Dialogues of the Dead

“Shh,” said Rye, lowering her voice. “You mean Philomel Carcanet and that’s her out there, hiding behind that wall of Transactions. She came in this morning to supervise the dress rehearsal. She knows more about Roman Mid-Yorkshire than anyone alive. Trouble is, she can’t bear to talk to anyone alive for more than five minutes, which makes for a big communication problem. She came up here to pull herself together an hour ago. She’s still pulling. While those two are down there, dividing the spoils and jockeying for position when they advertise the post of Centre Director. Can you switch that kettle on?”

“So who’s your money on?” asked Hat.

“They’d both be disastrous,” she said, spooning instant coffee into mugs. “All they want is to make sure their own corner’s protected. Anyway, you’re not here to discuss Centre politics, are you? What’s Billy Bunter told you to ask me about? I think the kettle’s boiling.”

I must be made of glass, thought Hat. Everyone reads me like a book.

“Books,” he said, passing her the kettle. “You said you were a fan of Penn’s novels.”

“I enjoy them,” she said, pouring water into the mugs and passing one to Hat. “Though since he started being a fan of me, rather less so. Every time Harry Hacker says something smart or suggestive, I hear Penn’s voice. A pity. The lionization of authors is a chancy business. It’s like eating, really. While you’re enjoying a nice piece of rump steak, you don’t want to think too much about where it came from.”

Hat, who had so far in his life not allowed such a consideration to trouble his digestion, nodded sagely and said, “Very true. But to get back to Penn’s books, I saw one of them once done on the telly and gave up after ten minutes, so can you give me a brief tour through them?”

Then, to pre-empt the question he guessed her quizzical gaze was leading up to, he added, “The thing is this linguist guy from the Uni reckons that the Wordman’s so hung up on words, if we can get a line on the kind of stuff he reads, we raise our chances of getting a line on him.”

“Or the kind of stuff he writes, you mean,” said Rye. “You’re not interested in whether he reads the Harry Hacker novels, but whether he writes them.”

“We’ve got to follow all lines of enquiry,” said Hat.

“Yeah? That’s what Billy Bunter’s doing hounding Dick, is it? If you’re not getting anywhere chasing the guilty, keep bashing away at someone innocent in the hope that you’ll terrorize or trick them into a confession?”

“You may be right,” said Hat. “But that’s for top brass only. Me, I’m not even qualified to use the cattle prod yet so I’ve got to stick to old-fashioned methods like terrorizing people at long distance by asking questions when they’re not there.”

She thought about this, then said, “Harry Hacker is a sort of mix of the poet Heine, Lermontov’s hero, Pechorin, and the Scarlet Pimpernel, with a bit of Sherlock Holmes, Don Juan (Byron’s rather than Mozart’s) and Raffles thrown in …”

“Hold on,” said Hat. “Remember you’re talking to a simple soul whose idea of a good read is a newspaper that’s got more pictures than words. If we could cut out the literary padding and just stick to straightforward facts …”

“To the educated mind,” she said coldly, “what you term padding acts as a form of referential shorthand, saving many hundreds of words of one syllable. But if you insist. Harry is a Jack-the-lad, bumming around Europe in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, getting embroiled in many of the big historical events, a bit of a con artist, a bit of a crook, but with his own moral parameters and a heart of gold. His background is uncertain and one of the connecting threads running through all the books is his quest to find out about himself, psychologically, spiritually and genetically. Such introspections could be a bit of a drag in a romantic thriller, but Penn livens it up by putting it in the form of encounters with Harry’s doppelgänger, that’s another version of himself. Sounds daft but it works.”

“I’ll take your word,” said Hat. “This Harry sounds a right weirdo. How come the books are so popular?”