‘Right. Brilliant. Do you not think we’d be better spending our time . . .’ She sighed. ‘You are so annoying. And FYI, Mystery Man, the Jack Russell is dead.’
‘How do . . .?’
‘He is no more. He is an ex-Jack Russell.’
Her eyebrow rose ever so slightly and a glint appeared in her eye. She was challenging me. For those few moments the murders no longer mattered. How Alison, with her inferior intellect and intimate knowledge only of bangles and comics, could have deduced the fact of the dog’s demise based on one photograph and our current location defied logic. I quickly reviewed the evidence and immediately concluded that I had, almost literally, been barking up the wrong tree. Forensics officers had hoovered up every single doggy hair, which is why I hadn’t sneezed. Yet there was no dog bowl in the kitchen, no dog food in the cupboards. Outside, there was no smell of dog pee. The only evidence for the existence of the Jack Russell was its photograph. It therefore seemed obvious that I had misread the photograph. The sign of a good detective is one who isn’t afraid to re-examine the evidence and change his mind.
‘The dog was already dead,’ I said. Alison looked disappointed, but not, I think, surprised. ‘That was a photograph of a stuffed Jack Russell.’
‘Correctimundo. They bought it at a car boot sale just for a laugh. Everything about them was a laugh, right up to the point where they got bludgeoned to death.’
‘Okay. Dead dog. Let’s file that under irrelevant. Can we go now?’
‘Go? Man, dear, I’ve hardly started.’
And she was serious. I had to admire her commitment, though I didn’t share it. I didn’t like being in this house of the dead, in a dangerous neighbourhood where they would beat you to a pulp first and probably not ask questions later. My stomach cramped suddenly and I winced.
‘I think I need to . . .’ I thumbed upstairs.
‘Just like a burglar. You do that. I’ll concentrate on evidence-gathering.’
Although it wasn’t in itself sarcastic, there was a sarcastic way about her that wasn’t attractive. She was understandably in love with me, but that would wane, given time and experience. If the child proved to be mine – and I had every intention of seeking scientific confirmation – and presuming that the courts would sympathise with her, then I would have to find a way of getting it away from her. No Alibis was not necessarily tied to Belfast; there were cities all over the world that were lacking a mystery bookshop. It would be just a question of finding the right one. It should enjoy a temperate climate, it would not be prone to revolution, its inhabitants would speak English as a first language, and it must not have an extradition agreement with the United Kingdom, which probably ruled out Douglas, Isle of Man. I was thinking about other possible locations as I sat on the dead men’s toilet upstairs, looking down at a set of bathroom scales where their dead men’s feet had once rested, with their dead men’s dressing gowns hanging on the door, and their dead men’s toothbrushes in a paste-encrusted glass by the sink but level with my eyes, and I was humming ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ quite loudly to cover up the sounds. But the end of it coincided with hearing the pad of footsteps on the wooden floor of the landing outside, and immediately I regretted not closing the door fully and locking it. It is something I never do at home and rarely do when using the facilities in other locations because of my claustrophobia, but there and then I did not wish Alison to see me in such repose; it would be many years into our unworkable marriage before she would be allowed to see that.
My first thought as the steps grew closer was: Whatever she’s found, no piece of evidence is this important, and I was already crying, ‘Please don’t . . .!’ as the door was flung open.
My second thought was: You’re not Alison.
A woman stood there.
A woman in a floral dressing gown.
A woman in a floral dressing gown and at least nine months pregnant, with sleep hair and bleary eyes, looking stunned, and horrified, and screaming: ‘What the hell are you doing?!’
And I said the only thing that came to mind.
‘A poo.’
17
I hate showdowns and confrontations and loud arguments; I am of the school that sees nothing wrong with throwing the quilt back over your head and waiting for a problem to go away. Burying one’s head in the sand works for me, and look, here I am, a survivor. Other people will sort it out. Suffice to say I overcame my shyness and claustrophobia sufficiently to slam the door shut in the madwoman’s face, and had the wherewithal to lock it and return to my throne and stretch across to turn the taps of both the sink and the bath on full and then clamp my hands over my ears to further drown out the screaming from without while I recommenced humming ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’. Alison would deal with it. She is like that, reliable, a team player; she was in love with me, the father of her child; she wouldn’t bolt out of the back door at the first sign of trouble, the way I would. She would rise to the occasion, instantly concoct a story believable enough to calm the woman down, take her downstairs, make her a cup of tea, and from the state of her, probably deliver her baby as well. All the while the woman would be blubbering and ranting that there’s a nutter having a shit in my toilet, and Alison’s lovely calming voice would be saying if he’s going to have a shit, that’s probably the best place for him to have it, and soon they’d be laughing and all would be well with the world.
I gave it twenty minutes. I switched off the taps and cautiously ventured out. There were voices downstairs. I sat on the stairs halfway down and tried to make out what they were saying. I couldn’t. I tapped on the door at the bottom of the stairs and said, ‘Is it all right to come in?’
Alison said, ‘Yes.’
Alison and the pregnant woman were sitting on the sofa. They both looked like they’d been crying. The woman looked at me warily. I thought it better if I didn’t attempt an explanation or an apology.
Alison said, ‘This is my partner in solving crime.’
I nodded. There was no point in taking issue with that, yet. The woman said, ‘I’m sorry, so I am, I didn’t mean to walk in on you like that.’
See? Wait long enough, and they almost always apologise to you.
‘That’s okay,’ I said.
‘Pat’s Jimbo’s girlfriend,’ said Alison. ‘She’s heartbroken. She’s due any time.’
‘I live across the way, so I do. I miss him so much, I wanted to sleep in his bed, so I did. I had a key, but I couldn’t sleep, so I took some sleeping pills, too many, out like a light until . . . well, I thought youse were finished with your investigatin’ . . .’
‘We never sleep,’ I said.
Alison rolled her eyes. ‘You woke her up with your clumpin’ around, you big eejit. Pat’s been telling me all about Jimbo and Ronny, and wait till you hear. Go on, tell him.’
‘Well I told it all to your mates, so I did, but youse always want to hear it again.’
‘Wait till you hear,’ said Alison.
‘Him and Ronny had this house for years, they were best mates, so they were, but we were gonna get married after this one was born.’
‘Wait till you hear,’ said Alison.
I said, ‘Alison, without interruptions, please.’
‘Okay. But wait till you hear.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘she’s new. Please continue.’
She did. At length. I will spare you all the highways and byways, the roundabouts and the trunk roads and the dead ends and the no entries and the U-turns. She rattled on with her so I dos and so he dids peppering every sentence until I stopped hearing them at all; they became like dark matter between the relevant words, there but inaudible. She seemed like a good, down-to-earth woman, made miserable by the death of a loved one, but apt, in the way of traumatised widows and mothers, to view the departed through rose-tinted glasses.
Jimbo was her childhood sweetheart, Ronny part of the gang they all hung around in. They were into football and music and spent too mu
ch time messing at school to go into anything but the trades. They were good at their painting and decorating, but had their fingers in several pies, nothing too shady, Jack the lads really, anything for a laugh. Yes, they smoked a bit of dope. Were they dealers? Scumbags who’d sell crack to kids through the school fence? Course not. They were good drug-dealers, only supplying their mates. Were they paramilitaries or in with them? Only in the sense that everyone round here was, you had to be. But they never hurt anyone. And since peace broke out, all that has stopped, hasn’t it? So why do you think somebody killed them? Don’t know. Any enemies? Well . . .
‘Wait’ll you hear,’ Alison said.
‘I don’t know about enemies,’ said Pat. She had been twisting a damp piece of kitchen roll between her fingers and now it was starting to disintegrate, bits of it becoming attached to her dressing gown, other sodden fragments falling into the sofa and carpet where if they weren’t sorted they would dry and become part of the fabric, but at the same time never quite belong, like Romanians. The compulsive cleaner in me wanted to get down on my hands and knees and clean it up, but the sadist in me wanted to force her to do it.
‘I’m sorry?’ said Pat.
‘You’re sorry . . .?’
‘You said chains,’ said Alison.
‘Sorry. Yes. The chain of evidence. Getting ahead of myself. Enemies, you were saying?’
‘Not enemies. Just. What with the baby. And Christmas. We didn’t have much money, and what we have we were trying to save for the little one, so we were. So we’d agreed, so we had, that we weren’t going to buy each other presents. They said I was due after Christmas, so they did, and that would be the biggest present, wouldn’t it? But Christmas Day Jimbo knocks on my door and he has a present for me all wrapped up. And I was furious because we’d said no presents, so we had. But he said it was only a little one and he brings it in and it’s big, like, but I hadn’t a clue and then I took the wrapping off and I didn’t really know what to say. You know the way you maybe buy your girlfriend or maybe your baby like a cuddly toy? Well Jimbo’d gone and bought me this stuffed dog, but not like a softy one you’d buy in the toy shop; it was like . . . like you’d see in . . . like a museum or something. You know, properly stuffed. A real animal with its bits hoovered out and . . . stuffed. It was one of them . . .’
‘Jack Russells,’ said Alison. ‘But wait’ll you hear . . .’
‘Well, I mean, like, I wasn’t exactly, y’know, thrilled.’
‘So . . .?’ I asked, not exactly thrilled myself.
Alison nodded encouragement to Pat. Pat dropped some more bits of kitchen roll on the carpet.
‘So it happens, to Jimbo. And Ronny. And I’m in bits, and I don’t get on great with my family anyway, and I didn’t like that Jack Russell one bit, but since it happened, you know, like, it was the last thing Jimbo gave me, the last thing he touched, and so I was hugging it and kissing it and it slept in the bed with me . . .’
‘A comfort,’ I said.
‘Yeah, and then I was back and forth to the police station; they wanted statements, and photos of Jimbo, and I had to do like a press conference appealing for information and all that, so I did. But I come back home yesterday and someone’s gone and broken into my house, and they messed it up pretty awful and one of them – not that I know there was more than one – one of them did . . . well, he did . . . a dump on my bed . . .’
I held my hands up in mock innocence, but she was too busy tearing the remains of her kitchen roll to shreds to notice.
‘That’s why when I saw you . . . but that wasn’t the worst. When they didn’t find nothing valuable, what did they do, just for badness, they took my dog, they took my Jack.’
‘They took her Jack,’ said Alison.
‘They took her Jack,’ I repeated.
We walked away, pleased with our night’s work.
As we got back into the Beetle Alison said, ‘Well?’
‘Well what?’
‘Aren’t you going to thank me?’
‘For what?’
‘Saving your arse. Literally.’
‘I expected nothing less.’
Alison started the engine. And sighed. ‘That’s a compliment that isn’t one. She came wailin’ down those stairs like a banshee while you sat up there doing God knows what. I had to calm her down.’
‘Okay. Much appreciated. What’d you do, slap her?’
‘Yeah, right, that would have helped. In case you didn’t notice, we did have something in common?’
‘You and her?’
‘No, me and the man in the moon. Yes, me and her.’
‘What?’
‘Take a wild guess?’
‘Talk too much?’
‘No.’
‘Annoying? Untidy? Sarcastic? Self-obsessed? Overdramatic?’ And then I had it. ‘Pregnant?’
‘The penny drops. Yes, pregnant, dummy. It was the only thing I could think of. We got talking about our babies. We compared scans.’
‘You . . .?’
‘Uhuh.’
‘But Jeff . . .’
‘I had two.’
‘You . . .’
‘You’re so easy, Mystery Man.’
18
I had always known Alison was devious – really it goes with the territory, being a woman, I mean; it’s always been completely clear to me why they didn’t call it The One Face of Eve – but I hadn’t realised she would sink so low as to use the image of my son-to-be as a bargaining chip. Not only had she lied to me and misled me, forcing me to cross into a working-class area of the city in semidarkness, she had also caused me to sack my right-hand idiot. Jeff had been wilfully stupid in tearing up the scan, but the fact that there was another copy somewhat lessened both the dreadfulness of it and the sincerity of Alison’s anguished reaction. She lacked scruples. She was mean.
I fumed all the way home. She parked outside my house and switched off the engine. I reached for the door handle.
‘So it’s like that, is it?’ she snapped. ‘Oh get over yourself, would you? It was important to the case.’
‘You got Jeff sacked.’
‘Then phone him in the morning and tell him it was a misunderstanding, and he was still an arse tearing it up. You should thank me for using my initiative.’
‘Thank you for using your initiative.’
‘You’re so fucking perfect, aren’t you?’
I studied the cars thereabouts. There were no personalised number plates in view, which was a pity, because I felt the need. I had my nail for the scoring of cars with personalised number plates in my pocket. I had taken to carrying it with me on a more regular basis recently, instead of taking it out on special occasions. Despite their scarcity in this area, the general problem of expensive personalised number plates seemed to be growing, even though the world was spiralling ever more deeply into recession. It was a conundrum. My book sales were also immune to the recession. They were as low as ever.
She put a hand on my leg. ‘Aren’t you going to invite me in?’
‘No.’
‘You could rip my clothes off and ravage me. Or we could make toast. Whatever turns you on.’
‘No.’
‘So you’re just going to huff.’ I gave her a look. She took her hand back. ‘You’d cut off your nose to spite your face, wouldn’t you? When you could have me. Look at me. I’m gorgeous. But I won’t be for long. Once the twins start getting bigger.’
I would not rise to the bait. Either physically or mentally. I had a case to think through, new evidence to evaluate. I got out. I closed the door behind me, then crouched down and indicated for her to open the window, but she just glowered, started the engine and roared off.
I have been around detective fiction all of my life, and there is very little of substance that I have not read. I have also read most of the insubstantial, and plenty of barely literate garbage that has no stantial at all. Irrespective of the quality, however, people, including the police themselves, q
uite often make the mistake of thinking that there is a huge gap between fiction and fact, but I have discovered many parallels and coincidences and learned much about the realities of life and crime through mystery fiction. Modern policing’s reliance on science, I have found, is often at the expense of old-fashioned detective work. So much emphasis is put on the likes of DNA that what we traditionally refer to as ‘clues’ are often missed out. For example, I was quite certain that DI Robinson didn’t have a clue about the missing Jack Russell. Of course, it could still mean nothing. But it could just as easily mean something. With a remote possibility of everything.
I phoned Alison at midnight. My loins were stirring, plus I had decided to forgive her. But she wouldn’t come over, and embarked instead on a revenge huff. I knew it wasn’t that serious because she didn’t hang up. I think perhaps her loins were stirring as well but she was too up herself to give in to my temptations. So to dampen our mutual ardour I turned to the case.
‘We probably shouldn’t get too excited about it,’ I said. ‘It’s a classic mistake in detective fiction – they become fixated on the McGuffin even though everyone plus their aunt knows it’s a McGuffin. It’s a lazy way to write, but sometimes the McGuffin’s all you have. Get rid of the McGuffin and the whole bloody thing falls apart.’ There was silence from the other end. ‘Alison?’
‘What.’
‘You’ve gone quiet again.’
‘What’s a McGuffin?’
‘Oh. Sorry.’ I had forgotten. Her field of expertise was bangles. ‘It’s just like a thing that seems like it’s really important, but ultimately isn’t that important.’
‘Like you.’
‘Ho. Like, you know, in The Maltese Falcon where it’s all about finding and holding on to this bird statue that you think must be dead important but isn’t; it’s just an excuse to go chasing about and to exchange some smart dialogue. Or like the top-secret plans in The Thirty-Nine Steps. Or the letters of transit in Casablanca. The government secrets in North By Northwest. The stamps in Charade. The case with glowing contents in Kiss Me Deadly. The—’
The Day of the Jack Russell (Mystery Man) Page 9
