Death

Dalziel looked at her and thought, she knows why I'm here.

Here was her flat. He'd visited it once before, illegally, after his illegal entry into Mai Richter's apartment next door. Light and her welcoming presence made it look different now. She looked different too from the last time he'd seen her. She was definitely thinner. And paler, but her pallor disguised by a light that seemed to shine through her translucent skin. This light, her lively movement, her gay manner, all disguised or at least distracted the eye from the fact that she was beginning to look seriously ill.

He sat down opposite her and they locked, or rather engaged gazes, for there was nothing of strife or opposition in the way they looked at each other.

He heard himself saying, 'Myra Rogers, her next door, she were really Mai Richter, an investigative journalist. I expect you knew that?'

'I guessed it. Or something like it. But only after she left. She said she'd got a job offer down south, but I knew there was more to it. More to her.'

'She liked you. She couldn't bear to hang around after you told her you were going to die and not let anyone do anything about it.'

He hadn't meant to say any of this, or at least he hadn't planned to say it in this way, but to keep as long as he could the advantage of knowing more than she did.

'I liked her.'

'Me too,' admitted Dalziel. 'I know how she felt. I'm not mad about sitting around doing nowt while you snuff it.'

'Unless you plan to hold me down while you operate, I don't see there's much you can do about it,' she said, smiling.

'What about young Bowler? How's he going to feel?'

'As bad as anyone can feel and still go on living,' she said sombrely. 'But he will go on living. I'm glad you know the truth, Mr Dalziel, because you'll be ready to help Hat. You and Mr Pascoe. He thinks you're both marvellous. This is your chance to prove he's right.'

He thought of all the arguments he could put forward to make her change her mind, and dismissed them. In the interrogation room, he generally knew after a couple of minutes when there was no point going o m.

He knew that now.

He said, 'You'll do what you want, lass. In my experience that's what lasses usually do. One thing, but – are you planning to leave any little billy-doos behind you?'

'In my experience, you can be a bit more direct than that’ she said.

'All right. There's buggers like Charley Penn and maybe others who don't think the Wordman's dead. I'm not interested in what you and Dee were getting up to that day out at the Stang. But I'd like to know what you think. Is the Wordman dead?'

She thought about this long enough to make him feel uneasy. Then she said in a low voice, 'Yes, I believe he is. And I'm sure that when he looks back at what he did, whatever pleas there might be in mitigation, he is filled with a horror that makes death welcome. But Charley Penn is right. Dick Dee was a lovely man. Charley's right to remember him like that. When we die I don't think anything matters much, but if anything matters a little, it's how our friends remember us. Goodbye now, Mr Dalziel.'

She watched him go. And Pascoe through his feverish gaze watched him go too at the end of his sick-room visit and found he was watching through Rye Pomona's cool brown eyes and thinking what she was thinking, which was so unthinkable that he twisted in his turbulent thoughts like a drowning man and struck out wildly for some impossible shore and found himself in the middle of Edgar Wield's pain…

'I'm sorry’ Wield said. This is stupid. I shouldn't be like this. It's worse than stupid, it's unfair. I shouldn't be doing this to you.'

'And who else should you be doing it to?' said Digweed. 'So shut up and eat your frikadeller. They are, though I say it myself as shouldn't, being the one who has slaved away in the kitchen to produce them, quite perfect.'

Wield, who found them indistinguishable from frozen meatballs cooked in the microwave, dutifully put one in his mouth.

'I don't know why I should feel like this,' he said, chewing. There really was nothing between us, Edwin, you know that, don't you?'

'Oh yes there was,' said Digweed. 'He must have been a remarkable child. I told you at Christmas he was looking for a dad, and, against all the odds, I think he succeeded. You're not acting like a bereft lover, Edgar, but a bereaved father. Which is fine. Odd but fine. But for once I agree with that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox, Superintendent Dalziel. What you mustn't act like is an avenging fury. No man can profit from assaulting a lawyer. Besides, from what I know of Marcus Belchamber, he seems unlikely to have countenanced this brutal assault.'

'He's countenancing what could turn out to be a brutal assault on some security guards,' retorted Wield.

Usually he was as discreet as a confessor about the details of his job, but grief and anger had unlocked his lips.

'At a distance, in pursuit of an obsession, and on people he doesn't know’ said Digweed. 'I dare say this has given him pause. Shock at Lee's death plus fear of what he may have revealed to you could well result in the whole thing being cancelled.'

'I hope not’ said Wield. 'Because if we can't get him for this, I'll need to go round to his office and punch his lights out.'

He spoke tough but he didn't feel tough. Vengeance was for heroes. He did not feel heroic. Nothing he could do to anyone was going to remove either of those memories which would forever have the power to leave him feeling weak as a tired child trying to weep away this life of care. The first was of that other tired child's battered, drowned face looking up at him on the canal bank. The second was of that same face, smiling encouragingly, lovingly, as it belted out the words of the song on the karaoke screen.

I really need you tonight… forever's going to start tonight

…

Perhaps Pascoe had picked this up from Wield's monosyllabic references… perhaps the sergeant had opened up to Ellie with whom he'd always been very close… but there were other projections which were much harder to explain…

In the comfortable study where Lee Lubanski had visited him so often, Marcus Belchamber sat and tried to recapture the sublime thrill he had felt when he held the serpent crown. And failed. All he could see was Lee's slim body being hauled out of the cold murky waters of the Burrthorpe Canal. He had never felt anything for the boy. He was a whore. You rented his body like a hotel room, looked to find everything there that you'd paid for, made yourself perfectly at home in it, but you never thought of it as home. At the end of each rental period you left without a backward glance. And yet…

If the boy had died in a road accident, he wouldn't have thought of it other than as an inconvenience. Like your hotel burning down. You have to find another place to stay.

This was different. Though he refused to accept responsibility, he could not deny that between himself and that sordid death ran an unbroken chain of causality. It was not his fault that the boy was dead. But he was attainted by the death in too many ways.

His first reaction had been to talk of cancelling the whole job.

Polchard had smiled his cold smile and made it clear that he and his team would still require payment in full. Already because Linford in his grief had reneged on the further payments which had fallen due, Belchamber had had to promise Polchard a large portion of the monies projected from the sale of the disposable part of the Hoard. That was bad enough, but worse was the fear that now that the initial agreement had been broken by Linford's default, Polchard might simply take the lot, ruthlessly melting down individual items to make them more easily disposable.

Or perhaps the crown would suffer the fate of so many stolen works of art and end up as permanent collateral in a series of squalid drug deals.

He couldn't bear the thought of that.