Dialogues of the Dead

“Don’t get me wrong about Harry. He’s a real Romantic hero. He can be the life and soul of the party, pulling the birds almost at will, yet at other times he has these fits of Byronic (sorry, I can’t think of any other way of putting it) melancholy in which all he wants is to be by himself and commune with Nature. But his saving grace is a strong sense of irony which enables him to send himself up just when you think he’s taking himself far too seriously. The books are full of verbal wit, lots of good jokes, passages of exciting action, good but not overdone historical backgrounds, and strong plots which often include a clever puzzle element which Harry is instrumental in solving. They are not great works of art, but they make very good not unintelligent recreational reading. Their televisation, as so often happens, manages to disguise, dilute or simply dissipate most of those elements which make the novels special and give them their unique flavour.”

She paused and Hat put down his coffee mug to applaud, not entirely ironically.

“That was good,” he said. “Fluent, stylish, and I understood nearly all of it. But just to cut to the chase, is there anything in them which might connect directly to what we know about the Wordman?”

“Well, that depends on how you’re using we. I dare say the full harvest of police knowledge and what I’ve managed to glean from your furrow are two very different things. But from my lowly point of view, the answer is possibly, but not uniquely.”

“Eh?”

“I mean, if it turned out the Wordman had written something like the Harry Hacker series, it wouldn’t be amazing. But I can think of a lot of other books it wouldn’t be amazing to find he’d written, except of course that it would be, as some of the authors are dead and none of those who aren’t lives in Mid-Yorkshire.”

“Which is just the point. Penn does live in Mid-Yorkshire,” said Hat. “What about this other stuff he’s interested in, the German thing?”

“Heinrich Heine? Nothing there I can think of except insofar as he’s a model for Harry Hacker. Harry was Heine’s given name, you know.”

“Harry? Thought you said it was Heinrich.”

“That came later. One of Penn’s translations called him Harry and I asked about it and he told me that at birth Heine was named Harry afteran English acquaintance of the family. It gave him a lot of grief as a kid, particularly as the sound the local rag and bone man used to yell to urge his donkey on came out something like Harry! Heine changed it to the German form when he converted to Christianity, aged twenty-seven.”

Now Hat was very attentive.

“You mean the other kids used to take the piss out of him because of his name?”

“Apparently. I don’t know if there was anti-Semitism there too, but the way Penn told it made it sound pretty traumatic.”

“Yes, it would,” said Hat, excited. “Same kind of thing happened to him at school.”

He told her what they’d found out about Penn’s background.

She frowned and said, “You’re digging deep, aren’t you? I presume you’ve been checking out Dick in the same way.”

“Yeah, well you’ve got to get all the relevant facts about everyone in an enquiry. In fairness to them really.”

His weak justification got the scornful laugh it deserved.

“So what relevant facts did you discover about Dick?” she demanded.

Why was it when he was talking to Rye there always came a point when, despite the rasp of Dalziel’s injunction in his mental ear, remember you’re a cop!, it seemed easiest to tell her everything?

He told her everything, picking up the framed photograph on the desk when he came to Johnny Oakeshott’s death and saying, “I presume that’s him in the middle. Penn’s got the same picture in his flat. Obviously he meant a lot to them both.”

Rye took the picture and stared at the angelically smiling little boy.

“When someone you’re close to dies young, yes, it does mean a lot. What’s sinister about that?”

He recalled her brother, Sergius, and said, “Yes, of course it must, I didn’t mean there was anything odd about that. But the attempts to get in touch with him …” Then just in case it turned out that Rye had tried making contact through a spiritualist, or some such daft kind of thing that girls might do, he pressed on, “But this stuff with the dictionaries, that’s got to be a bit weird, hasn’t it?”

“It’s no big deal,” she said dismissively. “Everyone who knows him well knows about the dictionaries. As for his name, all you had to do was look at the electoral register. Or the council employees list. Or the telephone directory. The fact that he’s known as Dick is no more significant than you being Hat or me being Rye.”

“Yes, but Orson …”

“No worse that Ethelbert. Or Raina for that matter.”

“No, I meant, Orson Welles …”

She looked baffled for a moment then began to smile and eventually laughed out loud.