Asking for the Moon (27 page)

surprise me, he'd leave you and me stuck where we are now, working forever? Is that fair, I ask you? Is that just?'

Lear-like, I was beginning to feel that handing over control wasn't perhaps such a clever idea, but I knew how to deal with such imaginative insurrection. I headed home and poured myself a long Scotch, and then another. After a while I let out an appreciative burp, followed by a more genteel hiccup.

Now I could ponder in peace the implications of what I had heard.

There's no getting away from it - in twenty years, Dalziel and Pascoe have aged barely ten. But the readers for whom Pascoe expressed such concern don't seem to find it a problem. At least, none of them has mentioned it in their usually very welcome letters.

On the other hand a flattering and familiar coda to these letters on whatever topic is a pleasurable anticipation of further records of this ever-diverse pair. But if we are all ageing at twice their rate, there must come a time when . . .

But suddenly I jumped off this melancholy train of thought. Time can be speeded up as well as slowed down. I write, therefore they are! And what better birthday gift can I give my loyal readers than a quick trip into the future, nothing too conclusive, nothing to do with exit lines and bones and silence, but a reassuring glimpse of Pascoe when time has set a bit of a grizzle on his case, and of Dalziel still far from going gentle into that good night?

So here it is, my birthday gift. 'Bloody funny gift,' I hear Andy Dalziel mutter deep within. 'Have you clocked the price? And look at the length of it! There's more reading round a bag of chips.'

To which Peter Pascoe thoughtfully replies, 'Half-bottles cost more than fifty per cent of the full-bottle price because production costs stay constant. Besides, if this book deletes one tiny item from those endless lists of things unknown and deeds undone which trouble our sleeping and our dying, then it will be priceless.'

Dalziel's reply is unprintable. But, pricey or priceless, unless you've got the brass nerve to be reading this on a bookshop shelf, someone's paid for it. Accept my thanks. Next time, we'll be back to the present. Meanwhile, a very Happy Twentieth Birthday to us all!

Ravenglass Cumbria

January 1990

The first man to land on the moon was Neil Armstrong on July 20th, 1969. As he stepped off the module ladder, he said, 'One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.'

The first man to be murdered on the moon was Emile Lemarque on May I4th, 2010. As he fell off the module ladder, he said,
'Oh mer-'

There were two hundred and twenty-seven million witnesses.

One of these was ex-Detective-Superintendent Andrew Dalziel who was only watching because the battery of his TV remote control had failed. What he really wanted to see was his favourite episode
of Star Trek
on the Nostalgia Channel. By comparison, Michelin-men bouncing dustily over lunar slag heaps made very dull viewing, particularly with the Yanks and Russkis leapfrogging each other to the edge of the solar system. But the Federated States of Europe had waited a long time for their share of space glory and the Euro Channel had been ordered to give blanket coverage.

In the UK this met with a mixed response, and not just from those who preferred
Star Trek.
Britain's decision to opt out of the Federal Space Programme had always been controversial. During the years when it appeared the Programme's best hope of reaching the moon was via a ladder of wrecked rockets, the antis had smiled complacently and counted the money they were saving. But now the deed was done, the patriotic tabloids were demanding to know how come these inferior foreigners were prancing around in the Greatest Show

Off Earth with no UK involvement whatever, unless you counted the use of English as the expedition's
lingua franca?
Even this was regarded by some as a slight, reducing the tongue of Shakespeare and Thatcher to a mere tool, like Esperanto.

But all most True Brits felt when they realized their choice of channels had been reduced from ninety-seven to ninety-six was a vague irritation which Andy Dalziel would probably have shared had he been able to switch over manually. Unfortunately he was confined to bed by an attack of gout, and irritation rapidly boiled into rage, especially as his visiting nurse, who had retired to the kitchen for a recuperative smoke, ignored all his cries for help. It took a violent splintering explosion to bring her running, white-faced, into the bedroom.

Dalziel was sinking back into his pillows, flushed with the effort and the triumph of having hurled his useless remote control through the telly screen.

'Now look what you've made me do,' he said. 'Don't just stand there. Fetch me another set. I'm missing
Star Trek.'

It took three days for it to emerge that what the two hundred and twenty-seven million witnesses had seen wasn't just an unhappy accident but murder.

Till then, most of the UK press coverage had been concerned with interpreting the dead man's possibly unfinished last words. The favourite theory was that
Oh mer . . .
was simply
oh mere,
a dying man's appeal to his mother, though the Catholic
Lozenge
stretched this piously to
Oh mere de Dieu.
When it was suggested that a life member of the
Soriete Atheiste et Humaniste de France (Lourdes branch) would be unlikely to
trouble the Virgin with his dying breath, the
Lozenge
tartly retorted that history was crammed with deathbed conversions.
The Jupiter,
whose aged owner ascribed his continued survival to just such a conversion during his last heart attack, showed its sympathy for this argument by adopting Camden's couplet in its leader headline - betwixt the

module and the ground, mercy he asked, mercy he found. The
Defender,
taking this literally, suggested that if indeed Lemarque had been going to say
Oh
merci, this was less likely to be a plea for divine grace than an expression of ironic gratitude, as in, 'Well, thanks a bunch for bringing me so far, then chopping me off at the knees!' The
Planet
meanwhile had torpedoed the
oh mere
theory to its own satisfaction by the discovery that Lemarque's mother was an Algerian migrant worker who had sold her unwanted child to a baby farm with many evil results, not the least of which was the
Planet's
headline - Woo dog flogged frog sprog. Ultimately the child had come into the hands of a Lourdes couple who treated him badly and
never took him to
the seaside (the
Planet's
italics), persuading the editor that this poor deprived foreigner had reverted to infancy in the face of annihilation and was once again pleading to be taken
au
mer. Chortling with glee, the
Intransigent
pointed out that
mer
was feminine and congratulated the
Planet
on now being illiterate in two languages. Then it rather surrendered its superior position by speculating that, coming from Lourdes, Lemarque might have fantasized that he was falling into the famous healing pool and started to cry,
Eau meroeilleux!

It took the staid
Autograph
to say what all the French papers had agreed from the start — that Lemarque was merely exclaiming, like any civilized Gaul in a moment of stress,
Oh
merde!

But it was the
Spheroid
who scooped them all by revealing under the banner case of the expiring frog! that the Eurofed Department of Justice was treating Lemarque's death as murder.

Even Dalziel's attention was engaged by this news. For weeks the Current Affairs Channel had been stagnant with speculation about the forthcoming Eurofed Summit Conference in Bologna. The key areas of debate were Trade and Defence, and the big question was, had the Federation at last become homogeneous enough to stand on its own two feet as a Superpower or, at the first sign of crisis, would there still be

the old clatter of clogs, sabots, espadrilles and sturdy brogues rushing off in all directions?

All this Dalziel found rather less enthralling than nonalcoholic lager. But a murder on the moon had a touch of originality which set his nerve ends tingling, particularly when it emerged that the man most likely to be in charge of the case was the UK Commissioner in the Eurofed Justice Department, none other than his old friend and former colleague, Peter Pascoe.

'I taught that lad everything he knows,' he boasted as he watched Pascoe's televised press conference from Strasbourg.

'Lad?' snorted Miss Montague, his new nurse, who could snatch and press her own considerable weight and whose rippling muscles filled Dalziel with nostalgic lust. 'He looks almost as decrepit as you!'

Dalziel grunted a promise of revenge as extreme, and as impotent, as Lear's, and turned up the sound on his new set.

Pascoe was saying, 'In effect, what was at first thought to be a simple though tragic systems failure resulting in a short circuit in the residual products unit of his TEC, that is Total Environment Costume, sometimes called lunar suit, appears after more detailed examination by American scientists working in the US lunar village, for the use of whose facilities may I take this chance to say we are truly thankful, to have been deliberately induced.'

For a moment all the reporters were united in deep incomprehension. The man from the
Onlooker
raised his eyebrows and the woman from the
Defender
lowered her glasses; some scribbled earnestly as if they understood everything, others yawned ostentatiously as if there were nothing to understand. Dalziel chortled and said, 'The bugger doesn't get any better.' But it took the man from the
Spheroid
to put the necessary probing question — 'You wha'?'

Patiently Pascoe resumed. 'Not to put too fine a point on it, and using layman's language, the micro-circuitry of the residual products unit of his TEC had been deliberately cross-linked with both the main and the reserve power systems in

such a manner that it needed only the addition of a conductive element, in this case liquescent, to complete the circuit with unfortunate, that is, fatal, consequences.'

Now the reporters were united in a wild surmise. The
Onlooking
eyebrows were lowered, the
Defending
spectacles raised. But once again it was the earnest seeker of enlightenment from the
Spheroid
who so well expressed what everyone was thinking. 'You mean he pissed himself to death?'

Dalziel laughed so much he almost fell out of bed, though the nurse noted with interest that some internal gyroscope kept his brimming glass of Lucozade steady in his hand. Recovering, he downed the drink in a single gulp and, still chuckling, listened once more to his erstwhile underling.

Pascoe was explaining, 'While there would certainly be a severe shock, this was not of itself sufficient to be fatal. But the short circuit was induced .in such a way as to drain completely and immediately all power from the TEC, cutting dead all systems, including the respiratory unit. It was the shock that made him fall. But it was the lack of oxygen that killed him, before the dust had started to settle.'

This sobered the gathering a little. But newsmen's heartstrings vibrate less plangently than their deadlines and soon Pascoe was being bombarded with questions about the investigation, which he fielded so blandly and adroitly that finally Dalziel switched off in disgust.

'What's up?' asked Miss Montague. 'I thought you taught him everything he knows.'

'So I did,' said Dalziel. 'But one thing I could never teach the bugger was how to tell reporters to sod off!'

He poured himself another glass of Lucozade. The nurse seized the bottle and raised it to her nostrils.

'I think this has gone off,' she said.

'Tastes all right to me,' said Dalziel. 'Try a nip.'

Miss Montague poured herself a glass, raised it, sipped it delicately.

'You know,' she said thoughtfully, 'you could be right.' 'I usually am,' said Dalziel. 'Cheers!'

At nine that night the telephone rang.

'This is a recording,' said Dalziel. 'If you want to leave a message, stick it in a bottle.'

'You sound very jolly,' said Pascoe.

'Well, I've supped a lot of Lucozade,' said Dalziel, looking at the gently snoring figure of Nurse Montague on the sofa opposite. 'What's up?'

'Just a social call. Did you see me on the box?'

'I've got better things to do than listen to civil bloody servants being civil and servile,' growled Dalziel.

'Oh, you did see it, then. That's what we call diplomatic language out here in the real world,' said Pascoe.

'Oh aye. Up here it's called soft soap and it's very good for enemas.'

Pascoe laughed and said, 'All right, Andy. I never could fool you, could I? Yes, this whole thing has got a great crap potential. To start with, we reckon the Yanks deliberately leaked their suspicion of foul play to bounce us into letting them take full control of the investigation. Now, we're not terribly keen on that idea.'

'Oh aye? Don't the~y have jurisdiction anyway?'

'Certainly not. Space is international by UN treaty. But they're established up there with all the facilities, so on the surface it's a generous, neighbourly offer, only . . . Look, it's a bit complicated . . .'

'Come on, lad, I'm not quite gaga and I do read the papers still,' snarled Dalziel. 'This is all about the Eurofed Summit, isn't it?'

'Is it?' murmured Pascoe. 'Do expound.'

'All right, clevercuts. There's a lot of Euros reckon all them trade agreements they signed in the nineties have worked out a lot better for the Yanks than anyone else. Plus some of the soldier boys would like to give NATO the elbow and concentrate on a pure Eurofed force, dumping America, and