Dialogues of the Dead

“So it would seem to me that our wee Wordman could regard certain printed texts as a sort of coded gospel. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding, sort of thing.”

“That’s Revelation, not a gospel,” said Dalziel. “Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man.”

“Now why am I not surprised you know that, Superintendent?” said Urquhart. “One last thing. In the Fifth Dialogue ‘life became too great a bore …’ that looks like a quote from the last letter that guy Beddoes poor Sam Johnson was researching wrote before he topped himself. ‘Life was too great a bore on one leg and that a bad one.’ Seems the poor sod had tried killing himself before and only succeeded in having a leg amputated. Him a doctor, too. Would have made a great NHS consultant from the sound of it!”

“That it?” said Dalziel. “All right, young Lochinvar, you can ride back into the west.”

This time Urquhart let the Fat Man have the last word and as if in acknowledgement, Dalziel waited till the door had closed behind him before he said, “Another waste of fucking time!”

“I don’t think so, sir,” said Pascoe firmly. “We’re building up a profile. And that last thing about the Beddoes quote, that tells us something.”

“Oh aye? From what you said about your mate being a bit of a piss-artist, mebbe it means he died legless, too,” said Dalziel.

“Very good, sir. But it means the Wordman must be quite well acquainted with Beddoes’ writings. And I know someone who’s deeply interested.”

“Oh God, not Roote again!” groaned the Fat Man. “Give it a rest, will you?”

“Arrest?” said Pascoe. “That’s exactly what I want to give him.”

Dalziel regarded him sadly and said, “Pete, tha’s beginning to sound like this Wordman. You ought to get out more. What is it the kids say nowadays? Get a life, lad. Get a fucking life!”

28

But getting a life isn’t easy when there’s so much death around.

On Saturday morning Pascoe woke, stretched, thought with pleasure, “I’m off duty.”

Then recalled he was going to a funeral, his second of the week.

For a cop, weekends usually meant more rather than less work. Yet Pascoe, like a slave dreaming of home, had never lost an in-the-grain feeling that Saturdays were for football matches, odd jobs, partying, getting married, taking the family on a picnic, all that sort of good stuff. So, despite the fact that the pressures of the Wordman investigation were causing a huge contraction of official time off (without any proportionate expansion of official paid overtime), he’d clung on to his scheduled Wordman-free Saturday like a drowning man to a life-belt.

But Linda Lupin, Loopy Linda, had changed all that.

Murdered bodies, especially where poison is involved, are usually kept on ice until all parties with a forensic concern-police, coroner, DPS, and (if someone’s in custody) defence counsel-are content that every last drop of evidence, incriminatory or exculpatory, has been squeezed from them. Fond relatives are advised to put their grief in cold storage too against the day of its proper obsequial display.

But when the fond relative is Linda Lupin, MEP, before whom even French officials have been known to quail, things may be arranged differently.

Her reasoning (which, as always, came carved on tablets of stone) was that her step-brother’s death was already causing Europe to suffer one period of her absence and it was doubtful if it could survive another so soon following. Therefore the funeral must take place during her current stay, i.e. before next week when she purposed to return to her divine task of keeping the Continent fit for Anglo-Saxons.

And so it came to pass that Sam Johnson was buried on Saturday morning.

Linda would have preferred the finality of cremation, but here the coroner dug his heels in. The body must remain accessible. So the ceremony took place in St. Hilda’s, the university church.

Official admission that Steel and Johnson were the Wordman’s fourth and fifth victims was in itself enough to provoke the British media into a feeding frenzy of speculation and accusation, and the unexpected involvement of Linda Lupin was the ox-tail in the olio. The funeral could have degenerated into a cross between a pop-concert and an England away-match if the wise Victorian founders of the university hadn’t extended the principle that any building likely to house students should be surrounded by high stone walls topped with shards of glass to include the church. University security guards, like a castle garrison in a siege, circumambulated the perimeter, pushing off the ladders by which the most depraved of invaders attempted to capture a view within, while a sharp radio message from the police soon took care of the helicopter which swooped, harpy-like, out of the low cloud cover above.