The Day of the Jack Russell (Mystery Man) (12 page)

‘You’re so fucking perfect, aren’t you?’

I studied the cars thereabouts. There were no personalised number plates in view, which was a pity, because I felt the need. I had my nail for the scoring of cars with personalised number plates in my pocket. I had taken to carrying it with me on a more regular basis recently, instead of taking it out on special occasions. Despite their scarcity in this area, the general problem of expensive personalised number plates seemed to be growing, even though the world was spiralling ever more deeply into recession. It was a conundrum. My book sales were also immune to the recession. They were as low as ever.

She put a hand on my leg. ‘Aren’t you going to invite me in?’

‘No.’

‘You could rip my clothes off and ravage me. Or we could make toast. Whatever turns you on.’

‘No.’

‘So you’re just going to huff.’ I gave her a look. She took her hand back. ‘You’d cut off your nose to spite your face, wouldn’t you? When you could
have
me. Look at me. I’m gorgeous. But I won’t be for long. Once the twins start getting bigger.’

I would not rise to the bait. Either physically or mentally. I had a case to think through, new evidence to evaluate. I got out. I closed the door behind me, then crouched down and indicated for her to open the window, but she just glowered, started the engine and roared off.

I have been around detective fiction all of my life, and there is very little of substance that I have not read. I have also read most of the insubstantial, and plenty of barely literate garbage that has no stantial at all. Irrespective of the quality, however, people, including the police themselves, quite often make the mistake of thinking that there is a huge gap between fiction and fact, but I have discovered many parallels and coincidences and learned much about the realities of life and crime through mystery fiction. Modern policing’s reliance on science, I have found, is often at the expense of old-fashioned detective work. So much emphasis is put on the likes of DNA that what we traditionally refer to as ‘clues’ are often missed out. For example, I was quite certain that DI Robinson didn’t have a clue about the missing Jack Russell. Of course, it could still mean
nothing
. But it could just as easily mean
something
. With a remote possibility of
everything
.

I phoned Alison at midnight. My loins were stirring, plus I had decided to forgive her. But she wouldn’t come over, and embarked instead on a revenge huff. I knew it wasn’t
that
serious because she didn’t hang up. I think perhaps her loins were stirring as well but she was too up herself to give in to my temptations. So to dampen our mutual ardour I turned to the case.

‘We probably shouldn’t get too excited about it,’ I said. ‘It’s a classic mistake in detective fiction – they become fixated on the McGuffin even though everyone plus their aunt knows it’s a McGuffin. It’s a lazy way to write, but sometimes the McGuffin’s all you have. Get rid of the McGuffin and the whole bloody thing falls apart.’ There was silence from the other end. ‘Alison?’

‘What.’

‘You’ve gone quiet again.’

‘What’s a McGuffin?’

‘Oh. Sorry.’ I had forgotten. Her field of expertise was bangles. ‘It’s just like a thing that seems like it’s really important, but ultimately isn’t that important.’

‘Like you.’

‘Ho. Like, you know, in
The Maltese Falcon
where it’s all about finding and holding on to this bird statue that you think must be dead important but isn’t; it’s just an excuse to go chasing about and to exchange some smart dialogue. Or like the top-secret plans in
The Thirty-Nine Steps
. Or the letters of transit in
Casablanca
. The government secrets in
North By Northwest
. The stamps in
Charade
. The case with glowing contents in
Kiss Me Deadly
. The—’

‘I get the picture, Brainiac. Except, of course, this is real life.’

‘All that means, Alison, is that we can’t fast forward to find out if our McGuffin has any relevance to the murders. But at this moment in time it’s all we have.’

‘It
is
all we have. Okay, Sherlock, just to make sure we’re on the same wavelength, which is, frankly, scary, we’re thinking Jimbo gave Pat the Jack Russell not because he was all romantic, but because he wanted it out of the house, but not so far away that he couldn’t get hold of it if he needed to? Right? So it’s a stuffed animal, what’s so important about it? Is it a favourite pet that they stole for a laugh? Or is it stuffed with something valuable? They were into drugs, weren’t they? What about a Jack Russell stuffed with cocaine? We had a Jack Russell once, they’re fucking manic, I wouldn’t like to see one on cocaine.’

‘Concentrate.’

‘Right. The burglars at Pat’s house. We have to presume there is no intrinsic value to a stuffed JR, so either they were specifically looking for it or they took it for badness. They’re frustrated, nervous, probably drunk, they wreck the joint, one takes a dump on the bed, the other takes the JR and they either take it home with them or toss it over a hedge somewhere.
Or
they forced the whereabouts of the JR out of Jimbo or Ronny before they killed them, and then just waited their chance to nip in and get it, causing a mess to make it look like they were common or garden burglars. So far so good?’

‘Not bad. But if you’re leaning towards them going there with a purpose . . .’

‘I am.’

‘. . . and these are bad guys, murderers, and they very probably have criminal records so they’ll have been careful not to have left fingerprints . . .’

‘Agreed.’

‘. . . then why would they leave a poo in the middle of Pat’s bed?’

‘Well maybe it’s a warning. Like don’t the Mafia . . .?’

‘Dead fish, or horses’ heads. Yes. Untraceable. But you can trace a poo back to . . .’

‘The pooer.’

‘Unless . . .’

‘They brought it with them. It’s somebody else’s poo.’

‘They’ve covered their backsides.’

‘If it was anyone with a criminal record, you could still trace it back to them, make a connection.’

‘They would have thought of that. It has to be a random poo or a poo without a record. An innocent poo.’

‘It’s an awful lot of trouble to go to.’

‘Which underlines how important the JR must be.’

‘Or brings us back to them just being nervous burglars.’ Alison sighed. ‘She got rid of the poo. She wasn’t to know it might have been vital evidence. You can’t blame her. You don’t want a strange poo hanging about your house. And certainly not on your bed. She burned the lot.’

The cogs turned.

Eventually I said, ‘We’ve been thinking about paramilitaries and drug-dealers because it’s that neck of the woods, but let’s not forget how we got into this.’

‘Billy Randall.’

‘Exactly. He employed me to find Jimbo and Ronny, and as soon as I do, they wind up dead. Simple doesn’t make it wrong.’

‘He has an alibi. It’ll be good, or the best money can buy, otherwise they wouldn’t have let him go.’

‘But it might fall apart if we could establish a connection to the JR. What if Jimbo and RonnyCrabs, as part of their misguided campaign against him, stole his JR without realising what it meant to him or contained. Then when he saw your photos, with the JR in one of them, that’s when he blew a gasket and decided to have them killed. Except when he or his hired hammer went there, the JR was gone.’

‘I like it,’ said Alison. ‘The proof, of course, would be to find that the JR was back in his possession.’

I was about to agree with this when I caught myself on. ‘No, Alison.’

‘No what?’

‘You know what.’

‘I’m not a mind-reader.’

‘Repeat after me.’

‘What?’

‘Just repeat after me.’

‘Christ. Repeat after me.’

‘We are not . . .’

‘We are not . . .’

‘Breaking into . . .’

‘Breaking . . . Oh now I get you.’

‘Say it.’

‘I never say what I don’t mean. Except in matters of romance and sex.’

‘Just say it. We are not breaking into Billy Randall’s house.’

‘We are not breaking into Billy Randall’s house.’

‘I swear on the life of my unborn son.’

‘No. That’s just sick.’

‘I want you to swear. You’ve already turned him into a burglar by default.’

‘I have
not
, he just went along for the ride.’

‘You corrupted a minor, and you’re not doing it again. Agreed?’

Alison sighed. ‘
Okay
. Agreed. Absolutely. We will definitely not break into Billy Randall’s. Absolutely defin-tootly.’

‘Alison.’

‘What?’

‘I mean it.’

‘Okay. Point made.’

We were both quiet then. At least until: ‘I don’t suppose . . .’

‘No,’ she said. ‘You had your chance.’

She hung up.

Even before he had fully exited Starbucks, I’d already made my mind up about Billy Randall’s minder. He had an aura of suppressed anger and violence. His eyes darted about like a paranoid, but there was also an innate cockiness to him, an ego based on steroid muscle and vanity. It didn’t make him a murderer, but it would make you think twice about pushing his buttons. He had gone to Jimbo and RonnyCrabs’ home with Billy Randall and there had been a falling-out. Perhaps he’d gone back later and killed them before removing the Jack Russell. It was a hunch based on nothing much, but he was certainly someone I needed to know more about.

His full name was Charles Hawk, Charlie Hawk to his friends, though who knew if he had any. You don’t really need them. I’ve gotten by for years without them. Friends stab you in the back, sometimes literally. Mother never allowed friends around to the house. She said they would steal and break things. Her friends were different, of course. They would sit in the front room and drink sherry until they were legless. And then
they
would steal and break things. I asked one time what the difference was between my friends and hers and she slapped me and locked me in the cupboard. Pretty soon I was too big for the cupboard. Fortunately, she had a wardrobe.

I used my contacts in the police and found out that Charlie Hawk had a record for assault and demanding money with menaces. Actually, that’s a lie. I have no contacts in the police – a few nodding acquaintances, but nobody I could phone up and ask sensitive information of. I relied on my old friend Chief Inspector Google. The
Belfast Telegraph
had carried a court case. The judge had called him ‘nothing more than a thug’, which in his line of work probably wasn’t a bad review. The report also told me where he lived, the street, though not the house number. There probably wasn’t anything to be gained by watching him, but seeing as how I never sleep and I had nothing better to do, I thought I would at least see if I could pinpoint his actual house, just for future reference.

I drove up in the wee smalls. It was damp and cold and I had my gloves on and a pompom hat. I drove as I always drive, slow, methodical and always mindful of the Highway Code. To me amber is red, and not just because of my colour blindness. I found his street, a long terrace close to the City Hospital, and parked and opened a Twix and sipped from a flask of Vitolink and began to try to work out if I could guess which house was his purely by deduction. But I had been parked for barely two minutes, and was still getting my bearings, when I jumped at a rat-a-tat on my window and there was Charlie, glaring in, his slap cheeks blazing.

‘What’re you doing? Are you watching me? Are you watching my house? What the hell are you playing at? Wind the window down.’

‘No.’

‘What?’

‘No!’

He was clearly a mentalist.

‘Wind the window down! I have a wife and children in there, and you’re watching my house! Think I don’t see you, I know you’re watching me, you in your murder van. Open the window!’

‘No!’

‘What?’

It wasn’t a very practical way of having a conversation, even a threatening one, especially as he seemed to be a little deaf. I wound it down a fraction.

‘I’m not watching your house. I just pulled in to make a call and eat a Twix.’

‘Balls! This is my house, my street, what are the chances of that? You’re watching me when you should be finding out who killed those boys.’

‘No, really.’

‘Balls! You’re watching me. You’re watching the wrong man. I have a wife and children who can vouch for me. Even my neighbours. I was having a barbecue when they were killed . . .’

‘It was Christmas!’

‘Exactly! Everyone is sick of it. I have a barbecue every Christmas. Most of them got food poisoning, so they will remember.’

‘Okay. If you say so.’

‘Which means you’re on a hiding to nothing, watching me day and night.’

‘I wasn’t, I just happened—’

‘Shut your fucking face! If I ever, ever see you in this street again, I will break you up into little pieces. Do you hear me? Break you up.’

He aimed a kick at the van. Later I would find that he had stove it in, even though I saw in the mirror that he was wearing slippers. I wasn’t sure if steroids could make your feet tougher, or maybe it was just the muscles that powered them. I started up and drove off. He continued to yell after me as upstairs lights winked on all along the terrace.

In the morning I knocked another fifty pee off one of the sale books I was advertising in the window, but when it failed to produce an immediate stampede I retired to my place behind the counter and went surfing. When that failed to yield the desired results I turned to the Yellow Pages and found listings for three local taxidermists. I phoned the second one, because I didn’t like the pattern of letters in the first one’s name, and asked him why he didn’t have a website.

‘Because I choose not to,’ the man replied gruffly. His business was called William Gunn and Son, but I didn’t know if I was speaking to the boss or the son of. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘There are very few businesses that don’t have them these days,’ I said, ‘very few.’

‘Really?’

I don’t like sarcasm, and have no patience for impatience.