Dr. Yes (10 page)

    
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 responded 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.

    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.

    'Oh.
You. Just thinking about the great cow uprising.'

    'What
great cow uprising?'

    'Exactly.
They are a secretive herd, but poised and ready to strike.'

    She
shook her head, set a Starbucks on the counter for me and said, 'I just thought
I'd pop over and thank you.'

    'For
what?'

    'For
waking me up, and then keeping me awake thinking about you and your bloody
cigar thingy for the little time I had left before I had to throw up.'

    'I
detect that your thanks have a basis in sarcasm.'

    'No
shite, Sherlock.' But she was smiling, and the coffee was the correct coffee.
She was definitely getting better, although she still had a long way to go and
an ulterior motive. Everybody does. It did not take long to manifest itself. I
was thinking about your cigar thingy, and I suppose there's a remote
possibility that you could be right.' I raised an eyebrow. 'Just remember,
pally, I was the one wanted this case in the first place; you were the one who
wanted to get rid of him because he was too much of a hassle to have around. I
always knew there was something suspicious about this, and it's you who're just
coming round to my way of thinking.'

    'If
you say so.'

    'I
do. So, any further along?'

    I
shrugged.

    She
sighed. 'Okay. Here's what
I'm
thinking. It's your fault.'

    'Good
start.'

    'I'm
thinking that Augustine was at your house, and the only people who knew he was
at your house were you, me, Jeff and your beloved Pearl.'

    '
Pearl
?'

    'Listen,
I've been around, I'm a girl, I know what you guys are like. Pearl is gorgeous
and she played you like a fiddle.'

    'That's
bollocks. I played
her
like a fiddle. In fact I played her like a string
quartet, with a bassoon and a trombone thrown in.'