Читать книгу The Death of Dalziel: A Dalziel and Pascoe Novel - Reginald Hill - Страница 20

Andy Dalziel is floating uneasily above Mid-Yorkshire.

His unease derives not from his ability to defy gravity, which seems quite natural, but his fear that someone below might mistake him for a zeppelin and shoot him down.

Not that England is currently at war with anyone likely to use zeppelins.

On the other hand what lies directly beneath him does look a bit like a bomb site.

It occurs to him that this might be exactly what it is. Hard to identify even the familiar from above, but isn’t that the old wool mill…and over there the railway line with a no-man’s land of desolation between…?

And don’t the spirits of the dead come back to haunt the place where they passed away?

But he’d shaken off Death, hadn’t he?

A starling circles him twice, then settles on his shoulder.

‘Watch what you’re doing up there,’ says Dalziel, squinting at it. ‘I’m not a fucking statue.’

The bird’s beady eyes fix on his. With its smooth gleaming head hunched down between its folded wings, it reminds him of…Hector!

‘Sod off!’ commands Dalziel. ‘I’m not dead!’

The bird’s gaze communicates an indifference worse than mockery.

The Fat Man feels his gut twist and tauten.

The pressure becomes intolerable.

He breaks wind.

The relief is huge and more than physical.

‘Dead men don’t fart!’ he cries triumphantly.

The starling rises from off his shoulder and flutters before his face as though contemplating sinking its arrowhead beak into his eyes.

Dalziel breaks wind again, this time with such force he gets lift-off and accelerates into the bright blue yonder like a Cape Canaveral rocket. Soon the startled starling is nothing more than a distant mote, high above which an overweight, middleaged detective superintendent at last realizes the Peter Pan fantasy of his early childhood and laughs with sheer delight as he tumbles and soars between the scudding clouds of a Mid-Yorkshire sky.