Death Comes for the Fat Man

11

Pascoe awoke suddenly.

There was a hooded figure standing over him, one hand on his shoulder, the other swinging a gleaming cleaver at his vulnerable neck.

He closed his eyes and tried to roll away. The hand held him more firmly. He opened his eyes once more, and this time found he was looking up into the anxious face of his wife. The bedside clock said it was five to two.

He struggled upright and said, “What?”

“You were rolling around and muttering.”

“Was I?”

He realized he was hot and sweaty and nauseous.

He rolled out of bed and just made it to the bathroom before he was sick.

“Pete, are you OK?” said Ellie, in the doorway.

“I’ll survive. Must have been something I ate.”

“Like all those cakes,” she said. “And how much did you drink with Wieldy?”

When they got home from the fete and he recalled he’d promised to meet the sergeant for a drink, he hadn’t wanted to go. But Ellie, who was very protective of Wield, had stopped him from ringing to cancel, saying, “Half an hour while I make the dinner won’t hurt.”

He should have followed his instinct. It hadn’t been a very successful meeting.

He’d laid out his theories about what had actually happened in Mill Street with what had seemed to him pellucid eloquence and irrefutable logic. Instead of applause what he got from Wield was the blank stare a probationer might have received who’d just made a botched report.

“So what do you think?” he’d demanded.

“Let’s be clear,” said Wield. “Your theory is that these Templars who murdered Mazraani and Carradice were responsible for the Mill Street bang. They were interrupted by Hector after one of them fired a gun presumably to put the frighteners on the Arabs. They then made their escape via the roof space to the end house, number six. They knew the police were in the vicinity because of Hector’s intervention. Nevertheless they recklessly detonated by remote control the bomb they’d left in number three. But when they heard that you and Andy had been hurt in the explosion, they decided to keep quiet about their involvement because they didn’t want to start their campaign with a botched op that could turn out to have killed a copper.”

“Right,” said Pascoe, wondering why his recent lucidity now seemed so opaque.

“And you’re also saying that these Templars who made such a cock-up aren’t just a bunch of gung-ho vigilantes but a well-organized cell of conspirators who have probably got someone in CAT feeding them info and running protection.”

“That’s how it seems to me,” declared Pascoe. “Look at the evidence! The bullet, the post-mortem reports, the cover-up of Freeman’s surveillance op, the reaction from CAT when I seem to be stirring things-”

“Pete, if you heard one of our DCs reaching for conclusions like yours from evidence like this, you’d slap him down and send him to bed without his supper. Even if there’s more to Mill Street than CAT are letting on, maybe they’re simply keeping quiet about their suspicions because it gives them a bit of an edge in the investigation. Maybe they found a lot more stuff when they were running the crime scene there and they just don’t want to let the perps know they’re coming at them from that particular direction.”

Pascoe considered this. There was a disturbing amount of sense in it.

“So why keep me on the outside?” he asked.

“Because that’s what you are, Pete. An outsider. They’re worried about you, not because there’s stuff to hide, but because after your own experience and with Andy lying in a coma, you’re a loose cannon. Likely that’s why Glenister got you attached to her team in the first place, so she can keep a close eye on you. You said yourself you’d been given a non-job.”

He’d had another couple of drinks with the sergeant to show he wasn’t put out at this demolition of his carefully constructed hypotheses. And he was nearly an hour late for his dinner, which he didn’t fancy anyway but which uxorial diplomacy made him eat.

And this had been the result. A nightmare he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, recall. And a stomach like the Red Sea after the application of Moses’s rod.

He immersed his head in cold water, brushed his teeth, gargled, and felt a little better. By the time he emerged from the bathroom, Ellie had made a hot milky drink.

She’d also unearthed the tablets prescribed by John Sowden when Pascoe left hospital. He’d stopped taking them after a few days and had left them at home when he went to Manchester. Now he looked at them with distaste.

“They make me drowsy,” he objected.

“You’re in your pajamas, it’s two o’clock in the fucking morning,” said Ellie. “Take them.”

Pascoe’s fairy godmother had been more generous than poor Hector’s, but they did to some extent share the gift of survival, though the Pascoe version was rather more specialized. He knew when not to argue with his wife.

He climbed back into bed.

“Feeling a bit better now?” she asked.

“Yes. Much. Thought I might go along to visit Andy in the morning. And Hector too.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” she said.

She leaned over to kiss him. He turned his mouth away because despite the toothpaste, gargle, and milky drink, he still had a faint aftertaste of vomit at the back of his throat. But she kissed him on the lips anyway.

Then they both lay there, side by side, simulating sleep while their open eyes stared uncertainly into the dark.