These he could read from here, but nevertheless he rose and went out to the shelf.
The first volume was easy.
A-Bazouki
The AA man, Andrew Ainstable. The boy who played the bazouki.
Next:
BBC-Chalypsography
Jax Ripley. And the other?
He took the volume down to check.
Steel engraving.
Oh, dreadful pun! Councillor Steel killed with a burin. And the Cyrillic letters engraved upon his head just to underline the joke.
The third volume.
Cham-Creeky
Cham. Illustrative quotation from 1759:
“… that great Cham of literature, Samuel Johnson.”
Then creeky…?
Stang Creek? Skip to the next volume.
Creel-Duzepere
Creel. Body in the creek, head in the creel. And duzepere?
A singular variant of douzepers meaning illustrious nobles, knights, or grandees.
Poor Pyke-Strengler. Perhaps if your father had not died…
The fifth volume.
Dvandva-Follis
Dvandva. A compound word in which the elements are related to each other as if joined by a copula. Actor- manager.
Follis. A small Roman coin, like that found in Ambrose Bird’s mouth.
And the first word in the next volume.
Follow
The $ hadn’t been a dollar sign, but merely the removal of the letter S.
Bird and Follows. Who died, to make the whole thing even more complete, joined in a copula.
He went back into the office for privacy, closed the door, and pulled out his mobile.
The case was altered. Before, he hadn’t really been able to get his head round the idea of the gentle quiet librarian being in the frame for all these killings. Now all he could think was that he’d sent a solitary young constable out looking for a man who had leapt to the terrifying eminence of being prime suspect.
“Answer, sod you, answer!” he yelled at the phone.
“Hello?”
“Bowler, where are you?”
“At Dee’s flat, but…”
“OK, don’t go in…”
“I’m in.”
“Shit. OK. Smile sweetly and say you’ve got to fetch something from the car. Then get out. No buts. Do it!”
He waited. Then to his relief he heard the youngster’s voice saying, “Sir, what’s going in?”
Quickly he ran through what he’d seen, what he was guessing, adding, “It may be quite wrong or nothing to do with Dee but I want you to wait till…”
But Hat was screaming at him.
“Sir, what’s the next word? Tell me the next fucking word!”
Pascoe frowned, decided this was no time for a lecture on chain of command, went out of the office into the library and read, “Follows-Haswed,” pronouncing it as spelt, voicing the w. “Has wed… that’s it! A wedding was in the last Dialogue. Though in fact it might be pronounced Hasued…”
“I don’t give a fuck how it’s pronounced, what’s it mean?”
Once more Pascoe reacted to the urgency not the insubordination and checked.
“Marked with grey or brown,” he said. “The Dialogue poem said ‘but wasn’t white,’ remember? Now if only…Hat? You still there? Are you all right? Hat!”
But Hat wasn’t hearing. He was seeing a head of rich chestnut hair marked by a flash of silvery grey. And something else he saw too, trembling on his retina like the filaments of light presaging a migraine.
1576
Not a year. A date.
I have a date, the poem had said.
1.5.76.
The first of May, 1976.
Rye’s birthday.
The bastard had told them she was next and he’d been too blind to see it!
“Hat? What the hell’s going on? Is Dee there? Hat!”
“No, he’s not,” yelled Hat, going down the stairs five at a time. “He’s out at Stangcreek Cottage. And he’s got Rye with him. She’s haswed, her hair’s haswed, and she was born May the first, seventy-six-1576, remember?”
“Hat, wait there, I’m on my way. Wait there, that’s an order.”
“Fuck you,” screamed Hat into his phone.
He flung it on to the passenger seat of his car without switching it off and Pascoe, now moving down the Centre stairs at a speed almost equal to that of his young colleague, heard the crash of gears, squeal of tyres, and roar of an engine as the MG took off.
46
THE CHAIR SHE SAT IN like a burnished throne gleamed in the firelight.
Sensuously she let her fingers trace the serpentine grooves of the intricately carved arm rests till she came to the sudden hard swell of the lions’ heads.
She smiled down at Dick Dee who squatted before her on the three-legged stool. Between them lay a Paronomania board, which, fully open, looked like some exotic medieval map of the cosmos.
“Will you take it with you?” she asked. “The chair, I mean?”
“Strictly speaking, it isn’t mine,” he said.
“And are you always a strict speaker, Dick?”
“Strict,” he mused. “From strictus, past participle of stringere, to draw or bind tight. It’s a synantonym, of course…”
He paused and looked at her invitingly.
Taking her cue, she said, “A what?”
“A synantonym. One of those interesting words which can be their own opposite. Like overlook, impregnable, cleave.”
