Reginald Hill: Dialogues of the Dead

He shook his head, smiling. No smarl this. He had a rather nice smile. One of the rather nice things about it was that he used it alike to greet compliment or insult, triumph or disaster. A couple of days earlier for instance a lesser man might have flapped when a badly plugged shelf had collapsed under the weight of the twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary , scattering a party of civic dignitaries on a tour of the borough’s newly refurbished Heritage, Arts and Library Centre. Only one of the visitors had been hit, receiving the full weight of Volume II on his toe. This was Councillor Cyril Steel, a virulent opponent of the Centre whose voice had frequently been raised in the council against “wasting good public money on a load of airy nowt.” Percy Follows had run around like a panicked poodle, fearing a PR disaster, but Dee had merely smiled into the TV camera recording the event for BBC Mid-Yorks and said, “Now even Councillor Steel will have to admit that a little learning can be a dangerous thing and not all our nowts are completely airy,” and continued with his explanatory address.

Now he said, “No, I’m not suggesting this as a contender for the prize, though it’s not badly written. As for the drawing, it’s part illustration and part illumination, I think. But what’s really interesting is the way it chimes with something I read in today’s Gazette.”

He picked up a copy of the Mid-Yorkshire Gazette from the newspaper rack. The Gazette came out twice weekly, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. This was the midweek edition. He opened it at the second page, set it before her and indicated a column with his thumb.

AA MAN DIES IN TRAGIC ACCIDENT

The body of Mr. Andrew Ainstable (34), a patrol officer with the Automobile Association, was found apparently drowned in a shallow stream running under the Little Bruton road on Tuesday morning. Thomas Killiwick (27) a local farmer who made the discovery theorized that Mr. Ainstable, who it emerged was on his way to a Home Start call at Little Bruton, may have stopped for a call of nature, slipped, and banged his head, but the police are unable to confirm or to deny this theory at this juncture. Mr. Ainstable is survived by his wife, Agnes, and a widowed mother. An inquest is expected to be called in the next few days.

“So what do you think?” asked Dee again.

“I think from the style of this report that they were probably wise at the Gazette to ask us to judge the literary merit of these stories,” said Rye.

“No. I mean this Dialogue thing. Bit of an odd coincidence, don’t you think?”

“Not really. I mean, it’s probably not a coincidence at all. Writers must often pick up ideas from what they read in the papers.”

“But this wasn’t in the Gazette till this morning. And this came out of the bag of entries they sent round last night. So presumably they got it some time yesterday, the same day this poor chap died, and before the writer could have read about it.”

“OK, so it’s a coincidence after all,” said Rye irritably. “I’ve just read a story about a man who wins the lottery and has a heart attack. I dare say that this week somewhere there’s been a man who won something in the lottery and had a heart attack. It didn’t catch the attention of the Pulitzer prize mob at the Gazette , but it’s still a coincidence.”

“All the same,” said Dee, clearly reluctant to abandon his sense of oddness. “Another thing, there’s no pseudonym.”

The rules of entry required that, in the interests of impartial judging, entrants used a pseudonym under their story title. They also wrote these on a sealed envelope containing their real name and address. The envelopes were kept at the Gazette office.

“So he forgot,” said Rye. “Not that it matters, anyway. It’s not going to win, is it? So who cares who wrote it? Now, can I get on?”

Dick Dee had no argument against this. But Rye noticed he didn’t put the typescript either into the dump bin or on to his possibles pile, but set it aside.

Shaking her head, Rye turned her attention to the next story on her pile. It was called Dreamtime , written in purple ink in a large spiky hand averaging four words to a line, and it began:

When I woke up this morning I found I’d had a wet dream, and as I lay there trying to recall it, I found myself getting excited again …

With a sigh, she skimmed it over into the dump bin and picked another.

“What the fuck are you playing at, Roote?” snarled Peter Pascoe.

Snarling wasn’t a form of communication that came easily to him, and attempting to keep his upper teeth bared while emitting the plosive P produced a sound effect which was melodramatically Oriental with little of the concomitant sinisterity. He must pay more attention next time his daughter’s pet dog, which didn’t much like men, snarled at him.

Roote pushed the notebook he’d been scribbling in beneath a copy of the Gazette and regarded him with an expression of amiable bewilderment.

“Sorry, Mr. Pascoe? You’ve lost me. I’m not playing at anything and I don’t think I know the rules of the game you’re playing. Do I need a racket too?”

He smiled towards Pascoe’s sports bag from which protruded the shaft of a squash racket.

Cue for another snarl on the line, Don’t get clever with me, Roote!

This was getting like a bad TV script.

As well as snarling he’d been trying to loom menacingly. He had no way of knowing how menacing his looming looked to the casual observer, but it was playing hell with the strained shoulder muscle which had brought his first game of squash in five years to a premature conclusion. Premature? Thirty seconds into foreplay isn’t premature, it is humiliatingly pre-penetrative.

His opponent had been all concern, administering embrocation in the changing room and lubrication in the University Staff Club bar, with no sign whatsoever of snigger. Nevertheless, Pascoe had felt himself sniggered at and when he made his way through the pleasant formal gardens towards the car park and saw Franny Roote smiling at him from a bench, his carefully suppressed irritation had broken through and before he had time to think rationally he was deep into loom and snarl.

Time to rethink his role.

He made himself relax, sat down on the bench, leaned back, winced, and said, “OK, Mr. Roote. Let’s start again. Would you mind telling me what you’re doing here?”

“Lunch break,” said Roote. He held up a brown paper bag and emptied its contents on to the newspaper. “Baguette, salad with mayo, low fat. Apple, Granny Smith. Bottle of water, tap.”

That figured. He didn’t look like a man on a high-energy diet. He was thin just this side of emaciation, a condition exacerbated by his black slacks and T-shirt. His face was white as a piece of honed driftwood and his blond hair was cut so short he might as well have been bald.

“Mr. Roote,” said Pascoe carefully, “you live and work in Sheffield which means that even with a very generous lunch break and a very fast car, this would seem an eccentric choice of luncheon venue. Also this is the third, no I think it’s the fourth time I have spotted you in my vicinity over the past week.”

The first time had been a glimpse in the street as he drove home from Mid-Yorkshire Police HQ early one evening. Then a couple of nights later as he and Ellie rose to leave a cinema, he’d noticed Roote sitting half a dozen rows further back. And the previous Sunday as he took his daughter, Rosie, for a stroll in Charter Park to feed the swans, he was sure he’d spotted the black-clad figure standing on the edge of the unused bandstand.