Death Comes for the Fat Man

5

Talking of tutelary spirits, there is one-much overworked-whose job it is to save men from sins of omission that involve forgetting birthdays and anniversaries and other significant events in the lives of their loved ones. Its intervention can take many forms, from an efficient secretary to a reminder stapled to your briefs by a distrusting wife.

In Pascoe’s case it took the form of Tig jumping onto the arm of the sofa and starting to lick his idle servant’s eyes open.

Pascoe awoke with a jerk. It took a moment to realize the folly Tig had saved him from. In reward he opened the French window to let the dog out then switched on the TV set. The timing was close. The opening titles of Fidler’s Three were just coming to an end, and here was young, cool Joe Fidler himself, immaculately casual in a designer sports shirt and crotch-clinging slacks.

“Hi!” he cried, his mouth curving to show teeth from which gleamed a light that never was on sea or land. “My guests tonight are local lad, Maurice Kentmore…”

The screen filled with the face of a man in his late thirties with tousled brown hair, candid blue eyes, and a determined jaw, smiling rather nervously at the camera. “…whose family have been farming at Haresyke Hall in the lovely dale country near Harrogate for at least five generations.”

Hardly local to Middlesbrough then, thought Pascoe. But doubtless to these southern media types, Yorkshire was like Watford, with fewer takeaways.

“Which makes you a bit of a local squire, is that right, Maurice?” continued Fidler.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”

“But you do host the local village fete on your land, don’t you? I know that because you asked me for a plug at dinner. So anyone in search of a nice day out for gran and the kids, look no further than the Haresyke village fete at Haresyke Hall near Harrogate tomorrow Saturday. There you are, Maurice. You can slip me the fiver later.”

Funny face, pause for laughter. If you didn’t laugh at Fidler’s jokes, you probably found your car clamped, thought Pascoe.

“Maurice is a man of many talents,” resumed Fidler. “Keen mountaineer, expert horseman, he is also a powerful and influential voice in the National Farmers’ Union and the Countryside Alliance. Nor does he hesitate to put his principles into practice. During the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak, he resisted attempts to slaughter his livestock when his land came within the designated distance of a confirmed infection. Despite the authorities’ calculations being proved wrong, Maurice was put on trial for threatening behavior with a firearm, but was triumphantly acquitted. If he’ll go to those lengths to protect his rare-breed pigs, I shouldn’t care to cause offense to his friends and family.”

Another knowing grimace, another laughter pause.

“Alongside him,” resumed Fidler, “we have another man who has triumphed against adversity, Kalim Sarhadi, who comes from Bradford.”

The name rang in Pascoe’s ears like a warning bell.

Sarhadi was in his late twenties, slimly built, darkly handsome. He grinned broadly at the camera, lounging at ease in his swivel chair. (Fidler liked swivels, it was said, because they permitted his guests to really get in each other’s faces.)

The presenter continued, “Eighteen months ago Kal was in Pakistan, visiting relations, when he got picked up by the security police. After a week of isolation and assault, he was interviewed first by three Americans, then by two Englishmen, none of whom ever identified himself and all of whom claimed to believe he was a terrorist. Happily for Kal, back home a huge campaign orchestrated by the editor of the Bradford News put such a firecracker under the backside of our beloved leader that finally the government intervened and after a month of incarceration Kal was finally released.”

Yes, it was that Sarhadi. Shit, thought Pascoe.

“Very active in that campaign was his fiancée, Jamila, who is in the audience tonight. Yes, there she is. Give her a big hand.”

A camera focused on a young Asian woman sitting at the back. For a moment she looked confused and turned to a slightly older woman sitting next to her, who squeezed her arm reassuringly. Then, recovering, she smiled and waved her hand to acknowledge the applause. She was very pretty but it was her companion Pascoe’s eyes were drawn to. With a narrow, almost emaciated face whose pallor was accentuated by jet black hair cropped so short it might almost have been painted on, her striking looks would not have been out of place on a wall painting in an Egyptian tomb.

The camera returned to Fidler, who said, “I think you said it’s a week tomorrow that you’ll be giving up your freedom again, Kal?”

“Right!” said Sarhadi. “Only this time I won’t be asking for the British consul!”

Laughter and applause. As it died, Fidler resumed, “My final guest is novelist Eleanor Soper from Mid-Yorkshire.”

Ellie’s face appeared. Pascoe thought she looked gorgeous, but then he always did. He tried to telepath his advice, which was, Don’t trust this smarmy bastard an inch!

“Ell’s debut novel exploded on the literary scene last year. She has been described as one of the most exciting new talents to emerge in recent years. Her book stares modern issues and dilemmas right in the face, and from what I hear of Ell, she’s not afraid to do exactly the same. If that’s right, Ell, you’ve come to the right place!”

Ellie winced, whether at the hype, which had more fiction in it than her book, or at the paring of her name wasn’t clear, then managed a modest smile.

Fidler went on, “Boys and girls, you’ll soon have your chance to find out what my guests are really made of, but first let’s have a big hand for tonight’s Fidler’s Three!”

The audience broke into enthusiastic applause. They were seated in a tight, gently raked semicircle before the panelists. There wasn’t even a table separating them. The front row could have leaned forward and patted them on the knee. On my show there’s nowhere to hide! was another of Fidler’s proud boasts.

To start with everything seemed fine. Fidler got the ball rolling by asking Kentmore how many politicians he’d trust to tell a cow from a cabbage. Kentmore talked eloquently of what he saw as the real problems of the rural economy. The audience began to join in. Pascoe suspected that, like the PM at Question Time, Fidler planted questions. A scruffy young man looking too like a hunt saboteur to be true tried to start the old fox-hunting debate running, but Kentmore brushed it aside.

“Personally, if I get bother from a fox, I shoot it. Never saw any reason to risk my neck or my horses’ legs galloping around over rough ground chasing the damned things.”

Applause, and Ellie, who looked as if she was getting wound up for her antiblood-sport rant, subsided.

Encouraged by the applause, Kentmore went on, “In fact, now that hunting foxes with dogs has been banned, I reckon we could solve the problem by substituting, say, journalists, except the poor dogs might find them rather unpalatable.”

Ellie was nodding again, but Kalim Sarhadi shook his head violently and said, “All right for you to make jokes about journalists, Maurice, but if it weren’t for them lads on the Bradford News and all their mates, I reckon I’d be chained to a wall with a hood over my head in Guantánamo Bay now.”

Kentmore looked discomfited, but Fidler rescued him by asking, “Just in case anyone out there hasn’t heard your story, Kal, could you tell us what happened to you?”

Pascoe had heard the tale before but it still made uncomfortable hearing. Sarhadi had been walking down a street in Lahore when he spotted a familiar face. It belonged to a young man called Hasan Raza who’d gone to the same school.

“We weren’t mates or owt, but we sat down in a caff and had a coffee. He were keen for news from home. When I asked what he were doing in Lahore, he got all vague. Then this car drew up outside, two big guys got out, and next thing we were in the back and being driven away.”

What had happened now seemed to be clear. Raza was a terrorist suspect the authorities had had their eyes on for some time. The sight of him talking to a new contact from the UK provoked the security police to move in. When their fairly primitive interrogation techniques produced no results, they called in their American counterparts who at least didn’t get directly physical. Then the British interrogators arrived.

“Was that because the Yanks were beginning to believe you?” asked Fidler.

“Nay, I think it were ’cos they couldn’t understand a word I were saying,” said Sarhadi, very broad Bradford.

That got a big laugh after which he finished his story, stressing his conviction that it was only the publicity pressure back home that got him released.

“Kal, how much do you think the fact that your mother is English helped get public support for that campaign?” asked Fidler.

Sarhadi gave him a long, cool stare.

“Me dad’s English too. Might be different down south, but up here that’s what we call folk who were born in England and work in England and pay their taxes in England.”

Big cheer. Fidler grinned and said, “Whoops. Sorry, Kal. Forgot you were a straight-speaking Yorkshireman. So, in the same spirit, did the fact that your mam is white make a difference to the level of public support?”

“No idea,” said Sarhadi. “I were chained up in a cellar, remember?”

“Of course. Terrible. Sir, you’ve got a question?”

A fat man near the back stood up and said, “I’m sorry for what happened to you, lad, but fair do’s, you lot don’t do yourself any favors, do you? Look at all these riots the papers are full of-”

“Hold on there,” interrupted Fidler. “Demonstrations, I think you mean.”

“You call ’em what you will, looked like bloody riots to me. And what about yon Raza, your mate, he really is a terrorist, right? So you can’t blame the cops when they saw the two of you so chummy together jumping to the wrong conclusion, right?”

“If you’d been kicked so hard in the balls you were pissing blood into a rusty bucket for a fortnight, you’d mebbe want some bugger to blame!” declared Sarhadi. “Just like the lads on them demos want to know who’s to blame for murdering them two innocent Muslims in Manchester. As for Raz, till he’s had a fair trial, he’s just an ordinary British citizen like you and me, and our government should be protecting him, not apologizing for yon mad bastard George Bush and his mates.”

“Strong words,” said Fidler. “Just how much did your experience radicalize you?”

“If you mean it’s turned me into an extremist, you’re dead wrong,” said Sarhadi. “But it did make me see it weren’t enough just to keep my nose clean and get on with my own concerns. It made me start thinking about what being a Muslim really meant.”

“Yes, and as I understand it, this means you’ve become much more active in your local mosque at Marrside. The mosque your friend Raza attended, right? And isn’t Sheik Ibrahim Al-Hijazi, who has been so forthright in his condemnation of the quote footdragging police investigation unquote into the Manchester killings, the imam there?”

“What are you trying to say, Joe? That we’re all terrorists at Marrside?”

“No, of course not. But Sheikh Ibrahim’s views are well known, aren’t they?”

“Aye, like the Archbishop of Canterbury’s. And if every churchgoer who disagreed with him walked out, where’d that leave the C of E?”

“Are you claiming to be a force for moderation then, Kal?”

“No. I’m just like most other young Muslims in Marrside, a British citizen trying to live his life by following the laws of his country and the laws of his religion.”

“And if they clash?”

“Properly interpreted, they don’t clash.”

“I think Sheikh Ibrahim might give you an argument there. Incidentally, is he going to your wedding?”

He was a clever bastard, thought Pascoe with reluctant admiration. He was managing to use Sarhadi to represent the Muslim both as victim and villain.

“Why shouldn’t he be?” said Sarhadi angrily. “Look, Joe, you want to have a barney with Sheikh Ibrahim, mebbe it’s him you should have invited onto the show.”

“Funny you should say that, Kal,” said Fidler with the self-satisfied smirk of the chat-show host who has got his guest to provide a desired cue. “We did invite the Sheikh, but after the report of the alleged attempt on his life earlier this week, his people came back to us with questions about security. Naturally we gave the assurances we offer all our guests, but it seems they weren’t enough for the Sheikh and he withdrew.”

Not having much luck with your guest list this week, thought Pascoe. Presumably Fidler had hoped to engineer a public confrontation between Sarhadi and the Sheikh.

“Perhaps,” continued Fidler, “what he was really worried about was whether he could get away without falling into the cliché trap. So far we’ve done rather well, but you’ve all got your weapons of mass destruction ready just in case?”

The audience laughed and waved the plastic bags full of colored Ping-Pong balls which they received as they entered the broadcast hall.

Ellie tried to speak but Fidler ignored her. Saving her for something else? wondered Pascoe uneasily as the halogen smile beamed on Kentmore again.

“Maurice, you’ve had your problems with the law,” said the presenter. “Do you think we have strong enough laws to control extreme political agitation?”

“We elect people to make our laws,” said the farmer shortly. “If we don’t like them, then we should elect somebody else.”

“That’s pretty reasonable of you, Maurice, considering what happened in your own family,” said Fidler.

Turning to speak directly to the camera with the serious, sympathetic face of a man offering condolence to a bereaved neighbor, he went on, “Some of you may recall that Maurice’s younger brother, Flight Lieutenant Christopher Kentmore, was one of the earliest British casualties during the invasion of Iraq.”

Kentmore turned pale with shock, then fury. He hadn’t been expecting this. Suddenly the true reason why he’d been invited to join the panel was obvious. Which left…

Ellie beware! Pascoe tried to telepath.

Fidler, leaving Kentmore to simmer, was already turning to her.

“Nowadays nearly everyone has some link, close or distant, to the modern terrorist threat. Ell, I know you use your maiden name on your book jackets, but wasn’t your husband, DI Pascoe, one of the victims of the recent terrorist explosion in Mid-Yorkshire? Happily, not the most seriously injured. In fact I believe he’s back at work. But are his hands too tightly tied by the very laws he upholds? And what about you, Ell? How do you feel about the kind of people who nearly made you a widow?”

It was blindingly obvious now how Ffion had managed to get unknown Ellie with her unimpressive literary track record onto the show.

You treacherous cow! thought Pascoe. You with your double f’s!

At least now it shouldn’t take a Dalziel to tell Ellie what the other one stood for.

He waited anxiously for her response. A blank no comment was probably safest, but Ellie wasn’t the no comment type. He gritted his teeth and waited for the explosion.

But despite his great love and admiration, he could still underestimate his wife.

She leaned forward, very serious, and said, “Well, all other things being equal, Joe, at the end of the day, all the police want is a level playing field-”

Chaos erupted. The speakers blasted out a chorus of zoo screeches over which a parliamentary voice bellowed, “Order! Order!” Klaxons blared, lights flashed, audience members screamed, “Cliché! Cliché!” and stood up to hurl their multicolored Ping-Pong balls at Ellie, who sat unflinching beneath the barrage.

“Oh, Ell, Ell!” cried Fidler. “This is serious-money time! OK, folks, settle down, thank you, I think we’ve shown the dreaded clichés exactly what we think of them…”

The shower of balls diminished to a trickle and the audience began to subside. But a woman in the front row remained on her feet, her hand still in her plastic bag.

“You don’t fool me,” she was yelling. “You deserved all you got, you murdering bastard! You’re just like the rest on ’em at yon mosque, you and that Sheikh. You send other bastards out to do your dirty work, but you’re just as bad. They should lock every last one of you up and throw away the key!”

It was Sarhadi, directly in front of her, she was shouting at, not Ellie.

Her hand came out of the bag. In it was a gun.

For a fraction of a second Pascoe thought, This is another of Fidler’s plants!

Then he saw the presenter’s face. Even the makeup couldn’t hide the pallor of terror. His lips moved but nothing came out. He tried to push himself backward but only succeeded in sending his swivel chair spinning round and round till he was bound fast by his own microphone wire.

The gun came up. It was pointed at Sarhadi, who stared at it in a disbelief which hadn’t yet had time to dissolve into fear.

Someone screamed. To the left and right of the woman the people best placed to intervene opted for self-preservation and flung themselves sideways.

And Ellie began to rise from her seat.

To Pascoe’s sagacious eye, she didn’t look like she was thinking of diving for cover or making a run for it.

“No!” he yelled. “Don’t be stupid! No!”

He hadn’t yelled at a screen like this since he was a kid at a Saturday-morning picture club.

And now, as if offended, the screen he was yelling at went completely blank.