One Small Step Page 2

  ‘I don’t quite see—’ began Pascoe.

  ‘Don’t go all diplomatic on me, lad. You’ve not got the eyebrows for it. I’ll spell it out, shall I? The Yanks’ preferred option is more troops and bases in Germany even if it means seeing the brickies back on the Wall again. But they know they can’t manage this without Eurofed backing. Their best bet for support there is France—typical of the Frogs, no one knows which way they’re going to jump. But one thing’s for sure, it’ll be emotion not logic that sets them hopping.

  ‘Us Brits on the other hand are famous for our rationality, and because the Yanks have banned all British supporters from the World Cup Finals in Florida, we’ll bust a gut to get them buggers chucked out of Germany!

  ‘But the Frogs hold the key. Which means, anything that gets them and the Krauts at each other’s goolies just now will look like very good news to the Yanks and lousy news to us.

  ‘Conclusion. The Americans have elected the German crew member number one suspect, and you reckon any investigation they mount will make bloody sure that’s where the finger points. How’s that for a bit of close political analysis?’

  ‘Marvellous,’ breathed Pascoe admiringly. ‘Who speaks so well should never speak in vain.’

  ‘I don’t know about in vain, but I do prefer in plain English. So what have they got on this German, then?’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Come on, lad,’ said Dalziel. ‘They must have a pretty good case against him, else you’d not be so worried.’

  ‘Yes, they do. But it’s not… Look, Andy. I’m sorry, but the thing is, security. You’re not cleared for this. It’s a need-to-know classification and the only people who need to know outside of government are the investigating officers. So I really can’t tell you any more. Not unless I appointed you an investigating officer!’

  He said this with a light dismissive laugh, but Dalziel had had many years’ experience of interpreting Pascoe’s light laughs.

  ‘All right, lad,’ he said softly. ‘What’s going off? Spit it out and make it quick, else this phone goes back down so hard it’ll need a jemmy to prise it back up.’

  ‘There’s no fooling you, is there, Andy?’ said Pascoe. ‘OK. Straight it is. I’ve been asked to take charge of the case, not because I’m the best, but because I’m not French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Danish or Irish. Meaning none of the countries actually involved in the Europa’s mission will trust any of the others to give them a fair deal! They’ve given me a free hand. They’ve also given me four days to get a result.’

  ‘Any result?’

  ‘The truth, Andy,’ said Pascoe heavily. ‘That’s the result I’m looking for.’

  ‘Only asking,’ said Dalziel. ‘So how come you’re wasting time talking to a clapped-out candidate for the boneyard?’

  ‘Andy, I need eyes and I need a nose. All right, I know I could have any of the Yard’s top men for the asking. Only, nowadays they get to the top by being on top of the technology and that’s no use to me here. Technology’s a two-way ticket. If you live by it, you can be fooled by it. Also the Yard’s best will still be on the way up. Europe’s wide open to an ambitious man nowadays. But ambitious men need to tread carefully, else when their names come up for advancement there can be more vetoes in the air than flies round a dustbin. So what I need is a seat-of-the-pants copper with a bloodhound’s nose, who’s got nothing to lose or to gain, and who doesn’t give a tuppenny toss about any bugger. I fed this data into my computer and it let out a huge burp. So I picked up the phone and I rang you, Andy. What do you say?’

  ‘You cheeky sod!’ exclaimed Dalziel. ‘I say you must be off your trolley! My nose is so out of practice I can hardly tell Orkney from Islay. As for seat-of-the-pants, I’ve been stuck in bed with gout for nigh on a fortnight, and I don’t want no jokes either.’

  ‘Who’s laughing? Andy, what you clearly need is a place where you won’t have to worry about putting pressure on your foot, and I can help you there.’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Dalziel. ‘I didn’t quite get that. This must be a bad line. You are talking about bringing the Europa’s crew back to Earth for investigation, aren’t you? Well, aren’t you?’

  ‘Andy!’ said Pascoe reprovingly. ‘First thing you taught me was, good investigation starts at the scene of the crime. And anyway, you always expected the moon from me. So how can you turn me down now that I’m finally offering it to you?’

  ii

  Space travel weren’t so bad after all, thought Andy Dalziel. It put him in mind of an occasion half a century ago when he’d supped about twenty pints and ended up on his back in a rowing boat drifting slowly down the cut, looking up at a midnight sky, heavy and dark as a nautch-girl’s tits, all studded with a thousand stars.

  He should have realized how easy it must be when Pascoe told him the Yanks had dumped a minority party senator and his wife to make room for them on their state-of-the-art lunar shuttle which had been ferrying distinguished visitors to the moon for half a decade. But he’d still been protesting even as Pascoe urged him into the soft yielding couch.

  ‘What’s going off?’ he demanded in alarm. ‘This thing’s trying to feel me up!’

  ‘It’s all right,’ assured Pascoe. ‘It’s just a wraparound fabric to hold you in place when we achieve weightlessness. Honestly, it’ll just be like riding in a limo, without any traffic jams.’

  ‘If it’s so bloody easy, why’s the Federation making such a big thing about it?’

  ‘It’s like going up Mont Blanc,’ explained Pascoe patiently. ‘You can either book a table at the summit restaurant and take the scenic railway or you can pack your sarnies into your rucksack and climb. That way it’s harder, but you get a lot more Brownie points. More important in the long run, it establishes the Federation’s right to be there. Space is international now, but there may come a time when the carving up starts, and we don’t want to be scavenging for crumbs under the Americans’ chair.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Dalziel. ‘I’ll leave the politicking to you, lad. I’ll stick to nicking villains. If I survive the trip, that is.’

  In fact, he was feeling better than he’d done for some time. The doctor had confirmed that his heart was in good order for a man of his age. He’d been more concerned about the high blood pressure related to Dalziel’s gout, but the drugs Dalziel was taking seemed to have this under control, and reluctantly he’d given the go-ahead. Now as the shuttle came swooping in over the moon’s surface, the fat man was delighted to find that his gout symptoms had almost completely vanished.

  ‘You were right, lad,’ he admitted. ‘There’s nowt to this astronaut business.’

  ‘Not this way,’ agreed Pascoe. ‘Mind you, Europa’s not so luxurious.’

  ‘Can’t be, if they’re still crapping in their breeks,’ said Dalziel.

  ‘Andy, I thought I’d explained,’ said Pascoe long-sufferingly. ‘They only need their TECs for moving around the moon’s surface. In the mother ship they just wear light tunics. The TECs were kept in the hold. Each crew member has his or her own locker and each suit is individually tailored and has a name tag stuck to it, so it’s quite clear that whoever tampered with Lemarque’s was aiming at him and no one else. Now, have you got it?’

  ‘All right, I’m with you,’ said Dalziel. ‘No need to go on about things. Christ, have you looked down there? It’s like the MI on a Bank Holiday. All dug up and no bugger working? Where’s this village at?’

  ‘Let’s see. Yes, there it is, down there, in the Sea of Tranquillity.’

  ‘Those pimples? Looks like an outbreak of chicken pox.’

  Dalziel wasn’t altogether wrong. The Village, a complex of sealed domes linked by corridors, covering about five acres, did indeed resemble a patch of blisters on the lunar skin till their third braking orbit brought out the scale of the thing. Next time round, one of the domes loomed large before them, threatening collision, and then they were slipping smoothly into a docking bay
, and suddenly the stars were out of sight.

  The Commander of the Lunar Village was waiting to greet them. He was a small balding astrophysicist with a nervous manner who reminded Dalziel of a snout who’d been foolish enough to feed him duff information twenty years earlier. With good behaviour the man should be getting out shortly.

  The Commander passed them over with speed and unconcealable relief to his Head of Security, Colonel Ed Druson, who was a lean and wiry black man with the stretched look of an athlete who has carried his twenties training schedules into his forties.

  ‘Welcome to the moon,’ he said, offering his hand. ‘Hope you had a good trip.’

  ‘Aye, it were grand,’ said Dalziel, bouncing gently up and down to test the effect of low gravity on his gouty foot. Delighted to feel no pain, he went on, ‘Only thing is, that space ship of thine didn’t seem to have a bar, and it’s thirsty work travelling.’

  ‘Andy,’ said Pascoe warningly. ‘Should you, with your gout?’

  ‘Bugger the gout,’ said Dalziel. ‘I’ve got a throat like a spinster’s tit. I could even thole bourbon if you’ve not got the real stuff.’

  ‘I’ll see what we can do,’ said Druson, clearly wondering what the hell the Brits were up to, filling valuable shuttle space with an overweight, geriatric alcoholic who had gout.

  He went on, ‘Like we told your people, Europa’s in a parking orbit with one of our guys acting nightwatch. We’ve got the crew in our new accommodation dome. We’re expanding our technical staff and they don’t start arriving till the weekend.’

  ‘We should be finished well before then,’ said Pascoe confidently.

  ‘Yeah? Well, you sure ought to be,’ said Druson.

  ‘Looks like an open and shut case. Could have saved yourselves the bother of a trip, I reckon. You’ve seen our file on the German? Jesus, you Euros surely know how to pick ’em!’

  To Dalziel it sounded like a just rebuke. Pascoe had provided him with copies of all the astronauts’ files plus the American incident report. This contained statements from the Europa crew, setting out where they were and what they were doing at the time of the fatality, plus Druson’s own analysis and conclusions. He saw little reason to look further than Kaufmann as culprit, and offered two pieces of concrete evidence and a motive.

  The first pointer was an entry in Lemarque’s private journal, removed from his locker in a search of doubtful legality. Several of the astronauts kept such journals with an eye to a literary future after their flying days were over. Lermarque’s consisted mainly of fluorescently purple prose about the beauties of space with mention of his colleagues kept down to a dismissive minimum. Then at the end of a much polished speech in which he told the world of his sense of honour at being the first Euro, and more importantly, the first Frenchman, to step out on to the moon’s surface, he had scribbled almost indecipherably, Ka s’en fâche. Gardes-toi!

  Ka is getting angry. Watch out!

  Was Ka Kaufmann? Druson had asked. And the discovery during the same illegal search of a microprobe in the German’s locker had deepened his suspicions. A gloss for the non-technical pointed out that a microprobe was a kind of electronic screwdriver which would have been necessary in the readjustment of the TEC circuits.

  But there was still the question of motive. And why was Ka getting angry?

  ‘Blackmail,’ Druson replied promptly. ‘You’ve read the file. It’s obvious.’

  It certainly appeared so. The major part of the American report was a digest of a CIA investigation which concluded that Captain Dieter Kaufmann had been passing military secrets to Moscow ever since he joined the German airforce four years after his arrival from Leipzig during the great trek west of 1989.

  ‘You’re saying he was a KGB plant at fourteen?’ said Pascoe sceptically.

  ‘They’re big on long-term planning,’ said Druson. ‘Read the evidence.’

  It was detailed and unanswerable. And it hadn’t been compiled overnight.

  ‘It would have been neighbourly to pass this information on a little earlier,’ suggested Pascoe mildly. ‘Say three years earlier.’

  It was three years since Kaufmann had joined the Europa crew.

  ‘We like to be sure of our facts in such a serious matter,’ said Druson.

  Also, thought Pascoe, Kaufmann’s full-time transfer into the Eurospace programme had removed him from access to NATO information and left him with nothing to pass on but astro-technology which in Russian and American terms was yesterday’s news. With no threat to themselves, the Americans had decided to keep their information under their hat till they could make maximum profit from it.

  Now that moment had come.

  ‘Can we look at the body?’ said Pascoe. ‘Just for the record.’

  ‘Sure. But it ain’t very pretty.’

  Dalziel had seen a lot worse.

  ‘Not very big, is he?’ said Pascoe.

  ‘Depends where you’re looking,’ said Dalziel.

  He turned away from the body and picked up the Frenchman’s TEC which was also on display.

  ‘I bet he fancied himself too,’ he said. ‘These little fellows often do.’

  ‘Why do you say that, Andy?’ asked Pascoe.

  ‘His name tag for a start.’

  Instead of following a horizontal line, the adhesive name strip had been adjusted to a jaunty thirty degrees angle echoing the shoulder seam.

  ‘Used to get buggers in the Force who tried to tart up their uniforms like that,’ said Dalziel, sniffing at the headpiece. ‘And they usually wore aftershave that’d kill mosquitoes too.’

  ‘Seems he did have a reputation for being a cocky little bastard,’ said Druson, looking at Dalziel with a new respect.

  Pascoe said, ‘And the circuitry was definitely interfered with?’

  ‘Oh yeah. Clear as a fox among chickens. Rush job by the look of it. Well, it would have to be, in the Europa’s hold. No time for finesse.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Pascoe. ‘Seen enough, Andy?’

  ‘More than enough. I’d got to thinking the next dead ’un I saw would be me.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Pascoe. ‘When did you start believing in an afterlife?’

  ‘Man who lets himself be talked into flying to the moon to stare at a dead Frog’s got no right to disbelieve anything,’ said Dalziel. ‘Did someone say something about a room with a bed in it?’

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Druson.

  He led them to their quarters, two small bedrooms with a shared living-room. When the door had shut behind him, Dalziel said, ‘OK, lad. What do you reckon? Still a fit-up by the Yanks?’

  ‘Open mind,’ said Pascoe. ‘They’ve certainly put a reasonable case together. Maybe Kaufmann did do it.’

  ‘Mebbe. I’d trust ’em a lot more if yon black bugger hadn’t managed to forget that Glenmorangie he promised me!’

  Pascoe grinned and said, ‘A good night’s sleep will do you more good, Andy. Nothing more to be done till the morning or whatever they call it up here. Then it’ll be straight down to the interrogations.’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Dalziel. ‘Scene of the crime, remember? That’s why you said we had to come here, and you were dead right. Only this isn’t the scene, is it? The Frog dropped dead somewhere out there. And the actual scene of the real crime is floating around somewhere up there. Shouldn’t we fix up to visit the Europa before we do owt else?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Pascoe. ‘I’ll be arranging a trip as soon as possible. But time’s too short to waste, so in the morning let’s get on with talking to the crew, shall we? Now I thought we’d work individually. I’ll take three and you take three, then we’ll swap over like a sort of reverse singles …’

  ‘It’s not bloody tennis!’ said Dalziel obstinately. ‘I’ll need to ask what these sods got up to on Europa and unless I’ve seen Europa, what they say won’t make bloody sense, will it?’

  There was a tap at the door. Pascoe didn’t move. Dalziel scowled at him and went to answe
r it.

  A smiling young man handed him two litre-sized bottles saying, ‘There you go, pops.’

  ‘Pops!’ said Pascoe as Dalziel closed the door. ‘You must be mellowing, Andy. Time was when you’d have nutted anyone who spoke to you like that.’

  ‘That was when I was young and daft,’ said Dalziel, removing the seal from one of the bottles. ‘At my age, anyone who gives me two litres of Glenmorangie can call me Mavis if he likes. You want a splash?’

  ‘Only water,’ said Pascoe. ‘I’ll have a shower. Then I’ll work out a schedule for the interrogations before I go to bed. OK?’

  He spoke defiantly. Dalziel stared at him for a moment, then shrugged.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘You’re the boss now.’

  ‘So I am,’ smiled Pascoe as he left. ‘So I am.’

  ‘And I’m to be Queen of the May, Mother,’ murmured Dalziel raising the bottle to his lips. ‘I’m to be Queen of the May!’

  iii

  Dalziel had a bad night. He dreamt he challenged Nurse Montague to the best of three falls and lost by a straight submission. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the dream had been erotic but it was merely humiliating and he woke up dry and droopy as a camel’s tail. Whisky only washed his black thoughts blacker and when finally there came a tap on the door and Pascoe’s voice invited him to go to breakfast, he snarled, ‘Sod off!’ He was still not washed or dressed half an hour later when Pascoe returned with a cup of coffee and a chocolate doughnut, and, even worse, the kind of sympathetic smile usually reserved for tedious old relatives in twilight homes.

  Only the younger man’s offer to call the Village medics and have someone check him out got Dalziel out of bed. He was still running his portable electric razor over the shadowy planet of his face as they made their way to the Europa crew’s dome, and this at last provoked an honestly irritated response from Pascoe.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Andy, put that thing away. We are representing the Federal Justice Department, after all!’

  With his first twinge of pleasure of the day, Dalziel slipped the slim plastic razor case into his breast pocket and followed Pascoe into the dome.