The Quorum (46 page)

The client, who had come unannounced and without an appointment, was a pot-bellied skeleton. He had a well-dressed, briefcase-carrying shadow with him.

‘Ms Rhodes?’ asked the client.

‘It’s miss,’ she said, silently biting off her instinctual ‘and proud of it, creepo!’ What she said was: ‘please go inside and get comfortable. I’ll be with you in a sec.’

The two men passed into her office. She brushed some gold dust off her skirt, and wrapped the gilt flakes in yesterday’s
Guardian.
The sign read orce work, but she’d fix that later. Inside, she basketed the newspaper and sat in the wonky swivel chair. The room was tidy through inaction rather than inclination.

She had recently given up smoking for economic reasons, so she picked up a biro with which to gesture. ‘Gentlemen, how can I help?’

The opening question had been carefully calculated by the Sunderland Agency, her former employer, to have the maximum tongue-loosening effect on the sort of people who needed confidential investigations. That is, people in trouble. The client wasn’t having any of it. He remained as smooth and confident as anyone who looks as if he has been lying dead in a bath for three weeks possibly can.

‘I am Nigel Karabatsos,’ he said. ‘I am rich.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘I mention the fact in order to establish a basis for our relationship, not out of any undue pride. I am rich through inheritance, and can thus claim no honour from my wealth. My great-grandfather invented the sticking plaster.’

‘I always wondered who’d done that.’

Karabatsos twitched a smile. He cradled his waistcoated stomach like a pregnancy. Aside from that swelling, there was scarcely a pocket of flesh on him. It took no morbid turn of the imagination to see the skull beneath his skin.

Sally realised the shadow was looking at her legs, and sat up straight. She had already pegged Karabatsos as a fruitcake, but knew she would have to bear with him. There weren’t all that many people willing to entrust their affairs to a private detective who looked more like Connie Francis than Alan Ladd.

‘I want you to see something. Mr Derewicz.’ The shadow gave Karabatsos an expensive black case. With fingers like refrigerated sausages, Karabatsos opened the case and took out a cloth-wrapped bundle which he gave to Sally. ‘It’s a statuette. Please examine it.’

She unwound the faintly scented cloth, and held the cool dark marble thing in her bare hands. It was a black bird, with human legs, hair and breasts. It had ruby eyes and diamond talons. A golden shaft, slightly bent, pierced its torso, wedged immovably in the stone.

‘Very pretty,’ she said, trying not to sound impressed. Actually, she felt an extraordinary desire to possess the statuette. As a child, she used to disconcert her parents whenever she saw a toy or sweet that took her fancy by shouting ‘I want it!’

‘Yes,’ purred Karabatsos. ‘Of course, it’s quite priceless. Nobody knows who made it, or when, where and why. The subject is classical, but there is something Germanic about the execution. Not exactly Gothic, but a chilly touch of the monasteries nevertheless...’

‘What is it? An angel? A harpy? Foghorn Leghorn’s sister?’

‘There’s a problem there. It first became known to history in 1520, when it was listed as one of the treasures of the Vatican. It is named as “Mythwrhn”, which sounds slightly Welsh. Don’t try to pronounce it. The best you’ll be able to do is “Mother Hen”.’

‘Mother Hen?’

‘That’s it. Its passage around Europe becomes obscure until 1839, when an English adventurer named Fleetwood stole it from a minor Russian princeling. He was colourfully flogged to death by Cossacks, but the booty was smuggled into this country and came into the possession of his family. At about the turn of the century, it became a kitsch object much prized by certain mystic-minded crackpots. Edwin Arthur Waite swears in a memoir that the sight of the Mythwrhn sent him into a three-day fugue. W.B. Yeats, the poet, is believed to have written “Leda and the Swan” in an attempt to exorcise the nightmares he suffered after examining the statuette...’

Sally resented being told who W.B. Yeats was. ‘There are a lot of crazies about,’ she interjected.

‘As you say. Roger Fleetwood died recently. He had wanted to go into the Church like his father, but eventually decided instead to become a heroin addict. As Fleetwood’s closest friend, I am executor of what remains of the estate. The Mythwrhn is a special bequest. It is to go to Roger’s cousin, Joel Silliphant. Maybe you have heard of him. He once had some inexplicable success as a popular musician. I would like to see you deliver the statuette into his hands.’

Sally stroked the marble feathers. The hole in the story was obvious. ‘I don’t want to talk myself out of a commission, but wouldn’t it be a lot simpler for you to give Silliphant his heirloom yourself?’

‘There are problems,’ sighed Karabatsos. ‘I am afraid that Silliphant and I are not on civil terms. A dispute remains unsettled. The prospect of being in his company disgusts and appals me. At our last meeting, he attempted to bite off my lower lip...’

‘He’s a scratcher, Miss Rhodes,’ said Derewicz, touching white scars on his cheek. He had a Halifax accent.

‘Do not be alarmed. Silliphant is not violent at random. He simply feels he has cause not to love Mr Derewicz and myself. You should be in no danger. Besides, someone in your profession must surely expect to run some risks. You are, I trust, competent in the arts of dirty fighting?’

‘Oh yes, in California these hands would have to be licensed as deadly weapons. But potential violence costs extra.’

‘Would £500 cover your requirements?’

‘Unless this Silliphant lives in Honolulu.’

‘As a matter of fact, he can be found in Camden. Mr Derewicz has all the details.’

Sally was given a slim white envelope.

‘There is a cheque inside,’ said Karabatsos. ‘Will you take the job?’

She was going to regret it, but...

‘I don’t see why not. I have a couple of other ongoing investigations, but nothing that can’t wait. I should be able to deal with Mother Hen this evening.’

‘Excellent. Incidentally, I’d advise you against telephoning Silliphant to tell him you’re coming. That would give him time to work up an irrational rage. There will be no need to inform me once you have discharged your duties. Good day.’

Karabatsos stood up, steadied his wobbling stomach, and left. Before shutting the door behind him, Derewicz said ‘you know you look just like that girl who sang “Where the Boys Are”.’

Sally gave him her zero degree smile. She shuddered as if her grave had been spat on. With an unnerving spasm of strength, she snapped the biro in two.

She could have sworn, for a moment, that Mother Hen had blinked.

* * *

Sally knew from experience and
The Rockford Files
that nothing was as simple as the commission she had accepted. She was being followed.

Although most of her backstreet scuffles had been with prodigal pussies, she was not unprepared for the occasional dangerous game of midnight hide-and-seek.

One of the imaginary plague of peeping toms in Highgate had turned out to be real. A borderline psychotic with a greasy quiff and a pair of boltcutters had found her watching him watching women in a garage toilet. He had dragged her into a petrol-stinking workshop, used the shears as a bludgeon, and tried to rape her. She had used the tool for a purpose related to that which it was intended for and neatly snipped off one of her assailant’s nuts. He had got a sociology degree in Pentonville, and she had been bound over to keep the peace.

There was an anonymous car tailing the 134 down the Archway Road. The bus stopped frequently, but the driver ignored all the opportunities to overtake it. Aside from the conductor, Sally shared the bus only with a pair of gibbering pensioners. The tail had to be on her.

The little Astra she sometimes carried for effect was locked up in a desk drawer back in Muswell Hill. Anyway, it didn’t have a firing pin. If it came to physical violence, she thought she could hand out a fairly punitive whack with Mother Hen. Holding tightly the cloth-wrapped statuette, she got off a couple of stops early and dodged into a crowded kebab place.

The windows were misted over, but she discerned the blobby shape of the car as it drove by. She couldn’t name the make but knew it was one of the common ones. Red tangles of dead cow turned over a weakly infernal light behind the counter. A loiterer with gorilla forearms and a ‘Feed the World’ T-shirt tried accidentally to touch her bottom. She deliberately stamped on his sandals, and stepped cautiously onto the crud-covered pavement.

Over the road, a giant chicken with a red and green chef’s hat clucked out special prices for its barbequed brothers in a Tennessee Williams accent.

The roar of a civil aircraft drowned the beating of Mother Hen’s wings. Drops of red fell hundreds of feet to splash in the streets.

The anonymous address in Camden turned out to be a club, Fly-By-Nite’s. The pursuit car was cruising around looking for an inconspicuous but convenient parking space. Karabatsos’s northern Polack was driving. He had on leather gloves and an SAS balaclava. Shit, thought Sally.

To get into Fly-by-Nite’s, Sally had to squeeze through a dingy corridor beside a licensed sex shop, negotiate a rat-eaten bead curtain, and descend a creaky spiral staircase. The strains of that perennially popular heavy punk standard ‘I Wanna Fuck a Pig’ could be heard over the amp feedback. There was a heady whiff of drugs in the air.

She found herself in an overpoweringly loud environment, an economy-size cavern with wall-to-wall beefcake. The near-naked Conan clone on the door pointed to a sign. no unaccompanied women. He had super steve written on one of his pectorals. He mouthed a discreet ‘naff off’.

She stuffed a five-pound note into his leather codpiece, not expecting any change. With a ball Pentel, she wrote on her hand:
I’M A MAN IN DRAG
. Super Steve wasn’t satisfied, and put on an impressive display of brow-flexing. She smeared her palm clean on his oiled shoulder, and shouted ‘where’s Silliphant?’

Super Steve changed his attitude as promptly as a foreign waiter confronted with a television-advertised credit card. He signalled, and an understudy, smartly dressed as Robin the Boy Wonder, took his place as he led Sally through the flesh-jammed dance floor to a quieter room. Unsurprisingly, no one tried to touch her up.

‘Would you mind waiting here?’ asked Super Steve in a reassuringly Balham-shaded voice. ‘I’ll fetch Joel.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘By the way, a friend of mine will be coming in soon. He’s a nice boy, just down from the North. He likes muscle guys.’

‘There’s a lot of that about,’ he said, striking an Adonis pose that threatened to burst his black leather studded armlet. ‘I’ll see he has a good time.’

‘I’m sure you will.’

Left alone, Sally sat in a low chair covered in crinkly plastic. She rested Mother Hen on a glasstop table. The cloth slipped, and an elegant head poked out. She smiled at the statuette, cheered by its unruffled confidence.

...as a little girl, Sally had liked Superman comics, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Biggles, and pterodactyls, and Dumbo, and astronauts, and ‘Snoopy and the Red Baron’, and zeppelins, and...

Her upper arms ached a little. She should have found a carrier bag for Mother Hen rather than clutching it like a baby. She stretched, and flapped her arms from the shoulders.

Silliphant walked into the room and she froze in a stupid position. It couldn’t be anybody else. His longish black hair was thinning, and his kabuki makeup was inexpertly applied, but he still looked like the king and queen of rock ’n’ roll, from his plastic horns down to his symbol-edged black robe.

He strutted in like a born performer, almost reaching for an invisible microphone. He turned to throw his combined sneer and pout at her, and caught sight of Mother Hen. He flew backwards and flattened against a wall as if tugged by a fishing line.

‘Get that fucking bird out of here,’ he shrieked, his two-inch nails raking the furry wall, ‘or I’ll have you fucking disembowelled here and now!’

She thought he was going to attack her, but Silliphant burned out like a flashbulb. His fury expired in an instant and he fell sobbing on the floor. He chewed the carpet and kicked the wall. His back arched. He could have been undergoing shock therapy.

In the cavern, the band segued into a thrash version of an old Beach boys number. ‘She’ll have fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, til her Daddy takes her T-bird away!’

Sally stood up, a little embarrassed. She pointed to Mother Hen. ‘I think this is yours,’ she said.

Silliphant twisted on the floor and looked up at her. He had a snot moustache and tear-track scars in his white pancake. He was almost cried out.

‘No,’ he whimpered. ‘I won’t touch it. Karabatsos has no power over me. She can’t have me. I repudiate the Thirteen.’

Silliphant reached into a rubber plant and grabbed it by the stem, close to the pot. Waxy leaves writhed as he swung the heavy ceramic pot above his head. He hit the table, cracked the glass. The pot broke, clods of earth scattered.

Unsatisfied with the partial destruction, Silliphant threw himself onto the table, landing with all his weight. Chrome-plated tubes buckled, and the sheet glass exploded. Sally snatched Mother Hen out of the wreckage.

Silliphant grovelled in the earth and pottery and plant and glass until he found a jagged shard large enough to open his throat. He stopped screaming, and sawed roughly through his windpipe and a major artery.

His neck in ruins, he stood up. A Niagara of splatter fountained from beneath his jawline. He cried out almost triumphantly. Sally sidestepped and put a chair between herself and the dying man. She still got warm stains on her tights.

Silliphant fell into his mess and shut up. The pseudo-mouth in his neck kept gurgitating long after the rest of him had stopped kicking.

At last, glitter rock was dead.

* * *

Mother Hen crouched on a crumbling windowsill, talons sunk into the concrete, wings spread against red brick. She had been cheated of the prey ordained for her by the First Among Thirteen. The wound in her breast ached.