Mystery Man

by Bateman, Colin

The pharmacist then asked if I'd taken this particular type of antidepressant before, and I said yes, twice daily for the past fifteen years. He asked if it worked for me and I said it was early days yet. I paid for the prescription, and it now being 12.30 I was pleased to see the woman in Mrs Geary's leather trousers finish with her client and hand over her cash-desk key to a colleague. She then pulled on a short coat over her beautician's jacket and left the shop.

  I hurried up to the beauty counter and said, 'Damn, I missed her . . .' The girl behind the counter looked unconcerned, but asked if she could help. 'Your colleague – in the leather trousers – she was checking out the availability of a certain perfume for me . . . but now I've missed her.'

  'She'll be back at two.'

  'Damn, I have to get back to work – but I could phone to see how she got on. Who should I ask for?'

  'Ask for Natasha.'

  'Natasha . . . ?'

  'Yes, Natasha.'

  'Her surname . . . ?'

  'Just ask for Natasha. Natasha on the make-up counter.'

  'But in case there's any confusion, her full name is . . . ?'

  'There's nobody else called Natasha.'

  Mrs Geary's leather trousers were coming back at two, so there was no immediate panic.

  'To tell you the truth,' I said to Laura, which was what it said on Laura's badge, 'she's not really helping me at all. I've been in three times and she keeps fobbing me off with excuses. So I'm really here to make a complaint. Can I speak to your supervisor?'

  Laura looked surprised, but she nodded and went to the phone. A couple of minutes later a woman in a smart business suit approached me and said, 'I understand you wish to complain about Miss Irvine?'

  Natasha Irvine returned from lunch forty minutes later. I was in position just to the left of the Boots front doors. She was a moon-faced girl with big eyes. There were flakes of sausage-roll pastry in the corners of her mouth and she gave a little jump when I said, 'Hello, Natasha.'

  She stopped and began to smile but then she realised she didn't know me, and she might have blushed, but it was difficult to tell with all the make-up, which looked like the Max Factor equivalent of stone cladding.

  'It is Natasha Irvine, isn't it?' Her mouth dropped open a little. 'I wanted to talk to you about your leather trousers.'

  I gave her my hard look, which is like my normal look, but harder. At this point, if she'd had any sense, she should have asked for ID, and I could have shown her my Xtravision card and my kidney donor card and then rattled my prescription at her and dribbled off into the distance ranting about this or that, but as it happened my hard look proved more than adequate.

  'Oh Christ,' she said, 'they're stolen, aren't they?'

  I raised an eyebrow.

  'Jesus wept,' she said. 'I took one look at them and I knew he couldn't afford them. My family owns this leather repair place on the Newtownards Road, so I know what costs what. But he swore to God he saved up. Christ.' She blew some air out of her cheeks and said, 'To tell you the God's honest truth, I don't even like them, I've piled the beef on since I had the twins, and they're cuttin' the hole off me. I only wear them to keep him happy. What am I going to do now?'

  I gave her another long look. A thick sweat had broken out on her brow, and I decided to move quickly in case it set off an avalanche of make-up. 'Here's what we're going to do,' I said, and this time I did take out my wallet. 'I can't be bothered with pursuing this to court, the paperwork's a bloody nightmare. As it happens, the owner's offered a reward. You tell your man they got stolen from your locker at work, he buys you another present, plus you're two hundred pounds better off.' I took out the money and held it out to her. 'Owner gets the trousers back, I don't have to do any pen-pushing, you're in the money. How does that sound?'

  'Too good to be true,' she said.

  'It's a once-in-a-lifetime offer,' I said.

  She thought about that for just a few moments, then nodded quickly. 'But could you make it two-fifty?' she asked.

  I shook my head. 'It's not your call, darlin',' I said, then held firm at two hundred and forty-five.

  4

  When I got back to the shop I told Jeff to take the hats out of the window, then gave him the rest of the day off. I also gave him a nice bonus. 'What's this for?' he asked.

  'Danger money,' I replied. I was feeling generous.

  When he'd left I sat by the till, rested my feet on the counter and unwrapped a celebratory Twix. Between the destruction of one stick and the devouring of the second I called Mr Geary.

  'Guess who?' I sang.

  He made five unsuccessful guesses, so I told him, and he still seemed a little confused, so I reminded him, and then he said, 'Ah, right.' I didn't plunge straight in with the good news, I wanted him to know how much work I'd put in. So I described how I'd established the crime line from the moment he'd left his wife's leather trousers in Pressed for Time: how they'd subcontracted them to the shop on the Newtownards Road, how the owner must have commented on their unique qualities to Miss Irvine's boyfriend, who'd decided that they'd make a perfect gift. He'd then persuaded the owner to fabricate the story about them being damaged and then the owner had panicked when I'd applied just the right amount of pressure. Despite being in mortal fear for my life, I'd nevertheless managed to track down the trousers and make them secure.

  'I have them back, Mr Geary,' I said, raising and admiring the chocolate-covered biscuit. 'I have your wife's leather trousers.'

  He seemed rather underwhelmed. 'Oh – well, that's . . . ah, that's nice.'

  'It cost me five hundred pounds, but I suppose it's still a pretty cheap way to save a marriage.' He cleared his throat. I said, 'So do you want to come and pick them up?'

  'Well, no,' he said.

  'No?'

  'Well, the fact is, it turns out she never liked the trousers in the first place.'

  'But . . .'

  'She threw a wobbler over my stupidity for losing them, not because of the trousers. I misunderstood.'

  'But . . . they're beautiful trousers . . .'

  'I know that, but apparently they cut the hole off her.'

  'But I've spent—'

  'Well, that's your problem, I'm afraid.'

  'But . . . but what am I supposed to do with . . .'

  'Perhaps you could give them to your own wife.'

  The Twix was now melting in my hand.

  'Yeah, I wish,' I sighed.

  So I was two hundred and forty-five pounds out of pocket on the trousers, not to mention the sleepless night, the rocketing of my blood pressure and the sixty-five quid I'd spent on cheap hats from Dunnes. One day I'd meet the man who'd come up with the phrase, if you want to get ahead, get a hat, and I'd have a strong word or two. But in the meantime I'd a business to run. Besides, I have found that when all else fails, you can always fall back on fine writing to see you through a dark patch. The very next day an aspiring book-collector came in enquiring about signed first editions, and I showed him one of the Grishams. He turned it over in his hand as though he knew what he was doing and said, 'How much?'

  'If you have to ask . . .' I said with as much disinterest as I could muster.

  'No, really,' he said.

  I made a quick calculation. Two forty-five, plus sixty-five for the hats, two hundred for my time and another fifty for being an unscrupulous cad. Five hundred and sixty, I said, and I could tell by the way he blanched that it was way more than what he had in mind. But I have learned over all my years in business that if you price something high enough, some sucker will eventually come along and fall for it. And so he pulled out his credit card and bought the Grisham and I was finally back in profit and also, I suppose, a wiser, more cautious man to boot.

  I put the book in a nice bag for him and said if he was interested I could maybe lay my hands on another one or two. He smiled nervously and quickly changed the subject.

  'I really like your trousers,' he said.

  I glanced lovingly down at them a
nd nodded. 'Thanks,' I said, 'they are nice, but they're cutting the hole off me.'

  5

  It was Serial Killer Week in No Alibis, and thus far the Chianti was proving way more popular than the fava beans.

  I pride myself on providing a welcoming atmosphere here in the store. We have a settee and coffee and there's even a toilet if you're caught short. But this is all provided on the strict understanding that you will buy something. I'm not a frickin' charity. It may be something off the 'buy one, get one at slightly less than the cover price' table, or I can order some difficult-to-find item off the internet, something you'd be well capable of doing by yourself at home if you weren't such a mental invalid, or, even better, you might allow me to choose a book of distinction for you, drawing on my twenty years' experience in the crime fiction business. Life is too short to spend an hour and a half on a mystery that will ultimately be solved by a cat.

  Serial Killer Week got off to an inauspicious start when the opening wine and bean evening was invaded by a former prisoner who misinterpreted the poster, but he was at least able to give us the professional's view of the genre, although in my opinion he was not up to speed on the recent rapid advances in forensic science. However, he made notes. One of my regular customers took quite a shine to him, and they left early together, amid much jolly quipping. I believe in both redemption and the power of love, but I also understand that recidivism in killers is close to 76 per cent; I suspect that we will shortly be reading either about their wedding or her disappearance.

  Otherwise we have had several writers visit to give readings or lectures, with varying degrees of success. The Holy Grail, of course, was Thomas Harris, the author of The Silence of the Lambs and any number of preposterous prequels and sequels. I only say preposterous because my polite e-mail invitation for him to be our guest of honour was returned as spam and subsequent attempts to contact him were not successful. His loss. I'm sure he would have found my customers, a heady mix of silent-but-deadly farters, shoplifters, alcoholics and students, endlessly fascinating. Not only would the addition of his scrawl to the slowly yellowing pyramid of my unsold stock of his interminable novels have helped to finally shift them, but he might also have been able to apply his incisive knowledge of the workings of the criminal's sociopathic mind to my most perplexing case so far, The Case of the Fruit on the Flyover.

  It started, as these things usually do, with a customer hesitantly approaching the cash desk and proffering a book for purchase. Books are precious things, and cannot be selected like tinned peas in Tesco. I had watched him pick it from the shelf without even bothering to read either the sales pitch on the back, which I happened to know gave nine-tenths of the plot away, or the review below, from the Toronto Star, which unmasked the killer. He then set it face down on the counter, as if embarrassed to be seen with it. In fact, it was high-end stuff, a Robert B. Parker, and it was within my rights and power and inclination to withdraw it from sale through lack of respect, but then I saw his face, which looked sad, and his eyes, which appeared hollow, so I let him have it, as Spenser is always a good remedy for melancholy, and prepared to listen to his woes.

  His name was Albert McIntosh, and as soon as he said it I gave him a second look, because there was something familiar about it. He gave me the usual heartbreaking saga about being let down by the long-closed detective agency next door and that he'd heard (erroneously, I might add – I'm very picky) that I was dealing with their considerable backlog of cases.

  He said he was the managing director of a small advertising agency in the centre of town. He employed fifteen people and enjoyed a reasonable turnover and a good reputation. He said, 'We're not exactly cutting edge, more middle of the road. Solid. Dependable. We've had the account for Denny's Pork Sausages for twenty-three years. The problem is, about six weeks ago I was driving to work, same route I've taken all my working life, and I have to pass under the flyover just before you go on to the West Link, and I noticed that somebody had spray-painted . . . well, had spray-painted Albert McIntosh is a fruit in very large letters in red paint. This was obviously most upsetting to me. Twenty thousand cars pass under the flyover every morning during the rush hour. Many of them have passengers. Then there's the buses, and God knows if you stretch your neck from the train you can probably see it too.'

  He did look truly distraught. I myself pass under this flyover, and it was for exactly this reason that I thought I recognised his name. There were of course facts to be established before I could even contemplate getting involved.

  'And is it the use of your name or the accuracy of the statement that most vexes you?' I asked.

  'Both! How would you like it if someone did it to you? If something isn't done about it soon, Albert McIntosh will become some kind of grotesque slang for people of that, er, persuasion.'

  'Do you have anything against people of that, ahm, persuasion?'

  'No! That isn't the point!'

  I nodded thoughtfully. 'Have you taken any action, thus far?' I asked.

  'Yes,' he replied, rather testily. 'I went to the DoE and the council and between them they sent out some clod to paint over it.'

  'And . . . ?'

  'And, when I drove to work next day it was back. Except now it said, Albert McIntosh is still a fruit. I complained again, but they said it could be as much as three months before they get back to it. I can't wait that long, I'll be a laughing stock. That's why I went to see your pal next door.'

  The detective next door had never been my pal, and I wasn't much taken with Mr Albert McIntosh's general demeanour, but the fact that the author of these alleged slanders had struck twice piqued my interest, because this determination seemed to me to elevate the crime into a different league – rather than a one-off act of petty vandalism or vindictiveness, this was clearly someone with a grudge, a serial painter leaving his blood-red mark as a challenge to whoever dared take him on, plus he'd done it with a certain amount of panache. I sensed that he would make for a very worthy foe indeed. He would be my Hannibal Lecter, my Moriarty, my minority in the woodpile.

  Albert McIntosh wanted the graffiti permanently removed and the perp identified. I wanted a small extension to the back of the store. Truth and justice would meet somewhere in the middle.

  6

  Although as far as Albert McIntosh was concerned time was of the essence, I have learned not to rush in where angels fear to tread. A possible first step was to arrange for the removal of the offending graffiti and to then stake out the flyover and catch the phantom artist literally red handed if he or she dared to strike again, presumably in the middle of the night like all ne'er-do-wells, villains and uhm, charlatans. However, it is not a particularly salubrious part of town, and the heating in the No Alibis van has been on the blink for some time, also my night vision is not great and my antidepressants dictate that I get to bed early and at least attempt to catch up on my sleep. Besides, I was not seeking a physical confrontation with my nemesis, more a psychological contest. My weapon was deduction, his a hairy brush, and what I couldn't deduce myself – well, it was another opportunity to employ my valued and varied clientèle as my eyes and ears around the city, some modicum of payback for all the countless man hours I've wasted on them.

  This is all still quite new to me, so I am not above seeking wiser counsel. When that isn't available I occasionally consult my assistant Jeff. I would say that he works for me Tuesdays and Thursdays, but it would be more accurate to state that he appears in the store twice a week and manages to spend most of that time on the phone calling disinterested parties on behalf of the local chapter of Amnesty International. Jeff has been rather subdued since the death of General Pinochet. Human rights violations under his regime had been Jeff's area of expertise, but now that the General was gone, the spotlight had shifted on to more recent abuses in the Middle East, leaving him marginalised. He had committed the cardinal sin of failing to move with the bleeding-heart-liberal times, he was yesterday's man clinging to the vain hope that
someone even more despotic would come to power in Santiago and rescue him from his do-gooding isolation. I thought drawing him into helping me with the case might rescue him from his doldrums in a way that my humming of 'Don't Cry for Me, Chile' every time I passed him hadn't.

  So I outlined the facts of the case to Jeff. He then asked a series of pertinent questions. He wanted to know the exact location of the flyover, and if there was any other graffiti on it (none); he asked about Albert McIntosh's personal life (married, three children), his social life (golf club, rugby club), the state of his business (profitable) and his religious beliefs (always relevant in this city, Protestant atheist). He wanted to know about disgruntled employees (not aware of any), unsatisfied clients (difficult to be sure) and if Mr McIntosh was prepared to admit to harbouring any skeletons in the closet (literally the closet) – but no, to all intents and purposes Albert McIntosh was a model citizen and nobody had a bad word to say about him, apart, obviously, from the phantom graffiti artist.

  I asked Jeff in the light of all of this information what our next move might be, while also reminding him to bear in mind that I occasionally suffer from stress-induced bouts of agoraphobia.

  Jeff nodded for several long moments before giving me the benefit of his wisdom.

  'It's a big flyover,' he said, 'so I would go up there in the dead of night, and right beside what he's written, I would spray in even bigger letters – Whoever wrote this is a cunt.'

  I thought about this for a while before responding. 'Jeff, if you wrote whoever wrote this, you'd be calling yourself . . . that.'

  'Ah . . . right. Then I'd write – Whoever wrote that is a cunt, and have a little arrow pointing at Albert McIntosh is still a fruit.'

  It seemed to me that he was merely matching one derogatory statement with another and that might only antagonise our target.

  'Exactly,' Jeff replied, 'it might flush him out into the open. And it may not even be a man. It might be a woman. In which case she might not only be one but also has—'