Murder Keeps No Calendar

by Cathy Ace

  Perspective is everything. Take me, for example; my mother would have a fit if she could see me now – though I think I could be doing a lot worse.

  I’ve been a private eye for about three weeks. My boss, Pete? He’s been one for thirty years – almost my whole life. He’s learned a thing or two in that time, he says. Took me on because he doesn’t have anyone like me on his team; more options for him when it comes to new jobs, he hopes. He’s impressed with the way I’ve applied myself so far.

  Pete says I need a selection of hats, jackets, and sunglasses in the boot of my car, so I’ll be able to follow someone without them knowing it’s me, possibly for days. That’s all people notice, he says; the big picture, not the details.

  He’s probably right. I know no one ever notices the stuff that really matters about me. Why would they? I’m just Sam. Big Sam. Sam who used to stand at the door of a club late at night, when the drunks and the weirdos want to get in. Sam with the growing beer belly. Sam with the failed marriage.

  This new job with Pete’ll be good. A job where I’m supposed to be invisible. Invisible means no one pays any attention as I pass them on the street, or sit opposite them in a pub. Never make eye contact, Sam, never connect; connections are a way in. I don’t want anyone taking up space in my life; my life is mine. I’ve managed to tear myself away from the rest of humanity, and now I’ve found a job where that’s a good thing. A perfect fit.

  Pete sounded relaxed when I phoned him about this job. ‘Easiest money we’ll make this week,’ he says.

  ‘For you,’ I say. ‘You don’t do anything yourself.’

  ‘I’ve trained you up, and I get us the jobs. You’ll get your cut.’

  ‘Cash? Today?’

  ‘When I get mine.’

  For him it’s just another case he’s handing off to one of his team. For me? It’s my first case out on my own. No more shadowing an experienced co-worker. It’s a new life. A chance to start over. Show the world what I’m made of.

  Pete says it’s just a repossession, and he doesn’t know why the client wants us to do it, but he does, and he’s not the type you argue with. He tells me why; Bert Sampson doesn’t sound like the sort of bloke whose wrong side would be appealing. Or healthy.

  ‘Shouldn’t take more than a few hours,’ he says. ‘Decent enough address to collect from. Some woman’s got it. Just get the car from her and bring it here. Pronto. The client’s coming to collect it here at the office. Shouldn’t be any trouble. Easy job to start you off. Easy money, Sam. See you later.’

  ‘Right-o,’ I say. Easy money sounds good, because there isn’t much of that about these days. And I certainly need some cash; the rent needs paying, I need ciggies, and pizza, and beer of course. It all costs. Maybe I can get myself a gym membership. I miss the gym.

  I signed on with Pete because I’m apparently getting too soft-looking to be an effective bouncer. Too many youngsters think that challenging the ‘beef’ at the door is sport. It wasn’t like that years ago, when I started. Then I got some respect. Awe, even.

  ‘You’re big,’ they’d say.

  ‘Indeed I am,’ I’d say, ‘and I know how to use every ounce. So watch it.’

  That would be that. Being good on the door means you should only need two muscles – your brain and your tongue. I never was much use in school, but I’ve always been sharp. Even my ex-wife said that.

  Recently, I found I wasn’t getting as much respect; it’s more difficult to diffuse a developing situation with a rapier wit when there’s only blubber, not muscle, to back it up.

  ‘You’re getting soft, Sam,’ says the club’s owner Zach a while back. ‘I’ve got to find someone harder, more ripped. Like you used to be. Whatever happened to that wife of yours? She kept you fighting fit.’

  ‘Traded me in for a younger model,’ I say. It’s true.

  ‘That’ll happen if you let yourself go, Sam,’ says Zach. He doesn’t understand.

  Zach gives me Pete’s number because he reckons I’m still sharp, even if I’m not ripped any more. I phone Pete; he’s got a good reputation in the area. With all the questionable characters a huge port like Dover attracts, there’s a fair amount of work here for PIs, he says. Pete and I sort out a deal. Ta-daa! New life for Sam.

  PI Sam doesn’t have the same ring to it as PI Pete, which is what all Pete’s adverts scream in big, bold letters. When we met for the first time face to face we laughed about Sam Spade; we both agree I’m nothing like him.

  When I woke this morning my head hurt. Too many beers mean a hangover, I know that, but they were in the fridge, and it was hot. Very hot, for Dover; usually the sea breezes keep it cool. But not this August.

  I towel-swat flies off week-old pizza boxes and think about clearing up, but don’t. Instead, I sit on the settee, light a cigarette, and enjoy the way the smoke and dust dance in the first shaft of early-morning sunlight. Swirling. Shifting. I smoke another cigarette just to keep watching.

  I chug, then push out thin streams, and pop circles with my tongue. The smoke reminds me of a family trip we took on an old steam train, when I was little. Then Daddy died, and we never did anything like that again. Mother’s new chap didn’t believe in family jaunts. He really didn’t care for me at all. Probably a good thing. I was always tall and stocky, even as a child. Maybe he thought I’d be able to take him on if he came for me, instead of her. Poor Mother; keeping up appearances and protecting the family name from the merest hint of trouble took its toll on her. Sherry was her answer. Harvey’s Bristol Cream, to be exact.

  When I turned sixteen I broke her heart; I didn’t follow the path she’d imagined for me.

  That Cirque lot over in Canada started a trend, and I became a catcher for a troupe based in Brighton where they did the same sort of thing. I started in a novelty kids’ act, then applied myself to the weight-training, got myself some of those special injections for a while, and beefed up nicely. They finally let me join an adult act when I turned twenty-two. The men who ran the business knew about the injections, but they didn’t care as long as I got bigger, and stronger. Fine by me.

  It’s a good thing most people around here know nothing about my old job. Admit to wearing face paint, wigs, and all sorts of weird get-ups? Wouldn’t help my image at all. But it was a good life. And there was Lena, of course.

  Lena and her sisters shipped in from Leipzig; did one of those specialty spots folding themselves around each other in sparkly costumes until the audience thinks they’re about to snap. Lena was the youngest in her family, and her mother got her doing all sorts of bendy stuff from the time she was a baby.

  To be honest, I never thought I’d be her type, but it turns out I was.

  It all began with me helping her with her English. Not a lot of folks along the south-east coast warm to Germans, even now; too many tales handed down within families of land-mined beaches, night-time bombing raids, and – of course – the Little Ships of Dunkirk. The English who live in these parts have never forgotten those mini-flotillas which set out from local harbors and beaches, especially in Kent, returning over-laden with battered, bloodied troops, and a total loss of innocence for the boaters who’d wanted to help their fellow countrymen. They never seem to talk about the death, the horror, the loss, only about the way they’d helped. That’s important.

  Lena and I would sit at the end of Brighton Pier, among the gaudy Victorian sideshows, and talk about all sorts. There was her with a heavy German accent, and me with my clipped public-school tones; her so tiny, and me so protectively large beside her. We got a few odd looks, which puzzled and annoyed me in equal measure; why can’t people live in the twenty-first century, for goodness’ sake?

  As time passed, she and I grew closer. You know how that goes. Neither of us had any real friends; it was just us. Her mother – ‘Mutti’ she called her – was still back in Germany, so that was the easy part. It was her sisters we had to avoid, especially the eldest one, Erma. That
woman hated me; once she worked out what was going on between us, she screamed at me in German whenever she saw me. Threatened Lena with dropping her from the act if we kept it up. But Lena stood firm. Besides, Erma knew the act would fail without Lena anyway, because she was the most lithe and flexible of all four sisters.

  It took a long time for us to get married, but we finally tied the knot – which, in Lena’s case, was something she could do with most of her body parts. We sneaked off to the Registry Office in Brighton, just the two of us. She thought it was romantic, and I loved seeing her so happy that day. But it was the beginning of the end for us.

  Everything was tickety-boo until we got that piece of paper, then it all went to pot. So many of my dreams died in that marriage. No one but me knows how many.

  First, I lost my career; I seriously damaged my knee trying to make a catch during rehearsal. It was a catch that was bound to fail, for someone; turned out that someone was me. I was laid up for two months, then hobbled about on crutches for a few more. Lena said I shouldn’t have attempted the catch at all; that I should have let the safety mats do their job. She went so far as to say I made it worse, that I caused trouble by trying too hard to help.

  That’s when I began to work the door at pubs and clubs. Even though I wasn’t as strong as I once was, I still looked the part because of all the physio workouts I’d done, and I kept on going to the gym as often as I could. But I wasn’t happy. We weren’t happy. We screamed and fought our way through another year, then we finally agreed on something – that it was time for me to leave. So I did.

  She kept the child.

  Leo, she named him. Lena and Leo; awful. Never told me who the father was, and Leo and I certainly never bonded. Best thing was for him to stay with her; I had no choice in the matter, anyway. He was two months old when I left; it’ll be his second birthday soon. I hate it when I admit to myself how much I miss her. Him, too. That could have been a great life – a real family. But it wasn’t to be.

  ‘Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should.’ Thanks, Mother. Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have tried to make that catch.

  So I cut my losses, and left my wife to raise the kid on her own. Maybe it’s still just the two of them, I don’t know. She made it clear as I left that she didn’t want anything from me, so I promised her I’d give her as much of my nothing-ness as possible. And that was that – except for signing some divorce papers, which her solicitor told me would allow Lena to move on. Always willing to help, that’s me.

  I stand at my flat’s grimy window and watch the seagulls swoop, thinking about how they’re free to steal treats from the hands of Brit kids here in the morning, and from French children across the Channel, if they so choose, in the afternoon; how they’re able to look down on humanity’s little idiosyncrasies, like who ‘owns’ what.

  ‘Come on, Sam, get focused, get ready for work,’ I tell myself.

  But I can’t. I look toward the horizon, my broken dreams pulling me there. The sky is so many blues. Every blue. I love the part of day when the light’s changing. It’s like time’s at a point where it could go either way; as though you can go forward, or back.

  I shower, then poke around the heaps of clothing on the floor with my toes. I don’t find anything that’s fit to wear, so I shift the end of my bed to pry open the wardrobe.

  I glance out of the window just one more time; the light’s stopped changing now – the point when time might go forward or back has passed. The day isn’t a . . . thingy . . . any longer.

  What’s the word? Something that’s the same, both ways round. I concentrate. I can see Mrs Beynon, my fourth form English teacher, writing it on the board for us to read aloud. PALINDROME. That’s it.

  ‘Why isn’t it one itself?’ I ask her.

  ‘You’re too sharp by half, Samantha Barraclough-Gordon,’ she says.

  ‘The word should be the same from both ends, like what it means,’ I press.

  ‘Stop being such a cheeky girl, or I’ll send to you to the headmistress’s office,’ she replies tartly.

  ‘Why can’t it be the same both ways?’ I grumble.

  ‘Nothing ever is,’ she snaps. ‘The odd word works that way, but nothing else. There’s always something that changes the story of an event, or a life, or even a day when you tell it from the end to the beginning, instead of from the beginning to the end. It’s called perspective. One little thing changes the way you see everything.’

  Mrs Beynon; I’d forgotten her. I hated her. I suspect the feeling was mutual.

  Finally, I find clean panties and a relatively fresh bra. It still fits. Just. Even my boobs are starting to sag. I do a few half-hearted palm clenches in front of the mirror to see if there’s still enough muscle tone to help them bounce back, one day. I notice my waist is almost as thick as my hips, though I still haven’t got a big bum. Lena used to laugh at me in my various glittery unitards, with no rear end to fill them out. Lena had a great smile.

  I pull on a pair of jeans, and a shirt that I think I washed relatively recently. I check myself in the mirror, flattening a sprout of hair.

  ‘You’re flaccid, Sam, but you can do something about it. You know you can. Work out. Eat properly. Build the muscle back. You did it twice before. You can do it again – bad knee or not. Maybe find somewhere to get a few of those special injections. That should do the trick. Just to get yourself moving in the right direction.’

  I agree with myself, and I’m finally ready to face the day; the first day of the rest of my life. A new life. A fresh start. Platitudes a-plenty.

  Upon reflection, my life could have been easier, I suppose: the butt of jokes at school, where even the exorbitant fees for day pupils weren’t able to insulate me from the other girls who would point and laugh at my lack of grace and lumpen appearance; Mother’s sadness and desperation after Daddy died, and how she never seemed to recognize my loss, just hers; striking out on my own when I was really too young to do so, knowing I was ‘different’ and that – back then – that would never do in polite society.

  And then, of course, there was Lena’s crushing decision that she wanted a child more than she wanted me, or us, after all.

  ‘Buck up, Sam. Remember the spirit of Dover – never let them grind you down. Be brave, courageous. Face your fears. Stiff upper lip, and all that.’

  I pick up a two-word note I wrote for myself when Pete phoned the night before to tell me I was getting my first job to do on my own for him; I’d drunk several beers by then and I can’t remember much about what he was saying other than that. I’ll phone him back; he’ll tell me what the note means. I chuckle; quite a coincidence – two of those palindrome things right there . . . two words that say exactly the same thing both ways around. But, like Mrs Beynon said, life’s not like that; something always changes a story when you know the end. I put her out of my mind because this is the beginning, isn’t it? Two words that mean I’m starting afresh. ‘Shannah’s racecar’.

  SEPTEMBER

  The Corpse that Died Twice

  When the University of Vancouver offered me an opportunity to become an Assistant Professor of criminology I more or less jumped at the chance; being arrested on suspicion of murder can be a good catalyst for migration. Apparently being released and never charged doesn’t mean a jot to the British tabloids, who’d hounded me – Cait Morgan, Associate Professor of criminal psychology, an irony they just couldn’t ignore – long after the police acknowledged I had nothing to do with my ex-boyfriend Angus ending up dead on the floor of my flat in Cambridge one morning. It must have been a quiet summer for the journalists; they made my life unbearable. They didn’t even let up when my parents died in a horrific car accident back in my homeland of Wales a few months later; instead they used the opportunity presented by Mum and Dad’s funeral to snap long-lens shots of me in tears, which they later used as they pleased. It was a nightmare.

  The opportunity of a fresh start in Canada – to sa
y nothing of a tenure-track promotion – meant I could stop being who I had been, and start to become the person I wanted to be; I could leave behind bad memories, and tragic ones, and reinvent myself . . . to a certain extent. It was a way to put down some of my personal baggage – or at least to store it out of sight until I was ready to examine it. When you’re in a new country you can show people only the parts of yourself you want them to see; you don’t run the risk of bumping into someone who knew you twenty years earlier and still judges you on what you were back then before you’ve so much as opened your mouth in the here and now.

  When I got the offer of an interview from the university where I now teach, I checked out some websites about Vancouver, and got the initial impression it was the sort of place you’d love if your desire was to go yomping up mountains before breakfast, yachting through lunch, then golfing before tea – followed by a dinner of salmon cooked four ways. All of which, with the possible exception of the salmon, is just not my cup of tea. Then I found some photographs of Harrison Hot Springs, and I began to see there were other ways to enjoy the wide-open spaces; just sit there and look at them.

  Since I moved to British Columbia, Harrison has become my ‘secret place’; I go there to escape the busy Downtown core of Vancouver itself, and even the bustling areas around my home and workplace in Burnaby. This being a stunning September Saturday – when the light has a mellowness you just don’t see any other time of the year, and the air has some warmth but also a freshness you’re glad to feel after the oppressive heat of the summer – I’d decided to head to Harrison for a little bit of R&R.

  I’d been working, off and on, with Bud Anderson and the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team for the past couple of months; he’d call me in whenever a case came along where he felt understanding the victim might help, or simply speed up, his team’s efforts. I’d also given a couple of talks to his team on the use of victimology in their investigations; it didn’t pay a great deal, but any extra income was always welcome, because university pay is pretty pitiful.