The Day of the Jack Russell (Mystery Man) (15 page)

I phoned Jeff. He answered, eventually.

I said, ‘Do you want your job back?’

‘It’s . . . four in the effing morning.’

‘Just answer the question.’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘I’ve been offered one in the university bookshop. The hours are shorter and the pay is better.’

‘Jeff. Don’t be ridiculous. I need you here, now. We’ve forgiven you, even if you are an arse.’

‘I’m ridiculous and an arse. You’re winning me over one insult at a time.’

‘Jeff, just get down here. I’m up to my neck in
The Case of the Cock-Headed Man
. It all seems to revolve around a stuffed Jack Russell that used to belong to the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. He may be involved in a double murder. This case resonates at the very highest levels of power; it’s a conspiracy. You love conspiracies. You love abuses of power. This is exactly like that shit you slabber on and on about in Amnesty International, but here it is, right on your doorstep. Or mine. Please, I’m in the shop, I’m alone and I’m scared to leave because I’m being watched. I need your help.’

‘Like I said, I’ve been offered a job in the university bookshop and the hours are better and so is the pay.’

He hung up.

I rang him back. ‘I can’t match what they’re offering, but whatever extra they’re paying you they’ll take it out of you in tax, you won’t be gaining anything, plus you’ll be contributing to Government coffers and I know that goes against the grain.’ I had him there. ‘And we can talk about the hours; they won’t be a problem.’

‘What about the coffee?’

‘What about the coffee?’

‘You keep sending me out to Starbucks for coffee, but you never buy me one. You make me use the instant.

‘I’m not buying you Starbucks coffee.’

‘Okay,’ he said, and hung up.

I rang him back and said, ‘One a day, tops.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Plus—’

‘I’m not negotiating.’

‘I believe you are.’

‘Look, I’m being watched, they could come for me at any time, and you’re discussing fucking coffee! Please come and help me.’

‘Bullshit. That place is done up like Fort Knox. You could withstand a nuclear strike. What’s wrong with Alison?’

‘Nothing. She’s pregnant. I don’t want to put her in harm’s way.’

‘But it’s okay to put me in harm’s way, and you’ll still stiff me on the coffee?’

‘Okay! Frick. If I get something from Starbucks, then you can have something from Starbucks.’

‘From any part of the menu?’

‘Yes!’

He said nothing. I could hear the cogs. Eventually he said, ‘Okay, then.’

‘Right. Christ. We have a deal?’

‘I suppose. What do you want me to do?’

‘I’m going to drive home shortly. If I’m right, whoever is watching me will follow. I’ll try and shake him, but I want you to follow him, see where he goes.’ Jeff was laughing. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘Sorry. Just. The very notion of you shaking someone. You’ve never driven faster than twenty-five miles an hour in your life. He would have to be walking for you to shake him.’

‘Will you just get down here?’

‘One thing.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t have a car. My mate has an ice-cream van, I can borrow that.’

‘You . . .’

‘Only winding you up. Give me ten minutes.’

‘Make it five,’ I said.

‘I live ten minutes away. I can’t make it five unless you rewrite the laws of physics.’

What I hate about the younger generation is that they always have an excuse. In my day people just
did
.

Right up to the point that he started following me, I couldn’t be sure that I was right, though I usually was. As soon as I backed out of the alcove and turned right on Botanic, I picked him up in the mirror. The roads were almost completely empty of traffic at that time, so he knew to stay well back. But he was there.

And behind him, Jeff.

My first attempt to lose him consisted of approaching a junction, indicating to turn left, but actually turning right. When that failed, I drove through the next set of traffic lights on amber, knowing that they would be red by the time he reached them. And he stopped. But it was a straight road. And I have an almost physical mental block about speeding, so he was able to patiently wait for the lights to return to green and still catch me up within a minute. But I can be a wily old fox when I need to be. I might not have been able to outrun him, but I am a dab hand at confusion and embarrassment. I led him the full length of the Lisburn Road until I came to a suitably large roundabout, whose main tributary led on to the outer ring surrounding the city. For me it was like the edge of the world. There might as well have been a big sign saying,
Here Be Dragons
, instead of
Lisburn
. I moved on to this roundabout, checking in my mirror that he was also joining it, but then I
stayed
on it.

I went round, and I went round, and I went round.

He went with me.

It would have been even more ridiculous if Jeff had also joined us, but I had planned sufficiently far ahead to call him and warn him to pull off short to await developments.

By the end of the third circuit, my tail knew for sure that I was fooling with him, rather than just dithering about which exit. Whether off his own bat, or having taken instruction, he cut off and back down the Lisburn Road. Jeff took off in pursuit.

I continued to drive around the roundabout. There was something quite relaxing about it. There were no surprises. I knew exactly where I was going, and where I had come from, and where I was going, and where I had come from. It was my kind of a journey. The grass was short, the traffic was light and there were several escape routes. I could have stayed there all night. Also, the easy, casual rhythm of it gave me time to think about who it was in the BMW.

The fact that I had only noticed him in the early hours of the morning did not mean that he hadn’t been with me for some time, but I am usually pretty well aware of my surroundings, and number plates, and would like to think I would have realised I was being watched or followed. It’s a bit like a spider-sense, although obviously I suffer from arachnophobia. I was reasonably sure he hadn’t been with us on our visit
to
William Gunn’s workshop; being the nervous passenger that I am, I had kept an eagle eye on the road and would surely have noticed if we were being followed, particularly as we got lost a couple of times on the way there and had to do some backtracking along narrow country roads. But with Alison shouting on the way back I hadn’t paid much attention to the traffic, so he could easily have picked us up there, which meant he could have been tipped off by William Gunn.

The roundabout was well lit, but the BMW hadn’t gotten close enough for me to get even a rough impression of the man driving. It could have been Marple. It could have been Gunn himself. It could even have been the Chief Constable, or the killers he had employed to top Jimbo and Ronny. I did not doubt that I would find out. I have been collecting number plates and tracking down their owners all of my life, because I like to. Tracing my original watcher or his replacement would not be hard. In fact, it was made terrifically easy because Jeff, going against the habits of his short lifetime, turned out to be rather good at tracking his target.

He phoned rather breathlessly fifteen minutes after he left me.

‘Just parking . . . He’s . . . man, you’re not going to believe this.’

I said, ‘Hold on till I pull over, I’m starting to feel a little dizzy.’

It wasn’t just the roundabout, it was the medication.

I took the first exit I came to and parked a hundred yards up. It had begun to rain quite heavily. It was dark still and cold. I liked it.

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘shoot.’

‘Do you want to know where I am?’

‘Yes. Jeff. Obviously.’

‘And you’ve agreed to the pay rise and the Starbucks and to cut my hours and not to shout at me.’

‘I never agreed to a pay rise. And I’ll shout if I damn well . . .’

‘Well I think—’

‘Just tell me where you are!’

‘You see? That’s
exactly
—’

‘Jeff. Will you stop pissing around and tell me what—’

‘Oh shit!’

‘Jeff?’

‘Shit shit shit shit shit!’

‘Jeff . . .?’

‘They’ve spotted me, they’re coming for me!’

‘Jeff, I’m not falling for it . . .’

‘Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit . . .’

‘Will you just tell me where you are and quit—’

‘Oh shit . . .’

‘Uhuh. If
they
are really there, just drive away.’

‘I can’t! They’ve parked in front and be—’

I heard a sudden loud tapping, like metal on glass.

‘Jeff?’

‘What’ll I say?!’

‘Jeff . . .’

‘They want me to open the window . . . there’s four of them!’

‘Jeff . . .’

‘I’m not insured!’ There were voices I could not make out. Then Jeff: ‘Sorry, I think I’m lost, is this the way—’

He did not finish; his door opened; there were grunts; someone said, ‘Now.’ There was a brief rush of static on the phone, but the line remained open. Then footsteps. A car door slamming. Then breathing.

‘
Jeff
. . .
?
’

‘Just remember one thing.’

It wasn’t Jeff’s voice. It was cold and hard and sterile.

‘What?’

‘Murder is
our
business.’

It was still some way short of dawn when I returned to No Alibis. I parked around the back and spent a harrowing few minutes opening the locks and punching in the codes before I reached the safety of what Jeff had more than once referred to as ‘the bunker’.

Jeff !

Poor imbecile, seized by unknown forces, and perhaps even now floating face down in the Lagan or tied to a chair with his ear cut off. Still, an idiot for getting caught, and at the end of the day, he was only part-time help, not family. My first concern was my own safety, then Mother, then the baby, then the carrier. Better to lead them back here to the shop. There was no way of gauging how much ‘they’ knew or even if they were interested in knowing anything. They had taken Jeff because he had followed one of them, and if he had not been so keen on the chit-chat he might have told me what he’d discovered before he was seized. Now all I had to go on were the registrations of two BMWs and the few words of threat one of them had uttered to me on the phone.

I flipped on the computer and checked the security cameras. There was no sign of any watchers outside, front or back. Perhaps they thought their warning was enough.

Or was it a warning? It was down to semantics.

They had said: Murder is our business, with the emphasis on the
our
.

What did that mean exactly? That they murdered people for a living? Or that they dealt with murder, making them cops? Or were they just taking the piss out of the No Alibis slogan?

I phoned Mother. She slept as little as I did, but whereas I kept myself busy, she sat in a chair by her window, drinking, and watching. There was not a thing that happened on our street that she did not know about. She knew the comings and goings, the affairs, the fights, the huffs, the pets, the deliveries, the names of the trees. She had a critical word for everyone and everything, including the trees. She was a mean, vindictive old biddy, but she missed nothing.

I said, ‘It’s me, are you still up?’

‘Yes, of course I’m still up, you stupid little shit.’

‘Are you at the window?’

‘I’m always at the window, at least when I’m not in your stupid little shop.’

‘Mother, please, I need to know. Have you noticed anything unusual out in the street? Any strange cars parked there, anyone sitting inside any strange cars, anyone watching our house. Anything unusual at all.’

‘Why? What have you done now? Do you owe people money? Are you in with drug-dealers now?’

‘No, Mother, I—’

‘I knew that shop would be a disaster, you’re fucking hopeless, I don’t know why I ever adopted you.’

‘You didn’t adopt me, Mother.’

‘If I had I could have sent you back, you pathetic little shit.’

I waited. She wasn’t like this
all
the time. It was like bleeding a radiator: once in a while you had to let the steam out, but you also needed to know exactly when to tighten the valve to stop the boiling water spraying out after it. If you caught it right, then whatever passed for normal service was resumed. I regularly had to tighten Mother’s valve. After about a minute of silence she said, ‘What sort of strange cars?’

‘Any sort you don’t see there regularly. Maybe a BMW.’

‘There was one here earlier; it drove off.’

‘How long was it there for? When did it drive off ?’

‘Been there since teatime, maybe drove off an hour ago.’

‘You didn’t happen to notice its number plate?’

‘No, because I’m not a sad little shit like you.’

‘Mother, there was someone in the car?’

‘No, it drove itself, arsewipe.’

‘I mean, when it was sitting there, there was someone inside, watching the house?’

‘How do I know if he was watching the house?’

‘But you know it was a he?’

‘Yes, of course. He was wearing a suit, a shirt and tie. He got out and had a pee in Mrs Abernethy’s bushes.’

‘But he didn’t come up to the house? He didn’t try to speak to you?’

‘I don’t owe him money, I never owed anyone a penny in my life, it’s you who brings shame on the family, you retarded little—’

I could say a lot of things about Mother, but at least I knew where I stood with her. At school football matches, she would shout encouragement to the other team. In those days I played sports, before the extent of my ailments became apparent. I cut the line and phoned someone who I at least knew wouldn’t greet me with a torrent of abuse.

Alison said, ‘What the . . . It’s six in the . . . What is it, Brian?’

‘It’s me,’ I said.

‘Oh.’

‘Sorry to wake you.’

‘I was up half the night with morning sickness. I only just got over it. What’s wrong? You hardly ever call me. When you do, you want something.’