him to fire it on the floor again?’
‘I thought, sir,’ said Pascoe stooping to pick up the scattered kit, ‘that as he was certainly going to do it anyway, I might as well use the certainty to authenticate my own role.’
‘By God, lad, if tha thinks as long-winded as tha speaks, I’m surprised you ever got out of nappies. Glad you picked me up on the food, but. I bet the bugger has me doubling to the cookhouse to collect it.’
‘Is that why you suggested it, sir? To get a look around, perhaps suss out a way to escape?’ asked Pascoe, impressed.
‘Don’t be bloody daft,’ said Dalziel. ‘I suggested it ’cos I’m bloody starving!’
I believe he means it! thought Pascoe helplessly. He’s just like all of his type and generation. Not without a certain animal cunning and sharpness, but like an animal, incapable of dealing with more than the immediate moment, the short-term crisis. Either something will turn up or it will go away, that’s his philosophy. If we’re going to get out of this, it’s going to need me to take the initiative.
He said, ‘I was thinking, sir. The woman, Judith, how far do you think she’ll go with her brother’s schemes? I wondered if I should try to work on her …’
‘Show her your dick, you mean, and tell her you love her? She’d shoot it off without a second thought. Very moral lass, Jude. Very faithful. A one man woman and she’ll go all the way to protect them as she’s given her loyalty to. Man who gets a lass like Jude can count himself lucky.’
Pascoe had finished collecting the kit, and now he watched as Dalziel once more neatly folded it and arranged it on the bed.
He said, ‘Do you really think playing this crazy game is going to get us anywhere?’
‘Game? Aye, that’s what it is, I suppose. That’s what the army is, in peacetime any road, and especially in the glasshouse. None of this daft rehabilitation stuff there. They don’t want to make good citizens out of you. They want to make good soldiers, and a good soldier is one who does what he’s told, no questions asked.’
‘So why’s Trotter doing this to you?’
‘Because it’s the worst thing he can think of. Also because he went through it for years and the poor sod reckons he came out on top. And he thinks a few days of what he suffered for years will break me like a pencil point. Which reminds me.’
He stepped onto the bed which groaned under his weight, removed his belt and with the buckle scratched on the damp granite wall the name TROTTER.
‘There,’ he said stepping down. ‘My name kept Tankie going. Let’s see if his can do the same for me.’
‘He must have been really fixated on his mother to hate you so much,’ said Pascoe.
‘Oh aye. There were another reason, but his mum would’ve been enough. Worshipped her like she was the Virgin Mary. Mebbe that’s why he’s so bent on getting himself crucified. You’ll have noticed the tattoo on Tankie’s arm? Got that done when he were a lad. But the black border round it he did himself after she snuffed it. Used boot blacking and a sharpened bed spring while he were in the glasshouse. They thought they might have to cut off the arm, but he survived. Then while he were convalescing, he hit his guard with his drip, stole his clothes, jumped out of a third-storey window and headed home. Only this time it were my home he headed for. My missus opened the door and Tankie just walked in.’
‘My God, that must have been a terrible shock for your wife!’
‘Aye, might have killed a weaker woman,’ said Dalziel with a faint note of regret. ‘But once she realized it were me he’d come to kill, they got on like a house on fire. They were sitting having a cup of tea when I walked in. Luckily I’d had some bother with the car and took the bus home, so he had no warning. He jumped up and spilt his tea over his lap. Must’ve been hot ’cos he didn’t half yell! Then I hit him with the teapot and he stopped yelling.’
‘And your wife …?’
‘She started yelling. It were her Crown Derby pot. I said, serve you right for getting the best china out for a nutter like Tankie, but she didn’t see it like that. Why the hell am I telling you all this, Pascoe?’
He turned a coldly speculative gaze on the young DC like a man looking for the watermark in a suspect pound note.
Memo to self, thought Pascoe. This is not a man the details of whose domestic life you want to know.
He said, ‘You mentioned another reason Trotter has for hating you.’
‘Did I? Not important.’
‘Shouldn’t I be the judge of that?’ insisted Pascoe. ‘You keep telling me it’s my balls on the block too.’
This sudden descent into the demotic clearly impressed the Fat Man more than any amount of epagogic argument.
He said, ‘Mebbe you’re right. It’s to do with Thomas, Tankie’s dad. He died just at the time his mum took ill. I reckon he gave her a punch too many, bust something in her gut. She’d never blow the whistle on him, but he got his comeuppance all the same. Fell into the canal one night coming home pissed. Drowned. Tankie got compassionate for the funeral. Manacled to an MP, naturally. I weren’t there, but I heard he spat into the grave.’
‘He wasn’t on the loose when his father drowned then?’
‘Good thinking. No, safely banged up. Inquest brought in accidental death.’
There was an absence of finality in his tone.
Pascoe said, ‘You don’t think it might have been … Judith?’
‘You’re not just a pretty face then?’ said Dalziel. ‘Aye, it did cross my mind. But I said, what the hell? No way I could prove it, no way I wanted to prove it!’
‘So why should this bother Trotter?’
‘’Cos I told him I could prove it,’ said Dalziel gloomily. ‘I got to thinking, I didn’t much fancy having to look over my shoulder for evermore in case Tankie were coming after me. So before they took him back to the glasshouse, I told him if he ever pulled a stunt like that again, I’d make sure his everloving sister got banged up even longer than he did. I thought, that’ll do the trick.’
‘Instead of which it just gave him another reason for wanting to sort you out.’
‘Worse. I reckon he told Jude. I don’t think she’d be risking everything she’s got just for love of Tankie. No, she’s got her own agenda here, protecting her own interests, her own life.’
‘While actually you don’t have anything on her at all! Great move, sir. Really clever thinking!’
‘Nobody’s perfect,’ said Dalziel without conviction.
‘Joe E. Brown. Some Like It Hot,’ said Pascoe.
‘What the fuck are you on about?’ said Dalziel. ‘Stand by! Here we go again.’
Once more he was a second ahead in detecting the key in the door.
This
