Death's Jest-Book (19 page)

Oh dream of joy! is this indeed
The light-house top I see? Is this the hill? Is this the kirk? Is
this mine own countree?

I do believe it is. I'll finish
this tomorrow.

Hello
again! How quickly things change. Just in case you did think of
dropping in on me over the next few days, don't bother, I'm not here.
Or rather, not there!

Here's what happened. I awoke
this morning quite early - Syke conditioning! I'm not due back at
work till tomorrow and my renewed hopes that I might once more be
able to find a publisher for Sam's Beddoes biography made me keen to
get back to work on it. I headed straight out to the university
library, planning to spend the day there, probably without a break,
which is the way I like to work once I've got my teeth into
something.

But I'd hardly started work
before I was interrupted by the arrival of Charley Penn.

Charley has many excellent
qualities and he has been most helpful in encouraging my literary
ambitions, giving me many tips both creative and practical. In all of
us there is both light and shade; in some one predominates, in
others, the other. But in Charley there is a darkness which
sometimes blots out the brightness altogether. Where does it spring
from? Perhaps it's part of the German psyche. Though he has taken on
much colouring from his Yorkshire upbringing, he is in many ways a
true scion of his Teutonic ancestry.

It was Charley who drew my
attention to a poem of Arnold's called 'Heine's Grave'. Fine poem, a
moving tribute to the dead poet and a sharp assessment of what made
him tick. In it Arnold speculates that it was Heine that Goethe had
in mind when he wrote that some unnamed bard had 'every other gift
but wanted love'.

So it seems to me with Charley.
The one person who drew love out of him and returned it to him was
Dick Dee. Dee's death and the revelation that he was probably the
killer of so many people, including, God damn his soul, my beloved
Sam, has quite overthrown Charley. Oh, for much of the time he seems
the same, saturnine, savagely humorous, unblinkingly perceptive, but
that darkness which always exists in the depths of a pine forest has
in his case now spread out to envelope even the crowns of the trees.

Evidence of this came when I
asked him what brought him here away from his usual perch in the town
reference library.

'She's away on holiday, so I
thought I'd take a break too,' he said laconically.

I didn't need
an explanation.
She
is Ms Pomona who came so close to being
the Wordman's final victim. Charley is so convinced of his friend
Dee's innocence that he has persuaded himself there must have been a
conspiracy to conceal the truth. But I'm sure that you know all about
this already, Mr Pascoe, as you and Rumbleguts, who were first on the
scene after Dee's death, are marked down as the head conspirators!
Charley, I think, has the Gothic fancy that his accusing presence in
the Reference when Ms Pomona is on duty will eventually wear her down
and bring a confession.

I can't say that I was too
pleased to see him as my head was full of ideas, but I owe him a lot
for recent kindnesses and could not decently refuse his invitation to
pop out for a coffee and a chat.

As we drank our coffee, I told
him about my excitements in Cambridge, which he found mildly
entertaining, but I could tell his mind was elsewhere.

Finally I said, 'Charley, you
seem a bit down. Book going badly?'

'No, that's going fine, except I
sometimes wonder, what's the point? Heine, Beddoes, we work our
knackers off to produce "the definitive work", except of
course it never is. At best it replaces the last definitive work and
with a bit of luck we may pop our clogs before it gets replaced by
the next one. Why do we do it, Fran?'

'You know why,' I said rather
pompously. 'We pursue the Holy Grail of Truth.'

'Oh yeah? Well there's only one
truth I want to pursue and I've been getting nowhere.'

Oh God, I thought. Here we go.
Dick Dee is innocent, OK!

I said, 'Charley, if you're
getting nowhere, maybe it's 'cos there's nowhere to get.'

He shook his head and said, 'Not
true. But they're clever, I'll give 'em that. This is a fucking
X-file. The truth is out there, under Andy Dalziel's fat buttocks or
up yon Pascoe's tight arse. I wanted to do this by myself, but I'm
not too proud to admit I need help. If the authorities won't listen
to me, I've got friends that will!'

I wasn't sure what this meant. I
don't think he's wrong about needing help, but I suspect that's not
the kind of help he's got in mind. I could speculate, but I'm not
going to. Frankly, if Charley's obsession leads him into
illegalities, I don't want to know. A man in my situation needs to
keep his relationship with the Law plain and unambiguous.

Which is why I feel I need to
pass on my fears that Charley is so obsessed with proving his
friend's innocence that he's capable of almost anything.

I do this not in any spirit of
delation - my time at the Syke has conditioned me irredeemably to
regard a grass as the lowest form of life - but in the sincere hope
that by alerting you to Charley's state of mind, you might be able to
head him off from any indiscretion or, worse, illegality of
behaviour.

Enough of
that. On my return to the library, I found I was uncomfortably aware
of Charley's presence at the next table. It was like having Poe's
raven or Beddoes' old crow of Cairo (which Sam amusingly points out
is homophonous with the Christian monogram
chi-rho,
a pretty
fancy which he plays with entertainingly for a page and a half before
discarding it) brooding at my shoulder. So, though as I said before,
I normally hate to be interrupted at my work, it was quite a relief
when my mobile began to vibrate.

To my surprise it was Linda
ringing from Strasbourg. Instantly I started to fantasize that
Emerald had been on the phone to her, telling her she'd met me and
later realized that I was the only man on earth for her! What idiots
sex makes of us, eh?

Naturally it was nothing like
this, though she knew of my meeting with Emerald as she'd been
talking to Jacques on the phone. What concerned her more was the
account she'd read in her paper of the events at God's.

She questioned me closely, asked
if I was all right, then with that savage ability to cut to the chase
which is her political hallmark went on to say, 'At least this means
that you have a clear field for Sam's book. You'll want to get down
to some serious work. When we met in Belgium, you mentioned that
there were still a few things Sam had been working on about Beddoes'
time in Basel and Zurich. Worth following up, you reckon?'

'Well, yes, I suppose so,' I
said. 'I mean, even if they turn out dead ends, the only way to be
sure is to follow them as far as possible . . .'

'Quite right. Like in politics,
always cover your back so that you don't find some pushy little
squirt second-guessing you. Right, here's what we do. Some chums have
got a place in Switzerland. They're heading for warmer climes for a
month or two so they've given me use of their bunkhouse while they're
away and I'll be spending Christmas there with a few people. It's
called Fichtenburg-am-Blutensee in Canton Aargau. The chalet there's
the perfect place for you to work, lovely and quiet - my party won't
be turning up till the twenty-fourth - and there's easy access to
both Zurich and Basel. How's that sound?' .

'It sounds very nice,' I said.
'But maybe . . .'

'Good,' she said. 'You'll join us
for the festivities, but otherwise you'll be your own master. I've
spoken to the housekeeper, Frau Buff, and she'll expect you this
evening . . .'

This evening!' I exclaimed. It
dawned on me that Linda wasn't discussing possibilities but dictating
arrangements! It had been the same when she'd contacted me last month
to say that she was in Brussels for a meeting and had decided to
spend the weekend in the Stranger House at Frere Jacques' monastery
and wouldn't it be a good idea for me to actually meet the founder of
Third Thought face to face? While I was still wondering how to refuse
politely, she was telling me about my travel arrangements!

The same thing was happening now.
I was booked on a tea-time flight from Manchester and my ticket would
be waiting for me at the airport. A taxi driver would meet me at the
arrivals gate at Zurich.

She rattled on in that peremptory
manner of hers for a little while, but after the initial shock, I
found that all I could think of was, will Emerald be there at
Christmas?

I said, 'That sounds marvellous,
Linda. Both for the work, and for Christmas. It was beginning to look
like being a bit lonely. But I don't want to intrude on your family .
. .'

'You won't,' she said brusquely.
'It will be a couple of political chums. And Frere Jacques will be
with us, God willing. So, all fixed, right?'

And now disappointment made me
dig my heels in a bit.

'Getting to Manchester might be a
problem.

‘My car's knackered . . .
and there's my work . . .'

'Take a cab, bill it to me. As
for work, that's why you're going’ she snapped.

'I meant, my job in the
university gardens

I heard that snort of disbelief
so familiar to millions of British viewers and listeners from her
appearance on various chat shows. It had also been a distinctive
punctuation of Labour speeches in parliamentary broadcasts before she
fell out with her own leadership and flounced off to give the
Europeans the benefit of her incredulity.

'You're a full-time scholar now,
Fran, so it's no longer necessary to cultivate your garden. The
book's the thing.'

Strange, I thought, that after
so, many years of estrangement from her stepbrother while he was
alive she should be such an enthusiast of his work now that he was
dead.

In the end, I did what most
people do when Linda comes at them with their lives mapped out. I
gave in.

And indeed the more I thought
about her plan, the more attractive it seemed.

I really did want to do some
serious work and what better place to do it in than a luxurious house
(the wooden shack image of chalet I'd immediately discounted as the
kind of pseudo-modest understatement by which the rich emphasize
their wealth) in beautiful countryside with a nice motherly
housekeeper to take care of my comfort?

I didn't really need the uni
library for anything other than a chair, as Linda had told me to
extract from Sam's personal library all those books I felt relevant
to his researches. And I would be completely free from the oppressive
presence of poor old Charley.

I went back in to collect my
things and tell him of my change of plan.

He said indifferently,
'Switzerland? Don't stand in front of any cuckoo clocks.'

Finally I scribbled a note to
Jack Dunstan, the Head Gardener, offering him my thanks and my
notice.

So where am I now? On another
train, that's where! This time heading for Manchester. Some innate
parsimony made me unable to take up Linda's kind suggestion of
travelling there by taxi. It would cost a fortune, and this train
gets me there with plenty of time to spare.

So there we are. I hope you and
dear Mrs Pascoe and your lovely little girl have a merry Christmas,
and now that I know why I'm writing to you, I hope you won't think it
an imposition if I drop you another line in what looks like it might
be a very Happy New Year indeed!

Fondly yours,

Franny

‘I don't believe it!' said
Pascoe. 'Here's another one.'

'Another what?'

'Letter from Roote.'

'Oh good. Anything's better than
these round robins so many people send with their cards. It's the
modern disease. The media's full of it. The obsession with trivia.'

'So how come you find Roote's
trivia so interesting?'

'How come you find it so
significant? Come on, let's have a look.'

'Hang on. There's reams of it
again.'

As he read, Ellie picked up the
discarded pages and read in tandem.

Finishing just behind him she
regarded his long pensive face across the breakfast table and said,
'Well, friend, guru, father-figure, what's bugging you this time?'

'I feel . .. stalked.'

'Stalked? That's a bit strong,
isn't it? A couple of letters

‘Four. I think four letters
constitutes a nuisance if not a stalking, especially when each of
them separately is long enough to make several normal letters!'

'In this e-mad age, perhaps. But
there's something rather touching about someone taking the time to
write a good old-fashioned long narrative letter. And I don't see how
your detective neuroses can find anything even vaguely threatening in
this one. In fact he goes out of his way to warn you to watch out for
Charley Penn who, I must admit, has been rather odd since Dee's
death. Not that he ever says anything to me about it, being as I'm
compromised by shagging one of the chief conspirators, but I can tell
there's something simmering down there somewhere.'

Ellie knew Penn much better than
Pascoe. She'd been a member of a literary group he ran, and with the
publication of her first novel scheduled for the spring, he had
admitted her to the adytum of real writerhood and their acquaintance
had taken a step towards friendship till Dee's death had brought the
barriers down.

'You don't think Charley's going
to come after me with a poisoned ballpoint, do you?' said Pascoe.

'There you go, paranoid every
time. If he does have a go, he's more likely to start sniping at you
in print. That would be his way of attack. He's a word man, after
all.'

She realized what she'd said even
as she said it. The last Wordman who'd touched their lives had used
more than words to dispose of his many victims.