The Day of the Jack Russell (Mystery Man) (17 page)

‘You’re forgetting the website,’ said Alison.

‘We can take it down.’

‘You can take the feed down, sure, but a thousand copies will be back up in no time.’

‘I didn’t say the feed. We can take the internet down.’

‘You can’t just—’

‘Don’t underestimate what we can or cannot do.’

‘We don’t even know if you have Jeff.’

‘Of course we have him.’

‘Let me speak to him.’

‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible.’

‘Then Patch won’t be possible.’

‘Patch?’

‘Yep. We’ve become quite close. You let us speak to—’

‘STOP.’

Surprisingly, it was me, not him. Both of them looked at me. There was no reason for Greg to know that I didn’t have a backbone, but Alison had been aware of it for a long time, so she looked the more surprised. I would explain to her later about my epiphany, and then it would be as obvious to her as it suddenly was to me.

Greg’s eyes burned into me. ‘Stop?’

‘Yes. Enough. Do you think you can . . . just . . . come in here and, and . . . threaten
us
? Well . . . you know what I think? I think . . . you’ve been talking out of your arse! Maybe you do work for the Government, maybe you are some kind of spook, but at the end of the day, you’re
here
, trying to browbeat
us
into handing over your precious little stuffed dog, and that doesn’t sound to me like you’re in a very strong position, and it’s not made any stronger by having your face plastered all over the internet. I mean, how dumb is that? If you ask me, you’ve lost Patch and now you’re scrambling to get him back before someone important, i.e. not you, finds out. Eh? Eh? Is that not more like it? If I were you,
mate
, I’d make sure our Jeff turns up without a hair on his empty head out of place, and then maybe we’ll talk turkey,
capisce
?’ I pulled open a drawer, took out a business card and slapped it down on the counter. ‘I’ve a case to solve and I don’t need to be wasting time with the likes of you. So I’d have a wee think about it, and if you’ve anything to contribute, give us a bell, that’s if you even have a job after this. But in the meantime, get the fuck out of my shop!’

It was a perfect ending to our confrontation. Alison’s eyes fluttering up to me, impressed. I could have retired happy, there and then.

Unfortunately it wasn’t
the
ending. Greg barely batted an eyelid.

‘Very good,’ he said, ‘very
passionate
. But let me put you straight, arsehole. We’ve already been through this shitty little shop of yours, so I know you don’t have any fucking cameras. We’ve been through your computer – you’ve got some weird shit on there. I could have come in with all guns blazing, but no, I thought I’d be nice, come in to speak to you, face to face. Your pal hasn’t given us shit yet, but he will, and so will you pair. So if I were you I’d have a serious talk amongst yourselves and then give
me
a call.’ He produced his own business card and slapped it face down on the counter. ‘I’m going to give you twenty-three hours to produce the dog. If you don’t, I’ll organise it so that all three of you go down for Jimbo and RonnyCrabs.’ He nodded at Alison. ‘Be sensible. I don’t think prison would suit you, not in your condition.’

He raised an eyebrow, then turned and walked to the door.

As he went through it Alison yelled, ‘Wanker!’

It wasn’t quite Oscar Wilde, but it wasn’t inaccur ate either.

Righteous anger in a small burst is easy, particularly when there is no apparent physical risk. But if there is no positive outcome, then it is just a waste of emotion. On the other hand, sustained and focused anger, with an ultimate objective, is much more difficult to maintain and is definitely something one should aspire to. Obviously there was no point in me harbouring such aspirations. The spine I have is hopelessly buckled and incapable of supporting anything other than the brief flurry of bad temper I had just exhibited, or indeed any kind of organised sporting activity, like hockey, or soccer, or tennis, or golf, or netball, or rugby, or gymnastics, or baseball, or volleyball or dominoes.

Now that Greg was gone, I had to lean on the counter for support – as it clearly wasn’t going to come from Alison. She was in no mood to fetch the portable defibrillator I keep in the kitchen cupboard, she being much too fired up by the spook’s threat to think of anyone but herself and her suddenly best friend Jeff. I classify anyone who does not think of me first as selfish. She must have been aware that I was labouring for breath, but her self-centredness was so all-enveloping that she completely ignored my condition, choosing instead to focus on Greg’s threat: she wanted to call the papers, the radio stations, and every other news outlet known to man, to expose him and his Government-sponsored blackmail. It was a typically female hysterical response, whereas if she’d taken the trouble to order me an ambulance and had me taken to hospital, I could, once I was satisfactorily hooked up to a life-support system, have calmly explained to her what she clearly failed to appreciate, that Greg had chosen his words carefully. We had
twenty-three
hours to come up with Patch, i.e. one short of a television series. He was making his point: don’t even think about alerting the media.

I said it anyway, in between laboured breaths, and she immediately flared up: ‘We have to! He’s your friend!’

‘Well actually he’s—’

‘And he works for you!’

‘Well technically—’

‘And he was doing you a favour when they seized him. You ordered him out of bed . . .’

‘I didn’t order—’

‘And now he’s languishing in some cell, for all we know hooded and waterboarded and his fingernails pulled out . . .’ She burst into tears. It was probably the hormones, what with her being up the duff. ‘We have to help him.’

I took her hand, despite the risk of infection, and patted it gently. ‘Listen, sweetie, it’s not like that any more. This is an Obama world. Torture and all that malarkey, it simply doesn’t happen any more.’

She took her hand back. ‘Christ, you just don’t get it, do you?’

‘I get it, I get it, I get it. Okay. I’m just trying to cheer you—’

‘Well stop it.’ She wiped at her eyes. ‘You’re actually serious, aren’t you?’

‘Always.’

‘About Obama, and the torture . . .?’

‘Yes, of course.’

She sighed. ‘Clowns to the left of me, eejits to the right, here I am . . .’

‘If you feel you’re stuck, you don’t have to stay.’

‘Will you focus? Our friend is being held by . . . by . . .’

‘Spooks.’

‘Spooks?’

‘Spooks.’

‘How do you know he’s a—’

‘Because while you were ranting and raving, I was putting his number plate into the system, and it’s a Government car, and even Government cars have to be registered somewhere, and his is . . . here . . .’

I turned the computer monitor to show her. I had a Google image of a recently built three-storey building in the middle of Holywood, five miles away from us.

‘It’s MI5’s new regional headquarters; they opened it last year. If their regular base in London is attacked, they take over. Ten thousand square feet of spookiness, including a subterranean level, four hundred employees, and you can be sure they have the most hi-tech hi-techy stuff in the world, make an Xbox look like an abacus. When Greg said he’d been through the shop I didn’t believe him, not with all the alarms and locks I have, but if he says he’s been through the computer, that I’m more inclined to go with. I have firewalls on my firewalls, but their shit is bound to be better than my shit.’

‘What sort of weird stuff
do
you have on there?’

‘Just stuff.’

‘Pervy stuff ?’

‘Define pervy.’

‘On second thoughts, I don’t want to know. Okay. You’ve worked your magic. I’m calmer now. Now what are we going to do about Jeff ?’

‘I had thought about recruiting a dozen former terrorists, training them into a cohesive unit and storming MI5 headquarters. We may not all get out alive.’

‘Okay.’

‘Alternatively, we do nothing. At the moment they think he knows
something
but is just holding out on them. If they really did use torture, they’d soon realise that he doesn’t actually know anything, but they must be adhering to Obama because I know Jeff has a threshold for pain that is only marginally above my own. I’ve seen him cry over a paper cut. Never mind waterboarding; if they threatened to throw a glass of lukewarm milk over him, Jeff would give up his mother.’

‘Okay. Fair point. That leaves us with the threat. Twenty-three hours to produce Patch or else. Or else what?’

‘Well, if I’m right, and I usually am, and Greg’s not in control of the situation, then he’s going to be pretty desperate to sort this out, which makes him unpredictable. He could do anything. I don’t mean we’re necessarily going to end up face down in the Lagan with Jeff; it could be more subtle than that.’

‘Like a couple of extra noughts added to your rates bill.’

‘Well probably not as subtle as
that
. Maybe the best idea would just be to . . . you know, hide.’

‘The emu approach to solving problems.’

‘Ostrich.’

‘Just conveniently forgetting that our chum is being held . . . Ostrich.’

‘Yes.’

Alison shook her head. ‘You’re capable of so much more than this.’

‘Capable, yes. But capability requires desire. Desire requires energy and application and courage.’

‘You have all of those. Vast reserves of them. They just need to be tapped.’

‘I assure you, you’re wrong. I just want to be left alone to read my books and sell some.’

‘You would give up on this?’

I nodded.

‘And if I decide to continue, because I feel a connection to Pat, you would stand back and let me, even in my condition.’

‘Your condition has nothing to do with me. You should have used protection.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘Stop it. I know what you’re doing, you’re just trying to wind me up, I know it’s the nature of you, and I also know that you aren’t really going to leave me to do this by myself.’

I looked at her.

She looked back.

She had me in a staring match again. My malfunctioning tear duct that causes me to blink in moments of stress did its work. I also have degenerative myopia. I’ve unsuccessfully applied three times for a cornea transplant.

Alison smiled as I blinked in defeat. I was transparent. It was a side effect of one of my medications. On a bright day with the sun at my back, you could see my liver.

‘See? I know you better than you know yourself. It’s not because of Jeff, it’s most certainly not because of me, or our unborn, or justice; it’s because it’s a puzzle and you won’t let it defeat you. And what makes it even more fascinating than normal is that there’s a time limit, and you love having a challenge like that. Twenty-three hours to crack it. You will throw all the facts and clues and rumours and gossip up into the air and then you’ll look for your crazy patterns as they land, and you
will
solve it. And the truth is that it will hardly scratch the surface of what you’re actually capable of. You know that, don’t you? You’ll only use, what . . .?’

‘About seven per cent,’ I said.

I have never been modest about my own abilities, and with good reason.

Alison clapped her hands together. ‘Well, a seven per cent solution is good enough for me, Sherlock. Let’s get to it.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

Alison was only partially right. She could never be completely right, because then she would be me. But it
was
a puzzle I needed to solve; it was a gnawer. If anything, it was even trickier than the Nazi case, which had eventually come down to numbers and patterns, my area of expertise; it was also
potentially
just as dangerous.
Potentially
because I was still in two minds about Greg’s ultimatum. To stick to his deadline would be a challenge, but it also meant acknowledging that the threat was genuine, that there was a realistic chance of something dreadful happening to me if I failed to produce Patch at the specified time. Or, to a lesser extent, happening to Alison or Jeff. I wasn’t entirely sure that such threats actually worked. Did anyone ever solve anything quicker because of the threat of extreme violence? How did it help you to think clearly about anything other than impending death? I can see how from a dramatic point of view a threat helps – because having the bad guy saying we’d really quite like it if you could solve this puzzle as soon as you possibly can probably doesn’t put many bums on seats – but in reality, holding the Sword of Damocles over one’s head is likely to jumble one’s thinking rather than focus it. The fact was that there was no way of substantiating how realistic Greg’s threat was; therefore I would ignore it. But I would embrace the time limit in the same way that a chess player accepts that he must sometimes complete his move within a specified number of minutes, or a contestant on
Countdown
must assemble a word from his randomly selected vowels and conson ants before an annoying jingle tells him that his time is up. I had to accept that it was one of the rules of the game, and treat it as such: a game.

‘Are we focused?’ Alison asked.

‘I am.’

‘Because you’ve been staring into space while humming that annoying jingle from
Countdown
for five minutes, while all the while Jeff’s life hangs in the balance and the clock is ticking.’

Sometimes you just have to let things go. I glanced at my watch. ‘I’m good,’ I said.

‘Okay then, get stuck in. I’ll pop over at lunchtime to see how you’re doing.’

She moved to the door.

‘You’re working?’

‘Of course I’m working. Bills to pay, cheap diamonds to sell.’

‘But Jeff . . .’

‘How’re you supposed to solve anything with me staring down your neck? Go toss your clues. You need to do it by yourself and you need to do it somewhere where you know you aren’t going to be disturbed.’

We nodded around the interior of No Alibis.

There was nothing to say.

She had plagued me for so long about being my sidekick, about being included, that to suddenly turn round and say she was leaving me to it was quite a surprise. A welcome one, I supposed, because it showed that she at last realised how I worked best – alone – but also disconcerting because it was so uncharacteristic. Perhaps the focus of
her
attention was moving away from solving crime to impending motherhood. Working in the jeweller’s and actually earning money was akin to gathering the materials she would need for nest-building. Or she was planning to run away with my baby and needed the money. Or she was back to oneupmanship, intent on solving the—