Chapter 39
Knowing that he was to be my star witness, I had borrowed a bar stool from Madison's Hotel a few doors down, and now Buddy Wailer was sitting on it, beside me, with Augustine Wogan looking down on him. Even sitting down, he was as tall as I was. He kept the hatbox in his lap, and his hands on either side of it, protectively. After briefly studying Buddy, his height, his thinness and his nervous disposition, my audience was now completely mesmerised by the box. I knew it wasn't empty. They had guessed it. They wanted to know, but at the same time, they didn't.
I said, 'Before we get into this, that box is going to be distracting, so the sooner we find out what's in it, the sooner we can move on. Do you want to tell us what you have there?'
'It contains a head.'
There were groans and little cries of disbelief and horror. They also craned their necks.
'Now I appreciate that some of you may be of a nervous disposition, so I'm going to put this to a vote. Before we hear what Buddy has to say, shall we open the box?'
'YES!'
Dr Yeschenkov said nothing. Neither did Pearl or Alison or Jeff or Robinson or Spider-web.
'Buddy, if you wouldn't mind?'
Buddy removed the lid and angled the box up. There were shouts and yells and fucking hells!
It was definitely a head.
Buddy Wailer's head. Staring blankly out.
My audience was stunned. They were mouthing:
But that's . . .
How in hell...?
Fucking hell, that's creepy!
'Just to clear up any confusion,' I said, 'and particularly for the likes of my mother back there, who has just crossed herself, even though she's not a Catholic, will you please tell us whose this head is or was or belongs to.'
'It's my head.'
'Your head? But you are clearly alive. Did you have an identical twin brother?'
'No, this is a three-dimensional wax portrait of my head.'
There were gasps and whispers, and all around my shop, the sounds of pennies dropping.
I said, 'For the purposes of the webcam record of these proceedings, will you please tell our audience who you are and what you do for a living.'
Buddy cleared his throat. 'My name is Brian Wailer. Until 2005 I was Global Head of Wax Commissions at Madame Tussauds. Since then I have worked as a freelance operative.'
'Which means . . . ?'
'I travel the world selling and making these 3-D portraits. They are, I hope you will agree, astonishingly lifelike.'
'And how much do they cost?'
'I will do a portrait for somewhere around eighty thousand pounds.'
'You're serious? Who's going to pay . . . ?'
'With power, wealth and success, there usually comes a degree of vanity that needs to be indulged, or exploited. I travel the world with this, my own head, and believe me, commissions are not in short supply.'
'And you make them yourself?'
'No, I employ a team of experts, many of whom worked for the Madame. It's a highly complex process. Hundreds of photographs are taken, colour transparencies of eyes and teeth are made. The teeth are accurately mapped and an exact set made; acrylic eyes are built from the iris outwards. I even use silk threads to reproduce the veins inside the eye. The whole process should take several months, but my service is not only cheaper, it's much, much quicker.'
'So how did you end up on these fair shores?'
'I was invited here by the Yeschenkov Clinic.'
I looked to Dr Yes. 'Is that right?'
'No. Yes. It is true that I invited this man to the clinic after hearing about his work, but on the day he visited I was unexpectedly called away. One of my fellow directors oversaw his visit and liked his work, but believed it was too expensive, and to tell you the truth, somewhat . . . unsettling. That is the extent of my dealings to date with Buddy Wailer and if he says otherwise, he is misrepresenting both himself and the clinic.'
'And we won't hesitate to take legal action,' said the rotund solicitor.
'Mr Wailer?' I said.
'It's true I have not met Dr Yeschenkov until today, but, nevertheless, I have completed seven portraits for clinic patients, and I've been paid for them.'
'That's impossible!' cried Dr Yes.
'As a hit man,' I said, 'you probably wouldn't have much in the way of paperwork, but as a creator of wax portraits, you probably do?'
'Yes. Of course. Not with me, but obtainable.'
'And you were paid directly by the clinic?'
'Yes.'
'And the director who you met when you visited, who lined up the clients, who paid you with money transfers from the Yeschenkov Clinic was . . . ?'
Buddy kept his eyes on me. But he said, 'Miss Knecklass.' 'This woman, in the front row?'
Buddy nodded. Eyes still on me.
Dr Yes turned to Pearl. They were separated by four chairs, three Augustine fans and a towpath regular. 'Pearl . . . this isn't true?'
She'd joined Buddy in staring at me.
'Pearl!'
Her eyes slowly moved towards him, like a sniper scoping no-man's-land.
'You made me promises you couldn't keep.'
Dr Yes looked at his solicitor. 'That's simply not
'I had to look out for myself. And you were too busy gazing at yourself in the mirror to notice.'
'It's simply not true!'
It was, of course. They'd been screwing in the Forum.
I said, 'Buddy, you didn't suspect something was amiss?'
'No - at least, not until Miss Knecklass called about Arabella Wogan. That's when it all started to come out.'
It had been weighing heavily on Buddy Wailer, so heavily that it had brought him back from the airport, brought him to my home in the middle of the night for a long, tearful confession. Then it had been rambling and panicked. Now he was calm and collected.
Arabella had been introduced to Buddy by Pearl as a potential client; they had discussed and agreed a fee and the work began. The photographs were taken by his regular local photographer, Liam Benson, as soon as the bandages came off her face. Arabella still had several medical procedures to undergo, but getting her face done first enabled the work on the portrait to get under way, with the idea being that it would be ready for her when she checked out of the Forum. But then Buddy received a call from Pearl in the middle of the night, ordering him to the hotel. She met him in the foyer and took him up to Arabella's room - where she was lying dead. Pearl said she'd suffered an extreme reaction to her medication; it was an accident, but if word got out, the clinic would not only be sued for millions, its reputation would be irredeemably tarnished.
'She already had it all worked out,' Buddy told me that night, him with his hand shaking as he held his glass of whiskey, mine with the shakes that come with the medication I take to stop me having seizures. 'She wanted me to complete work on the portrait, double- quick time, and also to provide a full torso so that we could mock up photographs to show that Arabella was still alive.'
'Did nobody else know that she was dead? Doctors? The staff at the hotel?'
'No. Several different doctors and surgeons were treating her, but if she had any problems, she had to go through Pearl to get to them. She called Pearl complaining that she wasn't well, but by the time Pearl arrived and let herself in, Arabella had passed away.'
'You didn't think at the time it was a rather extreme way of dealing with it? Patients die after surgery. It's a fact of life.'
'Sure I did, and I kick myself now for going along, but I was in a bind - Pearl controlled the money, and I needed it. All those trips to Vegas have turned what used to be a hobby into what you might call an addiction. I owe, big time.'
In the shop, Buddy looked out at the audience. They weren't a jury, but they were as good as one.
'She had two guys come in remove the body.'
'How did they do that?'
'Brazenly. They came in with a large cardboard box, loaded her into it, put it on a l
uggage cart, and I left with them via the service elevator.'
'Had you ever seen them before. Or since?'
'Sure. One of them's standing over there.' He raised a very long, very thin finger, and pointed towards the back of the store. 'That man, with the spider's-web tattoo.'
Spider-web gazed calmly back.
'And the other one?'
'I shot him dead last night.'
When the buzz died down, Buddy said he'd been out of the country for several weeks and only returned to his rented house the day before Augustine died. He immediately thought there was something suspicious about Augustine's death and confided his suspicions to his friend Liam Benson. Liam had already worked out that neither of them were actually working for Dr Yes, but for Pearl, and that she had made herself so essential to the running of the clinic, and had so much power vested in her, that she could run her scam right under Dr Yes's nose without fear of discovery.
'We know now why you felt you had to comply with her cover-up, but why did Liam? Presumably he wasn't making the kind of money you were? Did he have debts as well?'
'No, he didn't make much, and he didn't owe anyone a red cent. Problem with Liam was that he was in love.'
'Ah,' I said, nodding at Pearl. 'That's how she works.'
'He was in love with me.'
'Oh. You mean he was
'The feeling was mutual. He didn't think he could tell the police about what was going on because he knew about my financial difficulties and wanted to support me. And because he didn't tell, he died.'
Buddy swallowed hard. His eyes grew a little misty. He raised a finger and pointed at Pearl, in the process looking at her properly for the first time.
'You came to Liam's office and told him someone was asking questions and warned him not to say anything. But he had to tell someone, and who else but the love of his life? So we arranged to meet up, except he was followed, and he was murdered.' He looked back to me. 'I was scared, real scared. Then Pearl calls me, tells me there's a private detective has discovered all about the cover-up and is trying to blackmail the clinic; we have to get rid of whatever evidence there is, whatever happened to Arabella's wax head and torso? She nearly freaked when I told her they were still in the house. She wanted them melted down and Arabella's clothes we'd used to dress her burned.'
'Why Tollymore?'
'This isn't my country, and I know very little of it, but Tollymore was always special to Liam and me. It just seemed logical to go somewhere I was fairly familiar with.'
'And you told Pearl where you were going?'
'Yes, I had to. She wanted me out of the country, but she still owed me money and I said I wasn't going anywhere without it. So she said she would bring it down. Except it wasn't her that turned up, it was
'Rolo.'
'. . . Rolo. I recognised him from the hotel, I knew he was in the business of removing bodies, and I was convinced he wasn't there just to hand over the money.'
'So you grabbed his gun and shot him.'
'No! Yes. Sort of. It was more than just that. He was . . . odd. He was in no hurry. He sat down on a log beside the fire and said how lovely it was, it reminded him of camping with his dad when he was a boy, but they'd had no car, so they only ever camped in his back yard. He said he liked the trees. And the smell of pine. He had a hip flask, whiskey, he gave me a drink. He said he knew I was in a rush, but would I mind sitting with him for a while. So I sat with him. And we drank. He took out this book he was reading. He said it was great but he needed to finish it. Just one last chapter, he said. Don't worry, he said, they're really short chapters. I remember him saying, "That Spenser, he's some pup." I remember it because I didn't know what he was talking about. He asked me if I believed in God, and I said yes. He said he'd lived a terrible, evil life and was looking for salvation. He said he'd been sent down to murder me; that he had been murdering people since he was a teenager. He admitted killing Liam. He said he killed Augustine. He said they were the latest in a long list. Problem was he knew too much about where the bodies were buried, and that was fine as long as he continued killing, but once he stopped, once he went soft, they would rub him out, the people who employed him, some kind of agency he worked for. He said either he killed me, or I killed him. He had had enough. He didn't want to kill anyone else, but at the same time he couldn't let me escape. He took out his gun and handed it to me. There was no way I was going to shoot him, because he was drunk and would probably regret it in the morning, if he was alive, but he shouted at me to do it. When I wouldn't, he made a grab for the gun, but I wouldn't give it to him because that meant he might be shooting me instead, and so we wrestled for it, and he was stronger than me and he was getting it off me, but my finger was on the trigger and somehow it went off, and I killed him, and I might never be able to sleep again.'
You could hear a pin drop.
'I killed him, but I am not a murderer. I buried him as quickly as I could. I was just in a blind panic. I drove straight to the airport. But this man called me. His shop is called No Alibis and that suits me down to the ground. I have no alibi, but he convinced me that justice would look kindly upon me. So here I am.'
DI Robinson remained by the door. He studied Buddy, sitting there in despair, and said, 'We should talk. But first . . .' He nodded at me. 'You may as well see this through.'
I said, 'Pearl, would you take the stand?'
'It's not a stand, you moron. It's a bar stool. In this crappy little shop. I don't have to do anything.'
She was still lovely. And she was undoubtedly defiant. But then Dr Yes looked across the Augustine fans and the towpath regular and said, 'God knows it will sink us both, Pearl, but take the damn stand!'
* * *
Chapter 40
Pearl's eyes narrowed.
It was a testament to Dr Yes's good work that they still could.
She stood up. She was three fifths stiletto. Buddy got out of the chair. He stepped away left as she came from the right. As she sat, she crossed her legs. In the crossing of them, everyone looked up her short skirt. It was a learned reaction. It wasn't just the men, or the impure of thought. If the Pope had been there, he would have looked. Mother Teresa would have taken a gander. The chances of two Catholic icons turning up in a mystery bookstore on Botanic Avenue were slim, particularly with one of them dead, but if they had, they would have eyeballed Pearl's nether regions just the same as everyone else. There was something about her. Even Alison was drawn in. Fact was there was nothing to see. With my eyesight I could see nothing anyway, so it was necessary for me to watch back the webcam coverage later, in high definition, and zoom.
She said, 'This means nothing; it's not a court, I've sworn nothing, my solicitor isn't here, it's not a confession or a denial or an admission. But I will tell you my story. My name is Pearl Knecklass and all I'm guilty of is falling in love.'
Dr Yes lowered his eyes. His rotund companion was shaking her chins.
I said, 'Pearl, maybe you could tell us if that is your real name?'
'Yes. Of course.'
'And how did you come to be working in the Yeschenkov Clinic?'
'I come from Estonia. There's no money in Tallinn. I know, because I was an accountant. I heard Belfast was nice. I came here. There's money here, but I'm not an accountant. My qualifications were not recognised. So I got a job as a cleaner with an agency, and they placed me in the clinic.'
'You have no accent.'
'I . . . lost it.' She looked pointedly at Dr Yes. 'He arranged it.'
'How do you mean?'
'He sent me for lessons, electrocution lessons Rolo used to call them.'
'So you knew Rolo for quite a while.'
'Sure. We were neighbours. Cleaners don't get to live in the Merchant.'
It was the best hotel in Belfast.
'Why would he send a cleaner for elocution lessons?'
'Because I was his little project.' She changed position in the chair, uncrossing and recrossing her legs. The shop wi
ndow steamed up a little more. 'I was working night shifts. I was thirty years old but I looked forty. I was heavy. My teeth, stomach, tits . . . everything was wrong. I looked and felt like a pig. I saw women come in one way, go out another. I could only dream. I was depressed. One night Dr Yeschenkov was working late; he found me crying. He was so nice. Men tell you bullshit things, but he didn't. Or maybe he did, but in a different way. When I said I had bags under my eyes, he said yes, you have. When I showed him my fat tummy, he said yes, it is. Everything I hated about myself he agreed with. I wanted to smack his face. But he said he could help me. I asked him how and he said the best way for this clinic to promote itself was to show what it was capable of. Women came in for their breast lifts, or tummy tucks, or eye lifts, and they wanted it all done at once, but there was always a limit to how much could be achieved in a couple of weeks. He wanted a long- term project. He wanted to prove he could totally transform someone in every aspect of their life. He said I had the bone structure and the height for it, the economic and cultural background for it; if I wanted he could turn me into a goddess, his crowning achievement. I said I couldn't afford to have my hair combed in his clinic, never mind all that shit, but he said he would do it for free. Who could say no to that?'
'How long did all of this take?'
'Three years.'
'And what exactly did he do?'
'You really want to know?' The women in the audience nodded. 'Okay. I had liposuction, a tummy tuck, buttock implants, calf implants, arm lifts, thigh lifts, breast enlargement, breast uplift and nipple correction.'
'That's certainly
'I had a facelift, cheek implants, rhinoplasty, my ears were pinned back, the bags under my eyes removed, I had chin implants
'Is that ...?’
'I had dental implants, veneers, straightening. I had a gastric band. My vagina was tightened.'
'That, uhm, yes. It was, ahm, pretty thorough.'
'Then there was the elocution, the fitness programme, the studying for my accountancy exams, and at the end of it all, I was a new me, and I loved it.'
Dr. Yes Page 23
