setting out and my destination?
Yes, that’s exactly how I felt. Oh me of little faith, wherefore did I doubt? How far have I come and how quickly, a quarter of my way now in the blink of an eye, striding out with braggart step, measuring my path not in miles, but in leagues!
No plan is needed when you are part of a plan, and when I beheld him who was equally a part of the plan, though his time seemed some way still removed, descending like one who hurries to a longed-for assignation, without thought I followed-happy word!
In the darkness I lost him for a while, then suddenly the torches flickered to life, the sounds swelled, the odours drifted across my flaring nostrils, and I found myself deep in the past of the Roman market. Two figures moved towards each other between the stalls, one clad in a courtier’s purple and gold tunic with jewelled clasps, clutching in his hand a leather bag from which he took coins as if to make a purchase, the other in the plain dignified toga which denotes a senator.
“Ho, Diomed, well met! Do you sup with Glaucus tonight?” cried the first.
“I know not,” said the senator. “What a fearful night is this! There’s two or three of us have seen strange sights.”
“And shall see stranger still. Will you walk with me into the bathhouse where we may hear ourselves talk above this fearful babble?”
“Gladly, for the stink of this place rubs my nostrils raw!”
Side by side they moved into the calidarium.
Through the viewing port I watched them, still not knowing what I was called to do or indeed, with the middle step still not clear, not certain I was called to do anything.
Then as the tunic was unclasped and the toga slid to the ground, I felt time, already by artifice here displaced, begin to slow like cooling lava running down Vesuvius’s side which in its last embrace grips fragile flesh and makes it live forever.
They step into the water, the courtier first, his long gold hair catching the light from the images of naked bathers projected on the wall, his trembling limbs slender and white; the senator behind, his black ponytail jutting out jauntily, the muscles of his sturdier browner body taut with desire. There is no pause for foreplay. The strong brown arms go round the slim white body as, like a full-acorned boar, a German one, the senator cries “O!” and mounts the courtier.
Unnoticed, because lava itself bursting through the walls would in this condition go unnoticed, I open the door and step inside.
Like a surgeon who need not look for his instrument because he knows it will always be there to hand, or in this case to foot, I feel no surprise as my toe catches on a cable and sends an electric soldering iron snaking across the floor to plop into the pool like a questing vole. Nor does thought play a part in sending my hand along the cable to its source where my fingers find and press a switch.
They twist and tauten in one last orgasmic spasm and then go still. From the courtier’s discarded tunic I take the dagger and make the necessary mark on his white flesh, while from his bag I take the necessary coin and place it in the senator’s open mouth.
Now it is done. I step back into Roman time and without haste mount the stairway to my own.
I feel a deep peace. I know now that I can proclaim myself from the mountaintops, yet none will hear and understand and lay traps to prevent me. Never has the way ahead seemed so clear. A path In VIew, I neVer stray to Left or rIght.
A weDDIng was, or so It seems, but wasn’t whIte.
A Date I haVe, the fIrst In fun, though not by nIght.
43
“THEY WERE STILL-how shall I put it?-coupled when we got there,” said Peter Pascoe.
“Fused together,” growled Dalziel. “Don’t be mealy-mouthed.”
“Coupled,” repeated Pascoe. “The maintenance man claims that he disconnected the soldering iron from the extension lead and disconnected the extension lead from the socket on the floor above, which was where he’d had to plug it in because of course all the electrics in the basement had cut out when the fault down there developed. He admits, because he can hardly deny it, that after going upstairs to check the repaired circuits at the main power box, he omitted to return to collect the iron. He says he left it in situ because he intended doing another check on the basement circuitry first thing this morning to make sure all was well for the official opening. A conscientious worker.”
“A lying bastard,” said Dalziel. “He switched the iron off at the switch on the extension plug, went upstairs, checked the power box, then one of his mates yelled, ‘Coming for a pint, Joe?’ and he forgot all about it.”
Pascoe gave him a tightly weary smile and wondered why, as they’d both had the same sleep-curtailed night, the Fat Man looked so alert and vigorous while he felt ready to keel over?
But keeling over wasn’t an option when he was giving a briefing to his CID team, plus the Chief Constable who’d decided that in view of the seriousness of the situation, he himself would monitor the next conference, plus the Doctors Pottle and Urquhart, whose presence had also been Trimble’s idea as soon as he heard that the Seventh Dialogue had been found next morning in one of the Centre mailboxes-not the library box which the police were monitoring, but the unmonitored Heritage box on the far side of the building.
Dalziel had objected, making the point that details of advanced investigative procedures and likely suspects ought not to be made available to civilians, to which Trimble had replied somewhat acidly that if he did not trust his co-opted experts then perhaps he shouldn’t have recruited them in the first place, and if they were to be of any use to the team, then they must be as fully briefed as everyone else. The Fat Man had got a bit of his own back when the Chief had commented on the presence of DC Novello. “CID rule, sir. If you’re fit enough to drink, you’re fit enough to work,” he’d said. He’d answered Pascoe’s own reservations on the DC’s presence rather more humanely by saying, “I gave her a ring, asked if she felt up to sitting in for an hour. Break her in gently’s best after what she’s been through. Also, could be useful getting a female slant on things. Can’t be any dafter than the crap we’re likely to get from Oor Wullie and Smokey Joe.”
“Maybe they won’t have much to say,” Pascoe tried to reassure him.
“They never do. Doesn’t stop the buggers from prattling on, but. Just try not to encourage them, eh?”
But it was Trimble who gave the first cue.
In response to Dalziel’s interjection, he asked, “Does it really matter at this juncture if the maintenance man is trying to cover his back or not?”
“Not really,” said Pascoe.
“Except,” said Dr. Pottle, “insofar as what he says throws doubt on to the Wordman’s version in the Dialogue.”
He paused, weighed Dalziel’s menacing glower against the Chief Constable’s encouraging nod, decided that in this case rank counted, and went on, “The Wordman’s version as always stresses his sense of being the instrument of some superior power, a very active instrument of course, but nonetheless one whose certainty of invulnerability is based on the provision by his guiding power of that conventional trinity of crime investigation: motive, means and opportunity.”
“What motive?” demanded Dalziel. “There ain’t none, that’s the point when you’re dealing with madmen!”
“You’re wrong, Superintendent, though I won’t irritate you with psychological analysis at this juncture. But motive in the sense that these killings are clearly sequential not even you will deny.”
“Meaning he only kills people who fit some crazy pattern he’s working to? Well, thanks for that insight, Doctor. It ’ud be a lot more useful if you could work out the pattern for us, but I dare say that’s not on offer yet?”
“I regret the basis of the sequence still escapes me, but I’m working on it,” said Pottle, lighting his fifth cigarette since arrival. “What is clear is that the Wordman looks to his guiding power to point out his next victim or victims, then to bring them into the killing situation, and finally to provide the means.”
