Mystery Man (31 page)

Or had I? Maybe it was a conspiracy. What if he'd been sent in undercover to poison me? Why had he picked me out when there was any number of casualties he could have slipped his sucked nuts to? Max Mayerova had tracked me down to the hospital and come up with a devilishly fiendish method of killing me. Brian wasn't the assassin, it was an old man in a tartan dressing gown. He was Hyman Roth in
The Godfather: Part II
, on the surface a harmless old septuagenarian, in reality a ruthless Mafia boss.

I rested my head against the cubicle wall. I was sweating profusely. It was impossible to tell if it was just the aftermath of the throwing up or the poison at work. I might have twenty minutes left to me to pass on what I knew about the case, or the rest of my life.

What if, even as I sat there, Hyman was in Alison's cubicle, smothering her with a pillow?

I staggered out of the toilet and back out into the waiting room.

There was no sign of Hyman.

Panicked, I hurried back to Alison – and was relieved to find her sleeping peacefully. I collapsed back down into the chair by her bed. I studied her. She had rocked my world in a most unexpected manner. I thought about how things might have turned out if I hadn't had the support of my psycho taxi driver, if it really had been a killer instead of her ex-husband, if he had managed to lose me outside of No Alibis and her reckless attempt to prove her worth as a private detective had led her nowhere but a cold, hard mortuary slab.

There had been a lot of murders, but I had been quite detached from them. This attempt on Alison was different. This time it was personal. Just because she was still alive did not mean the end of it; there would be another attempt, and another, until everyone involved in
The Case of the Dancing Jews
was eliminated. If nothing was done, things would continue to
escalate.
I had already proved that the pen, the
keyboard
in fact, was mightier than the sword by cracking the case, but just because I knew, it didn't mean the guilty were going to throw up their hands in surrender; the information had to be passed on, and considered, and judged, and they had to be brought to justice. In the meantime, unless I came up with some means of transforming myself into a ninja in a few short hours, we were sitting ducks.

I needed help.

I needed to overcome a lifetime of mistrust and invest in someone with the power to make things happen.

I returned to the waiting room and crossed to the payphone. I punched in the numbers. I remember most numbers I have ever used. It was answered on the third ring.

I said, 'I'd like to speak to DI Robinson.'

'One moment, please.'

As I waited for much longer than
one moment
my eyes roved across the rows of chairs containing the fractured, the walking wounded, the dangerously drunk and the badly beaten survivors of a typical Belfast night, before coming to rest on a figure standing leaning against a pillar with his arms folded, watching me intently.

'DI Robinson,' I spluttered, 'how the bloody hell did you manage that?'

He said I was a stupid, stupid man and I had no idea what I was dealing with, and I countered that I wasn't a stupid, stupid man and I had a very good idea of what I was dealing with, I just wasn't equipped
to
deal with it and anyway there was a reasonable chance that he was up to his neck in it and his concern was a façade and a smokescreen and he'd actually been sent here by Max Mayerova or his dad or his brother to finish me off, and he said: 'What the fuck are you talking about?'

And I gave him a look that said,
You know.

And he gave me a look that said,
What the fuck are you talking about?

'I'm hauling your arse down to the station,' he growled.

'I'll never get there alive,' I said.

'What fucking planet are you on?' he asked.

'Similar planet to you,' I replied, 'but not as dirty.'

'Are you
on
something?'

I glared at him. Fact was I was
off
something. Everything. Once again I had missed my meds. I was sweating and itchy and the lights were too bright and I was being slowly poisoned by an old man's sucked nuts and might expire at any time and then Alison would be defenceless. I
had
to tell him, I
had
to trust him, there was nobody else to turn to. But I still . . . couldn't . . . quite.

'How did you even know I was here?'

'Because a doctor reported you for administering Rohypnol to a helpless young woman, enough to near as dammit kill her, and your name cross-referenced with my investigation and so I was called from my nice warm bed.'

'And here you are, all alone,' I sneered. 'How come you always travel in ones?'

'Cutbacks.'

I raised an eyebrow. He just kept looking at me. The stroke victim came wandering back in and sat in his usual chair. DI Robinson moved closer to me and lowered his voice. 'Because everyone else told me to let it go, there's no connection between any of these deaths, we have bigger fish to fry. But I know there is. So it's kind of my hobby.'

'Like collecting crime fiction.'

'So you sussed me out.
Whoopy-woo
.'

We glared. First ten seconds I can handle anyone, after that I'm like putty.

'I didn't murder anyone,' I said.

'Did I say you did?'

'You're implying.'

'Am I?
Did
you murder someone?'

'No.'

'Did you slip your girl roofies?'

'No, sir, I did not. But someone did.'

'And you know who it was?'

I nodded. 'Do you?'

'Would I be standing here if I did? Listen, beam back down to us, son, and we might be able to get this sorted out.'

It really was time to choose. It really was time to trust.

'Okay,' I said. 'But on my terms.'

He rolled his eyes. 'Why the hell should I care about your terms?'

I folded my arms and looked at him. After a while, and without further progress, I said, 'Okay. But do one thing for me. Then I'll tell you all about
The Case of the Dancing Jews
.'

'The . . .'

'Get some of your uniformed chums down here to stand guard over Alison.'

If I was about to take a long walk off a short pier I wanted there to be a record of it, some paper trail that said he was here and he was involved.

He thought about that for several moments before nodding. 'This,' he said, raising his mobile phone, 'had better be worth it.'

'It will,' I promised. I nodded towards the curtained-off cubicles. 'I'm going to say goodbye to her.'

DI Robinson sat down two empty chairs up from the stroke victim while he waited for a response on his phone. 'Don't be long,' he called after me.

'I won't.' I nodded back at his new neighbour. 'And watch out for the nuts.'

'I always do,' he replied.

I was once encouraged to attend a salsa class by Mother. She thought it would help me to experience social interaction with people who were not obsessed with 1940s pulp fiction or serial killers. But people who suffer from irritable bowel syndrome should not attend salsa classes.

When I come to power, all forms of dancing will be banned, especially salsa.

Naturally I shot down Alison's suggestion that we have some kind of dance performance at the launch of Anne Smith's
I Came to Dance
with the ruthless efficiency of a Jap on a whale cull. She argued that it would help to lull our targets into a false sense of security; I argued that much the same could be achieved by a few bottles of Concorde and a sausage roll. I won that particular argument because it was my shop and my rules. If any kind of inspirational performance was going to take place in No Alibis, then it was going to come from me. God knows I spent long enough setting it up, and learning my lines, and joining the dots, and rehearsing it all.

It was the day of reckoning.

Or, in fact, the evening of reckoning.

The evening of closure, and justice.

To get there, there was a bit of bargaining involved. When a squad of uniformed cops arrived at the Ulster Hospital to guard my loved one, when Brian came through surgery with flying colours, when I realised that for all his solo investigations DI Robinson knew virtually nothing, when I understood that he had never had the faintest notion of trying to frame me for any of the murders, I knew that the ball was very much in my court. I could have volunteered everything I had discovered during the course of
The Case of the Dancing Jews
at any point during the eight hours he kept me in a cold police cell without access to a lawyer or Twix, I could have given it to him all at once or drip-fed it one sentence at a time. But I held out. Of course it was vital that the bad guys be brought to justice, but it was also important that the glory wasn't stolen away from me. I wasn't in it for the glory, but if there was some glory to be distributed then I was bloody sure I was going to get the lion's share of it, having done the leg work, having suffered the outrageous slings and arrows of being pursued by Nazis, and having worked my fingers to the bone tracking down the truth over the information superhighway. DI Robinson had done nothing but look a bit furtive from time to time.

Also, I had a girl to impress.

DI Robinson got really quite angry at my decision to withhold my evidence until the night of the book launch. The longer I held on to it, the more difficult it would be to mount a successful prosecution, the more likely it was that DNA evidence relating to the murders would degrade, the more opportunity there was for those involved to flee the country or concoct an alibi. But I wasn't for shifting.

Agatha's many thousands of novels may be considered to be ridiculously old-fashioned, but the dame certainly knew how to wind up a plot. These days it's all SWAT teams and torture porn. Back then all she had to do was get all the protagonists into one room, present the facts, and then sit back and wait for the fallout. I saw no reason why, with proper undercover police protection, I should not reveal my findings in a similar fashion. Of course times have moved on, and too much talk can be confusing or put you to sleep, so I decided to present my revelations by way of a PowerPoint demonstration.

DI Robinson, my lovely Alison, and Jeff were 'in' on the fact that something was going to happen, but I was the only one who actually knew the details. Alison besieged me for information, but after the trauma of trying to tell her about my triumphs in the hospital I decided that once bitten, etc. and to keep it to myself until the big reveal. DI Robinson demanded it, but he was in no position to apply pressure. Jeff didn't seem to care one way or another. I loaded the images on to my laptop and rehearsed the presentation alone, projecting it after hours on to the bare back wall of No Alibis, with me safe in my panic room and also secure in the knowledge that there were uniformed cops on duty outside. I had twenty-four-hour protection. I was important. Alison also had protection, but not as much. DI Robinson even offered to extend it to my mother, because if the bad guys sensed that something was up, they might try to get to me through her. They might kidnap her and send her fingers through the post to me one at a time as a warning. I told DI Robinson not to bother investigating until they got as far as her thumbs. You need your thumbs. They are one reason cats can't make omelettes. Besides, Mother was well capable of looking after herself.

Thankfully Alison showed no ill effects from her experience with Max Mayerova. Incredibly, he sent her a bouquet of flowers and a note saying he hoped she'd recovered from her food poisoning, and he felt terrible about taking her to such a dreadful restaurant, and he hoped she would give him a second chance and soon. He had
no idea.
The fact that he sent them to the jewellery store, on the very day she finally returned to work, showed that he was still watching and waiting. It sent a little chill down both our spines. Alison brought the flowers across to show me and I immediately raged at her about the possibility of them being sprayed with deadly poison. She said, 'But Interflora delivered them,' and I said, '
Exactly
.'

I was still giving her something of a cold shoulder. I was absolutely and totally in love with her, but she had to
learn
that my emotions were not to be toyed with. She had betrayed me by going behind my back with Brian and Max, and it would take a lot of effort on her part to regain my trust. She certainly worked at it, mostly by throwing herself into the organisation of the launch party for
I Came to Dance.
I was glad of her help, for I have had very little experience of parties, having never had one as a child or been invited to more than a handful as an adult. My knowledge of choosing cakes, or chairs, or drinks, or canapés was negligible, and my knowledge of book launches even smaller. One of the many benefits of Northern Irish terrorism is that for more than thirty years there was an almost total lack of locally produced crime fiction. There was just too much distracting baggage to squeeze in. There was no such thing as an ordinary common or garden murder, it always had to do with this organisation or that, or one religion or another. There was never a simple
body in the library,
there were multiple body parts of multiple people blasted all over footpaths and the sides of buildings. There was just something about the sheer horror of it all that turned writers away from even attempting to chronicle it within the confines of the mystery fiction genre. There was also a very definite lack of interest from readers: if you walked out of your front door in the morning and there was a British soldier crouched with his rifle in your front garden, the last thing you wanted to do was read a crime novel in which a British soldier was crouched with his rifle in your hero's front garden. If people wanted to read crime fiction they generally wanted to escape to somewhere exotic, and that meant American authors, and when they found they had exhausted the so-called big names in the Main Street stores, they would go searching for alternative sources and eventually come across the nirvana of No Alibis. So the Troubles were actually great news for me, and I mourned their passing, because business was never as good again. However, this total lack of local authors meant that I was virtually never asked to host book launch parties, and thus I had to rely on Alison's greater experience to pull it all together while making sure to offer her only the occasional scrap of encouragement.