Death Comes for the Fat Man (52 page)

There was a loud snore from the bed. Dalziel was pretending to have gone to sleep. Or perhaps the poor old sod wasn’t pretending.

Ellie saw her chance and said softly, “Peter, I think perhaps we ought to go.”

“Yes, of course.”

Cap pressed a button to lower the bed’s backrest. Supine, he looked even paler and frailer. They moved quietly to the door. Cap followed them into the corridor.

“Thanks for coming,” she said. “Bring Rosie next time. He’s very keen to see her.”

“We practically had to lock her up to stop her coming today,” said Ellie. “But we thought, best leave it till we saw how he looked. How do you think he’s doing, Cap?”

“Fine,” said Cap. “But not half as fine as he wants to pretend. It’s going to be a long haul to get him back to where he was, and you know Andy, he’s a one-mighty-leap man. But don’t worry, we’ll get him there eventually.”

Her breezy confidence was reassuring, and Pascoe needed to be reassured. While there’d been flashes of the old Dalziel, what had been 396 r e g i n a l d h i l l

disturbingly constant was the sense of change, his fear that something had happened inside to dilute the Fat Man’s essence, perhaps that something was broken beyond repair.

He tried to dislodge the distressing notion from his mind by returning to the niggle provoked by what Cap had told them.

“Why do you think Alexander Kewley agreed to change his name?”

he asked.

“Don’t know. Maybe because he was seriously strapped for cash and the Hodges had it dripping out of their ears,” said Cap.

“That makes it sound like a deal,” said Pascoe.

Ellie said, trying not very successfully to hide her irritation, “Stop being a cop!”

Cap said, “I’m still in touch with old Kitbag. Could ask her about Edie Hodge if you like.”

Ellie gave him her Gorgon glare and Pascoe began to mutter, “No really, don’t bother,” when a thin reedy voice called from within the room, bringing to all their minds memories of past Dalzielesque summonses that could drown all church bells within an acre.

Cap pushed open the door and went back inside.

Ellie said, “Peter, you are going to leave it alone, aren’t you?”

“Yes, of course I am. Honest. Normal service resumed. I promised, didn’t I?”

She looked at him distrustingly but before she could respond, Cap reappeared.

“He woke up and realized you’d gone and he says there’s something he wanted to say to you, Peter. Do you mind?”

“Of course not.”

As the door closed behind Pascoe, Cap looked at Ellie curiously and said, “You two OK, are you?”

“Yes. Fine,” said Ellie shortly. Then she added, because she disliked prevarication, and Cap though not close was a friend, “He promised me all this business with CAT was behind him. He’s lucky to have got out of it as lightly as he did. I just think that he ought to give it a rest and settle back into things here.”

“It was Andy who wanted to hear all about it,” said Cap.

“That’s what Peter said, but I can tell, it’s stirred it all up again.”

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 397

“Ellie,” said Cap gently. “One thing I’ve learned since I partnered up with Andy is we need to be linked together by a long and loose rope.”

“Peter’s not Andy.”

“Of course he isn’t. But the rope linking them is in some ways a lot shorter and tighter than ours.”

The two women found things to look at in the empty corridor. They knew they were in a minefield where even a cautious step might end in an explosion, and so they stood in a silence waiting for rescue.

There was a saving silence too at Dalziel’s bedside. To Pascoe it seemed that the Fat Man had gone to sleep again, and he felt relieved, suspecting that anything that was said now was merely going to confirm his worst fears.

He began to turn away.

A sound from the bed stopped him and he leaned over the still fi gure.

The lips moved a fraction, letting out scarcely enough breath to stir a feather. Pascoe thought he heard his name on the breath.

He said, “Yes?”

“Peter, is that you?”

This was marginally stronger but not so strong it would have done more than tremble a candle fl ame.

“Yes, Andy, it’s me.”

The Fat Man’s eyes opened. The pupils seemed cloudy and unfo-cused.

He said, “Peter.”

“Yes.”

His left hand moved. Pascoe instinctively patted it and felt his fi ngers seized in a grip weaker than he recalled his daughter’s when fi rst he’d held her.

“Pete, mate, I thought you’d gone.”

“No, Andy, still here,” said Pascoe, thinking,
Mate!
Oh Jesus, this was bad.

“Something I need to . . . Cap told me . . . back in Mill Street when I got blown up . . . ”

The voice failed. Were those tears in his eyes? Oh shit, this was very bad!

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

“It’s OK, Andy,” he said. “You rest now. We’ll talk about it later, OK?”

“No . . . need to do it now . . . in case . . . you know. In case. Cap said . . . if it weren’t for you I’d likely have . . . she said you saved me, Pete . . . you saved me . . . ”

His voice choked, as if the emotion were too much for his depleted strength.

“I can’t recall much about it now, Andy,” said Pascoe, eager to get out of here before the Fat Man said something so cloyingly sentimental it would clog up their relationship forever. But the grip on his fi ngers was too strong now for him to break away without it being quite clear that that was what he was doing.

“ . . . and what I want to say, Pete . . .”

The voice was getting fainter again, the eyes had closed. Perhaps the poor bastard’s debility was going to save him! He leaned forward closer to catch the soft-spoken words.

“ . . . what I want to say is . . . ”

And the eyes snapped open and stared straight into Pascoe’s, bright and tearless.

“Just because tha gave me the kiss of life doesn’t mean we’re bloody engaged!”

Now the great mouth opened wide to let out a bellow of laughter so strong Pascoe felt himself blasted upright.

“You rotten bugger,” he said. “Oh you rotten bugger!”

Grinning broadly he made for the door.

The two women, attracted by the sudden outburst within, greeted him anxiously.

“Is he all right?” asked Ellie.

“I’m afraid so,” said Pascoe. “Well, look who’s here.”

Along the corridor, moving on a pair of crutches with a strange crablike motion, came Hector. Tucked into the neck of his T-shirt was a bunch of lilies whose pollen had redistributed itself generously across his gaunt features, giving him the appearance of a man who had just died of some rare form of jaundice.

“How’re you doing, Hec?” inquired Pascoe.

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 399

“Fine, thank you, sir. How’s Mr. Dalziel? Can I go in to see him?”

Cap had begun to say, “No, he’s resting . . . ” when Pascoe stepped in front of her and opened the door.

“Mr. Dalziel’s fine,” he said. “And he’d love to see you. In you go, Hec.”

The constable hopped sideways through the door which Pascoe closed gently after him. There was a moment’s silence then came a crash, presumably as Hector dropped one of his crutches in order to extract his bouquet, then a dull thud, presumably as he fell across the bed, followed by a great cry of shock or rage or pain.

“Why did you let Hector in?” asked Ellie curiously as they left the hospital.

“Why not?” asked Pascoe gaily. “After all, in a way it was them two that started it all. Only fitting that they should bring it to an end, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” agreed Ellie, returning his smile. “The end. Only fi tting. Now let’s go home.”

2

R E A L LY T H E E N D

But it wasn’t really the end.

The following sunny Sunday Pascoe and Rosie and Tig had gone for a walk to a favorite spot by the river where Tig could swim, Rosie could paddle, and Pascoe could lie in a green shade and think thoughts of whatever color he pleased. Ellie had excused herself on the grounds of a woman’s work never being done.

This was true, but the work in question was not in fact the implied mountain of ironing, it was work on her novel, which had reached a sticky patch.

Not admitting this was of course just silly. In regard to her literary ambitions, Peter had never been anything but a source of support, admiration, and praise. Yet, until she could wave a very large royalty check at their bank balance, she couldn’t avoid this absurd sense of guilt at the inroads into her family life made by the creative impulse.

She switched on the computer and as always checked for e-mail.

There was a small backlog which she dealt with swiftly. Peter had a couple also, one from Cap Marvell. After a moment’s thought, she brought it up.

Cap embraced all new forms of technology and their idiom with a fervor which brought out the mad Luddite in Dalziel. As Ellie picked her way through the message she felt in some sympathy with the Fat Man. If this is what she did to her e-mails, God knows what her text messaging looked like!

Hi! Wnt to see Ktbg at Sndytn ystrdy—rmmbrd ur intrst in E Hodge as I ws lvng—Ktty v trd by thn—sd shd thnk abt it—gt e frm her tdy whch Im frwdng—A mkng gd prgss—tlks of cming hme—dr sys nt 4 a cpl d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 401

wks at lst—thn cnvlsce smwhre lke Sndytn whre wrks nt on hs drstp! Luv 2El nd Rsi nd Tg Cap Ellie turned to the forwarded message and was relieved to fi nd that Dame Kitty had not followed her old pupil down the path of mangled language. To her, e-mail was simply a faster way of sending a letter.

The Avalon Nursing Home

Sandytown

East Yorkshire

Dear Amanda,

Thank you for your visit of yesterday. Buried in this
necropolis, it is always pleasant to receive news from
the world of the living, despite the fact that, as you
doubtless observed, I find even the vicarious sharing
of a life like yours quite exhausting.

I am sorry I was too fatigued by the end of your
visit to deal with your inquiry about Edie Hodge but I
woke up this morning feeling much refreshed and all
the details of Edie’s adventure came fl ooding back.

The story that it was I myself who caught them in
the potting shed is in fact untrue. The truth is, as so
often, both likelier and stranger.

It was in fact Jacob, the boy’s father, who came
across them. You might have thought that his concern would have been to keep things quiet for fear of
the possible consequences for his son, but his reaction
was as Old Testament as his name. The way he saw
it, his son was not the seducer but the seduced, led
astray and defiled by a Daughter of Satan!

While not able to go along with this completely,
knowing Edie as I did left me with the suspicion that it
was probably six of one and half a dozen of the other.

At least after that onslaught from Jacob, dealing with
Matt Hodge was relatively easy. Initially of course he
was very angry indeed, such anger being the natural
emotion of a good Catholic parent who feels that his
child’s welfare has been neglected by those paid to
402 r e g i n a l d h i l l

take care of it. But though he was a doting father, he
was by no means blindly so, and I do not doubt he was
well aware of Edie’s proclivities. Indeed after his initial
anger, I wondered whether he did not see this case
of
in fl agrante
as an opportunity to re-establish some
control over his wayward child.

So the withdrawal of Edie from St. Dot’s was a
decision reached amicably on both sides. Jacob dispatched his son to fresh woods and pastures new, and
I kept an excellent gardener!

Once the dust had settled, I must confess I was
much more surprised by Edith’s rapid return to a state
of grace than by her fall from it. I suspect her marriage
to Alexander Kewley was a case of her father striking
a deal while the iron was hot! The nature of the heat
is a matter of speculation, of course. I have no fi rm
facts though the circumstantial evidence does come
close to being a trout in the milk. When I was left holding the baby at the Founder’s Day reception (much
to the amusement, I do not doubt, of all you girls), I
was able to examine the infant at close quarters. And
my reaction was, if this is a Kewley, I’m the Queen
Mother! The hasty marriage, its speedy outcome, the
change in the Kewley fortunes and the Kewley name
were all explained, or at least explicable!

But I have always been an addict of detective fi ction, so perhaps I only saw what an overheated imagination inclined me to see, though the giving of her
lost love’s name to the baby does seem indicative.

Of course, when I read all these years later in the
newspapers of the poor boy’s sad fate, such speculation seemed irrelevant, almost indecent. Poor Edith.

That her pursuit of pleasure, and her father’s pursuit
of respectability, should have brought them to this
ambush! Indeed, as flies to wanton boys are we to
the gods.

But I am very pleased to hear that the wanton gods
have not put paid to your Andy. May his improvement
continue. He sounds an interesting man. Perhaps I may
d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 403

meet him someday? By way of hint let me remind you
that the Avalon complex is not simply a place where
old tuskers like myself come to die. The old house is
used for convalescence, and its inmates have been
seen to leave on their own two feet.

Whatever you decide, do keep in touch, if only to
remind me that our speculative astronomers are right
and there definitely is life out there!