Reginald Hill - Dialogues of the Dead

Johnson had been out of the country during the long vacation and so missed the saga of Roote’s apparent suicide attempt, and the young man clearly hadn’t bellyached to him about police harassment in general and Pascoe harassment in particular, which ought to have been a point in his favour.

The lecturer concluded by saying, “So I got him the gardening job, which is why he’s out there in the garden, and he lives in town, which is why you see him around town. It’s coincidence that makes the world go round, Peter. Ask Shakespeare.”

“This Johnson,” said Dalziel, “how come you’re so chummy you take showers together? He fag for you at Eton or summat?”

Dalziel affected to believe that the academic world which had given Pascoe his degree occupied a single site somewhere in the south where Oxford and Cambridge and all the major public schools huddled together under one roof.

In fact it wasn’t Pascoe’s but his wife’s links with the academic and literary worlds which had brought Johnson into their lives. Part of Johnson’s job brief at MYU was to help establish an embryonic creative writing course. His qualification was that he’d published a couple of slim volumes of poetry and helped run such a course at Sheffield. Charley Penn, who made occasional contributions to both German and English Department courses, had been miffed to find his own expression of interest ignored. He ran a local authority literary group in danger of being axed and clearly felt that the creative writing post at MYU would have been an acceptable palliative for the loss of his LEA honorarium. Colleagues belonging to that breed not uncommon in academia, the greater green-eyed pot-stirrer , had advised Johnson to watch his back as Penn made a bad enemy, at a physical as well as a verbal level. A few years earlier, according to university legend, a brash young female journalist had done a piss-taking review of the Penn oeuvre in Yorkshire Life , the county’s glossiest mag. The piece had concluded, “They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but if you have a sweet tooth and a strong stomach, the best implement to deal with our Mr. Penn’s frothy confections might be a pudding spoon.” The following day Penn, lunching liquidly in a Leeds restaurant, had spotted the journalist across a crowded dessert trolley. Selecting a large portion of strawberry gateau liberally coated with whipped cream, he had approached her table, said, “This, madam, is a frothy confection,” and squashed the pudding on to her head. In court he had said, “It wasn’t personal. I did it not because of what she said about my books but because of her appalling style. English must be kept up,” before being fined fifty pounds and bound over to keep the peace.

Sam Johnson had immediately sought out Penn and said, “I believe you know more about Heine than anyone else in Yorkshire.”

“That wouldn’t be hard. They say you know more about Beddoes than anyone in The Dog and Duck at closing time.”

“I know he went to Göttingen University to study medicine in 1824 and Heine was there studying law.”

“Oh aye? And Hitler and Wittgenstein were in the same class at school. So what?”

“So why don’t we flaunt our knowledge in The Dog and Duck one night?”

“Well, it’s quiz night tonight. You never know. It might come up.”

Thus had armistice been signed before hostilities proper began. When talk finally turned to the writing course, Penn, after token haggling, accepted terms for making the occasional “old pro” appearance, and went on to suggest that if Johnson was interested in a contribution from some-one at the other end of the ladder, he might do worse than soon-to-be-published novelist Ellie Pascoe, an old acquaintance from her days on the university staff and a member of the threatened literary group.

This version of that first encounter was cobbled together from the slightly different accounts Ellie received from both participants. She and Johnson had hit it off straightaway. When she invited him home for a meal, the conversation had naturally centred on matters literary, and Pascoe, feeling rather sidelined, had leapt into the breach when Johnson had casually mentioned his difficulty in finding a squash partner among his generally unathletic colleagues.

His reward for this friendly gesture when Johnson finally left, late, in a taxi, had been for Ellie to say, “This game of squash, Peter, you will be careful.”

Indignantly Pascoe said, “I’m not quite decrepit, you know.”

“I’m not talking about you. I meant, with Sam. He’s got a heart problem.”

“As well as a drink problem? Jesus!”

In the event it had turned out that Johnson suffered from a mild drug-controllable tachycardia, but Pascoe wasn’t looking forward to describing to his wife the rapid and undignified conclusion of his game with someone he’d categorized as an alcoholic invalid.

“Mate of Ellie’s, eh?” said Dalziel with a slight intake of breath and a sharp shake of the VCR which, with greater economy than a Special Branch file, consigned Johnson to the category of radical, subversive, Trotskyite trouble-maker.

“Acquaintance,” said Pascoe. “Do you want a hand with that, sir?”

“No. I reckon I can throw it out of the window myself. You’re very quiet, mastermind. What do you reckon?”

Sergeant Edgar Wield was standing before the deep sash-window. Silhouetted against the golden autumn sunlight, his face deep shadowed, he had the grace and proportions to model for the statue of a Greek athlete, thought Pascoe. Then he moved forward and his features took on detail, and you remembered that if this were a statue, it was one whose face someone had taken a hammer to.

“I reckon you need to look at the whole picture,” he said. “Way back when Roote were a student at Holm Coultram College before it became part of the university, he got sent down as an accessory to two murders, mainly on your evidence. From the dock he says he looks forward to the chance of meeting you somewhere quiet one day and carrying on your interrupted conversation. As the last time you saw him alone he was trying to stove your head in with a rock, you take this as a threat. But we all get threatened at least once a week. It’s part of the job.”

Dalziel, studying the machine like a Sumo wrestler working out a new strategy, growled, “Get a move on, Frankenstein, else I’ll start to wish I hadn’t plugged you in.”

Undeterred, Wield proceeded at a measured pace.

“Model prisoner, Open University degree, Roote gets maximum remission, comes out, gets job as a hospital porter, starts writing an academic thesis, obeys all the rules. Then you get upset by them threats to Ellie and naturally Roote’s one of the folk you need to take a closer look at. Only when you go to see him, you find he’s slashed his wrists.”

“He knew I was coming,” said Pascoe. “It was a setup. No real danger to him. Just a perverted joke.”

“Maybe. Not the way it looked when it turned out Roote had absolutely nothing to do with the threats to Ellie,” said Wield. “He recovers, and a few months later he moves here because (a) his supervisor has moved here and (b) he can get work here. You say you checked with the probation service?”

“Yes,” said Pascoe. “All done by the book. They wanted to know if there was a problem.”

“What did you tell the buggers?” said Dalziel, who classed probation officers with Scottish midges, vegetarians and modern technology as Jobian tests of a virtuous man’s patience.

“I said no, just routine.”

“Wise move,” approved Wield. “See how it looks. Man serves his time, puts his life back together, gets harassed without cause by insensitive police officer, flips, tries to harm himself, recovers, gets back on track, finds work again, minds his own business, then this same officer starts accusing him of being some sort of stalker. It’s you who comes out looking like either a neurotic headcase or a vengeful bastard. While Roote …just a guy who’s paid his debt and wants nothing except to live a quiet life. I mean, he didn’t even want the hassle of bringing a harassment case against you, or a wrongful dismissal case against the Sheffield hospital.”