Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!

by Douglas Lindsay

  He shrugged. Wiped a digestive crumb from the corner of his mouth.

  'Maybe,' he said. 'But I knew it was going to be there, and it was, which, in my book, means it ain't a coincidence.'

  He glanced at me and shrugged again.

  'There was just something about you four, man, and I wasn't part of it. And there, on that poster, was the proof. And you know what it means?'

  I shook my head.

  'Me neither,' he said. 'Haven't a clue.'

  I breathed out and turned away. Suddenly I found myself looking out over Glasgow and my stomach didn't immediately fly into my mouth, my heart didn't immediately explode out of my chest.

  'Completely confused,' I said.

  'Join the club.'

  In the distance a plane was emerging from the cloud on its way, directly over the city, to the airport. We couldn't hear it. That would be the moment when I would be relieved, when the plane stopped being tossed in the cloud, and would be coming in for a smooth landing.

  'What was the name of the other printer?' I asked.

  'What?'

  'On the poster. You said that Jones was one of two printers. Who was the other one?'

  'Oh,' he said. 'Crosskill. Jones and Crosskill. No idea who Crosskill is. You ever meet a Crosskill?'

  25

  It was clear that Jones was coming, and I started to see her round every corner. I liked her, I loved her, there was barely a day in the previous seventeen years when I hadn't thought about her, yet now that I knew she was out there it seemed as though I feared her.

  I'd been curious after hearing about her at the Stand Alone, but it was Henderson who had instilled the trepidation. Now it turned out she had been to see Two Feet. Yet all of those had been the previous week. She'd been in Glasgow, and none of them had been able to give her any intelligence on where to find me. Even if they'd had my home address, and I don't think any of them did, I wasn't there a week ago.

  So what had Jones been searching for? Was she really looking for me, or, despite what she'd said to the others, was she also searching for the Jigsaw Man and thought that I might be her best bet for information? For the first time in a while, I felt like I had when I'd been living up north for those long six months. Thinking about what had to be done – trying to work out what was going on and what was the best way forward – only seemed to make things worse.

  This general feeling of confusion and discomfiture had been further enhanced by Two Feet and his talk of Jones and Crosskill. I don't think I could remember ever having heard of anyone called Crosskill before, and now the name had popped up twice in quick succession. Two Feet was right about the lack of coincidence in all this.

  Yet the idea of my two interrogators having the same name as the printers of the poster that influenced the writing of a song with my name in it seemed to go some way beyond coincidence, although, of course, I didn't know if the female agent was actually named Jones. Her name could have been anything. At the moment it was nothing more than another potential layer of mystery to by filed away with all the others.

  I went back to the hotel and sat in my room for a while. I flicked on the TV and almost immediately turned it off. I never watch TV, and mid-afternoon is not the time to start. I sat at the small desk and looked through the hotel brochure. There was a swimming pool, pictured in perfect, shimmering blue. In the picture there were two people swimming and no one else standing at the side. I wondered if the pool was always that quiet.

  I went downstairs to the leisure complex area. From the reception there was a view of the pool. It was deserted. I bought myself a pair of trunks and went for a swim.

  The water was warm, relaxing. I didn't know what to do other than swim lengths, up and down, up and down. As I started I thought I might swim for an hour, but every time I dipped my head beneath the water in the middle of a breaststroke, I imagined that when I looked up Jones would be standing there, having appeared from nowhere. A dark, tall presence at the far end of the pool.

  I started not dipping my head, which not long afterwards became looking over my shoulder. The swim didn't last so long.

  'Everything all right for you today, Sir?' asked the woman at reception, as I retreated towards the body of the hotel.

  'Of course,' I replied. 'Thank you.'

  'Have a nice day,' she tossed casually at me as I pushed open the double doors.

  I went to the bar, checked the time – not yet two – and decided to order a gin and tonic anyway. I sat with my back to a wall and a good view of the bar, the entrance and what I could see of the street outside. I had a second gin and tonic, and ate a small bag of peanuts with each drink.

  Customers came and went, the bar never getting busy. I sat there for over an hour. At first, it was almost as if I was expecting Jones to walk in the door at any moment, but the longer time went on I knew that wasn't going to happen. For all the apprehension I could manage to instil in myself, it didn't feel right. Jones had been here a week ago. She would never have hung around all that time in the vague hope that I might turn up. Why should I have? A week ago I was in a cell, who knows where in the world. It was almost arbitrary that I was here now.

  That was how it seemed anyway.

  The thing that started to nag at me, the longer I sat there, was why none of them had heard that I had died. Yes, I'd lost touch with them all. There had been a lot of British people on that plane, and it was impossible that any news item would ever have listed them all. There were too many even for it to be unlikely that a newspaper would print one of those mawkish double page spreads with individual photographs of everyone who'd died. So, there was some sense that they hadn't heard, yet it still seemed strange. I still had some distant family back here, someone somewhere would have known, I would surely have been included in the body count at least.

  During my third gin and tonic I began to wonder if there had even been a plane crash. There was a small bank of four computers in the lobby. I finished off the third drink, left the place with a small nod to the barman, and sat down at a monitor. Since checking in, I hadn't seen any of them used.

  I Googled “plane crash December 17th”, and images of the plane before and after were coming up even before I'd finished typing the date. The crash had at least happened. That was a start. Every report I looked at stated that, passengers and crew combined, three hundred and six people had died. There had been no survivors. Then I found the full list of names, all three hundred and six of them.

  And there I was. Mr James Kite.

  Dear God. What a peculiar feeling ran through me. I had died. The other me had died in the plane crash. It was right there. The list of those who had died, and I was on it.

  I don't know what I'd been expecting, but since I didn't know, I hadn't been thinking about it. Now, however, I immediately thought of my girls. Brin and Baggins, thinking I was dead, all this time. Four-and-a-half months. How terrible it must have been for them.

  I wanted to call them, right there. I looked round the lobby, round to the reception desk. My eyes fell on the phone. Any phone. I could pick it up, let them know.

  Yet, even as those desperate thoughts were running through my head, I knew I couldn't. They'd warned me. Don't contact your family.

  There was nothing I could do, and anyway, they'd had all this time to get used to me not being there, another day or two or three wouldn't make any difference. All I could do was try to make those few days as short as possible. I needed to find the Jigsaw Man, and in order to do that, I somehow knew that first I would have to find Jones.

  I needed to go on the offensive. I needed to find Jones before she found me. I'd Googled her often in the past, of course, followed her career around the standards of British TV, but I'd never actually tried to find out where she was at any particular point in time.

  It was funny how none of us ever used her first name, and she never used it herself. But it was there on IMDb. The acting profession probably wouldn't let her away with just a single name; at least, n
ot one as straightforward as Jones at any rate.

  A football team arrived in the lobby, shirts and ties and young players carrying kit. I watched them for a moment, then turned back to the monitor.

  Pretty quickly I found details of the acting agency with which Jones was a client. I spent a little longer trying to see if there was any mention on Twitter or some such about where she might be right now, what she might be filming, but made no further progress.

  I went back into the bar and ordered another gin and tonic, my fourth, while I thought of my story. I had to be convincing right off the bat, and it really wasn't the kind of thing with which I was comfortable.

  I called the agency. I set out to not ask much, in fact, to ask very little. To tell, rather than ask. I got someone on reception, didn't ask to speak to anyone else. I gave full details of the independent film I was making, and how Jones would be perfect for it. Not the lead. She hadn't played the lead in anything so far, so I didn't want to sound too outlandish. I talked a lot, as if I was the one giving the information, explaining the story and the concept and the shooting schedule and the funding, all at some length. We would be getting going in early summer, however, and I needed to know that Jones would be available soon.

  There had been nothing on IMDb to say that Jones had been currently filming, but after I had talked for some time, I was informed that she was in Warsaw making a Polish movie, and would be there for another week at least.

  I gave the receptionist three different false phone numbers, and hung up, then I went to the restaurant and sat down for dinner. It was only just after five, but I hadn't eaten much all day, and I'd drunk far too much alcohol for so little food. I drank water, and ate a large steak with a small salad and French fries.

  I didn't seem to have any option. I had no idea where to find the Jigsaw Man. Jones was in Warsaw. I was going to have to go to Poland. Did she speak Polish? Perhaps she did. I really knew very little about her.

  I wondered how closely Agent Crosskill and his partner – who I had decided to refuse to believe would be called Jones – would be following me, and if they would stop me getting on a plane out of the UK. I presumed they wouldn't. They could obviously follow me wherever I went.

  Given that I was working off an agency account, after dinner I went to the reception and asked that they book me on a flight the following day to Warsaw, business class if possible, and that they make a reservation in a hotel in the centre of town for two nights. I didn't ask that they book a return flight, as I knew that I was now finished with Glasgow.

  After that I went back to my room and sat on the bed, waiting for reception to call. Half an hour later she let me know that I was on a BA flight, via Heathrow, leaving at eleven a.m. the following day. I cleaned my teeth and went to bed at just after seven pm, and slept for eleven hours.

  The following morning, I showered, cleaned my teeth again, and headed out for breakfast. I walked to the Stand Alone. I felt that not only was I leaving Glasgow for the last time in this search for the Jigsaw Man, but that perhaps I was leaving for the last time ever.

  I walked down Brown Street, past the old Ministry of Defence building, to the Clyde, then turned left and walked along to where I'd find the Stand Alone, the small building standing alone looking out over the water, impervious to the developments that had gone on around this area in the last twenty years.

  I could tell as I approached that it wasn't open yet, which seemed strange. It had always been open from 6 a.m. in the old days. Times had changed; the Stand Alone had evolved. There were barely any customers in the middle of the morning or afternoon, so why open at 6 a.m.?

  It wasn't until I was only twenty yards or so away that I realised that it wasn't just that the Stand Alone had yet to open that morning. It was closed down. The darkened windows were the same, the faded lettering was just as faded, but one of the windows was broken, and there was graffiti on another. The door was boarded up and triple locked. The windows were taped in places.

  I stood as close as I could get and peered inside. This wasn't a café that had closed in the previous day or two. It had been closed for some time. I peered in to try to see as much as I could, but there was darkness in there, a darkness that more than overcame the meagre, grey daylight of an early spring morning.

  The Stand Alone was shut. Henderson was right. He'd said he'd thought it had closed down, and here was the proof.

  I looked around at the area, which had completely changed since our day. It had all been a bit run down back then, and the Stand Alone had stood out amongst the decay. Now it was the other way round, with new office blocks and apartments built around it, the Stand Alone standing alone in rundown, closed doors melancholy.

  Checked my watch. 0714hrs. I looked up and down the street, but right at this moment there was no one around. I crossed the road and went on to the riverbank, leant against a railing and looked at the water. There was the smell of spring in the air. Today was going to be a good day, a nice day. I hadn't looked at the weather forecast.

  I stood against the railing for nearly half an hour. The river flowed by. There was the occasional boat. Not much river traffic, of course, not in a long while. When I finally turned and looked back at the Stand Alone and the small street lined with new office blocks, there were a few more people around.

  I returned to the front of the café and peered in once again, hoping that the slightly brighter day would afford me a better look inside.

  I looked for the Jigsaw Man's table, and saw the space that I'd seen the other day. And there, high on the wall – and maybe something which I could find only because I knew exactly where to look – was the Sgt. Pepper album cover, with George, John and Ringo crossed through.

  I turned. There was a woman in a grey suit, slightly older than me perhaps, walking up from the river on the other side of the road. I crossed and addressed her at some distance.

  'Excuse me.'

  She slowed, looked up from her mobile, enquired with her eyes.

  'Sorry, there's no reason you should, but d'you know when this place closed its doors?’

  'The Stand Alone?' she said, finally stopping beside me and looking across the road.

  'Yes.'

  'Yes, we used to go in there for lunch. Sometimes met a client over coffee. It's a shame. Closed about three years ago, I think. Maybe four. Been a while.'

  'You ever see the Jigsaw Man?'

  She had been about to walk on, the busy businesswomen, but the name seemed to stop her, although it wasn't through recognition.

  'The Jigsaw Man?' she said, smiling. 'You mean a guy doing jigsaws?'

  I smiled with her. It always did sound kind of stupid.

  'Pretty much. The owner. He used to sit in the far corner...'

  'And do jigsaws?'

  I nodded.

  'Sorry, never saw anyone do that.'

  'Was Janine still there?' I asked. 'The waitress?'

  She paused for a moment and looked back at the café. Something passed across her face, although I wasn't sure what.

  'No, no she... she left I think. Not sure when. She used to be there, but not for a while. I think that was why it closed.'

  I followed her gaze over to the café. It looked back at us, empty and tired, the opposite of the bright welcoming place that the gang and I had had trouble staying away from.

  'You need to find someone?' she asked. She had lost the urgency with which she had been striding towards me.

  'No,' I said. 'You know... I feel sure I was in there... I came here two days ago, as soon as I arrived in Glasgow, and I came here. It was open, kind of rundown, but open.'

  She looked at me without judgement and then back across at the café.

  'You saw this man doing jigsaws?'

  'No,' I said, 'just the gap in the corner where he used to sit. You can see it, a space without a table, if you look in the through the window.'

  She nodded.

  'I remember. I thought it was odd, wondered why they didn't
use the space. But then, they hardly needed to.'

  I glanced at her and then looked back at the café. I'd been going to mention the album cover, but there was no reason. She didn't need to know about that.

  'Maybe you dreamt it,' she said.

  'Maybe.'

  'Funny place,' she said. 'A lot of people didn't know it was there. That was probably why it closed in the end.'

  We stood in silence looking across the road, and then, with nothing more than a small nod, she turned and walked quickly into the building next to us, already looking at her phone before she reached the front door.

  26

  It was a beautiful spring day in Warsaw, mid-afternoon by the time I checked into the hotel. I was staying at the Hyatt, an '80s building next to the gigantic Russian embassy and about a mile walk into the centre of the city. A short walk and across the road from the hotel was Łazienki Park, which the in-flight magazine had said was Warsaw's Hyde Park, containing the Palace on the Water, with a lake and miles of walks through woods, and ice cream and red squirrels and a large Chopin Monument.

  I didn't know what to make of the strange instance of the Stand Alone Café. Perhaps the woman with the phone had been right. Perhaps I had dreamt it, the first night in my hotel. All I could do was to keep going forward until this whole drama had played out. Then, perhaps, life might return to normal.

  Whatever was going on, I had a self-confidence to ask questions and to ask for help that I'd never before felt. Having checked into my room, and decided that I would go out to enjoy the rest of the afternoon walking in the park, I asked at the front desk if they could find out for me the location of the shooting of the motion picture Benevolence. I gave no details on why I might be interested, but I must have looked more like I might be involved in the project, rather than a fan wishing to stalk any of the actors involved, because the desk clerk seemed eager to help.

  The park was beautiful. It did not remind me of Hyde Park, other than that it was a large park in a large city. I stood for a long time by the Palace, looking out over the small lake. There was a boat on the water, taking tourists on a short trip, ending up back where they started. I'd decided to buy coffee rather than ice cream, even though it was a warm afternoon, like a Scottish summer's day. There were women in light summer dresses, children in shorts. Nevertheless, there were also some older locals determinedly wearing thick coats, because it was still April and obviously not supposed to be this warm yet.