, I thought. Here we go. Dick Dee is innocent, OK!
I said, 'Charley, if you're getting nowhere, maybe it's 'cos there's nowhere to get.'
He shook his head and said, 'Not true. But they're clever, I'll give 'em that. This is a fucking X-file. The truth is out there, under Andy Dalziel's fat buttocks or up yon Pascoe's tight arse. I wanted to do this by myself, but I'm not too proud to admit I need help. If the authorities won't listen to me, I've got friends that will!'
I wasn't sure what this meant. I don't think he's wrong about needing help, but I suspect that's not the kind of help he's got in mind. I could speculate, but I'm not going to. Frankly, if Charley's obsession leads him into illegalities, I don't want to know. A man in my situation needs to keep his relationship with the Law plain and unambiguous.
Which is why I feel I need to pass on my fears that Charley is so obsessed with proving his friend's innocence that he's capable of almost anything.
I do this not in any spirit of delation – my time at the Syke has conditioned me irredeemably to regard a grass as the lowest form of life – but in the sincere hope that by alerting you to Charley's state of mind, you might be able to head him off from any indiscretion or, worse, illegality of behaviour.
Enough of that. On my return to the library, I found I was uncomfortably aware of Charley's presence at the next table. It was like having Poe's raven or Beddoes' old crow of Cairo (which Sam amusingly points out is homophonous with the Christian monogram chi-rho, a pretty fancy which he plays with entertainingly for a page and a half before discarding it) brooding at my shoulder. So, though as I said before, I normally hate to be interrupted at my work, it was quite a relief when my mobile began to vibrate.
To my surprise it was Linda ringing from Strasbourg. Instantly I started to fantasize that Emerald had been on the phone to her, telling her she'd met me and later realized that I was the only man on earth for her! What idiots sex makes of us, eh?
Naturally it was nothing like this, though she knew of my meeting with Emerald as she'd been talking to Jacques on the phone. What concerned her more was the account she'd read in her paper of the events at God's.
She questioned me closely, asked if I was all right, then with that savage ability to cut to the chase which is her political hallmark went on to say, 'At least this means that you have a clear field for Sam's book. You'll want to get down to some serious work. When we met in Belgium, you mentioned that there were still a few things Sam had been working on about Beddoes' time in Basel and Zurich. Worth following up, you reckon?'
'Well, yes, I suppose so,' I said. 'I mean, even if they turn out dead ends, the only way to be sure is to follow them as far as possible…'
'Quite right. Like in politics, always cover your back so that you don't find some pushy little squirt second-guessing you. Right, here's what we do. Some chums have got a place in Switzerland. They're heading for warmer climes for a month or two so they've given me use of their bunkhouse while they're away and I'll be spending Christmas there with a few people. It's called Fichtenburg-am-Blutensee in Canton Aargau. The chalet there's the perfect place for you to work, lovely and quiet – my party won't be turning up till the twenty-fourth – and there's easy access to both Zurich and Basel. How's that sound?'.
'It sounds very nice,' I said. 'But maybe…'
'Good,' she said. 'You'll join us for the festivities, but otherwise you'll be your own master. I've spoken to the housekeeper, Frau Buff, and she'll expect you this evening…'
This evening!' I exclaimed. It dawned on me that Linda wasn't discussing possibilities but dictating arrangements! It had been the same when she'd contacted me last month to say that she was in Brussels for a meeting and had decided to spend the weekend in the Stranger House at Frere Jacques' monastery and wouldn't it be a good idea for me to actually meet the founder of Third Thought face to face? While I was still wondering how to refuse politely, she was telling me about my travel arrangements!
The same thing was happening now. I was booked on a tea-time flight from Manchester and my ticket would be waiting for me at the airport. A taxi driver would meet me at the arrivals gate at Zurich.
She rattled on in that peremptory manner of hers for a little while, but after the initial shock, I found that all I could think of was, will Emerald be there at Christmas?
I said, 'That sounds marvellous, Linda. Both for the work, and for Christmas. It was beginning to look like being a bit lonely. But I don't want to intrude on your family…'
'You won't,' she said brusquely. 'It will be a couple of political chums. And Frere Jacques will be with us, God willing. So, all fixed, right?'
Reginald Hill
D amp;P20 – Death's Jest-Book
And now disappointment made me dig my heels in a bit.
'Getting to Manchester might be a problem.
‘My car's knackered… and there's my work…'
'Take a cab, bill it to me. As for work, that's why you're going’ she snapped.
'I meant, my job in the university gardens
I heard that snort of disbelief so familiar to millions of British viewers and listeners from her appearance on various chat shows. It had also been a distinctive punctuation of Labour speeches in parliamentary broadcasts before she fell out with her own leadership and flounced off to give the Europeans the benefit of her incredulity.
'You're a full-time scholar now, Fran, so it's no longer necessary to cultivate your garden. The book's the thing.'
Strange, I thought, that after so, many years of estrangement from her stepbrother while he was alive she should be such an enthusiast of his work now that he was dead.
In the end, I did what most people do when Linda comes at them with their lives mapped out. I gave in.
And indeed the more I thought about her plan, the more attractive it seemed.
I really did want to do some serious work and what better place to do it in than a luxurious house (the wooden shack image of chalet I'd immediately discounted as the kind of pseudo-modest unders
tatement by which the rich emphasize their wealth) in beautiful countryside with a nice motherly housekeeper to take care of my comfort?
I didn't really need the uni library for anything other than a chair, as Linda had told me to extract from Sam's personal library all those books I felt relevant to his researches. And I would be completely free from the oppressive presence of poor old Charley.
I went back in to collect my things and tell him of my change of plan.
He said indifferently, 'Switzerland? Don't stand in front of any cuckoo clocks.'
Finally I scribbled a note to Jack Dunstan, the Head Gardener, offering him my thanks and my notice.
So where am I now? On another train, that's where! This time heading for Manchester. Some innate parsimony made me unable to take up Linda's kind suggestion of travelling there by taxi. It would cost a fortune, and this train gets me there with plenty of time to spare.
So there we are. I hope you and dear Mrs Pascoe and your lovely little girl have a merry Christmas, and now that I know why I'm writing to you, I hope you won't think it an imposition if I drop you another line in what looks like it might be a very Happy New Year indeed!
Fondly yours,
Franny
‘I don't believe it!' said Pascoe. 'Here's another one.'
'Another what?'
'Letter from Roote.'
'Oh good. Anything's better than these round robins so many people send with their cards. It's the modern disease. The media's full of it. The obsession with trivia.'
'So how come you find Roote's trivia so interesting?'
'How come you find it so significant? Come on, let's have a look.'
'Hang on. There's reams of it again.'
As he read, Ellie picked up the discarded pages and read in tandem.
Finishing just behind him she regarded his long pensive face across the breakfast table and said, 'Well, friend, guru, father-figure, what's bugging you this time?'
'I feel… stalked.'
'Stalked? That's a bit strong, isn't it? A couple of letters
‘Four. I think four letters constitutes a nuisance if not a stalking, especially when each of them separately is long enough to make several normal letters!'
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