Death's Jest-Book (52 page)

'Before what?'

She emptied her whisky glass,
filled it up again, emptied it again.

'I do not know if I have the
right to tell you this, and I do not think I could tell you this if I
was going to stay and be her friend as she believes I am. And I
believe it too, or believe it could be so, which is why I am leaving
and why I will never see her again, and also why I am able to break
the word I have given.'

'Slow down, luv,' said Dalziel.
That Scotch is turning you German. Breaking confidence is like taking
off a sticky plaster. There's only one way, short and sharp.'

She nodded, took a long slow
breath, then said, 'On Monday she went to the hospital for tests. She
has a brain tumour. She is going to die.'

'Well fuck me rigid and sell me
to the Tate!' exclaimed Dalziel, who had let his mind rehearse half a
dozen possible revelations without getting close. 'Can't they do
owt?'

'She does not want anything done’
said Richter.

'Shit. Someone's got to talk to
her’ said the Fat Man agitatedly. 'These days they can cure owt
save foot and mouth and politicians. Does Bowler know?'

'No one knows. Except me. Now
you. So now it is your responsibility not mine to decide what to do.
This is why I am glad to go. My job, which was never a job I should
have undertaken, is done. Now I can go to a real job’

'Run away, you mean, and leave
the poor lass to suffer all this alone, after you've weaselled your
way into her confidence? Jesus! What they say about you bastards
doesn't tell the half of it!'

His contempt left her unmoved.

She said, 'You
mistake, Superintendent. If she was as unhappy as I would be in her
situation, then I doubt if I could have decided so easily to go. No,
the thing that makes me go is that the news has not made her
miserable, it has made her happy! She acts as if she had gone along
to the hospital anticipating confirmation that she had cancer and
instead been told that she was free! I can offer comfort to despair.
I cannot try to bring despair to joy. Now I think I have said all
that I want to say to you, Superintendent.
Aufwiedenehen,
but
not too soon, eh?'

Dalziel finished his drink and
said, 'Just one thing afore I go. If you'd not mind taking off that
nightie or whatever you call it. . ‘

She looked at him, puzzled, then
smiled, stood up and pulled the T-shirt over her head.

'Turn around’ he said.

She obeyed.

'Right’ he said. 'You can
put it back on.'

'For a moment I thought you'd
changed your mind’ she said, parodying a disappointed pout.

'Nay, don't take it personal,
lass’ he said, rising. 'Just making sure there was nowt but
flesh to see. And very nice flesh it was.'

She smiled at him as he went to
the bureau, picked up her gun, examined it, put the safety catch on,
then slipped it into his pocket.

'You couldn't take it out of the
country’ he said. 'Not legally, anyway. So best I take care of
it’

'I am being permitted to leave
then, am I?'

'Can't see why not. One thing
more, but. Just in case you're hoping this tape you switched to
record when you came in might have summat on it that would embarrass
me, don't be too disappointed when you find I disconnected the
recording switch. Just as well, eh, else you'd have ruined old
Wagner’

He reset the deck and once again
the doom-filled music rolled around the room.

'What would I have used it for
anyway?' she said indifferently. 'Tell me, Mr Dalziel, why did you
choose this music?'

'Don't know. Why do you ask?'

'There are some who say that it
contains all that is best and worst in the German psyche’ she
said. 'I thought perhaps it was some kind of statement, a bit racist,
even’

'Racist? Me?' he said
indignantly. 'Nay, lass, I just dearly love a catchy tune, even if it
were written by a dead Kraut. You'll be seeing Charley afore you go?'

'Yes’

'What will you tell him?'

'As much as he needs to know’
she said.

'A man can't ask more than that
from his woman’ said Andy Dalziel.

* * *

A
few miles away, close entwined by choice and by necessity in the
narrow single bed, Rye and Hat lay in the dark.

'You awake?' said Hat.

'Yes.'

'Not worried about anything, are
you?'

'What should I worry about when
I've got everything I want? Do I look worried?'

'Well, no . . .'

In fact during the past few days
she had seemed to exude happiness. It was true that sometimes when he
glimpsed her without her knowledge, he thought she looked paler and
the shadows beneath her eyes looked darker. But the moment she became
aware of his presence, she glowed with a joy that made such thoughts
seem a blasphemy.

He ran his hands down her body
and said, 'Not losing a bit of weight, are you?'

'Perhaps. After Christmas I like
to start the New Year with a diet to get rid of all those chocs. But
I've noticed that cops seem to prefer their women with a bit of
weight.'

'Not me,' said Hat fervently.
'But I don't want to feel I'm going to bed with a xylophone - ouch!'

She had rammed a finger up his
backside till it hurt.

'My body's my business,' she
said. 'You'll just have to learn to play the xylophone. And if you
keep on living off junk food, I'll just have to learn to play the

bagpipes.'

'We'd better get a house in the
country or else the neighbours'll be complaining every time we make
love. Talking of which’

'So soon? Are you taking
something?'

'No, I meant talking of a house
in the country . . . when are we going to move in together? I mean
permanently, not turn about, your place and mine. In fact, I mean
really permanently. How do you feel about getting married?'

She didn't reply and after a
while he said, 'You thinking about it, or just thinking how to say
no?'

'I'm thinking about it,' she
said. 'Best advice seems to be it's not such a good idea marrying a
policeman.'

'You've been taking advice?' he
said, faking large indignation to conceal small hurt.

'Of course not, but I read a lot
of books, and wherever there's a cop there's usually a marriage in
trouble.'

'Books! What do these writers
know? They should get out more instead of spending all their time at
home inventing stuff.'

'But it's true’ she said.
'It's a demanding job. And it's dangerous.'

She pushed herself away from him
as far as she could, which wasn't far without falling to the floor,
and said, That's one thing that does worry me, Hat. Your job is
dangerous, and it's getting more so. I just don't know what I'd do if
anything happened to you.'

'Don't be daft,' he said.
'Chances of anything like that must be ... I don't know what, but
they've got to be longer than winning the lottery.'

'It almost happened, remember?'
she said. 'I came close to losing you.'

'OK, but lightning doesn't strike
twice, so that makes it even less likely it could happen again.'

'I wish I could believe that. All
I know is, if anything did happen that would be the end for me. Of
everything, I mean. My life would be over too. There'd be no point in
going on.'

'No, you mustn't say that,' he
urged fiercely. 'Look, nothing's going to happen

'But if it did?'

'Then you'd have to bear it, I
suppose

'No way.'

'Yes, you could. You're strong,
Rye. Stronger than me. I think you could come through anything if you
put your mind to it.'

'I wouldn't want to put my mind
to it.'

'You'd have to. Promise me!'

'What? That I'd throw roses on
your grave then head down to the singles club?'

'No, don't be silly. That you'd
give life a chance.'

'That sounds like something off a
calendar!'

'I'm sorry I don't have some
Fancy Dan way of putting it. It's just that I think these days
everyone seems so concerned with getting ready for death. It's all
about hospices and such things. Well, death's not that much of a
problem, it seems to me, and if it is, it soon gets solved. Living's
the hard thing to get right. Living's the important thing.'

He fell silent. She put her hand
on his face and traced his eyes and his mouth in the darkness.

'That's a good calendar you've
got,' she said. 'OK, I'll promise. Only you've got to promise too.'

'Eh?'

'Fair's fair. If anything should
ever happen to me, you've got to promise that you'll practise what
you've just been preaching, that you won't confuse grief with
despair, that you'll mourn but not forever, that you will never
forget me, but you'll never forget this promise that you made to me
either. That you understand I won't be at rest till you are happy
again. Can you promise that? If you can't, I won't.'

He put his hand up to take hers.

'I promise,' he said.

'OK, then so do I.'

He drew her to him. Her softness,
her scent, her warmth enveloped him like the air of lost Eden, but he
frowned into the dark as he tried to analyse a strange feeling that
something had happened which he didn't understand.

Rye lay with her head pressed
against his chest and her lips were smiling.

The UNIVERSITY of SANTA
APOLLONIA Ca.

Guest Suite No 1

Faculty of Arts

Wed
Jan 16th

Dear
Mr Pascoe,

What
a week this has been! What a rare mood I'm in! You cannot believe how
much I'm enjoying America. It's been like stepping into a movie and
finding I was a star! Have you been here? I'm sure you have - a
cultured, well-rounded man like yourself will not have been content
to take the rest of the world on report. You will have travelled
everywhere, observed, sampled, judged. My exuberance probably strikes
you as ingenuous, perhaps naive, even jejune. But remember, this
brave new world is indeed new to me. All my acquaintance with it
hitherto has been through the cinema, so no wonder I saw and felt it
as a movie set!

Of course my good impression of
this bright sunlit world was helped by the contrast with what I had
left behind. Frankfurt was wet and windy, Gottingen locked in ice and
snow. Anyone wanting to understand the Gothic glooms of the German
character should spend a winter there! Not that I suffered any
particular discomfort, being able to afford, at Linda's insistence,
decent lodgings. But I made no noticeable advance in my researches in
either place. I did track down some people called Degen in Frankfurt
who may or may not be of the same family as young Konrad, the baker
whom Beddoes lived and travelled with and attempted to turn into a
Shakespearean actor. But they had no papers or artefacts that could
be linked to their distant relative and I got the impression that
their few alleged family memories of the man were in fact gleanings
from various predecessors (including Sam himself) who had come here
on Beddoes' trail. (Though there was a young blond Degen who
fluttered his silky eyelashes at me . . .ah, the things we
biographers do in search of empathy with our subjects!)

As for Gottingen, it's a pretty,
enough little town, much of which has survived intact since Beddoes'
day. My hopes soared, but, apart from viewing his name in the
university records, I could find nothing to add to what his own
letters tell us of his life there. Sam wrote one of his 'Imagined
Scenes' in which Beddoes and Heine, both students at the university
and sharing an interest in poetry and radical politics, met and
quarrelled, but the dates don't really fit and eventually Sam scored
through it on the grounds that even imagination's wings need at least
one feather of fact to achieve lift-off.

So all in all,
what with the foul weather, the lack of progress, the weighty
echt
Deutchheit
of everything, I grew daily duller and more stupefied,
and time seemed to crawl by as if I'd been put into an uncomfortable
seat between two fat men with BO at the start of one of Wagner's
longer operas sung by an amateur music society and accompanied by a
school band, and told there weren't going to be any intervals.

At this juncture I thought how
wise you had been, dear Mr Pascoe, to eschew the life academic in
favour of the life detective. The mean streets your work takes you
down seemed as nothing compared to the gloomy avenues I found myself
lost in. No wonder that poor Beddoes with his death fixation opted to
spend most of his adult life here. Even now in this age of universal
light when it's possible in England or America for a child to grow up
in a big city without ever having noticed a star, shades and miasmas
and Gothic glooms are available on tap out here. What it must have
been like in the early eighteen hundreds pains the imagination!
Beddoes sought enlightenment through medicine, that most socially
beneficial of sciences, and through support of radical egalitarian
movements, but each of these avenues led him back to the same
conclusion, that man was a botched creation whose proper domain was
darkness and whose only salvation was death.

The longer I stayed there, the
closer I could feel myself coming to agreeing with him!

Happily at this juncture the US
Embassy in London, with whom I had been in close correspondence since
talking to Dwight, now summoned me for interview, so I took my conge
with considerable relief!

Not that things improved in
England. The weather was foul and the Embassy officials treated me
like their Public Enemy No.l, bent on bringing down the Republic. The
only good thing was I once again found Frere Jacques in residence at
Linda's Westminster pad, and this time, having become such chums,
neither of us objected to me bedding down on the couch for a couple
of nights. It turned out he was heading north on his promotional tour
and, as I wanted to touch base back in Mid-Yorkshire before heading
off into the west, he offered me a lift in his hired car as far as
Sheffield.