‘Sospan, have you heard of a man called Søren Kierkegaard?’
‘The one who writes his name with an O that looks like a wobbly Saturn? ’Course I have. Teleological suppression of the ethical. Fear and Trembling, Despair and The Sickness unto Death. And don’t bother offering me the signed first edition, I’ve already got one. My grandfather left me it in his will.’
‘You’ve seen the ad, then?’
He pulled out a copy of the Cambrian News from under the counter and began rummaging around inside for the classified ad. I stopped him, closed the paper to the front page and read the report on the Father Christmas slaying. He’d been found in a Chinatown alley a few nights back, lying in a pool of blood. He’d been shot twice, and while he lay dying the assailant had chopped off his manhood and put it in his mouth. Mrs Dinorwic-Jones, the art teacher who regularly drew the chalk outline round the freshly slain, was said to be in a state of shock. The final detail was the most intriguing. With his dying strength Father Christmas had dipped his finger in his own blood and written on the pavement the word ‘Hoffmann’.
Chapter 2
CALAMITY ARRIVED at the office next morning carrying a bundle of butcher’s paper and a copy of the Cambrian News. She spread the butcher’s paper on the floor and handed me a marker pen.
‘What’s going on?’
‘JDLR,’ said Calamity.
‘I’m still no wiser.’
‘JDLR. It’s what the Pinkertons say. It means Just Doesn’t Look Right.’
‘What doesn’t?’
She pointed to the front page of the paper. It carried a photo of the celebrated chalk outline.
‘What am I looking at?’
‘Doesn’t his posture strike you as unusual?’
‘He’s been brutally murdered.’
‘Even so, it doesn’t look natural.’
‘He fell awkwardly.’
‘That’s my point: you can’t fall like that. Look.’
She did a slow, dignified collapse onto the floor, roughly in the same attitude as the corpse.
‘Draw round me.’
I took the cap off the pen and drew her outline.
She got up and looked down. ‘See? His foot’s facing the wrong way. He’s lying on his left side, his right knee is touching the ground on top of his left leg. There’s no way you can get the right foot to face backwards like that unless you break the leg.’
‘So maybe he broke it.’
‘The report doesn’t say anything about a broken leg.’
‘Maybe it’s just a mistake in the drawing.’
‘Mrs Dinorwic-Jones has been teaching life study classes all her life. She wouldn’t get something like that wrong. There’s only one explanation.’
‘Which is?’
‘He did it deliberately. He took his leg out of the trousers and stuffed his hat in the trouser leg and boot, then twisted it round to face the wrong way.’
‘Where’s his real leg, then?’
‘It’s pulled back and up, inside the thigh, like actors who play Long John Silver.’
‘Why would he do a thing like that?’
‘It’s a signal. He was dying. He had just a few minutes left to live. So what does he do? He writes “Hoffmann” in his own blood. Who’s Hoffmann? Good question. My hunch is, either he recognised his assailant, who happened to be called Hoffmann, or it’s a message written to an accomplice called Hoffmann or about a subject of mutual interest to them both which is connected with someone called Hoffmann. So the accomplice reads about the murder and the word “Hoffmann” and realises that Santa has hidden something in the alley for him and has used the phoney leg routine to point to it.’ She started to gather up the sheets on the floor.
‘You mean, he’s hidden something in the alley?’
‘Yes.’
‘And pointed to it with his leg?’
‘Phoney leg.’
I laughed. ‘OK, we check the alley. Do we have anything else to go on? I’m not saying the phoney-leg routine isn’t promising or anything, but it would be nice if we – you know – had something else.’
Calamity took out a notebook and flicked it open. ‘The DOA is called Absalom. Arrived in town two or three weeks ago; no one is exactly sure when. Kept himself to himself. Took a job as Father Christmas even though he was Jewish. There’s mention of a woman.’ She opened the Cambrian News to the scandal pages. There was a picture of a mousey-looking Welsh woman in a stovepipe hat, in her early twenties probably, beneath a lurid headline: ‘SANTA SLASH MOLL IN STOVEPIPE HAT MOOLAH MYSTERY’.
I skimmed the first paragraph. It was a feeble attempt to insinuate a sinister explanation of where the girl got the money for her hats.
‘She’s the harp player out at Kousin Kevin’s Krazy Komedy Kamp,’ explained Calamity with a slight air of hesitation.
We swapped knowing glances. The holiday camp at Borth was not one of our favourite haunts, in contrast to most holiday camps they had a strictly enforced ‘No Dicks and Sleuths’ policy. They were good at spotting disguises, too.
‘We’ll take a ride out there,’ I said.
‘We also need to get some knitting needles.’
‘What for?’
‘Ballistics.’
‘Oh, of course.’
‘Been reading about it in the Pinkerton book. What you do is you stick the needle in the bullet holes in the wall and shine a flashlight along the line of the needle. That way you find out the trajectory, and you can work out where the firing came from.’
‘Is that so?’
Calamity assumed a nonchalant air. ‘Fairly standard scene-of-crime m.o.’
‘I’ve never come across it before.’
‘If Jack Ruby’s lawyer had tried it he probably wouldn’t have fried.’
‘Jack Ruby didn’t go to the chair. He died in hospital while awaiting a retrial. Embolism, I think.’
‘Same difference.’
‘And he shot Lee Harvey Oswald from three feet away. You wouldn’t need to stick a knitting needle into Lee Harvey Oswald to find out where the firing came from.’
‘It was just a . . . a . . .’ She consulted the Pinkerton book. ‘An illustrative example.’
‘That’s all right, then.’
‘I thought we could check the alley, see if the scene-of-crime boys missed anything.’
‘Is that likely?’
‘Of course it is. They only see what they’re expecting to see, because they arrive loaded with preconceptions. You have to empty your mind of the obvious and just see what turns up.’
‘And I bet that’s in the book, too.’
‘It’s all in the book, Louie.’
Outside the Chungking Express a police car with out-of-town plates was parked. We pushed through the door into the main parlour. It was the usual cuckoo’s nest of oriental bric-a-brac: lanterns, vases, model junks, silk dragons, a lacquered cabinet, Buddha and Confucius . . . objects side by side that would have occupied separate wings in a museum.
It was still early and the dining room empty except for a man eating an early lunch. A white napkin was stuffed a touch flamboyantly into his shirt collar. He wore a crumpled and stained suit that might once have been well cut and had an air that suggested the tailors of Swansea or Llanelli. Even without seeing the car outside I could smell cop. He looked up as we walked in, cast a glance and returned to the task of spooning the last drops of sauce from his plate into his mouth. We sat at an adjacent table. After deciding that no more could be scraped off the dish he threw it down with a rough clatter and dabbed his chin with the napkin. He shouted in the direction of the kitchen. ‘Hey, chop chop!’