Dialogues of the Dead

40

“Oh God, the smells, the smells!” cried Ambrose Bird, pinching his aquiline nose. “They are overdoing the smells. They always overdo the smells.”

“Smells are evocative, perhaps the most instantly evocative of all our human sense impressions,” retorted Percy Follows.

“Is that so? And evocative, as no doubt you are aware from the vast depth of your classical knowledge, derives from Latin evoco, evocare, to call forth. I see from the programme that one of these alleged smells is that of roasting dormouse. Putting aside the question of where in this ecologically sensitive age you would obtain a dormouse to roast, we must ask ourselves what it is this odour is supposed to be evoking? You cannot call forth that which is not there. How many of our visitors do you imagine will have had any experience of roast dormouse? Therefore as a stimulus of latent memory, such a smell can hardly be called evocative. Sic probo!”

“I see the floorshow’s started,” said Andy Dalziel.

Dick Dee turned and smiled.

“Superintendent, how silently you arrive. But I shouldn’t be surprised at such lightness of movement from one who only last Saturday evening was the terpsichorean star of the Fusiliers’ Ball.”

This was top-level intelligence. OK, he’d teased Pascoe and Wield with vague reference to his Saturday night dance date but even they would have been hard put to find where he’d been, so how had news of any of this reached Dick Dee?

The answer was obvious.

Charley Penn who must have hot-footed it down to Haysgarth to check out how Dalziel had broken his alibi.

He said, “You’re well informed for a man who does nowt but read old books. And talking of old books, why’ve you left ’em to come down here? Refereeing job, is it?”

Down here was the basement of the Centre, intended purely for storage until the discovery of the Roman floor during the digging of the foundations. The decision to incorporate the floor into the Centre as part of a Roman Reality Experience had seemed a brilliant compromise between the archaeologist camp and the council pragmatists who wanted to get the Centre finished as soon as possible. It hadn’t worked quite like that. Stuffer Steel had opposed every penny of the extra expense involved, and the extra strain placed on Philomel Carcanet had been a large factor in her breakdown.

“As always, you put your finger on it, Superintendent,” said Dee. “My modest reputation for being well informed brings me here as an arbiter between our disputing gladiators.”

“Why are they here anyway? Not their patch. Thought I saw Phil Carcanet up in your library just now.”

“Yes, indeed. It’s such a shame. It was her baby, the Experience, you know. She worked so hard getting everyone on board, the archaeologists and the council. She had to do it practically single-handed-no one else cared to take on Councillor Steel. It ran quite against the grain of her personality and in the end it broke her. She’s been on sick leave, but Mr. Steel’s demise removed the last obstacle to the project, suddenly the money was there, and with the opening so imminent, she made an effort to come in today, but I fear she found her fellow triumvirs reluctant to withdraw from the field. You see, that’s another thing the councillor’s death has done. It’s cleared the way to the appointment of an overall director, and it is his bays our heroes are apparently struggling for. At the first sign of dispute, dear Philomel fluttered away. Before you lie the fruit of her labours, but not for her the harvest. Oh dear.”

He put his hands to his ears in response to an explosion of noise.

“Turn it down, turn it down!” screamed Follows.

The noise declined and became recognizable as a babble of voices intermixed with horses neighing, cocks crowing, dogs barking, bells ringing, children laughing, and the occasional strains of a faintly oriental music, with brass notes blaring at a distance and plucked strings resonating much nearer.

“That’s better,” said the librarian.

“You think so? You must attend a lot of very quiet markets. They’re not like Sainsbury’s, you know, all Muzak and the swish of plastic. They are very noisy places,” said Bird.

“Ah, your famous crowd expertise,” mocked Follows. “Which must, I presume, have come from a previous incarnation as you can’t have picked it up from your theatre audiences. But that language-isn’t it supposed to be Latin and Anglo-Saxon these people are speaking? That doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever heard.”

“Why should it be when all you ever heard was some old fogey in a dusty gown declaiming Cicero or Beowulf? This, as far as the best palaeo-demoticists can assess, is how it must have sounded in its vernacular form.”

Dalziel, observing Dee, thought he caught a flicker of self-approval and said, “That pally whatsit one of yours, then?”

It was good pay-back for the Fusiliers’ Ball. Dee’s features registered surprise which he tried to cover not by concealment but by exaggerating it into comedy.

“Ooh, what a sharp old detective you are, Superintendent. Indeed, I did drop the neologism into a conversation I had with Mr. Bird and it’s pleasing to learn that, with his finely tuned actor’s ear, he has added it to his word-hoard. I should add that it seems to me a perfectly logical compound and one I would not be surprised to find already existent. What else, I wonder, has your own sharp ear extracted from these exchanges?”

Dalziel said, “Well, it’s confirmed what I knew, that they’re a right pair of mutton-tuggers. At a guess, I’d say that when poor old Phil took badly, Ambrose put himself in charge of sound effects and Percy took smells. Seems about right.”

“Spot on again,” said Dee. “I like mutton-tuggers, by the way. An evolved usage, but much apter than the original. Do you want to watch the rest of the shall we call it performance? Or shall we make a small tour while we talk?”

The internal interrogative was offered with a small smile which Dalziel stored up for future ingestion along with a lot of other stuff which was raising interesting questions.

“Talk about what?” he said.

“About whatever it is you’ve come to talk to me about,” said Dee. “Though at a guess I’d say it was the sad death of Lord Pyke-Strengler, and its place in the wider context of your pursuit of the Wordman.”

As he spoke he led the way around the market between the various stalls. Most were pure artefacts, as realistic as lighting and sound effects could make them, but with the goods on display and the traders selling them all ingeniously moulded out of plastic. There were, however, three or four stalls which were stocked with real articles and attended by real people. Dee paused before one of these which was selling small articles made of metal, weights, cups, ornaments and so on. The stallholder, a handsome dark-haired woman in a simple brown robe which complemented rather than concealed the sinuous body moving beneath it, smiled at him and said, “Salve, domine. Scin’ Latine?”

Dee answered, “Immo vero, domina,”then picked up a brass cat and rattled off a whole sentence in Latin to which the woman replied ruefully, “Oh shit. We’re not going to get a lot like you, are we?”

“No, I’m probably a one-off,” laughed Dee. “What I said was, I liked the pretty little pussy-cat but I liked the one in the brown robe a lot better.”

“Did you now? I see I’d better learn the Latin and Old English for cheeky sod if I’m going to survive here.”

Dalziel watched this little piece of by-play with interest, noting the ease with which the librarian joked along with the woman and her readiness to slip into flirt mode. No one had suggested to him that Dee might be a ladies’ man, but maybe that was because he hadn’t been questioned by a woman.

As they moved away he said, “So what were that all about?”

“In the interests of verisimilitude, some of the stalls are manned by real people. Ambrose Bird supplies them from his company, actors who aren’t in the current production and who fancy making a bit of extra cash. They’re taught enough Latin and Anglo-Saxon to say hello and ask any potential customer if they speak either language. When, as in most cases, they get a blank look, they relapse into a sort of broken Shakespearean English.”

“Except now and then they’ll get some clever bugger who does speak the lingo.”

“What would the world be without clever buggers?” asked Dee.

“A sight happier,” said Dalziel. “And do they actually sell that gimcrackery?”

“Very high quality reproductions,” corrected Dee primly. “Yes, when you enter the experience, you can purchase a follis full of folles …”

“Eh?”

“Follis means money bag, but it also came to refer to the coins, particularly the small-denomination copper and bronze coins, that the bag holds. These can be used to make purchases from the active stalls or in the taberna over there.”

“That’s like a pub, is it?” said Dalziel with interest.

“In this case more like a café,” said Dee. “But it might be a good place for us to have our talk. Note, however, the calidarium or bathhouse as we pass.”

He indicated a door which had a glass panel in it. Peering through, Dalziel saw a small pool of steaming water with a naked man sitting in it, reading a papyrus scroll. Beyond and only dimly visible through the wreathing steam stretched other expanses of water in which and along whose tiled edges disported figures, some draped with towels, some apparently naked, though the swirling steam kept all within the bounds of Mid-Yorkshire decency. It took him a moment to work out that what he was looking at was the first small pool multiplied by cleverly placed mirrors and backed by a video projection probably culled from some old Hollywood Roman epic.

“Clever, isn’t it?” said Dee.

“Not really,” said Dalziel. “Not when you’ve seen the big bath down the rugby club. And they know all the verses to ‘The Good Ship Venus’ down there too.”

The taberna also fell well short of the rugby club in its provision. There was no service and when there was, as Dee explained, the choice would be between a sweet more or less authentic fruit drink or a totally anachronistic cup of tea or coffee.

“A concession to Councillor Steel who had to be persuaded that there was going to be a strong self-financing element in the project,” said Dee.

“You’ll not be sorry he’s out of the way then?” said Dalziel as they sat on a marble bench.

“I might find that question provocatively offensive if I weren’t persuaded that it is your intention to provoke,” said Dee. “In any case, Superintendent, you should understand that the success or failure of this project means very little to me. On the whole, despite the educational arguments, it all verges a little too much on the kitsch for my taste. In these days of interactive user-friendly fully automated hi-tech exhibitions, I still feel nostalgic for the old-style museum with its musty smells and its atmosphere of reverential silence. The past is another country and I sometimes feel we are visiting it more like football hooligans on a day out than serious travellers. How about you, Mr. Dalziel? How do you feel about the past?”

“Me? You get to my age, you don’t want to be looking back too much. But professionally speaking, it’s somewhere I spend a lot of time,” said Dalziel.

“But not, I’m sure, in any glitzy hi-tech way like the modern Heritage industry?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You mind that old TV science-fiction series, Doctor Who? Fellow travels around in a time machine that looks like a police box from the outside? Load of old bollocks, most of it, but I always felt that bit were right. A police box. ’Cos that’s what I do with the past. Like yon Doctor, I spend a lot of time visiting bygone days where villains have done things to try and change the future, and I don’t much care how I get there. It’s my job to mend things as far as I can and make certain the future’s as close to what it ought to be as I can get it.”

Dee regarded him wide-eyed.

“A time-lord!” he exclaimed. “You see yourself as a time-lord? Yes, yes, I think I get it. Someone commits a murder, or robs a bank, it’s because they want to change the future as they see it, usually to make it more comfortable for themselves and those they are close to, right? But by catching them, you restore the status quo, so far as that’s possible. Naturally if someone has been killed, there’s little you can do by way of resuscitation, is there?”

“I can’t bring folk back to life, that’s for sure,” said Dalziel. “But I can keep them living. This Wordman, for instance, how many’s he killed now? Started with Andrew Ainstable, if you count letting someone die, then there was young David Pitman and Jax Ripley, and after that …who came next?”

“Councillor Steel,” said Dee readily. “Then Sam Johnson and Geoff Pyke-Strengler.”

“They tripped nice and easy off your tongue, Mr. Dee,” said Dalziel.

“Oh dear. Was that a trap? If so, let me make a suggestion, Mr. Dalziel. I have up till now been happy to play my part in the charade that I was being questioned as a witness. But your continuing interest makes me wonder if it might not be time for both of us to come out in the open and acknowledge that I am a suspect.”

His expression now was one of eager almost ingenuous enquiry.

“You want to be a suspect?” said Dalziel curiously.

“I want to have the opportunity to remove myself from your list-if, as I fear, I’m on it. Am I on it, Mr. Dalziel?”

“Oh yes,” said the Fat Man, smiling. “Like Abou Ben Adhem.”

“Thank you,” said Dee, smiling back. “Now let’s try to discover some single point of fact that will prove to you I’m not the Wordman. You may ask me anything you like and I will answer truthfully.”

“Or pay a forfeit.”

“Sorry?”

“Truth, Dare, Force or Promise. Used to play it a lot when I were a kid. You had to choose one of them. Or you could pay a forfeit, like taking your knickers off. You’ve chosen Truth.”

“And I intend to keep my knickers on,” said Dee.

“Oh aye. You bent?”

“Bent as in crooked, or sexually deviant?”

“Both.”

“No.”

“Never?”

“Well, I have in my time committed various offences, like breaking road traffic regulations, shading my expenses, and using library stationery for my own purposes. Also there are one or two small amatory idiosyncrasies which I enjoy if I can find a willing partner of the opposite sex. But I believe that all of these fall within the margins of normal human behaviour, so I feel able to answer no even though I am not strictly able to answer never.”

“So you and Charley Penn never pulled each other’s plonkers?”

“As young adolescents, yes, occasionally. But only as, if you’ll forgive the expression, a stop-gap strategy to fill that anguished period between the onset of puberty and access to girls. Once girls appeared on the scene, our friendship became nunlike in its chasteness.”

“Nunlike? Not monklike?”

“After the bad press many of the Catholic male Orders have been getting in recent years, I think I’ll stick to nunlike.”

“Could Charley be the Wordman?”

“No.”

“How so sure? ’Less you’re the Wordman yourself, of course.”

“Because, as I’m sure you have already ascertained, on the first of the two evenings you questioned me about, when I was enjoying the company of Percy Follows, Charley was culturally engaged with his literary group. And on the second evening he was with me.”

“Who says the killing took place in the evening? OK, that second day, you gave each other alibis in the evening, and your work means you’ve got an alibi for the day. But not Charley. He’s very vague about what he was doing that day. Says he thinks he probably went to the library but nobody seems able to confirm this. Not unless you’re suddenly going to remember seeing him there?”

“Now why should I do that?”

“One good turn, mebbe. But like mutual masturbation.”

“You mean in return for the good turn he has done me by alibiing me for that evening? But that would only make sense if we were both the Wordman.”

“That’s an interesting thought.”

“And one which I doubt has just sprung ready-formed into your mind, Superintendent. A folie à deux, is that the way you’re seeing things? Oh dear, and here was I thinking it was only myself I had to remove from your hook.”

“Hook. Like in fishing. Do any fishing yourself?”

“I have done, yes. Why?”

“The Hon. Geoff had a couple of rods with him. Like he’d mebbe gone out to fish with a mate.”

“I think perhaps you are mistaking our relationship.”

“Oh aye? How about your relationship with that lass of yours. You banging her?”

“Sorry?”

“Her with the silver flash and the funny name.”

“Rye. I assumed it was Rye you were referring to. It was the participle I had difficulty with.”

“There’s these tablets you can take. I said, are you banging her? whanging her? slipping her the yard of porridge? stirring her custard with your spoon? twiddling with her twilly-flew?”

That got a reaction but it was only a faint almost complimentary smile.

“Am I having a relationship with Rye, you mean? No.”

“But you’d like to?”

“She is an attractive woman.”

“That a yes?”

“Yes.”

“Got anything going at the moment?”

“A sexual outlet, you mean? No.”

“So how do you manage?”

“Manage what?”

“Manage not to embarrass yourself every time you stand up. Man in his prime, all parts working, getting horny whenever you look at your assistant, and you and Charley have grown out of giving each other a helping hand, so what do you do? Pay for it?”

“I don’t get the drift of your questions, Mr. Dalziel.”

“We never said owt about drift, just that I could ask anything I wanted and you’d answer truthfully. You got a problem with that?”

“Only an intellectual one. I understood there’d been no sexual overtones in these killings, so I’m curious why you seem concerned to focus on my sexuality.”

“Who said there’d been no sexual overtones?”

“You’ll recall I have in fact read three of the five Dialogues so I can draw my own conclusions from them. Only one woman has been attacked and there was nothing in what I read in that episode which suggested a sex motive. In fact there is, how shall I put it, an almost sexually sterile atmosphere about the whole affair.”

“You’re sounding a bit defensive.”

“Am I? Ah, I’m with you. You’re being provocative again. If I am the Wordman and my motive is completely non-sexual, then all these questions about my sex life might trigger a reaction at being so grossly misunderstood, is that the idea?”

“Reaction like this one, you mean?”

“Not being the Wordman, I could not be so precise. But I should say the impression I got from my reading was of someone clever enough to see through your little stratagem earlier than I did, and not let himself be provoked.”

“Or clever enough to appear slightly less clever than he really is.”

“Now that would be really clever. But surely such a paragon of cleverness would never let himself fall into your clutches for close questioning anyway?”

“Put your finger in it there, Mr. Dee. Let himself fall. Seems to me the fellow I’m thinking of might actually enjoy a little chat like this, face to face with the enemy and running rings round him.”

“It would, I think, be a long run. I speak metaphorically, of course. Forgive me if I seem to have erred towards over-familiarity, but I do feel that anyone trying to run rings round you, Mr. Dalziel, had best come equipped for a marathon. But how am I doing in my puny effort to persuade you I am not your man? I must confess I feel my strength failing.”

He did a little mime of exhaustion and, as if in sympathy, all the lights went out and the hubbub of sound effects which had provided a foil to their conversation ceased.

The ensuing silence was short. The voices of Bird and Follows rose in angry unison demanding what the hell was happening, then parted into contrapuntal duet as each sought to find a way of off-loading responsibility on to the other.

Dalziel and Dee felt their way out of the dark taberna into the market place where people were striking matches or flashing torches to give a dim illumination. The door of the calidarium opened and a man wearing swimming trunks and dripping water stepped out followed by a puff of smoke.

“Enter Dagon, downstage, left,” murmured Dee.

“What the hell’s going on?” demanded the man angrily. “Something electrical blew up in there and I’m sitting over my arse in fucking water!”

He had good reason to be angry, thought Dalziel as he made his way back towards the market centre where Bird and Follows were positioned. En route he stubbed his toe against various objects which he kicked aside with great force.

“Who’s in charge?” he demanded.

For once, neither of the two men seemed eager to assume the primacy.

“Well, I’ll tell you both summat for nowt-you’d best get this sorted else I’ll make sure the local Fire and Safety Officer closes you down permanent. That bastard in the bath could have been electrocuted. And why’s it so fucking dark? Imagine what it ’ud be like down here with a few dozen people, a lot of them kids, milling around. Where’s your back-up system, for God’s sake? Get it sorted quick or I’ll start thumbing through the big book to see what I can find to charge you with. And if I can’t find owt serious enough, I’ll mebbe just bray you with the book!”

He strode away, finding the stairs and the exit back to the regions of light and air by dead reckoning. When he got there, he paused and found Dee at his side.

“You know, Mr. Dalziel,” said the librarian with a smile, “after that performance, I think if I were the Wordman, I’d put my hand up now and confess.”

“That right, Mr. Dee?” said Dalziel indifferently. “And I’ll tell you what I think, shall I? I think you’re fuller of crap than a knackered septic tank.”

Dee pursed his lips and looked pensive as if this were a statement worthy of close examination then said, “I’m sorry to hear that. Does it mean our little game of Truth, Dare, Force or Promise is over?”

“Your little game. When there’s folk lying dead, I don’t play games. I’ll see you around, Mr. Dee.”

He moved away with mastodon tread. Behind him, still as a primeval hunter, Dick Dee watched till he was out of sight.