Dialogues of the Dead (39 page)

327 Chapter Thirty-eight

The press conference lasted a good hour. The technique preferred by most policemen when dealing with the gentlemen of the press, hungry for information, is the response monosyllabic. Yes and we, as appropriate, blossoming into an euphuistic No Comment when neither of these will do. Pascoe, however, favoured the sesquipedalian style. As Dalziel put it, 'After thirty minutes with me, they're clamouring for more. After thirty minutes with Pete, they're clamouring to be let out.' Tyro reporters had been known to leave one of his sessions with several pads crammed with notes which on analysis had not rendered a single line of usable copy. Only once on this occasion did anyone come close to laying a finger on him and that was Mary Agnew, editor of the MidYorkshire Gazette, whose personal attendance signalled the importance of the story. 'Mr Pascoe,' she said, 'it appears to us out here that these so-called Wordman killings are systematic rather than random. Is this your opinion also?' 'It would seem to me,' said Pascoe, 'that the sequence of killings plus the associated correspondence, details of which I am, for obvious reasons of security, unable to share with you at this juncture, predicates what for the want of a better term we might define as a system, though we should not let the familiarity of the term confuse us into apprehending anything we would recognize as a logical underpinning of the perpetrator's thought processes. We are dealing here with a morbid psychology and what is systematic to him might well, when understood, appear to the normal mind as disjunctive and even aleatoric.' 'I'll take that as a yes,' said Agnew. 'In which case, given that we have here a madman killing according to some kind of sequential

328 system, how close are you to being able to give warning to those most at risk of becoming victims, whether as individuals or in a body?' 'Good question,' said Pascoe, meaning in Westminster-speak that he had no intention of answering it. 'All I can say is that if these killings are systematic, then the vast majority of your readers can have nothing to fear.' 'They'll be pleased to know it. But looking down the list of victims, I can work out for myself that from Jax Ripley on, all of them have had something to do with the Centre, either directly or indirectly. Have you put everyone who works in the Centre or has any strong connection with it on alert?' Pascoe, feeling himself harried, switched tactics abruptly, said, 'No,' then directed his gaze towards a Scotsman reporter whose accent he knew to be thick enough to baffle at least half of those assembled and said, 'Mr Murray?' Afterwards he wondered, as he'd often done before, what would happen if he'd opted for sharing rather than evasion. Let them have all the disparate bits and pieces which were cluttering up his mind and his desk, and perhaps there was someone out there, someone with special knowledge or maybe just some enthusiastic reader of detective novels to whom such exegetics were but a pre-dormitory snack, who'd look at them and say, 'Hey, I know what this means! It's obvious!' One day perhaps ... The right to make such a choice could be one of the compensations of that rise to place which he sometimes feared - and sometimes feared would never come! 'Peter, hi. Am I about to be offered a scoop or am I just doubleparked?' John Wingate was coming towards him escorted by Bowler, whom Pascoe had told to extract the TV producer from the departing media mob with maximum discretion. 'Definitely not the first. As for the second, that's between you and your conscience,' said Pascoe, shaking the man's hand. They knew each other, not well, but well enough to be comfortable with each other. Being a cop meant many relationships which in other professions might have matured into friendships stuck here. Pascoe recognized the main hesitation was usually on his side. Other people

^29 soon forgot you were a cop, and that was the danger of intimacy. What did you do when you were offered a joint in a friend's house, or found yourself invited to admire his acumen in having picked up a crate of export Scotch, duty-free, from a contact in the shipping trade? He'd seen the expression of shocked disbelief in friends' faces when he'd enquired if these were wise things to be sharing with a senior CID officer, and that had often been the last totally open expression he'd seen in those particular faces. Now he contemplated an oblique approach to the question of Dee and Penn but quickly discounted it. Wingate was too bright not to realize he was being pumped. The direct route was probably the best, not directness as Andy Dalziel (who happily had not yet appeared) understood it, but something much more casual and low-key. 'Something you could help us with maybe,' he said. 'You went to Unthank College, didn't you?' That's right.' 'Were Charley Penn and Dick Dee there at the same time?' 'Yes, they were, as a matter of fact.' 'Good friends, were they?' 'Not of mine. I was a year ahead. A year in school's even longer than a week in politics.' 'But of each other?' Wingate didn't reply straightaway and Pascoe felt the just-afriendly-chat smile on his face begin to freeze into a rictus. 'John?' he prompted. 'Sorry. What was the question?' Good technique that, thought Pascoe. By forcing me to repeat the question in a much more positive form, he's upped the atmosphere from chat toward interrogation. 'Were Dee and Penn close friends?' he said. 'Don't see how I'm qualified to answer that, Peter. Not sure why you'd want to ask me that either.' 'It's OK, John, nothing sinister. Just part of the usual business of collecting and collating mile after mile of tedious information, most of which proves totally irrelevant. I certainly don't want you to feel used.' This was offered with a rueful you-knowallaboutthis-too twist of the lips. 'Oh, I don't, because so far I haven't been. And I don't think I will be, not unless you can give me some better reason, or indeed any reason at all, for interrogating me about my merry schooldays.' 'It's not an interrogation, John,' said Pascoe patiently. 'Just a couple of friendly questions. Can't see why someone in your job should have any problem with that.' 'My job? Let's examine that. Basically I'm still what I started out as, a journalist, and in that game you don't get brownie points for jumping into bed with the police.' 'Didn't do Jax Ripley any harm.' Dalziel had done one of his Red Shadow entrances; you don't know he's there till he bursts into song. 'What?' said Wingate, turning and looking alarmed. Then, recovering, he smiled and said, 'Superintendent, I didn't see you. Yes, well, Jax, God bless her, had her own techniques.' 'Certainly did,' said Dalziel. 'Don't want to interrupt, Pete, but just wanted to check with Mr Wingate if his missus was going to be at home this afternoon. Thought I might pop round and have a chat.' This produced a shared moment of bewilderment with Pascoe which might be to the good. 'Moira? But why should you want to talk to Moira about Dee and Penn?' asked Wingate. 'No reason, 'cos I don't. No, it's just a general chat I had in mind.' 'Yes, but why?' insisted Wingate, still more puzzled than aggressive. 'I'm conducting a murder investigation, Mr Wingate,' said Dalziel heavily. 'Several murder investigations.' 'So what's that got to do with her? She had no special connection with any of the victims.' 'She knew Jax Ripley, didn't she? I can talk to her about Jax Ripley and what she got up to. All right, I can probably tell her more than she can tell me. But I'm clutching at straws, Mr Wingate, and I might as well clutch at your missus, seeing it doesn't look like there's going to be owt to clutch at here. Is there, Mr Wingate?' He smiled one of his terrible smiles, lips drawn back from

331 savage teeth, like the jaws of a mechanical digger about to seize and uproot a tree. Pascoe was long acquainted with the Fat Man and all his winning ways and his mind had whipped, computer quick, through a wide selection of possible scenarios and opted for the one which-made most sense. The Fat Man was telling Wingate he knew that he'd been banging Jax Ripley and was offering him the simple choice all detectives at some time offer most criminals - bubble or be bubbled. Wingate's mind clearly moved as fast, or even faster as he had also to work out the best response. Not that there was much real alternative. He caved in instantly but to do him justice he caved in with style, turning back to Pascoe and saying with a good shot at urbanity, 'Where were we? Oh yes, you were asking me about my schooldays. And Dee and Penn. Now let me see what I can recall...'

It wasn't a very edifying story, but then the behaviour of schoolboys rarely has much to do with edification. Penn and Dee had arrived at Unthank on the same day without previous acquaintance but soon found themselves thrown together by a common cause, survival. Unlike the majority of pupils whose parents paid the school's fees, they were scholarship kids, known to the fee-payers as 'skulks', who were admitted under a system by which, in return for a modicum of support from the public exchequer, the college undertook to educate three or four scions of the commonalty each ^ year. Schoolchildren love elected victims - the strong to have a legitimate target for their strength, the weak to help divert persecution from themselves. Most victims, said Wingate, were localized by year, first-year skulks suffering at the hands of first-year bullies and so on. But some became a general target, usually because of some particularly distinguishing feature, like colour or a speech impediment. 'Penn got singled out when we found out he was German,' said Wingate. 'His first name is Karl, not Charles, which was pretty suspicious. Then someone saw his mother when she visited the school, a large lady, very blonde who spoke with a heavy Germanic accent. His father's real name, we soon found out, had been Penck, Ludwig Penck, which he'd changed to Penn when he got naturalized. I heard later that they'd got out of East Berlin when the Wall went up and kept going to the UK because Penck had an uncle here who'd been a p.o.w. in Yorkshire and stayed on after the war. Penck would have been sent back to West Germany, but his uncle was working on the estate of Lord Partridge, looking after his horses. Partridge was a Tory MP then, in the Cabinet, and he quickly took up the Pencks' cause. With old Macmillan in charge, liberal credentials could still do a Tory a bit of good back then, not like the present bunch where you need to kick two foreigners before breakfast to establish you're the right stuff. So he got permission to stay plus a job. Good heart-warming stuff, but of course at school no one was much interested in the political background, except maybe to think that if anyone had been persecuted once that was very good reason to persecute them again!' ''Kraut,' said Hat suddenly, his first contribution to the conversation.

They all looked at him. 'I heard Dee call Mr Penn Kraut,' he explained. 'That's right, that's what he used to be called at school. Karl the Kraut,' said Wingate. 'And he called Mr Dee something back ... it sounded like whoresonY 'It would have been. Karl the Kraut and Orson the Whoreson,' said Wingate. 'Dee's mother came to the school too. Everyone was always very interested in everyone else's parents. Anything you could use to embarrass anyone with was avidly seized upon. Mrs Dee was dead glamorous in a rather flashy way. Miniskirts were in then and she wore one right up to her bum. To add to the poor kid's other troubles, he had this birthmark, a sort of light brown patch of skin running down his belly into his groin. Some bastard suggested it was a symptom of some nasty disease he'd caught from his mother, and christened him Orson the Whoreson.' 'You can always tell a well brought-up boy by his manners,' said Dalziel. 'Why Orson?'

333 'That was one of his names,' said Wingate. 'His mother hadn't done him any favours, had she? I presume she was a movie fan.' 'Sir,' said Hat excitedly, 'you remember when I found . ..' Pascoe shut him up with a glance. The Pascoe glance might lack the Big Bertha impact of Dalziel's facial artillery, yet it had a Medusa-like quality which served just as well. 'So,' said the DCI to Wingate, 'we've got a couple of kids being bullied rotten by their social superiors, what happened next?' 'Let's not make this a class thing,' said Wingate equably. 'OK, they were skulks, but it wasn't just that. You'll find just as much bullying in your local comp. Even at Unthank you didn't have to be a skulk to get picked on. There was another kid Penn and Dee were pretty thick with. Little Johnny Oakeshott. He was no skulk, in fact his family could probably have bought and sold most of the rest of us . . .' 'Any connection with the Oakeshotts out of Beverley?' inter rupted Dalziel. 'Them as own halfHumberside?' 'That's the family,' said Wingate. 'Didn't stop Johnny from getting bullied. He was small, a bit girlish, lovely curly blond hair and the poor kid had a bit of a lisp. And his real name was Sinjon, which didn't help.' 'Sinjon spelt Stjohn?' said Pascoe. 'That's right. He became Johnny when Dee and Penn took him under their wing. Not that that was much protection to start with as the hunt was very much up for them. They were both pretty' small too, not as small as Johnny but small enough to be easy meat. Plus they were both pretty odd in their different ways. And that's what really sets off the bullies.' 'So what happened? Were they bullied all the way through school?' 'Far from it,' said Wingate. 'By the time I was in the fourth ; year and they were in the third, things had changed.' 'They'd started to fit in, you mean?' 'Hardly. But not fitting in isn't the point at school. It's the way you don't fit in. Penn's route to acceptability was the more conventional. He'd shot up and bulked out. He was never a heavy weight, you understand, but when he fought, he fought to kill. When he beat up the boss bully in his class, we all took notice.', When he sorted out the tough guy in my year too, it was universally agreed that Perm was not a suitable target any more.' 'And Dee?' 'Well, first of all he benefited from Penn making it clear that any attack on his mate, Dee, was an attack on himself. But at the same time his oddity developed along lines which entertained rather than alienated his classmates. He was obsessed with words, the more weird and wonderful the better, and he started using these during lessons. It was a marvellous form of piss-taking because the teachers couldn't really complain about it. They either had to admit their ignorance or try to bluff it out. Some of them tried to ignore him when he put his hand up to answer a question but the other kids caught on and made sure that often Dee's was the only hand that went up.' 'In other words, he had to perform to be accepted?' said Pascoe. Wingate shrugged. 'We all find our own ways to survive, at all ages,' he said, glancing at Dalziel. The Fat Man yawned widely. Indeed hippopotamicly, thought Pascoe. If such a word existed. He said, 'How about making up words?' Wingate smiled coldly and said, 'How like the police to know more than they let on. Yes, he did that too, which added a new element to this game he played with the staff who now also ran the risk of pretending to understand a word which didn't even exist. But it wasn't just a case of epater la pedagogic, he used to put these collections of words together into his own personal dictionaries, each one devoted to a special area. I recall there was a European dictionary, and an Ecclesiastic, and an Educational that was quite fun. But the one that really confirmed his status in the adolescent intellectual world was his Erotic dictionary. He had, I seem to recall, over a hundred words related to female genitalia. I don't know whether it was a real word or one of his own, but if you ever hear a man of my age refer to his woman's twilfy-flew, you know he's an old Unthinkable.' 'Ee,' said Wield. 'Eh?' said Wingate. 'All the examples you gave began with an E. European, Educational, Erotic.' 'Oh yes. That was part of the joke. It was our Head of English