by Paul Charles
‘Do you often have to work this late at night?’ Armstrong asked, breaking into McCusker’s mood.
‘Usually not,’ McCusker replied, remembering he hadn’t actually been on a graveyard shift since his days up at Portrush. ‘Where would the nearest taxi rank be?’
‘Either on Botanic Avenue or down outside the Europa Hotel on Great Victoria Street,’ Armstrong replied. ‘If you definitely wanted to be assured of getting one, I’d say outside the Europa would be your best bet, but…’
When Armstrong didn’t complete his answer McCusker leaned his head and shoulders towards the tall thin man, while continuing their walk, keeping his hands in his pockets as he did so.
‘Well, I was going to say that if you wanted to be more discreet, if you see what I mean, then perhaps Botanic Avenue would be a better option.’
‘Right! Yes. Good point,’ McCusker gushed, ‘tell me this Mr Armstrong: did Mr Bloom drive, did… does he have a car?’
‘Yes, Louis drives an elegant ice blue Jaguar S Type, possibly the last classic car to come off the UK production line. On the other hand Elizabeth drives a black VW Golf, and they were both parked outside their house when I arrived earlier.’
Al Armstrong and McCusker stood on the pavement just outside the beautiful Queens University red-brick Lanyon Building, across the green in University Square. McCusker found himself mesmerised by the grandeur of the building.
‘Maybe we should be heading back to the house,’ McCusker said, as he looked back up University Street, in the direction he clearly wanted to go.
‘Gosh, I suppose Botanic will be teeming with PSNI at first light?’ Armstrong offered, seemingly totally comfortable, with his arms folded in front of him as he walked along.
‘That’ll be the plan,’ McCusker replied, as they passed the spot they’d exited a few minutes previously and continued on up Stranmillis Road, past the front of the Ulster Museum, then past Friar’s Bush graveyard. McCusker had never noticed the graveyard before and went to open the gate.
‘It’s always locked,’ Armstrong offered. ‘There is too much vandalism going on these days. You have to make an appointment to gain entry.’
McCusker returned his hands to his pockets and continued up the gentle slope, to where they took the next left into the quaint Landseer Street, which looked like it was a stage set for a period drama.
Something was troubling McCusker and he couldn’t work out what it was. It was 03.50 a.m., and he felt a real need to return to the Bloom household, which was at the other end of Landseer Street. He wasn’t quite sure if he’d be rescuing Mrs Bloom or DI Lily O’Carroll.
Fifteen minutes later, tea and toasted up, McCusker had another thought. ‘Where did Mr Bloom keep his passport?’
‘In his office, love,’ Mrs Bloom quickly replied.
‘And his office is still locked and you don’t know where the key is,’ McCusker said, not so much as a question, because he knew the answer, but more to draw a line under yet another dead end.
‘I know where he keeps the key to his study,’ Armstrong offered, like a pupil keen to score Brownie points with his favourite teacher.
‘Really?’ Mrs Bloom offered, in what appeared to be genuine shock.
‘Gosh yes,’ Armstrong said, a little more self-consciously this time, ‘I didn’t realise it was such a big secret.’
He walked out of the kitchen followed by (in order) Mrs Bloom, DI Lily O’Carroll and McCusker bringing up the rear.
On the first landing he walked straight over to the door immediately in front of them and raised his left hand up, his fingers blindly working their way across the top ledge of the door frame. Not a difficult feat for someone of his height, but a clear impossibility for someone of Mrs Bloom’s stature.
‘Yes… here we are,’ Armstrong eventually, and largely, croaked as he handed a Yale key, not to either of the police but to Mrs Bloom, who stared at it in disbelief for a full minute before handing it over to DI O’Carroll.
Chapter Four
McCusker wasn’t even sure if he was expecting a dark and dusty, book-laden study but when they eventually unlocked the door, he was shocked at how bright, airy and uncluttered it was.
Mrs Bloom and Al Armstrong rushed right into the study ahead of the two members of the PSNI (one official, one via Grafton Agency). Mrs Bloom seemed beside herself in her excitement at being able to gain access to her husband’s private space. She had to be physically restrained (quite literally) by O’Carroll from sitting behind her missing husband’s desk.
‘Sorry, Mrs Bloom, we need to leave everything in here exactly as it is.’
‘You can’t stop her looking through her husband’s papers,’ Al protested loudly, ‘matrimonial rights!’
McCusker shook his head and rolled his eyes.
‘Yes, of course,’ Armstrong croaked, ‘what’s hers is his, but equally what’s his is hers.’
‘Well sir,’ O’Carroll started off, patiently enough, ‘at the moment Mr Bloom has officially been reported as missing and so as there may be vital evidence in this room, we really need the both of you to please leave with me now so that my colleague can search this room for evidence that suggests where Mr Bloom may be.’
‘Yes, Al, she’s correct isn’t she,’ Mrs Bloom offered quietly. ‘Let’s not get in their way. The sooner they discover what happened to Louis and find him, the better.’
With that Mrs Bloom meekly led the way out of the study. McCusker overhead her saying to Armstrong that she needed to take a nap, and would he be a dear and stay around to watch the place.
McCusker assumed the Xanax had just reached full effectiveness in her blood stream.
McCusker figured that the reason why the study and the adjoining conservatory – which was built out over the entrance hallway below them - was so sparsely furnished and airy was so that Louis Bloom would have no distractions to his research, writing or whatever else it was that the lecturer did up there.
The walls were painted off-white and totally free of attachments. The desk, Captain’s Chair, easy chair, bookcase and filing cabinet were all American Arts and Crafts design. On second glance McCusker figured that the Captain’s chair may not have been an American Arts and Crafts item. What looked like the original floorboards had been expertly sanded and stained, and the fact that the planks ran the full length of the room and extended into the conservatory proved that the glass structure was not the add-on that McCusker initially guessed it to be. The conservatory itself was totally item-free apart from some red and green stained glass on the back wall of the conservatory. The same pattern flicked across the translucent-walled room in red and green shafts of light.
‘No, there wasn’t a single item of furniture in the conservatory,’ McCusker repeated to himself, just under his breath. So, clearly, Louis Bloom was going for the Zen look in his study and he was using what looked like a greenhouse, which had just been plonked on the top of his hallway, exclusively as a light source.
The desk drawers – three on one side, a pair on the right and co-joined by a longer, thinner drawer across the knee-well – were all unlocked apart from the one on the bottom left. McCusker imagined that the key would be secure in one of the remaining drawers.
The top middle drawer was neatly – very neatly, it has to be said – filled with pens, pencils, erasers, rulers, paperclips, a few batteries, some coins in a red fingerbowl, and some plain but classy comp slips, with black embossed “Louis Bloom, QUB” in pleasing old-fashioned, courier font across the top. In the top drawer to the left was an inch stack of personalised (same style) foolscap, bonded, high-quality paper with matching envelopes. Next drawer down was empty except for a Perspex cylinder containing four green and white juggling balls. The bottom left drawer contained several bulbs; a small electric fan; a Roberts Radio & CD Player (2 in 1); copies of The Beatles’ Abbey Road, Revolver and Rubber Soul CDs, some Apple dongles, (charging leads, and two Apple charging plugs) all in matching white. The top drawer on the
right contained half a dozen QUB prospectuses and about two-dozen Phil Coulter vinyl records. The stash of singles was from Phil’s long-gone days at QUB when he fronted Phil Coulter & the Gleemen on their one and only single, ‘Foolin’ Time’. All copies were perfectly mint (1963) on the UED (Ulster Electronic Development) label, and protected in a Perspex box.
The next drawer down on the right was locked. Try though he did, McCusker could not find a key to that bottom right drawer. When O’Carroll returned to the study about 30 minutes later, McCusker complained about not being able to find a key.
‘Well, it must be here somewhere,’ she offered, starting on a bit of a shufti.
‘Or it’s on his key ring,’ McCusker said, in his own defence.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said, through an apologised yawn, ‘the door key was too obvious.’
O’Carroll took the Phil Coulter singles and the QUB prospectuses from the top right-hand drawer and then tried to remove the drawer totally from its runners. It would only come out about 80 per cent of the way and then wouldn’t budge any further. O’Carroll got down on the floor on her hands and knees and used her right palm to feel all around the underside of the extended drawer.
‘Here’s my wee beauty,’ she said gleefully, as she removed a key, which had been taped to the underside of the top drawer.
McCusker couldn’t wait to open the drawer and then seemed simultaneously shocked, surprised and disappointed when he discovered about two-dozen vintage Playboy magazines.
* * *
‘Did you find his passport yet?’ O’Carroll asked, tut-tutting her way through one of the Playboy mags.
‘Nope,’ McCusker replied. ‘Where’s Armstrong?’
‘He fell asleep on the living room sofa,’ she replied, still distracted by the magazine. ‘Not a pretty sight. He sleeps with his mouth open, catching flies, every raspy breath sounding like it would wake a herd of elephants.’
McCusker examined the three-drawer filing cabinet. The top drawer was locked, the middle drawer unlocked. He tugged on the bottom drawer expecting the same, but although it didn’t actually open he could feel it give a little. O’Carroll walked over to him, still engrossed in the mag. She gave the bottom drawer a solid Birkenstock-assisted kick. McCusker, just to humour her, leaned over and tugged once more at the handle of the drawer, and was pleasantly surprised when it opened to a gentle tug.
‘You know,’ O’Carroll began, as McCusker started to investigate the contents of the drawer, ‘they had some really cool underwear in the nineties. I wonder where I could get any of this today?’
McCusker was too distracted by the contents of the bottom drawer to pick up what she had said.
‘Sorry?’
‘Nothing, nothing,’ she said, quickly closing and returning the Playboy to the desk drawer they’d found it in, ‘I was just thinking out loud. What’s in there?’
‘Just a lot of paperwork in files – seems to be either his research or lecture material. I’ll leave it for DS Barr; he excels at this kind of stuff…’
‘On top of which, he loves doing it.’
McCusker was about to complain about not being able to open the top two drawers of the filing cabinet when he remembered her trick from earlier and hunkered down and slid his hand in the bottom drawer space and along the bottom of the middle drawer. Just like O’Carroll and Tom Thumb, he too was rewarded by discovering not a plum, but a key taped to the bottom.
The middle drawer seemed to contain more files just like those below, but McCusker figured they must be more important, due to the fact they were under lock and key. Again he decided to leave them for DS Willie John Barr.
The top drawer, to McCusker’s eyes, most definitely contained top-drawer material: journals; diaries; passports, for both Mr and Mrs Bloom; letters (still in their envelopes and addressed to Mr Louis Bloom c/o of a Belfast PO box number); postcards addressed to the same PO box; bank statements; credit card statements; phone records; National Insurance details; pension statements; job records; education certificates; sports diplomas; medical records; dental records and insurance policies. All fodder for DS Barr.
McCusker locked the door to Louis Bloom’s very private office space. Just in case either Armstrong or Mrs Bloom might have been watching him, he pretended to replace the key back on the top ridge but instead palmed it into his pocket. He wandered down the stairs believing that butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. McCusker thought this was one of the many really silly sayings; why on Earth would anyone want butter to melt in their mouth?
Chapter Five
McCusker used the excuse of “freshening up” the fly-catcher’s tea in order to wake him.
‘So tell me this, Mr Armstrong: who are Louis’ friends?’
‘Gosh, let’s see now,’ Armstrong sighed, through a stifled yawn, ‘gosh, that I know of, there would be: Sophie and Harry Rubens. Then there was the formerly elegant (some say escort) Mrs Mariana Fitzgerald. Then there’s a friend of hers, Mur… Muriel, no not Muriel, Monica maybe… no, not Monica either… sorry, I forget her first name, but she’s best friends with Mariana and she’s married to this big player about town – we (that is, Elizabeth and I) don’t exactly know what it is that he does. There would also be a couple of lecturers at Queens – Elizabeth can give you their details, but they’d have a better handle on Louis’ friends than Elizabeth or I would have. I only know about Mariana because I was sitting next to her once at a dinner party. She’s difficult to forget; she had jet-black hair the whole way down to her backside. She was quite interesting looking, in an Eastern European kind of way. There’s someone Louis…’
McCusker tuned out of the conversation at that precise moment. He was worrying about whether or not this Mr Louis Bloom was really missing or not. Maybe he’d only gone AWOL and the only reason O’Carroll and he were still spending time on this was due to the fact that Elizabeth Bloom, née Kavanagh, on discovering that her husband, apparently a man of very defined habits, had disappeared. She had immediately rung her sister, Angela Larkin, née Kavanagh, who in turn woke her husband, Superintendent Niall Larkin, who in turn woke Detective Inspector O’Carroll, who once again proved the theory that ordure always runs downhill and rang McCusker. There’d be an even bigger palaver in the morning when Louis Bloom returned home safely and Larkin would be buzzing about Customs House, complaining about overtime bills. McCusker was on double time but he didn’t think O’Carroll was. He’d thought DIs in the PSNI didn’t get overtime until O’Carroll had claimed Larkin had okayed overtime for this case; maybe she meant he’d okayed it for everyone else bar the DIs. It was most certainly at times like these that the DI Cages of the Customs House pointed the finger of PSNI resentment at the greed of the Yellow Packs, the Grafton Agency boys. Even the girls at the Grafton Agency were referred to as boys. But that was another rant he wanted to avoid. He felt terrible after he realised he was in a way wishing that something really bad had happened to Louis Bloom, and that Bloom was still genuinely missing.
‘What does Louis Bloom look like?’ he suddenly asked.
‘Oh gosh, now that just very well may be the question of the morning,’ the lanky Armstrong replied, as he awkwardly climbed out of the sofa. He reminded McCusker of a baby giraffe struggling to its feet; you always felt that the legs just were not going to be strong enough to support the rest of the body in their endeavours. Not only did Mrs Bloom’s bestie make it to his feet, he also scurried, hips swinging from side to side, out into the hall and returned a few seconds later with a framed ten-by-eight.
When the camera had happened to catch Louis Bloom, it looked as though he’d been unaware that his image (or part of his soul, as the Native Americans claimed) was being stolen. He clearly hadn’t had time to prepare for his close-up. He’d a full head of fine, copper coloured hair, which was absolutely shinning from the light of the flash of the camera. He wore his hair in a pageboy style, more John Denver than the Beatles on 1965’s Rubber Soul album sleeve. He had half-mo
on eyebrows, which were darker than the fringe they protruded from. Louis Bloom had a cherub face, flawed only by a feebly grown, droopy moustache. His skin was winter white. He looked younger than McCusker expected him to look. Or, at least, he looked a lot younger than he expected any husband of Mrs Bloom to look. The camera (or the resultant crop) had caught him only from the neck up, a neck completely hidden behind a black QUB scarf with its legendary doubling up of green, red and blue stripes. McCusker had always thought you could tell a lot from a man or a woman’s neck and ankles. Louis Bloom looked like a man who might have difficulty with the smiling process. Maybe he felt it was unbecoming for someone such as a lecturer to be behaving frivolously in public.
McCusker found himself deeply drawn into Bloom’s clear, very healthy-looking brown eyes. Due to the angle of the camera, it looked like Louis Bloom was questioning him, questioning the detective. McCusker had been searching for something in the photograph, something that would call out to him, but had discovered only a challenge from the subject.
Just then McCusker got the shivers. He told himself not to be foolish, it wasn’t anything, or anything other than the cold winds of the Glenshane Pass still haunting him.
He thought of Grace and about how lucky he’d been, that last night hadn’t been one of the nights she’d slept over; hadn’t been one of the nights they’d spent chasing the butterfly. Again, he accepted he was being foolish. He was aware that O’Carroll knew he and her sister were regularly sharing intimate moments, of course she did. But she was still very protective over her sister, and it would have been very awkward if she’d walked in on them that morning. Maybe it would be different if he and Grace were living together. Perhaps then, if that ever happened, Lily would finally be convinced that he wasn’t taking advantage of her sister.
