'What job, what were you doing?'
'I can't tell you! I just take pictures, that's all I do, anything else is ... I can't talk, okay? I signed up; they pay me, take it up with them. Now I think you'd better go. Please.'
He strode across to the door. He held it open, his knuckles white, and didn't look at us as we moved towards it.
Alison went through first. I stopped in the doorway. I took out my wallet and selected a business card. I held it out to him. He showed no inclination to take it. So I tried to tuck it into the breast pocket of his jacket, but it was one of those ones with the pocket already stitched closed. Forcing it open ruins the shape of the jacket. I knew it for a fact. I had half a dozen of them at home. Every time I cut the stitches I thought the result would be different. It never was. But I would never give up trying. I thought about pushing the card into the top of his jumper, or slipping it behind his ear, but they were both a little overfamiliar, so I just showed it to him and then let it flutter to the floor.
I said, 'You're up to your neck in this, Liam, but it may not be too late. If there's anything you want to tell us, you know where to call.'
'I haven't, and I won't.'
'Your funeral,' I said.
As we walked to the car, Alison said, 'You hear that?'
'I heard that. What did you hear?'
'He didn't deny that Arabella was dead.'
'That's what I heard too.'
'Quick thinking, slipping her in like that.'
'That's what I do.'
'But we're out in the open now, we've announced ourselves. If there was any doubt before, there's none now: we're in this and there's no going back.'
'No going back,' I agreed. 'Sometimes you've just gotta stand up and be counted.'
Alison had her keys out, but stopped at the driver's door without opening it. She looked across the canvas roof at me.
'You gave him my business card, didn't you?'
'Absolutely,' I said.
* * *
Chapter 21
There was a limit to how much flexitime Alison could take from her jeweller's. It was spring, and the minds of young lovers were turning to engagement rings, so demand was high, which meant all hands on deck. I walked her back to her shop. At the door, she avoided what must have been an overwhelming temptation to kiss me. Instead she said, 'Be careful,' and I said I was always careful, and she said she didn't mean with money, and I said oh.
I opened up No Alibis and took up my position behind the counter. I checked my e-mail. None of my customers had anything of value to tell me, but plenty of guff about their personal lives. I took advantage of the quiet to sit on my stool and read. I had moved on to Joseph Wambaugh's satirical take on the LAPD, The Choirboys. It seemed at one point in the 1970s that Wambaugh might become a major voice in crime fiction. The book was a popular success at the time, and it undoubtedly has its moments, but on the whole it has not aged well. It is a poor man's MASH without the saving grace of having been turned into a decent film, just an instantly forgettable one. Although he continues to publish, Wambaugh has pretty much sunk without trace, and in so doing has proved conclusively that there is no sustainable market for crime fiction with a sense of humour.
I was reading, but also thinking about Liam Benson and how frightened he had been, and what our next move should be. I had suggested that Arabella was dead, and he had not contradicted it. It would be a mistake to take that as one hundred per cent proof that she was indeed dead - he might easily have misheard, or not even heard at all, given how discombobulated he was by our revelations - but if I had to put a number on it, based upon my past experience of how people react in similar situations and my intuition and unsurpassed knowledge of crime fiction, I calculated that there was an eighty per cent probability that Liam believed Arabella Wogan was dead. Or possibly seventy-six per cent. Or maybe seventy-three per cent. Or in all likelihood, seventy-one per cent. Or maybe sixty-nine. Guessing is an inexact science.
At just after three, two customers came into the shop. I did my best to hold off on singing 'Hallelujah' at the top of my voice, despite the fact that this constituted the No Alibis equivalent of a gold rush. If
I was lucky, three or four times a day, a solitary individual would enter and begin to peruse the books; half the time, he or she was sheltering from the rain, or working up to asking if they could use the toilet, or if I had change for the parking metre, or if I was interested in Scientology, or believed in elves, but two at the same time was unheard of; it was like capturing a breeding pair, if they hadn't both been men.
My elation, of course, was short-lived.
They were roughly of the same height and build: about six foot and wide. Hair short and cropped. One with a stud in his ear. The other with a spider's-web tattoo on his hand. I saw this when he reached up and lifted a book down from the shelf and showed it to me. It was John Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novel, The Drowning Pool. 'Is this any good?' he asked.
'It's a classic,' I said. 'That particular copy is interesting because although his real name was Kenneth Miller, he wrote under the pseudonym of John Ross Macdonald, at least until another young writer, John D. Macdonald, started having some success, so to avoid confusion he dropped the John out of Ross Macdonald, and was Ross for the rest of his life. This is one of the rare copies with John Ross still on the front, that's why it's worth so—'
'Seventeen-fifty? Fucking hell.'
Spider-web had opened the cover and spotted where I'd written the price in pencil on the title page. He tore the page out and crumpled it up. Then he dropped the book to the floor.
It was at this point that I suspected something was amiss.
Spider-web took down another book. He held it up to me. 'Is this much crack?'
It was Now Try the Morgue by Elleston Trevor.
I said, 'It's one of his early books . . . he's better known as Adam Hall. . . You know, The . . . The Quiller Memorandum
He already had the title page out and balled and chucked. The book followed it.
He took down a third title.
I sensed a pattern emerging.
I said, 'Gentlemen, I don't believe you're book collectors.'
The other guy, the one who so far seemed pleasant and harmless, immediately mimicked me. 'I don't believe you're book collectors,' he said, making it all high-pitched and tremulous. He wasn't very good. My voice isn't high-pitched at all. He quickly added a much more manly 'Fucking right!'
The two of them then began to tumble the books off the shelves. Dozens of them. And soon, hundreds.
I sat where I was. Eventually they would tire themselves out, or grow bored. Beneath the counter there was a mallet, a machete, a butcher's knife, a set of Ninja nunchucks and a Sherlock Holmes spyglass. As I took them out, one by one, first Spider-web then his companion noticed, and stopped.
It was a calculated gamble. They were thinking bookshop owner, bound to be, well, bookish, weedy and weak. I was all of those things. But they weren't to know that. I could equally have been stereotyping them as well; just because they looked and behaved like thugs, it didn't mean that they weren't nuclear physicists or capable of reasoned argument and compromise. But what they did was out of my control; for the moment all I could do was screw with their preconceptions of me. I did have a panic button, but the police had come round and disconnected it because Mother pressed it every time the door opened. There was another button that could close all of the shutters in seconds, but of course that would only trap me in with them. Of all the weapons at my disposal, the Sherlock Holmes spyglass was the only one I was capable of handling. It wasn't a conventional weapon, but given Saharan sunlight I could quite easily have focused its beams through the lens and started a small fire, and from that I could have made a flaming torch to thrust at them, like an angry villager confronted by Frankenstein's monster. Unfortunately, Saharan sun was sadly lacking in Belfast. If it came to it, I would be reduced to throwing the spyglass at them.
They lit
erally nudged each other.
Spider-web said, 'Rolo, them's nunchucks.'
'What the fuck are you doing with nunchucks?'
'Come closer and I'll show you.'
They literally exchanged glances.
Rolo said, 'We were told you sold books.'
'I do sell books.'
'We were told you were a wanky dweeb boy we could blow over.'
'I am. Although I'm also the Irish featherweight champion at nunchucks.'
'You?' said Spider-web. 'At nunchucks?'
'You don't look like the Irish champion at anything,' said Rolo.
'Neither does your face.'
I have a tendency to hyperventilate, particularly when I see a cow, but I was controlling myself rather well. It was because I was in a tight corner. In a tight corner the wheat gets sorted from the chaff, metaphorically speaking, as I am allergic to both. I had promised Alison that I would try and stand on my own two bunioned feet, and now I was about to do it. I would rise like a cake from the floury gloop in an oven. I would fall back on my chosen specialist subject: my wit and intellect. It was all I had. If I even attempted to use the weapons, I would just make a tit of myself. They would take them off me like a rattle off a baby, and kill me, or worse.
They did not appear to have any weapons of their own. They were just big, and muscled.
'If this is about the Christmas Club,' I said, 'it's not me, it's the Chinese economy.'
'It's not about the fucking Christmas Club.'
'Good. Because the Chinese economy is fine. What is it . . . that you want, then?'
'What do you think we want, dipstick?' 'I don't really
'You've been poking your nose in,’ said Spider- web.
'And we're here to make you stop,’ said Rolo.
'By pushing a few books off the shelf? They're only books.'
I almost choked, saying it. They were my children. They had thrown my children on the floor. They had ripped pages from them. They would not get away with it. A complaint would be lodged. They would be in my ledger. But for now, all I wanted to do was get them away from my children. If they concentrated on me, then my children would be fine.
'How about we push you off a shelf?' Rolo asked.
'You'd have to get me up there first.'
They took it as a challenge. They advanced.
I said, 'I've only twenty-two pounds in the till.'
'It's not about the money,' said Rolo.
'Although we will take it,' added Spider-web.
'It's about teaching you a lesson, you four-eyed little shit.'
I picked up the machete. Rolo took it out of my hand and threw it across the shop. It imbedded itself in a colourful reproduction of the front cover of Black Mask magazine from June 1926, photocopied and taped to the wall rather than framed and glass-fronted, because framers are notorious rip-off merchants, along with insurance agents, farmers, bricklayers, carpet- fitters and clowns. Spider-web swept the remaining weapons off the counter with his hand.
'Violence,' I said, 'is the last resort of the scoundrel.'
'Shut the fuck up,' said Rolo.
He grabbed me by the shirt and pulled me across the counter until his face was no more than an inch from mine.
'I should pull your eyeballs out and stuff them up your nose,' he hissed.
'Okay,' I said.
'Okay? What the fuck do you mean, okay?'
'Do your worst. You big fucking bullies.'
Rolo was looking suitably perplexed. Then he slapped me hard across the face. Slapping in movies looks quite effeminate. It's what hot-blooded men used to do to calm irrational women down, before political correctness drove it from the screen; now they shoot them and make lampshades out of their bingo wings. In what passed for my real life, it hurt. He caught me across the ear as well, and for fully thirty seconds I could hear the tide coming in on Strangford Lough. But it was a foolish act on his part. It told me everything I needed to know.
These were two hard men. Their accents, their tattoos and piercings told me what side of the tracks they came from. These were not men who normally slapped. They had been told to slap me around, and taken whoever had told them at their word. They had been told to cause some damage, but not to go too far. They were here to intimidate me. They were heavyweights being told to behave like pixieweights. I was in no danger.
Spider-web said, 'Who're you calling a fucking pixie?' and head-butted me, expertly, on the bridge of the nose. As I fell, the blood already exploding out of my face, I was regretting, not for the first time, saying something out loud that I had presumed to be merely thought.
I hit the ground. My skull felt like it had caved in. I lay there clutching my nose as the blood squirted out between my fingers.
'I have you now,' I cried. 'I have you now . . .!'
'What the fuck are you talking about, you limp little
'I'm a haemophiliac! You were only meant to give me a scare, but now you've busticated my nose and it won't stop bleeding until there's no blood left! You've killed me! You're going down for this! You . . . you . . . fucking philistines!'
'What the fuck is he talking about?' Spider-web asked.
'How the fuck do I know? What's a fucking homophiliac?'
'Haemo ..." I whimpered. 'Get me a towel ... get me a towel!'
Spider-web looked at Rolo, who hesitated before nodding.
'Where . . . ?'
'In the kitchen . . . back there!'
Spider-web hurried through the shop. Rolo crouched and helped me up into a sitting position.
'That's a real thing 'n' all, isn't it? It's like being a bleeder. My cousin had that: every time I gave her a dead leg for a laugh, they'd have to call the ambulance. Killed her in the end. I mean, not the bleeding; the ambulance crashed, going too fast, ran a red light and smashed through someone's front room. But yeah, she had to wear one of those things around her neck like a silver locket thing to say she was a bleeder in case she was ever brought in unconscious, but you're not wearing one, so how do I know you're really a . . .'
'I'm . . . allergic to silver
Spider-web returned with the towel. He handed it to me and I pressed it to my crushed nose.
'Thanks,' I said.
'No problem. Rolo, what do we do now?'
'Whattya mean?'
'Well if he's going to bleed to death, maybe we should skedaddle.'
'And just leave him?'
'Yeah, why not? Someone'll sort him out.'
'We've been watching this place. There's about four hours between customers; he'll be bled dry before someone comes through the door.'
'Well should we give him a lift to the hospital or something?'
'We can't leave the car back with blood on it; it's my mum's, there's like cream seats, they'll stain something awful.'
'We could buy some Stain Devil, wouldn't that ... ?'
'Nah, you'd have to get the seats out of the car and into the washing machine; how's that going to work?'
I said, 'I'll be fine. Just go, you've delivered your message.'
'Are you sure?' Rolo asked. 'No hard feelings? It's just what we do, same as you do what you do. We all gotta earn a living.'
It was a very awkward situation. Particularly when they made me a cup of tea, and I asked for it stronger, and hotter. We sat around sipping it while they debated their next move. And after a bit it just felt as if I was getting on with them well enough to pursue my enquiries.
'If you don't mind me asking,' I said, 'what do they pay you for doing something like this?'
Rolo looked at Spider-web. Spider-web shrugged. 'Sixty quid,' he said.
'Each?'
They both looked a bit sheepish.
'Between you?'
'They chipped in for the petrol,' said Spider-web. 'But I know what you're thinking. Thirty quid. It's a bit rubbish, isn't it?'
'It's the market,' said Rolo, 'it's saturated. The recession, everyone's trying to make a buck. Do you think I want to be doing this?
Do you think I want to be threatening and scaring and intimidating and breaking knees? Do you think that's what I dreamt of when I was a kid?'
'I did,' said Spider-web.
'Yeah, well you're a fucking numbskull. How's the nose?'
'Sore,' I said.
'You want I can snap it back into place?'
'No, it's okay.'
'It's no problem.'
'Really. I'm fine.'
It was funny, looking at him, this bruiser hulk, so recently having vandalised my shop and supported the vandalism of my face, standing there, looking concerned and talking wistfully of unrealised dreams. I hadn't really felt fear, mostly because of my anger about what they were doing to my books.
I said, 'What did you dream of? When you were a kid.'
'Me?' Rolo looked thoughtful. 'Well, you know, I was a kid. Stupid stuff. Astronaut. But I never got my quallie. Didn't really finish school. Had a kid real young; he's eighteen now, going the same way as me. It's a fucking shame, no jobs for anyone.'
'You never think of . . . you know, retraining, back to school?'
'Nah. Too old for that shit now.'
'Do you ever read? Books?'
'Nah.'
'What about movies?'
'Yeah, of course. Used to be in the movie business.'
'Really?'
'Yeah, we'd do pirate copies down the markets, but that's all gone to shit now as well, everyone downloading.'
'But you watch them?'
'Sure. Who doesn't?'
'Well, you know, books are just like movies, except they're movies only you can see. In your head. That's what makes them so fantastic. They just make life seem a little better. Take you out of yourself. You meet people and listen to them chat, you encounter beautiful women and watch them being seduced, you see terrible crimes and learn how they're solved.'
Spider-web said, 'What the fuck are we listening to this shite for? We should get outta here.'
Rolo kept looking at me. Then he said: 'We delivered the message, we slapped him around, went a bit too far maybe. Where are we going now?'
Dr. Yes Page 12
