‘Hello. Earth to . . .?’
‘What?’
Alison shook her head. ‘Well you haven’t changed.’
‘Neither’s your face.’
‘Will you stop that, it’s stupid and it’s juvenile.’
‘So’s your face.’
‘Please.’
I shrugged. I sipped my frappuccino. In the preceding six weeks I had worked my way through the menu three times. One of the waitresses said to me, ‘You again, you’ll be getting shares in this place.’ That was just a stupid thing to say. But I didn’t tell her that. Sometimes I can hold my tongue. It comes with maturity.
‘So how have you been?’ Alison asked.
‘Great.’
‘Miss me?’ I gave her my screwed-up-face look. ‘Like a hole in the head, huh?’
I maintained a diplomatic silence. There was Christmas music playing in the background. There were damp footprints on the wooden floor. Stuffed shopping bags sat under tables.
‘Did you really throw my comics out?’
‘Yes.’
‘How would you feel if I threw your favourite books out?’
‘I wouldn’t lend you my favourite books.’
‘Well that’s true. Even when we were going well.’
‘Were we ever going well?’
She smiled. ‘Cup half empty as ever.’
‘Realist.’
‘Pessimist.’
‘So’s your—’
‘Please.’
I glared.
She said, ‘This is stupid.’
I was very tempted.
‘We were going well,’ she said. I shrugged. ‘We shouldn’t throw this away. I’m sorry. There’s only so many times I can say it.’
‘It’s not me you have to apologise to.’
‘I tried. Your mother told me to, and I quote, fuck off. At least I think she did; it’s hard to make out what she’s saying.’
‘Because you caused her to have a stroke.’
‘I did not, that’s just ridiculous.’
‘She is partially paralysed because you insisted on charging into her room like a banshee.’
‘That’s simply not true.’
‘You mean you didn’t?’
‘I just wanted to see if she was okay. I wanted to see if she existed.’
‘Existed.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘She went into shock. She had a stroke. She is permanently paralysed. She will never recover.’
‘Yet you have her working in the shop.’
‘You don’t miss much. I’m trying to help her.’
‘She’s driving away your customer.’
She smiled. I did not. I had no idea what I was doing there, apart from enjoying the coffee. I had once admired her from afar, and then she had seduced me. She had taken my virtue, paralysed my mother, and was now coming back for more. She was a vampire, insatiable.
‘Come on.’
She put her hand out across the table and took my own. I took it back. She sat back. She tutted. We sat in silence for a little while. The Christmas music was annoying.
She said, ‘You have a new case.’
‘Do I?’
She nodded. ‘Billy Randall.’
‘How do you know that?’
I knew how. She was a witch and had witch powers.
‘Jeff told me.’
‘What’re you doing talking to him?’
‘Why, have you told him not to?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘Because I don’t like him doing what he’s obviously just been doing. Talking about my business.’
‘He can’t help it. He loves me.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself. He loves anyone who shows any interest.’
‘Billy Randall, the Dick-Headed Man.’
‘Cock.’
‘Dick.’
‘Cock.’
She shook her head. ‘Are you ever wrong?’
I raised an eyebrow. Sometimes it is better to stand your ground and show backbone even if you are wrong. Empires have been built upon it. In this case, of course, I was not wrong.
‘It’s not much of a case,’ I said. ‘It shouldn’t take long.’
‘Well that’s good. Is he as obnoxious as he appears?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘You should get on well then. I looked it up on YouTube. Annadale Embankment, no?’
‘Maybe. If it is, it’s no concern of yours.’
‘I was thinking of heading over that way myself.’
‘It’s none of your business.’
‘I was thinking of tracking down RonnyCrabs and Jimbo and then giving the dickhead a call.’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘To show you I’m indispensable.’
‘Nobody is indispensable.’
‘Also I hear he’s single.’
‘You’d seduce a cock-headed man.’
‘I usually do.’
‘He’d see right through you.’
‘You didn’t.’
‘Did I not?’
‘No.’
‘Right.’
‘In fact, you’re still in love with me.’
‘Really.’
‘Yep. You’re just too pig-headed to admit it.’
‘And you think I live in my own little world?’
‘You do. And you are. Admit it and let’s stop this craziness. We’re made for each other. You know it, I know it. Who else would have you?’
‘You’re really winning me over.’
‘At least we’re talking.’
I stared at her. She was evil incarnate.
‘I’m six weeks pregnant,’ she said.
‘So’s your face.’
5
Next morning Jeff said, ‘You appear distracted.’
I said, ‘You appear not to be working.’
He rolled his eyes and returned to not working.
Jeff has it easy. Because I don’t trust him to order books or keep track of the stock and because customers are few and far between, he has relatively little to do. I don’t allow him to surf on the premises, or to have his friends in, or to use the landline or even his own mobile, so most of his time is taken up with staring into space and imagining unimaginable horrors being perpetrated on political prisoners in Third World countries. I had suggested that given his current employment with me he might be better off working in his spare time for an organisation like PEN, which specifically represents writers banged up abroad, rather than his current choice, Amnesty International, but he rejected that on the grounds that he couldn’t summon much interest in the type of writer that PEN represents, and after due consideration I found myself in that rare situation, total agreement with him. There is an inescapable irony to the fact that while every nation on earth boasts its own crime fiction, no crime fiction writers are currently locked up. That is because they have a healthy respect for the law. Literary authors, who tend to think that the sun shines out of their ink holes, believe that they are above it. When they rattle on about this or that they think they are promoting freedom of speech, but what they’re actually supporting is anarchy. They believe that just because they can string a few words together their views are more important or relevant than anyone else’s. But mostly we won’t support PEN authors because their books are usually shit. People would pay a lot more attention if John Grisham or James Patterson were locked up for criticising the state, although obviously, some would clamour for that even if they kept their traps shut.
Jeff was right. I was distracted.
I do not like being put on the spot. When Alison told me she was pregnant, and then assured me that she was serious, and then showed me the testing kit, I suggested that that proved nothing and that she was just trying to win me back by using fabricated evidence. What she really wanted was control of the shop and my money and my reputation and to make another murder attempt on my dear mother.
&nb
sp; She burst into tears.
At that point I was veering towards believing her, because I’m a pretty good judge of character and also it was roughly six weeks since we’d had sex for the first and last time and I could do the maths, though that didn’t rule out the possibility that she had also slept with her ex-husband or anyone else who asked. There was also the way she clung to me, and said she didn’t know what to do, and please could I not harbour a grudge and really she hadn’t meant to scare my mother so badly, and that she really did blame herself for her stroke, and given that Mother now had one largely useless arm and another that wasn’t much better, how was she ever going to be able to hold the baby?
I told her not to worry about that, as the shock of learning that she was going to be a grandmother would probably kill her.
‘Perhaps you want to tell her yourself, and finish off the job?’ I asked.
This wasn’t exactly what she wanted to hear. She snapped at me, I snapped back. We sat for a while. I ran my finger round the inside of the frappuccino and then sucked it. Alison said she felt ill. I said it was a little early for morning sickness. She told me to fuck off.
Outside, in the damp wind, we stood together but apart, her shop along a bit, mine on the other side of the road and down.
‘So,’ she said.
‘So,’ I said.
‘Food for thought,’ she said.
I nodded. ‘I’ll think then.’
‘Don’t think for too long.’
She nodded. She walked off. I returned to the shop. Because I’m a crime-fighter, I’m used to threats. And Alison had threatened me. It was subtle, but undeniable. Don’t think for too long. What she had neglected to add was ‘or’. Don’t think for too long or I’ll do something, like get rid of it. That was it. She had given me an ultimatum, but in a typically non-specific girlie way. She was telling me either I could get on board the team bus, or it was destined for the scrapyard. Or, if I didn’t play ball, she was going to keep the ball and take it home and say it was her ball and she could do what she liked with it. She would have him adopted. Or she would deny me access. She would move somewhere else, like South Africa or Portstewart. She knew I couldn’t travel outside of Belfast due to long-standing allergies to heat and dust and flies and grass and cows and beetles and corn and fruit and tin and wood and stuff. What might seem like an innocent relocation to a more pleasant environment would actually be a calculated act of torture. She was wicked to the core.
I didn’t need a child. A baby. I am like Mr Chips, I have thousands of them already. My books are my children; I nurture them, I protect them, then I send them out into the world. They travel, they educate, they change things, they inspire, they offer an escape, hope, humour, a climax and, almost always, a solution. Occasionally they return to me, battered, worn, sometimes even parts of them are missing, but they are always welcomed home and soon restored to health, ready to face the world again and at only slightly reduced charge.
A baby.
I tried to make myself think of the good days with Alison. She was lovely. She was caring. She did look out for me and after me. She was funny and beautiful and didn’t really have a bad bone in her body, which reassured me that if she really was pregnant, she would do nothing to harm the baby and that I had time to ponder our situation and come to the right decision. I had a bookshop to run and crimes to solve. Dames were one thing, babies another. You could count on the dislocated fingers of one hand the number of private eyes who had a mewling baby waiting at home. Babies weren’t just distracting, they were dangerous; in this game, if you were even five per cent off your mark, you were a goner.
‘Is there anything I can help you with?’
At first I thought Jeff was talking to a customer, which would have been funny in itself. But no, there he was, in the doorway of the stock room, looking confused, a little bit like a Labrador who knows something is up but hasn’t quite got the intelligence to work out exactly what.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You could move some of those boxes.’
He started to say something else, then nodded and went over to where I was indicating. He was, after all, just an employee.
6
I am nothing if not professional when it comes to work. The Case of the Cock-Headed Man was not going to solve itself. So I set my personal problems to one side and applied myself to identifying the perpetrators of the crimes, viral and otherwise, against Billy Randall.
I had already established that I was seeking two youngish tradesmen answering to the nicknames of Jimbo and RonnyCrabs, and that they either lived or worked, or quite possibly both, in the vicinity of the Annadale Embankment. I spent an hour on the phone calling as many decorators, roofers, TV aerial men and other outdoorsy types of manual labourer as I could track down in that general area in the Yellow Pages and then over the internet, but without success. It seemed to me that they were the types that did not advertise their services in the traditional media, but rather relied on handwritten notices in local shop windows or upon word of mouth. I was pretty sure they didn’t pay tax and quite possibly they exploited old women with estimates that wildly exaggerated the amount of work required. It would be good to take them down.
Ordinarily I would next have reverted to my wide and varied database of customers, alerting them of my need to track these two delinquents down, but it was Christmas week, and not a good time to be asking anyone anything; also my polite e-mail enquiry would doubtless have remained unread, most probably because I had bombarded these very same customers with enticements to join my Christmas Club every day for the past eighteen weeks and they were quite probably suffering from No Alibis fatigue. They would discard my appeal as mere spam, which was what I would be eating for Christmas if I didn’t get to the bottom of The Case of the Cock-Headed Man fairly quickly. My only choice, therefore, was to take to the road in the all-new, purpose-sprayed No Alibis van. My last, having recently been burned out, had been replaced by a larger, sleeker model with a sliding door and plenty of room for stock inside. Jeff had been instrumental in its selection and I had foolishly succumbed to his enthusiasm; fortunately I had come into a little money as a result of solving my last case, although I would probably have been wiser to invest it in National Savings. The No Alibis logo, with Murder Is Our Business in bloody red lettering below, did at first look impressive, and the vehicle did handle well. I was more or less comfortable driving it, though I took care to keep to my upper limit of 30 mph while I negotiated the speed bumps and other dangers one associates with the dark streets of Belfast. However, as soon as Jeff referred to it as ‘the Mystery Machine’, I began to have my doubts. These worsened when I was forced to drive my mother to a hospital appointment. She was claiming disability benefit because of her stroke but had to be assessed before they would hand over the money that might see us through the winter. Mother wanted to maximise the impression of her incapacity by using a wheelchair. Jeff suggested it would look much more effective if she arrived at the hospital in the No Alibis minivan and disembarked via a ramp. It was on our first practice run that Jeff referred to Mother as ‘Ironside’, and the nickname stuck in my head as surely as the tumours that will one day kill me. Mother, thereafter, began to regard the van as her own personal taxi, despite the fact that she had a perfectly good set of calipers and a Zimmer frame with which to traverse the city. Jeff, helpfully, worked out a way to bolt her wheelchair into the back of the van, and also adapted the seat belt so that no matter how hard I braked, there was no way of hurling Mother out of her chair and through the windscreen.
I drove carefully to Annadale Embankment and then along it until I came to the billboard featuring the now repaired or replaced image of Billy Randall. Although he was cock-free, there were now several holes in his head caused by stones, rocks or pebbles, bits of rubble, discarded beer tins, overripe fruit or mice in bottles. The Embankment itself is a busy thru-way devoid of buildings, but there is a large area of public housing close by, leading on to the shops on the O
rmeau Road, and it was here that I chose to park the van and begin my search for Jimbo and RonnyCrabs.
I stopped at the first newsagent’s window I came to and read the handwritten cards displayed there – teachers offering extra tuition, a lost cat, an ironing service, oriental massage, and several advertising the services of general handymen, which was a category that Jimbo and RonnyCrabs might well have fallen into. I called these handymen and asked for and about Jimbo – I couldn’t quite bring myself to enquire about RonnyCrabs – but without success. They may have known him, but were adhering to the general handyman’s code of silence, their omertà (distinct from their usual culpa lata ). I moved along then to the window of an Oxfam store, which featured a similar series of advertisements, and then a Save the Children. Each offered several possibilities, but led me nowhere. I stood and looked up and down an Ormeau Road thick with traffic and exhaust fumes, but framed above and at the sides by the twinkling of Christmas lights, and tried to figure out what to do next. Red-faced shoppers bustled anxiously along the footpaths in search of a late bargain: it was a lowrent area, largely devoid of franchise and multinational outlets; what in America they’d call mom and pop stores, but which I preferred to think of as cheap and nasty. I wouldn’t shop here if my life depended on it. There were dozens, perhaps hundreds of these little fly-by-night businesses and I could have spent weeks going from door to door asking questions, but it was cold, and I am susceptible to chills and flu. More than once have I lain at death’s door because of the weakness of my immune system and exposure to poor people; it was important not to dawdle here amongst the underclasses. I don’t like the smells of poverty: the damp, the stained, the abandoned, the threadbare, the stitched in time, the decaying, the turned, the mothball, the charity, the hopelessness, the malice, the fear, the hunger, the embalming fluid, the hatred, the bigotry, the fact that the Save the Children shop had a display of books in rather good condition but which still smelt like they’d been soaked in sweat and pressed face down into a manky carpet. It was Billy Randall territory and I didn’t like it. I had to track down Jimbo and RonnyCrabs fast and get out.
The Day of the Jack Russell (Mystery Man) Page 3
