Death's Jest-Book (22 page)

He tossed on
to the table the paperback he'd picked up at the Centre bookstall
when he'd spotted Penn in Hal's. It was entitled
Harry Hacker and
the Ship of Fools.
Its cover showed a ship crowded with agitated
men in a turbulent sea being driven on to rocks on which basked
several well-endowed women in a state of deshabille.

Penn frowned at it and said, 'So
what made you pick this one?'

'Liked the cover. Ship driven on
the rocks. Seemed to say something about you, Charley.'

'Like what?'

'Like out of control, mebbe.'

This seemed to reassure the
writer. He pushed the book aside and said, 'If it's not me you're
after in the Reference, then what is it?'

'Well, it's related to you in a
way’ said Dalziel. 'Just tell me straight, Charley. You know
where Ms Pomona, the librarian, lives?'

For a moment Penn went still,
like a wolf freezing when the wind brings it some trace of its prey.

'Got a flat in Peg Lane, hasn't
she?' he said.

'That's right. Church View House.
You been round there recently?'

'Why should I? We're not exactly
on social visiting terms.'

'Question answered with a
question is a question answered, that's what they taught us at police
college,' said the Fat Man. 'Thanks, luv.'

He raised the cappuccino the
waitress had set in front of him to his mouth and licked the
chocolate-flecked foam with an apparently prehensile tongue.

'And a suspect beaten with a
table is a criminally damaged table,' said Penn. 'Bet they taught you
that as well.'

'Hope it won't come to that,'
said the Fat Man, studying his doughnut with the keen eye of a man
expert at finding where the sac of jam is hidden. 'So?'

Penn let out a long sigh and
said, 'OK, you've got me bang to rights. I' did call round there for
a chat, last weekend it was. No harm in that, is there?'

'When at the weekend?'

'Oh, Saturday I think,' said Penn
vaguely. 'No one home, so I came away.'

Dalziel chose his point of
incision, raised the doughnut to his mouth and bit.

Through red-stained teeth he
said, 'Precision is important, Charley, else you miss the full
pleasure. Saturday. When on Saturday?'

'Morning, was it? Yes, morning.
Does it matter?'

'Morning starts at twelve
midnight. Between twelve and one, was it?'

'Don't be daft!'

'One and two then? No? Two and
three? No? Give us a clue at least, Charley!'

'And spoil your game? Play's
important to kids, isn't that what the psychs say?'

'How about between eight and half
past?' said Dalziel, pushing the rest of the doughnut into his maw.

‘That would be about right,
I dare say,' said Penn.

‘Thought it might, as a man
matching your description were seen lurking in Church View around
eight twenty-five.'

'Can't have been me,' said Penn
indifferently. 'I gave up lurking years back. Case of mistaken
identity then.'

'We got a description,' said
Dalziel, taking out a notebook and looking at a blank sheet.
'Bearded, furtive, mad-looking. Like a nineteenth-century
Russian anarchist who'd just planted a bomb.'

'Yeah, that does sound like me’
said Penn. 'So I called at about eight fifteen and she wasn't in so I
left. So what?'

'Bit early for a social call,
weren't it?'

'You know what they say about
early birds, Andy.'

'Catch colds, don't they? Still
sounds a bit odd to me. Can't remember the last time I called on a
lass so early. Not unless I had a warrant and wanted to catch 'em
afore they got their clothes on.'

'No such ambition. I just wanted
to catch her before she went to work.'

'Works Saturdays, does she?'

'Aye. In the mornings. Mostly.'

'Yes, you'd know that 'cos you'd
be in the library yourself most days, right, Charley? So why not have
your little chat with her there?'

'Because it's hard to be private
there.'

'Private? So there was something
private you wanted to discuss with her, Charley?'

'Not particularly.'

'Not particularly? But
particularly enough to call on her at sparrow-fart! Come on, Charley!
There's only one thing you're interested in discussing with Ms Pomona
and it's not something that Ms Pomona would want to discuss with you
any time, seeing as it was a nasty traumatic experience which she'll
have been doing her very best to forget! So what do you think she was
going to say if she opened her door at eight a.m. and saw Cheerful
Charley Penn standing there? Sod off! That's what she was going to
say.'

Penn drank his coffee, then asked
quietly, 'Andy, what's going off here? She made some kind of
complaint about me?'

'Not yet.'

'Meaning, but she will? Doesn't
surprise me. She has to be dancing to your tune in this, no other way
I can see it working.'

‘I won't ask you what that
means 'cos I don't like hitting a man I've just invested a coffee in.
So what you're saying, Charley, is, you've never been in Ms Pomona's
flat?'

'You're slow, Andy, but you get
there in the end.'

'That's what all the girls tell
me. So if we happened to find one of your fingerprints in Ms P's
flat, you'd be hard put to explain how it got there?'

Penh raised his coffee cup,
looked at it speculatively and said, 'If you took this cup and left
it in the Vatican, you'd find my print there, but that doesn't mean
I'm the Pope. Andy, don't you think it's time you told me what you're
really after here?' 'Just having a coffee with an old friend.' Penn
made a play of looking round then said, 'Must have missed him.'

Dalziel emptied his cup and said,
'No rest for the wicked, eh? Oh, just one thing more. Lorelei. What's
one of them when it's at home?'

'Why do you ask, Andy? Owt to do
with little Miss P's intruder?'

Dalziel didn't
answer but just stared at the writer till he raised his hands in mock
surrender and said, 'She's a German nymph who lives on the Rhine. Her
beautiful song lures fishermen to steer their boats on the rocks and
drown. Heine wrote a poem about her.
"Ich weifi nicht was
soil es bedeuten Daft ich so traurig bin. Bin Marchen aus alien
Zeiten, Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.'"

'You're hard enough to follow in
English, Charley.' '"I don't know of any good reason For me to
feel so sad. A legend from some old season Keeps running around in my
head."'

'Sounds like you, Charley.'

'How so?'

'Well, you've got everything most
men want, a bit of fame, a bit of fortune, but you still droop around
like you got the world on your back. And this Lorelei, beautiful
young woman luring ships to destruction. Seems to run around in your
head all right. Like in this book of yours, if the cover's owt to go
on.'

'It's an imaginative
interpretation.'

'That's all right then. What
happened to Lorelei in the end? Some questing knight stick his lance
into her?'

'Not that I know of,' said Penn.
'Not many fishermen on the Rhine nowadays, but I don't suppose she's
averse to going for bigger prey, the odd pleasure boat full of
trippers. No, I'd say that Lorelei's still out there, biding her
time.'

'Best left alone then. That's
what my old Scots gran used to say about beasties and bogles and
things that go bump in the night. You don't bother them and they
won't bother you. See you upstairs, mebbe.'

He stood up. Penn said, 'You've
forgotten your book.'

He opened the paperback,
scribbled in it and handed it to Dalziel.

The Fat Man moved away, squeezing
between the crowded tables. He expected Penn would follow his
progress out of the cafe, but when he looked at the reflection in the
glass wall which marked Hal's boundary, he saw the bearded face
buried deep in a book once more.

Wonder what language he thinks
in? thought Dalziel.

Outside, he opened the book. The
printed dedication was in German.

An Mai - wunderschon in alien
Monaten!

Dalziel's German was up to that.
'To May - beautiful in every month!'

But he didn't
need linguistic skills to interpret the message which Penn had
scrawled beneath the title
Harry Hacker and the Ship of Fools.

Bon voyage, sailor!

He laughed out loud.

'Charley’ he said. 'I
didn't know you cared.'

A
man cannot live and work in the same town for many years without
finding his head and his heart assailed by fond associations wherever
he looks, and when Dalziel's route to the reference library took him
past the toilet in which the Wordman had murdered Town Councillor
'Stuffer' Steel with an engraver's burin, he went inside for a pee,
but stopped short when he found himself looking at a man up a
step-ladder screwing a video camera into the ceiling.

'How do,' said Dalziel. 'What's
this? Filming Uro-trash?'

'Updating the system, mate. State
of the art, that's what they're getting now. Beam a close-up of your
bollocks to the moon with this kit,' said the man proudly.

'Oh aye? Mebbe someone should
warn 'em at NASA.'

Unfazed by the prospect of
universal distribution, he had his pee then went on his way, from
time to time observing other evidence of the new installation taking
place.

In the reference library he was
greeted with the kind of smile that twangs a man's braces and the
words, 'Mr Dalziel, how nice to see you!' uttered with evident
sincerity by the fine-looking young woman behind the desk.

The Italian strain in the Pomona
family might be a couple of generations old, but the genes had come
out fighting in Raina of that ilk, pronounced Rye-eena and contracted
familiarly to Rye. Her skin had a golden glow and her dark expressive
eyes might have sent a more poetic man than Fat Andy in search of
images from Mediterranean skies. Her hair was a rich brown, except
for a single lock of silvery grey which marked the main impact point
of a head injury she had received at the age of fifteen in the car
crash that killed her twin brother. Antipathetic at first towards the
superintendent, and not encouraged to greater charity by the reports
of persecution she received from her incipient boyfriend, DC Hat
Bowler, she had relented her attitude in the aftermath of the Wordman
case when she had come to see that, no matter what his outward
semblance seemed to indicate, Dalziel was deeply defensive of his
young officer and determined that no official crap should come his
way.

Also, as she had confessed to Hat
(causing the young man some perturbation of spirit), there was
something sort of sexy about Dalziel, in a non-sexy sort of way.
Observing the DC's bewilderment, she had added, 'I don't want to shag
him, you understand, but I can see how it might be that he's not
short of offers.'

Hat, who had often joined in lewd
canteen speculation about the geophysics of the Fat Man's
relationship with his inamorata, the not insubstantial Cap Marvell,
found himself looking at things from a new viewpoint. Rye often had
this effect on him - this was one of the pleasures, and the perils,
of getting close to her - but no previous change of angle had been so
disorientating as having to regard Andy Dalziel as a sex object
rather than a performing whale. Thank God she had put in the
disclaimer about not fancying him herself. Even the imagined prospect
of such a rival quite unmanned him.

Knowing nothing of the food for
thought he'd given the young couple, and careless of it had he known,
Dalziel returned the smile and said, 'Nice to see you too, lass. What
fettle? Tha's looking well. Helping young Bowler convalesce must be
doing you good.'

Did his eyes twinkle salaciously
as he said it? Rye didn't mind if they did, being as indifferent to
his speculations as he would have been to hers.

'Yes, he's coming along very
nicely. You'll have him back later this week, I gather.'

'That's right. Can't wait, from
the look of him. He even popped in for a chat yesterday afternoon,
just to get the feel of things. That's what brings me here today,
summat he said. Not that I need an excuse to want to see you, but.'

He spoke flirtatiously. He'd
decided that there was no way to the subject of her burglary save
head on. But like in his rugby-playing days, no harm in a gently
distracting shimmer of the hips before you ran straight through the
bugger standing in your way.

'He told you about the break-in
then’ she said, undistracted.

'You don't seem surprised. Didn't
you tell him you didn't want to make a thing of it?'

'I heard he'd been asking my
neighbours questions. Didn't think it would stop there.'

'You were right. It was his duty
to report it in, and he's a good cop,' said Dalziel sternly. Then he
added with a grin, 'And likely he also got to thinking if he said
nowt, then you got murdered in your bed and he mentioned casually
that your place had been turned over a few days back, I'd have sent
him to join you.'

'I'm sure you'd have meant it as
a kindness. All right. Some idiot got into my flat, left it looking a
bit untidy, but nothing damaged and nothing taken. I couldn't see the
point of pouring oil on dying embers by letting you lot really mess
the place up with fingerprint powder all over the place and God knows
what else. I've had enough of questions, statements and creaking
bureaucracy in recent times to last me a lifetime!'

'Aye, it's a slow grinding mill,
ours, and everyone ends up a bit ground down.'

'Doesn't show on you,
Superintendent’ she said.

He laughed and said, 'Nay, I'm
part of the machinery. And once I'm set in motion, I've got to clank
on till I run down. Any chance of a coffee?'

'Any chance of me saying no? No.
Come on through then.'