Reginald Hill: Death Comes for the Fat Man

Not that he was sure how all right he was. But a lot all righter than this still heap of something which he was now close enough to to formally identify as Andy Dalziel.

He had fallen onto his left side and his arms and legs were spread and bent like the kapok-stuffed limbs of some huge teddy bear discarded by a spoilt child. His face had been shredded by shards of glass and brick, and the fine gray dust sticking to the seeping wounds made him look as if he were wearing a Kabuki mask.

There was no sign of life. But not for a second did Pascoe admit the possibility of death. Dalziel was indestructible. Dalziel is, and was, and forever shall be, world without end, amen. Everybody knew that. Therein lay half his power. Chief constables might come and chief constables might go, but Fat Andy went on forever.

Pascoe rolled him over onto his back. It wasn’t easy but he did it. He brushed the dust away from his mouth and nose. He definitely wasn’t breathing. He checked the carotid pulse, thought he detected a flutter, but a combination of his dull fingers and Dalziel’s monolithic neck left him in doubt. He opened the mouth and saw there was a lot of debris in there. Carefully he cleared it away, discovering in the process what he hadn’t known before, that Dalziel had a dental plate. This he tucked carefully into his pocket. He checked that the tongue hadn’t been swallowed. Then he cleared the nostrils, undid the shirt collar, and put his ear to the mighty chest.

There was no movement, no sound.

He placed his hands on top of each other on the chest and pressed down hard, five times, counting a second interval between.

Then he tilted the head back with his right hand under the chin so that the mouth opened wide. With the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, he pinched Dalziel’s nose. Then he took a deep breath, thought, I’m never going to hear the end of this, pressed his mouth down onto those great lips, and blew.

Five times he did this. Then he repeated the heart massage and went through the whole process again. And again.

Once more he tried the pulse. This time he was sure there was something. And the next time he blew into the mouth, the chest began to rise and fall of its own volition.

Now he began to arrange Dalziel in the recovery position. This was a task to daunt a fit navvy with a block and tackle, but he finally managed it and sank back exhausted.

All this seemed to take hours but must have consumed only a few minutes. He was vaguely aware of figures moving through the miasma. Presumably there were sounds too but at first they were simply absorbed by the white noise which the blast had filled his ears with. Another hour passed. Or a few seconds. He felt something touch his shoulder. It hurt. He looked up. PC Maycock was standing over him, mouthing nothings, like a fish in a glass tank. He tried to lip-read and got, “Are you all right?” which hardly seemed worth the effort. He pointed at Dalziel and said, “Get help,” without any assurance that the words were coming out. Maycock tried to assist him to his feet but he shook his head and pointed again at the Fat Man. He stuck his little fingers in his ears and started to prize out the debris that seemed to have lodged there. This, or perhaps the simple passage of time, improved things a little, and he began to pick out a higher line of sound he tentatively identified as approaching sirens.

Time was still doing a quickstep. Slow, slow, quick quick, slow. In the slow periods he felt as if sitting here in the postblast smog watching over Fat Andy was all he’d ever done and all he was ever likely to do. Then he closed his eyes for a fraction of a second and when he opened them the smog had thinned and paramedics were stooping over Dalziel’s body and firemen were going about their business before the ruined terrace. Where number 3 had been there was nothing but a flame-filled cavity, like hellmouth in a morality play. The Victorian entrepreneurs’ shoddy building materials had offered little resistance to the blast. This was perhaps one of those instances of a Bad Thing eventually turning out to be a Good Thing, which divines through the ages had educed as evidence of God’s Mysterious Purpose. If the walls of number 3 had shared any of the massive solidity of the viaduct wall against which the terrace rested, the blast would have been directed straight out. As it was, numbers 2 and 4 were in a state of complete collapse, and the rest of the terrace looked seriously shell-shocked.

They were attaching all kinds of bits and pieces to the Fat Man. But not, so far as Pascoe could see, a crane. They’d need a crane. And a sling. This was a beached whale they were dealing with and it would take more than the puny efforts of half a dozen men to bear him back to the life-supporting sea. He tried to say this but couldn’t get the words out. Didn’t matter. Somehow these supermen were proving him wrong and managing to get Dalziel onto a stretcher. Pascoe closed his eyes in relief. When he opened them again he found he was looking up at the sky and moving. For a second he thought he was back on his hammock in his garden. Then he realized he too was on a stretcher.

He raised his head to protest that this was unnecessary. The effort made him realize it probably was. Ahead he could see an ambulance. Beside it stood an all too familiar figure.

Hector, the author of all their woes, his face a cartoonist’s dream of uncomprehending consternation.

As the medics slid the stretcher into the vehicle, he held out both his hands toward Pascoe. In them were two paper bags, partially open to reveal a pair of mutton pasties and an almond slice.

“Sir, I’m sorry, but they were out of custards…,” he stuttered.

“Not my lucky day then,” whispered Peter Pascoe. “Not my lucky day.”

Andre de Montbard, Knight of the Temple and right-hand man to Hugh de Payens, the Order’s Grand Master, was fishing in the dull canal at the far end of Charter Parker. He sat on a canvas stool, his back against a plane tree, his rod resting on a fork made from a wire coat hanger. The sun had vanished behind the warehouses on the opposite bank but the air was still warm and the sky still blue, though darkening toward indigo from the azure of the afternoon. His float bobbed in the wake of a passing longboat and the helmsman gave a half-apologetic wave.

A man walking his dog paused and said, “Anything biting?”

“I think I felt a midge.”

“Oh aye? Just wait half an hour and you’ll need a mask. Cheers.”

“Cheers.”

As the man moved away, he passed the two Geoffreys strolling slowly along the towpath. Geoffrey O stooped to pat the dog but Geoffrey B didn’t look in the mood for chitchat. As well as the shared name, they both wore black slacks, sneakers, and T-shirts. But there any claims to being a matching pair ended, thought Andre. Odd relationship. Shrinks would have a field day with it. Useless twats. What do you call a shrink treading on a land mine? A step in the right direction. Himself, he’d always been an effect man, bugger causes. And the effect here had been to make them ripe for knighthood.

Performance was another thing. Soon as he’d heard things had gone a bit pear shaped, he’d started anticipating how they’d react.

His guess was, Geoff B headless chicken, Geoff O heartless wolf.

He knew he’d got it right even before Geoff B opened his mouth.

When they reached him, they paused as if to ask how the fish were biting. At least that was the impression Geoff O gave, smiling down at him pleasantly. But Geoff B couldn’t manage a smile. He unslung the small rucksack he was carrying over his shoulder and dropped it by the empty catch basket. As he did so, he brought his face close to Andre’s and hissed with barely controlled anger, “What the hell was all that about? A communications post you said, a bit of gear maybe, but not a fucking powder magazine.”