Death Comes for the Fat Man

14

Andy Dalziel is on his way to Mairi’s wedding.

Step we gaily on we go

Heel for heel and toe for toe

Proud to be a Yorkshireman, proud of all that his lovely Yorkshire mam had brought to his being, proud to belt out “On Ilkla Moor baht ’at” with the best of them, it has always been the music from his father’s side of the family that plucked at his heart strings and squeezed the tear out of his eye.

Arm in arm and row on row

All for Mairi’s wedding

Who he is arm in arm with he is not certain, nor indeed whether in any strict sense the arms in question are arms at all, but the feelings of joy and lightness which the song inspires are real enough, and he’s never been a man to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Unless of course it’s donated by Greeks. Or Lancastrians.

Over hill ways up and down

Myrtle green and bracken brown…

No real hills of course. No greens or browns. Just effortlessly floating on a highway of music as he recalled doing years ago, squashed in a corner of some tiny bothy with his Scottish cousins when big Uncle Hamish got his fiddle out.

Plenty herring plenty meal

Plenty peat tae fill her creel

Peat. The sweet smoky reek of it. And better still when it’s coming off the surface of a golden pool set in a crystal tumbler…

Plenty bonny bairns as weel…

Now young Rosie Pascoe was a bonnie bairn and she’d grown into a bonnie lass and would, if God was kind, which so far he’d not been given any reason to doubt, turn out a stunning woman. And what was more important a kind and caring one.

Cheeks as bright as rowans are…

He’d always been able to depend on the kindness of women. Even his wife had been kind…in her way…Some women before they left cut up their husbands’ suits or poured their twenty-year-old single malts down the bog and substituted vinegar. His had left a note…Your dinner’s in the oven on the low burner…He’d gone to the kitchen and opened the oven.

There it was, gently crisping.

A plate of ham salad.

It still makes him laugh all these years on.

Women, women…perhaps it is their arms that he feels in his now…all those kind women…

And one above all…

The last? Who can say that?

But a star…more than a star…

Brighter far than any star

Fairest of them all by far…

Cap. Ms. Amanda Marvell. Mrs. the Hon. Rupert Pitt-Evenlode. Call her what you will. The sense of her presence sends him soaring even higher than the music.

Over hill-ways up and down

Myrtle green and bracken brown

Past the shieling through the town

All for the sake of…

Cap.

The music dies away but still he floats.

But what’s this? The pace slackens to a crawl, the mood changes. Oh no!

“The Flower of Scotland.”

Dear God! What a doleful dirge. He has always been persuaded that the only thing keeping Scottish rugby from World Cup glory is their pre-match anthem. How can those fine young men be expected to march forward to fight the auld enemy with this turgid tune clogging their feet? It makes “God Save the Queen” sound like a cavalry charge!

But at last it drags its weary weight to a close.

And now thank God he’s out of the mire again and soaring high once more as the pipes and drums explode into the song which is his signature tune at the Police Christmas Party.

Sure by Tummel and Loch Rannock and Lochaber I will go

By heather tracks wi’ heaven in their wiles

If it’s thinking’ in your inner hairt the braggart’s in my step,

You’ve never smelt the tangle o’ the Isles.

Here’s the truth of it. Though his feet have always been firmly planted in the rich earth of his native Yorkshire and on the hard pavements of its great cities, the heart is forever Highland.

And when a man is hovering between this world and the next, it takes a music as seductive as that of the far Cuillins to pull him away, though whether its call is to heaven or to earth Andy Dalziel as yet cannot and indeed does not care to know.