Gunn, though, almost purred with pride. He showed us examples of his work and Alison oohed and aahed over them while giving me yuck looks when he wasn’t looking. I wanted out. We needed to get to the point. I asked him if there were any creatures he couldn’t stuff.
William Gunn’s head snapped towards me. ‘We do . . . not . . . stuff. I am a member of the Guild of Taxidermists, a founder member. I have been performing taxidermy for fifty years. It requires the skills of a surgeon, the artistic eye of a great master and the manual dexterity of a craftsman. Please, please, never refer to it as . . . stuffing.’
‘Understood,’ I said. I nodded around the workshop. ‘And very impressive, all this. But are there, like, any creatures that can’t be . . . you know, done?’
His eyes held steady on me. ‘No. Over the years, I’ve pretty much done them all.’
‘Have you ever,’ I asked, ‘stuffed a whale?’
‘Do not say stuffed.’
‘I’m sorry, my mistake. Could you do a whale?’
‘Do you have a whale you need me to do?’
‘No, of course not. I wouldn’t have anywhere to put it. But theoretically?’
‘Never mind him,’ said Alison. ‘He’s only out for the day.’
He softened a little. ‘No . . . no. It is a good question. Theoretically, yes, I could do a whale, but I would need a whole team working with me. The size. The problem would be the skin – taxidermy really only works well where the creature has either fur or feathers. If there is only skin, it discolours. It does not look . . . well.’
‘Could you stuff a human?’ I asked.
‘Please! Do not refer . . .’ He stopped and sighed. ‘It is a losing battle,’ he said wearily. ‘Seventy-five years of expertise between me and my da, yet it is always stuff this or stuff that.’ His eyes flitted back to me and he pointed. ‘You. Your voice is . . . familiar.’
I just looked at him.
‘That’s because he’s as common as muck,’ said Alison. She laughed. After a moment he laughed too, but his eyes held steady on me until Alison expertly drew his attention back. She said, ‘I’m sorry, we’re just heartbroken about our wee dog; we’ve had him for fifteen years, he’s part of the family. We thought it would be nice to have a reminder of him.’
She looked about to cry. Gunn surprised her, and me, by taking her hand and patting it. ‘Don’t you worry,’ he said gently, ‘you’ll have a fine reminder of him. Please, what type of a dog is he?’
‘A Jack Russell,’ said Alison.
‘Ah, lovely,’ said Gunn.
‘I was thinking, if you’ve done Jack Russells before, maybe I could see one? Just, half of me really wants it, but the other thinks it would be a bit . . . you know . . . strange having him around . . . you know . . . dead ‘n’ all, do you know what I mean?’
Gunn nodded. ‘I fully understand. Absolutely. Now, I’ve done quite a few dogs recently, but no Jack Russells. If you just hold on a minute, I’ll see if my dad remembers doing one. See, I was off on holiday for a few weeks in July, so he might have and just not mentioned it.’
‘That would be great, if it’s not too much trouble?’
‘Not a bit of it.’
Gunn gave me another sharp look before producing a mobile phone and moving towards the far end of the workshop.
‘His dad?’ I whispered. ‘He’s about ninety, how old’s the da?’
Alison shrugged. Then she punched me on one of my brittle arm bones. ‘Quit it with the stuffing crap, okay? We’re trying to get some answers.’
I made a face.
She made one back.
We were quite a team.
Gunn closed his phone then crossed to a tall green filing cabinet and pulled open a drawer. He rifled through it for half a minute before finding what he was looking for. ‘I was right,’ he said. ‘Dad did do one in the summer. And we always take pictures of our work.’
He had three photographs in his hand, which he passed to Alison one at a time. She passed them on to me. They showed a Jack Russell. It was difficult to tell if he was alive or dead, but that was as much to do with the quality of the photographs as the quality of the work.
‘They’re . . . a bit distant?’ Alison ventured.
Gunn looked at them himself. ‘You’re right. It’s Dad. As a taxidermist, even at his age, he’s a genius. Not so much a photographer.’
‘Well . . .’
Alison glanced at me, but made sure that Gunn saw it. Realising that he might be about to see business walk out the door, he moved quickly. ‘I’ll tell you what, if you really want to see how the last one worked out, I’m sure I could have a word with the owners, see if they mind you seeing the little fella.’
‘Do you think?’
‘Well, one can only ask. Give me a wee minute.’
Gunn produced his phone again and moved away. Alison winked at me. She was actually pretty good at this game. I had taught her well.
Gunn didn’t look quite so chipper when he returned. ‘Well, it might not be that simple after all. Seems they had a burglary just recently, and amongst other things they went and stole their Jack Russell.’
‘God,’ said Alison, ‘why would anyone do that?’
Gunn shook his head sadly. ‘I’m not even going to tell my dad, with his heart. They’re like his children.’
His stuffed children. It was an odd way to earn a living. That and undertaking.
‘The owners are devastated,’ Gunn continued. ‘I suppose that’s what happens when you’re a VIP – they target you, don’t they?’
‘A VIP?’ Alison asked. ‘Anyone really famous?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t say.’
But he said it in a way that you knew he could say, and would say, and probably did say on a regular basis. It was a way of promoting his business. He probably told everyone who arrived at his door, including the postman, about his celebrity clientele.
‘Oh go on,’ said Alison, ‘who is it? And you know I’m bringing our wee man here anyway. I’m very impressed.’
‘Well that would be good. And of course I’ll tell you, but you have to promise to keep it under your hat.’
‘Yes, of course!’
‘All right. It’s yer man—’
‘Billy Randall,’ I said.
Gunn looked annoyed at the interruption, but wasn’t fazed by the name. ‘Billy . . .? Oh aye, holiday guy? No, not him. Whatever . . .?’
‘Ignore him,’ said Alison. ‘Who is it, go on?’
So he told us, and she responded like she was impressed, but when she looked at me her eyes were as wide as mine.
It was time to get out. We had a new and potentially dangerous complication to discuss. Alison promised to return as soon as our JR popped his clogs and Gunn took a note of our bullshit telephone number and escorted us to the door and waved at us as we crossed the car park.
It was a huge relief to get outside. I’m usually allergic to country air, but on this occasion I took my life in my hands and sucked it in. Alison stopped at the driver’s door and began to rifle through her handbag for the keys. It was a big bag, and it was full of lady nonsense.
She looked across the top of the car at me and said, ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I know that look.’
She was right. I had unfinished business. I turned back to the workshop.
‘What’re you . . .?’
‘Forgotten to ask something, only be a mo.’
I re-entered the reception area. I pushed through the curtain and saw that Gunn was leaning over a work bench examining the indistinct photographs of the Jack Russell with the aid of a magnifying glass.
‘Excuse me,’ I said.
He looked up, surprised, and then peeved. ‘Yes?’
‘You thought you recognised my voice?’
‘I . . .?’
‘Get a website, you creepy old fucker.’
I slipped back through the curtain, grinning triumphantly.
21
Alison was furious with me, and did not wish to discuss the breakthrough in the case, nor take into account the fact that I had engineered it by suggesting we contact the taxidermist in the first place. All she could focus on was the smaller picture, and the fact that an old man had threatened to bash her car in with the shaft of a brush.
I had dismissed his claim that I had verbally abused him as the ramblings of a senile old stuffer, yet despite the fact that she and I were lovers, and I was the father of her child, and she wanted to spend the rest of her life with me, and had her eyes on my shop, and thought of herself as my equal and partner in detection, Alison chose to believe him over me. I told her honestly that I had returned to the workshop merely to ask a question in relation to the case. She demanded to know what the question was. I was not prepared to tell her, as it was already clear that she was doubting my version of events. William Gunn had threatened to hit her car with the shaft of a brush only because the end of it had already come off when he hurled it at me while chasing me around the locked car. It is unseemly and undignified for an old man to puff around exerting so much energy over something he had clearly misheard. It was, however, a sure indication of his impaired mental state and it reminded me to treat with caution everything he had told us earlier.
When Alison finally located her keys, in her pocket, and we departed to the accompaniment of hurled abuse, I sat on my hands and relocated to another dimension while she shouted and raved. For some reason, my lack of response infuriated her even more. It was not a comfortable journey home, although a lot of that had to do with the fact that we were in the vicinity of grass and bushes and sheep that looked at me with evil intent.
It was too late for me to reopen No Alibis, but I had to go back there to pick up the van. As she parked outside Alison said, ‘Grow up and stop huffing.’
‘Then stop shouting at me.’
‘You started it. Calling him a—’
‘I didn’t call him anything. He’s barking. Why won’t you believe me?’
‘Experience.’
‘I wouldn’t lie to you.’
She held her gaze steady. I folded. Malfunctioning tear ducts. Alison shook her head. ‘I honestly don’t think you’re even aware of it. What question did you ask him?’
‘If you must know, I asked him about the JR. You will have noticed that in both photographs the dog had a tail that curled back on itself.’
‘Yes. So?’
‘Well, when I was growing up, JRs never had tails. When they were born their tails were docked. But they decided it was unnecessarily cruel a while back and they brought in a law to prevent it. I wanted to ask Mr Gunn when that law was brought in; it’s the sort of thing he would need to know and it would be helpful to us.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it gives us the age of the dog. He said the law was brought in three years ago, which means that the JR in the picture, if it’s the same as ours, cannot be more than three years old.’
‘And what difference does that make?’
‘None. It’s just information. It may be useful somewhere further down the line. Three-year-old dogs should not require stuffing. Maybe there’s more to his death than meets the eye. I mean, would you want to be the man who ran down a Jack Russell belonging to the Chief Constable of Northern Ireland? They’d put speed cameras outside your house.’
‘Fair point,’ said Alison.
I am an accomplished liar. I had known the exact date of the enactment of the tail-docking law all along. It’s not an area of particular interest to me, but I do keep abreast of the latest developments in tail-docking. I have a lot of time to kill at night, what with not sleeping and Mother praying loudly if indistinctly.
‘So, the Chief Constable,’ said Alison.
‘The Chief Constable.’
‘That complicates things.’
‘It complicates them mightily.’
‘So what are we saying, that somehow Jimbo and Ronny got hold of the Chief Constable’s dog, and in getting it back he either killed them or had them killed? That’s just daft.’
‘Yes it is. Of course it is.’
‘But.’
‘Stranger things.’
‘Say they refused to hand it back, or they tried to blackmail him, and he just snapped and killed them.’
‘Or God knows, in his line he comes across enough murderers, and he struck a deal.’
‘It might not even be about the dog itself, but about the principle of the dog. Can you imagine if it got out that the Chief Constable was burgled? What would that do to the reputation of the police? It would be a disaster, it would be political.’
‘So let’s say he’s prepared to kill over a Jack Russell, then we would have to assume that he will go to equally extreme measures to protect himself from further investigation. And you know what that means?’
‘I do. You want to drop the case because you’re allergic to violence.’
‘Exactly.’
Alison smiled. ‘You’re right. We have a baby to think of. And let’s face it, the Chief Constable of Northern Ireland is not going to murder two painters and decorators over a stuffed dog. People do get very attached to their pets, but that is just plain silly.’
‘Yes it is, crazy.’
‘We shouldn’t think about it for a minute more.’
‘Not even a moment.’
‘I mean, even if the Chief Constable, the head of our police service, the man we trust to keep us safe at nights, did kill Jimbo and Ronny, and we expose him, it wouldn’t just be one man; it would rock our Government and jeopardise our fragile peace, and more importantly, it would put us in incredible danger. So we wouldn’t want to be doing that. Even if we knew something, it would be much safer just to sit on it, because really it’s none of our business, and we have to look after number one first.’
‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘Whatever we know can just sit in our consciences.’
I looked at her for a long time. She looked back.
‘Explain conscience again,’ she asked.
I knew what she was doing. She wanted to follow the case to its logical conclusion. She didn’t give a good God damn about our safety. She wanted to unravel the whole ball of string. But this wasn’t string; we were dealing with Christmas lights. Once ravelled, all but impossible to un. We could spend weeks trying to disentangle them, and when we finally did, we’d get electrocuted. Alison was young and enthusiastic, and could not always see the bigger picture. She thought she could play me. She thought she could implant some kind of autosuggestion in my brain box. She had bonded with the abundantly pregnant Pat and now felt morally responsible for tracking down whoever had killed the father of her unborn child, while hardly realising that by doing so she was putting her own at risk.
I was not built for big, important cases. I did not care about the fate of nations or police or politics. I had had more than enough of murder in the past and had only agreed to flirt with it again because Marple had attempted to tie us in to the deaths of Jimbo and Ronny. But there was no evidence. Billy Randall had browbeaten me into continuing the investigation and tempted me with an envelope full of cash. It might not have been blood money, but my instinct to reject it was absolutely right. I should have been strong and handed it back to him. I should have been decisive and told him that his predicament was no concern of mine, that I’d done my job and was now retiring from detection to concentrate on selling books, which has more than enough excitement for someone with my blood pressure, and varicose veins, and cholesterol, and brittle bones, and psoriasis, and angina, and rickets, and tinnitus, and the malaria I caught from a single rogue mosquito on a visit to Belfast’s Botanical Gardens.
I was about to be a father. I had an invalid mother. I did not need to be mixed up in murder. Jimbo and Ronny were two drug-dealers and I really did not care who killed them.
Did.
Not.
Care.
After she drove off, I sat in the No Alibis van for twenty minutes. Three times I switched the engine on, and three times I switched it off. Then I got out of the car and went up the back alley and entered the shop from the rear. I took my seat behind the counter and began to look again at The Case of the Cock-Headed Man.
Damn her eyes!
Three a.m. The phone rang.
Alison said, ‘I couldn’t sleep. I rang your mobile and couldn’t raise you. I rang your house. Your mother said you hadn’t come home. I was worried.’
‘You spoke to my mother?’
‘It wasn’t exactly a conversation.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She said, it’s nearly three in the morning, how the fuck do I know where the dirty stop-out is?’
‘Were you thinking I was with another woman?’
When she finished laughing, Alison said no. ‘You’re working on the case, aren’t you?’
‘Maybe.’
‘I knew you would. You’re a curious old Hector, aren’t you?’
‘I thought it would be worthwhile to spend a few hours of quiet contemplation reviewing the facts. It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘Well at least you’re thinking about it. So?’
‘We have a lot of don’t knows and possibilities and maybes, but very few facts.’
‘Oh.’
‘But I did turn up a photograph of the Chief Constable and his Jack Russell.’
‘How the hell did you manage that?’
‘I have the combined wisdom of ten thousand fictional detectives whizzing about in my brain.’
‘Let me rephrase the question. How the hell did you manage that?’
‘I typed Chief Constable of Northern Ireland and Jack Russell into Google. Wilson McCabe was appointed just over a year ago. He did a lot of press when he first arrived, liked to project himself as the friendly neighbour hood bobby, family man, all that fantasy crap. One of these was a photo shoot for QIP magazine . . .’
The Day of the Jack Russell (Mystery Man) Page 11