The Day of the Jack Russell (Mystery Man) (8 page)

‘Not if
he’s
wearing the wire.’

‘Aha.’

‘If they think he’s involved in these murders, then they’ve released him pretty damn quick. Maybe they’ve done a plea bargain with him, if he can get me to admit the murders on tape.’

‘That makes sense. God, you’ll be trying to get him to admit something and he’ll be trying to get you. It’ll be like a game of chess. Two criminal masterminds trying to outwit each other.’ He blinked at me. ‘Not that you’re a criminal mastermind.’

‘Okay. But where on earth would I get a wire? I need a tape recorder or a dictaphone.’

‘Use your mobile, there’s bound to be a recorder on it.’

I checked. It was old, but there was.

‘But what if as soon as I go in, he frisks me and finds the phone and sees that it’s recording.’

‘Keep it in your pants.’

‘He’ll be thinking the same, and be wearing his in his.’

‘You could, like, spill a drink over him. Short it out.’

‘Or you could go in first, hide it in the toilets. Then I let him frisk me, go to the toilet, pick up the phone, come back in.’

‘He’ll only frisk you again. Everyone knows that one. Maybe it’s out of your hands anyway. If Robinson thinks you’re both involved, then he’s already tapping your phone, so he knows about the meet. He’ll have the whole place wired, or someone at the next table.’

‘Not if you’re at the next table.’

‘Me?’

‘You sit there with a coffee, you take your mobile phone out, you pretend to be playing a game, but actually you’re recording what we’re saying.’

‘That might work. See, we’re a great team.’

I let that one pass.

I looked at the clock. I would have to remember to take my medication at the right time and in the right order. It wouldn’t do to doze off or be hyper during the meet. I had to be focused, alert, my radar working perfectly. I needed to speak clearly and succinctly rather than mumble and drool. I had to tell Billy that I knew nothing about the murders and didn’t want to be involved in his case in any way. Our brief business relationship was over. I’d completed my task and he needed to settle his account and leave me in peace.

Ten minutes before three, Alison arrived. I said, ‘I can’t talk to you now.’

‘Course you can,’ she said. She looked at Jeff. ‘Jeff, could you give us a minute?’

Jeff looked to me.

‘He’s fine where he is. We’re closing up for a little while.’

She looked from me to Jeff and back. ‘You never close up for a little while.’

‘Well we are. We have something to do.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘Did I see DI Robinson over earlier?’

‘Possibly.’

‘When I say “did I see”, what I actually mean is, I saw him clear as day.’

‘So.’

‘Bit of a shock.’

‘What is?’

‘Jimbo and RonnyCrabs. Looks like I might have been the last person to see them alive.’

She was such a
player
. Of course she was the last person to see them. She killed them.

‘He says my DNA is all over the living room.’ She shook her head. ‘The nerve of the man. Of course it is! I just visited them! He thinks it’s still the good old bad old days, first fingerprint you find, you put them away for thirty years; trouble is, nobody else thinks that way, not the solicitors, not the judges, nobody but him. Didn’t he find yours too?’

‘Possibly.’

‘He tried that on me too, like he was Sherlock Holmes or something, trying to get me to rat you out. How come, he says, if you’re the only one who entered the house, how come your partner in crime . . . and he really said
that
. . . left his DNA there as well? And he gave me one of those looks like . . .
ta-da!
And it took me about ten seconds to work it out. I’m new to this game, but I’ll get better. I’m sure you had it in, like, three.’

I nodded.

‘Once I said it,’ she continued, ‘that fairly shut him up. You should have seen his face drop. I think it’s quite sweet that my comics had your DNA on them. You must have been missing me and licked them.’

Jeff snorted. ‘It’s the price stickers. Instead of paying for new ones, he’s using this job lot he’s had for years. Most of the stickiness is gone out of them, so he licks them down.’

‘It means I can afford idiots like you, Jeff.’

Jeff made a face. Alison laughed. She was still a witch, but maybe she hadn’t tried to incriminate me. Or she had, in a different way, and I just hadn’t found out about it yet.

I had to remain on my guard.

‘Anyway, now he’s off your back, I’ve something to show you.’ Alison pulled her handbag round from behind her and began to search through it. ‘It’s just . . . here . . .’

‘It’ll have to wait.’

I was already at the door.

‘Jeff,’ I said, ‘lock up and follow me over. We’re late already.’

As I hurried out, I caught, out of the corner of my eye, the briefest glimpse of what Alison was removing from her bag. A small black and white photograph with a blurry image on it.

A scan.

Or, as I preferred to think of it, entrapment.

Billy Randall had chosen a seat at the window upstairs in Starbucks, a part of heaven I rarely venture into because of my vertigo. It gave him a perfect view of Botanic Avenue and No Alibis. It was fortunate indeed that I’d left the shop ahead of Jeff, otherwise Billy would have seen us together and our carefully thought-out plan to tape the coming exchange would have been spoiled. As it was, he was not quite alone either. A bodyguard sat at the next table. He didn’t have a badge or anything, but there was no mistaking him. Cropped hair, steroids, black suit, earpiece and watching me like a hawk. Billy himself was wearing a crumpled black suit. No tie. His shirt was pink. He was unshaven yet smelt of Calvin Klein aftershave. I recognised it because one day I spent eight hours at the corner pharmacy familiarising myself with all the different brands they had on sale and now it had paid off in spades. I heard the pharmacist committed suicide a while back. Business can be tough.

Billy Randall didn’t stand, but he did offer me his hand. I hesitated. I don’t like shaking hands at the best of times, but I didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot. His fingers were damp and pudgy and I squeezed them with the enthusiasm of a vegetarian being forced to massage half a pound of pork sausages. There was a vague outline of a tattoo running across his knuckles: ‘LOVE’, it said. I glanced at his other hand. Those knuckles bore the legend: ‘HAT’. His little finger was missing. I couldn’t help but stare at it. Or not at it. At the space. The stump. And wonder what had happened. I wasn’t sure if it qualified him as disabled, or if it would have stopped him becoming a professional tennis player, or golfer, or mountain climber, but it certainly would have put a family of five finger puppets into mourning.

‘This is some fucking fuck-up, isn’t it?’ said Billy.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Here, I got you an espresso.’

He pushed a cup and saucer across the table. I thanked him and tried not to look at it. It would interfere with my Starbucks schedule if I even inhaled. I’d have go back to the start of the menu. As I sat opposite him, I quietly moved it to one side.

‘Mr Randall . . .’ I began, but he immediately cut in.

‘Some Christmas that was, taken away from my wife and family in the dead of night. My youngest thought she could hear Santa Claus moving around downstairs, but it was the fucking Murder Squad. Took the door off its hinges. Still, I’m insured.’

He laughed. The bodyguard laughed. I laughed too, because sometimes toadying helps. Billy continued laughing, right up to the point where he stopped abruptly and snapped out: ‘So what’re we going to do?’

‘We?’

‘Sure, we. Aren’t we in this together?’

‘Well, technically . . .’

‘Someone’s trying to stitch us up. And technically I’m still employing you.’

‘Well actually . . .’

‘Well actually I haven’t paid you, so you’re still being employed by me, and it’s up to me if I change the parameters. You should check your employment law.’ He suddenly clicked his fingers at me. ‘What’s that old saying . . . about the piper . . .?’

‘The . . . piper . . .?’

‘The piper . . .’ He clicked them again. ‘The piper . . .’

‘Peter Piper pilked . . .?’

‘No.’

‘Peter Piper picked a pelk . . .’

‘No.’

‘Peter Piper picked a peck of peckled . . .’

‘No.’

‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers . . .’

‘No . . .’

‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. Did Peter Piper pick a peck of pickled peppers? If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper—’

‘Will you just . . . shut the fuck . . .
up
?!’ Billy Randall was staring at me: ‘Christ!’ He lowered his voice as two new customers sat down at the table immediately behind me. I caught their reflection in the window. It was Jeff. And Alison. Also I heard Jeff whisper loudly, ‘Which one is the record button?’ Billy Randall leaned a little closer. ‘What I mean about the piper is, he who pays the piper calls the tune,
capiche
?’

‘Technically, it’s
capisce
. . .’

‘Just . . .’

‘It’s important to . . .’

‘Listen to . . .’

‘Because misunderstand—’

‘QUIET. Listen to me. I am a very rich man. Rich men have enemies. I am being implicated in a double murder. I am innocent. And as the police are doing the implicating, I can’t run to them for help. I need you to find out who is really responsible for these murders. I need you to bring them to justice. That is what you do, right?’

I looked at him. He was right. It was what I did.

I had sworn never again to get involved in cases that were in any way dangerous, that even hinted at murder or violence. I would concentrate exclusively on safe little puzzles, almost like animated crosswords, where ultimately it didn’t matter if you solved them, but you got a nice little glow if you did. Something to while away a winter’s evening with one hand while mopping up your mother’s drool with the other. But here I was, within six weeks of that declaration, once again implicated in murder, and yet again through absolutely no fault of my own. Alison had hurled me into the maelstrom last time by insisting on breaking into the mysteriously shuttered detective agency next door and discovering the dead body of its owner; this time I had merely tried to track down a couple of vandals. Now I was going to have to find my own way out of it. If Billy Randall wanted to maintain the charade of me being his employee then that was fine with me, but I would be working to my own agenda.

‘I said, that is what you do, right?’

‘What?’

‘I said . . . Do you by any chance have a short attention span?’

‘I was thinking about the case.’

‘Oh – I like that. You’ve got tunnel vision. I’m a bit like that with my business. You know, I think we’re quite alike.’

Behind me, Alison snorted.

‘I think,’ he continued, ‘that once we set our mind to solving a problem, we don’t let anything stop us, we’re super-focused. That’s how I built my business, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let anyone take me down, and that’s what this is about: someone wants in, and the only way they think they can do that is by framing me for this, because they know they can’t beat me at business, I’ve got it all sewn up. So what do you say, are we a team?’

He held out his pork fingers to me.

I squeezed them again.

‘Sucker,’ said Alison, and we both turned to her. She made an elaborate show of tickling Jeff. ‘I
am not
a sucker,’ she giggled, ‘you’re the sucker!’ Jeff squirmed away as she attacked him again.

Billy Randall shook his head. ‘Young love, eh?’

Before I started the interrogation, I told him I’d need him to be completely honest, to answer each and every question without asking why, to show patience and courtesy, and most importantly, in order to get me back on track, he had to get me a caramel macchiato. He agreed to these conditions, except for a variation on the last, by which I mean he sent his bodyguard down to get it. Nobody tried to assassinate him while he was gone.

I said, ‘So these guys, did you kill them?’

‘No, don’t be daft.’

‘But the police think you did. What did they say?’

‘They?
Him
. A DI Robinson. My solicitor says he’s a law unto himself. He says the other detectives have a nickname for him. They call him Mr Marple. He’s like a pernickety old woman. He said that when he entered there was blood everywhere, looked like a real slaughterhouse, but one thing that caught his eye was the computer, still switched on, with YouTube on the screen and paused on a video of my billboard being defaced. He said it didn’t take a genius to work out that the victims were responsible for the graffiti. I mean, Christ, that was enough to haul me in? If there’d been a video of Kylie Minogue on the screen, would they have lifted her?’ Billy shook his head. ‘I should be so lucky.’

‘And that’s why they arrested you?’

Billy looked down at his coffee and added quietly, ‘Well, that and the fact that I did go round and visit them.’

‘Okay. Right. When was this? And why?’

‘The morning after you sent me their address. See, most people in my position, they’d call the lawyers in, threaten them with this or that. I’m not like that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an easy touch or anything, but I prefer to see if we can work something out. Charm them, you know what I mean? So we went round . . .’

‘We?’

‘Me and Charlie Hawk here.’ He nodded across at his bodyguard. Charlie winked. ‘I don’t go anywhere without Charlie.’

‘You came to see me without him.’

‘He was waiting outside. Stopping your customers. You’ll note that nobody else entered the whole time I was there.’

I let that one pass. ‘But you went to see these guys with your security guard. Might that not have been perceived as threatening?’

‘No. He’s very polite and friendly. More like a chauffeur or personal assistant. Which he is.’

Charlie gave me the thumbs-up. He still looked like a thug.