Dialogues of the Dead

But getting a life isn't easy when there's so much death around. On Saturday morning Pascoe woke, stretched, thought with pleasure, 'I'm off duty.' Then recalled he was going to a funeral, his second of the week. For a cop, weekends usually meant more rather than less work. Yet Pascoe, like a slave dreaming of home, had never lost an in-the-grain feeling that Saturdays were for football matches, odd jobs, partying, getting married, taking the family on a picnic, all that sort of good stuff. So, despite the fact that the pressures of the Wordman investigation were causing a huge contraction of official time off (without any proportionate expansion of official paid overtime), he'd clung on to his scheduled Wbrdman-free Saturday like a drowning man to a life-belt. But Linda Lupin, Loopy Linda, had changed all that. Murdered bodies, especially where poison is involved, are usually kept on ice until all parties with a forensic concern - police, coroner, DPS, and (if someone's in custody) defence counsel are content that every last drop of evidence, incriminatory or exculpatory, has been squeezed from them. Fond relatives are advised to put their grief in cold storage too against the day of its proper obsequial display. But when the fond relative is Linda Lupin, MEP, before whom even French officials have been known to quail, things may be arranged differently. Her reasoning (which, as always, came carved on tablets of stone) was that her step-brother's death was already causing Europe to suffer one period of her absence and it was doubtful if it could survive another so soon following. Therefore the funeral must take place during her current stay, i.e. before next week when she purposed to return to her divine task of keeping the Continent fit for AngloSaxons. And so it came to pass that Samjohnson was buried on Saturday morning. Linda would have preferred the finality of cremation, but here the coroner dug his heels in. The body must remain accessible. So the ceremony took place in St Hilda's, the university church. Official admission that Steel and Johnson were the Wordman's fourth and fifth victims was in itself enough to provoke the British media into a feeding frenzy of speculation and accusation, and the unexpected involvement of Linda Lupin was the ox-tail in the olio. The funeral could have degenerated into a cross between a pop-concert and an England away-match if the wise Victorian founders of the university hadn't extended the principle that any building likely to house students should be surrounded by high stone walls topped with shards of glass to include the church. University security guards, like a castle garrison in a siege, circumambulated the perimeter, pushing off the ladders by which the most depraved of invaders attempted to capture a view within, while a sharp radio message from the police soon took care of the helicopter which swooped, harpy-like, out of the low cloud cover above. But local knowledge, like love, can o'erperch the highest walls, and as Peter and Ellie Pascoe made their way up the gravelled path towards the church door, what looked like a lapidary Death detached itself from a tombstone and revealed itself as Sammy Ruddlesdin. 'Time for a quick word, Peter?' he asked. Pascoe shook his head and pressed on. Ruddlesdin kept pace with them. 'At least say if you're here in your official capacity or as a family friend,' he insisted. Pascoe shook his head again and went through the doorway into the church porch. Ellie paused on the steps and hissed into Ruddlesdin's ear, 'In which of his capacities would you like to be told to fuck off, Sammy?' As she followed her husband, the reporter yelled after her, 'Is that a quote, Mrs Pascoe?'