Alison nodded vaguely. She nestled back into the pillow. 'Rest . . . yes . . . but don't go away.'
'I'll be right here,' I said.
Here, or Bolivia.
42
I sat in the waiting room, nervously chewing my nuts. I was unsettled, I was anxious, but I wasn't to blame. Brian was in the operating theatre, for all I knew fighting for his life, simply because Alison had made the cardinal error of not letting anyone know that she had dragged him into The Case of the Dancing Jews. Absolutely nothing to do with me. He had been attacked by a taxi driver who had probably watched Taxi Driver too often. Brian was the unfortunate victim of friendly fire. Now that I thought about it, I was surprised by his size, and couldn't understand how, if she now had me as a lover, she could ever have been attracted to someone of his proportions. Maybe all women go through a phase of loving brawn over brain. In my few brief glimpses of him I had deduced that he didn't have the intelligence to tie his own shoelaces. The problem of course was that now he probably never would.
It was typical of life in general that at my very moment of triumph, when I should have been carried around shoulder high for cracking the case and overseeing the vanquishing of a villain, it had been snatched away from me. Instead of luxuriating in righteousness, in the victory of good over evil, I was sitting in a hospital waiting room chewing on an old man's nuts and worrying that my bloody handshake with the mental taxi driver meant that Brian's DNA had transferred to me and could thus tie me to what some cynical cop would doubtless consider to be attempted murder. Vigilantes have never gotten a good deal from the forces of law and order. They object to being shown how it should be done. I shook my head despondently. It was amazing how quickly things could change. One moment a nodding acquaintance of I, The Jury, the next it was Me, The Scapegoat.
The elderly stroke victim came back into the waiting room, spotted me, and despite my deliberately looking away when we made eye contact, shuffled across to sit beside me.
'Still here?' he asked.
'Yeah,' I said.
I sighed. I offered him his bag of nuts back.
He shook his head. 'Told you, don't like them. The chocolate was nice, though.'
'Sorry?'
'I sucked the chocolate off them and put them back in the bag. I hate to see anything go to waste.'
I nodded for several moments, then stood up wordlessly and hurried to the toilets, where I threw up.
I stayed in the cubicle for an hour. He might as well have injected me with his phlegm. For all I knew I had caught diabetes and emphysema and malaria and clots. The MRSA and C.difficile I'd already picked up were probably complaining about the overcrowding. I was dying. I was Frank Bigelow in D.O.A. I would walk into the cop shop and say, 'I want to report a murder.'
'Who was murdered?' they'd say.
'I was.'
Except I wasn't the victim of some criminal conspiracy. I had been done down by old-man dribble.
Or had I? Maybe it was a conspiracy. What if he'd been sent in undercover to poison me? Why had he picked me out when there was any number of casualties he could have slipped his sucked nuts to? Max Mayerova had tracked me down to the hospital and come up with a devilishly fiendish method of killing me. Brian wasn't the assassin, it was an old man in a tartan dressing gown. He was Hyman Roth in The Godfather: Part II, on the surface a harmless old septuagenarian, in reality a ruthless Mafia boss.
I rested my head against the cubicle wall. I was sweating profusely. It was impossible to tell if it was just the aftermath of the throwing up or the poison at work. I might have twenty minutes left to me to pass on what I knew about the case, or the rest of my life.
What if, even as I sat there, Hyman was in Alison's cubicle, smothering her with a pillow?
I staggered out of the toilet and back out into the waiting room.
There was no sign of Hyman.
Panicked, I hurried back to Alison – and was relieved to find her sleeping peacefully. I collapsed back down into the chair by her bed. I studied her. She had rocked my world in a most unexpected manner. I thought about how things might have turned out if I hadn't had the support of my psycho taxi driver, if it really had been a killer instead of her ex-husband, if he had managed to lose me outside of No Alibis and her reckless attempt to prove her worth as a private detective had led her nowhere but a cold, hard mortuary slab.
There had been a lot of murders, but I had been quite detached from them. This attempt on Alison was different. This time it was personal. Just because she was still alive did not mean the end of it; there would be another attempt, and another, until everyone involved in The Case of the Dancing Jews was eliminated. If nothing was done, things would continue to escalate. I had already proved that the pen, the keyboard in fact, was mightier than the sword by cracking the case, but just because I knew, it didn't mean the guilty were going to throw up their hands in surrender; the information had to be passed on, and considered, and judged, and they had to be brought to justice. In the meantime, unless I came up with some means of transforming myself into a ninja in a few short hours, we were sitting ducks.
I needed help.
I needed to overcome a lifetime of mistrust and invest in someone with the power to make things happen.
I returned to the waiting room and crossed to the payphone. I punched in the numbers. I remember most numbers I have ever used. It was answered on the third ring.
I said, 'I'd like to speak to DI Robinson.'
'One moment, please.'
As I waited for much longer than one moment my eyes roved across the rows of chairs containing the fractured, the walking wounded, the dangerously drunk and the badly beaten survivors of a typical Belfast night, before coming to rest on a figure standing leaning against a pillar with his arms folded, watching me intently.
'DI Robinson,' I spluttered, 'how the bloody hell did you manage that?'
He said I was a stupid, stupid man and I had no idea what I was dealing with, and I countered that I wasn't a stupid, stupid man and I had a very good idea of what I was dealing with, I just wasn't equipped to deal with it and anyway there was a reasonable chance that he was up to his neck in it and his concern was a façade and a smokescreen and he'd actually been sent here by Max Mayerova or his dad or his brother to finish me off, and he said: 'What the fuck are you talking about?'
And I gave him a look that said, You know.
And he gave me a look that said, What the fuck are you talking about?
'I'm hauling your arse down to the station,' he growled.
'I'll never get there alive,' I said.
'What fucking planet are you on?' he asked.
'Similar planet to you,' I replied, 'but not as dirty.'
'Are you on something?'
I glared at him. Fact was I was off something. Everything. Once again I had missed my meds. I was sweating and itchy and the lights were too bright and I was being slowly poisoned by an old man's sucked nuts and might expire at any time and then Alison would be defenceless. I had to tell him, I had to trust him, there was nobody else to turn to. But I still . . . couldn't . . . quite.
'How did you even know I was here?'
'Because a doctor reported you for administering Rohypnol to a helpless young woman, enough to near as dammit kill her, and your name cross-referenced with my investigation and so I was called from my nice warm bed.'
'And here you are, all alone,' I sneered. 'How come you always travel in ones?'
'Cutbacks.'
I raised an eyebrow. He just kept looking at me. The stroke victim came wandering back in and sat in his usual chair. DI Robinson moved closer to me and lowered his voice. 'Because everyone else told me to let it go, there's no connection between any of these deaths, we have bigger fish to fry. But I know there is. So it's kind of my hobby.'
'Like collecting crime fiction.'
'So you sussed me out. Whoopy-woo.'
We glared. First ten seconds I can handle anyone, after that I'm like put
ty.
'I didn't murder anyone,' I said.
'Did I say you did?'
'You're implying.'
'Am I? Did you murder someone?'
'No.'
'Did you slip your girl roofies?'
'No, sir, I did not. But someone did.'
'And you know who it was?'
I nodded. 'Do you?'
'Would I be standing here if I did? Listen, beam back down to us, son, and we might be able to get this sorted out.'
It really was time to choose. It really was time to trust.
'Okay,' I said. 'But on my terms.'
He rolled his eyes. 'Why the hell should I care about your terms?'
I folded my arms and looked at him. After a while, and without further progress, I said, 'Okay. But do one thing for me. Then I'll tell you all about The Case of the Dancing Jews.'
'The . . .'
'Get some of your uniformed chums down here to stand guard over Alison.'
If I was about to take a long walk off a short pier I wanted there to be a record of it, some paper trail that said he was here and he was involved.
He thought about that for several moments before nodding. 'This,' he said, raising his mobile phone, 'had better be worth it.'
'It will,' I promised. I nodded towards the curtained-off cubicles. 'I'm going to say goodbye to her.'
DI Robinson sat down two empty chairs up from the stroke victim while he waited for a response on his phone. 'Don't be long,' he called after me.
'I won't.' I nodded back at his new neighbour. 'And watch out for the nuts.'
'I always do,' he replied.
43
I was once encouraged to attend a salsa class by Mother. She thought it would help me to experience social interaction with people who were not obsessed with 1940s pulp fiction or serial killers. But people who suffer from irritable bowel syndrome should not attend salsa classes.
When I come to power, all forms of dancing will be banned, especially salsa.
Naturally I shot down Alison's suggestion that we have some kind of dance performance at the launch of Anne Smith's I Came to Dance with the ruthless efficiency of a Jap on a whale cull. She argued that it would help to lull our targets into a false sense of security; I argued that much the same could be achieved by a few bottles of Concorde and a sausage roll. I won that particular argument because it was my shop and my rules. If any kind of inspirational performance was going to take place in No Alibis, then it was going to come from me. God knows I spent long enough setting it up, and learning my lines, and joining the dots, and rehearsing it all.
It was the day of reckoning.
Or, in fact, the evening of reckoning.
The evening of closure, and justice.
To get there, there was a bit of bargaining involved. When a squad of uniformed cops arrived at the Ulster Hospital to guard my loved one, when Brian came through surgery with flying colours, when I realised that for all his solo investigations DI Robinson knew virtually nothing, when I understood that he had never had the faintest notion of trying to frame me for any of the murders, I knew that the ball was very much in my court. I could have volunteered everything I had discovered during the course of The Case of the Dancing Jews at any point during the eight hours he kept me in a cold police cell without access to a lawyer or Twix, I could have given it to him all at once or drip-fed it one sentence at a time. But I held out. Of course it was vital that the bad guys be brought to justice, but it was also important that the glory wasn't stolen away from me. I wasn't in it for the glory, but if there was some glory to be distributed then I was bloody sure I was going to get the lion's share of it, having done the leg work, having suffered the outrageous slings and arrows of being pursued by Nazis, and having worked my fingers to the bone tracking down the truth over the information superhighway. DI Robinson had done nothing but look a bit furtive from time to time.
Also, I had a girl to impress.
DI Robinson got really quite angry at my decision to withhold my evidence until the night of the book launch. The longer I held on to it, the more difficult it would be to mount a successful prosecution, the more likely it was that DNA evidence relating to the murders would degrade, the more opportunity there was for those involved to flee the country or concoct an alibi. But I wasn't for shifting.
Agatha's many thousands of novels may be considered to be ridiculously old-fashioned, but the dame certainly knew how to wind up a plot. These days it's all SWAT teams and torture porn. Back then all she had to do was get all the protagonists into one room, present the facts, and then sit back and wait for the fallout. I saw no reason why, with proper undercover police protection, I should not reveal my findings in a similar fashion. Of course times have moved on, and too much talk can be confusing or put you to sleep, so I decided to present my revelations by way of a PowerPoint demonstration.
DI Robinson, my lovely Alison, and Jeff were 'in' on the fact that something was going to happen, but I was the only one who actually knew the details. Alison besieged me for information, but after the trauma of trying to tell her about my triumphs in the hospital I decided that once bitten, etc. and to keep it to myself until the big reveal. DI Robinson demanded it, but he was in no position to apply pressure. Jeff didn't seem to care one way or another. I loaded the images on to my laptop and rehearsed the presentation alone, projecting it after hours on to the bare back wall of No Alibis, with me safe in my panic room and also secure in the knowledge that there were uniformed cops on duty outside. I had twenty-four-hour protection. I was important. Alison also had protection, but not as much. DI Robinson even offered to extend it to my mother, because if the bad guys sensed that something was up, they might try to get to me through her. They might kidnap her and send her fingers through the post to me one at a time as a warning. I told DI Robinson not to bother investigating until they got as far as her thumbs. You need your thumbs. They are one reason cats can't make omelettes. Besides, Mother was well capable of looking after herself.
Thankfully Alison showed no ill effects from her experience with Max Mayerova. Incredibly, he sent her a bouquet of flowers and a note saying he hoped she'd recovered from her food poisoning, and he felt terrible about taking her to such a dreadful restaurant, and he hoped she would give him a second chance and soon. He had no idea. The fact that he sent them to the jewellery store, on the very day she finally returned to work, showed that he was still watching and waiting. It sent a little chill down both our spines. Alison brought the flowers across to show me and I immediately raged at her about the possibility of them being sprayed with deadly poison. She said, 'But Interflora delivered them,' and I said, 'Exactly.'
I was still giving her something of a cold shoulder. I was absolutely and totally in love with her, but she had to learn that my emotions were not to be toyed with. She had betrayed me by going behind my back with Brian and Max, and it would take a lot of effort on her part to regain my trust. She certainly worked at it, mostly by throwing herself into the organisation of the launch party for I Came to Dance. I was glad of her help, for I have had very little experience of parties, having never had one as a child or been invited to more than a handful as an adult. My knowledge of choosing cakes, or chairs, or drinks, or canapés was negligible, and my knowledge of book launches even smaller. One of the many benefits of Northern Irish terrorism is that for more than thirty years there was an almost total lack of locally produced crime fiction. There was just too much distracting baggage to squeeze in. There was no such thing as an ordinary common or garden murder, it always had to do with this organisation or that, or one religion or another. There was never a simple body in the library, there were multiple body parts of multiple people blasted all over footpaths and the sides of buildings. There was just something about the sheer horror of it all that turned writers away from even attempting to chronicle it within the confines of the mystery fiction genre. There was also a very definite lack of interest from readers: if you walked out of your fro
nt door in the morning and there was a British soldier crouched with his rifle in your front garden, the last thing you wanted to do was read a crime novel in which a British soldier was crouched with his rifle in your hero's front garden. If people wanted to read crime fiction they generally wanted to escape to somewhere exotic, and that meant American authors, and when they found they had exhausted the so-called big names in the Main Street stores, they would go searching for alternative sources and eventually come across the nirvana of No Alibis. So the Troubles were actually great news for me, and I mourned their passing, because business was never as good again. However, this total lack of local authors meant that I was virtually never asked to host book launch parties, and thus I had to rely on Alison's greater experience to pull it all together while making sure to offer her only the occasional scrap of encouragement.
The first copies of I Came to Dance arrived on the morning of the party. I flicked through it rather disinterestedly – after all, that evening's event wasn't really about the book, it was about me, and what I had learned. All of the players had been invited and I was reasonably certain that they would attend. If any of them cried off, citing a migraine or a prior engagement, it would have deflated the whole carefully conceived and orchestrated denouement. Having to say 'so and so can't be with us tonight, but I would like to accept this murder charge on his behalf' would have been rather anticlimactic. The book itself was presentable enough, but I tried reading the first chapter and found it to be as dull as dishwater. Although prior to his unfortunate murder Daniel had provided me with a list of the leading lights of the dance community he wished to invite, and those invitations had in fact been sent out, in the few days immediately preceding the launch I had to go through the list again uninviting many of them. It is not a huge shop, and I had to make sure there was room for all those who were involved in The Case of the Dancing Jews and that they could be comfortably seated, not squished in with dozens of suck-cheeked former hoofers. There were some irate calls, but Jeff dealt with them, with only the very minimum of swearing.
Mystery Man Page 24