Death Comes for the Fat Man (38 page)

She didn’t answer and he said, “Look, Ffion, I know you’re pissed off with me, but I really did think they’d be turning you loose on Sunday. And I’m doing everything in my power to get you out of here, all right?”

Coming from a man who had next to no power, it wasn’t absolutely a lie.

She shrugged and said, “If you say so.”

“Well, I am, I promise you. So Youngman rang you on the train . . . ?”

“That’s right.”

“Was that the first time you’d spoken to him that day?”

“No. I’d rung him earlier in the journey just to confirm the arrangements. It’s best when you’re dealing with writers and the media to double-check everything all the time.”

“So before you rang Youngman, you’d already checked with the
Fidler’s Three
producer just to make sure everything was going ahead as planned?”

“Yes.”

“
Fidler’s Three
doesn’t advertise ahead who’s going to be on, does it?”

“No. That’s part of the gimmick,” she said. “Clever really. They don’t use big names with a lot of pulling power, see, so Joe makes
not
knowing
the hook.”

“How about the people he invites on the show? And the people he passes the invite through, like you? Do they know in advance who the other guests are?”

“No. That’s part of the deal too.”

“So you didn’t know that Kalim Sarhadi was going to be on?”

She hesitated and leaned forward. This time when she caught the involuntary flicker of his gaze to her breasts, she drew the robe more tightly around her.

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 285

“Not before Friday,” she said.

“Meaning the producer told you when you spoke to him from the train?”

“That’s right. I asked him straight out who the other two were.”

“Any reason.”

“Not really. It’s not like Jerry Springer or something. They don’t dig up ex-wives or bastard kids just to embarrass people.”

“But they do like to get some kind of connection going, right? Like in this case, the Middle East and terrorism. Which was how you were able to sell them Ellie when Youngman pulled out, right?”

He hadn’t meant to get personal. Perhaps he was just trying to work up a bit of uxorial indignation to compensate for the stirrings of lust caused by his glimpses of that lithe brown body.

She grinned and let the robe relax once more.

“Look, Ellie and I talked about it after. OK, she was pissed, but I told her, wait till you see next month’s sales figures. Her book got more hype from Friday night than we could have bought with a publicity budget twenty times as large as hers.”

“I don’t doubt it,” said Pascoe dryly. “Twenty times a fi ver doesn’t get you much these days. So when you rang Youngman, naturally you’d mention to him who else was going to be on the panel.”

“Yes, I think I did.”

He cocked his head and raised his left eyebrow quizzically, a trick it had taken many hours in front of his shaving mirror to master.

“All right, of course I did. I’m there for my writers, that’s what I get paid for.”

You were certainly there for Youngman, thought Pascoe.

She glared at him defiantly, as if she’d caught the thought, and he said quickly, “Before he told you he was going off to visit this alleged sick relative on Sunday, had there been any indication that he might be planning to leave?”

“Like what?”

“Like say a phone call which he might have claimed was from the hospital?”

She thought, then said, “No.”

“Or did he ring anyone?”

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

“Not that morning,” she said. “His phone did ring the previous evening while we were . . . busy. One of those rings like it does when you get a text. He checked it after . . . we’d finished. Then he went off with it into the bathroom and I think I heard him talking in there, so likely he’d rung someone.”

“Did he seem agitated at all when he came out. As if he’d had bad news.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Just the same as when he’d left the room. Or not quite the same. Unlike most men I know, he had a very quick recovery time.”

“Sounds as if he needed it,” said Pascoe dryly.

He immediately regretted the gibe. A flush spread across her face, then she stood up abruptly with her cup in her hand and turned toward the stove. As she moved forward her bare foot caught against the table leg and she stubbed her toe. She cried out, letting the cup fall to the floor where it shattered against the hard yellow tiles. Her other foot came down on one of the shards, which dug into her instep. Now she shrieked in pain and fell back across the table. Pascoe jumped up, started to pull her upright. Her robe had opened wide and the full length of her naked brown body was pressing against him when the door opened and Rod and Dolly came rushing in.

In such circumstances explanation is usually vain and often counter-productive. Better to let the situation speak for itself to the disinterested ear. But Pascoe heard himself babbling defensively, “She was going to get more coffee and she dropped her cup, I think she may have cut herself.” Ffion wasn’t helping matters. Sensing his embarrassment, she was treating this as payback time, pressing ever closer and looking up into his face with moist, parted lips.

Dolly regarded him with a neutral stare worse than accusation and said, “Best if you sat her down till I get this lot swept up.”

Pascoe was only too pleased to oblige. He resettled her onto the kitchen chair, pulling the robe shut over her body.

“Thank you, Ffion,” he said stiffly. “Hope you get out of here soon.”

She said, “Give my regards to Ellie.”

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 287

Outside he looked at Rod and said, “Don’t say a word.”

“What word would that be, Peter?” said the young man, grinning.

“And is that the entertainment over for the day or are we going on somewhere?”

“Oh yes,” said Pascoe, recovering a little. “The fun is just beginning.”

8

T O T H E C A S T L E

An hour and a half later they were approaching the village of Hathersage.

With anyone else driving it might have been just an hour later but Rod seemed to think there was an eleventh commandment which read,
thou shalt not overtake without a clear mile of empty road
ahead,
and all speed limits were meticulously observed with a good 2

percent safety margin.

“Do a lot of driving, do you, Rod?” Pascoe had inquired after a while.

“Not since the big pileup,” said the young man tremulously.

Jesus Christ! thought Pascoe in alarm. Then he saw Rod was grinning and realized he was being sent up.

“I know everyone says I’m a bit slow,” said Rod. “But when I got recruited into the firm, I got told that sometimes getting a job done might mean having to break the law, but if I started breaking laws for personal convenience, then I was no good to anybody. Sticking to the Highway Code seems a good way to keep that in mind.”

Pascoe digested this, then said, “Lukasz Komorowski?”

“That’s right. How did you guess?”

“I heard he recruited you. And it sounds like the kind of thing he might say.”

“Yeah, I was really lucky, not just with catching his eye but because that’s more or less the way he was recruited too. I think it pleased him to be offering someone else the chance that he got.”

I was right, thought Pascoe. Despite Freeman’s objection to the word, it really was romantic.

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 289

“Wasn’t there a Komorowski something to do with the Warsaw uprising?” he said.

“General Tadeusz, C in C of the Polish Home Army,” replied Rod promptly. “Lukasz’s dad was a half cousin. There were a lot of reprisals against the family. Lukasz is surprisingly unbitter. He says war does things to people, so the trick is to avoid war.”

“Seems a nice guy,” said Pascoe.

“Yes,” said Rod, nodding vigorously. “He is.”

So are they all, all nice guys, thought Pascoe. Lukasz and Bernie and Dave and Sandy and Tim and Rod and probably all of the others who worked in the Lubyanka.

But one of them, if his guess was right, believed that “getting the job done” gave the Templars license to ignore lesser laws such as the one against murder. In the world of Security, reaching that position probably took only a very small step. Deception, betrayal, assassination, torture were after all the tools of their trade, only usable perhaps as last resorts in circumstances of dire necessity, but even admitting that possibility put you on a downward slope.

The police world was very different. You were there to uphold the Law. OK, on occasion you could stretch it, twist it, bend it, even tie it in knots, but once you broke it you weren’t on a downward slope, you were off the edge and falling.

These musings, and others more precise, occupied his mind till Rod brought him back to the world with a triumphant, “This looks like it.”

He looked up to see that they were turning through a gateway which bore a sign reading
Kewley Castle 2 miles—unfenced road—

please observe 10 mph speed limit,
which Rod certainly did, from a considerable distance.

At least, thought Pascoe, it gives me time to enjoy my passenger’s perk and take in the view, which was of attractive moorland, aglow with gorse and rising into shapely hills, good walking country.

The castle itself, however, was as disappointing as Wield had forecast.

Little more than a line of rubble lying behind a modest declivity which had presumably once been a moat, only the broken arch of its 290 r e g i n a l d h i l l

ruined gatehouse took the eye, but even that did not hold it long, as Pascoe spotted a movement through the trees of a small copse just beyond the ruin. A man on a white horse emerged. When he saw the car he came to a halt framed against the broken arch. It made a lovely picture, fit for a tapestry woven with bone needles in an older age, a more innocent time.

Then he resumed his advance at a stately canter. Only the fact that the horse had farther to go allowed them to beat it to the house, which stood a few hundred yards behind the ruined castle whose name it bore.

Pascoe got out of the car with some relief. Not the kind he felt when he got out of a car driven by, say, DC Shirley Novello who believed that time spent driving from
here
to
there
was wasted time which would have to be accounted for on Judgment Day, but a sense of pleasure at being back in the dangerous world of standing on his own two feet.

He stood for a moment and took in the house, a severe-looking three-storied building in dark gray stone entirely without adornment, apart from a battlemented portico presumably added on to justify the appellation
castle
. They were in a tarmacked yard formed by a two-story stable block and a barn converted into a triple garage.

“An Englishman’s home,” said Pascoe.

“Probably a lot more convenient than the real thing,” said Rod.

The door of the main house opened and a woman appeared. She was in her late forties, with short dark hair and a classically oval face.

She had a full rounded figure and she held herself like a gymnast.

She wore a plain gray dress which though not positively a uniform, had something of a uniform about it. Too young to be the mother, judged Pascoe. Housekeeper maybe. Or serving wench? He fl ashed her his boyish smile and got no response either of expression or word.

But when Rod called out, “Hi there,” as if addressing some girl he’d bumped into in a club, he noticed an immediate thawing of her chilly expression under the warmth of the young man’s grin.

Before he could try to take advantage of this, he heard the clop of horse’s hoofs behind him and a voice said, “Can I help you?”

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 291

He turned to look up at the rider. He was a man of about thirty, his fine black hair tousled by the wind, his skin weather-beaten. Dark brown eyes regarded Pascoe unblinkingly.

Estate manager, he guessed. Certainly a man of authority. Or maybe that’s just because I’m looking up at him. Someone had said that a man astride a beast is always ridiculous unless he’s fucking it, in which case he’s disgusting as well. Probably Dalziel. But Pascoe always found horsemen a bit intimidating and this one sat with a straightness of back which somehow suggested a superiority more than physical.

“We’re here to see Major Kewley-Hodge,” he said.

“Mr. Kewley-Hodge,” corrected the man. “Is he expecting you?”

“No,” said Pascoe.

“So how do you know he is going to be in?”

To say, I don’t, but it’s a risk I was willing to take in order to catch him unprepared, was not an answer Pascoe felt he could give.

He said, “Is he in?”

“In fact he’s not,” said the man. “I daresay you thought, being wheelchair bound, he can’t get out much.”

“No. In fact I didn’t think that,” said Pascoe evenly. “I understand he is suffering from paraplegia. I have heard nothing of agoraphobia.”

The man smiled and nodded as if approving the answer.

“So if I see him, who shall I say he wasn’t expecting?”

“I’m Chief Inspector Pascoe of Mid-Yorkshire CID, currently attached to the Combined Antiterrorist Unit. And you, sir, are . . . ”

“I’m not in,” said the man. “On, girl.”

The gray moved forward obediently and came to a halt by one of the barns with an opening on the fi rst floor from which protruded an iron bar, presumably intended for a hoist to raise hay into the loft.

From his leather jerkin the man took what looked like a TV remote control and pressed a button. Out of the loft, along the metal bar, ran a square metal box from which depended what looked like a pair of nooses for a double hanging.

Another touch on the remote brought the nooses down a foot or two. The man eased his arms through the loops that Pascoe now saw were part of a harness. The rider fastened a retaining belt across his 292 r e g i n a l d h i l l

chest, used the remote to lift himself a fraction and take the weight off the saddle, then spoke to the horse, which moved forward, leaving the rider dangling in air.