Dialogues of the Dead

The press conference lasted a good hour. The technique preferred by most policemen when dealing with the gentlemen of the press, hungry for information, is the response monosyllabic. Yes and we, as appropriate, blossoming into an euphuistic No Comment when neither of these will do. Pascoe, however, favoured the sesquipedalian style. As Dalziel put it, 'After thirty minutes with me, they're clamouring for more. After thirty minutes with Pete, they're clamouring to be let out.' Tyro reporters had been known to leave one of his sessions with several pads crammed with notes which on analysis had not rendered a single line of usable copy. Only once on this occasion did anyone come close to laying a finger on him and that was Mary Agnew, editor of the MidYorkshire Gazette, whose personal attendance signalled the importance of the story. 'Mr Pascoe,' she said, 'it appears to us out here that these so-called Wordman killings are systematic rather than random. Is this your opinion also?' 'It would seem to me,' said Pascoe, 'that the sequence of killings plus the associated correspondence, details of which I am, for obvious reasons of security, unable to share with you at this juncture, predicates what for the want of a better term we might define as a system, though we should not let the familiarity of the term confuse us into apprehending anything we would recognize as a logical underpinning of the perpetrator's thought processes. We are dealing here with a morbid psychology and what is systematic to him might well, when understood, appear to the normal mind as disjunctive and even aleatoric.' 'I'll take that as a yes,' said Agnew. 'In which case, given that we have here a madman killing according to some kind of sequential

328 system, how close are you to being able to give warning to those most at risk of becoming victims, whether as individuals or in a body?' 'Good question,' said Pascoe, meaning in Westminster-speak that he had no intention of answering it. 'All I can say is that if these killings are systematic, then the vast majority of your readers can have nothing to fear.' 'They'll be pleased to know it. But looking down the list of victims, I can work out for myself that from Jax Ripley on, all of them have had something to do with the Centre, either directly or indirectly. Have you put everyone who works in the Centre or has any strong connection with it on alert?' Pascoe, feeling himself harried, switched tactics abruptly, said, 'No,' then directed his gaze towards a Scotsman reporter whose accent he knew to be thick enough to baffle at least half of those assembled and said, 'Mr Murray?' Afterwards he wondered, as he'd often done before, what would happen if he'd opted for sharing rather than evasion. Let them have all the disparate bits and pieces which were cluttering up his mind and his desk, and perhaps there was someone out there, someone with special knowledge or maybe just some enthusiastic reader of detective novels to whom such exegetics were but a pre-dormitory snack, who'd look at them and say, 'Hey, I know what this means! It's obvious!' One day perhaps ... The right to make such a choice could be one of the compensations of that rise to place which he sometimes feared - and sometimes feared would never come! 'Peter, hi. Am I about to be offered a scoop or am I just doubleparked?' John Wingate was coming towards him escorted by Bowler, whom Pascoe had told to extract the TV producer from the departing media mob with maximum discretion. 'Definitely not the first. As for the second, that's between you and your conscience,' said Pascoe, shaking the man's hand. They knew each other, not well, but well enough to be comfortable with each other. Being a cop meant many relationships which in other professions might have matured into friendships stuck here. Pascoe recognized the main hesitation was usually on his side. Other people