along to the Heritage Centre, he shouldn’t be long if you’d like to wait.”
Behind Dalziel, Hat grinned broadly, especially at Rye’s studied mispronunciation of the holy name.
But the Fat Man was untroubled by such bird-bolts as this and replied courteously, “Thank you, Ms. Pomona, but I’ll just go and find him. Glad to see you so chipper after your nasty experience at the weekend. Lot of lasses these days would have needed a month off work and counselling for life. Thank God there’s still some of the old stock around. But if you do need to talk to anyone, DC Bowler’s a good listener.”
With a hint of a wink at Hat, he wandered off through the door.
“You like living dangerously, do you?” said Hat.
Rye smiled and said, “Not so dangerous, just your normal neanderthal. I caught him clocking my cleavage.”
Hat, who had been enjoying an eyeful himself, averted his gaze and said, “So how’re you keeping?”
“I’m OK. Didn’t sleep too well, but that’ll pass.”
“I’m sure, but look, don’t try to be too relaxed about it. That was a nasty shock you had, the head and all. These things can get to you in unexpected ways.”
“You were there too. You have some kind of immunity?”
“No. That’s how I know about how it can hit you.”
They regarded each other gravely, then she smiled and reached out and touched his hand and said, “OK, so let’s counsel each other. Like a coffee?”
“If you’re not too busy.”
She gestured round at the almost empty library. A couple of pallid students were working in the reading bays, a wild-haired woman was sitting at a table behind a wall of the bound Transactions of the Mid-Yorkshire Archaeological Society, there was no sign of Penn or Roote or any of the regulars.
“Not exactly overworked, are you?” he said.
“We do other things than deal with the public,” she said. “And with Dick busy elsewhere, I’m glad things are so quiet.”
“So what’s so important in Heritage?” he asked as she led him into the office.
“It’s the Roman Experience. It’s due to open tomorrow. Councillor Steel’s death tipped the balance and the money was voted through at the next council meeting.”
“They haven’t hung about spending it then.”
“Everything was set up, it just needed the announcement that bills would be paid.”
“And what’s it got to do with Dick?”
“Nothing really. But you know this power struggle I told you about, between Prancing Percy and the Last of the Actor-Managers? Well, they’re both desperately trying to take the credit for the Roman Experience, and as Dick knows infinitely more about classical history than Percy, he’s been commanded along to give gravitas to Percy’s pronouncements. The trouble is, from Percy’s point of view, that Dick is so honest and even handed, Ambrose Bird raises no objection.”
“What about this woman, whatsername, the one who’s been ill? Is she still off the scene?”
“Shh,” said Rye, lowering her voice. “You mean Philomel Carcanet and that’s her out there, hiding behind that wall of Transactions. She came in this morning to supervise the dress rehearsal. She knows more about Roman Mid-Yorkshire than anyone alive. Trouble is, she can’t bear to talk to anyone alive for more than five minutes, which makes for a big communication problem. She came up here to pull herself together an hour ago. She’s still pulling. While those two are down there, dividing the spoils and jockeying for position when they advertise the post of Centre Director. Can you switch that kettle on?”
“So who’s your money on?” asked Hat.
“They’d both be disastrous,” she said, spooning instant coffee into mugs. “All they want is to make sure their own corner’s protected. Anyway, you’re not here to discuss Centre politics, are you? What’s Billy Bunter told you to ask me about? I think the kettle’s boiling.”
I must be made of glass, thought Hat. Everyone reads me like a book.
“Books,” he said, passing her the kettle. “You said you were a fan of Penn’s novels.”
“I enjoy them,” she said, pouring water into the mugs and passing one to Hat. “Though since he started being a fan of me, rather less so. Every time Harry Hacker says something smart or suggestive, I hear Penn’s voice. A pity. The lionization of authors is a chancy business. It’s like eating, really. While you’re enjoying a nice piece of rump steak, you don’t want to think too much about where it came from.”
Hat, who had so far in his life not allowed such a consideration to trouble his digestion, nodded sagely and said, “Very true. But to get back to Penn’s books, I saw one of them once done on the telly and gave up after ten minutes, so can you give me a brief tour through them?”
Then, to pre-empt the question he guessed her quizzical gaze was leading up to, he added, “The thing is this linguist guy from the Uni reckons that the Wordman’s so hung up on words, if we can get a line on the kind of stuff he reads, we raise our chances of getting a line on him.”
“Or the kind of stuff he writes, you mean,” said Rye. “You’re not interested in whether he reads the Harry Hacker novels, but whether he writes them.”
“We’ve got to follow all lines of enquiry,” said Hat.
“Yeah? That’s what Billy Bunter’s doing hounding Dick, is it? If you’re not getting anywhere chasing the guilty, keep bashing away at someone innocent in the hope that you’ll terrorize or trick them into a confession?”
“You may be right,” said Hat. “But that’s for top brass only. Me, I’m not even qualified to use the cattle prod yet so I’ve got to stick to old-fashioned methods like terrorizing people at long distance by asking questions when they’re not there.”
She thought about this, then said, “Harry Hacker is a sort of mix of the poet Heine, Lermontov’s hero, Pechorin, and the Scarlet Pimpernel, with a bit of Sherlock Holmes, Don Juan (Byron’s rather than Mozart’s) and Raffles thrown in…”
“Hold on,” said Hat. “Remember you’re talking to a simple soul whose idea of a good read is a newspaper that’s got more pictures than words. If we could cut out the literary padding and just stick to straightforward facts…”
“To the educated mind,” she said coldly, “what you term padding acts as a form of referential shorthand, saving many hundreds of words of one syllable. But if you insist. Harry is a Jack-the-lad, bumming around Europe in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, getting embroiled in many of the big historical events, a bit of a con artist, a bit of a crook, but with his own moral parameters and a heart of gold. His background is uncertain and one of the connecting threads running through all the books is his quest to find out about himself, psychologically, spiritually and genetically. Such introspections could be a bit of a drag in a romantic thriller, but Penn livens it up by putting it in the form of encounters with Harry’s doppelganger, that’s another version of himself. Sounds daft but it works.”
“I’ll take your word,” said Hat. “This Harry sounds a right weirdo. How come the books are so popular?”
“Don’t get me wrong about Harry. He’s a real Romantic hero. He can be the life and soul of the party, pulling the birds almost at will, yet at other times he has these fits of Byronic (sorry, I can’t think of any other way of putting it) melancholy in which all he wants is to be by himself and commune with Nature. But his saving grace is a strong sense of irony which enables him to send himself up just when you think he’s taking himself far too seriously. The books are full of verbal wit, lots of good jokes, passages of exciting action, good but not overdone historical backgrounds, and strong plots which often include a clever puzzle element which Harry is instrumental in solving. They are not great works of art, but they make very good not unintelligent recreational reading. Their televisation, as so often happens, manages to disguise, dilute or simply dissipate most of those elements which make the novels special and give them their unique flavour.”
She paused and Hat put down his coffee mug to applaud, not entirely ironically.
“That was good,” he said. “Fluent, stylish, and I understood nearly all of it. But just to cut to the chase, is there anything in them which might connect directly to what we know about the Wordman?”
“Well, that depends on how you’re using we. I dare say the full harvest of police knowledge and what I’ve managed to glean from your furrow are two very different things. But from my lowly point of view, the answer is possibly, but not uniquely.”
“Eh?”
“I mean, if it turned out the Wordman had written something like the Harry Hacker series, it wouldn’t be
