Death's Jest-Book (37 page)

'Failed miserably then.'

'So maybe Polchard's had to go
elsewhere for the money, which might explain how Belchamber got
involved.'

'No, he must've been involved
already if he were talking to someone about the van before it got
hit,' objected Dalziel. 'Look, until we've got a better idea what
we're dealing with - and it could turn out to be a bag of bones after
all - let's proceed with caution. Wieldy, I'll leave this lad in your
tender loving care for the time being, but if ever I feel the need,
I'll pick the young sod up myself and shake him around till I'm sure
there's nowt else to come out. Now bugger off, the two of you. We've
got nowt but mustard seeds here. I'm relying on you pair either to
water them or piss on them pretty damn quick.'

At the door Pascoe paused.

'Sir’ he said.

'What? Unless it's about Roote,
in which case sod off, I'm busy.'

'What's Novello doing with her
nose stuck in the Wordman file?'

'She's doing what she's been told
off to do, lad, and a bit more besides. I'd watch that lass. I reckon
she's after your job.'

'And welcome to it most days.
Shall I ask her direct then?'

With a sigh, Dalziel explained
what he was up to, most of it anyway.

'So how's she doing so far?'

'She's spoken to Pomona, put her
on guard.'

He gave Pascoe a quick summary of
Novello's account of her visit to the library.

'And Penn was showing Rye bits of
the "Lorelei" poem? Isn't that as good as an admission he
was the one did the break-in?'

'Not so. I'd mentioned Lorelei to
him and he's sharp at putting things together, is Charley. Couldn't
resist stirring the pot a bit, but I reckon the significant thing is
Charley apologizing and being what passes for conciliatory in a
tyke-bred Kraut. I reckon that Christmas Day really was just down to
too much sauce and he regretted it later. He wants Pomona lulled so's
his tabloid wolf can gobble up little Red Riding Hood unawares.'

'I see,' said Pascoe. 'Sir, it is
going to be all right, isn't it?'

Pascoe, though he hadn't opposed
them, had never been totally happy about the liberties they'd taken
with the official version of events that day out at Stang Tarn.

'Worried about your pension?'
laughed the,Fat Man. 'No need. If it comes to that, you can share
mine.'

The laughter still echoing in his
ears, How come it's only my pension that's at risk? wondered Pascoe.

Down in the canteen, Shirley
Novello and Hat Bowler were looking into the future but with no
thought of pensions.

It had been Novello who proposed
a chat over a cup of coffee and it hadn't started well.

'I was at the library this
morning,' said Novello. 'Had a talk with your girl.'

'What the hell for?' said Hat
fiercely.

'Just to see she was all right.'

'Oh yes? And what business is
that of yours? Mebbe you should keep your nose out.'

Oh shit, thought Novello. When
love came in the window, reason went out the door. Time to summon the
bogeyman.

'It was Mr Dalziel's idea. You
want I should tell Mr Dalziel to keep his nose out? Or would you
rather do it yourself?'

For a moment Hat looked as if he
might be seriously contemplating this, then reality set in and he
said, 'So what did he tell you to do?'

Novello explained. She held
nothing back. Dalziel had told her to handle things in her own way
and that didn't include risking alienation of a colleague she might
have to depend on at some future juncture.

Bowler seemed determined to be
stupid.

'So he thinks that Penn's trying
to get the papers interested in a scandal, only there's no scandal to
get them interested in, is there? How much time and money are they
going to waste on that, do you think? No story, end of story.'

'You're not looking at this
straight on, Hat’ she said. 'Think of it this way. We collect
evidence of what we think is a crime and we send it off to the CPS
and half the time they look at what we think is a water-tight case
and send it back saying, "Sorry no can do, won't stand up in
court." So, a good case to us looks like crap to them, right?'

'Yeah but’

'The newspapers are to us what we
are to the CPS. What looks like crap to us can look like a good case
to them. They don't have to worry about proving things in court.
Hints, allegations, lots of stuff in quotes, given half a chance they
can probably make us look like we're doing more covering up than a
drag queen.'

'Yeah, but if no one's done
anything wrong, they can't hurt us, can they?'

Could he really be so naive?
wondered Novello.

'If they find a story to run
they'll run it hard,' she said patiently. 'There'll be questions,
maybe another enquiry. You've been through one already, one that was
on your side, and you came out a hero. The papers loved you. But love
dies. Another scenario, another role. You may come out clean again,
but that doesn't mean you won't be damaged. You know how it works,
nothing on the record, but at every promotion board, someone asks,
wasn't he the one . . . ? Same with Rye. Yes, on paper she's good,
but do you recall. . .'

'They still need a story to run,'
he said obstinately.

'OK, try this. Librarian screws
boss in country cottage. Jealous lover catches them at it. There's a
fight. Lover stabs rival to death. Thirteen times.'

'That's a load of garbage!'

'Not the thirteen stabs. I've
read the PM report.'

Hat said, 'Listen, Novello, don't
you think I haven't been through all this? I was on my back with that
bastard on top of me. He'd stabbed me already, would have killed me
if Rye hadn't hit him with a bottle. That must've made him drop the
knife and he started hitting me with this heavy glass dish and would
probably have finished the job with that if I hadn't got hold of the
knife somehow and stabbed him with it.'

'Yeah. Thirteen times. Mainly in
the back, though you did manage to get him a good one under the ribs
too. That would probably have been enough without the other dozen.'

For a moment it looked as if he
was going to explode in resentful anger. Instead he closed his eyes
tight and knotted his fists tighter, then slowly forced himself to
relax.

'We were fighting, him for his
freedom, me for my life,' he said quietly. 'We rolled around a bit, I
suppose, but mainly he was on top of me with my arms round him, so
his back was the easiest target. I don't remember much. I was losing
consciousness. All I knew was while I still had an ounce of strength
left, I had to use it against him.'

'And of course you were defending
your girl's honour,' said Novello lightly. 'Real picture-book
heroics.'

To her surprise he grinned at her
mockery.

That's how it started maybe, but
not how it finished. In the end it was all about me being scared
shitless. Literally, I gather. I was convinced I was going to die and
I was terrified. You must know the feeling, Novello. You've been
there.'

Her hand went to the shoulder
where she'd taken the bullet that had come close to killing her.

'Not straight off’ she
said. 'For a time I was out of it. Still breathing, still moving, but
too shocked to feel much. Later though, when it looked like all of us
were going to end up dead and I was too weak even to think about
resistance, then I got scared.'

'Shitless?' he said.

'I may have pee'd myself, but we
ended up so wet there was no way of telling’ she said, smiling
at him in a sharing moment. Then the smile faded and she said in a
businesslike voice, 'OK, however you finished, you started off being
a hero. In your statement you say that when you burst into the
cottage, you found Rye and Dee struggling, both naked, lots of blood.
And you assumed’

'I assumed nothing! I saw he was
attacking her. And it wasn't just sexual, though that was bad enough.
The bastard was trying to kill her!'

'Because of the knife, you mean?
And because you'd worked out that all the evidence pointed to Dee
being the killer known as the Wordman? If there hadn't been a Wordman
connection and you'd come across the same scene, what would you have
thought?'

'The same’ he said
promptly. 'OK, different motivation. He'd wanted sex, she'd turned
him down, he'd got nasty, tried to force her, and when she fought
back, he lost it.'

'Right’ she said
thoughtfully. 'But even given his sole aim was to kill her, there
must have been some sexual element in the attack all the same. I
mean, in your hospital statement you say she was naked, right?'

'Yeah. He must have torn her
clothes off her, obvious.'

'Fair enough. No mention of this
in the inquest evidence though.'

'No need. It wasn't down as an
attempted rape.'

'No, of course not,' she said.
'Then there's Rye's injuries. It's on record she needed treatment,
but mainly for shock. Physically there was nothing but a few
scratches and a little bruising. No need for this to figure in the
inquest record either, nor in the enquiry report. She was attacked,
she was terrified, that was enough.'

'What's your point?' said Hat.
'In fact, what's the point of any of this? Like I say, I've been
through it all before, with Mr Dalziel and with the enquiry. So why
the hell do I have to sit here being interrogated by someone who
knows nothing about the case and whose only claim to seniority is
that she's been a DC a few months longer than me?'

'Do I have to explain it all
again?' she said wearily. 'Mr Dalziel, and the enquiry team too, they
had the same aim, to clarify the truth, but they had a bloody good
idea what the truth they wanted to clarify was. Dee, the psychopathic
serial killer, had been prevented from carrying out his last murder
by the intervention of Bowler, the modest young hero. That is the
gospel truth in the authorized version. Only there's Penn's revised
version, which Fat Andy thinks he's persuaded the forces of
Anti-Christ, better known as the tabloid press, to take an interest
in. We can assume the cunning bastards will get hold of everything
I've got hold of. And what we've got to ask ourselves so that we can
be ready for it, is what are they likely to make of things like the
thirteen stab wounds on Dee's body? The fact that they were made by
the deadly weapon with which he was attacking Rye, indicating clearly
that he'd been disarmed when he was killed? The absence of any
significant and life-threatening wounds on Rye's body?'

She could have added Rye's nudity
and the lack of any forensic evidence indicating that her clothes had
been removed by force, but she felt she'd gone far enough. Hat, she
observed with a pang, was looking worse than he had at any time since
his return to duty. Then, apart from a little pallor, he had shown no
signs of his illness, but had moved and behaved with all his old
ebullience. Now he looked careworn and a decade older.

'So what do you make of it,
Shirl?' he asked.

She hated Shirl, didn't much care
for Shirley, was happy to be simply Novello which had a neutrality to
match her work clothing. But Bowler's rare use of her first name
signalled dependency rather than condescension.

'Not much, and I doubt they'll
make much either, not without they get something else, like a few
good quotes from you or from Rye,' she said reassuringly. 'So take
care.'

'You bet,' he said, getting up.
'Back to the grind. See you upstairs.'

She watched him go. She had no
special feeling for Hat, but there was a quality of brightness and
bounce about him which it was hard to resist, and she wasn't happy to
have a part in snuffing it out. She hoped she'd been telling the"
truth about the likely tabloid reaction, but she doubted it. If, as
Dalziel suspected, one of the papers had already committed an
undercover investigative reporter to the case, they weren't going to
step away from it without at the very least a mud-stirring article.
There was enough material here already for that and she'd barely got
going on her devil's advocate assignment. But of course, it wasn't
just that which would be bothering Bowler. He too was a detective and
she doubted if she'd asked any questions he hadn't already asked
himself. She just hoped to God that he'd have the nous not to ask
Rye. She herself hardly knew the woman, thought her interesting, and
was certain there was a lot more to her than met the eye. If that lot
more had included opening her pages to her librarian boss, that was
her business and Hat would be well advised not to make it his.

But if it made a tabloid
headline, it would take a stronger will than she guessed he possessed
to keep his lips glued.

Wed
Dec 26th

My
dear Mr Pascoe,