Death Comes for the Fat Man

by Reginald Hill

  “I don’t believe you want them to go at all,” said Pascoe with quiet urgency. “Or Mrs. Sarhadi. Or these other young men. Or even me.”

  Now she glanced quickly his way before returning her attention to the Sheikh. It’s working, thought Pascoe. Get them engaged in an apparently rational discussion no matter how irrational it really is. Avoid anything that sounds patronizing or merely conciliatory, but persuade them you’re taking their madness seriously.

  “Frankly I don’t give a toss about those young men,” she said. “In fact, I suspect we’d be a lot better off without them. As for you, Peter, I nearly did for you once, didn’t I? Perhaps it is written, as the Sheikh might say. Right, Sheikh?”

  “Everything is written,” said Sheikh Ibrahim, who’d been listening to the exchange with the alert interest of a tutor conducting a seminar.

  Pascoe didn’t want him involved. This had to be between himself and Kilda, but there was worse disruption to come.

  “Written, is it?” exclaimed Tottie Sarhadi. “Aye, well, I daresay it is, but if you’ve got a gun, Mr. Copper, I reckon it’s written that now ’ud be a good time to pull it out and shoot her.”

  This was addressed to Pascoe, who tried by force of will and expression to convey to the woman the lesson he’d learnt on his negotiators’ course, that you didn’t meet threats of violence with threats of violence. But now came a new diversion, the sound of distant sirens getting nearer, welcome in one way but in another merely screwing up the tension several notches.

  And Tottie was all too ready to help the process.

  “About bloody time,” she said. “You hear that, luv? Talk time’s over. Soon this place’ll be full of boys in blue with popguns. And one thing I’ve learned is, give a little boy a popgun and he’ll not be happy till he’s used it.”

  Kilda glanced toward her and smiled.

  “I agree with you, Mrs. Sarhadi,” she said. “Time’s up.”

  She held the camera up to the Sheikh’s face.

  “Kilda!” cried Pascoe. “Think about the young people!”

  “I’ve thought,” said Kilda. “I’ll count up to five. Anyone not out of the room by then will just have to take their chances. Except, of course, you, Sheikh Ibrahim. You stay still. It’s virgin countdown time for you. ONE.”

  Pascoe screamed at the young couple, “Go! Go!”

  “TWO.”

  Sarhadi pulled his young bride to her feet. She seemed to have lost the use of her legs. The bodyguards began to move uncertainly this way and that. In case any of them might be thinking the promise of virgins made a suicidal charge worthwhile, Pascoe turned and screamed at them, “Get out! Now!”

  “THREE.”

  The guards turned and retreated. Sarhadi half-dragged, half-carried Jamila off the dais and headed toward the doorway after them. Behind him his mother stepped off the dais.

  “FOUR.”

  What am I still doing here? Pascoe asked himself. I have a wife and daughter. What’s keeping me here? Concern for a crazy woman who wants to die and a religious fanatic whose death will cause rejoicing in high places? I must be mad!

  He commanded his legs to carry him towards the door but they seemed to be functioning even less efficiently than the young bride’s. Tottie Sarhadi was having difficulty dragging herself away too, but her motives were at least mercenary. She’d taken a couple of paces forward when she realized she’d forgotten the money bag. She turned and stooped to pick it up from the edge of the dais. As she took hold of the bag by its drawstrings, Pascoe could see the muscles across her back bulging visibly beneath the tautened silk of her dress.

  “FIVE.”

  Time to run! But he found himself hypnotized by the chunky Yorkshirewoman who may have worked her rough magic on Andy Dalziel in the Mirely Mecca all those years ago. Could such coincidences happen and not be significant? wondered Pascoe as he watched Tottie, still half crouched on her haunches, begin to spin round like a hammer thrower in the circle. She had space for one and a half revolutions. Her feet did a series of intricate little dance steps, her arms straightened out as she rose to her full height, and she brought the heavy money bag, moving centrifugally at a speed not even a mathematician could have calculated in the split second available, slamming into Kilda’s pale slender neck, just below the right ear.

  Pascoe had never visited an abattoir but he hoped that the effect of a humane killer was as final and instantaneous as this. There was no hint of stagger, no delay into which any form of awareness of what was happening could creep. Kilda just slid straight to the ground like a dress slipping off a hanger.

  The Sheikh reached out and dextrously caught the camera as it dropped from her nerveless fingers.

  Tottie slung the bag over her shoulder, and without even a glance at the fallen women, headed for the door through which her son and his beautiful bride had just made their exit.

  As she passed Pascoe she said in a tone more pitying than scornful, “Everything’s written, right enough, but even Allah needs a pen. Men!”

  PART SEVEN

  So a cried out, “God, God, God,” three or four times. Now I to comfort him, bid him a should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, HENRY V, ACT TWO, SCENE THREE

  1

  THE END

  You told him I were dead and the bugger actually believed you?” said Andy Dalziel.

  Peter and Ellie Pascoe were sitting at his bedside. A week had passed since his return to consciousness. At first his days consisted of short bouts of confused wakefulness interspersed with long periods of sleep, some natural, some drug induced. But by day three the waking periods were longer and less confused. On day six he was moved out of intensive care and on day seven he demanded a gill of Highland Park and six bacon butties, which some of the staff took to be evidence of incipient dementia. Happily John Sowden, who knew him of old, was able to assure his colleagues that what it actually demonstrated was that Dalziel had taken a large step on the road to recovery.

  “But it’s a long road and precisely how far along it he will move is impossible to say,” Sowden warned Cap Marvell. “He is not a young man. Any return to work will only be possible after an extended period of convalescence. In fact, were he that way inclined, I could not see any problem about retirement on medical grounds…what?”

  Cap, who’d let out a hoot of amusement, said, “Why don’t you suggest that to him, Doctor? But I’d have your crash team on alert.”

  “No need for that,” Sowden assured her. “There’s no problem with his heart.”

  Cap said, “I know that. I mean on alert for you.”

  During this period there’d been a ban on visitors other than Cap, but that night she rang Pascoe to tell him that Dalziel was finally visitable.

  “I’ve told him all I could about what’s been happening,” said Cap. “But he’s really keen to hear your own account, Peter.”

  Which was a loose translation of, “I want to hear this from the horse’s arse.”

  It was a shock to see him sitting up, and not a reassuring one. On his back, unmoving, and linked to life by tubes and wires, he had somehow remained himself. A beached whale maybe, but still Leviathan. Now sitting up, pale and frail, talking and moving with visible effort, he was more like a flounder, flapping its last on the deck.

  But he still had strength enough to make it clear he wanted to know everything that had happened with regard to the Mill Street investigation, so, at first hesitantly then with accelerating flow, Pascoe told the story.

  Dalziel’s weakness made him a better listener than he normally was. Perhaps even more surprisingly, Ellie scarcely interrupted at all. Peace had broken out between the Pascoes with his assurance that his flirtation with the murky world of CAT and all its works was definitely over. His transgression was forgiven, but not, he suspected, forgotten, and when he reached the point in his story at which he tricked Kentmore, he attempted to glissa
de over it, but the Fat Man was on it in a flash.

  “You told him I were dead, and the bugger actually believed you?”

  “Well, yes,” said Pascoe.

  Dalziel shook his head incredulously. Pascoe caught Ellie’s eye to see if she shared his amusement that in this long twisty tale of death and deceit, the one thing the Fat Man found it hard to credit was that anyone could believe he was dead. She stayed stonyfaced. Forgiven he might be, but it was going to be a long time before she found anything about the deception amusing.

  “You must have been bloody convincing,” said Dalziel accusingly.

  “Well, actually, it was Wieldy who broke the news,” said Pascoe.

  “I suppose he’s got the face for it,” said the Fat Man grudgingly. “So, on you go.”

  The climax at the Marrside Grange Hotel Pascoe precised considerably, as he’d done when describing it to Ellie, not caring or, to be fair to himself, not able to explain to her why when Kilda started counting he hadn’t been the first person out of the door.

  Tottie Sarhadi’s heroic role he did full justice to, however, watching Dalziel keenly to see if there were any reaction to the name, but nothing showed.

  Maybe he was being diplomatic with Cap Marvell in the room. Not that there was much chance of Cap hearing anything. Dalziel was in a large comfortable room with all mod cons in the private patient wing of the Central. Pascoe guessed that Cap Marvell was picking up the bill. One of the world’s great organizers, she’d walked all over hospital regulations and installed herself in the room also. At present she was sitting at a table by the wall, earphones on, working at her laptop, probably organizing some direct action of doubtful legality, thought Pascoe as he brought his story to its conclusion with a fittingly upbeat flourish, implying that everything was neat and tidy.

  But the Fat Man, who had always been able to spot a loose thread on a Black Watch kilt at fifty yards said, “So let’s get things straight. We’ve definitely got the buggers who put me in this sodding bed?”

  “Yes. The Kentmores.”

  “Grand. I hope they lock ’em up and throw away the key.”

  Pascoe nodded agreement. It wasn’t the time or place to let out a hint of the growing ambiguity of his own feelings about the Kentmores. They had murdered three men in Mill Street, they had almost killed Dalziel, and it was only the intervention of kismet in the person of Tottie Sarhadi that had prevented Kilda from further slaughter.

  Yet when he thought of the two of them what came into his mind were images of Kilda, pale as a waif child and still unconscious, vanishing into the ambulance, and of Maurice’s stricken face as he received the deceitful news of Dalziel’s death. Bound together on a wheel of fire. Now permanently bound there. It was a hard way to come to the truth of poetry.

  “And this mad SAS bugger, Youngman. You say you’ve got him, but I’ve not heard any mention of him on the news.”

  “CAT have taken charge of him.”

  “How’d you let that happen? You collared the bugger, didn’t you? When I had a prisoner, no bugger took him off me ’less I gave the go-ahead.”

  Pascoe winced at the unjustness of it all.

  By the time he was done at Marrside, Youngman had been whisked away to the Lube where the mysterious Bernard was doubtless already airbrushing him out of the picture. There was nothing of substance to link him to the Mazraani beheading. As for the attempt on Hector, all they really had there was Hector’s jaguar sketch…! Which left the Kentmores. And how willing would they be to testify against the man who’d helped Christopher in his dying moments?

  Without Youngman, Pascoe could see no way of getting to Kewley-Hodge. And the galloping major was the only possible line of contact to St. Bernard.

  Pascoe couldn’t even be sure he’d actually met the Templar mole during his time at the Lube. But a copper has to go with what he’s got and those he thought of as the likely suspects had all turned up at the Marrside Grange Hotel within the space of a few minutes, Sandy Glenister and Dave Freeman in one car, Bernie Bloomfield and Lukasz Komorowski separately. Whether they’d all come from the Lubyanka, or whether they’d been dragged from their weekend recreation he did not know.

  They sat in the hotel office and listened to Pascoe’s account of events.

  “Pete, you’re a very lucky man,” said Glenister when he finished.

  “Yes, you are,” said Bloomfield. “Didn’t Napoleon try to surround himself with lucky men? I’m not sure if you deserve congratulation or reduction to the ranks, Peter.”

  “It is like gardening, the only thing that counts is results,” said Komorowski. “This could hardly have worked out better.”

  “Except perhaps,” said Freeman reflectively, “if Pete and Mrs. Sarhadi had got out of the room with the others and Mrs. Kentmore had blown up herself and the Sheikh…”

  To Pascoe this sounded a cynicism too far but when he looked at the other three, he saw that they were all examining the proposition and finding much to agree with.

  “Jesus!” he said in disgust. “If that’s what you want, why not just send out one of your own terminators and get the job done, nice and tidy?”

  “I think you have been reading too many thrillers, Peter,” said Bloomfield. “We are not in the terminating business, as you put it. On the other hand, Thou shalt not kill but needst not strive officiously to keep alive.”

  He smiled but Pascoe ignored the attempt to lighten the atmosphere.

  “Officiously keeping people alive was part of a policeman’s job last time I looked,” he said. “As for thrillers, it was reading Youngman’s books that put me on to the Kentmores. Maybe you people at CAT should do a bit more reading.”

  Freeman raised his eyebrows and looked at Bloomfield as if anticipating a sharp riposte, but it was Komorowski’s quiet pedantic voice that spoke next.

  “For me, I think things have turned out well. We have smashed this Templar gang and we can put the fact that you were instrumental in saving Al-Hijazi’s life to good use, Mr. Pascoe. Most important of all, this time you have escaped injury. I say well done.”

  “Quite right, Lukasz,” said Bloomfield. “Well done, Peter. Now let’s get out of here before the Press become intrusive. We’ll finish Peter’s debriefing back at the Lube.”

  They had started moving to the door when Pascoe said, “No.”

  The movement stopped.

  Bloomfield turned and said, “I’m sorry?”

  “I don’t work for CAT anymore, remember? Any further questions you want to ask, you’ll find me back home in Mid-Yorkshire. In the company of people I trust.”

  “Now you’ve lost me, I’m afraid,” said Bloomfield, his face a landscape of lugubrious uncertainty.

  “I very much doubt that, Commander,” said Pascoe crisply. “To say we’ve smashed the Templars is at the very least premature. How many more are there? The one called Archimbaud certainly. And the group who murdered Carradice. Is Youngman going to give you a list of names? I wouldn’t hold my breath. And finally, Commander, it must have struck you by now that the Templars couldn’t have functioned without considerable help from someone in CAT. St. Bernard, I believe his code name is. Like yours. Not that I’m casting aspersions. It could be any of you. Or, worse, all of you. Me, I’m heading back to Kansas. I’ve got an angry wife and a sick friend there.”

  And he’d walked out.

  As he drove away, the words of Bacon came into his mind. A man who has wife and children and a pension scheme should be very careful who he gives the finger to.

  Complete openness was the best road to survival, he decided.

  He’d written a detailed account of his activities, conclusions, and suspicions since the Mill Street explosion, and made three copies, one of which he’d given to Dan Trimble, one he’d sent to CAT, and the third he’d put into the hands of his solicitor.

  Maybe he was being neurotic but sometimes neurotic felt good.

  It also felt good to be talking to Andy Dalziel again, even i
f the old sod seemed inclined to blame him personally for the problems he foresaw in making charges stick.

  “I’m sorry, Andy,” he said finally. “Though it hurts me to say it, there’s nothing more I can do.”

  “It doesn’t hurt me to hear it,” said Ellie. “The further removed you are from those people, the better. Andy, we want you back on your feet soon as possible. Since you’ve been in here he’s bounced from one lot of trouble to another.”

  “Never you worry, luv,” said Dalziel. “Couple of weeks and I’ll be right as rain. Then Youngman and yon Kewley-Hodge wanker had better look out.”

  There was the sound of a chair being pushed back. Cap Marvell had removed her headphones in time to catch Dalziel’s last remarks.

  “Right as rain?” she said scornfully. “Andy, if in a couple of weeks you’ve reached the stage where you can wipe your own bum, you’ll be doing well.”

  The Pascoes grinned. Cap Marvell had a line in upper-class coarseness which was more than a match for the Fat Man’s vernacular bawdry.

  Cap went on, “This Kewley-Hodge you mentioned, would he be one of the Derbyshire Kewley-Hodges, or Kewleys as were?”

  “That’s right,” said Pascoe. “Of Kewley Castle, near Hathersage. You know the family?”

  “If they live in a sodding castle, of course she’d know the family,” said Dalziel, clearly stung by the bum-wiping comment. “Had to have an op to get the silver spoon out of her mouth when she took up with me. On private insurance, of course.”

  They were made for each other, these two, thought Pascoe.

  “Not really,” said Cap, ignoring the Fat Man, which was another of her rare talents. “But Edie Hodge, whose name got tagged onto theirs, was at St. Dot’s when I was there.”

  “St. Dot’s?”

  “St. Dorothy’s Academy, near Matlock.”

  “I think we used to play them at rugger,” said Dalziel.

  “She must have been a lot older than you,” said Pascoe.