Death Comes for the Fat Man

by Reginald Hill

  As a natural team player, it was good to feel that at last he was truly in the squad. This sense of belonging saw him return to the basement full of confidence that Glenister wouldn’t let him fester down here for long. He offered to help Tim and Rod in their work, but they said, “No no, this is only for us menials. You take the weight off your feet, Peter, and rest up till you are summoned.”

  He sat at his desk and opened Death in the Desert, the first of Youngman’s books, both of which he’d bought on his way to the Lubyanka that morning. It was hailed by its publisher as a new form, the docunovel, in which a factual skeleton was fleshed with fiction. Bugger new forms, what they needed was a new copywriter, thought Pascoe. It was dedicated, To Q, leader of men. Its back cover was crammed with snippets of praise extracted from reviews of the hardback. Pascoe was unimpressed. He and Ellie, finally realizing that two paragraphs in the local evening paper and three lines in the Other New Books section of a Sunday national was all the notice her novel was going to attract, had spent a tipsy evening extracting from this critical molehill an encomiastic mountain.

  He started to read.

  Youngman’s narrative style was raw and unsophisticated but Pascoe could see its appeal. His hero was, unsurprisingly, an SAS sergeant. Called William Shackleton, universally known by both his officers and his men as Shack, he was brutal, amoral, and pragmatic. His motto was Make it happen. His men didn’t like him much but followed him unquestioningly because he got them through. When someone in his hearing said the problem with guerrilla warfare was identifying the enemy, he said, “No problem. They’re all the fucking enemy.” He referred to the population of the Middle East in general as Abdul. When he needed to individuate, he called them Abs. His sexual philosophy was as basic as his military. He made no pretense of the nature of his interest. If a woman didn’t respond, he moved on. If she did respond, she got no promise of commitment. But most of his conquests remained as loyal as his men. In a rare moment of openness he explained his technique to one of his few friends. “If you fuck a woman five times in a night, she knows she’d be crazy to imagine she’s going to be the only one. Most of them don’t mind not being the only one so long as they think they’re the best. When I’m with a woman I make no secret there’s plenty of others. But I tell her, ‘Honey, whenever I’m fucking them, I’m thinking of you.’” Shortly after this conversation, as usually happened to any man he got close to, the friend got blown away.

  Was all this wishful thinking, or did Youngman actually practice what he preached? wondered Pascoe as he worked his way through the book. Maybe he should have asked Ffion, wherever she was. The thought made him feel guilty.

  He’d just finished the last chapter and was thinking of lunch when the phone rang.

  Rod picked it up, listened, and said, “Big Mac would like to see you.”

  “Big Mac?”

  “You know, the North-British lady with the knockers,” he said, cupping his hands.

  In Glenister’s office he was slightly taken aback to find not only the Chief Superintendent but Bloomfield and Komorowski. They were drinking coffee. Perhaps they’d had lunch already. His stomach rumbled, as if to say, well, I haven’t!

  “There you are, Peter. How nice,” said Bloomfield, as if this were a chance encounter. “Just talking about you. Read your wife’s book over the weekend. Jolly good. You must be proud of her.”

  “Yes, I am,” said Pascoe, wondering where this was going.

  “And she of you, I don’t doubt. Not without cause. That was a sharp piece of work at the hospital. Very sharp. So what did you make of it all?”

  As if Sunday’s events hadn’t been analyzed down to their quarks, thought Pascoe.

  But he replied in measured tones, “I think that these Templars, though they have not laid claim to it, were responsible for the Mill Street explosion. Concerned that PC Hector might be able to identify one of them, they decided to take him out. The first attempt with the hit-and-run having failed, they planned to complete the job in the hospital.”

  “Sounds about right to me. Lukasz?”

  Komorowski said in his chalk-dry voice, “Their reluctance to claim Mill Street because Superintendent Dalziel got seriously injured doesn’t quite fit with their apparent readiness to murder Constable Hector.”

  “Down to perceptions,” said Glenister. “Mill Street was their opening salvo, so to speak, and they didn’t want the bad press associated with injuring a policeman. On the other hand, offing Hector to protect themselves is fine, so long as it looks accidental. Which makes them almost as ruthless as the bastards they’re killing.”

  “So it does,” said Bloomfield. “They right to worry about this man Hector, Peter?”

  Pascoe, still uneasy that somehow his previous defense of Hector might have triggered the attack, shook his head.

  “No,” he said firmly. “I don’t think we’re going to get anything more from him.”

  “But it was his drawing of his attacker that put you on to Youngman, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, by an indirect route,” said Pascoe. “But he’d had a clear view of him in the car, whereas the man in the video shop was deeply obscured by shadow.”

  “Still, to capture such a good likeness from a face glimpsed for only a split second moving toward you at sixty miles an hour takes a special talent,” said Komorowski. “Which, incidentally, I don’t find any reference to in Constable Hector’s file.”

  Been studying that, have you? thought Pascoe.

  He said, “Probably because no one was aware of it.”

  “Ah,” said Komorowski, in a tone so neutral it said clearly, “If he’d been one of mine, I’d have been aware of it.”

  “Ah indeed,” rejoined Pascoe, in a tone which he hoped conveyed just as clearly that Komorowski, not having to deal daily with the loose amalgam of incompetences which was Hector, was talking through his arsehole.

  “We are well pleased with the work you did here, Peter,” declared Bloomfield somewhat regally, bringing this polite confrontation to a close. “How do you feel about following it up? Strictly speaking, it’s not within our brief, which is counterterrorism. To be frank, we’re pretty overstretched as it is, and it would be a great help if you could take this on. I can spare Chetwynd and Loxam to work with you. What do you say?”

  Pascoe was momentarily dumbstruck. To be offered the chance to do officially what he was in fact trying to do surreptitiously seemed too good to be true. Already his suspicious mind was suggesting that making his unofficial activities official was the perfect way for the Templar mole to keep close track of what he was up to.

  Whose idea was it? he wondered. Pointless asking. It could well be that the person who thought it was his or her idea had had it planted there by someone else anyway.

  He said, “Chetwynd and Loxam…?”

  “Tim and Rod, the guys you’ve been doing such sterling work with in the cellar,” said Glenister, frowning as if surprised he didn’t know their surnames, which indeed she was right to be. “Dave Freeman will help you settle in and act as your link to me.”

  That cleared up one thing, thought Pascoe. Freeman’s sudden friendliness was presumably explained by foreknowledge of this promotion, if that’s what it was.

  But, promotion or not, he could hardly say, No, I’d prefer to carry on sneaking around behind everyone’s backs.

  He said, “To do this properly, I’d need to have full access to all available records and other material.”

  “Of course. On tap. Not, I suspect, that an ingenious chap like you would have any problem finding less conventional modes of access,” said Bloomfield, smiling.

  Shit, thought Pascoe. Somehow the old sod knows that last time I was in this office, I’d been rifling through Glenister’s desk in search of information!

  “So we can take it that’s settled?” said Bloomfield.

  “Yes, sir. Thank you.”

  “Good. Sandy, you’ll see Peter gets everything he needs? Excellent. Come o
n Lukasz. Work to do.”

  He headed for the door, where he paused and looked up at the ceiling.

  “Sandy, that security camera, you ever get it fixed?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s working fine now,” said Glenister.

  “Good. Place like this, you need to be able to see what’s going on everywhere, Peter. Downside is you get to know who picks their nose a lot.”

  He looked at Pascoe as he said this, and smiled, and it might have been that his left eyelid drooped in a slow wink or it may have been just a natural blink.

  3

  MELODIOUS TWANG

  Cap Marvell was not a devout woman. Her father was a tribal Anglican who regarded the Church as God’s way of affirming the Tories’ right to rule even when Labor was in power, while her mother was a devout Roman Catholic who made sure little Amanda was brought up in all the proper Romish observances and insisted she went to her own old school, St. Dorothy’s Academy for Catholic Girls, which she regarded as the only doctrinally sound school in the country.

  Yet despite all these attempts to establish lines of control from the Holy See, it was the dear old domestic C of E which retained a niche in Cap’s affections when mature skepticism swept all other religious debris away, a fondness based almost entirely on childhood memories of her father’s insistence that his pack of assorted hounds, terriers, pointers, and retrievers should join him in the family pew at the village church. She hated the use they were put to, but she loved their company, and a heavenly kingdom without animals was not one she had any interest in entering.

  Andy Dalziel reckoned that if there were a God, He should be done for dereliction of duty, letting His Creation get into such a mess and relying on folk like A. Dalziel Esq. to pick up the pieces.

  This did not prevent him from being on good terms with the odd cleric, particularly if they shared his interest in the really important aspects of the human condition, such as where do you find the best whisky, and who would you pick for your eclectic all time XV?

  Such a one was Father Joe Kerrigan, a parish priest of indeterminate age, with a creased and crumpled leathery face like an old deflated rugby ball. Sport and whisky had brought them together, and once they’d established the ground rule that Kerrigan didn’t try to solve crimes and Dalziel didn’t try to save souls, they had become good friends who many a night tired the moon with talking and sent her down the sky.

  Cap, true to her own unbelief, and knowing Dalziel’s considered view that most religious ceremonies were balls, and them as weren’t balls were bollocks, had placed a strict interdict on admission to his room of any of the pack of spiritual predators who roam the corridors of modern multifaith hospitals looking for their defenseless prey.

  Joe Kerrigan, however, was an exception. His distress at Andy’s plight was personal rather than professional, and he won her imprimatur as a friend, not as a priest.

  But the leopard cannot change his spots, and that afternoon Father Kerrigan, visiting the Central to administer the last rites to a dying parishioner, was very much in professional mode when he decided to look in on Dalziel on his way out.

  The guardian constable placed outside the room since the events of Sunday recognized the priest and let him in without demur. For the first time Father Joe found himself alone with his friend, and now the prayers which previously in deference to and, it must be said, in fear of Cap Marvel, he had offered silently from within now poured spontaneously from his lips. “Dear Jesus, Divine physician and Healer of the sick, we turn to you in this time of illness…”

  As he spoke the priest’s words, through his mind ran the friend’s thought, “Where are you, Andy, me dear? Is it living you still are or am I talking to a lump of flesh in which the heart still beats but out of which the mind and the soul have long fled?”

  In fact Dalziel is both closer than Kerrigan can guess and farther than he can imagine. Living he still is, but that point of awareness in which his being is now entirely focused has drifted back to the far edge of darkness, close up against the wafer-thin membrane which separates him from the white light of Elsewhere.

  He’s here partly through necessity in that whenever the will to survive grows weary, this is where he automatically drifts, but also in some part through choice, because he is essentially a social animal and while his comatose limbo is filled with shadows of his consciousness, he is unable to truly communicate with any of them. Here, however, just beyond the membrane, there is possibly something distinct from himself.

  “I know you’re in there,” says Dalziel. “We’ve got you surrounded. If you come out with your hands up, we can all go home.”

  This approach is as unsuccessful as it was in Mill Street.

  “If my lad Pascoe were here,” says Dalziel, “he’d soon talk you out. He’s been on a course.”

  There is a something. Not a response. Something like that lightest breath of wind in a forest on a still day which reminds you of the huge canopy of foliage under which you stand. But it is enough for Dalziel.

  “You are there then,” he says triumphantly. “Grand. Now we’re getting somewhere. Next off is find a name, that’s what the manuals say. I’m Andy. What shall I call you? God, is it?”

  Again the breeze in the trees, and this time he thinks he gets a meaning.

  Why don’t you come through and see for yourself?

  “Nay,” says Dalziel. “Last time I tried that, I got blown up. Hang about. What’s going off?”

  Apart from his brief out-of-body experience, which had come to a sudden end when his unexpected glimpse of Hector lying in bed had driven him back to the security of his coma, he has no sense of external context. All he knows is that at the end of the darkness furthermost from the membrane separating him from the white light of Elsewhere lies another Elsewhere from which derive those fragments of sensation which still have the power to call him back.

  What is coming through now is a sort of monotonous mutter, which gradually he starts to break up into words.

  Omnipotent and eternal God, the everlasting salvation of those who believe, hear me on behalf of Thy sick servant, Andrew…

  “Bloody hell!” says Dalziel indignantly. “Some bugger’s praying to me!”

  To me, for you, I think you’ll find, corrects the forest breeze.

  “Same difference. You must get a lot of this stuff in your line of work. How the hell do you put up with it?”

  C’est mon métier, says the breeze.

  “Right. Like me having to listen to scrotes telling me they were somewhere else on the night in question, ladling out soup to the poor.”

  Something like that.

  “So what else you do apart from listening to this drivel? There’s got to be something else your side that keeps you too busy to take care of things my side.”

  You still think of yourself as being part of what you call your side?

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  Come through and we’ll talk about it.

  “Nay, you don’t catch me like that. This is as close as I’m getting. In fact it’s a bit too close for comfort. I’m off back there. Ta ta.”

  See you soon.

  “You sound very sure of that.”

  I am. You will be back. And each time you come back you will find it more difficult to retreat.

  “Is that right. Not so clever telling me then, is it?”

  I tell you because you will not be able to help coming back. And I tell you that because of course you know you already know.

  “No one likes a smart ass,” says Dalziel as he retreats.

  But he has to admit the breezelike Presence is right. It’s bloody hard, and if it weren’t for the help offered by that thread of sound he might never have made it.

  This doesn’t make him any the less resentful when he gets close enough to confirm that the mournful muttering is indeed nothing less than prayer. All he knows about prayers is that most of the ones he’s felt constrained to utter, particularly the one asking for a widow’s c
ruse of single malt or the ones suggesting a thunderbolt might be good response to some particularly irritating piece of official idiocy, have remained unanswered. But now he thinks he recognizes the voice. Surely those rough raspings can only emerge from the smoke-and-whisky-corroded larynx of his old mate, Joe Kerrigan? If anyone deserves an answer, it’s good old Joe.

  He concentrates all the power still at his command on finding a fitting response.

  Father Joe paused in his prayer. He thought he detected a movement of the great bulk on the bed. Yes, he was right. Something was stirring down there. Dear Lord, he thought. Is it possible that just for once you’re giving me a quick answer to my prayers?

  From beneath the bedsheet drifted a sound which put the scholarly Father Joe in mind of John Aubrey’s account of that spirit who vanished with a curious perfume and most melodious twang.

  When it died away and the body once more lay, a sheer hulk on the bed of an unfathomable sea, Father Joe stood up.

  “All right, you fat bastard,” he said, “I can take a hint. But God bless you anyway.”

  4

  RED MITE AND GREENFLY

  Pascoe was having lunch with Dave Freeman.

  It had been Sandy Glenister’s idea.

  “With Dave acting as liaison, it’s time you two started hitting it off a bit better. You’ve a lot in common,” she’d said.

  So she’d noticed their antipathy, thought Pascoe. Sharp eyes she had, though what they’d spotted he and Freeman had in common he couldn’t imagine.

  Or was it his own eyes which were developing a squint through looking at everything connected with the Lubyanka sideways?

  As he and Freeman moved from the counter of the staff canteen and started unloading their trays, he noticed that they’d made almost identical choices. Perhaps Glenister was right.