Quintin Jardine
Blackstone's Pursuits
In which I stare death in the face, Uncle Hughie swamps the Yellow Peril, and McArse and I meet our match
Being a Private Enquiry Agent isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, there are some days when it cracks me up. And this was going to be one of those days, all right.
Quite a few of the people I’m sent to interview start out by being difficult. Many of them have a two-word vocabulary … if you know what I mean. It’s as if they blame me for their wives having found out about them shagging that nice brunette person, or for their having been caught nicking a few quid from the partnership account.
This guy had done both, and I could tell at once that he was just not going to be the co-operative sort. It wasn’t only that I’d walked in on him and caught him stark naked. My main problem was that the poor, sad bugger was stone dead.
Looking at him, stretched out on his back on the crumpled bed, I could tell that he had been a wee man, a bit closer to five feet than six. But equally, I could guess at once what the nice brunette had seen in him. People are always going on to me about my favourite adjectives. They say I use them for effect, but that’s not true. It’s more that I take pleasure in words which strike me as particularly descriptive. At that moment, looking at him, stretched out on his back on the crumpled bed, ‘disproportionate’ thrust itself to the front of my mind and lodged there.
The knife was impressive too. At least its big hilt was. The rest of it, the blade, was rammed up under the wee man’s chin, nailing his mouth tight shut, away up behind his bulging eyes, all the way up, I guessed, into his brain.
Standing there, with the newly opened curtain still swinging behind me, I must have looked about as daft as he did. I stared at him, my eyes bulging out like organ-stops, just like his. He was ludicrous, lying there staring at the ceiling, so ludicrous that an idiot grin flickered around the comers of my mouth. Oddly, I felt myself feeling self-conscious, although why, God above knew. The wee man wasn’t aware of anyone’s presence, not any more, and his erstwhile companion was long gone.
It was the stench that drove home the enormity of it all. During my short, unhappy service as a probationer constable in Lothian and Borders Police I was called to the scene of precisely one death; yet another stupid kid found up a close in West Granton with a needle hanging out of her arm. My job had been to stand guard at the close-mouth, to keep a respectable distance between the wee girl — fifteen, she was, I remember — and the gawpers, oh yes, and between two bored, disinterested reporters who’d seen the same thing a few dozen times and who were pissed off because, but for this dead nuisance, they’d both have been freeloading at a civic lunch. The close-mouth was as close as I got to the victim, and until I walked into that room, that poor lassie was the only certifiably deceased person I’d ever seen.
At first, the shock shut out everything but the sight of him, but after a few seconds the hum forced its way up my nose. By and large, sphincters are a closed book to me, but not to the wee man on the bed. His had opened all of a sudden.
I turned back to the window, my stomach churning. The frames were the old wooden sash-cord type, the kind that usually you’d find stuck tight with paint. Thank Christ, though, once I’d freed the catch this one slid up nice and easy. I stuck my head out and took a deep breath, but it was no use. Normally, old Uncle Hughie eases up on you, giving you a couple of nudges so that you can be in the right place when finally he puts in an appearance. Not this time. The old familiar fist gripped my belly and squeezed as hard as it could, forcing up everything in there in a single violent shout, and firing it on to the pavement fifteen feet below. Well, almost on to the pavement. Instead of a splash, there was a yell.
‘Whit the … Away, ya dirty bastard!’
My eyes were still shut tight from the effort of my mighty boak. I opened one of them, fearfully, and looked down into Ebeneezer Street. The flat top of the traffic warden’s cap, and the shoulders of his tunic had caught most of it, but I was pleased to see — it’s funny, the details the mind registers in times of crisis — that some of Uncle Hughie’s output had landed on the page of his notebook on which the Yellow Peril was noting down the details of my out-of-date tax disc.
I opened the other eye and looked at him, pleading. ‘Aw come on, man! It only expired last week.’
He stared up at me, sending the mess on his hat cascading down the back of his heavy, porous uniform. ‘Yellow Peril’ had never been a more fitting nickname.
‘Whit’s the game, Jimmy?’ He didn’t have the wit to be astonished, only angry.
‘Lamb Rogan Josh,’ I muttered. ‘From the takeaway in Caroline Street. Sorry!’ I decided that I preferred the sight on the bed. Besides, the traffic warden probably smelled even worse than him. I pulled my head back into the room. As I did, I felt a current of cool air on my face and realised that I must have left the front door open. I walked out of the room and into the hall to close it.
I almost felt offended when she didn’t scream. I mean, isn’t that what women are supposed to do when they step into their flat and find a six-foot stranger standing in the lobby, even if he is wearing a Savoy Tailors’ Guild suit and holding a Motorola cell-phone in his hand?
When I got round to asking her, she really did offend me. ‘You just looked terrified,’ she said. ‘I felt sorry for you.’ I could have handled it if she’d said that fear had struck her dumb, or even just plain surprise. I could even have lived with revulsion. But being told I was pitiful was as hurtful as a smart kick on the kneecap, and the effect lasted longer.
In the there and then of it, she just stood and looked at me, her big brown eyes not startled, not even slightly wide, just questioning. She wore faded jeans, a crumpled tee-shirt and trainers with more than a few miles on the odometer. The bag slung over her shoulder looked bigger than she was. She let it slip to the floor as she shut the door behind her. In her right hand she held a bunch of keys big enough to choke a horse.
‘Well?’ she said, and I could have sworn she was smiling. ‘Are you him, then?’
I looked back at her: blankly, I think. ‘Eh?’ Right at that moment that was all the articulacy I could manage.
‘The mystery man. Dawn’s wee bit of illicit rough.’
The hair at the back of my neck prickled. This was like stepping into the middle of someone else’s movie. I decided that I’d better get a grip on reality, double-quick.
‘Look, I’m sorry. My name’s Oz Blackstone. I’m a private enquiry agent. I work for lawyers, insurance companies and the like.
‘I had an appointment to meet someone here this morning, at ten o’clock. When I got here, the door was unlocked. I knocked, and it just swung open. I shouted, but there was no answer. I thought that was odd, so I stepped inside and took a look around.’ I pulled a card from the stash in the breast pocket of my jacket. ‘Here.’
She looked at it. ‘Oz, eh. You don’t sound like an Australian.’
I scowled at her. Always, the same wisecrack. I sighed, and gave her the stock answer. ‘I’m not. It’s just that Osbert doesn’t cut the mustard down Pilton way.’
She gave me an odd smile, with a touche look about it. ‘I know what you mean. My name’s Prim Phillips. It’s short for “Primavera”. In English that means “Springtime”. I was conceived in May, on a holiday in a tent in the Costa Brava, and my Maw’s a terrible romantic. I decided early on that there was no bloody way I was going through life answering to “Vera”, therefore … You and I are kindred spirits in the daft name stakes.’ She shook her tousled sun-bleached head and smiled, and flashed me the sort of look that doesn’t stop at your eyes, but drills right into your head. ‘Imagine,’ she said, ‘giving a wee girl a four-syllable name!’