Dialogues of the Dead

44

HAT BOWLER’S UNPRODUCTIVE schoolboy flirtation with History had left him with a vague notion that the sixteenth century was a period which most of the English nation spent at the theatre.

It was at first a comfort when Rye Pomona pointed out that there’d been quite a lot of real-life action too.

Henry VIII had told the Pope to take a hike while he carved his way through six wives, though, disappointingly, it emerged he’d only executed two of them. Next Bloody Mary had disfigured, dismembered, disembowelled, and in sundry other ways disposed of large numbers of her subjects on the very reasonable grounds that she didn’t like the colour of their religion. Marginally less extreme on the religious front, Elizabeth had not spared to use the axe as a political statement even when it involved removing the heads of her Scots cousin and her Essex lover. And of course there’d been wars on land and sea, mainly against the Spanish whose great Armada was repulsed and scattered by a combination of English seamanship and English weather.

With such a record of bloody violence throughout the century, Hat had high hopes of finding something pertinent to the Wordman’s plans in the year 1576.

Alas, even when Rye had moved out of her own memory into that of the computer, it soon became apparent that of all years, this had been one of the least eventful. He tried to work the information that James Burbage had built the first playhouse in Shoreditch and that the explorer Martin Frobisher had made the first of his three voyages up the North American coast in search of the Northwest Passage into some kind of significant metaphor of the Wordman’s intentions, but it was beyond his ingenuity.

Appeal to Rye’s greater imaginative powers had no effect. He had, as usual, told her everything on the grounds that half knowledge is more dangerous than complete ignorance but for once she had shown little interest in his indiscretion. She seemed as thrown down in spirits as the rest of the library staff, among whom the huge buzz initially generated by the news, manner, and circumstances of Percy Follows’ death had rapidly faded to a pall-like silence under which individuals brooded on the meaning of these things. Even the chatty students in the reference library seemed subdued by it and took little advantage of the absence from his customary cubicle of Charley Penn whose snarling remonstrances usually kept them in order.

Nor was Dick Dee to be seen, so the second of Dalziel’s stated objectives-letting two of the prime suspects know that one of the Dialogue’s puzzles had been penetrated-had failed as completely as the first.

“How about something more local?” suggested Hat. “Was anything special happening in Mid-Yorkshire in 1576?”

“I’ve no idea,” she said. “Look, there’s the computer. You want to play around with the history archives, be my guest. With Dick not here, I’ve got plenty to be getting on with.”

“So where is he?” asked Hat.

“Senior staff crisis meeting with the chair of the Centre Committee,” said Rye.

“So you’re the bossman,” he said. “Congrats. Why don’t you use your authority to give yourself an extended coffee break.”

He smiled at her, he hoped winningly.

Vain hope.

She said, “For God’s sake, can’t you get it into your head that I’ve got a job to do too? And it strikes me you might be better employed doing yours somewhere else instead of wasting time hanging around here, asking about a stupid date. There are people dead, Hat, don’t you understand that? You seem to be treating it like it was some sort of game.”

Oh but it is! the retort formed in his mind. But now his eyes were telling him what his heart ought to have spotted much sooner, that here was a young woman who, only a few days after finding a severed head in a basket, had once again been brought in close contact with the monster, death.

He said, “Rye, I’m sorry …I thought, telling you everything like I do, well, I think I was beginning to think of you as another cop …I don’t mean …what I mean is, coping the way we do …the way we have to because it’s our job …but it’s not yours …I’m sorry.”

She looked at him for a moment, then said, “We all have to cope, Hat. Look under Local History Legal Chronology,” before turning away and retreating into the office.

As offers of olive branches go, that, he reckoned, was about as good as it was going to get.

He sat himself down at the computer, recalling with amusement pretending to be baffled by it as an excuse to make contact with Rye just a few short weeks ago. As a ploy, it hadn’t worked, except to put him handy when they needed a cop. In fact, come to think of it, if anything had brought them together, it was the Wordman. An uncomfortable basis for a relationship? Why so? No reason not to be grateful if good came out of evil.

The Local History site revealed that 1576 had been a very good year in Mid-Yorkshire for boundary disputes, cattle theft, and blasphemy, for which the penalties ranged from a big fine for taking the Lord’s name in vain, to having a hole burnt through your tongue with a red-hot iron for suggesting that, according to the Scriptures, the vicar ought to be giving tithes of his goods and produce to impoverished parishioners rather than the other way round. The vicar in question was called Jugg and the man with the holey unholy tongue was called Lamperley. Hat looked for a clue in this, found none, but nonetheless made a note of the names.

He went through all the other chronologies, social, cultural, religious, and found nothing to his purpose.

Now he had no more excuse to stay in the library, but he found himself lingering, or even, self-envisaged with a policeman’s eye, loitering around the desk. But Rye, whom he could see through the partially opened office door, kept her eyes steadfastly on her work. There was a bell to press if you required assistance, and he was steeling himself to press it when a voice said in his ear, “Hello, Mr. Bowler.”

He turned to find himself looking at a pleasantly smiling Franny Roote with, a little way behind him and staring at the computer screen which he had not cleared, Charley Penn who looked completely wrecked.

“Hello, Mr. Roote,” said Hat very formally, resolving in light of Pascoe’s warnings about the young man’s cleverness to give nothing away.

“Into local history now as well as birds?” said Penn, joining them. “Or are you just after the first sighting of the Lesser Nippled Tit in the sixteenth century?”

“Ornithological history can be very interesting,” said Hat, trying to work out if the man was sick or merely hungover.

“Is that right? In the old days, but, when you lot spotted an interesting new specimen, didn’t you used to shoot it so as you could take a closer look? Bit extreme that, I’d say, killing something for the sake of a hobby.”

He spat hobby out like a loose filling, then reached between Roote and Hat to press long and hard on the bellpush, at the same time shouting, “Shop!”

Rye emerged, her expression as blank as Hat was trying to keep his.

“Hello, luv,” said Penn. “Where’s thy gaffer?”

“Mr. Dee is at a meeting. I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

“A meeting? Of course, they’ll be debating the succession. Should we look for white smoke going up?”

“I think in the circumstances that’s a pretty crass and offensive remark, Mr. Penn,” said Rye, staring at the writer unblinkingly.

“You do? Well, as long as it’s pretty, eh? I just wanted to try out a new version of Der Scheidende on him. You’ll do, though. What do you think of translating it as ‘Man on his way out?’ Too free, maybe?”

As Penn thrust a sheet of paper at Rye, Hat turned away to remove himself from the temptation to interfere which he was certain would provoke only the man’s mockery and the woman’s resentment.

“I shouldn’t pay any heed to Charley, Mr. Bowler,” murmured Roote, following him. “He’s not too well today. Anyway, it’s all words with him. Words words words. They don’t mean anything. Or perhaps they just mean whatever he wants them to mean. So cheer up, eh?”

Furious at being offered comfort from this source, Hat said aggressively, “I notice you’re looking pretty cheerful yourself, Mr. Roote. Got something to be happy about, have we?”

“Oh God, does it show?” said Roote in alarm. “I’m sorry, I realize that after what happened last night, it must seem most inappropriate, especially here. But maybe it’s only your detective skills which have spotted it, and I look the same as ever to the layman’s eye.”

Is piss being taken? wondered Hat. And if it is, what the hell can I do about it?

He said, “So what’s making you happy, Mr. Roote?”

The young man hesitated as if debating how trustworthy his interlocutor was, then seemed to make up his mind and said in a low voice, “It’s quite remarkable considering the circumstances, you know, with me coming back here because of Sam, Dr. Johnson, then poor Sam dying like that, and suddenly I’ve lost my dearest friend, and also I’ve lost my tutor, the one man who could help me hold my studies together. I felt pretty low, you can understand that, I’m sure, Mr. Bowler. Then out of the blue I won the short story competition, and that was a much needed little perk. And out of that …well, it’s early days, but Charley, Mr. Penn, liked the story so much that he showed it to his publishers who liked it as well, and next time his editor comes up to see him, Charley’s going to introduce me with a view to maybe talking about some more stories, a whole bookful, for children, you understand. Isn’t that marvellous?”

“Great,” said Hat. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you, but that’s not all. You know Sam Johnson was working on a book about Beddoes …the poet,” he explained in response to the blank look which must have passed over Hat’s eyes, “early nineteenth century, fascinating writer, the last Elizabethan, Strachey called him, he figures in my study, in fact I’d grown more and more fascinated by him which was one of the things that brought Sam and me so close together. Well, Sam didn’t leave a will, it seems, so his only close relative, his sister, that’s Linda Lupin, MEP, inherits everything, and she’s been so pissed off with academics flocking around like vultures, each claiming to be Sam’s best buddy and the one he’d have wanted receive his research material and finish the book, that she’s told them all to get stuffed! And she invited me to see her and after we’d talked a while, she said that Sam had written a lot about me in his letters, and from what he’d said, it seemed to her if I was willing that I was the person he’d have wanted to finish the book! Isn’t that marvellous?”

“Yeah, great,” said Hat, to whom the prospect of finishing someone else’s book was about as appealing as the prospect of finishing someone’s else’s soup. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you, Mr. Bowler. I can see you understand. A lot of people might think it funny that I can be so happy so soon after losing such a dear friend, but it’s as if Sam’s death has turned my life around. Suddenly I can see before me a path leading to a future that’s got some shape and meaning. It’s almost as if it were meant to be, as if there’s someone out there, perhaps even Sam himself, who likes me and is looking after me. I went to the burial ground first thing this morning and offered thanks at Sam’s grave, and for a while it felt like I was down there with him, chatting away like we did in the old days.”

Hat looked into Roote’s eyes which shone with a born-again fervour and resisted the temptation to say, Why don’t we try to arrange that on a permanent basis then? and instead said, “Great. Excuse me now.”

He turned back to the counter and saw that Rye and Penn seemed to have finished, or at least she had finished with him.

The writer moved away from the counter and gave him an encouraging wink as they passed.

Rye was re-entering the office.

He spoke her name but she didn’t pause. He stood at the counter and watched her through the open door as she sat down at the desk once more.

There was a sheet of paper on the counter. He looked down and read what was written on it.

Man on his way out

Within my heart, within my head,

Every worldly joy lies dead,

And just as dead beyond repeal

Is hate of evil, nor do I feel

The pain of mine or others’ lives,

For in me only Death survives!

At least, unless these literary folk had their own erotic code, it didn’t read like sexual harassment. Perhaps clever old Pascoe and his weird Uni mates could riddle something out of it, and out of Roote’s euphoria too.

He raised his eyes from the poem.

At her desk in the office, Rye was watching him.

He spoke her name again and she stretched out one elegant leg and kicked the door shut.