On the very top floor we found one of Chick’s Premier Investigations cards stuck on a door with a piece of chewing-gum. The door was locked and the glass in the door covered by a blind made of waxy blackout material. Terri hammered on the door and after a considerable interval Chick, looking even more seedy, if that was possible, opened it cautiously.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said.
He seemed to be in the middle of manoeuvring an old filing-cabinet across the frayed linoleum of the floor, panting with the effort, droplets of sweat exuding from his balding head. He looked as if he was on the verge of a cardiac arrest – pasty and damp – but that was how he looked every time I saw him.
‘What do you want anyway?’ he asked gloomily. ‘Not money, I hope, the cow’s cleaned me out. Well, don’t just stand there,’ he added, ‘give me a hand.’
The filing-cabinet turned out to be lighter than it looked because it was empty.
‘I thought I’d get a woman,’ Chick said, contemplating the filing-cabinet as if he was thinking of actually keeping a woman in it, ‘to file and type,’ he said, ‘that sort of … stuff.’
I thought about recommending Andrea’s typing skills to him but she’d just finished carrying Proteus up four flights of stairs and was lying on the floor, panting, with her eyes shut.
‘Make yourself at home, why don’t you?’ Chick said to her, stepping over her prone form to reach a poke of chips in the in-tray on his battered desk. ‘I didn’t know you had a kid,’ he remarked to me, offering a cold chip to Proteus.
‘He’s not mine.’
‘You should be careful,’ Chick said. ‘Kidnapping’s a crime.’
‘Yeah, well,’ Terri said, ‘it’s funny you should mention that.’
* * *
The Sewells rented a big semi-detached house called ‘Birnham’, perched halfway up the slopes of the Law. Getting in was no problem; Chick had picked the lock on the back door before we’d even got Proteus out of the car. I wondered how noticeable four adults and a baby would be breaking into a house on a quiet street. Very noticeable, probably.
‘And you’re sure they’re not here?’ Andrea hissed for the hundredth time.
‘No, I told you,’ Terri said impatiently. ‘I heard them say they were going to Edinburgh. And they were leaving the dog.’
∼ How convenient for the plot, Nora murmurs. If you can call it plot.
Andrea had been in favour of taking the role of getaway driver and staying outside in the Cortina, but eventually had to admit, under Chick’s relentless interrogation, that she had no idea how to drive.
Inside Birnham, we entered each room cautiously, speaking in the hushed whispers of church-goers (or burglars).
‘This feels so … illegal,’ Andrea said.
‘That’s because it fucking is,’ Chick said, ‘and if I go down for stealing a dog that doesn’t even run for money, someone’s going to pay, I tell you.’ This last remark seemed to be addressed to me but I ignored him.
‘His bark’s worse than his bite,’ I reassured Andrea, who was regarding Chick with horror, never having been exposed to him before. Terri was sniffing the room for musk and spoor of dog. ‘He’s definitely here,’ she said with the conviction of a medium.
I had never been in such a clean house, it was like being in a show-house or the home of a robot. All the décor was in muted shades of magnolia and there wasn’t a single thing out of place, not a cup unwashed or a cushion unplumped. We tiptoed around the place like cat-burglars – or, to be more accurate – dog-burglars.
In the bedroom the Sewells’ night clothes were lying neatly on the end of the bed, maroon pyjamas for him, a lacy honeymoon-type garment for her. I placed Proteus on the eiderdown – a thick quilted-satin affair that was asking to be reclined on, and I couldn’t overcome an irresistible urge to lie down on it next to where Proteus was drowsily sucking his thumb. I would undoubtedly have fallen asleep if Hank/Buddy hadn’t suddenly bounded out from nowhere in a paroxysm of barking and bared teeth, like a hound from hell.
Chick and Proteus both started screaming while Andrea tried to faint, but Terri dropped to her knees and held her arms open like a beseeching martyr so that I was convinced she was going to be torn to pieces; but luckily at that moment Hank/Buddy recognized her and fell into her arms. (A girl in love is a frightening sight.)
‘Ah, true love,’ Chick said sarcastically. ‘Right, mission accomplished, can we go?’ he said, hustling everyone out onto the landing, just in time for us to hear the most unwelcome sound imaginable – the noise of the key turning in the lock downstairs.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,’ Chick said expressively.
‘Maybe it’s burglars,’ Andrea whispered. I didn’t bother pointing out the odds against two sets of burglars breaking into a house at the same time and instead, trying to stay in the shadows, I peered tentatively over the banister rail into the stairwell below, where Martha and Jay were depositing piles of Jenners’ carrier bags on the terrazzo and looking around for the sight of their dog running to greet them. Which he was unable to do because Terri had him pinned to the ground with her entire body.
‘Where’s Mummy’s little pooch?’ Martha cried and Jay shouted, ‘Buddy boy, where are you, boy?’ to no avail as Terri had wrapped her hands round Mummy’s little pooch’s muzzle so that the only bit of his anatomy able to greet his owners was a mute tail. Jay suddenly bounded up the stairs – too quickly for any of us to react – and stopped in surprise when he reached the top stair and saw the little party waiting to greet him. He frowned, trying to make sense of it.
‘Aren’t you all Martha’s students?’ he puzzled. ‘Is this some kind of college prank?’ He caught sight of Chick – clearly not a prankster of any kind – and looked alarmed. At that moment Hank/Buddy escaped Terri’s stranglehold and leapt towards Jay Sewell to greet him. Terri leapt as well, in an attempt to hang onto the dog, resulting in both dog and girl lunging into Jay at the same time. Which is exactly how accidents happen.
I suppose the laws of physics could explain what occurred next – pivots and fulcrums, et cetera; the way that there was more of Jay’s body above the banister than below it; the ratio of the Hank/Buddy/Terri combination to the singular Jay Sewell – but however you explain it, the effect was that Jay went cartwheeling over the banister rail and plummeted down into the stairwell – so quickly that not even a single cry escaped his lips. We all stared at each other in dumb amazement, all except for Proteus in my arms, who had fallen asleep with his head on my shoulder.
I rushed to look over the banister. Jay was spread-eagled on the floor below, blood pooling around his head and freckling the terrazzo. His eyes were open, giving him an air of, if anything, surprise.
‘Dead as a doorknob,’ Chick muttered to himself.
‘I think that’s as dead as a doornail,’ Andrea murmured, gazing at the blood-glazed tiles. In the profound silence that had befallen us – broken only by a faithful whine on the part of Hank/Buddy – I could hear Martha in the kitchen chatting blithely on about cashmere sweaters and the ‘cultural oasis’ that was Edinburgh. Any second now she was going to come out into the hall and discover her previously healthy husband as deceased (which is a longer form of dead) as an item of door furniture.
‘If you’re ever going to succeed at magic,’ I whispered to Andrea, ‘then now would be a good time to begin.’
Proteus woke up with a start and began to cry, breaking the trance that we’d been plunged into. I rifled desperately through my pockets for his dummy but all I could find was a torn piece of paper, the stray page of The Expanding Prism of J in which J plunges over the banisters and dies.
A sudden horrendous scream rent the suburban air, indicating that Martha had discovered her spouse’s unexpected demise.
‘Give me your lighter,’ I whispered urgently to Chick. He raised an eyebrow at me as if this was no time to take up smoking (although if not now, then when?) and passed me his lighter – a lurid affair displaying a
naked female on its casing. I grabbed it off him and set the flame to the piece of paper in my hand. (Well, it was worth a try.) The Expanding Prism of J flared up with a malevolent hiss in a greeny-blue flame – perhaps cyan, who knows? – and turned into a thin charcoal skin that floated up and hovered over the stairwell before disintegrating into a little shower of carbonized fragments like black snow.
‘Fucking hell,’ Chick said, looking down at the hall, ‘where’s he gone?’ For there was indeed no sign of a blood-boltered Jay, no screaming Martha, no sign of life or death. It was as if we had suffered a mass hallucination.
‘This is so freaky,’ Andrea said quietly.
‘Let’s get the fuck out of here now,’ Chick said, a sentiment we all agreed with heartily, and we ran out of the house and piled into the car anyhow so that for a brief and surreal moment Hank/Buddy was sitting behind the Cortina’s steering-wheel. Chick and the dog finally sorted themselves out and as we pulled away from Birnham with Chick in the driver’s seat we saw the Sewells’ car rounding the corner and drawing to a halt outside their home. I was glad to see that Jay was not only driving the car but was also in possession of a fully intact skull. Martha caught sight of us and her features contorted in a little grimace of recognition. She didn’t espy Terri or her erstwhile dog, as they were lying on the floor of the car.
‘So he was dead,’ Andrea puzzled, ‘and now he’s … not dead?’
‘Apparently,’ I said.
‘Now that’s magic realism,’ I say to Nora.
* * *
Terri asked Chick to drop her off at the bus station. I presumed she was going somewhere like Balniddrie to lie low for a while – it was obvious the Sewells would realize who had abducted their dog.
‘You don’t need to wait to see me off,’ she said to me and made a move to kiss me then thought better of it. Hank (as he would now be for ever more, I supposed) licked the back of her hand while he sat waiting patiently by her side.
‘We’re outlaws now,’ Terri said dreamily; ‘we have to go where desperadoes go.’
‘Where’s that?’ Chick asked. ‘Glasgow?’ and Terri said, ‘No, but it rhymes with that.’
‘Where?’ I said. ‘Aleppo? Cairo? Truro? Fargo? Oporto? Quito? Jericho? Soho? Puerto Rico? Kyoto? Chicago? Bilbao? Rio de Janeiro? Io? El Dorado? Kelso?’
‘Who would have thought,’ Andrea said wearily, ‘that so many places rhymed with Glasgow?’
‘There’s more if you’re interested.’
‘Where’s Io?’ Chick asked.
* * *
We got back in the Cortina, which seemed strangely empty now. In the absence of alcohol, Chick took a swig of Proteus’s gripe water. Proteus himself hadn’t stayed awake to watch Hank and Terri go. He was sitting on my knee, his head lolling uncomfortably. He was beginning to smell overripe.
‘I wish I could find Kara and give him back,’ I said to Andrea. Now that I had embarked on a life of crime it didn’t seem right to have an innocent infant in my care. (Although such ethical reservations never stopped Nora.)
‘She’s going to that party tonight,’ Andrea said, ‘the one in Broughty Ferry.’
‘Why didn’t you say that before?’
‘I didn’t know whose baby it was,’ she said huffily; ‘they all look alike to me.’
* * *
Broughty Ferry, once a fishing village now the closest thing Dundee had to a bourgeois suburb – the party was in a huge house that looked more like a small castle than a normal home. It was a red sandstone confection in the Scottish fantasy style – hotching with corbels and crow-stepped gables and fanciful little turrets with arrow-slit windows, like the result of a Victorian architect’s fevered dream.
‘Forres,’ Robin informed us, built for a nineteenth-century jute baron, but currently home to a disreputable gaggle of dental students and medics. Robin and Bob were the first people we saw as we staggered off the bus with Proteus and headed for the house. ‘Remind me never to have children,’ Andrea muttered.
Bob was excitedly explaining to Robin what had happened in the concluding part of Dr Who’s latest adventure, The Curse of Peladon, which he had just viewed. ‘And then this evil alien ambassador, who’s just a brain on wheels basically –’
‘Where do you suppose Shug is?’ Andrea said, interrupting this sophisticated critique and speaking to Bob as if he was a slightly retarded chimpanzee.
‘Dunno,’ Bob said.
‘Did he say anything to you?’ Andrea persisted, ‘about me, for instance?’
‘He said…’ Bob closed his eyes.
‘He’s thinking,’ I explained to Andrea.
‘He said – “Don’t forget to bring the Thai sticks.”’
Andrea sniffed the air and set off, following her moonstruck nose. Bob followed her, leaving me with Robin in the kitchen of the house which was dimly illuminated by one yellow lightbulb. A trail of people were coming and going, all in a desultory state of drug overload – the doctors and dentists of tomorrow presumably. On offer was the usual student party fare – a couple of large pan loaves and a block of red Scottish Cheddar, cheap wine and a metal keg of gassy lager squatting in the walk-in pantry, the floor of which was swilling with spilt drink. The bottles of wine on the table were almost all empty by now, although a milk crate of Balniddrian elderflower champagne remained untouched.
Robin poured the remains of a massive bottle of Hirondelle into a couple of plastic cups and gave one to me. Miranda, the dopey goat executioner, wandered into the kitchen, an almost visible aura of torpor about her, and started knocking back Tiger’s Milk from the bottle. She caught sight of Robin and gave him a lethargic ‘Hi.’ I don’t think she recognized me. Was she a fit person for me to hand Proteus on to, I wondered. Hardly. I asked her if she’d seen Kara and she made a vague gesture towards the door before slumping onto a chair and apparently passing out.
I pushed my way out of the kitchen, past a crush of people in a hallway and up a staircase, Robin trailing on my heels. We came upon what appeared to be a small ballroom – a space that was like a cross between a railway station and a bordello. There was a fireplace at either end of the room in that red-and-white marble that looks like uncooked beef and huge mirrors fixed to the wall, set in ornate ormolu frames. A massive milk-glass chandelier shaped like a palm-tree hung from the middle of the ceiling and smaller versions sprouted from the walls. I could almost imagine myself being waltzed off by a dashing cavalry officer, my mousseline de soie skirts swirling, a dance card dangling from my wrist.
‘Really?’ Robin said, apparently quite aroused by this vision. Something rather slimy, like a snail’s silver trail, had dribbled down his beard.
‘No, not really.’
Sadly the chandelier was unlit and the only light was provided by candles from Balniddrie, which were dotted perilously around the room, just waiting to be knocked over and catch on the drooping tattered curtains.
There was no furniture apart from two incongruous chaises-longues, covered in a red velvet that had frayed to almost nothing, and on which people were slumped like wet sandbags. Around the edges of the floor, where there must have once been elegant little gold chairs for the fairer sex to rest on, there were now heaps of old, stained mattresses. On one of these, on the far side of the room, I spotted Bob already wired up to a hookah.
The ballroom was still fulfilling its original function, to some degree anyway, as someone had set up a primitive disco with red, green and blue flashing lights and the occasional unnerving strobe. Quite a few people were dancing, if it can be called that. Andrea, still Shug-less, was one of them. Andrea had refined her rather abstract terpsichoreal style at the Isle of Wight Festival so that she now danced like a four-legged octopus in extreme pain.
To my surprise a few of the supposedly more voguish members of staff were present, although that adjective hardly applied to Dr Dick, loitering palely in a corner of the room and deep in conversation with his arch adversary, Archie. I think Dr Dick might have be
en drunk but Dr Dick drunk and Dr Dick sober was pretty much the same thing.
Andrea danced up to us and Robin said to her, ‘Do you want to dance?’ more in fear than hope, but I said, ‘No, she doesn’t,’ and thrust Proteus into her arms. ‘Just while I try and find Kara,’ I said, when she tried to run away. Before I could say anything else to her she was swallowed up by a mob of people and disappeared.
Robin was now dancing to ‘Spirit In The Sky’ with his eyes closed and moving like a Woodentop, jerky uncoordinated movements that at first made me think he was having a fit. The music changed to ‘Whiter Shade Of Pale’ and Robin opened his eyes and grabbed me and pulled me to his thin bird breast. His granddad T-shirt smelt of cheap joss sticks and sweat.
I was beginning to feel nauseous and oddly disassociated. I wondered if I’d accidentally eaten brownies again without noticing. There was a buzzing in my ears that I couldn’t shake out and I almost welcomed the support of Robin’s body. He started trying to kiss me but his general ineptitude, coupled with beard and droopy moustache, proved something of a hindrance, thank goodness. My head was beginning to feel very strange, as if my brain had been replaced with a skullful of wheat grains. If I tilted my head to one side all the grains of wheat seemed to roll in that direction.
‘I’ve been thinking a lot recently,’ Robin said softly, so close to my ear that I could feel how damp his lips were, ‘about Life Sentence. About the dynamic interplay between character and theme in the play. You see, Kenny’s the eternal outsider—’
‘I thought that was Rick.’ Oh no, I mustn’t enter into this conversation. ‘I’ve got to find Kara,’ I mumbled.
Robin started fumbling with my clothes. I was wearing so many that it would have taken him hours to get down to skin. I appealed to the estate agent’s son in him. ‘I think I need another drink, Robin.’
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