The Book of Extraordinary Amateur Sleuth and Private Eye Stories

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “Steve, I have to go or the bath will overrun.” She ended their conversation with the sad realization that he’d not heard a word, too busy with his own life and strife to care for her silly problems. Taking to the awful bed her grandmother had died on, the absence of her husband’s rumbling soon saw Mary asleep.

  ***

  Until Brian arrived home. Inconsiderately drunk—again. Stumbling and crashing as he made his way up the stairs, turning the house into a light show. He flopped onto the marital bed across the landing from her, a sweaty, inebriated heap, and rattled like a pneumatic drill.

  Only then did Mary open her eyes. Slipping from the bed, she donned her robe and padded downstairs, into the garden. To her favorite place under the willow, the gentle breeze ruffling her mussy hair. Autumn was definitely underway, but if this was what it took to make people hear her, this was what she had to do. Wrapping her gown tight, the water trickling a lullaby sang her to sleep.

  “I don’t believe this. Get up, you old bag. Four nights in a bleeding row. This has gone too far.”

  Mary banged her head on a hefty marrow squash as she sat, disoriented. “I don’t understand.”

  Muttering, Brian was already storming back to the house. He shouted over his shoulder, “I’m ringing Steve. Going to tell him you’ve gone nuts.”

  Apologizing to her brassicas and head to toe in mud, Mary dodged this way and that, trying not to flatten more vegetables than she already had. And from the house Brian watched his wife, her face etched with confusion. His son answered. “Any chance of taking your mother to the hospital? I seriously think she needs to be institutionalized.” Brian briefly described her new take on beds to the son whose stress levels were already at breaking point.

  Mary agreed to visit the hospital willingly, and Steve stayed a full five minutes before zooming back to his hectic life, suggesting that, if by the remotest chance they set her free that day, there was a bus stop by the main door.

  Again, a physical cause for her unusual behavior was ruled out and they asked her to see the mental health team. Waiting. Bored, she dug into the bag that her son had hastily packed for her, finding some mismatched pajamas and a pair of frilly knickers that hadn’t fitted for years. No book or magazine, no puzzles. Mary wasted two hours at the window watching the ambulances come and go, had three cups of coffee, spoke to a fellow patient before she was taken for an operation, and asked endless nurses how long the doctor would be. Finally, she gave up and sat on the chair, closing her eyes, snoozing.

  “Mary?” She jumped, turning to a man in a white coat. “Your son is concerned that you’ve slept in your garden for four nights in a row. Can you tell me why you do this? Are you having problems with your husband? Is he violent?”

  The barrage of questions was not what she’d anticipated, and she faltered. “No. Brian’s a domineering control freak with a crude mouth, but he’s never laid a finger on me. Well, not much, anyway.”

  “Do you feel unsafe in the house?”

  “Not really.”

  “So, you choose to sleep in the garden?”

  “No, I don’t know how I end up there. All I know is that I’m not going mad. It’s the dreams, they make me do it. I feel secure there.”

  She told him about Evie, about how nobody would take her concerns seriously. That she was certain her mother was buried in her place of sanctuary. Her worries that he would commit her drained when he took her hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze. “You’re right, Mary. I’m pretty sure you’re not suffering any form of mental illness.”

  She gaped at him. Still they weren’t listening.

  “My concern is why your husband and son were so quick to rush you here. A bad rash, it seems; they couldn’t get free of you soon enough.”

  She certainly hadn’t foreseen that and intended to milk the attention, filling the following ten minutes with details of the book, of Evie’s disappearance. To summarize, she told him, “I need my mother to have a proper burial.”

  “Forget Evie for now. Do you think it’s possible that sleeping in the garden is subconsciously a way of attracting attention?”

  “I can’t say for certain, but I don’t think so.” Still wary that the psychiatrist might suggest locking her up and throwing away the key, she said quietly, “I’m scared I’m being haunted.”

  He diagnosed on paper that she had too much time and not enough activity to stop her dwelling on an overactive mind, and prescribed sleeping tablets for seven days. “Is there somebody to take you home?”

  Fed up, she lied. “Yes.”

  ***

  The rumbling hippo was in bed by the time Mary arrived home after catching several buses to reach her village. His snoring shook the foundations of the house and she could smell alcohol. Not a single call to the hospital to see how she was, of course. To avoid waking him, Mary kept the lights off and opened the back door, inching carefully across the lawn to the beloved bench. Nobody intended to listen, so she would have to do something herself. It was time to dig.

  She took a shovel.

  Lost in the arduous job, she didn’t hear Brian approach. “I just don’t believe this. You really have lost the plot. Don’t you realize that the neighbors see you out here? That they hear you talking to your pathetic plants? You’re loopier than a sprung coil.”

  It had been a long, hard night, and her mind was fuzzy with exhaustion.

  “Get inside.” Brian tugged her, but this time she was having none of it. “Why didn’t the blasted doctors keep you in?”

  “Why won’t you listen to me about my mother?”

  “For God’s…” The steeliness in her eyes perturbed him and he stammered, “It’s all a coincidence, that book, everything. She’ll be long dead by now, so why does it matter?”

  “My grandmother killed her, of that I’m sure.”

  “You don’t even know she’s dead.”

  “Yes I do. She’s here. I’m digging her up now.”

  “You’re kidding me. This is unreal. Is the NHS so bad nowadays that they can’t spot a lunatic when they see one?”

  “You can’t bully me anymore, Brian. The doctor said I don’t deserve to be treated this way.”

  His face hovered close to hers, eyes challenging and lip curled. “You get everything you want, woman. I pay for your food, the bills, the roof over your head. And you just give me whingeing in return. Ungrateful, selfish cow.”

  “I collect a pension and the house is mine. Now I want you to help me get my mother.”

  He’d had enough. Either he’d beg the men in suits to give her a straitjacket and lead her away, or he’d stop this craziness for good. Grabbing a spade, he dug with vigor at the patch she’d already started, grumbling under his breath with every clump of soil he threw aside. She watched with hidden glee as her plan came to a head, even fetching a bottle of beer to help him on his way.

  Three a.m. The witching hour. Brian’s back ached, but he was pleased with his progress, now a good few feet down. He waved an arm at the hole, issuing a victorious grin. “See, you silly cow, there’s nothing down there.”

  No response. He glanced at the bench, but Mary wasn’t there.

  The loud crack of the spade against his skull took him by surprise and his knees buckled, falling forward into the pit, but he was still conscious when the first clump of soil landed on his head. And the second. Third.

  ***

  Mary had seen the coincidences in Our Evie, but knew from even the remotest of research that the Irish lass was not her mother. All she’d wanted was someone to dig the hole, and figured the police would do it with ease. Shame the ploy hadn’t worked, but the result was the same regardless. Used to grafting in the garden as she was, covering the body hadn’t been troublesome, and when Mary saw the curtains twitching next door, she beamed as brightly as the morning sun, waving.

  The neighbor war
ily stepped outside. “Are you okay, Mary?”

  “Couldn’t be better.” She patted the soil against the sapling she’d been meaning to plant forever and stood, clutching the small of her back.

  “No Brian this morning?” Still suspicious.

  “Nope, I gave him his packing orders, he left last night. The doctor made me see reason.”

  “Oh, I see.” The neighbor was nonplussed. “You realize you’ve planted a tree in your veggie patch?”

  “I’m a bit too old for all this digging and growing grubby produce, thought it was time to slow down.” And with a cheery smile and a skip in her step, she disappeared into the house she’d inherited from her real grandmother. Gertie had bought it after Mrs. Stanley died.

  It was time to sleep, in her own bed this time, and without the thunderous rumbling from a clammy mound of alcoholic coma. Closing her curtains against the promise of a beautiful day, flopping onto the cornflower covers, Mary settled into her new life. Alone.

  Closure

  Russel D McLean

  A J McNee short story

  The man who walks into my office has an uncertain expression on his pinched face. Late forties, thinning hair, dressed in blue jeans and a checked shirt. Heavy boots. Lumberjack chic, you might say. Minus the beard. He’s clean-shaven, with smooth skin that looks like he takes care of it.

  “Mr. McNee?” he says when he sees me.

  I stand, offer my hand. “Everyone just calls me McNee,” I say.

  “Even your friends?” He says it awkwardly, like he’s trying to make a joke.

  I give him a smile, putting him at ease. A practiced smile, of course. Comes as instinct after all these years in the game. “Even them,” I say, neglecting to mention that, after the last few years of my life, my friends are few and far between.

  I offer him a seat. He takes it. Still awkward. When he sits, he takes the weight on his right. Discomfort. Not recent. Something he’s lived with a long time. I noticed when he first walked in that there was a kind of stiffness on his left side, but now it’s obvious.

  “I have to admit, your email intrigued me.”

  He nods. “I guess most of your clients, they walk in here, and they ask you to find someone who’s gone missing.”

  “Not everyone asks me to find themselves. Most people, that kind of thing, they go to a therapist.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “Ten years,” he says. “Ten years, and I don’t know that I can live with the gap anymore.”

  He seems normal. I’ve had people walk in before, claim to be suffering from amnesia. When I ask them what they want to know, they claim to want proof of having been abducted by aliens or other flights of fancy. Not like Scotland is Roswell, New Mexico, but we have our share of believers. In 1996, two men claimed to have been abducted while driving along the A70. In 2016, the Ministry of Defence confirmed that they had taken the claim seriously.

  Clearly, the MOD are more open-minded than me.

  But Lucas Clayton doesn’t strike me as someone given to flights of fancy. His email was direct and clear. In person, he makes easy eye contact. And when he talks about his experience, there’s a sense that he’s aware of how he sounds, that he’s worried about whether I really believe him.

  My gut says I should.

  But I have to go through the procedure. My gut’s been wrong before. “And you don’t have any idea what happened?”

  He shakes his head.

  “I mean…” I try to tread as carefully as I can. “As I understand it, from what you’ve told me, this is like a pure form of retrograde amnesia. There’s a period of your life that is missing completely.”

  “Forty-eight hours.”

  “Forty-eight hours,” I say. “It’s a long period. Especially with no concrete explanation as to what happened.”

  “It’s not that long,” he says. “There are people who’ve had it worse. One lad I met when I was attending group sessions, he lost ten years. Just like that.”

  I try to imagine losing a period of my life, having a gap in my memories. Maybe it’s like sleeping through something, but even when you’re asleep, you’re aware of that fact. To simply blink and be somewhere else… To know that time has passed, but not know what you did… the idea seems fantastical. Dizzying.

  “In cases like this,” I say, “I need to understand what you want. I mean, you want me to trace where you could have been, what you could have done?”

  He nods. “After I lost my memory, I also stopped dreaming. Completely. I mean, dreams are vague things at the best of times, but this isn’t that I didn’t remember dreams: there was an absence. A gap.”

  “Like your memories?”

  “The same,” he says. “It’s disorienting when you think about it, when you try and find something that just isn’t there. There were times I tried so hard to remember that I actually vomited.”

  “And now you’re dreaming again?” Not exactly the most difficult conclusion to draw.

  He smiles. “You sound like my psychiatrist.”

  Maybe I do. After Elaine died, I attended mandatory counselling. For a while, at least. I was a police officer back then, and after she was killed in the hit-and-run, the force encouraged me to seek help. I know now it wasn’t simple compassion, so much as the fact that I was losing control; it was affecting my work.

  Looking back, I now know how much the doctor was trying to help me. Some days, I think I might empathize with him more now than I ever did back then. Working as an investigator, if you do private cases as opposed to corporate work, a lot of the jobs you get are deeply personal to your clients. And a lot of the time what you have to do is read between the lines of what they tell you.

  After a moment, Lucas takes a breath and talks. There’s something a little prepared about what he says, and I realize he’s been thinking a lot about how to explain this to someone. I can imagine him, the night before our appointment, rehearsing how he’s going to be, what he’s going to say. Trying to second-guess what I might find useful, or what might persuade me to take on his case.

  ***

  “I worked for a cash-and-carry business,” he tells me. “What we did, we supplied bars, corner shops, restaurants. Food, drink, whatever. I was a rep, travelled the country making sure customers were happy.”

  “Scotland, or down south, too?”

  “Used to be Scotland only. Then, you know how it is, there were cutbacks, doing less with more. Which translated to work harder, or have your arse handed to you.” He takes a breath. He’s looking red round the cheeks and there’s a slight sheen of sweat on his forehead. It’s spring, and there’s no heating in the office. Shouldn’t be too hot for him. Something else happening, and I don’t know that he’s even aware. “The doctors, they wondered if that was part of what happened. There’d been layoffs through the company. I’d been there for twenty years, right out of school.”

  “Unusual,” I said, “the whole job-for-life idea, even back then.”

  “Oh, aye,” he says. “Always telling my wife how lucky I was.” That makes him stop. I know what he’s going to say next, but I let him do it anyway. “Ex-wife, pardon me.”

  “Before or after the blackout?”

  “After.”

  I nod. File the information away. Know from my own experience that trauma can sometimes affect people badly, make them push away the ones they love.

  Memories push up. I push them back down, listen to my client. His story. His problems.

  “The last thing I remember before… well, before… I was coming out of the Kirkcaldy depot, having just heard about another round of layoffs due. I felt sick. Had a headache. My own job was in danger. It was like the nightmares I’d been having for years had bled over into the real world.”

  “How bad?”

  “The headache? Little floating circles at the edge of my vision. A constan
t crack of sharpness across the left side of my skull.”

  “Like a migraine?”

  “I guess. Other people have said that. Never had it before or since, so I have no idea, really.”

  He shifts in the seat. Again that discomfort on his left side.

  “The injury,” I say. “Recent?”

  “Had it back then,” he says. “Part of why I’m here. They think I got it during the time that vanished.”

  He chooses his words carefully. Anyone else might have casually used the word “blackout,” but since he doesn’t, I guess he knows the connotations behind the word. The link to drinking issues. He doesn’t strike me as a twelve-stepper, though. Just someone who might have considered whether he had a drinking problem.

  “After leaving the depot, next thing I’m aware of is that I’m in hospital. They found me in my car in the driveway of my home. Passed out, head on the steering wheel, honking that horn away. The time from walking out the door, seeing those dots, through to waking up in the hospital… that was all gone, all blank. But I must have at least travelled home during that time.”

  “Who found you?”

  “My wife.”

  “Did you have children?”

  “No. Just me and her. We were thinking about kids.”

  “Did she know about your issues at work?”

  Now he’s getting uncomfortable. More shifting. “I didn’t tell her. Not until later. When they were trying to work out what happened, when they suggested it could be related to stress.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “No.”

  “What else did they suggest?”

  “Drinking. I’d been drinking more than usual.”

  “You were drinking that day?”

  “They said I had been, yes. My blood alcohol content was high.”

  He’s being open and honest. Only shifting when he has to admit something he now regrets. But that’s reluctance, not avoidance.

  “But you don’t remember?”

  “No. I mean, I got home from the depot, so there’s that period of time… The front of the car was damaged. I mean, nothing serious, but…”