Reginald Hill - Asking For The Moon

'I'm not a bloody colour sergeant,' grated Trotter.

'That's right. And I'm not a squaddy and this ain't the glasshouse. So where does that get us? You want to prove that if I had to put up with what you had to put up with,

I'd crack like a Boxing Day wishbone. Well, wish away, lad, but it's not going to come true. Tha's not got the time and tha's not got the talent. So where do we go from here?'

Only one place! Pascoe's fears told him. But fear left just sufficient space for another voice which asked, why is Dalziel doing this? Why the change of tactics? And if there is a game, why the hell couldn't the big, fat, arrogant bastard let me in on it? Because he thinks I'm useless? Because he thinks he's God?

Because, came a tiny voice from somewhere deeper than reason, because he knew from the start that everything we said was overheard by Trotter.

Could it really be that this Quasimodo, this Incredible Hulk, this Creature From The Black Lagoon had been carefully orchestrating everything he said? Oh, that would be a trick worth knowing, even if it took a lifetime to learn. Did he have a lifetime? He was beginning to hope again. But perhaps it was all just a clutching at straws. His mind was racing through the Fat Man's inconsequential ramblings… his bad jokes… desperately seeking the small man in the booth who was working the Great Oz's lips…

'Tell you what, Tankie,' said Dalziel. 'Why don't you chuck it in? Leave us locked up and take off. I'll not chase you, believe me. Less i see of you in future the better. You can settle down somewhere, forget the past. Jude too. Past's dead and buried. Like your dad. Finished and forgotten, all debts paid. No names, no pack drill. You can both have a future. You wherever you go. And Jude back home with her man and her kiddie…'

And at last Pascoe saw it, clear as the hair in Dalziel's nose. All those casual references to Judith's settled life… Tankie had known nothing of this! The poor bastard really had believed that during all his time behind bars, his twin had been shut away too in some empathic fastness of the heart and mind, living only for his release, their reunion.

Dalziel had worked this out, guessed that Jude's cooperation wasn't just based on geminate love, or even fear that the Fat Man could tie her in to her father's death, but the much greater fear that if Tankie knew the truth, he might divert some or all of these pent up energies from destruction of Dalziel to destruction of her precious new life.

So why hadn't the Fat Man just spilled the beans straight off?

Because Tankie would probably have killed the messenger! This way, by letting him work it out for himself…

It was all a question of timing, of working out when the hints had finally worked. And they had worked. The evidence was there in the woman's face, floating in the shadows over her brother's shoulder. One cheek pale as a winter sky, the other flushed like a summer dawn.

The bastard had hit her. And then Dalziel had summoned him. Why?

So he could learn about the child, of course!

This revelation the Fat Man had kept for now, for face to face, guessing that Jude would keep hidden to the end what she valued most, even in face of – especially in face of! -Tankie's rage. For here was the clincher. A social life, a job, even a fellow, after the first explosion, these could be rationalized away. But a child…

Even Tankie would know this meant he was relegated to at least second place forever.

He was looking at her now, seeking confirmation in those eyes which so weirdly mirrored his own.

Pascoe glanced at Dalziel hoping for some sign of how he wanted to play this. Was the idea to take the chance offered by this moment of distraction and jump the Trotters? Or was he relying on the revelation having some softening effect on Tankie, making him realize that any further development of his crazy vengeance plan would not only destroy himself and his sister, but her child too?

He'd have betted on violence, but once again he saw he was wrong. The Fat Man was putting his money on psychology, turning now to the locker and taking his suit out.

Til be glad to get back into this,' he said. 'Wearing that stuff's like wiping your bum with sandpaper. Like to avert your eyes, Jude? Or do you reckon, seen one, you've seen 'em all?'

He pushed his fatigue trousers down as he spoke. And Pascoe, watching Trotter's face in profile, saw that for all his jungle cunning, the Fat Man had miscalculated.

Perhaps it was Dalziel's coarseness. Or perhaps it was the confirmation in his sister's expression of all that she'd kept from him, and why she'd kept it, and the difference it must make to their relationship for evermore.

Or perhaps it was simply that if fear of your reputation as a wild beast is the nearest you've had to respect in a waste of years, then a wild beast's response is the only option you ever have.

Reasons didn't matter. Nothing mattered except that he was swinging the gun round to blow the Fat Man away.

As in the climactic shoot-out in The Wild Bunch, everything slowed down. Dalziel like a Carry-On farceur was immobilized with his trousers round his ankles. Pascoe didn't have time to pick a role. His body was launching itself through the air towards the Last National Service Man leaving his mind some way back, wondering why the hell he should give a damn about saving the Fat Man for posterity.

Probably posterity would still have been spared this Grecian gift if Judith hadn't got in on the act.

No doubt about her motives. Where she had imagined her brother's crazy game could lead was never clearly established. Later she claimed that the mental intimidation from her dominant twin, plus the trauma of childhood abuse, not forgetting her fear for her own child, had combined to bring her to this point almost without any conscious thought. Now all she saw was that if the Fat Man were blown away, with him went everything in her life that made any sense of it.

She jumped on her brother's back, flinging both arms round his neck and wrapping her legs around his body in a grip as sexual as a Freudian could have desired as she tried to topple him backwards. He staggered and twisted. The gun wavered away from the overhang of Dalziel's belly, and Pascoe grabbed the barrel and dragged it even further round.

Perhaps Trotter deliberately squeezed the trigger, though later, naturally, he denied it. Perhaps it was a finger-jerk reaction caused by the shock of his sister's assault. Or perhaps Pascoe himself, by pulling on the barrel, literally triggered the explosion.

Whoever or whatever, it went off.

There was no pain, just a sense of some tremendous change in his relation with the universe. Then came a couple of seconds' out-of-body experience, in which he hovered somewhere around the single light bulb, watching Dalziel step out of his trousers, advance three paces across the room and deal Trotter a blow on the temple which felled him like a blasted pylon. As he hit the ground, the whole room dissolved under a tidal wave of white light which bore Peter Pascoe out through the cottage roof and carried him at breakneck speed towards the boundary of the universe.

Later he claimed never to have lost consciousness or even the power of rational thought. For a moment, or a millennium, he even had hopes of passing through a 2001 type stargate and ending up in a nice hotel room. But gradually the white light faded and the speed diminished till finally he was simply tumbling slowly through space.

Far below he spotted the twin orbs of the earth and its circling moon. He recalled in childhood his mother trying to get him to see the man in the latter, but he'd never managed it. Now however he could see his features quite clearly in the broad bright orb, and it came as no surprise how closely they resembled those of Andy Dalziel.