Dialogues of the Dead

But such flights of inspiration, though the commonplace of fiction, were very rarely spotted in the world of a humble detective constable. Close attention to detail, no matter how dull and repetitive, was what solved cases. And as he read, Hat cross-checked with Wield’s graph, not in expectation of finding an omission but in the not very strong hope of spotting a discrepancy. The closest he came was in Rye’s statement (direct and detailed enough to be a policeman’s) in which she said that when she collected her coat from the reference library she saw a few members of the public working, but no one she knew. Yet according to the graph, two people who’d been at the preview should have been there-Dick Dee and Charley Penn. He started shuffling through the statements.

“You got something?” said Wield, who’d come up behind him soft-footed.

“Not really …maybe …”

He found Dee’s statement. He’d left the preview a couple of minutes before Hat and Rye and gone straight to the library. On his arrival, the woman on duty had taken the opportunity to head off to the toilet. Dee had been at the far end of the library, checking a reference in some tome, when he glimpsed Rye collecting her coat from the office.

So he saw her, she didn’t see him.

Penn in his statement said he’d gone straight to the library and taken his place in his usual cubicle. Facing the wall, he’d written, you tend not to see many people. But later when he’d gone to the lavatory (not the locus in quo but the staff loo adjacent to the reference library, access to which I enjoy as a kind of “favoured nation” privilege), he had noticed Dee. So, a general cancelling out.

“No, sorry. Nothing. Look, I’m not trying to second-guess you, Sarge …”

“Aren’t you? That’s a pity. DC who’s not trying to second-guess his sergeant is no use to anyone. But don’t get so absorbed you miss the time. Ten more minutes. Be late for Mr. Dalziel and you could be late forever.”

Hat abandoned the statements and spent the remaining time processing a selection of people through the computer. It was like panning for gold in a worked-out claim. Dross, dross, nothing but dross.

Then at last, like a buttercup growing through a cow-pat, he glimpsed one tiny nugget of gold.

He drew it out, weighed it, recognized it wasn’t going to make him rich. But properly worked, it might make an elegant link in a chain. He glanced at his watch. Five minutes to go.

Probably more. Academics were notoriously bad timekeepers.

He reached for the telephone.

18

“Well, look who’s here,” said Andy Dalziel. “Come in, lad. Find a chair. Make yourself comfortable. Good of you to spare the time.”

The academics, unreliable as ever, must have been punctual.

Spouting apologies, Hat concentrated on the guests, to blot out Dalziel’s threatening glower and Pascoe’s reproachful pout. Even Wield’s blankness spelt out well-I-did-warn-you.

Dr. Pottle, the psychiatrist, was a small man in late middle age who had deliberately cultivated a natural resemblance to Einstein. “Patients find it very reassuring,” he’d once told Peter Pascoe who was, unofficially and intermittently, one of those patients. “Also I like to tell the really dotty ones that I’ve built a time machine and travelled into the future and everything’s going to be all right for them.”

“And how does it look for me, Professor?” Pascoe had replied.

Pottle’s other idiosyncrasy was that despite all the social, medical and political pressure, he still chainsmoked. Dalziel, who was an off-on smoker currently going through a pretty extensive off patch, bowed to the inevitable, helped himself to a handful of Pottle’s fags, and was drawing on the first like a drowning sailor come up for the third time.

The other expert was introduced as Dr. Drew Urquhart. Not very old, as far as Bowler could make out through a wilderness of beard. Fortunately he kept his upper lip bare. Had he worn the kind of Einsteinian moustache Pottle favoured, his features would have been beyond even a mother’s recognition. Dressed in non-matching trainers, threadbare jeans and a T-shirt which had rotted under the armpits to provide what seemed like very necessary ventilation holes, he looked more like a resident of cardboard-box country in the shopping centre than the Groves of Academe.

“Fuck this,” he growled in a Scots accent, unidentifiable to Bowler except that it wasn’t Glaswegian. “If I’m going to be choked dead then I might as well do it on my own weed.”

He produced a cigarette paper and began to fill it with something he took from a small leather pouch.

Dalziel said, “You light that, sunshine, and I’ll kick you all the way back to the Kingdom of Fife.”

“You check up on all your visitors, do you, Superintendent?” sneered Urquhart.

“Don’t need to check. Should have thought being a linguist you’d know you give yourself away every time you open your gob.”