“What?” said Noleen. “You’re Mexican.”
“Mexico was in North America last time I looked and, no matter what Lexy thought when she first met me, this—”
“Not again!” I said.
“—this is not a tan.”
“I wish you would stop dredging that up,” I said. “I said I was sorry. I am sorry. So maybe this could be my last punishment? I’ve proved myself too assimilated to swallow this lot.”
“’Kay,” Todd said.
“And now you’ve had your fun,” I said, “can we go? Della shouldn’t be stuck in the office for two hours after a double shift just so you can mess with me.”
Kathi had climbed the little hill while I was talking. Standing on top with her headlamp shining down she looked vaguely First Encounter-ish.
“Wrong again, Lexy,” she called back. “We’re not wasting your time and we can’t go till the cops secure the scene. There’s a cutty sark here, unless I’m seeing things.”
Todd gasped and surged forward. I gasped and surged forward. Noleen came trotting after us. “A what?” she said. “A cut what?”
“A mini dress,” said Kathi. That’s not usually how it’s translated from Burns’s eighteenth-century Scots, but that’s what it means. I clambered up the mound and took hold of Kathi’s arm for balance. The beam of her headlamp shone down on where the gossamer light little shirt lay carefully draped over the stinkweed, so that it floated like ground mist on a winter’s morning.
Todd reached out towards it, but I laid a hand on his arm.
“Best not,” I said. “Look. Kathi, can you shine your light on the collar there?”
Kathi bent over to train the beam more directly and we all got a better look at what I was sure I had seen. There was a dark red mark on the back of the neckline, seeping a little way into the white linen and turning it rusty.
“Some girl’s been hurt here, hasn’t she?” Noleen’s voice was shaking with suppressed emotion. “Some sick fuck’s done something bad, hasn’t he?”
I didn’t always agree with Noleen about the rights and wrongs of this world. I didn’t believe that all women were gentle angels and all men were monstrous devils. Well, neither did she, really. She knew it was muddier than that. And we’d both agreed it was sick that someone killed a man and stapled a novelty wig to his dead head. This little smear of blood didn’t strike me as in that league, not nearly.
But there was something about it. The way it floated there, six inches above the ground. And the way it had been placed there and left there, as if it was waiting for us to find it. Above us the sky was full dark now, ink black, the stars piercing and cold, but the cutty sark only seemed to grow more luminous as night fell and thickened. Even when Kathi switched off her headlamp, it still glowed as it lay there.
Six
Mike wasn’t on duty. There was an upside. The guy who came out to look at the cutty sark and listen to us tying it to the horse tail and the corpse in the slough wasn’t already sick of Todd, Kathi, Noleen, and me giving him the run-around from earlier in the year.
But there was a downside. The guy who stood there in the wreckage of the Armour farmstead and listened to us tying a discarded mini dress on the southwest edge of town tonight to an assault on a horse over on the east side last night and a guy who’d been shot who knows where days on end ago didn’t know we’d helped to catch a killer earlier in the year, kinda.
“A poem,” he said, snapping on a pair of those blue latex gloves. He would have been played by Kevin Costner in the movie version, sparkling white shirt, crew-cut, moisturiser emergency.
“A famous—Yeah, a poem,” I said.
“And some girl gets attacked in this poem?”
“No,” I said. “The woman is a witch who chases the drunk.”
“So because a witch in a poem chases a drunk, you think a shirt in a field is evidence of an assault,” he said, bending to lift the flimsy garment up between finger and thumb. “This is why you dragged me out here?”
“There’s blood on it,” I pointed out.
“It was Halloween last night,” the detective said. “There’s fake blood on costumes dumped all over town.”
“Fake?” I said.
“Probably not even the good stuff,” said the detective. He stripped off one of his gloves and scratched at the bloodstain with a thumbnail, sending flakes of it spiraling to the ground. Kevin Costner wouldn’t have taken his glove off and contaminated evidence like that. Not unless he was in on it and trying to tank the prosecution’s case before it got started. “Dollar store, I reckon.”
“Hmph,” I said.
“But the wig was fake too,” said Todd. “And yet the guy was really dead. Just because the blood is fake doesn’t mean the girl this dress belongs to wasn’t in real trouble when she lost it.”
“I suppose the case is still open?” said Noleen. “The dead guy?”
The detective said nothing, but he said it so grumpily we got our answer anyway.
“Where’s the dress from? “ I said, thinking if it was handstitched by a local tailor, or if it was a genuine eighteenth-century linen slip from an antiques shop, or even if it had come from one of the pricey little boutiques in downtown Cuento, someone might remember who’d bought it.
“Where’s it from?” said the detective. “What, in case it’s from some frou-frou little boutique and the owner remembers who bought it?” Kevin Costner would never have spoken to a crucial witness that way. He squinted inside the neck. “Evangeline’s Costume Mansion,” he said. “Like I said. Halloween.”
“Look,” I said, taking a step towards him.
Todd laid a hand on my arm. “Sorry to trouble you, Officer,” he said. “We were spooked. We’re not trained to assess threat. We panicked.”
I thought he was laying the grovelling on a bit thick, but Kevin-Costner-cast-against-his-wholesome-type-as-a-total-plonker just gave a gruff sort of nod and turned back to his car, the cutty sark still dangling from one hand.
“We can throw that in the trash for you,” Todd said.
“Be my guest,” Kevin-Costner-wouldn’t-touch-this-role-if-Fellini-came-back said and let the garment drop to the ground as he strode away. We waited until he had disappeared in a puff of dust from under his back wheels and then Kathi switched her light back on and we all gathered round the little pile of white linen.
“Mike’s gonna have his ass on a cracker when she hears about this,” Noleen said.
“How can anyone be so dumb?” I said. “Of course it’s a Halloween costume. The whole thing hinges on Halloween.”
“Yeah, what a twat,” Todd said.
“Don’t say twat,” I told him. “You sound like an arse. Has anyone got a baggie?”
“Don’t say baggie,” Todd told me. “You sound like a douche.”
“But has anyone got one?” I insisted.
Noleen patted her pockets. It took a while. She had breast pockets on her shirt; front, back, and leg pockets on her cargo shorts; and seven compartments in her bum bag. “Nope,” she said. “Kathi?”
Kathi tried to look innocent then shrugged and took a pair of blue latex gloves out of her jeans pocket and snapped on one, just like a real detective. “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “They’re for pressing the buttons on crosswalks and opening bathroom doors. It’s common sense.”
It wasn’t common sense, in my professional opinion. In my professional opinion, it was out of control. But it would be rude to nag her while we benefitted from it. When she took out a folded pad of clingfilm, though, and used it to parcel up the shift, I had to say something.
“For … toilet seats?” I said.
“Have we met?” said Kathi. “I would have to touch a toilet seat to Saran Wrap it.”
“So … ?”
“Touchscreens,” she said. “You never know.”
; “I never know what?” I said. “I never know if I’ll need to touch a screen with a finger I could then wash by entering a bathroom, whose door I opened with a glove on?”
“I don’t open the door through a glove on the way in!” said Kathi. “The outside of my glove would get contaminated. I wear the glove on the way out. When my hands are clean.”
“At least you use public loos,” I said. “I’ve heard of some poor souls giving themselves kidney infections refusing to pee.”
“I’m prepared for emergencies,” Kathi said. “But I haven’t used a public bathroom since 1997, and that was on an international flight. Now stop badgering me and let me wrap this thing up before it turns to compost.”
“You know what troubles me,” said Todd. Noleen wasn’t willing to switch on the no vacancies sign when there was that one tantalising room still free, but she didn’t want to miss out on the summit meeting either. So instead of lounging in comfort on my porch or in even greater comfort in Todd and Roger’s room, where Todd had ditched the standard-issue motel furniture in favour of goose down and moleskin, we were crammed into the front office. Noleen was behind the duct-taped counter in her Barcalounger; Todd, Kathi, and Roger, just off his shift and still in his scrubs, were in front of the counter sitting on three of the four excruciatingly uncomfortable wrought-iron breakfast chairs. I was perched on the counter itself because it was nice and high and I found it weird to have a conversation with people I couldn’t see.
Kathi had shaken out the cutty sark to show Roger and he’d taken a long close look at it.
“Before you folded this to wrap it, did it have signs of being worn?” he said. “Creases at the elbow? Anything?”
“What troubles me,” said Todd, “is that the blood is fake—according to a detective, who should know—and the wig was fake, but the horse really had its tailed chopped off. Doesn’t that trouble anyone else?”
“No,” I said. “The bullet was real enough.”
“Yes, but the bullet was necessary,” said Todd. “You can’t kill a guy with a fake bullet.”
“Ohhhhh!” said Noleen. “I see.”
“I don’t,” I said. I stared down to one side at Noleen in her lounger and then down to the other side at the three of them on their lumpy bistro chairs.
“The blood wasn’t needed,” Todd said. He was scrolling on his phone. “The witch in the micro-mini doesn’t bleed, does she?”
“Someone bleeds,” Kathi said. She was scrolling too. “Translate this part, Lexy,”
I took the phone from her hands. “‘A murderer’s bones in gibbet irons … a thief cut down from his hanging rope …’ Here we go: ‘five tomahawks with blood red-rusted, five scimitars with murder crusted.’”
“Tomahawks?” said Noleen.
“Yadda yadda yadda,” I said, scanning forward. “‘A knife a father’s throat had mangled … grey hairs still stuck to the shaft.’”
“Yucko,” said Todd. “But stuck with blood probably, wouldn’t you say?”
“What is this that’s going on in this poem?” said Roger.
“The devil’s playing the bagpipes in a cemetery and all the coffins have opened up like cupboards to show who’s inside them,” I said.
“Doesn’t anyone just die of old age in Scotland?” Roger said. “Sounds worse than Stockton.”
“It’s only a story,” I said. “But you’re right, Todd. The dancing witch doesn’t bleed. That’s significant. I suppose that dumbo detective is right, is he? It’s really not blood. Because if it is, it’s from a throat wound.”
“One of the five tomahawks?” said Noleen. “Why would there be a tomahawk in a Scottish coffin?”
“Or a scimitar?” said Kathi.
“I don’t know if it’s fake,” Roger said. “But no one’s ever worn this costume.”
“Did you just sniff the armpits?” Kathi said. “You … You … Lexy, what’s that expression?”
“Clarty besom?” I said.
“You clarty besom!” Kathi said.
“So someone bought this from Evangeline’s Costume Mansion,” Roger went on, “put fake blood on the neck, and left it at a fake burial ground.”
“But cut a horse’s tail off for real,” Todd said. “Which, like I said, is still bothering me.”
“The ring’s bothering me,” I said. A look passed around the three of them on the public side of the counter. “What?” I whipped my head round to look at Noleen. She gave me a sheepish smile. “What?” I asked her.
“Todd’s had an idea,” she said.
“Oh?”
“You’re not going to like it.”
“Try me.”
“I think you should draw the ring and then we can take the drawing to Mike,” Todd said.
“Why wouldn’t I like that idea? It makes sense. I should have done it already.”
“Well,” Todd said, “you suck at drawing and your recall is a testament to the amount of hard drinking you did in college.”
“None taken,” I said.
“So I want to hypnotise you.”
“No way, José.”
“Racist.”
“Bullshit.”
“Bully.”
“Todd, you are not hypnotising me.”
He was just about managing to keep a straight face, but Roger was nose laughing and Kathi and Noleen were openly tittering.
“Why?” said Todd. “Don’t you think it’ll work?”
“Sod off.”
“Racist.”
“How is sod off racist?”
“It’s anti-Irish. It’s telling Irish peasants to leave the land of their fathers.”
“Bollocks it is. It’s short for sodomise. It means go away and bugger yourself up the arse.” Which didn’t put me on the strongest moral ground, I suppose. And I didn’t have strong grounds for refusing to be hypnotised either, only just that when we had gone out to a stage hypnotist on Todd’s birthday, they had all enjoyed the show and I had come away with a black hole in my memory. But Kathi filmed it. I could have got to the end of my life quite happily without seeing myself as Rocky Balboa, wearing nerf boxing gloves and sparring to the knockout with a piñata, shouting “Yo, Adrian!” and “Cut me, Mick!” in my very own Dundee accent.
“I’ll draw it without any hypnosis, thank you very much,” I said. “Nolly, fling me up a pen.” I turned over a flyer that was lying on the counter, trying to pretend I hadn’t read the front of it—Trinity solutions: turning your life around is as easy as one, two three—clicked up the pen nib, and drew.
I drew a lump, with some swirls, and a squiggle.
Then I gave it a long hard look.
“Okay,” I said, “hypnotise me.”
“When Noleen locks up for the night,” Todd said. “Over at your place.”
“Why does Noleen have to be there?” I said. “No offence, Nolly, but it’s not a spectator sport. Why are you giggling? Todd, if you want to be part of a therapeutic trio, you’ve got to aspire to higher ethical standards than making me eat raw onions and filming it on your phone.”
“Deal,” said Todd.
“Wait,” I said. “What deal?”
“If I stick to helping you sketch one ring tonight, Kathi and I will finally be accepted as full participants in our company.”
“I didn’t—” I began.
“Everyone heard you,” said Kathi.
“Roger?” I said, turning to the usual source of all sanity in the face of Todd’s whackadoodalitis.
“Tag, you’re it,” he said. “You shouldn’t have spent so long telling me how I could manage him with just a little effort.”
“You did?” said Todd. “Well, don’t mind me, I’m sure.”
“Time to put your money where your mouth is,” Roger said.
“And how does Kathi get gr
andfathered in on a full ride?” I said.
“You have no idea what either of those two expressions mean, do you?” Kathi said.
“We need the Trinity income,” Noleen said. “We’ve got two rooms permanently sidelined in quite a small motel to start with.” She gave me a hard look. Stony hard, that is. Not hard to interpret. I knew Noleen wanted me to therapy away Kathi’s germaphobia so that they could move back into the Last Ditch owners’ quarters. At the moment—a moment that had lasted two years and counting—Kathi cleaned the empty owner’s flat and they slept in one of the renting rooms, with another renting room held in antiseptic readiness in case the first one somehow got unexpectedly dirty. We had never said it out loud, but I knew the only reason Noleen put up with a houseboat moored off her property and a succession of mentally fragile clients battering their way through her oleanders to counselling appointments all day every day was because I was supposed to be curing Kathi.
Hypnosis is lovely, if I’m honest. I sat back in my comfiest chair, with Kathi, Noleen, and Roger crammed in a row on the couch, beers in hand and chips in laps.
Todd stood behind my head. “Listen to my voice,” he said. Already I could feel my arms getting heavy, lolling at my sides like two unbaked baguettes. “Let your mind unhook from all your cares and drift up into the gentle world of dreams.”
Someone crunched a chip. Someone giggled. Todd tutted.
“Feel your feet sink against the floor,” he said. I could do better than that. I felt my feet melt through the floor and dangle in the cool water of the slough underneath us. “Feel your back resting against the cushion behind you. Become aware of your hips settling into the cushion beneath you. When you feel ready, let your head fall gently—Jesus!”
My head had thwacked back against the armchair as if someone had cut my throat. I knew it. I could feel it. But it didn’t bother me. Someone crunched another chip but no one giggled this time.
“When you feel ready,” Todd went on, “close your ey—Oh.”
My eyes were glued shut already. I could tell I was drooling but I didn’t care.
“Now, Lexy,” Todd said. “It’s Halloween. You are looking over the side of the boat, through the water. You are looking at a waving hand. The hand is wearing a ring. Tell me about the ring.”
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