Dialogues of the Dead

14

As PAsCOE watched Bowler move away, making a bee-line for the girl from the library, he found he was smiling.

Who was it said that middle age began when you started looking fondly on the young, and old age when you started really resenting the bastards?

Probably Dalziel.

Time to check out the art.

He’d been checking for several minutes without much enthusiasm when someone touched his shoulder and said, “Peter, how’re the muscles? Recovered enough for another go?”

He turned to see Sam Johnson grinning at him.

“You’ve got to be joking,” he said. “Nice to see you, though. I wanted a word. I spotted Franny Roote earlier. He with you?”

It was hardly a subtle approach but Johnson was too sharp for obliquities, as Pascoe had discovered when he’d checked out Roote’s story with him. Now the lecturer emptied his wine glass, seized another off a passing tray, and said, “Yes, I got Franny an invite. Is that a problem?”

“No problem. Just an occupational reflex,” said Pascoe lightly. “You see him as a bright student, I see him as an old customer.”

“I also see him as a friend,” said Johnson. “Not a close friend maybe, but getting that way. I like him very much.”

“Well, that’s all right then,” said Pascoe. “Can’t be much wrong with a bright student whose supervisor likes him very much.”

It came out a bit sharper than he intended. Something about Johnson acted on him as a mild irritant, the same thing probably which had provoked him into that farcical non-game of squash from which his shoulder was still aching. Not that there was anything obviously irritating about the young academic. Boyish without being childish, good-looking this side of matinee idol, bright but not in-your-face smart ass, entertaining in a self-mocking rather than self-congratulating style, totally non-menacing, he had somehow contrived to ripple the Pascoe pond. The DCI had thought about it long and hard. Jealousy? A man might be forgiven for feeling a little jealous of someone who could make his wife laugh so much. But Ellie Pascoe had been through experiences in recent months which might have crushed a lesser woman and to Pascoe the sound of her laughter was a blessed affirmation that all was well. He heard it now and over Johnson’s shoulder glimpsed her with a trio consisting of Charley Penn, Percy Follows and Mary Agnew. Which of them had made Ellie laugh wasn’t clear, but Pascoe felt nothing but gratitude. Not that either of these men looked possible candidates for jealousy. Penn with his cavernous eyes and sunken cheeks was hardly a romantic threat, while Follows was of the type Ellie unkindly categorized as prancers, with his mane of honey gold hair, his flamboyant gestures, his flowery language, his bow ties and garish waistcoats. “I don’t mind if he’s really gay,” Ellie had said, “but I can’t be doing with it as a fashion statement.”

So, no jealousy there, and not even in the case of the much more desirable young lecturer. Then what was it in Johnson that stirred him up?

Eventually and reluctantly he’d come to the conclusion that he felt Johnson as a challenge to, or more accurately perhaps, a comment on his way of life.

There’d been a point years back at the end of university when he’d stood uncertainly at a fork in the track; then, with a deep breath and many a half-regretful backward glance, he’d set his foot on the road that had brought him to his present state.

The other path, he guessed, might well have led him to some condition not unlike that of Johnson. They were, roughly speaking, of the same generation, but Sam looked younger, dressed younger, talked younger. On campus, the casual observer would probably find it hard to distinguish him from the students he taught. Yet he could take his place among his seniors at conferences or in the senate as a respected equal, even a potential superior, with a bright beginning behind him and the promise of glittering prizes ahead. At the very least he had the prospect of spending the years of his maturity in comfortable old rooms looking out on a smooth razed lawn running down to a river gay with punts in term time and serene with swans through the long vacations. …

OK, that was probably a pie-in-the-sky picture of academic life which didn’t exist or, if it did, had no appeal to Johnson. But in his own career, not even his most way-out fantasies could devise any comparable pastoral idyll.

Toil and trouble, trial and tribulation, till he was put out to grass, which was the only version of pastoral his future seemed to offer.

On the other hand, he didn’t have a drink problem, and his heart, so he’d been told on his annual medical check-up, was in perfect condition.

Johnson was looking at him as if expecting a response.

“Sorry,” said Pascoe. “Hard to hear with all this noise.”

Enunciating very clearly as if in a large lecture hall with a bad acoustic, Johnson said, “I was saying, we all make mistakes, Peter. Happily, most of us come to terms with them and get on with our lives.”

For a moment Pascoe felt like he’d been thought-read, then the lecturer went on, “And it can’t be pleasant for Franny, feeling he’s under constant observation.”

How about not being pleasant for me either? wondered Pascoe. But it was a blind alley of a conversation so he said lightly, “Depends on who’s doing the observing. I think one of us is being summoned.”

Ellie was beckoning. He gave a little wave and she replied by pointing her finger towards Johnson.

“You, I think,” said Pascoe.

He followed in Johnson’s wake. Charley Penn gave them both a nod and Ellie smiled a welcome and said, “Sam, do you know Percy Follows who runs the library service? And Mary Agnew, editor of the Gazette?” “Hi,” said Johnson.

“Percy was just telling me about this short story competition the library and the Gazette are running together. It seems they’re having a bit of bother with the judging.”

“Yes,” said Follows. “To be quite honest, I don’t think that Mary or myself realized the degree of interest there was going to be. My staff are doing the preliminary sorting and it’s turned into quite a task for us, I can tell you. We’ve had well over seven hundred entries, a very high standard, and we want to be sure that our winners really are la crème de la crème.”

“To cut a long story short,” said Ellie brutally, “Mary and Percy were looking for an expert panel. They naturally turned to Charley here as our most distinguished local lion who was kind enough to mention my own imminent elevation to the pride, then naturally your name came up.”

“Yes,” said Agnew. “This writing course of yours, seems to me that many of the entrants to the competition must be potential customers. You could almost look upon it as a recruitment campaign.”

Sam Johnson, if he’d had a quiz-glass, looked as if he’d have used it. Pascoe didn’t blame him. Ever since MYU’s creative writing course had been started, the Gazette had debated whether this was a sensible use of educational time, staff and money when the country was full of young people desperate for qualifications in subjects with some relevance to the real world.

It wasn’t hard to work out what had changed.

Agnew and Follows had initially taken the short story competition so unseriously that the librarian had wished the initial sorting out on Dick Dee, while Agnew had dumped the final judging into the lap of the Hon. Geoffrey Pyke-Strengler. Two things had happened. First, they’d probably been genuinely surprised by the number of entries. And secondly, after Jax Ripley’s final broadcast and subsequent death at the hands of the Wordman, the short story competition had entered the public consciousness in a big way. OK, it had little real connection with the investigation, but the national media, as always greedy for any crumb falling from such a richly set table, would be focusing in on the result. There’d already been a feature on Pyke-Strengler in one of the colour supplements. He was just the kind of anachronistic, sub-Wodehousian aristocrat the British love. His answers to his interviewer’s questions had been tinged with a vague bafflement at all the fuss, a quality which also informed his photographed face. One thing, though, had shone quite clearly through the vagueness-this was a man singularly unqualified to judge of literary merit.

So old pro Agnew was suddenly keen to have a judging team whose literary credentials wouldn’t make her paper look totally stupid. Charley Penn was an obvious choice. He’d passed the parcel to Ellie who in turn had involved Sam Johnson, who now said, “But surely you already have a judge in place: Mr. Pyke-Strengler. He’s here, isn’t he? I was admiring some of his wildlife watercolours earlier, painted I presume before he shot the creatures. Has he been consulted about the proposed changes?”

“If he hasn’t,” said Ellie, “now’s your chance. There he is talking to Mr. Dee. Perhaps they’re discussing the competition.”

Dick Dee and his companion were certainly deep in discussion of something and that’s how, or so it seemed to Pascoe, Agnew would have liked to leave them, but Ellie in mischief-making mood was not to be denied and she called loudly, “Hello! Mr. Pyke-Strengler! Do you have a moment?”

She winked at Johnson who grinned back. Then all gazes turned to watch the Honourable Geoffrey Pyke-Strengler come shambling towards them.

In the Great Outdoors, remote from human habitation, on mountain, moor or riverbank, the Hon. was by most accounts, certainly his own, a creature at one with the environment, soft of foot, sharp of ear and eye, endlessly ingenious in devising methods of getting close enough to the fur, fish and fowl he so loved to make easy the task of slaughtering them. He had been the kind of child who, if his parents had opted for the once popular upper class alternative to an expensive boarding school of staking him out on a cold mountain, would probably have dispatched the first wolf or bear that came marauding with his bare hands, then eaten it. In fact, as the supplement article had informed Pascoe, by the time he was ten his parents had abandoned him even more completely than by exposure to the elements. His father, Baron Pyke-Strengler of the Stang, a famous defender of animal rights in the Upper Chamber, had run off to Tahiti with an Australian anthropologist, as a consequence of which his deeply if idiosyncratically religious mother had entered a vegan cult’s Californian commune from which she had not emerged for twenty-five years, leaving the Hon. Geoffrey to grow up watching most of his inheritance steadily eroding under the very different but uniformly large financial demands of his absent parents. By the time he reached his majority, only the unassailable entail remained, consisting of the ancestral house (let as a corporate rest home), plus large chunks of Stangdale containing a few tumbledown farms.

Little wonder perhaps in view of his parents’ predilections that the Hon. Geoffrey should have declared war on the natural world, and in the Great Outdoors developed those predatory skills for which he was justly famed.

Indoors, however, though still as destructive, his depredations tended to be accidental. As he approached he kicked over a table bearing a display of wooden bowls, moved sharply to his left to avoid treading on them, jostled a girl bearing a trayful of wine glasses, ducked away from the resultant shower of chardonnay and caused a nasty friction burn down the arm of the Lady Mayor with his ancient hacking jacket which was cut from the most spikily horrent tweed known to man.

Finally he made it and smiled benevolently on the group. He had a rather attractive doggily-trusting sort of expression. In fact he gave the impression that with the slightest encouragement, he’d have placed his paws on your shoulders and licked your face.

Mary Agnew introduced him. When she mentioned the short story competition, he nodded knowingly and said, “Stories, eh? Picture’s worth a thousand words, isn’t that what they say? And a pair of Purdys are worth a thousand pictures, that’s what I say. But could be worse. Could have been a novel competition instead of stories. God, now that would have been really hard.”

“Wasn’t it Chekhov who said that people only write novels because they don’t have time to write short stories?” said Johnson.

“Think you may have got that the wrong way round, old boy,” said the Hon. helpfully.

“Geoffrey,” said Mary Agnew, “I was thinking, maybe you could use a bit of help judging these stories …”

“No need. Just talking to Dick about it. He says he’ll steer me right. Good man, Dick,” said the Hon., beaming confidence. “Anyway, man who can judge a good terrier shouldn’t have any problems with a few scribbles.”

Pascoe noted with mild interest this apparent familiarity with Dee who, from his own limited knowledge, didn’t appear the huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ type.

“Nevertheless,” said Agnew with the firmness of one who is certain of her absolute authority, “I’ve decided that you shouldn’t have to cope alone and I’ve just been asking Dr. Johnson here, and his colleagues, if they would form a judging committee. With you, of course.”

“No, count me out,” said the Hon. “Would have done it myself, noblesse oblige, honoured my commitment sort of thing, but this is different. Can’t abide committees. Good luck with it, old boy.” (This to Johnson.) “Make sure she pays you the going rate.”

Johnson looked surprised at the mention of money, but Penn’s eyes lit up and he said, “Just what is the going rate then?”

“No idea,” said the Hon. “Didn’t apply to me. I’m sort of staff, you see. Was, anyway.”

“Was?” echoed Agnew, looking at him as if she didn’t object to the idea.

“Yes. Going to tell you. Heard this morning. The old man’s dead. Boat accident. Sad, but haven’t seen him for twenty-five years, so …well there it goes. Anyway, means the bits and bobs he couldn’t get his hands on come to me, so I shan’t need to do the column any more. And now you’ve got yourself a committee, don’t need to do the judging any more, do I?”

Still the benevolent smile, but Pascoe had a sense he was enjoying this.

Ellie said, “So that means you’re Lord Pyke-Strengler now?”

“Of the Stang. Yes. But normally don’t use the title till the previous holder’s been buried.”

“Which is when?”

“Well, could be a bit of a problem there, actually,” said the Hon. reflectively. “Seems the sharks were a bit faster getting to him than the rescue boats, you see.”

Oh, what fun it is to look at their faces and see that they are seeing what you want them to see but completely missing the many-splendour’d thing. They think we are all moving forward along the same broad highway, all crowded together, all jostling for the best position, some congratulating themselves on having outdistanced those they started with, others feeling themselves pushed to the edges, even trampled into the gutter, but none of them denying that the choice lies between striving forward along that road or stepping off it into annihilation. And all the time I am following the twist and turns of my own path whose existence they are only just beginning to believe in, and whose route they cannot hope to track because its purpose is so far beyond their comprehension. I look at them looking at these so-called works of art and laugh because I know that the true artists in this life use brush strokes too delicate and colours too bright for the ordinary eye to detect or to tolerate …

“So what do you think of this?” asked Rye. “Rather good, wouldn’t you say?”

She had come to a halt before a watercolour of a rather tumbledown house on the bank of a lake with the evening sun turning the water into wine. Or blood.

“It’s OK, but I’d rather look at you,” said Hat.

“Watch a lot of old Cary Grant movies, do you?” said Rye, eyes firmly on the picture.

“Not if I can help it. OK, let the dog see the rabbit.”

He moved her gently to one side, enjoying the excuse for contact.

“Oh yes,” he said. “Stangcreek Cottage.”

Now she looked at him then down at her catalogue.

“You’ve seen it already,” she said accusingly.

“No. I’ve seen the cottage and you’ll see it tomorrow. That’s Stang Tarn, which, unsurprisingly, like Stang Creek and Stangcreek Cottage, is in Stangdale. As close with their words as they are with their money, these Yorkshiremen. If you like the look of it so much, we’ll take a photo, save you the bother of buying the painting.”

If she wanted to play the connoisseur, he was quite happy to play the philistine.

“Is that all paintings are to you? Just some form of record?”

“Nothing wrong with records, is there? Here’s a place I liked the look of on such and such a date at such and such a time?”

“Is that all it says? Doesn’t the light and the colouring and the time of day tell you anything?”

“Sure. It’s getting dark, and maybe the painter’s run out of blue and green but he’s got lots of red. Or maybe he’s just better at blood than water. Yes, I’d say he should stick to blood.”

“OK, so let’s stick to blood. Any leads yet on the Wordman?”

This pulled him up short and he said, “Hey, I’m off duty here, remember?”

“Are you? Clearly you don’t want to talk about Dick’s painting, so I thought you must be one of those sad bastards who can’t relate to anything outside his job.”

“Dick’s painting? You mean, Dick Dee painted this?”

“Didn’t you realize? I thought that maybe that was why you were being so resistant.”

Clever clogs. She’d picked up on his antipathy to her boss even though he’d scarcely acknowledged it to himself.

He said, “No, I didn’t realize …sorry. I just thought we were playing a game. Actually, I think it’s very striking, you know …atmospheric. …”

“You like playing games, do you?”

“Oh yes,” he said. “Anything but solitaire.”

Let her twist and turn as much as she liked, she wasn’t going to shake him off.

“So what about the Wordman? What game is he playing?”

“What makes you think he’s playing a game?”

“Those Dialogues. No reason to write them except to involve someone else.”

“They could just simply be a record.”

“Like this painting?”

“You’ve persuaded me it’s more than that.”

“Then look at the Dialogues …surely they’ve got a subtext, too …an atmosphere. …”

“Like blood on the tarn, you mean?” said Hat, staring at the painting of Stangcreek Cottage.

“Blood on the tarn? Why didn’t I think of that for a title?” said Dick Dee.

He had come up behind them.

“Hello, Dick,” said Rye with the welcoming smile Hat had not received. “We’re just deconstructing your opus.”

“I’m flattered. You remember Ambrose Bird?”

“Who could forget the Last of the Actor-Managers?” said Rye fluttering her eyelashes in a manner which Hat, not without relief, identified as ironical.

“Yes, of course, we met in Dick’s office. Alas, with the dreadful news of Miss Ripley’s death weighing on us, the normal courtesies went out of the window, but distracted though I was, I recall making a mental note to improve our acquaintance,” said Bird, matching her mock admiration with his own histrionic gallantry. “Let’s start afresh. Dick, a formal introduction, if you please.”

“This is Rye Pomona, who works with me in Reference,” said Dee.

With not for, acknowledged Bowler grudgingly.

“Pomona …you’re not related by any chance to Freddie Pomona?”

“He was my father.”

“Good lord. He must have had you late, I think. Dear old Freddie. He was Titinius when I carried my first spear in Caesar. I recall how well he died, too well indeed for the director who had to get him to tone it down a bit. Can’t have the support out-Brutusing Brutus.”

“He was a ham, you mean?” said Rye.

Bird laughed and said, “I mean he belonged to an older school of acting than that which now prevails. In any case, a well-cured jambon is the tastiest of meats. Who knows better than I? But dear Freddie is sadly missed. And your mother too …Melanie, wasn’t it? Of course it was. I recall dear Sir Ralph at a cast lunch given by some unusually generous management saying, ‘I think I shall start with a slice of Melanie accompanied by the merest morsel of Pomona Ham.’ Such a wag, dear Ralph.”

Dick Dee, who had been regarding Rye with some concern, said sharply, “I think, to persuade us of that, you might have found a better example of his wit.”

“I’m sorry,” said Bird, acting being taken aback. “Perhaps it wasn’t dear Ralph. Sir John, perhaps? G, of course, not M. Not his style at all.”

“I was commenting on the matter rather than the manner,” said Dee, glancing significantly at Rye.

“What? Oh, I see. My dear, I’m so sorry. No offence intended. I recall dear Freddie laughed like a drain.”

“No offence taken,” said Rye, smiling.

“There, you see, Dick. You’re far too sensitive. Now is no one going to introduce me to this fine-looking young man whose face also looks strangely familiar?”

“That’s because he is Detective Constable Bowler, who was so ably assisting DCI Pascoe on that same day you met Rye,” said Dee.

“Well, well. DiCaprio eat your heart out,” said the actor-manager, taking Bowler’s hand and squeezing it hard.

“Nice to meet you,” said Hat, pulling his hand away.

“I hope we may improve our acquaintance also,” murmured Bird. Then, like a grand duchess signalling an audience was over, he turned abruptly to the painting and said, “So, Dick, this is one of your masterpieces, is it? Hmmm.”

The hmmm was the first thing that Hat had liked about the man. It spoke a whole hiveful of reservations.

The two men stepped closer to the painting and Hat took Rye by the arm and steered her away, saying, “Why don’t we take a look at that engraver woman?”

“Because it sounds like metalwork?” said Rye. “I bet at school you were hot on metalwork.”

“You bet. Straight A’s. Talking of which, that asshole Ambrose is a bit over the top, isn’t he?”

“Bird? He’s harmless. Just an act.”

“Acting being a great actor, you mean?”

“It happens all the time. Of course, if you can’t hack it on the stage, you soon get found out. But Bird’s acting being an old-fashioned actor-manager which is a much meatier role. To give him his due, he does a pretty good job. Have you seen any of his productions?”

“Not yet,” said Bowler, wondering if he was going to have to brush up his Shakespeare as well as his art to get near this girl. He was full of curiosity over the revelation that she came from a theatrical family, but a close study of the psychology of interrogation had taught him the supreme importance of rhythm and timing in getting a result. So another place, another time …

“Is he acting being gay as well?” he said.

“Think he fancies you? Now that’s really vain,” she said.

“The way he shook my hand, either he fancies me or he’s a member of some Lodge I don’t know about.”

“So it’s true. You do have to be a homophobic mason to get on in the Filth,” she said.

But she said it with an affectionate smile and he smiled back as he replied, “I thought everyone knew that. Now why don’t we go and look at some etchings?”