Dialogues of the Dead

'Well, look who's here,' said Andy Dalziel. 'Come in, lad. Find a chair. Make yourself comfortable. Good of you to spare the time.' The academics, unreliable as ever, must have been punctual. Spouting apologies, Hat concentrated on the guests, to blot out Dalziel's threatening glower and Pascoe's reproachful pout. Even Wield's blankness spelt out well-Ididwarn-you. Dr Pottle, the psychiatrist, was a small man in late middle age who had deliberately cultivated a natural resemblance to Einstein. 'Patients find it very reassuring,' he'd once told Peter Pascoe who was, unofficially and intermittently, one of those patients. 'Also I like to tell the really dotty ones that I've built a time machine and travelled into the future and everything's going to be all right for them.' 'And how does it look for me, Professor?' Pascoe had replied. Pottle's other idiosyncrasy was that despite all the social, medical and political pressure, he still chain-smoked. Dalziel, who was an off-on smoker currently going through a pretty extensive off patch, bowed to the inevitable, helped himself to a handful of Pottle's fags, and was drawing on the first like a drowning sailor come up for the third time. The other expert was introduced as Dr Drew Urquhart. Not very old, as far as Bowler could make out through a wilderness of beard. Fortunately he kept his upper lip bare. Had he worn the kind of Einsteinian moustache Pottle favoured, his features would have been beyond even a mother's recognition. Dressed in non-matching trainers, threadbare jeans and a T-shirt which had rotted under the armpits to provide what seemed like very necessary ventilation holes, he looked more like a resident of cardboardbox country in the shopping centre than the Groves of Academe. 'Fuck this,' he growled in a Scots accent, unidentifiable to