“Hey, that makes you the Singing Detective,” she gasped. “Even better billing than the Baritone Blackbird. Why don’t we clear up here and go somewhere to talk about your career?”
“First you tell me what makes you so keen to take a last look at your friend, Mr. Tallas?” he said.
She smiled and glanced fondly into the coffin.
“David and I were once very close. Arnie never knew — he’d have killed me if he’d found out. So you see why I wanted to pay my last respects alone.”
It was clearly crap, but spoken with such sincerity that Joe wasted a second working out the odds it was the truth. His abacus mind had difficulty computing the figures, and the effort of concentration must have switched off his fear-heightened senses for a second because it was a change in Mandy’s expression rather than what must have been the not inconsiderable noise made by a man walking on crutches that alerted him to the danger behind.
He twisted round, fast enough to see but not to avoid the blow from the crutch handle. But at least the movement diverted it from the back of his head where it might have produced unconsciousness, to the side of his face where it just felt like he’d been kicked by a misanthropic mule. As he fell back, the man swung a plaster-cast leg at him. Joe scrabbled backwards across the tiled floor, and more by chance than judgment his left foot hooked around the man’s other crutch, now bearing all his weight, and pulled it from under him. The man teetered for a moment and Joe, supine, hurled Mr. Tooley’s urn at his chest.
There wasn’t enough force in the projectile to do any damage, but the impact was enough to tip the balance and with a shrieked word which Joe didn’t recognize but which sounded like an oath, his attacker fell backwards like a felled pine.
Joe closed his eyes in relief and opened them again to find the gleaming tip of Mandy Levine’s screwdriver poised three inches above the left one, of which, being the stronger, he was particularly fond.
She was holding the implement in both hands and he did not doubt that the full weight of her generously structured upper deck could drive it via his eyeball into his almost paralysed brain.
But she wasn’t looking down at him, she was looking towards the fallen figure of the intruder. Joe did not dare raise his head to follow her gaze, but his straining ears could hear no sound to indicate the man was preparing to return to the attack.
Then the bright blade wavered and the woman rose. Joe sat up quickly too, and winced as he found that Mr. Tooley’s urn, as though in revenge for being so impiously misused, had rolled back between his legs. Holding it, Joe got groggily to his feet.
Mandy Levine was kneeling by the fallen man.
“Bring the light,” she commanded.
She was, Joe guessed, a woman accustomed to being obeyed. He, being from long practice a man accustomed to obeying women accustomed to being obeyed, swapped the urn for the lantern and carried it over to her.
Expertly she raised the man’s eyelids, examined his eyes, felt for a pulse in the neck, and said flatly, “Dead. You’ve killed him. Cracked his skull.”
“Hang about,” protested Joe. “It was an accident. He’s dead, I’m sorry, but it wasn’t my fault. Who the shoot is he, anyway?”
He knew the answer before she said it. Sometimes the impossible is also the inevitable.
“Tallas,” she said. “David Tallas.”
Joe went to the coffin and shone the lantern into it.
“Shoot,” said Joe. Mirabelle’s soapy-mouthwash aversion therapy had made this his strongest oath, but under provocation he could utter it with an intensity that would have won him style points in Billingsgate.
The coffin was a showy mahogany affair, with ornate gilt handles and the kind of brocade silk upholstery which, even though ripped so that the stuffing trickled through, must have cost an arm and a leg. Of arms there was no trace, but there were legs aplenty, four to be precise, all belonging to a deceased and decomposing goat.
It wasn’t very big, barely more than a kid, but its bouquet was enormous.
“Mrs. Levine,” said Joe, gagging. “Maybe you ought to tell me what’s going on.”
The woman slowly rose. Her foot kicked against one of the crutches. She picked it up and held it two-handed as she eyed Joe calculatingly.
Joe would have liked to be sure she was merely working out what to say to him, but the memory of the screwdriver poised over his left eye was still strong, and he had an uneasy feeling that she was still weighing war against jaw.
Words won, temporarily at least.
“I’ll give it to you straight, Joe,” she said in that husky, caressing voice. “The reason David here went to Greece was as agent for a little syndicate put together by my Arnie and his friends. He was good at that sort of thing, David. Could sell false teeth to tigers, and buy their stripes at the same time. There was a fair amount of money involved, hard cash money which he took with him, so imagine how Arnie and the others felt when they heard the news. David, driving from the airport in a hire car, had swerved on a mountain road to avoid a goat, bounced down the hillside, got thrown out, hit a rock, broke his neck, while the car had gone up in flames. Nothing left but unidentifiable ashes.”
“To avoid a goat?” said Joe, glancing at the coffin.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. More chance of David avoiding a dirty weekend at the Ritz than swerving to avoid a goat. Came in useful though.”
“So he faked his death to pocket the syndicate money?”
“You got it, Joe,” she said admiringly.
“Must’ve taken some doing,” said Joe dubiously. “I mean, even in Greece there must be regulations...”
“Sure there are. But the cousin who’s his closest relative over there happens to be a police chief out in the sticks. Just the guy to know all the forms and formalities as well as all the fiddles. Wait till the goat’s beginning to pong a bit so no one wants to get too close to the coffin, screw it down, and send it home. Easy.”
Joe pondered this, conscious of the woman’s eyes upon him. He didn’t have the kind of detective mind which made connections like a digital exchange, but put a goat in his path and he’d fall over it.
He said, “Easy, yeah. But not so easy as fixing a fake funeral in Greece. Lot less risky too. And why’d he come back himself? And how come if he faked the accident he’s up to his hams in plaster? And why did he cancel the funeral today? And why’s he hobbling round here trying to kill people? And just what the shoot are you doing here, Mrs. Levine?”
“Mandy,” she said. “Call me Mandy. I like to be on first-name terms with people I do business with.”
“We’re doing business?” said Joe. “Have I missed something?”
She smiled and said, “Come on, Joe. No need to play quite so dumb, even when you’ve got the face for it.”
She really did believe he knew what was going on. It was quite flattering. He turned away from her so that the bewilderment on his face didn’t show quite so bright. And he found himself looking into the coffin again... the torn silk lining... the stuffing oozing out... powdery, white... what kind of stuffing did these Greek undertakers use anyway?
He licked his finger, touched it to the powder, tasted the grains on his tongue. They said it helped you see things clearly. It certainly worked for Joe Sixsmith.
“Smack,” he said. “That’s what he went to buy.”
“That’s right. Greece has got borders like a lace curtain. Most of the stuff pouring in from Pakistan and the East hits Europe there. But moving it on to where the big markets are is a lot harder, especially for the small-time operators. So David set up a deal to pay his cousin what was a small fortune in his terms, and buy enough shit to make Arnie and his chums a large fortune in their terms. It looked an all-round winner. Only David fancied a bit more than his commission. In fact, the lot, not just the money but the sell-on profit. And he could only get that by selling the stuff here.”