The No. 2 Global Detective (23 page)

‘Nice place you've got here, Faye. Always knew you'd do well.'

This is not true and Faye knows it. No one could explain her appeal then, while she had been at Cuff College, and no one can explain it now.

‘You have a good sidekick,' states Colander, glancing down at Rambouillet. ‘I wish I had a good sidekick.'

How he misses the simple pleasures of life in Ynstead.

The sidekick in question groans on the floor.

Anger flashes in Carpaccia's eyes. She will definitely fire Rambouillet.

‘I thought Lemm Lemmingsson might be good for the role,' continues Colander, somewhat solipsistically, thinks Tom Hurst, ‘but he seems a bit one-dimensional. And, whenever I go to see the new woman police officer, who is so highly thought of in Stockholm, I drink a little too much raw spirit and end up being sick in her postbox.'

Again, no one knows what to say to this. It is to be an evening of non sequiturs.

‘Talking of which, Dr Carpaccia, have you anything to drink?' asks Mma Ontoaste. She has drunk heavily on the flight over, only avoiding being put off the plane in an emergency landing in Newfoundland because she fell asleep clutching a bottle of Napoleon brandy to her chest, but now her almost unquenchable thirst has returned.

After a minute they are sitting on the bar stools in the kitchen on the other side of a couple of bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon, all talking sales figures. In the microwave Carpaccia is defrosting some Turkey Twizzlers.

‘What aggravates me,' she complains as she opens a jar of tomato relish she had previously bought from the 7-11, ‘is that I invented the strong female character and yet no one gives me enough credit. All these silly bitches in pantyhose copying what I do make me so angry.'

Carpaccia drives the Sabatier knife she is wielding into the maple cheeseboard, neatly bisecting a piece of crackerjack cheddar on the way and sending the pieces across the table.

‘You're lucky, Mma,' says Mma Ontoaste, fielding a piece of crackerjack and popping it into her mouth before anyone can blink. ‘No one has ever tried to write a bargain-basement version of me. I suppose it is because I am the absolute deliberate opposite of all of you: I am a woman—'

‘So am I!' Carpaccia aggressively snaps.

‘So you are,' Mma Ontoaste cautiously agrees, ‘but you are small and powerful and you have a massive collection of guns, not to mention your submarine—'

‘What are you saying?'

‘That for all your empathy with dead women, you might as well be a man,' continues Mma Ontoaste.

‘Aye, owning a submarine is a wee bit phallic, is it no', Faye?'

Carpaccia is so angry she is at a loss for words. How dare this Scotch man insult her submarine? How dare this fat black woman suggest she is somehow unfeminine because she is obsessed with guns and has the phrase ‘NRA4EVER' tattooed on her right buttock? Her small powerful hands and huge great big knife make quick work of chopping the Turkey Twizzlers into one-inch pieces, but she controls herself enough to put these pieces on cocktail sticks with small cubes of crackerjack and cocktail onions and pass them around.

‘Go on,' she icily says. ‘Help yourselves.'

‘Thank you, Doctor. These are good.'

After finishing the plate, Mma Ontoaste returns to her theme.

‘I am the positive print of your negatives,' she says, talking to Rhombus and Colander. ‘The exact opposite to you. I am a black, tea-drinking woman with a happy marriage.'

Here Tom wonders about the state of her marriage to Mr JPS Spagatoni; wonders about the state of Mr JPS Spagatoni, if it came to that.

‘I come from Botswana and see only good in things, while you are both white alcoholic males with no love in your lives, you live in the north and you see only the worst in everything.'

There is a short pause. Outside rain has begun to fall very heavily. The wind rocks the trees.

‘I sometimes wonder if I deal with abstract quandaries too much,' intones Colander to no one in particular.

There is a pause. Mma Ontoaste cannot suppress a giggle and Rhombus, encouraged, starts laughing.

‘Your books are shite!' he jeers.

He takes a quick sip of the wine and puts the glass heavily down on the table. The others exchange glances. Tom Hurst opens his mouth to speak, but Rhombus continues.

‘I'll say this for you, though, pal: you've managed to make a career out of nothing. And I mean nothing. Nothing ever happens in Sweden. There is no crime at all. You invent the crimes and then go around suggesting they have some wider implication.'

Mma Ontoaste jumps to Colander's defence.

‘Well, Rra, your books deal with the same sorts of things, don't they? Corruption in the police force; the rich, the poor; escaping the past; the SAS; and then something topical like immigration or cannibalism.'

Cannibalism?
thinks Rhombus. He wonders how many of his books she has read.

‘Er, look,' says Tom Hurst, trying to calm things down. ‘Let's agree that any of our perceived faults as writers are more to do with the limitations of the Genre and the human desire for strong stories, however improbable either may be and then let's leave it at that, shall we?'

A vague truce is called.

‘Okay, let's all drink to huge sales figures and forget about it.'

Carpaccia opens a bottle of vintage Cristal champagne but she will not offer any of the champagne to Rhombus until he apologises to her submarine. Nor does she offer any to Mma Ontoaste until she admits it is perfectly natural to own something like a thousand guns.

‘Including three 50-calibre machine guns?' she asks.

‘Including three 50-calibre machine guns,' agrees Mma Ontoaste.

‘Can we talk about why we are here?' asks Tom. He explains about the death of Claire Morgan.

‘Oh, the poor thing!' exclaims Carpaccia. ‘I feel for her already. Did you bring the body? I bet she is covered in some kind of coppery residue.'

‘It's possible,' he agrees, before explaining the series of clues that have brought them to Virginia. As Tom continues, the brevity of his case becomes apparent. When he is finished there is silence for a while until Mma Ontoaste snores suddenly.

‘I think you are being played with,' suggests Carpaccia. ‘Often what happens in my cases is that I discover all this weird stuff about the dead bodies that have absolutely nothing to do with how I catch the criminal in the end.'

Carpaccia is not used to drink and is becoming confessional.

‘Mostly it's chance,' she continues. ‘Sometimes something I find out about the body does help catch the criminal, but there are times when I wonder why anyone lets me near the criminal investigative process.'

‘I'm like that,' Rhombus impatiently agrees. ‘Especially as I am usually suspended or “in the frame” for the murder in the first place.'

‘I usually get a pretty clear idea who the murderer is,' enjoins Colander, ‘and then I get into my tracksuit and take a gun into the woods and sort of roll about in the pine needles and mud until the murderer turns up and then I shoot him.'

‘Oh, yes. Luck plays a big part,' agrees Mma Ontoaste. ‘No doubt about it.'

There is a silence for a while. Sips of drink are taken, Twizzlers eaten.

‘What sort of stroke of luck are you hoping for in this case, Tom?' Colander dolefully asks after a while. Tom does not really know.

‘I suppose I was hoping you would come up with something. You seem to be the luckiest detectives alive.'

‘Amen to that,' agrees Rhombus. ‘Hey! I wonder what happened to the others in our year at Cuff. Do any of you see anyone from those days?'

There is a round of regretful head-shaking.

‘I wonder what happened to that old guy who solved crimes while stacking shelves at a DIY store somewhere in middle England?'

‘He wore an orange tabard, didn't he? With a slogan that said something like “stop me if you need any help”.'

‘I bet he's still there.'

‘It's good to have a trade, Rra,' muses Mma Ontoaste. ‘That way you have something in the quiet times.'

‘And wasn't there an Eskimo? What was his name?'

‘I remember him, Rra! His name was Nak-ka-khoo. He tried to kiss me once.'

‘God, yes. Now he was really stupid. How did he ever get a place at College at all? He couldn't detect his way out of a paper bag, could he? He was always failing his practicals.'

‘And he could hardly string a sentence together.'

There is an embarrassed silence for a second.

‘But couldn't he hypnotise people?'

‘And he was a musician. He could play loads of musical instruments. He could play the viola, the viola. Like the Music Man.'

Dr Carpaccia stretches across to jot down the name of her next compulsive murderer: the Music Man.

‘Oh Rra, he used to play the most wonderful music. He played the Spanish guitar and all the girls would …' She stopped and took a sip of her wine.

‘Anyway,' she said. ‘It was a long time ago.'

‘The strange thing is that I think I saw him the other day,' murmurs Colander.

‘You saw Nak-ka-khoo? How odd. Where?'

‘He was – wait, let me think. He was in a shop somewhere. Buying something. Yes, he was buying something in a shop, but what?'

‘And where? In Ynstead?' asks Tom urgently.

‘I think so, but it could have been Malmö. Wait a second it was in Malmö. At the video store. He was renting a video. I thought at the time that it was him, but I was in a real hurry and I could not be sure and then it hit me only later.'

‘What does he look like now?'

‘The same,' shrugs Colander. ‘Small; dark hair; weather-beaten face; fishing pole; fur-lined hood; shoulders hunched from all that fishing.'

‘Oh, Rra! That is strange. That sounds exactly like my new assistant, Mma Murakami. She locked herself in her office all day and I hardly saw her, but she looked just like that.'

‘Did you ever see her handle a canoe?' Carpaccia sharply asks.

‘No. But she did play jazz on her radio, and she smelled strongly of fish, now that I come to think of it.'

‘Fish?'

‘And seal meat and whale blubber, I suppose.'

‘And jazz? That is odd. The new officer from Stockholm who was called Knut Knutsson was always playing jazz on his radio in the next-door office.'

Rhombus is looking worried.

‘I heard some music in a kitchen in Edinburgh that made me forget for a second who I was or what I was supposed to be doing too. Ah. A haunting refrain; the power of cheap music.'

‘And those notebooks!' recalls Tom Hurst. ‘Sealskin.'

‘How strange. We have been finding bodies in Florida bound in fishing twine.'

The weight of coincidence reaches a tipping point.

‘All right,' says Tom Hurst. ‘I am ringing the Dean to see if I can find out where Nak-ka-khoo is now.'

None of the detectives look convinced.

‘But it could be anyone,' says Rhombus. ‘I mean have you no' walked down the street, heard some music playing – some Eric Clapton, for example – and you just start tapping your feet and, before you know it, a whole afternoon has passed?'

‘And just because I thought I saw him doesn't mean anything.'

‘And my assistant looking a little like someone Burt thought he saw? Rra, I know he could be good at disguises but Nak-ka-khoo and I “knew” each other at Cuff. I do not think that Mma Murakami could be Nak-ka-khoo in disguise.'

‘And the fact that someone is tying chickens up with fishing twine? C'mon. It's too far-fetched.'

It struck Tom then just how far these detectives were off-song. He had fought them all the way to Richmond, reminding them to trust their instincts, to seize on one particular thing and go with that, just as they had learned in the first year at Cuff, but now here they were ignoring the most fantastically oblique chain of clues in favour of rational observations and, God forbid, Probability.

Before he can say anything, they are dazzled by star-bright white light shining in through the Venetian blinds at all the kitchen windows. The detectives flinch and try to cover their eyes. All are panicked.

‘What is it?' asks Mma Ontoaste, her voice rising maybe a couple of octaves.

‘Put your weapons down and your hands up!' blares an amplified voice from the darkness outside the house. ‘Come on out, Aunty Faye! I have the house surrounded. There is no escape.'

‘Oh, sweet smiling Baby Jesus!' Carpaccia whispers. ‘I recognise that voice! It's Creepy Lesbian Niece! Get down, everybody. There is no telling what she will do.'

They slide off their chairs, copying Carpaccia, and onto their hands and knees. They are staring wildly at one another now.

‘What does she want?' Tom asks.

‘It's you I want, Aunty Faye,' comes the booming voice again. ‘I know everybody else loves you the most but I love you even more than that and I mean to make you mine and mine alone!'

‘Quick!' Carpaccia whispers. ‘To the submarine!'

There is a chaotic scramble back through Carpaccia's house as behind them there is a deafening explosion. Creepy Lesbian Niece has bazooka-ed the kitchen in which minutes ago they had been having a quiet drink. The noise is awful. The blast is fearsome. Scraps of metal and wood fly down the corridor after the fleeing detectives, followed by a rolling cloud of choking dust and smoke.

‘Well, butter my biscuit!' Carpaccia exclaims. ‘That ungrateful bitch!'

In the hallway she turns and opens a door from which steps lead down to her indoor submarine pen, where the green water softly laps against cinderblock walls. Moored in the middle is a small M8-63 hi-tech submarine made in Norway and usually used in off-shore salvage operations. It is slate-grey and barnacled in places. The hatch to the conning tower stands open.