Like that chap yesterday . . .
He paused.
The chap yesterday . . .
The world held its breath.
Quietly and gently there settled on him the knowledge that something, somewhere, was ghastly. Something was terribly wrong.
There was a disaster hanging silently in the air around him waiting for him to notice it. His knees tingled.
What he needed, he had been thinking, was a client. He had been thinking that as a matter of habit. It was what he always thought at this time of the morning. What he had forgotten was that he had one.
He stared wildly at his watch. Nearly eleven-thirty. He shook his head to try and clear the silent ringing between his ears, then made a hysterical lunge for his hat and his great leather coat that hung behind the door.
Fifteen seconds later he left the house, five hours late but moving fast.
4
A MINUTE OR two later Dirk paused to consider his best strategy. Rather than arriving five hours late and flustered, it would be better all around if he were to arrive five hours and a few extra minutes late, but triumphantly in command.
“Pray God I am not too soon!” would be a good opening line as he swept in, but it needed a good follow-through as well, and he wasn’t sure what it should be.
Perhaps it would save time if he went back to get his car, but then again it was only a short distance, and he had a tremendous propensity for getting lost when driving. This was largely because of his “Zen” method of navigation, which was simply to find any car that looked as if it knew where it was going and follow it. The results were more often surprising than successful, but he felt it was worth it for the sake of the few occasions when it was both.
Furthermore he was not at all certain that his car was working.
It was an elderly Jaguar, built at that very special time in the company’s history when they were making cars which had to stop for repairs more often than they needed to stop for petrol, and frequently needed to rest for months between outings. He was, however, certain, now that he came to think about it, that the car didn’t have any petrol, and furthermore he did not have any cash or valid plastic to enable him to fill it up.
He abandoned that line of thought as wholly fruitless.
He stopped to buy a newspaper while he thought things over. The clock in the newsagent’s said eleven thirty-five. Damn, damn, damn. He toyed with the idea of simply dropping the case. Just walking away and forgetting about it. Having some lunch. The whole thing was fraught with difficulties in any event. Or rather it was fraught with one particular difficulty, which was that of keeping a straight face. The whole thing was complete and utter nonsense. The client was clearly loopy, and Dirk would not have considered taking the case except for one very important thing.
Three hundred pounds a day plus expenses.
The client had agreed to it just like that. And when Dirk had started his usual speech to the effect that his methods, involving as they did the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, often led to expenses that might appear to the untutored eye to be somewhat tangential to the matter in hand, the client had simply waved the matter aside as trifling. Dirk liked that in a client.
The only thing the client had insisted upon in the midst of this almost superhuman fit of reasonableness was that Dirk had to be there, absolutely had, had, had to be there, ready, functioning and alert, without fail, without even the merest smidgen of an inkling of failure, at six-thirty in the morning. Absolutely.
Well, he was just going to have to see reason about that as well. Six-thirty was clearly a preposterous time, and he, the client, obviously hadn’t meant it seriously. A civilized six-thirty for twelve noon was almost certainly what he had in mind, and if he wanted to cut up rough about it, Dirk would have no option but to start handing out some serious statistics. Nobody got murdered before lunch. But nobody. People weren’t up to it. You needed a good lunch to get both the blood-sugar and blood-lust levels up. Dirk had the figures to prove it.
Did he, Anstey (the client’s name was Anstey—he was an odd, intense man in his mid-thirties with staring eyes, a narrow yellow tie and one of the big houses in Lupton Road; Dirk hadn’t actually liked him very much and thought he looked as if he were trying to swallow a fish), did he know that 67 percent of all known murderers who expressed a preference had had liver and bacon for lunch? And that another 22 percent had been torn between a prawn biryani and an omelet? That dispensed with 89 percent of the threat at a stroke, and by the time you had further discounted the salad eaters and the turkey and ham sandwich munchers and started to look at the number of people who would contemplate such a course of action without any lunch at all, then you were well into the realms of negligibility and bordering on fantasy.
After two-thirty, but nearer to three o’clock, was when you had to start being on your guard. Seriously. Even on good days. Even when you weren’t receiving death threats from strange gigantic men with green eyes you had to watch people like a hawk after the lunch hour. The really dangerous time was after four o’clockish, when the streets began to fill up with marauding packs of publishers and agents, maddened with fettuccine and kir and baying for cabs. Those were the times that tested men’s souls. Six-thirty in the morning? Forget it. Dirk had.
With his resolve well stiffened. Dirk stepped back out of the newsagent’s into the nippy air of the street and strode off.
“Ah, I expect you’ll be wanting to pay for that paper, then, won’t you, Mr. Dirk, sir?” said the newsagent, trotting gently after him.
“Ah, Bates,” said Dirk loftily, “you and your expectations. Always expecting this and expecting that. May I recommend serenity to you? A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment. Learn to be one with the joy of the moment.”
“I think it’s twenty pence, that one, sir,” said Bates tranquilly.
“Tell you what I’ll do. Bates, seeing as it’s you. Do you have a pen on you at all? A simple ballpoint will suffice.”
Bates produced one from an inner pocket and handed it to Dirk, who then tore off the corner of the paper on which the price was printed and scribbled “IOU” above it. He handed the scrap of paper to the newsagent.
“Shall I put this with the others, then, sir?”
“Put it wherever it will give you the greatest joy, dear Bates, I would want you to put it nowhere less. For now, dear man, farewell.”
“I expect you’ll be wanting to give me back my pen as well, Mr. Dirk.”
“When the times are propitious for such a transaction, my dear Bates,” said Dirk, “you may depend upon it. For the moment, higher purposes call it. Joy, Bates, great joy. Bates, please let go of it.”
After one last listless tug, the little man shrugged and padded back toward his shop.
“I expect I’ll be seeing you later, then, Mr. Dirk,” he called out over his shoulder, without enthusiasm.
Dirk gave a gracious bow of his head to the man’s retreating back, and then hurried on, opening the newspaper at the horoscope page as he did so.
“Virtually everything you decide today will be wrong,” it said bluntly.
Dirk slapped the paper shut with a grunt. He did not for a second hold with the notion that great whirling lumps of rock light years away knew something about your day that you didn’t. It just so happened that “The Great Zaganza” was an old friend of his who knew when Dirk’s birthday was, and always wrote his column deliberately to wind him up. The paper’s circulation had dropped by nearly a twelfth since he had taken over doing the horoscope, and only Dirk and The Great Zaganza knew why.
He hurried on, flapping his way quickly through the rest of the paper. As usual, there was nothing interesting. A lot of stuff about the search for Janice Smith, the missing airline girl from Heathrow, and how she could possibly have disappeared just like that. They printed the latest picture of her, which was on a swing with pigtails, aged six. Her father, a Mr. Jim Pear
ce, was quoted as saying it was quite a good likeness, but she had grown up a lot now and was usually in better focus. Impatiently, Dirk tucked the paper under his arm and strode onward, his thoughts on a much more interesting topic.
Three hundred pounds a day. Plus expenses.
He wondered how long he could reasonably expect to sustain in Mr. Anstey his strange delusions that he was about to be murdered by a seven foot tall, shaggy-haired creature with huge green eyes and horns, who habitually waved things at him: a contract written in some incomprehensible language and signed with a splash of blood, and also a kind of scythe. The other notable feature of this creature was that no one other than his client had been able to see it, which Mr. Anstey dismissed as a trick of the light.
Three days? Four? Dirk didn’t think he’d be able to manage a whole week with a straight face, but he was already looking at something like a grand for his trouble. And he would stick a new fridge down on the list of tangential but non-negotiable expenses. That would be a good one. Getting the old fridge thrown out was definitely part of the interconnectedness of all things.
He began to whistle at the thought of simply getting someone to come round and cart the thing away, turned into Lupton Road and was surprised at all the police cars there. And the ambulance. He didn’t like them being there. It didn’t feel right. It didn’t sit comfortably in his mind alongside his visions of a new fridge.
5
DIRK KNEW LUPTON Road. It was a wide tree-lined affair, with large late-Victorian terraces which stood tall and sturdily and resented police cars. Resented them if they turned up in numbers, that is, and if their lights were flashing. The inhabitants of Lupton Road liked to see a nice, well-turned-out single police car patrolling up and down the street in a cheerful and robust manner—it kept property values cheerful and robust too. But the moment the lights started flashing in that knuckle-whitening blue, they cast their pallor not only on the neatly pointed bricks that they flashed across, but also on the very values those bricks represented.
Anxious faces peered from behind the glass of neighboring windows, and were irradiated by the blue strobes.
There were three of them, three police cars left askew across the road in a way that transcended mere parking. It sent out a massive signal to the world saying that the law was here now taking charge of things, and that anyone who just had normal, good and cheerful business to conduct in Lupton Road could just fuck off.
Dirk hurried up the road, sweat pricking at him beneath his heavy leather coat. A police constable loomed up ahead of him with his arms spread out, playing at being a stop barrier, but Dirk swept him aside in a torrent of words to which the constable was unable to come up with a good response off the top of his head. Dirk sped on to the house.
At the door another policeman stopped him, and Dirk was about to wave an expired Marks and Spencer charge card at him with a deft little flick of the wrist that he had practiced for hours in front of a mirror on those long evenings when nothing much else was on, when the officer suddenly said, “Hey, is your name Gently?”
Dirk blinked at him warily. He made a slight grunting noise that could be either “yes” or “no” depending on the circumstances.
“Because the Chief has been looking for you.”
“Has he?” said Dirk.
“I recognized you from his description,” said the officer, looking him up and down with a slight smirk.
“In fact,” continued the officer, “he’s been using your name in a manner that some might find highly offensive. He even sent Big Bob the Finder off in a car to find you. I can tell that he didn’t find you from the fact that you’re looking reasonably well. Lot of people get found by Big Bob the Finder, they come in a bit wobbly. Just about able to help us with our enquiries but that’s about all. You’d better go in. Rather you than me,” he added quietly.
Dirk glanced at the house. The stripped-pine shutters were closed across all the windows. Though in all other respects the house seemed well cared for, groomed into a state of clean, well-pointed affluence, the closed shutters seemed to convey an air of sudden devastation.
Oddly, there seemed to be music coming from the basement, or rather, just a single disjointed phrase of thumping music being repeated over and over again. It sounded as if the stylus had got stuck in the groove of a record, and Dirk wondered why no one had turned it off or at least nudged the stylus along so that the record could continue. The song seemed very vaguely familiar and Dirk guessed that he had probably heard it on the radio recently, though he couldn’t place it. The fragment of lyric seemed to be something like:
“Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i—
“Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i—
“Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i—” and so on.
“You’ll be wanting to go down to the basement,” said the officer impassively, as if that was the last thing that anyone in their right mind would be wanting to do.
Dirk nodded to him curtly and hurried up the steps to the front door, which was standing slightly ajar. He shook his head and clenched his shoulders to try and stop his brain from fluttering.
He went in.
The hallway spoke of prosperity imposed on a taste that had originally been formed by student living. The floors were stripped boards heavily polyurethaned, the walls white with Greek rugs hung on them, but expensive Greek rugs. Dirk would be prepared to bet (though probably not to pay up) that a thorough search of the house would reveal, among who knew what other dark secrets, five hundred British Telecom shares and a set of Dylan albums that was complete up to “Blood on the Tracks.”
Another policeman was standing in the hall. He looked terribly young, and he was leaning very slightly back against the wall, staring at the floor and holding his helmet against his stomach. His face was pale and shiny. He looked at Dirk blankly, and nodded faintly in the direction of the stairs leading down.
Up the stairs came the repeated sound:
“Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i—
“Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i—”
Dirk was trembling with a rage that was barging around inside him looking for something to hit or throttle. He wished that he could hotly deny that any of this was his fault, but until anybody tried to assert that it was, he couldn’t.
“How long have you been here?” he said curtly.
The young policeman had to gather himself together to answer.
“We arrived about half-hour ago,” he replied in a thick voice. “Hell of a morning. Rushing around.”
“Don’t tell me about rushing around,” said Dirk, completely meaninglessly, He launched himself down the stairs.
“Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i—
“Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i—”
At the bottom there was a narrow corridor. The main door off it was heavily cracked and hanging off its hinges. It opened into a large double room. Dirk was about to enter when a figure emerged from it and stood barring his way.
“I hate the fact that this case has got you mixed up in it,” said the figure, “I hate it very much. Tell me what you’ve got to do with it so I know exactly what it is I’m hating.”
Dirk stared at the neat, thin face in astonishment.
“Gilks? ” he said.
“Don’t stand there looking like a startled whatsisname, what are those things that aren’t seals? Much worse than seals. Big, blubbery things. Dugongs. Don’t stand there looking like a startled dugong. Why has that . . .” Gilks pointed into the room behind him—“why has that . . . man in there got your name and telephone number on an envelope full of money?”
“How m . . .” started Dirk. “How, may I ask, do you come to be here, Gilks? What are you doing so far from the Fens? Surprised you find it dank enough for you here.”
“Three hundred pounds,” said Gilks. “Why?”
“Perhaps you would allow me to speak to my client,” said Dirk.
“Your cli
ent, eh?” said Gilks grimly. “Yes. All right. Why don’t you speak to him? I’d be interested to hear what you have to say.” He stood back stiffly and waved Dirk into the room.
Dirk gathered his thoughts and entered the room in a state of controlled composure which lasted for just over a second.
Most of his client was sitting quietly in a comfortable chair in front of the hi-fi. The chair was placed in the optimal listening position—about twice as far back from the speakers as the distance between them, which is generally considered to be ideal for stereo imaging.
He seemed generally to be casual and relaxed, with his legs crossed and a half-finished cup of coffee on the small table beside him. Distressingly, though, his head was sitting neatly on the middle of the record which was revolving on the hi-fi turntable, with the tone arm snuggling up against the neck and constantly being deflected back into the same groove. As the head revolved it seemed once every 1.8 seconds or so to shoot Dirk a reproachful glance, as if to say, “See what happens when you don’t turn up on time like I asked you to,” then it would sweep on round to the wall, round, round, and back to the front again with more reproach.
“Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i—
“Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i—”
The room swayed a little around Dirk, and he put his hand out against the wall to steady it.
“Was there any particular service you were engaged to provide for your client?” said Gilks behind him, very quietly.
“Oh, er, just a small matter,” said Dirk weakly. “Nothing connected with all this. No, he, er, didn’t mention any of this kind of thing at all. Well, look, I can see you’re busy. I think I’d better just collect my fee and leave. You say he left it out for me?”
Having said this. Dirk sat heavily on a small bentwood chair standing behind him, and broke it.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set Page 28
