The Day of the Jack Russell (Mystery Man) (4 page)

Jeff was right. I was distracted.

I do not like being put on the spot. When Alison told me she was pregnant, and then assured me that she was serious, and then showed me the testing kit, I suggested that that proved nothing and that she was just trying to win me back by using fabricated evidence. What she really wanted was control of the shop and my money and my reputation and to make another murder attempt on my dear mother.

She burst into tears.

At that point I was veering towards believing her, because I’m a pretty good judge of character and also it was roughly six weeks since we’d had sex for the first and last time and I could do the maths, though that didn’t rule out the possibility that she had also slept with her ex-husband or anyone else who asked. There was also the way she clung to me, and said she didn’t know what to do, and please could I not harbour a grudge and really she hadn’t meant to scare my mother so badly, and that she really did blame herself for her stroke, and given that Mother now had one largely useless arm and another that wasn’t much better, how was she ever going to be able to hold the baby?

I told her not to worry about that, as the shock of learning that she was going to be a grandmother would probably kill her.

‘Perhaps you want to tell her yourself, and finish off the job?’ I asked.

This wasn’t exactly what she wanted to hear. She snapped at me, I snapped back. We sat for a while. I ran my finger round the inside of the frappuccino and then sucked it. Alison said she felt ill. I said it was a little early for morning sickness. She told me to fuck off.

Outside, in the damp wind, we stood together but apart, her shop along a bit, mine on the other side of the road and down.

‘So,’ she said.

‘So,’ I said.

‘Food for thought,’ she said.

I nodded. ‘I’ll think then.’

‘Don’t think for too long.’

She nodded. She walked off. I returned to the shop. Because I’m a crime-fighter, I’m used to threats. And Alison had threatened me. It was subtle, but undeniable.
Don’t think for too long
. What she had neglected to add was ‘or’. Don’t think for too long
or
I’ll do something, like
get rid of it
. That was it. She had given me an ultimatum, but in a typically non-specific girlie way. She was telling me either I could get on board the team bus, or it was destined for the scrapyard. Or, if I didn’t play ball, she was going to keep the ball and take it home and say it was her ball and she could do what she liked with it. She would have him adopted. Or she would deny me access. She would move somewhere else, like South Africa or Portstewart. She knew I couldn’t travel outside of Belfast due to long-standing allergies to heat and dust and flies and grass and cows and beetles and corn and fruit and tin and wood and stuff. What might seem like an innocent relocation to a more pleasant environment would actually be a calculated act of torture. She was wicked to the core.

I didn’t need a child. A baby. I am like Mr Chips, I have thousands of them already. My books are my children; I nurture them, I protect them, then I send them out into the world. They travel, they educate, they change things, they inspire, they offer an escape, hope, humour, a climax and, almost always, a solution. Occasionally they return to me, battered, worn, sometimes even parts of them are missing, but they are always welcomed home and soon restored to health, ready to face the world again and at only slightly reduced charge.

A baby.

I tried to make myself think of the good days with Alison. She
was
lovely. She was caring. She did look out for me and after me. She was funny and beautiful and didn’t really have a bad bone in her body, which reassured me that if she really was pregnant, she would do nothing to harm the baby and that I had time to ponder our situation and come to the right decision. I had a bookshop to run and crimes to solve. Dames were one thing, babies another. You could count on the dislocated fingers of one hand the number of private eyes who had a mewling baby waiting at home. Babies weren’t just distracting, they were dangerous; in this game, if you were even five per cent off your mark, you were a goner.

‘Is there anything I can help you with?’

At first I thought Jeff was talking to a customer, which would have been funny in itself. But no, there he was, in the doorway of the stock room, looking confused, a little bit like a Labrador who knows something is up but hasn’t quite got the intelligence to work out exactly what.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You could move some of those boxes.’

He started to say something else, then nodded and went over to where I was indicating. He was, after all, just an employee.

I am nothing if not professional when it comes to work.
The Case of the Cock-Headed Man
was not going to solve itself. So I set my personal problems to one side and applied myself to identifying the perpetrators of the crimes, viral and otherwise, against Billy Randall.

I had already established that I was seeking two youngish tradesmen answering to the nicknames of Jimbo and RonnyCrabs, and that they either lived or worked, or quite possibly both, in the vicinity of the Annadale Embankment. I spent an hour on the phone calling as many decorators, roofers, TV aerial men and other outdoorsy types of manual labourer as I could track down in that general area in the Yellow Pages and then over the internet, but without success. It seemed to me that they were the types that did not advertise their services in the traditional media, but rather relied on handwritten notices in local shop windows or upon word of mouth. I was pretty sure they didn’t pay tax and quite possibly they exploited old women with estimates that wildly exaggerated the amount of work required. It would be good to take them down.

Ordinarily I would next have reverted to my wide and varied database of customers, alerting them of my need to track these two delinquents down, but it was Christmas week, and not a good time to be asking anyone anything; also my polite e-mail enquiry would doubtless have remained unread, most probably because I had bombarded these very same customers with enticements to join my Christmas Club every day for the past eighteen weeks and they were quite probably suffering from No Alibis fatigue. They would discard my appeal as mere spam, which was what I would be eating for Christmas if I didn’t get to the bottom of
The Case of the Cock-Headed Man
fairly quickly. My only choice, therefore, was to take to the road in the all-new, purpose-sprayed No Alibis van. My last, having recently been burned out, had been replaced by a larger, sleeker model with a sliding door and plenty of room for stock inside. Jeff had been instrumental in its selection and I had foolishly succumbed to his enthusiasm; fortunately I had come into a little money as a result of solving my last case, although I would probably have been wiser to invest it in National Savings. The No Alibis logo, with
Murder Is Our Business
in bloody red lettering below, did at first look impressive, and the vehicle did handle well. I was more or less comfortable driving it, though I took care to keep to my upper limit of 30 mph while I negotiated the speed bumps and other dangers one associates with the dark streets of Belfast. However, as soon as Jeff referred to it as ‘the Mystery Machine’, I began to have my doubts. These worsened when I was forced to drive my mother to a hospital appointment. She was claiming disability benefit because of her stroke but had to be assessed before they would hand over the money that might see us through the winter. Mother wanted to maximise the impression of her incapacity by using a wheelchair. Jeff suggested it would look much more effective if she arrived at the hospital in the No Alibis minivan and disembarked via a ramp. It was on our first practice run that Jeff referred to Mother as ‘Ironside’, and the nickname stuck in my head as surely as the tumours that will one day kill me. Mother, thereafter, began to regard the van as her own personal taxi, despite the fact that she had a perfectly good set of calipers and a Zimmer frame with which to traverse the city. Jeff, helpfully, worked out a way to bolt her wheelchair into the back of the van, and also adapted the seat belt so that no matter how hard I braked, there was no way of hurling Mother out of her chair and through the windscreen.

I drove carefully to Annadale Embankment and then along it until I came to the billboard featuring the now repaired or replaced image of Billy Randall. Although he was cock-free, there were now several holes in his head caused by stones, rocks or pebbles, bits of rubble, discarded beer tins, overripe fruit or mice in bottles. The Embankment itself is a busy thru-way devoid of buildings, but there is a large area of public housing close by, leading on to the shops on the Ormeau Road, and it was here that I chose to park the van and begin my search for Jimbo and RonnyCrabs.

I stopped at the first newsagent’s window I came to and read the handwritten cards displayed there – teachers offering extra tuition, a lost cat, an ironing service, oriental massage, and several advertising the services of general handymen, which was a category that Jimbo and RonnyCrabs might well have fallen into. I called these handymen and asked for and about Jimbo – I couldn’t quite bring myself to enquire about RonnyCrabs – but without success. They may have known him, but were adhering to the general handyman’s code of silence, their
omertà
(distinct from their usual
culpa lata
). I moved along then to the window of an Oxfam store, which featured a similar series of advertisements, and then a Save the Children. Each offered several possibilities, but led me nowhere. I stood and looked up and down an Ormeau Road thick with traffic and exhaust fumes, but framed above and at the sides by the twinkling of Christmas lights, and tried to figure out what to do next. Red-faced shoppers bustled anxiously along the footpaths in search of a late bargain: it was a lowrent area, largely devoid of franchise and multinational outlets; what in America they’d call mom and pop stores, but which I preferred to think of as cheap and nasty. I wouldn’t shop here if my life depended on it. There were dozens, perhaps hundreds of these little fly-by-night businesses and I could have spent weeks going from door to door asking questions, but it was cold, and I am susceptible to chills and flu. More than once have I lain at death’s door because of the weakness of my immune system and exposure to poor people; it was important not to dawdle here amongst the underclasses. I don’t like the smells of poverty: the damp, the stained, the abandoned, the threadbare, the stitched in time, the decaying, the turned, the mothball, the charity, the hopelessness, the malice, the fear, the hunger, the embalming fluid, the hatred, the bigotry, the fact that the Save the Children shop had a display of books in rather good condition but which still smelt like they’d been soaked in sweat and pressed face down into a manky carpet. It was Billy Randall territory and I didn’t like it. I had to track down Jimbo and RonnyCrabs fast and
get out
.

It was getting close to lunchtime, which in my world means dipping back into the well of medication that keeps me in this mortal coil. I had sixteen pills to take, but such was my state of distraction vis-à-vis Alison that for the first time in years I had neglected to bring with me the bottle of Vitolink I always wash my medication down with, and so I was forced to return to the newsagent’s shop to peruse their shelves of soft drinks. They did not, of course, have any bottles of Vitolink. It is only available via the internet, and is shipped to me in powdered form from Mexico. Three hundred health-giving vitamins and minerals are hand-crushed by pre-pubescent señoritas wielding flat rocks. The vetting process is so rigorous that the señoritas each have to pass a severe medical examination before they are allowed to crush the vitamins and minerals in case a disease or bug falls off them into the powder and contaminates it. The good people who invented Vitolink were so taken with my enthusiasm for their product that they asked if I would like to purchase the marketing rights for Northern Ireland. While flattered, I declined their offer. I’m a crime man through and through and I’ve no interest in mixing businesses; also, if people die of perfectly curable diseases through ignorance of Vitolink, it is no concern of mine.

I selected a bottle of Coke.

There was an elderly woman in the queue ahead of me. She said, ‘
Woman’s Realm
for my Sadie.’

The newsagent, a rotund man with a dark quiff, knelt behind the counter and produced a copy of the magazine. As he handed it over and accepted the money he said, ‘Give Sadie me best.’

The elderly woman shuffled off. I put the Coke on the counter and said, ‘This, and
Painter and Decorator
for Jimbo.’

It was what you call a light-bulb moment, though for the moment it was flickering.

The newsagent’s brow furrowed. ‘What was that?’

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘You said
Painter and Decorator
for Jimbo.’

‘Possibly. Is there a problem?’

‘Jimbo asked you to pick up his
Painter and Decorator
?’

I cleared my throat in a positive manner. ‘Right then.
Painter and Decorator
it is.’ He produced a copy of said magazine. It had a logo and a dull photo of a man with a paintbrush on the front. The name
Jimbo Collins
was handwritten in the top right-hand corner. ‘Pound for the Coke and three fifty for the magazine,’ said the newsagent. ‘And not forgetting . . .’ He knelt beneath the counter again. When he stood, with no little effort, he was holding a precariously towering column of similar magazines. He quickly set them down on the counter and just managed to stop them from toppling over. He peered out from behind them. ‘Sixteen weeks he’s been avoiding coming in here so he won’t have to pay for this lot. So you can bloody shell out for them.’

‘This is the same Jimbo Collins? Chlorine Gardens?’ I’d parked there; it was just around the corner.

The newsagent steadied the column again before reaching out for a small hard-backed notebook. He quickly flicked through several handwritten pages. ‘Chlorine . . . has he moved? I have Marston Court.’