Reginald Hill - Dialogues of the Dead

“Nay, lad, that’s why I keep clever sods like you, to do my explaining.”

“Then perhaps you should listen when I say that Roote’s not crying murder without a reason.”

“Double bluff, you mean? Because he did it? Nay, I’ll give you he may be feeling guilty, but there’s all kinds of guilt. What if him and Johnson had got a thing going …”

“A thing?”

“Aye. A thing. Buggering around with each other. I were trying to save your blushes. That Sunday they go to the flat for a quick bang then have a tiff. Roote flounces out. Johnson thinks he’ll be back any minute and settles down with his book and a coffee, then this dicky ticker you told me about reacts to all the excitement of the row and whatever else they’d been getting up to, and he snuffs it.”

The preliminary medical examination hadn’t got any further than suggesting heart failure as the cause of death. The examiner reckoned that Johnson had been dead at least two days which took them back to Sunday when Roote was the last person to admit to seeing him alive. The full post mortem examination would take place the following morning. Roote’s prints were on the glass by the other armchair but not on the coffee mug or whisky bottle which had been sent to the police lab for further examination and analysis.

“Meanwhile Roote’s really taken the huff,” continued Dalziel. “He doesn’t go back, reckoning that Johnson will come running after him some time in the next couple of days. When he doesn’t, Roote starts to get worried, and naturally when he sees him dead, he doesn’t want to blame himself so he cries murder. What do you think?”

I think, thought Pascoe, you’re feeling the pressure, Andy, and you’d kill someone if it meant not having another murder on your patch.

“I think if there was much more assumption in what you’re saying, they’d make this a feast day,” he said forcefully. “For a start, Sam’s heart problem wasn’t life-threatening. And what makes you think either of them’s gay?”

“Well, blind man on a galloping horse can see there’s summat very odd about Roote. Bit of a swordsman back in yon college, by all accounts, but it didn’t stop him getting tangled up with that lecturer who died, the one who topped himself. Funny, now I think back, weren’t he called Sam too? Which brings us to this Johnson, I only met him the once at yon preview, but he’s another of your arty-farty intellectuals, isn’t he?”

“For God’s sake!” exclaimed Pascoe. “Is that the full menu, then? Big slice of guesswork topped up with prejudice?”

“I’ll let you be the judge of that, Pete,” said Dalziel. “I mean, I’m no lover of Franny Roote, but it seems to me you can’t look at the guy without wanting to blame him for everything in sight. That’s what I call prejudice.”

Feeling he had been set up, Pascoe said stubbornly, “All right, I’ve got no evidence that Roote’s directly involved in this. But one thing I know for certain, Roote’s not crying murder because he feels guilty. That bastard never felt guilty about anything in his life!”

“First time for everything, lad,” said Dalziel genially. “I might start putting Ribena in my whisky. Who the hell’s that?”

The phone had rung. He picked it up and bellowed, “What?”

As he listened, he looked increasing less genial.

“Fucking champion,” he said banging the receiver down. “They’ve traced Johnson’s next of kin.”

Following usual procedure in suspicious deaths, the police had checked to see if anyone profited. They found Sam Johnson had died intestate, which meant his next of kin got what little he had to leave. Pascoe recalled Ellie asking the lecturer about his family when he came to dinner. He had replied tipsily, “Like Cinderella, I am an orphan, but I am fortunate in having only one ugly stepsister to avoid,” then refused, with a pantomimic shudder, to be drawn further.

“The step-sister, is it?” said Pascoe. “So?”

“So you know who she turns out to be? Only Linda Lupin, MEP. Loopy bloody Linda!”

“You’re kidding? No wonder he didn’t want to talk about her!”

Linda Lupin was to the European Parliament what Stuffer Steel had been to Mid-Yorkshire Council, a thorn in the flesh and a pain in the ass. So right wing she occasionally even managed to embarrass William Hague, she never missed a chance to trumpet financial mismanagement or creeping socialism. A lousy linguist, she could nevertheless cry I accuse! in twelve languages. Deeply religious in an alternative Anglican kind of way, and passionately opposed to women priests, Loopy Linda, as even the Tory tabloids called her, was not the kind of relative a trendy left-wing academic would care to admit to. And she was certainly not the kind of crime victim’s next of kin an investigator under pressure wanted knocking at his door.

“As if things weren’t bad enough with Desperate Dan and all the tabloids on my back,” groaned Dalziel, “now I’m going to have Loopy Linda sitting on my face.”

Pascoe tried turning the words into a picture but its grotesqueries required a Cruikshank or a Scarfe.

But at least the entrance of Loopy Linda on the scene had the good effect of ending the Fat Man’s brief flirtation with the role of Wise Old Sensible Cop.

“Right, Pete, I’m converted,” he declared, pushing himself to his feet. “Whatever that bastard Roote’s guilty of, let’s start pulling out his fingernails till he confesses!”

But this pleasant prospect had to be postponed till the following day as, whatever Roote’s real state of mind, he had convinced the medics that he was too distraught to be questioned.

There was no doubt about the genuineness of Ellie Pascoe’s distraction when she heard the news of Johnson’s death.

She went out into the garden where, despite the chill evening air, she stood unmoving under the skeletal ornamental cherry tree for almost half an hour. Her rangily athletic frame seemed somehow to have lost its old elasticity and Pascoe, watching through the French window was shocked to find himself for the first time thinking of that lithe body he knew so well as frail. Rosie, his young daughter, came to his side and asked, “What’s Mum doing?”

“Nothing. She just wants to be alone for a bit,” said Pascoe lightly, concerned not to let adult distress spill over into the child’s world, but Rosie seemed to take this desire for solitude as entirely natural and said, “I expect she’ll come in if it starts raining,” then went off in search of her beloved dog.

“Sorry,” said Ellie when she returned. “I just had to get my head round it. Not that I have. Oh God, poor Sam. Coming here to make a new start, then this …”

“New start?” said Pascoe.

“Yes. It was pretty much a sideways move, you know. He’d had …a loss back in Sheffield, it seems, and just wanted to get away, and this job came up unexpectedly, so he applied, got it, then took off abroad for the summer. That’s how they landed him with this creative writing thing. That should really have been a separate post but he wasn’t in a state to argue and naturally the bastards took advantage …”

“Hang on,” said Pascoe. “This loss …you never said anything about this and I never heard Sam mention it.”

“Me neither,” admitted Ellie. “It was just gossip, you know what they’re like at the Uni, bunch of old women …”

On another occasion this combination of ageism and sexism from such a doughty defender of human rights might have cued mock-outrage, but not now.

“In other words, your old SCR chums filled you in on Sam’s background? Or at least the gossip,” said Pascoe.

“That’s right. Gossip. Which was why I never said anything to you. I mean, it was Sam’s business. It seems that in Sheffield there was some student Sam got very close to, and he had some kind of accident, and he died …”