Death Comes for the Fat Man (49 page)

“The truth, dickhead. What else would I tell him? He wants to speak to you.”

“Tell him the truth again,” cried Pascoe. “Tell him I’m not here.”

“But you are—”

Then Collaboy realized that Pascoe wasn’t asking him to lie.

The DCI had vanished from sight at a fast run and a moment later all that indicated he’d ever been there was the scream of an overrevved engine fading away on the rich summer air.

5

W E D D I N G G I F T S

So now I’m a married man, thought Kalim Sarhadi.

Throughout the ceremony he had felt curiously disconnected, more like a casual onlooker than one of the main par-ticipants. His even stronger sense of disconnection from Jamila hadn’t helped. A few weeks ago she’d announced that she wasn’t going to wear the white bridal gown usually favored in marriages in the West, but a traditional
shalwar-qameez
outfit. He’d been amused, thinking her main motive was to take the bangers by surprise, but when he saw her, he’d been struck dumb. In Western white she would doubtless have looked beautiful, but in scarlet silk richly embroidered with heavy gold thread, she was an exotic jewel. He could not believe this lovely creature was his Jamila. In his sharp gray suit and brilliant white shirt he felt shabby and out of place. It was as if he had entered one of the old stories in which a young man affianced since childhood to some unknown girl approaches his wedding day with considerable trepidation, only to discover he has been contracted to a princess.

But he didn’t want a princess, he wanted his Jamila.

The feeling of not-rightness persisted all the way to the Marrside Grange Hotel where he found himself enthroned alongside Jamila on a sofa raised on a shallow dais so that the assembled guests could see them together and approach them with congratulations and gifts.

He turned toward her and she turned toward him. For a second they looked, solemn faced, into each other’s eyes, two complete strangers wondering what the future might bring.

Then she grinned and murmured, “Any chance we can skip the nosh?” and suddenly she was his Jamila again.

He relaxed and began to enjoy his wedding day.

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

It was, as most second- and third-generation marriages were these days, a mix of old and new, of East and West.

The
nikah
in the mosque had naturally followed the old established pattern but once they’d moved on to the hotel for the
walima,
tradition had been considerably rearranged. This enthronement was taking place before the actual
walima
rather than after, and the
walima
itself, which back in Pakistan traditionally consisted of two separate banquets, one for the men, one for the women, was going to be mixed.

“Don’t care what they do over there,” Tottie had declared. “Over here, them as pays the piper calls the tune.”

Any mutterings from fundamentalists had been stifled by the Sheikh’s ready agreement to all the arrangements Tottie wanted to make. When Sarhadi thanked him for not raising any objection, he had replied with a smile, “Fundamentalism is about substance, not form. Preserving old truths does not mean we cannot learn new tricks.

And I daresay many of the old traditions will still be observed, if only by accident. For instance the one which declares that strictly speaking the
walima
should not take place till after the marriage has been consummated.”

This hint that he knew how far Sarhadi and Jamila had gone in their very untraditional courtship had come as a shock. More likely it was just an educated guess. Thanks be to Allah that the bangers were not so educated.

His mother had greeted news of the imam’s accord with typical directness.

“Grand,” she’d said. “Not that it ’ud have made a ha’porth of difference if the old bugger had said owt else.”

While Kalim never doubted that his mother’s had been a true conversion, it was quite clear that the spirit of Allah had supplemented rather than replaced the spirit of Yorkshire independence.

Tottie was standing alongside the sofa-throne now, taking care of the gifts of money, most of which came in the form of notes or checks, though some of the guests, harking back to the days when the bride was showered with coins, gave all or part of their offering in the form of purses stuffed with golden coins. The gift received and thanks given, any guests who looked inclined to linger too long were soon chivvied d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 373

into the dining room by this redoubtable lady. There was no doubt who was in charge here. When Farrukh Khan, one of the group of young men who formed the Sheikh’s unofficial bodyguard, tried to station himself behind the sofa, Tottie tapped his shoulder and with a jerk of her head sent him packing, to join the pair of bangers who were checking on the guests entering the lounge.

The self-important and officious manner of most of these self-appointed guards got up Sarhadi’s nose, but there was no escaping the fact that some lunatic had fired a gun at the Sheikh’s car, so any occasion which involved his presence meant you had to put up with the bangers too.

By now the flow of guests was dying to a trickle and Tottie was glancing at her watch with the satisfaction of someone whose timetable was proving atomically accurate. She frowned as she saw Farrukh’s bulky frame once more approaching the sofa, but the young man ignored her and said to Sarhadi, “Got a woman outside trying to get in. Says she’s a photographer and she knows you. You not been arranging another photographer, have you? My uncle Asif ’s got the job, right?”

“Yeah, sure. What’s her name?” asked Sarhadi, puzzled.

“Kent, something like that, I think. I’ll tell her to push off.”

“No, hang on,” said Jamila. “Kentmore, could it be? Kilda Kentmore?”

“That’s right.”

“Kal, you remember her? Last week—she’s the sister-in-law of that guy who was on the TV with you. We met her again at the fete. I talked with her a lot. She’s a real photographer, Kal, did fashion, knows all the top models. If she wants to photograph us, let’s ask her in.”

“What about Uncle Asif ?” protested Farrukh.

“What about him?” said Jamila with spirit. “Everyone knows he’s going blind in one eye and that’s the eye he puts to the viewfinder. I say you let Kilda in.”

Farrukh looked at Sarhadi. Tottie was one thing, but he wasn’t about to start taking instructions from this mouthy girl.

Sarhadi said, “Yeah. Why not? Let her through.”

6

H I - Y O , S I LV E R !

To average fifty-plus miles per hour driving through urban West Yorkshire on a Saturday afternoon in the height of summer requires a lot of luck and a total disregard of law. In Pascoe’s wake the law was in tatters, but fortunately so far his luck had held. He knew he was acting irrationally but rationality involved time.

Across his mind, like a blizzard over an inland sea, raged everything that had happened since Mill Street blew up. Because he’d feared—

because deep down he’d believed—that Andy Dalziel was going to die, he had ploughed forward in what to start with had seemed a simple inexorable search for certainties.

Oh what a dusty answer gets the soul . . .

He had made things happen, and the things he had made happen had made other things happen, so that in the end it wasn’t a simple trail that he had followed, but a track, many of whose twists and turns he had actually created. In trying to trace a line back from an effect to a cause he had himself become a cause and did not know if the place he was at now was a place that would have existed if he hadn’t started on his quest, whether he was the Red Cross Knight riding to the rescue or merely a bumbling Quixote, creating confu-sion rather than resolving it.

He would have liked nothing more than to pull over into a quiet lay-by, relax, and let everything that had happened, everything he knew, or thought he knew, or merely guessed at play across his mind till the surface lay still and the depths became clear.

But he just didn’t have the time.

The first cause, the death of Dalziel, was no longer a cause.

Of course he had only Wield’s secondhand account to assure him d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 375

that the Fat Man had woken in his right mind. But somehow he felt certain that all was going to be well.

But how often did it happen that the starting point of a chain of action becomes irrelevant long before the end comes in sight?

No point in saying that if Dalziel had woken up the day after the explosion, he would not be here now, desperately driving like a madman toward what he fervently prayed would be nothing more than a rendezvous with a few harmless windmills.

As he got through Skipton, his car phone rang

“Yes!” he bellowed to activate the receiver.

It was Glenister. Being pissed off made her sound even more Scots than usual.

“What the hell’s going on? We’ve just heard that Youngman’s been taken. Your name was mentioned. Peter, you were warned to keep out of this stuff. Are you still playing the Lone fucking Ranger?”

Her emotion had the homeopathic effect of quelling his.

“Hi, Sandy,” he said calmly. “I was just going to ring you.”

It wasn’t a lie. As he drove along he’d found himself worrying about the consequences if something happened at Marrside and he hadn’t called his suspicions in. His conscience would find it hard to live with, his career impossible.

“Oh, good! So now I’ve saved you the bother. Fill me in!”

He said, “Let’s leave the details for later, OK? I’m on my way to Bradford. I’ve got reason to suspect a woman called Kilda Kentmore might be planning an attempt on Sheikh Ibrahim’s life. She’s fi ve foot eight, slender, thin face, black hair. She may be armed with a sidearm, but that’s unlikely, too difficult to conceal. No, if she’s got anything, it will be a bomb, and I think it may be concealed in a camera. She’s a professional photographer, and I think she’s going to Sarhadi’s wedding reception. She won’t have been invited but he knows her, so it could be easy for her to blag her way in.”

There was a pause then Glenister said incredulously, “You’re telling me that there’s a Western suicide bomber going to Kalim Sarhadi’s wedding?

Christ, Pete, these Templars are crazy but surely they’re not that crazy?”

“The others have been acting out of some half-baked notion of vigilante justice,” said Pascoe. “This one is just plain nuts. I think she 376 r e g i n a l d h i l l

wants to die. Look, it’s complicated. You need to get off the phone and alert your people. I’m pretty certain she won’t go to the mosque but she’ll head straight for the
walima
at the Marrside Grange Hotel, so tell your people watching the mosque to get along there straightaway. Tell them if they spot her, to approach with very great care.”

Another pause, then one stretching so long he said, “Sandy, you still there?”

Glenister said, “Peter, we’ve got no people at Marrside.”

“
What?
But you said there was an observation team on-site. That’s how you knew I’d gone to see Sarhadi . . . oh no. Don’t tell me, this is Mill Street all over again, right? Low-scale surveillance. Don’t run up overtime over weekends and Bank Holidays. Jesus, what kind of Fred Karno outfit are you people running?”

“Pete, my bonny lad, we’re not the CIA. Those plonkers in Westminster huff and puff about national security, but when it comes to doling out the dosh, they find it more painful than passing gall-stones. How close are you?”

“Ten, fifteen minutes,” said Pascoe.

“OK. I’ll get some people mobilized but you’ll definitely be fi rst. At least you’ll recognize her. Kentmore? She related to the Kentmore your wife was on TV with?”

“Yes.”

“He mixed up with this?”

“Yes.”

“So where can we get hold of him?”

“He’s in custody. In the Mid-Yorkshire nick,” said Pascoe.

He didn’t anticipate congratulation and he didn’t get it.

“Since when, for Christ’s sake?”

“Since lunchtime.”

Again the silence, longer this time, but not ending in the expected explosion.

“Oh, Peter, Peter,” she finally breathed. “What have you been playing at?”

“I can explain, but not now, eh?”

“Of course not. After all, if you get to Marrside and find the hotel d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 377

in rubble, there’s no explanation you can give which will be of any interest, is there?”

She rang off.

She was, he knew, right. If you played the Lone Ranger too long, there came a time when not even your faithful Indian companion could watch your back.

He threw back his head, yelled “Hi-yo Silver, away!” and stamped on the accelerator.

7

G AT E C R A S H E R S

Kilda Kentmore stepped into the hotel lounge.

What she would have done if refused entry she did not know because what she planned had such an air of inevitabil-ity about it, alternatives were pointless. What did these people say?
It is
written.
Well, they were soon going to find out that non-believers could write a fair hand too.

No sign of the Sheikh. Not a problem. Her new sense of fatalism convinced her he’d be along shortly. Meanwhile she’d get the others used to her presence.

She advanced toward the sofa-throne, smiling.

Jamila returned her smile, with added brilliance. The girl looked so happy that for a moment Kilda felt uneasy at what she was going to do to her wedding day. But only for a moment. OK, the girl’s memory of her big day was going to have a shadow over it, but at least if all went well she’d be able to share many anniversaries with her husband.

Kalim said, “Nice to see you, but what are you doing here?”

“I was in Bradford, taking some pictures. And I remembered Jamila saying it was your wedding day today, and when I passed the hotel on my way to the motorway, I thought I’d see if I could get a few shots of you arriving or leaving or something. When I realized that everyone was inside already, I should just have carried on home. Sorry.”