The Mule

by David Quantick

  My father, of course, turned out not to be a missing person in the strict sense of the phrase, in that he had simply decided to move out and was now staying with a friend (he said) in the next town. He claimed he had written a note ‘which would explain everything’ but we were never able to find this note. In fact, on the day that my mother and I moved out of the house, when it was empty of furniture and effects, I made my own search (waiting until my mother had gone on to the new flat) and turned up nothing. I now suspect any ‘note’ my father had composed never left the confines of his own active imagination.

  So the situation with Carrie was slightly different, but it was still quite odd. Why didn’t the report give her name? Whether she was called Carrie or not, the people who had reported her missing would surely know what she called herself. And who were the ‘concerned parties’? The whole thing seemed to have escalated from a simple case of a girl going AWOL for a few hours into a concerted and urgent effort to trace someone who was apparently in some sort of danger.

  And then I realised that I myself would be an object of interest to the police. I was, quite possibly, the last person she had seen, with the exception of the driver of the cab that took her from my apartment (and, if they were a different person, her abductor, if indeed she had been abducted. It was a very vague newspaper report). But apart from the matter of the book, which was still embarrassing to me as a breach of manners and good faith, I had literally no information of use to anyone, let alone the police. Admittedly, I had the notebook, but what use could rock group reviews be in a missing persons enquiry? There could be no earthly way that I could help find her. All that aside, I reasoned, I was a witness of sorts and the police are trained in discovering information that a witness may not even realise they possess. And, to be cynical, if the barman or anyone else in the bar that night were to come forward and say, ‘Yes, I saw her, she went home with this man,’ and described me, I would be more than a witness. I would be a suspect. Suspected of what, I had no idea, but a suspect nevertheless.

  Finally, however, it was something else that roused me. Not my own possible involvement, or worries for my own self-preservation, but the photographs in the book. I didn’t know what these images of the murdered girl were or how they had come into existence but I did know one thing: I didn’t want them to be predictions of what might actually happen.

  * * *

  Finding a police station is harder than you might think. For a start, they don’t look like police stations any more, but instead resemble offices of the most anonymous kind. There are no blue lamps, precinct signs or revolving orange light outside, just a small sign which the unobservant might easily miss. I didn’t know if I should go to my local police station, or even if I had a local police station. The numbers on the police website were useful only if you wanted to talk to someone about noise-related issues (which were apparently not a police matter), community relations (which sounded rather broad-based) or to make comments about the website itself. I was loath to dial the emergency police number, because I wasn’t sure if this was an emergency.

  So instead I traipsed the streets for an hour or two until eventually I found a small, grey-faced building which looked like it might have been happier as a public records office or a library. One or two squad cars were parked outside as I pushed open the door, but inside there was very little evidence of anything police-like. The reception area was drab and there were perhaps a few more metal grilles and security doors than you’d find in a normal office, but this effect was offset by several garish posters that wouldn’t have been out of place in a kindergarten or a community centre. There was nobody behind the somewhat battered front desk, so I pressed a small recessed switch in the wall, which immediately sank into its own rim and refused to resurface.

  After a while, a desk sergeant appeared, as if by coincidence, and when I caught his eye I said, ‘Excuse me, I have some information concerning a missing person.’

  The sergeant looked mildly vexed, as if I’d accused him of not completing his tax return, and said, ‘Stay there.’ He disappeared, and returned what could not have been but felt like half an hour later with a woman police officer.

  ‘Yes?’ she said and I repeated what I had said to the sergeant. She looked at me with the same annoyed expression as the sergeant’s, but instead of walking away, pressed a switch that caused a security door to open with a loud clunk, and said, ‘Come through.’ After a brief walk through some unpleasant corridors, she showed me into an interview room similar to the kind I had seen on television. ‘Wait here,’ she said, and left the room.

  I took a seat and imagined myself a criminal lawyer. ‘Say nothing,’ I would advise my client. ‘You can’t touch him!’ I sneered at a tough detective. ‘My client has nothing more to add – good day!’

  I passed several pleasant minutes this way until the door opened again and this time two extremely sour-looking people came in and sat opposite me. They were a male detective and a female detective and they stared at me for several seconds until the female detective said, ‘How can we help you?’ She had a name badge that said she was called Detective Sergeant Lisa Chick.

  ‘I think I have some information regarding a missing person,’ I said.

  ‘What kind of information?’ said Detective Sergeant

  Chick.

  Her colleague corrected her. ‘What missing person?’ Chick looked annoyed, as if he did this a lot.

  I showed them the newspaper. ‘I met this girl,’ I said. ‘We had a drink together the other night.’

  They said nothing.

  ‘In a bar,’ I added fatuously.

  ‘This girl?’ said the male detective, whose name badge I now saw said DC CHRIS QUIGLEY, which was also no help.

  ‘It says in the newspaper report that anyone with any information should contact the police,’ I said.

  ‘And that’s it?’ said DS Chick. ‘That’s your information?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing else?’ she said. ‘You had a drink with her.’

  I don’t know why but instead of going on, I said nothing.

  ‘You see, we know she had a drink with some guy,’ said Quigley. ‘There were several witnesses. She was a pretty girl and people notice pretty girls.’

  ‘The thing is, those witnesses said you left together,’ said Chick. ‘But here you are, and you don’t mention that. So who do we believe, you or witnesses?’

  ‘She did leave with me,’ I said, looking at the table. ‘She came back to my apartment but it didn’t work out.’

  ‘What didn’t work out?’ said Quigley. DS Chick looked at him, and he laughed.

  ‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Oh, right. Well, I can understand that. You’ll pardon me for saying, but you do look like the kind of man that things don’t work out for.’

  And they both laughed.

  ‘So she left your place when?’ said DS Chick.

  ‘About one,’ I said. ‘I went with her to the taxi rank, to be sure she got a cab.’

  ‘And did she?’ Quigley said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Can you describe the driver?’ said Quigley.

  ‘I didn’t see him,’ I said, ‘it was dark.’

  ‘Often is, at night,’ DS Chick said. ‘Convenient.’

  People saying that something is ‘convenient’ when it clearly isn’t is one of my bugbears. I know it’s meant sarcastically but it doesn’t make sense to me. For example, in this case surely it would have been convenient if I had been able to see the cab driver, rather than not. The fact I couldn’t see him was actually inconvenient, as I was unable to prove my story. I didn’t point this out, of course. I wasn’t going to draw attention to any flaws in my story.

  Then Quigley said, ‘So, do you have the book?’

  I froze. ‘What book?’ I said.

  ‘We spoke to the barman,’ said Quigley. ‘Jesus, who do you think we are? The barman said you came in the next day and he gave you a notebook.’

&nb
sp; My hand went to my pocket and at once Quigley’s and Chick’s eyes were drawn to the movement. I had scanned in most of the notebook’s pages and I could quote large chunks of the reviews of Carrie and the Legions, but I was reluctant to hand it over. It was a direct connection to her, something she had made, and I didn’t like the idea of it just going into an evidence bag and then into a metal drawer.

  ‘It’s just copies of reviews of records and concerts,’ I said. ‘Some group called Carrie and the Legions.’

  ‘It’s evidence,’ said DS Chick. ‘We can jail you for withholding it.’

  ‘It’s hers,’ Quigley said. ‘How could it not be evidence? It’s not yours to keep.’ Suddenly he sprang from his seat and jammed his hand into my pocket.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be wearing gloves?’ I said, but he ignored me and dragged out the contents of my pockets. There was a handkerchief and some coins, but no notebook. I had, sensibly, left it at home, along with the scanned pages from the copy of Alice Through the Looking-Glass.

  ‘Very funny,’ said Quigley.

  ‘Carrie,’ I said. ‘Is that her name? Carrie?’

  ‘You should know, stud,’ said DS Chick, and she snickered. Then her face changed. ‘You’ve got twenty-four hours to bring the notebook in or we’ll arrest you for wilful obstruction. And we’ll need your telephone number.’

  Quigley jotted it down as I dictated, one eyebrow raised as if to suggest that even the digits in my phone number were ridiculous.

  ‘Goodbye,’ DS Chick said as she opened the door. ‘I hope things work out for you.’

  They left the room, laughing.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A few minutes later, I found my way out into the street again, angry and none the wiser about what was going on. One thing was for sure: the police had as much idea as I did. While I doubted that the notebook would get them anywhere and they clearly didn’t have any other leads, I had now made enemies. It was cold so I stuffed my hands into my overcoat pockets and began to walk home.

  As I crossed the road at the traffic lights, it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t mentioned the other book at all. While I doubted that police officers of the low calibre of those two clowns would have the ability to do what I, a trained translator and linguist, had failed to do, and make some link between the disappearance of the girl and a copy of a Victorian children’s book rendered into an imaginary language, the translated Alice was as much evidence as the notebook, possibly even more so. By rights, I should not only have mentioned it but also brought the two scanned pages down to the station, where better qualified experts might have made head or tail of it. But I didn’t, and I was glad. I was starting to understand that I had a personal link to this case – I felt odd using that word but ‘case’ was the correct description so far as I could see – and, while I was happy that the police would attempt to make inroads using their conventional methods, I had my own ideas, which certainly didn’t involve a pair of flatfoots trampling all over my hard-won insights. Not that my insights amounted to much, that was certain. All I had discovered was that the missing girl collected reviews of a band called Carrie and the Legions, whose singer she may or may not have been, and that she had come into possession of a translation of Alice Through the Looking-Glass which somehow contained photographs of her apparent death.

  On the minus side, it looked like I had nothing to go on. On the plus side, it was time for some food. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, I realised, and a hot meal might revive my exhausted brain cells.

  * * *

  ‘Are you OK?’ asked the waitress. She was a pretty red-haired girl who I hadn’t seen in this particular restaurant before. Like most solitary diners who regularly patronise the same establishment, I knew and was known to most of the staff. I don’t know if they liked me or not – I wasn’t a particularly big tipper because I’m not a millionaire – but they were all friendly enough and once, when I’d mentioned to a waiter that it was my birthday, they brought out a small bun with a candle in it and sang ‘Happy birthday’ to me. But tonight none of the usual staff seemed to be on duty.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said to the waitress, although I wasn’t. I couldn’t decide what to order and the whole business of the day was weighing heavily on me. I’d never been humiliated by police officers before and I was beginning to resent my treatment – after all, I had been the one who had come to them, quite voluntarily.

  ‘If you’re sure you’re OK,’ said the waitress, and she seemed slightly offended, as if she knew I wasn’t really telling the truth.

  ‘I’m not fine, actually,’ I said, which made her tense up, as though I were about to complain about the service or maybe come on to her (although how a sentence like ‘I’m not fine, actually,’ could be the precursor to a come-on, I wasn’t sure). ‘To be frank, I’ve had a bad day, and on top of that I have a problem that I can’t solve.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. May I take your order?’

  Clearly I had gone too far in my confidences. Maybe my voice had sounded harsh and bitter (‘Modulate your voice,’ my mother often used to say to me, ‘you’re very loud’). I gave her my order and she went away. I concentrated on the breadsticks and drank some iced water. A few minutes later the waitress returned with my soup.

  ‘You know,’ she said, when she had set the bowl down in front of me, ‘sometimes when I have a problem and I cannot see a way out, I go and tell it to someone else and nine times out of eight, they totally see what to do.’

  She stood over me expectantly and I smiled. ‘So is that all I have to do?’ I said ruefully. ‘Just tell my problem to someone?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But it has to be the right person.’

  I stared at her. Of course!

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘Not a problem,’ she said. ‘Enjoy your soup.’

  * * *

  I didn’t enjoy my soup, because I gulped it down so quickly I burned my tongue and the back of my mouth. But now I knew what to do. I also knew why I hadn’t done it before. A mixture of my own vanity – I can do this! – and a certain reluctance to register what should have been staring me in the face had combined to create a stumbling-block out of what should have been a logical step forward. You see, from my point of view, the translated Alice was, as I’ve indicated, a dead end.

  True, it was possible that this version might contain crucial textual variants and reveal itself as an encoded cipher that would answer all my questions, but when I sat down and looked at the text, already recognising whole lines from the book even in this absurd fictional tongue –‘“Contrazze!” dixizt Tradelidon’ and so forth – this seemed unlikely.

  And even if it did – even if these two pages did somehow hold an encrypted key that would magically reveal all – how would I know? I was a translator of real languages. Real languages have real rules and, even if they do veer off into irregular verbs or grammatical variants that make no sense to a tyro, they’re rules that work because they have grown out of the daily application of that language. So what if, for example, ‘girl’ in German is neuter (Das Mädchen)? It works. Who cares if the past tense of ‘strive’ is not ‘strived’ but ‘strove’? Hundreds of years of linguistic evolution is on the side of ‘strove’. Here’s the bad news, Klingon speakers: your language isn’t real and will never be real until real people use it in their daily discourse. Boo hoo, Esperanto – nice try, fellows, but nobody cares. When a language is fictional, its rules are nothing more than a big book of ‘if you say so’. And with this text I had no way of knowing which parts were deliberate errors or clues. If, indeed, any.

  And now you can see what had blinded me. My own arrogance. My own prejudices, which in my work were perfectly valid and even practical. But, in the present circumstance, my background as a translator had caused me to have a closed mind concerning anything of this sort. A book translated into an imaginary language is, to a man like me, a red rag to a bull rather than an int
ellectual challenge.

  I was, in short, not the man for the job. But now a thought occurred to me. A thought I had put as far in the back of my mind as I possibly could. Because I might not have been the man for the job but I knew a man who would be. A man who, in any other circumstances, I would cross the road to avoid. A man whose self-belief was matched only by a corresponding pompousness. And yet he was the only person I knew who might be of any use in this extraordinary situation.

  There was nothing else for it. I was going to have to call Euros Frant.

  * * *

  You may have gathered from remarks I made earlier that this was not a decision I was making lightly. Not only was Frant a person in whose company I was reluctant to spend much time – his table manners alone were bad enough in themselves, while even his eyebrows had repellent personalities of their own – but also he represented everything I disliked. I mean, not literally everything, just the things that I suppose I held most dear. I was someone who spent his life trying to bring clarity to books, making texts easier to understand and – sorry to blow my own trumpet – helping people who didn’t speak each others’ languages to communicate with one another. Frant was devoted to spreading confusion and nonsense, making things up that weren’t necessary, and generally practising the science of moving the goalposts. If something didn’t fit his world, he just made up his own explanation for it.

  I’ll give you an example. One time I met Frant in a café to discuss a particularly knotty section of his atrocious paper-filling exercise (I refuse to call it a ‘book’). I had coffee and he had some peculiar purple fruit tea, and I wanted to talk about a passage whose details I won’t anger myself by recounting in any depth, but it contained the words yna Roisa. By now I was enough used to Frant’s garbled car-crash fake medieval gibberish to take a guess that yna Roisa meant ‘a rose’. And when I put this to Frant, he confirmed it. Or rather, he dipped his head and smiled as if he were a great chevalier conceding a fine point to a vulgar peasant.