Reginald Hill - Dialogues of the Dead

She paused, wondering, Am I babbling? Dalziel was certainly looking at her as if he reckoned she was delirious.

She got help from an unexpected source.

Wield said, “You mean his reason for chopping the Hon.’s head off could be something to do with words, with these steps you’re talking about, rather than with the Wordman’s state of mind. External, not internal?”

“That’s right,” she said. “Like he thought, all right, I’ve got a body, that’s a step. Now if I do this and this with it, that would be another two steps. He’s eager to be moving forward along this path he keeps talking about and when something like this occurs, whatever it was, of course he puts it down to divine intervention or something.”

“So what are you suggesting?” asked Pascoe.

“Maybe instead of concentrating on clues in the conventional sense, we should start collecting words. Listing them in every way we can until one of the lists makes some kind of sense.”

“Examples, please,” said Pascoe encouragingly.

Dalziel would have growled, “Money where your mouth is, luv, else keep it zipped.” She felt that she would have preferred that, then glanced at him, saw his expression, and changed her mind.

“Well, Pyke-Strengler’s body was found in the stream, right, and his head in a fishing basket in his boat. So words like stream, water, beck, brook, river, and boat, basket …wickerwork …creel …”

She was starting to feel very tired and these swirling ideas which had seemed on the verge of coalescing into something solid were beginning to dissipate like morning mist, but she pressed on.

“And this latest, Bird and …whatsisname …words like coin …and dollar …and money …”

She felt something like a sob gathering in her throat and tailed off into silence because it seemed a better alternative.

Dalziel and Pascoe exchanged glances then the Fat Man said, “Ivor, that’s grand. You keep working on that, eh? I really appreciate you coming in like this, and the Chief’ll have noted it too. Now I reckon it’s time you headed off home for a bit of a rest.”

Cue to say, No, I feel fine, but speech felt even more treacherous in face of this lumbering sympathy, so instead she stood up, nodded curtly, and made it out of the door without a wobble.

Dalziel said, “Wieldy, see she’s all right. Don’t know what you were thinking of, Pete, pressing her like that when she’s still convalescing.”

“Hang about,” said Pascoe indignantly. “It wasn’t my idea having her here.”

“Wasn’t it? All right. Back to the case. What other ideas are you not having?”

“Keep banging away at Penn, Roote and Dee, I suppose.”

“Sound like a firm of dodgy solicitors. That it?”

“Yup. Sorry. How about you, sir?”

“Me?” Dalziel yawned widely and scratched his crotch like it had offended him. “Think I’ll go home and read a good book.”

And I can guess which one it’s likely to be, Hamish , thought Pascoe.

But being a sensitive man, with a wife, child, child’s dog, and mortgage to support, he didn’t say it.

HAT BOWLER’S UNPRODUCTIVE schoolboy flirtation with History had left him with a vague notion that the sixteenth century was a period which most of the English nation spent at the theatre.

It was at first a comfort when Rye Pomona pointed out that there’d been quite a lot of real-life action too.

Henry VIII had told the Pope to take a hike while he carved his way through six wives, though, disappointingly, it emerged he’d only executed two of them. Next Bloody Mary had disfigured, dismembered, disembowelled, and in sundry other ways disposed of large numbers of her subjects on the very reasonable grounds that she didn’t like the colour of their religion. Marginally less extreme on the religious front, Elizabeth had not spared to use the axe as a political statement even when it involved removing the heads of her Scots cousin and her Essex lover. And of course there’d been wars on land and sea, mainly against the Spanish whose great Armada was repulsed and scattered by a combination of English seamanship and English weather.

With such a record of bloody violence throughout the century, Hat had high hopes of finding something pertinent to the Wordman’s plans in the year 1576.

Alas, even when Rye had moved out of her own memory into that of the computer, it soon became apparent that of all years, this had been one of the least eventful. He tried to work the information that James Burbage had built the first playhouse in Shoreditch and that the explorer Martin Frobisher had made the first of his three voyages up the North American coast in search of the Northwest Passage into some kind of significant metaphor of the Wordman’s intentions, but it was beyond his ingenuity.

Appeal to Rye’s greater imaginative powers had no effect. He had, as usual, told her everything on the grounds that half knowledge is more dangerous than complete ignorance but for once she had shown little interest in his indiscretion. She seemed as thrown down in spirits as the rest of the library staff, among whom the huge buzz initially generated by the news, manner, and circumstances of Percy Follows’ death had rapidly faded to a pall-like silence under which individuals brooded on the meaning of these things. Even the chatty students in the reference library seemed subdued by it and took little advantage of the absence from his customary cubicle of Charley Penn whose snarling remonstrances usually kept them in order.

Nor was Dick Dee to be seen, so the second of Dalziel’s stated objectives-letting two of the prime suspects know that one of the Dialogue’s puzzles had been penetrated-had failed as completely as the first.

“How about something more local?” suggested Hat. “Was anything special happening in Mid-Yorkshire in 1576?”

“I’ve no idea,” she said. “Look, there’s the computer. You want to play around with the history archives, be my guest. With Dick not here, I’ve got plenty to be getting on with.”

“So where is he?” asked Hat.

“Senior staff crisis meeting with the chair of the Centre Committee,” said Rye.

“So you’re the bossman,” he said. “Congrats. Why don’t you use your authority to give yourself an extended coffee break.”

He smiled at her, he hoped winningly.

Vain hope.

She said, “For God’s sake, can’t you get it into your head that I’ve got a job to do too? And it strikes me you might be better employed doing yours somewhere else instead of wasting time hanging around here, asking about a stupid date. There are people dead, Hat, don’t you understand that? You seem to be treating it like it was some sort of game.”

Oh but it is! the retort formed in his mind. But now his eyes were telling him what his heart ought to have spotted much sooner, that here was a young woman who, only a few days after finding a severed head in a basket, had once again been brought in close contact with the monster, death.

He said, “Rye, I’m sorry …I thought, telling you everything like I do, well, I think I was beginning to think of you as another cop …I don’t mean …what I mean is, coping the way we do …the way we have to because it’s our job …but it’s not yours …I’m sorry.”

She looked at him for a moment, then said, “We all have to cope, Hat. Look under Local History Legal Chronology,” before turning away and retreating into the office.

As offers of olive branches go, that, he reckoned, was about as good as it was going to get.

He sat himself down at the computer, recalling with amusement pretending to be baffled by it as an excuse to make contact with Rye just a few short weeks ago. As a ploy, it hadn’t worked, except to put him handy when they needed a cop. In fact, come to think of it, if anything had brought them together, it was the Wordman. An uncomfortable basis for a relationship? Why so? No reason not to be grateful if good came out of evil.