'Okay, keep your hair on. Go on, Jeff, before you were so rudely
'She wasn't rude, she means well; she's really quite lovely, aren't you?'
'Yes, Jeff . . . you were saying . . . ?'
'Oh yeah, the fight . . .'
'What fight?' I asked.
'Between him and him. The longy tally fella and the newy fella ... I wasn't close enough to hear . . . but they were arguing . . . and then there was ... it . . . you know ... it . . . and I knew I had to get out of there
'It, Jeff?' I said.
'Yes, exactly, a gunshot ... so I went back to the van and waited there . . . and after a bit I saw lights coming towards me, so I keep my head down and a car drives past . . . but I don't see who it is . . . and then everything's dead quiet, and kind of spooky, and so I light up my gear just to chill a bit, you know, and then when I'm chilled enough I wander back over here, and sit by the fire, and have another one, and think about things, you know, and how pointless it all is and how we should all just love each other, you know? I might have had an E as well.'
He began to look around his feet, thinking that he'd dropped his spliff. Alison prodded him and said, 'Jeff . . . if someone was shot . . . and someone drove off . . . was there not a body?'
'What . . . ?'
'Was there no body when you got back here?'
'Oh, body, yeah . . . there's one kind of over there a bit . . .' He waved his hand somewhere behind him.
'Jeff! Who is it?'
'Did I drop . . . ?'
He was, as they say, away with the fairies. And as far as I was concerned, they could keep him.
Alison flicked the flashlight back on. I pointed down. There were drag marks through the moss and twigs, leading up a short rise, and then down the other side. At the bottom, someone, the killer, had made a half- arsed attempt to cover up the body with fallen pine branches, but even without the torchlight, the size and shape of his ad hoc burial mound would have made it stand out from its surroundings.
Alison said, 'We should leave it to Forensics.'
'Yep, or we'll be contaminating a crime scene.'
'Poor Bunny,' said Alison. 'Don't you start. Anyway, it might not be him.' 'Who is it then, Pearl in man drag?' 'Stranger things.'
'It's Buddy all right; look at the length of him.' 'Lived by the gun, died by the gun.' 'If he has a phone on him, it may contain vital evidence. Who set him up. Who the killer was.' 'All sorts of shit,' agreed Alison. 'And meanwhile the killer is getting away.' 'Time is of the essence.' 'So we'd be within our rights.' 'And we'll only contaminate it a little tiny bit.' We were in agreement. We looked down at the branches.
Alison said, 'So?'
I looked at her. 'With these allergies?' She sighed. She crouched down and began to remove the covering. In a few moments there was only one branch remaining, the one obscuring his face.
'Well, are you ready for your big reveal?' Alison asked.
'Just do it,' I said. She did it.
We gazed at his still, pale face.
And then Alison said, 'Who the fuck's that?'
'Rolo,' I said.
* * *
Chapter 34
Alison led, and sped, and I brought up the very distant rear. I had to cope with the oncoming lights and an inability to go above thirty. Jeff lay snoring in the back of the van, only emerging from his dope sleep on particularly sharp bends for long enough to tell me how much he loved me. We had decided to get out of Tollymore fast and thus reduce the risk of being framed, blamed, seized or ambushed. We agreed to leave the metaphorical post-mortem until we got back to my place.
By the time I arrived, Alison had been pacing about in front of the house for some considerable time. Obviously I have not given her a key, but the front door was already open and there were lights on within.
I joined her. 'Did you . . . ?'
'No! I've learned my lesson. This one you can do by yourself.'
Jeff clambered out of the back of the van and stumbled across to us. He put his head on my shoulder and went back to sleep. I moved to one side and let him slump to the footpath.
The door did not look as if it had been forced. Equally, nobody else has access to the nineteen keys required to gain entrance. The lights were on upstairs and downstairs, something I would never be guilty of.
‘If it's a trap,' I said, 'they, he or she wouldn't have left the door open. Or maybe that's what they, he or she want us to think.'
'A double bluff.'
'No, just a bluff.'
Alison nodded. 'You're right. We use double bluff too easily. It's just a bluff. But we can argue semantics all night; they don't get us in there to find out.'
'They're not semantics,' I said.
There was, of course, an obvious solution, and it was so apparent that we didn't even have to say it; we only had to look at each other and nod.
We hauled Jeff to his feet.
'Jeff, honey,' said Alison, 'go on in and have a wee lie-down.'
He mumbled, 'Okay ... okay ... thank you . . . just a wee ...' and made his way groggily up the steps and through the open door.
He disappeared from view. No shot rang out. There were no obvious sounds of a struggle, though a squirrel with a peashooter could have felled him without much of a problem.
'What now?' Alison asked. 'Could still be a bluff. They, she or he might be holding him down, covering his mouth, or they, she or he could have just slit his throat.'
'We could call Robinson.'
'It might be Robinson.'
'Could be Buddy'
'Maybe Buddy wasn't the problem; maybe your mate Rolo was the problem, and they decided to kill two birds with one stone. Burn Arabella and shoot Rolo.'
'Then why not bury them both? Or burn them both?'
'I don't know.'
'There's something we're not getting.'
'There's a lot we're not getting.'
'Maybe the answer's waiting in there.'
'Maybe it is.'
We both stared at the house.
Alison said, 'I'm not going in, I'm pregnant.'
'It's not a disability, you know. You lot spend long enough whining for equality, but when it's presented to you on a plate, you complain about the plate.'
'You're such a coward.'
'It's my heart.'
'Your heart will still be beating long after I'm gone.'
'That would be the pacemaker.'
But then there was a blood-curdling scream.
And all the more blood-curdling for being from a familiar source.
'GET OUT OF MY BED, YOU FUCKING RAPIST!'
Mother was home.
She said she'd escaped from the Sunny D, but I thought it was altogether more likely that they had dumped her back whence she came. Her clothes were in bin bags in the hall beside her wheelchair. She had dragged herself up three flights of stairs to climb into her bed, she claimed, though I thought it more likely that she had walked up quite normally, as I knew she was capable of it. Judging from the ash and butts, she had stopped on each of the landings for a cigarette. Beside her bed was a half-drunk bottle of sherry, and on the floor, out cold, was Jeff.
'I didn't push him,' she said unconvincingly. 'He fell. Is he another one of your sex partners?'
'Mother, I don't have any .. .'
'And what sort of a state have you left my house in? Everything's everywhere. It's disgusting.'
Mother knew all about disgusting, but this time she was wrong. 'Mother, you know I have ASD; everything is the opposite of everywhere.'
'That's you all over, always contrary. Look at the state of you: dirty stains everywhere, tramping them into my lovely house .. .'
She had a point. I'd wiped my hands on my trousers out in the forest but not noticed in the dark the mess I was making. The gunk had dried into a waxy substance that I could have scraped off with my fingernail, if I'd had any. I would have to burn the trousers. They were infected now.
'Mother, how did you even get into the h
ouse?'
'With keys, how the hell do you think?'
'But where did you get them from?'
'What do you mean? I have my own keys.'
'Mother, I took them off you, and I changed the locks.'
'Well I borrowed yours and had copies made, didn't I, you dozy kipper? What sort of a son takes the keys to her own house off his own mother, and then changes the locks? I ought to throw you out, and then where would you go, you little shit? Move in with that scrubber?'
'That would be me?' Alison asked from the door.
Mother had never, to the best of my knowledge, been taken by surprise in her whole life before, but this was the second occasion in a matter of minutes. She hardly blinked.
'When are you going to stop abusing my son and marry him?' she snapped out.
'Soon as he asks,' she snapped back.
Alison and I sat at the kitchen table, sipping Slim a Soup. Mother was in a sherry-induced coma and Jeff was in between precarious columns of books in one of the spare rooms throwing up into a plastic basin.
'This is exactly why no really good fictional detective ever has a family,' I said, although I knew that wasn't strictly true. I could get away with saying it because Alison wasn't and never would be as well read as I was, but it was my way of saying that we were never going to get married.
'Your mother is like a salmon, swimming upriver, determined to get home to spawn, no matter what.'
'Devil spawn,' I said.
'But she made a fair point. I would hate to bring shame on the family.'
She smiled, and hugged her mug.
I hugged mine and said, 'Let's talk about the case.'
She said, 'You can't keep sweeping it under the carpet.'
I said, 'There's two bodies out in the woods and a killer at large. Let's focus.'
'Whatever.' She sighed. 'Okay. Do we go to Robinson?'
'He's useless.'
'What if Buddy's at the airport, fleeing the country?'
'We don't want the monkey, we want the organ- grinder.'
'We want both. Robinson could stop him, Buddy could spill the beans on Dr Yes, case closed.'
'Buddy is a contract killer; he's professional, he's cool, he's not going to spill any beans. He won't be at the airport. Or at least not at George Best or the International. He'll be at a small airstrip somewhere, or across the border. He's no mug. And we have these . . .'
I took out the mobile phone and wallet we'd recovered from Rolo's jacket. Two calls had come in from
Pearl since we'd taken possession of the phone; his ringtone was the theme from Captain Pugwash. She had left two messages, each asking Rolo to call, the second shorter and more urgent than the first. A check of the call history showed that Pearl and Rolo were the only ones using the phone, which suggested that it had been purchased purely for that purpose. The wallet contained two twenty-pound notes, and nothing else. A phone that could be thrown away, and a wallet without identification. Rolo probably wasn't his real name.
'Dr Yes is no mug,' I said. 'Everything comes through Pearl, and in the end he'll sacrifice her as well. For the moment we don't know for sure who was being set up in Tollymore.'
'If Buddy is as cool and professional as you say, he wouldn't have fled the way he did, leaving Rolo half buried and the fire still going. He would have tidied up. But he was taken by surprise, he was betrayed. So what would you do in that case?'
'Me?'
'No, I know what you would do: you would hide under the quilt. Buddy, what would he do, what would he really do, bearing in mind what he does for a living?'
'He'd be angry, so angry that he's gotten sloppy with the murder scene.'
'And if he's angry, he's not going to go gently into the night, is he?'
'You're right. He'll be looking for whoever set him up.'
'Pearl.'
We looked at each other. I was noticing how cool and calculating Alison's eyes were.
'Maybe we'll be doing the world a favour if we let him sort her out/ she said. 'She's rotten to the core.'
'Just sit back and let her be murdered?'
'One less bad guy to worry about.'
'You wouldn't really, would you? Just because you don't like her.'
'That has nothing to do with it.'
Her gaze did not waver. Mine did, obviously, but only because of my dysfunctional tear ducts.
'No, Alison.'
She drummed her fingers on the table. Then she pushed Rolo's pay-as-you-go phone across to me. 'Maybe we should establish if she's still alive?'
I picked up the phone. 'And if she answers?'
'Do what your heart tells you.'
'That's ...'
'I'm only winding you up. Call her. Do what you think is best.'
'There you go again!'
'I mean it! Do the right thing for the case, Sherlock.'
'With no comeback?'
'We'll see.'
I sighed. She winked. I shook my head. I dialled. It was answered on the third ring.
'Rolo! Where the . . . ?'
'Rolo's dead.'
'What? Who . . . ?' 'It's me.'
There was a few seconds of silence. And then: 'How did you get his phone?'
'It's a long story, Pearl, you wouldn't believe it . . .'
'Tell me.'
'I can't . . . there's no way of knowing who's listening . . .'
'You think someone is?'
'I don't know! This is way out of my league! I don't know what's going on exactly, and I'm not sure I want to know, but there are dangerous people out there and I don't think you know what you're involved in . . . I think I was right all along, Pearl, it's Dr Yeschenkov, I think he's a killer, he's using a hit man called Buddy Wailer . ..'
'Buddy!'
'Yes!'
'But that's impossible, Buddy's ...'
'I have the evidence, Pearl. Come and see for yourself. We need to talk this through. I said we were partners, and we are. I trust you, and we can work this out together, but you have to tell me the truth.'
'Yes. Of course. You're right. I've been sucked in to this and I don't know how to get out. You're a good man, Mr No Alibis, I do trust you. I have to see you. Will I come now?'
'No, it's not safe. They're watching. Tomorrow, come to the shop tomorrow, tomorrow at noon. I'm having a little get-together, book stuff, but we can talk after, find somewhere private, yeah? Will you trust me on this?'
'Of course I will. And thank you. I had no idea . ..'
'Just come.'
'Slick,' said Alison. 'But I don't follow. What gathering? Why bring her to the shop?'
'Because it's that time again.'
'That time?' She studied me. 'Oh. That time. The time when all the cogs begin to turn and you sit up all night until the solution comes spewing out of you. Does that mean you have an inkling already, and if you do, is it roughly in line with what we've been thinking?'
'Yes and no.'
'Is that all I'm getting?'
'Things will be clearer in the morning.'
'And if they're not?'
'They will be. Trust me.'
'I do trust you. But not with Pearl. Not going somewhere private with her. Wherever she goes, I go too.'
'That's fine, absolutely. I'm not the slightest bit interested in her.'
'Man dear, that doesn't matter. If she wanted, she could have you for breakfast and you wouldn't have any choice in the matter.'
'I don't think so.'
'She walks through a room, men stand to attention. And I don't mean they stand to attention.'
'Not me.'
'Yes you.'
'I have erectile dysfunction.'
Alison patted her tummy. 'I think otherwise.'
'I'm not convinced it was me.'
She put her hands on her hips and sighed. 'Well, when he comes out looking like a twerp, we'll know for sure.'
'You're sure it's a he?'
'No, I'm sure it's a twerp.'
'You're funny.
'
She came to me and kissed me. Then she whispered in my ear, 'So's your face.'
* * *
Chapter 35
Alison was still coming up with questions as I ushered her out of the house. I told her to go home and get some rest; she was eating for two, she might as well sleep for two as well. That didn't go down well. She called me names and I called her them back. When she saw that I was serious about being left alone, she offered to make sandwiches and bring them in the middle of the night. I declined. She offered roast beef. I declined. She offered cottage pie. I declined. She offered chicken casserole. I declined. Obviously she could have continued until the end of time. Finally I just shoved her out of the door and told her to leave me alone. Two minutes later she banged on the front window and bellowed: 'Spaghetti bolognese?'
I pulled the blinds, I bolted the door. The house was quiet. Mother and Jeff were both asleep. I looked at my watch. It was ten p.m. I got a can of Coke from the fridge and a bag of Opal Fruits from the cupboard. I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop in front of me, Rolo's mobile phone, a notebook and pen. I opened the can and the bag. I emptied the sweets on to the table and threw the blackcurrant ones behind me. Then I sorted the greens, oranges and reds into three lines; they would be eaten in that order, at timed intervals, through the night.
At last I was ready to begin. You will know that I have a great facility for remembering figures. I had solved the Case of the Musical Jew by accurately remembering the numbers tattooed on the arms of two old people even though I had only observed them for a couple of seconds. Similarly, I now recalled the phone number that Buddy Wailer had texted from when responding to Liam Benson's request to meet on the towpath, which DI Robinson had very briefly shown me to me on Liam's mobile phone. I also knew his home number, following our visit to his house, but I thought it much more likely that he would be on the move.
I called him. I was not afraid. An hour ago I might have been.
I don't know if Rolo's name flashed up on his phone or even if he knew Rolo was the name of the man he had killed, but even his one word answer: 'Yes?' sounded strained.
I said, 'Buddy?'
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