Death Comes for the Fat Man (28 page)

“Peter, what’s going on?” he demanded. “Paddy Ireland says you think someone might be trying to kill Hector. Why in the name of God should anyone want to do that?”

Paddy’s told him what I think, thought Pascoe. But he wants to make me say it myself, and then he can bollock me for not ringing him straightaway.

Trimble listened without comment till Pascoe concluded, “I think that Hector’s accident wasn’t an accident, but someone deliberately ran him down for fear he might be able to identify the man he saw in the video shop on Mill Street. And I think the same man came here today to try and have a second bite at the cherry.”

Now the Chief spoke.

“I thought I made it clear that I was to be kept apprised of anything that could have a connection with the Mill Street explosion,” he said coldly.

“Yes, sir. And I was going to ring you just as soon as I got things sorted on the ground here. When an officer’s at risk, practicalities come before protocol, that’s what Mr. Dalziel always says.”

In fact, he couldn’t recall Fat Andy ever saying any such thing, but if he hadn’t, it was only because it was too sodding obvious to need saying.

It certainly gave Trimble pause.

“Right, then. Let’s hear about these practicalities.”

Pascoe fi lled him in on what he’d done, concluding, “I did a quick check with the ward staff. A couple of them recall seeing the man d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 209

around the ward earlier, and one of them spotted him sitting in the dayroom reading a paper, about an hour ago.”

“I haven’t had much truck with hired assassins. Is that normal behavior?” interrupted Trimble.

“He’s not going to go around with a homburg pulled down over his eyes, carrying a violin case,” said Pascoe with some irritation.

“Mr. Mills, that’s Hector’s roommate, recalls the door to their room being opened earlier this morning. Someone looked in—he didn’t see who it was—then went away. I think it was Youngman. When he realized that Hector had someone else in the same room, he went and waited quietly in the dayroom till he saw Mr. Mills come in. Then he headed back to the ward, only to find myself and Rosie arriving to visit Hector at the same time. He probably kept an eye on things till he saw Mr. Mills return and realized that this wasn’t really his day. Like I said, I’ve got Security looking for him, but I reckon he’s gone. But he could come back.”

If he’d had to give a rating to his report, it would have been Beta minus at best. He’d started with a heavy handicap. In Mid-Yorkshire anything with Hector at its center needed a supporting affi davit from the angel Gabriel. And he couldn’t blame the Chief for looking shell-shocked when he heard about the constable’s vision, nor for his uncon-trollable twitch when the charioteer sketch was produced as supporting evidence.

But Trimble was a man who liked to give his offi cers leeway. Anyone with Andy Dalziel under his command soon learned that the likely alternative was to find yourself high and dry on a sandbank.

He said, “All right. Leave someone on watch here. I don’t suppose you’ve had time to contact Superintendent Glenister yet, though of course you were going to ring her immediately after you rang me?”

“That’s right, sir,” said Pascoe.

“Good. Well, just as Mr. Ireland saved you the trouble of contacting me, I’ll extend the same courtesy with regard to CAT.”

Meaning you don’t trust me to do anything about it for the next couple of hours, thought Pascoe.

But Trimble was wrong. Locally Pascoe knew all the shortcuts and short circuits. He’d been well taught. Getting after Youngman outside 210 r e g i n a l d h i l l

Mid-Yorkshire, where he guessed the search would have to begin, was another matter. Dalziel might have been able to manage it. He had strings to pull whose far ends were tied to some very strange places.

But for Pascoe that kind of network was still being woven.

In any case the quickest way to show CAT you didn’t trust them was to act like you didn’t trust them, and he wanted a far better hand before he made that play.

“Peter!”

He turned to see Ellie coming toward him with Rosie.

He’d got one of the nurses to look after her. He’d suggested taking her to the hospital crèche at first but this had evoked such a furious response that he’d changed it to the canteen and offered as placation a tenner for refreshment.

Then he’d rung Ellie, said there was a bit of an emergency, and asked if she could come and pick the girl up.

Ellie as always had responded to the word
emergency
without question.

But now she was here, she expected to hear what was going on.

Her response echoed Trimble’s.

“Someone wants to kill Hector?” she said incredulously. “But why?”

She listened to his theory with the kind of expression Galileo probably saw on the face of his Chief Inquisitor.

“Pete, for heaven’s sake, this is Quentin Tarantino stuff. I mean . . .

Hector
!”

“All right,” he said testily. “One way to check is, I’ll cancel the guard on Hector’s room and if he gets killed, then I was right!”

“Now you’re being silly.”

He glowered at her, then turned his attention to his daughter, intending to short-circuit the discussion before it became a row by asking for his change. How much refreshment could a girl ingest in forty minutes?

She regarded him with her mother’s wide-eyed candor, then before he could speak said, “I think Dad’s right. I didn’t like that man.”

“You didn’t?” said Pascoe delighted at this unexpected support.

“Why was that?”

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 211

“Well, he smiled as he held the door open but I could tell he was really pissed off,” said Rosie. “I mean, a lot more pissed off than you’d be just because someone you’d come to visit wasn’t in his bed.”

Do I reprimand her for saying
pissed off
—twice!—or let it go because she’s said it in support of my case? Pascoe asked himself.

Ellie had no doubt.

“Come on, my girl,” she said grimly. “We’ll get you home and on the way we’ll have a little heart-to-heart about your special relationship with the language of Shakespeare. Any idea how long you’ll be, Peter?”

Truce offered and accepted. “Not long,” he promised. They kissed.

Defi nitely accepted.

She said softly, “Just in case you’re right, which I don’t admit, take care.”

He watched them go. She was right. If he was right, he should perhaps take care.

And of course the people he should take most care of weren’t lying in a hospital bed but walking away from him.

At the door Ellie turned and called, “I forgot to ask. How’s Andy?”

Pascoe looked at his daughter who smiled at him complicitly.

He said, “No change there. Either.”

14

T H E TA N G L E O ’ T H E I S L E S

Andy Dalziel is on his way to Mairi’s wedding.

Step we gaily on we go

Heel for heel and toe for toe

Proud to be a Yorkshireman, proud of all that his lovely Yorkshire mam had brought to his being, proud to belt out “
On Ilkla Moor baht

’at”
with the best of them, it has always been the music from his father’s side of the family that plucked at his heart strings and squeezed the tear out of his eye.

Arm in arm and row on row

All for Mairi’s wedding

Who he is arm in arm with he is not certain, nor indeed whether in any strict sense the arms in question are arms at all, but the feelings of joy and lightness which the song inspires are real enough, and he’s never been a man to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Unless of course it’s donated by Greeks. Or Lancastrians.

Over hill ways up and down

Myrtle green and bracken brown . . .

No real hills of course. No greens or browns. Just effortlessly fl oating on a highway of music as he recalled doing years ago, squashed in a corner of some tiny bothy with his Scottish cousins when big Uncle Hamish got his fi ddle out.

Plenty herring plenty meal

Plenty peat tae fill her creel

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 213

Peat. The sweet smoky reek of it. And better still when it’s coming off the surface of a golden pool set in a crystal tumbler . . .

Plenty bonny bairns as weel . . .

Now young Rosie Pascoe was a bonnie bairn and she’d grown into a bonnie lass and would, if God was kind, which so far he’d not been given any reason to doubt, turn out a stunning woman. And what was more important a kind and caring one.

Cheeks as bright as rowans are . . .

He’d always been able to depend on the kindness of women. Even his wife had been kind . . . in her way . . . Some women before they left cut up their husbands’ suits or poured their twenty-year-old single malts down the bog and substituted vinegar. His had left a note . . .

Your dinner’s in the oven on the low burner
. . . He’d gone to the kitchen and opened the oven.

There it was, gently crisping.

A plate of ham salad.

It still makes him laugh all these years on.

Women, women . . . perhaps it is their arms that he feels in his now

. . . all those kind women . . .

And one above all…

The last? Who can say that?

But a star . . . more than a star . . .

Brighter far than any star

Fairest of them all by far . . .

Cap. Ms. Amanda Marvell. Mrs. the Hon. Rupert Pitt-Evenlode.

Call her what you will. The sense of her presence sends him soaring even higher than the music.

Over hill-ways up and down

Myrtle green and bracken brown

Past the shieling through the town

All for the sake of . . .

Cap.

214 r e g i n a l d h i l l

The music dies away but still he fl oats.

But what’s this? The pace slackens to a crawl, the mood changes.

Oh no!

“The Flower of Scotland.”

Dear God! What a doleful dirge. He has always been persuaded that the only thing keeping Scottish rugby from World Cup glory is their pre-match anthem. How can those fine young men be expected to march forward to fight the auld enemy with this turgid tune clog-ging their feet? It makes “God Save the Queen” sound like a cavalry charge!

But at last it drags its weary weight to a close.

And now thank God he’s out of the mire again and soaring high once more as the pipes and drums explode into the song which is his signature tune at the Police Christmas Party.

Sure by Tummel and Loch Rannock and Lochaber I will go By heather tracks wi’ heaven in their wiles If it’s thinking’ in your inner hairt the braggart’s in my step, You’ve never smelt the tangle o’ the Isles.

Here’s the truth of it. Though his feet have always been fi rmly planted in the rich earth of his native Yorkshire and on the hard pave-ments of its great cities, the heart is forever Highland.

And when a man is hovering between this world and the next, it takes a music as seductive as that of the far Cuillins to pull him away, though whether its call is to heaven or to earth Andy Dalziel as yet cannot and indeed does not care to know.

15

A S H O T I N T H E D A R K

As far as Peter Pascoe was concerned, you could take heather tracks and stick them up your reeking lum.

There was heather beneath his feet now and he was being bitten to death. OK, Scotland didn’t begin officially for another dozen miles but nobody had bothered to tell this to the midges that were assailing his face with a Caledonian ferocity. Perhaps their native reiv-ing instincts had been alerted by the rancid smell of the CAT camoufl age makeup that Glenister had insisted he smear on his cheekbones and brow.

It was her suggestion too that he should wear a flak jacket. No,
suggestion
was the wrong word. The jacket had been a sine qua non of his inclusion in the raid.

Pascoe was confident that both jacket and camouflage were unnecessary.

If, as he suspected, the Templars had a mole in CAT, then the chances of John T. Youngman being inside the small white cottage the CAT hit squad was presently surrounding were nil.

Glenister was full of bounce, in strong contrast to her rather weary and harassed demeanor the last time he’d seen her at the Lubyanka.

The prospect of crawling around in the dark in pursuit of a dangerous suspect seemed to have perked her up. Pascoe had seen plenty of male officers turned on by the prospect of physical danger, but never a woman.

Perhaps he ought to get out more.

Though if this was what getting out entailed, perhaps not.

The reaction to Trimble’s phone call had been swift.

First Freeman had turned up at the hospital.

216 r e g i n a l d h i l l

In reply to Pascoe’s, “You must have been close,” he had given that irritating enigmatic smile. Then he’d asked a few questions, very sharp and pertinent Pascoe had to admit, before interviewing Hector. What he got out of that he didn’t reveal. Finally he had approved all the measures Pascoe had taken and vanished with the charioteer sketch.

At no point had he hinted a doubt of Pascoe’s interpretation of events.

Despite this, even with every possible precaution in place, an irrational fear that the moment he left, orders would be given countermanding all he’d done made it hard for Pascoe to leave. It took an anxious, irritated phone call from Ellie wondering if he was the only police offi cer on call that weekend to give him the impetus to head for home.

Ellie did her best to make the evening as normal as possible and Pascoe did his best to respond. He tried to conceal his restlessness, but he knew he wasn’t being very successful and it was a relief when about eight o’clock, the phone rang. Somehow they both knew it was to do with the case.

Ellie answered it.

“I’ll get him,” she said.

Handing the phone to Pascoe she said, “Ms. Sinister,” loudly enough to be heard at the far end of the line.

“You’ve been at it again, laddie. Go on like this and you’ll put us all out of work.”