Reginald Hill - Asking For The Moon

It took three days for it to emerge that what the two hundred and twenty-seven million witnesses had seen wasn't just an unhappy accident but murder.

Till then, most of the UK press coverage had been concerned with interpreting the dead man's possibly unfinished last words. The favourite theory was that Oh mer… was simply oh mere, a dying man's appeal to his mother, though the Catholic Lozenge stretched this piously to Oh mere de Dieu. When it was suggested that a life member of the Soriete Atheiste et Humaniste de France (Lourdes branch) would be unlikely to trouble the Virgin with his dying breath, the Lozenge tartly retorted that history was crammed with deathbed conversions. The Jupiter, whose aged owner ascribed his continued survival to just such a conversion during his last heart attack, showed its sympathy for this argument by adopting Camden's couplet in its leader headline – betwixt the module and the ground, mercy he asked, mercy he found. The Defender, taking this literally, suggested that if indeed Lemarque had been going to say Oh merci, this was less likely to be a plea for divine grace than an expression of ironic gratitude, as in, 'Well, thanks a bunch for bringing me so far, then chopping me off at the knees!' The Planet meanwhile had torpedoed the oh mere theory to its own satisfaction by the discovery that Lemarque's mother was an Algerian migrant worker who had sold her unwanted child to a baby farm with many evil results, not the least of which was the Planet's headline – Woo dog flogged frog sprog. Ultimately the child had come into the hands of a Lourdes couple who treated him badly and never took him to the seaside (the Planet's italics), persuading the editor that this poor deprived foreigner had reverted to infancy in the face of annihilation and was once again pleading to be taken au mer. Chortling with glee, the Intransigent pointed out that mer was feminine and congratulated the Planet on now being illiterate in two languages. Then it rather surrendered its superior position by speculating that, coming from Lourdes, Lemarque might have fantasized that he was falling into the famous healing pool and started to cry, Eau meroeilleux!

It took the staid Autograph to say what all the French papers had agreed from the start – that Lemarque was merely exclaiming, like any civilized Gaul in a moment of stress, Oh merde!

But it was the Spheroid who scooped them all by revealing under the banner case of the expiring frog! that the Eurofed Department of Justice was treating Lemarque's death as murder.

Even Dalziel's attention was engaged by this news. For weeks the Current Affairs Channel had been stagnant with speculation about the forthcoming Eurofed Summit Conference in Bologna. The key areas of debate were Trade and Defence, and the big question was, had the Federation at last become homogeneous enough to stand on its own two feet as a Superpower or, at the first sign of crisis, would there still be the old clatter of clogs, sabots, espadrilles and sturdy brogues rushing off in all directions?

All this Dalziel found rather less enthralling than nonalcoholic lager. But a murder on the moon had a touch of originality which set his nerve ends tingling, particularly when it emerged that the man most likely to be in charge of the case was the UK Commissioner in the Eurofed Justice Department, none other than his old friend and former colleague, Peter Pascoe.

'I taught that lad everything he knows,' he boasted as he watched Pascoe's televised press conference from Strasbourg.

'Lad?' snorted Miss Montague, his new nurse, who could snatch and press her own considerable weight and whose rippling muscles filled Dalziel with nostalgic lust. 'He looks almost as decrepit as you!'

Dalziel grunted a promise of revenge as extreme, and as impotent, as Lear's, and turned up the sound on his new set.

Pascoe was saying, 'In effect, what was at first thought to be a simple though tragic systems failure resulting in a short circuit in the residual products unit of his TEC, that is Total Environment Costume, sometimes called lunar suit, appears after more detailed examination by American scientists working in the US lunar village, for the use of whose facilities may I take this chance to say we are truly thankful, to have been deliberately induced.'

For a moment all the reporters were united in deep incomprehension. The man from the Onlooker raised his eyebrows and the woman from the Defender lowered her glasses; some scribbled earnestly as if they understood everything, others yawned ostentatiously as if there were nothing to understand. Dalziel chortled and said, 'The bugger doesn't get any better.' But it took the man from the Spheroid to put the necessary probing question – 'You wha'?'

Patiently Pascoe resumed. 'Not to put too fine a point on it, and using layman's language, the micro-circuitry of the residual products unit of his TEC had been deliberately cross-linked with both the main and the reserve power systems in such a manner that it needed only the addition of a conductive element, in this case liquescent, to complete the circuit with unfortunate, that is, fatal, consequences.'

Now the reporters were united in a wild surmise. The Onlooking eyebrows were lowered, the Defending spectacles raised. But once again it was the earnest seeker of enlightenment from the Spheroid who so well expressed what everyone was thinking. 'You mean he pissed himself to death?'

Dalziel laughed so much he almost fell out of bed, though the nurse noted with interest that some internal gyroscope kept his brimming glass of Lucozade steady in his hand. Recovering, he downed the drink in a single gulp and, still chuckling, listened once more to his erstwhile underling.

Pascoe was explaining, 'While there would certainly be a severe shock, this was not of itself sufficient to be fatal. But the short circuit was induced. in such a way as to drain completely and immediately all power from the TEC, cutting dead all systems, including the respiratory unit. It was the shock that made him fall. But it was the lack of oxygen that killed him, before the dust had started to settle.'

This sobered the gathering a little. But newsmen's heartstrings vibrate less plangently than their deadlines and soon Pascoe was being bombarded with questions about the investigation, which he fielded so blandly and adroitly that finally Dalziel switched off in disgust.

'What's up?' asked Miss Montague. 'I thought you taught him everything he knows.'

'So I did,' said Dalziel. 'But one thing I could never teach the bugger was how to tell reporters to sod off!'

He poured himself another glass of Lucozade. The nurse seized the bottle and raised it to her nostrils.

'I think this has gone off,' she said.

'Tastes all right to me,' said Dalziel. 'Try a nip.'

Miss Montague poured herself a glass, raised it, sipped it delicately.

'You know,' she said thoughtfully, 'you could be right.' 'I usually am,' said Dalziel. 'Cheers!'

At nine that night the telephone rang.

'This is a recording,' said Dalziel. 'If you want to leave a message, stick it in a bottle.'

'You sound very jolly,' said Pascoe.

'Well, I've supped a lot of Lucozade,' said Dalziel, looking at the gently snoring figure of Nurse Montague on the sofa opposite. 'What's up?'

'Just a social call. Did you see me on the box?'

'I've got better things to do than listen to civil bloody servants being civil and servile,' growled Dalziel.

'Oh, you did see it, then. That's what we call diplomatic language out here in the real world,' said Pascoe.

'Oh aye. Up here it's called soft soap and it's very good for enemas.'

Pascoe laughed and said, 'All right, Andy. I never could fool you, could I? Yes, this whole thing has got a great crap potential. To start with, we reckon the Yanks deliberately leaked their suspicion of foul play to bounce us into letting them take full control of the investigation. Now, we're not terribly keen on that idea.'