Six Pack of Sleuths: Comedy Mysteries

by Barbara Silkstone

  ‘Hello, Hot Line. What activity do you have to report?’

  ‘I don’t have anything to report. I’d like some information.’

  ‘We don’t give information about extraterrestrials, we collect it.’

  ‘Do you know where I can get information?’

  ‘We don’t give information.’

  ‘You won’t even give me information about where to get information?’

  ‘No.’

  Sheila sighs and puts down the phone. The young woman, unseen at the other end of the line, makes a V sign at the receiver before she replaces it in the cradle. She stops up her pen and replaces it, unused, on the blank pages in front of her. Then she leans back on the table top again, inadvertently rubbing shiny patches on the elbows of her fashionable yet unremarkable wool and viscose mix jumper.

  Sheila picks up the phone again and dials Alison. She takes a tangential approach to the subject of her phone call. ‘Theatres are like people, sometimes,’ she tells Alison. ‘They can be ugly on the outside but able to convey beauty inside. Take the South Bank, for example. The buildings are hideous but the seats are comfortable, the view of the stage is good and the acoustics are great.’

  ‘I don’t really go to the theatre much.’

  ‘You should. There always seems to be a message for me, when I go. The words speak to me. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Songs are like that. The words always seem really personal to your situation. Like when you’re in love or when you break up with someone. Suddenly every song you hear seems to express the emotion you’re feeling.’

  ‘Do you think that there’s more to this idea of hidden messages than we realize?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Do you think possibly it’s a special way of communicating with us?’

  ‘Oh yes, I think artists always hope to communicate something, whether it’s through theatre or painting or music.’

  ‘I think what I’m really trying to ask is whether that communication could be hijacked in some way.’

  ‘By politicians?’

  ‘By aliens.’

  Alison, slumming her way through the conversation without paying too much attention to Sheila’s questions or her own responses, now tries to backtrack in her mind to see if she’s missed out a chunk of the conversation and hasn’t quite followed Sheila’s meaning.

  ‘Um. Aliens.’

  ‘I think that aliens have been communicating with me through the medium of theatre. I know it sounds strange.’

  ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘I feel so powerless. I feel as if Roy is standing just the other side of a door and I can’t see him. I need someone to help me but when I come up against snotty people like the woman on the Extra Terrestrial Hot Line, all the breath is knocked out of me and I feel as if I can’t get started. It makes me feel very alone. Don’t you ever feel lonely, Alison?’

  ‘No.’

  After she has hung up, Alison walks around the flat for a while, thinking about Sheila, then she takes a poem with a phone number written on it from a notice board on the wall above her computer and goes back to the phone.

  ‘Jeff?’

  ‘Ali?’

  ‘Thanks for the lip gloss. I thought I might come and visit you. I could cook something for you. Everything would be brightly colored and fragrant.’

  ‘You said you had a lot of color in your life.’

  ‘I’d make a salad and scatter it with flower petals. I’d build a pyramid from scoops of melon soaked in vodka. I’d use watermelon, cantaloupe, honeydew – red, yellow and orange. Then I’d add some green from little twists of lime and mint picked from my garden.’

  ‘And you’d cook them?’

  ‘I wasn’t actually going to apply heat to them, no. I suppose it isn’t cooking so much as assembling and balancing fruit.’

  ‘When will you visit me?’

  ‘I wonder if it would be a good idea or a bad idea if I came to visit you? I don’t think I could sleep next to you. I’d just lie awake listening to you breathing. It’s a habit I’ve got into with Phoebe.’

  ‘I think it would be a good idea.’

  ‘I could bring my mobile with me. Taron would be able to tell me.’

  It is 2 o’clock in the afternoon. The bright light outside reaches into the corners of Jane Memory’s bedroom and intensifies the vivid green and blue of the large checks on the expensive cotton covers and pillow cases on the bed, where Jeremy is lying without any clothes on. Jeremy’s tan line stops two inches below his navel, approximately where a pair of hipster trousers would begin, if he ever wore them.

  Jane used to bite her nails when she was a teenager and her manicurist uses extensions in natural pink to disguise the damage that remains. Jane uses the acrylic tip of one these nails to tap Jeremy gently on the ribs, signalling that he should roll over. She rests her silver-ringed hand in a fan shape on one white buttock and inspects the rest of Jeremy’s body. It is very lean. She pinches a little bit of skin between her thumb and first finger. He probably has no more than fourteen per cent or fifteen per cent fat on him.

  ‘Ow’, says Jeremy. Jane puts her mouth to his shoulder and smells the skin before she bites him, sweeping her hand between his thighs. He turns over so that she can sit on top of him, the soles of her feet tucked under the backs of his legs and her hands at either side of him on the blue and green checked pillows under his head.

  A shower of shiny, golden pound coins has fallen from the hip pockets of Jeremy’s summer dress into the bed, as if riches have flowed directly from his loins. Every so often Jane or Jeremy rolls on to one of the coins, gasps, and throws it on to the floor where it bounces against the skirting board with a ‘ting’.

  There is no part of Jane’s body that she dislikes. She exfoliates her knees and her elbows regularly. Her nipples point up, her buttocks point up, her hips are narrow, her stomach is flat. There is a clear, straight line of vision from her breast bone to her pubic bone, with nothing wobbly in the way. She might get her belly button pierced, but she’s not convinced it won’t hurt. If she got sick of it and removed it, she’d hate for it to leave a scar.

  ‘Oh,’ says Jeremy. ‘God, Jane.’ Jane leans forward with one hand against the wall behind his head and dips her head so she can kiss him. If they shower together it will save time and she can drop Jeremy back at his flat before the rush hour traffic begins, unless he insists on travelling back there by bicycle in which case she can probably have sex with him again and still have enough time to pop into Marks & Spencer to pick up something for her dinner.

  Jane’s boyfriend Philippe Noir has square feet with a high instep. His fingers are rectangular. His hands, like his feet, are slightly moist, even in the cold weather. He has full lips, which is supposed to be an indication of sensuality, although he displays none of this when in bed with Jane. When they first spent time together, Jane would bring pots of strawberry fromage frais or vanilla ice cream to bed and leave them where they were easily to hand in case Philippe should feel the urge to slather her body with it and flick it away with his thick pink tongue. He preferred to finish eating the food – one spoon for you, one for me; he has always been fair about sharing it – while she grasped his cock and said ‘umm’ a lot to get him in the mood.

  Philippe likes to keep abreast of developments in the competitive docu-soap world and schedules their love-making so that there is plenty of time to sit up in bed, find his designer glasses with thick rectangular frames wherever he has discarded them, and switch on the TV for the next edition of a rival’s work. The thing about Philippe is that he doesn’t really have to try very hard as he has a good job and could always get another girlfriend if he wanted one.

  Since Jeremy insists on getting himself home on his bicycle this afternoon, Jane has enough time to have sex with him again. She lies him on the floor, ties him to the wooden feet of the bed by the wrists with a pair of her knickers (she makes a kind of slip knot with the leg holes), tucks a cush
ion under his arse so he doesn’t get carpet burns, and tips some of the most delicious contents of her freezer over his body and licks it off. Jane often eats in restaurants with friends so there isn’t much to choose from but she manages to take Jeremy through the full range of emotions using a tub of frozen blackberry yoghurt, a bottle of frozen but still viscous Absolut vodka and a tray of ice cubes. He wobbles a little unsteadily on his bicycle when the time comes to leave, but whether this is due to the alcohol or the sex, Jane couldn’t say.

  Chapter Twenty-One ~ Wind Chimes

  Sheila wakes groggily to a terrible thumping sound. She is not sure at first whether there is someone at the door or whether the noise is inside her head. Since Roy’s disappearance she has been suffering from headaches. Unless she rests, the headaches get worse and eventually she has to close her eyes to bright lights and spots of color that she sees jumping across her vision, even though she knows they are not there. Her sister would say it is stress.

  ‘Sheila?’ Her sister is at the door now, calling her name. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. The woman has fists of steel. ‘Sheila?’ Bang, bang, bang, tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap. Bang, bang, bang.

  Sheila waits until her sister has gone. The phone starts to ring but she doesn’t answer it. Ring ring. Ring ring. Ring ring. Ring ring. Ring ring. After five rings it rolls over onto the answer machine.

  Sheila gets out of bed and checks the message, in case it is not from her sister. It is, though. Above her head, on the table where she keeps the phone, there hangs an unusual wind chime made from re-cycled cutlery that she bought recently from Covent Garden Market. When the tines of the forks strike against the bowls of the spoons and the blades of the knives, there is a very pretty ‘ding’ sound.

  It is rare that a breeze stirs within Sheila’s flat as she prefers to keep her windows closed against the traffic noise. However, the primary purpose of the contraption is to gather and concentrate messages from aliens so on the whole Sheila is very pleased with her purchase and the frown lines in her face relax a little whenever she passes it in her hallway.

  Roy has climbed the wooden ladder leading to Sylvia’s high wire, now more-or-less permanently strung in place, and is standing on the platform next to the house, looking out over the small bay. To the left, past the orchard, he can see the top of the hay barn, a maroon structure the size of an aircraft hangar. The land behind him is hidden from view by the house. He still dislikes heights but by climbing up here often and just looking around, he is coming to terms with the feelings of dizziness and disorientation that come from being so far above the ground.

  When Roy was a child he thought that Heaven would be familiar, like a sunny England. During his difficult teenage years, he didn’t believe in the after-life. As an adult he thought Heaven would be exotic and unfamiliar, the sort of place that is unattainable for ordinary people, like Richard Branson’s island in the Caribbean.

  This morning, as he walked along the path leading to the beach, he noticed hundreds and hundreds of cobwebs in the hedgerows, each strand of each web sparkling with drops of moisture from the mist that had come in from the sea. By the time he went to fetch Sylvia to show her how magical it looked, the mist had rolled back and the cobwebs had shed the moisture, their patterns barely noticeable among the leaves as they had been every other morning that Roy had walked along the path. If it weren’t for magic like this, Roy could almost be disappointed in how much Heaven is like the English countryside of his childhood.

  Chapter Twenty-Two ~ The Café

  Venetia Latimer is feeling lonely. On days like these, bitterness can creep up on her unless she takes care not to let it in. Her husband is at work, her son has left home. She has a business of her own to run, but still the bitter feelings ambush her in the quiet moments when she is alone in her office.

  Venetia is thinking about the money Sylvia took from her. She had shown Sylvia the gray suitcase filled with money that she kept in the safe for emergencies and contingencies, and she had shown her the safe combination. Sylvia was a very open and unaffected person, she didn’t shy away from intimacy or confidences. Venetia always felt she could truly be herself in front of Sylvia – truly an idiot, in the case of the suitcase full of money.

  Sylvia let her do little things for her, which Venetia enjoyed. Sylvia said it reminded her of the way the girls used to take care of each other in the circus. Venetia washed Sylvia’s hair for her, and she plaited it sometimes, deftly and tightly as if preparing a horse for a show. Venetia painted Sylvia’s fingernails, she helped her with her tax return, she made sure Sylvia had custard to go with her puddings in the evenings if she wanted it. There was no part of Sylvia’s life that she didn’t care about.

  Venetia would like to recover the elephant Sylvia stole from her and she would like to recover the money. She would like to open the suitcase and then destroy it in front of Sylvia, burning it or tearing the £20 notes into shreds, scrunching the pieces and letting them run through her fingers to show that it wasn’t just about the money after all. It was about something else she lost when Sylvia ran away.

  I must work through the pain, thinks Venetia Latimer. She breathes in very deeply once, then again, to activate her brain with oxygen. I must make my mark on the world and leave it a better place. She turns to her Usefulness file.

  On a personal level, Mrs Latimer’s quest to turn the useless into the useful extends its reach into her son Joey’s life. Miss Lester’s dating agency literature and Taron’s phone number are listed in Joey’s section of the Usefulness file. She would like to prevent Joey from working in the City and she would like to find him a girlfriend with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes. Someone with lots of eyeliner and an unconventional attitude to life. Someone like Taron. Although she is currently focussed on finding the right girl for Joey, Mrs Latimer would be equally enthusiastic about finding him the right man if he ever were to ask for her help in this area. She only wants to save him from a life of well-cut suits and conservatism. However Mrs Latimer belongs to a generation who associate gay men with wide lapels and saucy double entendres and she might be appalled to discover that homosexuality and conservatism are not mutually exclusive.

  Among the other Usefulness projects, the performing mink are coming along well. Venetia has also recently written to the Head Teachers of all the local primary schools in the area suggesting that, since pre-teen children are reportedly concerned about the environment and particularly about litter, they should be provided with small sized rubber gloves made from recycled materials and asked to collect a bag of rubbish each on their way to school. She doesn’t know that children don’t walk to school any more. Their mothers drop them at the school gates in their Volvos.

  There is another, still nebulous, project which Venetia has been formulating. It could benefit men, and in turn all mankind, but it is unlikely it will come to fruition in her lifetime. However it may be something she can use to advance the plans she has to ruin Mrs Fitzgerald. Venetia Latimer dwells for a moment on vengeance, which, like her projects for usefulness and like time, will heal her wounds. Then she goes to meet Mrs Fitzgerald.

  Ella Fitzgerald is waiting for Venetia Latimer in a small café near Clapham Junction, where they have agreed to meet. Small pieces of other people’s food crunch underfoot as Mrs Fitzgerald takes her place at a table near the window and looks around. The siren smell of bacon cooking apparently induces the regular customers to eat whatever is put in front of them in spite of the unhygienic surroundings.

  Mrs Fitzgerald flicks a very small fragment of a previous occupant’s charred bacon from where her hands rest on the table to a cosier spot between the tomato sauce bottle and the sugar shaker. She orders a large cappuccino and an apricot Danish, and she settles to watch the people around her.

  Almost everyone else in the café is a solitary diner, catching up on their calories, lost in their thoughts. There is something – perhaps it is the harsh, hospital lighting and the plastic seats,
or the way that the café’s occupants pour over the Sun newspaper rather than connecting with each other – that makes Mrs Fitzgerald feel very lonely. If there were a waiting room where people took their places to turn mad, it would look like this; the table tops smeared with ketchup; the people sitting close to each other but apart, drinking no-brand cola and eating black pudding with chips, wearing layers of jewellery fashioned in thinly beaten gold, as if to pay a Stygian keeper of the gates of madness. The café is comfortable, warm and smelly, but to Mrs Fitzgerald, it is a staging post on the frontier between sanity and madness.

  Venetia Latimer takes her place across the table, ready for the showdown. Mrs Fitzgerald signals for the boy to take her companion’s order, then plays it straight.

  ‘I’ve been investigating your organization.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You’ve been feeding a prototype veterinary drug called Serum 10 to your animals. Emphglott, your sponsor, supplies you with all your food and the serum.’

  ‘You’ve found no evidence of maltreatment or illegal activity.’

  ‘No maltreatment. Your work with Emphglott is unethical. Your relationship with them is not good business practice.’

  ‘You’ve found nothing. I’m sure you feel your methods are thorough and yet you’ve found nothing.’

  ‘I have found two areas of concern and that’s why I’ve asked to meet you. Firstly, can you explain the disappearance of an elephant? Secondly, can you explain why you’ve also been feeding Serum 10 to your employees?’