Mystery Man (12 page)

'Alison, please. You can't just . . .'

Her third strike went through. Her boot was next door while the rest of her was still in my roof space. 'I believe I just did,' she said, and then held a hand out to me to stop herself from falling back.

I took it. 'This is
insane
,' I said.

'Well you're the expert,' she said.

There wasn't time to think about
that
then – though it had the potential to keep me awake for days – because she immediately used me as leverage to pull her boot back through before renewing her assault on the wall. She rained half a dozen further kicks against it until she'd created a hole large enough for her to squeeze through.

And me. If I chose to.

'Are you coming or not?' she asked from the other side. I could already see the beam of her flashlight criss-crossing my neighbour's roof space.

'No,' I said. 'It's illegal. It's . . .
wrong
.'

'It's an adventure.'

'
Please,
Alison . . .'

'Oh come on . . . it's just some harmless fun . . .'

'I really don't think it's—'

'OH JESUS CHRIST!'

Her cry was sharp and piercing.

'ALISON!' I threw myself through the gap into the dark interior. No flashlight. No sound. 'ALISON!'

The torch flicked on, under her chin, illuminating her smiling face. 'I thought I saw a spider,' she said. 'Still, while you're here . . .'

She angled the beam to the floor and began to search for the ceiling panel that would allow her,
us,
access to the office below.

There is a thin line between love and hate.

Very thin.

Alison led the way down bare, creaky stairs, my heart in my mouth, dust mites conspiring to ignite my allergies. Running a bookshop I fight a constant battle to stop the place smelling musty; unsold books can do that. Even after six months, Malcolm Carlyle's offices smelled fresh. If I ever met him again I'd ask him his secret.

Before I could stop her Alison flicked on a light switch as we entered the front office. Surprisingly the power was still on. There was a desk and a switchboard, although I'd never seen a receptionist. I think it was all just for show. He was strictly a one-man operation, although if he'd asked he could have borrowed my idiot. There was a set of filing cabinets behind the desk that lay open; files spilled out of the drawers; many were scattered across the floor. As I crouched down to examine them, Alison moved across to check out the main office.

I was looking for the
Ts
– Daniel Trevor or Rosemary – but they were all jumbled up. I did find the Geary file, but I'd already solved that one. From somewhere behind, Alison again said, 'Jesus Christ.'

'I suffer from arachnophobia,' I said. 'You'll have to sort it out yourself.'

She repeated, 'Jesus Christ,' a little louder.

'Alison, I'm not falling for—'

'Jesus Christ!'

Something about it made it sound as if she wasn't swearing, but literally appealing for help and guidance. As I glanced round I saw that she had reversed out of Carlyle's office to the point where she was now steadying herself against the door jamb.

'Alison?'

She stared back into the office.

There was still a fair chance that she was attempting to stitch me up again, so I just smiled and stood and carried several of the files across to her, determined not to be sucked in, but also curious. 'If we're going to go through all of these we'd be better taking them back to my place rather than—'

Then I saw what she saw.

Malcolm Carlyle was sitting in a leather swivel chair, the flesh rotted off him, and hung with hundreds of Pine Fresh air freshener trees.

'Jesus Christ,' I had to agree.

No Alibis was warm and welcoming and all laid out for a party for two, but neither of us felt much like dips. We were both shaking with adrenaline and fear and disgust. Ever the trouper, Alison opened the wine.

'What the hell, what the hell,' I was saying, 'what the hell, what the hell, what the hell . . .'

'Please,' Alison pleaded, 'stop pacing, you're making me seasick.'

'Shouldn't have gone in, shouldn't have gone in, shouldn't have gone in . . .'

'Listen to me – he might just have had a heart attack after closing up for the night.'

I stopped. 'Yes, and Rosemary is off on holidays and Manfredd is careless around big speeding trains! God!' I started again. 'Shouldn't have gone in, shouldn't have gone in, shouldn't have gone in . . .'

'Look . . . look, you're right, but it's done now . . . what difference does it really make . . . we found his body, maybe we'll get a pat on the back.'

'No! They were all murdered! The only pat on the back we'll get will be with a huge fucking pickaxe! Shouldn't have gone in, shouldn't have gone in, shouldn't—'

'Please! Just settle down!'

I glared at her. It was all her fault. There was a wall between our two stores for
a reason.
It was
private
property.

She put her hands together, as if in prayer. 'Okay, he was
probably
murdered. But that was six months ago! Nobody knows we've been in there, can't we just close up the hole in the roof space and forget about it?'

'Forget about it? Don't you know
anything
?' I didn't really care that she looked hurt. She had put me in this
position.
I was implicated. I was a suspect. I was an accessory. 'I shouldn't have listened to you, I shouldn't have listened to you . . .' I stopped. I tried to control my breathing the way they'd taught me. 'We're screwed, we're really screwed . . . every way you look at it we're screwed . . .'

'I don't see how . . .'

'Then listen, you halfwit . . . ! Sorry . . . sorry . . . it's just . . . just because nobody's found the body yet, when they do,
when they do,
the police, the
police
will seal the place off and their forensic people will go in and they'll find
our
DNA, our fingerprints,
we
will be accused of killing him!'

'We could go back in and wipe it up and—'

'No, you moron, it doesn't work like that! And we may not even survive long enough for them to find the body anyway. Don't you see? Everything I thought in the first place is right! There's a murderer out there, and he's killing everyone who knows about the book, he's killed Rosemary and then Malcolm and now Manfredd and it's like he's ticking them off and it's only a matter of time before he comes looking for Daniel and me.
Me!
'

'So I'm okay?'

'No! As soon as we're arrested for next door, he'll find out about you, and he'll just add your name until there's no one left. We're all up shit creek!'

She nodded to herself. 'Or.'

'
Or?
'

'Or because I've only just met you, and have nothing to do with your crime-fighting, and nobody but you knows that I even know about it, and because Malcolm Carlyle had customers in there all the time, so that's how my DNA got in there, you could just stand up like a man and take all the blame if the police come calling, that way I won't be involved in discovering the body and I won't be on the killer's hit list. What do you say?'

'
Fuck
off! You got me into this, it's your fault, I didn't want . . .'

But she was holding up her hands. And bloody
laughing.
'I'm only joking.'

'This isn't a time for jokes!'

'I know . . . I know . . . but
of course
I'm in this with you. And we'll work it out. Honestly.'

'
How?
'

'I don't know . . . but we will. We'll solve it. We really will.'

And then she came forward and gave me a hug.

And it was quite one of the most wonderful things that has ever happened to me, so I forgot for the moment that I hated her and that I was in imminent danger of being murdered, and luxuriated in her embrace, because it couldn't last for ever, and didn't.

She let me go, shook her head and said: 'Fucking pine trees. Piece of genius or what?'

I was trying to work it out in my head, while Alison quickly got drunk.

I rarely drink. It reacts with the medication. For this, I needed to be in control of all my remaining faculties, because now I knew that at any moment of any day from here on in the killer might strike. I had no idea if the Odessa still existed – I mean, it wasn't as if it had a website – but even if it did, Malcolm Carlyle's death seemed like the work of just one man, probably a German. Rosemary was killed in Germany, so was Manfredd, and Malcolm had gone there to investigate Rosemary's disappearance. He had surely then been followed back to Belfast and killed in his own office. The fact that the killer had left the body
in situ
suggested that he wasn't confident enough to try to dispose of it in an unfamiliar city and/or that he didn't have the physical strength to lift it himself. Malcolm Carlyle wasn't a huge man, but a dead weight is, literally, a dead weight, and extremely hard work. I know this because I'd dragged my father's body from the bathroom where he collapsed and died to the bedroom where I laid him out. He had been delirious, and weak as a kitten, but it says much about the moral core of the man that he had forced himself up and into the bathroom to use the toilet so that he wouldn't soil the bed. His last words to me, as I hovered near the door, were, 'Tumbling into the darkness.' He could see death coming. My mum's last words to me were, 'Comb your hair.' She wasn't dead, we just weren't speaking. But Dad wasn't a big man either, yet so heavy in death that I staggered under the weight of him. I fell and his corpse fell on me, and I had to crawl out from beneath him and start again. Unless Malcolm Carlyle's killer was some kind of weightlifting champion, he would have struggled to dispose of the body.

Alison was pouring another glass of white. She paused when it was half full, a thought suddenly striking her. She put the bottle down and turned: 'You're wrong,' she said. 'It's not just you and Daniel and possibly me on the list – who are you forgetting?'

'Jeff?' I suggested hopefully.

'No – Anne Mayerova.'

'Bloody hell.
Of course
.' She was the source of it all. And if he got to her then he'd have the main witness to whatever it was that was annoying him. I took a deep breath. 'That's it,' I said. 'This can't go on.'

I lifted the phone and began to punch in the numbers. There were only the three of them.

'What're you doing?' Alison demanded, crossing from the trestle table to the desk.

'What do you think? I'm calling the police.'

She reached out and cut the line. 'No.'

'What do you mean,
no
? It's my case, it's my life, it's my shop and it's my phone.'

I punched the numbers in again.

The operator said: 'Which service, please?'

Alison shook her head. I covered the mouthpiece and said: 'I
have
to. I do itty-bitty cases. There's a corpse next door and a killer on the loose. I don't deal in lead, I deal in paper.'

'We can do this.'

'We will
die
.'

'
Which service, please?
'

'Not
yet
,' Alison said firmly. 'It's going to be hard enough explaining about Malcolm Carlyle. If we start into the whole German, dancing Jews, Auschwitz thing they're going to think we're mental, and even if they don't they're going to take their time checking it all out, and meanwhile the killer's going to be free to find old Mrs Mayerova. We have to get to her first, we have to warn her, after that, okay, call the cops in then. But at least let's give her a chance.'

I looked at her, with her big lovely eyes, pleading, and I looked at the phone.

'
Which ser
—'

'Oh fucking buggery,' I said, and cut the line.

There was no right way to do things, of course. My gut instinct, based on my father's regular beatings, designed to instil in me the sanctity of the law and God as the ultimate arbiter of justice, was to go to the police and confess all. But our story had the whiff of fantasy about it already, and I'd read enough fiction to know for a fact that once they gained access to my medical records it would be as good as making a signed confession. Nor would it help if they searched No Alibis, as they surely would, and discovered my nail for the scratching of cars with personalised number plates. Getting rid of it wasn't an option. It was precious to me. There was also the fact that the forces of law and order had nothing to do in Belfast these days, which made it difficult for officers seeking promotion to stand out. They would be falling all over themselves to secure a conviction for
anything
and
quickly.
It wouldn't even be good cop, bad cop, it would be bad cop, bad cop, and they would twist everything we said until we somehow implicated each other.

So really we had no choice, although I did think briefly that one possible solution would be to finger Jeff for the murder next door. I could quite easily take a book impregnated with his DNA and fingerprints and place it in the dead fingers of Malcolm Carlyle. It would be a just and fair reward for his attempts to steal my girl.

'What?' Alison asked.

'What
what
?'

'You mumbled something about
stealing my girl
.'

'No I didn't. Concentrate on the road.'

My girl,
who was driving at speeds way beyond what I felt were safe. I didn't know if she normally drove this quickly, but we were certainly
moving.
I would have driven in daylight, but with my poor night vision and my nerves it simply wasn't safe for me to take control. In some situations a drunk driver is better than a hesitant one. A drunk driver focuses and concentrates to prevent him- or herself from crashing. A hesitant driver prevaricates and ends up causing crashes. A drunk driver indicates half a mile before junctions, which is a big help to those following behind. A drunk driver never goes through lights on amber. Alison was breaking all of these rules. But I did not tell her this, of course: I just threw her the keys and told her I wanted to go through the files we'd stolen from Malclom Carlyle's office and which were now piled untidily in my lap and at my feet. We had decided that we had nothing more to lose by going back in and scooping up as many files as we could carry. I didn't look at the deceased again. There were doubtless things I might have deduced, but I didn't have the stomach for it. On our exit we stacked up boxes of books against the hole Alison had kicked in the dividing wall in a rather poor attempt to disguise our burglary.