Dialogues of the Dead

Desperate Dan was Chief Constable Trimble. The vultures were the media. Interest in the Wordman killings had increased exponentially with each new death and this latest killing had rocketed it into an international dimension. Not only was the Hon. a peer of the realm, but one of the tabloids had worked out that there was a distant royal connection which put him at something like three hundred and thirty-seventh in line to the throne. American and European interest had exploded. One German TV company had dug up a would-be telly don whose claim that a Pyke-Strengler had been beheaded during the Civil War sparked speculation that a left-wing revolutionary movement was behind the killing. Attempts to fit the earlier killings into such a political pattern were proving ludicrous, but journalists haven’t reached the depths of their profession by allowing ludicrosity to get in the way of a good story.

Pascoe, who had ambiguous feelings about being regarded as the acceptable face of policing, had been elected spokesman at the forthcoming press conference. His ambiguity rose from a reluctance to accept the kind of type-casting which, while it might be good for his career, could also take it in directions he was not yet ready to go. The world of policy committees and high-level political contacts might get a lot of scrambled egg on your shoulders, but it was far removed from that other world of practical investigation which got a lot of honest dirt under your fingernails. Like St. Augustine and sex, he knew he’d have to give it up one day, but preferably not yet.

“Mr. Trimble wants an update, does he?” he asked.

“Update?” said Dalziel. “Nay, the bugger wants a result and he wants it yesterday. Someone up there’s giving him a hard time.”

He spoke with the grim satisfaction of one who knows what a hard time is. Pascoe observed him with a sympathy he was careful not to show. Dalziel drove his troops mercilessly when the occasion demanded, but he took his own bumps and rarely passed them on to his underlings. Going up or coming down, the buck stopped with Andy Dalziel, and Pascoe could only guess at the strain the Wordman case was putting the Fat Man under.

Hat came back into the room. His reaction to the discovery of the body had won grudging praise from Dalziel, though he had advised for future consideration that on the whole it was best not to let your bit of fluff play netball with the victim’s severed head.

In particular, Hat’s immediate return to Stangcreek Cottage where he’d promptly secured the axe and taken a preliminary statement from Dick Dee had been approved, not because of anything it produced but because it kept the librarian in situ as a witness. That he must also be classed as a suspect, Bowler had known from the minute he saw the body, and if Dee hadn’t been in the cottage when he and Rye got back to it, the DC would have put out a call to pick him up. Similarly if he’d tried to leave before the troops arrived, he would have arrested him which would have started the custodial clock ticking.

Not that it was just professional satisfaction at not wasting any precious senior officer interrogation time that he felt. The way that Rye had accepted Dee’s comforting on their return to the cottage had made him very aware that if she got a sniff he was treating her boss as a serious suspect, the smooth course of their relationship might have hit a rock. She’d probably got the message by now, but at a sufficient remove for the blame to be heaped on Pascoe or the Fat Man rather than his lowly self.

The good news (if the removal of a possible perp from the frame could be called good news) was that they’d found nothing positive to link Dee with the Hon.’s death.

It was true that his prints were all over the axe which Forensic had confirmed was the instrument used to sever the Hon.’s head, but as he’d been using it to split logs in Hat’s presence, this was hardly surprising. He did have a small cut on one of his fingers, but when his claim that his blood type was O was confirmed by a check of his medical records (written permission to see which “for elimination purposes” he readily gave), hope of tying him in to the AB blood spots on the fish hook faded.

Dalziel, who felt that anyone found using a bloodstained axe near a headless body was at the very least guilty of wasting police time, seemed inclined to blame the messenger, but Pascoe’s slim shoulders had grown professionally broad over the years and he was able to ignore the accusatory grunts and snorts and carry on with his meticulous summation of the lack of evidence against Dee.

“The path. report suggests the Hon. had been dead between two and four days. Dee’s alibi’d at work for most of the relevant daylight hours. After work with the evenings drawing in, seems less of a possibility. The time it would have taken to get out there means it would have been dusk when they arrived-”

“They?” interrupted Wield.