Mystery Man (19 page)

Her eyes narrowed, cute, not
that
serious: 'People in glass houses . . .'

'Are you ready to order?'

May was back at our table, smiling down at us.

'Yes, we are,' said Alison.

'But first,' I said, 'can I have a word in your ear?'

Though I might occasionally play the chauvinist, I had taken on board what Alison was saying. Also, I wanted to stay in her good books. Either way, I felt obliged to tell May who we were and what we were at and to give her the choice of whether we reported back to my client that we'd found her. If she decided against it, then it was no loss to me; I could still sting him for the price of half a dozen curries.

As we spoke to her, May's hand wandered occasionally to one ear or the other; though fixed flat against the sides of her head, they were still clearly very red, and now that I was able to study them up close, somewhat swollen. She said the operation was
horrendous.
They had told her she would experience some discomfort, but it felt like her ears had been fed through a mangle. When we told her about her ex-boyfriend she was sweet but mortified. Sweet that we had taken the trouble to track her down, mortified that we knew about her ears and how the falling-out had come about.

Alison was quick to jump in with, 'I don't blame you for dumping him. He sounds like a big fat loser to me.'

May's fingers gingerly traced the outline of her left ear. 'He . . .'

'He abuses you, makes you feel like shit, he more or less forces you under the surgeon's knife, and then has the gall to hire us to find you. You should tell him to—'

'You misunderstand,' May cut in, nervously bending a menu between her hands. 'I love him very much. I have not
dumped
him. I knew he would not approve of me having the operation, because he does not wish me to suffer any pain; also I did not want him to worry about me having it; so I merely withdrew from his company until I could have it and I was sufficiently recovered to be the old me again, the me he loves. I was very ill after the operation and it took me longer to recover, but I did not think he would miss me so much that he would hire private investigators to find me. But that is him all over. He is so good to me and I love him so much and I cannot wait to see him with my new ears.'

'I think that's
so
romantic,' Alison said immediately.

The Case of the Missing FA Cup
was exactly the kind of investigation I was interested in. No particular exertion required, barely a whiff of danger, no extensive travel, very little in the way of having to talk to strangers, and a resolution based on observation and deduction.
The Case of the Dancing Jews
was its polar opposite, and, more to the point, unlike the girl with the formerly sticky-out ears, it simply would not go away.

Towards the conclusion of the former case, I was returning from a lunchtime curry with Alison to relieve Jeff when I observed to my horror that Daniel Trevor was in the store. Jeff was behind the counter, studiously ignoring him, while Daniel was pacing back and forth at the back of the shop. He was muttering, 'Yes, this will do rightly, yes it will. Absolutely.'

I was attempting to back out of the doorway when he turned suddenly and spotted me. He clapped his hands together and exclaimed: 'The very chap I'm looking for! Come on in!'

Daniel Trevor, beckoning me into
my own store.

'Mr Trevor,' I said, 'how can I help you?'

'Very easily, my friend, very easily indeed! I want to borrow your shop!'

'Borrow?'

'Absolutely! You host book launches, don't you?'

'Very occasionally.'

'Perfect! I want to do one right here!'

'Well, I'm not sure if that's going to be poss—'

'Of course it is! You can't be booked up every night from here to eternity. Just tell me whatever night is free and book me in. This is the ideal location. The School of Dance is just a few hundred yards away, the staff and students will be able to nip in and—'

'Whoa there, Mr Trevor. You're doing the book? Anne Mayerova's . . . ?'

'I Came to Dance.
Yes, I am. I'm making a stand. Anne Mayerova stood up to terrorism in her own way, and now I'm going to stand up to it in mine. I'm going ahead with publication.'

'But it's not finished, and you didn't like it anyway, and what if it stirs up—'

He held up a hand to stop me. 'Relax, my friend, everything is going to be just fine. I'm publishing exactly what we contracted for, Anne Smith's history of dance in Northern Ireland.'

'Not the dancing at Ausch—'

'It won't even be mentioned. I think on reflection that part of her reason for not including it in her life story is that she refuses to let her life be defined by such barbarism, she doesn't want to give them credibility, even after all these years. She's a remarkable woman to be able to put it in perspective like that, and I admire her for it. It will be a tribute night to Anne Smith, to Anne Mayerova, and also to my dear departed Rosemary. Neither of them will be able to attend the launch, but I, sir, know how to run an event and I'm quite sure that every student of dance in this mighty province of ours will be making their way to your delightful premises on whatever night you see fit to grant us, and every single one of them is going to buy one, two or three copies of
I Came to Dance.
A night of tribute, and a night of profit, sir. What do you say to that?'

'I can do any Thursday in August,' I said.

I am not purely driven by financial gain, but one must be practical. I may not always enjoy the good health I enjoy now. Books do not grow on trees, and must be purchased, and where cash is not readily available, credit must be employed; let us just say that my credit is not always good. That is the lot of the small business. I could have cut and run the way so many others have, but I have stood and faced and fought to keep No Alibis open, and it would be criminally negligent of me not to reluctantly accept a profit when it presents itself. Bookselling is like prostitution, you sell your wares, you close your eyes, and you never fall in love with the clients. You also keep your fingers crossed that they won't ask for anything perverted.

A date was agreed two weeks away. When I told Alison about it she laughed and offered to provide tray bakes 'for a price'. She told me I had no principles. She is wrong. I have lots of them. I keep them in the safe at the back of the shop and only take them out when required. She said that I seemed to have gotten over my fear of Nazis. I said they were coming to the launch until they heard about the tray bakes.

Oh we laughed. It was a golden period.

Daniel Trevor was handling the publicity and the invitations, he was providing the wine and the music. I also advertised through the website, though I doubted if any of my regulars would bother turning up for what I jokingly referred to as 'an evening of dance crap'. I had to negotiate the borrowing of two dozen chairs from a local hotel. It took me about half an hour to explain the concept of
borrowing
as opposed to
purchasing,
and I had to invoke the Blitz spirit of all small traders sticking together to finally ensure their delivery. When the blokes from the hotel arrived and stacked them in the back room, one of them took a fancy to the new Michael Connolly and asked if he could borrow it. I told him I wasn't a library. Honestly, the riff-raff I have to deal with.

Everything proceeded apace. Not only that, but there was a general upturn in business thanks to some unseasonably good weather – sunshine in summer, thank God for global warming! – and the days flew by. Alison and I continued to meet for lunch and things continued apace on that front as well. She was pleased with the display of her comics in the shop and could hardly keep up with the demand. I told her she was soon going to have to employ the services of a proper printer. When I handed over the cash from their sale – minus my commission, obviously, because I'm not a charity – she looked like I'd given her the keys to the bank. She peppered me with kisses. If I'd known she was going to do that I'd have opened the till and given her a fiver weeks ago.

But.

I should have known better.

Golden days are known as golden days because they are valuable and rare, and another way of saying they are rare is that they are few and far between, and when they do come along they are fleeting. I was happy and smiling one moment, and the next the phone rang, and I should have known better than to answer it. Almost as soon as the man at the other end of the line spoke, my Spider-sense tingled.

'Hello – is that No Alibis, yes?'

An elderly voice, but with a thick German-sounding accent. I was so thrown by it that I agreed that this was indeed No Alibis instead of instantly claiming a wrong number.

'I understand that you buy and sell rare books?'

'Yes . . . yes, we do.'

'And you have a number of these in your store?'

'Yes, of course.'

At that very moment I was alone, and I
felt it.
Even though this caller was only on the end of a telephone line, I felt physically threatened.

'I wonder if it might be possible to make an appointment to come and see you? I am a collector, and would appreciate the opportunity to peruse them in private, with your personal attention.'

'Well I don't really . . .'

'I am an old man, with the traffic, the pushing and shoving . . . really I would prefer . . . shall we say seven p.m.?'

'Well, I'm . . .'

'Very well. Seven p.m. it is.'

He cut the line. I hadn't even thought to ask his name. I was shaking and sweating. But strange as it may seem, I was also curious. Until I had started investigating these cases I had never been curious about
anything.
Now, particularly with this one, there was a need to know. He could of course just be an old duffer with a foreign accent and an interest in books. But he had made an arrangement to see
me,
in
private, alone,
by
myself
at a time when I had only recently been living in fear of murder by an elderly German assassin. (And I mean assassin, because like it or not, I am an important person, albeit in the shrinking world of independent bookselling.) It was surely just too much of a coincidence. He was coming for me. It was
The Night of the Jackal.
My Reichenbach Falls. My date with destiny. I would conquer fear and I would deal with it. It would be a meeting of minds. I would outwit him. I would be that bloke in that Swedish film sitting down to play chess with the Grim Reaper and confounding him with logic. And if that failed I would use the meat cleaver beneath the counter.

I would also have back-up.

I wasn't stupid. He might be old, but at point-blank range a gun doesn't care how old the trigger man is. First of all I called Jeff and explained the situation. He said that was scary and he'd love to help but he'd arranged to go swimming. I told him to rearrange or he could kiss goodbye to his job and say hello to an invoice for all the books he'd sold to his mates at less than cover price. He said he'd be there before seven. One of my favourite private detectives, Spenser, calls on a huge jive-talking black man called Hawk when he needs back-up. Hawk scares everyone and the ladies love him. Jeff, who occasionally lifts some weights,
only
scares women, and being from Amnesty International I suspected that he was less likely to tackle an assassin than mount a campaign for his release after he had killed me, although if the assassin was going to kill me, then he could just as easily kill Jeff as well. So safety in numbers was required. I called Alison and told her and she said I was mad letting him into the shop, that I should call the police, it was better to appear foolish and live than be brave and die. It was a good point. But alerting the police
in general
was only going to be time-consuming and would require frankly fantastical explanations, at the end of which I would be no nearer to solving
The Case of the Dancing Jews
but considerably closer to appearing in a local court charged with wasting police time or being sued for making false allegations about an elderly book-collector.

However, there was, I thought, a way of attracting police protection without actually tipping them off.

I phoned DI Robinson. As I had previously imagined there to be a small possibility that he was in the employ of the Odessa, I first asked him if he was busy that evening. He said, 'Apart from protecting Ulster from evil, no.' Satisfied, I explained to him that I was having a special private viewing in No Alibis for some of my favoured clients, and wondered if he would like to come. A number of very rare and immensely collectable titles would be on sale, with discounts well into the double figures (in my mind's eye that was 11 or 12 per cent). Even if he had purchased the Kinky Friedman in order to maintain his cover story, this would surely allow him to get even further into my good books, while at the same time providing me with a modicum of protection. So I wasn't particularly surprised when he thanked me, and told me I was very kind, and yes he would be very pleased to come.

Thus adequately protected in the store – I presumed that while the assassin was prepared to kill me, he would not be foolhardy enough to perpetrate a massacre – I turned my mind to what would happen when he realised that he wasn't going to be able to kill me there and then. If he was any sort of a tactician he would maintain his respectable front, purchase a book or two, then withdraw to plot anew. That was exactly the time that I needed to pounce – and I would track him to his lair.

But of course I wouldn't be able to achieve that by myself. I have already described my reluctance to drive in the dark, and the chances of me getting to the No Alibis van and completing my safety checks before he disappeared were quite small, even if he was an ancient crumbly. Besides, at certain times of the month I have an aversion to turning left, and this happened to be one of them, so there was a fifty-fifty chance that I would lose him if it was left up to me. One alternative was to call on my database of customers. They are not 'friends', as such, but they are loyal and supportive, and have certainly been an aid to me in previous investigations. However, if I issued an appeal to them, I knew I would necessarily have to be vague, so that although they would be keen to help, they would also want,
demand
to know why they hadn't been invited to the sale as 'favoured clients' and I'd end up having to sell off half my collection to them, and at a greater discount. I suppose I could have cherry-picked one or two of them – but word would inevitably spread; I believe they gossip about me behind my back, and quite possibly have an internet forum dedicated to it.