Dead in the Trunk: A Short Story Collection Page 18

  He strained, relaxed and then twisted his frame on the uncomfortably cold seat. Groaning loudly, he clenched and released in a manner long practised.

  Arse-blowing, his own invention, and perhaps paramount among toilet sports, was an art. Once, he had managed a mushroom cloud. His favourite, though, had been a string of sausages. It was no small trick, stopping it from breaking off half way through. Any accidental breakage was an aborted attempt, a technical foul which put him in a bad mood for the day.

  Rewarded with a resounding splash and smaller plop, Spiggot rubbed his knees and pulled a wad of toilet paper (twenty-two sheets precisely) from the dispenser. He wiped carefully, then, holding the used toilet paper in his hand so as not to obstruct his viewing, Spiggot finally rose and gazed at the shape he had blown.

  A kind of elongated turd with a twist.

  A cheese twist, then.

  ‘Fucking rubbish,’ he chided his behind.

  He dropped the soiled paper onto his poor effort, which he awarded a paltry score of five out of ten, flushed, and left the toilet, hitching his trousers and muttering to himself.

  Shutting the door behind him, he closed in the smell for the next competitor and headed for his remaining breakfast dabbing his hands on his trousers.

  He sat down and returned to his last McMuffin.

  ‘Breakfast of champions, eh?’ he said, and took a satisfying chomp of a slightly cold, rather greasy and extremely rubbery muffin.

  *

  The scud hurtled along the northern bypass, zipping into the fast lane to overtake, flashing whoever happened to be in front when they didn’t move fast enough for Trout’s liking, but never undertaking. Trout abided by the law she had sworn to uphold so long as it didn’t involve speeding. She wouldn’t undertake, but hitting 200km per hour on the bypass was somehow acceptable.

  Small puffs of smoke came out the window. Had there been a movie camera inside the vehicle, it might have picked up Spiggot’s satisfied face blowing smoke carefully through the crack in the window, and a mike, or a boom, or whatever the gaffer or silly third leg in movie circles calls those things, would pick up the grumbles and occasional growls from his partner. But the reality is, this is just a drive-by shot. All sound is whisked away in the instant the car slips past as easily as Spiggot’s bodily functions.

  A short shot, then, of a car, speeding, whipping round traffic, rare brake lights twinkling as it recedes into the distance, and then, cut…

  *

  ‘What’s his name again? I can never get it straight.’ Spiggot flicked his fifth butt of the day into a flowerbed.

  ‘Guff.’

  ‘What kind of name is that?’

  ‘It’s short for Gorvalski.’

  ‘What is he? German?’

  Spiggot, the world’s greatest misanthrope, thought racism was acceptable as long as it rhymed. It didn’t, Spiggot reasoned, matter what you called people behind their backs. How could they take offence if they didn’t know? He had more racial classifications in his head than the average biologist, but the list always culminated in Germans.

  Germans were a sub-class, according to Spiggot, who had never known the civilising influence of a Roman hand. It was like he’d studied history at some BNP rally rather than growing up reading the tabloids and whacking off in the toilet over page three while his mother shouted out from downstairs, “Spiggot, where’s the bloody racing form?!” and thought to her dying day that her son was an avid gambler, rather than a complete wanker, as Trout had soon discovered.

  ‘No, he’s Lithuanian,’ said Trout, thinking this but speaking on automatic and thus narrowly averting a crisis.

  ‘What’s one of them, then?’

  ‘Eastern European.’

  Spiggot mulled this over quietly.

  Trout rang the doorbell. The hallway of the high rise smelled of cannabis. Spiggot wasn’t really a connoisseur, but he thought it had the grubby hint of resin about it. It lacked the pungency of grass.

  ‘How is Guff short for Gorvalski?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. I’m not his bloody parole officer.’

  Spiggot shrugged. Now she was back on the job, he felt she’d calmed down a little. She got that way, sometimes. He admired that about her. The way she could be professional even though she was on the rag.

  He was her first partner out of the academy, and he liked to think a little of his wisdom had rubbed off. She insisted on being a bloody liberal but he’d drum that out of her soon enough. No sense in it. Not the way the tide was turning since the BNP and the end of partisan politics, shortly followed by the total devolution of British Counties into semi-autonomous nation states. New Anglia – Cambridge, Suffolk and Norfolk, at least – had accepted unilaterally the principles of the BNP’s New Deal, whereby sole power resided in one head of state. Now the Curfew Bill looked like going through, and Spiggot, who didn’t often watch the news, knew that it was just a short hop to forced repatriation for anyone down to third generation immigrants and asylum seekers. He had nothing against foreigners and their like, himself, but you had to let the wind blow you where it would. No sense in fighting it. He’d seen it as a plod in London, and later in Peterborough and Leeds. Some might stand against it, but not him. Follow the crowd and watch your back. He’d learned that in the riots. Stand against it and you were liable to get crushed, squashed, stamped on, set on fire, and if you were lucky someone would piss on you afterwards, but you’d better not count on it.

  Footsteps approached the door. Spiggot held his badge up next to Francesca’s in front of the fish eye. The door opened a crack and jinked as it reached the end of the chain.

  ‘Wha’ d’you want?’ said a man with bleary eyes and drunken English.

  ‘Guff, it’s Trout.’

  ‘Trout?’

  ‘Open the fucking door, son,’ said Spiggot, not unkindly. No sense in trying to rile a smoker.

  Guff scrunched up his eyes to get a better look at their badges, sighed and shut the door. After some fumbling and rattling, the door was pulled aside and Spiggot got his first look at Gorvalski.

  The Lithuanian’s jeans hung limply against swarthy yet somehow feminine hips, his ribs were pressing against a tight tee-shirt and Spiggot, in a very detective-like manner, deduced that the man had a nipple ring from the odd protuberance where an ordinary nipple should be. Furvermore, yer ‘onour, I deducted from the preceding evidence, that said stoolie was a nine pounder, a horseshoe, or to speak plainly, a bender…yes, yer ‘onour, a poofter…is what he might have said if he had been an east end gangster circa 1965 giving evidence before the court, or even a copper from said era, but he wasn’t, so he didn’t say that. He settled for taking the higher ground and ensured that his hands didn’t touch anything else in case he caught GAY germs, the fear of which kept him away from GAY bars and GAY criminals.

  Despite years of should-have-known bettering, his mum had drummed such fears into him from an early age, along with don’t play with Mr Pee-Pee, always wipe your arse with your right and pick your nose with the left, and the old favourite, broccoli makes your hair grey. Spiggot had never eaten broccoli in his life, and his hair was still turning around the edges, but he’d adopted a slap-dash approach to evidence over the years and Mr Pee-Pee told him to do it, so it wasn’t, strictly speaking, his fault when pages two and three of the Sun had been stuck together that time…times…all the time.

  ‘Who’s ‘a biff?’ Guff mumbled politely.

  ‘My partner,’ said Trout. ‘He’s fine. Go and put the kettle on, would you? I’ve got a few questions and I’d like a cup of coffee with no grease in it.’

  Guff raised an enquiring eyebrow at Spiggot.

  ‘I’ll be fine, nothing for me, no, just had a big breakfast…’ Spiggot told Guff in a slightly higher pitch that usual, then watched Guff’s receding back with his Adam’s apple bobbing crazily in his throat.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ asked Trout, concerned. Spiggot didn’t usually turn this shade of grey until hi
s eighth pint.

  ‘Nothing, nevermind,’ he said, gagging. ‘You could have told me he was a gay.’

  ‘Don’t see how that makes any difference.’

  ‘Well, he’s gay. You’re not really going to drink his coffee, right? You just said that, you know, to put him at his ease. It’s a trick, right?’

  ‘What’s got into you?’

  Spiggot sniffed, then panicked as the smell of the flat hit him, full of ripe man smells, BO, a hint of a morning bowel movement, marijuana, bitter tang of coffee…and germs. He’d read somewhere that when you smelled things it was actually tiny particles hitting your nose…he imagined them. Particles, GERMS, floating, drifting unseen through the air, making him GAY…GAY GAY GAY…

  ‘Arwghleb,’ he said, his throat constricting in panic.

  ‘Jesus, Spiggot, stop being a dick. We’re going to sit down and drink coffee and we’re going to find out about our lady, so act like a god damn adult for once in your life and sit down.’

  ‘Can’t. Air. Outside,’ he told her, clipping off each word briskly so he didn’t have to breath in the GAY GERMS. He slammed the door.

  She listened to the sound of his footsteps slapping along the corridor until they were gone. She hadn’t known he could move so fast.

  ‘Fuck me,’ said Trout to herself, a bewildered look on her face. She rarely swore, but sometimes it seemed appropriate.

  Guff poked his head round the corner. ‘Where’s ‘a biff gone?’

  ‘Beats me,’ she said with a shrug, and headed for the kitchen.

  Week old washing up was pilled in the sink but the counter was scrupulously clean. A small cat sat on a high chair, eyelids drooping like it was just preparing to nod off and couldn’t really be bothered to check out the new arrival. Trout wasn’t surprised. The air was heavy and pungent. The cat was probably off its tits.

  A fat joint sat in an elongated ashtray. Next to the washing up, a set of scales with some residue that looked suspiciously organic in nature. She took a seat at what she charitably called Guff’s breakfast bar, sniffed the joint, and took her coffee.

  ‘Thanks, Guff.’

  ‘He coming back?’ said Guff. He pronounced ‘back’ like the composer. He sounded like an undereducated extra in a period piece about the Russian tsars, a million years before Russia had ceased to exist as it had in the 20th Century and evolved into the Russo-Chinese Confederation.

  ‘Don’t think so. I think he’s got his period.’

  ‘She a tranny?’

  ‘No, just figuratively speaking.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nevermind. Now, tell me about the lady.’

  Guff picked up the joint and raised his eyebrows questioningly at Trout.

  ‘No, don’t mind me. Just talk.’

  He flicked a bic lighter at the tip while he puffed to get the joint going to his satisfaction.

  ‘You know something ‘bout her, or you would not be here.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Well, the lady, I hear she’s from Stoke. And she’s a gyptian.’

  ‘Hn? A gypsy?’

  ‘No, no gypsy. A gyptian. You know. From Egypt.’

  ‘An Egyptian lady from Stoke?’

  ‘Zactly right,’ he beamed at her.

  God save me when my only positive feedback comes from smokers and therapists, Trout thought to herself.

  ‘I knew she was from Eurafrica. Didn’t know she was Egyptian, though.’

  ‘Zat is right.’

  ‘Keep talking,’ she said with a smile, her eyes beginning to water in the thick smoke. ‘Keep talking.’

  ‘Well…’ he said.

  It went something like this…

  *

  ‘…So, all in all, the Egyptian lady from Stoke is bad news? Is that what this is all about? I thought we knew all that already…’

  ‘You’re not listening…’

  ‘I am,’ said Spiggot, squinting against the midday sun brightly burning his eyes. ‘It’s just a waste of time and energy. We spent an hour here, and I could’ve been down the pub.’

  ‘You might as well have been, for all the good you were.’

  Spiggot was still shaking from his near miss with AIDS. He looked like a deep sea fish, caught and dragged up onto a boat made of chalk and rolled in flour…and dead.

  ‘I was watching your back…yeah, that’s it…watching your six, you know, like in the old movies about the war.’

  Francesca let it go. She had let much go over the last eight months, and she still wouldn’t complain about him to the boss or IAD. She was a woman in a man’s world, and if they thought they couldn’t rely on her, she’d never be able to rely on them.

  So, she grinned and bore it, like a porn star addicted to heroin waiting for her next fix. She liked the analogy, or simile, or synonym, or antonym, or whatever some smart wit fuck nuts professor of grammar would call it (a swear, she admitted to herself, but it wasn’t out loud, and fuck nuts had a nice ring to it). She called it as she saw it.

  She got into the scud and waited for Spiggot to settle in beside her.

  Trout put the car into gear and pulled sedately away. She sighed. It wore her down sometimes. Sometimes her feet seemed heavy and her eyelids weary on the job. She drove out of the car park, past a fiesta amputated at the wheels, sat on sad stumps waiting a transplant. Even the bright cold sun couldn’t make the paint shine. It just laid dead and dull waiting for a scrap van or a hobo to make it his home.

  She nursed the car out of the car park and onto the street.

  An old lady wheeled an S & S trolley along the pavement, one hand on its overflowing contents to stop her tin cans and cardboard and worn out old shoes from tumbling out. She couldn’t actually tell what was in the trolley. Everything was wrapped in black bin liners in case of rain. She wondered what she would take with her if she was reduced to living out of a trolley. A clean set of drawers, most likely, but then personal hygiene probably didn’t seem quite so important in crazy old lady world. Maybe she carried the carcass of her first dead cat, or used condoms which she intended to sew into a rain mac, or 90 kilos of first class bubblegum for the local mister big.

  ‘…off’d her own son? Is that gospel?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Guff said she off’d her own son? And her husband? Just because someone found out who they were? Sounds pretty harsh. And a bit made up. Nobody kills their own family just to make a point. Not these days. That’s just movie shit.’

  ‘That’s the word. I didn’t make it up. Just add that to a long list of what we already know about her.’

  Trout ticked each point of on perfect fingers as she spoke. ‘She’s been making waves. She’s suspected of making off with some of the most valuable religious artefacts in the country, as well of numerous thefts of historical curios. The items she steals all have something in common – folk tales and rumours of mystical powers. Maybe she believes the rumours, who knows? All I know is that the prize of her collection is the phylacteries of the Disciples. The other artefacts she’s stolen are priceless, but the phylacteries are rumoured to have the power of Christ held within. Each one is supposed to contain a fragment of the last will and testament of Christ himself.’

  Trout didn’t have any particular religious beliefs, as such, but she recognised the inherent value in the artefacts. In the end, what she believed had nothing to do with it. The phylacteries were expensive, and police work was largely about protecting property, rather than people. Those innocent bystanders that were hurt seemed like an afterthought in the reports. What the police force really wanted was the return of the phylacteries to their rightful owners.

  ‘From what Guff says, word on the street is she could set up her own museum if she wanted to. She’s got the money to travel the world and set up in any country she wants but she lives here now. This is where the last of the Phylacteries came. New Anglia. This is where she does most of her work. Sure, she’s worked abroad before, but she comes back here. If I didn’t know
better I’d think she was some kind of collector. But she’s a psycho, too. Who knows? Whatever the truth of the matter is, whether she killed her family, whether she even had a family, even if she really comes from Egypt, we’ll only know if we catch her. All the rest of it happened in another world. We only need to worry about what happens in ours.’

  Spiggot was looking at her fingers with a confused look on his face. Trout swiftly tucked her fingers back around the steering wheel. She really should have been making coherent points if she was going to count on her fingers. She turned onto the outer ring road into heavy traffic.

  ‘Funny goings-on they have over there on Eurafrica,’ said Spiggot, thinking about how much the Egyptian Lady from Stoke’s haul was worth. It would be a feather in his cap if he and Trout could crack this case.

  ‘No stranger than anywhere else, I guess. Remember our first week together? The man with the shoe?’

  Spiggot laughed. ‘Yeah. When I were a youngster,’ he said, lapsing into a terrible northern brogue, ‘Two pieces of liver and a peanut’d make do, and you’d think yerself lucky.’

  ‘A peanut?’

  Spiggot shook his head with mock severity. ‘You’re not ready for that just yet, lass.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose I am. You really think she’ll be there tonight?’

  ‘I wouldn’t count on it. She’s too smart. Even if the brass only wants a minimal presence so as not to scare her off, she’ll smell us. We’ve got a woman who’s made off with some of the most valuable archaeological what-nots in the world, never been face mapped, and we’ve never even had a sniff at her. She’s wanted for untold thefts and sixteen counts of aggravated assault. There’re a couple of murders we can’t pin on her, though I suspect most of the violence is the work of her better half. She thinks she’s immune, and I doubt we’re the ones to prove her wrong. She’s been getting away with it for so long she just doesn’t know how to get caught. I reckon it’s become like a habit for her, like smoking or whacking off while searching for a fit quiz show host on late night telly. Erm…’ Spiggot coughed. ‘That’s by the by. She’s an old hand at it, is what I’m saying.’