Death Comes for the Fat Man

6

To average fifty-plus miles per hour driving through urban West Yorkshire on a Saturday afternoon in the height of summer requires a lot of luck and a total disregard of law. In Pascoe’s wake the law was in tatters, but fortunately so far his luck had held. He knew he was acting irrationally but rationality involved time.

Across his mind, like a blizzard over an inland sea, raged everything that had happened since Mill Street blew up. Because he’d feared-because deep down he’d believed-that Andy Dalziel was going to die, he had ploughed forward in what to start with had seemed a simple inexorable search for certainties.

Oh what a dusty answer gets the soul…

He had made things happen, and the things he had made happen had made other things happen, so that in the end it wasn’t a simple trail that he had followed, but a track, many of whose twists and turns he had actually created. In trying to trace a line back from an effect to a cause he had himself become a cause and did not know if the place he was at now was a place that would have existed if he hadn’t started on his quest, whether he was the Red Cross Knight riding to the rescue or merely a bumbling Quixote, creating confusion rather than resolving it.

He would have liked nothing more than to pull over into a quiet lay-by, relax, and let everything that had happened, everything he knew, or thought he knew, or merely guessed at play across his mind till the surface lay still and the depths became clear.

But he just didn’t have the time.

The first cause, the death of Dalziel, was no longer a cause.

Of course he had only Wield’s secondhand account to assure him that the Fat Man had woken in his right mind. But somehow he felt certain that all was going to be well.

But how often did it happen that the starting point of a chain of action becomes irrelevant long before the end comes in sight?

No point in saying that if Dalziel had woken up the day after the explosion, he would not be here now, desperately driving like a madman toward what he fervently prayed would be nothing more than a rendezvous with a few harmless windmills.

As he got through Skipton, his car phone rang

“Yes!” he bellowed to activate the receiver.

It was Glenister. Being pissed off made her sound even more Scots than usual.

“What the hell’s going on? We’ve just heard that Youngman’s been taken. Your name was mentioned. Peter, you were warned to keep out of this stuff. Are you still playing the Lone fucking Ranger?”

Her emotion had the homeopathic effect of quelling his.

“Hi, Sandy,” he said calmly. “I was just going to ring you.”

It wasn’t a lie. As he drove along he’d found himself worrying about the consequences if something happened at Marrside and he hadn’t called his suspicions in. His conscience would find it hard to live with, his career impossible.

“Oh, good! So now I’ve saved you the bother. Fill me in!”

He said, “Let’s leave the details for later, OK? I’m on my way to Bradford. I’ve got reason to suspect a woman called Kilda Kentmore might be planning an attempt on Sheikh Ibrahim’s life. She’s five foot eight, slender, thin face, black hair. She may be armed with a sidearm, but that’s unlikely, too difficult to conceal. No, if she’s got anything, it will be a bomb, and I think it may be concealed in a camera. She’s a professional photographer, and I think she’s going to Sarhadi’s wedding reception. She won’t have been invited but he knows her, so it could be easy for her to blag her way in.”

There was a pause then Glenister said incredulously, “You’re telling me that there’s a Western suicide bomber going to Kalim Sarhadi’s wedding? Christ, Pete, these Templars are crazy but surely they’re not that crazy?”

“The others have been acting out of some half-baked notion of vigilante justice,” said Pascoe. “This one is just plain nuts. I think she wants to die. Look, it’s complicated. You need to get off the phone and alert your people. I’m pretty certain she won’t go to the mosque but she’ll head straight for the walima at the Marrside Grange Hotel, so tell your people watching the mosque to get along there straightaway. Tell them if they spot her, to approach with very great care.”

Another pause, then one stretching so long he said, “Sandy, you still there?”

Glenister said, “Peter, we’ve got no people at Marrside.”

“What? But you said there was an observation team on-site. That’s how you knew I’d gone to see Sarhadi…oh no. Don’t tell me, this is Mill Street all over again, right? Low-scale surveillance. Don’t run up overtime over weekends and Bank Holidays. Jesus, what kind of Fred Karno outfit are you people running?”

“Pete, my bonny lad, we’re not the CIA. Those plonkers in Westminster huff and puff about national security, but when it comes to doling out the dosh, they find it more painful than passing gallstones. How close are you?”

“Ten, fifteen minutes,” said Pascoe.

“OK. I’ll get some people mobilized but you’ll definitely be first. At least you’ll recognize her. Kentmore? She related to the Kentmore your wife was on TV with?”

“Yes.”

“He mixed up with this?”

“Yes.”

“So where can we get hold of him?”

“He’s in custody. In the Mid-Yorkshire nick,” said Pascoe.

He didn’t anticipate congratulation and he didn’t get it.

“Since when, for Christ’s sake?”

“Since lunchtime.”

Again the silence, longer this time, but not ending in the expected explosion.

“Oh, Peter, Peter,” she finally breathed. “What have you been playing at?”

“I can explain, but not now, eh?”

“Of course not. After all, if you get to Marrside and find the hotel in rubble, there’s no explanation you can give which will be of any interest, is there?”

She rang off.

She was, he knew, right. If you played the Lone Ranger too long, there came a time when not even your faithful Indian companion could watch your back.

He threw back his head, yelled “Hi-yo Silver, away!” and stamped on the accelerator.