The Spotted Dog

by Kerry Greenwood

  ‘Kylie, what do you mean you saw me? Please tell me you weren’t there?’

  Gossamer shook her head. ‘Of course not, Corinna! Someone took a video. It’s going viral!’ She took out her phone, flicked the screen a few times and handed it to me.

  Oh my. What I saw was as follows: A smoke-filled street scene, with alarums and excursions offstage. And running down the street, right across centre stage, was Daniel, self, and Alasdair with Geordie in his sling. We leapt into the Prius, slammed the doors, and there was our cameo scene with Letty White. After we had been allowed to drive away, the camera panned to the crime scene. Police were running and taking cover. The bullhorn could be heard a long way off. It sounded like it was under a few metres’ worth of water. And there was one impassive-looking cop with an assault rifle. She wasn’t looking at the camera, which was just as well, else the unknown auteur would undoubtedly have been Helping the Police with Their Enquiries.

  I handed the phone back to Goss and took a deep breath. ‘Oh good. Do you know, once upon a time, when suburban streets erupted in flame, people used to duck for cover. Now it seems everyone’s first reaction is to whip out their phone. Does anything about this strike you as wrong?’

  Kylie looked at me as though I had just dropped in from Planet Weird. ‘Well, duh! Something like this can get you thousands of subscribers on YouTube. There’s huge money in it, potentially.’

  I gave up. ‘Well, if you say so. And yes, we’re fine, give or take being a bit bruised and scared out of our wits. As you – and apparently all the world – saw, that was Daniel and me, and of course Alasdair. We went there to rescue his dog, and we were successful. We just weren’t expecting to be pitched into the Siege of Sarajevo.’

  Kylie hugged me. Being hugged by someone as stick-insect-like as she is always an odd experience. I was always too terrified to hug her back in case she broke in half. ‘Corinna, that’s amazing! Well done you! And you haven’t been broken into again?’

  I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. ‘No, I managed to go a whole weekend without a home invasion. I don’t know how I’ll get used to it, but I think I’m going to enjoy it. The people whose house got blown up had kidnapped Geordie, for reasons we needn’t go into right now, and we are pretty much certain that it was also they who’ve been breaking into Insula.’

  ‘Do you know what they were looking for?’

  I opened my mouth and shut it again. How could I even begin to explain to these adorable yet feather-brained girls the spear of Longinus, its significance and the bizarre reasons whereby they had come to look for it here?

  ‘Whatever it was, they didn’t find it. And now they’re all in prison. And the bad guys are too, I would imagine.’

  ‘There were lots of news stories,’ put in Goss. ‘The cops said that a number of arrests had been made, and lots of houses raided. Kilmarnock? Is that even a place? I’ve never heard of it.’

  ‘Neither had I until quite recently. I would have been completely happy to have remained in ignorance of it.’

  Kylie was fiddling with her phone again, and frowning. Her face cleared. ‘Here’s one of the news broadcasts, Corinna. Have a look. It must have been terrible.’

  I peered into her phone. There was smoke and debris and hard-faced police. What must have been the front of the house looked like it had lost an argument with a hurricane. Out the front of what remained of Maison Petrosian a Very Senior Cop gave a granite-jawed, unsmiling account of it all. Two fatalities, one more in intensive care, arrests made. Gangland violence was not being ruled out, but it was too early to be certain of anything. Simultaneous raids. Enquiries were continuing. I was about to look away when a fresh-faced female reporter pushed a microphone towards the cop, and I could feel my blood pressure going into overdrive. ‘Inspector, we understand that a small group of people were seen leaving the scene of the crime directly after the explosion, and one of them was carrying a dog. Are you able to tell me if they are suspects?’

  Not a muscle moved in his obsidian features. ‘At this stage, it would appear that these people are not directly involved in the case.’

  ‘They are not suspected of any involvement?’

  ‘No, they are not of further interest at this stage. Enquiries are continuing,’ he repeated, and the video mercifully wound to its inglorious conclusion. I silently thanked Letty White, many times over. Kylie gave me an overexcited look.

  ‘That was you, wasn’t it?’

  ‘If they were carrying a dog, then yes, that was us. Oh my. All right. What did you get up to on the weekend, anyway?’

  I noted that while I still appeared to have Kylie’s attention, Goss was lost in her phone. I had a quick look over her shoulder at the video she was watching. It appeared to be a rehearsal of Othello, starring none other than our guest actors. One face kept appearing, centre stage. I exchanged a look with Kylie, who shrugged and rolled her eyes.

  ‘We’ve been partying with the actors. You didn’t hear us come in on Sunday morning? It must have been around dawn.’

  ‘Dawn and I have this understanding, Kylie,’ I informed her. ‘We say hello every weekday morning. At weekends, we go our separate ways.’ I looked again at Goss. Oh dear. Now she had freeze-framed on none other than Stephen, our public schoolboy and Trinculo impersonator. Oh dear. This looked like an outbreak of romantic love in its most virulent manifestation.

  ‘Well, I’m glad somebody managed to stay out of trouble.’ I made shooing gestures with both arms. ‘Howsoever this be, we have work to do. Jason and I bake the bread, and you two sell it. To arms, ladies. Aux barricades, citoyens!’

  Kylie all but wrenched the phone out of Gossamer’s hands, and they began hauling bread trays out into the shop.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Well, here’s my comfort. (Drinks)

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE TEMPEST, ACT 2, SCENE 2

  Around nine am the bread and muffin trays were clearing away nicely. We don’t work at full capacity in January. Full service is resumed only after school holidays end, but I was relieved to find – as I was every single morning – that my customers are faithful and buy my bread all year round. By this time of the morning everyone who is going to come in on their way to work has already done so, and it’s a good moment for everyone to take a short breather. This was, therefore, the ideal moment for Meroe to walk through my front door and look me over. She wore her customary straight black dress, some lightly chiming jewellery and the inevitable purple gypsy wrap and she looked – as ever – calm, composed and exalted.

  ‘I see you’re all right, Corinna,’ she observed, moving closer to me. Her face crinkled in delight.

  ‘I am, thank you. Your supernatural assistance came in handy. It was a close-run thing, but we got in and out and Alasdair has his dog back.’

  ‘So I heard.’ I did not ask if she’d seen it on TV or somebody’s phone. Perhaps there’s a special psychic channel out there somewhere and all she has to do is tune in to the twenty-four-hour feed and pull news off the ether. It would be rude to enquire, so I didn’t. She looked at the ring she had given me and smiled. ‘Your courage was equal to the test.’

  ‘It was. Though I’ve never experienced gunfire before. Or explosions. It was …’

  ‘Testing?’

  ‘Absolutely bloody terrifying. I think I would have been furiously angry afterwards – how dare these thugs start treating our town like the Fall of the Assyrian Empire? But we had the dog, and that was what we came for. And after that I was too relieved to be really cross.’

  ‘How is Alasdair?’

  ‘Blissfully happy. A man and his dog. It must have been love at first sight.’

  ‘Those two have a deep psychic link. When you trust your life to another sentient being, the bond is strong. I am so glad.’ She leant over, kissed me lightly on the cheek, and whispered, ‘Blessed be.’ And with that she melted away into the street again before I could offer her a muffin. But she so rarely seemed to want anything.

&n
bsp; Our next visitor was Mrs Dawson, in search of bread. I looked her over with care. She was dressed in a light brown suit and appeared steadfast, but somewhat sad. While Gossamer attended to the financial aspects of the occasion, I asked her how she was.

  ‘Tolerably well, thank you, Corinna. But, alas: it seems my guest must return to his apartment. The police have quite finished with it, and he is anxious to return to his studies. I shall miss the company.’

  ‘You can have dinner with him every night if you want to,’ I suggested.

  She smiled. ‘There is that. So much more satisfactory than breakfast. Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast. I shall ask him to dinner tonight. Thank you, Corinna.’

  She turned on her heel and departed. I wondered about her and Dion Monk. Especially the latter. I was eager for a talk with him. Jon’s revelations about our good Professor had intrigued me.

  Since we had the shop to ourselves for the present, and Kylie and Goss, whom I had permitted to consult their phones, were engrossed, I mentally reviewed our cases. Most were tied up with a little pink bow around them, but there remained some annoying loose threads.

  Sitting in the Solved column were Narek’s break-ins, the abduction of Geordie and the attack on Philomela. With the latter, we didn’t know for sure it was the Petrosians, but it certainly looked like it. All part of a ridiculously ham-fisted gang war. Neither ensemble would be troubling the scorers for a while, I guessed.

  As for Jordan King … As far as I could make out Dion Monk had committed some nameless heresy of interest only to holy warriors like him. I could see that Jesus being married with children might upset a strict Catholic, but that was old news; many writers had already posited as much. If Dion Monk had found a manuscript suggesting that Jesus had founded a society of pole-dancing tax lawyers I could understand his outrage, but I couldn’t see what was exercising the young man in the Gospel of St Joseph. Perhaps he might eventually confide in Sister Mary, and she would tell me.

  My other loose end was the cyberattack on Cafe Delicious. At the time, I had assumed it was the same folks who had done everything else. The more I thought about it, though, the less likely this became. Someone else had probably done it. Just a common everyday cyberattack then? Presumably so.

  My train of thought was interrupted by a sudden inrush of customers, and I returned to my core business: baking bread and bready products and selling them. I decided I would stick to that.

  The rest of the day passed without events of note. Kylie went to the bank to deposit the day’s takings, and I returned to my apartment and had a lazy afternoon playing with my cat and making a light dinner of salade nicoise. Horatio demanded tribute from my bowl and took the tuna away to the bathroom floor to be alone with it, and I poured myself a glass of chardonnay. For years I had abominated the stuff and drunk only sauvignon blanc from New Zealand’s Marlborough Sounds. My unlamented husband James had drunk chardonnay, and would pontificate endlessly on the subject unless discouraged with a cake fork. I thought it tasted like chateau collapso shaken up with pine bark: the stuff you smear all over gardens if you wish to discourage unauthorised plant life. But I had recently discovered some wonderful offerings from South Australia which tasted like heaven in a glass, and I had decreed that James or no James, I was going to reintroduce it to my life.

  Sipping the cool, fruit-filled nectar at leisure, I switched on the TV. I might as well find out what the rest of the world was learning about our gangland wars. I really hoped there would be no repetition of the video with our inglorious flight from Petrosian HQ. Fortunately, there wasn’t. Instead, the headline story carried the banner CRIME BOSS ARRESTED. A small army of detectives ranged themselves around a handcuffed man, and the camera zoomed in on his face. Deep brown eyes, cafe latte skin, small hands, very sharp black suit. He eyed the camera with impassive hostility, like an accountant with a brain tumour. Meanwhile the newsreader could barely contain her enthusiasm.

  ‘Tural Aldjanov, alleged Azeri crime boss, was today arrested and charged with the murders of Tigran and Aram Petrosian and the attempted murders of several other people. In all, forty-nine charges have been laid against five men from the Aldjanov family. This follows from yesterday’s attack on the Petrosians’ home in Kilmarnock. It will be alleged that this attack formed part of an ongoing drug-trafficking turf war between rival gangs of Armenians and Azeris in Melbourne’s north.’

  The scene now shifted to a replay of yesterday’s explosion and exchange of gunfire. Our cameo roles had been left on the cutting-room floor this time. I didn’t want to think about it ever again. I hadn’t had any nightmares yet about the roaring madness and the rush of heat passing over me like a tidal wave, but I expected they might be lying in wait around the corner for me. If we had been any closer our clothes would have been scorched off our backs.

  The newsreel segued effortlessly into something asinine and political, and I tuned out. Nobody expects anything politicians say to make any sense. When they do it is an unexpected bonus, like challenging a parking ticket and having it withdrawn. I received a text from Daniel which said: All very well here see you tomorrow. I responded with yes please and a suitably lascivious emoticon. Then I watched something anodyne that entirely escapes my memory and put myself to bed with Horatio.

  Tuesday morning began as dull and uneventful as Monday, with breakfast, baking and the Stately Minuet of the Bread Trays.

  I couldn’t get enough of dull and uneventful. Kylie and Gossamer arrived as Jason left for his Cholesterol Surprise and all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

  Barely had such smug thoughts occurred to me when Jason returned at double speed. ‘Cap’n! You gotta come now! Del Pandamus is strangling one of the actors!’

  ‘Kylie!’ I bellowed, pointing an admonitory finger at her. ‘You’re in charge! I may be some time!’

  I grabbed my purse and hared out into Calico Alley, with Jason at my side. The sun hadn’t made it over the skyscrapers yet, but a hot wind was buffeting the passers-by, ourselves included. It plucked at my sleeve like an insistent relative, but I ignored it. I barrelled into Cafe Delicious and caught Del’s eye. He had young Stephen in his grip and wasn’t showing any signs of wanting to let go. Peloponnesian oaths filled the cafe. Yai-yai was standing by the kitchen door with her arms folded, looking like all three of the Erinyes at once. She was watching her son’s efforts with what looked like solid approval. Several customers, including the other actors, were watching Del’s performance from a safe distance. Clearly some form of intervention was required before Del did serious damage to the young man.

  ‘Del, I wouldn’t dream of interrupting your chastisement, but what’s going on?’

  Del did not answer at once, but tightened his grip once more. Stephen was struggling. He looked like someone who had probably played rugby or some such pastime. He came across as one of those disgustingly healthy boys with muscles on his muscles, but he was clearly no match for a man who had probably spent his boyhood chasing down goats on Mediterranean hillsides. Or tanks; I wouldn’t put it past him. Stephen went limp, and Del pushed him down into a chair.

  ‘Siddown!’ he ordered, in English this time. And Stephen sat cowering in his chair, with Del’s left hand still gripping his collar. ‘You! You drink my coffee, you eat my baklava, and you do this to me? What you say, huh?’

  Fascinating though this undoubtedly was, I wanted some subtitles immediately. I had my own business to run, and use of the fast-forward button seemed appropriate. ‘Stephen,’ I ordered, ‘explain yourself.’

  ‘Speak up, listis!’ growled Del. ‘You tell her!’

  Stephen gave me a winning smile. Except it wasn’t. He wasn’t winning anything right now. ‘I, er, I put the ransomware on the cafe website. Look, I didn’t mean any harm. But I need the money for our production. Arts Victoria wouldn’t give us a grant, and neither would the university. So I had to improvise.’ His eyes willed me to understand. ‘Art is important. And this production
has to go ahead!’

  I stared at him. ‘You horrible little man,’ I managed. ‘You sit there with your socks full of feet and tell me you were intending to steal from this hardworking family business to finance your dramatic indulgences?’ I turned to Luke, Claire and Sam. ‘And you? Did you know about this?’

  The trio were glaring at their erstwhile friend and colleague.

  ‘You said you’d ask your father for money!’ Sam said.

  Stephen grinned weakly. ‘I did. He told me to use my initiative.’

  ‘You were going to steal from an old lady?’ demanded Luke, his tone one of utter loathing. ‘Dude, just no. I think we’re done here?’

  Two emphatic nods from the girls.

  They rose, still shaking their heads, and exited the cafe without another word.

  I turned to Del. ‘What shall we do with this miserable worm, Del? Would you like to press charges? Do please feel free.’

  Del let go of the boy’s collar. ‘Ochi.’ He shook his head in silent fury. ‘I can’t be bothered with you, boy. Just go away. You’re banned from my cafe. You never show your face down my chimney again, right?’

  Stephen stood up and looked around the room for support. Finding none, he slunk out the door.

  Del stalked back into the kitchen, accompanied by Yai-yai. Me? I wasn’t finished yet. Because I had seen Gully, lurking in the corner. I beckoned to him. He looked at me like a cat with a stolen salmon. I gestured to the door.

  When I had got him outside, I poked him in the middle of his moth-eaten black T-shirt. ‘Gully, there’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there?’

  He blinked at me. Bright sunshine was hardly his metier, and he squirmed like a snail. But I didn’t want him to be comfortable. ‘Don’t mess me around, Gully. You fixed the ransomware straight away. And – let me guess? – you knew who it was immediately, but you spun out the process so you could get a whole lot of extra free meals from Del. You did, didn’t you?’