Dialogues of the Dead

211 'Never are when you want 'em. Useless sods, doctors,' said Dalziel. 'What's all this about a Yorkie bar?' 'Just winding him up. The other one had been taken out of its wrapper and put down on the mantel shelf. Probably Johnson was going to eat it but didn't get round to it.' 'Wouldn't mind one myself,' said Dalziel, rubbing his belly. 'So what do you think, lad? I mean, if Roote weren't mixed up in this, would you be doing owt other than tell the coroner it looks like he topped himself?' Pascoe thought then said, 'I'd still want to know where Johnson got the Midazolam. And why he put it in the whisky first rather than straight into his coffee.' 'Good questions,' said Dalziel. 'Let's get back in there, shall we? See if he's settled down, then we'll wind him up some more.' They went back inside. Roote was, outwardly at least, back to his usual fully controlled self. Dalziel took up the questioning as if nothing had happened. 'This tutorial you were having with Dr Johnson, bit of an odd time for it, Sunday lunch? I mean, most folk are sitting down to roast beef and Yorkshire pud with their nearest and dearest.' 'I seem to recall we left you in The Dog and Duck, Superintend ent,' said Roote. 'Aye, well, pubs is where I meet my nearest and dearest,' said the Fat Man. 'So what were this tutorial about?' 'What has this got to do with anything?' 'It might help us understand Dr Johnson's state of mind when you left him,' murmured Pascoe, 'His state of mind is immaterial,' insisted Roote. 'You're not still trying to brush this aside as suicide, are you? Sam just wasn't the suicidal type.' 'Takes a one to know a one, does it?' said Dalziel. 'Sorry?' 'You did slash your wrists a few months back, I seem to recall.' 'Yes, but that was...' 'More a gesture? Aye, well mebbe the good doctor was making a gesture too. Mebbe he planned to be found sitting with his book in plenty of time to have his stomach pumped and then spend a happy convalescence been cosseted by his loving friends. You see yourself as a loving friend, do you, Mr Roote?' For a second it looked like there might be another outburst, but it came to nothing. Instead he smiled and said, 'Let me prevent you, Superintendent, in the archaic as well as the modern sense of the word. You think perhaps Sam and I were a gay couple who had a riff that lunchtime, and I flounced out, and Sam decided to teach me a lesson by drinking a carefully measured non-fatal draught in the expectation that I would soon return in plenty of time to oversee his resuscitation, after which it would be all reconciliation and contrition, not to mention coition, for the rest of the day. But when I didn't come, he didn't stop drinking. And now I, filled with guilt, am trying to ease my agitated conscience by insisting it was murder.' Pascoe felt an unworthy pang of pleasure at hearing what he thought of as Dalziel's absurd theory so precisely anatomized. The Fat Man, however, showed no sign of discomfiture. 'By gum, Chief Inspector,' he said to Pascoe, 'didst tha hear that? Knowing the questions afore they're asked! Get a few more doing that, and we'd only need to teach them to beat themselves up, and you and me 'ud be out of a job.' 'No, sir. We'd still need someone to hear the answer,' said Pascoe. 'Which is, Mr Roote?' 'The answer is no. Sam and I were friends, good friends, I believe. But above all he was my teacher, a man I respected more than any other I ever knew, a man who would have made a huge contribution to the world of learning and whose loss to me, both personally and intellectually, is almost more than I can bear. But bear it I must, if only to ensure that you bumbling incompetents don't make as big a cock-up of this investigation as you've made of others in the past.' 'Nobody's perfect,' said Dalziel. 'But we got you, sunshine.' Roote smiled and said, 'So you did. But you didn't get to keep me, did you?' And Dalziel smiled back. 'We just catch them, lad. It's the lawyers as decide which are going to be kept and stuffed, which chucked back as tiddlers rill they're big enough to be worth the keeping. You think you're big enough yet, Mr Roote? Or are you still a growing boy?' Pascoe would have been interested to see how this verbal tennis played but the door of the interview room opened at that moment