Dialogues of the Dead (41 page)

345 woman was sitting at a table behind a wall of the bound Trans actions of the Mid-Yorkshire Archaeological Society, there was no sign of Penn or Roote or any of the regulars. 'Not exactly overworked, are you?' he said. 'We do other things than deal with the public,' she said. 'And with Dick busy elsewhere, I'm glad things are so quiet.' 'So what's so important in Heritage?' he asked as she led him into the office. 'It's the Roman Experience. It's due to open tomorrow. Coun cillor Steel's death tipped the balance and the money was voted through at the next council meeting.' 'They haven't hung about spending it then,' 'Everything was set up, it just needed the announcement that bills would be paid.' 'And what's it got to do with Dick?' 'Nothing really. But you know this power struggle I told you about, between Prancing Percy and the Last of the ActorManagers? Well, they're both desperately trying to take the credit for the Roman Experience, and as Dick knows infinitely more about classical history than Percy, he's been commanded along to give gravitas to Percy's pronouncements. The trouble is, from Percy's point of view, that Dick is so honest and even handed, Ambrose Bird raises no objection.' 'What about this woman, whatsername, the one who's been ill? Is she still off the scene?' 'Shh,' said Rye, lowering her voice. 'You mean Philomel Carcanet and that's her out there, hiding behind that wall of Transactions. She came in this morning to supervise the dress rehearsal. She knows more about Roman Mid-Yorkshire than anyone alive. Trouble is, she can't bear to talk to anyone alive 1' for more than five minutes, which makes for a big communication problem. She came up here to pull herself together an hour ago. She's still pulling. While those two are down there, dividing the spoils and jockeying for position when they advertise the post of Centre Director. Can you switch that kettle on?' 'So who's your money on?' asked Hat. 'They'd both be disastrous,' she said, spooning instant coffee into mugs. 'All they want is to make sure their own comer's protected. Anyway, you're not here to discuss Centre politics, are you? What's Billy Bunter told you to ask me about? I think the kettle's boiling.' I must be made of glass, thought Hat. Everyone reads me like a book. 'Books,' he said, passing her the kettle. 'You said you were a fan of Penn's novels.' 'I enjoy them,' she said, pouring water into the mugs and passing one to Hat. 'Though since he started being a fan of me, rather less so. Every time Harry Hacker says something smart or suggestive, I hear Penn's voice. A pity. The lionization of authors is a chancy business. It's like eating, really. While you're enjoying a nice piece of rump steak, you don't want to think too much about where it came from.' Hat, who had so far in his life not allowed such a consideration to trouble his digestion, nodded sagely and said, 'Very true. But to get back to Penn's books, I saw one of them once done on the telly and gave up after ten minutes, so can you give me a brief tour through them?' Then, to pre-empt the question he guessed her quizzical gaze was leading up to, he added. 'The thing is this linguist guy from the Uni reckons that the Wordman's so hung up on words, if we can get a line on the kind of stuff he reads, we raise our chances of getting a line on him.' 'Or the kind of stuff he writes, you mean,' said Rye. 'You're not interested in whether he reads the Harry Hacker novels, but whether he writes them.' 'We've got to follow all lines of enquiry,' said Hat. 'Yeah? That's what Billy Bunter's doing hounding Dick, is it? If you're not getting anywhere chasing the guilty, keep bashing away at someone innocent in the hope that you'll terrorize or trick them into a confession?' 'You may be right,' said Hat. 'But that's for top brass only. Me, I'm not even qualified to use the cattle prod yet so I've got to stick to old-fashioned methods like terrorizing people at long distance by asking questions when they're not there.' She thought about this, then said, 'Harry Hacker is a sort of mix of the poet Heine, Lermontov's hero, Pechorin, and the Scarlet Pimpernel, with a bit of Sherlock Holmes, Don Juan (Byron's rather than Mozart's) and Raffles thrown in.. .'

341 'Hold on,' said Hat. 'Remember you're talking to a simple soul whose idea of a good read is a newspaper that's got more pictures than words. If we could cut out the literary padding and just stick to straightforward facts .. .' 'To the educated mind,' she said coldly, 'what you term padding acts as a form of referential shorthand, saving many hundreds of words of one syllable. But if you insist. Harry is a Jack-the-lad, bumming around Europe in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, getting embroiled in many of the big historical events, a bit of a con artist, a bit of a crook, but with his own moral parameters and a heart of gold. His background is uncertain and one of the connecting threads running through all the books is his quest to find out about himself, psychologically, spiritually and genetically. Such introspections could be a bit of a drag in a romantic thriller, but Penn livens it up by putting it in the form of encounters with Harry's doppelganger, that's another version of himself. Sounds daft but it works.' 'I'll take your word,' said Hat. 'This Harry sounds a right weirdo. How come the books are so popular?' 'Don't get me wrong about Harry. He's a real Romantic hero. He can be the life and soul of the party, pulling the birds almost at will, yet at other times he has these fits of Byronic (sorry, I can't think of any other way of putting it) melancholy in which all he wants is to be by himself and commune with Nature. But his saving grace is a strong sense of irony which enables him to send himself up just when you think he's taking himself far too seriously. The books are full of verbal wit, lots of good jokes, passages of exciting action, good but not overdone historical backgrounds, and strong plots which often include a clever puzzle element which Harry is instrumental in solving. They are not great works of art, but they make very good not unintelligent recreational reading. Their televisation, as so often happens, manages to disguise, dilute or simply dissipate most of those elements which make the novels special and give them their unique flavour.' She paused and Hat put down his coffee mug to applaud, not entirely ironically. 'That was good,' he said. 'Fluent, stylish, and I understood nearly all of it. But just to cut to the chase, is there anything in them which might connect directly to what we know about the Wordman?' 'Well, that depends on how you're using we. I dare say the full harvest of police knowledge and what I've managed to glean from your furrow are two very different things. But from my lowly point of view, the answer is possibly, but not uniquely.' 'Eh?' 'I mean, if it turned out the Wordman had written something like the Harry Hacker series, it wouldn't be amazing. But I can think of a lot of other books it wouldn't be amazing to find he'd written, except of course that it would be, as some of the authors are dead and none of those who aren't lives in Mid-Yorkshire.' 'Which is just the point. Penn does live in Mid-Yorkshire,' said Hat. 'What about this other stuff he's interested in, the German thing?' 'Heinrich Heine? Nothing there I can think of except insofar as he's a model for Harry Hacker. Harry was Heine's given name, you know.' 'Harry? Thought you said it was Heinrich.' 'That came later. One of Penn's translations called him Harry and I asked about it and he told me that at birth Heine was named Harry after an English acquaintance of the family. It gave him a lot of grief as a kid, particularly as the sound the local rag and bone man used to yell to urge his donkey on came out something like Harry} Heine changed it to the German form when he converted to Christianity, aged twenty-seven.' Now Hat was very attentive. 'You mean the other kids used to take the piss out of him because of his name?' 'Apparently. I don't know if there was anti-Semitism there too, but the way Penn told it made it sound pretty traumatic.' 'Yes, it would,' said Hat excited. 'Same kind of thing happened to him at school.' He told her what they'd found out about Penn's background. She frowned and said, 'You're digging deep, aren't you? I presume you've been checking out Dick in the same way.' 'Yeah, well you've got to get all the relevant facts about everyone in an enquiry. In fairness to them really.' His weak justification got the scornful laugh it deserved. .

349 'So what relevant facts did you discover about Dick?' she demanded. Why was it when he was talking to Rye there always came a point when, despite the rasp of Dalziel's injunction in his mental ear, remember you're a cop!, it seemed easiest to tell her everything? He told her everything, picking up the framed photograph on the desk when he came to Johnny Oakeshott's death and saying, 'I presume that's him in the middle. Penn's got the same picture in his flat. Obviously he meant a lot to them both.' Rye took the picture and stared at the angelically smiling little boy. 'When someone you're close to dies young, yes, it does mean a lot. What's sinister about that?' He recalled her brother, Sergius, and said, 'Yes, of course it must, I didn't mean there was anything odd about that. But the attempts to get in touch with him ...' Then just in case it turned out that Rye had tried making contact through a spiritualist, or some such daft kind of thing that girls might do, he pressed on, 'But this stuff with the dictionaries, that's got to be a bit weird, hasn't it?' 'It's no big deal,' she said dismissively. 'Everyone who knows him well knows about the dictionaries. As- for his name, all you had to do was look at the electoral register. Or the council employees list. Or the telephone directory. The fact that he's known as Dick is no more significant than you being Hat or me being Rye.' 'Yes, but Orson ...' 'No worse that Ethelbert. Or Raina for that matter.' 'No I meant, Orson Welles...' She looked baffled for a moment then began to smile and eventually laughed out loud. 'Don't tell me. Orson Welles .. . Citizen Kane . .. rosebud'. I've heard of drowning men clutching at straws, but this is going out to sea in a colander. I mean, where does it lead next? Touch of Evil maybe? Though come to think of it, when I look at your Mr Dalziel, you may be on to something there .. .' He didn't get the reference but didn't think it sounded a useful line to pursue. 'These dictionaries of Dee's, you knew about them then?' he said. 'Yes. I've seen some of them.' He thought instantly of what Wingate had said about the Erotic Dictionary and said jealously, 'Which ones?' 'I really can't remember. Does it matter?' 'No. Where did you see them? Here?' He looked around the office in search of the offending tomes. 'No. At his flat.' 'You've been to his flat?' 'Any reason why I shouldn't have been?' 'No, of course not. I was just wondering what it was like.' She smiled and said, 'Nothing special. A bit cramped but maybe that's because every inch of space is crammed with dictionaries.' 'Yeah?' he said eagerly. 'Yeah,' said Rye. 'Not because he's obsessed or round the twist or anything like that, but because they are at the centre of his intellectual life. He's writing a book about them, a history of dictionaries. It will probably become the standard work when it's published.' She spoke with a sort of vicarious pride. 'When will that be?' 'Another four, five years, I'd guess.' 'Oh well. I'd probably wait for the movie anyway,' said Hat. 'Or the statue.' He sat back in his chair and sipped his coffee and looked at the pictures hanging on the wall. Once more it struck him that they were all men. But he wasn't about to remark on it, not even neutrally. Previously any hint that Dee was in the frame had provoked angry indignation. By contrast, this rational debunking he was hearing now was affectionate banter and had to indicate that he'd made progress in his quest to win her heart. No way he was going to risk that by what might sound like a homophobic sneer! He said, 'This the Dee ancestral portrait gallery?' 'No,' said Rye. 'These are all, I believe, famous creators of or contributors to dictionaries. That one's Nathaniel Bailey, I think. Noah Webster. Dr Johnson, of course. And this one here might interest a man in your line of work.' She pointed at the largest, positioned right in front of the desk, a sepia-tinted photo of a bearded man sitting on a kitchen chair

351 with a book on his knee and on his head a peakless cap which gave him the look of a Russian refugee. 'Why's that?' 'Well, his name was William Minor, he was an American doctor and a prolific and very important contributor of early instances of word usage to what eventually became the Oxford English Dictionary.' 'Fascinating,' said Hat. 'So what's his claim to fame as far as the police are concerned? Found the first use of the word copper, did he?' 'No, I don't think so. It's the fact that he spent the best part of forty years, the years in which he made his contributions to the OED, locked up in Broadmoor for murder.' 'Good God,' said Hat staring with renewed interest at the photograph. Contrary to received opinion that there is no art to read the mind's construction in the face, many of the faces that he'd seen staring back at him from official mug-shot albums seemed to have criminality deeply engraved in every lineament, but this serene figure could have modelled for the Nice Old Gent in The Railway Children. 'And what happened to him in the end?' 'Oh, he went back to America and died,' said Rye. 'You're missing the best bit,' said a new voice. 'As indeed was poor Minor.' They turned to the doorway where Charley Penn had materialized like Loki, the Aesir spirit of malicious mischief, his sardonic smile showing his uneven teeth. How long had he been in eavesdropping distance? wondered Hat. 'Can I help you, Mr Penn?' said Rye with enough frost in her voice to blast a rathe primrose. 'Just looking for Dick,' he said. 'He's in the basement. They're working on the Roman Market Experience.' 'Of course. Per Ardua ad Asda, one might say. I think I'll go and see the fun. Nice to see you again, Mr Bowler.' 'You too,' said Hat, who was working out whether Penn wanted to be asked what was the best bit Rye had missed out, or whether his intention was to provoke the question direct once he'd departed. He made up his mind and called after the retreating writer, 'So what was this best bit I haven't heard?' Penn halted and turned. 'What? Oh yes, about Minor, you mean? Well, it seemed that, despite his advancing years, the poor chap had constant erotic fantasies about naked young women which he found incompatible with his growing belief in God.' 'Yeah? Well, it must happen to a lot of older men,' said Hat with what he felt was commendable sharpness. But Penn didn't look wounded. On the contrary he grinned the saturnine grin and said, 'Surely. But they don't all sharpen their penknives and cut off their dicks, do they? Have a nice day.'