'He abuses you, makes you feel like shit, he more or less forces you under the surgeon's knife, and then has the gall to hire us to find you. You should tell him to—'
'You misunderstand,' May cut in, nervously bending a menu between her hands. 'I love him very much. I have not dumped him. I knew he would not approve of me having the operation, because he does not wish me to suffer any pain; also I did not want him to worry about me having it; so I merely withdrew from his company until I could have it and I was sufficiently recovered to be the old me again, the me he loves. I was very ill after the operation and it took me longer to recover, but I did not think he would miss me so much that he would hire private investigators to find me. But that is him all over. He is so good to me and I love him so much and I cannot wait to see him with my new ears.'
'I think that's so romantic,' Alison said immediately.
28
The Case of the Missing FA Cup was exactly the kind of investigation I was interested in. No particular exertion required, barely a whiff of danger, no extensive travel, very little in the way of having to talk to strangers, and a resolution based on observation and deduction. The Case of the Dancing Jews was its polar opposite, and, more to the point, unlike the girl with the formerly sticky-out ears, it simply would not go away.
Towards the conclusion of the former case, I was returning from a lunchtime curry with Alison to relieve Jeff when I observed to my horror that Daniel Trevor was in the store. Jeff was behind the counter, studiously ignoring him, while Daniel was pacing back and forth at the back of the shop. He was muttering, 'Yes, this will do rightly, yes it will. Absolutely.'
I was attempting to back out of the doorway when he turned suddenly and spotted me. He clapped his hands together and exclaimed: 'The very chap I'm looking for! Come on in!'
Daniel Trevor, beckoning me into my own store.
'Mr Trevor,' I said, 'how can I help you?'
'Very easily, my friend, very easily indeed! I want to borrow your shop!'
'Borrow?'
'Absolutely! You host book launches, don't you?'
'Very occasionally.'
'Perfect! I want to do one right here!'
'Well, I'm not sure if that's going to be poss—'
'Of course it is! You can't be booked up every night from here to eternity. Just tell me whatever night is free and book me in. This is the ideal location. The School of Dance is just a few hundred yards away, the staff and students will be able to nip in and—'
'Whoa there, Mr Trevor. You're doing the book? Anne Mayerova's . . . ?'
'I Came to Dance. Yes, I am. I'm making a stand. Anne Mayerova stood up to terrorism in her own way, and now I'm going to stand up to it in mine. I'm going ahead with publication.'
'But it's not finished, and you didn't like it anyway, and what if it stirs up—'
He held up a hand to stop me. 'Relax, my friend, everything is going to be just fine. I'm publishing exactly what we contracted for, Anne Smith's history of dance in Northern Ireland.'
'Not the dancing at Ausch—'
'It won't even be mentioned. I think on reflection that part of her reason for not including it in her life story is that she refuses to let her life be defined by such barbarism, she doesn't want to give them credibility, even after all these years. She's a remarkable woman to be able to put it in perspective like that, and I admire her for it. It will be a tribute night to Anne Smith, to Anne Mayerova, and also to my dear departed Rosemary. Neither of them will be able to attend the launch, but I, sir, know how to run an event and I'm quite sure that every student of dance in this mighty province of ours will be making their way to your delightful premises on whatever night you see fit to grant us, and every single one of them is going to buy one, two or three copies of I Came to Dance. A night of tribute, and a night of profit, sir. What do you say to that?'
'I can do any Thursday in August,' I said.
I am not purely driven by financial gain, but one must be practical. I may not always enjoy the good health I enjoy now. Books do not grow on trees, and must be purchased, and where cash is not readily available, credit must be employed; let us just say that my credit is not always good. That is the lot of the small business. I could have cut and run the way so many others have, but I have stood and faced and fought to keep No Alibis open, and it would be criminally negligent of me not to reluctantly accept a profit when it presents itself. Bookselling is like prostitution, you sell your wares, you close your eyes, and you never fall in love with the clients. You also keep your fingers crossed that they won't ask for anything perverted.
A date was agreed two weeks away. When I told Alison about it she laughed and offered to provide tray bakes 'for a price'. She told me I had no principles. She is wrong. I have lots of them. I keep them in the safe at the back of the shop and only take them out when required. She said that I seemed to have gotten over my fear of Nazis. I said they were coming to the launch until they heard about the tray bakes.
Oh we laughed. It was a golden period.
Daniel Trevor was handling the publicity and the invitations, he was providing the wine and the music. I also advertised through the website, though I doubted if any of my regulars would bother turning up for what I jokingly referred to as 'an evening of dance crap'. I had to negotiate the borrowing of two dozen chairs from a local hotel. It took me about half an hour to explain the concept of borrowing as opposed to purchasing, and I had to invoke the Blitz spirit of all small traders sticking together to finally ensure their delivery. When the blokes from the hotel arrived and stacked them in the back room, one of them took a fancy to the new Michael Connolly and asked if he could borrow it. I told him I wasn't a library. Honestly, the riff-raff I have to deal with.
Everything proceeded apace. Not only that, but there was a general upturn in business thanks to some unseasonably good weather – sunshine in summer, thank God for global warming! – and the days flew by. Alison and I continued to meet for lunch and things continued apace on that front as well. She was pleased with the display of her comics in the shop and could hardly keep up with the demand. I told her she was soon going to have to employ the services of a proper printer. When I handed over the cash from their sale – minus my commission, obviously, because I'm not a charity – she looked like I'd given her the keys to the bank. She peppered me with kisses. If I'd known she was going to do that I'd have opened the till and given her a fiver weeks ago.
But.
I should have known better.
Golden days are known as golden days because they are valuable and rare, and another way of saying they are rare is that they are few and far between, and when they do come along they are fleeting. I was happy and smiling one moment, and the next the phone rang, and I should have known better than to answer it. Almost as soon as the man at the other end of the line spoke, my Spider-sense tingled.
'Hello – is that No Alibis, yes?'
An elderly voice, but with a thick German-sounding accent. I was so thrown by it that I agreed that this was indeed No Alibis instead of instantly claiming a wrong number.
'I understand that you buy and sell rare books?'
'Yes . . . yes, we do.'
'And you have a number of these in your store?'
'Yes, of course.'
At that very moment I was alone, and I felt it. Even though this caller was only on the end of a telephone line, I felt physically threatened.
'I wonder if it might be possible to make an appointment to come and see you? I am a collector, and would appreciate the opportunity to peruse them in private, with your personal attention.'
'Well I don't really . . .'
'I am an old man, with the traffic, the pushing and shoving . . . really I would prefer . . . shall we say seven p.m.?'
'Well, I'm . . .'
'Very well. Seven p.m. it is.'
He cut the line. I hadn't even thought to ask his name. I was shaking and sweating. But strange as it may seem, I was also curious. Until
I had started investigating these cases I had never been curious about anything. Now, particularly with this one, there was a need to know. He could of course just be an old duffer with a foreign accent and an interest in books. But he had made an arrangement to see me, in private, alone, by myself at a time when I had only recently been living in fear of murder by an elderly German assassin. (And I mean assassin, because like it or not, I am an important person, albeit in the shrinking world of independent bookselling.) It was surely just too much of a coincidence. He was coming for me. It was The Night of the Jackal. My Reichenbach Falls. My date with destiny. I would conquer fear and I would deal with it. It would be a meeting of minds. I would outwit him. I would be that bloke in that Swedish film sitting down to play chess with the Grim Reaper and confounding him with logic. And if that failed I would use the meat cleaver beneath the counter.
I would also have back-up.
I wasn't stupid. He might be old, but at point-blank range a gun doesn't care how old the trigger man is. First of all I called Jeff and explained the situation. He said that was scary and he'd love to help but he'd arranged to go swimming. I told him to rearrange or he could kiss goodbye to his job and say hello to an invoice for all the books he'd sold to his mates at less than cover price. He said he'd be there before seven. One of my favourite private detectives, Spenser, calls on a huge jive-talking black man called Hawk when he needs back-up. Hawk scares everyone and the ladies love him. Jeff, who occasionally lifts some weights, only scares women, and being from Amnesty International I suspected that he was less likely to tackle an assassin than mount a campaign for his release after he had killed me, although if the assassin was going to kill me, then he could just as easily kill Jeff as well. So safety in numbers was required. I called Alison and told her and she said I was mad letting him into the shop, that I should call the police, it was better to appear foolish and live than be brave and die. It was a good point. But alerting the police in general was only going to be time-consuming and would require frankly fantastical explanations, at the end of which I would be no nearer to solving The Case of the Dancing Jews but considerably closer to appearing in a local court charged with wasting police time or being sued for making false allegations about an elderly book-collector.
However, there was, I thought, a way of attracting police protection without actually tipping them off.
I phoned DI Robinson. As I had previously imagined there to be a small possibility that he was in the employ of the Odessa, I first asked him if he was busy that evening. He said, 'Apart from protecting Ulster from evil, no.' Satisfied, I explained to him that I was having a special private viewing in No Alibis for some of my favoured clients, and wondered if he would like to come. A number of very rare and immensely collectable titles would be on sale, with discounts well into the double figures (in my mind's eye that was 11 or 12 per cent). Even if he had purchased the Kinky Friedman in order to maintain his cover story, this would surely allow him to get even further into my good books, while at the same time providing me with a modicum of protection. So I wasn't particularly surprised when he thanked me, and told me I was very kind, and yes he would be very pleased to come.
Thus adequately protected in the store – I presumed that while the assassin was prepared to kill me, he would not be foolhardy enough to perpetrate a massacre – I turned my mind to what would happen when he realised that he wasn't going to be able to kill me there and then. If he was any sort of a tactician he would maintain his respectable front, purchase a book or two, then withdraw to plot anew. That was exactly the time that I needed to pounce – and I would track him to his lair.
But of course I wouldn't be able to achieve that by myself. I have already described my reluctance to drive in the dark, and the chances of me getting to the No Alibis van and completing my safety checks before he disappeared were quite small, even if he was an ancient crumbly. Besides, at certain times of the month I have an aversion to turning left, and this happened to be one of them, so there was a fifty-fifty chance that I would lose him if it was left up to me. One alternative was to call on my database of customers. They are not 'friends', as such, but they are loyal and supportive, and have certainly been an aid to me in previous investigations. However, if I issued an appeal to them, I knew I would necessarily have to be vague, so that although they would be keen to help, they would also want, demand to know why they hadn't been invited to the sale as 'favoured clients' and I'd end up having to sell off half my collection to them, and at a greater discount. I suppose I could have cherry-picked one or two of them – but word would inevitably spread; I believe they gossip about me behind my back, and quite possibly have an internet forum dedicated to it.
At that precise moment I happened to glance out of the window and across the road to Alison's jewellery store. She has one of those old-fashioned display windows, which instead of going straight down to the pavement, is about three-quarter length, with brickwork below and a windowsill sticking out in front. Inevitably people sit on this, and she spends half her life shooing tramps, drunks, kids and old people off it. A gang of steeks had proved particularly obstinate, and despite having been moved on by the police several times, had taken to sitting there at every opportunity. Alison was convinced that they were planning to smash the glass and steal the jewellery, but I doubted they would be so obvious – more likely they were there for one of two reasons. The first was because it was directly opposite the Wine Mark off-licence they were barred from, so it was a good vantage point from which to observe muggable customers. The second was because they wanted to look at Alison, because she was so pretty.
In escorting Alison back to her shop I had had to walk their gauntlet of fear several times. They had said nothing to us, but as soon as I left her inside it was a different matter. Several times I was subjected to severe verbal abuse while I waited to cross back to No Alibis. They called me knob head, and prick face, and Pinocchio, peg leg, gimp, dummy, retard, spaz, queer, faggot, dyke, carpet-muncher, fudge-packer, smack head, crack head, meth head, slut, slag, scrubber, bitch, schizo and Catholic. But it was water off a duck's back. I heard worse at home.
On this occasion, however, I thought that their very steekness, their street nous, might allow them to blend in and follow my nemesis without arousing suspicion, either on foot or in one of the cars they routinely stole for joy-riding escapades.
Today there was just the two of them, so the prospect of putting my proposition to them wasn't quite as daunting as it would have been with the whole gang present. Anyone else attempting this might have opened with a 'Wassup, bro?', but that is not only demeaning but quite ridiculous to someone of my background and education. Instead I ushered them into the shop, took up position behind the counter, one hand on my cleaver, and asked them if they had ever heard of the Baker Street Irregulars.
'What the fuck are you talking about?' was their considered response.
I explained that Sherlock Holmes employed a group of street urchins to help him out from time to time.
'What the fuck are you talking about?' was their considered response.
'You calling us fucking urchins, Holmes?' one asked.
I explained that I was willing to pay them money if they would do something for me.
'Fuck off, you fucking pedo,' was their considered response.
It was a game, a verbal jousting, we were establishing boundaries. It was like a mating ritual, without the mating, or cats pissing out their territory. As part of this one of them lifted The Criminal by Jim Thompson and licked it. It was necessarily a slow process, but gradually they came to understand what I wanted of them, if not why, and lacking money for drink or drugs, they became quite amenable to the idea. There was some good-natured joshing over their fee – my first suggestion that payment be made in book tokens redeemable only in these premises was greeted with much humour – but eventually we settled on straight cash, half now, half later. They were to hang about in their usual spot outside Alison's, and as my ne
mesis was leaving I would give them a thumbs-up through the window and they would follow him to the Eagle's Nest.
Everything was falling into place nicely.
29
The clock was ticking, and all but one of the players were in place. I was behind the counter, one hand on the cleaver. DI Robinson was towards the rear of the shop, looking through three shelves of signed first editions, Jeff was kneeling on the floor beside a box of books, giving the impression of recording newly arrived stock, and Alison was in the kitchen, with the door open, washing dishes, but with one submerged hand gripping a steak knife. Across the road my Botanic Avenue Irregulars loitered outside the jewellery store, apparently sniffing glue.
Seven o'clock came, seven o'clock went. By 7.15 p.m. DI Robinson had two books in his hands and looked about ready to approach the counter. I made eyes at Jeff and he confounded the critics by understanding: he quickly produced a dozen more signed first editions for DI Robinson to peruse; he knew they were valuable because I kept them in transparent plastic envelopes so tight that they discouraged examination; I knew they weren't because they were signed by Jehovah's Vengeance Grisham.
Across the road one of my trackers suddenly lay down on the footpath.
Alison appeared in the doorway and said, 'Why don't I make us all a cup of—'
Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
She stopped. DI Robinson glanced up. Jeff stared. I took several moments to examine my computer screen, to at least make it appear like I was fairly nonchalant, then looked to the door.
There he was.
An old man in a good suit. Silver hair cut close.
The Valium was useless.
Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz . . .
I pressed the door release. As he entered I said, 'Sorry, I was miles away there.'
'No matter.' He waved the apology away, as if he was swatting a fly. He stepped towards the counter with his hand extended. I was unprepared for this sudden familiarity and had to quietly let go of the meat cleaver in order to offer my own hand. I managed to set it down, but my nerves were such that in reaching across the counter my knuckles caught the top of a stapler and knocked it over the edge. My nemesis quickly diverted his hand and caught it before it had travelled more than a few inches.
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