Earthly Delights (26 page)

I heard no raised voices. Nothing appeared to be broken. Jason and Goss must be staying out of each other’s way. There was a rush of business then which kept Goss and me busy for the next four hours. She wasn’t talking much and had a prim, self-righteous air which I associated with her recent foray into the occult.

So it wasn’t until lunchtime that I went into the bakery and found Jason lying on the floor. I ran and knelt beside him
and then I found that he was not dead, he was not overdosed, he had not been beaten. He was drunk. The empty brandy bottle had rolled away from his limp hand. He had wiped himself out completely.

I manoeuvred him onto a couple of flour sacks and had a look at the room. They say Sherlock Holmes invented deduction. Ridiculous. Women invented it. Who else needs to know what, for example, a child has eaten when the child herself will swear blind, between retches, that she hasn’t eaten anything at all? And one decides from the green stains on the knees of the trousers and the fact that there is an apricot tree heavy with unripe fruit (which the child has been forbidden to climb) just next door. No one gets lied to as much as mothers. Necessity is the mother of deduction.

The bakery was shining clean, even the floor, and it was dry. It takes half an hour to dry. Jason had started his caraway experiment. The toffee had reached soft ball stage and had been left to solidify in the saucepan. The flour, sugar and caraway seeds were weighed out. The muffin tins were oiled. He had been interrupted after he had finished the cleaning and while he was making toffee by—what?

Or whom?

I went back into the shop with the strong intention of strangling Goss. But I did not yell. I asked her very quietly, ‘What did you say to Jason?’

She didn’t bother to deny it. ‘He said he was going to be your apprentice,’ she said. ‘He must have been lying.’

‘Go on,’ I prompted. She was beginning to look a little uncomfortable. She toyed with one of the five rings in her ear.

‘I said he wasn’t, he was just a worthless junkie,’ she said.

‘And?’

Now she was really worried. Even Goss has enough sense of self preservation to know when she had gone too far. She was conscious of this, but not as conscious as she would be in a moment.

‘And you were just being nice to him because of Daniel. That’s all I said!’ she yelped as I advanced on her.

‘I’m not going to sack you,’ I said through clenched teeth, ‘because you are leaving anyway. But tomorrow, if you ever wish to be saved, you are going to apologise to Jason. I did ask him to be my apprentice. He has a lot of talent. You didn’t notice that. Have I made myself clear, Gossamer?’

‘Talent? Him?’ she almost screeched.

‘Talent, him. Now behave yourself, I’ve got things to do. If you flounce out,’ I added, turning my back on her, ‘don’t return.’

I went into the bakery. I didn’t hear the door slam so I assumed that she was staying. Don’t ever tell me that men are more violent than women. They just use different methods. At school I had often thought that a nice, simple, straightforward punch in the nose would be preferable to female methods of torture.

I made Jason more comfortable on a pile of empty flour sacks. The Mouse Police surveyed him dubiously, wondering if he would make a good perch and deciding against it.

It would be hours before he woke. There hadn’t been enough brandy left in the bottle to kill him. And he hadn’t drunk the vanilla essence, so he probably wasn’t an alcoholic. I could have kicked that little bitch Goss. I hoped that Meroe had explained karmic debt, because unless she mended her manners, Goss was going to come back as a slug. And in Trudi’s garden, slugs got salted.

Kylie had taken Goss’s place when I came back into the shop.

‘Goss called and asked me to take over,’ she said breathlessly. ‘She said she was shaking too hard to message. She’s really lost it.’

‘She never had it,’ I muttered. ‘What do you think of Jason?’

‘If he made those muffins, he’s cool,’ she said. ‘I just had a little tiny piece. But they smelt so nice. Like Christmas.’

She seemed surprised when I hugged her.

‘Goss is jealous,’ she explained. ‘She thinks you like Jason more than her. I told her she was being an airhead. But she didn’t listen. She never does,’ said Kylie. ‘She just called me a ditz. I hope she likes this new job, or it’s gonna be real gross living with her. When she doesn’t like things she throws up a lot.’

I refused to be sorry for Goss. But I was. Sort of.

When we closed I sent Kylie to buy me food for three and took it upstairs to see if Daniel was awake. He was still sleeping like a large, unbelievably gorgeous baby so I lunched alone and got on with my GST return, always a constant source of pleasure for an ex-accountant. I wouldn’t go back to doing figures full time but it’s fun when it’s your own business. I am aware that my view is not widely shared.

The computer has taken most of the difficulty out of keeping books anyway. I checked all my receipts and invoices and waybills against the figures on my spreadsheets, and once I was sure that I had everything included, all I had to do was press a button and ask for the balance. And a very nice balance it was, which meant a nice cheque to be paid to the Tax Office. I was doing that when arms came around me and someone nuzzled my neck, sending harmonics down my spine which grounded with a thud.

‘Mmm,’ he growled. ‘I love a woman who’s good with figures. Tell me, oh accounting woman, how goes your bakery?’

‘It goes very well,’ I said. ‘Nice cash flow, no debts and a pretty set of numbers. In fact everything is in excellent condition. Except for the drunk.’

‘What drunk?’

I explained about Jason. Daniel leaned his chin on my shoulder.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Dock his wages for the brandy and tell him not to do it again. Also, he has to clean the toffee saucepan. That ought to be punishment enough.’

‘That, and the hangover. He’s probably done this before, you know. It’s a self-defeating pattern. He goes along well, almost gets accepted, then something happens and he blows it. And he hates himself even more because he has blown it.’

‘He hasn’t blown it,’ I said. ‘He’s got real talent. I can handle a few hiccups on the way.’

‘But you’re unique,’ said Daniel, and kissed the back of my neck in that same disturbing way. Why wasn’t I dragging this man into bed? What was wrong with me?

I didn’t know. Now thatI was convinced that the painter of signs with the one-track vocabulary was some minion of James’s, everyone had relaxed. The level of tension in the building had gone down. I was sleeping better. I had just weathered a relapse and I still had Jason, though how he would react when he woke I couldn’t guess. I knew what he would say, if he could speak. It would be some variant on ‘just let me die’.

But we still had a mission, Daniel and I. Who was killing the junkies? I didn’t have the faintest idea. The only pattern I had been able to find had been the missed days, which argued that the killer either wasn’t allowed out every night or had a job which kept him away from his victims. There must be hundreds of people in that position.

‘We have to find out who’s killing the children,’ I told Daniel. Trout pool eyes looked into mine, infinitely sad.

‘That’s what I have been trying to do,’ he said. ‘Come and hug me. I need a hug, Corinna.’

I supplied the hug. His voice rose from somewhere under my collarbone. He was pillowing his face on my breast with as much familiarity as if he had been nursed there. It felt very good. So good that I missed the first couple of sentences in the glow.

‘… and then I went to the John Smith family. It was a little risky because they don’t approve of me, though they do approve of the Soup Run. So I took a bodyguard.’

‘Who? Ma’ani? He ought to have been proof against anything but a direct hit with a nuclear missile.’

‘Worse. I took Sister Mary.’ He chuckled.

‘Did you tell her who she was going to see?’ I remonstrated.

‘Oh yes, she knows them. All the Smiths are Catholics. She stings them for huge sums every Easter. And you know Sister Mary. No nonsense. She just said, “If you are doing this then God have mercy on you, John Smith, for I won’t have any at all,” and he crumpled up immediately. This from a woman who barely clears the height of a parking meter to a man who had three men chainsawed in half and buried in concrete for not speaking respectfully enough of his wife. That sort of thing stays with you,’ said Daniel.

‘But John Smith swore up, down and sideways that it wasn’t him or any of his relatives, and asked who would waste good heroin killing junkies when you could just knock them on the head? Which I have to admit is unanswerable. Then Sister Mary admonished him to mend his wicked ways—some hope—and we left. The heir apparent, Cain, told me that the
family was getting out of drugs anyway, and into abalone smuggling. Apparently there’s more money in it.’

‘It’s a strange world,’ I commented, stroking his forehead.

‘I’ve covered every dealer, every junkie, every source I could think of,’ he said flatly. ‘I have it on good authority that it isn’t a Triad revenge kick. They are due to be arrested today. I talked to some bikies I know about someone trying to do a Murder Inc and they laughed a lot and didn’t hit me, which is bikie for “good joke, mate”. No one knows a thing. Two of the dead kids were friends of Jason’s, when he was Jase. He’s my last hope.’

‘And he isn’t in any state to answer questions,’ I said. ‘So let’s just have a nap, and we’ll think of something when we wake up.’

And I did. When I had disentangled myself from Daniel, dislodging Horatio, I did think that maybe Jason might feel like telling us about his dead friends in exchange for a reasonable hangover cure. Meroe made one and I had a packet of the herbs somewhere. They worked too. I had mentioned the merchandising opportunities in a land where a lot of people drank unwisely and too well, but she had sniffed. Some of those herbs were rare. Some of them had yet to be cultivated. Start selling a sure-fire hangover remedy and the plants would be highly priced, packaged mulch in moments and so would the surrounding landscape.

I had to agree with her. Anyway, before it went on general release, something would have to be done about the smell. It had an odd, metallic odour a bit like lemon juice boiled in a brass pot. Getting it down Jason might be the hardest part of the interview. I made the tea, added a dollop of honey, collected the litre of lightly sugared water which went with the cure, and Daniel and I descended to the depths.

A crapulous human wreck was vomiting noisily in the bathroom. When he crawled out he was, I swear, green in the face. He saw us, dived back and threw up again.

‘Not used to alcohol,’ said Daniel judiciously. ‘Notice the slightly amazed look under all that crippling pain and nausea. He didn’t know what being drunk does to the body. Apart from the constipation, heroin is a clean drug.’

This came under the heading of things I didn’t need to know.

‘Get those clothes off him and into the washer,’ I ordered. ‘He can have James’s old gown until he stops throwing up.’

‘And why me?’

‘Because you’re male,’ I told him.

Daniel muttered something about ‘nice of you to notice’ and went off to minister to the fallen. When he brought Jason back he had been forcibly rinsed and dressed in the old gown. He said his first sentence.

‘I’m going to die, aren’t I?’ he asked pathetically.

‘No, you only wish that you could,’ I told him. ‘Now you are going to talk to us and we are going to cure your hangover.’

‘Why?’ He squinted up at me. ‘You’re just going to sack me. I stuffed up. I always stuff up. I’m stupid. I’m useless. Don’t bother with me.’

I was in no mood for a dose of adolescent self-pity. ‘Yes, you stuffed up. Everyone does, sometimes. I am not going to sack you. But if you do it again, I may. You owe me twenty for the brandy.’

‘I’ll work if off,’ he said, with as much dawning of hope as could be expected under the circumstances. ‘Thanks. I was going good. Then she said …’

‘I know what she said. And what makes the opinion of a jealous eighteen year old airhead more important than mine?’

Jason had not thought of this before. He thought of it now with his few remaining brain cells. Then he said, ‘Oh.’

‘And you will scrub the toffee saucepan. Clean. Now, Daniel has a question and I want you to answer it.’

Jason nodded and instantly winced.

‘What did you and those others do that made Big John knock out your tooth?’ asked Daniel, in a clear voice calculated to pierce an alcoholic fog. Jason had lost all his defences. He just answered.

‘He thought that Vic stole some drugs. Early in the morning, in King Street. From a car.’

‘And did Vic do that?’

‘I dunno. I suppose. But then he died and Will died and I dunno anymore. I hid away and detoxed. I didn’t see them again.’

‘Are you being straight with me, Jason?’ asked Daniel severely.

‘True’s death,’ said Jason. He accepted the cup of hangover cure. ‘What’s this stuff? It smells like cat’s piss.’

‘Yes, and it probably tastes like it, but it will make you feel better, trust me. Have a few sips and then some of this water and then a few sips more and I promise, in half an hour you won’t feel like dying anymore,’ I told him.

‘Where’d it come from?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘Meroe.’

This satisfied his thirst for knowledge and he sipped immediately. Then he sipped some water. Then he sipped more tea. This was going to go on for some time.

‘The John Smiths didn’t get their drugs back, then,’ said Daniel, ‘if they had to attack Heckle and Corinna. Now they don’t think that you have them. Who does have them?’

Jason shrugged. ‘Who says that they haven’t been used up by now?’ he asked. ‘This stuff doesn’t taste so bad now. Can I have some more?’

I supplied more herbal tea. Jason was looking better. Some of his assurance was returning. He had stuffed up as he always did. He had betrayed my trust and expected to be thrown out. I was punishing him for his misjudgment and letting him stay. Obviously this had never happened before. I had, with any luck, begun to break the pattern. An overdose of brandy was a good deal easier to tolerate than an overdose of heroin. Not that I wanted him to make a habit of it. But I do suspect that you get more chances to get off alcohol. Not that it won’t wreck your liver and break your family’s heart and finally rob you of everything you own, starting with self respect. It just seems to take longer.