The Day of the Jack Russell (Mystery Man) (26 page)

‘Hide and seek?’

‘Practical experience. There is no substitute for actually
doing
something. You can send them into a mocked-up house, you can yell all you want at them over an obstacle course or a shooting range, but in-house training can only give you so much. They’re always going to be aware it isn’t real; they’re never going to have so much adrenalin going they can’t help shitting their pants.’

I smiled.

‘What?’

I smiled some more. I couldn’t help it. Everything was falling nicely into place.

‘That’s why you want the Jack.’

‘Why do I want the Jack?’

‘Because you gave your students a task, a practical, you sent them out on a spying mission. You weren’t going to risk them abroad, you weren’t going to send them into some foreign embassy here; you needed to find someone local, someone important enough and inaccessible enough to give them a real sense of danger, yet someone who, if it came to it, and he found out, your superiors could probably sort it out. Except you didn’t check, and it all went tits up.’

‘Maybe.’

‘You gave them a for instance. What if the Chief Constable was planning a military coup or was taking kickbacks or . . . whatever. How do we find out? And then you left them, literally as it turned out, to their own devices.’

He pulled his chair a little closer to the table. He cupped his hands around his coffee.

‘Go on.’

‘I don’t know if they got into police HQ; maybe it’s too hard, so they decide to focus on his nice new home. Except the Chief’s no doughbag; he knows he has his enemies inside and out of the force, inside and out of the Government, so he has the place swept for bugs on a regular basis. Your guys have to figure out a way to get inside, and I’m guessing you put some restrictions on them, made them do it the old-fashioned way, surveillance, sure, electronics, but nothing they couldn’t put together themselves in a lab.’

Greg was smiling now. ‘You’re good. You’re really good.’

Of course I was.

And I wasn’t finished. I pulled at my lip, thinking out loud.

‘They couldn’t crack it, could they? At least not until . . . somebody got careless. What was it, a change of shift? Someone’s tired, doesn’t want to take the long way home, so they drive directly past McCabe’s house, and they get punished for it – the Jack Russell comes charging out, and your guy knocks him down, kills him. Then the Chief is there, but he doesn’t lose his temper and beat your man up; he deals with it the way a cop should, because he’s at fault, letting the dog run out, and because he knows that every single thing he does in life is going to be scrutinised. He offers his insurance details and asks for your guy’s, and there’s the panic, because once he has those, and finds out it’s under a Government policy, then he knows he’s being targeted by MI5.’

‘So we had a crisis.’

‘But that’s just part of the training.’

‘Trick is not to panic. We went looking for someone to stand in for our driver, pulled up Michael Gordon, Belfast native, but killed in a road accident in Birmingham seven months ago.’

‘And the surveillance didn’t stop?’

‘No, of course not. It was part of the training, not being derailed by incidents, seeing it through.’

‘Then, in following the Chief to the taxidermist, suddenly there was your opportunity, how to get inside his house. Bug the Jack.’

‘It’s called a Passive . . .’

‘. . . Resonant Cavity Bug. It’s the Great Seal!’

‘It’s the Great Seal.’

‘What the fricking hell are you talking about seals for?’ Alison demanded, appearing at our table after an eternity in the ladies’ with Mother, who was now, very clearly, out for the count in her wheelchair. ‘And by the way, never, ever inflict that on me again. I thought we might bond, but she tried to drown me in the toilet, there was a mad scuffle and we’ve broken the cistern. Anyway, are you not going to give a pregnant woman a seat?’

Greg, to his credit, got up and moved one across from a vacant table opposite. She then asked him to get her a coffee.

Greg, to his greater credit, held his temper, and went to fetch her one.

‘We were just getting to the heart of the matter,’ I said.

‘You were discussing
seals
.’ She clapped her hands together like Flipper. ‘Besides, it’s important to show who’s in charge.’

‘You think
you’re
in charge?’

‘We. Us. And even
her
.’ She nodded at the lolling, paralysed shell of my mother. ‘You know she has a colostomy bag? I can understand old bats not plugging in their hearing aids, but not connecting up their . . .’ She shook her head. ‘Anyhoo – seals?’

‘Seal, singular. And not that kind. The Great Seal . . .’

‘Like the Great Aslan.’

‘. . . of the United States of America.’

Greg arrived back with Alison’s coffee and sat. ‘The Great Seal, yes indeedy.’

‘Of the United States? What has this got to do with . . .?’

I told her. That in 1946 the Soviet Union presented a copy of the Great Seal of the United States to the American ambassador in Moscow – with a bug hidden inside it. It was a new type of device, called a Passive Resonant Cavity Bug, which was activated by sound waves from a conversation in a room. It hung prominently for years, at least part of the time in the ambassador’s study, before a tiny microphone was eventually discovered. And that’s what had happened here. Greg’s students had taken it upon themselves to bug the Chief Constable’s new house by planting the device in Patch . . .

‘Purely as an exercise . . .’

‘But it got stolen by Jimbo and Ronny . . . and it continued to be activated by sound waves . . . and we’ve moved on from the forties, so I’m presuming there are pictures as well as words?’

Greg nodded.

‘And you think it was still working at Jimbo’s when they got murdered?’ That was Alison. We nodded. All of us. With the exception of Mother, who drooled. It almost seemed like we were all on the same side. Except, of course, we weren’t. And we had to remember it.

Greg leaned back in his chair. He nodded appreciatively at me. ‘You do know your stuff. Have you had any training?’

‘Training?’

‘In the services.’

Alison snorted.

‘You seem to have a pretty good handle on this espionage business.’

‘I’ve had a certain amount,’ I said.

‘Without leaving the comfort of his sofa,’ said Alison.

‘Ludlum, le Carré, Kipling, Childers, Horowitz, Hall, Diment, even Tom Clancy. They all know their onions.’

‘Well, you’ve surprised me. And I’ve told you just about everything I can. The Jack is out there, and we want him back.’

He looked at me expectantly.

‘So that you can hand him over to the police, because there’s a double murder buried inside him.’

He clasped his hands. ‘We don’t know that. It may not have recorded anything; it all has to do with placement. He could just as easily have been stuffed in a cupboard and recorded nothing.’

‘You mean you don’t actually know? The pictures weren’t being beamed somewhere?’

‘It was a primitive device. The project was designed to test my pupils’ initiative. It would have been too easy to give them high-end stuff so they could just sit on their arses. Whatever there is, it’s in the dog.’

Alison was shaking her head, slowly. She stuck a finger out at Greg. ‘You’ve no intention of handing the dog over to the police, you’ve no interest in solving the murders; you just want your tape back so that you don’t get into hot water over bugging the Chief.’

He opened his mouth, and for a moment I thought he was going to launch into an elaborate justification of this, or a complete denial. But then he just said, ‘Yes.’

‘Yes?’

‘That’s what this is about, protecting my end.’

‘But what about solving the murders?’ Alison asked.

‘That’s not my concern.’

‘Fuckin’ hell,’ said Alison, ‘you’re a callous son of a b, aren’t you?’

He lifted his coffee. ‘It tends to go with the territory.’

We pushed Mother back out to the Mystery Machine. I was debating if I would have time to take her home before we were due at Roselawn for the cremation, or whether I should take her with us and just leave the window open a fraction, as you would for a dog.

An open window might easily attract thieves.

It was a thought.

Greg walked with us, waiting, and then waiting some more for us to spill the beans about Patch. He had, as far as I could tell, played it straight. Now one of us had to tell him that we hadn’t the foggiest notion where the Jack was.

‘I’ll just get Ironside fixed in the back,’ I said, opening the side and lowering the ramp. ‘Why don’t you . . .?’

I nodded at Greg, for Alison’s benefit. It would be easier for her. She disliked and mistrusted him already.

Through the side of the van, as I was bolting the old witch in place, I heard her say, ‘We appreciate your honesty. But it really wasn’t anything we hadn’t already worked out. Your man in there . . . he may look like an idiot, but there’s not much that he misses.’

I was glowing and growling at the same time.

Greg wasn’t happy. ‘I’m putting myself on the line here; you said you’d help. I need the Jack.’

‘And you’ll get him.’ I stood in the doorway. Alison smiled up, squinting against the low winter sun. ‘But only if we’re completely convinced that you’re not going to turn round and stab us in the back.’

‘Why on earth would I do that?’

‘Because it tends to go with the territory.’

He sucked on his lower lip. He glanced at his watch. His eyes flicked up. ‘What do you want?’

‘Once I recover the Jack . . .’

‘You mean you haven’t yet?’

‘I will. Today. As soon as we have it, we watch the tape together, and you get me a copy of the scenes showing who killed Jimbo and RonnyCrabs. You do what you want with the rest of it.’

‘Okay. That it?’

‘Jeff may be in police custody as we speak. I want him released.’

‘We have no control over—’

‘I want him released.’

‘Okay. Is
that
it?’

‘No. An end to supermarkets offering huge discounts off the cover price of books. It’s driving us out of business.’

‘I can’t just . . .’ He stopped. He even smiled. ‘So you’ll get me the Jack? Today?’

‘Sure I will. Or my name isn’t—’

A thunderous banging from the inside of the van stopped me.

‘Take me home!’ Mother screamed. ‘I need a shit!’

The dumper became the dumpee. With Mother safely tucked up in bed, with a tartan flask by her side and a remote control and a large television with the sound turned up to max, we were free to hurry along to Jimbo’s funeral at Roselawn. She screamed after us about being left alone, about her mistreatment, about how she was going to tell the authorities, and then when Alison went back in to reassure her she screamed at her too, demanding to be left alone. Alison bustled back out, swearing under her breath.

Greg, reluctant to let us out of his sight, had tried to ride with us, but we resisted, and now he was trailing behind us in his BMW.

Alison had one eye on him in the side mirror. She said, ‘I like a confident man, and it isn’t usually you.
Do
you know where the Jack is?’

‘Haven’t the foggiest.’

‘Then why did you . . .?’

‘I’m hoping it will become clear in the course of the afternoon.’

‘Hoping?’

‘Everyone will be there, and I will have the chance to study them, and their reactions, and their inter actions if they have any.’

‘Which will tell you exactly what?’

‘I don’t know yet. But getting everyone in one room, it generally works for Agatha.’

‘Agatha, if it’s the same Agatha we’re talking about, has presented all the evidence and drawn her conclusions before she stands up to address the suspects.’

I nodded.

‘You mean you have worked out who has the Jack?’

‘No. But I know who murdered Jimbo and RonnyCrabs.’

‘You do?’

‘And I’m pretty close to making a cultured guess as to the location of the Jack.’

‘But how? I’ve seen most everything you have, and I haven’t the foggiest notion who killed who or what or whatever.’

‘Well that’s why you’re the junior partner.’

‘You say it with a smile, but you really mean it.’

‘Because it’s all there; it has to be. Look, I make my living out of detective fiction, and they all laugh at me because I put so much faith in it.’

‘They . . .?’

‘They. Everyone.’

‘Everyone doesn’t . . .’

‘Just listen. You see, we’re all exactly the same. You think real police officers are somehow smarter than someone who designs hats? No, they just have better access to crime scenes, evidence, labs. But writers of detective fiction are every bit as smart, and quite often much, much smarter, because their experience is greater, they work in different fields; they can be astrophysicists, or turkey farmers or housewives, or jockeys or mountaineers or teachers or ventriloquists, and they bring all that experience to the table, whereas most cops are cops from the day they enter the academy, they haven’t lived in the real world. Do you have any idea how many crime novels have been written over the past hundred years?’

‘No, I—’

‘Hundreds of thousands. And do you know what that means?’

‘The market is over—’

‘It means there’s scarcely a crime that you can possibly imagine that hasn’t already been imagined by a mystery writer, that hasn’t been
solved
by a mystery writer. I’m not saying there are exact parallels with real life, but you take little things out of different cases, and you put them together, and you come up with a solution that is every bit as plausible as the one the cops have been working towards.’

Alison nodded for a little bit, then said: ‘You really do live in your own wee world, don’t you?’

I almost countered by asking her if she had ever heard of Ronald Knox, while knowing full well that she hadn’t. He was a priest, a theologian and a crime writer, but he remained best known, at least in
our
community, for his Decalogue, ten commandments that every mystery story had to adhere to in order to not stretch the bounds of credulity. He had ruled that the criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know. That super natural elements must be ruled out as a matter of course. There must not be more than one secret room or passage. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end. No Chinaman must figure in the story. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition that proves to be right. The detective himself must not commit the crime. The detective is bound to declare any clue he discovers. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts that pass through his mind; his intelligence must be very slightly below that of the average reader. Twins, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.