Death Comes for the Fat Man (18 page)

“No, not really. Sorry, but this is big. They want me on
Fidler’s
Three.
Tonight.”

Fidler’s Three
was the current big hit television talk show. Each week its host, Joe Fidler, invited three guests to join him in a different venue to discuss matters of current interest before a participating audience.
Fidler’s Three
had two gimmicks that made it very popular. First, no politicians, journalists, or A-list personalities were permitted on the panel. Second, at the start of each show a list of debating clichés scrolled down the screen, starting with the old favorites—
level playing field, at the end of the day, with great respect, hardworking families,
etc.
—then moving on to the latest arrivals. Guests undertook to make a donation of fifty pounds to a charity of Fidler’s choice each time they used any of these, a slip marked by a recorded voice crying, “Order!

Order!” above a cacophony of zoo sounds, which was the signal for audience participation in the form of a barrage of multicolored Ping-Pong balls hurled at the offender.

Fidler himself was a personable young man who’d been a New Labor MP till “the sheer meaningless gab of it” had driven him to resign and spend more time with his money by becoming a TV personality.

He claimed that the only qualification needed by his guests was that they should be articulate and opinionated, but usually there turned out to be some kind of linking theme to his choice.

“A bit short notice, isn’t it?” said Pascoe.

“Well, it’s Ffion, actually,” said Ellie.

“Ah.”

Ffi on Lyke-Evans was the Press Offi cer in charge of the publicity for Ellie’s novel. Pascoe had met her at a signing in Leeds. Delayed, he’d entered the almost empty store twenty minutes late. Seeing Ellie’s solitary figure sitting alongside a wall of unsold books, her desperate eyes giving the lie to her insouciant smile, he might have stolen quietly away if a seductive Welsh voice hadn’t lilted into his ear, “Hello, sir.

Come for the signing, have you? It’s a lovely book, you won’t be able to put it down.”

She talked a good book, Pascoe had to admit. She was young and attractive, with long black hair, huge dark eyes, lips to suck men’s souls d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 135

with, and a winningly mischievous smile. Once Pascoe identifi ed himself, she offered him twenty-five convincing reasons for the absence of punters. Pascoe was unpersuaded but noticed that Ellie, the archskep-tic, hung on every spellbinding word uttered by the Welsh witch.

Her faith had been blunted a little by the subsequent silence of all branches of the literary media, but still, if invited to share a joke at Ffion’s expense, she would insist the girl knew her job. And, despite his ingrained skepticism, Pascoe, whenever he spoke to Ffi on always found himself momentarily infected by her merry optimism.

Today it seemed all Ffion’s skills had been put to the test. She had contrived to get one of her authors domiciled in the northeast onto
Fidler’s Three
and had made the long journey north to smooth his path and calm his nerves. Then just as she arrived in Middlesbrough, her mobile rang and she was told he couldn’t make it, having been summoned to the sickbed of a near and dear relative.

Faced with the prospect of Joe Fidler’s fury and the loss of her own credibility, she’d thought quickly. First she rang Ellie and explained the situation. Ellie’s first novel launch hadn’t been her finest hour, she admitted, which was why, she went on with scarcely a breath, she’d been really excited at this God-given chance to make up for past fail-ings by offering Fidler Ellie’s name.

“Not tentatively,” she told Ellie. “TV doesn’t do tentative. I told them you’re wise, witty, and wacky, opinionated, assertive, and articulate, and that you are a definite rising star, the next George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie . . . ”

“Agatha Christie?” queried Ellie indignantly.

“I could see they hadn’t heard of the others,” said Ffion. “So they’re not surprised they haven’t heard of you! But they’re desperate to have you. So can you come?”

“Try to stop me!”

“Great. Grab a taxi and get yourself up here pronto! See you!”

Ffion Lyke-Evans broke the connection and punched in Joe Fidler’s mobile number. She didn’t think she’d been dishonest. In her job a simple temporal reorganization was a long way from a lie. What would have been stupid was to sell Ellie to Joe and then discover she was on 136 r e g i n a l d h i l l

holiday. Of course if Fidler said, “No way!” she’d have to ring Ellie back and invent a reason for disappointing her, but dealing with authors’

disappointments was the first thing they taught you at publicist school.

Anyway she was sure that she had the arguments to persuade Fidler to accept Ellie as a substitute.

“Hi, Joe,” she said. “It’s Ffion. Listen, I’ve got some rather bad news and some incredibly good news . . . ”

And Peter Pascoe, cynical though he was about anything connected with the media, could not bring himself to voice any doubts when he saw that Ellie regarded this as incredibly good news too.

“So I can’t ring back and tell Ffion I can’t do it after all, can I?” she concluded.

“No, of course not,” he agreed. “Who are the other guests, by the way?”

“No idea. No one knows who the three are going to be till showtime, not the audience, not even the guests. Which is good. No one will know I was a second choice!”

“And they’d find it hard to believe anyway,” he said gallantly.

She mouthed him a kiss.

“Thank you kindly,” she said. “It’s really great to know you’ll be here when I get back. By the way, did you hear about Hector?”

“No. What’s he done now? Got the Nobel Prize for brain sur-gery?”

“Not funny. The poor sod got knocked over this morning. Hit and run. Wieldy told me this afternoon when he rang to see how I was. He’s OK, though.”

She told him the story.

“Poor bastard,” said Pascoe. “If I’d known, I could have looked in on him earlier.”

“Earlier?”

“Yes,” said Pascoe, mentally kicking himself. “I called in at the hospital to see how Andy was.”

It was, like the best lies, only half a lie. He had certainly called at the hospital but his inquiry about the Fat Man had been an afterthought made on the internal phone.

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 137

Ellie, though susceptible to her press offi cer’s blandishments, had been a detective’s wife long enough to have developed a sensor for evasions.

“Funny no one mentioned Hector,” she said.

“I was hardly there a moment,” he said. “I was in a hurry to get home, remember?”

Oh you’ll pay for this in the next life, he thought. In fact, as the doorbell rang, he acknowledged he was paying for it now.

“That will be my taxi,” said Ellie. “Just think what that’s going to cost the bastards. They must really want me! Listen, Pete, it’s just struck me, why not come along? I’m sure they can find you a seat in the audience.”

Pascoe thought about it then shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I’ve done enough traveling for one day and I’m pretty bushed. I’ll just sit here and watch a bit of telly. I expect I’ll fall asleep. There’s never anything interesting to see on a Friday night, is there?”

She gave him a hard jab in the ribs.

“Don’t wait up,” she said. “I can always wake you if I want anything. Which I wouldn’t be surprised if I do.”

“I’ll take that as a promise,” he said.

They smiled at each other lovingly. Then Pascoe spoiled it by saying, “Ellie, be careful if Fidler tries to get you talking about the terrorist threat, that kind of thing . . . ”

“Because of my connection with you, you mean?” said Ellie. “Pete, why can’t you get it into your head that in most people’s eyes I’m not defined by the fact that I’m married to a cop? They value me for what I am, what I do. And I made it quite clear to Ffion when my novel came out that I didn’t want any reference to the fact that you were a cop.

OK, she may have hyped me up a bit to get me on the show, but it’s Eleanor Soper the novelist they’re interested in, not Ellie Pascoe the demure little policeman’s wife!”

“Hey, when do I get to meet
her
?” said Pascoe. “Sorry. You’re dead right, of course. It was a silly thing to say. Put it down to resentment at not being able to get any closer to you than ten million other people this evening.”

138 r e g i n a l d h i l l

“Ten million? Is that all?” said Ellie. “Ciao!”

She was smiling again, so that was all right.

And he’d deserved the reproach, thought Pascoe as he watched the taxi pull away. He was just going to have to get used to having a celebrity wife. Eventually.

Back in the house, Pascoe made himself a sandwich, opened a can of lager, and sat down in front of the telly. There was still an hour and a half to go before
Fidler’s Three.

He picked up the phone and rang Wield.

“Hi, it’s me,” he said. “I’m home.”

Briefly he explained, then said, “Ellie told me about Hector. What happened?”

“Sounds like he did his usual trick of stepping off a pavement without looking.”

“Yes. Hard to blame the driver.”

“You can blame the bastard for not stopping,” said Wield. “A milkman found Hector unconscious.”

“How did he know? Sorry. Ellie says he’s OK though.”

“Yes, if it had been serious, I’d have rung you. He’s bruised and battered but mostly unbroken. They were worried about brain damage

—don’t say a thing—but eventually they realized that what they’d got was normal and unhooked him from all the life-support stuff. Can’t recall a thing, of course. The milkman saw a car pulling away, black he thinks, powerful, maybe a Jag. Paddy’s had his boys doing house to house in case anyone heard or saw owt. Anyway, are you back with us for good, do you think, or have you made yourself indispensable in Manchester?”

“Who knows?” said Pascoe. He would have liked to talk over things with Wield but found he was too paranoiac to trust his own home phone.

He said, “Let’s meet for a jar tomorrow, Wieldy. The Feathers, early evening, suit you? Meanwhile don’t forget to tune in to
Fidler’s Three.
”

“Wouldn’t miss Ellie for worlds,” said Wield.

If I’d got home an hour earlier, there wouldn’t have been anything to miss, thought Pascoe glumly.

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 139

He opened his briefcase and took out the slim file in which he was recording his very unofficial investigation into the Mill Street explosion. He started making notes of his afternoon’s work in an effort to assess whether it got anywhere close to being worth the loss of his wife’s company.

He wasn’t betting on it.

3

H E C T O R I N G

Pascoe’s first port of call on returning to town had been the Civic Center. In the Housing Offi ce there he had talked to a woman called Deirdre Naylor whom he knew from the PTA at Rosie’s school. She had obtained for him details of the renting out of number 6 Mill Street to Crofts and Wills. He had bluffed Bloomfield into an admission, but that wasn’t worth the air it was spoken on without con-crete evidence to back it up. Whether he’d ever reach a point where such evidence would be needed, he’d no idea, but it made sense to get it while he could, and in person, not by phone.

The rental had begun only five weeks before the explosion. He read through the correspondence and examined the contract.

“Didn’t strike anyone as strange that a Patents Agency should want office space in such a locality?” he said.

“Why?” she asked. “Not the kind of business that has people tramp-ing in and out all day, I shouldn’t have thought. So they just wanted an address and somewhere cheap. Do you reckon they were up to something, Peter?”

He shook his head.

“Not really,” he said. “Just having a bit of bother tracking them down to check a couple of things out after the explosion.”

She looked at him doubtfully then said, “You could just have rung us.”

He gave her his most charming smile and said, “Just happened to be passing, so I thought I’d save the ratepayers a few bob.”

It didn’t sound all that convincing, but to his surprise she smiled back and it occurred to him that she might be imagining this was personal. A good-looking woman in her thirties, she was bringing up her d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 141

boy alone, and with her extrovert manner and curvaceous fi gure, she was probably used to being a far from obscure object of desire.

“Can I take copies of this stuff ?” he said.

“Of course you can. Always happy to cooperate with the Law,” she said. “How’s Ellie? Haven’t run into her at the PTA for a while. We usually have such a good crack.”

Mention of Ellie was good. It told him that while she didn’t object to a bit of friendly flirtation, he’d be out of his mind to imagine she’d dream of really getting involved. Which was a relief.

And also, just looking at things hypothetically of course, a touch disappointing.

From the Center he’d gone to the forensics lab where he’d talked to Tony Pollock, the technician who’d checked the Mill Street bullet.

He showed him the CAT technicians’ report on the round recovered from the body in Mazraani’s flat. Pollock looked at it for a moment then said, “Am I authorized to see this?”

“If I’m authorized then you are too,” said Pascoe fi rmly.

Pollock grinned as if he saw right through this prevarication.

“Good enough for me,” he said. Privately he’d always regarded Pascoe as a bit of a prancing pony that it amused Dalziel to toss the odd sugar lump to. Now it was dawning on him that you didn’t run in harness with the Fat Man unless you could pull your weight. And punch it too.

Unasked, he did a quick comparison of the Manchester results with his own and confirmed that while the same make of gun had almost certainly been used, the rounds had come from different weapons.

“Something else I’d like you to take a look at,” said Pascoe.

He handed over the CAT analysis of the Mill Street explosive.