Be that as it may, Rambouillet does not like the look of the man in front of the screens and has a word with him.
‘Yo! Douche bag!’ he calls. ‘Show some respect, huh?’
The man looks up. He is surprised to see Dr Carpaccia in this glamourless part of the building and he jumps to his feet. He is visibly sweating and even from the door Rambouillet can smell the sickly-sweet stench of pineapple.
‘Dr Capadoccia,’ the man incorrectly mumbles, standing up now and bowing his head and removing his baseball cap. Dr Carpaccia is angry with him for deliberately insulting her by not using all her titles. She is, in fact, Dr Faye Carpaccia, The Presiding Genius of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Destroyer of The Nation’s Enemies wheresoever they may be found, be it on Land or at Sea or in the Air, Summoner of Messages from beyond the Grave, Worshipped from afar by those who do not know Her and Adored by those Who Do, Queen of the Inter-Coastal Waterway, Toll Booth Owner of Interstate 64, Great High Judge of Seafood in Richmond, Cynosure of Prying Eye Wherever She goes, M.Phil, PhD, VC, CBE, ECT Etc Etc.
Dr Faye Carpaccia looks at the man and thinks that she might, if she were forced to think about it, come to despise him. She has a shortlist of people whom she appreciates more as live human beings than as dead bodies and this man is not on that list and so she resents having to share time, air and space with him. Rambouillet bundles him out of the door of the Ops room and wipes the chair that he had been sitting on clean with a pack of baby wipes that he keeps in a boot holster.
Dr Carpaccia sits down and begins to manipulate the mouse herself. Despite being fed live feeds from twelve cameras simultaneously, she finds the system easy to use and very soon they are watching the last recorded hour at the Facility. They watch each camera view at high speed with the Movement Sensor switched on. On the eighth camera the alarm pings and the images slow to reveal a man pole-vaulting over the wire fence, making sure the pole does not touch the sensors, and landing with a cat-like ease.
‘Well, I’ll be,’ murmurs the big detective.
To begin with they think it is a cat, but Carpaccia zooms in and they can see that it is in fact a werewolf. I swear. A werewolf.
‘My God,’ mutters Carpaccia. ‘It’s Lou Garroooooooooooooooo.’ She ends his name with a lonesome-pine howl.
‘But he is on death row in Louisiana!’ exclaims Rambouillet. ‘No one escapes death row in Louisiana!’
‘Maybe he is on day release?’ mutters Carpaccia.
She is angry and she is frightened and she is right to be angry and frightened because it was only through her tiresome work that Lou Garrew, to give him his proper name, was incarcerated on death row in Louisiana, rather than in an open prison in Virginia, because they have a zero-tolerance approach to werewolves in Louisiana and the death sentence is mandatory. And now here he was, in Virginia, weaving his way through the intricate field of landmines that her late lover, the FBI one with the strong warm tongue, had devised just before he was killed in a freak clambake accident, precisely to stop this sort of thing.
They watch as the wolf begins a high-speed zigzagging run through the minefield. Neither can believe the mines do not go off and it is as the wolf is approaching the house that it first occurs to Carpaccia that perhaps this is not Lou Garrew, but someone dressed in a werewolf costume hired from CostumeShack™.
‘But the only person who knows the exact layout of the minefield is—’ Rambouillet begins but stops himself.
‘I know what you are going to say,’ says Carpaccia. ‘The only person who knows how to get through the minefield is my ex-FBI lover, the one with the strong warm tongue.’
‘But he is dead!’ exclaims Rambouillet.
‘Or is he?’ Carpaccia rhetorically asks.
They watch him now as he – whoever he is – slides open the window, left open three days earlier by someone they would now have to fire, bundle into a Bell JetRanger helicopter, fly out over the Atlantic Ocean, and drop from 1500 feet with their feet tied to the engine block of an old Hummer.
Carpaccia left clicks the mouse and they get a shot of Lou Garrew from the internal cameras. The werewolf slides quickly across the kitchen while Juanita’s back is turned, opens the fridge, disappears for a second and then re-emerges, carrying a tagged bag of evidence. He exits through the window and is gone before Juanita turns round.
Carpaccia tries the other camera angles and picks him up again by the skips, towards the back of the Facility. The skips contain household rubbish and the remains of all the canvases and picture frames that Dr Carpaccia has been cutting up and destroying in her effort to prove that Beryl Cook, an octogenarian British artist, was responsible for the shot that killed JFK in Dallas. It does not surprise Dr Carpaccia that Lou Garrew heads for the skip with the trashed paintings. It merely confirms her fears that Beryl Cook is not only a werewolf but also a murderer.
As they are looking, the werewolf climbs into the skip and seems to vanish from sight. Dr Carpaccia is reaching for the phone to alert security when it rings. She exchanges another glance with Rambouillet. Carpaccia feels a fist of panic in her stomach. Only one person knows where they are.
‘You answer it,’ she pleadingly asks.
‘I have a frog in my throat,’ coughs Rambouillet.
‘I’ll give you five dollars to tell her I am not here,’ offers Carpaccia.
‘Make it ten,’ counters Rambouillet.
‘Done.’
Rambouillet picks up the phone.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s me,’ snaps a voice on conference call. Carpaccia flinches. It is her niece, Creepy Lesbian Niece.
‘Hello, Creepy Lesbian Niece,’ says Rambouillet. He is sure that Carpaccia will not want to tell her about the reappearance of the werewolf in case it brings Creepy Lesbian Niece to the Facility.
‘Is my aunt there?’ asks Creepy Lesbian Niece, without greeting the detective, even though she has known him since she was ten.
‘She has popped out for some milk,’ bluffs Rambouillet.
‘How dare you lie to me!’ snaps Creepy Lesbian Niece. ‘EVERYBODY knows Aunt Faye is lactose-intolerant.’
‘She is getting it for Juanita,’ extemporises the detective.
‘Oh,’ says Creepy Lesbian Niece. ‘That is so like Aunt Faye. I love her! She is so kind to everybody she meets, and not just the dead ones. I am missing her so much, you bet your sweet bippy, that I am going to drive over from my townhome in Snakeskin and come and see her right this minute I am.’
Rambouillet tries to put her off. ‘Oh. Well your aunt is very busy with a case right now.’
‘Well,’ Creepy Lesbian Niece smartly says, ‘In that case she needs my help.’
‘But she has all the help she needs, I promise you.’
‘You are trying to deny me access to my aunt! I can tell she needs my help and that I love her more than you do!’
‘That is not possible, Creepy Lesbian Niece. I love her more than anyone could, apart from that man with the warm strong tongue, and anyway that was different. And think of the dangers, Creepy Lesbian Niece! All those psychopaths and compulsive murderers out there waiting for someone in an expensive car to chase and butcher! You will never make it this far alive.’
‘My love for my aunt will see me through.’
‘But—’
‘Butt-fuck you too!’ she wittily says. ‘I have devised some software that tells me when a caller is telling me untruths.’
Creepy Lesbian Niece breaks the connection.
‘We have to get out of here!’ Carpaccia urgently cries. ‘She’ll be here soon and she is so irritating that I cannot bear to be in the same room as her. Where shall we go?’
Rambouillet scratches his head, all thoughts of the stupid old werewolf forgotten now.
‘What about back to Richmond? We could see what that man from Britain wants?’
4
A pair of pantyhose and a Glock pistol with Tridium sights lie bundled together on the bed of Dr F
aye Carpaccia’s modest Duplex and outside it the rain is falling unseasonably heavily again. The journey up from the Facility has been tense. At any moment they expected depth charges to be dropped upon them or Creepy Lesbian Niece to have developed and used some sort of submarine-crippling software, but they had parked in the underwater pen under Carpaccia’s modest ranch-style Duplex in Richmond without incident and now Dr Carpaccia and Rambouillet were sitting in her office, waiting to meet the Lecturer from England.
There is a ring on the doorbell. Rambouillet unclips his holster and takes up position behind a curtain, ready for anything, while Dr Carpaccia looks through the spy hole in the middle of the door. Through the spy hole she can see four people, all dressed somewhat outlandishly. One of them is black. She cannot decide if any of them are men or women. She nods at Rambouillet who now draws his gun.
Carpaccia opens the door. She steps back, visibly shaken. All four are wearing Scotch clothes. They look crumpled and tired and in need of a wash, as if they have just come a long way by public transport. But it is not their clothes or the evidence of past perspiration that shocks Carpaccia as she looks from one to the other of the new arrivals. It is that she knows them. Or thinks she does.
There is the enormously fat African lady, for a start, who reminds her powerfully of someone she hated when she had been at that College in Britain, but then there is also the gloomy-looking man with the hang-dog face who looks as if the world will end in the next five minutes, and then there is the shifty-looking one, undernourished and maybe with rickets, with dark eyes, who has about him the mien of someone about to remove the aerial from your car. And they are all looking back at her with their mouths open, as if they recognise her. Ordinarily, she is used to this adulation and has over the years developed a way in which to deal with it, but this is different. None of these three seem remotely in awe of her, but rather confused and slightly shocked to see her, as if they had not expected her to answer her own door. They stand there and they do not know what to say, until the one whom she does not recognise, and who is slightly younger than the other three, stretches out a hand to introduce himself. Then from the corner of her eye she sees Rambouillet launch himself through the doorway, catch the hand that the younger one extends, drag the man into the house, slam him against the wall, poke the barrel of his Glock into the man’s face and shout from a distance of no more than six inches that, if anyone touches Dr Faye Carpaccia, it will be him and not some pansy-assed, lily-livered, homo cock-sucking Limey in a fucking dress.
Only a massive ham-fisted blow from the black woman into the side of Rambouillet’s head saves Tom Hurst from this awkward scene. It sounds like a hammer on a pumpkin. The American detective slumps to his knees, apologising to Dr Carpaccia for letting her down and straightening the lapels of Tom Hurst’s jacket as he slips past, his face pressed against the Lecturer’s chest, leaving a snail’s trail of drool on the pleats and tucks of Tom’s dress-shirt as he goes. He clutches Tom’s tartan kilt before rolling to one side. Finally he lies quiet and unconscious on the parquet floor.
‘Sweet smiling Baby Jesus,’ says Carpaccia as Mma Ontoaste starts to laugh, a great basso profundo wheeze that seems to come from the bowels of the earth itself.
‘Oh Mma! I have always wanted to do that.’
There is something about this woman that is monumental and it is this monumentality that appeals to Dr Carpaccia. Her skin is silky and abundant and the tartan she has picked out really matches her eyes.
‘Well, I guess you had better come in,’ Carpaccia politely says, standing aside to let them pass.
Mma Ontoaste is rubbing her knuckles. Tom Hurst picks up his Tam-o’-Shanter and dusts it down before putting it on his head and then taking it off again. He introduces himself and is about to introduce the others, when Rhombus saves him the trouble.
‘Don’t bother, Tom. We already know each other. Same year at Cuff. How are you, Faye?’ he asks, stretching to kiss her cheek. ‘Long time no see.’
Dr Carpaccia has never been so insulted in her life, but there is something of the charmer about this man, whom she recalls now as having been in some kind of church choir. The touch of his skin, rough with gingerish bristle, sends a charge down her spine and she wonders for a second whether his tongue is warm and strong, like the man who fell in the fire and died at the FBI summer clambake the other year.
Tom Hurst is standing stock-still. He should have expected them all to have known each other, of course, but he had not known they were in the same year. Had the Dean known when he sent Tom to see them? If not, then it cast all the clues that the murderer had been leaving in a different light. He was trying to involve the detectives. Why?
Meanwhile Rhombus is reminding Carpaccia of his name.
‘Detective Inspector Scott Rhombus,’ he says. ‘Ex-SAS.’
‘Ex-SAS, hey?’ replies Carpaccia, pleased at last to shoehorn this ‘joke’. ‘Who do you fly with now? British Airways?’
From over Rhombus’s shoulder comes a long sad noise, like the sigh of air from a lilo let down at the end of a week’s vacation at the beach near Malmö.
Detective Inspector Burt Colander is laughing.
‘I used to fly Virgin,’ continues Carpaccia, not recognising the sound for what it is. ‘But I now own a private submarine that is faster and has a further range than any other civilian submarine in existence and next year I will upgrade to an even bigger one with a further range and this one will have a full nuclear arsenal.’
There is a pause. No one quite knows what to say to this.
‘But it depends on the sales of my books, I suppose,’ she says, adding a curiously downbeat ending to her boast.
Rhombus walks across the spacious hallway towards the kitchen. He thinks of his own flat in Edinburgh, cold now, and able to fit easily into the kitchen of Dr Carpaccia’s well-appointed but nevertheless modest townplex. A swathe of marble kitchen surface – mined in the same quarry from which the sculptor Michelangelo got his stone to sculpt his famous statue of David – reflects the thousand points of light that emit from the chandelier that Carpaccia’s Creepy Lesbian Niece bought from an aristocratic French family off eBay. The appliances alone cost more than seven million dollars.
‘Nice place you’ve got here, Faye. Always knew you’d do well.’
This is not true and Faye knows it. No one could explain her appeal then, while she had been at Cuff College, and no one can explain it now.
‘You have a good sidekick,’ states Colander, glancing down at Rambouillet. ‘I wish I had a good sidekick.’
How he misses the simple pleasures of life in Ynstead.
The sidekick in question groans on the floor.
Anger flashes in Carpaccia’s eyes. She will definitely fire Rambouillet.
‘I thought Lemm Lemmingsson might be good for the role,’ continues Colander, somewhat solipsistically, thinks Tom Hurst, ‘but he seems a bit one-dimensional. And, whenever I go to see the new woman police officer, who is so highly thought of in Stockholm, I drink a little too much raw spirit and end up being sick in her postbox.’
Again, no one knows what to say to this. It is to be an evening of non sequiturs.
‘Talking of which, Dr Carpaccia, have you anything to drink?’ asks Mma Ontoaste. She has drunk heavily on the flight over, only avoiding being put off the plane in an emergency landing in Newfoundland because she fell asleep clutching a bottle of Napoleon brandy to her chest, but now her almost unquenchable thirst has returned.
After a minute they are sitting on the bar stools in the kitchen on the other side of a couple of bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon, all talking sales figures. In the microwave Carpaccia is defrosting some Turkey Twizzlers.
‘What aggravates me,’ she complains as she opens a jar of tomato relish she had previously bought from the 7-11, ‘is that I invented the strong female character and yet no one gives me enough credit. All these silly bitches in pantyhose copying what I do make me so angry.’
Carpaccia drives the Sabatier knife she is wielding into the maple cheeseboard, neatly bisecting a piece of crackerjack cheddar on the way and sending the pieces across the table.
‘You’re lucky, Mma,’ says Mma Ontoaste, fielding a piece of crackerjack and popping it into her mouth before anyone can blink. ‘No one has ever tried to write a bargain-basement version of me. I suppose it is because I am the absolute deliberate opposite of all of you: I am a woman—’
‘So am I!’ Carpaccia aggressively snaps.
‘So you are,’ Mma Ontoaste cautiously agrees, ‘but you are small and powerful and you have a massive collection of guns, not to mention your submarine—’
‘What are you saying?’
‘That for all your empathy with dead women, you might as well be a man,’ continues Mma Ontoaste.
‘Aye, owning a submarine is a wee bit phallic, is it no’, Faye?’
Carpaccia is so angry she is at a loss for words. How dare this Scotch man insult her submarine? How dare this fat black woman suggest she is somehow unfeminine because she is obsessed with guns and has the phrase ‘NRA4EVER’ tattooed on her right buttock? Her small powerful hands and huge great big knife make quick work of chopping the Turkey Twizzlers into one-inch pieces, but she controls herself enough to put these pieces on cocktail sticks with small cubes of crackerjack and cocktail onions and pass them around.
The No. 2 Global Detective Page 17