The Day of the Jack Russell (Mystery Man) (14 page)

‘Ignore him,’ said Alison. ‘Who is it, go on?’

So he told us, and she responded like she was impressed, but when she looked at me her eyes were as wide as mine.

It was time to get out. We had a new and potentially dangerous complication to discuss. Alison promised to return as soon as our JR popped his clogs and Gunn took a note of our bullshit telephone number and escorted us to the door and waved at us as we crossed the car park.

It was a huge relief to get outside. I’m usually allergic to country air, but on this occasion I took my life in my hands and sucked it in. Alison stopped at the driver’s door and began to rifle through her handbag for the keys. It was a big bag, and it was full of lady nonsense.

She looked across the top of the car at me and said, ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I know that look.’

She was right. I had unfinished business. I turned back to the workshop.

‘What’re you . . .?’

‘Forgotten to ask something, only be a mo.’

I re-entered the reception area. I pushed through the curtain and saw that Gunn was leaning over a work bench examining the indistinct photographs of the Jack Russell with the aid of a magnifying glass.

‘Excuse me,’ I said.

He looked up, surprised, and then peeved. ‘Yes?’

‘You thought you recognised my voice?’

‘I . . .?’

‘Get a website, you creepy old fucker.’

I slipped back through the curtain, grinning triumphantly.

It was an inconvenient time for Alison to lose her keys.

Alison was furious with me, and did not wish to discuss the breakthrough in the case, nor take into account the fact that I had engineered it by suggesting we contact the taxidermist in the first place. All she could focus on was the smaller picture, and the fact that an old man had threatened to bash her car in with the shaft of a brush.

I had dismissed his claim that I had verbally abused him as the ramblings of a senile old stuffer, yet despite the fact that she and I were lovers, and I was the father of her child, and she wanted to spend the rest of her life with me, and had her eyes on my shop, and thought of herself as my equal and partner in detection, Alison chose to believe him over me. I told her honestly that I had returned to the workshop merely to ask a question in relation to the case. She demanded to know what the question was. I was not prepared to tell her, as it was already clear that she was doubting my version of events. William Gunn had threatened to hit her car with the shaft of a brush only because the end of it had already come off when he hurled it at me while chasing me around the locked car. It is unseemly and undignified for an old man to puff around exerting so much energy over something he had clearly misheard. It was, however, a sure indication of his impaired mental state and it reminded me to treat with caution everything he had told us earlier.

When Alison finally located her keys, in her pocket, and we departed to the accompaniment of hurled abuse, I sat on my hands and relocated to another dimension while she shouted and raved. For some reason, my lack of response infuriated her even more. It was not a comfortable journey home, although a lot of that had to do with the fact that we were in the vicinity of grass and bushes and sheep that looked at me with evil intent.

It was too late for me to reopen No Alibis, but I had to go back there to pick up the van. As she parked outside Alison said, ‘Grow up and stop huffing.’

‘Then stop shouting at me.’

‘You started it. Calling him a—’

‘I didn’t call him anything. He’s barking. Why won’t you believe me?’

‘Experience.’

‘I wouldn’t lie to you.’

She held her gaze steady. I folded. Malfunctioning tear ducts. Alison shook her head. ‘I honestly don’t think you’re even aware of it. What question did you ask him?’

‘If you must know, I asked him about the JR. You will have noticed that in both photographs the dog had a tail that curled back on itself.’

‘Yes. So?’

‘Well, when I was growing up, JRs never had tails. When they were born their tails were docked. But they decided it was unnecessarily cruel a while back and they brought in a law to prevent it. I wanted to ask Mr Gunn when that law was brought in; it’s the sort of thing he would need to know and it would be helpful to us.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it gives us the age of the dog. He said the law was brought in three years ago, which means that the JR in the picture, if it’s the same as ours, cannot be more than three years old.’

‘And what difference does that make?’

‘None. It’s just information. It may be useful somewhere further down the line. Three-year-old dogs should not require stuffing. Maybe there’s more to his death than meets the eye. I mean, would you want to be the man who ran down a Jack Russell belonging to the Chief Constable of Northern Ireland? They’d put speed cameras outside your house.’

‘Fair point,’ said Alison.

I am an accomplished liar. I had known the exact date of the enactment of the tail-docking law all along. It’s not an area of particular interest to me, but I do keep abreast of the latest developments in tail-docking. I have a lot of time to kill at night, what with not sleeping and Mother praying loudly if indistinctly.

‘So, the Chief Constable,’ said Alison.

‘The Chief Constable.’

‘That complicates things.’

‘It complicates them mightily.’

‘So what are we saying, that somehow Jimbo and Ronny got hold of the Chief Constable’s dog, and in getting it back he either killed them or had them killed? That’s just daft.’

‘Yes it is. Of course it is.’

‘But.’

‘Stranger things.’

‘Say they refused to hand it back, or they tried to blackmail him, and he just snapped and killed them.’

‘Or God knows, in his line he comes across enough murderers, and he struck a deal.’

‘It might not even be about the dog itself, but about the principle of the dog. Can you imagine if it got out that the Chief Constable was burgled? What would that do to the reputation of the police? It would be a disaster, it would be political.’

‘So let’s say he’s prepared to kill over a Jack Russell, then we would have to assume that he will go to equally extreme measures to protect himself from further investigation. And you know what that means?’

‘I do. You want to drop the case because you’re allergic to violence.’

‘Exactly.’

Alison smiled. ‘You’re right. We have a baby to think of. And let’s face it, the Chief Constable of Northern Ireland is not going to murder two painters and decorators over a stuffed dog. People do get very attached to their pets, but that is just plain silly.’

‘Yes it is, crazy.’

‘We shouldn’t think about it for a minute more.’

‘Not even a moment.’

‘I mean, even if the Chief Constable, the head of our police service, the man we trust to keep us safe at nights, did kill Jimbo and Ronny, and we expose him, it wouldn’t just be one man; it would rock our Government and jeopardise our fragile peace, and more importantly, it would put us in incredible danger. So we wouldn’t want to be doing that. Even if we knew something, it would be much safer just to sit on it, because really it’s none of our business, and we have to look after number one first.’

‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘Whatever we know can just sit in our consciences.’

I looked at her for a long time. She looked back.

‘Explain conscience again,’ she asked.

I knew what she was doing. She wanted to follow the case to its logical conclusion. She didn’t give a good God damn about our safety. She wanted to unravel the whole ball of string. But this wasn’t string; we were dealing with Christmas lights. Once ravelled, all but impossible to un. We could spend weeks trying to disentangle them, and when we finally did, we’d get electrocuted. Alison was young and enthusiastic, and could not always see the bigger picture. She thought she could play me. She thought she could implant some kind of autosuggestion in my brain box. She had bonded with the abundantly pregnant Pat and now felt morally responsible for tracking down whoever had killed the father of her unborn child, while hardly realising that by doing so she was putting her own at risk.

I was not built for big, important cases. I did not care about the fate of nations or police or politics. I had had more than enough of murder in the past and had only agreed to flirt with it again because Marple had attempted to tie us in to the deaths of Jimbo and Ronny. But there was no evidence. Billy Randall had browbeaten me into continuing the investigation and tempted me with an envelope full of cash. It might not have been blood money, but my instinct to reject it was absolutely right. I should have been strong and handed it back to him. I should have been decisive and told him that his predicament was no concern of mine, that I’d done my job and was now retiring from detection to concentrate on selling books, which has more than enough excitement for someone with my blood pressure, and varicose veins, and cholesterol, and brittle bones, and psoriasis, and angina, and rickets, and tinnitus, and the malaria I caught from a single rogue mosquito on a visit to Belfast’s Botanical Gardens.

I was about to be a father. I had an invalid mother. I did not need to be mixed up in murder. Jimbo and Ronny were two drug-dealers and I really did not care who killed them.

Did.

Not.

Care.

After she drove off, I sat in the No Alibis van for twenty minutes. Three times I switched the engine on, and three times I switched it off. Then I got out of the car and went up the back alley and entered the shop from the rear. I took my seat behind the counter and began to look again at
The Case of the Cock-Headed Man
.

Damn her eyes!

Three a.m. The phone rang.

Alison said, ‘I couldn’t sleep. I rang your mobile and couldn’t raise you. I rang your house. Your mother said you hadn’t come home. I was worried.’

‘You spoke to my mother?’

‘It wasn’t exactly a conversation.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She said, it’s nearly three in the morning, how the fuck do I know where the dirty stop-out is?’

‘Were you thinking I was with another woman?’

When she finished laughing, Alison said no. ‘You’re working on the case, aren’t you?’

‘Maybe.’

‘I knew you would. You’re a curious old Hector, aren’t you?’

‘I thought it would be worthwhile to spend a few hours of quiet contemplation reviewing the facts. It doesn’t mean anything.’

‘Well at least you’re thinking about it. So?’

‘We have a lot of don’t knows and possibilities and maybes, but very few facts.’

‘Oh.’

‘But I did turn up a photograph of the Chief Constable and his Jack Russell.’

‘How the hell did you manage that?’

‘I have the combined wisdom of ten thousand fictional detectives whizzing about in my brain.’

‘Let me rephrase the question. How the hell did you manage that?’

‘I typed Chief Constable of Northern Ireland and Jack Russell into Google. Wilson McCabe was appointed just over a year ago. He did a lot of press when he first arrived, liked to project himself as the friendly neighbour hood bobby, family man, all that fantasy crap. One of these was a photo shoot for
QIP
magazine . . .’

‘
QI
. . .?’

‘
Quite Important People
– it was supposed to chronicle the lives of the rich and famous here, but we don’t have very many of them and those we do have are dead boring. People weren’t the slightest bit interested. It collapsed after three issues. But not before they persuaded Wilson McCabe to pose with his wife and two boys and their sweet little six-week-old Jack Russell pup. You can check them out yourself, they’re all online.’

‘And what does that do for us?’

‘Well, the JR was just a pup, but I compared it with Jimbo’s, and the markings are identical. Just smaller.’

‘Okay. And what does that do for us?’

‘Well, we know that the JR was taken from Pat’s. If it turns up at the Chief Constable’s house, there’s your direct line. If it’s at Billy Randall’s, there’s another.’

‘And if it’s at neither?’

‘Well then we’re scundered, it’s the only thing we have. No stuffed JR, then we leave the police to investigate the murders themselves, which means that they might yet rope us back into them.’

‘So we’re going to find the pup?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Darling, you know you won’t be able to sleep until you’ve worked out where it is.’

‘Darling,’ I responded, ‘I haven’t been able to sleep since 1976.’

Come four a.m., I realised I was being watched.

The shutters were down, but there are security cameras front and back that feed into my computer. I had them installed after being bushwhacked outside my own yard during my previous investigation. I also like to watch, and have spent many hours, watching. I have seen couples fornicate, drunks urinate and burglars speculate. Botanic Avenue is a commercial street, with cramped student housing running off it. There’s a hotel a hundred yards down from No Alibis, but it doesn’t have its own parking. There are bars and nightclubs and restaurants; a lot of people drive down, and then leave their cars overnight. What all this means is that there are generally few parking spaces available, day or night. But still, people come and go at all hours. There was nothing remarkable about the BMW parked opposite No Alibis and the man inside it, or the fact that the first time I noticed him, or the light from his mobile phone, was at two a.m., or that he was still there just before four. People wait for hours to sober up, or to be absolutely certain that there are no police around to catch them drink-driving. But at exactly four a.m. the BMW’s lights came on, and it pulled out, and drove off, only for another BMW to immediately pull into the space and switch off, with the driver making no attempt to leave his vehicle. That did not suggest he had lucked into a convenient parking space; it suggested a change of shift.

Call me paranoid. Many people have, including several who know what they’re talking about. Just as I am a glass-half-empty kind of a guy, I generally go for the guilty explanation rather than the innocent one. But the swapping of the BMWs might possibly just have been a weird coincidence if I had not noticed their number plates, as I tend to do, and saw that their registrations were but one digit apart, which suggested: fleet vehicles.