“No, I’m probably a one-off,” laughed Dee. “What I said was, I liked the pretty little pussy-cat but I liked the one in the brown robe a lot better.”
“Did you now? I see I’d better learn the Latin and Old English for cheeky sod if I’m going to survive here.”
Dalziel watched this little piece of by-play with interest, noting the ease with which the librarian joked along with the woman and her readiness to slip into flirt mode. No one had suggested to him that Dee might be a ladies’ man, but maybe that was because he hadn’t been questioned by a woman.
As they moved away he said, “So what were that all about?”
“In the interests of verisimilitude, some of the stalls are manned by real people. Ambrose Bird supplies them from his company, actors who aren’t in the current production and who fancy making a bit of extra cash. They’re taught enough Latin and Anglo-Saxon to say hello and ask any potential customer if they speak either language. When, as in most cases, they get a blank look, they relapse into a sort of broken Shakespearean English.”
“Except now and then they’ll get some clever bugger who does speak the lingo.”
“What would the world be without clever buggers?” asked Dee.
“A sight happier,” said Dalziel. “And do they actually sell that gimcrackery?”
“Very high quality reproductions,” corrected Dee primly. “Yes, when you enter the experience, you can purchase a follis full of folles…”
“Eh?”
“Follis means money bag, but it also came to refer to the coins, particularly the small-denomination copper and bronze coins, that the bag holds. These can be used to make purchases from the active stalls or in the taberna over there.”
“That’s like a pub, is it?” said Dalziel with interest.
“In this case more like a cafe,” said Dee. “But it might be a good place for us to have our talk. Note, however, the calidarium or bathhouse as we pass.”
He indicated a door which had a glass panel in it. Peering through, Dalziel saw a small pool of steaming water with a naked man sitting in it, reading a papyrus scroll. Beyond and only dimly visible through the wreathing steam stretched other expanses of water in which and along whose tiled edges disported figures, some draped with towels, some apparently naked, though the swirling steam kept all within the bounds of Mid-Yorkshire decency. It took him a moment to work out that what he was looking at was the first small pool multiplied by cleverly placed mirrors and backed by a video projection probably culled from some old Hollywood Roman epic.
“Clever, isn’t it?” said Dee.
“Not really,” said Dalziel. “Not when you’ve seen the big bath down the rugby club. And they know all the verses to ‘The Good Ship Venus’ down there too.”
The taberna also fell well short of the rugby club in its provision. There was no service and when there was, as Dee explained, the choice would be between a sweet more or less authentic fruit drink or a totally anachronistic cup of tea or coffee.
“A concession to Councillor Steel who had to be persuaded that there was going to be a strong self-financing element in the project,” said Dee.
“You’ll not be sorry he’s out of the way then?” said Dalziel as they sat on a marble bench.
“I might find that question provocatively offensive if I weren’t persuaded that it is your intention to provoke,” said Dee. “In any case, Superintendent, you should understand that the success or failure of this project means very little to me. On the whole, despite the educational arguments, it all verges a little too much on the kitsch for my taste. In these days of interactive user-friendly fully automated hi-tech exhibitions, I still feel nostalgic for the old- style museum with its musty smells and its atmosphere of reverential silence. The past is another country and I sometimes feel we are visiting it more like football hooligans on a day out than serious travellers. How about you, Mr. Dalziel? How do you feel about the past?”
“Me? You get to my age, you don’t want to be looking back too much. But professionally speaking, it’s somewhere I spend a lot of time,” said Dalziel.
“But not, I’m sure, in any glitzy hi-tech way like the modern Heritage industry?”
“Oh, I don’t know. You mind that old TV science-fiction series, Doctor Who? Fellow travels around in a time machine that looks like a police box from the outside? Load of old bollocks, most of it, but I always felt that bit were right. A police box. ’Cos that’s what I do with the past. Like yon Doctor, I spend a lot of time visiting bygone days where villains have done things to try and change the future, and I don’t much care how I get there. It’s my job to mend things as far as I can and make certain the future’s as close to what it ought to be as I can get it.”
Dee regarded him wide-eyed.
“A time-lord!” he exclaimed. “You see yourself as a time-lord? Yes, yes, I think I get it. Someone commits a murder, or robs a bank, it’s because they want to change the future as they see it, usually to make it more comfortable for themselves and those they are close to, right? But by catching them, you restore the status quo, so far as that’s possible. Naturally if someone has been killed, there’s little you can do by way of resuscitation, is there?”
“I can’t bring folk back to life, that’s for sure,” said Dalziel. “But I can keep them living. This Wordman, for instance, how many’s he killed now? Started with Andrew Ainstable, if you count letting someone die, then there was young David Pitman and Jax Ripley, and after that…who came next?”
“Councillor Steel,” said Dee readily. “Then Sam Johnson and Geoff Pyke-Strengler.”
“They tripped nice and easy off your tongue, Mr. Dee,” said Dalziel.
“Oh dear. Was that a trap? If so, let me make a suggestion, Mr. Dalziel. I have up till now been happy to play my part in the charade that I was being questioned as a witness. But your continuing interest makes me wonder if it might not be time for both of us to come out in the open and acknowledge that I am a suspect.”
His expression now was one of eager almost ingenuous enquiry.
“You want to be a suspect?” said Dalziel curiously.
“I want to have the opportunity to remove myself from your list-if, as I fear, I’m on it. Am I on it, Mr. Dalziel?”
“Oh yes,” said the Fat Man, smiling. “Like Abou Ben Adhem.”
“Thank you,” said Dee, smiling back. “Now let’s try to discover some single point of fact that will prove to you I’m not the Wordman. You may ask me anything you like and I will answer truthfully.”
“Or pay a forfeit.”
“Sorry?”
“Truth, Dare, Force or Promise. Used to play it a lot when I were a kid. You had to choose one of them. Or you could pay a forfeit, like taking your knickers off. You’ve chosen Truth.”
“And I intend to keep my knickers on,” said Dee.
“Oh aye. You bent?”
“Bent as in crooked, or sexually deviant?”
“Both.”
“No.”
“Never?”
“Well, I have in my time committed various offences, like breaking road traffic regulations, shading my expenses, and using library stationery for my own purposes. Also there are one or two small amatory idiosyncrasies which I enjoy if I can find a willing partner of the opposite sex. But I believe that all of these fall within the margins of normal human behaviour, so I feel able to answer no even though I am not strictly able to answer never.”
“So you and Charley Penn never pulled each other’s plonkers?”
“As young adolescents, yes, occasionally. But only as, if you’ll forgive the expression, a stop-gap strategy to fill that anguished period between the onset of puberty and access to girls. Once girls appeared on the scene, our friendship became nunlike in its chasteness.”
“Nunlike? Not monklike?”
“After the bad press many of the Catholic male Orders have been getting in recent years, I think I’ll stick to nunlike.”
“Could Charley be the Wordman?”
“No.”
“How so sure? ’Less you’re the Wordman yourself, of course.”
