by Bateman
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Three.’ I was going to add, but not necessarily on this planet, but did not.
‘It is a terrible thing to lose a brother,’ he said.
He lifted a leather bag from his feet. There were fasteners on the front like a primary-school satchel, which he struggled to open because his hands were shaking. When he got them free he delved inside and produced an object wrapped in an old tea-towel, and from the way he handled it I did not have to guess what it was.
As he unwrapped the defixio he said, ‘This was found outside my home, buried under a pile of autumn leaves. It could only have been there for a couple of days. I know you’ve encountered these before. My brother told me about his, eventually, but I didn’t really take it seriously. Now it’s put the fear of God into me.’
He handed it to me. It had the same O’Dromodery curse, but was cleaner, with little soil or dirt engrained in the letters. Without having the other defixios all in a row, it was impossible to say if they had all been cut from the same piece of lead, but I thought it probable.
‘Was there nothing on your security cameras?’ I asked.
‘How do you know I have cameras?’
‘You are travelling with two carloads of bodyguards. I’m sure you’ve taken other precautions.’
‘Yes, indeed – and yes, we found a fleeting glimpse of someone in a big coat, with their face masked, really nothing identifiable.’
‘Male or female?’
‘I would say from the way they moved, maybe female.’
‘Big coat, or big person?’
‘I would say – not a large person, and moving quickly.’
‘And the date and time on the footage?’
‘Tuesday the nineteenth, and I can’t remember the time off-hand, but it was in the morning.’
‘The early hours?’
‘No. Day-time. Around eleven, I think.’
I nodded, and calculated.
He said, ‘Do you know what this is about?’
‘I’m getting there.’
‘You have to tell me something. My house is crawling with security, but I don’t know if I need security men for the security men, and security men for the security men for the security men. It’s driving me mad. And now I know that psycho is out there, I’m expecting him to jump out of the woodwork any time and stab me the way he stabbed that other poor fella. If you know who is doing this or why, please tell me. I will pay you double whatever my brother was paying you.’
‘Plus VAT,’ I said.
He nodded warily. ‘My brother said you were a cool one. Okay. Not a problem.’
‘It’ll be tomorrow before I have answers. Where’s the funeral?’
‘Roselawn. But we’re keeping it small – family, friends and a few close business acquaintances. Would it help if you came along?’
‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’m barred.’
‘From Roselawn?’
‘Yes. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll see everyone back at the house.’
‘The . . . Who told you we were . . .?’
‘The killers did. Once they found out you were inviting mourners back home, instead of to some hotel or restaurant, that’s when they decided to bury this defixio.’
‘Jesus! I don’t understand any of this! But why, why would they bury this . . . thing?’
‘You know why. Your gathering is the perfect time to strike.’
‘Strike?’
‘Absolutely. At all other times you’ll be surrounded by security, but with a house full of mourners they know that it might be their only opportunity.’
‘I don’t . . . You mean that one of my relatives or friends might try and . . . That’s just not possible. Is it?’
‘’Tis,’ I said.
42
Sean O’Dromodery dropped me off round the corner from No Alibis and quite close to the burned-out wreck of Jeff’s mother’s car. Employing me did not seem to have cheered him up much or reassured him in any way that his troubles were coming to an end. For some reason, I don’t inspire confidence in people, even though my results are testament to my abilities.
I resolved, as I observed the shop from the sanctuary of Starbucks, to work on my motivational skills. I was, after all, a new man. My body was free of legal and illegal medications and potions, and if the voices in my head were not quite gone, then certainly their volume had been dialled down. There was a whole new world out there for me to conquer now that I was largely unencumbered by mental or physical illnesses, and I would do it with charm, panache and a new regard for the sanctity of life and appreciation for the eccentricities of human nature.
When I was satisfied that the shop was not under observation, and Jeff was not being held against his will, but rather playing with his phone, I lifted my Americano and approached my beloved premises. When I opened the door, Jeff grinned at me.
I said, ‘Have we broken the £30 barrier for takings or something?’
‘No,’ he said. He came out from behind the counter, shut the door after me and turned the sign that said Open to Closed. ‘Haven’t sold sod all, but I have solved your little mystery.’
I did not like his condescending tone, or his smug face, and I very much doubted if he had solved anything. He may have stumbled upon something, the way peasants occasionally stumble upon landmines. I turned the sign from Closed to Open, for I have a business to run, and followed him back to the counter.
I said, ‘Has no one been looking for me?’
‘No,’ said Jeff.
‘I’m a fugitive, on the run,’ I said.
‘Apparently not,’ said Jeff. ‘They’re still warning people not to approach The Man in the White Suit, but you don’t get a mention. Incidentally, how is he? Attacked anyone of late?’
‘No, Jeff. It must be something about you.’
I smiled. He smiled. His eye was much better now, but there was bruising around his throat.
Jeff said, ‘Did you hear what happened to my mum’s car?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s not top of my list of—’
‘Someone torched it. Local kids, most likely.’
‘Oh. Well. Sorry to hear that.’
‘Don’t be. Mum is extremely happy.’
‘Happy?’
‘Absolutely, she’s delighted. It’s a complete write-off.’
‘So . . .?’
‘You didn’t notice it was held together with bubble gum? It was condemned by the garage about six months ago, but she just drove on, but now the insurance company’s going to be giving her a nice new one. She’s delighted.’
‘I’m pleased for her,’ I said, ‘but can we get back to crime-fighting?’
He was turning his phone over in his hands, and sticking with the smug look. He said, ‘First, I want an acknowledgement of how important I am to your investigations.’
‘You’re important to my investigations, Jeff.’
‘A sincere acknowledgement.’
‘That was sincere. I can’t help if it sounds sarcastic, it’s the way of me.’
‘Nevertheless.’
‘Jeff, whatever you think you’ve solved, it remains to be seen. I’m not giving out compliments based on nothing much. Prove to me that you’re worthy of sincere acknowledgement.’
‘Then you’ll have the solution, and I’ll have nothing, and you’ll tell me to catch myself on.’
‘Jeff, I give you my word.’
‘Your word is worth nothing. I know you.’
‘Jeff, I’ve changed. You know I’ve changed. I was just thinking on the way here what a grand job you’ve been doing for me, and how it’s great I can depend on you to man the barricades while I’m out on a case.’
‘And also I want a pay rise.’
I managed not to snort. I said, ‘Jeff, Kindle.’ And opened my palms to him. Before he could respond I added, ‘Tescos, iPads, smartphones. The book business is in chassis and our footfall is down thirty-six per cent year on year. For Godsake, Jeff, even James Patter
son is virtually on the breadline! He only wrote thirty-six novels last year! How’s anyone supposed to make a living from that? Never mind Amazon – the bloody Amazon rainforest is recovering because no one’s buying books any more!’
‘Do they even make books out of the rainfo—?’
‘Jeff, my point is, a pay rise just isn’t going to happen. Appreciation, yes. Spondulicks, no. Now, I am on the verge of cracking this case wide open, and yet you seem to care more about your mercenary demands. You haven’t even asked how close I am to solving it.’
‘Well, how close . . .?’
‘Never mind that now. I have work to do, serious work. If you have a contribution to make, please make it now.’
‘But I—’
‘Jeff!’
He sighed. He showed me his phone. ‘The music,’ he said, ‘I know what the music is.’
Jeff had, as instructed, posted the MP3 of Gabriel playing his party piece on the store website and also sent it as an attachment to every one of my Facebook friends, Twitter followers, Christmas Club members and other devotees of crime fiction in Belfast who had come to my attention and whom I had stalked relentlessly. Not one of them had responded.
The fact that I bombard them every other day with offers, inducements and begging letters probably meant that they hadn’t bothered to actually open the e-mail or listen to the music. Jeff, as I suspected, had stumbled upon the answer to the mystery by accident, and it was entirely to do with his short attention span and extreme laziness.
He said, ‘Have you ever heard of the Angry Birds?’
‘You mean, Jeff, The Birds, the 1963 movie by Alfred Hitchcock, based on the short story by Daphne DuMaurier.’
‘No, I mean the Angry Birds – the app: it’s the most popular in the world by far. These birds have to try and rescue their eggs which have been stolen by some hungry green pigs, and there’s all these different levels.’
‘Jeff, relevance?’
‘Okay. Angry Birds. So what happens every time something is hugely successful?’
‘Tescos discount it?’
‘A million and one rival and usually crappier versions of it come out, right? Like when The Da Vinci Code was briefly more popular than The Highway Code and all those rubbish Vatican conspiracy thrillers you always rant about came out?’
‘Yes, Jeff,’ I said.
‘Well, there’s been a whole lot of different Angry Bird-type apps, most of them terrible, but there’s one that manages to send it up and at the same time is actually quite good to play. It’s a Scottish one called Angry Lairds.’
‘Angry . . .?’
‘Lairds. It’s Scottish for—’
‘I know what a Laird is, Jeff.’
‘It’s a Lord,’ Jeff said authoritatively, ‘and ranks below a Baron and above an Esquire.’
‘Yes, Jeff,’ I said. He wasn’t showing an aptitude for investigation, he was showing it for Wikipedia.
‘What I’m saying is, instead of birds you have crofters, and they have their possessions stolen by the Lairds, and the crofters try to get them back.’
‘So why isn’t it called Angry Crofters?’
‘Because it isn’t. That wouldn’t make any sense, and it doesn’t matter – what I’m saying is, I knew I recognised that tune he was playing but I couldn’t quite get it, at least not until this morning, when I was just sitting here trying to do my revision but I couldn’t get my head around it, so I went on to the Angry Birds but got a bit bored with it, and then I remembered about the Angry Lairds and thought I’d give it a go, and . . . listen.’
He pressed the touch screen and loaded the Angry Lairds app and immediately some rudimentary animations of little red-haired men in tartan kilts appeared and then some grander-looking creatures mocking them from ancient castles, but I did not pay any attention to either group because it was all taken up with the very simple, very repetitive plinkity plink of the soundtrack: electronic, with a hideous Casio backbeat – and also very familiar as Gabriel’s theme tune.
If I’d been a more expressive individual, I might have jumped for joy; and, in fact, with my much improved knees, I literally could have done so without worrying about them collapsing under me. But as it was I just grinned at Jeff and said, ‘This is wonderful, Jeff, well done.’
‘Well, thank you,’ Jeff replied, beaming. ‘I’m thinking he’s some kind of games designer, or he works on the soundtracks for games, or maybe he’s just fixated with Angry Lairds. Anyway, just before you came in I looked up the Angry Lairds website and read the credits and it says exactly who composed the music, and his name is Alexander Kh—’
‘. . . orsikov,’ I said.
‘You know him?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘but as soon as you said Alexander, it was exactly the prompt I needed. Alexander Khorsikov. Indeed.’
I drummed my fingers on the counter. The music continued to play. I smiled. Everything was falling nicely into place.
‘Well?’ Jeff asked. ‘Is that who Gabriel is? This Alexander . . .’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Alexander Khorsikov is dead.’
43
It was a long night, although in my world, all nights are long. Regular readers will know that I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since Mary Peters won the Pentathlon Gold at the 1972 Munich Olympics. She was a big country girl with hair like straw and throwing muscles that could make Finn Mac Cool weep. If the West German authorities had sent her in against Black September instead of relying on their own miserable sharpshooters, there might have been a very different outcome. I had thought about it often, since. But not this night. Nor was it one of tossing and turning and plotting and fantasising about matricide, patricide or suicide, it was one of research, locked and shuttered into my store, a night of poring over documents, and maps, and lifting the devil phone and talking to humans who were not much interested in talking to me at four in the morning but who soon changed their tune when I spoke to them of defixios and conspiracies, fraud, and many, many bodies, and bones.
I spoke to a bleary-voiced Dr Winter at the City, who again tried to join the Midnight Gardeners and was again rebuffed; but I used my charm to persuade him to consult Big H, the National Health Service’s master computer, and then when he’d spent hours on that I ordered him round to Nicola’s house to examine Gabriel. I spoke to the Vice Principal of St Mary’s who had accosted us in the graveyard and invited him to the funeral, which confused him greatly, but I assured him that the future reputation of his beloved school depended on him attending, which was a lie, but he fell for it, because I am good. When I could not find them on the web, I persuaded the chief librarian at Belfast City Library to rise from her bed and travel downtown so that she could photograph old maps and documents and e-mail them to me. She was a great supporter of crime fiction, and we often exchanged views on the new trends; she hated the Scandinavians even more than I did. My Russian is not great, but was good enough to exchange e-mails with the Lavrentiy Beria Conservatory in Moscow. They were very relieved to hear from me, and most informative.
As dawn approached I consulted the on-line menus of the Milltown Road Catering Company and discovered what they would be offering to the mourners at the après funeral gathering at the home of Sean O’Dromodery, and found it to my liking, which was unusual, because my allergies normally stopped me from enjoying anything other than gruel or Starbucks, but now I was positively looking forward to a mushroom vol-au-vent. Indeed, in the middle of the night, and almost without thinking, I made myself a Nescafe coffee from the jar Jeff kept in the kitchen because I did not often stretch to buying Starbucks for him, and in drinking it realised that I had broken the Starbucks spell; it did not repel me, and my head did not swell to the size of a pumpkin.
The final thing I did, before slipping out of the back door and boarding the Mystery Machine, was to phone DI Robinson to invite him to the gathering at Sean O’Dromodery’s, but my call went through to his voicemail and I left a message instead.
I drove at a leisurely pace. I always drive at a leisurely pace, but this driving at a leisurely pace was because I was calm, and content. It was a beautiful morning, with a sea mist lingering over the centre of town and birds chirruping in the trees and milk-floats on their way back to base and the Bank of England base lending rate increased by half a per cent which had to be good for small traders. I was going home to my partner and child and Mother, and I had solved the most complex of cases by way of research, observation, intuition and nous. I was on top of my game, and I was abuzz already but not pharmaceutically with adrenaline for the coming day. I would, once again, take centre stage and reveal all. I would have remained in the shop, honing my presentation, but Alison had texted me to hurry home because she wanted to ‘give me one for Ulster’, which, roughly translated, meant that she wanted the sex, and seeing as how it had been an extraordinarily long time, I was happy to oblige. It was also good to notice, as I approached the house, that my erectile dysfunction was a thing of the past, and I could only hope that nobody else noticed, between car door and front door, or I would be arrested.
I bounded up the steps and put the key in the door and stood in the hallway and it felt good to be home. I could smell bacon, and it did not make me ill, but ravenous, and I had to decide whether to give in to the ravening or insist on the ravishing, and the latter won because there would always be pigs, and so I called Alison’s name and she said she was ‘in here’ which meant the kitchen, and I pounded forward quite happy to have her on the table or the hob, but instead I found her leaning against the sink with a mug of tea in her hand, and wearing a dressing-gown stained with milk and spaghetti hoops and smiling at me but fleetingly with it, because there was someone else there who did not often make anyone smile – not Mother, but DI Robinson sitting with his back to me and not even bothering to turn round but nodding and saying, ‘Welcome home,’ and I knew then that he had influenced Alison to send her text and I should have guessed that, she being a lady, she would not have offered to give me one for Ulster or any other small but optimistic province, but I had allowed myself to be carried away by my own extreme state of horniness which had now, thankfully, instantly dissipated because DI Robinson, even naked in a Babygro, does not do it for me, not that he was.