Emotionally Weird (33 page)

I closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face. Suddenly (and quite illogically as far as I could see), I felt my spirits lift. I was aware of the strange feeling I’d experienced at the standing stones in Balniddrie – a kind of bubbling in the blood and an aerating of the brain – as if I was on the verge of something numinous and profound and in one more second the universe was going to crack open and arcana would rain down on my head like grace and all the cosmic mysteries were going to be revealed, perhaps the meaning of life itself and – but no, it was not to be, for at that moment a dark shadow fell across the world.

The icy interstellar winds whipped rubbish along the footpath and caused a great tsunami to travel up the Tay, overwhelming the road bridge and sweeping the rail bridge away. Volcanic ash rose into the air and encircled the earth, choking out all the air and blotting out all the light. The terrible figure that was the cause of this stood before me. Dressed in widow’s weeds like an unravelling shroud, this daughter of Nemesis was gnashing her teeth and wringing her hands and rending the air with lamentation and woe. Black smoke rose from the top of her head and her aura was composed of nothing but scum and scoria. Yes, it was Terri.

She was waving a black ostrich-feather fan in an agitated manner and wearing long black gloves and jet earrings as befits a woman in mourning, for she had discovered the fate of her beloved – encountering the Sewells in the street, in the company of a docile Hank/Buddy trotting along on a lead, and had engaged in a vigorous wrestling match with Jay’s six-foot-two inches of jogger’s flesh from which he was lucky to emerge the winner and only did so because Martha threw her dignity to the winds and started brawling and scrapping like a streetfighter.

‘I’ve lost him,’ Terri said forlornly, sinking onto the bench and lighting a cigarette. ‘So now we have to get him back,’ she added, glaring at Fife in the distance.

‘
Kidnap
Hank, you mean? It didn’t work with the goat, did it?’ I reminded her.

‘All the more reason to make it work with the dog, then.’ Terri threw the stub of her cigarette away and stood up. ‘So – do you know how to break into a house?’

‘No,’ I said wearily, ‘but I bet I know someone who does.’ We had walked all the way up Roseangle before Terri wrinkled her nose as if smelling something bad and said, ‘Where did that baby come from?’

On the very top floor we found one of Chick’s
Premier Investigations
cards stuck on a door with a piece of chewing-gum. The door was locked and the glass in the door covered by a blind made of waxy blackout material. Terri hammered on the door and after a considerable interval Chick, looking even more seedy, if that was possible, opened it cautiously.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said.

He seemed to be in the middle of manoeuvring an old filing-cabinet across the frayed linoleum of the floor, panting with the effort, droplets of sweat exuding from his balding head. He looked as if he was on the verge of a cardiac arrest – pasty and damp – but that was how he looked every time I saw him.

‘What do you want anyway?’ he asked gloomily. ‘Not money, I hope, the cow’s cleaned me out. Well, don’t just stand there,’ he added, ‘give me a hand.’

The filing-cabinet turned out to be lighter than it looked because it was empty.

‘I thought I’d get a woman,’ Chick said, contemplating the filing-cabinet as if he was thinking of actually keeping a woman in it, ‘to file and type,’ he said, ‘that sort of . . . stuff.’

I thought about recommending Andrea’s typing skills to him but she’d just finished carrying Proteus up four flights of stairs and was lying on the floor, panting, with her eyes shut.

‘Make yourself at home, why don’t you?’ Chick said to her, stepping over her prone form to reach a poke of chips in the in-tray on his battered desk. ‘I didn’t know you had a kid,’ he remarked to me, offering a cold chip to Proteus.

‘He’s not mine.’

‘You should be careful,’ Chick said. ‘Kidnapping’s a crime.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Terri said, ‘it’s funny you should mention that.’

‘No, I told you,’ Terri said impatiently. ‘I heard them say they were going to Edinburgh. And they were leaving the dog.’

Inside Birnham, we entered each room cautiously, speaking in the hushed whispers of church-goers (or burglars).

‘This feels so . . . illegal,’ Andrea said.

‘That’s because it fucking is,’ Chick said, ‘and if I go down for stealing a dog that doesn’t even run for money, someone’s going to pay, I tell you.’ This last remark seemed to be addressed to me but I ignored him.

‘His bark’s worse than his bite,’ I reassured Andrea, who was regarding Chick with horror, never having been exposed to him before. Terri was sniffing the room for musk and spoor of dog. ‘He’s definitely here,’ she said with the conviction of a medium.

I had never been in such a clean house, it was like being in a showhouse or the home of a robot. All the décor was in muted shades of magnolia and there wasn’t a single thing out of place, not a cup unwashed or a cushion unplumped. We tiptoed around the place like cat-burglars – or, to be more accurate – dog-burglars.

In the bedroom the Sewells’ night clothes were lying neatly on the end of the bed, maroon pyjamas for him, a lacy honeymoon-type garment for her. I placed Proteus on the eiderdown – a thick quilted-satin affair that was asking to be reclined on, and I couldn’t overcome an irresistible urge to lie down on it next to where Proteus was drowsily sucking his thumb. I would undoubtedly have fallen asleep if Hank/Buddy hadn’t suddenly bounded out from nowhere in a paroxysm of barking and bared teeth, like a hound from hell.

Chick and Proteus both started screaming while Andrea tried to faint, but Terri dropped to her knees and held her arms open like a beseeching martyr so that I was convinced she was going to be torn to pieces; but luckily at that moment Hank/Buddy recognized her and fell into her arms. (A girl in love is a frightening sight.)

‘Ah, true love,’ Chick said sarcastically. ‘Right, mission accomplished, can we go?’ he said, hustling everyone out onto the landing, just in time for us to hear the most unwelcome sound imaginable – the noise of the key turning in the lock downstairs.

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,’ Chick said expressively.

‘Maybe it’s burglars,’ Andrea whispered. I didn’t bother pointing out the odds against two sets of burglars breaking into a house at the same time and instead, trying to stay in the shadows, I peered tentatively over the banister rail into the stairwell below, where Martha and Jay were depositing piles of Jenners’ carrier bags on the terrazzo and looking around for the sight of their dog running to greet them. Which he was unable to do because Terri had him pinned to the ground with her entire body.

‘Where’s Mummy’s little pooch?’ Martha cried and Jay shouted, ‘Buddy boy, where are you, boy?’ to no avail as Terri had wrapped her hands round Mummy’s little pooch’s muzzle so that the only bit of his anatomy able to greet his owners was a mute tail. Jay suddenly bounded up the stairs – too quickly for any of us to react – and stopped in surprise when he reached the top stair and saw the little party waiting to greet him. He frowned, trying to make sense of it.

‘Aren’t you all Martha’s students?’ he puzzled. ‘Is this some kind of college prank?’ He caught sight of Chick – clearly not a prankster of any kind – and looked alarmed. At that moment Hank/Buddy escaped Terri’s stranglehold and leapt towards Jay Sewell to greet him. Terri leapt as well, in an attempt to hang onto the dog, resulting in both dog and girl lunging into Jay at the same time. Which is
exactly
how accidents happen.

I suppose the laws of physics could explain what occurred next – pivots and fulcrums, et cetera; the way that there was more of Jay’s body above the banister than below it; the ratio of the Hank/Buddy/Terri combination to the singular Jay Sewell – but however you explain it, the effect was that Jay went cartwheeling over the banister rail and plummeted down into the stairwell – so quickly that not even a single cry escaped his lips. We all stared at each other in dumb amazement, all except for Proteus in my arms, who had fallen asleep with his head on my shoulder.

I rushed to look over the banister. Jay was spreadeagled on the floor below, blood pooling around his head and freckling the terrazzo. His eyes were open, giving him an air of, if anything, surprise.

‘Dead as a doorknob,’ Chick muttered to himself.

‘I think that’s as dead as a door
nail
,’ Andrea murmured, gazing at the blood-glazed tiles. In the profound silence that had befallen us – broken only by a faithful whine on the part of Hank/Buddy – I could hear Martha in the kitchen chatting blithely on about cashmere sweaters and the ‘cultural oasis’ that was Edinburgh. Any second now she was going to come out into the hall and discover her previously healthy husband as deceased (which is a longer form of dead) as an item of door furniture.

‘If you’re ever going to succeed at magic,’ I whispered to Andrea, ‘then now would be a good time to begin.’

Proteus woke up with a start and began to cry, breaking the trance that we’d been plunged into. I rifled desperately through my pockets for his dummy but all I could find was a torn piece of paper, the stray page of
The Expanding Prism of J
in which J plunges over the banisters and dies.

A sudden horrendous scream rent the suburban air, indicating that Martha had discovered her spouse’s unexpected demise.

‘Give me your lighter,’ I whispered urgently to Chick. He raised an eyebrow at me as if this was no time to take up smoking (although if not now, then when?) and passed me his lighter – a lurid affair displaying a naked female on its casing. I grabbed it off him and set the flame to the piece of paper in my hand. (Well, it was worth a try.)
The Expanding Prism of J
flared up with a malevolent hiss in a greeny-blue flame – perhaps cyan, who knows? – and turned into a thin charcoal skin that floated up and hovered over the stairwell before disintegrating into a little shower of carbonized fragments like black snow.

‘Fucking hell,’ Chick said, looking down at the hall, ‘where’s he gone?’ For there was indeed no sign of a blood-boltered Jay, no screaming Martha, no sign of life or death. It was as if we had suffered a mass hallucination.

‘This is
so
freaky,’ Andrea said quietly.

‘Let’s get the fuck out of here now,’ Chick said, a sentiment we all agreed with heartily, and we ran out of the house and piled into the car anyhow so that for a brief and surreal moment Hank/Buddy was sitting behind the Cortina’s steering-wheel. Chick and the dog finally sorted themselves out and as we pulled away from Birnham with Chick in the driver’s seat we saw the Sewells’ car rounding the corner and drawing to a halt outside their home. I was glad to see that Jay was not only driving the car but was also in possession of a fully intact skull. Martha caught sight of us and her features contorted in a little grimace of recognition. She didn’t espy Terri or her erstwhile dog, as they were lying on the floor of the car.

‘So he was dead,’ Andrea puzzled, ‘and now he’s . . . not dead?’

‘Apparently,’ I said.