Authors: Kerry Greenwood
‘Okay,’ he agreed. We stood up. I brushed at the seat of my trousers, which were dusty.
Then someone groaned in Calico Alley.
‘No, I can’t stand it,’ said Jason wildly.
‘Yes, you can.’ I walked to the corner. A man was slumped near my back door. The police tape was gone, I noticed. I knelt down next to him, fending off Jason, who was pulling at my arm. The face turned to me.
It was Mr Vincent Wyatt from Best Fresh, and he was as drunk as several skunks. I was almost stifled by the wash of raw alcohol as he breathed out.
‘Pissed,’ said Jason with infinite relief.
‘As a newt. Slip inside and get me a bottle of water and some paper towels, will you? After we haul him up onto the step.’
It took both of us. Mr Wyatt was in that boneless state of inebriation which means that a drunk can fall down an embankment, tumble across a couple of broken bottles and collide with a tree without bruising or cutting himself. We finally managed to gather all his limbs into a fireman’s lift and sat him with his back against the Insula wall and his head inclined, rather fortuitously, over a handy gutter. Into which,
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joggled by our moving him, he began to throw up his last bottle of whisky.
A fairly disgusting ten minutes later, he was drinking water and throwing it up, which was an improvement. Ten minutes after that he was retaining water and wiping his face with the paper towels. There was no one about in our part of the city. Still too early for the office workers.
‘You’re killing yourself,’ I told Mr Wyatt. ‘If you want to kill yourself, go and do it somewhere else. And by some neater method.’
‘Like jumping off the roof?’ he sobbed. ‘I poisoned that boy. It’s all my fault. I did it. It was all my fault!’
‘What?’ asked Jason, taken aback.
‘Gimme a drink,’ he demanded. ‘Do I know you?’
‘Jason. I’m the apprentice at Corinna’s bakery. This is Corinna,’ he added, in case Mr Wyatt’s alcoholic amnesia had progressed.
‘Nice woman,’ said Mr Wyatt owlishly. ‘Don’t deserve to be ruined. But me. I deserve it.’
‘We both do. Now, where do you live, eh?’ I asked.
Vincent Wyatt made a complex gesture with both arms which conveyed that he lived somewhere north of where he was presently sitting. Moving made him sick again. Jason lunged while Mr Wyatt was occupied and came back up with a wallet.
‘They lose their sense of direction,’ he explained to me. ‘The really old blokes do, too. Now, he must have a driving licence or something.’
‘I’m not even going to ask how you got so good at picking pockets,’ I said, inspecting the wallet.
‘I might have to go back to it,’ said Jason. His eyes searched my face for signs of hope. ‘If I get back on the gear.’
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‘And why should you get back on the gear?’ I demanded.
‘It hurts,’ said Jason simply. ‘And junk makes it better.’
This was no time for a lecture. I gathered him into my arms and hugged him hard. Even if he didn’t want to be hugged, I wanted to hug him. He didn’t struggle.
‘Junk makes it better for a little while,’ I said. ‘Then it makes it worse. You remember. We’ll get through this, Jason. If we can’t be bakers anymore we can be something else. I’m not going to lose you, you hear me?’
‘You’re a nice lady,’ blurred Mr Wyatt.
‘I hear,’ said Jason into my shoulder. Wonder of wonders, he actually put his arms around me and hugged me back. Then he kissed me loudly on the cheek.
‘You and me, eh, Corinna?’ he said, almost smiling.
‘You got it, Midshipman Jason.’
‘Cap’n,’ he said. He drew away from me, stood up and saluted. ‘Orders, sir?’
‘Let’s find out where this poor sodden wreck lives and take him home. Then we can cook ourselves some breakfast. And him, too.’
‘He’s got one of the apartments in Cathedral Lane,’ said Jason, holding a card up to the streetlight. ‘Come on, mate, you can’t stay out here all night. Cops’ll be along any minute.’
He was right. The patrol passed us as we rounded into Swanston Street. What we were doing was clear, however, especially as Mr Wyatt had started to cry again. They let us past without comment. Jason managed the outer lock and the lift. Luckily Vincent didn’t have any contents in his stomach so there was no mess, and we got to the apartment in fair order. It was five thirty in the morning.
The flat was small and unbelievably messy, though not downright sordid, by which I mean there were no old condoms, pizza boxes or sour cartons of fulminating milk. There were clothes all over the floor and the bed had not been made. Jason lowered Mr Wyatt into a chair while I hastily reassembled his bed and then we put him into it.
‘Place is a real mess,’ said Jason. ‘What say we clean it up for him?’
‘And possibly learn interesting things while we do so?’
He didn’t even lower his eyes, much less blush. ‘Yeah, maybe,’ answered Jason the Shameless. But he was also Midshipman Jason the Efficient. He had entered my employ as a cleaner and he still wielded a mean mop. And it wasn’t as though we had anything else to do.
There was a bedroom and a parlour, but apart from a kitchen in which one could not even twirl a highly coopera
tive kitten and a bathroom suited only to anorexic midgets, that was it for the Cathedral Place apartment. I started collecting bottles. There were a lot of bottles. I was sorry to see that Mr Wyatt had blotted himself out with the cheapest fortified port and the worst Genuine Old Whisky made in Collingwood. He was going to have a hangover to which the term ‘exploding cranium’ would be appropriate. Jason commented as he handed me another cardboard box: ‘I know this stuff. They used to say it had ten thousand dead brain cells in every bottle. Only derros drink it.’
‘We’re used to a better class of drunk in Insula,’ I said, thinking of Cherie Holliday’s father, Andy, who only drank Absolut or Laphroig and was now confining himself to one bottle every three days, which was an improvement on two a night. And he now drank it mixed with things like water or orange juice instead of straight from the freezer. Jason stuffed an armload of soiled clothes into an empty laundry basket.
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‘You know, he’s pretty organised,’ he said. ‘I mean, most drunks don’t have a laundry hamper, or a desk.’
‘He was probably fine until that rye flour arrived on his doorstep,’ I said bitterly, straightening out a pile of papers, separating the newspapers and the correspondence and the junk mail. ‘Tie this into a bale for the recyclers, will you, Mr Midshipman?’
‘I been thinking about that,’ said Jason slowly, doing as I had ordered.
‘And?’ I put a towel and several t-shirts into the laundry basket.
‘It can’t have been just that rye flour,’ he said, ‘cos it was going on too long. There was only one sack of dodgy mix, and it would all have gone in one batch. Not like our pure rye, which lasts us a week. That was a mix and that fuckwit Eddie just emptied it into the mixer.’
‘You are right,’ I agreed, struck by his excellent logic. ‘And the soul cake song...’
‘Was going on before the courier gave us the bodgy sack.’
‘So it was.’
We had cleared the lounge. The bedroom contained more soiled clothes and more bottles. The kitchen was grimy but not filthy and Jason turned on the hot tap and found the detergent. Bubbles foamed over a collection of dirty dishes.
‘So it wasn’t us,’ he said. I gave him another hug and he still didn’t fight me.
‘Maybe not,’ I agreed. ‘Maybe not, indeed.’
No flat was ever cleaned with such diligence by two such superstitious people attempting to buy off Fate. I opened windows to let in the cold breeze. We found a broom and swept the flat clean. We stacked and rattled bottles and papers and Jason slid seven loads of rubbish down the chute. We carried all the recyclables down to the basement, where we found a bank of washing machines and dryers. It seemed a bit much to do the man’s laundry after invading his life so comprehensively.
‘He can sit here and recover,’ I told Jason. ‘Nothing like watching the socks go round to soothe the mind.’
‘Really?’ asked Jason. ‘I always got bored and fell asleep.’
‘That, too, might be useful. Here’s some money, go and buy him bread and milk and some coffee, he’s out of coffee. Eggs, bacon, that sort of thing. We might as well make ourselves some breakfast. And whatever you are having yourself, of course.’
‘Sir!’ Jason took the purse and ran off towards the all-night supermarket. He ran lightly like the boy he was, heels springing. Suddenly, we were all right. For that I was willing to resurrect any number of drunks, from the dead if necessary. Though for that I was going to need Meroe and I hoped that she was sleeping soundly in her satiny lilac and purple bed with her black cat curled up in the small of her back as usual.
The little flat looked and smelled much better as I came in again. Vin Wyatt was asleep rather than passed out. I filled a clean mineral water bottle with tap water to supply his dehydrated body as soon as he woke and set it next to his bed. The furnishings had come with the flat, that was clear. They were easy minimalism, IKEA chic. Which made them easy to clean as well. Though hell to assemble. The lounge room carpet, now visible, was going to need a vacuum cleaner and there was nothing to do immediately but fill the kettle and find the cafetiere and some clean cups, so I did that, and then sat down to thoroughly invade Mr Wyatt’s business privacy.
Best Fresh was a franchise, which meant that he had to pay franchise fees, as well as all his operating expenses and rent. He
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had put up an initial fifty thousand dollars, which was now almost gone, and he was making a small profit, just enough to service his debt. He employed two part time workers at dirt poor rates, Janelle Richards and Eddie Ramsgate. Not surprising that the gum-chewing girl showed little enthusiasm for her tasks and that Eddie had spotted Jason ten dollars for not telling on him about the flour.
Mr Wyatt needed to transform his business into a success, and having dedicated workers, and paying for them, was the key. He should get up and do his own baking and employ someone during the day who liked bread. Then he could double the assistant’s wage and get someone with more presence than poor Janelle. Also, getting up and doing his own baking might keep him off the booze. Of course, maybe he had just taken to it lately. Which might explain his choice of poisons.
I scanned the list of permitted breads which Best Fresh supplied to its franchisees. Not a lot of room to improvise. None, in fact. The essential thing about a franchise is that wherever you buy, it will taste exactly the same, whether it’s Kentucky Fried Chicken with its identical mix of the Colonel’s secret herbs and spices, or Coca-Cola, which sold the essential cordial to be diluted with local water. This reliability promotes brand loyalty and explains the state of perpetual war between, as it might be, Coke and Pepsi. However, it means that a franchisee can’t go off on his own and start inventing new chicken dishes or innovative hamburgers. It’s not wrong or right, it’s just the way that these things work. What had persuaded Mr Wyatt, who seemed to be a good baker from what he had told me when we had met before his plunge into the bottle, to accept restrictions like these? The idea of an inspector coming into my bakery and telling me that my cream buns had too much cream in them and therefore must be altered would have made my blood boil. Or at least simmer.
His personal finances were sound enough, though stretched. He had a nice little share portfolio, though lately he had plunged on Navarino Gold, the company about which Mr Benson, the muffin-appreciating wunderkind, had had doubts. Still, it wasn’t expensive, and he didn’t have a large number of shares. The others were sound enough. He owned a small house in Templestowe. His divorce had just been finalised. His driving licence was going to expire in a week. His insurance premiums were due. He had a couple of photographs of a dark-haired woman with a small child at the beach under his blotter. And if he didn’t get a wriggle on with his BAS, he was going to be fined.
I didn’t discover anything more enlightening in the papers and I was slotting them into their folder when Jason came in with bulging bags.
‘I went a bit OTT,’ he confessed, piling them on the little kitchen bench. ‘But I’m—’
‘Starving?’ I guessed.
The glaze of pink donut icing on his chin was a bit of a dead giveaway. He nodded. We set out Jason’s food on the coffee table and the couch—more donuts, cheese rolls, those sad, limp microwave hot dogs, several packets of biscuits and a huge bottle of vanilla Coke. I made coffee and toast, found a frying pan and cooked myself some eggs and bacon.
The scent of coffee woke Mr Wyatt, who drank his bottle of water and a double fizzy Berocca with puzzled docility and went obediently back to sleep. He did not seem surprised that his flat had been augmented by me and Jason. His eyes shut as he hit the pillow.
‘Eggs?’ asked Jason hungrily, having polished off more
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junk food than a science fiction convention in a little under twenty minutes.
‘And bacon.’ I yielded him the kitchen and took his place on the couch.
I felt so much better. Yes, that might have been a contaminated sack of flour and it might have been the cause of one freak-out, but not all of them. The freak-outs both preceded and followed the sack of contaminated flour, so where, I wondered, were the soul cakes coming from? Who was making them? The police report said that the victims all had the remains of cakes in their stomachs. It was reasonable to assume that the soul cakes were indeed cakes. They hadn’t come from my bakery, of that I was positive. Where, then, was the devil’s baker who was making
pain maudit
on my territory?
Nothing sprang to mind. I was tired. I closed my eyes. Jason woke me after he had demolished the remaining toast and bacon and eggs and done the washing-up.