Lucy Locket

I felt better at least for the bath, and my room-mate, bless his little PVC hotpants, had found me a shirt and suit from somewhere.  The shirt was comfortable; the suit fit in all the important areas (the sleeves were too long and tended to fall over my hands, but I could see where that might come in useful) and most importantly, he’d told me he didn’t want the clothes back.  I slipped my hands into the pockets to see if there was anything left behind and found a monogrammed handkerchief, a delicate blue silk number with a calligraphic M in one corner.  Whistling, I walked away from our little home and out into the night.

I was wandering aimlessly at first, letting my mind mull over the events of the last few days, and the weirdness that was transpiring.  Natasha Monkeybutt was up to something, but that wasn’t news, or even worth investigating.  She had the blessing of City Hall for the moment, and when she fell out of favour with them they’d deal with her in their own way.  Nothing I was going to do would hasten that fall, unless Mad Frankie got so upset with me that he decided to do something about her himself.  And that was as likely as a freebie from a girl with thirty years on the street.

I still wanted to locate Boy Blue.  Whether he knew what he was mixed up in or not, I wanted to find him now and find out what the hell he thought was going on.  And why he had that picture of Natasha Monkeybutt… well, for all I knew better, I couldn’t resist giving her tree a little shake and seeing if the Death-watch beetles were ticking yet or not.  And he was clearly annoying her, and that was reason enough to see if he needed any help in my book.  It’s not a big book, and there’s more pictures than words, but it’s my book nonetheless.

I turned down another street without really looking where I was going and nearly tripped over some woman’s child-buggy; a double-stacked double-wide thing that looked like it should be used for delivering outsize packages, not supporting the over-population of the city.  There were two children who looked to be of toddling age in the lower stack in little chairs that were like the classic push-chair from when I was a child.  I never had a push-chair, my mother didn’t believe in pandering to anyone’s desires.  I crawled everywhere once I could crawl, sometimes with her chivvying me along like a recalcitrant sled-dog according to people who knew her back then.  Above them, acting almost as a canopy, were two smaller bassinet-style things supported on a cantilevered plastic frame.  In one of those was a pudding of a child that had presumably hurt its mother to give birth to, and in the other were two babies placed top to tail and wearing little shark-themed onesies.

“Look where you’re going!” bellowed the woman pushing this contraption, who was so stick-thin that I could both the bones in her forearms.  I wondered that she control this buggy with all the weight that was clearly in it.

“If you’d left any room on the pavement…” I retorted, and attempted to step around her.  She wrenched the buggy as hard as she could, and to my complete lack of surprise failed to get it to turn even an inch.  I sidled past, listening to her scream in frustration and thinking to myself that she couldn’t know this neighbourhood very well.  When she the corner that I’d just come round, probably after a titanic struggle with the buggy, it went downhill.  Very gradually at first, but it got steeper as the river came into sight, and I couldn’t see her being able to slow the buggy down, let alone stop it.

I looked around me, and realised that I knew where I was, and wondered again for a moment what my feet had been up to.  I paused, and then decided to pay a visit for old time’s sake.  And to ask if Lucy knew about Boy Blue by any chance.

Lucy Locket’s was a non-descript house of three storeys in a three-storey neighbourhood with a large front garden who edges were lines with leylandii to keep peeping eyes out.  The front path was narrow and gravelled, and I knew that stepping off it was the cue for the dobermen to come leaping out of hiding and inspect you.  At the end of it was a couple of concrete steps up to a front-door with an imposing knocker that was never answered; but walk around to the tradesmen’s entrance and there was a buzzer and a peephole.  Lucy opened the door almost immediately to me, and I could smell the disinfectant and hear the strains of a badly-tuned piano.

“Mac!” she said, looking as though she’d embrace me if I weren’t me.  “You look… clean!”

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.

Gaby

The pianist came out first, a dapper man in a tuxedo and tails, wearing a top hat that was a little bit battered.  When he turned and bowed before sitting down at the piano we saw that something had taken a large bite out of the crown of his hat at some point, and you could see his bald spot.  The hair that hung down from below the hat was long, lank, and the colour of the liquid you find in an old oil sump.  He sat with his back to us, raised his hands theatrically and cracked his knuckles.  A couple of people in the front row ducked, reflexively, and not all of them sat back up again.

Then Gaby sauntered out in her burlesque costume: a whalebone corset in burgundy lace, some fishnet tights, fishnet sleeves that ran from her elbows to her shoulders, sage-green high-heels, and a little too much puppy fat for the look of emo seduction she was going for.  She caught the eyes of the crowd, and pouted, crossing one leg in front of the other in the most strained pose I’ve seen in a while, and I can still remember an evening in an S&M club where if you couldn’t pay your bar bill you were hauled on stage to become part of the entertainment.  The pianist struck a chord on the piano, and I braced myself.

Gaby opened her mouth, and then closed it again.  She winked, and turned around, bending over to pick something up off the floor.  Someone in the audience wolf-whistled, but the rest of us were still reeling from being confronted with so much flesh – it was like a new island rising from the ocean and assaulting you with geography.  She stood back up again slowly and I realised that now I knew what watching Atlantis sink below the waves must have been like.  She turned around again, winked once more, and spread her hands apart.  She was holding juggling torches.

The pianist stood up and produced a gold-plated cigarette lighter from inside his jacket and struck the flint a couple of time until a tall yellow flame was produced.  Gaby held up her clubs, and he approached them at lit each one.  I turned to look at Tom, and to my surprise he moved over to my elbow, carrying a fresh Pink Lady with him.

“Fire?” I asked, sotto voce.

“Can’t stop her, Mac,” said Tom putting the drink down in front of me.  “We’ve pointed out the hazards, but she’s dating the Fire Chief’s daughter so he’s refusing to shut her, or us, down.”

“Wow,” I said.  I tasted the drink.  I was pretty certain there was a hint of bleach in there, but Tom’s being trying to poison me for a long time and bleach is nothing I can’t handle.  I coughed politely though, to let him feel that he was getting somewhere.

Gaby started juggling the torches as the pianist played something jaunty, and she actually wasn’t bad.  The lighting tech turned the spotlight down again so we could see the tracks of the flames through the air better and every now and then, as the clubs threatened to get out of control and escape from her, someone would gasp and there would be the scrape of thirty chairs being moved ready for people to run out of the bar if it caught fire.  Then she caught all of the torches and held them in one hand.  One by one she carefully put the flaming torch in her mouth and then pulled it out again, revealing afterwards a tongue of flame that she’d somehow managed to steal from each torch.  She blew the flames at the audience, who were on the verge of stampeding out of the bar by now.

Finally the pianist stopped playing and Gaby dropped her arms and extinguished her clubs.  The lights came back up, and the bar calmed down again and started drinking once more.

“Another drink, Mac?” asked Tom, innocently.

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.

Bar black

I don’t know if I like Bar Black, but I know it’s where I go when I need a place to drink while I think.  The overflow morgue’s great for thinking, but the only stuff to drink in there will pickle your insides.  Literally.  It’s on a street that’s down another street, and you only get to that street by walking to the end of another street that you’d be forgiven for thinking wasn’t going to end.  I met the guy who did the city planning during a previous investigation: in order to makes ends meet he was dressed up as Shirley Bassey and singing karaoke at a place that specialised in burlesque.  Right before I punched him in the jaw he told me that all of his city planning was done on the comedown after nights like that.  He also offered to rezone Mad Frankie’s office as a school district for me, and I won’t say I wasn’t tempted.

I reached the end of the street and turned down on the next street.  There were little groups of people sitting on the front steps of the houses here, muted conversations being had just on the fringes of the streetlights.  The windows of the houses behind them were all dark and quiet; families tucked up in bed and dreaming of a better future while their heads talked about the world and the possibilities it might offer in the morning light.  Now and then someone would look up as I walked past, and a conversation would pause for just long enough to let me know I wasn’t welcome, but I walked on and they resumed talking behind my back.  Which is where most of the world talks, it would seem.

One more turn onto a street darker still, more forgotten by the world, and I stepped up to a door with a man the size and shape of the Michelin-man outside.  He grunted, tiny red eyes opening and glaring at me like those of a homicidal robot in a science-fiction film.

“Mac?” he said, his voice high-pitched and slightly whistly from the holes in his teeth.

“The very same,” I said, and tipped my hat slightly towards him.

“You’re welcome,” he said, and shuffled aside to allow me to squeeze past him.  He could have moved further, but I happen to know he likes a little frottage now and them, and not many people are happy to have me touch them.

The bar was busy, but there were still two seats available.  One was next to the torch-singer, who was putting on her make-up and sipping from a martini glass, and the other was between two guys who looked like sailors.  I picked the sailors; Gaby the torch-singer lives up to her name and I wasn’t in the mood for listening to second-hand showbiz gossip from a lush.  I can get that in the morning papers.  Away from the bar there were tables with people sat at them, a small stage with a piano and a microphone, and a tiny little stand holding three chafing dishes that met the ‘hot food’ requirement for the bar to have its current licence.  No-one seemed to be eating from them, and past experience reminded me why.  Botulism is a dish best not served at all.  I hoisted myself up on to the bar-stool and tried to get Blue’s bed-leg out from my trousers.

“Hey.”  The voice from the guy on my left wasn’t friendly.  “Why are you playing with yourself?”

“Because you probably won’t do it for him,” said the barman walking over from where he’d been pouring Gaby another martini.  “The usual, Mac?”

“Uh-huh,” I said.  “It’s a big one,” I said to the talkative guy getting a grip on the leg at last.  “Want to see?”

He growled, a low, rumbling, threatening sound like a volcano letting you know that it’s feeling congested and might be doing something about it shortly.  I yanked hard and pulled the bed-leg free, though I heard something tear and knew that my trousers were going to draughty after this.  Tom, the barman, slid a cocktail glass in front of me, and I shoved the bed-leg under talkative-guy’s nose.  “Impressed?” I asked.

“I bet that’s the biggest thing you’ve ever pulled out of your pants, Mac,” said Tom.  I spared him a glance; I’ve known him for years and indirectly I’m responsible for him only having three fingers on each hand.  He gestured at my glass, “One pink lady.  And don’t ask for a tab.”

“What the fuck is this?” growled talkative guy.  “You bringing your bed in here with you?”

“Would you go home with him to find it?” asked Tom, stepping neatly out of reach and going over to the other side of the bar to serve a tall man dressed head-to-toe in a haz-mat suit.

“It’s not my bed, and it’s none of your business,” I said.  “Just keep drinking and let me worry about the furniture.”

Talkative guy grunted and swivelled on his stool slightly so that his shoulder was all I could see of his head, and I shook the bed-leg experimentally to see what might drop out.

Dead sheep

I looked around Blue’s flat when my vision stopped swimming and the blur had cleared up.  The floor was still covered with drying and dried blood, and small clouds of flies hovered here and there, dipping down from time to time to feed.  The smell wasn’t too bad yet, but I suspected that Monkeybutt’s men had used some deodorant while they were in here; cheaper than masks, probably sourced from a Monkeybutt company, and bad for the environment.  I shifted slightly, and realised from the tacky, pulling sensation that I’d landed in a puddle of semi-dry blood.  It didn’t seem worth moving for the moment though.

The pulp paperbacks were gone, so Monkeybutt or her men had taken them.  It seemed a bit odd as they could hardly be evidence, but maybe they’d taken them out to the van to read while they were on stakeout.  The dead sheep were still there, at the foot of the bed.  I could see from this angle that they’d both had their throats cut, presumably to get decent spray on the blood and cover as much of the room as possible.  The sheep-killers looked to have been sending a message, though why to Blue was still a mystery.  He was a grotty little lowlife, it was unlikely he had any money or possessions worth threatening him over.  So what did that leave?  Information?

The bed looked odd.  I blinked and looked at it again, trying to work out what was wrong.  It was a double bed with filthy sheets and a blood-stained duvet.  The sheets were wrinkled and pulled away from one corner of the mattress, which also looked filthy.  There were crumbs – well, I hoped they were crumbs – scattered on them where the duvet didn’t cover them up, and there were three pillows, all missing pillowcases.  I suspected Monkeybutt again, taking things that she hoped she could make a case from.  She was probably having them analysed for DNA to find out who Blue was sleeping with.  I could have told her if she’d asked: Blue didn’t bring people back to his flat because he was ashamed of it.  All of his conquests (and the last one I knew of was three years ago and the poor kid was both blind and blind drunk) usually ended up in a dark alleyway somewhere listening to him whisper that outdoor sex was more erotic.  I tilted my head to the side, and the bed straightened up, and suddenly it was obvious.  The bed was lopsided, one corner raised up more than the other three.  I straightened my head again and studied the corners.

It was the bottom right leg, closest to the wall, that was too long.  I guessed that the safest leg – top right, pushed into the corner made by the walls – was a little too awkward for him because he’d have to drag the bed out to get to it.  Bottom right was conveniently close to where I was sprawled, so I took a closer look, pushing the duvet out of the way.  The leg looked normal until I ran my thumbnail down its length and it caught about a inch away from the bottom on a nearly-invisible seam.  I sighed, and stood up, shook myself a little, and then sat back down, cross-legged.  I had to bite back a moan from the effort of bending my knees like that, but once they’d locked in place I felt a little better.  Then I lifted the bed.  The long leg dropped neatly out, revealing that it had been poking through the bed-frame and up into a hole made in the mattress, and was actually as long as my forearm.

I wanted to open it there and then and find out what Blue had that needed hiding like this, but I was acutely aware that Dan Drough and his officers would be send back by Monkeybutt in short order, possibly with riot shields if she was feeling generous, and that I’d barely looked around the flat.  I slipped the bed-leg down my trouser leg, gripped the edge of the bed to haul myself upright, and stared around the room some more.

There was nothing in the way of decoration or ornament, and there was no musical instrument either.  Or scores for that matter.  I frowned then, thinking back; had I seen any when I’d been here the first time?  The more I thought, the more I was sure that I hadn’t.  I could imagine Blue having his horn with him if he’d been out, but where was the rest of the stuff?  There wasn’t enough here, like maybe he’d already skipped out before the sheep-killers arrived?  Did he know he was running out of time?  And did that mean that the bed-leg down my leg was already empty?

I walked, a little stiff-legged thanks to the bed-leg, over to the only other door in the room, and opened it into a bathroom.  There was a toilet, a sink, a bath and a closed-over shower-curtain.  I pulled the curtain back, the rings whisking against the bar, and found a mirror on the wall and a sheep’s head in the bath.  I met its gaze for a moment, and then pulled the curtain back.  Nothing here then.  I turned to go, and then I turned back again.  I scanned the room again, and frowned.  No towels, and there were no cupboards in this place to put them either.  So where were they?  Had Monkeybutt taken them as evidence?

I left the bathroom and considered the front-door.  I knew Monkeybutt had it wired up, but what did it connect to?  I didn’t really want to risk my life again on the bricks outside the window.  Then I spotted the wire on the inside, and traced it over to the duvet, which when pulled back revealed a radio transmitter.  It was a matter of moment to remove the battery, and then I opened the front-door.  Looking around Blue’s impoverished room I finally found a heavy glass ash-tray on the floor and used it to smash the lock on the outside to look like someone had forced entry, then left the door open and walked off.  If Blue was coming back, I was sure he’d thank me.

I remembered about how slippery the floor was only after I’d taken two steps in the direction of the stairwell.

Back in the thick of things

I slipped up the stairs, noting that they were slick with something as my feet slipped and slid around.  Luckily my gait is erratic enough that I barely noticed it, but I could see it causing the residents here some trouble.  When I reached the top I paused and looked back; no footprints, no sign that anything had disturbed the steps.  So not a little Monkeybutt trap either then, but perhaps a consequence of whatever she and her men had done in Blue’s rooms.  Sure enough the landing was equally greasy, and I skated across the floor to the door with the police tape nailed across it, and then sailed past having completely misjudged how long it would take me to come to a halt.  I turned my skid into a turn and bodychecked the wall of another flat.  It hurt, but in the litany of aches and pains that I have daily it wasn’t even worth thinking about.  I aimed at Blue’s door, and pushed off again.

The police tape had been genuinely nailed in place, by a nail-gun by the looks of things, and that made me instantly suspicious.  In this town the police tie the tape to whatever’s closest, and if that then gets up and walks off, meowing to itself, well tough.  I peered at a nail and decided that I couldn’t see anything clearly in the dim, sodium haze from the walkway ceiling light.  I have a pocket torch, a fancy little thing about as long as my hand, heavy as lead with a ring of LEDs that can be switched from white to blue to red to ultraviolet to infrared.  It’s strictly not civilian issue, but Mad Frankie had a surplus and I had sticky fingers.  I’ve used the infrared setting to cook food on a stakeout before now, as well as keep my hand warm in my pocket when I was caught in a walk-in freezer for a half-hour.  I twisted the head to the white setting and turned it on.

The blaze of crystalline white light hurt my eyes a little at first, but my pupils gradually shrank and my vision improved and I could see through the tape now, and so see the fine wire running through it that connected each of the nails in turn, the doorhandle, the hinges, and then ran off along the floor against the wall and into the flat next door.  I checked the top of the door next; Monkeybutt loves to think she’s clever than the rest of us.  Sure enough, a second wire ran off that way along the ceiling and into the flat on the other side.  I snorted.  That woman has no imagination.

“Balcony inspector.”  I glared at the young girl that had opened the door to the next-door flat.  She glared back at me, an eight-year-old with attitude.  She stuck her hand on her hip in a way that reminded me of a brothel-keeper in the Seychelles.  “We don’t got no balcony, fool,” she said.

“You’ve lost your balcony?” I went with angry sounding, figuring that any council-worker coming out here would be either angry or scared.  “How the hell do you lose a balcony?”

“We never had no fool balcony!”  I could see the momentary uncertainty in her eyes though.

“You sold it for drugs, didn’t you?  You only went and sold your damn balcony for drug money.  How much did that get you?  Was it enough to make you happy?”

“I don’t do no drugs!”  There it was, the quiver of the lip, a tiny hiccough in her voice.  “We ain’t never had no balcony,  and that’s the godfearin’ truth.”

“You’d better show me this,” I said.  “I’m gonna hafta get the guys round here to look at this.  There’ll be structural damage, probably have to condemn this little crack house.  You’ll have to leave too.  You got kids?  We can take them into social services I guess.”

“We ain’t don’t got no damn fool balcony!”  She took a step back, and I stepped forwards.  “You come see for yoursel’ you fool.  Then you be seeing that you be being a fool.”

I followed her down a short hallway that seemed filled with doors into tiny little steamy rooms, and at the end there was a room just big enough for the three-seat sofa and tv that was in there.  She walked across the sofa, I squeezed past it, trying not to knock the tv.  The two kids on the sofa shouted at us both to get out of the way, and she opened a window.

“There!  No balcony, no never no balcony.  Fool.”

“Lemme see.”  I pushed past her, and hauled myself out of the window.  My desperate feet found the little ledge of brick that ran decoratively beneath the window, and I allowed myself to breathe.  I edged along, pressing my aching body against the wall, listening to my knees click like the approaching death of cockroaches, and reached Blue’s window.

“You definitely sold this balcony!” I shouted back to the girl who had poked her head out of the window and was staring at me looking frightened.  “I’m coming in, and then we’re talking about this!”  I reached up to Blue’s window, and pulled it open with unexpected ease, nearly falling backwards and to the floor below.  I struggled for a moment, then got my balance back, and hauled myself into his little studio.  My heart was pounding as erratically as ever, and I could taste blood in my mouth.

Boy Blue's studio

I thought about taking the bus, but it was starting to get light, and the night buses in this burg only pick up if they feel like it.  The bus drivers’ union has a line about refusing to pick up anyone obviously dangerous, or likely to endanger the other passengers, but the statistics speak for themselves: last year more people on night buses were held up and robbed by the driver than by anyone getting on the bus.  Taxis generally don’t stop for me, and there weren’t enough people around for me to steal someone else’s cab, or even persuade someone else to flag the cab down for me.  I was walking again, as it seemed I always did.  It got you intimate with the city of course, and there aren’t many back alleys, rat-holes and forgotten streets that I don’t know about.  I even know about the trap streets, both the ones the mapmakers use and the real trap streets that you should know better than to walk down.  Mad Frankie’s Anger Management take things a little too literally at times.

The rain had stopped and the moisture from the ground was starting to swirl up and around into fog.  Someone up at the museum had explained how it happened to me once, while I was on a stakeout for a bag-snatcher and snatch-bagger who had a thing for academics and people in horn-rimmed glasses.  Somehow the city created a layer of warmer air above the ground, which was cooled by the underground rivers and waterways, and the moist air got trapped between the two layers and just hung around, shrouding us all in icy white curtains that could get thick enough that you couldn’t see your hand held out in front of you and left you soaking wet when you went back inside.  I smiled a little at the thought that knowing how it all worked still didn’t stop me getting wet or blind by it, and plodded on, one foot in front of the other, just like my old dancing coach used to mutter.

Some would claim it’s hard to tell, but the streets around me grew poorer and I knew that I was getting close to where Boy Blue had lived.  Might still live; I didn’t know that he was dead yet, just missing, presumed sheared.  A road-sign appeared on the side of a house: Schalk Road.  I turned in, and cut across the carpark of a housing block.  At the other side I clambered over a waist-high metal fence, wishing I was still limber enough to just jump it, and pushed through the rhododendrons until I emerged in the car-park of a different housing block.  Across that, under a low arch, and I was in the car-park of Boy Blue’s housing block.  Every now and then I find myself wondering if the town planners ever bothered to learn about geometry in school, because the way they put things together beats human comprehension.

There were no police cars or vans in the car-park, but I knew what I was looking for, and in the furthest corner from the entrance was a maintenance van from Tar’em’n’car’em.  Monkeybutt had left someone behind to keep an eye on the scene and tell her who turned up.  The question now was, how many of them had she left behind?

These blocks are poor for a reason: their construction was done on the cheap three decades ago, and it shows.  I went back to the arch and levered a brick out of the wall with not much effort at at; there were plenty of places where the local kids had already pulled bricks and half-bricks out.  I dropped the brick on the floor, and it cracked into two pieces readily.  I picked them both up, and lobbed one of them at the van with an underarm throw.  I can throw overarm, but it usually dislocates my shoulder when I do.  The brick sailed parabolically through the air, and landed with a thud on the top of the van, where it shattered into a rain of brick nuggets.  I waited two seconds, and then threw the second one, which struck surprisingly close to the first.  The van engine started up and the van reversed across the car park to the other side.  When it stopped, the engine still idling, a man opened the rear doors and stuck his head out, looking up and back rather than from side to side.

“Bloody kids,” I hear him call, though his voice was thin and reedy at that distance.  “They must have figured out we’re not local.”  He ducked back inside, closing the door behind him, and I went and fetched another brick.  Two more thuds, and the van moved to the gate and waited there, the engine running.  I kept waiting, and was rewarded with the sight of a burly man with a prominent bald spot swaggering across the car park from the building.  I recognised him as Lieutenant Drough, one of Natasha’s side-kicks.  He was known behind his back as Dan, for the obvious reason.

“What’s the matter?”  He had a strong inner-city accent; all t’s replaced with stops, dropped h’s and g’s and trouble with any word of more than three syllables.  “Why’s youse moved the van?”

I couldn’t hear the other side of the conversation, but before it got very far a microwave crashed into the car-park from the fifth floor, and Dan turned to look.  It was a slow, deliberate turn, and followed immediately by a slow, deliberate getting into the van.  It was the inner-city completely: I’m not scared of you, and I think I know who you are, so I’m just going to get my mates and then I’m coming back.  I’d be more impressed if I didn’t know that whoever threw the microwave was also getting their mates, and their mates’ mates, and it looked like there’d be a little bit of action here in about an hour.  The van pulled out of the car-park, and I limped my way across to the entrance to the block.  I needed to be in and out before Dan came back.

Jigsaw puzzles

The overflow morgue smells clinical; the air is cold and tastes slightly of formaldehyde, but there’s a rancid note like off-butter underneath it all.  I kind of like it, but that might just be familiarisation, given how much I come here to think.  The trolleys are hard, cold steel, but that’s pleasant when your body’s as abused and damaged as mine: I don’t have to support anything, and the chill numbs the aches and pains of a life lived long.  I exhaled and let Death hug me just a little closer.

The sheep thing bugged me still.  Why had someone gone to the trouble of dragging one up all those flights of stairs to slaughter it?  And where was Boy Blue at the time?  Did he open his door and have a sheep bleat at him, probably angry and panicked by that point?  I knew Blue a little, and I expect he would have panicked too, probably backing up into the room while the sheep was goaded forwards.  There was so little in his room – even I have more in mine, though most of it belongs to my room-mate and probably wouldn’t fit me – that he’d reach the mattress before he knocked anything over.  Then he’d end up sitting down on the bed while the sheep bleated and pawed the ground, its eyes rolling madly in its triangular head, while behind it some shadowy figure made threats.

No, that just didn’t work.  How did Blue get out in that case, and why kill the sheep?

I adjusted my position on the trolley slightly and felt my shoulders go numb, which was a blessed relief.  Let’s try again.

Could Blue jump out of the window?  Not and stand up again, and certainly not run away.  Too many floors to fall.  Could there have been something below the window when he jumped that he could land on?  Seemed unlikely, but I hadn’t checked when I was there.  That would be lucky for him (I presumed), and stranger things did happen.  People thought that odd coincidences only happened in stories but that was because they didn’t do the numbers: with as many people in the world as there are, a one-in-a-million chance should be happening to a few hundred people on any given day.  Maybe yesterday had been Blue’s day?  He probably thought he was overdue one, most people did.

But was there an easier answer?  What if Blue wasn’t there when the sheep-killer arrived; could the murder of the sheep be a warning message?  Well, then the sheep had to be important and either Blue had been angering French farmers or… well, Belle Peep had already shown up in my investigation hadn’t she?  Her father, Bo Peep, had run a small inner-city farm before his death about ten years ago, and rumour had it that Belle kept the farm going but that the tours were for much more select groups with special interests.  Could Belle have a quarrel with Blue?  Or did Belle just supply the sheep for someone else who had a quarrel with Blue?

Something tickled at my foot, and I kicked out.  There was a soft outrushing of breath and a second, sharper, intake of breath so I opened my eyes.  Two medical students, easily identifiable by the looks of terror on their faces and the textbooks they were clutching were backing away from my trolley.  One was doubled over, as though he’d just been kicked in the pit of his stomach and the other was making the sign of the cross repeatedly across his chest.

“I’m not dead,” I said slowly.  It seems like that’s the one thing that should be easy to grasp about this situation, but in my experience it’s the bit people have most trouble with.  I blame all these zombie movies, and the occasional zombie outbreak.  “I’m having a think.”

“In the morgue?” said the self-crossing student lowering his arm.  His other hand, holding a heavy textbook, remained ready to swat at me in case I decided his brains were enough for a meal, which I rather doubted.

“It’s quiet, and I don’t often get disturbed,” I said.  “What are you doing here?”

“Homework,” wheezed the other student, slowly coming upright again.  “We’re a bit behind in class, so we got the keys–“

“Permission!” injected the second student quickly

“– and the keys to come down here and catch up a bit,” continued the first.  “We weren’t going to use your body, we were just wondering how badly advanced your state of decomposition was.”

“Still living,” I said with a snarl.  “You want the room next door; all the bodies in here are missing limbs that need to be put back with them before they can be autopsied.”

“Right,” said the first student starting to leave, but then stopped as the second looked at me quizzically.

“How do you know?” he asked.

“I’m supposed to be here,” I said.  “Night watchman.”

“Oh.”  He didn’t look convinced, but I didn’t care.  They wandered off, whispering to each other and looking nervous, and I slipped off the trolley.  I was going to go and check out Blue’s place again and see what I’d missed when Monkeybutt turned up, and then I was going to go and find out if Belle Peep really did still have her daddy’s farm.

The overflow morgue

The mortician at the overflow morgue lets me have my own key because she got tired of trying to find how I’d broken in again.  She sighed as she threw it at me, and then laughed as I struggled to bend enough to pick it up.  I’d had a particularly difficult time with a particularly tricky case the night before, involving a sadistic acupuncturist, a loose goose and a bag of leaf tea and I really wasn’t set up for bending, stretching, or even moving faster than a stumble.

“Sweet beggared Moses, Mac,” she’d said, without any more malice in her tone than people who don’t know me use, “what have you done to yourself this time?  I don’t know, but you keep coming in here so you may as well call it home.  It’s people you know who keep this place in business, so perhaps I should show some gratitude, however indirectly.”

I hooked the key with a shoe and started to pull it up my leg to where my aching fingers could reach it.  “I like it in here,” I said.  “It’s quiet, no-one tries to bother me or interrupt my thoughts.”

“Who in their right mind would bother you, Mac?”

“People wanting me dead, mostly.”

“So you’re giving them a bit of a head start, eh?  Where better to hide a dead body than a morgue?”

“The graveyard, but it involves digging and a bit of heavy lifting.”  I got my fingertips to the key and tried to straight up again.  It proved painful, and from the sound of her laughter, humorous too.

“Don’t scare my assistant,” she said.  “And try not to let anyone official catch you.  If they come in while you’re thinking hard –,” her tone suggested that she thought I was sleeping, “– don’t sit up and greet them.  Not unless you’re trying to add to the population here yourself.”

I grunted, mostly with the effort of dragging my shoulder up so they were level with one another and she left it at that.  As she walked off I remember thinking that from the rear she was stunning, but when you saw her face she was breath-taking.  As in, she took your breath away so much that you couldn’t even beg for mercy.  She could have given Medusa tips on both make-up and hair-care.

I let myself in to the morgue and sniffed.  There was a strong blast of formaldehyde in the air, but there were the subtle, almost-citrussy notes of chloroform underneath.  I asked Miss Sapphire about it once, wondering if it’s supposed to smell like Japanese lime and she just wrinkled her delicate little nose at me.

“You sniff chloroform, Mac?”  She shook her head and exhaled very gently, a ladylike take on a very masculine gesture.  “How are you even still alive?”

I walked through the little entrance office without signing the visitors book; I figured that this was like a home away from home so I wasn’t really visiting.  And if I wasn’t here there was nothing to explain if someone noticed a trolley out of place, or a roll of bandages borrowed for a while.  In the next room the temperature dropped noticeably.  The overflow morgue is dug into the ground for insulation and they keep it cold enough that it doesn’t smell much except in summer.  The floor sloped steadily downwards as I headed towards the corpse bays where the bodies for autopsy are prepped.  There was pretty much always a free trolley there, and I have faith I’d wake up before they cut too deep; while if I slept in the fridges I might not wake up until I was in the chiller cabinet.  They lock those doors from the outside too.  I asked about it, and the mortician just shrugged her shoulders.

“Mad Frankie went to the city council and insisted,” she said.  “Sat there in the Mayor’s chair, banging his fist on the table and insisting that we put security in, saying that he wanted to know that when he died he wasn’t going to be some necrophiliac’s sex toy.  God only knows what kind of people he hangs out with, Mac.  Well, God and you, from what I hear.”  I had my own opinions about why Mad Frankie might want to be able to lock people into a morgue fridge, and I wasn’t going to speculate.

The corpse bays were unusually crowded, and when I started opening body bags and checking the contents I found that everyone seemed to be missing an arm or a leg, sometimes both.  Then I found the bag that contained all the arms and legs and realised that the mortuary staff would be doing jigsaw puzzles come the morning, and I permitted myself a grim little smile.  This wasn’t Mad Frankie’s style, he was much more direct.  This looked and felt like Natasha Monkeybutt to me, deploying some police weapon without due care and consideration.  I pushed the bag of limbs onto the floor, climbed on to the trolley and lay back.  I exhaled deeply, closed my eyes, and tried to think about all the things that had happened since I went looking for Little Boy Blue.  And I realised that I still hadn’t found out where he was and why someone had dragged a sheep up to his room to slaughter it there.

Jack Horner

“Why’d you want to know about yourself?”  As I’d hoped, the kid wasn’t thinking fast enough to spot that I’d been asking for own name a minute ago.

“I’m that paranoid,” I said.  It was the truth as well.  In my line of work it doesn’t take you very long to start feeling like there isn’t anywhere that isn’t under surveillance.  It doesn’t help that Mad Frankie and his Anger Management has paid-for access to all of the police CCTV cameras either; between that and his network of informers a man can’t piss up against a doorway without Mad Frankie knowing and sending you the bill for having it cleaned again.  I know; I have six from him.  One of which complains that I managed to give the door dutch elm disease, which I’d contest if there was a court that would hear the case.

“Hah, that’s just healthy in this town,” said the kid sounding twenty years older again.  “Well mister, I can tell you that you come in here every Thursday looking right different to how you look now, and you order a plum pie from us, with six plums.  Fancy one now?”

I shook my head, and waited for him to continue.  He didn’t, so I had to speak again.  “What else?  What’s my name?  How do I pay?  When was the last time I stiffed you?  How often do I sleep with your aunt?”

He looked a little taken-aback by the staccato questions rattled at him like machine-gun fire, and indeed he even took a step backwards.  Over in the corner the aunt knocked over a tub of ketchup which started to very slowly ooze from captivity.  She righted it before it got within an inch of the lip and wiped the table anyway.

“You’re Jack Horner,” he said.  “You sit in the corner eating your pie, and you mostly do it by sticking your thumb in, pulling out a plum, and making a song and dance about being a good boy.  Frankly mister, you’re weird, but you always pay up front so it kind of makes it hard to throw you out.  And if you’ve slept with my aunt mister, then it’s a bit weirder still that you keep trying it on with me.”  He was a little red-faced by the end, but a long way away from anything I’d call attractive.

“How many thumbs have I got?” I said.  It was a strange question but the vague description of Jack Horner was ringing bells in my head; tiny little silver bells like a carillon in a morose major key.

“Count ‘em for yourself, mister,” said the boy.  “Do you reckon you’ll come up surprised?”

“I think you might,” I said.  “I’ve got three, haven’t I?”

He looked at the counter, and his gaze didn’t move for a moment.  I wondered what he was thinking, and then, too late, realised that my hands were both resting on the counter.

“Not at the moment,” he said.  “Which is another weird thing mister.  I don’t think you’re who you’re claiming to be, so either you buy a pie and eat it, or you get out.”

“I’ll take the plum pie,” I said.  “Six plums.”

I sat down at an empty table, though they were all empty so it gave me an unaccustomed choice.  I sat as far away from the aunt as I could get and twiddled my thumbs.  The only man I know who’s got three thumbs and is so proud of it that he won’t shut up about it is Jack Crown.  He had a girlfriend for a while, a girl called Jill Hill, and then he lost his job after an accident he won’t talk about and needed alternative work.  He found it, but he’s secretive about it, and he’s a hard man to track down if he owes you anything.  He owes me a bucket and some brown paper, so maybe that’s why I’d not seen him in an age and a half.  But then there were the rumours that he’d found work for Natasha Monkeybutt, so maybe I wasn’t seeing him because he didn’t want me to.  Monkeybutt wouldn’t be above setting a tail on me and thinking she could get away with it.

“There you go mister not-Jack,” said the boy slamming a small pie down on the table.  The crust jumped slightly from the force, and when it settled back I could see the first plum glistening between the crust and the side of the dish.  I slipped my thumb in and pulled it out.

“What type of plum?” I asked.  “Victoria?”

The kid gave me an old stare and, turning away, said, “I think you mean Whose plum, mister.”

I was starving.  I ate it anyway.  I even paid him afterwards.

The Corner Pie House

“Do they know him in there?” I asked, thinking that a plum pie wasn’t all that much to go on.

“Yes,” she said, her lips twisting thinly in an approximation of a smile that only a physicist could accept.  “He’s the guy who buys their plum pies.”

I left Mother Hubbard to her heeling, which neither Damned Simon or the little ferrety man looked much enthusiastic about, and walked back into the main bar of the Cow and Spoon.  Tom was still waving his pint glass of slops at me like he thought I’d come to heel if he tried it for long enough, so I walked over to the bar and just stood there.  About fifteen seconds later he recoiled, dropping the pint glass on the black rubber mats that covered the floor behind the bar.

“Jesus Mac!  What have you been rolling around in this time?”  He was coughing and tears were running from his eyes.  I watched his enviously for a moment – Mad Frankie had my tear ducts cauterised a few years back as the easiest way to not have to see a grown man cry – and then I told him.

“Holy….  They’re still running the Blue Swan?  I thought that got closed down after it got flooded.”

“Nah,” I said, remembering the first couple of days after the flood when you had to wade through waist-deep water to get to the bar and push the occasional dying swimmer out of the way.  “It’s still going.  It’s a bit drier than it was of course.  And I bumped into Jackie outside, though she’s calling herself something else now.”

“Mad Jackie?  Jackie “they’ll steal your prayers” Jackie?  I heard she was a bit of a looker in her day.”

“Depends on where you were looking, I guess,” I said.  I could remember Jackie back when she started, a chubby girl with a big smile, frightened eyes and rat-tailed hair.  The smile disappeared with her first scar, a beauty that ran from her collar-bone to her hip that she eventually got covered up with a tattoo of a shopping trolley.  The weight just disappeared; it’s hard not to be hungry in her line of work, whether it’s aspirational hunger or just plain starvation.  The hair was now hidden under her tin-foil rollers I supposed, but I doubted that it had changed all that much.

“I’d have done her,” said Tom, going a little dreamy-eyed on me.  I snorted, and he blinked, took a step backward, trod on the fallen pint-glass and went arse-over-tit onto the floor.  He groaned, the patrons took a moment out from beating up the poor wretch now curled up foetally on the pool-table to laugh, and I left with someone else’s bottle of WKD.

The drink tasted like bubble-gum but I knocked it back anyway for the sugar.  It seemed like a long time since I’d last eaten as well, and the memory of Miss Sapphire’s pasta was starting to seem more edible by the minute.  I spat the dregs out into the gutter and abandoned the bottle, and then strolled down the street towards the Corner Pie House.  Mother Hubbard had nothing against me at the moment – nothing more than the general animosity I generate from everyone – so I was only watching the street like a paranoiac, checking the shadows, anything that moved, most things that didn’t.  Nothing seemed too unusual, and when I stopped at the Pie House it seemed like the kind of place I wouldn’t get kicked straight out of.  There was no doorman, and the shop was in a building that looked like it had been a chemicals warehouse once.  I racked my brains, trying to remember what this part of the city had looked like fifteen years ago but all that came to mind was a nightclub that had its own abortionist on the premises.

Inside it smelled like an abattoir and I had another flashback to the nightclub abortionist.  There were lots of scrubbed wooden tables with four chairs arranged at each as you’d expect.  They were laid out in a rectangular pattern like a child-labour sweat shop, and against the left-hand side of the shop was the counter where you ordered your pies and got served.  A blackboard on the wall behind it listed the pies and sides that were available and their prices, all of which struck me as rather more reasonable than I was expecting.  A woman wearing a maternity dress and an ivory apron was stood at the counter watching me with little piggy eyes and a nose so smashed it might well have been a snout.

“Yers?” she said, her words slurred and only one side of her mouth working.

“Plum Pie,” I said.  There were no customers in here yet, so I’d have to ask about Jack Horner and find out when he was likely to be in.

“Yers,” she said.  “‘Ow many plumsh der yet want?”

“No,” I said getting close enough to the counter for my stench to repel her.  She stayed put, and didn’t even look like she’d smelled me.  “No, you’ve got a customer who buys your plum pies.  I want to meet him.”

“‘Ow many plumsh der yet want?”

“I want to know who buys your plum pies.”

“I’ll give yer six.”

“I’m not paying.”  That was enough to break her chain of thought (a very small, circular chain that clearly went round and round a lot without ever stopping) and her eyes lit up like little furnaces and she huffed and snorted through her mashed-up nose.

“Rowghghghghg!”

For a moment I thought she was going to charge at me like an enraged wild boar, and I instinctively checked her for tusks, hooves, sharp teeth and anything else that might cause injury.  But she didn’t move, and my body stepped down from Defcon I and went back to aching painfully.  I watched her still, wondering what she’d do next, but then a young boy appeared through a curtained doorway behind her, took in the scene, and walked steadily over to us.

“Are you upsetting my aunt, Mister?” he said.  He couldn’t have been older than twelve, and given how thin he was he clearly wasn’t eating any of the pies.  His eyes were grey and slightly misty, and I suspected he had the onset of cataracts.

“She’s upsetting me,” I said.  “I thought she was going to try and eat me a moment ago.”

“What do you want?”  He sounded like a man twenty years older.

“I want to know who buys your plum pies.”

“Customers, Mister.  We don’t do wholesale.”  His aunt growled to herself again and lumbered off along the counter to pick up a dirty cloth and start rubbing the tables down with it.

“You’ve got a man who comes in on Thursdays just for the plum pies.  I want to know who he is.”

“Sounds like nothing I’d know about, Mister.  That’s gotta be covered by the Data Protection Act.”

I eyed him up again, noticing that it took him a couple of seconds to realise what I was doing and start eyeballing me back.

“I come in on Thursdays and order a plum pie,” I said.  “I’d like to see the data you keep on me.”

Mother Hubbard

She was no-one’s mother.  She said that she’d never had the maternal instinct, that when she was a little girl she’d preferred to drown her dolls than look after them.  She said that her sisters would find their dolls all wrapped up tight in swaddling cloths, heavy fabric pressed down heavily over china noses and mouths.  She said that she was allergic to child-spit, that the sound of childish laughter made her skin crawl and that even the sight of a child was enough to make her break out in hives.

Mad Frankie had let it be known that she was nobody’s mother because she’d tried stiffing him some of the take when she was one of his girls and he’d had her spayed as a punishment.  There were people who’d claimed to have seen the scars as well.

There was a place where, if you knew where to go, what the right time was, and who to ask, a man with a glass eye and breath like a gasworks would tell you that she was nobody’s mother because she’d had a lover who’d left her to do a job and had never returned.  He would tell you that she’d sworn never to sleep with another man again so that she couldn’t be hurt any more.  Then you’d probably pass out from his breath, and when you woke up you’d find your pockets lighter by the wallet-load and your clothes sold to the charity shops where charity was something definitely only practised at home.  Which is not to say a determined man couldn’t get them back, but you had to be willing to threaten elderly women with artificial limbs.  And no, I won’t explain how you’re intended to parse that sentence.

And then there were the hospital records that most everyone thought had been incinerated in a fire twenty years ago.  They made for some very interesting reading indeed.

But no matter what you chose to believe, everyone called her Mother Hubbard, and no-one ever asked her either to go to her cupboard or if her poor doggie had a bone.  Her poor doggie was actually a pack of seventeen armoured chihuahuas, and while that may not sound very scary you’ve not been pursued by them late at night, knowing that they get through gaps much smaller than any you can, and that they’re effectively bullet-proof and psychotic.  To my credit, I did manage to get away, but I was a whole lot younger then, and Mother Hubbard’s been teaching them new tricks ever since.

I pushed open the door of the Cow and Spoon, and leaned cautiously round it.  The pub’s interior was dark and damp and smelled like a tramp’s armpit.  There were people stood around the bar, and someone was getting beaten up over the pool-table.  I heard the mutter of odds being called, the scrunch of money changing hands, and the pitiful wail of the victim as a pool-cue was jabbed somewhere painful.  The man behind the bar, Tom, looked at me with disdain and wrung the barmat into a pint-glass.

“The usual, Mac?” he called, setting the glass on the counter.  I shrugged, and stumbled inside.  They’d cleaned the floor and my shoes weren’t sticking as much as usual; I kept overcompensating for how hard I had to pull my feet up, and it meant I was walking like a clown.

“Mother Hubbard?” I said.  Tom pointed to the Saloon.

“Holding court,” he said.  She’s been there since eleven, so she’s gonna be packing up soon.  Not drinking, Mac?”  He waved the pint-glass of slops at me.

“Not right now,” I said, ignoring the growl of my stomach reminding me that I’d not been able to eat Miss Sapphire’s pasta either.  “I need to see a woman about a dog.”

“Har, har, har,” said Tom.  “You should tell her you said that.”  Somewhere beyond the Saloon door I heard an angry yip, the kind of bark a small dog makes to let you know that you’re making far too much of the size issue.

“Yeah, I will,” I said.  “Just as soon as she tells me who Jack Horner is.”

*

I opened the door to the Saloon and walked inside; there’s no point peering in at Mother Hubbard.  She’ll only send someone out to bring you back.  She was sat in the middle of a horseshoe of chairs, her back ramrod straight, wearing a hat covered with mouldy fruit.  Only two of the horseshoe of chairs were occupied.  I recognised Damned Simon, who was nursing a dislocated shoulder, and I didn’t recognise a little ferrety man who was clutching a miniature traffic cone to his chest like a nipple protector.  Mother Hubbard turned and looked at me as I came in.

“Don’t sit down, MacArthur,” she said.  “I’ll have to get them to wash the chairs then.  What do you want?”

I gestured to her audience.  “Looks like I’m not first,” I said.  “I can wait.”

“Yeah, sure you can.  Well both of these are calling for a personal touch,” she said, cracking her knuckles on the word personal.  “So I think I’ll get your little complaint dealt with first, and then I can start heeling.”  There was a lot of emphasis on that last word, and neither Damned Simon nor the ferrety man looked happy.

“Jack Horner,” I said.  She didn’t react.  “Jack Horner had hired me to do a little watching,” I said.  “Only there’s no cash up front, and you know how I feel about that.”

“You worried you might end up doing a good deed and get kicked out of Hell, Mac?”  She giggled like the little girl she hadn’t been for over fifty years.  “I reckon the inmates down there won’t let that happen to a nice guy like you!“

“I like to watch whoever’s promising me the cash,” I said.  “Call it paranoia if you must.”

“I call it business sense,” said Mother Hubbard, the mirth dying away.  “Doesn’t explain what you’re doing here interrupting my little judgements though.”

“I need to know where to find Mr. Horner,” I said.  “And his real name might be nice, too.”

“Names I ain’t got,” said Mother Hubbard.  Her voice was pitched slightly higher, slightly snappier.  She sounded a little bit aggrieved.  “All I’ve got for you is that he likes the Corner Pie House, especially on a  Thursday.”

“What’s so special about Thursday?”

“They serve plum pie.”

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.”

The kitchen of the Blue Swan

While I don't know what I was exactly expecting to see when I stumbled through into the kitchen, the plate of badly cooked food held in front of me like a prayer for departed, I know I wasn't expecting to see anyone I recognised.  So when my eyes beheld Miss Sapphire leaning against a range, wearing a belt that was doing double duty as a skirt, holding a pint glass of something clear in one hand and a can-opener in the other, I was shocked.  I staggered to a halt, my feet vibrating like violin strings at the opening of the concerto and my ankles complaining they were being abused.
"Mac," she said, her voice like spider-silk, all ethereal and barely there, but somehow still coating my ears and making them feel sticky.
"Miss Sapphire," I grunted back.  She's always been a Miss to me, even though her legs were longer than lampposts and her stockings as sheer as the sides of a prison.  "I didn't know you cooked."
"I don't," she said, dropping the can opener and lifting the glass to her lips.  As she drank she tipped her head back, downing easily half the glass.  She righted it again, set it on the range next to her, wiped her lips, and burped very delicately.  "I just arrange things, whether its food on a plate, money in bank-accounts, or meetings in unlikely places.  But you know this already Mac, how many times have we done this already?"
"Not enough, it seems," I said.  "It keeps happening.  I'm busy, Miss Sapphire.  Mad Frankie will have to use someone else this time."
"Not Mad Frankie," she said.  "He's busy too Mac, and he doesn't like using you anyway.  People die around you, it's like a bad habit you have."
"Hardly my habit," I said.  "It's not like I'm helping them on their way.  You want a smother party, try Big Ben's disco on the first Monday of the month."
"I don't want a smother party, Mac.  I don't even want to find out what one is."
"You're not missing out.  So, you're moonlighting for someone else?  Mad Frankie know about it?"
"Of course he knows, and it's not moonlighting.  It's a secondary interest, and I'm looking after Mad Frankie's interest for a few seconds.  But it's not Frankie who wants your services this time, Mac.  It's someone with a much smaller budget."
"I don't come cheap."  I do, that was a lie, but it felt good to say it.
"You do."  Damn, did I have no secrets from this woman?  "But that's not the point.  The point is, that the job you're being hired for is to keep tabs on Natasha Monkeybutt."
"That's not how she likes it pronounced," I said, just a touch smugly.  Miss Sapphire conjured cigarettes and a lighter from somewhere.  Even though I was watching her hands I didn't see how she did it.
"How else could you pronounce it?"  She sounded curious, and the problem was, I was too.  Natasha had never told me how she liked her name pronounced, just that I was saying it wrong.  I shrugged, and Miss Sapphire lit her cigarette.  The end glowed red like a cyclopean eye peering from the cave, and a thin black line of smoke began to curl up to the ceiling.
"Keeping an eye on her is fine," said Miss Sapphire.  "What we don't want happening though is what we think your hire is after.  We don't want her falling foul of your little curse that means bad things happening to everyone around you.  Keep an eye on her, Mac, but don't let her die."
"I'm not a nursemaid," I said.
"Few things in this world would make as unfit a parent as you," she said.  "But that aside, keep an eye on her, don't let her die.  Make her the subject of your investigation if that helps.  But she's necessary, Mac.  She can do things."
"Fine," I said, shrugging again.  One of my shoulders refused to come back down.  "She's looking for Blue, so am I.  Seems like she'll be underfoot no matter what I do.  Who's hiring me then?  Where's the money?"
"He calls himself Jack Horner, but that's probably not his real name," said Miss Sapphire.  She was looking up at the ceiling.  "You'll get paid when I next see you.  Tell me, Mac, what's the white thing up there?"
I looked up and saw the smoke detector, and the curl of jet-black smoke just reaching it.  I looked down, and she'd vanished, leaving just the cigarette behind, floating in her half-full pint glass.  I turned and lunged through the kitchen doors, just before the fire system set off and started raining fire retardant chemicals down all over the kitchen.  The barman looked startled as I burst back through, and the bouncers all came to their feet and looked attentive.
"He's gone mad!" I shouted, pointing back into the kitchen.  "He's chopping up the pot-washer!"  The bouncers pushed past me, pounding heavily into the kitchen, and I ran for the hatch out to the street, knowing it was quicker than the stairs.
"She's quite a looker, Mac," said the barman as I threw myself through, hoping not to skid too far on my face.

Paschal Pasta

"Mac's your name?"  The barman looked surprised.  "I call everyone Mac, Mac.  It's just one those thingies, you know?  Metasyntactic variables."
"Never heard of it," I said.  "That drink won't make itself, you know."
The bartender finally got busy with the bottles and a pint-glass, which is a bit big for a drink on the house, but made me happy as I can never drink enough Old Peculiar.  Not least because someone usually interrupts me after a few sips.  Occasionally it's a broad, and rarer still she'll have chutzpah to take my drink away from me and try drinking it herself.  I think it's the twist of grapefruit, makes them think the drink's going to be light, fizzy and feminine.  After a mouthful of Old Peculiar though, she's normally face down on the floor, retching like she's trying to regurgitate the Hope diamond, and nine times out of ten my drink's down there with her, lifting the varnish from the floorboards and killing off the cockroaches.
"You were looking for me though," I said, putting aside fond memories of the women I've had trying to throw up on my shoes.
"Well Mac, there's always somebody looking for you in this world.  Don't you believe in love connections?"  To his credit the barman managed to wink at me.  I was impressed.
"There's always people looking for me, barman," I said.  "None of them are after a love connection though, and a lot of them are the kind of gentlemen you carefully refer to as gentlemen and never comment on where their hands might be or why they'd be carrying large musical instrument cases this far from an orchestra."
"I've got a cosh behind the bar, Mac," said the barman, holding his nose as he dropped the twist of grapefruit into my drink.  "Jesus, Mac, how can you drink that?"
"Is this a message from Mad Frankie?"  I pulled the drink towards me and inhaled.  I've lost most of my sense of smell, but there was a citrussy hint from the drink that made me feel instantly better.
"It's a plate of lamb pasta," said the barman, turning to the serving hatch behind him and opening it.  Behind it was a plate of spaghetti bolognese that looked like it had been made by a chef with no hands.  The spaghetti was uncooked, long, stiff straw-like strands splayed across the plate, and the bolognese sauce had come from a can – I could see the can lid half-covered by the sauce.  The barman whisked the plate up and set it in front of me with a flourish.  I pushed it away.
"That's not cooked," I said.  "Send it back."
"You'll have to take it up with the chef himself," said the barman.  "Only he won't come out of the kitchen."
"How much of the bar do I have to destroy before he will?"  I was feeling in my pockets for my gun, and wondering if I'd remembered to put it on this morning.
"You have to go back to the kitchen and talk to him yourself, Mac," said the barman, his words delivered slowly and precisely.  Just as I found the gun tucked into the waistband of my underpants – surely I'd been trying to hide it, but why? – I realised that this was another coded message.  "Leave the drink here, Mac," said the barman.  "I wouldn't want you starting any trouble back there."
I sighed, and took a couple of sips of the Old Peculiar, just so I could remember what it tasted like, and pushed it back to him.  "All yours," I said.  "Enjoy it."  He recoiled slightly, regarding the glass like it was a live grenade.
"Take the plate, Mac, so the chef knows why you're going back there."
I picked the plate up, wondering why he had to be so cloak-and-dagger about it all.  Why not just tell me that there was someone in the kitchen wanting to talk to me?
"Where are you going?"  One of the bouncers had stood up again and was glaring at me.
"This food's lousy," I said.  "I'm going to make the chef eat it and see if he still wants to charge me for it."
"He's a lousy cook," said one of the others.  "We should watch, it could be funny."
"Incoming, guys," said the barman promptly, gesturing at the stairs, and the bouncers turned away to see what he was talking about.  I bolted for the kitchen, while the barman waved me anxiously on.  I pushed the swing doors open with the plate, and stumbled on through.

Blue Swan

The door that allows entrance to the Blue Swan opens inwards and doesn't open outwards.  To leave the bar you have to use another door, or possibly an old beer-barrel hatch if the bouncers have decided they don't like you.  The hatch is in the middle of the wall after you've walked down the steps from the door to the bar floor and is at road-level on the outside, so the drayman could just roll the barrels through the hatch for the bar staff to catch (or drop, more often) and then roll down to the cellar.  The bouncers have perfected the art of throwing a man through it so that he skids along the pavement on his nose for the last three feet or so, and you can spot the regulars by the way their noses are worn away.
I don't count as a regular, but the bouncers recognised me anyway as I came down the stairs, and they came to attention, muscles bulging and rearranging under their black, smart suit jackets.  Their eyebrows raised a little – and if they stood close enough together it looked like they shared a single eyebrow running from the guy on the left to the guy on the right.  They weren't even the same height and the eyebrow somehow managed that trick.  I paused on the stairs, and they tensed a little, and then the barman called out my name.
"Mac!" he yelled, his tone more friendly than I'd been expecting.  "You looking for someone?"
"How did you know?" I asked, continuing my descent.  My heels ached, and my ankles clicked, and one of the bouncers looked at me with surprise distorting his ugly features.
"You sound like you've got death-watch beetle," he grunted, his lips barely moving when he spoke.
"I have," I said, and walked past them to the bar.
I don't have death-watch beetle, but I did for a while, which both puzzled and scared my doctor.  He'd looked at me long and hard in the white, hard fluorescent light of his surgery, edged his chair away from me, and poked me with a tongue-depressor.
"I don't get it," he'd said.  "The medical text-books say you should be dead.  The voodoo books say you should be dead.  All the second opinions I've gathered say you should be dead.  The blood-test results say you are dead, and yet you're still moving around, and catching tree-diseases.  What the hell are you?"
"Just lucky, I guess," I'd said, and accepted the referral to a tree-surgeon and a prescription for creosote.
"Might have some news for you, Mac," said the barman.  I didn't recognise him, but I sat down on a bar-stool anyway and stared hungrily at him.  He stared back, meeting my gaze unflinchingly, and then moved a menu in front of me with a twitch of his fingers.
"Tell me, then," I said.  "I'm looking for Little Boy Blue, or, failing that, someone with a thing for sheep." I looked at the menu and realised that I'd not eaten in a couple of days.  My stomach gurgled, which is as enthusiastic as it ever gets, and I pointed at the first two steaks on the battered bit of cardboard.  "What sides do I get with them?"
"Bashed potatoes, bruised onions, soggy frites, some white sauce the chef doesn't like to talk about," said the barman promptly.  "I'd recommend the pasta Mac.  Comes with lamb."
"Pasta's not a food for men," I snorted, my finger not shifting from the steak.
"Might be for boys, though," said the barman, and suddenly the import he was trying to give his words made it past the defensive barricades of my mind and I realised what I was being told to do.
"I'll have the pasta," I said, mechanically.  "Comes with lamb does it?"
"And there's a drink on the house as well," said the barman, his smile wide enough to let the top of his head fall off if he leaned back.  "What are you drinking, Mac?"
"Make it an old peculiar," I said.
"You mean an old-fashioned, there, hey?"
"Nope," I said.  "Old peculiar.  Mix whiskey sours with a splash of tangerine juice, a jigger of vermouth and top it up with cheap white wine.  Add a twist of grapefruit."
"Sounds peculiar," said the barman nodding.
"And while you're making it," I said, "you can tell me how you know my name."