He spoke her name but she didn’t pause. He stood at the counter and watched her through the open door as she sat down at the desk once more.
There was a sheet of paper on the counter. He looked down and read what was written on it. Man on his way out Within my heart, within my head,
Every worldly joy lies dead,
And just as dead beyond repeal
Is hate of evil, nor do I feel
The pain of mine or others’ lives,
For in me only Death survives!
At least, unless these literary folk had their own erotic code, it didn’t read like sexual harassment. Perhaps clever old Pascoe and his weird Uni mates could riddle something out of it, and out of Roote’s euphoria too.
He raised his eyes from the poem.
At her desk in the office, Rye was watching him.
He spoke her name again and she stretched out one elegant leg and kicked the door shut.
45
ON THE DAY OF Percy Follows’ funeral, the library was closed.
Officially this was to permit his colleagues to attend the ceremony.
“Wrong,” said Charley Penn to Dick Dee. “It’s to force his colleagues to attend the ceremony.”
“I think for once your cynicism misses the mark, Charley,” said Dee. “Percy had many good qualities, both as a man and a librarian. He’ll be genuinely missed.”
“Yeah?” said Penn. “Either way, it’s fucking inconvenient. I can’t work in my place with all those hairy workmen banging and shouting and competing whose ghetto-blaster is the loudest. Any road, with the funeral at one, I don’t see why the place needs to be shut all afternoon.”
“It was felt that as a mark of respect…” He saw he wasn’t impressing the writer so quickly added, “Also there will be some light refreshment on offer afterwards at the Lichen Hotel, a chance to talk about Percy and celebrate his life. By the time that’s over…”
“Everyone’ll be well pissed. But you’ll be coming back, I would have thought. A glutton for punishment but not for lunchtime booze. So why don’t I come round about three, say…”
“No,” said Dee firmly. “I’ve got things to do.”
“What?”
“If you must know, I thought I’d go out to Stangdale and clear my stuff out of the cottage.”
“Why? New landlord giving you grief?”
“Hardly, as they’re still looking for him, it seems. Some cousin who went out to America in the sixties looks the best bet. No, I just haven’t felt any desire to go back there since…since what happened happened. It might wear off, of course, but until it does, it’s silly to leave all my gear lying around for some passing rambler to nick. I wouldn’t mind some company. Fancy an outing?”
“You must be joking!” said Penn. “You know what I feel about the fucking countryside. Once was enough. No, it’ll have to be the Uni library, I suppose. All those gabby undergrads. I may run amuck.”
Dee sighed and said, “All right, Charley, you can use my flat. But you don’t touch my espresso machine, is that understood? Last time you left me with the choice of brown water or solids.”
“Cross my heart,” said Penn.
Percy Follows had been (and presumably, if all had gone according to plan, still was) a devout member of the Church of England at its apogee, a step beyond which could see a man tumbling into Rome. Not for him the simple worship of a day. If it didn’t involve incense, candles, hyssop, aspersions, processions, genuflections, soaring choirs and gilded vestments, it didn’t count. His parish priest being naturally of the same mind pulled out all the stops and did not miss the opportunity to deliver a meditation upon death and an encomium upon the deceased in what he fondly imagined was the style of Dr. Donne of St. Paul’s.
Pascoe, admiring but unable to follow the example of his Great Leader, whose head was bowed and whose lips from time to time emitted a susurration not unlike the sound of waves making towards a pebbled shore, thumbed desperately through his prayer book in search of distraction. The Psalms seemed the nearest thing to light relief he was likely to find there, full of nice turns of phrase and good advice. How pleasant it might have been if the priest, for instance, had taken the hint of the first of the two appointed to be read at the burial service (only one was necessary but they’d got them both), the second verse of which read, ‘I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle; while the ungodly is in my sight.’
With Andy Dalziel snoring away before him, he could hardly have any doubt about the presence of the ungodly!
Pascoe riffled through the pages, letting them open as they would, and found himself looking at words he’d read recently.
The Lord is my light, and my salvation; whom then shall I fear: the Lord is the strength of my life; of whom then shall I be afraid?
Psalm 27 which the Wordman seemed so fond of, finding assurance therein (if Pottle had got it right) that his sense of acting on instruction from the Other World made him invulnerable.
Not quite the same words, his excellent (though unlike Wield’s, not quite eidetic) memory told him. There’d been no thens in the version he’d read in the Bible. And it had been headed by the legend A Psalm of David, while here in the Prayer Book you got the first couple of words of the Latin original Dominus illuminatio. No, not the original, of course. A Latin translation of the Hebrew, presumably in St. Jerome’s Vulgate. From vulgatus-made public.
Odd to think of an age when things were made public by translating them into Latin!
Did any of this have any bearing on the hunt for the Wordman? None whatsoever. It was like hunting the Snark. Who, as the Baker feared, would probably turn out to be a Boojum.
The Baker. Funny how these things came back. There’d been a guy at university, a slight inconsequential fellow who made so little impression that some wag doing Eng. Lit. (that natural home of waggery) had christened him Baker because-how did it go?- He would answer to “Hi!” or any loud cry,
Such as “Fry me!” or “Fritter my wig!”
To “What-you-may-call-um!” or “What-was-his-name?”
But especially “Thing-um-a-jig!”
In the end everyone called him Baker, even the tutors. Did he write Baker at the head of his exam papers and take his degree in the name of Baker? Was he happily settled down now as Mr. Baker, the civil engineer or actuary, with a Mrs. Baker and a whole trayful of little Bakers?
Weird thing, names. Take Charley Penn. Christened Karl Penck. Karl the Kraut. How hurtful it must be to have your own name hurled at you in derision. Like his poetic hero, Heine. Named Harry. Mocked with donkey cries. Till he changed it and his religion, both. But you can’t change the scars inside.
Or Dee. Another one with problems. Orson Eric. Not names to be ignored by the little savages at their play. But at least they gave him the initials which ultimately provided an escape route. OED. Dick the Dictionary. But what baggage did he take with him along that escape route?
Escape route. Escape Roote. He wished he could. No change of name there, except the familiarization of Francis to Franny. But he still recalled that poem read out at Johnson’s funeral, “… there is some maddening secret hid in your words…’mongst stones and roots…” and how the reader’s eyes had sought him out, mockingly, as he put a subtle stress on the word roots.
Or had he just imagined that? And was his attempt to read something significant into these name changes merely a symptom of his own personal paronomania? After all, a conscious shift from an unwelcome given name was common enough. He didn’t need to look further than the young man at his side who seemed to have a touching belief that attendance at murder victims’ funerals was de rigueur for an ambitious detective. Normally it was probably a source of some irritation for anyone called Bowler to be addressed as Hat, but when your real name was Ethelbert, you embraced the sobriquet with much relief! And then there were the more private and intimate forms
