Dialogues of the Dead

Clever sod, thought Hat. Though it was well to remember that the Wordman was a clever sod too. But it helped him choose what to look at and what to shove aside for later examination.

He turned his attention to those who had something to report about the councillor and/or thought they’d noticed something at the demonstration.

He rapidly came to the conclusion that most of the reports of odd behaviour were motivated either by an over-eagerness to help or by a simple longing for importance. None of the professional observers there, i.e. himself, Wield, Pascoe, and the super, contributed anything, which might or might not be significant. Five witnesses recalled that when they were watching the engraver at work, a nearby table had been jostled and a couple of glasses had fallen to the floor, which could have been a deliberate diversion. Unfortunately, none of them had a distinct memory of who was in the vicinity at the time; indeed only one of them could recall the presence of any of the others.

Stuffer Steel had made rather more impression, though much of the recollection centred on the amount of food he managed to put away. Reports of his actual conversation suggested a preoccupation with two themes. The first was that most of the art on display was a load of crap and spending public money on displaying it was a scandal and he’d be proposing a motion of censure on the Finance Committee at the next council meeting. The second was that Jax Ripley’s death had fallen very fortuitously for the Mid-Yorkshire police whose extravagances and inefficiencies she was, with his assistance, in the midst of exposing.

Mary Agnew in particular had got an earful, as had Sammy Ruddlesdin, and John Wingate from BBC MY. Several witnesses reported that Wingate had interrupted Steel after a while and there had been a heated exchange, ending with the TV man walking away. Wingate himself gave a full account of this, saying that he’d got pissed off with listening to the councillor rattle on as if the only important thing about Jax Ripley’s death had been its effect on Steel’s campaigning. This was an understandable reaction from a colleague of the dead woman, but Bowler recalled his own speculation when getting a statement from Wingate after the murder that there might have been a more than professional relationship between the two of them.

He made a note and read on, concentrating on those who’d left round about the same time as the councillor. Wield had already done the groundwork here also, producing a neat graph showing who was where at what time. A copy of Hat’s own statement was here, of course, and he read through it with as much detachment as he could muster. It was a good policeman’s statement, precise and detailed. It said nothing of that feeling he’d had when he entered the toilet of stepping into a new dimension in which nothing existed but himself and the body on the floor, curled in a foetal question mark. How long he’d simply stood and looked at it he did not know. In fact, How long? did not seem a question that applied, not when it seemed possible to step back into the corridor, wait a second, then re-open the door and find that the image had been erased. Of course he’d done no such thing. Of course the training had snapped in and he’d gone into the sequence of checking pulse, calling help, attempting resuscitation, making the scene secure, and by the time he went to bed that night, the sense of disassociation had faded to a memory of natural shock at such a grisly discovery.

But when he read the copy of the Fourth Dialogue Wield handed him that morning and realized he had been only a few heartbeats behind the Wordman, it all came back to him so strongly that he found himself grasping at the hardness of a table and staring fixedly at the second hand on his watch to assure himself of the continuance of corporeality.

Now he reconsidered his statement in view of the new information that this wasn’t merely a one-off killing but part of the Wordman’s sequence. Perhaps his feelings were now relevant …But how? And his heart sank at the thought of trying to explain them to Dalziel. He might be able to retrieve his reputation from the false accusation of being Deep-throat, but Air-brain was probably beyond recovery.

He put his statement aside and went on with the others.

It would of course be nice to be able to go to the meeting and perform a piece of mental gymnastics which took him leaping from one small overlooked item to another, ending with a triple somersault before landing firmly on the Wordman’s back. In his mind’s eye he saw the Trinity looking on with wonder and admiration before holding up their score-cards awarding maximum points for both style and content.