Death Comes for the Fat Man (17 page)

Probably didn’t need to. OK, no reason to doubt Glenister was on her way to Nottingham, but he suspected the idea to send him back to Yorkshire had come from somewhere a lot closer.

Sauron was doing a bit of damage limitation after all.

There was little resentment in the thought.

How could he resent a maneuver which sent him home to the people he loved most in the world?

8

N O W I T ’ S S A F E

At three o’clock that afternoon in Nottingham Crown Court after a series of delaying tactics that would have made Fabius Cunctator seem impetuous, the prosecution fi nally admitted defeat and shortly afterward Abbas Asir, né Michael Carradice, stepped down from the dock, a free man.

As George Stainton, his solicitor, shook his hand, no emotion showed on what could be seen of his client’s face behind a vigorous black beard which, extending halfway down his chest, made his stocky body seem even shorter.

A court official approached and courteously invited Mr. Asir to accompany him to go through the formalities of processing him out of the system and returning to him the personal possessions removed when he’d been taken into custody some six months earlier.

“I’ll step outside and keep the media happy,” said the lawyer. “You’re sure you want to talk to them, Abbas?”

Carradice nodded.

“You will be careful what you say? Mustn’t give the buggers any excuse to take you back into custody.”

The two men parted.

Stainton went out of the main entrance of the court building to be greeted by a media pack that began howling and yelping when they saw he was alone.

“Mr. Asir will join me shortly,” he assured them. “Yes, he will be happy to answer questions. Meanwhile, if I may offer my own reactions to the trial and its outcome . . . ”

He began a carefully rehearsed statement in which the terms
dodgy
intelligence, rule of law, police state, historical freedoms, free speech, etc.,
d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 125

etc.
occurred frequently, in fact rather more frequently than rhetoric demanded as his client’s nonappearance obliged him to recycle his declaration of human rights to fill in the time.

The pack members, scenting a deception, were beginning to snarl once more.

Finally the solicitor excused himself and went back into the building.

The court official who had approached them earlier assured him that the formalities of release had been completed at least ten minutes ago. His last sighting of Mr. Asir had been as he left the room, presumably heading to the main entrance to celebrate his freedom.

Stainton could only speculate that his client had changed his mind about meeting the gentlemen of the press and found another way out of the building. Doubting if he could persuade these same gents that he hadn’t been party to the deception, and realizing that even if he succeeded, all he would be doing was making himself look a fool, the solicitor decided his best option was to follow his client’s example.

Several of the more persistent pack members were already waiting for him at his office and in the end he had to tell his switchboard not to accept any more calls unless they were certain of the identity of the caller.

He rang home to warn his wife. She told him rather irritably that there were already journalists camped outside the gate, with a few bolder ones poking around in the greenhouse and the garden, clearly suspecting that Asir might have taken refuge there.

He told her not to speak to them, and when he finally headed home it was with some natural trepidation at the prospect of the welcome he was about to receive both outside and inside his house.

But to his surprise and relief as he drove into the pleasant dormer village where he lived, he could spot no sign of alien life around the gateway of his mock-Georgian villa, and his wife confirmed that ten minutes earlier they had all suddenly got into their cars and headed off with much burning of rubber.

“I told you not to worry,” he told her rather pompously. “The good thing about our media is that like children they have a very short attention span. All that it takes to soothe away the pain of a disappointment 126 r e g i n a l d h i l l

is the promise of another bigger treat. Now I think I’ve earned a large G and T.”

As he busied himself preparing the drinks, his wife turned on the television to catch the early evening local news program.

“Oh look, George,” she said. “Isn’t that the mere?”

As ardent bird-watchers, one of the attractions of their house for the Staintons was its proximity to a large reservoir with a thriving population of both resident and visiting waterfowl.

“There’s something going on there,” said Mrs. Stainton. “I do hope they’re not disturbing the greylags.”

Stainton turned to look at the picture. The camera was panning over crowds of people on the reedy banks of the reservoir. He recognized some of them. The disappearance of the reporters was now explained. He’d been right about the promise of a bigger treat and they were all here, thronging the banks in anticipation of it.

The sound was turned down low but he thought he caught the name Carradice and suddenly felt a vague unease. He took a drink from his glass, topped it up with gin and went to sit down next to his wife.

“Turn up the volume, will you?” he said.

The commentator was explaining, clearly not for the first time, that every main media outlet had received a message suggesting that anyone concerned about the outcome of the Carradice trial should go to the reservoir, where they might find something to their interest.

The camera now moved to give a shot out across the water.

About sixty yards from the edge floated what looked like an infl atable rubber dinghy with a short mast and a loosely hanging sail. A motorboat full of uniformed policemen was speeding toward it. But the camera was quicker, zooming in close.

There seemed to be something in the dinghy, but its alignment in relation to the camera made it hard to be certain what. Then a puff of breeze swung the vessel round.

“Look at those poor grebes,” said his wife indignantly as birds scat-tered, panicked by the motorboat’s approach.

“Oh shit,” said the solicitor.

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 127

Lolling in the dinghy with one arm trailing in the water was a man, his mouth agape, his eyes wide and staring. He had a thick black beard which stretched halfway down his chest.

The camera moved slowly up the mast, which turned out not to be a real mast but an oar or paddle propped upright. And the sail wasn’t a real sail but some sort of banner with words printed on it, illegible until another puff of wind straightened it out above the reservoir’s dark blue water, revealing it as the kind of swallowtail guidon that might have fluttered above a troop of medieval knights galloping into battle.

The resemblance didn’t end there. At the broad end of the pennant, in bright red, was painted the cross of St. George.

Alongside it were some words, block capitals in black. It took a little time for the camera and the wind to make these readable, but when they were, the solicitor emptied his gin and tonic in a single gulp.

NOW IT’S SAFE!

Q
PAR
T FOUR

A man that looks on glasse,

On it may staye his eye,

Or if he pleaseth, through it pass . . .

— G E O R G E H E R B E R T,

“ T H E E L I X E R ”

1

T H E S H O C K O F R E C O G N I T I O N

Andy Dalziel is having an out-of-body experience.

How he knows this is different from dancing with Tottie Truman in the old Mirely Mecca or tumbling like a pigeon in the bright air high over Mid-Yorkshire, he doesn’t know, but that small core of awareness which preserves the self even in the wildest dreams and the scariest nightmares detects the difference.

Perhaps it’s the fact that he can see himself ? A man doesn’t dream himself, does he? And if you can see your own body, then it is self-evident that you are out of it.

The body in question lies supine on a bed. It has tubes and wires connected to it. What it is doing there the Dalziel consciousness fl oating above it has neither the capacity nor the inclination to inquire, but it does have the critical power to remark that it’s not a pretty sight. If anything it reminds him of the carcass of a beached whale he once saw near Flamborough.

And that had been dead three days.

A couple of nurses are working on the hulk, cleaning it, anointing it, checking the inlets and outlets of the various tubes. Their purpose he has no curiosity about, but he feels sorry that such a pretty pair of lasses should have nothing better to do with their time than administer to this slab of unattractive fl esh.

He moves away. It’s easy. No need to fart this time, no question of effort, hardly even of volition. This is very different from the pigeon tumbling which his dream self so enjoyed. Then his fecund fancy created for himself the physical delight of flight—air streaming over the limbs like water over a swimmer, the exhilaration of the swoop, the d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 131

serenity of the soar—just as the same fancy re-created the voluptuous softness of Tottie Truman’s flesh . . .

Now however there is no physicality. Flesh was that hulk on the bed. Good riddance to it.

He drifts through other rooms full of beds on which lie men and women in all sorts of conditions, some comatose, some in pain, some sitting upright, bright eyed and impatient for their time of escape, some with visitors whom they find delightful, debilitating, or down-right depressing in equal proportions.

And then he penetrates a small ward with only two beds in it, one empty, one occupied by a figure who looks strangely familiar.

He hovers above it, trying to arrange those sleep-blanked features into a pattern with a name.

Suddenly the eyes open wide.

The woken face makes identifi cation easy.

But there’s something more, something unexpected in those eyes, something which shocks Dalziel.

They belong to Constable Hector, and they look as if they’re actually seeing him.

He doesn’t wait to check this out but flees like a ghost at daybreak back to the welcome unconsciousness of the beached whale.

2

R U L E F I V E

If being in your friends’ thoughts is truly a form of survival, then Andy Dalziel needn’t have had any fears, for hardly a minute went by without someone somewhere in Mid-Yorkshire having occasion to think of him.

Some thought of him with affection, with tears, even with prayer.

Others with a quiet satisfaction that one great obstacle to their hopes and dreams had been removed. The triggers of memory were many and varied. The drawing of a pint of beer, a simple turn of phrase, the distant slamming of a door, the shadow of a cloud drifting across a hill-side, a dog lying in the sun and scratching itself contentedly.

And sometimes it was a situation that brought into the minds of those who knew him best one of those philosophical truths with which the Marcus Aurelius of Mid-Yorkshire from time to time condescended to improve their lives.

Such a maxim popped into Peter Pascoe’s mind on his return home that Friday evening.

According to the Great Sage Dalziel, the fifth rule of marriage was, Never give your wife a surprise she doesn’t know about.

“The first four rules,” he’d gone on to explain, “aren’t allowed to be writ down, else no man would ever get married.”

Pascoe had broken Rule Five by deciding to turn up at home unannounced. Alongside a conventional male fantasy of the possible delec-table consequences of taking Ellie unawares, he had a good rational reason for his decision. There were things he needed to do in Mid-Yorkshire and he didn’t know how long they might take. To ring Ellie and say, “Hello, darling, I’ve got the rest of the day off so why don’t you d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 133

slip into something comfortable like our bed, I’ll be back as soon as I can,” was one thing. To ring and say, “Hello, darling, I’ve got the rest of the day off but there’s stuff I want to do which I rate more important than heading straight home,” was quite another.

As his various diversions occupied several hours, his decision seemed quite a wise one as he pulled into his driveway shortly after six. The evening stretched out invitingly before him. There’d be only the two of them. Friday night was stopover night. Rosie and a couple of classmates were spending it with their friend Mandy Pulman whose mother, Jane, was taking them ice-skating in the morning, thus guaranteeing the long lie-in he was hoping would prove necessary.

He opened the front door quietly. Tig came to meet him. Happily he greeted everyone silently except for Rosie, and Pascoe rewarded his restraint with a pat on the head. The downstairs rooms were unoccupied but he heard a sound upstairs. This got better. Perhaps she was having a shower. Or taking a nap. His fantasy was in full flight now and he tiptoed up the stairs, anticipating melting into her dream as the rose blendeth its odor with the violet. Ahead was the bedroom door, ajar.

Gently he pushed it open.

Ellie was sitting at her dressing table, applying lipstick. She saw him in the glass. Those rich dark eyes and those deep incarnadined lips rounded in surprise.

She said, “Oh shit.”

This wasn’t quite the greeting he’d hoped for, but creeping up on her had been pretty infantile, so he made allowances, which was easy as she looked gorgeous.

“Sorry,” he said. “Should have rung but here I am anyway.”

He went to her and they kissed. It was a pretty good kiss, but it didn’t feel like it was going anywhere.

He said, “Had a hard day, love?” he hoped sympathetically, as she pulled away and started repairing her makeup.

“Not really. Peter, it’s great to have you home, but I’ve just arranged to go out.”

“Oh,” he said. “Can’t you unarrange?”

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