Dialogues of the Dead

“He must be about the same age as Penn and Dee. Might be worth a chat, Pete. Find out what they got up to as kids. Christ, I must be desperate, can’t believe I’m saying this. I’ve spent too much time listening to your mate Pozzo.”

The phone was still ringing.

Pascoe said, “Shall I answer that? Could be the Chief’s office again.”

“Then he’ll think I’m on my way,” said Dalziel indifferently.

He glanced at his watch.

“Tell you what, Wingate’ll be at your press conference with all the other vultures. Reel him in when it’s over. Knowing your style, Pete, that should be about half twelve. These telly bellys like shooting the questions, let’s see if he can take his own medicine.”

“You’ll be finished with the Chief by then?”

“Unless he opens a new bottle of Scotch,” said Dalziel. “Bowler, you be there too. After all, this is your idea.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Hat, delighted.

“Don’t get carried away. Likely it’ll turn out a waste of time, and I just want you close so I don’t waste my energy kicking summat inanimate.”

He left. Hat turned to the others, smiling, inviting them to share Dalziel’s joke.

They didn’t smile back.

Pascoe said thoughtfully, “Not like the super to chase rainbows.”

“Not unless he’s got an itch in his piles …”

They contemplated the Fat Man’s famous haruspical piles for a moment, then Pascoe said, “Wieldy, the OED’s online now. Ellie’s a subscriber, if I give you her details, can you whistle it up on the computer?”

“You authorize it, I can whistle up the PM’s holiday snaps,” said Wield.

They followed him to his computer and watched as he ran his fingers over the keyboard.

“Right,” he said. “Here we are.”

“Great. Now find paronomania,” said Pascoe.

But Wield was ahead of him.

“Paranomasia we’ve got. And paromphalocele we’ve got too, which from the sound of it we could do without. But no sign whatsoever of paronomania. So unless the great Oxford English Dictionary’s missed a bit, there’s no such word.”

“And yet,” said Pascoe, “we have all seen it, and its definition. Interesting. While you’re at it, Wieldy, try contortuplicated.”

“That’s what the super said,” said Hat. “I thought he just made it up.”

“No,” said Wield. “It’s here. ‘Twisted and entangled.’ But it’s obsolete. Just one example and that’s 1648.”

“Not attributed to A. Dalziel, is it?” said Pascoe. “Let that be a lesson to you, Hat. Never underestimate the super.”

“No, sir. Sir, how did Mr. Dalziel know about Mrs. Blossom’s tattoo?”

“Can’t imagine,” said Pascoe. “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

38

The press conference lasted a good hour.

The technique preferred by most policemen when dealing with the gentlemen of the press, hungry for information, is the response monosyllabic. Yes and no, as appropriate, blossoming into an euphuistic No Comment when neither of these will do.

Pascoe, however, favoured the sesquipedalian style. As Dalziel put it, “After thirty minutes with me, they’re clamouring for more. After thirty minutes with Pete, they’re clamouring to be let out.” Tyro reporters had been known to leave one of his sessions with several pads crammed with notes which on analysis had not rendered a single line of usable copy.

Only once on this occasion did anyone come close to laying a finger on him and that was Mary Agnew, editor of the Mid-Yorkshire Gazette, whose personal attendance signalled the importance of the story.

“Mr. Pascoe,” she said, “it appears to us out here that these so-called Wordman killings are systematic rather than random. Is this your opinion also?”

“It would seem to me,” said Pascoe, “that the sequence of killings plus the associated correspondence, details of which I am, for obvious reasons of security, unable to share with you at this juncture, predicates what for the want of a better term we might define as a system, though we should not let the familiarity of the term confuse us into apprehending anything we would recognize as a logical underpinning of the perpetrator’s thought processes. We are dealing here with a morbid psychology and what is systematic to him might well, when understood, appear to the normal mind as disjunctive and even aleatoric.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” said Agnew. “In which case, given that we have here a madman killing according to some kind of sequential system, how close are you to being able to give warning to those most at risk of becoming victims, whether as individuals or in a body?”

“Good question,” said Pascoe, meaning in Westminster-speak that he had no intention of answering it. “All I can say is that if these killings are systematic, then the vast majority of your readers can have nothing to fear.”

“They’ll be pleased to know it. But looking down the list of victims, I can work out for myself that from Jax Ripley on, all of them have had something to do with the Centre, either directly or indirectly. Have you put everyone who works in the Centre or has any strong connection with it on alert?”