Dialogues of the Dead

“It was felt that as a mark of respect …” He saw he wasn’t impressing the writer so quickly added, “Also there will be some light refreshment on offer afterwards at the Lichen Hotel, a chance to talk about Percy and celebrate his life. By the time that’s over …”

“Everyone’ll be well pissed. But you’ll be coming back, I would have thought. A glutton for punishment but not for lunchtime booze. So why don’t I come round about three, say …”

“No,” said Dee firmly. “I’ve got things to do.”

“What?”

“If you must know, I thought I’d go out to Stangdale and clear my stuff out of the cottage.”

“Why? New landlord giving you grief?”

“Hardly, as they’re still looking for him, it seems. Some cousin who went out to America in the sixties looks the best bet. No, I just haven’t felt any desire to go back there since …since what happened happened. It might wear off, of course, but until it does, it’s silly to leave all my gear lying around for some passing rambler to nick. I wouldn’t mind some company. Fancy an outing?”

“You must be joking!” said Penn. “You know what I feel about the fucking countryside. Once was enough. No, it’ll have to be the Uni library, I suppose. All those gabby undergrads. I may run amuck.”

Dee sighed and said, “All right, Charley, you can use my flat. But you don’t touch my espresso machine, is that understood? Last time you left me with the choice of brown water or solids.”

“Cross my heart,” said Penn.

Percy Follows had been (and presumably, if all had gone according to plan, still was) a devout member of the Church of England at its apogee, a step beyond which could see a man tumbling into Rome. Not for him the simple worship of a day. If it didn’t involve incense, candles, hyssop, aspersions, processions, genuflections, soaring choirs and gilded vestments, it didn’t count. His parish priest being naturally of the same mind pulled out all the stops and did not miss the opportunity to deliver a meditation upon death and an encomium upon the deceased in what he fondly imagined was the style of Dr. Donne of St. Paul’s.

Pascoe, admiring but unable to follow the example of his Great Leader, whose head was bowed and whose lips from time to time emitted a susurration not unlike the sound of waves making towards a pebbled shore, thumbed desperately through his prayer book in search of distraction. The Psalms seemed the nearest thing to light relief he was likely to find there, full of nice turns of phrase and good advice. How pleasant it might have been if the priest, for instance, had taken the hint of the first of the two appointed to be read at the burial service (only one was necessary but they’d got them both), the second verse of which read, ‘I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle; while the ungodly is in my sight.’

With Andy Dalziel snoring away before him, he could hardly have any doubt about the presence of the ungodly!

Pascoe riffled through the pages, letting them open as they would, and found himself looking at words he’d read recently.

The Lord is my light, and my salvation; whom then shall I fear: the Lord is the strength of my life; of whom then shall I be afraid?

Psalm 27 which the Wordman seemed so fond of, finding assurance therein (if Pottle had got it right) that his sense of acting on instruction from the Other World made him invulnerable.

Not quite the same words, his excellent (though unlike Wield’s, not quite eidetic) memory told him. There’d been no thens in the version he’d read in the Bible. And it had been headed by the legend A Psalm of David, while here in the Prayer Book you got the first couple of words of the Latin original Dominus illuminatio. No, not the original, of course. A Latin translation of the Hebrew, presumably in St. Jerome’s Vulgate. From vulgatus-made public.

Odd to think of an age when things were made public by translating them into Latin!

Did any of this have any bearing on the hunt for the Wordman? None whatsoever. It was like hunting the Snark. Who, as the Baker feared, would probably turn out to be a Boojum.

The Baker. Funny how these things came back. There’d been a guy at university, a slight inconsequential fellow who made so little impression that some wag doing Eng. Lit. (that natural home of waggery) had christened him Baker because-how did it go?-

He would answer to “Hi!” or any loud cry,
Such as “Fry me!” or “Fritter my wig!”
To “What-you-may-call-um!” or “What-was-his-name?”
But especially “Thing-um-a-jig!”