Reginald Hill - Dialogues of the Dead

“About the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed the city way back in Roman times.”

“Well, that fits with all that stuff about lava later on. And the Julius Caesar quote might suggest that a tyrant is about to be overthrown …”

“Hang on,” said Pascoe. “These aren’t the Wordman’s words but what Follows and Bird said to each other.”

“We only have the Wordman’s word for that,” said Urquhart. “And I did say might suggest. I’m just trying to strike a few ideas here. On a bit. ‘Middle step, lava,’ done that. Ah yes, the para about them getting down to it in the water. Bit of excitement here. No moral disapproval, I’d agree with Pottle there, but I think the Wordman got a wee bittie titillation here, maybe. ‘Like a full-acorned boar, a German one …’”

He looked invitingly at Dalziel who said, “Nay, lad. Tha’s had all the help tha’s going to get from me. I don’t keep pups and yap.”

“Shakespeare again. Cymbeline . Posthumus imagines the suppositious coupling of his wife, Imogen, with her alleged lover, Iachimo.”

“Like a full-acorned boar, eh?” savoured Dalziel. “Not bad. So what do you make of that, dominie?”

Urquhart grinned at the appellation and said, “Fuck all. On we go. Para starting ‘Like a surgeon,’ note the little play on hand and foot . This cunt really lives in a world where words and their relationships mean more than people and theirs. ‘Questing vole’ is a bit odd …”

“Evelyn Waugh,” said Pascoe.

“Oh, her,” said Dalziel.

“Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole. Scoop,” said Pascoe.

“Significant?” wondered Urquhart.

“It’s parodic. And of course comic. I suppose it reinforces what you said about the Wordman’s preference of words to people. Yet wasn’t there in the first couple of Dialogues anyway some sense of genuine, I don’t know, almost affection for Mr. Ainstable and young Pitman?”

They all considered for a moment then Novello said, “Maybe the difference was, he didn’t know them. Not personally.”

This was her first contribution. She really didn’t look well, thought Pascoe, determined that she was going to be dispatched home the minute this lot was over.

Hat Bowler checked out his colleague’s pallor with less sympathetic eyes. What the fuck was she doing here anyway? he asked himself. This case was his big chance to establish himself firmly as a player in the Holy Trinity’s game and he didn’t care to see an old favourite coming up on the rails.

But you don’t shoot old favourites down, not in public anyway.

He said brightly, “That’s right. He seems to have got started on this by chance. But after those two, all the others seem to be connected in some way, either with the investigation or with the library. How about if he knew the others and had reasons for not caring about them?”

“Or reasons for not letting his acquaintance with them get in the way of killing them. Word-play, jokes, quotation can be useful distancing devices,” said Pottle.

Dalziel made a noise like an old iron pier undermined by the suck of the sea and said wistfully, “Are we near done?”

“Not quite. The best is still to be,” said Urquhart. “Last prose para. Thought you might have had something to say about this, Pozzo.”

“His sense of peace, you mean? His belief that he is invulnerable, invincible? I hardly feel it necessary to point out the obvious. As I’ve said before, eventually it is this belief that he can tell us anything about himself and his purposes with no risk of either prevention or detection that will be his downfall. But of course we need your linguistic skills, Dr. Urquhart, to interpret these nods and winks.”

“Well, thank you kindly. OK, the wee bit of verse at the end, it’s a riddle of course. Right wee Jimmy riddler, this guy. And when you find answers, they usually just ask more questions.”

“Which is what the press out there are waiting to do,” said Trimble sourly.

Poor old Dan, thought Pascoe. He came along hoping that rabbits were going to be plucked from hats by the burrowload. Instead, the end of the expert evidence is in sight and he doesn’t feel he’s even glimpsed a vanishing rump!

“Aye, well, if the guid Lord had gi’en us the airt to see the morn today, we’d all be farting through silk, as my auld Kirkcaldy grannie used to say. But dinna despair. Pozzo’s right, he’s giving us clues and I’m the boy to grasp ’em. Anything strike you about this wee doggerel?”

They all looked at their copies of the Dialogue, then Bowler and Novello said simultaneously, “The print,” and looked at each other speculatively.

“That’s right. The print. All them capitals. Could they mean something, I asked myself,” said Urquhart.

“Like he’s a lousy typist,” said Dalziel.

“Not anywhere else, he’s not,” said Urquhart. “No, I reckon this is a chronogram.”

He looked around triumphantly. The returned gazes were blank.

“A chronogram,” he explained, “is a piece of writing in which certain letters are made to stand out to express a relevant date or epoch. Mostly it used Roman numerals because of course they are expressed in letters. For example, Gustavus Adolphus, the Swedish king killed during the Thirty Years War, had a medal struck to commemorate a victory in 1632 with this inscription.”

He went to the drywipe board and wrote:

Chr Ist Vs DVX:ergo tr IVMph Vs

“Which of course means …”

He paused expectantly, playing up to the dominie role that Dalziel had mocked him with.

“With Christ in charge, we’d solve this in no time,” said Novello pertly.

They all laughed, even Trimble, and Urquhart flashed her the louche smile which probably pulled any number of female students, thought Hat maliciously.

“That’ll do nicely,” said the linguist. “Now, think Roman numerals and check out the upper case letters. In Latin inscriptions, U’s are normally printed as V’s of course. Which gives us-” he wrote 100+1+5+500+5+10+1+5+1000+5-“which equals 1632. This also works in English. A famous example is …”

He wrote again.

Lor Dha Ve Mer CIe Vpon Vs

“Add this up and you will see we get 1666. The reference incidentally isn’t to the Great Fire but to the other great event which Dryden celebrates in his Annus Mirabilis , the naval warfare between Britain and Holland.”

It was interesting, thought Pascoe. The more he got into his teaching mode, the less marked his Scots accent became.

“This one uses U’s as V’s too, though it’s not in Latin,” said Wield.

“A licence carried over from the craft of lapidary inscription,” said Urquhart. “Before they got power tools, it was a lot easier for masons to carve straight lines and angles than curves. Our Wordman, however, is a purist. In his triplet, only V’s count numerically. And you will note that as in all the best chronograms every numerically significant letter is capitalized and therefore counts. It’s much easier if you just pick out those that add up to the sum you want. Anyway, let’s see what we have.”

He wrote:

1+5+1+1+5+50+1+500+500+1+1+1+500+1+5+1+1+1 = 1576

“Well, there you go,” he said complacently, returning to his seat.

They all sat looking at the board like Belshazaar’s courtiers staring at the wall.

“And that’s it?” said Andy Dalziel.

“Unless my arithmetic’s wrong.”