Dialogues of the Dead

“Oh God, the smells, the smells!” cried Ambrose Bird, pinching his aquiline nose. “They are overdoing the smells. They always overdo the smells.”

“Smells are evocative, perhaps the most instantly evocative of all our human sense impressions,” retorted Percy Follows.

“Is that so? And evocative, as no doubt you are aware from the vast depth of your classical knowledge, derives from Latin evoco, evocare, to call forth. I see from the programme that one of these alleged smells is that of roasting dormouse. Putting aside the question of where in this ecologically sensitive age you would obtain a dormouse to roast, we must ask ourselves what it is this odour is supposed to be evoking? You cannot call forth that which is not there. How many of our visitors do you imagine will have had any experience of roast dormouse? Therefore as a stimulus of latent memory, such a smell can hardly be called evocative. Sic probo!”

“I see the floorshow’s started,” said Andy Dalziel.

Dick Dee turned and smiled.

“Superintendent, how silently you arrive. But I shouldn’t be surprised at such lightness of movement from one who only last Saturday evening was the terpsichorean star of the Fusiliers’ Ball.”

This was top-level intelligence. OK, he’d teased Pascoe and Wield with vague reference to his Saturday night dance date but even they would have been hard put to find where he’d been, so how had news of any of this reached Dick Dee?

The answer was obvious.

Charley Penn who must have hot-footed it down to Haysgarth to check out how Dalziel had broken his alibi.

He said, “You’re well informed for a man who does nowt but read old books. And talking of old books, why’ve you left ’em to come down here? Refereeing job, is it?”

Down here was the basement of the Centre, intended purely for storage until the discovery of the Roman floor during the digging of the foundations. The decision to incorporate the floor into the Centre as part of a Roman Reality Experience had seemed a brilliant compromise between the archaeologist camp and the council pragmatists who wanted to get the Centre finished as soon as possible. It hadn’t worked quite like that. Stuffer Steel had opposed every penny of the extra expense involved, and the extra strain placed on Philomel Carcanet had been a large factor in her breakdown.

“As always, you put your finger on it, Superintendent,” said Dee. “My modest reputation for being well informed brings me here as an arbiter between our disputing gladiators.”

“Why are they here anyway? Not their patch. Thought I saw Phil Carcanet up in your library just now.”

“Yes, indeed. It’s such a shame. It was her baby, the Experience, you know. She worked so hard getting everyone on board, the archaeologists and the council. She had to do it practically single-handed-no one else cared to take on Councillor Steel. It ran quite against the grain of her personality and in the end it broke her. She’s been on sick leave, but Mr. Steel’s demise removed the last obstacle to the project, suddenly the money was there, and with the opening so imminent, she made an effort to come in today, but I fear she found her fellow triumvirs reluctant to withdraw from the field. You see, that’s another thing the councillor’s death has done. It’s cleared the way to the appointment of an overall director, and it is his bays our heroes are apparently struggling for. At the first sign of dispute, dear Philomel fluttered away. Before you lie the fruit of her labours, but not for her the harvest. Oh dear.”

He put his hands to his ears in response to an explosion of noise.

“Turn it down, turn it down!” screamed Follows.

The noise declined and became recognizable as a babble of voices intermixed with horses neighing, cocks crowing, dogs barking, bells ringing, children laughing, and the occasional strains of a faintly oriental music, with brass notes blaring at a distance and plucked strings resonating much nearer.

“That’s better,” said the librarian.

“You think so? You must attend a lot of very quiet markets. They’re not like Sainsbury’s, you know, all Muzak and the swish of plastic. They are very noisy places,” said Bird.

“Ah, your famous crowd expertise,” mocked Follows. “Which must, I presume, have come from a previous incarnation as you can’t have picked it up from your theatre audiences. But that language-isn’t it supposed to be Latin and Anglo-Saxon these people are speaking? That doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever heard.”

“Why should it be when all you ever heard was some old fogey in a dusty gown declaiming Cicero or Beowulf? This, as far as the best palaeo-demoticists can assess, is how it must have sounded in its vernacular form.”

Dalziel, observing Dee, thought he caught a flicker of self-approval and said, “That pally whatsit one of yours, then?”

It was good pay-back for the Fusiliers’ Ball. Dee’s features registered surprise which he tried to cover not by concealment but by exaggerating it into comedy.