Reginald Hill - Dialogues of the Dead

Hat, who had so far in his life not allowed such a consideration to trouble his digestion, nodded sagely and said, “Very true. But to get back to Penn’s books, I saw one of them once done on the telly and gave up after ten minutes, so can you give me a brief tour through them?”

Then, to pre-empt the question he guessed her quizzical gaze was leading up to, he added, “The thing is this linguist guy from the Uni reckons that the Wordman’s so hung up on words, if we can get a line on the kind of stuff he reads, we raise our chances of getting a line on him.”

“Or the kind of stuff he writes, you mean,” said Rye. “You’re not interested in whether he reads the Harry Hacker novels, but whether he writes them.”

“We’ve got to follow all lines of enquiry,” said Hat.

“Yeah? That’s what Billy Bunter’s doing hounding Dick, is it? If you’re not getting anywhere chasing the guilty, keep bashing away at someone innocent in the hope that you’ll terrorize or trick them into a confession?”

“You may be right,” said Hat. “But that’s for top brass only. Me, I’m not even qualified to use the cattle prod yet so I’ve got to stick to old-fashioned methods like terrorizing people at long distance by asking questions when they’re not there.”

She thought about this, then said, “Harry Hacker is a sort of mix of the poet Heine, Lermontov’s hero, Pechorin, and the Scarlet Pimpernel, with a bit of Sherlock Holmes, Don Juan (Byron’s rather than Mozart’s) and Raffles thrown in …”

“Hold on,” said Hat. “Remember you’re talking to a simple soul whose idea of a good read is a newspaper that’s got more pictures than words. If we could cut out the literary padding and just stick to straightforward facts …”

“To the educated mind,” she said coldly, “what you term padding acts as a form of referential shorthand, saving many hundreds of words of one syllable. But if you insist. Harry is a Jack-the-lad, bumming around Europe in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, getting embroiled in many of the big historical events, a bit of a con artist, a bit of a crook, but with his own moral parameters and a heart of gold. His background is uncertain and one of the connecting threads running through all the books is his quest to find out about himself, psychologically, spiritually and genetically. Such introspections could be a bit of a drag in a romantic thriller, but Penn livens it up by putting it in the form of encounters with Harry’s doppelgänger , that’s another version of himself. Sounds daft but it works.”

“I’ll take your word,” said Hat. “This Harry sounds a right weirdo. How come the books are so popular?”

“Don’t get me wrong about Harry. He’s a real Romantic hero. He can be the life and soul of the party, pulling the birds almost at will, yet at other times he has these fits of Byronic (sorry, I can’t think of any other way of putting it) melancholy in which all he wants is to be by himself and commune with Nature. But his saving grace is a strong sense of irony which enables him to send himself up just when you think he’s taking himself far too seriously. The books are full of verbal wit, lots of good jokes, passages of exciting action, good but not overdone historical backgrounds, and strong plots which often include a clever puzzle element which Harry is instrumental in solving. They are not great works of art, but they make very good not unintelligent recreational reading. Their televisation, as so often happens, manages to disguise, dilute or simply dissipate most of those elements which make the novels special and give them their unique flavour.”

She paused and Hat put down his coffee mug to applaud, not entirely ironically.

“That was good,” he said. “Fluent, stylish, and I understood nearly all of it. But just to cut to the chase, is there anything in them which might connect directly to what we know about the Wordman?”

“Well, that depends on how you’re using we . I dare say the full harvest of police knowledge and what I’ve managed to glean from your furrow are two very different things. But from my lowly point of view, the answer is possibly, but not uniquely.”

“Eh?”

“I mean, if it turned out the Wordman had written something like the Harry Hacker series, it wouldn’t be amazing. But I can think of a lot of other books it wouldn’t be amazing to find he’d written, except of course that it would be, as some of the authors are dead and none of those who aren’t lives in Mid-Yorkshire.”

“Which is just the point. Penn does live in Mid-Yorkshire,” said Hat. “What about this other stuff he’s interested in, the German thing?”

“Heinrich Heine? Nothing there I can think of except insofar as he’s a model for Harry Hacker. Harry was Heine’s given name, you know.”

“Harry? Thought you said it was Heinrich.”

“That came later. One of Penn’s translations called him Harry and I asked about it and he told me that at birth Heine was named Harry afteran English acquaintance of the family. It gave him a lot of grief as a kid, particularly as the sound the local rag and bone man used to yell to urge his donkey on came out something like Harry! Heine changed it to the German form when he converted to Christianity, aged twenty-seven.”

Now Hat was very attentive.

“You mean the other kids used to take the piss out of him because of his name?”

“Apparently. I don’t know if there was anti-Semitism there too, but the way Penn told it made it sound pretty traumatic.”

“Yes, it would,” said Hat, excited. “Same kind of thing happened to him at school.”

He told her what they’d found out about Penn’s background.

She frowned and said, “You’re digging deep, aren’t you? I presume you’ve been checking out Dick in the same way.”

“Yeah, well you’ve got to get all the relevant facts about everyone in an enquiry. In fairness to them really.”

His weak justification got the scornful laugh it deserved.

“So what relevant facts did you discover about Dick?” she demanded.

Why was it when he was talking to Rye there always came a point when, despite the rasp of Dalziel’s injunction in his mental ear, remember you’re a cop! , it seemed easiest to tell her everything?

He told her everything, picking up the framed photograph on the desk when he came to Johnny Oakeshott’s death and saying, “I presume that’s him in the middle. Penn’s got the same picture in his flat. Obviously he meant a lot to them both.”

Rye took the picture and stared at the angelically smiling little boy.

“When someone you’re close to dies young, yes, it does mean a lot. What’s sinister about that?”

He recalled her brother, Sergius, and said, “Yes, of course it must, I didn’t mean there was anything odd about that. But the attempts to get in touch with him …” Then just in case it turned out that Rye had tried making contact through a spiritualist, or some such daft kind of thing that girls might do, he pressed on, “But this stuff with the dictionaries, that’s got to be a bit weird, hasn’t it?”

“It’s no big deal,” she said dismissively. “Everyone who knows him well knows about the dictionaries. As for his name, all you had to do was look at the electoral register. Or the council employees list. Or the telephone directory. The fact that he’s known as Dick is no more significant than you being Hat or me being Rye.”

“Yes, but Orson …”

“No worse that Ethelbert. Or Raina for that matter.”

“No, I meant, Orson Welles …”

She looked baffled for a moment then began to smile and eventually laughed out loud.

“Don’t tell me. Orson Welles …Citizen Kane … rosebud! I’ve heard of drowning men clutching at straws, but this is going out to sea in a colander. I mean, where does it lead next? Touch of Evil maybe? Though come to think of it, when I look at your Mr. Dalziel, you may be on to something there …”