Belle Peepers

I stumbled out of Bar Black feeling like I’d not had enough to drink.  Gaby’s little performance had been the icing on the cake after the revelations of the things I’d found in Boy Blue’s bedleg and the whole world seemed a little bit surreal to me.  I looked up at the sky, half-expecting to see a melted clock hanging there in place of the moon, while a lizard giggled to itself as it played guitar, but to my surprise I saw the first hints of dawn.  Medicinal pink cloud hugged the horizon, and the stars had faded away to nothingness.  A grey vault hung overhead, waiting to absorb the unwary, and I looked back down at the ground and hunched my shoulders up and tried to hide.

The jingle of cutlery alerted me, and I ducked.  Belle Peep’s handbag sailed over my head, just brushing the tips of my hair, and crashed into a wall; the side of Bar Black.  It tried to stick for a moment, then slid down with a gritty tearing sound.

“‘er what owns that bag wants to talk to you,” said a voice that made me wonder if people drowned frogs in chocolate.  It was glutinous and mucousy, and it croaked and hopped over sounds in the words like it would choke on itself if it didn’t.  I looked round, thinking I might recognise it, but all there was behind me was a filthy street urchin.  “Yeah, you, guv’nor,” said the urchin.  He moved then and I caught sight of a patch on the sleeve of his coat.

“You’re one of the Runners,” I said.  The voice made sense now, as William Physick, the criminal mastermind who ran the Runners, spoke that way too and didn’t like to be made fun of.  “What are you doing throwing a handbag away?”  The Runners got their name from the way that they ran off as fast as tube-mice after they’d picked a pocket or snatched a bag.

“It’s a message,” said the boy.  I could see more of his face now; he had a hare-lip and a nasty-looking scar down the right-hand side of cheek.  It looked fresh enough to be still weeping.  “It’s for you.  You’re Mac, ain’t ya?”

“I’ve had lots of names,” I said, and that was the truth.  “I don’t speak your language though, what kind of message is a bag thrown at my head.”

“Your problem, guv’nor,” said the boy.  “I’m just passing it on.”  He turned, and suddenly he was a blur of motion, disappearing at high speed away from me.  I thought of chasing him for a minute, but by the time I’d finished that thought he was turning the corner at the top of the street, and I knew that my joints weren’t up to running, let alone catching up with a Runner.  I sighed, and went and retrieved the bag.

I have no idea what Belle Peep needs a complete 48-piece cutlery set in her handbag for, but that the entirety of the contents.  What disturbed me more was that she, or whoever had sent me her bag, had known that I’d be able to recognise it from the cutlery.  That was sufficiently suspicious that I tipped everything out of the bag again, and went through the contents more carefully this time.  Other people drifted out of Bar Black and some of them were curious enough to walk a little close by, mostly seeing if there was anything they could lift and run off with, but the cutlery didn’t interest any of them.  It interested me though.  Every piece of it had a little crest engraved on the handle, and Belle Peep definitely wasn’t nobility.  Or even from a noble background.  Wherever this had come from then, she was carrying it around because it meant something to her.  Sadly, beyond recognising that it was crested it meant nothing to me.  I stirred it with my foot one last time, and then something sparkled in the mix.

I bent down, regretting it as my vertebrae kicked up a fuss, and picked up a tiny silver ball that appeared to have been stuck to the handle of a spoon, where it would have gone unnoticed.  Two tiny slits in the side of it confirmed to me that it contained electronics and was probably a tracer device.  I tossed it down the nearest drain, left the cutlery in the road to foul the early morning traffic, and limped away.  I had my suspicions as to what might be happening here, and I wanted to get the bedleg hidden away somewhere safe before any more messages came my way.

Letters and Words

The first thing that fell out was a packet of smokes and a lighter.  I picked them up quickly as I knew what Boy Blue smoked; sure enough when I opened the packet to check they were very fragrant cigarettes and all hand-rolled.  Very neatly too.  When Blue wants to do a job he takes his time and does it well, and that’s probably the only reason he can still get jobs in this town as an actual musician.  I’d heard him him play in a couple of clubs, usually when I was waiting to be thrown out, but once when I was aiming to get someone else thrown out, and he definitely improved the music.  Then I heard him play one night in his little bedsit by himself and if I’d still been able to cry, I would have.  I put the ciggies and the lighter in my inside pocket, with the idea that I might return them to him if I found him alive at the end of all this.  Then I paused for a moment and wondered why they were in the bedleg, which clearly wasn’t something he’d have been going in and out of every night.  I shook the leg a little more gingerly this time to find out what else was in there.

I had to put my fingers inside in the end to pull out the papers that were stopping it up, and Tom, the barman, couldn’t resist a cheap comment.  The guy sat to my left, who was still fulminating to himself decided that he’d had enough of perverts like me at that point and lumbered off his stool in search of somewhere else to stand or sit in the bar.  I barely even watched him go, knowing perfectly well that a bar that was happy to have me as a patron was going to have far worse than me to sit next to.  I just stretched out a little and occupied both stools, propping the bed-leg against the bar on the other one.

“What’ve you got there anyway, Mac?” asked Tom.  There were plenty of people trying to catch his eye, waving money, credit-cards and assorted numbers of fingers, but he still stopped by me and looked at the papers.

“Can’t say I know yet,” I said.  “I’ll have to learn how to read first.”

He closed his mouth, his words having been stolen from him, and then gestured at my untouched glass.  “Another drink, Mac?”

I tipped the drink down my throat and laid the glass in front of me.  “You’re a gent, Tom.”

“And you’re the scum of the earth, Mac.”

The first page I turned over startled me.  It was headed paper, and right at the top in an overly fussy typeface was From the desk of Miss Belle Peep, Proprietress of City Farm.  Underneath that was an address, phone and fax numbers, email address and then an eight digit number that went unexplained.  I checked the address, and it definitely wasn’t where I thought the farm was, at least not the one she’d inherited from her father.  I made a mental note; that needed checking out.  The rest of the page was taken up with a short letter discussing the purchase of seventeen sheep, though as I read it I felt as though I was missing something.  There were plenty of technical-sounding and looking references, but something about the letter as a whole didn’t gel with me.  Possibly because Boy Blue was hiding it and it simply didn’t look incriminating.

The second page was just a pornographic picture and I was about to offer it round the bar for the best offer when I looked more closely as the face and almost fell off my stool.

“Dirty pictures, Mac?” Tom placed my drink down and leaned over to get a better look.  “Is that really your kind of….”  He tailed off, and frowned.  Then he turned the picture the other way up, and then he stared at me.  “Isn’t that…?”

“Natasha Monkeybutt’s face,” I said.  “Yes.  The question is though, is the rest of it her?”

“You sure you want to be walking around with that, Mac?”

“You want to pin it up on your wall, Tom?”

He recoiled and wandered off to serve some other desperately thirsty customer, and I rolled the picture up and put it back in the bedleg.  That was lit dynamite as far as I was concerned, and I wondered what the hell Boy Blue had been doing with it.

That left one more; a scruffy, torn-covered notebook.  I opened it and learned inside a couple of paragraphs that this was Boy Blue’s diary.  Doubtless there’d be an explanation for the picture in here, but his handwriting was atrocious and the bar was far too noisy (and nosy) to sit here and try and puzzle it out.  I’d take this one back to the morgue.

“Showtime, Mac,” said Tom as the lights dimmed and Gaby was spotlighted on the tiny stage.

White-knuckled

I’ve gone through life white-knuckled and knock-kneed, and running away from the Blue Swan was no different.  Thankfully Jackie was still playing doggo and staying where I’d told her to, so I wasn’t pursued.  As I veered left at the T-junction I heaved a huge breath into my aching lungs and wondered when I be able to stop running away.  I didn’t think there was a whole lot of hope unless I’d finally broken my legs.  I took the next left, a quick right, and then fell against the first lighted doorway that I saw and only sobbed a little when it didn’t open for me.

No-one had followed me, it seemed.  I wheezed heavily, getting my breath back and feeling the aches and pains molest me like an eighties television presenter, but there were no running feet, no cries for people to stop me, and best of all, no sounds of gunshot or angry people hitting defenceless street furniture with heavy tools.  Eventually I pulled my legs in, listened to the cartilage in my knees crunch, and wondered what I was going to do next.  I was still looking for Boy Blue, if only to let him know that Natasha Monkeybutt was looking for him too, and I was kind of curious about whoever had redecorated his room with sheep’s blood.  I knew there were better things to do than get involved with any part of a case more than treating it as just a job: like Miss Sapphire had said, people tend to die around me and it’s better that I don’t let myself get attached.  I’ve watched kids get orphaned while I was on their case, and I’ve watched relationships fizzle and die just because I’ve been sat at a nearby table.  My record is emptying an entire restaurant on Valentine’s day, with all the men going one way and the women another.  It’s not a proud moment, but I ever write up a CV it’s going on there.

Then there was the Jack Horner angle.  There was a name I’d not come across before, and I thought I knew all the low-life in this city.  From what Miss Sapphire had been saying it sounded like it might be a pseudonym, which is a long word for a small-time crook.  And he had to be small time, or Mad Frankie would be putting me on his case in the hopes that he’d be the next victim of the MacArthur curse.  Or blessing, depending on who you asked.

The gentle patter of rain started, soot-laden droplets splashing down on the filthy, pot-holed streets and making me glad I was sat in a doorway.  I looked out across the street into the fading light of late-afternoon, and the door I was leaning against pushed out squashing me against the wall.

“Move it, you piece of crap,” snarled a woman with a red face like she’d been washing it in the floor-scrubbing bucket.  She was wearing a heavy woollen coat and carrying a handbag like a mattock.  She swung it at me to make her point, and I ducked, to avoid it.  “Get out of my bloody doorway,” she continued.  “It’s scum like you that make an honest woman like me afraid to walk the streets at night.  You disgust me, you tramp.”  Her handbag struck the wall with the clatter of cutlery and she didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed.  I wriggled out from behind the door as she put her weight against it, and I just got out of the way in time.  The door struck the wall and the glass in the top quivered with the impact.

“Now look what you’ve made me do, wretch,” she said.  Little flecks of white spittle flew out of her mouth, and I flinched away.  I have a mild germophobia about other people, which my doctor says he can’t understand given where I seem to spend most of my time.  Then he orders me out of his office before he autoclaves me, which is a threat I know he’d like to make good on.

“Harridan,” I said, racking my brains as to why she looked familiar.

“Hah!  Big words.  What a shame your wallet can’t match your mouth.”  Her words dripped with sarcasm the way a cobra’s fangs drip with venom and suddenly I knew who she was; the last time I’d seen her was a few years ago when she was still a stripper at Lucy Locket’s.  She’d been hanging upside down from a sequined pole wearing a g-string, high-heels and an ill-fitting wig that didn’t really hide either her dandruff or her cradle cap, glaring at me while I crawled under the seating pursuing the Legless Wonder.  She’d spat at me then too, and I’d thrown a handful of change at her.

“Belle Peep,” I said, my cough hacking its way through her surname and dragging it out for a whole six seconds.  She didn’t look happy that I knew it.

“The next show’s at nine,” she said.  “Pay on the door.”

I looked up: the doorway I was in was the side-door of the Municipal Library.  I don’t know if she saw my quizzical face (it’s a lot like my orgasm face, I’ve been told, which fact I ascribe to the infrequency of my orgasms) but she swung her bag at me again.  I dodged once more to the sound of crashing cutlery, and then she was past me, stalking off down the street like an old whore with too much pride to pick her breasts up off the floor and retire.

“Jack Horner,” I muttered under my breath, hoping it wouldn’t start my cough off again.  My doctor’s written on my records that he’s hoping its consumption and refusing to test me for it so as not to jinx things.  “I know how to find you.”