Authors: Colin Bateman
I
said, 'You're up to your neck in this, Liam, but it may not be too late. If
there's anything you want to tell us, you know where to call.'
'I
haven't, and I won't.'
'Your
funeral,' I said.
As we
walked to the car, Alison said, 'You hear that?'
'I
heard that. What did you hear?'
'He
didn't deny that Arabella was dead.'
'That's
what I heard too.'
'Quick
thinking, slipping her in like that.'
'That's
what I do.'
'But we're
out in the open now, we've announced ourselves. If there was any doubt before,
there's none now: we're in this and there's no going back.'
'No
going back,' I agreed. 'Sometimes you've just gotta stand up and be counted.'
Alison
had her keys out, but stopped at the driver's door without opening it. She
looked across the canvas roof at me.
'You
gave him
my
business card, didn't you?'
'Absolutely,'
I said.
There
was a limit to how much flexitime Alison could take from her jeweller's. It was
spring, and the minds of young lovers were turning to engagement rings, so
demand was high, which meant all hands on deck. I walked her back to her shop.
At the door, she avoided what must have been an overwhelming temptation to kiss
me. Instead she said, 'Be careful,' and I said I was always careful, and she
said she didn't mean with money, and I said oh.
I
opened up No Alibis and took up my position behind the counter. I checked my
e-mail. None of my customers had anything of value to tell me, but plenty of
guff about their personal lives. I took advantage of the quiet to sit on my
stool and read. I had moved on to Joseph Wambaugh's satirical take on the LAPD,
The Choirboys.
It seemed at one point in the 1970s that Wambaugh might
become a major voice in crime fiction. The book was a popular success at the
time, and it undoubtedly has its moments, but on the whole it has not aged
well. It is a poor man's
MASH
without the saving grace of having been
turned into a decent film, just an instantly forgettable one. Although he continues
to publish, Wambaugh has pretty much sunk without trace, and in so doing has
proved conclusively that there is no sustainable market for crime fiction with
a sense of humour.
I was
reading, but also thinking about Liam Benson and how frightened he had been,
and what our next move should be. I had suggested that Arabella was dead, and
he had not contradicted it. It would be a mistake to take that as one hundred
per cent proof that she was indeed dead - he might easily have misheard, or not
even heard at all, given how discombobulated he was by our revelations - but if
I had to put a number on it, based upon my past experience of how people react
in similar situations and my intuition and unsurpassed knowledge of crime
fiction, I calculated that there was an eighty per cent probability that Liam
believed Arabella Wogan was dead. Or possibly seventy-six per cent. Or maybe
seventy-three per cent. Or in all likelihood, seventy-one per cent. Or maybe
sixty-nine. Guessing is an inexact science.
At just
after three, two customers came into the shop. I did my best to hold off on
singing 'Hallelujah' at the top of my voice, despite the fact that this
constituted the No Alibis equivalent of a gold rush. If
I was
lucky, three or four times a day, a solitary individual would enter and begin
to peruse the books; half the time, he or she was sheltering from the rain, or
working up to asking if they could use the toilet, or if I had change for the
parking metre, or if I was interested in Scientology, or believed in elves, but
two at the same time was unheard of; it was like capturing a breeding pair, if
they hadn't both been men.
My
elation, of course, was short-lived.
They
were roughly of the same height and build: about six foot and wide. Hair short
and cropped. One with a stud in his ear. The other with a spider's-web tattoo
on his hand. I saw this when he reached up and lifted a book down from the
shelf and showed it to me. It was John Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novel,
The Drowning Pool.
'Is this any good?' he asked.
'It's
a classic,' I said. 'That particular copy is interesting because although his
real name was Kenneth Miller, he wrote under the pseudonym of John Ross
Macdonald, at least until another young writer, John
D.
Macdonald, started
having some success, so to avoid confusion he dropped the John out of Ross
Macdonald, and was Ross for the rest of his life. This is one of the rare
copies with John Ross still on the front, that's why it's worth so—'
'Seventeen-fifty?
Fucking hell.'
Spider-web
had opened the cover and spotted where I'd written the price in pencil on the
title page. He tore the page out and crumpled it up. Then he dropped the book
to the floor.
It
was at this point that I suspected something was amiss.
Spider-web
took down another book. He held it up to me. 'Is this much crack?'
It
was
Now Try the Morgue
by Elleston Trevor.
I
said, 'It's one of his early books . . . he's better known as Adam Hall. . .
You know,
The . . . The Quiller Memorandum
He
already had the title page out and balled and chucked. The book followed it.
He
took down a third title.
I
sensed a pattern emerging.
I
said, 'Gentlemen, I don't believe you're book collectors.'
The
other guy, the one who so far seemed pleasant and harmless, immediately
mimicked me.
'I don't believe you're book collectors,'
he said, making
it all high-pitched and tremulous. He wasn't very good. My voice isn't
high-pitched at all. He quickly added a much more manly 'Fucking right!'
The
two of them then began to tumble the books off the shelves. Dozens of them. And
soon, hundreds.
I sat
where I was. Eventually they would tire themselves out, or grow bored. Beneath
the counter there was a mallet, a machete, a butcher's knife, a set of Ninja
nunchucks and a Sherlock Holmes spyglass. As I took them out, one by one, first
Spider-web then his companion noticed, and stopped.
It
was a calculated gamble. They were thinking bookshop owner, bound to be, well,
bookish, weedy and weak. I was all of those things. But they weren't to know
that. I could equally have been stereotyping them as well; just because they
looked and behaved like thugs, it didn't mean that they weren't nuclear
physicists or capable of reasoned argument and compromise. But what they did
was out of my control; for the moment all I could do was screw with their
preconceptions of me. I did have a panic button, but the police had come round
and disconnected it because Mother pressed it every time the door opened. There
was another button that could close all of the shutters in
seconds,
but
of course that would only trap me in with them. Of all the weapons at my
disposal, the Sherlock Holmes spyglass was the only one I was capable of
handling. It wasn't a conventional weapon, but given Saharan sunlight I could
quite easily have focused its beams through the lens and started a small fire,
and from that I could have made a flaming torch to thrust at them, like an
angry villager confronted by Frankenstein's monster. Unfortunately, Saharan sun
was sadly lacking in Belfast. If it came to it, I would be reduced to throwing
the spyglass at them.
They
literally
nudged each other.
Spider-web
said, 'Rolo, them's nunchucks.'
'What
the fuck are you doing with nunchucks?'
'Come
closer and I'll show you.'
They
literally
exchanged glances.
Rolo
said, 'We were told you sold books.'
'I do
sell books.'
'We
were told you were a wanky dweeb boy we could blow over.'
'I
am. Although I'm also the Irish featherweight champion at nunchucks.'
'You?'
said Spider-web. 'At nunchucks?'
'You
don't look like the Irish champion at anything,' said Rolo.
'Neither
does your face.'
I
have a tendency to hyperventilate, particularly when I see a cow, but I was
controlling myself rather well. It was because I was in a tight corner. In a
tight corner the wheat gets sorted from the chaff, metaphorically speaking, as
I am allergic to both. I had promised Alison that I would try and stand on my
own two bunioned feet, and now I was about to do it. I would rise like a cake
from the floury gloop in an oven. I would fall back on my chosen specialist
subject: my wit and intellect. It was all I had. If I even attempted to use the
weapons, I would just make a tit of myself. They would take them off me like a
rattle off a baby, and kill me, or worse.
They
did not appear to have any weapons of their own. They were just big, and
muscled.
'If
this is about the Christmas Club,' I said, 'it's not me, it's the Chinese
economy.'
'It's
not about the fucking Christmas Club.'
'Good.
Because the Chinese economy is fine. What is it . . . that you want, then?'
'What
do you think we want, dipstick?' 'I don't really
'You've
been poking your nose in,’ said Spider- web.
'And we're
here to make you stop,’ said Rolo.
'By
pushing a few books off the shelf? They're only books.'
I
almost choked, saying it. They were my children. They had thrown
my children
on the floor. They had ripped pages from them. They
would not get away with
it.
A complaint would be lodged. They would be in my ledger. But for now,
all I wanted to do was get them away from my children. If they concentrated on
me, then my children would be fine.
'How
about we push
you
off a shelf?' Rolo asked.
'You'd
have to get me up there first.'
They
took it as a challenge. They advanced.
I
said, 'I've only twenty-two pounds in the till.'
'It's
not about the money,' said Rolo.
'Although
we will take it,' added Spider-web.
'It's
about teaching you a lesson, you four-eyed little shit.'
I
picked up the machete. Rolo took it out of my hand and threw it across the
shop. It imbedded itself in a colourful reproduction of the front cover of
Black Mask
magazine from June 1926, photocopied and taped to the wall
rather than framed and glass-fronted, because framers are notorious rip-off
merchants, along with insurance agents, farmers, bricklayers, carpet- fitters
and clowns. Spider-web swept the remaining weapons off the counter with his
hand.
'Violence,'
I said, 'is the last resort of the scoundrel.'
'Shut
the fuck up,' said Rolo.
He
grabbed me by the shirt and pulled me across the counter until his face was no
more than an inch from mine.
'I
should pull your eyeballs out and stuff them up your nose,' he hissed.
'Okay,'
I said.
'Okay?
What the fuck do you mean, okay?'
'Do
your worst. You big fucking bullies.'
Rolo
was looking suitably perplexed. Then he slapped me hard across the face.
Slapping in movies looks quite effeminate. It's what hot-blooded men used to do
to calm irrational women down, before political correctness drove it from the
screen; now they shoot them and make lampshades out of their bingo wings. In
what passed for my real life, it
hurt.
He caught me across the ear as
well, and for fully thirty seconds I could hear the tide coming in on
Strangford Lough. But it was a foolish act on his part. It told me everything I
needed to know.
These
were two hard men. Their accents, their tattoos and piercings told me what side
of the tracks they came from. These were not men who normally
slapped.
They had been told to slap me around, and taken whoever had told them at their
word. They had been told to cause some damage, but not to go too far. They were
here to intimidate me. They were heavyweights being told to behave like
pixieweights. I was in no danger.