Big Sky Page 22

  “I need to make a bit of a detour, if that’s okay, Vince,” Steve said. It wasn’t really a question, Vince noticed. “A bit of business I have to see to. It won’t take long.” Vince hoped not. The idea of lunch had perked him up. His insides felt hollow, as if they’d been scooped out with a sharp spoon, although that could be fear, he supposed. Despite being under suspicion of murder, he was surprised at how ravenously hungry he felt. Of course, he’d had nothing to eat since the toast in that bloke’s house last night. Vince was under such stress that he would have forgotten his name if the bloke hadn’t given him his card. Jackson Brodie—Brodie Investigations. “Call me,” he’d said, “if you need to talk.”

  They drove for quite a long time, through an increasingly decaying hinterland of run-down cafés, tattoo parlors, and lockups and garages that had, bizarrely, been transformed into funeral homes as if that were a natural evolution for them. He had a sudden, unexpected memory of his mother laid out in a dimly lit funeral parlor that had smelled of beeswax and something less pleasant—formaldehyde, perhaps, although he might have been recalling the preserved specimens in biology class at school.

  His mother had died of some unnamed cancer, something that had seemed shameful from the way it was discussed in low voices by her female friends and relatives. Vince was only fifteen and his mother had seemed old, but he realized that when she died she was considerably younger than he was now. She’d been a good cook, he could still conjure up the taste of her hot pot and her steamed sponge puddings. After she died, Vince and his father lived off steak pies from the butcher’s and boil-in-the-bag cod, a diet that intensified their sense of loss. “I miss your mother’s cooking,” his father said, but Vince supposed what he meant was that he missed the woman rather than her shepherd’s pie, although the two were inextricably mixed somehow, in the same way that Wendy was partially construed of bonsai and prosecco. What was Crystal Holroyd made of? he wondered. Sugar and spice and all things nice, probably. He imagined biting into her—a leg or an arm—and hearing the crisp snap of sugar. Jesus, Vince, get a grip, he thought. Was he going insane?

  Eventually they reached the outskirts of town, and they were almost into open countryside when Steve took a left and drove down a long, curving driveway, bordered with overgrown bushes and trees. Wendy would have been itching to take a trimmer to it, Vince thought. But then he remembered that she was beyond wanting anything, beyond all feelings in this life. Was she in the next one, he wondered, pruning and lopping away at the shrubbery? He hoped she wasn’t in hell, although it was hard to imagine her in heaven. Not that Vince believed in either, but it was impossible to think of Wendy being nowhere at all. He hoped that, for her sake, if she was in heaven, it was staffed by a lower order of angels who would wait on her hand and foot after a hard day in the bonsai fields. (I’m knackered, Vince, fetch me a glass of prosecco, will you?) At least his mother had beached comfortably in a Baptist-run funeral parlor, whereas Wendy was still on a cold slab somewhere like a haddock slowly going off.

  “Vince—you all right?”

  “Yeah, sorry—miles away. Thinking about Wendy.”

  “She was a good woman.”

  “You think?”

  Steve shrugged. “Seemed like it. I only met her a couple of times, of course. It can take a lifetime to get to know a person. Sophie still surprises me.” Vince thought of his cat. His Sophie, as opposed to Steve’s Sophie, used to bring Vince the gift of mice in her younger days as a hunter. They were tiny little velvety things that Sophie played with endlessly before biting their heads off. Was Vince a helpless mouse, being toyed with by Inspector Marriot? How long before she bit his head off?

  A large neglected building loomed into view as they rounded a corner of the driveway. A weathered sign announced Silver Birches—A Home Away from Home. It seemed to have once been an institution of some kind, a mental hospital or a nursing home, long since unfit for any purpose—it had obviously been closed for years. Vince couldn’t imagine what kind of business Steve could have here.

  “Stay in the car, Vince,” Steve said, leaping out athletically from the Discovery. “I’ll just be five minutes.”

  It was turning into a long five minutes, Vince thought, as he waited for Steve to return. He suddenly found himself beset by another memory. It seemed as if the past was being peeled open before his eyes today. When he was a boy, a friend of his father’s had an allotment and in the summer he used to give them vegetables he couldn’t use from his overabundant harvest—beetroot, runner beans, lettuces. Bob, that was his name. Uncle Bob. Vince’s father often drove over to Bob’s allotment in the evening in summer. They didn’t have a car, they had a van: Robert Ives—Plumber painted by a sign writer on the side. They were straightforward times, people didn’t feel it necessary to have clever names or slogans and taglines. (Strain the Drain he had seen on the side of a white van recently.)

  One evening when Vince was perhaps six or seven years old, his father had taken him along in the van to Bob’s allotment.

  “See if he’s got any potatoes!” his mother shouted after them as they pulled away from the curb.

  “You wait in the van,” his father said to Vince, parking at the entrance to the allotment. “I’ll just be five minutes.” And Vince was left alone while his father went off, whistling, to find Bob in his shed on the far side of the allotments.

  Late-summer twilight turned into dark. The allotments appeared to be deserted and Vince began to grow frightened. At that age he was easily scared by thoughts of ghosts and murderers and he was terrified of the dark. He sat there for what seemed like forever, imagining all the dreadful things that might have happened to his father—and, worse, all the dreadful things that might be about to happen to him. By the time his father reappeared, still whistling, Vince was a quivering tearful wreck.

  “What you crying for, you daftie?” his father said, his arms full with a huge lettuce and a bunch of sweet Williams as well as the requested potatoes. “Nothing to be frightened about. You could have come and found me.” Vince didn’t know that. Didn’t know he had free will or independence. He was like a dog—if he was told to stay, he stayed.

  Bob was an older man, no family, and in return for the vegetables he was often invited for Sunday lunch. There were caveats from his father. “Don’t sit on Uncle Bob’s knee if he asks you to.” It was true that Bob was always trying to cajole him into sitting on his knee (“C’mon, lad, give your old Uncle Bob a cuddle”), but obedient Vince never did. His mother liked Uncle Bob—he was a laugh, she said. “Him and his shed, it makes you wonder what he gets up to in there.”

  Vince hadn’t thought about Uncle Bob in years. He’d forgotten about the van altogether. Robert Ives—Plumber. He missed his father. Still, you shouldn’t leave a little child alone like that.

  The clock on the Discovery’s dashboard informed him that Steve had been gone nearly half an hour. This was ridiculous, Vince could have walked to the Belvedere by now instead of sitting here like a lemon, twiddling his thumbs.

  He had independence these days. He had free will. He didn’t always stay when he was told to stay. He got out of the Discovery. He left it unlocked and walked up the steps to Silver Birches. He went in.

  Two-Way Traffic

  Gdansk. Landed.

  About time too, Andy thought. The plane had taken off two hours behind schedule and had made up hardly any of that time. He had seen its status drift from scheduled to delayed to estimated to expected as if it was stuck in some endless time warp, a kind of cosmic holding pattern. By eight o’clock in the evening Andy himself was in a black hole, having drunk four espressos and read the Mail from cover to cover in minutiae. He had even been reduced to attempting the sudoku—at which he had failed miserably. It felt like days, not hours, since he had delivered the Thai girls to Silver Birches. One of them had struggled and Vasily had plucked her up and held her around her waist while she kicked and bucked in protest. She might as well have been a rag doll. Andy could st
ill see her contorted features as she screamed at him while she was carried away, “Mr. Andy! Mr. Andy, help me!” Jesus wept. But, hey, not Andy. Heart of stone. What if it cracked? Had it begun already? Little fault lines everywhere. Mr. Andy! Mr. Andy, help me!

  It felt as if he had done nothing but drive up and down the A1 all day on a tide of caffeine. His car must have dredged a channel in the road by now. Traveling salesmen spent less time in their cars than Andy did. He supposed that was what he was in many ways. A rep, peddling his wares around the country. No shortage of buyers, that was for sure.

  He thought again of those washing machines, the ones that had fallen from the Holroyd lorry. Casualties of the highway. There were only so many washing machines you could sell, but there was no limit on the trade in girls.

  Andy wondered whether Steve’s wife—holier-than-thou Sophie—knew about the trailer, her husband’s “other office.” “Stephen works all the hours God gives,” she said to Andy at a New Year’s drinks party. “Yeah, he’s a real workaholic,” Andy agreed. Wendy and Vince had been there too. Wendy had had too much to drink and Andy caught Sophie rolling her eyes at Steve. If only she knew where all their money came from she wouldn’t be quite so up herself. “He does it for me and the children, of course,” she said. “He’s selfless that way.” Yeah, right, Andy thought.

  It wasn’t about sex, none of them ever touched the goods—well, maybe Tommy occasionally—it was about money. All profit, no loss. For Andy it had always been just a job—enough money to live on and a comfortable retirement at the end of it all in Florida or Portugal, somewhere with a really good golf course. A house with a swimming pool for Rhoda to lounge around, wearing one of her big supportive swimming costumes, drinking a piña colada. A little paper umbrella. There was something about a little paper umbrella that signaled the good life. He didn’t suppose Lottie would share that view.

  He had enough put away for this good life, so why carry on? Where was the boundary? Where did it stop? He had crossed so many dodgy frontiers by now that he supposed there could be no going back. He’d gone over the top and he was stuck in no-man’s-land. (“Christ, Andy,” Steve said. “When did you begin to think? It doesn’t suit you.”) It had become like one of Carmody’s carousels, one that you couldn’t get off. “Well, you know what the song says,” Tommy said. “You can check out but you can’t leave.”

  Steve had tried to bring in a fourth musketeer. Vince Ives. More Dogtanian than d’Artagnan. Vince and Steve went all the way back to school and Steve thought Vince might be “useful,” he’d been in the Army, apparently, and knew a lot about IT, but neither of those things was of any use to them, both Steve and Andy were pretty skilled at all the internet stuff.

  Steve seemed to think that he owed Vince because decades ago he had pulled him out of a canal. (If he’d just left Steve to drown, like an unwanted cat, they wouldn’t be in this trade. So really if anyone was to be held responsible for what they were doing, it was Vince.) It was immediately obvious that Vince wasn’t the kind of bloke who would have the stomach for the kind of business they were in. The fourth musketeer turned out to be a fifth wheel and they decided to keep him in the dark, although he still tagged along with them on the golf course and at parties. In the end Vince had proved to be more of a liability than an asset, especially now with Wendy’s murder attracting police like flies on horseshit. And he couldn’t even put in a decent round of golf.

  Andy sighed and drained his coffee. Left a good tip, even though he’d had no service to speak of. He made his way to Arrivals. Their names were on the iPad already, he fired it up and adjusted his face. Mr. Congeniality. The doors to Arrivals opened and he lifted up the iPad so they wouldn’t miss it.

  They were a pair of pretty blondes, Polish, genuine sisters ensnared by Steve. Nadja and Katja. They spotted him straightaway. Massive suitcases—no big surprise. They marched confidently toward him. They looked almost alarmingly strong and healthy and for a second he thought they were going to attack him, but then the taller one said, “Hello, Mr. Price?”

  “Nah, I’m Mr. Price’s representative.” Like the Pope was God’s representative on earth, he thought. “Call me Andy, love. Welcome to the UK.”

  A Panda Walks into a Bar

  “And I said to her, I’m only looking for your inner woman, love!” Barclay Jack was in full flow on the stage.

  “Christ, he’s disgusting,” Ronnie said. Reggie and Ronnie were standing at the back of the stalls, waiting for the matinée to finish.

  “Yeah,” Reggie agreed. “The guy’s a Neanderthal. Sadly, they all seem to love him. The women particularly. That’s the depressing part.” Reggie sometimes wondered if a day would ever go by when she wasn’t disappointed in people. She supposed that would be utopia, and utopias, like revolutions, never worked. (“Not yet,” Dr. Hunter said.) Perhaps there was somewhere far away from here where it was different. New Zealand, perhaps. (Why don’t you come, Reggie? Come for a visit. You might even think about getting a job here. It would be nice to live near Dr. Hunter, to watch her son Gabriel growing up.) Upholding justice was a righteous act, but you may as well be Canute trying to stop the tide coming in. (Was that a historical fact? It seemed unlikely.)

  “What do a road and a woman have in common?” Barclay hollered. “You in the front row,” he said, gesturing at a woman in a red top. “Yes, I’m talking to you, love. You’d better close your legs or you’ll get a through draft.”

  “I can see children in the audience,” Reggie said. She sighed. “How much longer has this got to go?”

  “Not long, I think,” Ronnie said. “Ten minutes or so.”

  Although he had been flagged during the original inquiry, Barclay Jack had been discounted at the time. Bassani’s and Carmody’s positions in the community had meant that they had rubbed shoulders with a lot of entertainers over the years—Ken Dodd, Max Bygraves, the Chuckle Brothers—none of whom had come under any kind of suspicion. Carmody used to throw a big summer-season party and invite all the stars who were in town. It was a lavish affair, there was some cine film of one of the parties that Ronnie and Reggie had watched. Bassani’s home movies, apparently—the pair of them judging a Bonny Baby competition and some kind of beauty pageant with the women in one-piece bathing suits. Everyone laughing. Barclay Jack was in one shot at the summer party, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, leering at the camera. He was just one more person (“Man,” Ronnie amended, “one more man”) who had been mentioned in the endlessly bifurcating fractal that was Operation Villette. Another piece in the jigsaw, another brick in the wall.

  “Gender fluid, that’s what I call it!” Barclay Jack shouted another punch line to the gods. Reggie had tuned out some time ago.

  “You’ve got to laugh,” Ronnie deadpanned.

  Of course, there had been rumors about him down the years, even, once, a raid on his home—despite his noisy embrace of all things northern, Barclay Jack actually lived on the South Coast. He had ceased to be successful a long time ago, and yet here he was, larger than life, rouged and primped and prancing around on the stage telling jokes that should have made any self-respecting woman—or indeed a person of either gender or any in between—squeamish with the incorrectness of it all. That was his attraction, of course, he got to say things people usually only thought, although now that there was the internet, a web of hatred and vitriol, you might have thought that comedians like Barclay Jack would have lost their appeal.

  “We could probably arrest him on several counts right now,” Reggie mused.

  “Not worth the calories,” Ronnie said.

  “Because they both have manholes!” Barclay Jack bawled. “Anyone in the audience from Scunthorpe?” he continued relentlessly. A man somewhere in the circle responded in a belligerent manner and Barclay Jack said, “So you’re the one that put the cunt in Scunthorpe, are you?” There was a moment’s delay while the audience processed the joke and then the whole place screamed with delight.

  �
��‘Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it,’” Reggie murmured.

  “Eh?” Ronnie said.

  It’s nothing to be alarmed by, Mr. Jack,” Reggie said. The three of them were crammed into Barclay Jack’s small dressing room. The place was a tip. There was the scent of something fetid in the air. Reggie suspected that it might be the chewed-up remains of a burger that was nestling among the spillage on his dressing table, or perhaps it was Barclay Jack himself, decaying from the inside out. He certainly didn’t look the picture of health.

  Reggie caught sight of herself in the vanity mirror that was framed by Hollywood-style lightbulbs. She looked small and wan, although no more so than usual. “Peely-wally,” her mother would have said in her native dialect. No wonder her handsome ex-boyfriend’s family had looked aghast at her when he brought her home to meet them.

  She gave herself a mental shake and continued, “We’re conducting an investigation into a historic case, Mr. Jack, and this is just a routine interview. We’re looking into several individuals and would like to ask you a few questions, if that’s all right? We’re trying to build a picture, fill in some background details. A bit like doing a jigsaw. I’d like to start by asking you if you know someone called—are you all right, Mr. Jack? Do you want to sit down? Would you like a glass of water? Mr. Jack?”

  How do you handle a dangerous cheese?”