Death Comes for the Fat Man (33 page)

He emptied his glass, pointed at Ellie’s.

She shook her head.

He said, “Probably wise. The bottle was a temptation back then. In the end I resisted it. But let’s have some coffee.”

When it came he said, “This was meant to be a jolly sociable lunch.

Sorry to off-load all this stuff onto you, especially when you’ve got troubles of your own.”

“Troubles?” she echoed, unsure which of them he might be refering to.

“Peter’s boss, I get the impression he means a lot to you both . . . ”

“Andy? Yes, he does. A lot.”

“So if he doesn’t make it, you’re going to be hit hard?”

It occurred to her that if this was his idea of getting the lunch back on jolly sociable lines, he ought to go on a course.

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

She said, “Yes, we are. It will be . . . I think earth-shattering’s the only way to put it. Most people we love, kids, parents, spouses, you feel their vulnerability, you worry about them, often too much maybe. But Andy . . . imagine going to the Lake District and fi nding that Great Gable wasn’t there. I keep telling myself the prognosis isn’t good, that it’s time to start letting go. But inside I can’t get close to accepting it.”

He squeezed her hand again. It felt like genuine sympathy rather than a move.

He said, “Incidentally, I was reading in the paper about an alert at the hospital on Sunday. There was some speculation that an attempt had been made on the life of a policeman who was a patient there and I wondered if it might have been your friend.”

Ellie looked at him curiously. The only paper which had come that close to the truth was the
Voice,
and she wouldn’t have put Kentmore down as a reader.

He misread her hesitation and said, “Look, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be asking you about police matters. It was crass of me. And as I only saw it in some rag I glanced at in the hairdresser’s, it’s probably a load of rubbish anyway.”

“No,” she said. “You’re right, there was an incident. But it didn’t involve Andy, not directly, that is. Another officer who was a witness in the Mill Street case. Look, I really don’t know anything more than that.”

And Peter would tell her she shouldn’t have said even as much as that. But by comparison with what she wasn’t saying, about her crazy husband running around the Kielder Forest with a bunch of heavily armed madmen, it was the tiniest of indiscretions. And whatever else Kentmore was, she couldn’t see him as an undercover
Voice
reporter!

His hand was still on hers. He gave what felt like a farewell squeeze, poured more coffee, and asked how Tig and Rosie were after their triumph at the fete.

As they left together, Ellie said, “Thanks for the lunch. I enjoyed it.”

“Does that mean you’ll want to come again if I call again?”

“If ? That’s not very flattering,” she said.

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 247

“It just means I’m far too old-fashioned to be presumptuous enough to say
when.
”

This rang a bit arch. Or maybe that’s what old-fashioned fl irting sounded like.

“In that case, good-bye. Or au revoir,” she said, offering her hand.

She could do archness too.

He took her hand. This time however he did not shake it fi rmly, but used his grip to draw her toward him and brushed his lips against her cheek.

“I’ve really had a good time,” he murmured. “Thank you.”

For a moment she thought his lips were coming round to her mouth. Then over his shoulder, reflected in the glass of one of the pub windows on the far side of the road half hidden by a parked car, she saw a figure she recognized.

“There’s Kilda,” she said, breaking away. “She must have come looking for you.”

She turned to wave, and felt her face adjusting into an expressive mode she couldn’t immediately identify. Then she got it. This was the look of wide-eyed innocence she used to adopt whenever her mother almost caught her reading a magazine that didn’t have the parental seal of approval. Jesus! she thought, forcing her features into a neutral mask.

It isn’t like I had my hand down the guy’s trouser front or something!

For a second the woman behind the car didn’t move and Ellie thought, Maybe it isn’t her. Or maybe she’s had a few and doesn’t care to meet me.

Then she moved forward across the road toward them.

If she’d been hitting the bottle, there was no sign of it in either her appearance or her speech. She flashed a brief formal smile at Ellie then said, “Maurice, I finished earlier than I expected so thought I might still catch you here. Hello, Ellie.”

“Hello,” said Ellie. “We were just saying good-bye.”

“That sounds a bit final,” said the woman.

Ellie detected a note of mocking satisfaction that she found pro-vocative.

“Not really,” she said. “In fact, I was just going to ask Maurice here if he fancied coming to lunch with us at the weekend? Peter will be 248 r e g i n a l d h i l l

back by then and I know he’ll be sorry to have missed you. You too, of course, Kilda.”

There you are, dear, thought Ellie, feeling back in control of the situation. Let’s see just how possessive you are!

The Kentmores looked at each other, deciding which of them would formulate the refusal, guessed Ellie.

Then the man said, “It would have to be Saturday for me.”

“Fine.”

“Then that would be lovely. Wouldn’t it, Kilda?”

“Great,” said the woman.

“Oh good,” said Ellie. “I’ll look forward to seeing you then. Shall we say round about twelve? Thanks again for lunch, Maurice.”

“Thanks for coming. I enjoyed it. See you Saturday then.”

The pair of them walked away, close but not touching. As soon as they were out of earshot an animated conversation broke out between them. It didn’t look too friendly.

Just what is the relationship between them? wondered Ellie as she watched them go.

And how the hell am I going to explain to Peter that I’ve asked them for lunch?

2

P R O M O T I O N

Back in the Lubyanka Pascoe found that attitudes had changed.

The first person he saw when he arrived at eight forty-fi ve was Freeman, who’d glanced at his Patek Philippe watch with a smile and said, “What kept you?”

“My ten-mile run before breakfast,” said Pascoe. “Is Sandy in yet?”

“Of course she is. You know the old Jacobite tradition. No breakfast till you’ve killed an Englishman. But you’ll have to wait. She’s upstairs with Uncle Bernie.”

“Killing him?”

“I hope not. I’ll let her know you’re here, shall I? Where will you be?”

Pascoe said, “In the cellar, I suppose. I don’t want to get myself arrested by showing up anywhere else.”

Freeman seemed to find this very witty.

“Good to have you back, Pete,” he said, sounding as if he meant it.

Pondering these things, Pascoe descended to the room where he’d worked so boringly the previous week. Here he found Tim and Rod already engaged in their seemingly endless task of record trawling.

When they saw him, they both rose with expressions of delight and greeted him like a returned prodigal. News of his role in the Youngman affair had clearly reached them and they were eager for details.

Suspecting some kind of confidentiality test, he only confi rmed what they already knew. Unsatisfied, they insisted he join them in the staff canteen for further debriefing and morning coffee. The few people already there and others who came later also gave him the big welcome, confirming what he’d already begun to feel, that he had moved, or been moved, from outsider to one-of-us.

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

Still he looked for hidden motives, for mocking irony. But quickly he began to realize how much his sense of being kept out of the loop and his suspicion that the Templars had an informant in CAT had colored his feelings about the whole of the unit. Now he was reminded of what he shouldn’t have forgotten, that these people too—even the spooks—were policemen, and cops don’t like vigilantes. If, as occasionally happens, there is dirty work to be done, then you consult your conscience and if you get a green light, you do it yourself. What you never do is let civilians trespass on your turf, even if they seem to be giving you a helping hand. And when the vigilantes in question not only blow up a cop, but then compound what was presumably an accident by trying to kill another who might be a witness, any ambiguity about their status evaporates completely.

As a natural team player, it was good to feel that at last he was truly in the squad. This sense of belonging saw him return to the basement full of confidence that Glenister wouldn’t let him fester down here for long. He offered to help Tim and Rod in their work, but they said, “No no, this is only for us menials. You take the weight off your feet, Peter, and rest up till you are summoned.”

He sat at his desk and opened
Death in the Desert
, the fi rst of Youngman’s books, both of which he’d bought on his way to the Lubyanka that morning. It was hailed by its publisher as a new form, the docunovel, in which a factual skeleton was fleshed with fi ction.

Bugger new forms, what they needed was a new copywriter, thought Pascoe. It was dedicated,
To Q, leader of men.
Its back cover was crammed with snippets of praise extracted from reviews of the hard-back. Pascoe was unimpressed. He and Ellie, finally realizing that two paragraphs in the local evening paper and three lines in the Other New Books section of a Sunday national was all the notice her novel was going to attract, had spent a tipsy evening extracting from this critical molehill an encomiastic mountain.

He started to read.

Youngman’s narrative style was raw and unsophisticated but Pascoe could see its appeal. His hero was, unsurprisingly, an SAS sergeant.

Called William Shackleton, universally known by both his offi cers and his men as Shack, he was brutal, amoral, and pragmatic. His motto was d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 251

Make it happen.
His men didn’t like him much but followed him unquestioningly because he got them through. When someone in his hearing said the problem with guerrilla warfare was identifying the enemy, he said, “No problem. They’re all the fucking enemy.” He referred to the population of the Middle East in general as
Abdul.
When he needed to individuate, he called them
Abs.
His sexual philosophy was as basic as his military. He made no pretense of the nature of his interest. If a woman didn’t respond, he moved on. If she did respond, she got no promise of commitment. But most of his conquests remained as loyal as his men. In a rare moment of openness he explained his technique to one of his few friends. “If you fuck a woman five times in a night, she knows she’d be crazy to imagine she’s going to be the only one. Most of them don’t mind not being the only one so long as they think they’re the best. When I’m with a woman I make no secret there’s plenty of others. But I tell her, ‘Honey, whenever I’m fucking them, I’m thinking of you.’ ” Shortly after this conversation, as usually happened to any man he got close to, the friend got blown away.

Was all this wishful thinking, or did Youngman actually practice what he preached? wondered Pascoe as he worked his way through the book. Maybe he should have asked Ffion, wherever she was. The thought made him feel guilty.

He’d just finished the last chapter and was thinking of lunch when the phone rang.

Rod picked it up, listened, and said, “Big Mac would like to see you.”

“Big Mac?”

“You know, the North-British lady with the knockers,” he said, cup-ping his hands.

In Glenister’s office he was slightly taken aback to find not only the Chief Superintendent but Bloomfield and Komorowski. They were drinking coffee. Perhaps they’d had lunch already. His stomach rumbled, as if to say, well, I haven’t!

“There you are, Peter. How nice,” said Bloomfield, as if this were a chance encounter. “Just talking about you. Read your wife’s book over the weekend. Jolly good. You must be proud of her.”

“Yes, I am,” said Pascoe, wondering where this was going.

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

“And she of you, I don’t doubt. Not without cause. That was a sharp piece of work at the hospital. Very sharp. So what did you make of it all?”

As if Sunday’s events hadn’t been analyzed down to their quarks, thought Pascoe.

But he replied in measured tones, “I think that these Templars, though they have not laid claim to it, were responsible for the Mill Street explosion. Concerned that PC Hector might be able to identify one of them, they decided to take him out. The first attempt with the hit-and-run having failed, they planned to complete the job in the hospital.”

“Sounds about right to me. Lukasz?”

Komorowski said in his chalk-dry voice, “Their reluctance to claim Mill Street because Superintendent Dalziel got seriously injured doesn’t quite fit with their apparent readiness to murder Constable Hector.”

“Down to perceptions,” said Glenister. “Mill Street was their opening salvo, so to speak, and they didn’t want the bad press associated with injuring a policeman. On the other hand, offing Hector to protect themselves is fine, so long as it looks accidental. Which makes them almost as ruthless as the bastards they’re killing.”

“So it does,” said Bloomfield. “They right to worry about this man Hector, Peter?”

Pascoe, still uneasy that somehow his previous defense of Hector might have triggered the attack, shook his head.

“No,” he said firmly. “I don’t think we’re going to get anything more from him.”

“But it was his drawing of his attacker that put you on to Youngman, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, by an indirect route,” said Pascoe. “But he’d had a clear view of him in the car, whereas the man in the video shop was deeply obscured by shadow.”

“Still, to capture such a good likeness from a face glimpsed for only a split second moving toward you at sixty miles an hour takes a special talent,” said Komorowski. “Which, incidentally, I don’t find any reference to in Constable Hector’s fi le.”