Death Comes for the Fat Man

1

Andy Dalziel is having an out-of-body experience.

How he knows this is different from dancing with Tottie Truman in the old Mirely Mecca or tumbling like a pigeon in the bright air high over Mid-Yorkshire, he doesn’t know, but that small core of awareness which preserves the self even in the wildest dreams and the scariest nightmares detects the difference.

Perhaps it’s the fact that he can see himself? A man doesn’t dream himself, does he? And if you can see your own body, then it is self-evident that you are out of it.

The body in question lies supine on a bed. It has tubes and wires connected to it. What it is doing there the Dalziel consciousness floating above it has neither the capacity nor the inclination to inquire, but it does have the critical power to remark that it’s not a pretty sight. If anything it reminds him of the carcass of a beached whale he once saw near Flamborough.

And that had been dead three days.

A couple of nurses are working on the hulk, cleaning it, anointing it, checking the inlets and outlets of the various tubes. Their purpose he has no curiosity about, but he feels sorry that such a pretty pair of lasses should have nothing better to do with their time than administer to this slab of unattractive flesh.

He moves away. It’s easy. No need to fart this time, no question of effort, hardly even of volition. This is very different from the pigeon tumbling which his dream self so enjoyed. Then his fecund fancy created for himself the physical delight of flight-air streaming over the limbs like water over a swimmer, the exhilaration of the swoop, the serenity of the soar-just as the same fancy re-created the voluptuous softness of Tottie Truman’s flesh…

Now however there is no physicality. Flesh was that hulk on the bed. Good riddance to it.

He drifts through other rooms full of beds on which lie men and women in all sorts of conditions, some comatose, some in pain, some sitting upright, bright eyed and impatient for their time of escape, some with visitors whom they find delightful, debilitating, or downright depressing in equal proportions.

And then he penetrates a small ward with only two beds in it, one empty, one occupied by a figure who looks strangely familiar.

He hovers above it, trying to arrange those sleep-blanked features into a pattern with a name.

Suddenly the eyes open wide.

The woken face makes identification easy.

But there’s something more, something unexpected in those eyes, something which shocks Dalziel.

They belong to Constable Hector, and they look as if they’re actually seeing him.

He doesn’t wait to check this out but flees like a ghost at daybreak back to the welcome unconsciousness of the beached whale.