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

Yet throughout all this, she and Dame Kitty had remained in touch and eventually, rather to their surprise, realized they were friends. Not that the friendship made Cap feel able to address her old head by her St Dot’s sobriquet of Kitbag, and Dame Kitty would rather have blasphemed than call her ex-pupil anything but Amanda.

A long and very active retirement had ground Dame Kitty down till ill health had finally obliged her to admit the inevitable, and two years earlier she had moved into a private nursing home that was part of the Avalon Clinic complex at Sandy-town on the Yorkshire coast.

At her best, Dame Kitty was as bright and sharp as ever, but she tired easily and usually Cap was alert for the first signs of fatigue so that she could start ending her visit without making her friend’s condition the cause.

This time it was the older woman who said, ‘Is everything all right, Amanda?’

‘What?’

‘You seemed to drift off. Perhaps you should sit in this absurd wheelchair while I go inside and order some more tea.’

‘No, no, I’m fine. Sorry. What were we saying…?’

‘We were discussing the merits of the govern-ment’s somewhat inchoate education policy, an argument I hoped your sudden silence indicated I had won. But I fear my victory owes more to your distraction than my reasoning. Are you sure all is well with you? No problems with this police officer of yours, whom I hope one day to meet?’

‘No, things are fine there, really…’

Suddenly Cap Marvell took her mobile out.

‘Sorry, do you mind?’

She was speed-dialling before Kitty could answer.

The phone rang twice then there was an invitation to leave a message.

She opened her mouth to speak, closed it, disconnected, and stood up.

‘I’m sorry, Kitty, I’ve got to go. Before the mobs start moving off the beaches…’

This effort to offer a rational explanation produced the same sad sigh and slight upward roll of the eyes brought by feeble excuses for bad behaviour in their St Dot days.

‘OK, that’s not it. Sorry, I don’t know why,’ said Cap. ‘But I’ve really got to go.’

‘Then go, my dear. And God go with you.’

Normally this traditional valediction would have won from Cap her equivalent of the old headmistress’s long-suffering expression, but today she just nodded, stooped to kiss her friend’s cheek, then hurried away across the lawn towards the car park.

Dame Kitty watched her out of sight. There was trouble there. Despite the bright sun and the cloudless sky, she felt it in the air.

She stood up out of the wheelchair which the staff insisted she should use on her excursions into the gardens, gave it a whack with her stick, and began to make her slow way back to the house.

Later Peter Pascoe worked out that Dalziel had probably saved his life twice.

The Fat Man’s car which they’d been sheltering behind was flipped into the air then deposited upside down on the pavement.

If he hadn’t obeyed the Fat Man’s command to follow, he would have been underneath it.

And if he hadn’t been walking in the lee of that corpulent frame when the explosion occurred…

As it was, when some slight degree of awareness began to seep back into his brain, he felt as if every part of his body had been subjected to a good kicking. He tried to stand up but found the best he could manage was all fours.

The air was full of dust and smoke. Like a retriever peering through the mist in search of its master’s bird, he strained to penetrate the swirling veil of motes and vapour. An amorphous area of orangey red with some consistency of base gave him the beginnings of perspective. Against it, marked by its stillness in the moving air, he made out a vague heap of something, like a pile of earth thrown up alongside a grave.

He began to crawl forward and after a couple of yards managed to rise off his hands into a semiupright crouch. The shifting coiling colour he realized now was fire. He could feel its heat, completely unlike the gentle warmth of the sun which only an hour ago he’d been enjoying in the green seclusion of his garden. That small part of his mind still in touch with normality suggested that he ought to ring Ellie and tell her he was all right before some garbled version of events got on to local radio.

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 formally identify as Andy Dalziel.

He had fallen on to 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 grey 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 for ever 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 for ever.

He rolled him over on to 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 on to 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 finally he 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 prise out the debris which 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 which 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 post-blast 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 the business before the ruined terrace. Where Number 3 had been there was nothing but a flame-filled cavity, like hell-mouth 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.