Pascoe watched it go.
“I think words always do exactly what you want them to do, Franny, my boy,” he murmured. “The root of most human problems. Oh yes, that fits you to a tee. But I shall pull you up out of the earth before I’m finished and consign you to the bonfire like any other noxious weed. I shall. I shall. Believe me, I shall!”
He went to his own car, climbed in, and drove home.
31
“MY GOD,” said Rye Pomona as she opened the door. “The birdman cometh!”
“What?” said Hat Bowler, his face darkening.
“What what? It’s called a joke. Or is there some rule which says twitchers’ gear mustn’t be a source of merriment?”
Hat, though he felt rather dashing in a Great Outdoors windswept sort of way, was more baffled than offended by this reference to his camouflage forage cap, RSPB tanktop and moleskin breeks. Then his error dawned on him.
“Sorry. You said birdman. I thought you said Wordman, which I didn’t think was very funny…”
“Which indeed it would not have been, had I indeed said it,” replied Rye coolly. “Is there anything else I haven’t said which you would care to be offended by?”
This wasn’t the start he’d hoped for, thought Hat. Time to regroup.
“You look great,” he said, running his eyes down her yellow top and burgundy shorts. “The birds will be watching you.”
She made a face like she’d just sucked a lemon, which was not the optimum reaction to what had in the past been a pretty successful chat-up line but nonetheless preferable to chilly reproach.
“You’d better come in before someone sees you and sends for help,” she said. “As I suspect you’ve guessed, I’m not ready. You’re early, aren’t you?”
He followed her into her flat. There were old movies, he recollected, where a guy drove up to a girl’s front door, blew his horn, and watched her come running down the steps, big smile on her face, hoping she hadn’t kept him waiting. But this was a recollection he thought better to keep to himself, as was the observation that no, he wasn’t early, but so dead on time you could have set a nuclear clock by him.
He sat down and said, “Hey, I saw you on telly last night.”
“You did? You must have sharp eyes.”
“Twitchers’ eyes,” he said. “Spot a redwing at three hundred paces. By the way, don’t know if it’s the same for girls, but my mother used to tell me to be careful pulling funny faces or I might stop like that.”
That worked. The renewed sour-lemon look vanished to be replaced by a broad grin.
“You think it’s easy scowling when what I planned was…”
“What?”
“Something like this.”
She stooped over him and kissed him on the lips, lightly but with a definite hint of tongue.
This was even better than smiling girl running down the steps to the car.
She said, “I’ll be with you in a couple of minutes.”
He watched her go into what he presumed was the bedroom and fantasized about following her. Decided no. That kiss was encouraging but not an invitation. Besides, these moleskin breeks were hell to get out of in a hurry, and in the distant future he wanted their first time to be replayable for passion not for laughs.
The distant future.
Why was he so certain they were going to have a distant future together in which to remember a first time?
Because he couldn’t imagine any kind of future apart.
“So what was that all about last night?” she called to him through the partially open door.
“All what where who?”
“Don’t be coy. All that with your two colleagues, Dorian Gray and the attic.”
He worked this out.
“DCI Pascoe and Sergeant Wield,” he said. “You mean at the presentation?”
He’d seen it on TV. And he’d got a detailed background when he called in at the station that morning, thinking, with the kind of logic he’d have probably laughed at in a woman, that after a couple of days on sick leave it might be well to establish that he was recovered sufficiently to take his day off.
“You see, you do know all what where who,” Rye said from the bedroom. “When that creepy guy Roote came up to get his prize, I saw beauty and the beast watching him like they’d have preferred to be massaging his extremities with a cattle prod. At least, that’s how the good-looking one looked. The other always looks like that, I guess.”
“Well, there’s a bit of a history there,” said Hat.
She came out of the bedroom. The top and shorts had been replaced by jeans and a chunky brown sweater and her crown of hair tucked into a drab green beret.
“Will the birds still be watching me?” she said challengingly.
“Only if they’ve any sense,” he said.
She nodded and said, “Good answer. So what’s this history, and what had been going on last night to hot things up? Was it something to do with the security cameras?”
“How the hell do you know that?” he demanded.
“That ugly sergeant started asking me questions again about the morning I found the Ripley Dialogue. But what he seemed particularly interested in was me finding Charley Penn’s translation of ‘Du bist wie eine Blume.’ It felt like he’d been watching me and the only way I could figure that was, the camera must have been on. If that’s right and you lot have only just realized, it looks like someone’s been sleeping on the job, eh?”
“What did Wield say about Penn?” asked Hat, trying to keep his voice neutral.
“Not a lot. He’s not exactly effusive, is he? I suggested leaving poetry lying around was an oblique form of sexual harassment which he might care to investigate, and I think he smiled but it might just have been wind.”
“But he didn’t actually mention the tapes?”
“No. I worked that out all by my little self.”
“Clever,” he said. “Really. I’m not taking the piss.”
“Yeah. Well, I did sweet-talk Dave, the security man, just to be sure,” she admitted. “So come on. Fill me in on Franny Roote and your
DCI.”
It did not seem a good time to plead police confidentiality, and besides he was in so deep sharing Wordman stuff with Rye that it was easier to go on than pull back, so he told her about Pascoe’s fraught relationship with Franny Roote.
“When I saw him going up to the stage last night, I was gobsmacked,” he said. “Especially after what they’d said about the winning story. Didn’t sound like him at all…”
“Like your Mr. Pascoe’s version of him, you mean?” she said.
“I have met him myself a couple of times,” said Hat defensively. “And you called him creepy.”
“Yeah, but I meant it sort of literally. He gets in the library sometimes, and he moves so lightly, you never know he’s there till suddenly he’s next to you. So Pascoe fancies him for the Wordman? Hey, I’ve just thought. His wife was helping Penn to judge, wasn’t she? Cooperating with one suspect to give the prize to another! I bet Pascoe was delighted about that. I bet they lay awake all night chuckling about it.”
“She wasn’t to know, was she?” said Hat, who was an Ellie Pascoe fan. “You must have read the story. How did it sound to you?”
