Dialogues of the Dead

This didn’t stop her shovelling scripts into the reject bin with wild abandon, but halfway through the morning she went very still, sighed perplexedly, re-read the pages in front of her and said, ‘Oh hell.’

‘Yes?’ said Dick Dee.

‘We’ve got a Second Dialogue.’

‘Let me see.’

He read through it quickly then said, ‘Oh dear. I wonder if this one too is related to a real incident.’

‘It is. That’s what hit me straight off. I noticed it in yesterday’s Gazette. Here, take a look.’

She went to the Journal Rack and picked up the Gazette.

‘Here it is. “Police have released details of the fatal accident on Roman Way reported in our weekend edition. David Pitman, 19, a music student, of Pool Terrace, Carker, was returning home from his part-time job as an entertainer at the Taverna Restaurant in Cradle Street when he came off his motorbike in the early hours of Saturday morning. He sustained multiple injuries and was pronounced dead on arrival at hospital. No other vehicle was involved.” Poor sod.’

Dee looked at the paragraph then read the Dialogue again.

‘How very macabre,’ he said. ‘Still, it’s not without some nice touches. If only our friend would attempt a more conventional story, he might do quite well.’

‘That’s all you think it is, then?’ said Rye rather aggressively. ‘Some plonker using news stories to fantasize upon?’

Dee raised his eyebrows high and smiled at her.

‘We seem to have swapped lines,’ he said. ‘Last week it was me feeling uneasy and you pouring cold water. What’s changed?’

‘I could ask the same.’

‘Well, let me see,’ he said with that judicious solemnity she sometimes found irritating. ‘It could be I set my fanciful suspicions alongside the cool rational response of my smart young assistant and realized I was making a real ass of myself.’

Then his face split in a decade-dumping grin and he added, ‘Or some such tosh. And you?’

She responded to the grin, then said, ‘There’s something else I noticed in the Gazette. Hold on … here it is. It says that AA man’s inquest was adjourned to allow the police to make further enquiries. That can only mean they’re treating it as a suspicious death, can’t it?’

‘Yes, but there’s suspicious and suspicious,’ said Dee. ‘Any sudden death has to be thoroughly investigated. If it’s an accident, the causes have to be established to see whether there’s any question of neglect. But even if there’s a suspicion of criminality, for something like this to have any significance …’

He held up the Dialogue and paused expectantly.

A test, she thought. Dick Dee liked to give tests. At first when she came new to the job she’d felt herself patronized, then come to realize it was part of his teaching technique and much to be preferred either to being told something she already knew or not being told something she didn’t.

‘It doesn’t really signify anything,’ she said. ‘Not if the guy’s just feeding off news items. To be significant, or even to strain coincidence, he’d have to be writing before the event.’

‘Before the reporting of the event,’ corrected Dee.

She nodded. It was a small distinction but not nit-picking. That was another of Dee’s qualities. The details he was fussy about were usually important rather than just ego-exercising.

‘What about all this stuff about the student’s grandfather and the bazouki?’ she asked. ‘None of that’s in the paper.’

‘No. But if it’s true, which we don’t know, all it might mean is that the story-teller did have a chat with David Pitman at some time. I dare say it’s a story the young man told any number of customers at the restaurant.’

‘And if it turns out the AA man had been on holiday in Corfu?’

‘I can devise possible explanations till the cows come home,’ he said dismissively. ‘But where’s the point? The key question is, when did this last Dialogue actually turn up at the Gazette? I doubt if they’re systematic enough to be able to pinpoint it, but someone might remember something. Why don’t I have a word while you …’

‘… get on with reading these sodding stories,’ interrupted Rye. ‘Well, you’re the boss.’

‘So I am. And what I was going to say was, while you might do worse than have a friendly word with your ornithological admirer.’

He glanced towards the desk where a slim young man with an open boyish face and a sharp black suit was standing patiently.

His name was Bowler, initial E. Rye knew this because he’d flashed his library card the first time he appeared at the desk to ask for assistance in operating the CD-ROM drive of one of the Reference PCs. Both she and Dee had been on duty, but Rye had discovered early on that in matters of IT, she was the department’s designated expert. Not that her boss wasn’t technologically competent – in fact she suspected he was much more clued up than herself – but when she felt she knew him well enough to probe, he had smiled that sweetly sad smile of his and pointed to the computer, saying, ‘That is the grey squirrel,’ then to the booklined shelves: ‘These are the red.’

The disc Bowler E. wanted to use turned out to be an ornithological encyclopaedia, and when Rye had expressed a polite interest, he’d assumed she was a fellow enthusiast and nothing she’d been able to say during three or four subsequent visits had managed to disabuse him.

‘Oh God,’ she said now. ‘Today I tell him the only way I want to see birds is nicely browned and covered with orange sauce.’

‘You disappoint me, Rye,’ said Dee. ‘I wondered from the start why such a smart young fellow should make himself out to be a mere tyro in computer technology. It’s clearly not just birds that obsess him but you. Express your lack of enthusiasm in the brutal terms you suggest and all he’ll do is seek another topic of common interest. Which indeed you yourself may now be able to suggest.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Mr Bowler is in fact Detective Constable Bowler of the Mid-Yorkshire CID, so well worth cultivating. It’s not every day us amateur detectives get a chance of planting a snout in the local constabulary. I’ll leave him to your tender care, shall I?’

He headed for the office. Clever old Dick, thought Rye, watching him go. While I’m being a smart-ass, he’s busy being smart.

Bowler was coming towards her. She looked at him with new interest. She knew it was one of her failings to make snap judgments from which she was hard to budge. Even now, she was thinking that him being a cop and possibly motivated in his visits to the library by pure lust didn’t stop him being a bird nerd.

The suit and tie-less shirt were hopeful. Not Armani but pretty good clones. And the shy little-boy-lost smile seemed to her newly skinned eye to have something just a tad calculating in it which she approved too. The way to her heart wasn’t through her motherly instincts, but it was nice to see a guy trying.

‘Hello,’ he said hesitantly. ‘Sorry to bother you … if you’re too busy …’

It would have been entertaining to play along for a while but she really was up to her eyes in work even without this short story crap.

She said briskly, ‘Yes, I’m pretty well snowed under. But if it’s just a quickie you’re after, Constable …’

The shy smile remained fixed but he blinked twice, the second one removing all traces of shyness from his eyes (which were a rather nice dove-grey) and replacing it with something very definitely like calculation.

He’s wondering whether I’ve just invited him to swing straight from boy-next-door into saloon-bar-innuendo mode. If he does, he’s on his way. Bird nerd was bad, coarse cop was worse.

He said, ‘No, look, I’m sorry, I just wanted to ask, this Sunday I was thinking about driving out to Stangdale – it’s great country for birds even this time of year, you know, the moor, the crags and of course the tarn …’

He could see he wasn’t gripping her and he changed tack with an ease she approved.

‘… and afterwards I thought maybe we could stop off for a meal …’

‘This Sunday … I’m not sure what I’ve got on …’ she said screwing up her face as if trying to work out what she was doing seventy-two weeks rather than seventy-two hours ahead. ‘And a meal, you said …?’

‘Yeah, there’s the Dun Fox this end of the moor road. Not bad nosh. And now the law’s changed, they’ve starting having discos on Sunday nights as well as Saturdays …’

She knew it. An old-fashioned road-house on the edge of town, it had recently decided to target the local twenty-somethings who wanted to swing without being ankle-deep in teenies. It wasn’t Stringfellows but it was certainly a lot better than a twitchers’ barn dance. Question was, did she want a date with DC Bowler, E?