The Mystery of Mercy Close (18 page)

5) Drive to Clonakilty and talk to Wayne’s family, but not just yet. Not until it stopped seeming
obvious
.

However, instead of whirlwinding out through the door with my list of duties, I decided to lie on the living-room floor, on a very attractive rug, and gaze at the ceiling (painted daringly in Ennui). Aloud, I asked, ‘Where are you, Wayne?’

So where was he? Driving around Connemara in a camper van taking photos of gorse? Or could he have been kidnapped? I hadn’t entirely taken it seriously because Jay and the other Laddz were so adamant that he was just throwing a strop, but suddenly I had a mental picture of Wayne thrown in a darkened lock-up, his legs and arms tied with electric flex.

But who would kidnap him?
Why
would someone kidnap him? It’s not as if he had any money. Or
had
he? Had I missed something in my quick scan of his finances? I needed to go back upstairs to his office for another look because there are usually two reasons people go missing: money and honey.

And if not for a ransom, I realized there were other reasons he could have been kidnapped. Someone might want to sabotage the Laddz comeback. Someone who had it in for Jay (surely hundreds of people?), or who had it in for the promoters. But it didn’t make sense to abduct Wayne so far in advance of the first gig, if only because the longer you hold someone the higher your chances of getting caught.

If someone was serious about sabotage, they’d have grabbed Wayne on Wednesday, the day of the first concert. Then there would be no time to find him, to manage the press, to issue refunds … it would be utter mayhem.

Of course there was always the random nutter factor. A besotted fan – ‘window lickers’ I believe they’re called – could have tipped over into
Misery-
style devotion and grabbed Wayne. Right this minute, Wayne could be wearing an ill-fitting white suit and be shackled to a rose-pink loveseat in a soft-furnished dungeon, singing Laddz’s greatest hits over and over, while his mystery abductor (I suspected a female) shouted, ‘Again, again, more, more!’

Or could the whole thing be a ruse orchestrated by Jay? To fire up ticket sales?

(So how
were
ticket sales? I wondered. I must find out.)

Could Jay be double-bluffing me? Could he have temporarily ‘disappeared’ Wayne? And hired me to ‘find’ him? But really hired me because I was crap?

Could all that stuff about keeping it out of the press be a sham? In a couple of days would details of ‘missing Wayne’ be leaked to a tabloid? Followed by a massive run on tickets to see if Wayne would actually turn up on the night?

I mean, look at how resistant Jay had been last night when I’d wanted to install the monitors on Wayne’s house and car. Okay, it was late and he was knackered and what difference would a few hours make? But if he’d really been frantic with worry, wouldn’t he have wanted it done straight away?

The reason I was so suspicious was because I’d been set
up like this before. A few years back I was hired to get photo evidence of a woman playing away. However (for reasons too complicated to go into), the person who hired me didn’t actually want the reveal, but they needed to be seen to be going through the motions. Basically I was given the job because they thought I was too much of a lightweight to be able to pull it off.

Even now it stung to think about it and if Jay bloody Parker was spinning my wheels in the same way, I’d … I’d …

Anger tipped over into desolation. I’d find some way to punish him, but I wouldn’t think about it now. I’d think about Wayne.

I didn’t know why, seeing as we’d never met, but I wanted to help him. I guess I thought he looked nice.

Which is actually a very poor way to judge someone. I mean, think about Stalin. If you didn’t know what a badzer he was, you might think, with his ’tache and his brown bear eyes, that he was nice. Something about him reminded me of this man who ran the taverna that Bronagh and I used to go to, that time we were on holiday in Santorini. He was like a cuddly uncle and often gave us drinks on the house.

So whenever I see a picture of Stalin I get a warm feeling and think, ‘Free ouzo!’ – instead of recoiling and thinking what I should be thinking, which is, ‘Paranoid despot responsible for the deaths of twenty million people.’

I could be as wrong about Wayne as I was about Stalin.

All the same, I decided it was worth exploring the possibility that Wayne hadn’t disappeared voluntarily but had come into contact with some nasty types.

I had one contact in the criminal world, Harry Gilliam. We’d met a few years back when his assistant had hired me to work a case (the same case, coincidentally, for which I’d been hired for my crapness). Both Harry and I had come out of the whole sorry business bruised and battered, quite literally in my case. I’d been bitten on the bum by a dog, but that
wasn’t why I hated dogs. I’d always hated them. So, luckily, no lasting trauma.

Harry sort of owed me, but I was loath to call him on it. Favours are like currency; you can’t fritter them away on useless stuff. You’ve got to be really sure you want what you’re going to get. Wayne, I decided on balance, was worth it.

I dialled Harry’s number and on the sixth ring, someone said, ‘Yeh?’

‘Harry?’ I asked in surprise. He never used to answer his phone personally.

In a clipped, angry way, he said, ‘You know to never use my name on the phone.’

‘I forgot. It’s been a long time.’ I could have given some smart arse reply but it really wasn’t a good idea to piss him off. I’d always found him mildly risible, but the fact was that he was genuinely connected. He had information that I wouldn’t be able to get any other way. ‘I need to talk to you. Just a couple of questions.’

He wouldn’t do any business on the phone. I used to think that that was hard-man nonsense, but now that I knew what I knew about the bugging of phones, I thought he was right.

‘Can I come to see you?’ I asked.

I was mentally calculating how long it would take to talk to Wayne’s neighbours. Impossible to know. The unpleasant truth was that talking to the neighbours – any neighbours – was usually a bust. Either they were blank-faced automatons who ‘didn’t want to get involved’ and who closed the door on your foot, or, worse still, they got wildly excited about being part of a case and, even though they knew nothing remotely useful, engaged you in time-wasting chat and conjecture (‘Could he be a member of Al-Qaeda? I mean,
someone
has to be …’).

Better to go and see Harry. Bird in the hand and all that.

‘Can I come now?’ I asked.

‘No. I’ll let you know. Someone will ring you.’

After he hung up, I felt very, very low. I was suddenly acknowledging the fact that Wayne might never come back, that he might actually be dead. Most coppers will tell you that if you don’t find a missing person in the first forty-eight hours the chances are that they’re a goner. Obviously they’re talking about people who haven’t disappeared voluntarily and Wayne might just be hiding out somewhere, but all the same.

To diffuse this depressing thought, I turned on the telly, which was housed in the elegant, hand-joined shelves in the fireplace alcove.

In a coincidence that had me sitting up straight, who appeared on the screen? Only Docker! Some report on Sky News about himself and Bono and a couple of other high-profile do-gooders, handing in a letter to 10 Downing Street on behalf of some down-trodden nation. I studied Docker with great interest. So good-looking and shiny and well made. Hard to believe he was Irish.

You know what? I still hadn’t heard from John Joseph Hartley and it was going on for midday. What was the story? Didn’t he
want
Wayne to be found?

I turned off the news – somehow watching Wayne’s telly made me feel like I was trespassing – and John Joseph answered on the third ring. ‘Hey, Helen.’

‘John Joseph? Birdie Salaman? You were going to get back to me with her number and stuff.’

‘Sorry, hon, I don’t have anything for her. Thing is, I met her only a couple of times. I was living in Cairo most of the time Wayne was going out with her. We were never close.’

‘Do you know where she lives?’

‘Northside. Swords, Portmarnock, one of those places.’

Aw, come
on
, I’d never met her but even I’d found an address for her. ‘Any idea where she works?’

‘No, sorry.’

‘What does she do for a living?’

‘No idea, hon. Sorry.’

‘That’s a shame,’ I said evenly.

‘Yeah. Gotta go. Lunchtime, and here comes our cottage cheese. But anything I can do to help, any time, day or night …’

I hung up, thinking:

A) Don’t call me ‘hon’.

B) Don’t take me for a moron.

C) Don’t call me ‘hon’.

Oh, and D) Don’t call me ‘hon’.

Clearly John Joseph Hartley didn’t want me talking to Birdie Salaman and that was a pity because I’d liked him and now I
didn’t. I suspected him of … what, exactly? I didn’t know. The wheels in my brain weren’t turning fast enough. All I knew was that I shouldn’t call him on it, not yet. I should wait it out for a bit. See if Birdie got back to me. And if she didn’t? Well, I knew where she lived. I could drive out and harass her in the comfort of her own home.

While I’d been having my entirely unhelpful talk with John Joseph, I’d missed a call from Artie, so I rang him back. ‘It’s me,’ I said.

‘Listen, are you okay, baby?’

‘What do you mean?’ Had he noticed how weird I was becoming?

‘I mean, your flat? You love that place. Losing it … we should talk about it.’

‘Sure. Soon,’ I said quickly. Under no circumstances did I want a conversation which bumped up against the possibility of me moving in with Artie. I didn’t want us to even think it. There was too much change going on, too much shifting and strangeness, and I wanted to hang on to what was good, not run the risk of breaking it. ‘Would you believe I’m on a job!’ I said brightly.

I knew he wouldn’t want to go with the subject change, but he’d feel churlish if he didn’t celebrate me getting some work; he’d seen how bad things had been for me. ‘So you said,’ he said. ‘That’s great. What happened?’

‘Got a call last night. After I’d left yours.’ Well, in a way, that’s how it had come about. ‘A missing person case. In fact I’ve a lot to get on with. I’d better go. Talk to you later … um, best regards.’

‘
Fondest
regards.’ He gave a little laugh and hung up.

I stared at my phone, musing on how unpredictable life was: Artie Devlin was my boyfriend. Had been – as Bella had pointed out last night – for almost six months.

How odd that our paths had crossed again. After he’d sent the scalpel back to me and I’d had the brief moment
when I’d decided to make him mine, I’d met Jay Parker at that party neither of us should have been at and I’d been so knocked sideways that I totally forgot about Artie. Even after the break-up with Jay, a year ago, I still didn’t think about him.

Then, a couple of weeks before last Christmas, there was a fête in my local parish hall.

Now, I adored fêtes,
adored
them. People were often amazed that someone as sour as me would enjoy such an amateurish array – the rough-hewn cakes and the hand-knitted scratchy mittens, which on closer inspection turn out to fit only the left hand – but the more crap the fêtes were, the more charming I found them. What made them extra alluring was that, skint as I was, everything cost so little that I could afford to buy anything in the place. It made me feel rich and swaggery, like a Russian oligarch.

Outside the hall, in the church car park, Christmas trees were doing a roaring trade, being wrapped in chicken wire and hoisted into hatchbacks by the few able-bodied men on the parish committee.

Inside the hall the mood felt moderately festive. Christmas music was playing and I drifted about from stall to stall. I purchased a small home-made chocolate cake then I stopped off to inspect the tombola prizes. By Christ, they were risible: a bottle of barley water, a roll of Sellotape, twenty Marlboro Lights. But – all in a good cause, all in a good cause – I bought a line of tickets.

At the jam and chutney stand I questioned the woman closely on the difference between jam and chutney, but when she couldn’t give me a satisfactory answer I moved on, to her evident relief, without having made a purchase.

The woman in charge of the knitting stall was actually knitting. ‘A balaclava for my grand-niece,’ she said, clicking away with smug speedy pride. Is it just me or is the sound of two knitting needles clacking against each other one of the
most sinister noises ever? And the strange objects that issue from the needles, would anyone ever actually wear them? Fear of this woman made me pretend to inspect her array of itchy-looking wares, but I swear I could feel hives popping up on my skin.

‘What’s this?’ I asked, genuinely baffled by something that looked like a hairy surgical collar.

‘That’s a snood,’ she said angrily. ‘A lovely hand-knitted snood. Try it on, it’ll keep your neck nice and cosy.’

It was imperative that I get away, and quickly. ‘I think you just dropped a stitch on your grand-niece’s balaclava,’ I said, and in the ensuing panic I moved on to the next table, the book stall, which was piled with yellowing paperbacks. ‘Five for a euro,’ the stall-holder barked at me. ‘Twelve for two euro.’

‘I’m not much of a reader,’ I said.

‘Neither am I,’ she said. ‘But you could use them to light the fire. Twenty for three euro. We’re looking at a hard winter. Fifty for five euro. You can take the whole table for a tenner.’

Then, having forced myself to save the best till last, I went to my favourite stall: the bric-a-brac. Or bric-a-crap, as it really should be called.

Traditionally it’s a stall strewn with absolute tat – broken old ornaments, cracked plates, a pestle without a mortar, a single roller skate. The woman on the parish committee who ends up running this stall has obviously committed some appalling
faux pas
during the year. It’s a real humiliation to be rostered to oversee this load of old cack.

Not only is it impossible to take any pride in your goods, but it’s a lonely sort of a spot, a veritable Siberia. Most fête customers give this stall a good swerve. The germs, you see, the morbid fear of germs. Which brings me to another item on my Shovel List: people who shudder dramatically and say, ‘EEEWWWWW,’ at the thought that another human being
might have touched something. It’s an affectation imported fairly recently from the US, a very, very irritating one. I wasn’t really sure what people were trying to prove with it. That they have a higher standard of cleanliness than you? That you are dirtier than them? The fact is that the human race has survived for a very long time (way too long, in my opinion; they can bring on the Rapture anytime they like) without cave-dwelling hunter gatherers and their descendants carrying a little squeezy tube of pomegranate-scented hand sanitizer tucked into their loincloths.