D&P20 - Death's Jest-Book

by Reginald Hill

  'Jake Frobisher. Some link with that lecturer who was one of your Wordman victims.'

  'Of course. Yes, I remember. Turned out he was popping pills to keep himself awake to meet some work deadline, wasn't that it?'

  That's right. Accidental death, clear cut. Only complication was, when his gear was sent to his family, his sister started asking questions about some expensive watch she said was missing, implication being that one of our lot had nicked it. Well, it all got sorted, no evidence, no case, his mum didn't want a fuss, in fact she didn't even recollect the watch in question. End of story, right?'

  'Should be,' said Pascoe neutrally, letting his gaze drift towards Wield, who was peering into a screen as if he saw his future there. 'But I'm not going to bet on it.'

  'Wise man,' said Rose. 'Sophie, that's the sister, - started here as a student in September, and lo and behold, end of last term she got pulled in with a bunch of other kids all high as kites on speed. Must run in the family, eh? We found a great stash of the stuff in her room, which incidentally is in the same house her brother died in - how's that for morbid? Anyway, the little cow, instead of putting her hand up, starts claiming it was planted there so we could get our own back for her daring to accuse us of nicking her brother's watch! Case came up yesterday. The bloody magistrate lets her ramble on through the whole sad story, wipes a tear away from his eye, glowers at me on the witness bench, and gives her a conditional discharge! I told her afterwards she was lucky and she'd better be careful or she'll, end up like her brother. Having my watch nicked, you mean? she says, and gives me the finger, then takes off with her mates, laughing. It's a great job we've got, isn't it?'

  'Yes,' said Pascoe thoughtfully. 'Yes, I believe it is. I'll be in touch, Stan.'

  He put down the phone and stared at Wield until the sergeant's head turned, as if compelled by the force of Pascoe's gaze.

  The DCI jerked his head in summons and went through into his office.

  The sergeant followed, closing the door behind him.

  Succinctly, Pascoe filled him in on the day's debacle.

  'So thanks a lot for that, Wieldy,' he concluded. 'Nothing I like better than a scenic tour of the county in mid-winter instead of wasting my time doing useful things.'

  'Pete, I'm sorry. I'll talk to my informant and see . . .'

  'Yeah yeah,' said Pascoe impatiently. The failed job had dropped a long way down his priority list of things to be pissed off with Wield about. 'Forget it. But there's something else. Remember when Sam Johnson died, I asked you to check out that student death in Sheffield, boy called Frobisher, the one people seemed to think had upset Johnson so much he made the move here to MYU?'

  'I remember’ said Wield.

  'And you told me it was all done and dusted, accidental overdose, no loose ends.'

  ‘That's right.'

  'What about this missing watch? I don't recollect you mentioning that in your report. That not a loose end?'

  'Didn't look like one to me,' said Wield. 'In fact it looked like it was probably nowt at all, not worth mentioning, just a young lass being silly.'

  'Even young lasses get over being silly’ said Pascoe. 'Not this one though, eh?'

  He hadn't wanted to sound confrontational, but the sheer unreadability of the sergeant's face was a provocation to provocation. For the first time he understood how it must feel to be sitting opposite Wield in the interrogation room.

  The reply came in the quiet reasonable voice of a patient father explaining life to a recalcitrant son.

  'If you remember, the reason you gave for being interested in Frobisher was it might be relevant to Johnson's state of mind if it turned out he'd topped himself. By the time I got the details of Frobisher's accidental overdose, we knew that Johnson had been murdered by the Wordman, so there was no way for the lad's death to be relevant, not even if it had had more loose ends than you'd find at a monk's wedding.'

  The tone remained constant throughout, but the concluding Dalzielesque image sent a message of strong feeling which Pascoe gleefully registered as a minor victory, of which he was almost simultaneously ashamed.

  Wield had been then, and was now, trying to save him from what he and probably everyone else regarded as a dangerous obsession.

  But they were wrong, Pascoe assured himself. Not that he was absolutely, bet-the-deeds-of-the-ranch certain he was right. But obsessions were irrational and as he wasn't going to do anything that couldn't be tested by reason, this was no obsession. As for danger, how could this particular pursuit of truth be more dangerous than any other?

  The only real danger he would admit was that of falling out with those he loved most.

  He said gently, 'Sorry, Wieldy. I'm being a plonker, but everyone's entitled this time of year. Rose tell you what he was after? No? Ah, well, it's me he feels owes him.'

  He quickly ran through Rose's request for help.

  'Not much,' said Wield.

  'Not much is overstating it. Still, he's a good cop, so let's pull out the stops. Any sniff of anything big going down on our patch, I want to know. Pass the word.'

  'Even to Andy? He'll not be chuffed at you paying off old debts on company time.'

  'He's going to be even less chuffed if something big did happen and South were sitting there smugly saying, "Well, we did warn you!"'

  Wield gave a small nod which might have meant anything from he was totally convinced to he was totally unpersuaded, but Pascoe watched him go, certain that his instructions would be carried out to the full.

  He took off his overcoat, hung it up, then sat at his desk and on a piece of paper wrote Sophie Frobisher. Then he added a question mark.

  What the question was he wasn't certain, nor indeed whether he'd ever ask it.

  One thing was certain, thank God, and that was that he needn't make any decision about it till next month when the new university term began.

  Perhaps by then Roote would have faded to distant irritation. Perhaps the last letter in which he said goodbye to England would prove to be a farewell letter in every sense.

  And perhaps Christmas would be cancelled this year!

  Pascoe laughed.

  Dalziel said, 'Glad to see you're in such a good mood.'

  Shit! Is there a secret passage he uses to get into my room? wondered Pascoe.

  'I was just coming to see you, sir. Dud tip, I'm afraid, complete waste of time

  'Half right’ said the Fat Man. 'About the waste of time, but not the tip.'

  'Sorry?'

  'I've just had an angry call from Berry at Praesidium. Says he thought we were taking care of his wages van today.'

  'Yes, sir, and we did until it made its last drop . . . Shit, you're not saying .. . ?'

  He was.

  The Praesidium security men, after a day spent in the expectation of imminent attack, had felt they deserved a soothing cup of tea on the way back, to which end they had pulled into the lorry park of a roadside cafe on the bypass just north of town. As they got out of the van, they were jumped on by a bunch of masked men armed with baseball bats and at least one sawn-off shotgun. Surprised in every sense, they put up no resistance and were left unharmed, locked in a white transit van, tucked away in a remote corner of the lorry park where they might have remained a lot longer if Morris Berry, the Praesidium boss, hadn't noticed his van suddenly vanish from the screen. He'd sent someone to investigate at the last known location and they'd heard noises from the transit. By the time Pascoe arrived on the scene, he found the security men enjoying their now even more necessary soothing cup of tea and sufficiently recovered to be much amused at the image of the thieves' gobsmacked expressions when they found they'd got a vanload of nothing.

  Pascoe didn't share their amusement. This might be a cock-up for the crooks, but he knew that it was going to register as a cock-up for the cops also. When the story was told in the canteen and the papers, the joke was going to be on him. And in the annual list of crime statistics, this day's work would show as a securi
ty van hijacked despite a tip-off and an expensive escort operation.

  Suddenly Franny Roote was relegated to the very bottom of his piled-up troubles and when at last he returned to his office, he swept the piece of paper bearing Sophie Frobisher's name into his waste bin without even reading it.

  7

  The Temptation

  Letter 5 Received Mon Dec 24th P.P

  «•"*'*

  Monday Dec 17th (Midnight!)

  Dear Mr Pascoe,

  My mind's in a turmoil so here I am writing to you once more. Let me skip over my nightmare journey here. Suffice it to say that my efforts at economy were rewarded by two train breakdowns and I ended up reaching Manchester Airport only five minutes before my departure time, and I still had to collect my ticket! No way could I do that and run the gauntlet of baggage and security checks in less than half an hour, I thought. Oh dear. Linda, who likes her arrangements to stay arranged, would not be pleased.

  But I needn't have worried. Even Linda's organization is like a dry reed beneath the brutal tread of the airlines.

  My flight was delayed . . . And delayed ... And delayed...

  Finally we took to the air. Clearly they hadn't let the delay interfere with their catering schedule. What arrived on my plate made the Chapel Syke cuisine look attractive. And I was seated next to a fat talkative estate agent with a bad cold.

  Nor did my problems end when we landed in Zurich.

  My case was the very last to appear on the carousel, a neanderthal customs officer could not be persuaded that I wasn't a Colombian drugs baron, and when I finally emerged into the public concourse, nowhere amongst all the attendant banners bearing sjiange devices did I see one with my name on it.

  Some time later, I almost literally stumbled across my taxi driver snoozing in the coffee bar. Only the fact that he'd placed the sheet of paper bearing an approximation of my name (Herr Rutt) over his eyes to keep the light out gave me the necessary clue. He seemed to resent being woken and set off into what looked to me like an incipient blizzard without more than a guttural grunt in my direction, but after the estate agent's mucous maunderings, I was not too sorry about this.

  (I seem to recollect saying I was going to skip over all this, but it's too deeply impressed on my psyche to dismiss so easily! Sorry.)

  Linda had assured me that Fichtenburg was within easy driving distance of Zurich but not, I felt, in this weather or with this driver. It seemed to take forever. In the end my fatigue overcame my fear and I dozed off. When I was awoken by the car coming to a halt with a suddenness which threw me forward quite violently, my first thought was we'd had an accident. Instead, as I recovered my senses, I realized the driver had placed my luggage outside the taxi and was standing holding the passenger door open, not, I hasten to add, in any spirit of flunkeydom but merely to expedite my exit.

  Still half asleep, I staggered out, he slammed the door, climbed into the driver's seat, slammed that door also and roared off into the night without so much as a Leb 'wohl!

  It was snowing gently. I strained my eyes to pierce the curtain of flakes. All I could make out in vague outline was rank upon rank of tall fir trees.

  The bastard had dropped me off in the middle of a forest!

  Alarmed, I span round. And with infinite relief my eyes, now adjusting to the darkness, this time made out the solid-faced and sharp angles of a building. I let my gaze run to the left and couldn't find its limit. To the right the same. I leaned backwards to look up and through the floating veils of snowflakes I glimpsed turrets and battlements.

  Fichtenburg!

  'Oh my God!' I said out loud.

  My school German has almost vanished, but I seemed to recollect that Fichten meant pine trees and I was certain Burg meant castle.

  I had assumed this was just some fancy name Linda's chums had given to their holiday chalet. I should have known better.

  Fichtenburg was exactly what its name stated - a castle among the pines!

  And, what was worse, apparently a deserted castle.

  Feeling like Childe Roland when he finally made it to the Dark Tower and started to wonder if it had been such a great idea after all, I advanced towards what looked like the building's main door. Constructed of heavy oak planks bound together with massy plates of iron, it had clearly been designed by a man who didn't care to have his relatives dropping by unexpectedly.

  A bolus of metal attached to a chain hung from one of the granite doorposts. I seized it and pulled. After a while, somewhere so distant it might have been in another world, a bell rang.

  In a Gothic novel, or a Goon Show script, the next sound effect would have been a slow shuffle of dreadful feet growing louder as they approached.

  I was almost glad when my straining ears detected nothing.

  Almost, for now the possibility that there'd been some misunderstanding and I wasn't expected and there was no one here to greet me began to loom frighteningly large. My knowledge of Switzerland derives largely from early nineteenth-century literature in which it figures as a confusion of towering mountains, huge glaciers and snowy wastes. Since the airport, I had seen little to correct that impression. Even when I turned my back on imagination and applied to common sense, the answer I got was scarcely more reassuring. People who built castles rarely did so within striking distance of neighbours to whom they could apply for the loan of a barrel of boiling oil if ever they ran short.

  The alternative to trudging off into the snow in search of help was to break in.

  Now with your average suburban house, this (my acquaintance at the Syke assured me) normally involves little more than putting your elbow through a pane of glass and unlatching a downstairs window.

  Your average castle, however, is a horse of a different colour. For a start, and indeed for a finish, the only windows I could see through the drifting snow were well out of my elbow's reach and protected by bars.

  It would be easier to break into Chapel Syke!

  My one remaining hope was that in a building of this size, there might be a servants' quarter round the back, full of life and warmth, with a TV set playing so loud that the doorbell went unnoticed. Such hopeful fantasies crowd thick upon a desperate man. In any case, any movement seemed preferable to standing here and freezing to death.

  I set off along the front and then down the side of the castle, following the twists and turns of its coigns and embrasures, till I had no idea whether I was still at the front or the side or the back! The snow had stopped falling and slowly the cloud was beginning to break up, allowing occasional glimpses of a nearly full moon. But its beams brought little comfort, showing the solid unwelcoming stonework broken only by barred and darkened windows.

  In despair, I turned my back on the castle and strained my eyes outwards into the crowding forest.

  Was it rescue? Was it an evil delusion? For a second, I was sure I saw a distant light! Then it was gone. But welcome or will-o'-the-wisp, it was all I had and I rushed in the direction I'd seen it, even though it meant leaving the guiding wall of the castle behind me and heading into the forest, all the while slipping and floundering in deep folds of snow, and shouting, 'Help! Help!' then, recalling where I was, 'Zur Hilfe! Zur Hilfe!'

  Finally and inevitably, I fell flat on my face in a drift. When I pushed myself upright and looked around me (the breaking of the clouds giving me the full benefit of the moon at that moment), I saw that I was in a clearing in which stood a building. For a second I had hope that this might be the source of the light I had seen, but as I moved nearer, I saw that it was a ruined chapel. Strange how powerful the human imagination can be, isn't it? You'd think that sheer physical fright at the prospect of dying from exposure in this cold and inhospitable terrain would have left little room for any more metaphysical fear. But as I examined that place, all my awareness of mere bodily discomfort and peril was subsumed in superstitious terror! It wasn't just the post-Romantic knee-jerk reaction to a Gothic ruin in a wild and remote setting. No, what really broke
me out in a sweat despite the temperature was what I saw painted on the chapel's internal walls. The plaster had fallen completely in many areas and where it remained it was cracked and flaking, but I had no doubt what it was the artist had depicted there.

  It was the Dance of Death.

  A grisly enough subject, you are probably thinking, and not one a chap in young Fran's situation would wish to dwell upon, but why should it affect him so strongly?

  The answer is this. In Beddoes' Jest-Book, that most terrifying scene in which the Duke, hoping to raise his wife from the dead instead resurrects the murdered Wolfram, is set before a ruined Gothic church on whose cloister wall is depicted the Dance of Death. My quest for Beddoes had brought me to this place, and now he seemed to be saying in that typically sardonic way of his, ‘‘ you want to see me plain, this way lies your route!

  I know it sounds silly. After all, unlike the Duke, I have no murdered rival whose resurrection I need fear, have I?

  And in any case my God-given reason tells me, as it told Beddoes, there are no ghosts to raise, Out of death lead no ways. Oh, that there were! How I would labour to raise dear Sam. But what horror if instead of Sam I found myself confronted by ... some less welcome revenu!

  What nonsense this seems in broad daylight.

  But there in the dark forest close by the ruined chapel, I have to admit, Mr Pascoe, that both innocence and rationality failed me and I closed my eyes and said a prayer.

  When I opened them, I saw that some god had heard me, but whether in the Christian heaven or some darker colder Nordic place, I wasn't yet ready to say. The light I had seen before showed itself again, much nearer this time, and approaching! I could see it intermittently among the trees, moving with a serpentine motion, now visible, now masked by the long straight trunks of the pines, a circle of brightness growing larger as it neared, putting me in mind of that shining sphere which marks the arrival of Glenda in The Wizard of Oz.