Mystery Man

by Bateman, Colin

  I dozed a little before waking to the question of her really being pregnant, and whether that would then give our unborn child rights over No Alibis? What if those ninety seconds of debatable fun resulted in me losing control of my pride and joy? What if the two of them worked in tandem to asset-strip me at their earliest opportunity?

  I had not shouted my mother's name out during sex. That was part of the plot to unsettle me. To make me doubt myself. I had to be on my guard at all times. There are conspiracies out there, the skill is recognising the real ones from the paranoid ones. Some of them are so glaringly obvious. One glance at Gregory Peck with his dyed black hair and overgrown Hitler moustache in The Boys from Brazil was enough to tip everyone off to the fact that he was a bad guy. But the secret of a good mystery is that while you suspect all along that it might be the best friend, you don't really know until the final chapter.

  I woke up in full daylight and with another erection.

  I could see how they could become habit-forming, but I willed it away. I have perfected this technique. My father taught it me. I no longer need the bucket of cold water or his strap.

  Now the erection was gone.

  But so was Alison.

  A quieter version of the hubbub was back, this time gently vibrating through the house while the artists ate breakfast. I would probably never eat again. I rolled out of bed and held my head in my hands. I needed my medication. You can miss those babies out once, but any longer and it really messes with you. I get the shakes. And I sweat. And my spatial awareness is not good. My palpitations run wild. My teeth ache. My sinuses tug at my brain strings. I needed Alison to run me home. We would have to rush through our Daniel debriefing, or return later, but I had to go. I was suffering withdrawal. I could become catatonic, or just as easily manic, or the one followed by the other, or in either order. I would also be car sick. I was not in a good place. The fact that I had lost my virginity was slim compensation, because I could not remember any of it, so in a sense I really had lost it, or it had been stolen, pickpocketed by an expert who even now was downstairs stuffing her face, and she would have no sense of shame at all. Perhaps the laughter drifting up the stairs was at my expense. Perhaps when I showed my face they would burst into sarcastic applause. The poets would compose an ode to my lost virtue, and the sculptress would fashion an erection in sarcastic tribute to me from Quaker oats and burned toast.

  I struggled down the stairs, but in catching my breath on the first-floor landing I was more than relieved to spot Alison outside, walking by the lake. Though it was a bright summer morning she had her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her zipped-up jacket, and her head was bowed in thought. I had a sudden paralysing notion that her experience in bed with me had been so harrowing that she was walking the lake trying to compose a form of words that would not only let me down gently but also rid her of me for good. But she wasn't a master of words. She could much more easily have drawn me a picture, and how cruel would that be? I would throw it down in tears, and she would reclaim it and display it in a gallery. I would become the poster boy for bad sex. If it were me, I would just get in the car and drive off. But she was classier than that. She would even give me a lift home. She would say, 'We can still be friends,' when she knew it was a lie. She probably knew that I would make a doll of her and stick pins in its eyes and pass disparaging remarks about the provenance of her jewellery and arrange for someone who didn't suffer from vertigo to daub offensive graffiti about her on flyovers. And she didn't care, because she knew she could do better than me. Better than a one-third share in an independent bookshop. She had bigger ambitions. Like Borders.

  I slipped out of the front door so as to avoid the catcalls of the kitchen. I hurried, as far as my hardening arteries would allow, after the object of my occasional affections and probable mother of my child. When I caught up with her, on the far side of the lake, she did not look up. I fell into step beside her.

  'Morning,' I said.

  'Morning,' she said.

  'Did you have breakfast?'

  'Yes. Scrambled eggs. They're in the bushes about a hundred yards back.'

  'Morning sickness,' I said.

  'I wish,' she said.

  Further on, I said, 'If you want to get it over with, you should say it now. I understand. I'm used to it. Or, when I say I'm used to it, I'm not used to it, because I'm rarely in this position. In fact, when I say rarely, I mean never. I'm never in this position. But you should, nevertheless, get on with it. I have to get home. I have to get my medication. Say it now.'

  'Say what now?'

  'What you have to say.'

  She stopped. She looked at me. 'How do you know?'

  'I just know.'

  'Okay then. You asked for it.' She took a deep breath.

  Before she spoke, I cut in with: 'I wanted to thank you for last night, and apologise. I want you to know that no matter what happens I appreciate it and I'm prepared to give you any number of book tokens if you don't take the shop away from me and give me some sort of access to the child.'

  She shook her head. 'You are extraordinary.'

  'Sorry.'

  'I think it's why I love you.'

  I nodded. 'But . . .'

  She screwed her face up. 'But . . . ?'

  'But . . .'

  'Is that what you normally say when a girl tells you she loves you?'

  I studied her. If you don't know people the way I know people, you might have taken her at face value. But I am wise enough to know that all protestations of love are merely in furtherance of a plot to achieve goals and rewards: you build them up and you knock them down; you encourage the mouse in with cheese, and then you decapitate it. She would not find me that easy to play. I knew every plot in every book. I could bluff with the best of them.

  She said, 'Are you not going to say anything?'

  'I love you too,' I said.

  She smiled widely. 'Then give a girl a kiss.'

  So I did.

  Then after a bit she said, 'Sorry about the taste of boke.'

  By our second lap of the lake, hand in hand, I was itching to go. Literally itching to go. I was going cold turkey, with side orders of fleas and shingles. Alison did not seem to understand. She seemed happy just to be alone with me in such congenial surroundings, which they were not. There were flies and bugs and stagnant water, which, with the onset of global warming, could at any moment give itself up to some new and untreatably malign form of malaria. There were trees swaying in the breeze that could snap on our heads and somewhere in the far distance the buzz of a chainsaw and who knew how many he had killed already? By this stage we were no longer alone. One of the poets had appeared almost opposite to us. The path around the circumference of the lake was not tremendously wide, but this poet, the American, had veered off it and was now crouched perilously close to the edge of the water – it was not deep, but it was murky, and there were fish, and he could easily have toppled forward and knocked himself out on a rock and drowned or been eaten, but nevertheless he reached out, meticulously chose several pebbles, then straightened and began to skim them across the water towards us with what I could only take to be some sort of baseball expertise and a blatant disregard for the obvious safety issues. He waved at us once, and I glared back. If one of his boulders jumped up and out of the water it could quite easily have caused a serious head trauma, leading to paralysis and a slow wasting away. It was needless gung-ho-ery, and it was a blessed relief when we finally moved out of range.

  Alison squeezed my hand and kissed my cheek as we walked on, but before we'd gone very far the American disturbed us again by shouting from across the lake. I thought for a moment that the stupid fool had actually fallen in, for we could see that he was now up to his knees in the water. He was gesticulating wildly at us; as he did so he did actually lose his footing and went down on his arse; but almost as soon as he did he scrambled madly backwards until he was right back up on the path again, but he was still pointing and shouting ra
ther incoherently. He was certainly upset enough for Alison to hurry along the path towards him – while still keeping a tight grip of my hand – and the closer we got the more we realised that far from causing a big fuss over nothing, as Americans will, there was actually something very badly wrong. It therefore seemed ridiculous to me that we were actually going towards him, when that something could very easily turn out to be upsetting or contagious or dangerous. We should immediately have gone in the opposite direction, to seek proper help, or at least sought safety in the branches of a tree. But no, Alison drew me relentlessly forward. The American poet, normally so eloquent, was now only managing to point and splutter. Despite having the kind of wide mouth and Mormon teeth that were perfectly suited to insincere smiling, he was grim faced and harrowed.

  Alison let go of my hand. I stayed where I was, while she ventured forward to the side of the lake. Almost immediately she let out a small cry. But it didn't stop her. She stepped into the water, and waded out several feet. I could see now what she could see. There was something large and dark floating just below the surface. Alison glanced back at me. 'It's Daniel Trevor,' she said in a brittle voice. 'It's bloody Daniel Trevor.'

  36

  I did that rare thing, I listened. Poets, cops, kids, undertakers. I heard them all compare notes. Daniel Trevor had drowned. He had stumbled into the lake while drunk. Or he had thrown himself in while in a blue funk over his wife's disappearance. There were no obvious signs of a struggle, no suggestion yet of a suspicious death. There was a pointless ambulance, there was a reporter from the local paper, but it was cut and dried. Cut and wet. But it stank. Stank as much as Daniel did as he was dragged from the goddamn stagnant lake, already bloated, his dressing gown saturated, pondweed straggling from him, his hair dank, the poets supporting his body, shoulder high, as if carrying a mighty hero from the field of battle, his daughter on her knees in hysterics, his son standing stunned.

  He'd been pissed. He'd been the paternal life and soul of the party. He'd chosen to go out this way remembered well, in the company of the artists and poets he loved, his children singing and dancing.

  Brendan Coyle was supposedly the last man to see him alive. He was still drinking at three a.m. when he saw Daniel pass by the kitchen door. He spoke to him, but the publisher didn't reply. The time struck a chord. Daniel's room was next door to ours. My phantom tinnitus was a phone call. I had checked the digital clock by our bed.

  A call to lure him outside?

  How difficult was it to drown a drunk and not leave a mark?

  Not hard, I was sure.

  Especially not hard if you were practised at it.

  I knew this much about serial killers. That once they had the taste for it, they were insatiable. That where there might once have been months between killings, this soon reduced to weeks, and days. It was called escalation. Fritz had killed Rosemary some nine months previously, then there was a long gap before he started picking up speed. Now he was stacking them up on a daily basis. Rosemary, Manfredd, Malcolm Carlyle, Leather Trouser Man, and now Daniel Trevor.

  Alison was really shaken.

  I was literally shaking. It was mostly the medication. But also it was the jitters brought on by further proof, as if we needed it, that we were in terrible danger.

  I said to her, 'We have to get out of here.'

  'Why?'

  'Because one of them might be the killer.'

  'He drowned. They said he drowned. Which one?'

  'I have no idea. Brendan Coyle.'

  'You think?'

  'I don't know. Yes.'

  'You're sure?'

  'No. But we have to get out of here.'

  I was doing the math. A terrible expression, but appropriate. While we had made love, Daniel Trevor was being murdered. We should have been alert to the danger. I knew sex and death and evil were on a par. It had been drilled into me since I was a toddler by my father. You could trace it all back to Eve. My father despised his own weakness in being seduced by my mother. I think they only had sex once. I was the product. That's how it happens. Now I was about to produce an heir conceived in the shadow of murder. The math could, quite easily, in a pessimist, add up to 666.

  Doors slammed, engines started. The poets and the sculptress and the screenwriter were all leaving. From the window of our room the lake looked placid. Water was the great life-giver, but it also took it away with surprising ease, leaving behind no trace.

  No chalk outline on a lake.

  No scene-of-crime tape.

  Nor, so far, any DI Robinson nosing around. It was probably a different police division, but I was pretty sure that word would soon filter back to him wherever he was and it would become his business. We needed to slip away now.

  'Alison, please.'

  'I can't believe he's dead.' She was lying on our bed, where we had created Damien. 'Before I met you, I'd never seen a dead body. Now I've seen two. You sure know how to show a girl a good time.'

  'I'm sorry.'

  She shook her head. 'You look so sad. It's not your fault. Come and lie beside me.'

  'We need to go.'

  'Just for a minute. I need a hug.'

  I lay on the bed beside her. She put her arms around me. She started to kiss me.

  People deal with death in odd ways.

  I got a crick in my neck turning to watch the road behind us as we drove home.

  Home.

  Where the heart is.

  No Alibis.

  'Don't you have to check on your mother?' Alison asked.

  'She is self-sufficient.'

  'Do you want my mobile to call her?'

  'She wouldn't answer if she didn't recognise the number.'

  Alison nodded. 'I wish I didn't have to go back to work, but I have to or I'll be fired.'

  'It's okay,' I said. 'I'll be fine.'

  She said the jewellery store was fitted out like Fort Knox. Maybe it was. But it was nothing compared to No Alibis. When I lock down, it's like Panic Room. I knew I would be safe inside, as long as I kept my defences in place. That meant not opening for the public. Profits would take a hit, but I was prepared to make the sacrifice. I needed my medication, doubles and triples of which I kept in the shop, and located at emergency depots around the city, and I needed time for it to work.

  But mostly, I needed time to think.

  I took my pills. I applied my lotions. I drank coffee. I sat at the till, lights off, the only glow from my computer. It was time to sort this case out. A cool appraisal of the facts. But every time I tried to address them, to assimilate, to establish patterns, my mind wandered.

  All I knew about Fritz was that he was out there.

  Time dragged. From time to time someone battered on the shutters outside. I had CCTV coverage. He or she looked like a customer, but how did I know? The whole world was threatening to turn Fritz on me. If I shouted, 'Closed for stock-taking,' someone would know I was in there. Even when Jeff turned up for his shift, I played dumb. If he was stupid enough to be in Amnesty International, then he was stupid enough to give me away to Fritz. Alison phoned half a dozen times. She was equally jumpy. Every time a potential client came into her shop she found a spurious reason to retreat to the storeroom at the back.

  In the middle of the afternoon, DI Robinson banged on the No Alibis shutters. When he couldn't gain access, my phone rang. I let it, and he left a message. Give him a call. My e-mail went crazy. Customers demanded to know if I was shutting down for good and if there was going to be a proper sale. I did not respond.

  Instead, I reapplied myself to the facts.

  I went over everything I knew about the murders.

  I examined my lists of car licence plates.

  I became an expert on modern dance.

  I knew everything there was to know about Auschwitz. I worked through the night and on into the next day.

  If not for my brittle bones and poor circulation I could probably have gained a place at Anne Mayerova's former dance school based
on my extensive research alone. Or I could have made a documentary for the Shoah Foundation.

  But I was no closer to identifying Fritz.

  I have often seen in movies journalists and writers falling asleep at their typewriters, and have always thought, how ridiculous, it's practically impossible, but that's exactly what I did. If someone had made a tracing of my forehead in the immediate aftermath they would have found the faint impression of a reversed qwerty appearing on their paper. It was partly the effort of my investigation, partly the lingering hangover. But mostly it was to do with the double dose of medication I'd taken to catch up.

  When I woke nine hours later I could barely move my neck. I'd knocked the remnants of the Starbucks coffee across the counter and drooled extensively. There was a fresh flurry of angry e-mails waiting for me, including one from the late Daniel Trevor.

  I stared at it for a long time without opening it. It had arrived during the night, but that didn't necessarily tell the full story Sometimes e-mail is instantaneous, occasionally it meanders around for days. He might have sent it to me last week, or on the day of his death, or he might have decided to send me some vital information seconds before his date with destiny. Perhaps he had identified the killer. He might even have sent it from beyond the grave. AOL's tentacles reach everywhere. I phoned Alison for advice. She was just getting up for work. She said, 'Ugghhh . . . Brian?'