Dying to Read

by John Elliott

  ‘A young woman asked you about Augustin Cox this morning?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Geraldine.’ Another Portugese expression Hamish didn’t understand. ‘Very attractive. She could be hot if she learned how to dress right… I saw her last night as well.’

  If before he had been floored metaphorically by a Ricky Hatton counterpunch, when the subject of his thoughts had announced she was a detective, now the referee was towering above him, showing him ten fingers and sweeping his arm across his chest to signal KO. Out for the count! Two common expletives ricocheted in his brain followed by two more, the last one being more unlikely and esoteric. ‘Geraldine Mycroft of the Bones Detective Agency?’ His question was entirely superfluous. It could not have been anyone else.

  ‘She’s looking out for Augustin.’

  What the hell did that mean? Looking out for Augustin. She had been looking out for Augustin. That was her brief. Had been her brief back at Wandsworth, in the taxi, at the club with her cheek turned to his, on the way to West Hampstead. The towel from his corner had been thrown into the ring too late. He was a stretcher case, but the stadium lights were on undimmed, and he was caught in their full glare. The questions he kept asking Gonçalo Pereira came from someone else although his lips still managed to move, and his larynx seemed to produce words which were understood. No he, Gonçalo, had never been to Bedfont. No he had only met Augustin at gigs Yes he could tell him Augustin worked at the Lincoln International. No he never knew anybody else whom Augustin knew. Music was the answer was all he would say. The rest was nothing, a void, an end of the conversation.

  He wished. What did he wish? He wished he had gone in with her instead of leaving when he did. He wished he’d bedded her. Had her last night. Had her doggy fashion as a Cynic would just as the fearless Diogenes freely masturbated in the agora. If only hunger could be so easily assuaged, he’d said as he rubbed his belly. The common expletive would have completed, closed, given a reason not to return, have eased the pain, have been in vain because he saw Jerzy’s face, and he knew Jerzy was saying it’s unworthy of you, Hamish. And Jerzy, of course, was right, but he couldn’t go to her tonight. So much was definite. And he shouldn’t go to her again. No. Not again for the joke was, apart from her treachery, he’d learned nothing from calling Gonçalo Pereira but a hotel address, which they would have found in time by routine.

  *

  Meanwhile Geraldine had skimmed through The Moving Toyshop à la mode de Norma according to Alison Petrie. The intriguing initial set up of a body found at night in a toyshop which mysteriously reverted next morning to the grocery store it had always been was in the end disappointingly explained. Apart from an engaging, donnish detective called Gervaise Fenn — she liked the ring of his name — the plot of the book was simply a variant on the hoary locked room conundrum. No grist there for the Augustin mystery, and the Oxford setting, although murder strewn in later Morse days, didn’t chime with run-down Bedfont. It was time to figuratively get her visa and over a quart of bourbon move on to the mean streets and hard-boiled pages of American crime where violence was as endemic as Mom’s apple pie.

  Uruguayan. She came back to that. Why had Mr Pereira said Augustin was Uruguayan? That was a definite question for the client, who, no doubt, as promised would ring in the next quarter of an hour. ‘Fat,’ she said to Lacenaire. ‘I’m waiting to hear what comes after.’

  ‘The writer did it,’ was the parrot’s habitual retort.

  No excitement there. But the real question was what was she going to wear tonight. Hamish had not proposed a definite venue, but they would likely go for a drink, perhaps a meal, then go clubbing, or it could be the cinema. She smiled at the memory of her schoolgirl self clutching a bag of chips on a rainy Kilkenny night whilst her beau, who had ineffectually tried to grope her in the back stalls of the picture house, boasted of his prowess at the football (Gaelic) for the coming Saturday. That liaison had not lasted the final whistle. ‘Fat,’ she said again, thinking of the greasy chips.

  ‘What’s up chucky? Tiger got your snowdrop?’

  Like her, Lacenaire seemed in romantic mood. ‘Wrong time of year, my green orator,’ she replied, mentally starting to juxtapose her possible variants on tops, slacks or dress when the phone rang. It was Joan Oliphant, punctual as ever.

  Once the niceties, as etiquette demanded, were over. Geraldine broached the Uruguayan connection.

  ‘He was born in London and was as English as I am. However, I know his mother came from Montevideo. Is that in Uruguay? My South American geography is somewhat lacking.’

  ‘It’s the capital. How close was he to his mother?’

  ‘Oh normal. A boy. His mother. She died when he was fourteen. His father was killed in a car accident two years later.’

  ‘And you brought him up after that?’

  ‘No, dear. As I explained, I used to chaperone him and when that finished he sometimes visited me. He stayed with an aunt, his father’s sister. She went to Australia when she remarried. Then he got a little bed-sit of his own. Augustin was very independent.’

  Geraldine debated how much to divulge. ‘He was heavily into Latin American music.’

  ‘That I don’t know. We never discussed it. Music is alright if it’s kept in its place.’

  ‘He was working at the Lincoln International Hotel. Did he discuss that or his flat in Bedfont with you?’

  ‘Not really. As I wrote, once he had got over his worries, and really they were not very great, we just had a sociable time together. Usually reminiscing over happy times at the studios etc.’

  Why not, thought Geraldine, get it out in the open. After all she is the client and although she’s not telling me everything she is paying so I’ve an obligation not to keep anything I know from her. ‘I’ve been told he liked to spank women.’ There was a long pause at the other end of the line. ‘Are you okay, Joan?’

  ‘Mine’s a large krepkaya and ginger ale,’ interjected Lacenaire.

  ‘You still have that obstreperous parrot I hear. You’re very mistaken, Geraldine. I have no idea who could have possibly told you such a thing. Augustin was always perfectly gallant with our sex. Always the gentleman. If anything he tended to put us on a pedestal, which, as I told him, was not the best way necessarily to a woman’s heart. I would be obliged if you did not listen to malicious gossip and remembered you were hired to protect his interests.’

  ‘And to find out or help to find out who killed him.’

  ‘Yes certainly. I want to see justice done.’

  ‘A plus point. I’ve made contact with someone engaged on the police investigation. Is there anything else you now want to tell me?’

  ‘Congratulations. Your link could be very helpful. I’ll ring again at the same time in two days.’

  The line went dead.

  Geraldine proceeded upstairs. Somehow she believed Gonçalo Pereira more than she believed Joan Oliphant. She patted her rump lightly. Spanked women, eh? Well it took all sorts to keep gravity functioning and gravy to remain on the plate.

  Showered, towelled, decisive and dressed, she studied herself in the mirror as she put the finishing touches to her make-up. Kilkenny cats ready to go her lips puckered back at her. Just as dogs must have their day cats were entitled to their nights, and no one called them dirty stop outs. Geraldine, book and human detective, was ready for action, the anticipation of which was almost as good as the real thing.

  *

  Hamish was blue but wouldn’t admit it. Anger kept bubbling up during the routine tasks he was set to perform. Pat’s inanities grated more and more. Mentally he consigned her and the entirety of her Star Wars mother ship to at least the nearest wormhole if not to the ultimate black hole. One thing was for sure he was not going to see Geraldine again. I might scratch, she had said. More than that she had used him in the most feline way, playing to his vanity, giving him the glances he had misinterpreted. Those glances. No don’t think of them. If there had been the proverbial stray moggy treatin
g the station as a second home he would have, well, not exactly booted its posterior, after all he purported to be as much an animal lover as the next DC, but he would have looked coldly upon it and would have refused it the last sardine in the can even if it had miaowed piteously.

  He was still blue when he got home. Home now felt like a treacherous word. Where exactly was his home? Say one thing for Eunice she had always been loyal. Irritating, aspirational in a way he was not, but loyal, steadfast even. He couldn’t settle to eat the ready made cottage pie from the fridge. He switched off the TV five minutes after he had switched it on. The DVDs he had were unappealing. One viewing was all they were really worth. He was so blue in fact, without properly admitting it to himself, he started to tidy up the flat. The oft postponed house work finally got done in unforeseen circumstances. During the black plastic bag filling, the assorting into categorized piles, the dusting and the vacuuming, his mobile phone rang three times. Each time he knew exactly where it was but did not answer it.

  Chapter 7

  Alone But Not Unhappy

  The person who had dealt the fatal blow to Augustin Cox now felt more and more at home in their skin. The skin naturally was the same as before, but the regained home felt not only revived but also different. With a few decisive whacks all the dirty things, the complicated, intrusive things had been spirited away, not with a fairy wand exactly but rather with the salutary thump of Mister Punch’s solid stick. Yes, that really had been the way to do it, children. You couldn’t have managed cleansing things better if you’d bundled them all up in a sack, weighed it down with stones, secured it tightly and thrown it into a bottomless pit. Good bye interference. Good bye mockery and slurs. Good riddance trouble and hello to a new beginning — the graspable chance to be someone and something else.

  In recollection, that moment of immediacy, of action, of release, was a joy never to be forgotten. Sheer, unlooked for euphoria worth a perpetual giggle in anyone’s book. A giggle, which shouldn’t be suppressed, but might have to be made into a purely secret delight. A secret delight, which because it was secret and therefore never to be divulged, was sweeter by far than — but words couldn’t express it for words, when you came down to it weren’t real, not compared to something done, something so finally and triumphantly achieved.

  Care now was the watchword. The time it had taken the authorities to discover the body had been an unexpected bonus. Fortune really did favour the brave. Forensics, however, still posed an unknown threat. Danger lurked there but then when a corpse — only an object when you came right down to it — began to decompose how much evidence could be used? Evidence which might or might not prove to be detrimental.

  The upside of the future was glorious re-invention, the regained chance of a lifetime, while the downside was exile. It was the price that had to be paid. A snake sloughed off its old skin, yet it remained the same snake. Then the cast off skin had to be buried like a dead body and forgotten as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the snake in its new guise had to disappear even if it meant, as it did, never again seeing someone dear.

  Protectively all-encompassing London was a huge, sprawling swarm of being. So huge and ever fluctuating in its rapaciousness to include new territories, new fads and fashions, that in a sense its boundaries and innards became so indeterminate that they almost ceased to be recognised. Its multiple identities of place and function were only mindsets for those thinking this is the City, this is Chelsea, Clerkenwell, Gospel Oak. A way of saying this is where I am and how I am so the outside world could get the picture.

  In reality, in order to survive, most people clung to compartments. Home to work. Work to home. Tight little social networks, their geography of movement determined by habit, by sexual orientation and the pursuit of pleasure. Money was the lubricant. The necessity to maintain the mortgage or pay the rent kept their heads down along deep-rutted tracks. Anything else they blanked out. You could see the vacancy behind their eyes as they walked the street, settled on buses or rode the tube. Down there, on auto-pilot, they read the city the way it had been transformed into theoretical straight lines on the ever present graphic map. Only the tourists, in their sense of ‘now I am in London’, showed any signs of life through their half furtive conversations trying to find out where exactly they were.

  Meanwhile, up above, the real areas, the real streets, the real intersections, broadways and alleyways, shifted into a dreamscape. A place where no-one looked twice at who was passing by, who they might surprisingly recognise.

  So it wasn’t a question of having to hide as such in the city’s bigness. Once absence from routine and habit had been gained, and now thankfully it had been more than gained, then one could move virtually unseen and unremarked upon in the parallel city, the dream city which, for those who imagined they were awake, also happened to be the real London.

  Chapter 8

  Norma in Bed

  Norma Bones leant back and re-plumped the pillows, setting them upright again. Although it was summer and the weather outside was more than clement the central heating thermostat still had not been turned down in spite of Alison Petrie’s protestations. She re-arranged the silk bed jacket carefully around her shoulders. Geraldine was expected any minute, and, even though in a self-induced decline, she had no wish to bare more aged flesh in her presence than necessary. A comfortable bed, sufficient heat, carefully selected munchies, silence and innumerable books now enlivened by a visit from Gerry all enhanced her now increasingly happy old age.

  The only thing missing was Lacenaire. Yet that too was for the best. A semi-detached villa in Dollis Hill was no place for a parrot, certainly not for one named after the failed playwright, turned criminal murderer, played by Marcel Herrand in ‘The Children Of The Gods’. His squawks here in the epitome of Metroland would have been altogether de trop. Not that Norma had wholly given up on teaching him to say, ‘tu parles. tu parles c’est tout ce que tu sais faire,’ like his literary cousin, Laverdure, the parrot, in Zazie In The Metro. Futile perhaps after twenty-seven years, but one never knows. Geraldine’s svelte powers of persuasion back at the library might yet do the trick.

  ‘Norma dear. How’s it hanging, Cheetah Lady?’ Geraldine planted two smackers on Norma’s cheeks and remembered to apply the third one. ‘Jeez it’s hotter than hell in here even for orchids. You’ll have me stripped down to my undies in no time.’

  ‘A very small dose of Mr Elroy goes a long way, Geraldine. You see I have kept up to date with the toilers across the pond. Much better to stick to your Sternwood orchid scenario, but you’ve omitted to ask me in proper English how I am.’

  ‘How are you, Norma?’

  ‘That’s better. The appropriate manners for chez Dollis Hill should be observed at the bedside. I’m tolerable now you ask, but you? Do I detect a trace of ill-concealed love lies bleeding behind your transatlantic patois? Your eyes betray you, my beauty. A bit of rough gone wrong or, heaven help us, one of those undecided-gender Greeks? Even though you’re such a tomboy I predict one of these days Cupid’s darts will topple you out of the apple tree.’

  ‘I went dancing the night before last that’s all. I met a policeman. I’ve never danced with a policeman before and since you ask, yes he was rather fanciable.’ The fact that the said policeman had stood her up and then had not answered her calls remained unspoken.

  Norma patted her hand encouragingly. ‘Why Miss Geraldine we’ll have you out of these denim jeans and into a store bought gingham frock afore yon sun goes down. You’ll make an old woman mighty happy. Seeing him again?’

  ‘Mebbee. Oh, I don’t know. He was going to take me out. He didn’t show. I phoned. He didn’t answer.’ She shrugged defiantly.

  ‘Well a funicular railway has its ups and downs. Some things don’t run smooth. Where is this prospective swain based?’

  ‘Feltham CID. He’s a DC.’ Geraldine made a face.

  Norma made a face in return and pursed her lips. ‘If I had the strength to whistle I’d whis
tle happy coincidences.’

  ‘I thought so, but now I’m not so sure. He’s bound to be on our case, and I took the initiative. He was looking for people who might have known Augustin at the place we went to dance so I followed up and got a lead he didn’t know about.’

  Norma sighed. ‘Detection has its perils as I know to my cost. Do you want to see him again?’

  Geraldine nodded.

  ‘Then you’ve got to tell him you’re working on the same thing. He has to hear it direct from you, and if you can throw him a helpful bonne-bouche so much the better. Speaking of which, bonne-bouches that is, the hardworking Madame La Petrie has concocted a little refreshment for later. Now read something to me. A couple of paragraphs will do. I’d like to hear the words in your voice. Pick at random and don’t tell. I’ll close my eyes.’

  Geraldine rummaged obediently among the piles of books stacked precariously on the bedside table. She slid one out, opened it beyond halfway and began to read. When she had finished Norma opened her eyes and smiled. ‘What a wag that Iris Murdoch was. Always up to larks. For Bradley to be addressed repeatedly as Brad by that awful woman is so delicious. Sublime end, too, to forget what she had done, all the books she had written, who she he was.’

  Geraldine looked at the title, The Black Prince. ‘Not one I’ve read.’

  ‘You’ve time, dear heart. More than enough time. But tell me of the bird. Any progress?’

  ‘One new word. Fat. He’s said it twice. Otherwise it’s only the usual changes to the tiger stuff and occasionally the drinks, but that’s the extent of his repertoire as you well know. Why should he be able to switch to French?’