Dialogues of the Dead

The taberna also fell well short of the rugby club in its provision. There was no service and when there was, as Dee explained, the choice would be between a sweet more or less authentic fruit drink or a totally anachronistic cup of tea or coffee.

“A concession to Councillor Steel who had to be persuaded that there was going to be a strong self-financing element in the project,” said Dee.

“You’ll not be sorry he’s out of the way then?” said Dalziel as they sat on a marble bench.

“I might find that question provocatively offensive if I weren’t persuaded that it is your intention to provoke,” said Dee. “In any case, Superintendent, you should understand that the success or failure of this project means very little to me. On the whole, despite the educational arguments, it all verges a little too much on the kitsch for my taste. In these days of interactive user-friendly fully automated hi-tech exhibitions, I still feel nostalgic for the old-style museum with its musty smells and its atmosphere of reverential silence. The past is another country and I sometimes feel we are visiting it more like football hooligans on a day out than serious travellers. How about you, Mr. Dalziel? How do you feel about the past?”

“Me? You get to my age, you don’t want to be looking back too much. But professionally speaking, it’s somewhere I spend a lot of time,” said Dalziel.

“But not, I’m sure, in any glitzy hi-tech way like the modern Heritage industry?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You mind that old TV science-fiction series, Doctor Who? Fellow travels around in a time machine that looks like a police box from the outside? Load of old bollocks, most of it, but I always felt that bit were right. A police box. ’Cos that’s what I do with the past. Like yon Doctor, I spend a lot of time visiting bygone days where villains have done things to try and change the future, and I don’t much care how I get there. It’s my job to mend things as far as I can and make certain the future’s as close to what it ought to be as I can get it.”

Dee regarded him wide-eyed.

“A time-lord!” he exclaimed. “You see yourself as a time-lord? Yes, yes, I think I get it. Someone commits a murder, or robs a bank, it’s because they want to change the future as they see it, usually to make it more comfortable for themselves and those they are close to, right? But by catching them, you restore the status quo, so far as that’s possible. Naturally if someone has been killed, there’s little you can do by way of resuscitation, is there?”

“I can’t bring folk back to life, that’s for sure,” said Dalziel. “But I can keep them living. This Wordman, for instance, how many’s he killed now? Started with Andrew Ainstable, if you count letting someone die, then there was young David Pitman and Jax Ripley, and after that …who came next?”

“Councillor Steel,” said Dee readily. “Then Sam Johnson and Geoff Pyke-Strengler.”

“They tripped nice and easy off your tongue, Mr. Dee,” said Dalziel.

“Oh dear. Was that a trap? If so, let me make a suggestion, Mr. Dalziel. I have up till now been happy to play my part in the charade that I was being questioned as a witness. But your continuing interest makes me wonder if it might not be time for both of us to come out in the open and acknowledge that I am a suspect.”

His expression now was one of eager almost ingenuous enquiry.

“You want to be a suspect?” said Dalziel curiously.

“I want to have the opportunity to remove myself from your list-if, as I fear, I’m on it. Am I on it, Mr. Dalziel?”

“Oh yes,” said the Fat Man, smiling. “Like Abou Ben Adhem.”

“Thank you,” said Dee, smiling back. “Now let’s try to discover some single point of fact that will prove to you I’m not the Wordman. You may ask me anything you like and I will answer truthfully.”

“Or pay a forfeit.”

“Sorry?”

“Truth, Dare, Force or Promise. Used to play it a lot when I were a kid. You had to choose one of them. Or you could pay a forfeit, like taking your knickers off. You’ve chosen Truth.”

“And I intend to keep my knickers on,” said Dee.

“Oh aye. You bent?”

“Bent as in crooked, or sexually deviant?”

“Both.”

“No.”

“Never?”

“Well, I have in my time committed various offences, like breaking road traffic regulations, shading my expenses, and using library stationery for my own purposes. Also there are one or two small amatory idiosyncrasies which I enjoy if I can find a willing partner of the opposite sex. But I believe that all of these fall within the margins of normal human behaviour, so I feel able to answer no even though I am not strictly able to answer never.”

“So you and Charley Penn never pulled each other’s plonkers?”

“As young adolescents, yes, occasionally. But only as, if you’ll forgive the expression, a stop-gap strategy to fill that anguished period between the onset of puberty and access to girls. Once girls appeared on the scene, our friendship became nunlike in its chasteness.”

“Nunlike? Not monklike?”