Dialogues of the Dead

28

But getting a life isn’t easy when there’s so much death around.

On Saturday morning Pascoe woke, stretched, thought with pleasure, “I’m off duty.”

Then recalled he was going to a funeral, his second of the week.

For a cop, weekends usually meant more rather than less work. Yet Pascoe, like a slave dreaming of home, had never lost an in-the-grain feeling that Saturdays were for football matches, odd jobs, partying, getting married, taking the family on a picnic, all that sort of good stuff. So, despite the fact that the pressures of the Wordman investigation were causing a huge contraction of official time off (without any proportionate expansion of official paid overtime), he’d clung on to his scheduled Wordman-free Saturday like a drowning man to a life-belt.

But Linda Lupin, Loopy Linda, had changed all that.

Murdered bodies, especially where poison is involved, are usually kept on ice until all parties with a forensic concern-police, coroner, DPS, and (if someone’s in custody) defence counsel-are content that every last drop of evidence, incriminatory or exculpatory, has been squeezed from them. Fond relatives are advised to put their grief in cold storage too against the day of its proper obsequial display.

But when the fond relative is Linda Lupin, MEP, before whom even French officials have been known to quail, things may be arranged differently.

Her reasoning (which, as always, came carved on tablets of stone) was that her step-brother’s death was already causing Europe to suffer one period of her absence and it was doubtful if it could survive another so soon following. Therefore the funeral must take place during her current stay, i.e. before next week when she purposed to return to her divine task of keeping the Continent fit for Anglo-Saxons.

And so it came to pass that Sam Johnson was buried on Saturday morning.

Linda would have preferred the finality of cremation, but here the coroner dug his heels in. The body must remain accessible. So the ceremony took place in St. Hilda’s, the university church.

Official admission that Steel and Johnson were the Wordman’s fourth and fifth victims was in itself enough to provoke the British media into a feeding frenzy of speculation and accusation, and the unexpected involvement of Linda Lupin was the ox-tail in the olio. The funeral could have degenerated into a cross between a pop-concert and an England away-match if the wise Victorian founders of the university hadn’t extended the principle that any building likely to house students should be surrounded by high stone walls topped with shards of glass to include the church. University security guards, like a castle garrison in a siege, circumambulated the perimeter, pushing off the ladders by which the most depraved of invaders attempted to capture a view within, while a sharp radio message from the police soon took care of the helicopter which swooped, harpy-like, out of the low cloud cover above.

But local knowledge, like love, can o’erperch the highest walls, and as Peter and Ellie Pascoe made their way up the gravelled path towards the church door, what looked like a lapidary Death detached itself from a tombstone and revealed itself as Sammy Ruddlesdin.

“Time for a quick word, Peter?” he asked.

Pascoe shook his head and pressed on. Ruddlesdin kept pace with them.

“At least say if you’re here in your official capacity or as a family friend,” he insisted.

Pascoe shook his head again and went through the doorway into the church porch.

Ellie paused on the steps and hissed into Ruddlesdin’s ear, “In which of his capacities would you like to be told to fuck off, Sammy?”

As she followed her husband, the reporter yelled after her, “Is that a quote, Mrs. Pascoe?”

She sat down next to Peter, kicked her shoes off and rested her feet on a hassock.

Pascoe murmured, “Thought I’d lost you.”

“Just having a word.”

“Oh hell. What did you say?” he asked in alarm.

“Nothing printable,” she assured him. “I told him to fuck off.”

“You didn’t? You did. Bit rough, weren’t you? It’s only old Sammy.”

She turned her head to look at him and said, “Peter, I don’t know what capacity you are here in, but me, I’ve come to say goodbye to someone I’ll miss, someone I regarded as a good friend, and that doesn’t involve being polite to journalists, whether it’s old Sammy or any of those other hyenas prowling around out there. So just let me get on with mourning, OK?”

“Fine,” he said. “So you won’t be assaulting Loopy Linda with a custard pie then?”

Linda Lupin was one of the Left’s pet hate figures.

Ellie considered.

“No. Not till she’s off holy ground, anyway.”

One thing that even her many enemies had to acknowledge of Linda Lupin was that she had presence. Not even a coffin could upstage her. The solemn progress of the last remains of Sam Johnson up the aisle went almost unremarked as all gazes focused on the unexpected sister.

She was of stocky build, medium height, with cropped black hair, wide-set eyes which never seemed to blink, a long nose, a rubber mouth and a chin to break ice with. Yet she was not unattractive. Indeed a retired politician famous for his amours had confessed to getting more pleasure out of a recurring fantasy involving Linda and a cat-o’-nine-tails than real-life affairs with two or three women he most ungallantly named.

Her strength, thought Pascoe, was that in any company on any occasion she never for one moment showed doubt that she was the most important person present. Her current entourage, consisting of the university Vice-Chancellor and the senior members of the English Department all in their academic robes, looked like a Gilbert and Sullivan chorus doing their stiltedly intricate little routines behind the principal singer.

Indeed most of the chief mourners were university people, including several colleagues Pascoe had heard Johnson in his cups categorize as “plagiarizing plonkers who haven’t had an original idea since they cut off their bollocks to see where their watery spunk came from.” Two in particular he’d mocked for their alleged attempts to wheedle their way into his confidence so that they could gain access to his painstakingly acquired Romantic database. Well, perhaps now was their chance. He couldn’t see Loopy Linda having much use for it, so presumably it would go to the most successful sycophant.

One absentee, whom he’d expected to see if not among the chief mourners, at least on the fringe of the group, was Franny Roote. He and Ellie were seated quite near the back of the church and the student/ gardener certainly wasn’t in front of them. Odd, he found himself thinking. Then, recalling Dalziel’s warning against obsessionalism, he firmly put the matter out of his mind.

The service got under way. The university chaplain, a young man who was almost brutal in his determination to avoid the old orotund style, gave an account of Johnson’s life which, whatever it did to the traditionalists, moved Ellie to tears.

When he finished, the chaplain said, “And now, if anyone here would like to say something more about Sam, please come forward …We don’t often get the chance to speak from the heart. Don’t be afraid to take it.”

He descended from the pulpit and took his seat below, gazing out with an encouraging smile at the congregation who, naturally, being British, lowered their eyes, shifted uneasily on their buttocks, and generally gave every sign of acute embarrassment.

Pascoe bowed his head in deep prayer, in fact in two deep prayers, the first being that Loopy Linda wouldn’t seize the chance for one of her famous bring-back-the-bastinado rants. The second, and more fervent, was that Ellie wouldn’t make a move. Believing that God helps those who help God, with his right foot he edged one of her discarded shoes out of her reach. Not that that would stop her. If the fit came on her, she was quite capable of advancing bare-footed, like a penitent of old.

He felt her muscles tense preparatory to rising. Then good old God at last showed his appreciation of his servant Pascoe’s efforts to give Him a helping hand. Or foot. Somewhere behind them there was a susurrus of rising bodies and speculation as someone moved along a pew. Everyone turned to gawk, as if the “Wedding March” had just struck up to announce the bride’s arrival in the church.

But Pascoe knew who it was before his eyes confirmed it.

Slowly, silently, the slim figure of Franny Roote advanced up the aisle and climbed into the pulpit. He was wearing his usual black, broken only by a tiny white cross which, despite its size, seemed to burn against his chest.

For a long moment, he stood looking down on the congregation, his pale face expressionless, as if gathering his thoughts.

When at last he spoke his voice was low, yet like an actor’s whisper, it carried without difficulty to the furthermost corners of the silent church.

“Sam was my teacher and my friend. When I first met him, I was coming out of a bad time without any certain knowledge that a worse did not lie ahead. Behind me was a known darkness; before me was a darkness I did not know. And then, by human chance but, I am sure, by God’s design, I met Sam.

“As a teacher, he was a light in the darkness of my ignorance. As a friend, he was a light in the darkness of my despair. He showed me that I had nothing to fear by going forward in search of intellectual knowledge and everything to gain by going forward in search of myself.

“I last saw him not long before his dreadful death. Our talk was mainly of matters academic, though as always other things were mixed in, for Sam didn’t lock himself away in some elitist ivory tower. His domain was very much the real world.”

He paused and his gaze flickered towards the array of academics surrounding Linda Lupin in the front pew. Then he resumed.

“I’ve tried to think of the things he said at that last encounter, for it is my belief that death, even when he comes-indeed perhaps especially when he comes-violently and unexpectedly, never comes without sending ahead messages that he is near.

“I know we certainly spoke of death. It is hard not to speak of him when discussing, as we were, Sam’s favourite poet, Thomas Lovell Beddoes. And I know we spoke of death’s mystery, and of the way our usual, though not our sole, medium of communication, language, by its very complexity often conceals more than it reveals.

“Did he have a premonition? I recall how he smiled, it seemed to me wryly, as he quoted a fragment from Beddoes:

(It seemed to Pascoe that as the man spoke the word roots, his eyes sought out Pascoe’s and a faint smile flickered across those pallid lips. But perhaps he was mistaken.)

The man spoke on.

“Perhaps Sam was trying to tell me something, something he barely understood himself. Perhaps one day I will interpret that secret. Or perhaps I will have to wait till Sam himself interprets it for me.

“For though Sam did not subscribe to any organized form of religion, I know from our discussions that he had a deep belief in a life after death very different from but very superior to this grotesque bergomask we lumber through here on earth. In this, his soul was deeply in tune with that of Beddoes, and the book he was writing about him would have been a masterpiece of philosophy as well as scholarship.

“A few more lines of poetry, and I am done. Forgive me if they strike any of you as macabre, but believe me that they would not so have struck Sam. In fact he once told me that if he had the planning of his own funeral, he would like to hear these lines recited.

“So for his wish and my own comfort, let me speak them.

And the drowned and the shipwrecked have happy graves.”

He stood as still as the carved eagle whose spread wings held the pulpit lectern, looking down at the congregation with a fierce intensity to match the bird’s. The silence in the church felt more than mere absence of noise. It was as if they had drifted out of the main current of time into some bye-water which promised a Lethean oblivion to any strong enough to reach over the side and drink. Then Roote himself broke the spell as he descended and walked back down the aisle, his shoulders hunched, his head bowed, no longer a commanding other-worldly presence but a waif and forlorn boy.

“Follow that!” whispered Ellie.

She was right, thought Pascoe, relieved. It would have taken an ego as insensitive as a politician’s to stand up now and proclaim what must inevitably sound a more prosaic sorrow.

He saw Linda Lupin crane her head to follow Roote’s progress down the aisle. Then she spoke sharply and urgently to the Vice-Chancellor.

Wanting to know who this weird creature is who’s presumed to so disturb the even tenor of the funeral, thought Pascoe, wondering, not without a certain glee, what retribution for such impertinence she might be able to drop on to Roote from her political eminence.

After the interment, as people milled around the churchyard prior to running the gauntlet of journalists and cameramen lined up outside the gate, he saw that Loopy Linda had actually taken matters into her own hands and had Roote in her grasp and was pouring out her anger into his shell-shocked ear.

“See that,” he murmured to Ellie. “I bet our Franny wishes he was back inside.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because anything must be better than oral acupuncture,” said Pascoe.

But even as he spoke, the reason for Ellie’s doubtful response penetrated as he saw Roote finally open his mouth in reply and something like …no, something that definitely was a smile broke out across Linda Lupin’s face. They were having a conversation, not a row.

“I thought she’d be a straight up-and-down old-fashioned C. of E. Christian, help the deserving poor and sod the rest, no farting in church,” he said, disappointed. “I was looking forward to seeing her tear Franny’s head off.”

“Where’ve you been, Peter? Our Linda is, naturally, a modern loopy touchy-feely, I-hear-voices kind of Christian. Her most recent loopiness is a deep involvement with the Third Thought Counselling movement …You have heard of Third Thought Therapy, haven’t you?”

“Anything to do with Third Age, University of?”

“Only in terms of its target audience. Its subtitle is Hospice for the Soul. Some Belgian monk started it. Basically it’s a raft of stratagems for coming to terms with death, bottom line being that you shouldn’t wait till it comes looking for you but go out to confront it while you’re still fit in mind and body.”

“And Third Thought?”

“I know you rarely get past the sports page in your paper, but what happened to education?”

“Not Beddoes, is it?” said Pascoe.

That bugger kept on cropping up. The last line of Roote’s tribute still echoed in his mind …

… and the drowned and the shipwrecked have happy graves.

Hadn’t the First Dialogue talked about the drowned AA man having a happy grave?

“Don’t be silly,” Ellie said. “It’s Big Daddy himself. Will the Shake. Prospero. ‘And then retire me to Milan where Every third thought shall be my grave.’ How could you not recognize that?”

“Not everyone had the advantage of playing Caliban in the school play,” said Pascoe.

“Ariel,” she said, punching him. “Anyway, Linda, it seems, met this monk and was bowled over by him, since when she has been advocating pumping large sums of Euro-dosh into the movement.”

“But he’s Belgian, you say?”

“Linda has nothing against foreigners so long as they don’t want to tell us what to do, and of course acknowledge the superiority of the Brits, which this guy clearly did when he chose an English name for his therapy, though I suspect his reason was commercial, wanting maximum recognition on his website.”

“A website in a monastery?”

“Peter, leave Dalziel’s Disneyland for a while and try the real world.”

“How come you know so much about Loopy?”

“Like the little red book says, know thyself, but know thine enemies a bloody sight better. But to get back to what we were talking about, far from dropping himself in deep doo-doo with Ms. Lupin by maundering on about graves and things, I think our friend, Roote, may have done himself a lot of good. You see, by a strange chance, the symbol of Third Thought is a tiny white cross, so Roote must be into it as well. Lucky boy.”

“Lucky,” spat Pascoe. “I doubt if luck had anything to do with it. Cunning little bastard!”

“Quote, Chief Inspector?” said Sammy Ruddlesdin, leaping out from behind a basalt angel. “You got a quote for me?”

“Sammy, why don’t you fuck off?” said Peter Pascoe.