Death's Jest-Book (27 page)

No ice palace this, I'm glad to
say, but a warm and comfortable and roomy cabin with all mod cons!
This was the chalet Linda had referred to, belonging to the castle
and used, I presume, to accommodate visitors like myself who for
whatever reason were best kept separate from the beau monde in the
big house. Frau Buff had been waiting for me here. When I didn't
arrive at the expected time she'd made enquiries and discovered my
plane was delayed. When I still hadn't appeared by the revised
expected time, she contacted the taxi company and was told their
driver had reported dropping his passenger at the castle some minutes
earlier. She, deducing that the Dummkopf had dumped me at the wrong
place, had come looking for me.

All this I pieced together with
my slowly resurrecting schoolboy German and her sparing replies.

She was, God bless her, much more
interested in feeding me than conversing with me. Fortunately, what
she'd been preparing was one of those all-inclusive casserole dishes
which, unlike airline food, only gets better the longer it stays in
the oven.

Once she saw me tucking in, she
indicated apologetically that she was leaving me to my own devices. I
tried to say that it was me who should apologize for taking up so
much of her free time, and I must have got my message across because
as she furred herself up preparatory to stepping out into the cold
night, she seemed to my slowly adjusting ear to say it wasn't her own
pleasure which was taking her away but getting rooms ready in the
castle for Frau Lupin.

Thinking I'd got her wrong, I
said in my fractured German, 'But Frau Lupin isn't coming till next
week.'

And as she went out of the door
she tossed something over her shoulder which froze my forkload of
delicious stew in mid-air.

'Nicht Frau sondern Frd'ulein
Lupin. Ihre Tochter.'

Not Mrs but Miss Lupin. Her
daughter.

Perhaps I had misheard!

I broke the spell and rushed out
after Frau Buff. She was already on the snow buggy.

'Fraulein
Lupin,'
I cried to her.
'Wann kommt sie?'

'Morgen’
she called.
'Urn Schnittschuhlaufen!'

That baffled
me. What in the name of hell was
Schnittschuhlaufen?

'Was ist
das?'
I shouted as she started up and began to move away.

She pointed away from the chalet
with her right hand.

'Auf dem
See!'
she tossed over her shoulder. Then she was gone.

On the sea? I stood there
baffled. Then for the first time I noticed the snow had stopped, the
clouds were breaking up and going about their business, leaving the
sky to a scatter of diamond dust such as those of us in city pent
never see, and a slice of moon hung there, bright enough to light up
before me a level meadow almost perfectly round.

Except it
wasn't a meadow! It was a small lake. Idiot! This must be the
Blutensee
which
Fichtenburg
was
am,
frozen over
and besprinkled with snow.
(See
only means 'sea' when it's
feminine; I once got my knuckles rapped for forgetting that!)

Skating.
Schnittschuhlaufen
was skating. Emerald was coming here in the
morning for the skating!

Now my ever-optimistic mind was
racing. Was this coincidence, I asked myself, or was it planned?
Could Emerald have learned her mother's plans for me and decided to
cut in? Or was I being absurdly arrogant to even imagine that it
might be so?

These things
distracted me so much that on my return inside I hardly noticed the
delights of Frau Buff's casserole or the smoothness of the bottle of
excellent burgundy I had chosen from a well-stocked wine rack. And I
have even postponed the plateful of scrumptious-looking
Sahnetorte
the good woman has left for pudding so that once more I can write
to you, my friend, my spiritual father, to clear my mind and remind
me that in the midst of no matter what fiery -turbulence of spirit
I can always find a small circle of coolness and calm, like the lake
outside my window, to bring me peace.

Well, it's
worked. Now I feel ready to face the future - and to enjoy my
Sahnetorte.

Thank you.

Franny

In
England on the whole even criminals celebrate Christmas, but rest for
the wicked does not automatically mean rest for the law's guardians
also. The crimes of greed which are proper to Advent may fade to
nothing on the day itself, but they are more than compensated for by
those crimes of new rage and old resentment which spring naturally
from the close confinement, with large supplies of alcohol, of blood
relations who have had the good sense to keep far apart for the
previous three hundred and sixty-four days.

So as Pascoe hastened home on
Christmas Eve, bearing with him gifts for Rosie which several of his
generous colleagues had placed on his desk, he also bore the fear
that the two days off he had won after much hard wheeling and dealing
could be interrupted by a phone call saying, Sorry, but there's so
much domestic mayhem going on we can't cope, and could you come in
and give us a hand, please?

Or, if it were Dalziel calling,
scrub the question mark and the please.

As he put his key into his front
door lock, he looked at the brass lion's-head knocker which Ellie had
'rescued' from a derelict farmhouse up on Greendale Moor and waited
to see if it would turn into the Fat Man's face. .

No change, so maybe he was going
to be spared a haunting.

But when he went in and saw on
the hall table where Ellie left his personal mail an envelope with a
Swiss stamp on and the address written in what was becoming a
familiar hand, he felt he'd relaxed too soon.

He would have thrown it in the
fire except that Ellie would have known, and he'd resolved to try and
keep to himself just how much these letters bothered him.

But he did manage to ignore it
till he'd embraced his wife, thrown his daughter into the air,
persuaded her fiercely protective dog, Tig, that this was not a form
of personal assault, got into his comfortable, back-flattened,
dog-chewed slippers, which he did not doubt would be replaced
tomorrow by a new stiff pair which he and Tig would have to start
working on immediately, and taken a long pull at a long gin-and
tonic.

'See you got some more
Fran-mail,' said Ellie.

'I noticed. So what's it say?'

'How should I know?'

'You mean you haven't steamed it
open?'

'If I were that keen to read it I
would rip it open,' said Ellie. 'But I don't deny I'm mildly
interested to see how he's getting on hobnobbing with the idle rich.'

'It's their nobs that are likely
to get hobbed,' said Pascoe.

He opened the envelope, scanned
through the letter then tossed it across to his wife.

She read it more slowly, then
turned back to the beginning and started again.

'Hell's bells,' he said. 'It's
not Jane Austen.'

'Oh, I don't
know. Hero and heroine meet, exchange yearning glances, part perhaps
for ever, then by a strange turn of fate are thrown together in a
remote Gothic setting. Not a million miles from
Northanger Abbey,'
said Ellie.

'When Roote's involved, there's a
good chance the Gothic stuff will turn out to be really supernatural’
said Pascoe.

'No. He's a realist at heart. An
explanation for everything. Except that thing about having a vision
of you. Very odd. I mean, the Virgin Mary's one thing, but you!'

'You won't laugh when I'm a
cult,' said Pascoe negligently.

He hadn't told Ellie about his
own vision of Roote by St Margaret's Church at the same time the man
was allegedly seeing him. One thing being a policeman taught you was
that the world was awash with coincidences. In fact it often seemed
to him when critics moaned about a book relying too much on them that
usually the false note was struck by writers refusing to admit just
how large a part they did play in our day-today existence.

So he persuaded himself he had a
rational argument for saying nothing. But he found himself childishly
eager to have her approve his reaction to the letters in some degree.

'You've got to see he's taking
the piss’ he urged.

'Have I? So what precisely do you
think he's mocking you about?'

'You see the way he compares the
Duke's desire to raise his dead wife with his own longing to
resurrect Sam Johnson? Instead, the Duke gets this rival he's
murdered. And I ask myself, where do I find a dead rival of Roote's?
All over the place, that's where! Albacore for a start. Then there's
that student in Sheffield, Jake Frobisher, the one who overdosed
himself trying to catch up on his work, the one whose death was
responsible for Johnson's sudden move to Mid-Yorkshire Uni.'

'The one whose death you had
Wieldy double-check with no result? Come on! At the very worst Franny
might be gently mocking your obsession with dragging him into your
investigations, but I defy you to point to anything that even a fully
paid-up paranoid like yourself can take as positively,threatening.'

'What about the bit about envying
my domestic bliss?' said Pascoe stubbornly.

She checked it out, looked up at
her husband and sadly shook her head.

'He tells you you're lucky to
have such a lovely wife and delightful daughter, and you think that's
a threat? Come on!'

'Well, how about all that crap
about me providing him with a circle of peace and calm. You've got to
admit that's just a bit weird’ said Pascoe, annoyed that he'd
let himself be drawn into an argument about the letter in spite of
all his resolutions.

'Maybe. But you've been elected
his guru, his spiritual father, remember? You can't blame an orphan
boy with growing pains for turning to his wise old spiritual daddy!'

This might have provoked an
outburst most unfitting for the eve of this great family festival had
not Rosie come into the room at that moment, yawning widely and
demanding to know if it wasn't past her bedtime. This being akin to
the Prince of Darkness suddenly expressing a desire to close down
Hell and open a care home, her parents burst into sadly unsympathetic
laughter and then had to repair the damage done to her tender
sensibilities.

There is a story somewhere of a
man in his last night in the condemned cell trying to pretend he is a
child waiting for Christmas in order to turn his baring hours into
those tortoise-paced minutes of childhood. Fast or slow, good or bad,
all things come in the end, and the following morning it took only a
paler shade of blackness in the eastern sky to have Rosie bursting
into the parental bedroom demanding to know if they intended lying
there all day.

After that things proceeded more
or less according to her timetable, with Pascoe made to feel that his
insistence on having coffee and toast before starting to open the
presents was a manifest offence against the European Declaration on
Human Rights.

The pile of parcels beneath the
tree was large, not because the Pascoes were over-indulgent parents,
but because their daughter had a strong sense of equity and insisted
that everyone else should have as many parcels to unwrap as she did,
including the dog.

Her unselfish delight in watching
her mother and father in receipt of their gifts more than compensated
for the strain on Pascoe's dramatic abilities as he declared with
rapture that a pair of electric blue cotton socks was all he needed
to make his life complete.

Of course others of his gifts
were more luxurious and’ or more interesting.

'Let me
guess,' he said to Ellie, hefting a book-shaped parcel. 'You've
bought me a Bible? No, it's too light. The Wit and Wisdom of Prince
Charles? No, too heavy. Or is it that intellectual treat I've been
after for ages:
The Pirelli Calendar: the Glory Years?'

'Don't get your hopes up,' said
Ellie.

He ripped off
the wrapping paper and found himself looking at a book with a jet
black jacket design broken only by a small high window of white which
bore the title
Dark Cells
by Amaryllis Haseen.

‘I saw it in that remainder
shop in Market Street,' said Ellie. 'And I thought, if you're going
to be hung up on Roote, you might as well read what the experts have
got to say.'

'Well, thank you kindly’
said Pascoe, uncertain how he felt about it. Then he caught Rosie's
gaze upon him and was reminded. That's absolutely marvellous. I've
been looking for a copy everywhere, how clever of you to find one,
and so heavily discounted at that.'

Satisfied, Rosie turned her
attention to Tig whose pleasure at his prezzies, as long as they were
instantly edible, was genuine and unconfined.

Finally the ceremony was over.
Rosie now had the difficult task of deciding which of her many gifts
to concentrate on first. Her pecking order, which Ellie was glad to
see had nothing to do with expense, placed equal top a
trace-your-ancestors genealogy kit and a silent dog whistle which the
instructions assured her would provide instant control of her pet
over distances up to half a mile. Finally, because as she said it was
Christmas for Tig too, and ignoring the disincentive of a biting east
wind, she opted for the whistle and took the dog out into the garden
to change its life. Ellie went upstairs to ring her mother who was
coming to them tomorrow but insisted on spending Christmas Day itself
with her Alzheimer-stricken husband in his nursing home. To her
daughter's proposal that they would all make the two-hour drive to
join her there on Christmas afternoon, Mrs Soper had replied briskly,
'Don't be silly, dear. I know you feel guilty, but you really mustn't
let your guilt spoil things for others. It's a bad habit I hoped
you'd got out of.'