Reginald Hill - Dialogues of the Dead

“Haud yer weesht, Hamish, and ye’ll maybe find oot,” replied Urquhart.

That was twice the Scot had shot Hamish at Dalziel like a custard pie, and twice Dalziel had looked momentarily spattered. Am I missing something? thought Pascoe.

What Urquhart had got for them wasn’t much, and at least as literary as linguistic, which made Pascoe suspect his wee hairie in the Eng. Lit. Department was seeing more of the Dialogues than she ought to be. Well, as long as the leak stopped there and didn’t trickle into the tabloids, no harm done, and they were getting two experts for the price of one.

“Pozzo said something about this guy and religion, didn’t he? Not a religious maniac in the obvious sense, in fact probably totally a-religious on the surface. That’s always the way with these trick-cyclists, isn’t it? They give with one hand while they’re taking away with the other, and in the end you’re left with fuck all.”

“Better a handful of fuck all than a handful of crap, which is all I’m looking at so far,” growled Dalziel holding up a great paw as if in illustration.

“Me too,” said Urquhart, staring hard at him. “Like I said, lots of religious language, both in tone and direct reference, but you’ve probably noticed that yourself, Mr. Pascoe.”

Nice stress there, implying that I’m the police force’s token literate, thought Pascoe.

“Yes, I did notice a few,” he said.

“But one thing keeps on coming up. First Dialogue: ‘the force behind the light, the force which burns away all fear …’ Third: ‘be the strength of my life; of whom then shall I be afraid …’ Fourth: ‘in the light of that aura, I had no one to fear …’ Fifth: ‘my light and salvation which is why I don’t have to fear any sod.’ I checked these out. And what I got was Psalm 27.”

He produced a Bible and read, “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” then looked around triumphantly, as if the silence which followed were tumultuous applause.

“Interesting,” said Pascoe hurriedly. “May I see?”

He took the book from Urquhart and read the beginning of the psalm.

Dalziel said, “And?”

“And me no ands , Andy,” said Urquhart. “Except maybe I did wonder, looking at yon illustration in the First Dialogue, could that object in the bowl of the P be a book, maybe the Bible itself, or a missal in which you’d find the psalms?”

Pascoe put the Bible down and looked at the illuminated letter.

“You could be right,” he said. “It could be the spine of book. But what about the design on it? Any thoughts on that?”

“Maybe it’s meant to be the specific codex that contains the illuminated In Principio this is based on?” suggested Urquhart. “But you’d need a specialist to help you there.”

Dalziel, who’d picked up the Bible to thumb through it, recited sonorously, “‘Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.’ Please, no more specialists.”

“Aye, I can see how they’d be a bother to you,” said Urquhart.

But he soon after brought his textual analysis to a conclusion.

“So it would seem to me that our wee Wordman could regard certain printed texts as a sort of coded gospel. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding , sort of thing.”

“That’s Revelation, not a gospel,” said Dalziel. “Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man.”

“Now why am I not surprised you know that, Superintendent?” said Urquhart. “One last thing. In the Fifth Dialogue ‘life became too great a bore …’ that looks like a quote from the last letter that guy Beddoes poor Sam Johnson was researching wrote before he topped himself. ‘Life was too great a bore on one leg and that a bad one.’ Seems the poor sod had tried killing himself before and only succeeded in having a leg amputated. Him a doctor, too. Would have made a great NHS consultant from the sound of it!”

“That it?” said Dalziel. “All right, young Lochinvar, you can ride back into the west.”

This time Urquhart let the Fat Man have the last word and as if in acknowledgement, Dalziel waited till the door had closed behind him before he said, “Another waste of fucking time!”

“I don’t think so, sir,” said Pascoe firmly. “We’re building up a profile. And that last thing about the Beddoes quote, that tells us something.”

“Oh aye? From what you said about your mate being a bit of a piss-artist, mebbe it means he died legless, too,” said Dalziel.

“Very good, sir. But it means the Wordman must be quite well acquainted with Beddoes’ writings. And I know someone who’s deeply interested.”

“Oh God, not Roote again!” groaned the Fat Man. “Give it a rest, will you?”

“Arrest?” said Pascoe. “That’s exactly what I want to give him.”

Dalziel regarded him sadly and said, “Pete, tha’s beginning to sound like this Wordman. You ought to get out more. What is it the kids say nowadays? Get a life, lad. Get a fucking life!”

But getting a life isn’t easy when there’s so much death around.

On Saturday morning Pascoe woke, stretched, thought with pleasure, “I’m off duty.”

Then recalled he was going to a funeral, his second of the week.

For a cop, weekends usually meant more rather than less work. Yet Pascoe, like a slave dreaming of home, had never lost an in-the-grain feeling that Saturdays were for football matches, odd jobs, partying, getting married, taking the family on a picnic, all that sort of good stuff. So, despite the fact that the pressures of the Wordman investigation were causing a huge contraction of official time off (without any proportionate expansion of official paid overtime), he’d clung on to his scheduled Wordman-free Saturday like a drowning man to a life-belt.

But Linda Lupin, Loopy Linda, had changed all that.

Murdered bodies, especially where poison is involved, are usually kept on ice until all parties with a forensic concern-police, coroner, DPS, and (if someone’s in custody) defence counsel-are content that every last drop of evidence, incriminatory or exculpatory, has been squeezed from them. Fond relatives are advised to put their grief in cold storage too against the day of its proper obsequial display.

But when the fond relative is Linda Lupin, MEP, before whom even French officials have been known to quail, things may be arranged differently.

Her reasoning (which, as always, came carved on tablets of stone) was that her step-brother’s death was already causing Europe to suffer one period of her absence and it was doubtful if it could survive another so soon following. Therefore the funeral must take place during her current stay, i.e. before next week when she purposed to return to her divine task of keeping the Continent fit for Anglo-Saxons.

And so it came to pass that Sam Johnson was buried on Saturday morning.

Linda would have preferred the finality of cremation, but here the coroner dug his heels in. The body must remain accessible. So the ceremony took place in St. Hilda’s, the university church.

Official admission that Steel and Johnson were the Wordman’s fourth and fifth victims was in itself enough to provoke the British media into a feeding frenzy of speculation and accusation, and the unexpected involvement of Linda Lupin was the ox-tail in the olio. The funeral could have degenerated into a cross between a pop-concert and an England away-match if the wise Victorian founders of the university hadn’t extended the principle that any building likely to house students should be surrounded by high stone walls topped with shards of glass to include the church. University security guards, like a castle garrison in a siege, circumambulated the perimeter, pushing off the ladders by which the most depraved of invaders attempted to capture a view within, while a sharp radio message from the police soon took care of the helicopter which swooped, harpy-like, out of the low cloud cover above.