Death's Jest-Book (39 page)

Why Basel? Because that's where
poor Beddoes ended his life in January 1849.

Despite being a doctor, his
suicide was a long drawn out business, its first stage being a
self-inflicted wound in his right leg in July 1848. It's ironic that
after a couple of decades of active involvement in radical politics,
Beddoes should have sunk to this pitch of despair in the very year
when most German states were in a ferment of revolution. Initially it
looked as if the radical cause was winning. In Frankfurt a German
parliament was trying to draft a new liberal constitution uniting the
whole of Germany, yet it was this same city that Beddoes left in the
spring with his young friend, Konrad Degen, to wander through Germany
and Switzerland for several weeks without showing the slightest
interest in the fascinating new political situation.

According to Beddoes' cousin, Zoe
King, Beddoes had been very depressed as a result of an infection
contracted through a cut in his own skin while dissecting a corpse.
Also, for reasons we do not know, he believed his republican friends
had deserted him. His life must have seemed utterly empty when, after
the failed theatrical debut of Konrad in Zurich, the friends
quarrelled and the young baker headed back home.

So Beddoes moved to Basel and
wounded his leg. Perhaps he intended to sever an artery and bleed to
death. Strangely off target for such a devoted student of anatomy, he
was taken to hospital where he attempted to finish the job by
deliberately letting the wound become infected, he hoped fatally.
Again he was only partially successful, the part in question being
his right leg below the knee, which was amputated in September of
that year after gangrene set in.

By January, apparently recovered
in spirits and reconciled with young Konrad who'd been installed in
lodgings nearby, he was fit enough to make excursions from his
hospital room. On one of these he obtained poison of some kind - not
difficult if you were a doctor - and that was that.

How sad - not that he should die,
for we all must come to that - but that he who had such talent, such
intelligence, and such opportunity, should have ended up so depressed
and disappointed and disillusioned that life lost all meaning for
him.

He left a note, addressed to one
of the two important men in his life, both of them lawyers. He was
articled for a while to the first of these, Thomas Kelsall, a
Southampton solicitor. The law career came to nothing, but a
friendship was formed which remained one of the few constants in
Beddoes' existence. Without the correspondence between these two we
would know even less of Beddoes' life than we do, and without
Kelsall's unselfish enthusiasm for the poetry, very little of it
might have survived.

The other lawyer, to whom the
note was addressed, was a man called Revell Phillips of the Middle
Temple who seems to have become Beddoes' consultant on financial
matters, though, as with Kelsall, there was clearly something much
deeper in the relationship. Together, Sam speculates, these two
lawyers may have provided in some wise the substitute he was always
seeking for that father he lost so young.

In the note Beddoes writes the
phrase which provided Sam with the title for his book.

I should
have been
among other things
a good poet.

And typically he ends with a
macabre jest.

Buy for Dr
Ecklin
[his attending physician]
one of Reade 's best stomach
pumps.

Knowing, of course, that next
time Ecklin sees him he'll be dead from poisoning!

It's a letter that makes me cry
every time I read it. And smile too. He was truly a merry mad tragic
figure.

But I mustn't end on a melancholy
note this letter which has been concerned with this most merry of
times! I hope you and yours have had as good a Christmas as I have.

Yours fondly,

Franny

Pascoe
frowned as he read the letter, then tossed it across to Ellie who
read it and laughed out loud.

'What?' he said.

'The farting poem. I begin to
warm to Beddoes. Who on earth is St Gingo, or did he just make him up
for the rhyme?'

'Wouldn't be surprised. Making
things up to suit his own weird purposes, sounds just the sort of
thing that would appeal to Roote.'

'And what precisely do you think
he's making up here?'

Pascoe thought, then said,
'Himself. He's making himself up. This jolly, sociable fellow who
gets on with people and has serious conversations with his spiritual
advisor and goes off to work out of sense, of duty. He's telling me,
"Look, Mr Pascoe, I can be anything I want to be. Try to get
hold of me and you'll find yourself clutching air."'

'Ah, now I'm with you. He's
telling you this in the same way he told you he'd just bashed
Albacore over the head and left him to burn to death in the Dean's
Lodging?' said Ellie. 'Peter, I suggested you got this business
sorted, but I meant by doing your job. All you seem to be doing is
diving into Roote's letters like some religious fanatic reading
Nostradamus's texts and finding in them whatever fits his particular
world-picture.'

'Yeah? Well, Nostradamus was mad
too,' said Pascoe stubbornly. 'And Pottle agreed there was something
seriously disturbed about the guy when I showed him the letters.'

'Yes, and didn't he say that
Haseen was a psychologist of good standing in the trade, not the
idiot you took her for?'

'Just shows how clever Roote is,
doesn't it?' said Pascoe. 'All that crap about his father, she
swallowed it hook, line and sinker.'

Ellie shuddered at the confused
image and said, 'So how about maybe it's you who swallowed the crap?'

'Sorry?'

'What do you really know about
Roote's childhood and early family background? I mean, where did you
get it from?'

'I don't know, the records, I
suppose.'

'Right. But where did the stuff
in the records come from? Maybe that's the crap and Franny put it
there. Maybe Ms Haseen was good enough to dig some of the truth out
of Fran and, when he saw it in her book, he was really pissed off at
how much he'd let slip.'

'Yes, but it's
Roote in his letters that draws my attention to this. I mean, he's
not mentioned by name in
Dark Cells,
is he? I'd probably never
have known about the sodding book if he hadn't referred to it.'

'Yes, but he knows you're a
clever clogs, Pete. OK, he may overdo the admiration for you, but my
reading is, he's only exaggerating what he really feels. In his eyes,
you'd have no difficulty in tracking down the book and his part in
it. So he makes a pre-emptive strike and draws your attention to it
and his cleverness in deceiving Haseen about the father he never
knew. Because that's what he wants the world to think, that he never
knew his father, that he never had this close worshipping
relationship with him and suffered this huge psycho-trauma when he
left them and’or died.'

Pascoe finished his coffee and
rose from the breakfast table, shaking his head in mock wonderment.

'And to think’ he said,
'you're the one tearing me off for reading between the lines! I may
be stretching things sometimes trying to break his code, but you're
into astrology!'

He stooped and kissed her and
made for the door.

She called after him, 'Don't
forget the champagne.'

They had decided to celebrate the
New Year at home. They'd received a couple of party invitations, and
Fat Andy had assured them that an invite to the Lord Mayor's Hogmanay
Hop in the old Town Hall was theirs for the arm-twisting, but they'd
turned down everything on the grounds that they couldn't get a
babysitter. Which was probably true. But in fact Ellie knew she
hadn't tried very hard, and Peter hadn't looked at all disappointed.
Is this how middle age begins? she wondered. Which gloomy thought had
made her insist that staying in didn't mean they couldn't celebrate
expansively and expensively.

'And get the real stuff,' she
shouted after him. 'None of your sodding Cava!'

'You saying you can taste the
difference?' he shouted back.

'Maybe not, but I can read it!'
she yelled.

She went up to her study to check
on Rosie. The genealogy kit she'd got for Christmas had been a great
hit, mainly because of a jocular suggestion in the preamble that a
study of your ancestry could reveal that you were in fact really a
prince or princess.

'Mum,' she said when Ellie
entered the room, 'will I ever see Granddad Pascoe?'

Pascoe's father lived in
Australia with his eldest child, Susan. Ellie had met him once when
she and Peter were students and she'd stayed overnight at their
Warwickshire home. She hadn't cared for the way he brought up his
son's plans to join the police force and tried to engage her in his
objections against them. The fact that she too thought Peter would be
throwing himself away made no difference. Fathers should be concerned
about their children, but with warmth and understanding, not with
chilly uncaring self-righteousness. She sometimes wondered, but not
aloud, how large a part the desire to disoblige his father had played
in helping Pascoe make up his mind to join the Force.

It had come as no surprise when
she re-engaged with Pascoe to learn that his father had joined his
favourite daughter in Australia on retirement. He'd never been back.
The loss of one grandfather to Alzheimer's had clearly got Rosie
wondering about the other.

'One day, I'm sure you will’
she said brightly. 'And all your Australian cousins.'

Who might be all right. She'd
seen photos and they looked quite normal. Anyway, there was time
enough for Rosie to learn that families weren't all sweetness and
light.

'How's it going, dear?' she
asked. Yesterday she'd got the impression that where dialectics had
failed, simple tedium might be succeeding.

'It's all right but I think Tig
gets a bit bored’ said Rosie.

Ellie smiled. More and more it
was Tig who got bored, Tig who got hungry, Tig who got tired. It was
a masterly transference strategy which left Rosie able to assert
herself without overt selfishness. Everyone, thought Ellie, should
have a Tig.

It was certainly true that the
little mongrel sitting under the desk had an air of patient
long-suffering which seemed to say, this genealogy's OK, but when
does the action start?

Now! was clearly the answer as
Rosie's mention of his name brought him to his feet with a tail wag
that started at the neck.

Rosie slid off her chair.

'Shall I clear up later?' she
said. 'Tig looks like he might want to do a dump.'

Clearing away all her gear had
been a condition of Rosie's use of the study, but cleaning up after
Tig got precedence.

'I'll do it,' said Ellie, pretty
sure she'd been conned again.

She sat down at her desk and
began to put together the genealogy pack. It was aimed at the young
market, and the introductory blurb urged the tyro genealogist to
press older relations for details of family history, adding, 'but be
careful. As people grow older, they are more likely to make little
slips of memory. So double-check everything!'

Good advice.

More or less the good advice
she'd been giving to Peter about Roote.

Would he take it? Maybe. Maybe
not.

On the other hand, she thought
virtuously, there wasn't much point going around dishing out good
advice unless you were willing to take it yourself.

And, because she always found the
cloak of virtue a rather itchy cloth, she gave herself a good scratch
by adding, and wouldn't it be fun to toss the result of her own
researches into Roote's background in front of Peter and say, hey, I
think you missed a bit!

She got the pack papers in order
and began to read from the beginning.

The
Old Town Hall clock, still standing proud despite the fact that its
broad face which once enjoyed a clear view right out to the swell of
the northern dales now had to squint through a jungle of tumescent
modernity, gathered its strength and struck.

The still and frosty air offered
such little resistance to the note that even the benighted
inhabitants of Lancashire must have been made aware that here in the
very middle of God's Own County the Old Year was on his way out and
the New on her way in.

For a moment there was no
competition, then every bell in the town started ringing, rockets
climbed into the air to dim the stars with their cascading colours,
car horns sounded, revellers round the equine statue of the Grand Old
Duke of York in Charter Park which already bore its traditional
embellishment of streamers, toilet rolls, and inflated condoms, burst
into raucous cheering while in the more sedate confines of the Old
Town Hall itself, the guests at the Lord Mayor's Hogmanay Hop let out
a welcoming whoop, then started applying their tongues to the first
serious business of the New Year.

One of many things Dalziel liked
about Cap Marvell was she gave as good as she got and they might have
become linked in a lingual knot it would have taken an Alexander to
sever if Margot, the Lady Mayoress, hadn't exercised her droit de
seigneuse by tapping him on the shoulder and saying, 'Fair do's,
Andy. Save some for old Tom's breakfast.'

'By God, Marge, I'd not have
liked to be in thy tag team!' said Dalziel, massaging his shoulder
where she'd tapped it.

Not many people dared to call her
Marge or make open reference to her former career as a female
wrestler, but Margot was not in the mood to be offended. She grabbed
Dalziel in a neck lock, gave him a kiss like a hot jam doughnut,
said, 'Happy New Year, Andy!' then moved on to perform her consort
duties round the rest of the guests.

Dalziel winked at Cap then turned
his attention to the age-honoured ceremony of embracing every woman
of his acquaintance in turn and wishing them a Happy New Year. The
greeting ranged from full-length body hug and mouth contact to a
chaste cheek peck, though air-kissing happily had not penetrated the
heart of Mid-Yorkshire. Dalziel, who was no grabber of unwilling ass,
was usually able to gauge to a T the amount of pressure and skin
contact each encounter required, but finding himself suddenly face to
face with Rye Pomona, he paused uncertain. He'd been delighted if
surprised to see Bowler escorting the young woman into the
high-vaulted council chamber (now used solely for social functions
since the erection of a modern state-of-the-art Civic Centre a few
years back), delighted because Rye looked so much better than last
time he'd seen her, and surprised that the young couple hadn't found
somewhere noisier, sweatier and younger for their night out. All had
been explained when during his welcoming speech the mayor had
mentioned their sadness at being without Councillor Steel ('Save a
fortune on catering but’ Dalziel had whispered to Cap). 'On the
other hand’ continued the mayor, 'it gave him great pleasure to
have as his personal guests the young people who had contributed so
much to the final apprehension of the monster who murdered him.'