Reginald Hill - Dialogues of the Dead

“No, sir. Sir, how did Mr. Dalziel know about Mrs. Blossom’s tattoo?”

“Can’t imagine,” said Pascoe. “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

The press conference lasted a good hour.

The technique preferred by most policemen when dealing with the gentlemen of the press, hungry for information, is the response monosyllabic. Yes and no , as appropriate, blossoming into an euphuistic No Comment when neither of these will do.

Pascoe, however, favoured the sesquipedalian style. As Dalziel put it, “After thirty minutes with me, they’re clamouring for more. After thirty minutes with Pete, they’re clamouring to be let out.” Tyro reporters had been known to leave one of his sessions with several pads crammed with notes which on analysis had not rendered a single line of usable copy.

Only once on this occasion did anyone come close to laying a finger on him and that was Mary Agnew, editor of the Mid-Yorkshire Gazette , whose personal attendance signalled the importance of the story.

“Mr. Pascoe,” she said, “it appears to us out here that these so-called Wordman killings are systematic rather than random. Is this your opinion also?”

“It would seem to me,” said Pascoe, “that the sequence of killings plus the associated correspondence, details of which I am, for obvious reasons of security, unable to share with you at this juncture, predicates what for the want of a better term we might define as a system, though we should not let the familiarity of the term confuse us into apprehending anything we would recognize as a logical underpinning of the perpetrator’s thought processes. We are dealing here with a morbid psychology and what is systematic to him might well, when understood, appear to the normal mind as disjunctive and even aleatoric.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” said Agnew. “In which case, given that we have here a madman killing according to some kind of sequential system, how close are you to being able to give warning to those most at risk of becoming victims, whether as individuals or in a body?”

“Good question,” said Pascoe, meaning in Westminster-speak that he had no intention of answering it. “All I can say is that if these killings are systematic, then the vast majority of your readers can have nothing to fear.”

“They’ll be pleased to know it. But looking down the list of victims, I can work out for myself that from Jax Ripley on, all of them have had something to do with the Centre, either directly or indirectly. Have you put everyone who works in the Centre or has any strong connection with it on alert?”

Pascoe, feeling himself harried, switched tactics abruptly, said, “No,” then directed his gaze towards a Scotsman reporter whose accent he knew to be thick enough to baffle at least half of those assembled and said, “Mr. Murray?”

Afterwards he wondered, as he’d often done before, what would happen if he’d opted for sharing rather than evasion. Let them have all the disparate bits and pieces which were cluttering up his mind and his desk, and perhaps there was someone out there, someone with special knowledge or maybe just some enthusiastic reader of detective novels to whom such exegetics were but a pre-dormitory snack, who’d look at them and say, “Hey, I know what this means! It’s obvious!”

One day perhaps …

The right to make such a choice could be one of the compensations of that rise to place which he sometimes feared-and sometimes feared would never come!

“Peter, hi. Am I about to be offered a scoop or am I just double-parked?”

John Wingate was coming towards him escorted by Bowler, whom Pascoe had told to extract the TV producer from the departing media mob with maximum discretion.

“Definitely not the first. As for the second, that’s between you and your conscience,” said Pascoe, shaking the man’s hand. They knew each other, not well, but well enough to be comfortable with each other. Being a cop meant many relationships which in other professions might have matured into friendships stuck here. Pascoe recognized the main hesitation was usually on his side. Other people soon forgot you were a cop, and that was the danger of intimacy. What did you do when you were offered a joint in a friend’s house, or found yourself invited to admire his acumen in having picked up a crate of export Scotch, duty-free, from a contact in the shipping trade? He’d seen the expression of shocked disbelief in friends’ faces when he’d enquired if these were wise things to be sharing with a senior CID officer, and that had often been the last totally open expression he’d seen in those particular faces.

Now he contemplated an oblique approach to the question of Dee and Penn but quickly discounted it. Wingate was too bright not to realize he was being pumped. The direct route was probably the best, not directness as Andy Dalziel (who happily had not yet appeared) understood it, but something much more casual and low-key.

“Something you could help us with maybe,” he said. “You went to Unthank College, didn’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“Were Charley Penn and Dick Dee there at the same time?”

“Yes, they were, as a matter of fact.”

“Good friends, were they?”

“Not of mine. I was a year ahead. A year in school’s even longer than a week in politics.”

“But of each other?”

Wingate didn’t reply straightaway and Pascoe felt the just-a-friendly-chat smile on his face begin to freeze into a rictus.

“John?” he prompted.

“Sorry. What was the question?”

Good technique that, thought Pascoe. By forcing me to repeat the question in a much more positive form, he’s upped the atmosphere from chat toward interrogation.

“Were Dee and Penn close friends?” he said.

“Don’t see how I’m qualified to answer that, Peter. Not sure why you’d want to ask me that either.”

“It’s OK, John, nothing sinister. Just part of the usual business of collecting and collating mile after mile of tedious information, most of which proves totally irrelevant. I certainly don’t want you to feel used.”

This was offered with a rueful you-know-all-about-this-too twist of the lips.

“Oh, I don’t, because so far I haven’t been. And I don’t think I will be, not unless you can give me some better reason, or indeed any reason at all, for interrogating me about my merry schooldays.”

“It’s not an interrogation, John,” said Pascoe patiently. “Just a couple of friendly questions. Can’t see why someone in your job should have any problem with that.”

“My job? Let’s examine that. Basically I’m still what I started out as, a journalist, and in that game you don’t get Brownie points for jumping into bed with the police.”

“Didn’t do Jax Ripley any harm.”

Dalziel had done one of his Red Shadow entrances; you don’t know he’s there till he bursts into song.

“What?” said Wingate, turning and looking alarmed. Then, recovering, he smiled and said, “Superintendent, I didn’t see you. Yes, well, Jax, God bless her, had her own techniques.”

“Certainly did,” said Dalziel. “Don’t want to interrupt, Pete, but just wanted to check with Mr. Wingate if his missus was going to be at home this afternoon. Thought I might pop round and have a chat.”

This produced a shared moment of bewilderment with Pascoe which might be to the good.

“Moira? But why should you want to talk to Moira about Dee and Penn?” asked Wingate.

“No reason, ’cos I don’t. No, it’s just a general chat I had in mind.”

“Yes, but why?” insisted Wingate, still more puzzled than aggressive.

“I’m conducting a murder investigation, Mr. Wingate,” said Dalziel heavily. “Several murder investigations.”