The Day of the Jack Russell (Mystery Man) (22 page)

I wouldn’t. I didn’t. I shook my head and asked if she had a Twix. I had once known a child who was allergic to eggs, whose head had swollen to the size of a trombone. I like to minimise risk. I was not that child. Alison opened the fridge and gave me a Twix.

‘I got them,’ she said, ‘just for you.’

‘That’s sweet, so it is,’ said Pat. ‘Jimbo used to do stuff like that for me, so he did.’

‘Poor Jimbo,’ said Alison. I was trying to make eye contact with her, but she was back to stirring her eggs. What was this woman even
doing here
? She was burying her man today, there were bound to be things to do. I sat down at the table. She was smoking and using a saucer as an ashtray. There were
no words
.

Pat smiled at me. Yellow teeth. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘but we just got on like a house on fire, and she said to call if I wanted a shoulder to cry on, and I just had one of those nights where I couldn’t sleep for thinking about him, and my family, they do their best, but they just don’t know what I’m going through, and Ali does, so she does.’

Ali.
I
didn’t even call her Ali.

‘And you’re more than welcome.’

Ali
set down a plate for Pat, then returned with her own.

Pat said, ‘These are gorgeous, so they are.’ She nodded at me, and when she spoke I could see egg in her mouth. ‘I should have guessed you weren’t a cop. And Ali – we got on too well for you to be one, so we did. But private investigators, that’s exciting.’

‘It has its moments,’ said
Alison
.

‘Have youse gotten any further? The police tell me nothing.’

‘Not really,’ I said.

‘Oh I wouldn’t say that,’ said Alison.

‘We can’t really talk about it,’ I said.

‘Oh balls,’ said Alison. ‘Her boyfriend was
murdered
. . .’

‘I know he was.’

‘. . .and she’s having a baby. Imagine it if was our baby and you were murdered . . . I’d want to know. Wouldn’t you want to know everything there was to know if I was murdered?’

Probably not, was the correct answer. I would just move on. But I managed a nod and said, ‘Well, there really isn’t anything to report.’

‘Apart from the Jack Russell,’ said Alison. ‘For some reason everyone’s interested in the dog.’

‘Why on earth?’ asked Pat.

‘If we knew that . . .’ said Alison. ‘I suppose it just stands out – why would anyone steal it? On the other hand, it could just as easily be a load of bollocks.’

‘It’s a mangy old thing, so it is.’

Pat nodded to herself for several moments, while Alison and I made eyes at each other. She was meaning for me to make more of an effort; I was meaning for her to show Pat the door.

‘Youse wouldn’t have a couple of Hedex, would you?’

‘Of course, love.’

‘We had a bit of a . . . well, do you call it a wake? It’s more of a Fenian expression, isn’t it?’

My eyes flicked up to Alison as she put down the tablets. She suppressed a smile. It was so totally un-PC, but probably not uncommon in Pat’s neck of the woods.

‘A party to celebrate his life,’ Alison suggested.

‘Aye, well, I don’t like wake anyway, like he’s gonna wake up.’

‘That’s not actually what it means,’ I said. ‘It means standing guard, or watching out for him.’

‘Okay, Brainiac,’ said Pat. ‘Whatever. We had a few drinks too many, so we had, and I’m not half feeling it. Friends and neighbours, you know? It was nice, telling stories about him, so it was, but strange, him being there, in the middle of the room, in the box. Strange.’

‘How did he look?’ Alison gave me a look. I said, ‘What?’

‘It’s not the sort of question you ask.’

‘Why not?’

‘It just
isn’t
. . . I’m sorry, Pat, he has no sense of—’

I cut in with: ‘My dad was a handsome man.’ People stand on ceremony too much. ‘But by the time the morticians got to work on him, he looked like Frankenstein’s monster. Or maybe not him, but like he’d been beaten with a mallet and allowed to swell up. You couldn’t see his eyes hardly at all. He looked like a pig. Piggy eyes. With make-up on. Like a Regency whore’s make-up. Really heavy and pink. A piggy-faced whore.’

Alison nodded. ‘Thanks for that,’ she said.

‘He did,’ I said. ‘Did Jimbo . . .?’

‘Christ,’ said Alison.

But Pat was shaking her head. ‘The coffin was closed. I didn’t want to remember him dead, if you know what I mean? I wanted to remember him how he was.’

‘Quite right,’ said Alison.

‘But now I’m all worried about the funeral,’ said Pat. ‘I’m worried about who’ll be there. Don’t they say that killers always turn up at the crime scene or at the funeral? What if he comes up and I shake his hand and I won’t even recognise him. I won’t be able to concentrate.’ She smiled a little then. ‘Didn’t he always love a good bonfire? Sure, settin’ fire to him today will be right up his street.’

She made it sound like it was some kind of Viking funeral, rather than a routine cremation at Roselawn. But she was right about the attendees – if reading countless thousands of mystery novels had taught me anything, it was that the murderer almost always showed up at the funeral. Most murders are committed by someone familiar to the victim and it would seem odd if they didn’t attend the ceremony. Some gave Bible readings from the pulpit, others delivered tearful eulogies, all the while praying to God that the net was not slowly closing in on them. It was the nature of murder, and it brought me back to Pat, and who she knew who had known Jimbo and could possibly be responsible. I asked her again to go over his friends, his dealers, his customers, but she shook her head and took a drag on her fag and said, ‘The detectives have been all over me, they took the names I knew, practically everyone I ever met, so it was, and I’ve heard nothing. I’m not going to suddenly remember someone . . .’ She stopped then, and her mouth dropped open a little, and we both leaned a little closer, then she smiled and said, ‘I mean, am I? You know what you know at the time and do your best. If they’d found someone, they’d have arrested them, they wouldn’t let him come to the funeral, and if you knew who it was, you would have them arrested, so I’m thinking, so I am, that nobody knows anything and we’re going to set fire to my Jimbo and it could be anyone there watching, so it could, maybe cheering because they know the evidence, something the cops haven’t even thought of, is going up in flames.’ Big tears began to roll down her cheeks. ‘How am I going to get through today? How am I?’ She ground her cigarette out into her ashtray saucer, then placed her hands palm down on the table. They were shaking. ‘Why did my Jimbo have to die? Why him? What am I gonna tell my baby?’

She wanted a hug. But Alison had risen to rinse the scrambled egg pan. Instead she crumpled into me and sobbed, her whole body shaking. I don’t like un controlled displays of emotion. I tried to eat the Twix and pat her back at the same time, but I couldn’t get it quite right. She sensed my discomfort and let me go. She wiped at her tears.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

I sneezed.

‘Sorry,’ I said, and handed her some kitchen roll.

In the shop, after Pat had finally gone to prepare for the funeral, we were both pretty nervous. Although we had dismissed Greg’s twenty-three-hour threat as just talk, the hands of the clock were still moving inexorably towards noon. Alison, taking her art more seriously and with her hours in the jewellery shop cut back, was there for me, both as my crime-fighting partner and for moral support, but she also seemed to feel the need to be very touchy-feely, which was awkward and embarrassing and would have been much more so if we had actually had a customer. I kept saying, ‘Don’t,’ and she kept laughing and trying it again.

By 11.45 a.m. I had sought sanctuary in the kitchen. I was trying to restore some sort of order – Brendan Coyle had trashed the place looking for the wine I had lied to him about, so I guess that joke kind of backfired on me – when I heard the shop door open. I have a bell that sounds, and several buzzers and whistles. The kitchen door was closed to stop a puddle of Booker-nominated urine reaching the display area, so I couldn’t be sure who it was, but with the chances of it being a customer rather remote, I had to presume that it was Greg, coming early, hoping to catch us off guard. I am
never
off my guard, but also I am never more than three seconds from running away – although running, in my case, obviously is not the same as running in, say, your case, unless you’re in a wheelchair yourself or have splints or malformed muscles – so I already had the back door open and was preparing to make a calipered bolt for safety when Alison shouted back: ‘Someone for you!’

It didn’t sound like how she would announce Greg’s arrival, so I hesitated, one foot already out.

‘I’m busy. Who?’

‘Come and see.’

She sounded cool, but not unduly distressed. So I moved back to the kitchen door and opened it just enough to let me see who it was. There, by the counter, looking sheepish, was Jeff. His hands were thrust into the pockets of his combat jacket and he was avoiding eye contact with Alison. He brightened, a little, when he saw me come properly into the shop.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘I was asking him if I could help him with a book, but he didn’t seem interested.’

Alison was smiling, although in an American
have a nice day
way, devoid of emotion.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is awkward.’

‘Not for us,’ said Alison.

Jeff gave me a hopeful look. ‘I was wondering, you know, about my job, and if, like, I could have it back.’ Alison snorted. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I was just freaked out. And besides that I’ve been thinking about what happened, and now I know they had nothing to do with Hugo Cadiz getting his visa.’

Alison rolled her eyes and said, ‘Hugo Cadiz.’

‘How’d you work that out?’ I asked.

‘Well I went round to see him, and he showed me the document he needs to have him stay, and it was dated last week, and he showed me the envelope it arrived in, and it was posted two days ago, which would have been before they picked me up and took me down to the beach and shouted at me, so I guess they were basically bullshitting me.’ He looked very briefly from me to Alison and back. ‘I want back in. The shop. The investigation.’

‘He’s a double agent,’ said Alison.

‘I’m not, I swear to God.’

‘He’s a double-bluffing double agent.’

‘I’m not, I’m really not. Give me a task and I’ll prove it.’

‘Well you could open those boxes of books and get them shelved,’ I suggested.

‘I mean some kind of mission.’

‘Send him out for buns,’ said Alison.

There was an impasse.

I wanted to support Alison. But, also, I needed Jeff. He was cheap and strong and guilty of not really very much.

An impasse must always be filled.

Or perhaps it’s a vacuum.

The shop door, almost creaking through overuse, opened for the second time in as many minutes, and I turned, fully expecting to find Greg, but instead found another familiar but for once more welcome face.

‘Detective Inspector,’ I said, ‘an unexpected pleasure.’

DI Robinson’s brow furrowed. ‘Why? You left a message for me.’

At this point, Alison said she had to pop out to get some coffee from Starbucks. She averted her eyes from me as she passed. She opened the door, and just as we watched her, for she was eminently watchable, a BMW rolled slowly past the shop, right to left.

There was Greg, in the passenger seat, raising two fingers and a thumb, like a gun. Pointed up at first, but then moving slowly down to point at Alison. Except this wasn’t sunny LA, and his window was up, and he bumped them on the glass, and then he fumbled for the button to lower the window, but too late, he was past.

It was funny.

But funny like a fire in an orphanage.

Because it was suddenly clear to me what the whole motif of the case was.

Ineptitude.

From the murders of Jimbo and RonnyCrabs, the bed-shitting Jack Russell thieves and the non-kidnap of Jeff, from the police investigation to the rogue MI5 agent’s threats, it all reeked of ineptitude; but there was no relief with this realisation, because ineptitude is not only what gets you caught, it’s also what gets you killed.

Later she said she was worried what Greg might do to me. It was caring, but wrong. Greg didn’t scare me in the way that, say, cows and other herbivores do; I had shown her before that I was prepared to stand up to him, and this lack of belief in me worried and annoyed me. Yes, obviously there were my health issues, the brittle bones, and the collapsed lung, and the blood pressure, and the Achilles tendon problem, and the arthritis, and the fibromyalgia, and the colour blindness, and the recurrent tinnitus, although instead of an incessant high-pitched squeal, what I actually heard was a brass band playing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ twenty-four-seven, but not too loud and quite hummable. I remained confident, though, that I could match wits with and outfox the likes of Greg the spy. Now I had been undermined by a dizzy blonde acting flaky and calling the cops. Later, she also said she was worried about Greg just shooting me, which, I had to admit, was a strategy I would probably have found difficult to outfox. But she knew she had done me wrong, which was why she had skedaddled, leaving me with DI Robinson and Jeff.

‘Did I see what I thought I just saw?’ Robinson asked.

I nodded.

‘Weirdos,’ he said. ‘Anyway, what did you want to see me about?’

‘A book came in, thought you might fancy it.’ I turned to the shelf behind me where I keep the rarer volumes and customer orders. I pulled one out and showed it to him. ‘It’s a first edition of James Hadley Chase’s
The Dead Stay Dumb
from 1939. Very rare. In America they called it
Kiss My Fist!
. Which is just . . . wrong.’

The DI studied me. Then the book. Then me. ‘How much?’

‘One twenty.’

‘What do you think a DI gets paid?’

‘Plus kickbacks.’

‘Oh yeah.’

He continued to study me. He was pretty good at not blinking.

‘I thought maybe you wanted something else,’ he said. ‘I thought maybe you were still on that little case of ours, and you’d found something, and you wanted to come clean, the way you did last time, and we both benefited from it.’