Death Comes for the Fat Man

2

Back in the Lubyanka Pascoe found that attitudes had changed.

The first person he saw when he arrived at eight forty-five was Freeman, who’d glanced at his Patek Philippe watch with a smile and said, “What kept you?”

“My ten-mile run before breakfast,” said Pascoe. “Is Sandy in yet?”

“Of course she is. You know the old Jacobite tradition. No breakfast till you’ve killed an Englishman. But you’ll have to wait. She’s upstairs with Uncle Bernie.”

“Killing him?”

“I hope not. I’ll let her know you’re here, shall I? Where will you be?”

Pascoe said, “In the cellar, I suppose. I don’t want to get myself arrested by showing up anywhere else.”

Freeman seemed to find this very witty.

“Good to have you back, Pete,” he said, sounding as if he meant it.

Pondering these things, Pascoe descended to the room where he’d worked so boringly the previous week. Here he found Tim and Rod already engaged in their seemingly endless task of record trawling.

When they saw him, they both rose with expressions of delight and greeted him like a returned prodigal. News of his role in the Youngman affair had clearly reached them and they were eager for details. Suspecting some kind of confidentiality test, he only confirmed what they already knew. Unsatisfied, they insisted he join them in the staff canteen for further debriefing and morning coffee. The few people already there and others who came later also gave him the big welcome, confirming what he’d already begun to feel, that he had moved, or been moved, from outsider to one-of-us.

Still he looked for hidden motives, for mocking irony. But quickly he began to realize how much his sense of being kept out of the loop and his suspicion that the Templars had an informant in CAT had colored his feelings about the whole of the unit. Now he was reminded of what he shouldn’t have forgotten, that these people too-even the spooks-were policemen, and cops don’t like vigilantes. If, as occasionally happens, there is dirty work to be done, then you consult your conscience and if you get a green light, you do it yourself. What you never do is let civilians trespass on your turf, even if they seem to be giving you a helping hand. And when the vigilantes in question not only blow up a cop, but then compound what was presumably an accident by trying to kill another who might be a witness, any ambiguity about their status evaporates completely.

As a natural team player, it was good to feel that at last he was truly in the squad. This sense of belonging saw him return to the basement full of confidence that Glenister wouldn’t let him fester down here for long. He offered to help Tim and Rod in their work, but they said, “No no, this is only for us menials. You take the weight off your feet, Peter, and rest up till you are summoned.”

He sat at his desk and opened Death in the Desert, the first of Youngman’s books, both of which he’d bought on his way to the Lubyanka that morning. It was hailed by its publisher as a new form, the docunovel, in which a factual skeleton was fleshed with fiction. Bugger new forms, what they needed was a new copywriter, thought Pascoe. It was dedicated, To Q, leader of men. Its back cover was crammed with snippets of praise extracted from reviews of the hardback. Pascoe was unimpressed. He and Ellie, finally realizing that two paragraphs in the local evening paper and three lines in the Other New Books section of a Sunday national was all the notice her novel was going to attract, had spent a tipsy evening extracting from this critical molehill an encomiastic mountain.

He started to read.

Youngman’s narrative style was raw and unsophisticated but Pascoe could see its appeal. His hero was, unsurprisingly, an SAS sergeant. Called William Shackleton, universally known by both his officers and his men as Shack, he was brutal, amoral, and pragmatic. His motto was Make it happen. His men didn’t like him much but followed him unquestioningly because he got them through. When someone in his hearing said the problem with guerrilla warfare was identifying the enemy, he said, “No problem. They’re all the fucking enemy.” He referred to the population of the Middle East in general as Abdul. When he needed to individuate, he called them Abs. His sexual philosophy was as basic as his military. He made no pretense of the nature of his interest. If a woman didn’t respond, he moved on. If she did respond, she got no promise of commitment. But most of his conquests remained as loyal as his men. In a rare moment of openness he explained his technique to one of his few friends. “If you fuck a woman five times in a night, she knows she’d be crazy to imagine she’s going to be the only one. Most of them don’t mind not being the only one so long as they think they’re the best. When I’m with a woman I make no secret there’s plenty of others. But I tell her, ‘Honey, whenever I’m fucking them, I’m thinking of you.’” Shortly after this conversation, as usually happened to any man he got close to, the friend got blown away.

Was all this wishful thinking, or did Youngman actually practice what he preached? wondered Pascoe as he worked his way through the book. Maybe he should have asked Ffion, wherever she was. The thought made him feel guilty.

He’d just finished the last chapter and was thinking of lunch when the phone rang.

Rod picked it up, listened, and said, “Big Mac would like to see you.”

“Big Mac?”

“You know, the North-British lady with the knockers,” he said, cupping his hands.

In Glenister’s office he was slightly taken aback to find not only the Chief Superintendent but Bloomfield and Komorowski. They were drinking coffee. Perhaps they’d had lunch already. His stomach rumbled, as if to say, well, I haven’t!

“There you are, Peter. How nice,” said Bloomfield, as if this were a chance encounter. “Just talking about you. Read your wife’s book over the weekend. Jolly good. You must be proud of her.”

“Yes, I am,” said Pascoe, wondering where this was going.

“And she of you, I don’t doubt. Not without cause. That was a sharp piece of work at the hospital. Very sharp. So what did you make of it all?”

As if Sunday’s events hadn’t been analyzed down to their quarks, thought Pascoe.

But he replied in measured tones, “I think that these Templars, though they have not laid claim to it, were responsible for the Mill Street explosion. Concerned that PC Hector might be able to identify one of them, they decided to take him out. The first attempt with the hit-and-run having failed, they planned to complete the job in the hospital.”

“Sounds about right to me. Lukasz?”

Komorowski said in his chalk-dry voice, “Their reluctance to claim Mill Street because Superintendent Dalziel got seriously injured doesn’t quite fit with their apparent readiness to murder Constable Hector.”

“Down to perceptions,” said Glenister. “Mill Street was their opening salvo, so to speak, and they didn’t want the bad press associated with injuring a policeman. On the other hand, offing Hector to protect themselves is fine, so long as it looks accidental. Which makes them almost as ruthless as the bastards they’re killing.”

“So it does,” said Bloomfield. “They right to worry about this man Hector, Peter?”

Pascoe, still uneasy that somehow his previous defense of Hector might have triggered the attack, shook his head.

“No,” he said firmly. “I don’t think we’re going to get anything more from him.”

“But it was his drawing of his attacker that put you on to Youngman, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, by an indirect route,” said Pascoe. “But he’d had a clear view of him in the car, whereas the man in the video shop was deeply obscured by shadow.”

“Still, to capture such a good likeness from a face glimpsed for only a split second moving toward you at sixty miles an hour takes a special talent,” said Komorowski. “Which, incidentally, I don’t find any reference to in Constable Hector’s file.”

Been studying that, have you? thought Pascoe.

He said, “Probably because no one was aware of it.”

“Ah,” said Komorowski, in a tone so neutral it said clearly, “If he’d been one of mine, I’d have been aware of it.”

“Ah indeed,” rejoined Pascoe, in a tone which he hoped conveyed just as clearly that Komorowski, not having to deal daily with the loose amalgam of incompetences which was Hector, was talking through his arsehole.

“We are well pleased with the work you did here, Peter,” declared Bloomfield somewhat regally, bringing this polite confrontation to a close. “How do you feel about following it up? Strictly speaking, it’s not within our brief, which is counterterrorism. To be frank, we’re pretty overstretched as it is, and it would be a great help if you could take this on. I can spare Chetwynd and Loxam to work with you. What do you say?”

Pascoe was momentarily dumbstruck. To be offered the chance to do officially what he was in fact trying to do surreptitiously seemed too good to be true. Already his suspicious mind was suggesting that making his unofficial activities official was the perfect way for the Templar mole to keep close track of what he was up to.

Whose idea was it? he wondered. Pointless asking. It could well be that the person who thought it was his or her idea had had it planted there by someone else anyway.

He said, “Chetwynd and Loxam…?”

“Tim and Rod, the guys you’ve been doing such sterling work with in the cellar,” said Glenister, frowning as if surprised he didn’t know their surnames, which indeed she was right to be. “Dave Freeman will help you settle in and act as your link to me.”

That cleared up one thing, thought Pascoe. Freeman’s sudden friendliness was presumably explained by foreknowledge of this promotion, if that’s what it was.

But, promotion or not, he could hardly say, No, I’d prefer to carry on sneaking around behind everyone’s backs.

He said, “To do this properly, I’d need to have full access to all available records and other material.”

“Of course. On tap. Not, I suspect, that an ingenious chap like you would have any problem finding less conventional modes of access,” said Bloomfield, smiling.

Shit, thought Pascoe. Somehow the old sod knows that last time I was in this office, I’d been rifling through Glenister’s desk in search of information!

“So we can take it that’s settled?” said Bloomfield.

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

“Good. Sandy, you’ll see Peter gets everything he needs? Excellent. Come on Lukasz. Work to do.”

He headed for the door, where he paused and looked up at the ceiling.

“Sandy, that security camera, you ever get it fixed?”

“Yes, sir. It’s working fine now,” said Glenister.

“Good. Place like this, you need to be able to see what’s going on everywhere, Peter. Downside is you get to know who picks their nose a lot.”

He looked at Pascoe as he said this, and smiled, and it might have been that his left eyelid drooped in a slow wink or it may have been just a natural blink.