I squinted, trying to make out the object in the darkness, then gave up and aimed my torch beam.
Hell
. Now why did I have to go and do a stupid thing like that?
The item was a shoe. Tan leather, scuffed around the toe and heel. It was attached to an ankle, sheathed in a fawn-coloured sock. That was all I could see. The rest was concealed behind the display unit, at least until the pale, splayed fingers of a hand emerged from the other side.
I would have liked to have walked away from it. I would have liked it very much. And if I was the ruthless thief I should have been, I would have done just that. But I had character flaws just like the next guy, and one of them was that I was just simple-minded enough to go and take a look.
I chose the end with the foot. Smart choice. The hard terrazzo floor was dry. The area around the head was a different story. Blood. A lot of it. Pooled around his face and shoulders, collecting between the spread fingers of his outstretched hand, getting in under the nails. It looked like someone had emptied a paint tin over him. Maybe two tins. The blood glistened in the light from my torch, shimmering like cranberry juice.
His face was side-on, lips parted and resting in the bloody puddle as if he planned to slurp his way back to life. His right arm was folded beneath his chest, elbow protruding on an awkward angle, with his hand hidden.
I checked the shop window behind me. Nobody watching.
Stepping carefully over his rag-doll legs, water dripping from the soles of my shoes and the bottom of my trousers, I crouched down by his torso and took a closer look. His eye was swollen, bugged out of his head as if he was as shocked to see me as I was to find him. He looked dead – unquestionably so – but I’d made mistakes in the past and I intended to learn from them. I needed to turn the head but I didn’t rate the idea of touching him, even through my gloves. A pot of pencils was resting on the stand above me. I plucked one free and poked the end with the rubber eraser inside his mouth, wedging it against his cheek. I tugged. His face turned and turned and then …
Crap.
I let go of the pencil and fell onto my backside. Pushed myself away across the floor until I bumped hard into a shelf of notepads. I sat there for a while, swearing under my breath as if I was uttering some kind of magic chant that might just be capable of erasing the terrible image that wouldn’t go away.
So it had been more than pipe smoke that I’d smelled when I’d entered the room. There’d been gun smoke too – the hot, gassy discharge from a bullet fired at close range. Half the guy’s face was missing, and the little that remained really wasn’t worth holding onto. It looked as if he’d done it to himself. There was no sign of a disturbance and the shop had been locked when I’d arrived. I had no clear idea what could have driven him to it, but he must have slipped the gun inside his mouth and fired up and out. It was ugly, ragged, messy.
I fumbled around for my torch, hands shaking, and cast it along the shelves at my side. Splatter patterns – covering the walls, the ceiling, the displays of expensive wrapping paper on the angled sliding racks. The paper was marbled more than Graziella’s uncle could ever have intended and I very much doubted that he’d be able to sell it any time soon. He wouldn’t be smoking his pipe again, either – at least not in this life. He was as dead as it was possible to get.
I glanced around him for the gun he must have used, but I couldn’t see it. That was strange but it wasn’t capable of troubling me any more than the sight of what he’d done to himself. What did I care, anyway? I certainly didn’t want to touch the gun if I found it. Chances were it was beneath him, still gripped in his concealed hand, and he was welcome to keep it.
Using the shelf above me to clamber upright, I patted myself down and checked that I hadn’t dropped anything. My spectacles case was still tucked inside my coat, nestled beside my cigarette packet, the pepper spray was safe in my trouser pocket and my torch was in my hand. There was nothing to suggest I’d ever been there, apart from the bloody pencil. I thought about taking it, then changed my mind. Grabbing the pot, I scattered its contents beside the body, hoping it looked as if he’d disturbed the pencils when he fell.
I sucked air through my teeth, squeezed my fists tight shut.
Idiot
. I should never have come inside the shop in the first place. The apartment was the better prospect. It was where Graziella lived. If there was anything useful to be found, that was where I’d uncover it. Not here. Especially not now.
I paced stiffly across the room, my drenched socks slurping against my shoes, and through into the soggy corridor, letting the door fall closed behind me. Funny how choices work out. If I hadn’t ventured inside the shop, I could have made my way upstairs and set about my search without the shakes that seemed to have taken over my body, or the chill, prickly sensation in the base of my spine. Glancing down, I turned my hands and found that it was like watching somebody else mirror the gesture. My actions felt mechanical, detached from me, as if I was some kind of shabby puppet that didn’t work quite right. I jerked on the strings, moved my legs, stumbled forwards into the black until I found a narrow staircase leading up to my left.
Two unmarked doors faced me at the top of the stairs. No locks – just handles. I chose the one directly in front of me and it swung three-quarters open before bumping against something soft. There was light in a room at the end of a short corridor – the light I’d spotted from outside. It was enough to see by, and what I saw was mess and confusion.
The corridor was jammed with boxes, stacked close to the ceiling and leaving only a thin channel to squeeze through. I placed one sodden foot inside, then the other. Checked behind the door. More boxes. The door was resting against them. I pulled it back and closed it behind me.
A box beside my knee was open. It contained blocks of notepaper, the edges printed to look like a map of Venice. Another box held a selection of pens. I abandoned the boxes and shuffled between them in the direction of the light.
The first room I passed was a sparsely furnished bedroom. It contained a single bed, unmade, with a tangle of yellowing sheets and faded blankets. A two-drawer bedside cabinet was loaded down with coffee mugs and dusty water glasses that trapped the light from my torch. In the corner, I spied a small closet, its doors splayed open, with a sorry collection of men’s clothing spilling out onto the tatty carpet.
Room two was a bathroom. A cramped space, it greeted me with a dirty toilet, lid up, the rim sticky with urine and curled hairs. Beside the toilet was a cracked sink with a slither of old soap and a disposable safety razor balanced on the shelf above. A hand towel of an indeterminate colour hung from a rusty nail alongside. Tucked behind the door was a freestanding shower with a mildewed curtain that had been fixed to the off-white tiles with gaffer tape.
Next to the bathroom was a kitchen. The sink was loaded with dirty crockery, floating in water that was filmed with a greyish scum. A squat electric oven was positioned on the Formica counter, its underside clogged with crumbs of burned food. Nearby was a two-ring hob, connected to an orange gas canister by a rubber pipe that appeared brittle and permeable enough to spark a decent house fire. Two cupboards had been tacked to the wall. The right-hand cupboard contained a chipped cereal bowl. The shelves on the left held a modest collection of jars and tins. Nothing I was interested in.
That only left the room with the light, and if it was as untidy as the rest of the apartment, I thought I could understand why the shopkeeper had shot himself. Perhaps his sloppy housekeeping was a reaction against the precision his job required of him – or a sign of how much time he devoted to his craft.
Surprising, then, that the room was clean and orderly. A modern flat-screen television filled the corner opposite the doorway and two well-worn lounge chairs were pointed towards it. I craned my neck around the door and found that the centre of the room was dominated by an oval dining table, fashioned from teak, with four mismatched chairs. A three-bulb spotlight was shining down from the middle of the ceiling.
I moved closer. The table was covered in thick plastic sheeting, as if to protect it from a careless decorator, but there was no painting going on. It looked as if the shopkeeper had been engaged in a hobby of some kind. A toolbox was open on the table, the concertina shelves stocked with screwdrivers and pliers, wire trimmers and craft knives, tubes of glue, rolls of sticky tape and a jeweller’s loupe. Beside the toolbox were coils of electrical wire (blue, green, red and yellow), wrapped around miniature cardboard drums. Three cheap digital watches had been lined up in a row, laid flat with their wrist straps stretched out.
I sprayed the beam of my torch over the watch faces – God knows why I was still using my torch when there was a main light on in the room – and found that all of them featured the same digital read-out.
00:00:00
.
I’d like to tell you that by the time I’d seen the watches, realisation was dawning on me. I’d love to believe I wasn’t
that
slow. But in truth, it wasn’t until I’d contemplated the dun-coloured bricks of putty with the strands of brightly coloured wires sticking out of them that I finally understood. This was no ordinary pastime – Graziella’s uncle hadn’t been in the habit of fitting sailing boats inside glass bottles or fashioning scale models of the Rialto Bridge from spent matchsticks. Far from it. No, it seemed quite obvious to me now that the poor chap I’d lately discovered with one side of his face scattered liberally around his shop floor had applied the dexterity and steady hand he’d developed as a bookbinder to the delicate art of bomb making, and I’d just happened upon his home studio.
So that was how Graziella had got hold of a bomb. And not just the one I’d had the misfortune to trigger, but also, perhaps, the device that had been used to kill Alfred’s friends in Monte Carlo. It was little wonder that the shopkeeper had struck me as suspicious. He was a man with an awful lot to hide.
I backed away from the table and hurried out of the apartment, moving at quite some speed. Yes, that had something to do with the volume of explosives on the table, but there were a couple of other reasons, too. Number one, I wasn’t keen to linger in a building with a dead man in it any longer than necessary. And two, I hadn’t seen anything to suggest that Graziella shared the apartment with her uncle. There was only one bedroom, and it was something of an understatement to say the place lacked a woman’s touch. But there was also the second door at the top of the stairs to investigate, and I’d decided it was high time I did just that.
The door opened onto a flight of wooden steps that curled steeply to the right. I followed them and they kept turning, spiralling around like the staircase in the tower Graziella had led me to. It was every bit as dizzying, and I kept scraping my kneecap on the treads above, but just before I lost my bearings and my patience altogether, the steps unwound and opened into a charming entrance hall.
The first thing I noticed was the hat stand, weighed down with a selection of hats and coats, not to mention an extensive collection of wigs. Some I recognised – the glamorous blonde sweep, the harsh black bob and, of course, the vivid red number – but there were many others that were new to me. I have to confess I was glad I hadn’t been exposed to Graziella’s entire repertoire, because it was hard to imagine how much chaos that many encounters would have involved.
The hallway floor was wooden, laid in a herringbone pattern, buffed to an oily sheen and smelling strongly of cleaning fluid. Either side of the hat stand were two copper planters with plastic lilies poking out of them, and a short distance further along was a porcelain cat figurine. The cat was jet-black in colour, with green ceramic eyes that flashed like gems in the light from my torch. It was arranged in a sitting position, licking a paw, with a long tail curling above it, a closed door positioned just behind and two open doorways on either side.
One doorway led into the bathroom, which was small but neatly kept. The dated brown suite was spotlessly clean and decorated with scented candles and stylish toiletries. The towels stacked beside the sink were pale green and fluffy, and the white plastic shower curtain looked shop-fresh.
There was nothing for me in the bathroom aside from a pleasant fragrance, so I crossed the hallway and found myself in a bedroom. The bed was a futon – probably the only thing that could be transported up the narrow staircase, and then only just. It was neatly made with a pink embroidered duvet and a generous collection of pillows and cushions. Off to the side was a metal hanging rail, crammed with clothes, and a small alcove in the wall where a pile of shoes had been stashed. The bedside cabinet was an upturned wooden crate with a carton of cigarettes on top of it. On the floor beside the crate were a stack of paperback novels.
I lifted the top novel and a leather bookmark fell out. She was about a third of the way through. There were four books underneath, their spines all thoroughly cracked, and I could see that a number of pages had been turned down at the corner. I checked some of the flagged pages and found that she’d drawn on them in biro – underscoring certain passages, jotting down a question mark or a little smiley face beside others.
I fanned the pages, feeling the breeze against my face. Small world. I’d read the same books myself. Many times, in fact. Because it just so happened that I was the author.
The five titles formed a complete collection of the mass-market editions of my Michael Faulks burglar novels. Each one had a jacket in a different lurid colour and each featured my name on the front, printed in a modest black font along the bottom, and a deceptive author photo at the back. The most recent edition had been published some years ago now. It was called
The Thief and I
and it was dedicated to one Victoria Newbury,
My Fabulous Agent
.
Hmm, what to do? There was a biro on the floor and I snatched it up and pulled off the lid with my teeth. Turning to the first page, I flexed my arm and started to write.