Death's Jest-Book

by Reginald Hill

  ‘Andy, let’s both cut the blunt down-to-earth Yorkshire crap. Just tell me what it is you think I’ve done that brings you out here looking for me.’

  A waitress approached and enquired timidly if she could help them.

  ‘Aye,’ said Dalziel. ‘Coffee. One of them frothy ones with bits of chocolate. And a hot doughnut. Charley? My treat.’

  ‘By God, it must be serious. Another double espresso, luv. Right, Andy, spit it out.’

  Dalziel settled more comfortably in his chair, spreading its legs a little wider.

  ‘First off,’ he said, ‘I’ve not come here looking for you, I was on my way to the Reference when I clocked you. Though happen I did think I might find you sitting in your usual spot in the library. I’ve just bought one of your books, thought I’d get you to sign it for me, make it more valuable when I send it up to Sotheby’s.’

  He tossed on to the table the paperback he’d picked up at the Centre bookstall when he’d spotted Penn in Hal’s. It was entitled Harry Hacker and the Ship of Fools. Its cover showed a ship crowded with agitated men in a turbulent sea being driven on to rocks on which basked several well-endowed women in a state of deshabille.

  Penn frowned at it and said, ‘So what made you pick this one?’

  ‘Liked the cover. Ship driven on the rocks. Seemed to say something about you, Charley.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like out of control, mebbe.’

  This seemed to reassure the writer. He pushed the book aside and said, ‘If it’s not me you’re after in the Reference, then what is it?’

  ‘Well, it’s related to you in a way,’ said Dalziel. ‘Just tell me straight, Charley. You know where Ms Pomona, the librarian, lives?’

  For a moment Penn went still, like a wolf freezing when the wind brings it some trace of its prey.

  ‘Got a flat in Peg Lane, hasn’t she?’ he said.

  ‘That’s right. Church View House. You been round there recently?’

  ‘Why should I? We’re not exactly on social visiting terms.’

  ‘Question answered with a question is a question answered, that’s what they taught us at police college,’ said the Fat Man. ‘Thanks, luv.’

  He raised the cappuccino the waitress had set in front of him to his mouth and licked the chocolate-flecked foam with an apparently prehensile tongue.

  ‘And a suspect beaten with a table is a criminally damaged table,’ said Penn. ‘Bet they taught you that as well.’

  ‘Hope it won’t come to that,’ said the Fat Man, studying his doughnut with the keen eye of a man expert at finding where the sac of jam is hidden. ‘So?’

  Penn let out a long sigh and said, ‘OK, you’ve got me bang to rights. I did call round there for a chat, last weekend it was. No harm in that, is there?’

  ‘When at the weekend?’

  ‘Oh, Saturday I think,’ said Penn vaguely. ‘No one home, so I came away.’

  Dalziel chose his point of incision, raised the doughnut to his mouth and bit.

  Through red-stained teeth he said, ‘Precision is important, Charley, else you miss the full pleasure. Saturday. When on Saturday?’

  ‘Morning, was it? Yes, morning. Does it matter?’

  ‘Morning starts at twelve midnight. Between twelve and one, was it?’

  ‘Don’t be daft!’

  ‘One and two then? No? Two and three? No? Give us a clue at least, Charley!’

  ‘And spoil your game? Play’s important to kids, isn’t that what the psychs say?’

  ‘How about between eight and half past?’ said Dalziel, pushing the rest of the doughnut into his maw.

  ‘That would be about right, I dare say,’ said Penn.

  ‘Thought it might, as a man matching your description were seen lurking in Church View around eight twenty-five.’

  ‘Can’t have been me,’ said Penn indifferently. ‘I gave up lurking years back. Case of mistaken identity then.’

  ‘We got a description,’ said Dalziel, taking out a notebook and looking at a blank sheet. ‘Bearded, furtive, mad-looking. Like a nineteenth-century Russian anarchist who’d just planted a bomb.’

  ‘Yeah, that does sound like me,’ said Penn. ‘So I called at about eight fifteen and she wasn’t in so I left. So what?’

  ‘Bit early for a social call, weren’t it?’

  ‘You know what they say about early birds, Andy.’

  ‘Catch colds, don’t they? Still sounds a bit odd to me. Can’t remember the last time I called on a lass so early. Not unless I had a warrant and wanted to catch ’em afore they got their clothes on.’

  ‘No such ambition. I just wanted to catch her before she went to work.’

  ‘Works Saturdays, does she?’

  ‘Aye. In the mornings. Mostly.’

  ‘Yes, you’d know that ’cos you’d be in the library yourself most days, right, Charley? So why not have your little chat with her there?’

  ‘Because it’s hard to be private there.’

  ‘Private? So there was something private you wanted to discuss with her, Charley?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘Not particularly? But particularly enough to call on her at sparrow-fart! Come on, Charley! There’s only one thing you’re interested in discussing with Ms Pomona and it’s not something that Ms Pomona would want to discuss with you any time, seeing as it was a nasty traumatic experience which she’ll have been doing her very best to forget! So what do you think she was going to say if she opened her door at eight a.m. and saw Cheerful Charley Penn standing there? Sod off! That’s what she was going to say.’

  Penn drank his coffee, then asked quietly, ‘Andy, what’s going off here? She made some kind of complaint about me?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Meaning, but she will? Doesn’t surprise me. She has to be dancing to your tune in this, no other way I can see it working.’

  ‘I won’t ask you what that means ’cos I don’t like hitting a man I’ve just invested a coffee in. So what you’re saying, Charley, is, you’ve never been in Ms Pomona’s flat?’

  ‘You’re slow, Andy, but you get there in the end.’

  ‘That’s what all the girls tell me. So if we happened to find one of your fingerprints in Ms P’s flat, you’d be hard put to explain how it got there?’

  Penn raised his coffee cup, looked at it speculatively and said, ‘If you took this cup and left it in the Vatican, you’d find my print there, but that doesn’t mean I’m the Pope. Andy, don’t you think it’s time you told me what you’re really after here?’

  ‘Just having a coffee with an old friend.’

  Penn made a play of looking round then said, ‘Must have missed him.’

  Dalziel emptied his cup and said, ‘No rest for the wicked, eh? Oh, just one thing more. Lorelei. What’s one of them when it’s at home?’

  ‘Why do you ask, Andy? Owt to do with little Miss P’s intruder?’

  Dalziel didn’t answer but just stared at the writer till he raised his hands in mock surrender and said, ‘She’s a German nymph who lives on the Rhine. Her beautiful song lures fishermen to steer their boats on the rocks and drown. Heine wrote a poem about her. “Ich weiß nicht was soll es bedeuten Daß ich so traurig bin. Ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten, Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.”’

  ‘You’re hard enough to follow in English, Charley.’

  ‘“I don’t know of any good reason For me to feel so sad. A legend from some old season Keeps running around in my head.”’

  ‘Sounds like you, Charley.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Well, you’ve got everything most men want, a bit of fame, a bit of fortune, but you still droop around like you got the world on your back. And this Lorelei, beautiful young woman luring ships to destruction. Seems to run around in your head all right. Like in this book of yours, if the cover’s owt to go on.’

  ‘It’s an imaginative interpretation.’

  ‘That’s all right then. What happened to L
orelei in the end? Some questing knight stick his lance into her?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ said Penn. ‘Not many fishermen on the Rhine nowadays, but I don’t suppose she’s averse to going for bigger prey, the odd pleasure boat full of trippers. No, I’d say that Lorelei’s still out there, biding her time.’

  ‘Best left alone then. That’s what my old Scots gran used to say about beasties and bogles and things that go bump in the night. You don’t bother them and they won’t bother you. See you upstairs, mebbe.’

  He stood up. Penn said, ‘You’ve forgotten your book.’

  He opened the paperback, scribbled in it and handed it to Dalziel.

  The Fat Man moved away, squeezing between the crowded tables. He expected Penn would follow his progress out of the café, but when he looked at the reflection in the glass wall which marked Hal’s boundary, he saw the bearded face buried deep in a book once more.

  Wonder what language he thinks in? thought Dalziel.

  Outside, he opened the book. The printed dedication was in German.

  An Mai – wunderschön in allen Monaten!

  Dalziel’s German was up to that. ‘To May – beautiful in every month!’

  But he didn’t need linguistic skills to interpret the message which Penn had scrawled beneath the title Harry Hacker and the Ship of Fools.

  Bon voyage, sailor!

  He laughed out loud.

  ‘Charley,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know you cared.’

  Aman cannot live and work in the same town for many years without finding his head and his heart assailed by fond associations wherever he looks, and when Dalziel’s route to the reference library took him past the toilet in which the Wordman had murdered Town Councillor ‘Stuffer’ Steel with an engraver’s burin, he went inside for a pee, but stopped short when he found himself looking at a man up a step-ladder screwing a video camera into the ceiling.

  ‘How do,’ said Dalziel. ‘What’s this? Filming Urotrash?’

  ‘Updating the system, mate. State of the art, that’s what they’re getting now. Beam a close-up of your bollocks to the moon with this kit,’ said the man proudly.

  ‘Oh aye? Mebbe someone should warn ’em at NASA.’

  Unfazed by the prospect of universal distribution, he had his pee then went on his way, from time to time observing other evidence of the new installation taking place.

  In the reference library he was greeted with the kind of smile that twangs a man’s braces and the words, ‘Mr Dalziel, how nice to see you!’ uttered with evident sincerity by the fine-looking young woman behind the desk.

  The Italian strain in the Pomona family might be a couple of generations old, but the genes had come out fighting in Raina of that ilk, pronounced Rye-eena and contracted familiarly to Rye. Her skin had a golden glow and her dark expressive eyes might have sent a more poetic man than Fat Andy in search of images from Mediterranean skies. Her hair was a rich brown, except for a single lock of silvery grey which marked the main impact point of a head injury she had received at the age of fifteen in the car crash that killed her twin brother. Antipathetic at first towards the superintendent, and not encouraged to greater charity by the reports of persecution she received from her incipient boyfriend, DC Hat Bowler, she had relented her attitude in the aftermath of the Wordman case when she had come to see that, no matter what his outward semblance seemed to indicate, Dalziel was deeply defensive of his young officer and determined that no official crap should come his way.

  Also, as she had confessed to Hat (causing the young man some perturbation of spirit), there was something sort of sexy about Dalziel, in a non-sexy sort of way. Observing the DC’s bewilderment, she had added, ‘I don’t want to shag him, you understand, but I can see how it might be that he’s not short of offers.’

  Hat, who had often joined in lewd canteen speculation about the geophysics of the Fat Man’s relationship with his inamorata, the not insubstantial Cap Marvell, found himself looking at things from a new viewpoint. Rye often had this effect on him – this was one of the pleasures, and the perils, of getting close to her – but no previous change of angle had been so disorientating as having to regard Andy Dalziel as a sex object rather than a performing whale. Thank God she had put in the disclaimer about not fancying him herself. Even the imagined prospect of such a rival quite unmanned him.

  Knowing nothing of the food for thought he’d given the young couple, and careless of it had he known, Dalziel returned the smile and said, ‘Nice to see you too, lass. What fettle? Tha’s looking well. Helping young Bowler convalesce must be doing you good.’

  Did his eyes twinkle salaciously as he said it? Rye didn’t mind if they did, being as indifferent to his speculations as he would have been to hers.

  ‘Yes, he’s coming along very nicely. You’ll have him back later this week, I gather.’

  ‘That’s right. Can’t wait, from the look of him. He even popped in for a chat yesterday afternoon, just to get the feel of things. That’s what brings me here today, summat he said. Not that I need an excuse to want to see you, but.’

  He spoke flirtatiously. He’d decided that there was no way to the subject of her burglary save head on. But like in his rugby-playing days, no harm in a gently distracting shimmer of the hips before you ran straight through the bugger standing in your way.

  ‘He told you about the break-in then,’ she said, undistracted.

  ‘You don’t seem surprised. Didn’t you tell him you didn’t want to make a thing of it?’

  ‘I heard he’d been asking my neighbours questions. Didn’t think it would stop there.’

  ‘You were right. It was his duty to report it in, and he’s a good cop,’ said Dalziel sternly. Then he added with a grin, ‘And likely he also got to thinking if he said nowt, then you got murdered in your bed and he mentioned casually that your place had been turned over a few days back, I’d have sent him to join you.’

  ‘I’m sure you’d have meant it as a kindness. All right. Some idiot got into my flat, left it looking a bit untidy, but nothing damaged and nothing taken. I couldn’t see the point of pouring oil on dying embers by letting you lot really mess the place up with fingerprint powder all over the place and God knows what else. I’ve had enough of questions, statements and creaking bureaucracy in recent times to last me a lifetime!’

  ‘Aye, it’s a slow grinding mill, ours, and everyone ends up a bit ground down.’

  ‘Doesn’t show on you, Superintendent,’ she said.

  He laughed and said, ‘Nay, I’m part of the machinery. And once I’m set in motion, I’ve got to clank on till I run down. Any chance of a coffee?’

  ‘Any chance of me saying no? No. Come on through then.’

  He went behind the reception desk and followed her into the office.

  It was the first time he’d been in here since he’d supervised the search which followed Dick Dee’s death. They’d found nothing here or in the man’s flat which added much to the case for the Head of Reference being the Wordman, but it hadn’t mattered. In retrospect such a long trail of evidence, albeit mainly circumstantial, led to his door that CID had had to field a lot of hostile questioning about how many people had died because they couldn’t see what lay under their noses.

  Things had changed considerably.

  The paintings and photographs of great lexicographers which had darkened the walls had been replaced by some vapid watercolours of Yorkshire beauty spots and the plaster had been given a coat of paint. The furniture too was new, or at least new in here, probably a straight swap with another municipal office organized by someone sensitive enough to guess that Rye might not be too happy to feel that she was sitting on a seat polished by the buttocks of the man who’d tried to kill her.

  ‘Nice,’ he said, looking around. ‘Lot brighter.’

  ‘Yes. He’s still here though.’

  ‘You reckon? That bother you?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘They asked me tha
t, not directly of course, but they wanted to move me. And I said no, this was where I wanted to be. You see, I always liked Dick. He was kind to me. Except … yeah, well. Except. Maybe if I’d never gone out to the tarn that day … Maybes, eh? But here in the library, I always remember him as a good friend.’

  She busied herself making coffee, but he could see her dark eyes brimming with tears.

  Dalziel said, ‘He had to be stopped. What happened to you stopped him. Nowt to feel guilty about, luv. But I know how you feel. Couple of times I’ve had to send someone down that I’d rather not have done. Only a couple of times, you understand. Mainly I’m happy to kick ’em down the dungeon steps and slam the door behind them. But with these two, I sometimes think that if mebbe I’d done summat a bit different, mebbe looked the other way, I wouldn’t have had to … Aye, mebbe’s not a spot you want to spend a winter’s night in. I’ll take mine black.’

  Rye finished making the coffee and by the time she set a mug in front of him, she was back in control.

  ‘So apart from the fact that I’m a recovered victim and one of your work-slaves’ bit of fluff, how come I’m getting the special treatment over a minor crime? From what I’ve heard, you’re stretched enough trying to deal with major ones!’

  ‘We’re never so stretched that we can’t find time to spread a little comfort and light,’ said Dalziel. ‘Listen, I reckon I can talk to you straight. Being a victim and surviving doesn’t just get you tea, sympathy and congratulation. It can also get you a lot of unwelcome attention from all sorts of weirdos. There’s lunatics out there who work out that having been attacked once means you’ve probably got a taste for it. Or that it’s up to them to finish a job half done. Or they just get a kick out of thinking that, because you’ve been scared shitless once, you’re really going to freak out when it happens a second time.’