Death Comes for the Fat Man (21 page)

“Right!” said Sarhadi. “Only this time I won’t be asking for the British consul!”

Laughter and applause. As it died, Fidler resumed, “My fi nal guest is novelist Eleanor Soper from Mid-Yorkshire.”

Ellie’s face appeared. Pascoe thought she looked gorgeous, but then he always did. He tried to telepath his advice, which was, Don’t trust this smarmy bastard an inch!

“Ell’s debut novel exploded on the literary scene last year. She has been described as one of the most exciting new talents to emerge in recent years. Her book stares modern issues and dilemmas right in the face, and from what I hear of Ell, she’s not afraid to do exactly the same. If that’s right, Ell, you’ve come to the right place!”

Ellie winced, whether at the hype, which had more fiction in it than her book, or at the paring of her name wasn’t clear, then managed a modest smile.

Fidler went on, “Boys and girls, you’ll soon have your chance to find out what my guests are really made of, but first let’s have a big hand for tonight’s
Fidler’s Three
!”

The audience broke into enthusiastic applause. They were seated in a tight, gently raked semicircle before the panelists. There wasn’t even a table separating them. The front row could have leaned forward d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 157

and patted them on the knee.
On my show there’s nowhere to hide!
was another of Fidler’s proud boasts.

To start with everything seemed fine. Fidler got the ball rolling by asking Kentmore how many politicians he’d trust to tell a cow from a cabbage. Kentmore talked eloquently of what he saw as the real problems of the rural economy. The audience began to join in. Pascoe suspected that, like the PM at Question Time, Fidler planted questions.

A scruffy young man looking too like a hunt saboteur to be true tried to start the old fox-hunting debate running, but Kentmore brushed it aside.

“Personally, if I get bother from a fox, I shoot it. Never saw any reason to risk my neck or my horses’ legs galloping around over rough ground chasing the damned things.”

Applause, and Ellie, who looked as if she was getting wound up for her antiblood-sport rant, subsided.

Encouraged by the applause, Kentmore went on, “In fact, now that hunting foxes with dogs has been banned, I reckon we could solve the problem by substituting, say, journalists, except the poor dogs might find them rather unpalatable.”

Ellie was nodding again, but Kalim Sarhadi shook his head violently and said, “All right for you to make jokes about journalists, Maurice, but if it weren’t for them lads on the
Bradford News
and all their mates, I reckon I’d be chained to a wall with a hood over my head in Guantánamo Bay now.”

Kentmore looked discomfited, but Fidler rescued him by asking,

“Just in case anyone out there hasn’t heard your story, Kal, could you tell us what happened to you?”

Pascoe had heard the tale before but it still made uncomfortable hearing. Sarhadi had been walking down a street in Lahore when he spotted a familiar face. It belonged to a young man called Hasan Raza who’d gone to the same school.

“We weren’t mates or owt, but we sat down in a caff and had a coffee.

He were keen for news from home. When I asked what he were doing in Lahore, he got all vague. Then this car drew up outside, two big guys got out, and next thing we were in the back and being driven away.”

158 r e g i n a l d h i l l

What had happened now seemed to be clear. Raza was a terrorist suspect the authorities had had their eyes on for some time. The sight of him talking to a new contact from the UK provoked the security police to move in. When their fairly primitive interrogation techniques produced no results, they called in their American counterparts who at least didn’t get directly physical. Then the British interrogators arrived.

“Was that because the Yanks were beginning to believe you?” asked Fidler.

“Nay, I think it were ’cos they couldn’t understand a word I were saying,” said Sarhadi, very broad Bradford.

That got a big laugh after which he fi nished his story, stressing his conviction that it was only the publicity pressure back home that got him released.

“Kal, how much do you think the fact that your mother is English helped get public support for that campaign?” asked Fidler.

Sarhadi gave him a long, cool stare.

“Me dad’s English too. Might be different down south, but up here that’s what we call folk who were born in England and work in England and pay their taxes in England.”

Big cheer. Fidler grinned and said, “Whoops. Sorry, Kal. Forgot you were a straight-speaking Yorkshireman. So, in the same spirit, did the fact that your mam is white make a difference to the level of public support?”

“No idea,” said Sarhadi. “I were chained up in a cellar, remember?”

“Of course. Terrible. Sir, you’ve got a question?”

A fat man near the back stood up and said, “I’m sorry for what happened to you, lad, but fair do’s, you lot don’t do yourself any favors, do you? Look at all these riots the papers are full of—”

“Hold on there,” interrupted Fidler. “Demonstrations, I think you mean.”

“You call ’em what you will, looked like bloody riots to me. And what about yon Raza, your mate, he really is a terrorist, right? So you can’t blame the cops when they saw the two of you so chummy together jumping to the wrong conclusion, right?”

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 159

“If you’d been kicked so hard in the balls you were pissing blood into a rusty bucket for a fortnight, you’d mebbe want some bugger to blame!” declared Sarhadi. “Just like the lads on them demos want to know who’s to blame for murdering them two innocent Muslims in Manchester. As for Raz, till he’s had a fair trial, he’s just an ordinary British citizen like you and me, and our government should be protecting him, not apologizing for yon mad bastard George Bush and his mates.”

“Strong words,” said Fidler. “Just how much did your experience radicalize you?”

“If you mean it’s turned me into an extremist, you’re dead wrong,”

said Sarhadi. “But it did make me see it weren’t enough just to keep my nose clean and get on with my own concerns. It made me start thinking about what being a Muslim really meant.”

“Yes, and as I understand it, this means you’ve become much more active in your local mosque at Marrside. The mosque your friend Raza attended, right? And isn’t Sheik Ibrahim Al-Hijazi, who has been so forthright in his condemnation of the quote footdragging police investigation unquote into the Manchester killings, the imam there?”

“What are you trying to say, Joe? That we’re all terrorists at Marrside?”

“No, of course not. But Sheikh Ibrahim’s views are well known, aren’t they?”

“Aye, like the Archbishop of Canterbury’s. And if every churchgoer who disagreed with him walked out, where’d that leave the C of E?”

“Are you claiming to be a force for moderation then, Kal?”

“No. I’m just like most other young Muslims in Marrside, a British citizen trying to live his life by following the laws of his country and the laws of his religion.”

“And if they clash?”

“Properly interpreted, they don’t clash.”

“I think Sheikh Ibrahim might give you an argument there.

Incidentally, is he going to your wedding?”

He was a clever bastard, thought Pascoe with reluctant admiration. He was managing to use Sarhadi to represent the Muslim both as victim and villain.

160 r e g i n a l d h i l l

“Why shouldn’t he be?” said Sarhadi angrily. “Look, Joe, you want to have a barney with Sheikh Ibrahim, mebbe it’s him you should have invited onto the show.”

“Funny you should say that, Kal,” said Fidler with the self-satisfi ed smirk of the chat-show host who has got his guest to provide a desired cue. “We did invite the Sheikh, but after the report of the alleged attempt on his life earlier this week, his people came back to us with questions about security. Naturally we gave the assurances we offer all our guests, but it seems they weren’t enough for the Sheikh and he withdrew.”

Not having much luck with your guest list this week, thought Pascoe. Presumably Fidler had hoped to engineer a public confrontation between Sarhadi and the Sheikh.

“Perhaps,” continued Fidler, “what he was really worried about was whether he could get away without falling into the cliché trap.

So far we’ve done rather well, but you’ve all got your weapons of mass destruction ready just in case?”

The audience laughed and waved the plastic bags full of colored Ping-Pong balls which they received as they entered the broadcast hall.

Ellie tried to speak but Fidler ignored her. Saving her for something else? wondered Pascoe uneasily as the halogen smile beamed on Kentmore again.

“Maurice, you’ve had your problems with the law,” said the presenter. “Do you think we have strong enough laws to control extreme political agitation?”

“We elect people to make our laws,” said the farmer shortly. “If we don’t like them, then we should elect somebody else.”

“That’s pretty reasonable of you, Maurice, considering what happened in your own family,” said Fidler.

Turning to speak directly to the camera with the serious, sympathetic face of a man offering condolence to a bereaved neighbor, he went on, “Some of you may recall that Maurice’s younger brother, Flight Lieutenant Christopher Kentmore, was one of the earliest British casualties during the invasion of Iraq.”

Kentmore turned pale with shock, then fury. He hadn’t been expecting this. Suddenly the true reason why he’d been invited to join the panel was obvious. Which left . . .

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 161

Ellie beware!
Pascoe tried to telepath.

Fidler, leaving Kentmore to simmer, was already turning to her.

“Nowadays nearly everyone has some link, close or distant, to the modern terrorist threat. Ell, I know you use your maiden name on your book jackets, but wasn’t your husband, DI Pascoe, one of the victims of the recent terrorist explosion in Mid-Yorkshire? Happily, not the most seriously injured. In fact I believe he’s back at work. But are his hands too tightly tied by the very laws he upholds? And what about you, Ell? How do you feel about the kind of people who nearly made you a widow?”

It was blindingly obvious now how Ffion had managed to get unknown Ellie with her unimpressive literary track record onto the show.

You treacherous cow! thought Pascoe. You with your double f ’s!

At least now it shouldn’t take a Dalziel to tell Ellie what the other one stood for.

He waited anxiously for her response. A blank
no comment
was probably safest, but Ellie wasn’t the no comment type. He gritted his teeth and waited for the explosion.

But despite his great love and admiration, he could still underestimate his wife.

She leaned forward, very serious, and said, “Well, all other things being equal, Joe, at the end of the day, all the police want is a level playing fi eld—”

Chaos erupted. The speakers blasted out a chorus of zoo screeches over which a parliamentary voice bellowed, “Order! Order!” Klaxons blared, lights flashed, audience members screamed, “Cliché! Cliché!”

and stood up to hurl their multicolored Ping-Pong balls at Ellie, who sat unflinching beneath the barrage.

“Oh, Ell, Ell!” cried Fidler. “This is serious-money time! OK, folks, settle down, thank you, I think we’ve shown the dreaded clichés exactly what we think of them . . . ”

The shower of balls diminished to a trickle and the audience began to subside. But a woman in the front row remained on her feet, her hand still in her plastic bag.

“You don’t fool me,” she was yelling. “You deserved all you got, you murdering bastard! You’re just like the rest on ’em at yon mosque, you 162 r e g i n a l d h i l l

and that Sheikh. You send other bastards out to do your dirty work, but you’re just as bad. They should lock every last one of you up and throw away the key!”

It was Sarhadi, directly in front of her, she was shouting at, not Ellie.

Her hand came out of the bag. In it was a gun.

For a fraction of a second Pascoe thought, This is another of Fidler’s plants!

Then he saw the presenter’s face. Even the makeup couldn’t hide the pallor of terror. His lips moved but nothing came out. He tried to push himself backward but only succeeded in sending his swivel chair spinning round and round till he was bound fast by his own micro-phone wire.

The gun came up. It was pointed at Sarhadi, who stared at it in a disbelief which hadn’t yet had time to dissolve into fear.

Someone screamed. To the left and right of the woman the people best placed to intervene opted for self-preservation and fl ung themselves sideways.

And Ellie began to rise from her seat.

To Pascoe’s sagacious eye, she didn’t look like she was thinking of diving for cover or making a run for it.

“No!” he yelled. “Don’t be stupid! No!”

He hadn’t yelled at a screen like this since he was a kid at a Saturday-morning picture club.

And now, as if offended, the screen he was yelling at went completely blank.

6

K I L D A

For the next five minutes Peter Pascoe exercised the greatest degree of control he had ever called upon.

He did nothing.

Every instinct screamed at him to react. The loudest and most lunatic scream urged him to jump into his car and start driving north.

Pointless! It would take an hour even breaking every speed limit.

Nearly as loud and on the surface more sensible was the scream telling him to grab the phone and start ringing. Ellie’s mobile fi rst, then the TV station, then Middlesbrough police, then his own CID offi ce, then . . .

What stopped him was the certainty that Ellie, knowing he was watching, would ring him as soon as she could. He didn’t even dare risk using his mobile in case that was the button she hit. As for ringing her mobile, she’d have it switched off because of the broadcast, and when it got switched on again, it would be to ring him.