‘Well, I suppose it started as a hobby,’ the postman said over his shoulder, ‘and then it grew into something more. I like finding solutions to problems. Answers. Life is full of questions. Only the privileged few have access to the answers.’
‘But you can’t —’
‘It’s really amazing what people will say in their letters,’ he mused.
‘And this… this heinous intrusion into people’s privacy is what you call detection, is it?’
‘You may not like it,’ he replied, setting a cup in front of me and sitting down, ‘but it means that I can give you a Gold-Seal Guarantee of Success.’
‘Hmm,’ I said.
‘Let’s talk business,’ he said. ‘Actually, when I saw you at the door there I thought you must have come about your mortgage difficulties.’
‘Did you,’ I said.
‘Yes, thought you might have been wanting to fake your own death or something. Not unusual, people in your position.’
‘Not that it’s any of your concern,’ I told him haughtily, ‘but the mortgage is a minor matter, a simple crossed wire. As a matter of fact, I’m just on my way to see my bank manager and sort it out.’
He smiled at me indulgently. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Of course you are. I suppose the repo men won’t be needing this, then.’ He plucked from the pile a single sheet headed with the Irelandbank logo, a sort of euro-sign-meets-swastika affair, and passed it to me. It was addressed to a debt-collection agency, stating that the bank now had legal authorization to take ‘the next step’ and that the collectors could begin shortly with their ‘recovery’.
‘Quite so,’ I swallowed. ‘A trifle.’
‘So you’ve come about your sister,’ he said, grinning.
‘Yes — listen here, Eye, kindly remove that lascivious expression when discussing my sister, if you please.’
‘All right,’ he said amiably. ‘Fine-looking girl, though. Shame that company didn’t take her on. I’d have thought she was a shoo-in.’ He exhaled ruminatively, crossed an ankle over his thigh, fiddled about with the hem of his trouser-leg. ‘Takes the wind out of your sails, a knockback like that,’ he added as an afterthought.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ His omniscience was starting to irk me; it was like meeting the Wizard of Oz or something. ‘And I don’t want to know. I’m not especially pleased about taking this course of action, and I’d appreciate it, Eye, if we could keep to the matter at hand and you would at least pretend not to know all there is to know about my family.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘And another thing, don’t you have a name? I can’t keep calling you “Eye”, it’s confusing.’
‘Okay.’ His eyes narrowed and he rubbed his jaw. ‘Call me… MacGillycuddy.’
‘All right then.’ Carving a niche of air for myself from the steam, I told MacGillycuddy the whole story of Frank’s sudden and mysterious appearance in my house: his murky past and equally murky present, his baffling success with Bel, the disappearance of various household items, the sinister rusty white van.
‘I don’t quite get why the van bothers you so much,’ MacGillycuddy said.
‘Because no one knows what’s in it, that’s why.’ I told him about the time Frank was driving us to the greyhound race, when I had surreptitiously managed to peek into the back and seen dimly, through the smeared grille, what looked like mounds and mounds of garbage.
‘That’s unusual, right enough,’ MacGillycuddy admitted.
‘It’s more than unusual. The man’s a sociopath. I mean I don’t know if you’re familiar with Yiddish folklore at all, but — well, perhaps we shouldn’t get into that now. The sad fact is that my sister has a thing for sociopaths and if I don’t keep an eye on him he’ll run off with the whole house and her to boot.’
‘So you want me to…’
I told him that I wanted him to find out everything he could about Frank: who he was, what he did, what had happened to my chair. ‘Basically, anything incriminating,’ I said.
‘No bother,’ MacGillycuddy said. ‘Child’s play. Give me twenty-four hours.’ Having scribbled out my number and a cheque for his retainer, I rose to leave.
‘Say hello to your mother for me,’ he winked. ‘Good to have her back.’
I was tempted to pursue this, but the sight of his eagerly rubbing hands was enough to warn me away from opening any more Pandora’s boxes. I wished him good day, and opened the door.
‘And the repo men!’ he called after me.
I made my way back to the shopping centre sunk in thought. So they’d already called in the repossessors: that seemed rather unsporting of them. This interview might not be the formality I’d expected. I took a deep breath, and stepped through the doors of the bank.
It was a long, windowless chamber, with a rather elegant fan depending lifelessly from the low ceiling. A painted wooden counter ran down the left-hand side, bearing pens on chains, transaction dockets, leaflets about car loans, tracker bonds, inscrutable investment schemes. To the right, beside a small row of uncomfortable chairs, a louvred door led off to another room to which one went for cash, lodgements and so on. Two pictures hung side by side on a prominent area of the wall. One was an anaemic landscape of a soothing sun glinting through trees. ‘RELIABILITY,’ it said underneath in big, sincere letters. The other was somewhat more fanciful, depicting a tropical island with dolphins frolicking soothingly just offshore. ‘QUALITY SERVICE,’ this one said.
At the back of the room, a man in a badly-tailored blue jacket was smiling at me from behind a desk. His arms were folded and he was sitting at the exact midpoint between his computer and a fake-looking potted plant. He looked rather as if he had been sitting like that all day, smiling placidly; a sign saying ‘Information’ hung above him, with an arrow pointing down at his head.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said pleasantly, when he saw I had finished my examination of the dolphin picture.
‘Ah, hello,’ I replied with a whimsical brightness, as if I were just passing a few idle minutes on my way somewhere else.
‘How can I help you today?’ he inquired. He was a nondescript-looking fellow, with a kindly, roundish face and a little hyphen of a mouth.
‘Oh, just a small thing,’ I said breezily, waving a couple of red-stamped envelopes at him. ‘Just a few final-notice things we seem to have got by mistake.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Mind if I have a quick look at them?’
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Be my guest.’
‘Why not take a seat,’ he said, ‘Mr…?’
‘Hythloday — Charles,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
He scanned through the pages expressionlessly while I whistled something in keeping with the relaxed but respectful mood we had established, and tried to imagine what he might look like away from his desk — cheering on a boat race, or frowning thoughtfully over a jar of pickles in the supermarket. He slid his chair over to the computer and began to tap at it. He tapped for a good three minutes. ‘Oh,’ he said at one point, briefly pulling back from the screen. I leaned casually over to one side but I couldn’t make out what was on it. I continued uneasily with my whistling.
‘Well, Charles,’ he said eventually, ‘it says here that we haven’t received any mortgage payments from you in over six months.’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said in a businesslike manner that might make this sound like an explanation.
‘It looks like we’ve been trying to contact you about it for some time,’ he continued, still gazing into the computer screen. ‘Didn’t you get our letters about legal action?’
He was trying to keep up his friendly tone but I could tell that he was hurt, as though I had deliberately misled him. I explained that the letters had been misfiled in the String Drawer but this didn’t cut much ice.