‘No, really, I think we should go check.’
I laughed. ‘Would you ever wise up?’
I didn’t mean anything particularly harsh by it, but Alison reacted as if I’d just slapped her across the face.
‘What do you mean, wise up?’
‘She’s not going to catch fire. And even if she does, it’s none of our business.’
‘Of course it’s our business! She got drunk because of us.’
‘Bollocks, she was already steamboats when we arrived.’
‘She was tipsy, but she wasn’t plastered. It was talking about her son got her plastered. If she dies it’ll be our fault.’
‘Alison, for God’s sake, she’s a grown woman, she can look after herself. Anyway, the dog will start barking if there’s a fire.’
‘The dog was snoring louder than she was. I’m worried. We should go back.’
‘Alison, you can’t mother everyone.’
Her eyes nearly bulged out of her head.
‘You think I should just concentrate on you, do you? Well I’ve news for you, buddy boy, you’re going to have to start learning to stand on your own two feet, because when the little man comes along I won’t have time to go running after you.’
‘And what has that got to do with old Mother Hubbard?’
That was probably the wrong question to ask.
‘You would just let her burn, wouldn’t you? You selfish, arrogant dwarf.’
‘Dwarf ?’
‘You’re an emotional dwarf. You’re stunted. You’re . . .’
‘Alison, it’s your hormones . . .’
This, in retrospect, was also quite probably a mistake.
‘Hormones? Hormones? And what the fuck would you know about hormones? Why don’t you just fuck away off ?!’
But, in fact, she was the one who spun on her heel and walked away.
I started after her. ‘Alison, please . . .’
‘Leave me alone!’
So I stopped.
This, also, in retrospect, was the wrong decision.
She yelled back: ‘And you would, wouldn’t you? You’d leave me out here in the middle of fucking nowhere! You’d have me go back to that fucking house, you’d have me break down the fucking door, you’d have me fight my way through the smoke and flames and you’d have me drape that fat old tart over my shoulders and carry her out of the house, and then you’d have me give her the kiss of life, and then you’d whine at me until I went back for the fucking dog as well, and all of it in my fucking condition, you fucking wanker!’
‘Do you want me to come with you?’
‘NO!’
There were a number of strategies I could have followed and perhaps should have followed. I could have walked some yards behind, like a bad dog. I could have thrown myself at her feet and begged forgiveness. I could have caught up with her in the Mystery Machine and given her a lift the rest of the way. I most certainly could have said, you wait here, I’ll go and check if the old cow is still breathing.
But I just stood for about thirty seconds to see if she’d turn around, and when she didn’t, I walked back to the shop. She was storming off in a huff when she knew full well that I only had about eighteen hours left before rogue MI5 agents carried out their nonspecific threat. She was worried about an old smoker we hardly knew catching fire when we were up to our own necks in a conspiracy that threatened to threaten our national security. She was the selfish one. Sod her. She could rescue the old bag and then go back to her fricking jewellery and comics and leave liberty and justice and saving the British way of life to me.
I entered the shop via the back entrance. I turned the lights on and studied the books. I have an abiding interest in patterns. I particularly enjoy the strange patterns that are thrown up when a customer removes a book from one shelf and replaces it on another without me seeing. It’s not about finding the book, it’s about how it now relates to the books around it, and the sort of disruption and realignment caused by the space it leaves behind.
I did that for a while. It is quite relaxing. The patterns, the smell of the print, the little memories of reading each and every one of those books, the authors who wrote them, the originality or otherwise of the plots, the reviews, the sales, the attempted shopliftings. This was my shop. It was my story, my plot, my home. I was indeed feeling mellow, enough to even contemplate forgiving Alison if she first made a heartfelt and grovelling apology. The fact that I hated ninety per cent of human beings shouldn’t reflect badly on her; if you liked people and had an interest in them, then being concerned about their well-being went with the territory. I suppose it was nice of her to care so much about a stranger. She had heart. She would be a good mother. When she returned I would take her to Starbucks. And she was bound to return. I was irresistible.
But still, no sign of her.
Killing time, I moved behind the counter to check my e-mails. It had only been a few hours since my appeal for information about Greg’s car, but my customers, a collection of dullards, drunks and shoplifters, had rather unsurprisingly failed to rise to my challenge.
Nothing.
Bugger all.
I reposted the appeal, and this time added a note of urgency:
Please keep your eyes peeled. If I don’t find this car by lunchtime tomorrow, I’m a dead man.
Less than thirty seconds later, which is about as long as it must have taken to type it, I got a response:
Drop you a line after lunch.
I didn’t recognise his e-mail address. But no matter.
I despise this kind of smart-arsery. People who laugh at others’ misfortunes. He needed to be taught a lesson, one he wouldn’t forget in a hurry. I immediately barred him from the shop for two weeks and told him there was no point in even trying to join next year’s No Alibis Christmas Club. I added that he might think he was being funny but he was in fact not.
I regretted it almost the moment I sent it. Times were hard and I couldn’t afford to be losing even a single customer.
I e-mailed him again and explained that I was under a lot of stress, the case I was working on was rather dangerous and the store was experiencing financial difficulties due to the recession; he couldn’t be expected to keep an eye out for a strange car, I’m sure he had a busy enough life, and I was more than happy to have him join the Christmas Club and looked forward to seeing him in the shop in the near future.
He e-mailed back:
Fuck off, you tit.
I immediately e-mailed back:
No, you fuck off. You’re barred from the shop for good and I’ve checked your account and your taste in crime books is fucking shite. And Dorothy L. Sayers is read exclusively by old women and gay men. Which are you?
And he e-mailed back:
Fuck you and your progeny. Next time I’m past your tatty little shop, I’m going to put the windows in.
I e-mailed back:
I only have one window, you wanker.
He e-mailed back:
There’s a window in your door, you fuckwit.
I e-mailed back:
Fair point. This is quite funny, isn’t it?
He e-mailed back:
I’m going to fucking kill you.
People are so touchy. I signed out. I have enough troubles without wasting precious time on a nutter.
About a minute later the phone rang, and previous experience told me what to expect. It was important to get my attack in first.
‘Don’t you come near me,’ I said. ‘I’ve got friends in the police.’
But it wasn’t him, it was Alison, breathless.
‘She . . .’
‘You shouldn’t be running, not in your condition.’
‘She wasn’t there . . .’
I was about to launch in with ‘See, you ridiculous idiot, I was right . . .’ but thought better of it. I was a bigger man than that. I would be magnanimous. ‘Well, it was good of you to go and check. She prob—’
‘No, you don’t underst
and . . . she wasn’t there . . .’
‘I get that, honey.’
‘No, I mean . . . she hasn’t been . . .’
‘Catch your breath, there’s nothing to—’
‘LISTEN to me. I knocked on the door and she didn’t come. I thought she was still asleep or overcome by fumes. I went around the back, the door was locked.’
‘You did everything you could . . .’
‘I was really worried about her. So I kicked it in.’
‘You’re always fucking kicking things!’
‘Don’t shout at me! Listen to me! I broke in . . .’
‘And was there a fire?’
‘Shut up! She wasn’t there! She was gone, the dog was gone, all the fucking magazines were gone. I went through the house; all of the other rooms were empty, I mean completely empty. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘Then listen, you halfwit! I went next door. The woman there said Michael Gordon moved out last summer and the house has been empty ever since. Do you hear me? Nobody has been living there; his mother died years ago! We were set up, we were fucking set up!’
29
I have long mocked Jeff for his devotion to fantastical conspiracy theories – there is scarcely a moment in history he has not claimed as having been engineered by a Jewish conspiracy, Opus Dei, the Illuminati, aliens, the Magnificent Seven or a small group of junior clerks working for the Nationwide Building Society – while actually I have plenty of time for the more realistic conspiracy theories imagined by some of our finest novelists, many of whom are represented on the No Alibis shelves. There is Graham Greene’s masterful 1943 novel The Ministry of Fear, Richard Condon’s sublime The Manchurian Candidate from 1959, and even Umberto Eco’s wordy 1988 effort Foucault’s Pendulum has its moments. What I know from my many, many years of reading such thrillers is that characters who discover a secretive conspiracy are often unable to tell what is real and what is coincidence and are befuddled by the many conflicting facts, rumours, lies, propaganda and counter propaganda they are faced with. They have to work hard, often at the risk of their lives or sanity, to unravel clandestine machinations and, er, win the girl. So I was certainly open to the idea of a conspiracy, and yet, I liked to think, not gullible. Jeff being kidnapped, me being threatened, the Jack Russell being the subject of a doghunt – they all felt bizarre, yet real enough. Although Alison’s claim that someone had furnished an empty house with an old woman, an elderly Labrador and personal knick-knacks at what must have been very short notice, all in order to convince us that Michael Gordon had taken off for England when in fact something much more sinister had befallen him, felt like a step too far, I have to admit that having dealt in the past with murderous Nazis, I was no longer capable of being surprised at the lengths to which some people would go to befuddle me.
But I laugh in the face of befuddlement.
If anything, a lifetime immersed in the murky world of mystery fiction has perfectly equipped me for dealing with real-life shenanigans. There is scarcely a twist or turn even the most devious mind could conjure up that I have not already encountered between hard or soft covers. It would surprise me if ‘they’ had the wherewithal to truly surprise me.
I was just waiting for Alison to return from the house on the Lisburn Road, and was staring at the ceiling, thinking through the case, when I was disturbed by a sudden rattling on the security shutter; it certainly caused me to jump, and to take a firm hold of the meat cleaver beneath the counter. The rattling was repeated, but this time with a drunken accompaniment: ‘I know you’re in there, I can see your lights on, open up!’
I am used to drunks hurling abuse at me or the store in general. In truth, the shutters are from the cheap end of the market, and if you make a determined effort, particularly at the sides, you can just about make out the lights on within. They are, however, a considerable improvement on the early days of No Alibis, before I invested in shutters. I learned to my cost how vital they could be during the long weekend of 13–15 June 1998, when a gang of drunks laid siege to my premises for seventy-two hours, changing shifts several times during that period to be sure that there was always someone spectacularly drunk enough to continue hurling abuse at me and bang repeatedly on the windows. If I had merely given them a friendly wave as I worked late then they would probably have staggered on, but by suddenly switching off the lights and hiding under the counter I piqued their interest and hurt their feelings with one flick of a switch, and as it coincided with a sudden upsurge in our Troubles, and there were no police available to deal with what they considered to be a minor matter of public disorder, I was forced to survive for all of that time on half a bottle of water and three Opal Fruits. It was like the siege of the Alamo, but less dramatic.
This time, however, I had the relatively recent addition of the security cameras, with which I was able to zoom in on the drunk, who had continued his assault on the shutters. Even so, with the poor street lighting and the fact that he was wearing a poseur’s wide-brimmed hat, it took several minutes for me to realise that I knew the man, and several more minutes of internal debate for me to decide it was wise to raise the shutters. It was out of fear for my own safety. Being bored to death is not the way I intend to go.
However, the fact that he was a Booker-nominated author, that he taught a weekly creative writing class in my shop, and had even penned two bestselling, critically acclaimed mystery novels, were some of the mitigating grounds that led me to press the button that raised the shutters and eventually admitted Brendan Coyle into the inner sanctum. One has to think of business.
My thanks were wrapped up in his opening remark: ‘And about bloody time too.’
He had a half-drunk bottle of white wine in his hand. He took off his hat and skimmed it across the shop. It landed on the buy-one-and-get-another-at-exactly-the-same-price table.
‘Brendan, have you been out on the town?’
‘Yes, of course I have, Emil.’
He giggled. Brendan had taken to referring to me as Emil in tribute to the boy hero of Emil and the Detectives, the 1929 children’s novel by German writer Erich Kästner, which for a period in the 1960s had become required reading at primary schools across the country and which, he claimed, had inspired in him a lifelong fascination with crime fiction. It had not, however, inspired him enough to buy the copy of the first English-language printing of the novel, which I had acquired for a not inconsiderable sum off the internet on the presumption that a man of his means would leap at the opportunity to own such a perfect little reminder of his childhood. When I showed it to him, he actually almost physically turned his nose up at it, saying that he much preferred the less widely known 1933 sequel, Emil and the Three Twins, which he felt had been unjustly ignored because of the Nazis’ concurrent rise to power. Since I was already several hundred smackers out of pocket, if he thought I was going to search that one out only to be fobbed off with another pathetic excuse, he could kiss my arse.
‘I saw the light, and couldn’t resist calling in to see my old buddy, proprietor of the finest literary establishment in town!’
Pissed again.
‘What was the big occasion?’ I asked.
‘Oh, some little poet was publishing his first collection. I like to offer support where I can.’ He suddenly patted his blazer pockets. ‘Dash it, I appear to have left it in the bar. Oh well, no harm; better that the common man picks it up and perhaps learns something rather than an old soak like me. What’re you doing here so late? Looking at your damned patterns again?’
‘Who told you . . .?’
Generally I keep my habits to myself. Not everyone understands.
‘Oh, that little pal of yours who works here sometimes. What I understand you might refer to as a “slacker”.’
‘Jeff,’ I said.
‘That’s the boy. Couple of pints soon loosens his tongue!’
Poor Jeff. I had always known he was weak with drink, a gossip and je
alous of my success with a woman. But still. Poor Jeff, banged up by spooks; my fault, my fault, Alison had said. And she was not wrong. Without being wholly right. Which is my domain.
‘Yeah well, I wouldn’t be listening to him, the slabber.’
‘A wise head on young shoulders. He knows things, about Chapple . . . Chapple . . .’
‘Chappaquiddick.’
‘That’s the one. And not just Chapple . . . Chapple . . . you know what I mean. Other stuff. Closer to home.’ Brendan gave me an outrageously theatrical wink.
‘Yes, Brendan,’ I said, ‘it’s all one big conspiracy. Even the Booker Prize . . .’
‘Exactly! Those bastards!’ He looked at his bottle, then he looked at me. ‘I say, old man, you wouldn’t have a little old glass I could slosh this into, would you? One tries not to imbibe directly from the tap.’
I told him I would see what I could do. I went into the kitchen to pretend to look for one. I was long past the stage of regretting letting him in and was praying that Alison would very quickly arrive and shoo him out. She’s better at that kind of thing. I don’t like to confront if I can help it. I could stab you a million times in my own head, but I would have trouble saying no to you. Alison says I’m like silly putty in everyone’s hands. I tried to tell her that silly putty was created by accident during research into potential rubber substitutes for use by the United States in World War II, and that it will dissolve when in contact with alcohol, which is exactly what happens to me, but she told me to shut up.
So I did.
‘That, that Jeff one . . . when he got on to the moon landings, I just switched off!’
‘Uhuh.’
‘Nearly brought him with me, but he demurred!’
I stepped back into the kitchen doorway. ‘You nearly brought him what?’
‘I put it to the fella, let’s break in and rearrange your shelves, that would fair put the wind up you, but give him his due, he wanted nothing to do with it! Blessed fool was trying to listen to the poetry . . .’
‘He was . . . tonight? You’re talking about tonight?’
‘Yes, of course.’
The Day of the Jack Russell (Mystery Man) Page 16