Dialogues of the Dead

“She knew Jax Ripley, didn’t she? I can talk to her about Jax Ripley and what she got up to. All right, I can probably tell her more than she can tell me. But I’m clutching at straws, Mr. Wingate, and I might as well clutch at your missus, seeing it doesn’t look like there’s going to be owt to clutch at here. Is there, Mr. Wingate?”

He smiled one of his terrible smiles, lips drawn back from savage teeth, like the jaws of a mechanical digger about to seize and uproot a tree.

Pascoe was long acquainted with the Fat Man and all his winning ways and his mind had whipped, computer quick, through a wide selection of possible scenarios and opted for the one which made most sense.

The Fat Man was telling Wingate he knew that he’d been banging Jax Ripley and was offering him the simple choice all detectives at some time offer most criminals-bubble or be bubbled.

Wingate’s mind clearly moved as fast, or even faster as he had also to work out the best response. Not that there was much real alternative.

He caved in instantly but to do him justice he caved in with style, turning back to Pascoe and saying with a good shot at urbanity, “Where were we? Oh yes, you were asking me about my schooldays. And Dee and Penn. Now let me see what I can recall …”

It wasn’t a very edifying story, but then the behaviour of schoolboys rarely has much to do with edification.

Penn and Dee had arrived at Unthank on the same day without previous acquaintance but soon found themselves thrown together by a common cause, survival.

Unlike the majority of pupils whose parents paid the school’s fees, they were scholarship kids, known to the fee-payers as “skulks,” who were admitted under a system by which, in return for a modicum of support from the public exchequer, the college undertook to educate three or four scions of the commonalty each year.

Schoolchildren love elected victims-the strong to have a legitimate target for their strength, the weak to help divert persecution from themselves.

Most victims, said Wingate, were localized by year, first-year skulks suffering at the hands of first-year bullies and so on. But some became a general target, usually because of some particularly distinguishing feature, like colour or a speech impediment.

“Penn got singled out when we found out he was German,” said Wingate. “His first name is Karl, not Charles, which was pretty suspicious. Then someone saw his mother when she visited the school, a large lady, very blonde who spoke with a heavy Germanic accent. His father’s real name, we soon found out, had been Penck, Ludwig Penck, which he’d changed to Penn when he got naturalized. I heard later that they’d got out of East Berlin when the Wall went up and kept going to the UK because Penck had an uncle here who’d been a p.o.w. in Yorkshire and stayed on after the war. Penck would have been sent back to West Germany, but his uncle was working on the estate of Lord Partridge, looking after his horses. Partridge was a Tory MP then, in the Cabinet, and he quickly took up the Pencks’ cause. With old Macmillan in charge, liberal credentials could still do a Tory a bit of good back then, not like the present bunch where you need to kick two foreigners before breakfast to establish you’re the right stuff. So he got permission to stay plus a job. Good heart-warming stuff, but of course at school no one was much interested in the political background, except maybe to think that if anyone had been persecuted once that was very good reason to persecute them again!”

“Kraut,” said Hat suddenly, his first contribution to the conversation.

They all looked at him.

“I heard Dee call Mr. Penn Kraut,” he explained.

“That’s right, that’s what he used to be called at school. Karl the Kraut,” said Wingate.

“And he called Mr. Dee something back …it sounded like whoreson?”

“It would have been. Karl the Kraut and Orson the Whoreson,” said Wingate. “Dee’s mother came to the school too. Everyone was always very interested in everyone else’s parents. Anything you could use to embarrass anyone with was avidly seized upon. Mrs. Dee was dead glamorous in a rather flashy way. Miniskirts were in then and she wore one right up to her bum. To add to the poor kid’s other troubles, he had this birthmark, a sort of light brown patch of skin running down his belly into his groin. Some bastard suggested it was a symptom of some nasty disease he’d caught from his mother, and christened him Orson the Whoreson.”

“You can always tell a well brought-up boy by his manners,” said Dalziel. “Why Orson?”

“That was one of his names,” said Wingate. “His mother hadn’t done him any favours, had she? I presume she was a movie fan.”

“Sir,” said Hat excitedly, “you remember when I found …”

Pascoe shut him up with a glance. The Pascoe glance might lack the Big Bertha impact of Dalziel’s facial artillery, yet it had a Medusa-like quality which served just as well.