Death Comes for the Fat Man (3 page)

“Maybe because I don’t see any sign of any roadblocks, just Maycock smoking a fag at one end of the street and Jennison scratch-14 r e g i n a l d h i l l

ing his balls at the other. Also I’m crouched down behind your car with the patrol car next to it, right opposite number three.”

“Who needs roadblocks when you’ve got a pair of fatties like Maycock and Jennison? And why move the cars when anyone in there knows we’re on to them already? Any road, you and me know this is likely just another load of Hector bollocks.”

He shook his head in mock despair.

“In that case,” said Pascoe, tiring of the game, “all you need do is stroll over there, check everything’s OK, then leave a note on the shop door for the CAT man, saying you’ve got it sorted and would he like a cup of tea back at the Station? Meanwhile . . . ”

It was his intention to follow his heavy irony by taking his leave and heading for home and hammock, but the Fat Man was struggling to his feet.

“You’re dead right,” he said. “You tend to fumble around a bit, but in the end you put your white stick right on it, as the actress said to the shortsighted cabinet minister. Time for action. We’ll be a laughing-stock if it gets out we spent the holiday hiding behind a car because of Hector. Where’s yon bugger got with my mutton pasties, by the way?

We were mad to trust him with our money.”

“My money,” corrected Pascoe. “And you misunderstand me, I’m not actually suggesting we do
anything
. . . ”

“Nay, lad. Don’t be modest,” said Dalziel, upright now. “When you’ve got a good idea, fl aunt it.”

“Sir,” said Pascoe. “Is this wise? I know Hector’s not entirely reliable, but surely he knows a gun when he sees one . . . ”

As a plea for caution this proved counterproductive.

“Don’t be daft,” laughed Dalziel. “We’re talking about a man who can’t pick his nose unless someone paints a cross on it and gives him a mirror. If he heard owt, it were likely his own fart, and the bugger inside were probably holding a take-away kebab. Come on, Pete. Let’s get this sorted, then you can buy me a pint.”

He dusted down his suit, straightened his tie, and set off across the street with the confident step of a man who could walk with kings, talk with presidents, dispute with philosophers, portend with prophets, and never have the slightest doubt that he was right.

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 15

Interestingly, despite the fact that little in their long relationship had given Pascoe any real reason to question this presumption of rightness, the thought crossed his mind as he rose and set off in the foot-steps of his great master that there had to be a first time for everything, and how ironic it would be if it were Ellie’s tender heart that caused him to be present on the occasion when the myth of Dalziel’s infallibil-ity was exploded . . .

At this same moment, as if his mind had developed powers of teleki-nesis, Mill Street blew up.

3

I N T I M AT I O N S

When the explosion occurred Ellie Pascoe was asleep in the garden hammock so reluctantly vacated by her husband.

The Pascoe house in the northern suburbs was too far from Mill Street for anything but the faintest rumor of the bang to reach there. What woke Ellie was a prolonged volley of barking from her daughter’s mongrel terrier.

“What’s up with Tig?” Ellie asked, yawning.

“Don’t know,” said Rosie. “We were playing ball and he just started.”

A sudden suspicion made Ellie examine the tall apple tree in next-door’s garden. Puberty was working its rough changes on her neighbor’s son and a couple of times recently when the summer heat had lured her outside in her bikini, she’d spotted him staring down at her out of the foliage. But there was no sign, and in any case Tig’s nose pointed south, toward the center of town. As she followed his fixed gaze she saw a long way away a faint smudge of smoke soiling the perfect blue of the summer sky.

Who would light a fire on a day like this?

Tig was still barking.

“Can’t you make him shut up?” snapped Ellie.

Her daughter looked at her in surprise, then took a biscuit off a plate and threw it across the lawn. Tig gave a farewell yap, then went in search of his reward with the complacent mien of one who has done his duty.

Ellie felt guilty at snapping. Her irritation wasn’t with the dog, there was some other cause less defi nable.

She rolled out of the hammock and said, “I’m too hot. Think I’ll cool down in the shower. You OK by yourself ?”

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 17

Rosie gave her a look which said without words that she hadn’t been much company anyway, so what was going to be different?

Ellie went inside, turned on the shower, and stepped under it.

The cool water washed away her sweat but did nothing for her sense of unease.

Still nothing definable. Or nothing that she wanted to defi ne.

Pointless thinking about it. Pointless because if she did think about it, she might come up with the silly conclusion that the real reason she was taking this shower was that she didn’t want to be wearing her bikini if bad news came . . .

Andy Dalziel’s partner, Amanda Marvell, known to her friends as Cap, was even farther away when Mill Street blew up.

With her man on duty, she had followed the crowds on the traditional migration to the coast, not, however, to join the mass bake-in on a crowded beach but to visit the sick.

The sick in this instance took the form of her old headmistress, Dame Kitty Bagnold who for nearly forty years had ruled the famous St. Dorothy’s Academy for Catholic Girls near Bakewell in Derbyshire.

Cap Marvell had ultimately made life choices which ran counter to everything St. Dot’s stood for. In particular, she had abandoned her religion, divorced her husband, and got herself involved in various Animal Rights groups whose activities teetered on the edge of legality.

Yet throughout all this, she and Dame Kitty had remained in touch and eventually, rather to their surprise, realized they were friends. Not that the friendship made Cap feel able to address her old head by her St. Dot’s sobriquet of Kitbag, and Dame Kitty would rather have blas-phemed than call her ex-pupil anything but Amanda.

A long and very active retirement had ground Dame Kitty down till ill health had finally obliged her to admit the inevitable, and two years earlier she had moved into a private nursing home that was part of the Avalon Clinic complex situated at Sandytown on the Yorkshire coast.

At her best, Dame Kitty was as bright and sharp as ever, but she tired easily and usually Cap was alert for the first signs of fatigue so that she could start ending her visit without making her friend’s condition the cause.

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

This time it was the older woman who said, “Is everything all right, Amanda?”

“What?”

“You seemed to drift off. Perhaps you should sit in this absurd wheelchair while I go inside and order some more tea.”

“No, no, I’m fine. Sorry. What were we saying . . . ?”

“We were discussing the merits of the government’s somewhat inchoate education policy, an argument I hoped your sudden silence indicated I had won. But I fear my victory owes more to your distraction than my reasoning. Are you sure all is well with you? No problems with this police officer of yours, whom I hope one day to meet?”

“No, things are fine there, really . . . ”

Suddenly Cap Marvell took her mobile out.

“Sorry, do you mind?”

She was speed dialing before Kitty could answer.

The phone rang twice then there was an invitation to leave a message.

She opened her mouth to speak, closed it, disconnected, and stood up.

“I’m sorry, Kitty, I’ve got to go. Before the mobs start moving off the beaches . . . ”

This effort to offer a rational explanation produced the same sad sigh and slight upward roll of the eyes brought by feeble excuses for bad behavior in their St. Dot days.

“OK, that’s not it. Sorry, I don’t know why,” said Cap. “But I’ve really got to go.”

“Then go, my dear. And God go with you.”

Normally this traditional valediction would have won from Cap her equivalent of the old headmistress’s long-suffering expression, but today she just nodded, stooped to kiss her friend’s cheek, then hurried away across the lawn toward the car park.

Dame Kitty watched her out of sight. There was trouble there.

Despite the bright sun and the cloudless sky, she felt it in the air.

She stood up out of the wheelchair that the staff insisted she should use on her excursions into the gardens, gave it a whack with her stick, and began to make her slow way back to the house.

4

D U S T A N D A S H E S

Later Peter Pascoe worked out that Dalziel had probably saved his life twice.

The Fat Man’s car, which they’d been sheltering behind, was flipped into the air then deposited upside down on the pavement.

If he hadn’t obeyed the Fat Man’s command to follow, he would have been underneath it.

And if he hadn’t been walking in the lee of that corpulent frame when the explosion occurred . . .

As it was, when some slight degree of awareness began to seep back into his brain, he felt as if every part of his body had been subjected to a good kicking. He tried to stand up but found the best he could manage was all fours.

The air was full of dust and smoke. Like a retriever peering through the mist in search of its master’s bird, he strained to penetrate the swirling veil of motes and vapor. An amorphous area of orangey red with some consistency of base gave him the beginnings of perspec-tive. Against it, marked by its stillness in the moving air, he made out a vague heap of something, like a pile of earth thrown up alongside a grave.

He began to crawl forward and after a couple of yards managed to rise off his hands into a semi-upright crouch. The shifting coiling color he realized now was fire. He could feel its heat, completely unlike the gentle warmth of the sun which only an hour ago he’d been enjoying in the green seclusion of his garden. That small part of his mind still in touch with normality suggested that he ought to ring Ellie and tell her he was all right before some garbled version of events got on to local radio.

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

Not that he was sure how all right he was. But a lot all righter than this still heap of something which he was now close enough to to formally identify as Andy Dalziel.

He had fallen onto his left side and his arms and legs were spread and bent like the kapok-stuffed limbs of some huge teddy bear discarded by a spoilt child. His face had been shredded by shards of glass and brick, and the fine gray dust sticking to the seeping wounds made him look as if he were wearing a Kabuki mask.

There was no sign of life. But not for a second did Pascoe admit the possibility of death. Dalziel was indestructible. Dalziel is, and was, and forever shall be, world without end, amen. Everybody knew that.

Therein lay half his power. Chief constables might come and chief constables might go, but Fat Andy went on forever.

Pascoe rolled him over onto his back. It wasn’t easy but he did it.

He brushed the dust away from his mouth and nose. He defi nitely wasn’t breathing. He checked the carotid pulse, thought he detected a flutter, but a combination of his dull fingers and Dalziel’s monolithic neck left him in doubt. He opened the mouth and saw there was a lot of debris in there. Carefully he cleared it away, discovering in the process what he hadn’t known before, that Dalziel had a dental plate. This he tucked carefully into his pocket. He checked that the tongue hadn’t been swallowed. Then he cleared the nostrils, undid the shirt collar, and put his ear to the mighty chest.

There was no movement, no sound.

He placed his hands on top of each other on the chest and pressed down hard, five times, counting a second interval between.

Then he tilted the head back with his right hand under the chin so that the mouth opened wide. With the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, he pinched Dalziel’s nose. Then he took a deep breath, thought, I’m never going to hear the end of this, pressed his mouth down onto those great lips, and blew.

Five times he did this. Then he repeated the heart massage and went through the whole process again. And again.

Once more he tried the pulse. This time he was sure there was something. And the next time he blew into the mouth, the chest began to rise and fall of its own volition.

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 21

Now he began to arrange Dalziel in the recovery position. This was a task to daunt a fi t navvy with a block and tackle, but he fi nally managed it and sank back exhausted.

All this seemed to take hours but must have consumed only a few minutes. He was vaguely aware of figures moving through the miasma. Presumably there were sounds too but at fi rst they were simply absorbed by the white noise which the blast had filled his ears with. Another hour passed. Or a few seconds. He felt something touch his shoulder. It hurt. He looked up. PC Maycock was standing over him, mouthing nothings, like a fish in a glass tank. He tried to lip-read and got, “Are you all right?” which hardly seemed worth the effort. He pointed at Dalziel and said, “Get help,” without any assurance that the words were coming out. Maycock tried to assist him to his feet but he shook his head and pointed again at the Fat Man. He stuck his little fingers in his ears and started to prize out the debris that seemed to have lodged there. This, or perhaps the simple passage of time, improved things a little, and he began to pick out a higher line of sound he tentatively identified as approaching sirens.

Time was still doing a quickstep. Slow, slow, quick quick, slow. In the slow periods he felt as if sitting here in the postblast smog watching over Fat Andy was all he’d ever done and all he was ever likely to do. Then he closed his eyes for a fraction of a second and when he opened them the smog had thinned and paramedics were stooping over Dalziel’s body and firemen were going about their business before the ruined terrace. Where number 3 had been there was nothing but a fl ame-filled cavity, like hellmouth in a morality play. The Victorian entrepreneurs’ shoddy building materials had offered little resistance to the blast. This was perhaps one of those instances of a Bad Thing eventually turning out to be a Good Thing, which divines through the ages had educed as evidence of God’s Mysterious Purpose. If the walls of number 3 had shared any of the massive solidity of the viaduct wall against which the terrace rested, the blast would have been directed straight out. As it was, numbers 2 and 4 were in a state of complete collapse, and the rest of the terrace looked seriously shell-shocked.