Mystery Man (28 page)

So I wouldn't be handing
The Case of the Dancing Jews
over to the police any time soon. If DI Robinson was dirty, then I was certain that I would disappear for ever as soon as he got a whiff of my intentions. If he was dirty, perhaps he was laying off me for a reason. Maybe once he was in the employ of the Mayerovas, or any combination of them, he suddenly became interested in their big secret and thought he could squeeze it out of
me
in order to blackmail
them.
I can stand anything but pain, so I would give it up willingly at the first whisper of a Chinese burn, even though I still didn't know exactly what it was. However, since I had now identified the Mayerovas as certainly the source of the murders, I was convinced that their secret would soon follow.

I called Alison. I told her my suspicions about DI Robinson.

'You're barking,' she said. 'Phone me back
when you find something out
.'

She was right.

I had to focus.

Jeff, overhearing, said: 'All cops are dirty,' before adding: 'Are you going to marry her? If she talks to you like that now, in the first flush of romance, think how she's going to treat you once you're hitched.'

I thought about that for a moment. I had no better example than my own parents' troubled marriage. Father was trapped into wedlock and terrorised for forty years. He took his anger out on me, with a strap, and a stick, and a boot, and a large orange Space Hopper. But then again – Alison was nothing like my mother. Her barbs were playful, her putdowns came with a knowing smile, and I never had sex with my mother. Besides, Jeff was jealous of my success with women.

'Mind your own business, Jeff, and keep your eyes peeled for Nazis.'

For protection he had a hurly stick, which he wasn't sure how to hold, and my meat cleaver. He tutted, and muttered, '
Nazis
.'

I was convinced that the secret at the heart of
The Case of the Dancing Jews
had to be buried amongst the deportations, the death camps or the chaotic aftermath. It was about Anne Mayerova, her memory, her unwritten experience and the fear of what would happen if it ever was written down. Was it something she had witnessed, something terrifying she had experienced directly, someone she'd recognised? The events I had to investigate were more than half a century old, with most of the Holocaust survivors either dead or doting, and all I had to go on were two names and two numbers tattooed into their forearms. But it was a start. And this approach suited me better. I did not have to deal with living people, I did not have to interact, I did not have to travel, there was no requirement to charm or schmooze, I did not have to expose myself to their germs, their emotions, their black memories.

Just me.

My internet.

My determination.

I unpeeled a Twix.

I snapped a can of Diet Coke.

I sat down at my PC, determined not to shift until I had solved
The Case of the Dancing Jews.

I have always known that if you stare at numbers or letters or a combination of them for long enough a pattern will emerge. In this case,
The Case of the Dancing Jews,
it took five days and nights. A tsunami might have drowned the rest of the British Isles, a bubonic plague might have destroyed civilisation, but neither would have moved me from my position. My panic room is watertight, and I have been inoculated against everything, including inoculations.

Jeff
shone.
Instead of his occasional shifts, he worked from nine in the morning until six at night
every
day with no prospect at all of additional wages. Even when one of his fellow travellers in Amnesty International beseeched him to attend a particularly emotive protest (I believe some Kenyan was being forcefully repatriated despite the fact he was good at basketball) he stuck to his lack-of-guns, insisting that my investigation, my plight, my stand against the forces of evil was much more vital. I salute him. He deflected customer enquiries, answered the phone, and all the time kept the meat cleaver and hurly stick close by. Before he left at night he repaired to Starbucks and purchased coffees in the
right order
and secured sandwiches from Subway before locking me in. When he came in the morning he insisted on leading me into the back yard for some fresh air. It would have been like giving a prisoner in solitary some much-needed exercise, except this prisoner had to be coaxed out and once there was immediately desperate to return to his cell. I knew the solving of
The Case of the Dancing Jews
was within my grasp.

Alison, being a femme fatale, did try to lure me away on several occasions, but I remained sure and steadfast. She pecked my cheek and sent erotic e-mails, at first, but in the last couple of days merely stood in the shop during her lunch break and watched me. I caught her conferring with Jeff several times. I knew they were worried about the intensity of my investigation, that such concentration could not be healthy, but I also knew it was the only way to do it. I think, perhaps, that she also felt a little bit left out. I did not share what I was or was not learning, I did not divide the research or assign her a task. I couldn't. It was all going on in my head.
My
head. That's where the circuits were.

On the third day, Alison said, 'Should I call on your mum?'

'No, she's fine.'

My eyes did not leave the screen. I was scruffy and stubbly and smelly and sweaty. The bags under my eyes were the size of used teabags. And I knew more about Auschwitz than any sane man should.

'I don't mind. She might appreciate the—'

'Leave her be.'

'I'm only trying to—'

'
Please
. . .'

When I happened to glance up twenty minutes later she was gone.

Jeff, looking sullen, said, 'She's pissed off with you. You keep treating her like that, she'll walk for good. You should send her some flowers.'

I returned my attention to the screen. Alison would walk anyway. It was inevitable. I did not subscribe to the
treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen
school of romance because I did not subscribe to
romance,
full stop. I found flowers depressing and I was allergic to most of them.

'Do you want me to send . . .?'

'No. Leave it.'

He left it. I worked on through the night. She did not come across at lunchtime. Jeff gave me a
told you so
look, but said nothing.

I focused to the exclusion of all else.

Apparently, later that day, my Botanic Avenue Irregulars came into the shop and demanded money. Jeff punched one and wrestled the other to the ground before throwing them both out and I
did not even notice.

Five days, five nights.

And then, at about five o'clock on the morning of the sixth day, my Eureka moment.

Suddenly the pattern stood out like a 3D image on a 2D screen.

I punched the air and danced around and opened another Twix. I had a big wholesale box of them. It was the breakthrough I'd been searching for – perhaps not the final solution, but the beginning of the end. Now I could focus. The players were all still in the field, but there was a growing clarity. At that moment all I wanted to do was tell Alison, I wanted to see her little face lighting up when I showed her how I had worked it out, but it was still so early and I was dog tired. Jeff had made up a little cot for me in the kitchen, which I had barely used, but now I crawled into the sleeping bag and closed my eyes. I thought if I got a couple of hours' sleep, then when he arrived to open the shop I could pop home for a shower and a change of clothes. I could take Alison out for a special breakfast by way of apology for ignoring her and she would forgive me because she knew my work was important, and then when I told her how I had cracked the case she would collapse into the arms of the genius and kiss me passionately.

Except, of course, that when I finally opened my eyes and checked my watch, it was nearly closing time again. I stumbled into the shop, shouting at Jeff and scaring rare customers away.

'I thought it was better to let you sleep,' he said weakly.

He was a moron, but loyal.

'Has Ali . . .?'

He shook his head. Across the road the lights in the jeweller's winked off and a moment later Alison and her manager emerged, locking the doors behind them. The manager walked off; Alison lingered. She glanced once towards No Alibis, then quickly away.

She was hurting, and huffing.

But as soon as I told her, everything would change.

I yanked our door open and hurried across the footpath. I was crumpled and rancid, but it wouldn't matter. I waved, but she did not see. I called, but a rumbling Ulsterbus drowned it.

Then she moved to the side of the road, and I saw her smile, and knew everything was right again, but for all of a second, because the smile wasn't for me, it was for the man getting out of the red Ferrari with the personalised number plates.

It was for Max Mayerova.

I was staggered.
Stunned.
Frozen to the kerb. Alison. My Alison. With Max Mayerova. One of the killers. Or
the
killer. My immediate and inevitable thought was that somehow they were in league together, that it had all been a massive plot to get
me.
The Second World War, the Holocaust and the dancing Jews were all created in order to manoeuvre me into a position where I could one day be annihilated by the forces of evil. I was the custodian of some unknown universal code. Everything revolved around me. For countless generations my enemies had been spiralling closer and closer and I had been aware of it all along without ever quite being able to put my finger on it. By my investigating
The Case of the Dancing Jews,
my galactic enemies had realised that they were about to be unmasked and had decided to call all of their agents to a secret meeting, but in the midst of their panic they hadn't been careful enough and now I had spotted two of them, supposed enemies, slipping off to plot my downfall.

Then I thought, no, that's bollocks.

Alison wasn't
in league
with them. She was hurt by my rejection and being the wilful, wonderful, stubborn pixie that she was had decided to show me exactly what she was capable of. She was meeting Max Mayerova in order to trap him into revealing himself as the killer or part of a killing team. She had made repeated efforts to get through to me, but I was so caught up in my own investigation that I hadn't realised how desperate she was to help. She was putting herself in the line of fire for
me.

I could not allow it.

I had a sudden, God-like revelation, there and then, on the kerb, Botanic Avenue, Belfast, 5.15 p.m. of a sunny Wednesday, that she was the one for me, that all the barriers I had sought to put up, all the doubts and dismissals, all the anger and jealousy and paranoia, all those years of hate, were suddenly behind me. She was mine. She loved me. She may or may not already have been the mother of my child; but if she wasn't now she would be, and soon. All I had to do was stop this naive, lovely fawn from being carried away to her doom by a murderer. His Ferrari was already nosing out into the traffic.

I did the only thing I could.

I ran after it.

Despite my knees and arteries and heart and blood and ulcers and tumours, I charged along the footpath, pushing home-bound workers to one side, dodging prams and shouting, 'Alison! Alison! Alison!'

But to no avail.

Max was too quick, and the traffic too light.

A taxi pulled in at the far end of Botanic Avenue; a man in a monkey suit got out.
Literally
a monkey suit. Any other time it would have freaked me out, with his fake monkey hair and fake monkey features but
human
eyes, but he meant nothing. I jumped into the back seat of the taxi and snapped, 'Follow that car!'

The driver, a rotund man in a frayed shirt, glanced laconically back. 'Sorry, mate, I'm booked.'

'No!' I exploded. 'You have to
follow that car
!'

He looked ahead. 'Which car?'

'The red one. The Ferrari.
Please
.'

'I really am boo—'

'I'll pay double. Triple. Whatever it takes.'

He raised an eyebrow, and smiled. He put the car into gear and pulled out. 'That's what I hate about taxi drivers,' he said, 'they're so fucking unreliable.'

Despite the fact that it was a Ferrari, Max Mayerova was still inhibited by rush-hour traffic from showing what his car could do. Or perhaps he had no need to. He wasn't aware that he was being followed, and he had Alison exactly where he wanted her. He thought she had no idea who he was. He thought she was tangled in his web. I knew Alison was smart, but I didn't know if she was as smart as Max. Bodies were piling up and there was nothing to connect him to any of them.

Or there hadn't been.

The taxi driver's eyes occasionally flitted to me in the mirror, but he said nothing. He could, if instructed, have drawn level with them; he could have honked his horn and I could have gesticulated at Alison to
get out of the bloody car.

Max Mayerova intended to kill her. I knew that absolutely.

But I did not tell him to draw level.

I told him to pursue, but at a distance.

There was still that part of me that wanted to watch, and see, the voyeur.

What was Alison planning? How would it pan out?

After about fifteen minutes, though it was just over a mile in the heavy traffic, the Ferrari pulled into a side street on the far side of the Victoria Centre, and from there made its way into the Cathedral Quarter. The city now has a lot of these quarters, certainly more than four. I hate planners who mess with numbers like this. How are you ever supposed to see patterns when they don't adhere to the basic laws of mathematics?

Get over yourself.

Focus.

Your loved one.

Up ahead.

In mortal danger.

The street was cobbled and bare of parked traffic, so we were immediately more obvious. But still, just a taxi, en route to somewhere. The Ferrari disappeared into an alley about two hundred yards along. We slowed as we passed. It was jutting out of a parking bay a little bit up, and Alison and Max were climbing out.