Death Comes for the Fat Man (15 page)

All he’d had was a bottle of twelve-year-old Glen Morangie, from which he’d taken a generous slug before his early warning sensors had sent him back to his chair, ready to greet Trimble with a broad smile of welcome a few seconds later.

I could do with a drink, thought Pascoe.

He started on the desk drawers. There were only three, two shallow, one deep. The deep one was locked. The shallow ones produced nothing more interesting than a selection of pencils and some chocolate biscuits. Smarties were never going to be enough for a woman of her build, specially with the promised demise of the blue ones.

He looked at the deep drawer. In for a penny, in for a pound. From his wallet he extracted a small leather envelope containing various slim d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 109

pieces of metal. Many CID officers carried such a piece of kit, which had usually been offered in evidence during a burglary case and then somehow had not returned to the police store. So far the most feloni-ous use Pascoe had put it to was removing a wheel clamp one dark and stormy night when there wasn’t a taxi to be had for two hours.

Compared to a clamp, this lock was a doddle.

The drawer despite its depth contained only a slim plastic fi le, but this turned out to be potential treasure. Across the cover in Glenister’s bold hand were scrawled the words
Mill Street
. There were about a dozen sheets inside, paper clipped together in five or six sections. No time for more than a glance now. Every second he stayed here put him in danger of discovery. For all he knew, given the paranoid nature of the establishment, he was already being fi lmed!

He selected two sections of two sheets, one containing the explosive analysis report that not even the electronic legerdemain of Edgar Wield had been able to extract, while the other had something to do with the examination of the bodies taken from number 3.

He took the sheets to the fax machine standing by the wall and ran them through the copy facility. Then after carefully using his handkerchief to wipe his prints off everything he’d touched, he replaced the file, relocked the drawer, and made his escape.

As he deposited his security badge at the desk in the foyer and headed for the exit, he felt as if he were trailing visible clouds of guilt.

He didn’t relax till he reached his hotel room. Even here his sense of safety might be delusive. It was, after all, CAT who’d booked him in. But at least, he told himself as he plucked a bottle of Beck’s from the minibar and settled down in the deep soft armchair, they weren’t penny-pinching.

It took little more than a glance at the explosive analysis to convince him he’d need a friendly technical eye to make any sense out of it.

He turned to the second pair of sheets.

This was more accessible. It contained everything about cause of death and identification factors that he’d heard verbatim from Glenister in her briefings. But there were references to other findings and their attendant hypotheses which, after a while, he realized must have been 110 r e g i n a l d h i l l

contained in a separate report. So far as he could make out, it had something to do with position of limbs and examination of mouth cavities.

The thought that this too might have been in the plastic fi le made him annoyed for not taking more time to check while he had the chance. At least he’d been clever enough to instruct Wield to have a quiet chat first with Jim Lipton, the CFO, then with Mary Goodrich, the pathologist at Mid-Yorkshire Central into whose care the burnt corpses had been placed for a short while before CAT whisked them away. Pity that the Head of the Path Department, “Troll” Longbottom, had been away on vacation. Troll was an old mate of Dalziel’s and the personal link would have made him cooperative. Goodrich was new in the job. Her appointment as Longbottom’s assistant was her fi rst big career step, leaving her very susceptible to the kinds of pressure CAT

had probably exerted upon her.

On the other hand, Edgar Wield had a definite way with women.

Andy Dalziel had no problem analyzing it.

He’s bent as a lavatory brush, he’s got a face like that battered old
teddy bear most women love more than their kids, and he could sell a fi sh
a bicycle.

Pascoe smiled at the memory as he helped himself to another Beck’s. Yes, Wieldy would get to the bottom of things. He’d warned the sergeant not to ring till evening. In the Lubyanka, walls had ears. But any moment now . . .

His phone rang. He checked the caller display. He was right.

“Wieldy,” he said. “You come upon your hour, bearing good news, I hope.”

“Don’t know about that,” said the sergeant. “I spoke to Jim Lipton like you said.”

Wield filled him in on his conversation with the CFO.

“Excellent,” said Pascoe. “If you got as much out of Goodrich, I may have to pay the bribe and make you a lord.”

Wield, happy to hear his friend sounding so like his old self, wished he could continue the good work, but there was no point prevaricating.

He said, “Sorry. Got nowt there. Turned up unannounced like you suggested. She didn’t look busy but soon as she got a whiff what I d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 111

were talking about, she suddenly became far too busy to talk. When I pressed her, I got a reminder that I was nowt but a sergeant and mebbe ought to have a word with my superiors afore I bothered her again.”

“Stuck-up cow!” said Pascoe. “And I thought she was OK the only time I met her.”

“Nay, Pete,” said Wield. “I reckon she’s running scared. She’s been seriously warned off talking about the Mill Street bodies.”

“Yeah? I’d have liked to see them warn Troll Longbottom off. He’d have got so mad, he’d have called a press conference.”

“Maybe. But being mad only lasts till bedtime. Being scared is what’s waiting for you when you wake up alone in the middle of the night.”

There was a personal note here that Pascoe on another occasion might have wanted to examine more closely, but at the moment he had no time for distractions. At least this confirmed his reading of the CAT

report. There really was something to hide.

“So, anything else, Wieldy?” he said.

“Not really. No change on Andy. And I saw Ellie this morning. We bumped into each other and had a coffee.”

“
Bumped
like a real shunt or like on the dodgems?” said Pascoe suspiciously.

“I think she was glad to have a chat,” said Wield. “I reckon she’s worried about you. We all are. Pete, where the hell is all this going?”

“I’m just earning my pay, Wieldy. Which incidentally wouldn’t run to staying in this place. I’ve got a bathroom here bigger than our sitting room!”

Wield, recognizing this as a cutoff, said, “Listen, Pete, don’t get too used to the high life. We’ve got Ernie Ogilby sitting in Andy’s offi ce.

If you could solve crimes by studying traffi c flow, we’d have the best clear-up rate in the UK!”

“Inspector French solved a lot by studying train timetables,” said Pascoe.

“French? Don’t know him. What’s his patch?”

“The past,” said Pascoe. “They did things differently there. Cheers.”

He put the phone down, wondering what had brought Inspector French into his mind. It was years since he’d read any of the books.

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

He went downstairs and enjoyed his excellent dinner. He didn’t mind dining alone in a restaurant. There was an infinity of entertainment to be derived from working out the relationships between and backstories of the other diners.

Afterward he took a turn round the block then went up to his room, climbed into his emperor-sized bed, imagined what it would be like if Ellie were there to explore it with him, rang her and shared his imagin-ings, remarked but did not remark upon the fact that she didn’t mention her meeting with Wield, then switched on the TV and watched one of those English-heritage movies which drifts like a slow cloud across a summer landscape till at some point indistinguishable from any other point he mingled with the movie and fell fast asleep.

5

A L L T H E WAY H O M E

Hugh.” “Bernard.”

“De Clairvaux.”

“De Payens.”

one thousand two thousand three thousand

“Hugh, have you heard? Someone took a potshot at the Sheikh.”

“Yes, it was on the news. Nothing to do with us, unless of course we’ve inspired some right-thinking but inept copycat.”

“A copycat using one of Andre’s guns, from the look of it.”

“What?”

“It’s not absolutely sure. The round our persistent friend Pascoe dug out of Mill Street was very badly damaged, but what few scorings were detectable coincide precisely with those on the Sheikh’s bullet.

Can Andre be freelancing?”

“Not his style. Also, if he’d decided to grandstand, the Sheikh would be dead. But I’ll check it out.”

“Do. Al-Hijazi is on our list, but after this he’s likely to take a lot more care. Another possibility is one of the Geoffreys.”

“Perhaps. But Andre’s well trained. All weapons back to the armorer.

Certainly with Bisol so uptight about the wounded pig, I doubt if he’s going to go around blasting off wildly.”

“Perhaps not. Talking of pigs, anything yet on that other one?”

“Yes. Word is he’ll be going wee-wee-wee all the way home tomorrow morning.”

6

A N U R B A N F O X

Adolphus Hector woke up.

They say Fortune picks its favorites, but it also picks its fools. Hector had been on its hit list ever since his premature birth and instant christening.

What caused his mother to pick the name Adolphus is not known.

Perhaps some passing imp of mischief whispered it in her ear as the hospital chaplain asked her what she would like to call her son. Certainly the newborn had seemed such a weak and ailing child that no one present felt the name had other than a soteriological signifi cance.

Perhaps the child’s early arrival had caught his fairy godmother out too. Arriving at the christening too late to dispense the traditional baptismal presents, all she’d managed to slip under his pillow was the one gift without which all the others are useless anyway.

The instinct for survival.

Despite all pessimistic prognoses, Adolphus refused to die. When against all the odds he reached school age, he rapidly discovered the disadvantages of being called Adolphus. So when the first of many moves took him to a new school where his second name was assumed to be his first, he bore the mockery of
its
silliness with equanimity. At least Hector, as one kind teacher pointed out, was a hero and could be shortened to the very acceptable Hec, while Adolphus shrank only to the even less desirable Adolf.

If these bailiff-inspired moves were bad for his education, they did at least mean he was able to carry the lessons taught by peer persecution from one institution to the next. He even learned to hide the only skill he had that got within spitting distance of a talent, which was making recognizable portrait sketches in pencil. A child psychologist might have d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 115

identified this as being associated with a relatively mild form of autism, but he rarely stayed anywhere long enough to be more than a fl icker on a psychologist’s laptop screen. Resenting equally his fellow pupils’

efforts to involve him in producing caricature or pornography, and his teachers’ efforts to persuade him to sketch subjects of their choice, he soon learned to conceal this tiny talent also. So it remained hidden and unexplored, personal, private, and a comfort only to himself.

Perhaps this ability to catch signifi cant detail on paper was part of his equally hidden talent for survival. Like his pencil, it was a blunt instrument, consisting of little more than the capacity to select what was useful from what anyone said to him and ignore the rest. His choice of career arose from the baffl ed flippancy of a careers master who’d said, “I don’t know what to recommend, Hector. A life of petty crime perhaps, only you’re not qualifi ed. Maybe you should try for the police!”

So he did. And his application, coming at a low point in recruit-ment figures, was accepted even though his academic qualifi cations were at the stretch mark of minimal, his verbal skills were risible, and his self-presentation swung between the ridiculous and the pathetic.

Marked down as a certain failure the instant most instructors set eyes on him, this certainty in fact protected him. Being convinced that the rigors of the course would by themselves cause him to drop out, they took no positive steps to get rid of him. This showed that they missed the essence of Hector. Show him the door and he would have gone. But not being shown the door he took as a positive, and not even being knocked back to redo most of his courses with the following intake could make him relent his first avowed intent to be a policeman.

Eventually, in a prefiguration of his subsequent career, like a persistent mouse who survives both trap and poison, he ceased to be a pest in the college and became something of a pet. No one wanted to be known as the man who gave the coup de grace to Hector.

And so, to everyone’s amazement except his own, eventually he passed out of the training course and into Mid-Yorkshire legend.

That morning, as always after waking, Hector lay in bed for fi ve minutes precisely. Then he arose. He did not need an alarm clock any more than did a bird. He was on early turn this week, and this was the 116 r e g i n a l d h i l l

time he got up on earlies, and he would have been bewildered by any suggestion that he might awake earlier or later than he did.

Thirty minutes later, washed, fed, and clothed, he opened the front door of the terrace in which he rented a bed-sitter with kitchenette and shared bathroom, and stepped out onto the pavement of the narrow suburban street which some civic ironist had christened Shady Grove.

Despite the absence of trees, birds were singing, as yet unchallenged by traffic noise, and at the end of the long terrace the tail of an urban fox, on its way home after a pretty successful night scavenging the discarded take-away trail from the Chinese chippie half a mile away, flounced round the corner.