Dialogues of the Dead

“So,” said the DCI to Wingate, “we’ve got a couple of kids being bullied rotten by their social superiors, what happened next?”

“Let’s not make this a class thing,” said Wingate equably. “OK, they were skulks, but it wasn’t just that. You’ll find just as much bullying in your local comp. Even at Unthank you didn’t have to be a skulk to get picked on. There was another kid Penn and Dee were pretty thick with. Little Johnny Oakeshott. He was no skulk, in fact his family could probably have bought and sold most of the rest of us-”

“Any connection with the Oakeshotts out of Beverley?” interrupted Dalziel. “Them as own half Humberside?”

“That’s the family,” said Wingate. “Didn’t stop Johnny from getting bullied. He was small, a bit girlish, lovely curly blond hair and the poor kid had a bit of a lisp. And his real name was Sinjon, which didn’t help.”

“Sinjon spelt St. John?” said Pascoe.

“That’s right. He became Johnny when Dee and Penn took him under their wing. Not that that was much protection to start with as the hunt was very much up for them. They were both pretty small too, not as small as Johnny but small enough to be easy meat. Plus they were both pretty odd in their different ways. And that’s what really sets off the bullies.”

“So what happened? Were they bullied all the way through school?”

“Far from it,” said Wingate. “By the time I was in the fourth year and they were in the third, things had changed.”

“They’d started to fit in, you mean?”

“Hardly. But not fitting in isn’t the point at school. It’s the way you don’t fit in. Penn’s route to acceptability was the more conventional. He’d shot up and bulked out. He was never a heavyweight, you understand, but when he fought, he fought to kill. When he beat up the boss bully in his class, we all took notice. When he sorted out the tough guy in my year too, it was universally agreed that Penn was not a suitable target any more.”

“And Dee?”

“Well, first of all he benefited from Penn making it clear that any attack on his mate, Dee, was an attack on himself. But at the same time his oddity developed along lines which entertained rather than alienated his classmates. He was obsessed with words, the more weird and wonderful the better, and he started using these during lessons. It was a marvellous form of piss-taking because the teachers couldn’t really complain about it. They either had to admit their ignorance or try to bluff it out. Some of them tried to ignore him when he put his hand up to answer a question but the other kids caught on and made sure that often Dee’s was the only hand that went up.”

“In other words, he had to perform to be accepted?” said Pascoe.

Wingate shrugged.

“We all find our own ways to survive, at all ages,” he said, glancing at Dalziel.

The Fat Man yawned widely. Indeed hippopotamicly, thought Pascoe. If such a word existed.

He said, “How about making up words?”

Wingate smiled coldly and said, “How like the police to know more than they let on. Yes, he did that too, which added a new element to this game he played with the staff who now also ran the risk of pretending to understand a word which didn’t even exist. But it wasn’t just a case of épater la pédagogie; he used to put these collections of words together into his own personal dictionaries, each one devoted to a special area. I recall there was a European dictionary, and an Ecclesiastic, and an Educational-that was quite fun. But the one that really confirmed his status in the adolescent intellectual world was his Erotic dictionary. He had, I seem to recall, over a hundred words related to female genitalia. I don’t know whether it was a real word or one of his own, but if you ever hear a man of my age refer to his woman’s twilly-flew, you know he’s an old Unthinkable.”

“Ee,” said Wield.

“Eh?” said Wingate.

“All the examples you gave began with an E. European, Educational, Erotic.”

“Oh yes. That was part of the joke. It was our Head of English who started it, I think. He was one member of staff who wasn’t at all fazed by Dee’s little games. In fact he joined in, often managing to cap him. And it was him that drew attention to the significance of Dee’s initials. O.E.D. And after that Dee started finding E-words for all his collections so they could be OED’s too. Like Orson’s Erotic Dictionary.”

“But where’s the Richard?” enquired Pascoe.

“What? Ah, Dick, you mean? No, that was the English master’s joke. He started calling him Dictionary Dee, and it stuck. Dick is short for Dictionary. Gerrit?”

“I see,” said Pascoe. He could also see Dalziel yawning again.

He said, “So it was exit Karl and Orson, enter Charley and Dick, right?”

“And enter Johnny too. No more taking the piss out of Sinjon.”

“So now they belonged?”