Dr. Yes

by Colin Bateman

  I nodded. It was a grisly memento of the great man, and might conceivably have fetched something on eBay, but it clearly showed my pissedoffness with Augustine that I wasn't even prepared to check.

  Alison crossed to a pedal bin by the door and deposited the paper. She turned back and asked if I wanted to go to her place for something to eat, because it just didn't feel right cooking here in the house with Augustine so recently dead. I nodded. I was hungry, plus he'd eaten everything and I hadn't had the wherewithal to restock. She was just asking me what I fancied, when she stopped mid-sentence and turned back to the bin. She retrieved the newspaper. She stared down at it. Her lips moved silently. Then she said, 'Bloody hell.' Followed swiftly by, 'Bloody bloody hell.'

  She looked up and gave a disbelieving shake of her head before holding the paper out to me.

  I took it, but reluctantly. Augustine's blood.

  I held it at arm's length.

  There was a headline that said Dublin planners accused of corruption.

  She read my lips and said, 'No, the photo, look at the picture.'

  I studied it, although there wasn't much studying involved. A beaming man with a glamorous woman on his arm. The caption said: Celebrated surgeon to the stars Dr Igor Yeschenkov pictured at the opening of the Xianth Art Gallery in Upper Leeson Street with socialite Arabella Wogan.

  My eyes flitted up to Alison.

  The truth, staring up at us.

  Augustine had read these words, and seen her face, and remembered her saying, 'Love you, honey bun,' and then he had blown his own head off.

  * * *

  Chapter 10

  We ate in a Chinese restaurant on Great Victoria Street. I managed to get through it without an allergic reaction to anything, which I suppose was progress of some sort. Alison kept talking about Augustine as if she actually knew him, like he was her father-in-law, or older cousin, or like someone you grew up calling an uncle but actually he was just a friend of your parents, a little too much of a friend, a friend whom you actually suspected of having an affair with your mother except your poor sad father never knew, and who had gone to his grave taking all the details of his sordid affair with him, save for your mother locked up in a high-security nursing home, and she would deny it until she was in the ground as well because she liked to masquerade as pious when in fact she ranted and raved in her sleep and it was pretty clear that she had had a voracious sexual appetite. Alison

  hadn't known Augustine personally any better than I did, but my advantage was that at least I knew him through his work, and was aware that he was a giant in his field, even though he was well camouflaged in that field.

  At the end of the night I dropped Alison home, and she invited me in. I said no, I'd things to think about, and she said that I thought too much, which was just ridiculous. The case was gone, Augustine was gone, my reputation in the mysterious world was probably gone, plus I needed to find money to redecorate Mother's bedroom.

  I stayed up thinking about Augustine. I hadn't slept properly since the 1970s, but from the night Mother was dragged kicking and screaming to her nursing home, it had been easier to come by. This night I didn't even attempt it. I sat at the kitchen table, drinking Coke, eating Twix. Before me was the transparent plastic bag containing his personal effects. I have perfect control of my emotions, so I wasn't particularly angry, more annoyed: he had a wife, the lovely Arabella, who should by rights be picking over the contents of this bag, and getting teary, but instead she was somewhere in Dublin, having it off with the sleek Dr Yeschenkov. She had killed him. And as a reward she would inherit the rights to all of his books, published or not. She was not only currently shafting Dr Yes; she had also shafted her husband and the future prosperity of No Alibis.

  Poor Augustine - to feel so deeply about anyone that you would want to end your own life. I would never understand it. If I was horrendously betrayed the way he was, the worst I would consider was a paper cut. Although given my haemophilia, that might well be the end of me anyway. Perhaps if I'd found him with the gun raised to his head, I could have talked him out of it. I could have assured him that there were plenty more fish in the sea. Actually, having seen a documentary recently, I understand that technically there aren't plenty more fish in the sea, although that depends on your definition of 'plenty', and 'more', and possibly 'fish'. Or maybe I couldn't have. His head was screwed up. He had thought he was happily married; his wife had gone into Dr Yeschenkov's clinic, fallen for his plastic smile and youthful vigour, and unceremoniously dumped him. I knew the police had tried to contact her, without success, but I suspected she knew all about it and was deliberately lying low, knowing she had been the cause of his death. I wondered if she would have the gall to turn up at his funeral. No other family members had come forward. Alison and I might well be the only mourners. Perhaps afterwards, having no one else to give it to, the crematorium would present the urn to us. I could create a little shrine to him in the shop. Fans from all over the world might travel to pay their respects. I could put it in the store room at the back, with a little curtain, and charge entrance. Perhaps, over time, Augustine's shrine would pay me back for all the trouble he had caused, the food he had eaten, the drink he had guzzled, the redecoration charges he had run up with his bloody last act, and the hope he had extinguished by pulling that trigger.

  I opened the bag and emptied the contents on to the kitchen table. Augustine's actual clothes had been retained by the police for routine forensic examination. I knew for a fact that if they looked for it they would find alien DNA upon them - they were after all my father's: his suit, his shirt, even his socks. They had remained mothballed in my mother's room all these years, her own little shrine to him, until Augustine had borrowed them. What was now spread out before me were the poignant little reminders of his daily routines, as much the essence of the man as his writings: his wallet, his loose change, a torn cinema ticket, an old-fashioned handkerchief, his mobile phone, his cigar cutter, even the cigar he had started to smoke. There was an unopened packet of sugar from a cafe, a slightly furry Polo mint. I opened his wallet: a twenty-pound note, two credit cards, one for Lloyds Bank in England, and an expired one from a bank in Cyprus. A folded bill from the Europa Hotel in Belfast showing two nights' accommodation preceding his appearance outside No Alibis, a bar receipt from the same location showing that he'd drunk six pints of beer. He had a kidney donor card, which, given his apparent alcohol intake, would have been no use to anyone, a laminated card for a library in Scotland, a business card for a solicitor in Belfast, and one for the Yeschenkov Clinic, which, like mine, bore Pearl Knecklass's name. I flicked it back and forth between my fingers. It wasn't beyond possibility that Augustine had organised it all for his wife, knowing she was depressed about her fading looks, and had retained the card so that he could phone up and ask how she was getting on.

  There was a small pocket at the back of the wallet containing a crumpled, yellowed clipping from The Times. It was Augustine's entry in their One Hundred Masters of Crime Fiction supplement. I had had him on his pedestal for so long that I had ignored the truth of his writing career - he was a failure. Of course it depended, like the fish, how you defined failure. If just writing well was enough, then he wasn't one. But he was self-published. He was out of print. Outside of devoted aficionados of the genre he was completely unrecognised. He had no career. He had started out the way nearly all writers do, and I'd seen it a hundred times - amateurs transformed into gibbering wrecks by actually being published; what once they'd done for fun ruined for ever by the burden of expectation, the hope of sales and good reviews and riches, hobbyists turned authors made bitter by the knowledge that they'd missed their main chance. I'd met grown men who were only saved from complete insanity by the fact that they were the twenty-third best-selling crime writer in Lithuania. But because Augustine had been local to me, because he had impacted on me, I had elevated him above the morass of writers who are good for a couple of books and then fade back into richl
y deserved obscurity; because he had been a flickering candle in the darkness of a troubled Belfast, I had exaggerated his worth and impact. He was a failure, and he'd taken the coward's way out. If he was remembered at all, it would be for blowing his head off in a house belonging to the owner of No Alibis, who, actually, was much better known in the crime- writing community than he ever would be.

  I was the star all along.

  I was the one who should be sitting back content at what I had achieved. I should have been the one puffing on a cigar, not bloody Augustine Wogan. Oooooh, my wife's disappeared, she must obviously have been murdered, it couldn't be that I'm just a disaster and she's had enough of me. I picked up his cigar and held it up. I would obviously not put it in my mouth; his spit was probably still upon it. But I quite happily mimed it. I lifted the cigar cutter and pretended to cut off the end; I pretended to puff upon it, and then sat back, like the satisfied, successful champion of crime fiction that I was, and waxed lyrical to an imaginary audience about the greats of the genre, Americans mostly, with a sprinkling of English and French, no mention at all for the Scandinavians, obviously, and certainly not for a loser like Augustine Wogan, except to mention that he had blown his head off in my own shop, driven mad by the success of what he incorrectly perceived to be less talented authors than himself.

  Much as cigarettes distress me, I have never minded the smell of a cigar. My father smoked them, although always from the cheaper end of the market, usually Woolworth's, and he always had a lingering whiff of them about him. Mother smoked them as well, but that's another story. This one smelled richer, more exotic. The lovely Arabella had money, so it was more than likely hand-rolled in Cuba or Brazil rather than mass-produced on an industrial estate in Reading. Perhaps as soon as Augustine saw the picture of her with Dr Yes he knew it was the end of the line, that quality cigars were a thing of the past. Although in that case, why not savour the whole thing, rather than blow his head off after just a couple of puffs? Maybe this wasn't the last of his expensive cigars, but the first of a lesser brand, a bitter taste of how life was to be post-Arabella.

  Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

  I'm a terrible one for having to know things, but it's what I do and am. I set the cigar down and went upstairs. Although No Alibis is crammed with tens of thousands of crime books, and there are many more thousands here in the house, I also keep my other books here, books I have accumulated over the years to feed my endless quest for knowledge or, indeed, trivia. It is a large house, with seven bedrooms. Mother, having in recent years largely been confined to her room at the top, hadn't really noticed the extent to which I had quietly been filling every available inch with my collection; not on shelves, because I couldn't afford them, but in teetering piles or sagging cardboard boxes. Even when she did pass a remark, it was more along the lines of 'Why don't you use the fucking internet like everyone else, you little shit?' rather than a concern about the fact that I was transforming her house into my own private library. She never would understand books. 'They're a fucking fire hazard!' she yelled more than once, oblivious to the fact that on four out of any five nights I had to remove a burning cigarette from her lips after she nodded off and on more than one occasion had to put her head out with a fire extinguisher.

  It took me until dawn, but I found what I was looking for at the bottom of a box that was second in a pile of three sitting in the first-floor bathroom. It was A History of Post-Revolution Havana Cigars, an expensive illustrated coffee-table tome that I'd picked up for a tenner in a second-hand bookshop a couple of years before. I didn't know for sure that Augustine's cigar was from Cuba, but I suspected. I lugged the book downstairs and sat at the kitchen table. It was such a large volume that the cigars illustrated within were nearly all life-size, so I was able to fairly easily compare and contrast. I established that it was indeed Cuban in origin, and while being from the hugely popular Montecristo line, was in fact a rarer sub-brand, an Edmundo, named after the hero of Alexander Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond Dantes.

  So, I knew.

  Which begs the question - so what?

  Reader, I was born suspicious; I have man's intuition, if you will. When I feel uncomfortable about something, there is generally a reason for it. Admittedly, I am generally uncomfortable, and have been since I landed on this planet. My ill health, my allergies, my profound mental problems, they all contribute to my state of never quite being relaxed or settled. Big things annoy me, but I can't really control them. The smaller things I can do something about, even if it's just the gaining of knowledge so that I can say I found out. I now knew about Augustine's cigar. But I still wasn't happy. There was something nagging at me.

  Two hours later, agitated, excited, worried, slightly creeped out but stunned and impressed by my own remarkably analytical thought processes, I called Alison.

  'Brian?' she asked groggily. I remained silent. She very quickly reconsidered. 'No, there's only one idiot would call me at . . . six fucking forty-five in the morning. What is it? Has somebody died?'

  'Augustine.'

  'Yes, I believe I know that.'

  'Augustine. I don't think he killed himself.'

  She cleared her throat. I could hear her shuffling, sitting up in bed, a lamp clicking on. She said, 'Well, he did a pretty good impression of it.' She sighed. 'You haven't been to bed, have you?' I retained a diplomatic silence. 'Jesus God, man, how do you do it? Well? You may as well spit it out.'

  'Okay,' I said. And then fell quiet, because I hadn't quite worked out how to put it into words. 'Well. It's like this. I was researching the cigar he was smoking just before he died

  'Lord preserve us.'

  'It was a Cuban, Edmundo

  'Yeah, I was just thinking that.'

  '. . . but it's not about the cigar.'

  'Thank God for—'

  'It's about the cigar cutter.'

  'The what?'

  'The cutter. You have to cut off the end of the cigar before you can smoke it.'

  She sighed. 'Yes.'

  'Yes. You saw Augustine use his in the shop, and it was amongst his personal possessions returned to me by DI Robinson.'

  'Yes.'

  'The problem is, the cut in the cigar Augustine was smoking before he died does not match the shape that should be made by the cutter he uses.'

  'Should I be phoning the papers to hold their front pages?'

  'Listen to me. There are three basic types of cigar cutter: guillotine - sometimes called straight cut - punch cut or V-cut. Augustine used a straight cut; it's the most common. The entire cap is cut and the maximum amount of smoke is allowed out. With me?'

  'Yes.'

  'The cigar he was smoking before he died was

  V-cut. There was a wedge cut out of it rather than completely removing the cap. Some smokers prefer it because it penetrates deeper into the filler inside the cigar. Do you see where I'm going?'

  'If only

  'Alison, if he sat down, took a puff of his last cigar, and then shot himself, and the cigar was found still in his hand, and you saw the size of the gun, then it would have been extremely hard to do all that one- handed. But not impossible. What is impossible is for him to inflict a V-cut with a guillotine cutter. He didn't have a V-cut cutter. Now do you see?'

  'Nope. I'm sure this is all fascinating to you, but I have to get up in an hour to throw up because you got me pregnant, and then I have to go to work. And besides, he could have cut it before he even got to your house, using a V-cut cutter, another one he has . . . Oh, I don't even know why I'm talking . . .'

  'Alison, no cigar smoker is going to cut in advance. The cap keeps the cigar fresh and cutting it is almost a ceremonial act. He could not have cut the cigar in that fashion, in that room, without using a V-cutter. Therefore he had to borrow one. Therefore there was somebody else in the room with him. I think he had help.'

  'Like an assisted suicide?'

  'No, like a murder.'

  There was a long pause before Alison r
esponded with: 'Do you remember the moon landings?'

  'Yes.'

  'God, you're old.' 'What?'

  'Do you remember what Neil Armstrong said, one small step, et cetera?'

  'Yes.'

  'Well I think you've just taken a leap that is even bigger, you frickin' head case.'

  And then she hung up on me.

  * * *

  Chapter 11

  I am a puller of threads. It is the nature of me. Alison maintains that I sometimes destroy perfectly good metaphorical jumpers by completely unravelling them, when all that was wrong with them in the first place was the loose thread. Loose threads are not a crime, she maintains. But she is wrong. Loose threads are an indication of a crime and if you have to pull them until the metaphorical jumper, or civilisation itself, falls to pieces, then one must do so. I have a moral obligation. And also, it's fascinating.

  To say that I was distracted by my cigar-cutting discovery would be an understatement. I could not stop thinking about it. Jeff noticed straight away. We had customers in the shop, for once, and when they asked their pathetic, needy questions, I just looked at them and pointed them vaguely in the right direction where normally I would have been full of salient advice or haughty condescension. Jeff tried to step up to the plate by offering his opinions, but they were those of an idiot and the customers soon left. Yet I didn't chastise him.

  Augustine, murdered in my mother's bedroom.

  Yes, it was a huge leap from suicide to murder based on the shape of a hole in the end of a cigar, but the cut was impossible. That single fact altered everything.

  'Penny for them?'

  I looked up, surprised, my hand already seeking the mallet. But it was only Alison. The bell, which played the theme from The Rockford Files every time the door opened, must have sounded, but I'd heard nothing.