‘Youse wouldn’t have a couple of Hedex, would you?’
‘Of course, love.’
‘We had a bit of a . . . well, do you call it a wake? It’s more of a Fenian expression, isn’t it?’
My eyes flicked up to Alison as she put down the tablets. She suppressed a smile. It was so totally un-PC, but probably not uncommon in Pat’s neck of the woods.
‘A party to celebrate his life,’ Alison suggested.
‘Aye, well, I don’t like wake anyway, like he’s gonna wake up.’
‘That’s not actually what it means,’ I said. ‘It means standing guard, or watching out for him.’
‘Okay, Brainiac,’ said Pat. ‘Whatever. We had a few drinks too many, so we had, and I’m not half feeling it. Friends and neighbours, you know? It was nice, telling stories about him, so it was, but strange, him being there, in the middle of the room, in the box. Strange.’
‘How did he look?’ Alison gave me a look. I said, ‘What?’
‘It’s not the sort of question you ask.’
‘Why not?’
‘It just isn’t . . . I’m sorry, Pat, he has no sense of—’
I cut in with: ‘My dad was a handsome man.’ People stand on ceremony too much. ‘But by the time the morticians got to work on him, he looked like Frankenstein’s monster. Or maybe not him, but like he’d been beaten with a mallet and allowed to swell up. You couldn’t see his eyes hardly at all. He looked like a pig. Piggy eyes. With make-up on. Like a Regency whore’s make-up. Really heavy and pink. A piggy-faced whore.’
Alison nodded. ‘Thanks for that,’ she said.
‘He did,’ I said. ‘Did Jimbo . . .?’
‘Christ,’ said Alison.
But Pat was shaking her head. ‘The coffin was closed. I didn’t want to remember him dead, if you know what I mean? I wanted to remember him how he was.’
‘Quite right,’ said Alison.
‘But now I’m all worried about the funeral,’ said Pat. ‘I’m worried about who’ll be there. Don’t they say that killers always turn up at the crime scene or at the funeral? What if he comes up and I shake his hand and I won’t even recognise him. I won’t be able to concentrate.’ She smiled a little then. ‘Didn’t he always love a good bonfire? Sure, settin’ fire to him today will be right up his street.’
She made it sound like it was some kind of Viking funeral, rather than a routine cremation at Roselawn. But she was right about the attendees – if reading countless thousands of mystery novels had taught me anything, it was that the murderer almost always showed up at the funeral. Most murders are committed by someone familiar to the victim and it would seem odd if they didn’t attend the ceremony. Some gave Bible readings from the pulpit, others delivered tearful eulogies, all the while praying to God that the net was not slowly closing in on them. It was the nature of murder, and it brought me back to Pat, and who she knew who had known Jimbo and could possibly be responsible. I asked her again to go over his friends, his dealers, his customers, but she shook her head and took a drag on her fag and said, ‘The detectives have been all over me, they took the names I knew, practically everyone I ever met, so it was, and I’ve heard nothing. I’m not going to suddenly remember someone . . .’ She stopped then, and her mouth dropped open a little, and we both leaned a little closer, then she smiled and said, ‘I mean, am I? You know what you know at the time and do your best. If they’d found someone, they’d have arrested them, they wouldn’t let him come to the funeral, and if you knew who it was, you would have them arrested, so I’m thinking, so I am, that nobody knows anything and we’re going to set fire to my Jimbo and it could be anyone there watching, so it could, maybe cheering because they know the evidence, something the cops haven’t even thought of, is going up in flames.’ Big tears began to roll down her cheeks. ‘How am I going to get through today? How am I?’ She ground her cigarette out into her ashtray saucer, then placed her hands palm down on the table. They were shaking. ‘Why did my Jimbo have to die? Why him? What am I gonna tell my baby?’
She wanted a hug. But Alison had risen to rinse the scrambled egg pan. Instead she crumpled into me and sobbed, her whole body shaking. I don’t like un controlled displays of emotion. I tried to eat the Twix and pat her back at the same time, but I couldn’t get it quite right. She sensed my discomfort and let me go. She wiped at her tears.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
I sneezed.
‘Sorry,’ I said, and handed her some kitchen roll.
32
In the shop, after Pat had finally gone to prepare for the funeral, we were both pretty nervous. Although we had dismissed Greg’s twenty-three-hour threat as just talk, the hands of the clock were still moving inexorably towards noon. Alison, taking her art more seriously and with her hours in the jewellery shop cut back, was there for me, both as my crime-fighting partner and for moral support, but she also seemed to feel the need to be very touchy-feely, which was awkward and embarrassing and would have been much more so if we had actually had a customer. I kept saying, ‘Don’t,’ and she kept laughing and trying it again.
By 11.45 a.m. I had sought sanctuary in the kitchen. I was trying to restore some sort of order – Brendan Coyle had trashed the place looking for the wine I had lied to him about, so I guess that joke kind of backfired on me – when I heard the shop door open. I have a bell that sounds, and several buzzers and whistles. The kitchen door was closed to stop a puddle of Booker-nominated urine reaching the display area, so I couldn’t be sure who it was, but with the chances of it being a customer rather remote, I had to presume that it was Greg, coming early, hoping to catch us off guard. I am never off my guard, but also I am never more than three seconds from running away – although running, in my case, obviously is not the same as running in, say, your case, unless you’re in a wheelchair yourself or have splints or malformed muscles – so I already had the back door open and was preparing to make a calipered bolt for safety when Alison shouted back: ‘Someone for you!’
It didn’t sound like how she would announce Greg’s arrival, so I hesitated, one foot already out.
‘I’m busy. Who?’
‘Come and see.’
She sounded cool, but not unduly distressed. So I moved back to the kitchen door and opened it just enough to let me see who it was. There, by the counter, looking sheepish, was Jeff. His hands were thrust into the pockets of his combat jacket and he was avoiding eye contact with Alison. He brightened, a little, when he saw me come properly into the shop.
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘I was asking him if I could help him with a book, but he didn’t seem interested.’
Alison was smiling, although in an American have a nice day way, devoid of emotion.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is awkward.’
‘Not for us,’ said Alison.
Jeff gave me a hopeful look. ‘I was wondering, you know, about my job, and if, like, I could have it back.’ Alison snorted. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I was just freaked out. And besides that I’ve been thinking about what happened, and now I know they had nothing to do with Hugo Cadiz getting his visa.’
Alison rolled her eyes and said, ‘Hugo Cadiz.’
‘How’d you work that out?’ I asked.
‘Well I went round to see him, and he showed me the document he needs to have him stay, and it was dated last week, and he showed me the envelope it arrived in, and it was posted two days ago, which would have been before they picked me up and took me down to the beach and shouted at me, so I guess they were basically bullshitting me.’ He looked very briefly from me to Alison and back. ‘I want back in. The shop. The investigation.’
‘He’s a double agent,’ said Alison.
‘I’m not, I swear to God.’
‘He’s a double-bluffing double agent.’
‘I’m not, I’m really not. Give me a task and I’ll prove it.’
‘Well you could open those boxes of books and get them shelved,’ I suggested.
�
�I mean some kind of mission.’
‘Send him out for buns,’ said Alison.
There was an impasse.
I wanted to support Alison. But, also, I needed Jeff. He was cheap and strong and guilty of not really very much.
An impasse must always be filled.
Or perhaps it’s a vacuum.
The shop door, almost creaking through overuse, opened for the second time in as many minutes, and I turned, fully expecting to find Greg, but instead found another familiar but for once more welcome face.
‘Detective Inspector,’ I said, ‘an unexpected pleasure.’
DI Robinson’s brow furrowed. ‘Why? You left a message for me.’
At this point, Alison said she had to pop out to get some coffee from Starbucks. She averted her eyes from me as she passed. She opened the door, and just as we watched her, for she was eminently watchable, a BMW rolled slowly past the shop, right to left.
There was Greg, in the passenger seat, raising two fingers and a thumb, like a gun. Pointed up at first, but then moving slowly down to point at Alison. Except this wasn’t sunny LA, and his window was up, and he bumped them on the glass, and then he fumbled for the button to lower the window, but too late, he was past.
It was funny.
But funny like a fire in an orphanage.
Because it was suddenly clear to me what the whole motif of the case was.
Ineptitude.
From the murders of Jimbo and RonnyCrabs, the bed-shitting Jack Russell thieves and the non-kidnap of Jeff, from the police investigation to the rogue MI5 agent’s threats, it all reeked of ineptitude; but there was no relief with this realisation, because ineptitude is not only what gets you caught, it’s also what gets you killed.
33
Later she said she was worried what Greg might do to me. It was caring, but wrong. Greg didn’t scare me in the way that, say, cows and other herbivores do; I had shown her before that I was prepared to stand up to him, and this lack of belief in me worried and annoyed me. Yes, obviously there were my health issues, the brittle bones, and the collapsed lung, and the blood pressure, and the Achilles tendon problem, and the arthritis, and the fibromyalgia, and the colour blindness, and the recurrent tinnitus, although instead of an incessant high-pitched squeal, what I actually heard was a brass band playing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ twenty-four-seven, but not too loud and quite hummable. I remained confident, though, that I could match wits with and outfox the likes of Greg the spy. Now I had been undermined by a dizzy blonde acting flaky and calling the cops. Later, she also said she was worried about Greg just shooting me, which, I had to admit, was a strategy I would probably have found difficult to outfox. But she knew she had done me wrong, which was why she had skedaddled, leaving me with DI Robinson and Jeff.
‘Did I see what I thought I just saw?’ Robinson asked.
I nodded.
‘Weirdos,’ he said. ‘Anyway, what did you want to see me about?’
‘A book came in, thought you might fancy it.’ I turned to the shelf behind me where I keep the rarer volumes and customer orders. I pulled one out and showed it to him. ‘It’s a first edition of James Hadley Chase’s The Dead Stay Dumb from 1939. Very rare. In America they called it Kiss My Fist!. Which is just . . . wrong.’
The DI studied me. Then the book. Then me. ‘How much?’
‘One twenty.’
‘What do you think a DI gets paid?’
‘Plus kickbacks.’
‘Oh yeah.’
He continued to study me. He was pretty good at not blinking.
‘I thought maybe you wanted something else,’ he said. ‘I thought maybe you were still on that little case of ours, and you’d found something, and you wanted to come clean, the way you did last time, and we both benefited from it.’
‘You more than I.’
‘You got your picture in the paper, you sold a few books, people come to you with their problems.’
‘People annoy me.’
I was going to expand on that statement, then I thought, no, it pretty much said it all.
It was only at this point, being preoccupied by Greg’s drive-by fingering, Alison’s betrayal, and scrambling to construct a cock-and-bull story for the detective inspector, that I realised he was wearing a black tie, and why.
‘You’re going to the funerals?’
‘Jimbo’s. Ronny’s is being delayed for about a week. Something about most of his family being in Canada. You going?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Thought you might. Thought as seeing I’m here I could offer you a lift, you know, reduce our carbon footprint. It’s not for a couple of hours; maybe we could catch some lunch and we could talk about the meaning of life.’
To which the obvious response was: there is no meaning, and it’s pointless. But perhaps that wasn’t quite what he meant.
‘Appreciate the offer, but I’ve things to do first.’
Robinson nodded at Jeff, who was on his knees unpacking books. ‘What about the boy wonder? Maybe I should take him for lunch, see what he knows?’
Jeff swallowed. He looked up at me for support.
‘Sure,’ I said.
Robinson smiled. ‘Let’s cut to the chase. I’ll give you a hundred for it, and nothing more.’
‘One twenty.’
‘Which part of nothing more do you not understand?’
‘One twenty.’
‘One ten.’
‘One twenty.’
‘One ten.’
‘One twenty.’
‘One fifteen, and not a penny more.’
‘One eighteen.’
‘I knew I could break you.’
‘Plus VAT.’
‘There is no VAT on books.’
‘There is on rare books.’
‘You’re bullshitting.’
‘One eighteen.’
‘Deal.’
‘Will you be wanting a receipt?’
His eyes narrowed.
He knew what I was saying. If the book really was for him, then there would be no need of a receipt, but if it was something he felt he had to buy, to keep up his cover story, then he would be claiming it back on expenses.
‘You tell me,’ he said.
‘How would I know?’
‘How would you know?’
‘I wouldn’t.’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘Okay. No receipt then.’
‘Okay.’
He counted out the cash.
I put the book in a No Alibis bag with Murder Is Our Business on the side, with the familiar chalk outline logo. I took his change out of the till and passed it and the bag across. He took the bag and nodded. I nodded back. He turned for the door. He exited the shop. He walked past the window, out of view. I looked at Jeff. He looked at me. The shop door opened again. I had expected a sheepish Alison, but it was DI Robinson again.
‘Second thoughts,’ he said, ‘I will have that receipt.’
Alison tried to buy her way back into my affections with a dolce cinnamon frappuccino. But I couldn’t be bought that easily, although obviously I took the beverage from her. I told her I had work to do, on the case, and I needed to focus. She looked a little hurt, and then nodded at Jeff.
‘What about him?’
‘He will man the barricades while I focus.’
‘I could do that.’
‘You would distract me.’
‘And he wouldn’t?’
‘He’s too busy grovelling.’
‘You want me to grovel? Because you can kiss my arse.’
‘No, I just want you to leave me in peace so I can get on with the case.’
‘Okay. Fine. I’ll just go and grow your baby.’
‘Okay.’
‘If it is yours.’ She smiled. One of those cruel ones that pushes up the corners of the mouth. ‘Catch you later.’
She went on out.
Jeff said, ‘Told you she was a bitch.’
‘So
’s your face,’ I said.
I wasn’t that upset with her, and she knew it. Jeff didn’t really know how we got on. And that stuff about the baby. She was joking. Of course she was. If it were true, she wouldn’t just have blurted it out like that, she would have held it in reserve until she could really do some damage with it.
I gave Jeff a series of pointless tasks to keep him busy while waiting between customers, then settled in behind the counter with my Starbucks to think some more about The Case of the Cock-Headed Man. With the Jack Russell and the threats from Greg, I’d allowed my attention to wander, but DI Robinson’s reminder about the funeral had refocused it on Jimbo and RonnyCrabs and what could possibly have led to their murder.
With the co-operation of the banker who had come to me for help tracking down his Chinese girlfriend in The Case of the Missing FA Cup, I was fairly quickly able to gain access to both the business and private financial records of Jimbo and RonnyCrabs – a different bank, but they’re all connected, and he really appreciated what I had done for him – and although some of the patterns of numbers deflected me from my purpose for a while, I relatively quickly ascertained that there was nothing startling there. But in a way, it was more about what wasn’t there. Most tradesmen play fast and loose with the taxman, preferring cash rather than putting payments through the books. But if J & R had actually been employed by the new Chief Constable to decorate his house, that was one payment that would almost certainly have had to be made with a cheque or credit card. Someone in his position would keep everything above board. Admittedly, he had shown himself to be rather a rash individual by attacking the mysterious Michael Gordon, but that was surely a one-off. He would do everything else by the book. But there was no record of any payment. It didn’t compute.
I looked at my watch.
There was still time before I, or we, depending on whether I deigned to take Alison with me, would have to leave for Jimbo’s funeral. I needed to know more about what had gone on between the decorators and the police chief, and for all the wonders of the internet, some things still have to be done face to face by a brave man not afraid to look a potential killer in the eye and ask difficult questions.
The Day of the Jack Russell (Mystery Man) Page 18