Death Comes for the Fat Man

10

Saturday got off to a bad start. Not all your fault, thought Ellie Pascoe, but you certainly didn’t help. What you need’s a long PIN you’ve got to enter before you can punch the explosion button!

Rosie’s return had brought truce, and when the child had made it clear that whatever they did that day didn’t matter as long as they all did it together, going to the Haresyke fete began to seem not such a bad idea.

Within half an hour of arrival, it began to seem a very good idea indeed.

As they wandered round the stalls in the warm sunshine, she saw her husband relaxing into a condition as close to his old self as he’d been since the Mill Street explosion. Meeting Sarhadi and his fiancée had helped. He seemed to take to the young man, and as for Jamila, the company of a bright and attractive young woman rarely failed to regress him to the lively, laughing student he’d been when Ellie first met him.

Ellie was able to enjoy the transformation with no hint of jealousy. She liked the girl herself, and more importantly it was clear the girl thought the sun shone out of her fiancé’s big brown eyes. Jamila, she discovered, was third-generation British and in her speech and dress was so indistinguishable from her Anglo-Saxon coevals, that Ellie wondered how this went down with traditionalists at the mosque.

A firm believer that the first step to finding answers was to ask questions, she said casually, “God, I wish I still had the figure to wear a top like that.”

“You look great to me,” said Jamila with a pleasing sincerity.

“Thank you kindly, but once you get a bulge, even if it’s still bike tire rather than the full Michelin, I think it’s best to keep it under wraps.”

“Maybe, but a lot of the oldies down the mosque would reckon I’m far too skinny. They love a bit of bulging.”

“So you don’t get any aggro for the way you dress?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “All the time, but not from my family, and that’s all that matters to me. Of course I wouldn’t go near the mosque looking like this. Next week I’ll be wearing the full trad kit for my wedding. That should take the bangers by surprise.”

“The bangers?”

“Headbangers. That’s what I call these lads who creep around Sheikh Ibrahim like he’s a prophet or something. Kalim says I shouldn’t provoke them but they don’t bother me. Anyway, they’re all blow. They rattle on about how I ought to be disciplined for the way I dress and talk, but the Sheikh keeps them in order ’cos I’m Kalim’s girl.”

“So Kalim and the Sheikh are close?” probed Ellie, remembering the young man’s defensive attitude about Al-Hijazi on Fidler’s Three.

“Sort of,” said the young woman hesitantly. “A lot of the time they’re right in each other’s face about politics. He’s funny, the Sheikh. Sometimes he sounds like he wants to set a torch to most of the West, other times he’s even more laid back than my dad.”

“So you don’t think there’s anything in what some of the papers say about him encouraging his followers to commit terrorist acts?”

The girl did not reply straightaway and Ellie thought she’d over-stepped the mark but it seemed Jamila was only getting her thoughts together.

“I think what Kal says about him is likely right. He doesn’t encourage the bangers to break the law, but some of them are brain-dead enough to imagine he does, and mebbe he ought to take more care of that.”

“Ellie,” called Pascoe. “Do you know where Rosie’s got to?”

“I thought you were watching her,” said Ellie. “Sorry, Jam, we’d better find her.”

“She can’t come to much harm here,” said the girl reassuringly.

“It’s not her I’m worried about,” said Ellie. “We’ll probably see you two later.”

It didn’t take long to locate their daughter, as the fete wasn’t all that extensive. The setup was deliciously old-fashioned, not in any self-conscious retro fashion but because this was the way they’d been doing things for years and no one saw any good reason to change. A crowd of kids had attracted Rosie to a stall where for twenty pence you got three chances to precipitate one of the village schoolteachers into a trough of water by hitting a wooden lever with a well-aimed rubber ball. Rosie’s daily routine of hurling Tig’s ball as far as possible for at least an hour had built up a good throwing action. Her first success won rapturous cheers from the watching children, redoubled when Tig, imagining this was all for his benefit, plunged into the water alongside the drenched pedagogue. By the time her parents tracked her down, she had repeated her success twice, and her many new friends were ready to elect her Queen of the Fete.

She didn’t want to be parted from them and sent her parents on their way, having made it clear she found their concern agonizingly embarrassing.

“Reminds me of you,” said Pascoe as they walked away. “Willful, loud-mouthed, anti-authoritarian…ouch!”

They made no special effort to seek out Maurice Kentmore but a little later, as they paused before the bottle stall, Ellie did wonder aloud if maybe he wasn’t there.

“Probably declares the show open, then retreats for a sherry in his library, leaving a couple of mastiffs at the front door to repel the malodorous peasantry,” said Pascoe.

“Did I hear the word sherry? There was a rather nice bottle of amontillado somewhere. It’s great to see you both again. I’m so glad you decided to come.”

Kentmore in his shirt sleeves emerged from beneath the stall, flourishing a large bottle of Windsor sauce which he handed to a small woman who examined the sell-by date with a jay’s beady eye before paying an absurdly small sum and moving off.

“Now that amontillado,” he said. “Ah, here we are. I can recommend it, as I donated it myself. It’s marked up at two quid. At that price I’m tempted to buy it back!”

Pascoe was no great fan of amontillado but he felt guilty that Kentmore might have caught more of his comment than the word sherry.

As he paid he said, “Are you on here all day?”

“Neglecting my squirely duties of twirling my mustachios and ogling the milkmaids, you mean?”

So he had heard. Oh well. At least he was smiling about it.

“Nothing so responsible, I fear,” the man went on. “I am the lowest of the low, a general dogsbody. I wander around and whenever a stall minder wants a break, I step into the breach. Out of which I am about to step, as I see Miss Jigg returning. You two fancy a sit-down and a snack? Our local ladies could bake for Old England.”

They followed him to a refreshment tent. He sat them down at a table in the open air, vanished inside, and returned with a small tray on which rested a teapot, milk jug, cups and saucers. Behind him came a pretty girl, well worth an ogle, carrying a much larger tray with sandwiches and cakes.

Pascoe sampled the cakes. Kentmore hadn’t oversold the baking ladies. They were delicious. Then a hand rested lightly on his shoulder and Kilda’s voice said, “Peter, Ellie, isn’t this nice? Maurice, I see they’ve worked you off your feet already.”

“Kilda, you’ve surfaced,” said Kentmore. “I was just thinking about sending a search party down to your house.”

The woman gave Pascoe’s shoulder a last little squeeze then slipped onto a chair, putting her camera on the table.

Your house, Pascoe noticed. Ellie too, but she liked her assurances double sure.

“You live in the village, do you, Kilda?” she said.

“No. On the estate. You’d see the cottage as you drove into the car park. They call it the Gatehouse, but the gate’s long gone. Maurice was kind enough to offer it to Chris and me when we got married. Inertia has kept me there since I became a widow. I keep on thinking I must move on, but it will probably take an eviction order to shift me.”

Kentmore said, “You know the house is yours as long as you want it, Kilda.”

There was an awkward pause of the kind Ellie was expert at filling when she felt like it. This time she just sat quietly and waited to see how far it would stretch.

Not far, was the answer. There were two interruptions in quick succession. First an anxious matron summoned Kentmore to deal with some crisis. Then Rosie appeared, followed by a dripping Tig, with the news that she wanted to enter him in the terrier race but the stupid organizers required adult supervision of each entrant in case of trouble.

Trouble, thought Pascoe, looking at Tig, who was clearly in a state of delirious excitement, is what they were likely to get.

Ellie looked at her husband who held up a wedge of lemon meringue pie as evidence he was otherwise engaged.

“All right,” she said in response to Rosie’s impatient tug. “I’m coming.”

Pascoe watched them move away then pushed the cakes invitingly toward Kilda.

She smiled and shook her head.

“You can’t be dieting,” said Pascoe.

“I could be wearing a very tight corset,” she said.

“I don’t think so. That’s the first thing they teach us to spot at detective school.”

“What’s the second?”

“That’s it, the whole curriculum in a nutshell, guaranteeing what the Great British Press tells the great British Public we are, a bunch of hopeless plods.”

“That sounds bitter.”

“It was meant to sound funny,” said Pascoe.

“I’d understand bitter. Being blown up in the line of duty and no one getting arrested for it would make me bitter too. How’s your friend in hospital doing?”

“Just the same. I should go to see him sometime this weekend.”

“You don’t sound keen.”

“He’s in a coma. It just seems, I don’t know, like going through the motions.”

“At least you get to see him,” she said.

He recalled what had happened to her and felt a little pang of shame. At least Andy was alive. To be told you were never going to see again someone you loved…he recalled once more his feelings when the TV screen had gone blank last night and shivered.

“So will you go?” she asked.

“Probably. There is another of our guys in there I ought to look in on.”

“Not another in a coma, I hope?”

He smiled and said, “Well, there are different opinions about that. Happily our Constable Hector is notoriously a hard man to inflict serious damage on and I gather that he is conscious and reasonably well and likely to make a full recovery.”

“It’s a dangerous profession,” she said. “What happened to this one?”

“Nothing exotic. Accident. Hit-and-run. We’re still looking for the bastard.”

“And will you get him?”

“I expect so. We’ve a pretty good idea about the car, and as it’s a black Jag and it’s bound to have a large dent in it, that makes things easier.”

She picked up the camera and asked, “Mind if I take your picture?”

“Not in the least. That looks an expensive bit of kit.”

“Never stint when it’s your livelihood. No, don’t pose, just carry on scoffing.”

All the time as she talked she was taking snaps.

“So you’re still shooting for the rag trade then?”

“Not really. But I may sell this to the Police Gazette: ‘What the well dressed copper is eating this season.’ Do you like being a policeman?”

“Yes, I suppose I do,” he said. “Do you like being a photographer?”

“It’s OK.”

“That doesn’t sound terribly positive.”

“No? What I mean is, yes, I like doing it well enough. But you need more, don’t you? I think you implied that. You feel being a cop’s a job worth doing, right?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And you like doing it. That’s what makes life worth living, isn’t it? Finding something you feel’s worth doing, and something you get a kick out of doing.”

“I hope you find it.”

“I think I’m moving in the right direction,” she said with a smile. “There, that will do for capturing your likeness. Now I think I might be tempted to a sliver of apple tart.”

“Good choice,” he said.

They sat in silence for a while, one of those silences which can steal upon two people unawares, not a universal silence but one peculiar to them alone and their situation, a silence not broken but intensified by the totally separate existence of background noise, music playing, people laughing, and which for a moment seemed to encompass the whole of the sunlit field where the fete was taking place. The silence might be called companionable, but there was nothing sexual in it, at least nothing which would require action and the expense of energy and sweat. Indeed the feelings Pascoe felt rising within him had less to do with erotic fantasy than sentimental patriotism.

This is England, he found himself thinking. This is what Englishness means. Sitting at a village fete on a warm day of summer in pleasant company, eating Victoria sponge beneath a blue sky spotted with little white clouds, this is worth fighting for…

And then the idyll was shattered by a distant cacophony of barking and the din of human voices upraised in alarm and in command.

“What on earth is happening?” wondered Kilda.

“I think,” said Pascoe, sinking lower in his chair and reaching for another cream éclair, “I think that my daughter’s terrier may be introducing his fellow competitors to his totally original handicap system.”