Nice Weather For A Killing: A Darkly Humorous Murder Mystery by Cresswell Seymour

Author:Cresswell, Seymour
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Poolbeg Press
Published: 2024-07-17T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

In the midst of all this tragedy and chaos, life went on as normal. For example, my car failed its NCT. The report said that the brake-linings were burnt out. In fact, they said that it wasn’t safe to drive and refused to give me back the keys. ‘That thing’s a death trap,’ was the verdict from the cocky man in dirty overalls whose manner was brusque to the point of aggression. He told me to make arrangements to have it taken safely to a garage to have it fixed, explaining that if I left it at the test centre for more than a heartbeat I’d be fined heavily. My insurance covered the tow truck, but I was kept on hold for most of the morning while I waited to speak to a human in the roadside assistance department of my insurer, and then had to wait for most of the afternoon for the tow truck. I imagined that it would have been easier to repatriate a dead body from Yemen. Or perhaps that was just my funereal frame of mind.

I had stashed the money that I’d found on Alan Fenton in a plastic bag underneath the spare wheel in the boot of my car on the night of his death. There was forty-thousand euro there, mainly in five hundreds. I remember reading somewhere that the EU had ceased printing these high-value notes, because they were only ever used by the criminal fraternity. God alone knows where Fenton had robbed this money, but I reasoned that nobody knew he’d had it on him, therefore nobody was likely to question what had happened to it or to notice that it was missing.

I phoned for a taxi from the NCT test centre and took myself and the plastic bag to the pub where I had met with the Gizzard Man. While in the back of the cab, I counted out twenty-thousand euro. I reckoned that the over-payment would silence all the usurious claims by my lender. I also thought that it was rather apt that I might have been completing a circle: repaying the Quinlans with their own dirty money. It had an appealing sort of symmetry. I asked the taxi to wait for me.

The dimly lit pub and its long-haul drinkers looked as if it and they had been preserved in a time-warp since my first visit, including the smell of stale beer, ghostly cigarette smoke, and the grey-muzzled dog under the same side table, which growled at me again as I passed. I already knew my way to where the pale-eyed man held court.

‘Hi, there,’ I said to him, ‘I’m Arthur Cummins. I’ve come to pay what I owe you. How much is it?’

‘Ah, yes, Mr. Cummins!’ he pronounced the name as if he were expecting a laugh from an invisible audience. ‘I see you have met with a bit of an accident. Did you walk into a door, was it?’

‘Something like that, yes. How much do I owe you, please?’

‘That will be fifteen-thousand euros, to you, my friend.

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