Death's Jest-Book (17 page)

'Meaning gay?' said Wield
unfazed. 'Wouldn't surprise me, but it doesn't mean we meet in the
Turkish baths and exchange confidences. How about you in the Gents,
sir?'

This was a good riposte, but not
a counter accusation. 'The Gents' was short for the Mid-Yorkshire
Gentlemen's Club, of which Dalziel was a member mainly because so
many people had wanted to blackball him.

'Most on 'em think the sun shines
out of his arse’ said Dalziel. 'Wankers. Couldn't separate
steak from kidney in a pudding.'

Wield looked sadly at the few
crumbs of his pie remaining on the plate, then took his leave once
more and made for the door. Pascoe returned from the bar with two
pints. Normally he Wasn't much of a beer drinker at lunchtime, but
the Belcher left a nasty taste.

As he sat down he said, 'Sir.
I've been thinking . . .'

'Sod thinking. Try drinking. All
things come to him who sups.'

Pascoe raised his glass.

'For once, sir,' he said, 'you
may be right. Kill all the lawyers!'

'I'll drink to that,' said
Dalziel.

Dusk
comes early even on the brightest December day and when the clouds
sag low like dusty drapes over an abandoned bier, there's never much
more light than you'll catch in the gloaming of a dead man's eyes.

So though it was not yet four
o'clock, the streetlamps of Peg Lane were already kindling as Rye
Pomona slipped out of Church View.

Under her arm she carried a
Hoover bag.

At first she had tried with brush
and pan to retrieve the fine ash which, if the undertaker were to be
believed, comprised the selfsame molecules that had once danced
around each other to form the limbs and organs of her beloved twin,
Sergius.

But, do what she might, shards of
china, household dust, carpet fluff, and all the cosmetic debris of
her bedroom had been inseparably commingled in the pan while traces
of ash remained beyond the reach of bristle in cracks and crannies
from which it could only be summoned by Gabriel's trumpet on Judgment
Day.

Or a Hoover if you couldn't wait
that long.

This was the gallows humour with
which she diverted herself as she went about the task of vacuuming
her room. What else could she do? Sing a hymn? Speak a prayer? No,
Serge would have found the absurdity of the situation hilarious and
she would not let him down by relapsing into maudlin solemnity.

In fact, come to think of it,
Serge would have found the whole business of keeping his ashes in a
jar on her bedroom shelf ridiculous. 'Abso-fucking-lutely typical!'
she could hear him cry. 'I always said you were made for the stage.
You're a true-born drama queen!' Well, the accident had ended her
career plans. Not much future even in this age of teleprompts for an
actress whose mind went blank not just of her lines but of language
itself whenever she walked onstage. But, oh! how small a price this
seemed to be to pay for causing the death of her closest kin, her
dearest friend, the better half of herself. And the Furies had
thought so too, pursuing her to the frontiers of madness - no, beyond
- in their quest for retribution. She should have been warned. The
records of history and of literature are unanimous. Only the detail
varies of the horrors that invariably attend all man's attempts to
raise the dead. That period of her life seemed to her now like a
journey through a Gothic landscape by night whose veil of dark was
torn aside from time to time by brief jags of lightning to show
sights that made the returning blackness welcome. That journey was
over, thank God, but the past was not another country which you could
simply leave behind. Travel as far and as fast as you could, there
were parts of it you dragged with you. Only Hat offered her any hope
of freedom. With him she found complete if temporary oblivion. In him
she regained all she had lost and more. The half of herself that died
with Sergius had been the irreplaceable closeness of kin, but in
Hat's embrace she found a new completeness of kith which promised to
make her whole again.

But the Kindly Ones know their
stuff. Guilt, horror, self-loathing, these are coals of the selfsame
fire. Heap them high and they can get no hotter. There is a deep
which has no lower; a worst where pangs wring no wilder. So what's a
frustrated Fury to do?

Aeons past they had learned their
answer.

You don't pour water on a
drowning man, you show him dry land.

Waking in Hat's arms, for a
moment she could look ahead to a green and pleasant landscape whose
rolling hills were bathed in golden sunshine. And then a band of
white-hot metal snapped around her skull and her head was twisted
round till she saw once more what it was she trailed behind her.

She was a murderer; worse, a
serial killer, one of those monsters they paraded before you on
tele-documentaries, inviting you to marvel how ordinary they seemed,
to speculate what warped gene, what ruined childhood had brought them
to this monstrosity.

She had killed nine people - no,
not that many - the first two, the AA man and the boy with the
bazouki, she had only assisted at their deaths, which she had taken
as signs that she was on the right track - a track which had led her
beyond all mathematical equivocation to seven indisputable murders,
by knife, by poison, by gunshot, by electrocution . . .

Deluded (it was a delusion.
Wasn't it? She knew that now. Didn't she?) into believing that
through an alphabetically signposted trail of blood she could come
once more to her dead brother, and talk with him, and give him back
something of that lost life her wilful selfish stupidity had stolen
from him, she had done these dreadful things. And not unwillingly,
not under constraint, but eventually with eagerness, with glee even,
revelling in her sense of power, of invulnerability, until the trail
led her to her last victim, her boss at the library, Dick Dee, a man
she liked and admired.

That was torment enough to give
her pause. And when she saw the imagined signs pointing clearly
towards the man she was coming to love, to Hat Bowler, she began to
wake as it were from a dream, only to find herself pinned by black
memory in a nightmare.

Was atonement possible? Or - God
forbid - relapse?

She did-not know. Nothing, she
knew nothing . . . sometimes even the horrors seemed so far beyond
her comprehension that she almost believed they had indeed been a
dream . . . she needed help, she knew that . . . but who was there to
talk to? Only Hat, and that was unthinkable.

So forget the future, she had no
future, she had exchanged it for the past. Hardly a fair swap,
screamed the Furies. We want change! But it would have to do. We
creep under what comfort we can find in a whirlwind.

Getting rid of Sergius's ashes
wasn't a step forward, but it was a step in that marking of time
which kept her in the present.

Ashes to ashes . . . dust to the
dustbin. That was the obvious way to dispose of them. But she found
herself unable to do it.

Instead, holding the bag tight
against her breast, she crossed the narrow road and pushed open the
squeaky gate into the churchyard. Ahead loomed the tower, black on
dark grey against the wintry sky. This was an old burial place. Here
a marbled angel folded her grieving wings, there a granite obelisk
pointed an accusing finger at the sky, but for the most part the
memorials were modest headstones, many so flaky and lichened their
messages to the living were almost impossible to trace with finger or
with eye. Few were of such recent vintage that family members still
kept them tidy or laid anniversary flowers. A cold wind whispered
through the long grass and a hunting cat miaowed an almost silent
protest at her for interrupting his patient vigil, then sinewed away.

Distantly she
could perceive the glow of the populous city and hear the chitter of
its traffic, but these lights and sounds had nothing to do with her.
She stood like
a
ghost in a ghostly world whose
insubstantiality was her proper medium now. Some memory might remain
in this other place of that other place, but the laws of physics by
which mortals walk and drive and fly over the earth and by which the
earth itself and all the planets and all the stars swing round each
other in their crazy reel, were the dreams of an amoeba. She felt as
if she could float up through the looming tower and with one small
step be on the invisible moon.

You stupid bitch! she said to
herself in an attempt at a rescuing anger. Getting rid of Serge's
ashes is meant to be a move away from all this crazy crap!

And with a series of movements
like an orgasmic spasm, she shook the dust out of the Hoover bag.

The wind caught it and for a
moment she could see the fine powder twisting and coiling in the air
as if trying to hold together and reconstitute itself in some living
form.

Then it was gone.

She turned away, eager to be out
of this place.

And shrieked as she saw a figure
standing beside an ancient headstone which leaned to one side as if
something had just pushed it over to open a passage from the grave.

‘I’m sorry,' said a
voice. 'I didn't mean to startle you, but I was worried . . . are you
all right?'

Not Serge! A woman. She was
relieved. And disappointed? God, would it never stop?

'Yes, I'm fine. Why shouldn't I
be? And who the hell ire you?'

Speaking abruptly was the easiest
way to control her voice.

'Mrs Rogers ... I think we're
neighbours ... it is Ms Pomona, isn't it?'

'Yes. My neighbour, you say?'

Her eyes, accustomed now to the
dark, could make out the woman's features. Mid to late thirties
perhaps, a round face, not unattractive without being remarkable, her
expression a mixture of embarrassment and concern.

'Yes. Just since last week
though. We haven't met but I saw you going into your flat a couple of
times. I was just walking down the lane now and I saw you . .. I'm
sorry . . . none of my business . . . sorry if I startled you.'

She gave a nervous smile and
began to turn away. Not once had her gaze gone to the Hoover bag -
which must have been quite an effort, thought Rye. You spot someone
emptying their vacuum cleaner in a churchyard, you're entitled to
wonder if there's anything wrong!

'No, hold on,' she said. 'You're
going back to Church View? I'll walk with you.'

She fell into step beside Mrs
Rogers and said, 'My name's Rye. Like the whisky. Sorry I was so
brusque, but you gave me a shock.'

'I'm Myra. I'm sorry but I
thought that anything in a place like this .. . even a polite cough's
going to sound a bit creepy!'

'Especially a polite cough,' said
Rye, laughing. 'Which flat are you then?'

'The other side of you from Mrs
Gilpin.'

'Ah, you've met Mrs Gilpin. No
surprise there. Not meeting Mrs Gilpin is the hard thing.'

'Yes,' smiled the other woman.
'She did seem quite . . . interested.'

'Oh, she's certainly that.'

They had reached the gate. Across
the road they saw a figure standing at the front door of Church View.
It was Hat.

Rye came to a halt. She wanted to
see him but she didn't want him to see her, not coming from the
churchyard with a Hoover bag in her hand.

Mrs Rogers said, 'Isn't that the
detective?'

'Detective?'

'Yes, the one who was round
earlier asking if we'd seen anyone suspicious hanging around the
building over the weekend’

'Ah. That detective,' said Rye
coldly.

She watched Hat out of sight
along the street, then opened the gate.

'And did you see anyone?' she
asked.

'Well, there was a man last
Saturday morning. I hardly noticed him, but Mrs Gilpin seems to have
got a closer look.'

‘I'm amazed. Look, do you
fancy coming in for a coffee? Unless your husband's expecting you’

'Not any more,' said Myra Rogers.
'That's why I needed to find a new flat. Yes, a coffee would be
lovely. Are you planning to use that bag again?'

They were at the front door and
Mrs Rogers looked significantly down the basement steps to where the
building's rubbish bins stood.

'My domestic economy hasn't sunk
that low,' said Rye, smiling.

She went down the steps, took the
lid off a bin and dumped the empty bag inside.

'Now let's get that coffee,' she
said.

Sunday Dec 16th

Night,

somewhere in England, heading
north

Dear
Mr Pascoe,

It
was only a few hours since I posted my last letter to you, and yet it
seems light years away! Train travel does that to you, doesn't it?
Stop time, I mean.

You will recall I was on the
point of leaving Cambridge in the company of Professor Dwight Duerden
of Santa Apollonia University, CA. During the drive to London we
talked naturally enough about the recent unhappy events at God's, and
Dwight returned once more to his theme of good from evil, urging me
to at least explore the possibility of completing Sam's book myself
and finding a new publisher. He would be returning to St Poll for the
holidays, and he promised me again that he would make enquiry of his
university press. When we arrived at the Ritz we exchanged addresses
and farewells and he instructed his driver to take me anywhere I
wanted.