Reginald Hill - Dialogues of the Dead

Pascoe wanted to think about the strategy of the Wordman investigation and why it had failed. Hat wanted to think about Rye Pomona and whether she was still with Dee. But these troublesome thoughts seemed to lose their pace and energy as they ran up against the invisible barrier of this zone of calm elsewhereness.

It’s like, thought Pascoe (and even this thought did not set his pulses racing), it’s like those moments described in the Dialogues when time slows towards a halt …it’s as if the Wordman has trailed his aura and I am on the edge of his dimension, that passive world in which he is the only active element.

This is where I should be looking for him, not out there in the busy world of routines, and elimination, and forensics. This is the secret place of his dwelling.

He let his body relax even more.

Psalm 27. He is back in church reading Psalm 27. The Lord is my light. He tries to move elsewhere, that part of his mind which is still a Detective Chief Inspector wanting to use this weird feeling to range over the whole of the case but not finding any response to the controls. This is what the Wordman must feel, he thinks. Whatever I do in this timeless time is what I have to do, not what I want to do.

Still in the church reading the Psalm, but also in his office at the station, he reaches out to pull the Wordman file across his desk towards him. He intends to open it and look at the psalm references that have been isolated. But instead he opens it at the very beginning, at the strange drawing, the In Principio . His fingers have no strength to turn further. What am I looking for? he asks himself. The twin oxen. The two alephs . The AA man. This I know already. What else?

In principio erat verbum .

The opening of the gospel according to St. John.

Dee was at St. John’s College.

Roote is in the St. John Ambulance Brigade.

Johnny Oakeshott’s real name was St. John.

St. John, the “son of thunder,” St. John, symbolized by the eagle, St. John who bored his followers by his too often repeated exhortation to them to “love one another” because if you do that “you do enough;” who came close to being dumped into a cauldron of boiling oil under the persecution of the Emperor Domitian but escaped to die a natural death of ripe old age at Ephesus where he’d had a run in with a high priest of the goddess Diana, whose worship also brought a lot of trouble Paul’s way …

Very interesting but not relevant, not at the moment anyway-or rather not at the non-moment, not in this segment of non-time. Something else, he knows there is something else.

And outside his door, in the CID room, less self-consciously perhaps, Hat Bowler too sits on this shore of time and feels its mighty turbulent ocean recede. Rye, Rye, he wants to think of Rye but all he can conjure up is that date in the Dialogue: 1576. Fifteen seventy-six. It means something to him …Once more he rehearses all that he has been able to discover about it but nothing cries out to him …or rather nothing stops crying, for that’s what it feels like …like hearing a baby crying in a big empty house and rushing from room to room but finding them all empty …and still the baby cries …

One more door remains …behind this last door must lie the truth …

The door bursts open …

“Sorry, did I wake you, lad?” says Sergeant Wield. “Mr. Pascoe in?”

And without waiting for an answer he crashes just as unceremoniously into Pascoe’s office and with him comes surging back the relentless tide of time.

“Wieldy,” said Pascoe, reaching for his cold coffee. “No need to knock. Just come right in. Make yourself at home.”

With a confidence of welcome that put him beyond the reach of irony, Wield said, “Something you ought to see. First off, that partial on Ripley’s mule, we’ve got a match.”

“A match? I don’t follow. They reported no match on record.”

“Aye, but that was before the matching print was part of the record,” said Wield. “You recall we took Dee’s prints to match them with the prints on the axe that topped the Hon. …”

“Dee. You’re saying we’ve got a match with Dee?”

“Not a complete, but ten points, which, considering what little there was to work with, is a big step,” said Wield, laying a couple of sheets of paper in front of Pascoe.

“Ten’s a long way from sixteen,” said Pascoe disappointedly. “And how the hell did this come up anyway? Officially, Dee was never anything but a witness and his prints were taken purely for elimination, because he’d been using the axe.”

The rules were very clear. All fingerprints provided voluntarily for purposes of elimination had to be destroyed the minute the elimination process was complete.

“Don’t know what happened,” said Wield. “Must somehow have got put in the system for cross-checking against the record and by the time they reached the top of the queue, that partial from Ripley’s mule was part of the record. Something like that, I expect.”

When a master of precise detail starts being vague, it is best to look the other way, especially when the possible illegalities have a smell of Dalziel about them.

Pascoe looked the other way and said, “OK, but I can’t get excited, Wieldy. It’s not usable in court and even if we had a full sixteen-point match, with the bad press prints have had recently, we’d need a hell of a lot more.”

Wield said with just a hint of reproof, “Worked that out for myself. I thought, what else? And I remembered the bite.”

“The bite? Ah, yes. We had forgot the bite. And …?”

“I’ve been round to see Mr. Molar. Had to get him out of a lecture, he weren’t best pleased. But it was worth it. He compared Dee’s dental record with the bite and he says that it’s a definite maybe verging on a possible definitely that those teeth made that bite.”

“Dee’s dental records …?” Pascoe’s mind was spinning. “How the hell did you get hold of Dee’s dental records?”

“All above board,” said Wield briskly. “He gave us written permission to see his medical records when we were talking to him about the Hon.’s death, remember? Almost fell over himself to do it. Well, dental comes under medical, and as the permission was still on the file …”

There were more potential illegalities floating around here than in a Marbella swimming pool, thought Pascoe.

Sod them!

He shook them out of his head, opened his mouth to shout for Hat, then saw it wasn’t necessary.

The DC was standing in the doorway, his face aglow at the thought of getting Dick Dee into the middle of the frame.

Pascoe said, “Right. Let’s talk to Mr. Dee again, but softly, softly. No point in putting the boot in till we know what we’re kicking. All this could mean owt or it could mean nowt.”

The use of Dalzielesque phraseology emphasized the point he was making. There’d been too many instances recently of policemen going in hard with too little evidence and either warning off the guilty or provoking official complaints from the innocent.

“We’ll need someone to stay here and co-ordinate matters. And try to raise the super at the Black Bull.”

He looked at Hat, saw the disappointment and the pleading in his eyes, and said, “Better be you, Wieldy. There’s a trail here which could need some tidying up if it leads anywhere, and you’re best equipped to do it.”

No doubt about that. At the moment what little they had could be dispersed instantly by one indignant snort from a smart lawyer’s nostrils.

“Hat, you come with me to the library.”

“But it’s closed today. Mark of respect.”

“Hell, I’d forgotten. But that doesn’t mean the staff won’t be there. Dee and Rye Pomona drove straight off after the funeral. Clearly they weren’t going to the Lichen.”