D&P20 - Death's Jest-Book

by Reginald Hill

  It was a happy comparison, for as - guided I presume by my almost hysterical shouting - it emerged from the forest into the clearing, I saw that it was the headlight on one of those snow buggies, and though the goggled and furred creature that bestrode it was sexless to the eye, I knew she was my Good Fairy when she spoke and said, 'Herr Roote? Willkommen in Fichtenburg.'

  This, God bless her, was Frau Buff, the housekeeper, a woman it emerged of few words, and all of those German, but one whose good sense and ratiocinative powers make you understand why the Swiss lead the world in the manufacture of timepieces.

  Mind you, it did occur to me as she indicated I should climb up behind her (she'd already found my luggage at the castle entrance) and we set off along a winding track through the dark pine trees, to wonder if she might not be a good fairy after all but the Snow Queen, and I, like little Kay, was being abducted to her ice palace at the North Pole.

  No ice palace this, I'm glad to say, but a warm and comfortable and roomy cabin with all mod cons! This was the chalet Linda had referred to, belonging to the castle and used, I presume, to accommodate visitors like myself who for whatever reason were best kept separate from the beau monde in the big house. Frau Buff had been waiting for me here. When I didn't arrive at the expected time she'd made enquiries and discovered my plane was delayed. When I still hadn't appeared by the revised expected time, she contacted the taxi company and was told their driver had reported dropping his passenger at the castle some minutes earlier. She, deducing that the Dummkopf had dumped me at the wrong place, had come looking for me.

  All this I pieced together with my slowly resurrecting schoolboy German and her sparing replies.

  She was, God bless her, much more interested in feeding me than conversing with me. Fortunately, what she'd been preparing was one of those all-inclusive casserole dishes which, unlike airline food, only gets better the longer it stays in the oven.

  Once she saw me tucking in, she indicated apologetically that she was leaving me to my own devices. I tried to say that it was me who should apologize for taking up so much of her free time, and I must have got my message across because as she furred herself up preparatory to stepping out into the cold night, she seemed to my slowly adjusting ear to say it wasn't her own pleasure which was taking her away but getting rooms ready in the castle for Frau Lupin.

  Thinking I'd got her wrong, I said in my fractured German, 'But Frau Lupin isn't coming till next week.'

  And as she went out of the door she tossed something over her shoulder which froze my forkload of delicious stew in mid-air.

  'Nicht Frau sondern Frd'ulein Lupin. Ihre Tochter.'

  Not Mrs but Miss Lupin. Her daughter.

  Perhaps I had misheard!

  I broke the spell and rushed out after Frau Buff. She was already on the snow buggy.

  'Fraulein Lupin,' I cried to her. 'Wann kommt sie?'

  'Morgen’ she called. 'Urn Schnittschuhlaufen!'

  That baffled me. What in the name of hell was Schnittschuhlaufen?

  'Was ist das?' I shouted as she started up and began to move away.

  She pointed away from the chalet with her right hand.

  'Auf dem See!' she tossed over her shoulder. Then she was gone.

  On the sea? I stood there baffled. Then for the first time I noticed the snow had stopped, the clouds were breaking up and going about their business, leaving the sky to a scatter of diamond dust such as those of us in city pent never see, and a slice of moon hung there, bright enough to light up before me a level meadow almost perfectly round.

  Except it wasn't a meadow! It was a small lake. Idiot! This must be the Blutensee which Fichtenburg was am, frozen over and besprinkled with snow. (See only means 'sea' when it's feminine; I once got my knuckles rapped for forgetting that!)

  Skating. Schnittschuhlaufen was skating. Emerald was coming here in the morning for the skating!

  Now my ever-optimistic mind was racing. Was this coincidence, I asked myself, or was it planned? Could Emerald have learned her mother's plans for me and decided to cut in? Or was I being absurdly arrogant to even imagine that it might be so?

  These things distracted me so much that on my return inside I hardly noticed the delights of Frau Buff's casserole or the smoothness of the bottle of excellent burgundy I had chosen from a well-stocked wine rack. And I have even postponed the plateful of scrumptious-looking Sahnetorte the good woman has left for pudding so that once more I can write to you, my friend, my spiritual father, to clear my mind and remind me that in the midst of no matter what fiery -turbulence of spirit I can always find a small circle of coolness and calm, like the lake outside my window, to bring me peace.

  Well, it's worked. Now I feel ready to face the future - and to enjoy my Sahnetorte.

  Thank you.

  Franny

  In England on the whole even criminals celebrate Christmas, but rest for the wicked does not automatically mean rest for the law's guardians also. The crimes of greed which are proper to Advent may fade to nothing on the day itself, but they are more than compensated for by those crimes of new rage and old resentment which spring naturally from the close confinement, with large supplies of alcohol, of blood relations who have had the good sense to keep far apart for the previous three hundred and sixty-four days.

  So as Pascoe hastened home on Christmas Eve, bearing with him gifts for Rosie which several of his generous colleagues had placed on his desk, he also bore the fear that the two days off he had won after much hard wheeling and dealing could be interrupted by a phone call saying, Sorry, but there's so much domestic mayhem going on we can't cope, and could you come in and give us a hand, please?

  Or, if it were Dalziel calling, scrub the question mark and the please.

  As he put his key into his front door lock, he looked at the brass lion's-head knocker which Ellie had 'rescued' from a derelict farmhouse up on Greendale Moor and waited to see if it would turn into the Fat Man's face. .

  No change, so maybe he was going to be spared a haunting.

  But when he went in and saw on the hall table where Ellie left his personal mail an envelope with a Swiss stamp on and the address written in what was becoming a familiar hand, he felt he'd relaxed too soon.

  He would have thrown it in the fire except that Ellie would have known, and he'd resolved to try and keep to himself just how much these letters bothered him.

  But he did manage to ignore it till he'd embraced his wife, thrown his daughter into the air, persuaded her fiercely protective dog, Tig, that this was not a form of personal assault, got into his comfortable, back-flattened, dog-chewed slippers, which he did not doubt would be replaced tomorrow by a new stiff pair which he and Tig would have to start working on immediately, and taken a long pull at a long gin-and tonic.

  'See you got some more Fran-mail,' said Ellie.

  'I noticed. So what's it say?'

  'How should I know?'

  'You mean you haven't steamed it open?'

  'If I were that keen to read it I would rip it open,' said Ellie. 'But I don't deny I'm mildly interested to see how he's getting on hobnobbing with the idle rich.'

  'It's their nobs that are likely to get hobbed,' said Pascoe.

  He opened the envelope, scanned through the letter then tossed it across to his wife.

  She read it more slowly, then turned back to the beginning and started again.

  'Hell's bells,' he said. 'It's not Jane Austen.'

  'Oh, I don't know. Hero and heroine meet, exchange yearning glances, part perhaps for ever, then by a strange turn of fate are thrown together in a remote Gothic setting. Not a million miles from Northanger Abbey,' said Ellie.

  'When Roote's involved, there's a good chance the Gothic stuff will turn out to be really supernatural’ said Pascoe.

  'No. He's a realist at heart. An explanation for everything. Except that thing about having a vision of you. Very odd. I mean, the Virgin Mary's one thing, but you!'

  'You won't laugh when I'
m a cult,' said Pascoe negligently.

  He hadn't told Ellie about his own vision of Roote by St Margaret's Church at the same time the man was allegedly seeing him. One thing being a policeman taught you was that the world was awash with coincidences. In fact it often seemed to him when critics moaned about a book relying too much on them that usually the false note was struck by writers refusing to admit just how large a part they did play in our day-today existence.

  So he persuaded himself he had a rational argument for saying nothing. But he found himself childishly eager to have her approve his reaction to the letters in some degree.

  'You've got to see he's taking the piss’ he urged.

  'Have I? So what precisely do you think he's mocking you about?'

  'You see the way he compares the Duke's desire to raise his dead wife with his own longing to resurrect Sam Johnson? Instead, the Duke gets this rival he's murdered. And I ask myself, where do I find a dead rival of Roote's? All over the place, that's where! Albacore for a start. Then there's that student in Sheffield, Jake Frobisher, the one who overdosed himself trying to catch up on his work, the one whose death was responsible for Johnson's sudden move to Mid-Yorkshire Uni.'

  'The one whose death you had Wieldy double-check with no result? Come on! At the very worst Franny might be gently mocking your obsession with dragging him into your investigations, but I defy you to point to anything that even a fully paid-up paranoid like yourself can take as positively,threatening.'

  'What about the bit about envying my domestic bliss?' said Pascoe stubbornly.

  She checked it out, looked up at her husband and sadly shook her head.

  'He tells you you're lucky to have such a lovely wife and delightful daughter, and you think that's a threat? Come on!'

  'Well, how about all that crap about me providing him with a circle of peace and calm. You've got to admit that's just a bit weird’ said Pascoe, annoyed that he'd let himself be drawn into an argument about the letter in spite of all his resolutions.

  'Maybe. But you've been elected his guru, his spiritual father, remember? You can't blame an orphan boy with growing pains for turning to his wise old spiritual daddy!'

  This might have provoked an outburst most unfitting for the eve of this great family festival had not Rosie come into the room at that moment, yawning widely and demanding to know if it wasn't past her bedtime. This being akin to the Prince of Darkness suddenly expressing a desire to close down Hell and open a care home, her parents burst into sadly unsympathetic laughter and then had to repair the damage done to her tender sensibilities.

  There is a story somewhere of a man in his last night in the condemned cell trying to pretend he is a child waiting for Christmas in order to turn his baring hours into those tortoise-paced minutes of childhood. Fast or slow, good or bad, all things come in the end, and the following morning it took only a paler shade of blackness in the eastern sky to have Rosie bursting into the parental bedroom demanding to know if they intended lying there all day.

  After that things proceeded more or less according to her timetable, with Pascoe made to feel that his insistence on having coffee and toast before starting to open the presents was a manifest offence against the European Declaration on Human Rights.

  The pile of parcels beneath the tree was large, not because the Pascoes were over-indulgent parents, but because their daughter had a strong sense of equity and insisted that everyone else should have as many parcels to unwrap as she did, including the dog.

  Her unselfish delight in watching her mother and father in receipt of their gifts more than compensated for the strain on Pascoe's dramatic abilities as he declared with rapture that a pair of electric blue cotton socks was all he needed to make his life complete.

  Of course others of his gifts were more luxurious and’ or more interesting.

  'Let me guess,' he said to Ellie, hefting a book-shaped parcel. 'You've bought me a Bible? No, it's too light. The Wit and Wisdom of Prince Charles? No, too heavy. Or is it that intellectual treat I've been after for ages: The Pirelli Calendar: the Glory Years?'

  'Don't get your hopes up,' said Ellie.

  He ripped off the wrapping paper and found himself looking at a book with a jet black jacket design broken only by a small high window of white which bore the title Dark Cells by Amaryllis Haseen.

  ‘I saw it in that remainder shop in Market Street,' said Ellie. 'And I thought, if you're going to be hung up on Roote, you might as well read what the experts have got to say.'

  'Well, thank you kindly’ said Pascoe, uncertain how he felt about it. Then he caught Rosie's gaze upon him and was reminded. That's absolutely marvellous. I've been looking for a copy everywhere, how clever of you to find one, and so heavily discounted at that.'

  Satisfied, Rosie turned her attention to Tig whose pleasure at his prezzies, as long as they were instantly edible, was genuine and unconfined.

  Finally the ceremony was over. Rosie now had the difficult task of deciding which of her many gifts to concentrate on first. Her pecking order, which Ellie was glad to see had nothing to do with expense, placed equal top a trace-your-ancestors genealogy kit and a silent dog whistle which the instructions assured her would provide instant control of her pet over distances up to half a mile. Finally, because as she said it was Christmas for Tig too, and ignoring the disincentive of a biting east wind, she opted for the whistle and took the dog out into the garden to change its life. Ellie went upstairs to ring her mother who was coming to them tomorrow but insisted on spending Christmas Day itself with her Alzheimer-stricken husband in his nursing home. To her daughter's proposal that they would all make the two-hour drive to join her there on Christmas afternoon, Mrs Soper had replied briskly, 'Don't be silly, dear. I know you feel guilty, but you really mustn't let your guilt spoil things for others. It's a bad habit I hoped you'd got out of.'

  When Ellie had protested, her mother had reminded her of a ruined Christmas Day when, aged twelve, Ellie had decided she was going to send all her presents plus her Christmas dinner to Oxfam. That was only one of many times,' she'd concluded.

  'Your father's right out of it now. It's my place to be with him on Christmas Day. It's yours to be at home.'

  Good for her! Pascoe had applauded internally. But he had tried not to let it show.

  Now seated alone with another mug of coffee, he glanced at his watch, groaned to see that though his body-clock told him it must be dinner-time, its hands told him it was still only nine forty-five, then reached out and picked up Dark Cells.

  He skipped through the introduction in which the author assured him that this was a serious in-depth analysis of the relationship between penological theory and the practicalities of incarceration, a claim somewhat at odds with that made on the jacket sleeve where he was invited to be titillated by a riveting account of evil unmasked and a disturbing analysis of the failure of our prison system to contain it. Do not read this book unless you feel strong enough to meet some of the worst men in our society. Be prepared to be shocked, to be scandalized, to be terrified!

  A perfect antidote to Christmas, he thought. He went out to the hall and from a shelf in the cupboard under the stairs he took his private Roote file. Dalziel's gaze had noted it on his office desk, and doubtless noted too the drawer into which he'd slipped it. The drawer had a sturdy lock as did the office door, but Pascoe would not have bet sixpence against the Fat Man breaking through. So that same day he had brought the file home.

  He sat down again and from the file he took Roote's first letter and glanced through it. Here it was . .. I am Prisoner XR pp193-207...

  He picked up Dark Cells and turned to page 193, where sure enough the author began her case history of Prisoner XR.

  After giving details of crime and sentence, Ms Haseen got straight down to her sessions with Roote.

  His recorded responses during the investigation, the psychological assessment prepared in concurrence with his trial, and the whole raft of subsequent and consequent repo
rts I had read of his reactions and behaviour since sentence all contained significant indices that here was a highly intelligent man sufficiently in control of himself to use that intelligence to make his stay in prison as comfortable and as short as possible, and, though I am very aware of the need to proceed with great caution in matters of analysis, in his case I felt within a few minutes of our first meeting fairly sanguine that the proposed course of analysis would affirm the accuracy of those advance impressions.

  God, this was turgid stuff! No wonder the book had been remaindered!

  From the start he was keen to demonstrate, and to underline in case I missed the point, that he was accepting these sessions absolutely on my terms. Unlike many of the others (see Prisoner JJ pp!04ff and Prisoner PR pp!84 ff) he never showed any overt sexual awareness of me, nor when my investigation touched on matters pertaining to his sexuality did he see this as an opportunity to indulge in self-titillating sex talk (see Prisoners AH and BC pp209 ff). Yet despite this strict propriety, I often felt the atmosphere between us was highly charged, sexually speaking.

  You can bet your sweet ass it was! thought Pascoe.

  This fitted in very well with my developing judgment that Prisoner XR was going to be a difficult case to put under the magnifying glass of detailed analysis.

  He was dearly determined to provide me with no insight into his psyche that might be at odds with what he saw as the only truly important objects of our sessions viz. his rapid transfer from Chapel Syke to an open prison, and subsequently his early parole.

  She may be a lousy writer, old Amaryllis, thought Pascoe, but at least she got that right. Let's see if she managed to get under his guard at all. Though, remembering that it was Roote himself who'd drawn his attention to her book, it didn't seem likely.