Reginald Hill - Dialogues of the Dead

He looked into his glass with what might have been melancholia or was perhaps just a hint that it was almost empty.

“So his parents came to Yorkshire to settle, did they?”

“Got brought to Yorkshire. Lord Partridge, big Tory politician way back, he sponsored them. Bit of a gesture to show he was doing his bit to fight the red peril, I expect. Fair do’s but, he took care of ’em. She worked around the house, he helped with the horses. And Charley got a good education. Unthank College. Better’n me. Mebbe I should have been a refugee.”

“Unthank College? But isn’t that a public, I mean a private school? Boarders and all that?”

“So what? You’re not one of them trendy Trots, are you?”

“No. What I meant was, he doesn’t sound like he went to one of those places. He sounds more like …”

He tailed off, fearful of giving offence, but Dalziel said complacently, “More like me, you mean? Aye, you’re right, whatever else they did to Charley there, they didn’t get him speaking like he’d got a silver spoon up his arse. Interesting, that.”

Encouraged, Hat said, “Are both his parents still alive?”

“Don’t know much about ’em apart from what I’ve told you. In fact, come to think of it, I’d not heard Charley mention either of them till he started on about rushing off to see his mam just now.”

“She must be a good age. Penn’s no spring chicken,” said Hat.

“Nay, Charley’s not as old as he looks,” said Dalziel. “Continental skin tone, you see. Doesn’t age half as well as us home-grown stock. Likes to think he passes for a native, but you can always tell. But that’s no reason to be racially prejudiced, lad. He might look like an old-time axe-murderer, but I can’t see anything here that looks like a motive, not even in the dusk with the light behind it. You heard what he said about Ripley. They’d kissed and made out.”

“Yes, sir. But, well, even if, or especially if he’d killed her, he would say that, wouldn’t he?”

Dalziel laughed and said, “Now you’re thinking like a cop, lad. No, even if he were lying about that, he’d still need a better reason than her badmouthing his books five years back. Not that I think that were his real reason for assaulting her. Like I told him, I think what really pissed him off were her suggesting he’d never finish this thing he’s writing about Heinz.”

“Heine,” said Bowler.

“Both on ’em,” said Dalziel. “Any road, he tells me now it’s coming on nicely, so bang goes that motive if it ever was one.”

“Don’t quite follow …”

“Someone takes the piss saying you’re not up to finishing something you’ve started, you sock it to ’em by finishing it, not by killing ’em. It’s only if you think they may be right that you turn violent, which was why Charley reached for the pudding trolley in the first place. But now he reckons he’s cracked it, and in any case a peace treaty’s been sealed with a loving bang, where’s the point?”

“But surely the thing about the Wordman is he doesn’t need a motive, not in the strict sense. He’s got some other agenda,” argued Hat, reluctant to give up on Penn.

“Oh aye? I should never have let you listen to yon pair of academic mutton-tuggers,” said Dalziel. “You’ll be talking profiles next. How do you think Charley Penn fits in here, then?”

The Fat Man’s tone was sceptical and mocking, yet Bowler felt that there was a real and testing purpose in his question.

He recalled what Rye had told him about Penn and said, “He’s a man who feels he’s been diverted for the last twenty years or so from his real purpose by having to make a living out of some historical fantasy world.”

“And that makes him doolally? That would mean all novelists are a bit dippy, wouldn’t it? You could have something there.”

“Yes, sir. But the real purpose Penn has been diverted from isn’t getting to grips with the real world but writing about what another writer was writing about back in the historical world these novels of his are set in. I mean, I know he comes over as very direct and down to earth, a bit cynical even, the typical blunt Yorkshire tyke …”

He realized Dalziel was regarding him leerily and hastened on.

“… but even that’s an act, isn’t it? He’s not a tyke, he went to public school, he’s not even English. And when you look at where he spends his inner life, he’s a long way detached from reality, it seems to me. That’s what our job’s about, isn’t it, sir? Some of the time, anyway. Working out what’s actually going on inside people who are trying to hide it. We all do that, I reckon, all try to hide it a lot of the time, and it’s hard to know what anyone’s really feeling or thinking. But a writer, an artist, has to give his inner life away much more than most people, ’cos that’s what he’s trying to sell us.”

He halted, breathless, feeling he’d let his tongue run away with him and probably undone what little progress he’d made in his rehabilitation with the Fat Man, whose bloodshot eyes were regarding him like he’d just materialized out of a space capsule.

“You been spending a lot of time with Mr. Pascoe, have you, lad?” he said finally. “Me, I can’t get to grips with my Inner Life on an empty stomach, and from the way you’re rambling, I reckon you’ve not been eating properly either. All right, don’t look like I’ve just sat on your hamster. There’s definitely something weird about Charley Penn, I’ll give you that. But then I think there’s definitely something weird about Charley Windsor too, and I’m not going after him. Now let’s get serious. I recall that once upon a time they did a decent Scotch pie and mushy peas in this place. But I’ll tell you something …”

“What, sir?” said Bowler.

“If yon barman gives me a Cornish pasty and says I won’t notice the difference, I’ll shake the bugger till he spews his Inner Life all over the bar!”

Jax Ripley had been born and brought up in a large village with aspirations to be a small town on the southern fringe of the North Yorkshire moors, and it was here that her widowed mother brought her back to be buried.

If Charley Penn was right and Jax Ripley’s killer was at her funeral, then the police were spoilt for choice, thought Hat Bowler, looking at the teeming graveyard from the vantage point of the church porch. Family, friends, and professional colleagues would probably have formed a large congregation, but add to these those who imagined they knew her because of her TV show and those who were merely and vulgarly curious, and you were into celebrity proportions.

John Wingate was there, of course, plus his cameraman filming from a discreet distance. A similar duality was visible in the Gazette presence, with Mary Agnew in mourning black, very much the grieving friend and colleague, while Sammy Ruddlesdin made sure that local decorum didn’t prevent the Gazette photographer from sharing the photo-opportunities so ruthlessly seized by the unconscienced nationals whose hyenas were there in packs. Percy Follows and Dick Dee were there from the library. Hat had rung Rye to check if she was going but been told fairly brusquely that (a) she hardly knew the woman and (b) someone had to stay and do the work. Unmissable was Ambrose Bird, the Last of the Actor-Managers. Hat wondered what his relationship with the dead woman had been. Perhaps he simply did not feel able to deprive such a theatrical scene of his strikingly melancholy presence, though there were some who felt that a calf-length purple cloak was more ham than Hamlet. He had overtaken Follows up the aisle and managed to get the last seat in the second row of pews, turning to smile triumphantly at his rival.