Jammy Dodger (7 page)

‘Um …'

‘I'm going to need a coffee. Black. No sugar.'

Upstairs, Oliver was singing along to
Yellow Brick Road
in a tortured falsetto. (‘
I'm just a horny old toad
 …')

Half an hour later, Rosie summoned me over from the window seat where I'd been engrossed in a copy of
Elle
magazine.

‘Listen carefully,' she said, tapping the arm of the sofa with a biro. ‘This is what you must do …'

She started to speak. She was looking at me very intently, her mouth moving very quickly and precisely. Flashes of small, even white teeth. Lips moistened by tongue-tip approximately every thirty words. I nodded to show I was taking in what she was saying and then realised I wasn't. What
was
she saying?

‘… added to the balance sheet. You got that? Then subtract the square root of the hypotenuse … and index link ten percent of your risk profile to your Bollinger curve. Have a Hang Seng haircut, narrow your spread to twelve basis points and seasonally adjust your liquidity. After that it's just a question of killer bees and fallen angels. Okay?'

I nodded a few more times. Her eyes were mesmerising.

‘I'm sorry, could you repeat that?' I said. ‘I'll take notes this time.'

Overhead, Oliver emitted a long, shrill, Wookiee-like belch that reverberated through the light fittings.

Rosie leant back and regarded the ceiling while I folded up a sheet of paper and gently extracted the pen from her fingers. She began again. I tried to avoid looking at her. Tried to concentrate on the words.

I wrote: ‘Income on one side, outgoings on the other.' No problem. ‘VAT receipts. Subtract.' Got it. This was good … She really did have fine skin tone, though. Very healthy. A slight flush just below each cheek bone. Thick eyelashes. And how soft and white her throat was. Pulse and flow. I caught myself remembering the dazzle of her nakedness … Dammit! Not again. What was she saying?

‘… on a Japanese Candlestick Chart. That's important. If they use the Macaroni Defence you're going to get a Keynesian kickback … at the very least a dead cat bounce and if that happens … zero percent kruggerands … hedge wrapper … Joseph Effect. That's it. Do you think you'll manage that?'

‘What? Oh yeah, no problem. That's great. You're a star.'

‘I know. Of the County Down.'

‘That's right.
The maid with the nut-brown hair
. I can't believe you've never heard that song.'

‘Actually I have.'

‘What? I thought you …'

‘Of course I have. I just get tired of people pointing it out every time they hear my name.'

‘Sorry.'

‘That's alright.'

She smiled.

I smiled.

‘Listen,' I said. ‘Obviously we can't pay you for helping us out here but what would you say to me buying you a drink some time?'

She blushed instantly, laughed, then looked away.

‘That's very nice of you and I'd like to but, um …'

‘Yes?'

‘I have a boyfriend.'

Spoiler.

 

Back upstairs, I found Oliver absorbing a half-gallon of strawberry milkshake.

‘Well? Are we sorted?' he squeaked, wiping away a pink moustache.

I nodded.

‘Yep, Rosie's saved our bacon,' I said.

‘Are you sure? This could really mess things up.'

‘Don't worry. We've a bit of work to do but we'll blitz on it tomorrow.'

‘You're confident?'

‘Absolutely. Then we just need to make sure we're at the office early on Monday in time for Winksie.'

‘Brilliant!' He drained his glass. ‘This calls for a celebration. Let's have a milkshake.'

We moved to the kitchen, where the stack of Sunnyland Farm cartons had been rebuilt and now formed a head-height wall between the fridge and the window.

Oliver assembled his syrup bottles and took up his whisk.

‘Oliver, do you mind if I make a suggestion?'

‘Not at all.'

‘I'm just going to run this up the flagpole as it were …'

‘Fire away. Chocolate or strawberry?'

‘Chocolate. Wouldn't it make more sense to cut the competition coupons
out
of the cartons?'

‘Yeah, definitely.'

‘Right, so …?'

‘Well I would but I haven't got any scissors. Mick the Artist ran off with them that night he was going to kill Marty Pollocks. Remember? After the last
Lyre
party?'

I cast my mind back. The artists had been particularly volatile that night.

‘Fair enough.'

I sniffed.

‘You do wash them out, though, don't you? I saw some in the bathroom. And the ones at the office are getting a bit whiffy …'

He handed me my drink and raised his own.

‘Slainte.'

‘Cheers.'

It was horribly sweet. This couldn't be good for Oliver, I thought, and looking at him now I noticed he had gained weight. His face was slabby and had a dense, pearlescent pallor to it that surpassed the bleaching effect of the light from the window. Some lines of Heaney's – from
The Milk Factory
– popped, unbidden, into my head:
There we go, soft-eyed calves of the dew / Astonished and assumed into fluorescence.
Was Oliver turning into a veal calf?

I asked him if he had any plans for the night.

‘You better believe it. Iris is coming round.'

He smirked and began involuntarily licking his lips like a cat anticipating … well, cream. Oliver had been seeing Iris for nearly a year and their mutual lust – instantaneous and irrestistible – showed no signs of flagging. In fact, according to him, it was still as urgent as the first time. They had met in Crazy Prices, where they contrived a flirtation over the last packet of mint Viscounts and, three hours later, after a flurry of drinks in the Parador Hotel, found themselves naked, slicked in sweat and sharing a cigarette on Oliver's fragrant futon. (Yes, it was a mystery to me too.) There was just one drawback: Iris was the middle-aged wife of Samuel Niblock, a high-ranking and notoriously uptight policeman.

‘You know Sammy'll have you killed – or at the very least gelded – if he ever finds out?' I said.

‘He won't find out. He'd better not.'

‘And it'll be even worse when he twigs you're a Catholic.'

‘He won't. Anyway, I'm not a Catholic.'

‘What?'

‘I'm not a Catholic, I'm a Buddhist.'

‘Since when?'

‘About a year ago.'

I let that one slide. As far as I was aware, Buddha took a pretty dim view of alcohol abuse, junk food addiction
and
sexual gluttony.

‘Do you know much about this guy?' I asked.

‘Not really. Just bits and pieces Iris has told me.'

‘Such as?'

‘Well, his nickname in the force is The Mongoose. You know why?'

‘He looks like one?'

‘No. Well, a bit apparently, but that's not it.'

‘Because he likes raw eggs?'

‘Okay that's enough. No, it's because he goes after villains the way a mongoose goes after snakes. He has no fear. He's impervious to their venom.'

‘And you're doing the Cucumber Rumba with his wife. Are you mad?'

‘What can I tell you Artie, I'm ruled by my heart.'

‘Yeah, or something further south,' I muttered.

‘What?'

‘Nothing.'

Before I left, Oliver insisted I eat a cup of half-set panna cotta and a basinful of butterscotch Angel Delight.

It was the wrong thing to do.

‘You know, you could probably use an early night,' he observed. ‘You look a wee bit peaky.'

 

*

 

Nothing concentrates the mind quite as sharply as the arrival in the room of a man with a gun. If it's never happened to you – and you should count yourself lucky – the sensation is akin to what they say drowning is like. As you glimpse that precision-engineered black hole, everything you've ever experienced is sucked in an instant through your memory and compressed into a pinhead-sized ball of light that dances just above the bridge of your nose. With the logic of a dream everything suddenly makes sense: you didn't know it, but everything in your life has been leading up to this adrenaline-drenched moment.

This particular man had a moustache and wore a black Harrington jacket, and the gun in his right hand was a Browning nine-millimetre semi-automatic, part of an arms cache that went missing from a County Armagh police barracks in 1985.

 

But, let's backtrack briefly.

 

By the time Oliver arrived at the office on Sunday night (clutching a carton of curried chips and a flagon of banana milkshake) I had already pulled together a vaguely plausible set of
Lyre
accounts. Rosemary's tutorial had somehow paid off. All that was left to do was sort through our expense receipts and make them correspond to the numbers I had typed out. This proved more difficult than you'd think: for a start, there were two or three million of them, bursting like confetti from a dozen overstuffed envelopes; secondly, half of them related to biscuits and milk. The remainder were for unauthorised lunches, bogus equipment, stationery and, most testing of all, ‘miscellaneous' – a category of mysteries that included a chilling invoice from The Honeypot Salon for ‘intimate waxing'. (It wasn't mine.)

At midnight, we both lost the will to live.

 

At 9:03 a.m., Stanford Winks rapped crisply at the door.

I woke with a start, still sitting at the desk, looked at my watch and then across at Oliver who stared back at me with one open eye, tattered receipts stuck to his face where he had lain in them.

‘Get the kettle on,' I hissed.

While Oliver stumbled to ‘the kitchen', I managed to sweep the evidence into a plastic bag and – ‘Coming – ' stash it in a drawer.

Clawing my hair into shape I greeted the man from the Arts Council, who was dapper in a chocolate corduroy suit and pink floral tie.

‘Apologies for my lateness, Artie, the West Link was jammed. Always is when it rains,' he said, propping his umbrella against the wall and pulling out a tissue to polish his large round spectacles. ‘My God, it doesn't get any tidier in here does it? Don't you ever clean up? Where's Mr Sweeney?'

‘Here I am …' Oliver poked his head out of ‘the kitchen'. ‘How are you this morning Stanford?'

‘Very well, thank you. Bit wet.'

‘Cup of tea?'

‘That would be lovely.' Winks sniffed the air, his eyes narrowing. ‘On second thoughts, make it a coffee. No milk.'

We settled down for a chat. After a brief treatise on soft furnishings from our visitor, who was redecorating his house, we turned to business. He wanted to know when the next issue of
Lyre
would appear (he wasn't alone). He also led us to understand (‘Don't get me wrong, we love the mag') that ‘some people' had noted a deterioration of quality, a lack of focus, in the previous two editions. Could this be rectified? People were hungry for local flavour, very keen that emphasis be given to the issues and concerns of the day. ‘After all, we live in a very special part of the world with problems that are peculiar to us and we have a responsibility to recognise and confront those issues,' he said, as though reading from a teleprompter. Oliver and I nodded and looked grave.

Despite the pleasant tone, Winks was agitated and after just two Crinkle Crunch Creams he was popping the catches on his briefcase and asking for our accounts.

‘I'm sorry to be uptight about this, but there's real pressure coming down to make sure taxpayers are getting bang for their buck. A certain person back at HQ,
you know who
, seems to think some recipients – not you boys, obviously – are … how should we put it, having a laugh. And unfortunately, that means we're all under the microscope – ' He dropped his voice to a stage whisper. ‘… Just
entre nous
he has me half demented.'

I handed him the sheaf of figures I had conjured from the void the previous evening.

‘Thanks Artie, I'll pass them on to finance. All in order?'

‘Oh yes.'

‘Wait a minute, where are the receipts? No good without the receipts.'

‘Actually, they're – '

It was at this – I hesitate to say fortuitous – moment that the man with the gun arrived.

 

The door burst open, propelled by a size twelve boot, and he was across the threshold, breathing heavily, gun arm outstretched, assessing the room's danger potential. It was, it has to be said, low: Walter the Softy on one side, Oliver and I like rejects from a
Waiting for Godot
audition on the other. All motion ceased. There was no sound except for the drumming of raindrops on the skylight.

Keeping his eyes on us he crept sideways, then wheeled,
Miami Vice
-style, into the doorway of ‘the kitchen'. He sniffed a couple of times and withdrew. Having satisfied himself that everyone was accounted for, he approached the desk, whipped a chair around and straddled it bad-cop-style, resting his arms on its back. (I'd always thought people only did that in fiction.)

No one spoke.

He pointed the pistol at Oliver.

‘Which one are you?'

Oliver's face was the colour of lemon posset.

‘Listen, it wasn't me, it – '

‘Shut up. Sweeney or Conville?'

‘Sweeney, but I swear I never touched her – '

‘Shut the fuck up. That makes you Conville, right?'

‘That's right.'

He smiled, showing smoke-lacquered teeth. I noticed he had L-O-V-E tattooed in Indian ink – homemade job – across the knuckles of his right hand, H-E-A-T across the left.
Heat?

Oliver was highly agitated.

‘If you'll just let me explain, this whole thing was an innocent – '