‘OK, no. In principle, in essence, at the end of the day, no, you didn’t.’
‘So why’ve you done it to me, lad? Why’ve I spent the last few days with your hand up my arse working my jaw-hinges like Charlie McCarthy? Don’t answer that. I’ll tell you. It wasn’t my sodding expertise and independence you wanted. With your clout, you could have had any bright young thing in the game at your service, spouting your script with a will. But why risk an act when for no extra cost you can have the real thing? That would shut the Americans up, eh? Not a Euro whizzkid out to please daddy, but a genuine geriatric, out to please no bugger but himself, who would trip over the truth with his walking frame and leave the Yanks too bothered and bewildered to cry, “Foul!” Was it all your plan, Pete? Every bit of it? Or did some other genius set it off and you just threw me in as a makeweight to make sure you got your share of the glory?’
His voice never rose above a murmur, but its pace increased and its timbre changed, as waters that start soft and slow become harsh with menace when the meadows give way to rock and the stream starts accelerating towards the cataract.
O’Meara said, ‘Oh dear. If you two girls are going to quarrel, I really am going to sleep.’
And sinking back, he closed his eyes once more.
Pascoe too had slumped back into his couch. He did not speak for a long time, then said simply, ‘Andy, you’re absolutely right. What I did was unforgivable. I don’t know how …’
His voice failed.
Dalziel said, ‘It’s a tightrope, lad. The higher you go, the more dangerous it gets. Me, I got as far as I could safely. Beyond that, I didn’t fancy the trip. One small step in the wrong direction and you can end up bent, or you can end up using people. People that matter, I mean. Your mates. The other buggers are there to be used, aren’t they? Everyone thought I got stuck because them above me didn’t care for the colour of my eyes. Bollocks! I could make ’em and I could break ’em. And if I’d wanted … but I didn’t. Where I was was right for me. Anything more would have been giving a face-lift to a cuddy’s backside. But I always thought: There’s one bugger I know that I’ll trust to go all the way; who’ll be able to look up without getting delusions and down without getting giddy; who’ll not change to fit changes; who’ll not let new honours get more important than old mates …’
Now it was his voice that died away.
When Pascoe finally spoke, his voice was tight with restraint.
‘Andy, I’m sorry. More sorry than ever I’ve been about anything. I’ve let you down and I know it. God knows if I can hope to put things right with you, but I’ll try, I promise I’ll try. But there’s a more pressing problem even than that. I’ve got to ask you something, not as a friend or even an ex-friend, but as a Federal Justice Commissioner, Andy, you’ve got knowledge, possibly dangerous knowledge, about O’Meara, about Kaufmann, about the fit-up, about everything.
‘Andy, what are you going to do about it?’
What are you going to do about it?
Dalziel rubbed a hand like an eclipse across his face.
This was the second time that day he’d been asked this question.
Then as now he had not given an immediate answer, though he doubted if the delay would have the same result now as then.
His doubts had started long before their arrival on the moon; as soon as Pascoe had telephoned him, in fact. He was no Holmes or Poirot to be hauled out of retirement to solve one last all-baffling case. He was a pensioned-off bobby, suffering from gout, flatulence, distiller’s droop, and the monstrous regiment of visiting nurses.
So what the hell was the lad playing at?
He hadn’t worked it out straightaway but he’d soon worked out the role Pascoe wanted him to play. The old steam-age detective puffing his way to the pre-ordained terminus! And to start with, he’d really enjoyed playing it. Of course in the old days he’d have done things his way. They’d have visited Europa to get the feel of the ship before interrogating the suspects. But his resistance to Pascoe had been token. It was the lad’s game, so play to his rules. And the lad had been right. It was pointless planting his clues till he was sure the victim of the fit-up was going to play ball. Mind you, it had been rather offensive the way he’d shovelled them at Dalziel thereafter, as if he really did think his old taskmaster was past it! Best thing that could be said for him was he was working to a timetable. If they hadn’t caught this shuttle, they’d have had to wait forty-eight hours for the next, and that would have given the Yanks time to re-group and counter-attack O’Meara with a better offer.
Once Pascoe had got the famous stubby finger to point at the Irishman, all he had to do was get back to the Village as quickly as possible and go through the pre-arranged charade of accusation and confession, with the Yanks listening in helplessly. And preferably without a fat old steam-age cop sitting in the corner, nebbing in with awkward questions.
So the cunning bastard had left him on Europa, with the alleged task of making sure Silvia Rabal didn’t broadcast anything of what had taken place, this from a ship which was pumping out sound and pictures twenty-four hours of the day!
At this stage he still wasn’t sure what was going off. Mebbe Pascoe genuinely believed O’Meara was the perpetrator and had at last learned a lesson Dalziel had once despaired of teaching him, that like faith without works, belief without evidence got you no-where, so where was the harm in giving God a helping hand?
But it rankled not to be admitted to the plan, if that was the plan.
And also, like a stuffed owl, the case against O’Meara looked right, but it didn’t fly.
With these thoughts in his mind he had watched the pod depart, then turned to look at Silvia Rabal, no stuffed owl this but a living and exotic creature of the air, and matters forensic were flushed from his mind.
‘Right, luv,’ he said. ‘Now what can an old vulture like me and a bright little cockatoo like you do to pass the time? With a bit of luck, mebbe we’ll get an electrical storm, eh?’
Even though his tone was nostalgically playful rather than lewdly insinuating, it was not the most gallant of things to say, and had her reaction been scornful abuse, mocking indifference, or even righteous indignation, he would have accepted it as his due. But what rounded those huge dark eyes was surprise; more than surprise, shock; in fact more than shock—fear!
And suddenly, in a flash—but not at all sudden in truth, for this was where the subtle independent micro-circuits of his mind had been directing him while Pascoe was busy with spanner and wrench at the pistons and cogs of his consciousness—he saw the stuffed owl topple off its perch to be replaced by a warm, living, tremulous …
‘Tell me, luv,’ he said. ‘What’s French for cockatoo?’
She went floating away up into the bridge, fluttering her supple hands over the bank of control lights, and for a moment both terrifying and exhilarating he thought she might be going to send them blasting off into the depths of space.
But then she turned and floated back to face him.
She said, ‘Kakatoès. He called me Ka when we were … in private. But you know this, and more. Not everything perhaps. But enough to guess everything. From the start I saw you were the dangerous one.’
She spoke almost flatteringly. She was also speaking unnecessarily freely considering all those TV cameras.
He said warningly, ‘Mebbe we should …’ What? There was nowhere private to go! But she took his meaning and laughed, making a flapping gesture with her hands.
‘It is all right. No witnesses. These electrical storms are sometimes convenient, hey?’
‘You mean you’ve fixed it?’ A light dawned. ‘Of course, it was you who fixed it last time, not Marco. It was your idea.’
‘Of course. I guessed Marco might boast, but he’s too macho to tell it was not his initiative!’
‘Why’d you need to do it?’
‘I often imagined how it might be in zero gravity,’ she said mischievously.
‘I mean
t the blackout.’ He frowned.
‘Oh, that. If Control had spotted a fault in Emile’s TEC circuits during the module descent, they might have aborted the landing and spoilt my plan.’
She was bloody cool, thought Dalziel. Another thought occurred to him and he said, ‘But weren’t the suits tested earlier in the voyage out?’
‘Of those involved in the landing, yes.’
She regarded him expectantly. It was as if she wanted him to justify her decision to black out the cameras and confront him directly. Though what she hoped to gain by that …
As often happens with sight, taking his eye off a sought-after object brought it into view.
He said, ‘I saw the files. You and Lemarque are the same height, so your suits would be much the same. You fixed your suit at your leisure, didn’t you? You had time to do a real job on it, not this botched-up job the Yanks claimed. Then all you had to do was swap the suits. And the name strips, That’s why his was out of line. You had to do that in a hurry down in the hold. I should have remembered the smell.’
‘Smell?’
‘In Lemarque’s suit. That spicy smell. I thought it were a funny kind of aftershave …’
And now the memory of her spiced breath and the contents of the leather pouch in her locker came together and he said, ‘What was it you put in his coffee to make him pee? Dandelion juice? Used to call them piss-the-beds when I were a lad.’
‘Dandelion, pansy, burdock, black briony—just a very little of the briony, it is very poisonous, very dangerous to those who do not know how to use it. When I hear he is dead, at first I thought: My God, I have used too much and killed him!’
Her face paled with the memory of shock. Dalziel scratched his nose reflectively and said, ‘Aye, but you did kill him, lass.’
‘No!’ she protested indignantly. ‘He dies by accident! All I do is give him a shock, make him ridiculous in front of the whole world! You must believe me, Dalziel. You must!’
She looked at him beseechingly and he said, ‘Must I? I’ll need to know a lot more before I can go along with that. First thing I need to know is why you wanted to electrify his goolies anyway.’
She scowled and said, ‘He was a rat! He turned from me to that Danish icicle. Well, that was his right. I grow tired of men too. But this rat wanted us both, he is insatiable. Even that I don’t mind. But he hid it from me and he did not hide it from her, and that I mind very much! She knew I was being tricked and found it amusing. They screw with their minds, these Scands. But it was his fault, so I decided he must be punished and this idea came. It seemed to me—what is your phrase? Poetical justice! That’s it. To pain him in the places he valued most. His vanity and his sex! But pain only, not death. You cannot laugh at a dead man, can you?’
This sounded like a clinching argument to Dalziel.
‘So you’re saying it was a fault in the TEC design that killed him? But if you hadn’t interfered with it, that fault would never have shown up.’
‘My interference was a possible fault, therefore it could occur, so this other fault was the real fault,’ she flashed.
‘Mebbe that makes sense in Spanish,’ he said. ‘So you definitely left it looking like an accidental fault?’
‘Of course! You think I am stupid?’ she cried. ‘So what has happened? How is it you are looking for a killer? And why is Kevin accused? How can that idiot who comes with you believe such a stupidity? Kevin will prove his innocence, won’t he?’
He missed the implication of this for the moment as his mind tried to rearrange everything he knew into something he could understand. And as the picture emerged like a negative in developing fluid, his slab-like face grew cold and hard as a rock on a wintry fell.
‘I’d not put money on it, luv,’ he said. ‘In fact, I’d bet that yon idiot who comes with me has probably got O’Meara’s full and frank confession in his pocket already.’
‘Confession? Why should he confess?’
‘I don’t know yet. But one thing’s for sure. Somehow it’ll seem a better option for him than not confessing.’
She digested this.
‘You think so? Then in fact, I will be helping Kevin by keeping quiet, is that not so?’
He grinned at her ingenuity, and also at her naïvety.
‘Bit late to be thinking of keeping quiet when you’ve just coughed your guts out to me, luv,’ he said cheerfully.
‘Coughed? Oh yes. I understand.’ She smiled at him with wide-eyed innocence. ‘But I do not understand why you say I have coughed? There is no one here. Just you and me and the electrical storm. No witnesses.’
She gestured at the useless TV eyes.
Dalziel shook his head and showed his gums in a chimpanzee’s smile.
‘Good try, luv,’ he said. ‘But they don’t like us using a notebook and a stubby pencil any more.’
From his breast pocket he took a flat black plastic case with a silver grille along one edge, held it up to his ear, pressed a button and listened to the resulting faint hiss with every appearance of satisfaction.
‘That’s grand,’ he said switching off. ‘I was a bit worried in case the electrical storm had affected the recording quality.’
She stared at him, baffled, unsure, as he replaced the instrument in his pocket. He met her stare full on, raised his eyebrows as if to invite her comment. She moistened her lips nervously. At least it started as nervousness, but the tiny pink tongue flickering round the full red lips carried a sensual jolt like an electric shock, and when she saw his reaction, she smiled and let the tongue slowly repeat the soft moist orbit.
And then it was he heard that question for the first time.
‘So, tell me, Dalziel,’ she said. ‘What are you going to do about it?’
They were facing each other across the desk, resting against the bulkheads. If there was an up and a down on the Europa, this configuration came closest to what Dalziel thought of as ‘standing ’. Perhaps that’s what made him take the step.
One small step.
Indeed, hardly that. On earth it would have been a mere shuffling of the feet, a rather nervous adjustment of a man’s weight as he wondered what the hell to do next.
Only here there was no weight to adjust, and the small forward movement of the left foot provoked a counterbalancing backward movement of the right; and as this was against the bulkhead, it caused an equal and opposite reaction, thus doubling his forward movement; and now his arms swung back to grab for support, but, finding nothing to get hold of, merely struck hard against the surface, and this energy too was translated into forward momentum.
And so it was that one small step for Dalziel became in a split second a mighty leap.
She came to meet him. In her eyes a deal had been offered and enthusiastically accepted, and she was no niggard in a bargain. There was perhaps a moment when she became aware that the thin black plastic device spinning in the asteroid belt of clothing that soon surrounded them was not a recorder but an electric razor, but by then it was far too late to abort the blast-off. Far too late … far, far too late …
‘Andy? Andy! Are you OK?’
‘What? Oh aye. Sorry. What was it you said?’
‘I thought we’d lost you there,’ said Pascoe. ‘I asked you: What are you going to do about it?’
Dalziel regarded Pascoe with the exasperated affection he had bestowed on him almost from their first encounter. He’d thought then that mebbe the bugger was too clever for his own good, and now he’d got the firm evidence. The lad had sat down and worked out everything, method, motive, the lot. Jealous resentment, a jape that went wrong, the use of a diuretic in the coffee, everything had been there in his theoretical model. Only, that was all it had been to Pascoe. A model theatre into which he could dangle his puppets and watch them dance as he pulled their strings. He hadn’t been able to take the next small step and see that if a model works, then mebbe the reality works too, and perhaps there was no need of puppets, because there was a real culprit out ther
e, waiting to be caught.
And because he was so obsessed by clever trickery, he had thought to authenticate it all by dropping fat old Andy Dalziel into the play, a figure so obviously real that not even the suspicious and distrustful Druson could believe he was anyone’s puppet.
So what was he going to do? In a way, the ultimate disappointment was that the lad needed to ask. Dalziel didn’t believe in practising everything he preached, but the golden rule he’d recently reproached Pascoe with was twenty-two carat. You don’t drop your mates in it.
And anyway, whether he’d intended it or not, a deal had been struck back there on Europa.
‘Do?’ he growled. ‘What can I do? You’re in with the dirty tricks mob now, lad, and I don’t want to end my days with a poisoned umbrella up my gunga!’
‘Andy, you don’t really believe that?’ protested Pascoe. ‘No threats. It’s what you think right that matters.’
‘I think it right to go on living as long as I can,’ said Dalziel. ‘All right, all right. For Christ’s sake, take that hang-dog look off your face before the RSPCA puts you down. I’ll keep stumm. And I’ll forgive you. It’s my own fault, I suppose. Teach a fledgling to fly and you’ve got to expect he’ll crap on you some day. But I’m not going to kiss and make up, if that’s what you’re after!’
Pascoe’s face split in a smile of undisguised, uncontrived relief.
‘I should have known better than to mess around with you, Andy,’ he said. ‘I thought … well, to tell the truth, I thought you’d be so rusty, I wouldn’t have any bother. And I wanted to see you again, and to work with you. Honestly, that was part of it. But I underestimated that nose of yours. It must be the weightlessness that got it back working at full power.’
‘Not just the nose,’ muttered Dalziel.
‘Sorry?’
‘Nowt. Summat I meant to ask. Europa, it doesn’t just mean Europe, does it?’
‘No. It’s the name of a Phoenician princess who got ravished by Zeus in the form of a bull.’
‘Oh aye. I thought I recollected something like that,’ said Dalziel with a certain complacency.
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