Reginald Hill: Death Comes for the Fat Man

He dusted down his suit, straightened his tie, and set off across the street with the confident step of a man who could walk with kings, talk with presidents, dispute with philosophers, portend with prophets, and never have the slightest doubt that he was right.

Interestingly, despite the fact that little in their long relationship had given Pascoe any real reason to question this presumption of rightness, the thought crossed his mind as he rose and set off in the footsteps of his great master that there had to be a first time for everything, and how ironic it would be if it were Ellie’s tender heart that caused him to be present on the occasion when the myth of Dalziel’s infallibility was exploded…

At this same moment, as if his mind had developed powers of telekinesis, Mill Street blew up.

When the explosion occurred Ellie Pascoe was asleep in the garden hammock so reluctantly vacated by her husband.

The Pascoe house in the northern suburbs was too far from Mill Street for anything but the faintest rumor of the bang to reach there. What woke Ellie was a prolonged volley of barking from her daughter’s mongrel terrier.

“What’s up with Tig?” Ellie asked, yawning.

“Don’t know,” said Rosie. “We were playing ball and he just started.”

A sudden suspicion made Ellie examine the tall apple tree in next-door’s garden. Puberty was working its rough changes on her neighbor’s son and a couple of times recently when the summer heat had lured her outside in her bikini, she’d spotted him staring down at her out of the foliage. But there was no sign, and in any case Tig’s nose pointed south, toward the center of town. As she followed his fixed gaze she saw a long way away a faint smudge of smoke soiling the perfect blue of the summer sky.

Who would light a fire on a day like this?

Tig was still barking.

“Can’t you make him shut up?” snapped Ellie.

Her daughter looked at her in surprise, then took a biscuit off a plate and threw it across the lawn. Tig gave a farewell yap, then went in search of his reward with the complacent mien of one who has done his duty.

Ellie felt guilty at snapping. Her irritation wasn’t with the dog, there was some other cause less definable.

She rolled out of the hammock and said, “I’m too hot. Think I’ll cool down in the shower. You OK by yourself?”

Rosie gave her a look which said without words that she hadn’t been much company anyway, so what was going to be different?

Ellie went inside, turned on the shower, and stepped under it.

The cool water washed away her sweat but did nothing for her sense of unease.

Still nothing definable. Or nothing that she wanted to define. Pointless thinking about it. Pointless because if she did think about it, she might come up with the silly conclusion that the real reason she was taking this shower was that she didn’t want to be wearing her bikini if bad news came…

Andy Dalziel’s partner, Amanda Marvell, known to her friends as Cap, was even farther away when Mill Street blew up.

With her man on duty, she had followed the crowds on the traditional migration to the coast, not, however, to join the mass bake-in on a crowded beach but to visit the sick.

The sick in this instance took the form of her old headmistress, Dame Kitty Bagnold who for nearly forty years had ruled the famous St. Dorothy’s Academy for Catholic Girls near Bakewell in Derbyshire. Cap Marvell had ultimately made life choices which ran counter to everything St. Dot’s stood for. In particular, she had abandoned her religion, divorced her husband, and got herself involved in various Animal Rights groups whose activities teetered on the edge of legality.

Yet throughout all this, she and Dame Kitty had remained in touch and eventually, rather to their surprise, realized they were friends. Not that the friendship made Cap feel able to address her old head by her St. Dot’s sobriquet of Kitbag, and Dame Kitty would rather have blasphemed than call her ex-pupil anything but Amanda.

A long and very active retirement had ground Dame Kitty down till ill health had finally obliged her to admit the inevitable, and two years earlier she had moved into a private nursing home that was part of the Avalon Clinic complex situated at Sandytown on the Yorkshire coast.

At her best, Dame Kitty was as bright and sharp as ever, but she tired easily and usually Cap was alert for the first signs of fatigue so that she could start ending her visit without making her friend’s condition the cause.

This time it was the older woman who said, “Is everything all right, Amanda?”

“What?”

“You seemed to drift off. Perhaps you should sit in this absurd wheelchair while I go inside and order some more tea.”

“No, no, I’m fine. Sorry. What were we saying…?”

“We were discussing the merits of the government’s somewhat inchoate education policy, an argument I hoped your sudden silence indicated I had won. But I fear my victory owes more to your distraction than my reasoning. Are you sure all is well with you? No problems with this police officer of yours, whom I hope one day to meet?”

“No, things are fine there, really…”

Suddenly Cap Marvell took her mobile out.

“Sorry, do you mind?”

She was speed dialing before Kitty could answer.

The phone rang twice then there was an invitation to leave a message.

She opened her mouth to speak, closed it, disconnected, and stood up.

“I’m sorry, Kitty, I’ve got to go. Before the mobs start moving off the beaches…”

This effort to offer a rational explanation produced the same sad sigh and slight upward roll of the eyes brought by feeble excuses for bad behavior in their St. Dot days.

“OK, that’s not it. Sorry, I don’t know why,” said Cap. “But I’ve really got to go.”

“Then go, my dear. And God go with you.”

Normally this traditional valediction would have won from Cap her equivalent of the old headmistress’s long-suffering expression, but today she just nodded, stooped to kiss her friend’s cheek, then hurried away across the lawn toward the car park.

Dame Kitty watched her out of sight. There was trouble there. Despite the bright sun and the cloudless sky, she felt it in the air.

She stood up out of the wheelchair that the staff insisted she should use on her excursions into the gardens, gave it a whack with her stick, and began to make her slow way back to the house.

Later Peter Pascoe worked out that Dalziel had probably saved his life twice.

The Fat Man’s car, which they’d been sheltering behind, was flipped into the air then deposited upside down on the pavement.

If he hadn’t obeyed the Fat Man’s command to follow, he would have been underneath it.

And if he hadn’t been walking in the lee of that corpulent frame when the explosion occurred…

As it was, when some slight degree of awareness began to seep back into his brain, he felt as if every part of his body had been subjected to a good kicking. He tried to stand up but found the best he could manage was all fours.

The air was full of dust and smoke. Like a retriever peering through the mist in search of its master’s bird, he strained to penetrate the swirling veil of motes and vapor. An amorphous area of orangey red with some consistency of base gave him the beginnings of perspective. Against it, marked by its stillness in the moving air, he made out a vague heap of something, like a pile of earth thrown up alongside a grave.

He began to crawl forward and after a couple of yards managed to rise off his hands into a semi-upright crouch. The shifting coiling color he realized now was fire. He could feel its heat, completely unlike the gentle warmth of the sun which only an hour ago he’d been enjoying in the green seclusion of his garden. That small part of his mind still in touch with normality suggested that he ought to ring Ellie and tell her he was all right before some garbled version of events got on to local radio.