Reginald Hill - The Death of Dalziel - A Dalziel and Pascoe Novel

‘Evening, Mr Mazraani,’ said Andre to the tall man. ‘And this is…?’

‘My cousin, Fikri. He’s staying with me for a few days.’

‘That’s nice. Anyone else in the flat?’

‘No. Just the two of us,’ he replied.

‘Mind if we check that? Arch.’

Archambaud went out of a door to the left. After a few moments he came back into the living room and said, ‘Clear.’

‘So now we can perhaps get down to what brings you here. Won’t you introduce yourselves? For the tape?’

Mazraani’s voice was bland and urbane. He seemed almost to be enjoying the situation, by contrast with the other man who looked resentful and apprehensive.

Andre said, ‘Certainly, sir. I’m called Andre de Montbard, Andy to my friends. And my colleague is Mr Archambaud de St Agnan. He’s got no friends. And this lady singing is, I’d say, the famous Elissa? Compatriot of yours, I believe? Gorgeous girl. Lovely voice, and those big amber eyes! I’m a great fan.’

He moved to the hi-fi and turned up the volume, using his index knuckle.

Then he set his sports bag on the table, unzipped it, reached inside and took out an automatic pistol with a silencer attached.

A look of disbelief touched Mazraani’s features but the seated man did not even have time to register fear before Andre shot him between the eyes from short range.

‘Sorry about that, sir, but we wanted to talk to you privately,’ said Andre. ‘So why don’t you just relax and we’ll have that drink.’

Horror at what he’d just seen had paralysed Mazraani. He stood there looking down at the body, blinking now and then as if trying to clear the image from his vision, his mouth open but no words coming out.

Andre nodded at his companion, who looked almost as shocked as Mazraani.

‘Wake up, Arch!’ snapped Andre.

The man called de St Agnan gave a twitch, then reached into his pocket, took out a leaden cosh and swung it against Mazraani’s neck with tremendous force. He gave a choking groan and sank to his knees.

‘There, that wasn’t difficult, was it?’ said Andre. ‘And unless my nose has got stuffed up, you’ve not even crapped yourself yet. Now it’s show time.’

He went back to the sports bag and took out a video camera which he passed to Archambaud. Next came a black hood with eye-holes which he pulled over his head, then a pair of long latex gloves which he put on.

Now he took out a length of polished wood, about two and half feet long, like the extension butt of a snooker cue. And finally he drew forth a bin-liner from which he took a gleaming steel cleaver blade, six inches deep and eighteen inches long, with a threaded tail of another eight inches which he screwed into the end of the wooden butt.

Mazraani was trying to rise. Archambaud raised the cosh again but Andre said, ‘No need for that, Arch. Here, sir, let’s give you a hand.’

He placed one of the dining chairs on its side in front of the stricken man, then pushed him forward so that his head rested over the chair back.

‘Just get your breath, sir,’ said Andre. ‘Arch, you ready?’

‘Do we really need this…?’ said Archambaud uneasily.

‘Main point of the exercise. Just point the fucking thing and try to keep it steady.’

He pushed the tall man’s long hair forward over his head to leave the neck clear, grasped the polished wood of the butt and raised the glistening blade high above his head.

‘You rolling?’

‘Yes,’ said Archambaud in a low voice.

‘Then here we go!’

The blade came crashing down.

It took three blows before the severed head fell on to the carpet.

‘All that practise with logs, thought I’d have done it in one,’ said Andre. ‘You OK?’

Archambaud managed a nod. He was pale and shaking but he still held the camera pointed at the body.

‘Good man,’ said Andre.

He wiped the blade on the bearded man’s robe before unscrewing it from the handle and dropping it into the bin-liner, which he replaced in the sports bag.

‘Now all we need are the credits then we’re out of here.’

From the bag he took a cardboard tube about eighteen inches long out of which he pushed a paper scroll. This he unrolled to reveal it was covered with Arab symbols. After checking it was the right way up, he held it before the camera for thirty seconds.

‘OK,’ he said, replacing the scroll in the tube. ‘You can turn that thing off now. Time to go. You touch anything out there?’

‘Just the door handles and I wiped them.’

‘Great,’ he said, removing the hood and dropping it into the bag. ‘We make a good team. Morecambe and fucking Wise, that’s us. In fact, let’s see…’

He looked at his watch.

‘Four minutes thirty since we came through the door. I gave us five, and I was only expecting one of them. Now that’s what I call show business!’

After his first attempt to get back to work, Pascoe spent the next two days in bed. On the third he was feeling recovered enough to insist that he was only going to spend another day on his back if Ellie joined him, which she did, purely on medical grounds, she said, which in fact turned out to be true as she cunningly contrived to leave him so exhausted that when he woke again, it was the morning of the fourth day.

He appeared so much better that Ellie had few qualms about letting him take their daughter’s dog Tig out for a stroll after lunch.

‘You won’t be taking the car?’ she said.

‘Of course not. I’m going for a walk, remember?’ he retorted.

Satisfied that this amounted to an assurance he wasn’t going anywhere near Police HQ, she waved him goodbye before heading into her ‘study’ to get on with some very necessary work on her second novel.

(If asked—which few people dared—how things were going, Ellie would reply that it was one of the great myths of publishing that the most difficult thing of all was to follow up the success of a universally acclaimed first novel. No, the really difficult thing was to produce a second novel after your first had attracted as much attention as a fart in a thunderstorm.)

Now she re-immersed herself in her book, confident that all she needed to do here to produce a bestseller was apply the same subtle understanding of human nature that she had just demonstrated in her management of her husband.

Meanwhile, two streets away, Pascoe was climbing into a car driven by Edgar Wield, who wasn’t happy.

‘Ellie’s going to kill me when she finds out,’ he said.

‘Relax. She’ll not find out,’ said Pascoe confidently.

Wield didn’t reply. In his experience there were two people who always found out, and one of them was Ellie Pascoe.

The other was still lying in a coma.

‘So what’s Sinister Sandy up to?’ said Pascoe.

‘Oh, this and that,’ said Wield vaguely.

Pascoe looked at him suspiciously.

‘Start with this, then move on to that,’ he ordered.

‘Well, she plays her anti-terrorist stuff pretty close, that’s understandable,’ said Wield. ‘But with us being a bit short-handed at the top, it’s been a real help her being an old mucker of Desperate Dan’s. She keeps well back from the hands-on stuff, of course—says it’s our patch, so it should be our call—but when it comes to structuring organization and paperwork, she’s really got on top of things. Now it’s not just Andy who knows what’s going off, it’s the lot of us.’

Pascoe’s suspicions were thickening by the second. Praise from Wield on matters of organization was praise indeed. Well, he was entitled to call it like he saw it. But that crack about Dalziel came close to high treason.

He said, ‘You sound like you’re a convert, Wieldy. Hey, you didn’t tell her I rang this morning, did you?’