yesterday, the same day this poor chap died, and before the writer could have read about it.’
‘OK, so it’s a coincidence after all,’ said Rye irritably. ‘I’ve just read a story about a man who wins the lottery and has a heart attack. I dare say that this week somewhere there’s been a man who won something in the lottery and had a heart attack. It didn’t catch the attention of the Pulitzer Prize mob at the Gazette, but it’s still a coincidence.’
‘All the same,’ said Dee, clearly reluctant to abandon his sense of oddness. ‘Another thing, there’s no pseudonym.’
The rules of entry required that, in the interests of impartial judging, entrants used a pseudonym under their story title. They also wrote these on a sealed envelope containing their real name and address. The envelopes were kept at the Gazette office.
‘So he forgot,’ said Rye. ‘Not that it matters, anyway. It’s not going to win, is it? So who cares who wrote it? Now, can I get on?’
Dick Dee had no argument against this. But Rye noticed he didn’t put the typescript either into the dump bin or on to his possibles pile, but set it aside.
Shaking her head, Rye turned her attention to the next story on her pile. It was called ‘Dreamtime’, written in purple ink in a large spiky hand averaging four words to a line, and it began:
When I woke up this morning I found I’d had a wet dream, and as I lay there trying to recall it, I found myself getting excited again …
With a sigh, she skimmed it over into the dump bin and picked another.
‘What the fuck are you playing at, Roote?’ snarled Peter Pascoe.
Snarling wasn’t a form of communication that came easily to him, and attempting to keep his upper teeth bared while emitting the plosive P produced a sound effect which was melodramatically Oriental with little of the concomitant sinisterity. He must pay more attention next time his daughter’s pet dog, which didn’t much like men, snarled at him.
Roote pushed the notebook he’d been scribbling in beneath a copy of the Gazette and regarded him with an expression of amiable bewilderment.
‘Sorry, Mr Pascoe? You’ve lost me. I’m not playing at anything and I don’t think I know the rules of the game you’re playing. Do I need a racket too?’
He smiled towards Pascoe’s sports bag from which protruded the shaft of a squash racket.
Cue for another snarl on the line, Don’t get clever with me, Roote!
This was getting like a bad TV script.
As well as snarling he’d been trying to loom menacingly. He had no way of knowing how menacing his looming looked to the casual observer, but it was playing hell with the strained shoulder muscle which had brought his first game of squash in five years to a premature conclusion. Premature? Thirty seconds into foreplay isn’t premature, it is humiliatingly pre-penetrative.
His opponent had been all concern, administering embrocation in the changing room and lubrication in the University Staff Club bar, with no sign whatsoever of snigger. Nevertheless, Pascoe had felt himself sniggered at and when he made his way through the pleasant formal gardens towards the car park and saw Franny Roote smiling at him from a bench, his carefully suppressed irritation had broken through and before he had time to think rationally he was deep into loom and snarl.
Time to rethink his role.
He made himself relax, sat down on the bench, leaned back, winced, and said, ‘OK, Mr Roote. Let’s start again. Would you mind telling me what you’re doing here?’
‘Lunch break,’ said Roote. He held up a brown paper bag and emptied its contents on to the newspaper. ‘Baguette, salad with mayo, low fat. Apple, Granny Smith. Bottle of water, tap.’
That figured. He didn’t look like a man on a high-energy diet. He was thin just this side of emaciation, a condition exacerbated by his black slacks and T-shirt. His face was white as a piece of honed driftwood and his blond hair was cut so short he might as well have been bald.
‘Mr Roote,’ said Pascoe carefully, ‘you live and work in Sheffield which means that even with a very generous lunch break and a very fast car, this would seem an eccentric choice of luncheon venue. Also this is the third, no I think it’s the fourth time I have spotted you in my vicinity over the past week.’
The first time had been a glimpse in the street as he drove home from Mid-Yorkshire Police HQ early one evening. Then a couple of nights later as he and Ellie rose to leave a cinema, he’d noticed Roote sitting half a dozen rows further back. And the previous Sunday as he took his daughter, Rosie, for a stroll in Charter Park to feed the swans, he was sure he’d spotted the black-clad figure standing on the edge of the unused bandstand.
That’s when he’d made a note to ring Sheffield, but he’d been too busy to do it on Monday and by Tuesday it had seemed too trivial to make a fuss over. But now on Wednesday, like a black bird of ill omen, here was the man once more, this time too close for mere coincidence.
‘Oh gosh, yes, I see. In fact I’ve noticed you a couple of times too, and when I saw you coming out of the Staff Club just now, I thought, Good job you’re not paranoiac, Franny boy, else you might think Chief Inspector Pascoe is stalking you.’
This was a reversal to take the breath away.
Also a warning to proceed with great care.
He said, ‘So, coincidence for both of us. Difference is, of course, I live and work here.’
‘Me too,’ said Roote. ‘Don’t mind if I start, do you? Only get an hour.’
He bit deep into the baguette. His teeth were perfectly, almost artistically, regular and had the kind of brilliant whiteness which you expected to see reflecting the flash-bulbs at a Hollywood opening. Prison service dentistry must have come on apace in the past few years.
‘You live and work here?’ said Pascoe. ‘Since when?’
Roote chewed and swallowed.
‘Couple of weeks,’ he said.
‘And why?’
Roote smiled. The teeth again. He’d been a very beautiful boy.
‘Well, I suppose it’s really down to you, Mr Pascoe. Yes, you could say you’re the reason I came back.’
An admission? Even a confession? No, not with Franny Roote, the great controller. Even when you changed the script in mid-scene, you still felt he was still in charge of direction.
‘What’s that mean?’ asked Pascoe.
‘Well, you know, after that little misunderstanding in Sheffield, I lost my job at the hospital. No, please, don’t think I’m blaming you, Mr Pascoe. You were only doing your job, and it was my own choice to slit my wrists. But the hospital people seemed to think it showed I was sick, and of course, sick people are the last people you want in a
