He placed one of the dining chairs on its side in front of the stricken man, then pushed him forward so that his head rested over the chair back.
‘Just get your breath, sir,’ said Andre. ‘Arch, you ready?’
‘Do we really need this…?’ said Archambaud uneasily.
‘Main point of the exercise. Just point the fucking thing and try to keep it steady.’
He pushed the tall man’s long hair forward over his head to leave the neck clear, grasped the polished wood of the butt and raised the glistening blade high above his head.
‘You rolling?’
‘Yes,’ said Archambaud in a low voice.
‘Then here we go!’
The blade came crashing down.
It took three blows before the severed head fell on to the carpet.
‘All that practise with logs, thought I’d have done it in one,’ said Andre. ‘You OK?’
Archambaud managed a nod. He was pale and shaking but he still held the camera pointed at the body.
‘Good man,’ said Andre.
He wiped the blade on the bearded man’s robe before unscrewing it from the handle and dropping it into the bin-liner, which he replaced in the sports bag.
‘Now all we need are the credits then we’re out of here.’
From the bag he took a cardboard tube about eighteen inches long out of which he pushed a paper scroll. This he unrolled to reveal it was covered with Arab symbols. After checking it was the right way up, he held it before the camera for thirty seconds.
‘OK,’ he said, replacing the scroll in the tube. ‘You can turn that thing off now. Time to go. You touch anything out there?’
‘Just the door handles and I wiped them.’
‘Great,’ he said, removing the hood and dropping it into the bag. ‘We make a good team. Morecambe and fucking Wise, that’s us. In fact, let’s see…’
He looked at his watch.
‘Four minutes thirty since we came through the door. I gave us five, and I was only expecting one of them. Now that’s what I call show business!’
After his first attempt to get back to work, Pascoe spent the next two days in bed. On the third he was feeling recovered enough to insist that he was only going to spend another day on his back if Ellie joined him, which she did, purely on medical grounds, she said, which in fact turned out to be true as she cunningly contrived to leave him so exhausted that when he woke again, it was the morning of the fourth day.
He appeared so much better that Ellie had few qualms about letting him take their daughter’s dog Tig out for a stroll after lunch.
‘You won’t be taking the car?’ she said.
‘Of course not. I’m going for a walk, remember?’ he retorted.
Satisfied that this amounted to an assurance he wasn’t going anywhere near Police HQ, she waved him goodbye before heading into her ‘study’ to get on with some very necessary work on her second novel.
(If asked—which few people dared—how things were going, Ellie would reply that it was one of the great myths of publishing that the most difficult thing of all was to follow up the success of a universally acclaimed first novel. No, the really difficult thing was to produce a second novel after your first had attracted as much attention as a fart in a thunderstorm.)
Now she re-immersed herself in her book, confident that all she needed to do here to produce a bestseller was apply the same subtle understanding of human nature that she had just demonstrated in her management of her husband.
Meanwhile, two streets away, Pascoe was climbing into a car driven by Edgar Wield, who wasn’t happy.
‘Ellie’s going to kill me when she finds out,’ he said.
‘Relax. She’ll not find out,’ said Pascoe confidently.
Wield didn’t reply. In his experience there were two people who always found out, and one of them was Ellie Pascoe.
The other was still lying in a coma.
‘So what’s Sinister Sandy up to?’ said Pascoe.
‘Oh, this and that,’ said Wield vaguely.
Pascoe looked at him suspiciously.
‘Start with this, then move on to that,’ he ordered.
‘Well, she plays her anti-terrorist stuff pretty close, that’s understandable,’ said Wield. ‘But with us being a bit short-handed at the top, it’s been a real help her being an old mucker of Desperate Dan’s. She keeps well back from the hands-on stuff, of course—says it’s our patch, so it should be our call—but when it comes to structuring organization and paperwork, she’s really got on top of things. Now it’s not just Andy who knows what’s going off, it’s the lot of us.’
Pascoe’s suspicions were thickening by the second. Praise from Wield on matters of organization was praise indeed. Well, he was entitled to call it like he saw it. But that crack about Dalziel came close to high treason.
He said, ‘You sound like you’re a convert, Wieldy. Hey, you didn’t tell her I rang this morning, did you?’
‘What do you think I am?’ said Wield, hurt. ‘Anyway, she had to drive down to Nottingham. The Carradice trial’s started and she’s involved.’
‘Involved in the great cock-up, is she?’ said Pascoe not without satisfaction. ‘God, and she’s the one calling the shots in our investigation!’
They drove the rest of the way to their destination in silence except for the excited panting of Tig, who always insisted on having a car window open sufficiently for him to stick his snout out. Basically a terrier, he condescended to treat most humans as equals on condition they fed him, played games to his rules, and took him on adventurous walks, all that is except Rosie Pascoe, whom he had elected Queen of the Universe.
Now as the car came to a halt the little dog tried to squeeze the rest of his body through the narrow gap in his eagerness to explore what to him was new terrain.
‘So here we are,’ said Wield. ‘What do you want to do?’
‘Just take a look,’ said Pascoe. ‘No harm in that, is there?’
They were parked at the end of Mill Street. The rubble of the wrecked terrace had not yet been cleared away and barriers had been set up at either end of the street. A PC Pascoe recognized as a probationer called Andersen regarded them suspiciously till Wield wound down the window and waved.
‘Taking their time, tidying up,’ observed Pascoe. ‘That down to Glenister?’
‘I suppose. But the Council Works Department are still assessing damage to the viaduct wall. Word is it looks OK and they’re starting running trains over it again with a ten miles per hour speed restriction. The diversions were causing absolute chaos.’
‘So bad folk noticed, you mean?’ said Pascoe. ‘What about our royal visitant?’
‘Coming by chopper. What he prefers anyway.’
‘I see the papers are taking it as read that his train was the target,’ said Pascoe.
‘Keeps them happy,’ said Wield. ‘Glenister says she’s keeping an open mind.’
‘So you have