The Day of the Jack Russell (Mystery Man)

by Bateman, Colin

  Now that Greg was gone, I had to lean on the counter for support – as it clearly wasn’t going to come from Alison. She was in no mood to fetch the portable defibrillator I keep in the kitchen cupboard, she being much too fired up by the spook’s threat to think of anyone but herself and her suddenly best friend Jeff. I classify anyone who does not think of me first as selfish. She must have been aware that I was labouring for breath, but her self-centredness was so all-enveloping that she completely ignored my condition, choosing instead to focus on Greg’s threat: she wanted to call the papers, the radio stations, and every other news outlet known to man, to expose him and his Government-sponsored blackmail. It was a typically female hysterical response, whereas if she’d taken the trouble to order me an ambulance and had me taken to hospital, I could, once I was satisfactorily hooked up to a life-support system, have calmly explained to her what she clearly failed to appreciate, that Greg had chosen his words carefully. We had twenty-three hours to come up with Patch, i.e. one short of a television series. He was making his point: don’t even think about alerting the media.

  I said it anyway, in between laboured breaths, and she immediately flared up: ‘We have to! He’s your friend!’

  ‘Well actually he’s—’

  ‘And he works for you!’

  ‘Well technically—’

  ‘And he was doing you a favour when they seized him. You ordered him out of bed . . .’

  ‘I didn’t order—’

  ‘And now he’s languishing in some cell, for all we know hooded and waterboarded and his fingernails pulled out . . .’ She burst into tears. It was probably the hormones, what with her being up the duff. ‘We have to help him.’

  I took her hand, despite the risk of infection, and patted it gently. ‘Listen, sweetie, it’s not like that any more. This is an Obama world. Torture and all that malarkey, it simply doesn’t happen any more.’

  She took her hand back. ‘Christ, you just don’t get it, do you?’

  ‘I get it, I get it, I get it. Okay. I’m just trying to cheer you—’

  ‘Well stop it.’ She wiped at her eyes. ‘You’re actually serious, aren’t you?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘About Obama, and the torture . . .?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  She sighed. ‘Clowns to the left of me, eejits to the right, here I am . . .’

  ‘If you feel you’re stuck, you don’t have to stay.’

  ‘Will you focus? Our friend is being held by . . . by . . .’

  ‘Spooks.’

  ‘Spooks?’

  ‘Spooks.’

  ‘How do you know he’s a—’

  ‘Because while you were ranting and raving, I was putting his number plate into the system, and it’s a Government car, and even Government cars have to be registered somewhere, and his is . . . here . . .’

  I turned the computer monitor to show her. I had a Google image of a recently built three-storey building in the middle of Holywood, five miles away from us.

  ‘It’s MI5’s new regional headquarters; they opened it last year. If their regular base in London is attacked, they take over. Ten thousand square feet of spookiness, including a subterranean level, four hundred employees, and you can be sure they have the most hi-tech hi-techy stuff in the world, make an Xbox look like an abacus. When Greg said he’d been through the shop I didn’t believe him, not with all the alarms and locks I have, but if he says he’s been through the computer, that I’m more inclined to go with. I have firewalls on my firewalls, but their shit is bound to be better than my shit.’

  ‘What sort of weird stuff do you have on there?’

  ‘Just stuff.’

  ‘Pervy stuff ?’

  ‘Define pervy.’

  ‘On second thoughts, I don’t want to know. Okay. You’ve worked your magic. I’m calmer now. Now what are we going to do about Jeff ?’

  ‘I had thought about recruiting a dozen former terrorists, training them into a cohesive unit and storming MI5 headquarters. We may not all get out alive.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Alternatively, we do nothing. At the moment they think he knows something but is just holding out on them. If they really did use torture, they’d soon realise that he doesn’t actually know anything, but they must be adhering to Obama because I know Jeff has a threshold for pain that is only marginally above my own. I’ve seen him cry over a paper cut. Never mind waterboarding; if they threatened to throw a glass of lukewarm milk over him, Jeff would give up his mother.’

  ‘Okay. Fair point. That leaves us with the threat. Twenty-three hours to produce Patch or else. Or else what?’

  ‘Well, if I’m right, and I usually am, and Greg’s not in control of the situation, then he’s going to be pretty desperate to sort this out, which makes him unpredictable. He could do anything. I don’t mean we’re necessarily going to end up face down in the Lagan with Jeff; it could be more subtle than that.’

  ‘Like a couple of extra noughts added to your rates bill.’

  ‘Well probably not as subtle as that. Maybe the best idea would just be to . . . you know, hide.’

  ‘The emu approach to solving problems.’

  ‘Ostrich.’

  ‘Just conveniently forgetting that our chum is being held . . . Ostrich.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Alison shook her head. ‘You’re capable of so much more than this.’

  ‘Capable, yes. But capability requires desire. Desire requires energy and application and courage.’

  ‘You have all of those. Vast reserves of them. They just need to be tapped.’

  ‘I assure you, you’re wrong. I just want to be left alone to read my books and sell some.’

  ‘You would give up on this?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And if I decide to continue, because I feel a connection to Pat, you would stand back and let me, even in my condition.’

  ‘Your condition has nothing to do with me. You should have used protection.’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘Stop it. I know what you’re doing, you’re just trying to wind me up, I know it’s the nature of you, and I also know that you aren’t really going to leave me to do this by myself.’

  I looked at her.

  She looked back.

  She had me in a staring match again. My malfunctioning tear duct that causes me to blink in moments of stress did its work. I also have degenerative myopia. I’ve unsuccessfully applied three times for a cornea transplant.

  Alison smiled as I blinked in defeat. I was transparent. It was a side effect of one of my medications. On a bright day with the sun at my back, you could see my liver.

  ‘See? I know you better than you know yourself. It’s not because of Jeff, it’s most certainly not because of me, or our unborn, or justice; it’s because it’s a puzzle and you won’t let it defeat you. And what makes it even more fascinating than normal is that there’s a time limit, and you love having a challenge like that. Twenty-three hours to crack it. You will throw all the facts and clues and rumours and gossip up into the air and then you’ll look for your crazy patterns as they land, and you will solve it. And the truth is that it will hardly scratch the surface of what you’re actually capable of. You know that, don’t you? You’ll only use, what . . .?’

  ‘About seven per cent,’ I said.

  I have never been modest about my own abilities, and with good reason.

  Alison clapped her hands together. ‘Well, a seven per cent solution is good enough for me, Sherlock. Let’s get to it.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  26

  Alison was only partially right. She could never be completely right, because then she would be me. But it was a puzzle I needed to solve; it was a gnawer. If anything, it was even trickier than the Nazi case, which had eventually come down to numbers and patterns, my area of expertise; it was also potentially just as dangerous. Potentially because I was still in two minds about Greg’s ultimatum. To stick to his deadline
would be a challenge, but it also meant acknowledging that the threat was genuine, that there was a realistic chance of something dreadful happening to me if I failed to produce Patch at the specified time. Or, to a lesser extent, happening to Alison or Jeff. I wasn’t entirely sure that such threats actually worked. Did anyone ever solve anything quicker because of the threat of extreme violence? How did it help you to think clearly about anything other than impending death? I can see how from a dramatic point of view a threat helps – because having the bad guy saying we’d really quite like it if you could solve this puzzle as soon as you possibly can probably doesn’t put many bums on seats – but in reality, holding the Sword of Damocles over one’s head is likely to jumble one’s thinking rather than focus it. The fact was that there was no way of substantiating how realistic Greg’s threat was; therefore I would ignore it. But I would embrace the time limit in the same way that a chess player accepts that he must sometimes complete his move within a specified number of minutes, or a contestant on Countdown must assemble a word from his randomly selected vowels and conson ants before an annoying jingle tells him that his time is up. I had to accept that it was one of the rules of the game, and treat it as such: a game.

  ‘Are we focused?’ Alison asked.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Because you’ve been staring into space while humming that annoying jingle from Countdown for five minutes, while all the while Jeff’s life hangs in the balance and the clock is ticking.’

  Sometimes you just have to let things go. I glanced at my watch. ‘I’m good,’ I said.

  ‘Okay then, get stuck in. I’ll pop over at lunchtime to see how you’re doing.’

  She moved to the door.

  ‘You’re working?’

  ‘Of course I’m working. Bills to pay, cheap diamonds to sell.’

  ‘But Jeff . . .’

  ‘How’re you supposed to solve anything with me staring down your neck? Go toss your clues. You need to do it by yourself and you need to do it somewhere where you know you aren’t going to be disturbed.’

  We nodded around the interior of No Alibis.

  There was nothing to say.

  She had plagued me for so long about being my sidekick, about being included, that to suddenly turn round and say she was leaving me to it was quite a surprise. A welcome one, I supposed, because it showed that she at last realised how I worked best – alone – but also disconcerting because it was so uncharacteristic. Perhaps the focus of her attention was moving away from solving crime to impending motherhood. Working in the jeweller’s and actually earning money was akin to gathering the materials she would need for nest-building. Or she was planning to run away with my baby and needed the money. Or she was back to oneupmanship, intent on solving the—

  ‘Focus,’ said Alison.

  I gave her the thumbs-up.

  She exited No Alibis.

  She crossed the road and entered the jeweller’s.

  I watched her front door for twenty-seven minutes in case she tried to escape.

  Focus.

  From the Latin, focus.

  Focus, a point towards which light rays are made to converge.

  Focus, an earthquake’s underground point of origin.

  Focus, a jazz album by Stan Getz.

  Focus, the part of a sentence that contributes the most important information.

  Focus, a novel by Arthur Miller.

  Focus, a US Navy air-to-surface missile.

  Just fucking focus.

  I was thinking about the time line, and the crime line, and decided to go back to the very beginning, because it all surely started with the death of the dog we now knew as Patch. The manner of his death might seem irrelevant, but I have always believed that until you know everything you possibly can about a case, you cannot properly sift through the facts to find the relevant. It’s like looking for a Hallowe’en sixpence in a single bowl of apple pie and custard, when there are five other bowls it might equally be hidden in. To be absolutely certain, you have to go back to the original pie dish, before the portions are served up, and search not just through the sweet stewed apples and soft pastry, but the hard crust that gets left at the edge; indeed, you have to be sure that the sixpence has actually been placed in the pie in the first place and is not just a lie designed to test your honesty and patience, that in fact you haven’t been set up and caught in the act, which results in you being locked in a dark cupboard with the corpses of trapped mice and not allowed out for three days.

  It seemed clear to me that Patch had come to a sticky end, which had set the whole stuffed dog thing into motion. He wasn’t much more than a pup, and surely too young to die from natural causes. More likely the exuberant little critter had charged out into the road and been knocked down. Working on the principle that where there’s an accident there’s an insurance claim, I decided to call Billy Randall. He sold cheap travel insurance deals with his holidays. He was connected. Insurance companies are like that. They conspire against you.

  Despite the fact that he’d given me a number that he said was his direct line, I still had to work my way through a dozen different options courtesy of his automated answering service. Eventually I was put through to him.

  He said, ‘Have you never heard of the Data Protection Act?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Good. As long as you’ve heard of it. Then we can agree it’s a lot of bollocks. Has this something to do with our case or are you pulling a scam?’

  ‘Don’t know yet.’

  ‘No matter. Give me those dates again.’

  I gave him the September before last, when Patch had made his first and only appearance in QIP magazine as a six-week-old pup, and last July, when he had been stuffed by the senior Gunn while his son was on holiday. Datewise it was fairly vague, but it was considerably narrowed down by what I presumed was the location: the Comber Road in Hillsborough, where Wilson McCabe had moved to on his appointment as Chief Constable of Northern Ireland. Of course I didn’t tell Billy Randall he lived there.

  ‘Okay, leave it with me.’

  ‘As soon as possible,’ I said.

  ‘Keen.’

  While I waited for him to call back, I brought up my website and issued, first of all, an apology to my small and annoying database of occasionally loyal customers for the computer glitch that had caused them to be bombarded with increasingly desperate pleas to join my Christmas Club, and then followed that with a different kind of appeal. What they lack in spending power they make up for in diversity. Spread out across the city, there was a reasonable chance that at least one of them would spot Greg’s BMW as he drove it to and from Holywood each day. I thought it better not to mention MI5. I was looking for his home address or other locations he might frequent. This would serve two purposes – first, if we were fairly sure that Greg and his buds were rogue agents working without high-up approval, then they had to be holding Jeff somewhere apart from their headquarters. Second, if Greg really did have access to my computer, then he would soon know that I was on his tail as much as he was on mine, and while that might not exactly terrify him, it might give him pause for thought.

  Billy Randall got back to me within half an hour. He said, ‘Sure you don’t want to tell me what this is all about?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that you do or you don’t?’

  ‘Just tell me what you found out.’

  ‘Keen and efficient. You’re some pup. Just like the late and no doubt lamented pup in this case – the policy-holder made a claim against the Police Service of Northern Ireland for damage to his vehicle as a result of his hitting an unleashed dog, front driver’s side panel, and a personal injury claim for whiplash.’

  ‘And did they pay out?’

  ‘No – the policy-holder withdrew his claim.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘Probably accepted cash to settle it. Or, it being the police, perhaps he didn’t want them turning the tables and investigating him. I kno
w, you’re shocked, but it happens.’

  The policy-holder was a Michael Gordon; he lived on Windsor Avenue, he was twenty-seven years old. I was intrigued by the fact that this Michael Gordon had chosen not to pursue his claim. Ours is a litigious society.

  ‘And what sort of a car was he driving?’

  It was back to not knowing what was or wasn’t relevant.

  ‘Focus.’

  ‘I am. But what sort of a car was he driving?’

  ‘Very good, you’re very quick. A Ford Focus.’

  I laughed, and he said what, and I said nothing, and he said no, what, and I said, no, nothing.

  ‘How’s it going with our other thing?’

  ‘It’s going well.’

  ‘Anything you can tell me?’

  ‘Not at this time.’

  ‘Do you need any more money?’

  ‘No, I have more than enough.’

  He laughed, and I said what, and he said nothing, and I said no, what, and he said, no, nothing.

  He wanted to ask more, but I made my excuses and hung up. I liked the fact that he hadn’t connected the dead dog to our case. He could have been laying a double bluff, but it didn’t feel like it; I’m pretty good at reading people, although better at books.

  I called the sandwich shop down the street and had them deliver a lunch. When it arrived, I checked it for glass and poison. Then I ate it. It was yum. I called Mother to check that she wasn’t dead. I served a customer who for once had no ulterior motive beyond buying a book. After a grim start, it was turning into quite a good day.