Mystery Man (5 page)

However, on this occasion I had been studying her shop window for forty-seven minutes, without detecting any signs of movement, and was wondering if after eight months of steady surveillance it was time for me to take the initiative by introducing myself to her under the guise of buying a watch or a bangle for my mother, when the door opened and my next case walked in. I reluctantly turned from my vigil and found myself nodding at a distinguished-looking middle-aged gentleman in a grey pinstripe suit and lavender tie. Without bothering to glance at the shelves of new releases, or the table devoted to titles recommended by the staff – me, in fact, because Jeff's taste is in his bottom – he immediately approached the counter and placed two hands on it as if to steady himself, before asking in a deep yet querulous voice if the new James Patterson was in yet.

'Sir,' I replied with suitable haughtiness, because I know my onions, 'the
old
James Patterson isn't in. This is a James Patterson-free zone. Once we begin stocking Pattersons we'll have no room for anything else. We may as well change the name of the shop to Patterson Books.'

I felt confident in being so flippant because I knew straight away that this man was no more interested in James Patterson than he was in the man in the moon. It was his voice: choked with emotion. And nobody has ever gotten emotional over a James Patterson novel. If I had known then that this man's visit would lead me to become embroiled in my most fiendishly difficult and certainly most dangerous investigation,
The Case of the Dancing Jews,
then I would have excused myself for several moments, darted out the back way, charged down the alley, raced across the road to the Eason's book store and bought that month's James Patterson, sped back across the road and up the alley, all the while ruthlessly peeling off their 25% off sticker, in at the rear entrance, through the kitchen, into the body of the shop and then sold it to him for full whack, all in order to avoid further involvement in the sordid events I am about to recount.

However, too late, he started to talk, and before very long he had reeled me in to a mystery that began, as with all of the others, with his employing the services of the private eye next door.

'Truth be told,' he began, 'I'm not really after a Patterson. But I understand he's very . . .
popular.
It was just an ice-breaker. You see, I'm a publisher myself.' He nodded at me, clearly under the mistaken impression that this meant that there was already some kind of a bond between us. He nodded at my Ikea shelves. 'Of course not your type of material. Local books. History. Photography. Memoirs. Some literature, a little poetry. We do a very nice calendar of Strangford Lough. We're called Beale Feirste Books.'

'Yes Belfast Books,' I said.

'No – a lot of people make that mistake. It's actually Beale Feirste Books.'

'But it's the same thing.'

He looked at me. 'No it's not.'

I knew all about Belfast Books. It was the kind of publishing I detested. It survived on Arts Council grants and donations from charitable foundations. It was a producer of decaffeinated coffee table books masquerading as a beleaguered champion of culture. Under normal circumstances he wouldn't have given me the skin off his custard, but he was clearly after something. He didn't say it, but what he meant by 'some literature, a little poetry' was that nothing I sold in No Alibis would, in his mind, qualify as literature. That I was little more than a pimp for pulp fiction. That my life's work amounted to a wasted life. That I might as well never have existed.

I hate judgemental people.

I could have told him that we publish our own calendar every year. That it has twelve months and everything. That if he cared to flip back its pages he would become the beneficiary of a spiral-bound history of crime fiction in handy captions and meticulously reproduced classic covers: from arguably the very first
roman policier
(Emile Gaboriau's
Le Crime d'Orcival)
through the Yellow Back crime fighters (like Mary Paschal in
Experiences of a Lady Detective
in 1861). He would learn about twenty-year-old schoolteacher Edward Ellis who in the same decade sold 600,000 copies of
Seth Jones,
one of the first dime novels. He would become aware of the many rivals of Sherlock Holmes – Sexton Blake, Craig Kennedy, Martin Hewitt and Baroness Orczy's
Skin O' My Tooth.
He might learn the truth about Dashiell Hammett's
Continental Op
and his newspaper cartoon strip, 'Secret Agent X-9', or about Raymond Chandler calling Mickey Spillane's
I
,
The Jury
pulp writing at its worst even as it sold its four millionth copy; of James M. Cain's
The Postman Always Rings Twice
being seized by the Boston police for obscenity, of fantastic evocative noir titles like
Lady – Here's Your Wreath, Kiss My Fist, Road Floozie, Night and the City, Now Try the Morgue, Murder Thy Neighbour . . .
oh, I could have opened up a whole new world to him, but there was no point, his blinkers were firmly in place.

'Okay,' I said, 'you're a publisher. We don't sell your type of books.'

'It's not about the books,' he said, 'it's about your friend next door.'

Ah.

He wasn't the first to make this assumption, and he wouldn't be the last. But at that point he wasn't worthy of an explanation.

'What about him?' I asked.

'I paid, in advance, and now he's flown the coop. You have to tell me where he is.'

'I have no idea where he is. And one should never pay for
services
in advance.'

He fixed me with a look that was somewhere between anger and despair. 'I had to,' he finally admitted. 'I had to pay for his flight. I should have known then something was up. What sort of a state does a business have to be in that its owner can't afford a ticket to Frankfurt?'

'Frankfurt?'

I think it was at this exact point that I got sucked in. It was a classic honey trap. He hadn't even explained the case yet, but already the air was rich with intrigue and the possibility of international travel. He shook his head and sighed. I could see now that his face was deathly pale and the pulse on the side of his head was standing out like a varicose vein. He was obviously in turmoil. As it happened, at that very moment Jeff appeared through the door for his lunchtime shift – although I am constantly surprised to see him. I was frankly astonished that he accepted my argument that because I only get half as many customers in the summer months he should only receive fifty per cent of his normal pay. Still, it's a hundred per cent more than he gets working for that shower of whingers at Amnesty International, and at least with me he doesn't have to hold a placard or pretend that he understands Spanish. So I quickly instructed him to take over the desk, and to keep an eagle eye on the jewellery shop across the road, before escorting the Belfast Books publisher to the rear of the store, an open-plan area where I have provided a sofa and two armchairs – rescued from premature incineration on an Eleventh Night bonfire, thankfully the smell of petrol is now fading – for my customers to sit and browse through the books at their leisure, provided they can concentrate while I give them the Death Stare from the cash desk. One must make some sort of an effort in these days when customer care is so important, but there is a fine balance – I'm not a frickin' library. I like to think the atmosphere in the store is finally balanced between the pull-up-a-chair-and-peruse-our-books-for-nothing of Borders and the reading room at Guantanamo Bay. However, the area was currently unoccupied, so I sat him down, made him coffee and on my return encouraged him to tell all.

His name was Daniel Trevor and he had set up Beale Feirste Books with his wife Rosemary fifteen years previously. They had two children, who missed their mother dreadfully. Beale Feirste Books was, he said, a reasonably profitable business, but that wasn't really its
raison d'être
; they just loved books, and the arts, and artists. Beale Feirste Books operated out of a large house in the County Down countryside that doubled as an artists' retreat, where for days or weeks or months at a time writers, painters or sculptors, composers, dramatists or poets could come to a remote outpost to work free from distraction. 'It is absolutely idyllic,' said Daniel. 'However, now the idyll has been spoiled for ever. My darling wife Rosemary has disappeared, and I don't know where to turn.'

As he said this, his bottom lip quivered. I had never spoken to the girl in the jewellery shop, but I knew I would be similarly distraught if she ever disappeared from my life.

'When was this?' I asked.

He shook his head ruefully. 'It's been nine months now.'

If his face hadn't been so terribly sad I would probably have jumped in with 'Jesus, you took your time!' Instead I gave him a sympathetic 'And no word?'

'No, nothing, no calls, no e-mails, her credit card hasn't been . . .' He took a deep breath. 'I just don't know where to turn. The police, Interpol . . . no use whatsoever. They even dug up my—'

'Patio,' I said reflexively.

He nodded. 'But I swear to God I didn't . . . I wouldn't . . . I love her more than anything.'

He settled himself for a moment, before explaining that every autumn he and his wife travelled to Germany to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair. 'It's a huge old thing . . . almost every publisher in the world, big or small, attends . . . we negotiate international publishing rights and licensing fees . . . there's something like seven thousand exhibitors from . . . oh, about a hundred countries, over a quarter of a million people visit . . . and yet . . . there are so many familiar faces, it's almost like a family gathering.'

I nodded in recognition. I had once hosted a mystery convention over one miserable weekened here in the store, which, due to a combination of bad weather, alternative sporting attraction and a lack of advertising, was, also, literally, something of a family gathering.

'Unfortunately this year, because we had an unexpected influx of poets at our retreat, and they couldn't be left on their own – honestly, they would have been hanging from the rafters – I simply couldn't go. Rosemary – reluctantly I might add, because she hates leaving the kids – had to go to Frankfurt by herself. She was selling the rights to four of our forthcoming titles, she had appointments all day, every day, but she phoned religiously at seven every night. Even though she knew lots of people there she wasn't socialising at all, went to bed early to be sure to be bright for another day's work. The last night I spoke to her, the fourth night of the convention, she was tired but happy, business was going well. I . . . and I hate myself for this now . . . I was quite ratty with her because it had been a rather fractious day at the retreat, and then when I didn't hear from her the next night I thought she was just huffing with me. Then she was due back the following day, but there was no sign of her. Well, I didn't worry, at first, you know what Ryanair is like, they say they fly to Frankfurt but really they take you to Switzerland then put you on a bus for eighteen hours . . . but when she still hadn't arrived by the next morning, well then I really did start to get worried. I contacted the airline, but they said she hadn't turned up for her flight. I called the hotel but they said she'd checked out. I was obviously very unsettled by this stage. I spoke to Frankfurt police, but with the language thing, I wasn't convinced that they understood or fully appreciated my concerns, because she's not the sort who would just go off somewhere on a whim, so I talked to the local CID here and they followed up on my behalf. I have no reason to believe that the police either here or there didn't investigate thoroughly, but the fact is, they haven't found her.'

'So then you turned to Malcolm Carlyle, Private Eye.'

'Yes, exactly, that was three months ago. He talked a good talk. I had to pay for him to go to Frankfurt, and not with Ryanair, and put him up in the same hotel as Rosemary, and that wasn't cheap. He was there for a week, even though everyone to do with the convention was long gone. He told me he was on to something. He kept asking for more money. Now he's disappeared. I am employing a missing person to look for a missing person. I feel like I've been the most dreadful fool.'

It was the first time I'd heard any indication of impropriety regarding my former neighbour. Small businesses go bust all the time, and God knows I've walked that knife edge for long enough, but thankfully those who milk their customers dry in the full knowledge that they're about to go belly up are few and far between.

Daniel Trevor was staring into his coffee. I stared into mine. Jeff stared across the road. Daniel stared some more. I stared some more. Jeff watched the jewellery store.

Eventually Daniel Trevor said: 'I need your help.'

I relaxed then. You see, I never volunteer my services. I must always be asked. It sets the dynamic for a relationship.

'I believe you . . . investigate . . .'

'Daniel, I'm a busy man,' I said, despite all evidence to the contrary.

'I understand that.'

'But I am intrigued. People do not just disappear. Neither here nor in Germany.'

From the counter, Jeff cleared his throat. 'Six million—' he began, but then quit when I directed the Death Stare at him.

Since my own detective work had begun I had not yet failed to solve a case and my confidence had grown accordingly. So I was not bashful at all about stating: 'Daniel – I will find her. But I must warn you before I start – if you ask a question, you must be prepared for the answer.'

His brow furrowed. 'I'm not quite sure what you mean.'

'I mean, if you ask a question, the answer might not be what you want it to be.'

'I'm still not sure what you're getting at. If I ask a question, it isn't a matter of the answer being what I want it to be. The answer is just the answer.'

'Well, you're being quite literal. I mean if you ask a question, it might have variable answers. You might think that two and two makes four. But it doesn't always.'

'I . . . I believe it does.'

'Okay, bad example. I mean, if you ask what the capital of Australia is, I might immediately say Canberra, but between you asking the question and me actually going to find out the answer, it might easily have shifted to Sydney. Or Perth. Quite often the truth is based on shifting, whispering sands.'