Death's Jest-Book (12 page)

And you know what I saw this
time? Not temples to beauty and learning, not a peaceful haven where
a man could drop anchor and enjoy shore leave for ever more.

No, I saw it with eyes from which
Dwight had removed the scales, and what I saw was an old movie set,
looking sad as hell in the rain!

Why on earth would I want to
spend my days gossiping and bitching and boozing my life away in a
dump like this?

So now I'm packed - my few things
only take a minute to throw together - and waiting for Dwight. He
should be ready soon, so at last I'll bring this letter to a
conclusion rather than an interruption.

I hope I've cleared the air
between us. Perhaps some time in the future I may be moved to write
to you again. Who knows? In the meantime, as the year draws to its
close, may I once again wish yourself and your lovely family a very
Merry Christmas?

Yours on the
move
per ardua ad astral

Franny Roote

‘Sore
arse and rusty bum,' said Andy Dalziel.

'What?'

The Aral Sea. Christ, I've not
thought of that for years. You never know what's going to stick, do
you? Is it really drying up?'

'I don't know, sir,' said Peter
Pascoe. 'But does it matter? I mean

'Matters if you dive in and it's
not there,' said Dalziel reprovingly. 'Sore arse and rusty bum! Old
Eeenie would be chuffed.'

Pascoe looked at Edgar Wield and
saw only an incomprehension to match his own.

His decision to bring up Roote's
letters at the CID meeting was mainly pragmatic. He'd spent much of
the morning so far following up various lines of enquiry relating to
Roote and did not doubt that the eagle eye of Andy Dalziel above and
the cat eye of Edgar Wield below would have noticed this, so it was
best to make it official. But that triumphant feeling that his enemy
had delivered himself into his hands had gradually faded. Indeed
recollecting it now made him feel faintly ashamed. The investigation
of crime should be a ratiocinative process, not a crusade. So he had
introduced the letters in calm measured tones and passed them to his
colleagues without (he hoped) letting it show how desperate he was
for their confirmation that here was cause for concern.

Instead he was getting the Fat
Man, like some portly prophet, speaking in tongues!

The rambling continued.

'He once said to me, old Beenie,
"Dalziel," he said, "if ever I want to torture a man
of letters, I'll make you read blank verse to him." Right sharp
tongue on him, knew how to draw blood. But, God, it were a long
boring poem! Mebbe that's why I recall the end, because I were so
pleased it had got there!'

'What poem?' said Pascoe,
abandoning his efforts to swim against this muddy tide.

'I told you. Sore arse and rusty
bum, did you learn nowt at that poncy kindergarten of thine?' said
Dalziel. Then relenting he added, ' "Sohrab and Rustum"
were its Sunday name, but we all called it sore arse and rusty bum.
Do you not know it?'

Pascoe shook his head.

'No? Oh well, I expect by the
time you got to school, it 'ud be all this modern stuff, full of four
letter words and no rhymes.'

'Blank verse doesn't rhyme,' said
Pascoe unwisely.

'I know it bloody doesn't. But it
doesn't need to 'cos it sounds like poetry, right? And it's a bit
miserable. This poem's right miserable. Sore Arse kills Rusty Bum and
then finds out the bugger's only his own son. So he sits there all
night next to the body in the middle of this sort of desert, the
Chorasmian waste he calls it, while all around these armies are busy
doing what armies do, one of the saddest scenes in Eng. Lit., Beenie
said, and this river, the Oxus, keeps on rolling by. Bit like "OF
Man River" really.'

'So where's the Aral Sea come
in?' asked Pascoe.

‘I’m telling you,'
said Dalziel.

He struck a pose and started to
declaim in a sing-song schoolboy kind of way, end-stopping each line
with no regard for internal punctuation or overall sense.

'
...............................................
till at last.

The long 'd-for dash of waves
is heard and wide.

His luminous home of waters
opens bright.

And tranquil from whose floor
the new-bathed stars.

Emerge and shine upon the Aral
Sea.

'Now that's fucking poetry, no
mistake,' he concluded.

'And that's the end of this sore
and rusty poem?' said Pascoe. 'And old Beenie . . . ?'

'Mr Beanland, MA Oxon. He could
have thrown chalk for England. Put your eye out at twenty feet. He
went on and on about this Aral Sea, how remote and beautiful and
mysterious it were. And now this Yank says it's drying up, and
tourists go to see it, and it's not there. Like life, eh? Like
fucking life.'

'It isn't a correspondence that
leaps up and hits me in the eye,' said Pascoe sourly.

'Which is what I'd do if I had a
stick of chalk,' growled the Fat Man. 'Any road, talking of
correspondence, why'm I wasting precious police time reading your
mail?'

'Because it's from Franny Roote,
because it contains implied threats, because in it he admits
complicity in several crimes. And,' Pascoe concluded, like an English
comic at the Glasgow Empire seeing his best gags sink in a sea of
indifference and desperately reaching for any point of contact,
'because he refers to you as Rumbleguts.'

But even this provocation to
complicity failed.

'Oh aye. When you've been
insulted by experts that sounds like a term of endearment’ said
the Fat Man indifferently.

'Glad to find you so
philosophical’ said Pascoe. 'But the threats

'What threats? I can't see no
threats. How about you, Wieldy? You see any threats?'

The sergeant glanced
apologetically at Pascoe and said, 'Not as such.'

'Not as such’ mimicked
Dalziel. 'Meaning not at fucking all! The bugger goes out of his way
to say that he's not writing a threatening letter. In fact he seems
to rate you so highly, it wouldn't surprise me if he ended up sending
you a Valentine card!'

‘That's
all part of it, don't you see? Like this play he goes on about,
Death's Jest-Book,
it's all some kind of grisly joke. That
stuff about the ambiguities of revenge, one brother becoming dead
friendly with the Duke, the other bursting with hate, that's Roote
telling me how he feels.'

'No it's not. In fact I recall he
says quite clear he feels like the friendly brother. And all these
crimes you're going on about, what would they be?'

Pascoe opened the file he was
carrying and produced several sheets of paper.

'You've not been playing with
your computer again?' said Dalziel. 'You'll go blind.'

'Harold Bright, known as Brillo’
said Pascoe. 'Banged up in the Syke the same time as Roote. Had an
accident in the shower. Cracked his head. Traces of ammonia-based
cleansing fluid found in eyes but never explained. Complications
during treatment. Died.'

'And good riddance’ said
Dalziel. 'I remember the Brights. Hospitalized two of ours when they
got arrested, one of 'em had to take early retirement. Dendo still
inside?'

'No. Finished in Durham, but he
got out last month.'

'Problem solved then. Send him
Roote's address. He sorts out your lad, we bang Dendo up again for
the duration. Two for the price of one’

Over the years Pascoe had come to
a pretty good understanding of when the Fat Man was joking, but there
were still some grey areas where he felt it better not to enquire.

He said, 'My point is, we know a
man died, and now we have Roote's confession.'

'Bollocks’ said Dalziel.
'His admission might as well have been written by Hans Andersen. And,
like he says himself, where are you going to get witnesses? Any road,
if he did do it, he deserves a medal. Owt else?'

'I checked that Polchard was
there the same time as Roote, and the Syke's Chief Officer remembers
they played chess together’ said Pascoe sulkily.

'You going to do Roote for
cheating then? I remember Mate Polchard. Right tricky sod. He out
yet?'

Wield whose job it was to know
everything said, 'Yes, sir. Came out in the summer. Went off to his
place in Wales to recuperate.'

Polchard was
out of the normal run of thugs in more than just his penchant for
chess. Not for him the comforts of a Spanish villa with a plethora of
Costa fleshpots on his doorstep. His preferred hideaway was a remote
Welsh farmhouse in Snowdonia. But when it came to protecting his
interests, he ran true to type. Shortly after he bought the farm, a
barn belonging to it was burnt down and a message sprayed on a wall
in Welsh with under it a helpful translation.
Go home Englishman
or next lime it's the house.
A few days later the local leader of
the main Welsh activist group awoke in the early hours to find three
men in his room. They were unarmed and unmasked, which he found more
worrying than reassuring. They spoke to him politely, showing him a
list of the addresses of perhaps a dozen members of his group, his
own at the head, and assured him that in the event of any further
interference with Mr Polchard's property, every one of these houses
would be reduced to rubble within a fortnight. Then they left.
Fifteen minutes later his garden shed blew up and burned with such
ferocity it was a pile of cinders long before the fire brigade got
near. No complaint was made, but Police Intelligence soon picked up
the story, which Dalziel retailed now, at length, to signal his
interest in Roote was over.

But Pascoe listened with barely
concealed impatience to the oft-told tale and used it as a cue to
wrest the subject back.

'Polchard's not the only one
who's good at fires,' he said. This fire Roote writes about at St
Godric's, I've got several newspaper reports here arid I've been on
to the Cambridge Fire Service Investigation Department and they're
getting back to me

'Hold on, lad. Stop right there,'
said Dalziel. 'I've not had this letter X-rayed and-tested for
poisoned ink like you, but I have read it, and I don't recall owt in
it coming in hosepipe distance of an admission of arson! Did I miss
summat? Wieldy, how about you?'

The sergeant shook his head.

'No, definitely no admission, not
as such

There you go again. Not as such!
As what then if not such?'

Pascoe had had enough.

He interrupted angrily, 'For
Christ's sake, what's up with you two? It's as plain as the nose on
your face, he's mocking us, that's the whole point of the letter.

Even without the letter, I'd have
known something was wrong. Look at the facts. Franny Roote is a
nobody, an ex-con, working as a gardener. Then his tutor, Sam
Johnson, gets killed and Roote manages to sweet-talk Johnson's sister
into dropping his almost completed book on Beddoes into Roote's lap.
Suddenly from being an academic nobody, he's set for the big league.
One obstacle - there's competition in the shape of this guy Albacore,
who looks set to get his oeuvre in the shops several months earlier.
Roote and Albacore meet. Albacore thinks he's cut a deal. Take Roote
on board, squeeze the juice of Johnson's researches out of him, and
then, of course, he'd be able to drop Roote like the nasty little
turd he is. Only he doesn't know yet that this turd's got teeth.'

Dalziel who'd been listening with
his great maw open in maximum gobstopped mode burst out, 'A turd with
teeth! I told thee, this is what comes of reading modern poetry!'

Pascoe who was a trifle vain
about his style looked embarrassed but pressed on, 'But what happens?
There's a fire and Albacore ends up dead and his work goes up in
smoke. Coincidence? I don't think so. Like I say, I'd have been
suspicious if I'd read about it in the paper. But that's not enough
for the scrote! He has to write to me and gloat about it!'

'Gloat? I got no gloat. How about
you, Wieldy? You step in any gloat? And if you say not as such, I'll
pull your tongue out and ram it up your neb!'

Wield touched his lips with his
tongue as if rehearsing the manoeuvre and said, 'Not . . . that I
could say definitely was gloating. But like I say, if Pete's got a
feeling . . . and I agree that Roote's a tricky bastard

'Not so tricky we didn't bang him
up,' said Dalziel complacently.

'He's had the benefit of a prison
education since then’ said Wield.

He was speaking figuratively but
the Fat Man pretended to take him literally.

'Fair do's but’ he said.
'He didn't come out a sociologist like most of the buggers as get
educated inside. I really hate it when I hear one of them bastards on
the chat shows’

The DCI closed his eyes and Wield
said quickly, 'Mebbe we should wait and see what the Cambridge fire
people say’

The phone rang
so aptly that he wasn't in the least surprised when Pascoe, who'd
snatched it up, mouthed
Cambridge
at them.

Eyes less keen than Dalziel's and
Wield's could have worked out it wasn't good news.

Pascoe said, Thanks a lot. If
anything else comes up ... yes, thank you. Goodbye’

He put the receiver down.

'So?' said Dalziel.

'Nothing suspicious’ said
Pascoe. 'As far as they can make out, the fire started in a leather
armchair, probably caused by a lighted cigar butt which had slipped
down behind the cushion. Only sign of any accelerant was an exploded
brandy decanter’

'Aye, well, bunch of drunken dons
smoking big cigars in a building that's probably failed every fire
regulation laid down over five hundred years, that's asking for
trouble’ said Dalziel. 'Well, I'm glad we've got that out of
the way’

'For God's sake’ said
Pascoe, 'you don't think that someone like Roote was going to get to
work with a can of paraffin, do you? No, he was there, he tells us he
was there, puffing away on a cigar with the best of them. That's what
probably gave him the idea’