Death's Jest-Book Read online

  ‘Now let’s see who’s late,’ said Pascoe.

  Ms Wintershine lived in St Margaret Street, which unfortunately meant taking the main road into the city centre. At first they made reasonable progress then the traffic began to thicken.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Pascoe. ‘There’s not a football match on or something, is there?’

  ‘It’s Christmas shopping,’ said Rosie. ‘Mum said we should have set off a lot earlier.’

  ‘You weren’t ready a lot earlier,’ returned Pascoe. Which might have been worth a point if he’d been sitting in the drive with the engine revving when Rosie got into the car.

  Gradually the traffic declined from a meander to a crawl and finally to a stop.

  Rosie said nothing, but she had inherited from her mother the ability to communicate I-told-you-so by an almost indiscernible flexing of her nose muscles.

  ‘OK,’ said Pascoe. ‘Here’s something your mother can’t do.’

  He reached into the back seat, picked up his magnetic noddy light, opened the window, slammed it on to the roof, and pulled into the empty bus lane to his left.

  Siren howling, light flashing, he raced past the stationary traffic.

  Rosie expressed her delight at this turn of events by beaming from cheek to cheek and waving madly at the people in the stalled cars.

  ‘Do me a favour, love,’ said Pascoe. ‘Cut the Royal Progress act. Either look like a dying infant being rushed to hospital or a deadly criminal on her way to jail.’

  With some complacency he saw from the clock on St Margaret’s Church as they turned into St Margaret Street that they had almost five minutes to spare. All the parking spaces in front of the house were filled so he pulled into the Hearses Only spot in front of the church, switched off the siren, and said to Rosie, ‘There we are. Early.’

  She gave him a quick kiss and said, ‘Thanks, Dad. That was great.’

  ‘Yeah. But do me another favour. Don’t tell your mum. See you in an hour.’

  He watched her run along the pavement. She paused at the top of the steps leading up to the terraced house, waved at him, then disappeared inside.

  He relaxed in his seat. Now what? With the shopping traffic the way it was, there was little point in heading home as he’d have to turn round and come back almost straight away. Too early for weddings or funerals, so he might as well wait here. Something to read would have been nice. He should have brought a newspaper. Or a book.

  All he had was Franny Roote’s letter.

  He took it out of his pocket and started at the beginning again.

  What’s the bastard up to? he thought as he read.

  In his mind’s eye he could see that pale oval face with its dark unblinking eyes, which somehow managed to be at the same time compassionate and mocking, whether their owner was beating him over the head, lying in a bath with his wrists slit, or merely observing what a lovely day it was.

  Had he got anything to reproach himself with in his relationship with Roote? Did his legitimate questioning of the man in pursuit of his investigative duties have any smack of persecution about it?

  No! he told himself angrily. If there was any persecution going on here, it was quite the other way round. The obsessiveness was all Roote’s. And why the hell was he worrying about him anyway? At this very moment the bastard would be standing up to deliver the late Sam Johnson’s paper on Death’s Jest-Book.

  ‘Hope he gets hiccoughs!’ declared Pascoe, glaring towards the church as if challenging it to condemn his lack of charity.

  He found himself looking straight into Roote’s dark unblinking eyes.

  He was standing on the path which ran down the side of the church, partially obscured by a large memorial cross in weathered white marble. The distance was thirty or forty feet, but the expression of compassionate mockery was as clear as a close-up.

  The church clock started striking the hour.

  For two strikes of the bell they looked at each other.

  Then Pascoe started to open the car door but found he’d parked too close to a wizened yew tree, so he slid over to the passenger side and scrambled out.

  As he stood upright and looked towards the church, the clock’s ninth strike sounded.

  The churchyard was empty.

  He went through the gate and hurried down the path past the white cross to the rear of the church.

  Nothing. Nobody.

  He returned to the cross and checked the ground. The grass was still laced with morning frost and showed no sign of any footprint.

  He raised his eyes to look at the inscription carved on the cross.

  It was dedicated to the memory of one Arthur Treebie who quit this vale of tears aged ninety-two, grievously deplored by his huge family and armies of friends. Possibly Treebie himself, anticipating the gap he was going to leave, had chosen the consoling text:

  ‘Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.’

  Pascoe read it, shivered, glanced once more around the empty churchyard, and hurried back to the comfort of his car.

  Earlier that same Saturday morning, Detective Constable Hat Bowler had awoken from a dream.

  Ever since the incident in which he sustained the serious head injury he was officially still recuperating from, his sleep had been broken by lurid nightmares in which he struggled once more with the naked blood-slippery figure of the Wordman. The difference from the reality was that in his dreams he always lost and lay there helpless while his towering assailant clubbed him again and again with a heavy crystal dish till he slipped into unconsciousness with the despairing screams of Rye Pomona echoing through his broken head. And when he awoke into a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets, it was the memory of those screams as much as his own pain and fear that he brought with him out of the dark.

  This morning he woke once more into a tangle of sheets and a memory of Rye calling out, but this time there was nothing of fear or pain in his memory, only love and joy.

  In his dream he’d been lying in his hotel bed, his body a burning brand in a cold, cold waste of circumspection, wondering whether he was a wise man or an idiot not to have pressed his suit with Rye to either a conclusion or a rejection, when he had heard his door open and next moment a soft naked body had fused its warmth with his and a voice had murmured in his ear, ‘Thank God for equal opportunities, eh?’ And after that she had spoken no more till those final wordless but oh so eloquent cries which had climaxed their passionate coupling.

  He groaned softly at the sweet memory of the dream, tried to relax once more into that happy slumber, rolled over in the broad bed, and sat up wide-awake.

  She was there. Either he was still dreaming, or …

  Her arms went round him and drew him down.

  ‘How’s your head?’ she whispered.

  ‘I don’t know. I think I’m having delusions.’

  ‘So why don’t we delude ourselves again?’

  If this was dreaming, he was happy to sleep forever.

  Afterwards they lay intricately twined together, listening to the hotel coming to life around them and the birds, later than the humans on these dark mornings, beginning to waken outside.

  ‘What’s that?’ she said.

  ‘Goldfinch.’

  ‘And that?’

  ‘Mistle thrush.’

  ‘I like a man who knows more than I do,’ she said. ‘Hungry?’

  ‘What had you in mind?’

  ‘Sausage, bacon and egg, for starters.’

  She rolled away from him, picked up the bedside phone and dialled.

  He listened as she ordered the full English for two in his room.

  ‘Have you no shame?’ he asked.

  ‘Just as well I haven’t,’ she said. ‘Or were you planning to surprise me last night?’

  He shook his head and said, ‘No. I’m sorry. I wanted to, Jesus, how I’ve been wanting to! But I just lost my bottle …’

  ‘Why?’ she said curiously. ‘You’ve never struck me as the retiring virgin
type, Hat.’

  ‘No? Well, usually … not that there’s been a lot … but in most cases it didn’t matter, being turned down, I mean. Some you lose, some you win, that sort of thing. But with you I was terrified I’d lose everything by pressing too hard. I had to be sure you really fancied me.’

  ‘Girl fixes up a three-night break in a romantic country hotel and you’re not sure?’ she said incredulously.

  ‘Yeah, well, I thought … then we got here and you’d booked separate rooms.’

  ‘Fail-safe in case … anyway, you had the cue to look disappointed and say, “Hey, do we really need two rooms?’”

  ‘Oh, I was disappointed,’ he said with a grin. ‘If I’d been on duty, I’d have gone out and arrested the first ten people I saw smiling and charged them with being happy. So, disappointed yes, but maybe not altogether surprised.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning that during these past few weeks you’ve been concerned and caring and great fun to be with, all those things, but I always felt there was some kind of limit, you know: this far is fine but one more step and it’s on your bike, buster! Am I making sense?’

  She was listening to him with a frowning intensity.

  She said, ‘You think I was playing hard to get?’

  ‘Crossed my mind,’ he admitted. ‘But it didn’t seem your style. Though a couple of weeks back when things seemed to be going really well … do you remember? And I was thinking, this is the night! Then you got a headache! Jesus! I thought. A headache! How unoriginal can you get?’

  ‘You’ve been mixing with too many dishonest people, Hat,’ she said. ‘If I say I’ve got a headache, I mean I’ve got a headache. So you thought because I didn’t jump into bed with you the first time you got horny, I must be … what? What have you been thinking these past few weeks, Hat?’

  He looked away then looked back straight into her eyes and said, ‘I sometimes thought, maybe you’re just grateful because of what happened. Maybe that’s the limit, whatever gratitude can give but no more. Well, I couldn’t have put up with that forever, but I wasn’t ready yet to take the risk of making you say it. So that’s the kind of wimpish wanker you’ve got yourself mixed up with.’

  ‘Wimp you may be, but you can give up the wanking, eh, Constable?’ she said, drawing him close to her. ‘I love you, Hat. From now on in, you’re safe with me.’

  Which seemed to Hat even in these days of equal opportunity a slightly odd way of putting it, but he wasn’t about to complain, and indeed in her arms he felt so utterly invulnerable to anything fate could hurl against him, even if it took the form of Fat Andy Dalziel in berserker mode, that perhaps she had the right of it.

  Ablizzard rages across a desolate landscape, thunder rolls, wolves howl. Away in the distance there is movement. Gradually as the swirling snow parts the viewer sees that it’s a horse, no, three horses, pulling a sleigh. And as it gets nearer the passengers became visible, a man and a woman and two children, and they are all smiling, and as the din of the raging storm dies to be replaced by the swelling strains of Prokofiev’s ‘Troika’ music, the viewpoint swings round to show over the horses’ tossing heads the turrets and towers of what looks like a small city emerging from the white plain, above which arcs with a brilliance like the Northern Lights the word ESTOTILAND.

  ‘Christmas starts in Estotiland,’ intones a voice like the voice of a transatlantic God. ‘Here in Estotiland you’ll get so much fun out of shopping you’ll never think of dropping. And don’t forget, Estotiland is open from eight a.m. to ten p.m., and all day Sunday. So all you kids, git your mom and pop to hitch up the pony to the sleigh and head out here first thing tomorrow. But be careful. You may never want to go home again!’

  Music climaxes as the sleigh, which is now seen to be the point of a broad arrow of many other sleighs, leads them all into the shining city.

  ‘What a load of crap,’ observed Andy Dalziel from his sitting-room door.

  ‘Andy. Didn’t hear you come in.’

  ‘Not surprised, with that din on. Do I get a kiss or will that make you miss your favourite commercial?’

  He leaned over the sofa and pressed what a less welcoming and resilient recipient than Cap Marvell might have felt as a blow rather than a buss on her lips.

  The advertising break was ending and the presenter of Ebor TV’s early evening show was revealed half-engulfed in a deeply yielding armchair.

  ‘Welcome back,’ he said. ‘Just to remind you, my guest tonight is that man of many hats, lawyer, campaigner, charity worker and historian, Marcus Belchamber.’

  The picture changed to a shot of a man of early middle age, wearing a dinner jacket of immaculate cut, who was sitting in a sister chair to the presenter’s, but with no threat to his steadiness of posture or alertness of mien. Steady grey eyes looked out of the head of an idealized Roman senator topped by lightly greying locks so immaculately groomed that they might indeed have been set there by a maestro’s chisel rather than a barber’s craft. This was a gentleman in whom you could place an absolute trust.

  Dalziel made a farting noise with his lips.

  ‘Mind if I watch this item, love?’ said Cap.

  ‘I’ll get us a drink,’ said the Fat Man, heading for the kitchen.

  He and Cap Marvell didn’t cohabit, but as their relationship matured, they’d exchanged keys, and now one of the delights of returning home for Dalziel was the possibility of finding a light on, a fire burning and Cap sitting on his sofa, or sleeping in his bed. She assured him that she felt the same, though he’d exercised his privilege of entry to her flat with great care after the occasion on which he’d been woken, stark naked on her hearth rug, by the scream of a campaigning nun who was her house guest.

  From the sitting room he could hear the presenter’s voice.

  ‘Before we talk more about the Round Table Disadvantaged Children’s Christmas Party which you’re in charge of this year, Marcus, I’d like to have a word with you about another treat for both adults and kids which you’ve helped make available for us over the next few weeks. This is the chance, possibly for most of us the last chance, to see the Elsecar Hoard. For anyone out there that doesn’t know it, I should say that under one of his many hats, Marcus is President of the Mid-Yorkshire Archaeological Society and is acknowledged nationally, indeed I might say internationally, as one of the country’s foremost experts on Yorkshire during the Roman occupation.’

  ‘You’re too kind,’ said Belchamber in that rich timbred voice which some had compared not unfavourably with that of the late Richard Burton.

  ‘Perhaps you’d give us a bit of background just in case there’s anyone left in the county who hasn’t been following the saga?’

  ‘Certainly. The Elsecar Hoard is perhaps Yorkshire’s most precious historical treasure, though strictly – and herein lies the nub of the problem which emerged about a year ago – it doesn’t belong to Yorkshire but to the Elsecar family. The first Baron Elsecar emerged as a power in the county at the end of the Wars of the Roses and the family flourished for the next three centuries, but a natural conservatism, with a small c, left them ill-prepared for the industrial revolution and by midway through Victoria’s reign they had fallen on hard times. The greater part of their land, much of which later proved to be rich in minerals and coal, was sold at depressed agricultural prices to pay off their debts.

  ‘In 1872, the eighth baron was draining a boggy section of one of the few remaining estates, in what any competent geologist could have told him was a vain hope of finding coal, when his workers hauled up a bronze chest.

  ‘When opened, it proved to contain a large quantity of Roman coinage mainly of the fourth century, plus, more importantly, numerous ornaments of widely varied provenance, ranging from native Celtic designs to Mediterranean and Oriental. Particularly striking was a golden coronet formed of two intertwining snakes –’

  ‘Ah yes,’ interrupted the presenter, who had the TV personality’s terror that if left out o
f shot long enough he would cease to exist. ‘This is what’s known as the serpent crown, right? Isn’t it supposed to have belonged to some brigand queen?’

  ‘A queen of the Brigantes, which is not quite the same thing,’ murmured Belchamber courteously. ‘This was Cartimandua, who handed over Caractacus to the Romans, but her connection with the crown is tenuous and owes more, I believe, to Victorian sentimental horror at the betrayal than any historical research. Snakes in our Christian society have come to be linked with treachery and falsehood. But, as you know, in the symbolism of Celtic art they have quite a different significance …’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said the presenter. ‘Quite different. Right. But this Hoard, where did it actually come from? And was it simply a question of finders keepers?’

  ‘In law, there is no such thing as a simple question,’ said Belchamber, smiling.

  ‘You can say that again, you bastard,’ muttered Dalziel in the kitchen.

  ‘Scholars theorized that the Hoard was probably the collection of an important and well-travelled Roman official who found himself, either through choice or accident, isolated in Britain when the Roman rule broke down early in the fifth century. The big legal question was whether the chest had been deliberately hidden by its owner, thinking it prudent to conceal his treasure till quieter times came, in which case it would have been treasure trove and the property of the Crown; or whether it had simply been lost or abandoned, in which case it was the property of the land-owner. Fortunately for the Elsecars, the matter was settled in their favour when further drainage revealed the remains of a wheeled vehicle, suggesting the chest was being transported somewhere when accident or ambush had caused the carriage to overturn and sink in the swamp.’

  ‘So it was theirs, no question? Why didn’t they sell it straight away if they were so hard up?’ asked the presenter.

  ‘Because good things like bad often come in bundles, and at just about the same time the heir apparent to the baronetcy caught himself a rich American heiress, so they stowed the Hoard in the bank vault against a rainy day …’