Incompetence

by Rob Grant

  Apart from the small stab of heartache, the kitchen cabinets didn't turn up anything useful. Nothing for it, then: it looked like I'd have to undertake the unpleasant business of trawling through the main bins that serviced the entire building, though it was deeply unlikely that Klingferm would have dumped anything in the way of valuable information there. My last, best hope was his wardrobe.

  It was fairly spartan as clothes collections go: three lounge suits, one still in the dry cleaner's polythene; six shirts, two pairs of jeans and a dozen black T-shirts which probably performed the classic hopelessly single man's triple function of vests in winter, casual wear in summer and pyjama tops all the sad year round.

  A thorough pocket search revealed absolutely nothing, which meant they'd already been gone through. Definitely. There isn't a man in the world who has absolutely nothing in any of the pockets of his wardrobed clothes, even if he thinks he's being fastidious. You ask any divorce lawyer.

  I began to despair about the printer chips. Surely anyone this scrupulous about erasing evidence couldn't have made such a classic mistake.

  The communal garbage search, then, was unavoidable. Pointlessly, since my fingers already stank of banana and probably would until the height of summer, I took a pair of Klingferm's gloves and steeled myself for the job.

  The refuse zone was outside, round the back of the apartment block, mercifully locked away from sight so I wouldn't have to endure the pitying glare of passers-by as I plied my filthy trade. It was accessed by a standard utilities key -- all the services carry one: the refuse collectors, the various meter readers, the police, the fire brigade. And me.

  The bins were those big wheelie affairs, ranged round a slippery, uncovered cobblestone yard, slimy with mildew. Behind them was a small stretch of wasteland which clearly served as an unserviced public convenience for the local feral animal population. Your average wild city fox tends not to be too choosy about his diet, and his output has a unique and biting stink. All of which contributed tremendously to the exciting allure of the job in hand.

  I'd done garbage searches before. A lot of them. They're not exactly pure jet fuel to the engine of your self-esteem, but you can't get away from the fact that they get results.

  People are a little loopy about their rubbish. It's a curious thing: if they have to destroy an old credit card, they make damned sure it's destroyed. They fold it, bend it, break it, cut it up into thirty thousand pieces and scatter every individual fragment in different locations around the globe, with one eye over their shoulder to make sure no one's following them, collecting up the snippets with a view to joining them back together again and somehow passing them off as an undamaged card. But compromising material? People will happily put compromising material in a black plastic bag, tie it up and heft it into a flimsy container, put on the lid, and, they think, hey presto; it's vanished! They think by some miraculous yet undocumented physical law it's been utterly wiped out of existence, as if the bin itself contains some kind of tiny singularity that swallows up matter and obliterates it from all known universes for ever and a day.

  Truly. I've found material in waste bags that was so compromising, you'd still feel nervous about it if you'd shredded it, burnt the shreds, and then eaten the ashes in sweet and sour sauce. And even then you'd want to check your stools for the next three weeks to make sure it hasn't by a terrible twist of irony reconstituted itself into some kind of readable form.

  So, times aplenty I've searched garbage, and the results have been fruitful, if rottenly fruitful. The straight fact is: there is no pleasant way of pulling it off. You can tip the stuff out into sanitised groundsheets, you can wear gloves and toxic fume masks and disposable plastic clothing, you can use forceps or tongs or remote-controlled robotic arms, but it all comes down to the same thing. Sooner or later you're going to find yourself up to your humerus in indefinable rancid gunk, peeling putrid mackerel flesh and rotting chicken viscera off a promising-looking document that turns out to be a junk mail flyer someone probably used as an emergency toilet wipe.

  Glamorous it is not.

  The only way to do the dirty deed is to plunge straight in. And that I did, knowing full well that, within the hour, I'd be reflecting back with warm fondness on the time when the worst lingering smell on my digits was rotten banana.

  Garbage disposal is not straightforward. Used to be; you had some stuff you didn't want, you put it in a bag, took the bag out of the house and once a week some men would come along and take it away in their truck. Not any more. The disposal of household effluence is now a highly complex operation. The garbage first has to be divided into recyclable and non-recyclable or landfill waste. And woe betide you if you try to dump more than one bag of each in the same week, or try passing off landfill garbage in a recycling bag. You can do hard time for that kind of evil, my friend. But that's not the end of it. The recyclable stuff then has to be further subdivided into organic, glass and metal waste. But the glass can't be brown glass, and the metal can't be a defunct machine part. And you can't put batteries in there, or circuit boards or electrical appliances. I kid ye not, taking out the trash is now a full-time job in the good ol' US of E.

  In a way, the subdivision was helpful -- I doubted Klingferm's bottle or beer-can count would have been useful either as a lead or a morale booster, and it did mean that all his paper would be in just one bag. But it also meant he had to share his organic bin with four other apartments. Which in turn meant I'd have to conduct a detailed and doubtless stinky search through some very unpleasant glop before I even found out which bag was his.

  It being, for some unknowable reason, my turn in this particular lifetime to experience every frustration the natural world can possibly hurl my way, Klingferm's bag was, inevitably, the last one I came across, at the bottom of the pile. On the upside, by the time I got to it, I felt I'd gained some valuable insights into the private life of the modern Italian household.

  There was one sack that appeared to be entirely filled with nothing but faecal matter. Really. And, believe me, that wasn't the worst one by a long way. I won't dredge up the more gruesome of my discoveries, but I'll give you a handy tip: if you're ever in dire need of a total appetite suppressant, try taking a trawl through some Roman rubbish. Trust me, they'll have to force-feed you before your digestive system can even begin to think about operating again.

  Maybe the fumes of putrefaction were beginning to scramble my mind, or maybe it was the bizarre foreignness of what I'd just subjected myself to, but going through Klingferm's garbage, I actually began to feel homesick. Stupid, I know. I'd only been away from home a few short hours. It was such homely rubbish, though, so familiar, so... unhysterical.

  It wasn't homesickness, of course. It was grief. I didn't expect it, and I didn't want it, but it just sort of snuck up on me and wrapped its cold fingers round my windpipe. There was a whole pile of squeezed lime husks in Klingferm's garbage, and I suppose they set me off again on a maudlin trip back in time, because I didn't hear the key click in the lock, and I didn't hear the bin area door open, and I didn't even hear the footsteps coming over the cobbles towards me, but all of these things must have happened, because what I did hear was the unmistakable snap of a shotgun breech closing, and I certainly felt the cold barrel of a more than amply calibred shotgun press into the vulnerable bone of the crevice behind my ear.

  PROLOGUE

  On the last day of my life as I knew it, I woke up with a gulp of air that was far too fresh to qualify as breathable. I blew it out immediately, and it just hung there in front of my face like a lazy smoke signal. I blinked in the direction of my window, just to check I was actually in my bedroom and hadn't somehow contrived to fall asleep in a tent on the summit of K2, or drunkenly booked into some kind of igloo hotel on an Alaskan glacier.

  No, this was home. This was my cruddy London apartment.

  Nature had carved an astonishing set of icy geometric fractals on the lower half of the panes, and the sills were packed wit
h thick white bricks of snow. That told me two things: getting around London today was going to be the bitch of all bitches, and my landlord had almost certainly sabotaged my central heating again.

  I really didn't want to get up, but I had to get up, plain and simple. I was between investigations, and mostly pretty fancy-free, but today was contact day, just about the only day I was truly compelled to leave the building. But it was awfully warm underneath the duvet and awfully cold everywhere else, and I had had a very pleasant, very erotic dream I could probably slip back into without too much effort. On top of which, my latest rigorously observed wheat-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, pleasure-free diet meant that breakfast promised no joy whatsoever, and even less sustenance and comfort. So it was only with the greatest effort of will power and self-discipline, the likes of which are hardly encountered even in the saintliest of martyrs and the holiest of yogi mystics, that I was able to pupa myself out of the cocoon of my bed into the cruel reality of the walk-in freezer that was my apartment.

  It was cold all right. Cold enough to burst your nipples. I shucked myself into the chilly towelling of a dressing gown I'd left on a radiator in a moment of freakish optimism and padded to the cupboard that harboured the central heating system. I made the major mistake of feeling the tank with my bare hand. It was, at a conservative estimate, just below the temperature of liquid oxygen, as if it had been stored overnight in a frozen ocean on the planet Pluto. My hand actually stuck to the metal, and I ripped off ninety-three per cent of my fingerprints tugging it clear. It hurt plenty, but at least I was now in a position to commit the perfect crime, should the need arise.

  I knew from bitter experience that the central heating system control panel was no more or less complicated than the interface of the average intercontinental missile defence shield. It took me fifteen minutes just to remember how to open the casing that housed it. As usual, I studied the baffling array of buttons, dials and switches, hoping some part of their function might be intuitively obvious. As usual, I got no joy. Clearly it would require at least three highly trained and motivated personnel working in perfect synchronicity just to turn the damned thing on. Isolating and activating the radiator in my bedroom could easily be accomplished by a small consortium of theoretical physicists, so long as they were on their sabbatical year and didn't plan on going out much.

  No two ways about it, I was going to have to try the final desperate option of a hopeless man. I was going to have to read the manual.

  Naturally, the manual turned out to have been translated from Japanese into English by a Kalahari bushman whose closest contact with either language had been a chance encounter with a German explorer trying to ascertain the going barter rate for a second-hand camel in terms of petroleum and shiny beads. I tried a number of the proposed solutions 'In the eventuals of notworkingness', but having attempted to 'glide the initiation of the Captain illuminator' (fig.8.a) and 'rotate the combustion circle device (also fig.8.a) with repeated vigour until click-clickety sound produces whoosh of small explosion thump' (also, bizarrely, fig.8.a), I gave up, and tried to feed the manual to my recycling unit. The recycling unit wasn't working either. I was about to feed that to the street below when I realised the two things might be related.

  I checked the fuse box. The trip switch had been flipped. Impossible to say if that was down to landlordly sabotage or the marvellously inept wiring that tripped the system in the event of the major electrical surge produced by, say, turning on a light bulb, or even just thinking about turning on a light bulb. I decided to carry on hating the landlord anyway.

  The landlord's trying to get rid of me, see, because my rent is fixed. It's fixed high, of course, orbitally high, but it's steady, and he could certainly get even more for the hovel if he could persuade me to leave. The apartment's in central London, prime location, big demand. The fact that it could barely qualify as adequate living space for a cot-bound baby munchkin doesn't seem to affect its desirability. So my landlord plays these little games to try and wear me down. His favourite is rigging the thermostat on my water heater to such a stupidly high temperature that if I make the foolhardy mistake of actually using it, the water in the tank boils over, spills into the ceiling cavity and eventually starts to drizzle through, so I come home to a room slowly filling with rusty, warm rain. It's one of the reasons I never bring a date home for coffee. Making romantic small talk on my soggy sofa under umbrellas doesn't seem too likely to impress even someone with such a low expectation threshold she'd be prepared to date me.

  The other reason I don't bring a date home for coffee is that I never actually have a date.

  I finally did it. I finally got the heating On. I actually managed to successfully effect the rotaration of the combustion circle device with repeated vigour until the telltale click-clickety sound produced the promised whoosh of small explosion thump. The pipes started creaking and banging like the sun-parched decks of a ghost galleon. With luck, in six or seven days the apartment would be warm enough to accommodate a couple of exceptionally hardy and daring polar bears, so long as they huddled together, dressed warm and hibernated until July.

  A shower was out of the question. I would have died of shock or exposure or both. A bath was also out of the question because, naturally, the apartment didn't have one, the apartment being many, many times smaller than the average bath. So I boiled up a kettle and performed my ablutions in the sink.

  I tried to dress without actually taking my towelling robe off, but the shirt proved too much of a problem, and I had to endure another few frightening sub-arctic moments of upper body nakedness. I dressed warm like Momma always said and walked from my luxury kitchen area, through my superiorly appointed lounge slash dining zone and into my bright and airy reception hall area in only two steps. Just one thing to do before I left: take a photo of the rooms. Not because I was going to miss them awfully for the few minutes I planned to be away, this was a professional thing.

  If you came to my apartment, you would definitely file me under 'messy housekeeper'. Clothes and bric-a-brac are strewn over the floor and the few sticks of furniture are arranged in apparent chaos. Exactly the opposite is true, though. Every single item is carefully positioned. That's why I take a couple of digital photos of the rooms before I leave, just to make sure everything's exactly where it should be. Here's the thing: any idiot can enter and toss a tidy room, and leave everything in its place so you'd never even know you'd been searched. A messy room, it's difficult even for a talented professional to avoid leaving traces. I don't go the whole hog and leave a layer of cornflakes under key areas of the carpet, or any of that weird stuff, but that's because I don't keep anything compromising in my apartment. I just need to know if anyone's been going through my things.

  I tucked the camera into my pocket, double-locked my front door and went downstairs. I didn't bother checking my mailbox. I never get any mail I want to read. As usual, I read the sign one of my fellow tenants had kindly taped to the wall to fill us all with inspiration for the day ahead. It read, 'Please make sure the front door is fully closed, as heroin addicts use the hallway for shooting up.' Suitably inspired, I stepped out into Bing Crosbyland.

  Snow is more than beautiful. Snow is Nature's Tippex: it covers up mistakes and ugliness. You put a carpet of snow over Nagasaki, it probably looks like the Ice Queen's castle. Even the stinkiest, most crap-strewn streets of London's grimmest thoroughfares take on a fairy-tale, virgin beauty under the thinnest skein of snow.

  If you can actually get to them.

  Because, in London, of course, we always have the wrong kind of snow. All public transport is rendered instantly static and useless by the merest hint of a flurry of white. Moscow, on the other hand, always seems to get exactly the right kind of snow, somehow, and gets it with humiliating frequency, too. In Moscow snow, poorly built and ancient trains, trams and buses plough on about their business through twenty-foot drifts and swirling blizzards without missing a beat on the timetable. Here, as soon as t
he first flake falls, train points are frozen, engines seize up and tyres spin ineffectually on roads that instantly become giant ice-dance venues for buses to demonstrate their pirouetting virtuosity. We should try importing some of that good stuff, some of that Moscow snow. Then, maybe, we wouldn't get caught by surprise every God-damned year, when, unpredictably, it snows exactly the same kind of surprisingly wrong snow it did last year, and the entire Thames Valley might not be thrown back to the Mesozoic era for the duration of the winter.

  The first suck of air froze the tooth-rinsing water still lingering on my gums, turning my mouth into a deadly cavern of stalactites and stalagmites. I probably had a smile like Nosferatu. But I felt good. Like I was suddenly living somewhere clean and unsullied. It was peaceful, too. Almost silent. So silent, in fact, that I wondered, for a moment, if the bomb had finally fallen and this was the start of the nuclear winter. This was pretty much how I'd expected it to happen most of my life: the bomb would be dropped, eliminating all human life except for me and a small group of ludicrously beautiful and unfeasibly large-breasted women, desperate to avail themselves of a procreating male. In my mind's eye, though, it hadn't been this cold. In my mind's eye the temperature had warranted much bikini wearing and body oiling. But sadly, no. No bomb at all. It was only the fallen snow muffling the bedlamic clamour of London traffic, human and otherwise, that's all. Still, bomb or no, it would have ranked as one of my life's few perfect moments if only I'd had the smallest amount of feeling in just a single one of my toes.