Death Comes for the Fat Man (34 page)

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 253

Been studying that, have you? thought Pascoe.

He said, “Probably because no one was aware of it.”

“Ah,” said Komorowski, in a tone so neutral it said clearly, “If he’d been one of mine, I’d have been aware of it.”

“Ah indeed,” rejoined Pascoe, in a tone which he hoped conveyed just as clearly that Komorowski, not having to deal daily with the loose amalgam of incompetences which was Hector, was talking through his arsehole.

“We are well pleased with the work you did here, Peter,” declared Bloomfield somewhat regally, bringing this polite confrontation to a close. “How do you feel about following it up? Strictly speaking, it’s not within our brief, which is counterterrorism. To be frank, we’re pretty overstretched as it is, and it would be a great help if you could take this on. I can spare Chetwynd and Loxam to work with you. What do you say?”

Pascoe was momentarily dumbstruck. To be offered the chance to do officially what he was in fact trying to do surreptitiously seemed too good to be true. Already his suspicious mind was suggesting that making his unofficial activities official was the perfect way for the Templar mole to keep close track of what he was up to.

Whose idea was it? he wondered. Pointless asking. It could well be that the person who thought it was his or her idea had had it planted there by someone else anyway.

He said, “Chetwynd and Loxam . . . ?”

“Tim and Rod, the guys you’ve been doing such sterling work with in the cellar,” said Glenister, frowning as if surprised he didn’t know their surnames, which indeed she was right to be. “Dave Freeman will help you settle in and act as your link to me.”

That cleared up one thing, thought Pascoe. Freeman’s sudden friendliness was presumably explained by foreknowledge of this promotion, if that’s what it was.

But, promotion or not, he could hardly say, No, I’d prefer to carry on sneaking around behind everyone’s backs.

He said, “To do this properly, I’d need to have full access to all available records and other material.”

“Of course. On tap. Not, I suspect, that an ingenious chap like you 254 r e g i n a l d h i l l

would have any problem finding less conventional modes of access,”

said Bloomfi eld, smiling.

Shit, thought Pascoe. Somehow the old sod knows that last time I was in this office, I’d been rifling through Glenister’s desk in search of information!

“So we can take it that’s settled?” said Bloomfi eld.

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

“Good. Sandy, you’ll see Peter gets everything he needs? Excellent.

Come on Lukasz. Work to do.”

He headed for the door, where he paused and looked up at the ceiling.

“Sandy, that security camera, you ever get it fi xed?”

“Yes, sir. It’s working fine now,” said Glenister.

“Good. Place like this, you need to be able to see what’s going on everywhere, Peter. Downside is you get to know who picks their nose a lot.”

He looked at Pascoe as he said this, and smiled, and it might have been that his left eyelid drooped in a slow wink or it may have been just a natural blink.

3

M E L O D I O U S T WA N G

Cap Marvell was not a devout woman. Her father was a tribal Anglican who regarded the Church as God’s way of affi rming the Tories’ right to rule even when Labor was in power, while her mother was a devout Roman Catholic who made sure little Amanda was brought up in all the proper Romish observances and insisted she went to her own old school, St. Dorothy’s Academy for Catholic Girls, which she regarded as the only doctrinally sound school in the country.

Yet despite all these attempts to establish lines of control from the Holy See, it was the dear old domestic C of E which retained a niche in Cap’s affections when mature skepticism swept all other religious debris away, a fondness based almost entirely on childhood memories of her father’s insistence that his pack of assorted hounds, terriers, pointers, and retrievers should join him in the family pew at the village church. She hated the use they were put to, but she loved their company, and a heavenly kingdom without animals was not one she had any interest in entering.

Andy Dalziel reckoned that if there were a God, He should be done for dereliction of duty, letting His Creation get into such a mess and relying on folk like A. Dalziel Esq. to pick up the pieces.

This did not prevent him from being on good terms with the odd cleric, particularly if they shared his interest in the really important aspects of the human condition, such as where do you fi nd the best whisky, and who would you pick for your eclectic all time XV?

Such a one was Father Joe Kerrigan, a parish priest of indeter-minate age, with a creased and crumpled leathery face like an old deflated rugby ball. Sport and whisky had brought them together, 256 r e g i n a l d h i l l

and once they’d established the ground rule that Kerrigan didn’t try to solve crimes and Dalziel didn’t try to save souls, they had become good friends who many a night tired the moon with talking and sent her down the sky.

Cap, true to her own unbelief, and knowing Dalziel’s considered view that most religious ceremonies were balls, and them as weren’t balls were bollocks, had placed a strict interdict on admission to his room of any of the pack of spiritual predators who roam the corridors of modern multifaith hospitals looking for their defenseless prey.

Joe Kerrigan, however, was an exception. His distress at Andy’s plight was personal rather than professional, and he won her imprima-tur as a friend, not as a priest.

But the leopard cannot change his spots, and that afternoon Father Kerrigan, visiting the Central to administer the last rites to a dying parishioner, was very much in professional mode when he decided to look in on Dalziel on his way out.

The guardian constable placed outside the room since the events of Sunday recognized the priest and let him in without demur. For the first time Father Joe found himself alone with his friend, and now the prayers which previously in deference to and, it must be said, in fear of Cap Marvel, he had offered silently from within now poured spontaneously from his lips. “Dear Jesus, Divine physician and Healer of the sick, we turn to you in this time of illness . . . ”

As he spoke the priest’s words, through his mind ran the friend’s thought, “Where are you, Andy, me dear? Is it living you still are or am I talking to a lump of flesh in which the heart still beats but out of which the mind and the soul have long fl ed?”

In fact Dalziel is both closer than Kerrigan can guess and farther than he can imagine. Living he still is, but that point of awareness in which his being is now entirely focused has drifted back to the far edge of darkness, close up against the wafer-thin membrane which separates him from the white light of Elsewhere.

He’s here partly through necessity in that whenever the will to survive grows weary, this is where he automatically drifts, but also in some part through choice, because he is essentially a social animal and d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 257

while his comatose limbo is filled with shadows of his consciousness, he is unable to truly communicate with any of them. Here, however, just beyond the membrane, there is possibly something distinct from himself.

“I know you’re in there,” says Dalziel. “We’ve got you surrounded. If you come out with your hands up, we can all go home.”

This approach is as unsuccessful as it was in Mill Street.

“If my lad Pascoe were here,” says Dalziel, “he’d soon talk you out.

He’s been on a course.”

There is a something. Not a response. Something like that lightest breath of wind in a forest on a still day which reminds you of the huge canopy of foliage under which you stand. But it is enough for Dalziel.

“You are there then,” he says triumphantly. “Grand. Now we’re getting somewhere. Next off is find a name, that’s what the manuals say.

I’m Andy. What shall I call you? God, is it?”

Again the breeze in the trees, and this time he thinks he gets a meaning.

Why don’t you come through and see for yourself?

“Nay,” says Dalziel. “Last time I tried that, I got blown up. Hang about. What’s going off ?”

Apart from his brief out-of-body experience, which had come to a sudden end when his unexpected glimpse of Hector lying in bed had driven him back to the security of his coma, he has no sense of external context. All he knows is that at the end of the darkness furthermost from the membrane separating him from the white light of Elsewhere lies another Elsewhere from which derive those fragments of sensation which still have the power to call him back.

What is coming through now is a sort of monotonous mutter, which gradually he starts to break up into words.

Omnipotent and eternal God, the everlasting salvation of those who
believe, hear me on behalf of Thy sick servant, Andrew . . .

“Bloody hell!” says Dalziel indignantly. “Some bugger’s praying to me!”

To
me,
for
you, I think you’ll fi nd,
corrects the forest breeze.

“Same difference. You must get a lot of this stuff in your line of work. How the hell do you put up with it?”

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

C’est mon métier,
says the breeze.

“Right. Like me having to listen to scrotes telling me they were somewhere else on the night in question, ladling out soup to the poor.”

Something like that.

“So what else you do apart from listening to this drivel? There’s got to be something else your side that keeps you too busy to take care of things my side.”

You still think of yourself as being part of what you call your side?

“Why shouldn’t I?”

Come through and we’ll talk about it.

“Nay, you don’t catch me like that. This is as close as I’m getting. In fact it’s a bit too close for comfort. I’m off back there. Ta ta.”

See you soon.

“You sound very sure of that.”

I am. You will be back. And each time you come back you will fi nd it
more diffi cult to retreat.

“Is that right. Not so clever telling me then, is it?”

I tell you because you will not be able to help coming back. And I tell
you that because of course you know you already know.

“No one likes a smart ass,” says Dalziel as he retreats.

But he has to admit the breezelike Presence is right. It’s bloody hard, and if it weren’t for the help offered by that thread of sound he might never have made it.

This doesn’t make him any the less resentful when he gets close enough to confi rm that the mournful muttering is indeed nothing less than prayer. All he knows about prayers is that most of the ones he’s felt constrained to utter, particularly the one asking for a widow’s cruse of single malt or the ones suggesting a thunderbolt might be good response to some particularly irritating piece of official idiocy, have remained unanswered. But now he thinks he recognizes the voice. Surely those rough raspings can only emerge from the smoke-and-whisky-corroded larynx of his old mate, Joe Kerrigan? If anyone deserves an answer, it’s good old Joe.

He concentrates all the power still at his command on fi nding a fi tting response.

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 259

Father Joe paused in his prayer. He thought he detected a movement of the great bulk on the bed. Yes, he was right. Something was stirring down there. Dear Lord, he thought. Is it possible that just for once you’re giving me a quick answer to my prayers?

From beneath the bedsheet drifted a sound which put the schol-arly Father Joe in mind of John Aubrey’s account of that spirit who vanished with
a curious perfume and most melodious twang.

When it died away and the body once more lay, a sheer hulk on the bed of an unfathomable sea, Father Joe stood up.

“All right, you fat bastard,” he said, “I can take a hint. But God bless you anyway.”

4

R E D M I T E A N D G R E E N F LY

Pascoe was having lunch with Dave Freeman.

It had been Sandy Glenister’s idea.

“With Dave acting as liaison, it’s time you two started hit -

ting it off a bit better. You’ve a lot in common,” she’d said.

So she’d noticed their antipathy, thought Pascoe. Sharp eyes she had, though what they’d spotted he and Freeman had in common he couldn’t imagine.

Or was it his own eyes which were developing a squint through looking at everything connected with the Lubyanka sideways?

As he and Freeman moved from the counter of the staff canteen and started unloading their trays, he noticed that they’d made almost identical choices. Perhaps Glenister was right.

Or perhaps Freeman had deliberately echoed his choices . . .

There I go again! he thought.

But certainly as they picked over their salads, it became apparent that Freeman was making a real effort at rapprochement.

He talked to Pascoe freely about CAT’s resources and the quickest way of tapping into them, then invited questions. Pascoe asked for some background on Tim and Rod.

“I like to know the people I’m working closely with,” he said.

“Me too,” smiled Freeman. “I’ll send you my CV later. OK. Tim and Rod . . . ”

By the time he’d fi nished talking, Pascoe’s initial image of the pair as young Work Experience students, already considerably modifi ed, had vanished completely. Freeman talked of them as equal colleagues, with their feet firmly on the Security Service career ladder.

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 261

Tim Chetwynd was in fact twenty-seven, married, with three young children. Rod Loxam was twenty-three, unmarried but rarely unattached.

“If,” said Freeman dryly, “you can call the kind of relationships Rod usually has attachments. He is what is called in the vernacular, I gather, a babe magnet. Among our canteen staff I understand he is known as Hot Rod.”

“Good Lord,” said Pascoe, conjuring up a picture of the young man.