403 their thousands. Why are you screwing up that skinny face of thine? Bad taste? At least I listened to the sermon while you were leafing through the prayer book, looking for the mucky bits.' Dalziel asleep missed less than many men awake. 'I was meditating on the psalms,' said Pascoe. 'Psalm 27 to be precise. The Lord is my light, and my salvation; whom then shall I fear?" The Wordman's favourite.' And it was still with him, still working away in his mind . . . 'You OK?' demanded Dalziel. 'Yes, sorry.' He came back to here and now, aware that the Fat Man had said something that he'd missed. 'I were saying, it seems to work for him.' 'What?' 'The Twenty-seventh psalm,' said Dalziel longsufferingly. '"For in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his tabernacle: yea, in the secret place of his dwelling shall he hide me, and set me upon a rock of stone." Bugger's certainly well hidden. Mebbe even when we're looking right at him. See our friend Dee's here. No sign of Penn or Roote, but.' 'I hardly think that's significant,' said Pascoe. 'Follows was Dee's boss.' 'Never said it was significant, did I? Well, there you go, Percy. Let's hope that angel's haircut of thine is standing thee in good stead. See you around!' They'd reached the grave and Dalziel stopped to seize enough earth in his great fist to plant an aspidistra and hurled it on to the coffin-lid with a loud crash. It was a good job, thought Pascoe, that Follows hadn't left instructions for an ecologically correct cardboard coffin or they might have seen him sooner than expected. As they headed out of the graveyard towards the line of parked cars, he saw Dee and his assistant get into their vehicles, then drive off in convoy. When they reached the main road junction, neither turned left towards the Lichen Hotel where funeral meats awaited, but both went straight over towards the city centre. Paid Prancing Percy their respects then straight back to work. The queen is dead, long live the queen. Or king. No doubt the battle for succession in the library was already on. Dalziel watched them too, then as if taking this as a hint, he said, 'Think I'll give the wake a miss. I've seen the grub at the Lichen. Makes you understand how it got its name. But funerals always make a man thirsty. There's The Last Gasp round the corner. Weird sense of humour some of these breweries have. You can buy me a pint and a pie there. Both of you.' Reluctantly Pascoe and Bowler, both of whom had other things on their mind, followed their Great Master. Dalziel's stated purpose was only half fulfilled. After his first pint (Bowler's treat) he postponed the pie, and halfway through the second (Pascoe's) he opined loudly, 'This ale's almost as flat as the company. I'll not risk the grub here. Let's move on to the Black Bull. At least Jolly Jack knows how to keep beer.' But now, having obeyed the dictates of duty and selfpreservation, Pascoe was ready to be obstinate. 'No thanks. Lots to do,' he said firmly. Which was true but not the truth. What he really wanted was to be somewhere by himself and think. 'Jesus wept,' said Dalziel, amazed. 'How about you, young Bowler?' 'No,' said Hat shortly, taking courage from Pascoe's example. 'I'm busy too.' He too had noticed Dee and Rye driving off in convoy and wanted to brood on this and other matters. 'Well, I'll go to the foot of our stairs,' said Dalziel, recognizing finality. 'I'll mebbe have to change me after-shave. But think on, I'll be looking forward to seeing the outcome of all this busyness.' Back at the station Pascoe got a cup of coffee and a chocolate bar from the machine and slumped in his office chair, while the steam died from the liquid and the confection stayed unwrapped. Out in the CID room, Hat sat in a posture so like the DCI's that anyone seeing both of them simultaneously might have started wondering about doppelgSngers. There was no one else on the CID floor. Elsewhere in the building, normal busy life was going on but here its attendant noises touched the ear with that sense of remoteness and distance you get when standing on a misty beach on a windless day, or in a snow-filled wood in winter. Pascoe wanted to think about the strategy of the Wordman investigation and why it had failed. Hat wanted to think about
4°5 Rye Pomona and whether she was still with Dee. But these troublesome thoughts seemed to lose their pace and energy as they ran up against the invisible barrier of this zone of calm elsewhereness. It's like, thought Pascoe (and even this thought did not set his pulses racing), it's like those moments described in the Dialogues when time slows towards a halt . .. it's as if the Wordman has trailed his aura and I am on the edge of his dimension, that passive world in which he is the only active element. This is where I should be looking for him, not out there in the busy world of routines, and elimination, and forensics. This is the secret place of his dwelling. He let his body relax even more. Psalm 27. He is back in church reading Psalm 27. The Lord is my light. He tries to move elsewhere, that part of his mind which is still a Detective Chief Inspector wanting to use this weird feeling to range over the whole of the case but not finding any response to the controls. This is what the Wordman must feel, he thinks. Whatever I do in this timeless time is what I have to do, not what I want to do. Still in the church reading the Psalm, but also in his office at the station, he reaches out to pull the Wordman file across his desk towards him. He intends to open it and look at the psalm references that have been isolated. But instead he opens it at the very beginning, at the strange drawing, the In Principio. His fingers have no strength to turn further. What am I looking for? he asks himself. The twin oxen. The two alephs. The AA man. This I know already. What else? In principio erat verbum. The opening of the gospel according to St John. Dee was at St John's College. Roote is in the St John Ambulance Brigade. Johnny Oakeshott's real name was Stjohn. Stjohn, the 'son of thunder', Stjohn, symbolized by the eagle, St John who bored his followers by his too often repeated exhor tation to them to 'love one another' because if you do that 'you do enough'; who came close to being dumped into a cauldron of boiling oil under the persecution of the Emperor Domitian but escaped to die a natural death of ripe old age at Ephesus where he'd had a run in with a high priest of the goddess Diana, whose worship also brought a lot of trouble Paul's way .. . Very interesting but not relevant, not at the moment anyway or rather not at the non-moment, not in this segment of non-time. Something else, he knows there is something else. And outside his door, in the CID room, less self-consciously perhaps, Hat Bowler too sits on this shore of time and feels its mighty turbulent ocean recede. Rye, Rye, he wants to think of Rye but all he can conjure up is that date in the Dialogue: 1576. Fifteen seventy-six. It means something to him ... Once more he rehearses all that he has been able to discover about it but nothing cries out to him ... or rather nothing stops crying, for that's what it feels like ... like hearing a baby crying in a big empty house and rushing from room to room but finding them all empty ... and still the baby cries . .. One more door remains ... behind this last door must lie the truth . . . The door bursts open . . . 'Sorry, did I wake you, lad?' says Sergeant Wield. 'Mr Pascoe in?' And without waiting for an answer he crashes just as unceremoniously into Pascoe's office and with him comes surging back the relentless tide of time. 'Wieldy,' said Pascoe, reaching for his cold coffee. 'No need to knock. Just come right in. Make yourself at home.' With a confidence of welcome that put him beyond the reach of irony, Wield said, 'Something you ought to see. First off, that partial on Ripley's mule, we've got a match.' 'A match? I don't follow. They reported no match on record.' 'Aye, but that was before the matching print was part of the record,' said Wield. 'You recall we took Dee's prints to match them with the prints on the axe that topped the Hon. . ..' 'Dee. You're saying we've got a match with Dee?' 'Not a complete, but ten points, which, considering what little there was to work with, is a big step,' said Wield, laying a couple of sheets of paper in front of Pascoe. 'Ten's a long way from sixteen,' said Pascoe disappointedly. 'And how the hell did this come up anyway? Officially, Dee was never anything but a witness and his prints were taken purely for elimination, because he'd been using the axe.'
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The rules were very clear. All fingerprints provided voluntarily for purposes of elimination had to be destroyed the minute the elimination process was complete. 'Don't know what happened,' said Wield. 'Must somehow have got put in the system for cross-check
ing against the record and by the time they reached the top of the queue, that partial from Ripley's mule was part of the record. Something like that, I expect.' When a master of precise detail starts being vague, it is best to : look the other way, especially when the possible illegalities have • a smell of Dalziel about them. ,' Pascoe looked the other way and said, 'OK, but I can't get ; excited, Wieldy. It's not usable in court and even if we had a full sixteen-point match, with the bad press prints have had recently, ;'j we'd need a hell of a lot more.' i Wield said with just a hint of reproof, 'Worked that out for ', myself. I thought, what else? And I remembered the bite.' • 'The bite? Ah, yes. We had forgot the bite. And .. . ? 'I've been round to see Mr Molar. Had to get him out of a lecture, he weren't best pleased. But it was worth it. He compared Dee's dental record with the bite and he says that it's a definite maybe verging on a possible definitely that those teeth made that bite.' 'Dee's dental records .. . ?' Pascoe's mind was spinning. 'How : the hell did you get hold of Dee's dental records.' 'All above board,' said Wield briskly. 'He gave us written per mission to see his medical records when we were talking to him about the Hon.'s death, remember? Almost fell over himself to , do it. Well, dental comes under medical, and as the permission : was still on the file ...' There were more potential illegalities floating around here than in a Marbella swimming pool, thought Pascoe. ; Sod them! He shook them out of his head, opened his mouth to shout for Hat, then saw it wasn't necessary. The DC was standing-in the doorway, his face aglow at the ; thought of getting Dick Dee into the middle of the frame. '( Pascoe said, 'Right. Let's talk to Mr Dee again, but softly, softly. No point in putting the boot in till we know what we're kicking. All this could mean owt or it could mean nowt.' The use of Dalzielesque phraseology emphasized the point he was making. There'd been too many instances recently of policemen going in hard with too little evidence and either warning off the guilty or provoking official complaints from the innocent. 'We'll need someone to stay here and co-ordinate matters. And try to raise the super at the Black Bull.' He looked at Hat, saw the disappointment and the pleading in his eyes, and said, 'Better be you, Wieldy. There's a trail here which could need some tidying up if it leads anywhere, and you're best equipped to do it.' No doubt about that. At the moment what little they had could be dispersed instantly by one indignant snort from a smart lawyer's nostrils. 'Hat, you come with me to the library.' 'But it's closed today. Mark of respect.' 'Hell, I'd forgotten. But that doesn't mean the staff won't be there. Dee and Rye Pomona drove straight off after the funeral. Clearly they weren't going to the Lichen.' 'No, sir,' said Hat unhappily. Pascoe thought a moment then said, 'Tell you what, you try Dee's flat, see if he's there. I'll do the library, which still seems the best bet. OK?' 'Fine,' said Hat. They got into their respective cars simultaneously but the little sports car was burning rubber out of the car park before Pascoe had fastened his seat belt. He still felt pretty sure of finding Dee at the library and when he reached the Centre and saw the main doors were open, his confidence seemed justified. A security man stopped him to tell him the Centre was closed to the public that day. Pascoe showed him his ID and discovered that, as he'd suspected, a lot of staff were taking the chance to catch up on jobs that under normal workaday pressures got pushed to the back burner. He made his way to the reference library, rehearsing the sweet words which were going to lure Dee down to the station. But he found the place empty except for a young female library assistant he didn't know who was painstakingly checking the shelves to make sure that all the reference books had been returned to their rightful positions and order.
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He showed his ID again and asked if Dee had been in. She said she hadn't seen him, but she'd just arrived herself. Pascoe went behind the enquiry desk and tried the office door on the remote chance that the man was working inside, too rapt to hear conversation without. The door opened and suddenly Pascoe had a vision of discovering Dee sitting there with his throat cut. The office was empty. Pascoe went in and sat behind the desk to collect his thoughts. He must be getting hard. He felt relief that his absurd imagining had turned out to be just that, but it wasn't relief that a human being wasn't dead, but rather relief that a promising line of enquiry hadn't been nipped in the bud - or nicked in the jugular! Just how promising was this line anyway? Dee was a good fit for the profile Pottle and Urquhart had produced between them. There was the obsession with word games, the delight in his own cleverness, and if he wanted the other world focus which the Dialogues seemed to illustrate, then perhaps he didn't need to look further than this photograph on the desk. The three boys, two of them bright and sharp and fighting their way out of adolescent adversity into premature adult control, the third still childish, innocent, in need of love and protection. He recalled that poem again, the one on the page opened in the book in Sam Johnson's dead hands.
If there are ghosts to raise, What shall I call, Out of hell's murky haze, Heaven's blue pall? Raise my loved long-lost boy To lead me to his joy .. .
But these were not the kind of ideas the GPS liked to be presented with. They wanted something with much more shape and substance, hard physical evidence, preferably accompanied by a water-tight confession. And he had ... a thumb print and a bite mark. Neither definite. Both of doubtful admissibility. He closed his eyes and tried to ease his way back into that state of timelessness in which the answer had seemed almost within his grasp ... the Twentyseventh psalm: "God is my light. .." Dominus ilhiminatio men... Then he opened his eyes and he saw everything.
Hat's heart leapt up as he dragged the MG round the corner of the street in which Dee's apartment was situated. He had been frightened he would find Rye's car parked outside, lending weight to a fantasy he fought against but could not resist of Dee's door opening in response to his frenzied knocking to reveal over the man's bare shoulder a bedroom, and a bed, and Rye's tousled chestnut hair with its distinctive blaze of grey spread out across the pillow .. . But of course there was no sign of the car. No, she'd be safe at home. He thought of ringing her number, then decided that contact was better delayed till Dee was safely down the nick and he could see which way things were going. With luck she need never know that he himself had done the arresting. Not the arresting, he corrected himself. Pascoe wanted this played cool. A smiling invitation to have a friendly chat. No frenzied knocking then. None needed at the front entrance, which was open. He went sedately up the stairs and tapped gently on the door. It opened almost at once. 'What's this? A raid?' said Charley Penn. 'Don't tell me. Andy Dalziel's lying out there with a Kalashnikov, right?' 'Mr Penn. I was looking for Mr Dee ...' 'Well, you've come to the right place, but not at the right time,' said Perm. 'Step inside before someone shoots me.' Hat went in. 'Mr Bowler, how nice.' Franny Roote was smiling up at him from a chair placed before a table on which lay an open Paronomania board. There was no one else in the room. Unhappily, Hat let his gaze rum towards the bedroom door. 'Is Mr Dee ...' Penn went and threw the door open. 'No, not in here. Unless he's under the bed. Nor in the kitchen or the bog either, take a look. Sorry.'
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