'And I've passed the test?'
'Absolutely.' Now Komorowski smiled. The smile was like a shaft of sunshine lighting up a distant valley. It revealed the young man he once had been. Smooth out the creased leathery skin, add a mop of jet-black hair, and what you had was a very attractive piece of goods with the added allure of just a whiff of Eastern European exoticism.
Pity about the dirty fingernails.
His gaze must have dropped for now Komorowski held up his bottle and scissors.
'My other job,' he said. 'The building is surprisingly full of plant life, some of which I confess I have introduced myself: a couple of window boxes, and you may have noticed the trough in the foyer. Also many people bring in house plants to add a little colour, then forget about them and neglect them. It's the British way. So I've appointed myself head gardener to the Lubyanka.'
'Good Lord,' said Pascoe, feeling ashamed of his prissy thoughts about personal hygiene when all that the man's hands displayed was a love of good honest earth. ‘I hope they pay you well.'
'The job takes me away from my own lovely garden for far too much of the time,' said Komorowski. 'This is a small compensation. Il faut cultiver and all that. Anything I can ever do to assist you, Mr Pascoe, just ask.'
Pascoe watched him walk away.
A friend, he thought. I've found a friend. I think.
He returned to the cellar where his new colleagues greeted him once more without comment and for the rest of the day he worked steadily, conscientiously and unfruitfully through the files. Perhaps this truly was important work. He didn't know. And he didn't care. It wasn't providing him with any good reason for giving up the comforts of home.
Midway through the afternoon, there was a diversion. The phone rang. Rod answered it. What he heard made him look serious for a moment. He said. 'Good Lord. Right. On it already.'
He put the phone down and said, 'Someone's tried to off Sheikh Ibrahim.'
Sheikh Ibrahim Al-Hijazi was Imam of a Bradford mosque who ever since the 7/7 bombings had been a regular tabloid target. He had long been known for his extreme views, and though he never openly condoned the actions of terrorist groups, he never condemned them either. He had a band of devoted followers, mostly young men, at his mosque. Several of them had been investigated under suspicion of complicity in terrorist acts, but the nearest any had come to a formal charge was when one of them had been arrested in Pakistan and subsequently vanished into American custody. Al-Hijazi was personable and articulate and so far had displayed great dexterity in staying just the right side of all the laws, old and new, under which the tabloids howled for his head. His reaction of measured outrage to the Mazraani killing had been expressed in terms which were perfectly reasonable and perfectly calculated to send the right-wing press into a spasm of apoplectic indignation.
'What happened?' demanded Pascoe, excited at the possibility of there being some real police-work here for him to get his teeth into.
In fact the story turned out to be almost dull.
The Sheikh had left the mosque after the Zuhr or midday prayer to keep an appointment in Huddersfield some twenty miles away. As the car eased its way into the traffic flow on a nearby main road, the passengers heard a sharp crack as though a passing vehicle had thrown up a stone which had hit the side. The driver hadn't stopped, but when they reached their destination he had checked the paintwork for damage. What he found was a small hole punched through the cover of one of the rear lights. And closer examination revealed a bullet lodged inside.
'We'll get a look at it eventually, but first reports from Bradford suggest it's from a small-calibre pistol, fired at almost the limit of its range,' concluded the young man.
'Not the kind of weapon you'd expect a well-organized assassination team to use at a distance,' said Pascoe. 'Any claim being made? By these Templars, for instance?'
'Not a sound so far,' said Rod cheerfully. 'But it's early days. Meanwhile, just in case there is any connection, they want us to put the details into our search profile.'
So, thought Pascoe, no excitement, just another layer of dull futility.
At five thirty he was back at Glenister's door but he found it still locked.
Frustrated, he turned away and saw the superintendent coming through the door at the far end of the corridor, deep in conversation with Freeman.
When she noticed him she didn't look delighted but she summoned up a smile as she approached and greeted him.
Close up he could see that she looked worn out, but he stamped hard on the little flutter of sympathy.
'Can I have a word, ma'am?' he said, formally.
'I'm a bit stretched, laddie,' she said. 'Could it wait till morning?'
'No,' he said. 'It could not.'
Freeman gave him a get-you look.
'A few seconds then. Dave, I'll be with you shortly.'
She unlocked her door and he followed her into the office. She didn't sit down herself, nor invite him to sit.
'So how can I help you, Peter?' she asked.
'You can find me something useful to do,' he retorted.
'But you are doing something extremely useful . . .'
He snorted. His wife was a very good snorter, Dalziel could snort for Denmark, even Wield who rarely let any uncensored emotion escape had been known to aspirate expressively, but the snort hadn't figured much in the sonic range of a man sometimes referred to by his fat boss as Pussy-Foot Pascoe, the Tight-Rope Dancer.
Now, however, it emerged as if he'd been a snorter from birth; equine rather than porcine in nature, it was true, but powerful and unambiguous for all that.
'Useful? I've spent time more usefully reading Martin Amis,' he sneered. 'If you really want to marginalize me, why don't you just send me to the seaside and ask me to count grains of sand?'
Glenister looked concerned.
'Peter, I'm sorry, but in fact that's what a lot of our work here feels like. You get used to it. The first five years are usually the worst.'
She gave the sweet maternal smile she could have sold to a renaissance artist sketching his next Madonna and Child. He responded with the this-is-no-laughing matter-these-are-my-feelings-you're-crapping-on grimace he'd learned from his daughter.
Freeman stuck his head round the door. The bastard had probably been listening.
'Sandy, Bernie's just buzzed me. He's waiting . . .'
'On my way. Sorry, Peter,' said Glenister, urging him through the door, 'I'd like to talk more, but when master calls . . . Tell you what, you look a bit tired. We mustn't forget what you went through. Why don't you take tomorrow morning off, have a lie-in, take a stroll around, see the sights? Let's meet for a sandwich at the Mozart, one o'clock, and then we can work out how best to put that mighty brain to work, eh?'
He watched her as she hurried away down the corridor. He felt excluded. Not that there was any reason he should be included in what was presumably a debriefing on the Carradice trial, or a briefing on the Sheikh Ibrahim assassination attempt, but at the moment the building felt like it was full of doors which were firmly shut against him.
Then it occurred to him that there was one door not firmly shut. Glenister had forgotten to lock her office.
If they were going to treat him as a sort of licensed intruder, maybe it was time to start acting like one.
The corridor was empty. He pushed open the door and went back inside.
He had no idea what he hoped to find. Maybe some file or memo relating to himself and what they were really doing with him here. But what he was really doing was obeying another of Dalziel's dicta: 'Whatever chances the good Lord gives you, take 'em, and ask questions later!'
He recalled once being shown into Dan Trimble's office with Dalziel. The Chief would be along in a minute, his secretary had assured them. The second the door closed behind her, Dalziel had started opening desk drawers. Catching sight of Pascoe's disapproving expression, the Fat Man had grinned and recited, 'How doth the little busy bee improve each shining
hour. Hello, what have we here?'
All he'd had was a bottle of twelve-year-old Glen Morangie, from which he'd taken a generous slug before his early-warning sensors had sent him back to his chair, ready to greet Trimble with a broad smile of welcome a few seconds later.
I could do with a drink, thought Pascoe.
He started on the desk drawers. There were only three, two shallow, one deep. The deep one was locked. The shallow ones produced nothing more interesting than a selection of pencils and some chocolate biscuits. Smarties were never going to be enough for a woman of her build, specially with the promised demise of the blue ones.
He looked at the deep drawer. In for a penny, in for a pound. From his wallet he extracted a small leather envelope containing various slim pieces of metal. Many CID officers carried such a piece of kit, which had usually been offered in evidence during a burglary case and then somehow not returned to the police store. So far the most felonious use Pascoe had put it to was removing a wheel clamp one dark and stormy night when there wasn't a taxi to be had for two hours.
Compared to a clamp, this lock was a doddle.
The drawer, despite its depth, contained nothing more than a slim plastic file, but this turned out to be potential treasure. Across the cover in Glenister's bold hand were scrawled the words Mill Street. There were about a dozen sheets inside, paper-clipped together in five or six sections. No time for more than a glance now. Every second he stayed here put him in danger of discovery. For all he knew, given the paranoid nature of the establishment, he was already being filmed!
He selected two sections of two sheets, one containing the explosive-analysis report that not even the electronic legerdemain of Edgar Wield had been able to extract, while the other had something to do with the examination of the bodies taken from Number 3.
He took the sheets to the fax machine standing by the wall and ran them through the copy facility. Then, after carefully using his handkerchief to wipe his prints off everything he'd touched, he replaced the file, relocked the drawer, and made his escape.
As he deposited his security badge at the desk in the foyer and headed for the exit, he felt as if he were trailing visible clouds of guilt. He didn't relax till he reached his hotel room. Even here his sense of safety might be delusive. It was, after all, CAT who'd booked him in. But at least, he told himself as he plucked a bottle of Becks from the mini-bar and settled down in the deep soft armchair, they weren't penny pinching.
It took little more than a glance at the explosive analysis to convince him he'd need a friendly technical eye to make any sense out of it.
He turned to the second pair of sheets.
This was more accessible. It contained everything about cause of death and identification factors that he'd heard verbatim from Glenister in her briefings. But there were references to other findings and their attendant hypotheses which after a while he realized must have been contained in a separate report. So far as he could make out, it had something to do with position of limbs and examination of mouth cavities.
The thought that this too might have been in the plastic file made him annoyed for not taking more time to check while he'd had the chance. At least he'd been clever enough to instruct Wield to have a quiet chat first with Jim Lipton, the CFO, then with Mary Goodrich, the pathologist at Mid-Yorkshire Central into whose care the burnt corpses had been placed for a short while before CAT whisked them away. Pity that the Head of the Path Department, Troll' Longbottom, had been away on vacation. Troll was an old mate of Dalziel's and the personal link would have made him co-operative. Goodrich was new in the job. Her appointment as Longbottom's assistant was her first big career step, leaving her very susceptible to the kinds of pressure CAT had probably exerted upon her.
On the other hand, Edgar Wield had a definite way with women. Andy Dalziel had no problem analysing it.
He's bent as a lavatory brush, he's got a face like that battered old teddy bear most women love more than their kids, and he could sell a fish a bicycle.
Pascoe smiled at the memory as he helped himself to another Becks. Yes, Wieldy would get to the bottom of things. He'd warned the sergeant not to ring till evening. In the Lubyanka walls had ears. But any moment now .. .
His phone rang. He checked the caller display. He was right.
'Wieldy/ he said. 'You come upon your hour, bearing good news, I hope.'
'Don't know about that,' said the sergeant. ‘I spoke to Jim Lipton like you said.'
Wield filled him in on his conversation with CFO.
'Excellent,' said Pascoe. 'If you got as much out of Goodrich, I may have to pay the bribe and make you a lord.'
Wield, happy to hear his friend sounding so like his old self, wished he could continue the good work, but there was no point wrapping it up.
He said, 'Sorry. Got nowt there. Turned up unannounced like you suggested. She didn't look busy, but soon as she got a whiff what I were talking about, she suddenly became far too busy to talk. When I pressed her, I got a reminder that I was nowt but a sergeant and mebbc ought to have a word with my superiors afore I bothered her again.'
'Stuck-up cow!' said Pascoe. 'And I thought she was OK the only time I met her.'
'Nay, Pete,' said Wield. 'I reckon she's running scared. She's been seriously warned off talking about the Mill Street bodies.'
'Yeah? I'd have liked to see them warn Troll
Longbottom off. He'd have got so mad, he'd have called a press conference.'
'Maybe. But being mad only lasts till bedtime. Being scared is what's waiting for you when you wake up alone in the middle of the night.'
There was a personal note here that Pascoe on another occasion might have wanted to examine more closely, but at the moment he had no time for distractions. At least this confirmed his reading of the CAT report. There really was something to hide.
'So, anything else, Wieldy?' he said.
'Not really. No change on Andy. And I saw Ellie this morning. We bumped into each other and had a coffee.'
'Bumped like a real shunt, or like on the dodgems?' said Pascoe suspiciously.
'I think she was glad to have a chat,' said Wield. ‘I reckon she's worried about you. We all are. Pete, where the hell is all this going?'
'I'm just earning my pay, Wieldy. Which incidentally wouldn't run to staying in this place. I've got a bathroom bigger than our sitting room!'
Wield, recognizing this as a cut-off, said, 'Listen, Pete, don't get too used to the high life. We've got Ernie Ogilby sitting in Andy's office. If you could solve crimes by studying traffic flow, we'd have the best clear-up rate in the UK!'
'Inspector French solved a lot by studying train timetables,' said Pascoe.
'French? Don't know him. What's his patch?'
'The past,' said Pascoe. 'They did things differently there. Cheers.'
He put the phone down, wondering what had brought Inspector French into his mind. It was years since he'd read any of the books.
He went downstairs and enjoyed his excellent dinner. He didn't mind dining alone in a restaurant. There was an infinity of entertainment to be derived from working out the relationship between and back-stories of the other diners.
Afterwards he took a turn round the block then went up to his room, climbed into his emperor-sized bed, imagined what it would be like if Ellie were there to explore it with him, rang her and shared his imaginings, remarked but did not remark upon the fact that she didn't mention her meeting with Wield, then switched on the TV and watched one of those English heritage movies which drifts like a slow cloud across a summer landscape till at some point indistinguishable from any other point he mingled with the movie and fell fast asleep.
5
all the way home
'Hugh.'
'Bernard.'
'De Clairvaux.'
'De Payens.'
one thousand two thousand three thousand
'Hugh, have you heard? Someone took a potshot at the Sheikh.'
'Yes, it
was on the news. Nothing to do with us, unless of course we've inspired some right-thinking but inept copy-cat.'
'A copy-cat using one of Andre's guns, from the look of it.'
'What?'
'It's not absolutely sure. The round our persistent friend Pascoe dug out of Mill Street was very badly damaged, but what few scorings were detectable coincide precisely with those on the Sheikh's bullet. Can Andre be freelancing?'
'Not his style. Also, if he'd decided to grandstand, the Sheikh would be dead. But I'll check it out.'
'Do. Al-Hijazi is on our list, but after this he's likely to take a lot more care. Another possibility is one of the Geoffreys.'
'Perhaps. But Andre's well trained. All weapons back to the armourer. Certainly with Bisol so uptight about the wounded pig, I doubt if he's going to go around blasting off wildly.'
'Perhaps not. Talking of pigs, anything yet on that other one?'
'Yes. Word is he'll be going wee-wee-wee all the way home tomorrow morning.'
6
an urban fox
Adolphus Hector woke up.
They say Fortune picks its favourites, but it also picks its fools. Hector had been on its hit-list ever since his premature birth and instant christening.
What caused his mother to pick the name Adolphus is not known. Perhaps some passing imp of mischief whispered it in her ear as the hospital chaplain asked her what she would like to call her son. Certainly the newborn had seemed such a weak and ailing child that no one present felt the name had other than a soteriological significance.
Perhaps the child's early arrival had caught his fairy godmother out too. Arriving at the christening too late to dispense the traditional baptismal presents, all she'd managed to slip under his pillow was the one gift without which all the others are useless anyway.
The instinct for survival.
Despite all pessimistic prognoses, Adolphus refused to die. When against all the odds he reached school age, he rapidly discovered the disadvantages of being called Adolphus. So when the first of many moves took him to a new school where his second name was assumed to be his first, he bore the mockery of its silliness with equanimity. At least Hector, as one kind teacher pointed out, was a hero and could be shortened to the very acceptable Hec, while Adolphus shrank only to the even less desirable Adolf.
Death of Dalziel - Dalziel & Pascoe 22 Page 11