Dr. Yes (9 page)

    'Whatever
you want it to.'

    He
got up and left the room. He came back in. He had a see-through plastic bag in
his hands, which he set down on the table. 'There's a lot more I need to look
into. I want to know how he came by the gun; they're not supposed to be easy to
get any more, not round here. But in the meantime, these are his personal
possessions. For the moment you seem to be the closest he has to a next of kin;
you may hold on to them until we can track down his wife, wherever the hell she
is.'

    'Brazil,'
I said.

    His
eyes lingered on the bag. I don't know why he didn't just come out and say it:
I think there's something odd about this and I want you to look into it.
Why else would he give me Augustine's personal possessions, so quickly? A
hospital might, if there was no relative present, because they have a high
turnover. But the police? They let cases fester for years, and they hold on to
possible evidence for ever.

    Or, I
was misreading him, and he didn't think there was anything suspicious at all
and the quicker he could write Augustine off the better.

    There
was never a right answer to anything, just more questions.

    It
was life, and life was such.

    DI
Robinson nodded at the bag and its contents.

    'Looks
kind of sad,' he said.

    I
nodded too, but I was thinking that inanimate objects can't actually be sad.

    He
tutted, which made me think that I'd said it out loud.

    The
forensics people had to do their stuff. They had to photograph and scrape.
Since things had turned peaceful in Belfast they didn't have much to do, so
they took their time. It was a couple of days before they gave us the all-clear
to bring the cleaners in so that Mother's bedroom could be turned back into
something approaching habitable. When the cleaners were packing up to leave
they said that they thought they'd 'gotten most of it', which wasn't very
reassuring. I didn't want to be tidying one day and pull back a chair to find
Augustine's other ear.

    As
far as I could tell, they'd done a good job. There was a definite reddish tinge
to the wallpaper, but it was actually a slight improvement on its previous
nicotine hue. The wooden floors were stain-free and the actual chair where he'd
shot himself was, amazingly, looking as good as new.

    Alison
and I stood in the middle of the room. The sun was coming through the window,
but there were no dust motes to be caught in its rays, which appeared perfectly
pure and life-giving. I stayed well out of them. Alison couldn't take her eyes
off the chair.

    She
said, 'He was such a nice man.'

    I
grunted.

    She
said, 'Don't blame yourself.'

    'I
wasn't.'

    'Well
just in case you were, just in case you were thinking you shouldn't have left
the gun in the house and Augustine by himself, it wasn't your fault; you didn't
actually put the gun to his head and shoot him, no matter what Robinson
thinks.'

    'He
said that?'

    'Yes,
he did. But we all know what he is.' She gave the international sign for
wanking. 'And all this time Arabella is probably cavorting around Rio with some
toyboy and hasn't a clue. God, it didn't even make the local news, let alone
CNN.'

    As
far as anywhere other than the mysterious world was concerned, he was just
another suicide. Despite having been feted in his lifetime by
The Times
and the
Daily Telegraph
, there had been no obituaries, no contact from
reporters wanting to know the circumstances under which he had died. He was an
obscure writer in a largely ignored genre. Maybe there was stuff on the
internet about it, but I didn't check. I was off Augustine Wogan. He had
promised me big things, and backed out. His whole life, in fact, was about
unfulfilled promise.

    Alison
said, 'Will I throw this out?'

    She
was holding the blood-spattered
Irish Times
that Augustine appeared to
have been reading prior to his death and which the cleaners had folded and set
to one side.

    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.

    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 richly 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.