An evening chat

I was coming back from the kitchen with a fresh cup of coffee and yesterday's croissant, sat on a plate and reheated, when I felt a curl of cold air around my ankles. Instantly wary, I peered round the study door and felt a little silly when no-one was there. I put the cup and plate down on my desk and then jumped out of my skin as someone tapped on my shoulder.
I turned my head, my hand reaching for the letter opener, and saw the ruined, smoky face of MacArthur. I still kept reaching for the letter opener, but I relaxed.
"I scared you," he said, his voice growling hoarsely like a dog with laryngitis.
"Of course you scared me, you were intending to!"
"Yeah well, it's nice to know I succeeded."
"Why were you trying to scare me? That's not a nice thing to do, Mac. And I write your biography."
"Keeps me in practice. Keeps you on your toes. And that's what I've come to talk to you about."
I retreated to the other side of the desk, gripping the letter opener like a talisman, and sat down. The high-back leather chair squeaked slightly and drifted on its castors. I put my feet down on the floor and pushed it back.
"You found another writer?"
"No, but I don't feel you're doing me justice."
"How on earth can I be selling you short, Mac? You're about as low as you can get on this planet and still be on the surface. Vermin point you out to their children and tell them that they'll end up like you if they're naughty!"
He shrugged, which seemed to involve his whole body and caused a lot of unhealthy-sounding clicking from his joints.
"But you never tell anyone about the other side of me. You never tell people about the evenings spent at home, drinking quietly and watching television."
"Your last quiet evening at home resulted in a one-legged tap-dancing girl having to hop home with a nail driven through her only shoe. And you don't watch television because you're too cheap to pay for the electricity. And to top it all off, Mac, you don't even own your own home, you part-share with a rent-boy who you don't pay any rent to!"
He paused, then spat. Brown mucus started to soak into the carpet, and I just knew that the stain would be impossible to shift.
"Maybe that's a bad example."
"You think?"
"I'm kind to animals. You've never mentioned that."
"You don't keep any pets... that's certainly a kindness. I don't think I've ever seen you interact with an animal. Well, a non-human animal at least."
"I donate to charity."
"Mac, last year you donated firearms to Dr. Barnardos and then tried to claim it as a tax deduction. The firearms were stolen from the crooks who'd stolen them in the first place, and had live ammunition. You caused a bloodbath in an orphanage, and you think that this will show the nicer side of your character?"
Mac sighed heavily and I wondered for a moment if it was possible for the wind to get rusty. If so, that's how it would sound.
"Fine, well I'll leave you to your evening then," he said, and there was almost a hint of melancholy in his voice. "Enjoy."
And then he was gone again, and my croissant had somehow disappeared.

Flutterby

Rain pattered down as steady as a girlfriend who still thinks she's got an exclusive, making soft splattery noises on the leaves of the hot-house plants. There was a large hole in the glass ceiling that I'd made five minutes earlier when my grip on a gargoyle's tongue had slipped and I'd fallen. Luckily for me the compost pile had broken my fall. I'd pulled myself back to my feet, checked that I still had all my teeth, and limped over to the door. As I'd expected for a hothouse filled with rare tropical plants the door was locked; what I wasn't expecting was that the door was chained and padlocked shut. From the inside. The chains were shiny and new, and the padlock looked like no-one had tried to force it, so I reckoned that I ought to be discrete. I looked around for the key, and saw miles and miles of fleshy green leaves, tendrils as thick as my ex-wife's tonsils, and bright coloured flowers and blooms that gave me a brief flashblack to an afternoon in a psychiatrists office doing tests intended for a four-year old. I got paid handsomely for that by his parents. He's locked up in a maximum security mental hospital now.

I figured that the key was probably in with one of the plants so I picked up a gardening trowel and smashed a few more panels of glass near the door. I smashed a bit more than was strictly necessary, but I didn't want to risk cutting myself getting out. The owner of this little plant haven also bred Doberman Pinschers, and I didn't want to leave an obvious scent.

I paused there for a moment and sniffed. I smelled strongly of compost, which was either the compost I'd fallen into earlier, or an indication that my aftershave was past its expiry date again. I wish I were joking when I say that. Never buy aftershave from a Filipino with a pushy attitude and a hand-cart filled with rotting squid.

Outside the greenhouse it was wetter, as more of the rain could reach me, and darker. The sun was setting, and I realised that the greenhouse must have artificial lighting; it seemed like a lot of effort to go to just for some squelchy plants. I could understand it if they were papavera somnolens or cannibis sattiva, but the ones in there reminded me of old cheese and horse chestnuts. I looked off to my left, and sure enough, there was the hedge-maze, grown in the shape of a flutterby. It had taken me all of my skills of persuasion to find out what was at the heart of the maze, and that means all of my patience too.

I groped in the long pocket of my raincoat, the one that starts at mid-chest and descends to mid-knee and found the spray-gun of Agent Orange and the machete. I'm only good at puzzles that allow lateral thinking. I had a set of Quantifiers to find, and what lay at the heart of the maze was going to go a long way towards retrieving them.

Puss in Boots

Dick Whittington lay dead on a grimy blue mattress that reeked of cat's piss. His arms were flung out over his head as though he'd tried to stop himself falling, and the sleeves of his ragged shirt were rolled up, revealing track marks down the length of his arms. His plump, pale face was turned slightly to the side, and a trickle of dried blood, burgundy like the port I'd been drinking before being called out here, ran from a nostril down to his chin. His feet were bare and the soles of his feet had been slashed with something sharp. I suspected a razor blade.

"It's murder, isn't it?" said the woman stood in the doorway to the room. Silhouetted against the neon lights outside, her figure curved like an ecstatic scoliosis sufferer and her thigh-high burgundy leather boots glistening wetly she leaned one arm against the doorframe and bowed her head slightly. Thick blonde hair cascaded over her face and her shoulder trembled ever so slightly as though she were crying. If she sobbed I couldn't hear it for the howl of the night-time wind that very nearly drowned out the wail of the sirens: in this neighbourhood the ambulances were often attending to the fallen police and fire brigades. I shrugged my shoulders, and kicked Dick's feet.

"Miss Bootes," I spat, and then started coughing, heavy, wracking gasps for air like a volcano god with indigestion. I doubled over, feeling my cracked ribs grating against each other as I did so and a hot sensation in my eyes that would have been tears if Mad Frankie hadn't had my tear ducts cauterised last week as a precaution against me giving him the Evil Eye. Slowly I recovered and pulled myself upright, and looked to the doorway. She had come a couple of paces into the room, keeping her distance like most people do, and was looking at me with something less than loathing.

"Call me Pussy," she said. "Dick always liked that."

I bit my tongue hard to stop myself from laughing; with my fragile physical state I'd've ended up on the mattress with Dick, and corpses don't get paid. I tasted iron and remembered a night with a sadistic acupunturist when the wind had howled like this and I'd howled like the wind, and the laughter died.

"Seriously, McArthur," said Pussy, "It's murder isn't it? They've murdered the former Lord Mayor."

"You seem very certain of that," I growled, wishing I had enough lungs left to smoke. My voice grated like gravel in a washing machine. "So far I'm seeing a junkie with a bastinado fetish, and that's not a crime. Hell, dying in a one-room shit-hole like this is just a cliche."

"But what about the stiletto?" said Pussy. She frowned at me, and for an instant I felt like was six again, standing in front of my mother who would frown in exactly the same way wondering why I hadn't run away from home yet.

"What stiletto?" I said, and frowned back at her. She recoiled as though I'd shoved a 3-day old fish under her nose.

"The one in his chest," she said, and her voice was now flat and calm. She crossed her arms, threw her head back and shook her hair out like a sudden blaze of sunlight in the depths of the night.

I kicked Dick again, and rolled him over with one aching foot, and there it was, just as she said. A red stiletto-heeled shoe embedded a good three inches deep in his chest.

"So the question is," I mused aloud, "where's the other one?"

"Does it matter?" said Pussy.

"Of course," I said. "When someone is shot you ask where the gun is that goes with the bullet. When someone is knifed, you ask where the hand is that wielded the knife. And when someone stamps on your chest so hard that they leave their shoe behind, you ask where the other shoe is. But tell me, Puss, how did you know where to find Dick?"

"The mayoral elections are in two months time," she said, her eyes going wide. "Dick keeps me up to date with his whereabouts, in case we can find a PR opportunity."

I looked around the room, ill-lit with a 40 watt bare bulb hanging from frayed flex. There was the mattress and the corpse, some floorboards ripped up from the floor and stacked in a corner, and some writing on one of the walls, but otherwise the room was empty of everything but dirt. I checked the writing on the wall; it was a shopping list.

Pussy glared at me, her eyes sparkling defiantly. "Even here," she said. "I can turn this into PR about the poor housing conditions that still plague the city, and make the mayor a martyr for spending time here to get a feel for how the people who slip through the cracks in the system live."

"People like me?"

"There are no people like you McArthur! If you have membership of the human race then it's with a forged birth certificate."

I shrugged, my doctor had been telling me the same thing for years, and my mother had always been elusive when I'd asked her about my father.

"I'll take your case, Puss," I said. "I'll find out who did for Dick."

Tapdancing

The doorbell rang before I'd got even half-way down the bottle of gin. I had been sat on the chaise-longue with the black-and-white version of the Wizard of Oz on the DVD player, reminiscing about the only woman I'd never dared love. The sound on the film was turned down very low -- Judy Garland's voice sets my teeth on edge -- and the gin was very effectively bringing back memories of Miss Sapphire, so I wasn't very pleased to be interrupted.

It had been a bad day right from the start. I'd slipped in the shower first thing in the morning and banged my head on the wall, raising a large bruise on the side of my face. Trying to pull myself back up with my eyes full of water I had twisted the temperature dial and scalded myself. When I was finally out of the deathtrap of a bathroom, I got into the kitchen to find that a mouse had died in the kettle and the cat had died on the radiator. The stench from the cat meant that I didn't notice the mouse until I'd tasted the coffee. I left the house under-caffeinated and in a foul mood.

The day had not gone a lot better, but I knew it wouldn't be great anyway. I'm working undercover at the moment in a sweatshop in Camden so I spend 12 hours a day supervising imported children aged between 5 and 12 who are hand-sewing Bossy wallets, Gucchi handbags and marquee tents for weddings. The job would be easier if the kids weren't so damn servile; I get little chance at all to work my bad mood off by shouting at them or disciplining them. I'll be glad when we've found the little bastard who keeps shopping us to the police.

When the doorbell rang I had just remembered the time Miss Sapphire had whispered "You're my superman," in my ear and pushed me backwards off the platform into the car compacter. My life was flashing before my eyes again (it's happened so many times now that I know exactly where to fast-forward past the boring bits and where to hit the freeze-frame) and then the doorbell disturbed it all.

I answered the door ready to scream at whoever dared to disturb me during Happy Hour, and saw that it was the little girl from three doors over. She smiled at me, batted her eyelashes in a way that's just disturbing for an 8-year-old, and went into her tap-dancing routine.

She's only got one leg.

As she pogo'ed noisily up and down, counting time under her breath, something soft and fragile somewhere inside me gave way. I smiled encouragingly, and groped on the table in the hallway behind me. Most people would put the post on it when it arrived, or their car-keys when they came in. I keep my toolkit there.

I overpowered her easily and took her shoe off and hammered several nails into it, then put it back on her foot. Everytime she hopped, she'd drive the nails a little further into the shoe and thus into her foot. I pushed her back out of the door, bolted it, and went back to the gin.

McArthur's Quantifiers

It was a hot and steamy day in the office and I was sweating like a fat man in a sauna. We all were; the air-con had failed a couple of hours ago, and since there's six of us sharing one chair and one desk in the office (we stack), the woman at the bottom was getting the combined waterfall of our sweat. I was glad to be second from the top, where there was a tiny breeze from the window.

The door to the office creaked open, and a cloud of dust from the dry rot in the floorboards puffed upwards like a penny-theatre's special effect. When the dust subsided, a tall, thin man with more angles than a protractor was revealed. He was gray: his suit was gray and ill-fitting, his shoes were gray, his hair was gray, and his skin was gray. I dismissed him immediately as an accountant, probably here to talk to the ambulance-chaser of a lawyer who was fourth from the top in our little stack, and went back to daydreaming about Miss Sapphire.

The man coughed to attract attention, a hearty, chesty cough, that started and didn't stop, because the dust that had settled on his skin flew off and got sucked into his lungs. Slowly he doubled over and sank to his knees, his face turning purple and the coughing turning steadily into choking. Finally, unable to concentrate on Miss Sapphire for the noise, I pushed the guy on top of me off, and slid off the stack. I walked round the desk to our visitor and kicked him in the kidneys. My shoes have steel-toecaps, and the visitor stopped coughing and sprawled across the floor. I stood over him and asked him what he wanted.

"I'm looking for McArthur," he said wheezily. The coughing had shaken the dust off him, and though his suit and shoes were still gray, his face was now quite pink and his hair was ash-blonde. "I'm told you'll take any case that's offered you."

"No job's ever been too hard for me," I muttered, waiting for him to try getting up so I could kick him again. "And I've tackled some difficult cases in the past."

"I have a case for you then," said the man on the floor, refusing to move. I wondered how much he'd heard about me. "A set of quantifiers were stolen from my office last night, and they're unique. They're my ticket to academic freedom."

"And you want them back?" I snorted, inhaling the dry rot from the floor that was still hanging in the air. "That's a case for the police, Mister." I sneezed, three times in quick succession, and splattered the floor and the back of my visitor with black mucus, reminding me of my days as a snuff-addict.

"No," said the man on the floor in precise, clipped tones. "Just retrieval wouldn't get all the information back. I need to know that the only person who knows about the quantifiers is me. I need the quantifiers back, and the heads of whoever had read those papers."

I sneezed again, and felt the wrenching in my chest that had finally forced me to give up the snuff. "Murder's illegal," I said.

"Is there anything you do that isn't?" replied the prostrate man.

I sighed, he had a point. My doctor was of the firm opinion that breathing was a privilege I'd forgone after the snuff, the police force in this town put me on the list of suspects for anything that came in, and if it weren't for Mad Frankie's protection, I'd probably be my own exhibit in the Chamber of Horrors in the municipal museum.

"Where shall I start?" I asked.