‘Fine, that’s good enough for me,’ said Glenister, standing up and offering her hand. ‘We’ll talk again when you’re back on your feet. I hope that will be very soon.’
‘But can’t you tell me what you think happened in there?’ demanded Pascoe, holding on to the hand.
Glenister hesitated, then said, ‘Why not? I hear you’re a discreet man. In fact you might turn vain if you knew how highly you’re rated. Quite the blue Smartie yourself.’
She smiled at her joke. Pascoe gave her a token flicker and said, ‘So?’
‘We had the shop flagged as a meeting place, at best a casual message centre, for a group who showed little inclination to move from dialectic to destruction. At some time in the past few days a decision must have been taken to upgrade it to a storehouse for explosive in preparation for an event. We had some non-specific intelligence that something big was being planned in the north.’
‘Like blowing up Mill Street?’ said Pascoe incredulously. ‘Not exactly the Houses of Parliament, is it?’
‘I said Number 3 was just the storehouse,’ said Glenister. ‘Though it won’t have escaped your notice that the terrace backs on to the embankment carrying the main London line, and your fair city is being honoured with a royal visit the week after next. Be that as it may, suddenly there is a large quantity of explosive on site, harmless enough when being handled by experts. But, as I say, the group who had hitherto made use of the shop were anything but experts. Your Constable Hector disturbed them, your Mr Dalziel made them panic. Perhaps they were simply trying to conceal the explosive more thoroughly and something went wrong. Or perhaps when they saw you and Mr Dalziel moving forward, they weighed a long night in an interview room with you against an eternity in Paradise with a martyr’s promised houris. Either way, boom!’
She gently disengaged her hand, which Pascoe now realized he’d been clinging on to like an ancient mariner eager for a chat.
‘You take care of yourself now, Peter,’ said Glenister. ‘The Force can’t spare its blue Smarties in these troubled times. I hope you’re back at work really soon.’
She went out of the room. Pascoe stared at the closed door for a while, then shoved back the sheet and swung his legs on to the floor. He was surprised to find how weak this simple movement left him and he was still sitting on the bed, nerving himself to test his knee, when Wield came in.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ demanded the sergeant.
‘I’m going to see Andy.’
‘Not now you’re not,’ said Wield.
Something in his tone alerted Pascoe that the sergeant wasn’t just coming the nurse-substitute.
‘Why? What’s happened?’ he demanded.
‘I asked the ward sister to check how Andy was doing in Intensive Care,’ said Wield. ‘She was talking to someone there when all hell broke loose at the other end of the phone. Pete, his heart stopped. They’ve got the crash team working on him now, but from what the sister said, it’s not looking good. Pete, we need to face it. This could be the end for Fat Andy.’
Andy Dalziel is in the Mecca Ballroom, locked in a tango with Tottie Truman from Donny.
He feels as light as a feather. His feet hardly seem to be in contact with the floor, his muscles responding to every modulation of the music as if the notes were vibrating along his arteries rather than through his ears. And he can feel the blood pulsing through Tottie’s veins in a perfect counterpoint to his own rhythms as they move inexorably towards that blissfully explosive moment of complete fusion…
But not on the dance floor! It’s all a question of timing. In search of delay, he makes his mind step back and take in his surroundings.
The Mirely Mecca has changed a lot since his last visit which was…he can’t recall when. Never mind. The ceiling’s higher now and the soaring windows, spring-bright with coloured glass, wouldn’t disgrace a cathedral. The walls are lined with long tables, covered in white linen cloths on which rest a royal banquet of everything he loves—on one table crowns of lamb, barons of beef, loins of pork ridged with crackling, honey-glazed hams; on another roasted geese, Christmas turkeys, duck with cherries, pheasant adorned with their own feathers; on a third whole salmon, pickled herring, mountain ranges of oysters and mussels. Yet another is crowded with desserts: bread-and-butter pudding, rhubarb crumble, Spotted Dick, and his childhood favourite, Eve’s Pudding.
And there, by a table laden with bottles of every kind of malt whisky he’d ever tasted, stands Peter Pascoe, an open bottle of Highland Park in one hand and in the other a king-size crystal tumbler full to the brim which he is holding out in smiling invitation…
Later, lad, he mouths. Later. First things first. Dance till the music reaches its climax, then straight out of the door into that dark alcove at the end of the corridor to reach his and hers…
After which, being a gentleman, he’ll wait a decent interval of mebbe a minute and a half before heading back inside for another helping of Eve’s Pudding…
But just as he begins to wonder if he can hold out any longer, the music changes, accelerating from the sensuous pulse of the tango into the mad whirl of a Viennese waltz. His muscles obey the new commands effortlessly though his mind wonders what the fuck the band leader’s playing at. Round and round and round he spins, till the high walls and coloured windows and laden tables retreat to a blur of Arctic whiteness and Tottie’s body, which during the tango had been a comfortable armful of warm softness moulding itself ever closer to his, begins to feel like a sackful of old bones.
Now he too is beginning to feel tired, as if age and exertion and all the excesses of a life spent in mad pursuit of God knows what are at last catching up with him. He wants to rest. Surely Tottie would want to sit this one out too? He nuzzles his lips against her ear to whisper the suggestion, but he can’t find it. The cheek pressed against his no longer feels soft and warm but cold and hard and smooth.
He moves his head back to look into his partner’s face. Instead of the lustrous brown bedroom eyes of Tottie Truman, he finds himself peering into the deep shadowy sockets of a skull whose toothy leer and vacant gaze have something familiar about them.
Then recognition dawns.
Dalziel laughs.
‘Hector, lad,’ he cries. ‘I always said tha’d be the death of me, but I never meant it so literal!’
The skeletal figure does not reply but its grip tightens round the Fat Man’s broad frame and he finds his weary legs being urged into an even wilder dance which feels as if it will only end when those bony arms have squeezed out of him everything that makes up the life force—sun and wind and air and rain, good grub and mellow whisky, light and laughter—and whirled what little remains away into some icy eternity.
For a moment he is lost. He, the great Dalziel, who on his day has danced from dusk to dawn and then washed down the Full British Breakfast with a tumbler of whisky, has no strength to resist as Death, or Hector, bears him off to oblivion.
Then at the very point of submission, something happens.
New resolve seems to course through his weary limbs like an electric shock. Then another, even stronger. A third…a fourth…a fifth…
Sod this for a lark! he thinks. I’ll give this bugger a run for his money afore I let him dance me off my feet!
Pressing Death or Hector even closer to his chest, he rises on to his toes and goes whirling round the room, once more the leader not the