Reginald Hill - Death

'Sounds like you, Charley.'

'How so?'

'Well, you've got everything most men want, a bit of fame, a bit of fortune, but you still droop around like you got the world on your back. And this Lorelei, beautiful young woman luring ships to destruction. Seems to run around in your head all right. Like in this book of yours, if the cover's owt to go on.'

'It's an imaginative interpretation.'

'That's all right then. What happened to Lorelei in the end? Some questing knight stick his lance into her?'

'Not that I know of,' said Penn. 'Not many fishermen on the Rhine nowadays, but I don't suppose she's averse to going for bigger prey, the odd pleasure boat full of trippers. No, I'd say that Lorelei's still out there, biding her time.'

'Best left alone then. That's what my old Scots gran used to say about beasties and bogles and things that go bump in the night. You don't bother them and they won't bother you. See you upstairs, mebbe.'

He stood up. Penn said, 'You've forgotten your book.'

He opened the paperback, scribbled in it and handed it to Dalziel.

The Fat Man moved away, squeezing between the crowded tables. He expected Penn would follow his progress out of the cafe, but when he looked at the reflection in the glass wall which marked Hal's boundary, he saw the bearded face buried deep in a book once more.

Wonder what language he thinks in? thought Dalziel.

Outside, he opened the book. The printed dedication was in German.

An Mai – wunderschon in alien Monaten!

Dalziel's German was up to that. 'To May – beautiful in every month!'

But he didn't need linguistic skills to interpret the message which Penn had scrawled beneath the title Harry Hacker and the Ship of Fools.

Bon voyage, sailor!

He laughed out loud.

'Charley’ he said. 'I didn't know you cared.'

A man cannot live and work in the same town for many years without finding his head and his heart assailed by fond associations wherever he looks, and when Dalziel's route to the reference library took him past the toilet in which the Wordman had murdered Town Councillor 'Stuffer' Steel with an engraver's burin, he went inside for a pee, but stopped short when he found himself looking at a man up a step-ladder screwing a video camera into the ceiling.

'How do,' said Dalziel. 'What's this? Filming Uro-trash?'

'Updating the system, mate. State of the art, that's what they're getting now. Beam a close-up of your bollocks to the moon with this kit,' said the man proudly.

'Oh aye? Mebbe someone should warn 'em at NASA.'

Unfazed by the prospect of universal distribution, he had his pee then went on his way, from time to time observing other evidence of the new installation taking place.

In the reference library he was greeted with the kind of smile that twangs a man's braces and the words, 'Mr Dalziel, how nice to see you!' uttered with evident sincerity by the fine-looking young woman behind the desk.

The Italian strain in the Pomona family might be a couple of generations old, but the genes had come out fighting in Raina of that ilk, pronounced Rye-eena and contracted familiarly to Rye. Her skin had a golden glow and her dark expressive eyes might have sent a more poetic man than Fat Andy in search of images from Mediterranean skies. Her hair was a rich brown, except for a single lock of silvery grey which marked the main impact point of a head injury she had received at the age of fifteen in the car crash that killed her twin brother. Antipathetic at first towards the superintendent, and not encouraged to greater charity by the reports of persecution she received from her incipient boyfriend, DC Hat Bowler, she had relented her attitude in the aftermath of the Wordman case when she had come to see that, no matter what his outward semblance seemed to indicate, Dalziel was deeply defensive of his young officer and determined that no official crap should come his way.

Also, as she had confessed to Hat (causing the young man some perturbation of spirit), there was something sort of sexy about Dalziel, in a non-sexy sort of way. Observing the DC's bewilderment, she had added, 'I don't want to shag him, you understand, but I can see how it might be that he's not short of offers.'

Hat, who had often joined in lewd canteen speculation about the geophysics of the Fat Man's relationship with his inamorata, the not insubstantial Cap Marvell, found himself looking at things from a new viewpoint. Rye often had this effect on him – this was one of the pleasures, and the perils, of getting close to her – but no previous change of angle had been so disorientating as having to regard Andy Dalziel as a sex object rather than a performing whale. Thank God she had put in the disclaimer about not fancying him herself. Even the imagined prospect of such a rival quite unmanned him.

Knowing nothing of the food for thought he'd given the young couple, and careless of it had he known, Dalziel returned the smile and said, 'Nice to see you too, lass. What fettle? Tha's looking well. Helping young Bowler convalesce must be doing you good.'

Did his eyes twinkle salaciously as he said it? Rye didn't mind if they did, being as indifferent to his speculations as he would have been to hers.

'Yes, he's coming along very nicely. You'll have him back later this week, I gather.'

'That's right. Can't wait, from the look of him. He even popped in for a chat yesterday afternoon, just to get the feel of things. That's what brings me here today, summat he said. Not that I need an excuse to want to see you, but.'

He spoke flirtatiously. He'd decided that there was no way to the subject of her burglary save head on. But like in his rugby-playing days, no harm in a gently distracting shimmer of the hips before you ran straight through the bugger standing in your way.

'He told you about the break-in then’ she said, undistracted.

'You don't seem surprised. Didn't you tell him you didn't want to make a thing of it?'

'I heard he'd been asking my neighbours questions. Didn't think it would stop there.'

'You were right. It was his duty to report it in, and he's a good cop,' said Dalziel sternly. Then he added with a grin, 'And likely he also got to thinking if he said nowt, then you got murdered in your bed and he mentioned casually that your place had been turned over a few days back, I'd have sent him to join you.'

'I'm sure you'd have meant it as a kindness. All right. Some idiot got into my flat, left it looking a bit untidy, but nothing damaged and nothing taken. I couldn't see the point of pouring oil on dying embers by letting you lot really mess the place up with fingerprint powder all over the place and God knows what else. I've had enough of questions, statements and creaking bureaucracy in recent times to last me a lifetime!'

'Aye, it's a slow grinding mill, ours, and everyone ends up a bit ground down.'

'Doesn't show on you, Superintendent’ she said.

He laughed and said, 'Nay, I'm part of the machinery. And once I'm set in motion, I've got to clank on till I run down. Any chance of a coffee?'

'Any chance of me saying no? No. Come on through then.'

He went behind the reception desk and followed her into the office.

It was the first time he'd been in here since he'd supervised the search which followed Dick Dee's death. They'd found nothing here or in the man's flat which added much to the case for the Head of Reference being the Wordman, but it hadn't mattered. In retrospect such a long trail of evidence, albeit mainly circumstantial, led to his door that CID had had to field a lot of hostile questioning about how many people had died because they couldn't see what lay under their noses.

Things had changed considerably.

The paintings and photographs of great lexicographers which had darkened the walls had been replaced by some vapid watercolours of Yorkshire beauty spots and the plaster had been given a coat of paint. The furniture too was new, or at least new in here, probably a straight swap with another municipal office organized by someone sensitive enough to guess that Rye might not be too happy to feel that she was sitting on a seat polished by the buttocks of the man who'd tried to kill her.