Dead in the Water - Tickler Peter - Страница 2

“I just need some contact information then you can get home.” He ran his eyes up and down Mullen’s drenched profile. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any ID on you?”

“It’s at home.”

“And home is where?”

Mullen gave him his address in Iffley Road. It was only temporary, but he decided not to mention that. It would only complicate matters.

“Your mobile number?”

Mullen told him.

The sergeant wrote it down. Then he punched it into his own mobile. He waited for the one in Mullen’s hand to ring. He smiled. “It’s so easy to write numbers down wrong.”

Mullen smiled back, unconvinced. The guy wanted to check he hadn’t given him a dud number. Not that he blamed him. He would have done the same in the circumstances.

“Do you have a work number?”

“I’m self-employed.”

Again the sergeant smiled. “And what does ‘self-employed’ mean in your case?”

“I’m a private investigator.”

The smile disappeared. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Mullen replied. He felt a jolt of irritation. He thought he preferred the blunt Dorkin after all. “Really.”

The sergeant scowled.

“There’s no ID on him at all.” It was Dorkin, snarling the information out to no-one in particular. He was standing over the body, a black wallet in his hands. “It’s been cleaned out. Not a dicky bird.”

“Off you go, then,” the sergeant said to Mullen. He thrust a card into his hand. “If you think of anything else, give me a bell.”

Mullen nodded and turned away. For the briefest of moments, he had been tempted to say something more, but neither policeman had earned his co-operation. Why should he make their life easier?

* * *

Mullen had been calling himself a private detective for less than a month. It wasn’t something he felt called to. It wasn’t even something he had particularly wanted to do. It was essentially the result of desperation and chance. The desperation had grown like a cancer for several weeks, at precisely the same rate as the money in his bank account had shrunk. As for chance, that had been a conversation overheard in a coffee shop on the Cowley Road. It had been pouring down outside and Mullen had been seeing how long he could eke out a single Americano while he read the free newspaper which he had commandeered from the rack. The conversation had been taking place between two women at the table next to him and the topic had been their husbands. One husband, it appeared, was the model of conjugal loyalty and reliability, his only drawback apparently being a liking for Arnold Schwarzenegger films. His wife was trim and blonde and rather pleased with herself. It was the other woman that Mullen felt rather sorry for. She was the plain Jane of the pair, with a pinched face, large eyes and misery writ large across her features. Her husband, she was telling her friend, was cheating on her. At least, she thought he was. All she needed was proof. And she was pretty darned sure that it wasn’t the first time.

“Why don’t you hire someone?” the smug friend had suggested. “Catch him in flagrante delicto!” The idea seemed to excite her.

“But suppose he is cheating on me,” came the reply. “What do I do then?”

At that intriguing point the fire alarm sounded. Mullen had dutifully exited the cafe, making sure he took his coffee cup with him. Everyone, it seemed, had assumed it was a false alarm because there was no sign of panic, just as there was no sign of smoke or flames. Out on the pavement he had looked around for the women, eager to continue his eavesdropping, but they had disappeared from view.

Though they were gone, the thought patterns which their conversation had sparked remained behind, like wisps of smoke. So much so that after four cans of cheap lager that evening and a third-rate Bruce Willis film, Mullen had conceded defeat and set about reinventing himself on the internet. This had consisted of setting up a one-page website on which he described himself as ‘Doug Mullen, Private Investigator. Discretion assured.’ He had ruminated over this for some time, before eventually adding a hostage to fortune: ‘Fee payable only if job completed successfully.’ It was, he knew instinctively, a daft thing to promise. But anything that gave him an edge seemed worth a try. Besides, he could always turn down anything that wasn’t straightforward.

But putting yourself out there on the internet doesn’t mean thousands of suspicious spouses are suddenly scanning your website. For a week Mullen waited for something to happen. Nothing did. So he went on-line and ordered himself some business cards. Matt finish one side, blank on the reverse, again offering a ‘no win, no fee’ service. It was amazing how cheap a thousand cards could be if you ignored all the tempting extras the website tried to entice you into. When they arrived two days later neatly packaged in a box, Mullen felt a brief surge of excitement followed by a lurch of desperation as reality hit home; how on earth, he asked himself, was he going to get rid of them? Pubs, cafes, takeaways, community noticeboards, libraries — there were plenty of places to leave your business cards lying about or pinned up, but it would take a heck of a lot of pavement pounding to distribute them effectively. And how long would they survive before being cleared away by officious proprietors, zealous waiting staff or overworked cleaners? A thousand cards was, frankly, a lot. Nevertheless, Mullen was not a man to throw in the towel, at least not this early in an enterprise. So on the Tuesday he covered East Oxford, on the Wednesday Jericho and North Oxford and on the Thursday Headington. On the Friday morning, with over 500 cards still left and not a single in-coming phone call received, he decided to head to Abingdon. He took the bus, dropping a card on the seat at the front of the bus as he pretended to wrestle with his bus ticket. He took up position half-way back, curious to see the reaction of whoever it was who picked the card up. Almost immediately an overweight man with a red sweating face eased his body onto the seat, oblivious of the invitation beneath his buttocks. Mullen shut his eyes. It was going to be a long day.

* * *

Life, Janice Atkinson had come to realise, was a series of ifs. Not as in Kipling’s imperialist poem: ‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs.’ That was the level of advice her father had handed out to her on the rare occasions when he had been (a) present and (b) sober, ignoring — or possibly ignorant of — the last line of the poem, which was ‘you’ll be a man, my son.’ Or maybe that was his way of dealing with the disappointment of her being female — pretending that she wasn’t.

If!

If she hadn’t happened to be in the loo when her mother-in-law rang and therefore had to leave a voice message announcing she would be ‘passing by’ later that morning and would call in for a coffee.

If she hadn’t reacted by catching the first bus out of town, to Abingdon, and deliberately leaving her mobile at home so she couldn’t be contacted by her mother-in-law — or indeed anyone else.

If the heavens had not happened to open as she was heading along Ock Street, causing her to duck into the coffee shop she was just passing.

If. If. If.

The man who sat down in the corner was wearing a brown leather jacket. She liked a man in a good leather jacket; and it was a good leather jacket. She could tell that even though he was two tables away and she could see only his back. It was, admittedly, rather worn, but if anything that made him of greater interest to her. She felt a wild urge to walk over and run her hands down his spine, to feel the softness of the leather with her finger tips, not to mention the hardness of the body underneath. But Janice Atkinson wasn’t that sort of person, so she remained exactly where she was. His hair was short — a number one cut, unless it was perhaps a shaven head that had, like her own lawn, been allowed to grow untended for too long. His ears protruded somewhat and there was a visible scar across the back of his neck, which made him all the more intriguing. She took all this in via occasional glances over the top of her Daily Telegraph. Eventually the man got up and stretched. He walked over to the notice board near the front door. Janice had herself glanced at it as she stripped off her dripping mackintosh in the doorway. It had contained an eclectic mix of stuff: from plumbers to party planners, an autism support group, two amateur dramatics groups and an invitation to come tea dancing. She lifted the Daily Telegraph higher and turned a page, but her eyes remained on the man in the brown jacket. He pulled a drawing pin out of the board, ferreted in an inside pocket and then stuck a small card up on the board. After that, he zipped up his jacket and walked out.