Death Of A Nobody

by Derek Farrell

  “Maybe, if you stopped using terms like Dike-a-rella, or Lesbo Queen as though they were curses, and started behaving like Ali was a person with feelings the two of you might get along better.”

  “Mate,” Elaine pursed her lips, her right eyebrow raised to an angle of forty-five degrees, and still managed to smirk, “I aint got much pleasure in my life lately. So the last thing I want to do is get along better with that Basic. Now: are you comin’ out, or do I tell the Health Inspector that you’re too busy boiling.” She sniffed disgustedly, “Rats up, an’ trying to fix the fuckin’ world one teenager at a time?”

  And she turned on her heels and was gone.

  I blanched.

  “Do we still have that meat mallet?” Caz asked from across the room.

  “Did she,” I gestured at the open door through which Elaine had just flounced, “Say Health Inspector?”

  She dropped the knife. I turned the gas burners even lower, and we looked at each other across the room.

  “Keep calm,” Caz said. “There’s absolutely nothing to worry about.”

  “Well,” I said, “Apart from the fact that half the meat in the freezers went in there when Maggie Thatcher was in power, and that that,” I gestured at the grease-encrusted fixture that hung above the hob like a fat-filled pustule. I’d been threatening to replace it for months, and, from a glance, it was clear that it wasn’t so much filtering as exuding.

  “All kitchens are filthy,” she justified. “We’ll be fine. Just stay calm.”

  “You’ve said that twice,” I said, as I heard Ali’s voice from the hallway.

  “Just in here, Mister Tavistock,” she said loudly, before erupting into the room as noisily as possible – in an attempt, I assumed, to give me warning that nemesis was on its way, and that I should probably quickly replace the extractor filter, and drag that hundredweight of dubious frozen meat out the back into a skip.

  As the former would have required a HazMat suit, a gasmask and at least a days preparation; and as the latter would have needed a couple of the world’s strongest men and a skip capable of taking an almost unjointed cow, neither of these tasks would have been achieved before the arrival of a diminutive, bald man wearing a pair of horn rim spectacles so large they made him look like a child playing dress-up.

  I froze.

  “Danny,” Ali announced in her best smiley, welcoming happy voice (the one she reserved for the VAT man and the H&S inspector – well she wouldn’t waste it on the punters, would she?), “This is Mister Tavistock. From The Council.”

  The last was said in the tone of voice that I might expect the landlady at a Resistance Bistro to introduce a visiting Gestapo officer, ‘From The Nazis.’

  Caz switched on her aristo smile – a facial expression meant to denote serene confidence, but which always, to me, looks like something halfway between a stroke victim and a case of mild hysteria – and – before she could ask ‘Have you come far?’ I leapt in, hand extended.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, “I’m Danny Bird.”

  “I was hoping,” Tavistock said in an adenoidal whine, “To meet with Mrs Carver.”

  “Oh.” I froze again, looking over his shiny pate at Ali.

  Lilly Carver was the titular Licensee of The Marq. It was she that Chopper had – decades previously – installed as Landlady. Lilly had vanished without trace back when I was still in school, and Chopper – working, one supposed, on the idea that updating the licensee to another would attract attention, and that attracting attention, particularly from ‘The Council, The Rozzers or The Fucking VAT Man,’ was not exactly part of his business model – had never bothered to formally replace her on the paperwork with any of the half dozen other people who had supervised the joint for him in the meantime.

  Still, technically Lilly Carver was the Landlady, and her absence was likely to cause some issues here.

  “Lilly – Mrs Carver, that is,” I began, slowly, “Is, on holiday,” I said, as Ali – mistaking my panicked glance for a request for assistance, announced, simultaneously, very loudly that our absent Publican was “In Hospital.”

  Tavistock, his eyes - behind lenses that had to be two inches thick – the size of salad plates, glanced from me to Ali, his gaze hovering momentarily over Caz on the other side of the room, her face a fixed mask of aristocratic semi-welcome.

  “Well which is it?” He asked, his voice almost entirely nasal.

  “She’s,” Ali started, making the sort of eyes at me that were last seen being performed by Theda Bara.

  “She’s in hospital. On holiday,” I extemporised. “She fell down.”

  “A mineshaft,” Ali blurted, then, realising how insane the picture she’d just painted was, reverted to the silent movie eyes.

  Tavistock turned to stare at her, his glance, once again, lingering over the still silent figure of Caz, her loose white shift dress stirring lazily in the completely ineffective rotary fan we’d been attempting to cool the room with.

  “A mineshaft?” He asked, sounding for all the world like an adenoidal Lady Bracknell.

  “She was on a walking tour.” Ali, a single bead of sweat rolling through her crew cut, across her forehead, and down her nose, attempted to explain.

  “Of Death Valley,” I clarified, and he turned his attention back to me.

  “A walking tour of Death Valley where she fell down a mineshaft?” I didn’t blame him for sounding incredulous. We should have told him she’d been beamed up by aliens; it couldn’t have been any less likely.

  “She’s into all that,” Ali said above his head, addressing the remark to me, as though we were a music hall mind reading act.

  “Mad for Ghost Towns, she is,” I explained.

  “Loves a ghost,” Ali misheard, and ran with it, much like a lemming spotting a cliff edge. “Always having séances and weejee sessions here.”

  At that, Tavistock bristled. “She performs joinings,” he gasped, though as his voice came out of his nose at the same time he was furiously inhaling air, the gasp was more of a choke.

  “No, she had to give up the welding,” Ali – hysterically bounding, now, towards the metaphorical sound of crashing waves below – clarified, “For health and safety reasons.”

  The mention of health and Safety seemed to pull Tavistock back to the present. “I meant Spiritual Joinings,” he clarified. “I myself am a believer in another plane.”

  “Well Lilly won’t be getting on any planes for a while,” Ali went for it, flinging herself off the cliff edge and free-falling towards the rocks below, “she broke both her fucking legs when she fell down that mineshaft.”

  “Tell me,” Tavistock leaned conspiratorially in towards me, gesturing with his eyes towards the opposite side of the room where the still unmoving figure of a tall thin young(ish) woman in a white shift dress, the fabric fluttering in an almost imperceptible breeze, continued to stare at him with the sort of look that could only be described as wistfully lost, “Can you see her, or is it just me?”

  “Oh, my manners,” Caz exclaimed, holding out a hand, at which point Tavistock shrieked, leaped into my arms, and, realising that the gurning simpleton on the opposite side of the kitchen table was simply an onion-slicing kitchen help and not the spirit of a deceased resident of Bedlam, switched off the glimmer of humanity we’d been allowed to see, and slipped back into full Bureaucratic Bastard mode.

  “We’ve had an anonymous call,” he announced, brandishing a clipboard as Caz introduced herself, “And frankly, Lady Holloway,” this last said in a tone of incredulity that suggested he found our discussion about our inadvertently potholing spiritualist landlady welder more believable than that the once-vision on the opposite side of the room had come from the peerage, “I can already see why concern might be expressed. Who,” he swivelled his hugely magnified eyes back to me. “For example, who are you, and what, exactly, is your role in this,” he glanced with clear disdain around the room, “Establishment?”

  I introduced my
self, suggested – without actually saying so – that I was a relative of Mrs Carver, and was filling in during her unfortunately extended vacation.

  “What was the complaint about?” I asked, wondering whether it had been the noise, the fumes or the two corpses in the first six months of business that had brought the ire of the complainant on us.

  “It was anonymous, Mr Bird,” Tavistock droned, as though he were talking to a very slow person. In a coma. “If I told you what it was about, it wouldn’t be anonymous.”

  Yes it would, I was about to say, when I remembered who I was dealing with, what was in the freezer and how quickly I could be shut down if he didn’t like what he found. That done, I decided that this diminutive Maigret of the industrial kitchen could mangle the language as much as he liked; I wouldn’t be the one correcting him.

  “Now,” he pulled himself up to his full height, which left him level with my chin, and – tilting his head back slightly – fixed me with a steely stare, “Shall we get started?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “Lord,” Caz hoiked her handbag onto her shoulder, waved farewell to my dad as his taxi pulled away towards the river, and faced the imposing Georgian fronted house in front of us. “I bet that costs a fortune to heat.”

  It never failed to amaze me that a titled Aristo like Caz, who could happily spend a month’s salary – if she actually had a salaried job - on a pair of shoes, could, in the next moment, become an obsessive compulsive hausefrau.

  “Only you,” I noted, “Could think about heating a property in the middle of a heatwave.” I tilted my head, shading my eyes to take in the full scale of the property. “My guess is Olivia Wright can afford a few rads left on full power. Let’s just hope they’re not on today.”

  “Are you still annoyed with me?”

  “I’m not annoyed,” I said, “just… confused.”

  “I mean, shall we start with the small fridge seemed like a perfectly safe bet,” she explained, linking her arm in mine, in what I recognised instantly as a reconciliatory attempt to cheer me up.

  “How was I to know that that’s where you kept the dead pigeons?”

  I pulled my arm free. “I don’t keep pigeons – dead or otherwise. Someone planted them there.”

  “Ooh,” she murmured, “My cousin Rupert had exactly the same thing happen to him not long ago. Only, it wasn’t here, it was in Burma. And it wasn’t the Health inspector, it was the local police. And,” she trailed off, perhaps, finally, realising her analogy was somewhat failing, “It wasn’t dead pigeons; it was ten grams of heroin. But at least,” she said, brightening up, “They don’t hang you for dead pigeons.”

  “Might as well,” I muttered. “I can’t prove it. Yet. But the minute I do, Elaine Falzone is gonna think the Hangman’s Drop a mercy.”

  “You think Elaine planted them?”

  I flashed back to the moment of mortification: Tavistock holding the door of one of the small fridges – usually used to store liquids – his bulk filling the hole, so that we who stood behind could see nothing of the contents of the refrigerator, or know what he was poking at with the pen he’d dramatically removed from the breast pocket of his short sleeved shirt a moment before.

  “Mr Bird,” he asked, at length, “Why do you have two dead pigeons on a paper plate next to an open jug of milk?”

  “Pigeons?” I goggled, as he slowly slid the offending plate with the two birds – still feathered, their stony eyes staring unblinking at the ceiling.

  “Pigeons,” he repeated, offering the plate to me.

  These were no wood pigeons destined for a game pie; they were city vermin, their necks broken, their bodies simply dumped on a paper plate, and said plate then dumped unceremoniously into my dairy fridge.

  I goggled again.

  “Still,” Caz said, as we approached the gate of the house in Chelsea, “It could have been worse.”

  “Worse?” I turned to her.

  “I’m not happy,” Tavistock had intoned, his adenoidal voice suggesting that unhappiness was shorthand for horrified. “Not happy at all, Mister Bird.”

  He and I were sat facing each other at the kitchen table, the onions now slowly softening on the hob, as Caz mimed poking them with a spatula whilst eavesdropping on our conversation.

  “I genuinely have no idea how those birds got there,” I’d pleaded, my hands out in a beseeching pose that seemed to be having absolutely no effect whatsoever on the bureaucrat.

  “The pigeons,” he said, looking pointedly down at his checklist, which seemed covered in red ‘X’s with only a handful of blue Ticks to save me from the gallows. “Are the least of your problems. By my reckoning, Mister Bird, this establishment is in need of a change of management.

  “You have venison in the freezer which has been impacted by what looks like permafrost, two dead pigeons on a paper plate in your milk fridge, ten gallon jugs of what looks like unfiltered, possibly untaxed, apple-based alcohol in your back passage, and blocked loos. Blocked, it would appear, with plaster of Paris, though why anyone would have poured plaster of Paris down your toilets is beyond me.

  “And it’s the toilets that bother me most, because, to be honest, if any of your customers eat the venison or the pigeons, they’re likely to need them. Fast.

  “I’m also unhappy,” he added, gesturing across the room at a pile of bags coats and t-shirts in the corner, “With the amount of debris in the kitchen.”

  “Those belong to the staff,” I explained.

  Tavistock looked up from his clipboard, reached up to the bridge of his spectacles, and slowly removed them, before blinking myopically at me.

  “I don’t care if they belong to the Dalai Lama, Mr Bird; they are an obstacle, a challenge to food hygiene rules, and a trip hazard. They are, in fact, a health and safety nightmare.”

  “Nightmare?” Caz snorted as she pressed the buzzer mounted by the gate and advised the butler that Lady Caroline Holloway and Mister Daniel Bird had come to call on Miss Wright and Mister Benson, “It’s lucky for him he didn’t poke too deep into the big freezer in the cellar. I’m convinced it’s got bits of Lilly Carver in it. Poor Mr Tavistock would never sleep again…”

  The door opened and we were ushered into the sort of entry hall one usually only sees in the movies. The theme was Black and White, with White walls, a vast expanse of chess board tiling on the floor, a black chaise longue in the corner (cos, y’know: after walking from the cab to the house, mounting the three steps outside and knocking on the door, you’re almost bound to need a lie down) and a selection of uniformly framed black and white prints.

  Before us, a swooping staircase leads to the upper floors. I kept a beady eye on it, but Norma Desmond had clearly declined to make an appearance today. She was probably upstairs stuffing her chimp.

  The sound of classical music drifted from somewhere deep in the house.

  “This way, please,” the butler said, leading us to the left and into what the magazines like to call a Gracious Drawing Room.

  The space was filled with light from the vast bay fronted windows at the front of the house, and a modern designer had clearly been let loose on the place, because what would, at some point, have been a series of walls designed to separate the ground floor into different rooms had all been removed, so that the one drawing room stretched the full length of the house. The back wall – or what would once have been the back wall – was now a vast expanse of glass doors, which had been concertinaed back so that there was, effectively, no back wall, and the room just sort of bled into the garden.

  A massage table had been set up towards the garden end of the room, and Olivia Wright – naked, it seemed, save for a fluffy white towel across her bum – was lying face down on it.

  Kent Benson sat on an antique looking sofa, his mobile glued to his ears. “Yeah,” he growled into it, “Well tell Mr Chang that the production line either reduces error rates or we’re moving to the fucking Philippines. They’re fucking T-shirts, Maurice. I ca
n have ‘em made anywhere, and I will have them made anywhere if Chang can’t sort his fucking people out.”

  He spotted us, smiled, held a finger up as though to pause us, mouthed sorry, and ignored us completely for another five minutes while he berated the unfortunate Maurice.

  At length, he ended the call, and rose from the sofa. “Danny,” he extended a hand to me, accompanying the handshake with that backslapping thing beloved of some politicos. “Sorry about that. Business,” he rolled his eyes as though we shared some common understanding; as though churning out Gazpacho in The Marq were, in some way, equivalent to running a series of sweat shops in South East Asia. “Good to see you. How are things?”

  “Oh,” I smiled, wondering where to start, and went with “As always, really. How are you guys doing?”

  “Well,” he dropped his voice, leaned in towards me, “I’m worried about Olivia. Maggie’s death, the pressure of the upcoming wedding, these letters, and then the,” he paused, looking for the right word, “Unpleasantness at the pub the other night. She’s depressed. Very depressed. She’s putting on a brave face, but I’m worried.”

  Olivia raised a head, “Is that Messrs Bird and Holloway?” She called, as though a half blind invalid.

  “It is indeed, sweetheart,” Kent filled his voice with pep and verve, and ushered us down the length of the room to where the slim bronzed figure lay, while the squat stooped shape of Jane Barton, all unibrow and crazy hennaed hair, busied herself with mixing various potions on what looked like a high tech drinks trolley.

  “Danny,” Olivia smiled graciously, and extended a hand to me.

  As I went to shake it, Jane Barton gently, but firmly pulled it from my grip, and placed the hand back into position, palm down, on the massage table.

  “Remain calm,” she instructed Olivia, “And still,” and she rearranged Olivia’s head so that it was face down, and pointing through a hole in the table.

  Lifting a phial from the trolley, Jane poured a long thing stream of oil down Olivia’s spine, and commenced slowly, and with great concentration, massaging it all over the woman’s back.