“Wait,” said Bilbo and he leapt to his feet. “We haven’t finished our conversation!”
“Oh?” I said. “Go on then.”
“I use their first names because I’m a Quaker. Goodbye.” He sat down and spun away to look at his laptop. At the first mouse-jiggle he was lost to me.
“Right,” I said and left him.
∞
I talked myself in and out of going to report to Mike seven times on the drive back to Cuento and happened to be passing the entrance to the police station car park while I was talked in. Another five hundred yards and I’d have talked myself out for the eight time, but I decided not to question the universe. I pulled in, parked, and went to ask the dispatcher if she would page her.
There was no need. I met her in the foyer. The fact that she was carrying a Dora the Explorer skateboard and—I looked closer—a block of Crisco, hardly even registered.
“I’ve got to tell you something,” I said. “I had an anonymous phone call, from a woman. I didn’t recognise the voice.”
“Oh?” she said. She put the skateboard down and we both pretended not to notice as it rolled slowly away across the floor. She held out her hand.
“What?” I said, frowning at her hand.
“Show me your phone, so I can see the number,” she said. Boy, she was good at this.
“It was on the landline at the motel,” I said.
“Okay-doke,” she said. She sounded so jaunty, it was obvious she had busted me. It just wasn’t obvious how. “I’ll get the records. What did she say?”
“She told me she had the handcuff key. Does that mean anything to you?”
“What handcuff key?”
“That’s all she said.”
Mike put her foot out wide and brought the skateboard back towards her. She flipped it and caught hold of it in her hand.
“‘I’ve got the handcuff key’,” I said. “Those were her exact words.”
“Was she British?”
“No!” I said. “I mean, no.” I, on the other hand, was shit at this.
“So she’d have said ‘I have the handcuff key’ not ‘I’ve got’. What are you up to, Lexy?”
“Okay!” I said. “Bilbo didn’t keep his promise about keeping his mouth shut.”
“What?” she said. “Are you high?”
“Bilbo, the pyrotechnician at Bombaro’s,” I said.
“Ah. Yes,” she said. “Well, I’ve met his sort before. I’m surprised he hasn’t written a blog yet. No biggie. Free speech. What handcuffs, though?”
“Right,” I said. “An ongoing investigation. No way you’re going to share the details with me.” I turned away, but she put a hand out and touched my arm.
“Seriously,” she said. “What handcuffs are you talking about?”
I frowned at her. “The handcuffs and ankle-cuffs used to—”
“Oh!” she said. “I see. Great!”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“I know.” She smiled at me. “I like that.”
“I suppose you would,” I said. She gave me a puzzled look and God help me I sank to her level. I showed off. But oh so subtly. Not.
“Any time they’re asked,” I told her, “law enforcement professionals tend to say they joined the service to protect and serve, or out of a concern for justice, or even because of that time they fell down a well and a big cop saved them, but I’ve never bought it. It doesn’t surprise me at all that you take pleasure in knowing more than me and feel happier that way.”
The smile was gone. Totally gone. Simultaneous strokes on both sides of the brain gone.
“Be careful, Ms. Campbell,” she said.
“Yeah, see, that was definitely a flex of your professional muscles, wasn’t it?” I said. “That wasn’t protection, service, or justice calling the shots there.”
“Be very careful,” said Mike. “You don’t want to get on the wrong side of your local police force.”
I considered saying more. I half considered saying a lot more, but in the end I just nudged her with my elbow and said, “Only kidding.”
“This is your lucky day,” she said to me. “It’s not often you get to assault an officer and walk out of here.”
“Assault?” I said. “You mean that right there when I nudged you?”
“Be careful,” she said, “and don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Sixteen
I walked back out into the car park trembling, almost swooning as the peak of the day’s high-bake-setting hit me. I had got this seriously wrong. I had watched too many Inspectors—between Morse, Frost, and Lewis—and not nearly enough of The Wire. I had genuinely thought she didn’t mind me poking my nose in and I had even wondered if maybe we might be friends one day, Plainclothes Mike and me. I remembered Roger’s knee-jerk plea to leave the cops out of it and his flat look when I asked him why. I didn’t know if he’d been picked on for being gay or picked on for being black, but I felt stupid for not guessing, at least, that he’d been picked on.
I chirped open the Jeep then jumped at a voice behind me.
“Is that your vehicle, madam?” It was Soft Cop.
“It belongs to a friend of mine.”
“And do you have written permission confirming your right to be in possession of it?”
“Aw, come on!” I said. “Did Mike send you out here to hassle me?”
“If you don’t have proof that you’re in legal possession, you’d better leave it here until you get some.”
“It’s bloody boiling!” I said. “I’ll get sunstroke walking in this and I’ll sue the city.”
The cop looked up at the sky. “Pfft,” he said. “It ain’t even close to hot yet. Mid-nineties. Start moving. No loitering on police property.”
I was beginning to get how this worked. No one—not Noleen, not Della, not this guy—would entertain the notion that it was even warm until it hit a hundred. And they were all as wrong as they were crazy. It was melting. Even in the shade under the tunnel, I sweltered.
All of a sudden, I wished with all my heart I was in Dundee, even with the drizzle and the roadworks and the only thing stopping the kebab wrappers blowing along the streets on a Sunday morning being the puddles of vomit. I looked at the ground here in the darkest part of the tunnel. No litter, no puke, not even a dogshit. It wasn’t natural. Then a car coming up behind me slowed and I heard the window going down. My gloom deepened. A kerb crawler. Perfect.
“You look really unhappy!” came a familiar voice, and I turned to see Father Adam hanging out of the driver’s window of a Mini Cooper and grinning at me. Grinning for all the world as if he was really what he dressed as: a laidback, anything goes, California priest who would surf to work if we lived near the beach.
“You’d know all about that,” I said. “Sorry to snatch away your chance to ruin my day. It’s ruined already.”
“Huh?” he said. “Can I give you a ride?”
“Much as I’d love to sit beside you and tell you what I think of you on a long road-trip,” I said, “I’m just up here.” I pointed to the motel. “So it’s not worth fiddling with the seatbelt.”
“Huh?” he said. He checked in his rearview mirror, such a conscientious driver, not wanting to be holding anyone up. But no one was coming. Where was he going anyway? There was nothing this way except the motel and the Skweeky Kleen, a self-storage facility, and then a back road to the next one-horse town. “Lexy, have I done something to upset you?”
“Ha!” I said. “No, but you’ve done something to piss me off and make me despise you and everything you stand for.” Partly I just wanted to enjoy talking to someone who wouldn’t threaten me. Mike had seriously given me the willies. But partly it was true. “Visalia needs love and support and a listening ear right now. She doesn’t need you standing there with your rolling
pin and she doesn’t need saints and popes giving her what for.”
“What are you talking about?”
I rubbed my eyes with my knuckles. This felt like the fiftieth conversation today where I couldn’t make myself understood or understand what was being said to me and it was exhausting.
“She blew your cover, Holy Boy.”
“What the hell does that mean?” he said, jerking his chin into his neck and staring at me.
“Visalia told me you won’t give her communion because she won’t agree to a church funeral.”
“What?” said Father Adam. “She … what? Oh my God! I knew she wasn’t listening. I think she was drunk.”
“Two daiquiris,” I said, “but she hadn’t slept well.” I took a deep breath and tried to sound a bit more friendly. “What really happened then?”
“I offered confession and communion. She refused. It’s quite common to be angry at God when something terrible happens. And of course we’re having Clovis’s celebration of life in the church. Of course we are. No internment, because of his last wishes. Have you heard what he wanted done with his bodily remains?”
“I heard what’s being done,” I said. “Visalia thinks you think she’s doing it against Clovis’s wishes and thereby disobeying her husband. Which, as you know, is a big fat sin.”
“What?” said Father Adam, again. He put the car in neutral and pulled on the handbrake. Then he just sat there gaping up at me.
“And it’s not as if he’s here to see it.”
“Although I would say he’s looking down with interest,” Father Adam said. “But can you back up a bit there to the sin of disobedience?”
“Was she not supposed to tell me? Was it hush-hush? Understandable.”
“Hush-hush?” he said. “It’s bullshit.”
“Vi said two saints and two popes—”
“Oh, yeah, yeah, they sure did. Peter and Paul. Big fans of docile wives. And slavery. Every family has a couple of crazy uncles.”
I laughed out loud. I couldn’t wait to tell Visalia how firm a grasp she’d taken of the wrong end of this stick. I gave Father Adam my best smile, hoping he’d forgive me for calling him names and telling him I despised him.
Then I kind of ruined it, mocking his beliefs. “So,” I said, “you really believe Clovis is up there watching all this?”
“I really do. Fluffy cloud, harp, the whole enchilada.” Then he laughed at me and I let him.
“Even if he died in a state of … whatever it is? Because of almost running off with Barb?”
“God is love,” he said.
“’Kay,” was all I could dredge up in answer.
Father Adam leaned out of the open window and twisted until he was facing the roof of the tunnel. “Who killed you, Clovis?” he yelled, his voice booming in the echo chamber.
I glanced up at the dome of cobwebby brickwork above my head.
“Made ya look!” said Father Adam. Then, seeing a car coming up behind him, he pulled his head in and drove away waving. I noticed that his licence plate was JESUS FTW and I was grinning as I waved back.
The Mini Cooper and the car coming up behind it both turned in at the Last Ditch. Father Adam stopped in front of the launderette and hauled a huge sack of laundry out of the little boot. The other one, a Land Rover, stopped at the fifteen-minute space at reception and a tall woman jumped down. She didn’t look like the Last Ditch’s typical client: too prosperous to be staying here by choice and not knackered enough to be stopping because she couldn’t find the strength to drive another yard. She gave me a friendly nod and threw open the back doors. When I got closer I saw the refrigerated cases and the selection of butterfly nets and binoculars, so I took a guess.
“Are you Cindy Slagle?”
“At your service,” she said.
“Is there more trouble?” I said. “I saw the … ”
“Anoplura,” she said. “It was quite remarkable, wasn’t it?”
“It was disgusting,” I said. “Are they really all dead?”
“Of course they’re dead,” she said. “They were parasites with no host.”
I knew it was irrational, but I started to itch. I willed myself not to scratch my head but I failed. At least it made Professor Slagle happy, laughing at me.
“Do they carry disease?” I asked.
“Well,” she said, which wasn’t a great start. “Of course, there’s pediculosis, but it’s nothing to worry about.”
“Thanks,” I said. “So, it’s none of my business of course, but if the nanopurples—”
“Anoplura.”
“Yes. If they’re dead, why are you back?”
“I put one in Plexiglas as a souvenir,” she said, opening one of the cases in the back of the Land Rover and drawing out a little bubble of clear plastic. She held it on the palm of her hand as if it was a golden goose egg.
“Ahhh,” I said. “You might not want to be waving that around here.” But just then I saw Kathi coming out of the Skweeky Kleen to say goodbye to Father Adam. “Well, actually, if you give it to Noleen right now you’ll be okay.”
I even kind of wanted to follow her in and see what Noleen made of the gift, even just see what Noleen had selected as a t-shirt message that day, but I was exhausted and hungry and I’d sweated through my posh undies and t-shirt walking from the cop shop, so I left them to it and climbed the stairs to the walkway and my room, not touching the metal rail. I was half sure I could see it pulsing with heat.
Surprisingly, there was no sign of Todd and no evidence that he’d been in my room. I made for the bathroom, already stripping my damp t-shirt off. The door seemed sticky and in the extra two seconds it took me to shove it open I had time to think he’s been in and put a fluffy carpet down then that sounds like duct tape letting go then why would my door be duct-taped shut from the inside then what’s that funny noise. Then a pall of stink so thick and strong that I thought I could see it (it was yellow) rolled over me and a cloud of enormous oily-green insects rose like a tiny tornado from where they had been feasting, in my bath, on a raccoon, deader than any roadkill I had ever seen or smelled or dreamed of after French cheese for supper.
I took a breath to scream and inhaled one of them. Coughing and gagging, I reeled out and across the room. I pelted along the walkway and down the stairs. The Land Rover was still there. I burst into reception, hacking and whimpering, and shot straight through to the office, where Cindy and Noleen were sitting with cans of Coke.
“CRGHK!” I said.
Noleen leapt to her feet, got into position behind me, and wrapped her arms around my bare midriff. It was only then I twigged I was running about in my bra. Noleen jerked her elbows in and then, like the pro she was, Professor Slagle caught the insect in her baseball cap.
“Oh, Noleen!” I said and threw my arms round her.
“Chew your food,” Noleen said, patting me once on the back and then extricating herself firmly.
“Hmm,” said Professor Slagle. “Protophormia terranovae. Rather pedestrian after last night’s adventures.”
“Pedestrian?!” I said. “Are you kidding me?”
“It’s a Northern Blowfly,” Professor Slagle said. “Or bluebottle.”
“Come with me,” I said to her. “You too, Noleen, please.”
I was hurrying because I thought, now the door was open, the bluebottles would soon be gone. I hadn’t reckoned on the attractions of a very dead raccoon, bloated and stinking, though. When we got back to the bathroom, most of them were still there, resettled on their treat, so that the grey fur rippled and hummed with life as if a breeze was blowing through it.
Noleen dropped down onto the closed toilet lid. Her t-shirt today read Loan me a damn and I’ll give it but it was lying now. She gave a damn about this.
“Entomologically speaking,” said Professor Slagle, �
��this is of no interest, compared with the Anoplura, but in other respects, it raises questions.”
“Questions like how did a dead raccoon get into my bathroom and close the window behind itself and tape round the door?” I said.
The prof stepped up onto the rim of the bath and opened the small window there.
“Cindy,” said Noleen, with a break in her voice, “I swear to God, if you slip and put your foot through that critter, I will kill you. Once I’ve stopped throwing up, I will kill you with these two clammy hands.”
“It must have been someone pretty small and agile,” Cindy was saying. “I wouldn’t fit through here, although I could easily get up the tree. I do a lot of tree climbing on my collecting trips. Entomology is pretty much a licensed lifelong childhood in a way.”
“That’s great,” I said. “But how could someone climb the tree and get in the window carrying a dead raccoon?”
Cindy looked over her shoulder at me with a look doing its best to tell me I was an idiot.
“You’re an idiot,” Noleen said.
I opened my mouth to disagree but just then I heard footsteps on the metal stairs and went to shut and lock my door.
“Thank you,” Noleen said when I was back again.
“I am an idiot, though, aren’t I?” I said. “He would have brought the raccoon in through the door, sealed this door, and then left through the window.”
“Probably releasing the Protophormiae just before closing it,” Cindy said.
“Do you have security cameras?” I asked Noleen. She nodded. “So how about you and I sit and look through the tapes?” I said. I left a big outrageous pause.
“I need to clean all this up first,” said Noleen, leaving another one.
“Actually,” said Cindy, “if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to take this with me.”
“The raccoon?”
“And the Protophormiae. Don’t look at me like that. I’ve got a student doing a thesis on larval distrib—”
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