Death Comes for the Fat Man

7

Andy Dalziel is in the Mecca Ballroom, locked in a tango with Tottie Truman from Donny.

He feels as light as a feather. His feet hardly seem to be in contact with the floor, his muscles responding to every modulation of the music, as if the notes were vibrating along his arteries rather than through his ears. And he can feel the blood pulsing through Tottie’s veins in a perfect counterpoint to his own rhythms as they move inexorably toward that blissfully explosive moment of complete fusion…

But not on the dance floor! It’s all a question of timing. In search of delay, he makes his mind step back and take in his surroundings.

The Mirely Mecca has changed a lot since his last visit, which was…he can’t recall when. Never mind. The ceiling’s higher now and the soaring windows, spring bright with colored glass, wouldn’t disgrace a cathedral. The walls are lined with long tables, covered in white linen cloths on which rests a royal banquet of everything he loves-on one table crowns of lamb, barons of beef, loins of pork ridged with crackling, honey glazed hams; on another roasted geese, Christmas turkeys, duck with cherries, pheasant adorned with their own feathers; on a third whole salmon, pickled herring, mountain ranges of oysters and mussels. Yet another is crowded with desserts, bread-and-butter pudding, rhubarb crumble, spotted dick, and his childhood favorite, Eve’s Pudding.

And there, by a table laden with bottles of every kind of malt whisky he’d ever tasted, stands Peter Pascoe, an open bottle of Highland Park in one hand and in the other a king-size crystal tumbler full to the brim which he is holding out in smiling invitation…

Later, lad, he mouths. Later. First things first. Dance till the music reaches its climax, then straight out of the door into that dark alcove at the end of the corridor to reach his and hers…

After which, being a gentleman, he’ll wait a decent interval of mebbe a minute and a half, before heading back inside for another helping of Eve’s Pudding…

But just as he begins to wonder if he can hold out any longer, the music changes, accelerating from the sensuous pulse of the tango into the mad whirl of a Viennese waltz. His muscles obey the new commands effortlessly though his mind wonders what the fuck the band leader’s playing at. Round and round and round he spins, till the high walls and colored windows and laden tables retreat to a blur of Arctic whiteness and Tottie’s body, which during the tango had been a comfortable armful of warm softness molding itself ever closer to his, begins to feel like a sackful of old bones.

Now he too is beginning to feel tired, as if age and exertion and all the excesses of a life spent in mad pursuit of God knows what are at last catching up with him. He wants to rest. Surely Tottie would want to sit this one out too? He nuzzles his lips against her ear to whisper the suggestion, but he can’t find it. The cheek pressed against his no longer feels soft and warm but cold and hard and smooth.

He moves his head back to look into his partner’s face. Instead of the lustrous brown bedroom eyes of Tottie Truman, he finds himself peering into the deep shadowy sockets of a skull whose toothy leer and vacant gaze have something familiar about them.

Then recognition dawns.

Dalziel laughs.

“Hector, lad,” he cries. “I always said tha’d be the death of me, but I never meant it so literal!”

The skeletal figure does not reply but its grip tightens round the Fat Man’s broad frame and he finds his weary legs being urged into an even wilder dance which feels as if it will end only when those bony arms have squeezed out of him everything that makes up the life force-sun and wind and air and rain, good grub and mellow whisky, light and laughter-and whirled what little remains away into some icy eternity.

For a moment he is lost. He, the great Dalziel, who on his day has danced from dusk to dawn and then washed down the Full English Breakfast with a tumbler of whisky, has no strength to resist as Death, or Hector, bears him off to oblivion.

Then at the very point of submission, something happens.

New resolve seems to course through his weary limbs like an electric shock. Then another, even stronger. A third…a fourth…a fifth…

Sod this for a lark! he thinks. I’ll give this bugger a run for his money afore I let him dance me off my feet!

Pressing Death or Hector even closer to his chest, he rises onto his toes and goes whirling round the room, once more the leader not the led, faster and faster, till he leaves the wild music trailing in his wake. And this time, instead of blurring out his surroundings, the speed of the dance seems to bring them back into focus. First the high windows with their multicolored lights, and then white-clothed tables laden with provender, and finally he becomes aware that the brittle bones in his arms are once more clothed in the warm and yielding flesh of Tottie Truman from Donny.