Mystery Man (2 page)

'What place?'

'You answered the phone and said hello no something.'

'Ah. No. You misheard. I said hello, Noah. Noah Alibees. That's my name. It's French Canadian originally. I design hats. Are you calling about a hat?'

It seemed to do the trick. He quickly apologised and rang off. When I put the phone down I found that my hands were damp, my shirt was sticking to my skin and my heart was beating nineteen to the dozen.

Two days a week I employ a student called Jeff to mind the shop while I sit in the back office trying to make my books balance. He's keen and writes poetry and belongs to Amnesty International, but he'll grow out of all of these things. My office is close enough to the till so that I can hear what's going on in the store, in particular if Jeff is misusing the phone to call either his girlfriend or some government agency to demand that a political prisoner not be repatriated to Sierra Leone. In light of the previous day's threat I had considered not allowing Jeff to answer the phone at all, but a cursory examination of the books told me I wasn't in any position to turn away potential business, so by way of compromise I instructed him to answer any incoming calls with a French accent, which he managed passably well, and to be as vague as possible until he was able to ascertain the nature of the enquiry. Vagueness for Jeff, truth be told, wasn't going to be a huge stretch. I made him repeat
Noah Alibees
over and over until he got it just right. Then I said that if anyone called and asked for Larry he was to reply, 'There is no Larry here, would you like to buy a hat?'

Towards noon I was just beginning to think that I might have gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick. There had been four phone calls, all of them from either customers or publishers' reps. But then the fifth call came in and my carefully constructed cover story quickly began to unravel. I heard Jeff say, 'Noah Alibees, would you like to buy a hat?' and then, 'Yes, hats, all different types.' And then, 'No there's nobody called Larry Block here.' I moved from my desk in the back to the body of the shop. 'Nope, no Lawrence Block either.' Then with a piece of inspired improvisation Jeff added, 'You'd have to go to a mystery bookshop to find Lawrence Block.' Jeff saw me; he smiled and gave me the thumbs-up. Then he said, 'No trouble at all,' and hung up. When I approached the till he said, 'You look a little pale, what's the matter?'

I put my hands on the counter to steady myself, took a deep breath and said, 'I'm being intimidated by the owner of a shop that specialises in the cleaning and repair of leather goods.'

Jeff gave this due consideration. Then he said, 'Somebody's scrawled all over the John Grisham books.'

By the next day, and still being alive, and the shop not having been burned to the ground, I decided that I'd misinterpreted what the leather-care man had to say, that his threat had been more about consulting his lawyers than tanning my hide. However, I didn't wish to push my luck by calling him again to confirm this or to ask further questions about Mrs Geary's trousers, so instead I turned to the internet. I keep a database of loyal customers and send them an e-newsletter once a month. It's all about building a relationship. I try to sell them the latest releases and they burden me with their personal problems. It's tiresome but necessary. On this occasion, however, I wasn't selling anything, I merely asked those of my lovely customers living in the greater Belfast area to keep an eye out for a pair of leather trousers, and described their design in considerable detail. I included the words 'substantial reward' without specifying that it was a £10 book token plus a signed copy of
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,
albeit signed by Jehovah's Vengeance Grisham.

I didn't hear anything for another three days, but then, slowly, reports began to come in, and then what had been a trickle became a fast-flowing stream. The trousers were spotted again in Royal Avenue, at a cinema on the Belfast Road, at a concert in the Waterfront Hall, and twice again in Royal Avenue. It seemed like Royal Avenue was the place to be. Each of my informants who saw her there had observed the trousers between 12.30 and 1.30 p.m., and reported their occupant as, and I quote, 'a big girl' wearing too much make-up and a short white beautician's smock over the trousers. Putting two and two together, I decided to visit that purveyor of perfume and paracetamol, Boots. As it happened, I had a prescription that needed filling, so I was able to kill two birds with one stone. While standing in the pharmacy queue I kept a close eye on the make-up counters, and before very long I was rewarded with my first sight of Mrs Geary's leather trousers, which sent a shiver of anticipation, if not excitement, down my spine. I watched them for several minutes, moving up and down on the customer side of the counter as the large woman who inhabited them applied make-up to a pale woman in a pink woollen trouser suit; she was saying, 'Oh yes, that shade really suits you, and I'd tell you if it made you look like an old slut.'

The pharmacist then asked if I'd taken this particular type of antidepressant before, and I said yes, twice daily for the past fifteen years. He asked if it worked for me and I said it was early days yet. I paid for the prescription, and it now being 12.30 I was pleased to see the woman in Mrs Geary's leather trousers finish with her client and hand over her cash-desk key to a colleague. She then pulled on a short coat over her beautician's jacket and left the shop.

I hurried up to the beauty counter and said, 'Damn, I missed her . . .' The girl behind the counter looked unconcerned, but asked if she could help. 'Your colleague – in the leather trousers – she was checking out the availability of a certain perfume for me . . . but now I've missed her.'

'She'll be back at two.'

'Damn, I have to get back to work – but I could phone to see how she got on. Who should I ask for?'

'Ask for Natasha.'

'Natasha . . . ?'

'Yes, Natasha.'

'Her surname . . . ?'

'Just ask for Natasha. Natasha on the make-up counter.'

'But in case there's any confusion, her full name is . . . ?'

'There's nobody else called Natasha.'

Mrs Geary's leather trousers were coming back at two, so there was no immediate panic.

'To tell you the truth,' I said to Laura, which was what it said on Laura's badge, 'she's not really helping me at all. I've been in three times and she keeps fobbing me off with excuses. So I'm really here to make a complaint. Can I speak to your supervisor?'

Laura looked surprised, but she nodded and went to the phone. A couple of minutes later a woman in a smart business suit approached me and said, 'I understand you wish to complain about Miss Irvine?'

Natasha Irvine returned from lunch forty minutes later. I was in position just to the left of the Boots front doors. She was a moon-faced girl with big eyes. There were flakes of sausage-roll pastry in the corners of her mouth and she gave a little jump when I said, 'Hello, Natasha.'

She stopped and began to smile but then she realised she didn't know me, and she might have blushed, but it was difficult to tell with all the make-up, which looked like the Max Factor equivalent of stone cladding.

'It is Natasha Irvine, isn't it?' Her mouth dropped open a little. 'I wanted to talk to you about your leather trousers.'

I gave her my hard look, which is like my normal look, but harder. At this point, if she'd had any sense, she should have asked for ID, and I could have shown her my Xtravision card and my kidney donor card and then rattled my prescription at her and dribbled off into the distance ranting about this or that, but as it happened my hard look proved more than adequate.

'Oh Christ,' she said, 'they're stolen, aren't they?'

I raised an eyebrow.

'Jesus wept,' she said. 'I took one look at them and I knew he couldn't afford them. My family owns this leather repair place on the Newtownards Road, so I know what costs what. But he swore to God he saved up. Christ.' She blew some air out of her cheeks and said, 'To tell you the God's honest truth, I don't even like them, I've piled the beef on since I had the twins, and they're cuttin' the hole off me. I only wear them to keep him happy. What am I going to do now?'

I gave her another long look. A thick sweat had broken out on her brow, and I decided to move quickly in case it set off an avalanche of make-up. 'Here's what we're going to do,' I said, and this time I did take out my wallet. 'I can't be bothered with pursuing this to court, the paperwork's a bloody nightmare. As it happens, the owner's offered a reward. You tell your man they got stolen from your locker at work, he buys you another present, plus you're two hundred pounds better off.' I took out the money and held it out to her. 'Owner gets the trousers back, I don't have to do any pen-pushing, you're in the money. How does that sound?'

'Too good to be true,' she said.

'It's a once-in-a-lifetime offer,' I said.

She thought about that for just a few moments, then nodded quickly. 'But could you make it two-fifty?' she asked.

I shook my head. 'It's not your call, darlin',' I said, then held firm at two hundred and forty-five.

When I got back to the shop I told Jeff to take the hats out of the window, then gave him the rest of the day off. I also gave him a nice bonus. 'What's this for?' he asked.

'Danger money,' I replied. I was feeling generous.

When he'd left I sat by the till, rested my feet on the counter and unwrapped a celebratory Twix. Between the destruction of one stick and the devouring of the second I called Mr Geary.

'Guess who?' I sang.

He made five unsuccessful guesses, so I told him, and he still seemed a little confused, so I reminded him, and then he said, 'Ah, right.' I didn't plunge straight in with the good news, I wanted him to know how much work I'd put in. So I described how I'd established the crime line from the moment he'd left his wife's leather trousers in Pressed for Time: how they'd subcontracted them to the shop on the Newtownards Road, how the owner must have commented on their unique qualities to Miss Irvine's boyfriend, who'd decided that they'd make a perfect gift. He'd then persuaded the owner to fabricate the story about them being damaged and then the owner had panicked when I'd applied just the right amount of pressure. Despite being in mortal fear for my life, I'd nevertheless managed to track down the trousers and make them secure.

'I have them back, Mr Geary,' I said, raising and admiring the chocolate-covered biscuit. 'I have your wife's leather trousers.'

He seemed rather underwhelmed. 'Oh – well, that's . . . ah, that's nice.'

'It cost me five hundred pounds, but I suppose it's still a pretty cheap way to save a marriage.' He cleared his throat. I said, 'So do you want to come and pick them up?'

'Well, no,' he said.

'No?'

'Well, the fact is, it turns out she never liked the trousers in the first place.'

'But . . .'

'She threw a wobbler over my stupidity for losing them, not because of the trousers. I misunderstood.'

'But . . . they're beautiful trousers . . .'

'I know that, but apparently they cut the hole off her.'

'But I've spent—'

'Well, that's your problem, I'm afraid.'

'But . . . but what am I supposed to do with . . .'

'Perhaps you could give them to your own wife.'

The Twix was now melting in my hand.

'Yeah, I wish,' I sighed.

So I was two hundred and forty-five pounds out of pocket on the trousers, not to mention the sleepless night, the rocketing of my blood pressure and the sixty-five quid I'd spent on cheap hats from Dunnes. One day I'd meet the man who'd come up with the phrase,
if you want to get ahead, get a hat
, and I'd have a strong word or two. But in the meantime I'd a business to run. Besides, I have found that when all else fails, you can always fall back on fine writing to see you through a dark patch. The very next day an aspiring book-collector came in enquiring about signed first editions, and I showed him one of the Grishams. He turned it over in his hand as though he knew what he was doing and said, 'How much?'

'If you have to ask . . .' I said with as much disinterest as I could muster.

'No, really,' he said.

I made a quick calculation. Two forty-five, plus sixty-five for the hats, two hundred for my time and another fifty for being an unscrupulous cad. Five hundred and sixty, I said, and I could tell by the way he blanched that it was way more than what he had in mind. But I have learned over all my years in business that if you price something high enough, some sucker will eventually come along and fall for it. And so he pulled out his credit card and bought the Grisham and I was finally back in profit and also, I suppose, a wiser, more cautious man to boot.

I put the book in a nice bag for him and said if he was interested I could maybe lay my hands on another one or two. He smiled nervously and quickly changed the subject.

'I really like your trousers,' he said.

I glanced lovingly down at them and nodded. 'Thanks,' I said, 'they are nice, but they're cutting the hole off me.'

It was Serial Killer Week in No Alibis, and thus far the Chianti was proving way more popular than the fava beans.

I pride myself on providing a welcoming atmosphere here in the store. We have a settee and coffee and there's even a toilet if you're caught short. But this is all provided on the strict understanding that you
will buy something.
I'm not a frickin' charity. It may be something off the 'buy one, get one at slightly less than the cover price' table, or I can order some difficult-to-find item off the internet, something you'd be well capable of doing by yourself at home if you weren't such a mental invalid, or, even better, you might allow me to choose a book of distinction for you, drawing on my twenty years' experience in the crime fiction business. Life is too short to spend an hour and a half on a mystery that will ultimately be solved by a cat.

Serial Killer Week got off to an inauspicious start when the opening wine and bean evening was invaded by a former prisoner who misinterpreted the poster, but he was at least able to give us the professional's view of the genre, although in my opinion he was not up to speed on the recent rapid advances in forensic science. However, he made notes. One of my regular customers took quite a shine to him, and they left early together, amid much jolly quipping. I believe in both redemption and the power of love, but I also understand that recidivism in killers is close to 76 per cent; I suspect that we will shortly be reading either about their wedding or her disappearance.