The Day of the Jack Russell (Mystery Man) (29 page)

‘The law of the land is more important than—’

‘Sir, this crematorium operates on a strict schedule. We are already long past the time when the last cremation of the day should have taken place. Unless you can produce a court order or a search warrant or something that gives you the authority to open that coffin, then I am going to give permission for the service to proceed.’

‘I will get the paperwork, and if you even think about trying to start . . .’

‘That won’t be necessary.’ I turned at the deep but restrained voice at my shoulder. It was the Chief Constable. ‘Detective Inspector Robinson, if I could have a word?’

Robinson nodded immediately and moved off with the Chief Constable to the other side of the crematorium. McManus, not quite knowing what to say to me, but not wishing to endure another tongue-lashing from Pat either, moved away to stand by himself, hands clasped behind his back. Alison, seeing that I was now alone, hurried over.

‘What’s going on now? Honestly, I can’t keep up.’

Robinson and the Chief were having an animated exchange, but a quiet one.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Robinson was in my corner, but the Chief is the Chief. So . . .’

‘Are you absolutely sure about this? Because if they open it and there’s nothing . . .’

My brow furrowed involuntarily. Surely she knew that I was always right?

Robinson came back towards us, but didn’t stop. He stood at the front of the crematorium and called for silence and said that the Police Service of Northern Ireland wished to apologise unreservedly for the delay in proceedings, and that the service could now progress.

I just said, ‘What?’

Mourners began to retake their seats. Pat glared across at me. The Revd Delargey, that professional misery, shuffled forward. The Chief moved to the back of the crematorium and stood by the door.

I said, louder, ‘What are you doing?’ DI Robinson raised his hands in a helpless gesture. ‘You cannot let this happen. There is evidence in that coffin that this woman murdered two men. You cannot just let it all be burned up!’

‘It’s out of my hands,’ said Robinson.

‘Why don’t you just get the fuck out of here?’ Smally shouted.

‘Gentlemen, please!’ cried the Revd Delargey.

‘Yeah, go on, piss off!’ shouted one of the decorators.

‘Come on,’ said Alison, taking me by the arm.

‘This is just madness! She killed them, and you’re letting her get away with it!’

‘Get out! Get out!’ Smally’s young henchman, the one who’d failed to properly confront Mother, joined in the yelling.

‘Please, we need to begin!’ shouted the Revd Delargey.

Alison began to push and prod me up the aisle. She is stronger than she looks.

‘She’s a murderer!’ I shouted.

Pat remained in her chair, eyes front, focused on the coffin.

Halfway up, I pointed at the Chief. ‘It’s a conspiracy! It’s a cover-up! They were bugging you, you halfwit; why would you let this happen if there was even a remote possibility of its being true?’

The Chief just shook his head.

Billy Randall averted his eyes.

Charlie wiped tears from his, but not sad ones, laughter.

As Alison propelled me towards the doors, insults and boos filled the air. I saw Greg.

‘This just suits you fine, doesn’t it?’ I yelled at him. ‘All the evidence going up in smoke!’

He winked.

‘You’re all in it together!’

I pushed back against Alison just once, just long enough to survey the entire congregation. ‘Why is nobody listening to me? Have you all lost your minds?

The crematorium manager thrust the doors open ahead of us. ‘No, sir,’ he said, ‘but you appear to have lost yours.’

Alison pushed me out into a covered walkway and then along the path and into the car park, where she gave me a final little shove to release me.

‘Fuck!’ I shouted.

I immediately turned back towards the crematorium.

Alison put her hand out, palm up. ‘Stop! There’s no point.’

‘You don’t understand! They’re going to—’

‘I know what they’re going to. And there’s nothing you can do.’

‘But I solved it! I worked out who the murderer was!’

‘Settle, petal,’ she said. ‘You did everything you could.’

‘She’s going to get away with it! They’re all wearing blinkers!’

‘Yes they are. And you’re right. I know you are. I’m absolutely mostly certain that you’re right.’

‘You don’t believe me either!’

‘I believe
in
you.’

‘That’s not the same.’

My attention then was averted by the music emanating from the crematorium. ‘Angels’ by Robbie Williams.

‘They’ve started,’ Alison said. Her hand sought mine. I withheld that pleasure. Failing to give one hundred per cent support was tantamount to betrayal.

‘The fools,’ I said. ‘The bloody fools.’

A puff of white smoke rose lazily from the crematorium chimney. I cursed again.

‘Come on,’ said Alison. ‘You solved it, that’s the important thing.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No it’s not.’

It was about justice.

And acclaim.

There was a low rumble from the crematorium, like someone had suddenly whacked a bass drum, then a much sharper one. Three of the outer windows cracked. The smoke emerging from the chimney turned black, and then flames began to lick out of the top of it. Within seconds the crematorium doors were flung open and the mourners began to stumble out, coughing and spluttering through clouds of smoke.

‘Call the fire brigade!’ someone yelled.

‘There’s a fire at the crematorium!’ someone shouted into a mobile phone. And a moment later added: ‘He fucking hung up on me!’

‘Is it a bomb?’ someone shouted.

‘It just went off! Someone could have been killed!’

They all came rushing out into the gathering darkness, even the crematorium manager, looking lost and mumbling, ‘What have you done, what have you done?’

Robinson and the Chief and his colleagues or minders went back and forth into the smoke, making sure everyone was out. The beautifully manicured lawn in front was dotted with mourners, some sitting on their coats, others standing stunned, while others still spilled over into the car park and sat on bonnets watching while the flames licked up into the roof of the crematorium and more windows cracked and smashed. In the distance a fire engine sounded. Then someone pointed, and there in the double doors stood Pat. She looked me straight in the eye. Alison would say later, no she did not, you imagined that, but I know it to be true. She looked at me, then stepped back into what was now becoming an inferno, and closed the doors after her. Overwrought with guilt, she meant to kill herself and her unborn baby.

But it was not to be.

Robinson and the Chief shouldered the doors open between them and dived back into the smoke. It seemed like for ever before they reappeared, dragging her out screaming and crying, saving two lives and a killer in one fell swoop.

I would have helped them.

But smoke gets in my eyes.

Back in 1947, Irving Shulman sold four million copies of
The Amboy Dukes
, but they are now rarer than hen’s teeth and valuable enough in the right edition. This one was worth sixty pounds, but that didn’t stop me firing his tale of juvenile delinquency on New York’s East Side at the wall opposite my counter in No Alibis, breaking the book’s spine and causing its yellowed, pulpy pages to float to the floor.
The Dukes
has aged quite badly, its drug references are incredibly tame by today’s standards, but nevertheless, it is a classic of its type, pre-dating Evan Hunter’s much better-known
The Blackboard Jungle
by seven years.

But I was
mad
.

I had gone into
The Case of the Cock-Headed Man
to prove that Billy Randall wasn’t responsible for the deaths of Jimbo and RonnyCrabs, and now, though I knew who was responsible, it could never be proved. The evidence had been destroyed in the explosion that had rocked Roselawn Crematorium. Jimbo’s ashes were still up there, mixed in with brick and powdered glass and blackened wood. The papers said it had been caused by a malfunctioning furnace, but I knew better. I always know better. It was too convenient. Something had been planted in the coffin to absolutely make sure the evidence was destroyed if by chance the mighty temperatures of the furnace failed to break it down, or perhaps even set to go off if someone tried to open the box to look for said evidence. I would obviously not have opened it myself – I am allergic to dead people, and pine, and embalming fluid, and suits – but it could easily have been Alison, acting on my behalf, and she might now be dead, taking my baby with her. That, however, remained in the realms of
what if
, and was not something I dwelt a great deal upon. I was mad that Pat had gotten away with it, mad that everyone had conspired for their own reasons to get rid of the evidence, that I hadn’t been able to remove the shadow of suspicion from Billy Randall.

I could not focus, could not settle.

I took it out on Mother. She said, ‘Why don’t you get a grip, you stupid little prick?’

As a result of this, and for the first time, I refused to give her a bath. She had to pull herself up out of her wheelchair and tumble into the tub, and only then run the water. She yelled, ‘Stop looking at my tits and bring me the soap.’

I did neither.

Alison did her best with me, but it was a losing battle. If anything, I was getting worse. I had risked a lynching, then had my triumph ripped away from me by political and criminal shenanigans. She attempted to make love to me, but I put her in her place. It was not the time. It might never be the time again. It was as if aliens had waved at me, and me alone, and then gone home, leaving me convinced and the rest of the world either uninterested or disbelieving. She tried to tempt me with Twix and Starbucks, but the only appetite I had was for justice.

Jeff
especially
felt the wrath of my tongue. He had once again returned to my employ, but now armed with an official police caution. He seemed to think this put him on a par with some of the poor un fortunate bigmouths he championed through Amnesty International. I soon put him right on that. I used many swear words. He said very little in response. A couple of times I caught Alison and Jeff in close conversation, which they would then quickly drop. I knew they were talking about me, or plotting. The whole world was constantly plotting against me, including through fluoridation, but this was a little too close to home.

I raged on into February. It is one of the most forlorn months, together with June and September and April and March and October and November and December and January and May and August and July. Sales failed to pick up. I sacked Mother from the shop. She was verbally abusing the customers, accusing them of lingering, and stealing, and casting lustful glances at her. I knew of many other small bookstores across the country that had given up because of this miserable financial climate, and they didn’t even have a mother to drive customers away. Cases for me to solve continued to trickle through the door, and I took several of them on, but I was barely interested. I either solved them quickly or passed them on to Alison. She was good, and happy in the solving of them.

She said one day, towards the end of the month, ‘I’m becoming a big fat lump.’

‘Yes, you are,’ I said.

She burst into tears. She said, ‘You are mean and spiteful.’ She was wrong. I just do not sugar my almonds. ‘I’m eating for two, you know,’ she said.

I raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

She said, ‘You know, you look like Mr Spock when you raise your eyebrow like that. In fact, you may actually be Mr Spock. That’s exactly what you’re like. Cold and logical and heartless.’ I would not rise to the bait. She added, ‘You know, some pregnant women eat coal.’

I would probably have snapped something at her if the door had not opened and a customer entered. I glared at her instead, and she glared back. If my dysfunctional tear ducts had not let me down again we could have been there for ever. I sighed and turned from her. The customer was already perusing the books opposite.

I said, ‘Is there anything I can help you with?’

He turned.

It was the Chief Constable.

Plenty of people who come into No Alibis think they’re pretty powerful – writers, sales folk, customers who seem to believe that membership of my Christmas Club automatically gives them rights; even the likes of Billy Randall, or Greg, the possibly rogue MI5 agent – but none of them have ever made me particularly nervous. Rather they inspired me to do great things. This Chief Constable was different; even standing by himself, in my little shop, he had an aura, a presence that made you feel guilty just by being in his orbit. I had a sudden tremor that he had come for my nail for the scratching of cars with personalised number plates, or had CCTV of me standing in bushes, watching. Alison also looked a bit weak at the knees, but it was nothing to do with her weight.

He was in plain clothes. At least, you tend to think of a policeman not in uniform as being in plain clothes, but I suppose he was just in clothes. They were not remarkable clothes, which made them normal rather than plain. They weren’t dull. They were ordinary. Average. The meaning of average has changed over the years. No, not the meaning, the perceived meaning. The meaning of average has stayed the same, but people think it means less than it actually means. When you describe a kid’s school report as average, you tend to think of it being not good enough. The Chief Constable was wearing an average, ordinary, plain black suit, with a not too garish red tie. He looked buff and his skin was smooth and his greying hair was cut short.

He said, ‘Well I would like to buy a book, but mostly I’d like to have a little chat.’

‘What sort of a book?’ I asked.

‘What would you recommend?’

‘Something with a complicated plot and an un satisfactory ending.’

He smiled. His teeth were photogenic, and hence not his own.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Alison asked.

‘That would be nice.’