Dialogues of the Dead (18 page)

149 he felt now, maybe there was something in it. His relationship with Rye had certainly taken a step forward; though he could see it being knocked a couple of long steps back when she realized he'd kept stumm about the Fourth Dialogue. The temptation to tell her had been strong but, over the phone at least, not as strong as Sergeant Wield's prohibition on spreading the news. 'Keep this to yourself,' Wield had said. 'As far as the world's concerned, Councillor Steel's death is an isolated incident until the super decides different. And you want the super to feel you're reliable, don't you? Especially around young women.' Hat had thought of arguing that as Rye Pomona had been instrumental in bringing them into contact with the Wordman, she had a right to know, but it wasn't an argument he felt he could sustain in face of those louring features. So instead he said, 'Any reason why the super shouldn't think I'm reliable, Sarge?' 'I think,' said Wield carefully, 'he felt you might have got a bit close to Jax Ripley.' He watched the youngster's face closely, saw puzzlement bubble to understanding then boil into indignation. 'You mean all that stuff she did about us falling down on the job, Mr Dalziel thought she was getting inside info from me? . Jesus, Sarge, nearly every time I saw her, we got in a row about those programmes. OK, so we stayed friends, sort of, but we both knew we were just using each other. I might have done the odd trade-off with her - I'll show you mine if you show me yours but if she had a real deep-throat in the Force, it certainly wasn't me!' Wield noted but did not comment on the sexual imagery used in the denial. Though unsusceptible to such things himself, he was perfectly aware when a woman was turning up the heat in his direction, and he'd got a good warm blast on the couple of occasions he'd met the TV reporter. If, and he tended to believe him, Bowler hadn't succumbed beyond the point of professional discretion, then it said much for the young man's self-control. 'Do you think I should say something to the super?' Bowler had asked in some agitation. 'I shouldn't,' said Wield. 'Denial afore you're asked is as good as an admission in our game. He seemed quite pleased with the way you handled yourself yesterday. So forget it. The future's what matters, not the past. But be warned. You see a reporter, you run a mile.' That would mean taking up the marathon, thought Hat. The media interest in Ripley's murder had been vast and though there was as yet no official acknowledgement of a link with Steele's death, they were close enough in time and location for the bloodhounds to be sniffing the air once more and sending up their howls of speculation. Privately Hat thought Dalziel's notion of keeping quiet about the Fourth Dialogue was stupid, but not as stupid as giving any hint of what he thought. 'Yes, Sarge. So what's the state of play at the moment? Any other developments?' 'Well, there's a meeting in the super's office at ten. It's the DCI's idea. The Great Consult, he calls it.' 'What's that mean?' 'Something about all the devils getting together to decide how to get out of hell. Mr Pascoe sometimes lets himself go a bit poetic when things get tough,' said Wield indulgently. 'Any road, he's persuaded the super that it's time to call on some outside expertise, like Dr Pottle, the shrink, and some language expert from the university.' 'Jesus, things must be bad!' exclaimed Hat, who knew how the Fat Man felt about what he usually referred to as arty-forty crop-merchants. 'You're right. We're really scraping the barrel. You're invited.' The?' Exhilaration fought with apprehension at the news. 'Aye. So get yourself right up to speed. But first you'd best go and ring that lass from the library and tell her you'll definitely not be coming out to play today.' As he began to dial Rye's number, Hat had wondered how the hell Wield knew he had a date with Rye. But by the time he'd pressed the final digit, he'd worked out that the sergeant must have overheard all of the conversation before the hug which might have turned into an embrace. That sod misses nothing, he thought, half admiringly, half resentfully. But I'm a lot prettier!

I5I Half seemed a good measure and he decided he'd take only half of Wield's advice. He wouldn't say anything to the Fat Man about his unjust suspicions but he wouldn't forget them either. He knew he was innocent, which meant some other bugger wasn't and he didn't see why he should go through his career with this question mark against his name in Dalziel's book of remembrance. Meanwhile, he was determined to build on the good impression he seemed to have made on the super yesterday. Being invited to join the Holy Trinity at this Great Consult was a large step. He recalled the pangs of envy he'd felt on earlier occasions when he'd seen DC Shirley Novello, who wasn't that much senior, being admitted more and more to the inner triangle. Novello was still on sick leave after taking a bullet in the course of duty a couple of months before. Any hopes Bowler had had of filling the gap had soon been squashed, leaving him disappointed and puzzled till Wield had made things clear. Now he had his chance to shine and he wasn't going to miss out. He spent the hour's grace he had going through witness state ments. As every guest at the preview had been interviewed, there wasn't time to read them all. Fortunately, with typical efficiency Sergeant Wield had already collated these under several head ings with cross-references. The largest group was those who left the preview and the Centre more than ten minutes before the councillor's departure and also gave negative responses to the key questions - Did you talk to Councillor Steel or overhear him talking to anyone else? Did you observe anyone behaving oddly in the vicinity ofjude Illingworth '$ engraving demonstration? A note had been added in Pascoe's boyish scrawl. / don't think the killer would risk lying about the time of his departure though it is of course possible that he left earlier then waited for the councillor's departure. As for answering the two questions, I think it unlikely the killer would give a negative response to both, partly because I reckon that he probably did talk to Steel, but mainly because I doubt that someone as wordy as the Wordman could bear to say nothing. Clever sod, thought Hat. Though it was well to remember that the Wordman was a clever sod too. But it helped him choose what to look at and what to shove aside for later examination. He turned his attention to those who had something to report about the councillor and/or thought they'd noticed something at the demonstration. He rapidly came to the conclusion that most of the reports of odd behaviour were motivated either by an over-eagerness to help or by a simple longing for importance. None of the professional observers there, i.e. himself, Wield, Pascoe, and the super, contributed anything, which might or might not be significant. Five witnesses recalled that when they were watching the engraver at work, a nearby table had been jostled and a couple of glasses had fallen to the floor, which could have been a deliberate diversion. Unfortunately, none of them had a distinct memory of who was in the vicinity at the time; indeed only one of them could recall the presence of any of the others. Stutter Steel had made rather more impression, though much of the recollection centred on the amount of food he managed to put away. Reports of his actual conversation suggested a preoccupation with two themes. The first was that most of the art on display was a load of crap and spending public money on displaying it was a scandal and he'd be proposing a motion of censure on the Finance Committee at the next council meeting. The second was thatjax Ripley's death had fallen very fortuitously for the Mid-Yorkshire police whose extravagances and inefficiencies she was, with his assistance, in the midst of exposing. Mary Agnew in particular had got an earful, as had Sammy Ruddlesdin, and John Wingate from BBC MY. Several witnesses reported that Wingate had interrupted Steel after a while and there had been a heated exchange, ending with the TV man walking away. Wingate himself gave a full account of this, saying that he'd got pissed off with listening to the councillor rattle on as if the only important thing about Jax Ripley's death had been its effect on Steel's campaigning. This was an understandable reaction from a colleague of the dead woman, but Bowler recalled his own speculation when getting a statement from Wingate after the murder that there might have been a more than professional relationship between the two of them. He made a note and read on, concentrating on those who'd left round about the same time as the councillor. Wield had already done the groundwork here also, producing a neat graph showing who was where at what time. A copy of Hat's own

^3 statement was here, of course, and he read through it with as much detachment as he could muster. It was a good policeman's statement, precise and detailed. It said nothing of that feeling he'd had when he entered the toilet of stepping into a new dimension in which nothing existed but himself and the body on the floor, curled in a foetal question mark. How long he'd simply stood and looked at it he did not know. In fact, How long? did not seem a question that applied, not when it seemed possible to step back into the corridor, wait a second, then re-open the door and find that the image had been erased. Of course he'd done no such thing. Of course the training had snapped in and he'd gone into the sequence of checking pulse, calling help, attempting resuscitation, making the scene secure, and by the time he went to bed that night, the sense of disassociation had faded to a memory of natural shock at such a grisly discovery. But when he read the copy of the Fourth Dialogue Wield handed him that morning and realized he had been only a few heartbeats behind the Wordman, it all came back to him so strongly that he found himself grasping at the hardness of a table and staring fixedly at the second hand on his watch to assure himself of the continuance of corporeality. Now he reconsidered his statement in view of the new information that this wasn't merely a one-off killing but part of the Wordman's sequence. Perhaps his feelings were now relevant... But how? And his heart sank at the thought of trying to explain them to Dalziel. He might be able to retrieve his reputation from the false accusation of being Deep-throat, but Air-brain was probably beyond recovery. He put his statement aside and went on with the others. It would of course be nice to be able to go to the meeting and perform a piece of mental gymnastics which took him leaping from one small overlooked item to another, ending with a triple somersault before landing firmly on the Wordman's back. In his mind's eye he saw the Trinity looking on with wonder and admiration before holding up their score-cards awarding maximum points for both style and content. But such flights of inspiration, though the commonplace of fiction, were very rarely spotted in the world of a humble detective constable. Close attention to detail, no matter how dull and repetitive, was what solved cases. And as he read, Hat crosschecked with Wield's graph, not in expectation of finding an omission but in the not very strong hope of spotting a discrepancy. The closest he came was in Rye's statement (direct and detailed enough to be a policeman's) in which she said that when she collected her coat from the reference library she saw a few members of the public working, but no one she knew. Yet according to the graph, two people who'd been at the preview should have been there - Dick Dee and Charley Penn. He started shuffling through the statements. 'You got something?' said Wield, who'd come up behind him soft-footed. 'Not really .. . maybe . ..' He found Dee's statement. He'd left the preview a couple of minutes before Hat and Rye and gone straight to the library. On his arrival, the woman on duty had taken the opportunity to head off to the toilet. Dee had been at the far end of the library, checking a reference in some tome, when he glimpsed Rye collecting her coat from the office. So he saw her, she didn't see him. Penn in his statement said he'd gone straight to the library and taken his place in his usual cubicle. Facing the wall, he'd written, you tend not to see many people. But later when he'd gone to the lavatory (not the locus in quo but the staff loo adjacent to the reference library, access to which I enjoy as a kind of ^ favoured nation' privilege), he had noticed Dee. So, a general cancelling out. 'No, sorry. Nothing. Look, I'm not trying to second-guess you, Sarge ...' 'Aren't you? That's a pity. DC who's not trying to second-guess his sergeant is no use to anyone. But don't get so absorbed you miss the time. Ten more minutes. Be late for Mr Dalziel and you could be late forever.' Hat abandoned the statements and spent the remaining rime processing a selection of people through the computer. It was like panning for gold in a worked-out claim. Dross, dross, nothing but dross. Then at last, like a buttercup growing through a cow-pat, he glimpsed one tiny nugget of gold. He drew it out, weighed it, recognized it wasn't going to make

W him rich. But properly worked, it might make an elegant link i] a chain. He glanced at his watch. Five minutes to go. Probably more. Academics were notoriously bad timekeepers He reached for the telephone. Chapter Eighteen

'Well, look who's here,' said Andy Dalziel. 'Come in, lad. Find a chair. Make yourself comfortable. Good of you to spare the time.' The academics, unreliable as ever, must have been punctual. Spouting apologies, Hat concentrated on the guests, to blot out Dalziel's threatening glower and Pascoe's reproachful pout. Even Wield's blankness spelt out well-Ididwarn-you. Dr Pottle, the psychiatrist, was a small man in late middle age who had deliberately cultivated a natural resemblance to Einstein. 'Patients find it very reassuring,' he'd once told Peter Pascoe who was, unofficially and intermittently, one of those patients. 'Also I like to tell the really dotty ones that I've built a time machine and travelled into the future and everything's going to be all right for them.' 'And how does it look for me, Professor?' Pascoe had replied. Pottle's other idiosyncrasy was that despite all the social, medical and political pressure, he still chain-smoked. Dalziel, who was an off-on smoker currently going through a pretty extensive off patch, bowed to the inevitable, helped himself to a handful of Pottle's fags, and was drawing on the first like a drowning sailor come up for the third time. The other expert was introduced as Dr Drew Urquhart. Not very old, as far as Bowler could make out through a wilderness of beard. Fortunately he kept his upper lip bare. Had he worn the kind of Einsteinian moustache Pottle favoured, his features would have been beyond even a mother's recognition. Dressed in non-matching trainers, threadbare jeans and a T-shirt which had rotted under the armpits to provide what seemed like very necessary ventilation holes, he looked more like a resident of cardboardbox country in the shopping centre than the Groves of Academe. 'Fuck this,' he growled in a Scots accent, unidentifiable to