The Day of the Jack Russell (Mystery Man) by Bateman Colin

Author:Bateman, Colin [Bateman, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FICTION / General
ISBN: 1447223276
Publisher: CB Creative Books
Published: 2012-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

Normally I favour plans of inaction. I am not pro-active, I am inactive. I prefer sloth. I like books. My detections are about observation and deduction. It’s all I have.

I opened up as normal at nine. I worked the computer with one hand and rested the other on the meat cleaver beneath the counter.

It was my father’s.

He had an interest in cleaving meat.

Which was unusual, for a vegetarian.

Alison arrived. I did not like to put her in the way of danger, but I didn’t see what difference it made; they already knew all about her. Alison, bless, came up with useless suggestions for what we might do. Our situation was not helped any by what I found out on-line about the registrations of the two BMWs I had observed outside the shop. They read as if they were normal, but in fact they were impossible; they were a series of numbers and letters that would not come into use for another three years.

Alison said, ‘Perhaps they are from the future.’

She wondered sometimes why I did not think of her as an equal partner in the detection business when really it was plain for all to see.

‘We can’t just sit here and do nothing.’

‘I’m not,’ I said, the number plate breakthrough being clear, if unsettling, evidence of such.

‘I mean, they have him, dead or alive; we have to tell someone. Won’t his mother be looking for him?’

Ah, the concept of a mother who would look for one.

I wasn’t aware that Jeff had any kind of a family. He was just someone who stacked books. God knows I was burdened with enough of my customers’ troubles, but at least there was a remote prospect of squeezing some money out of them. I was paying Jeff, I didn’t need to know anything at all about him. In fact I realised that I only knew one absolutely concrete fact about him, but it was the only one I needed.

‘I know exactly who to call.’

‘Uhuh?’ She was rearranging books in the window in a frankly unconvincing attempt to persuade passing customers that the sale had been expanded.

‘Amnesty International. He’s wasted the best part of his adult life working for them; now it’s payback time. If they can get excited over some blabbermouth in Africa whining about freedom of speech, just think what they can achieve here with one of their own! There’ll be protest marches and hunger strikes and sit-ins; they’ll cause so much trouble, they’ll have to let him go.’ I was quite excited by my plan. I even had the phone in my hand. I was just waiting for praise from Alison before I set the campaign in motion. But she was distracted. ‘Alison, are you even . . .?’

Then I saw what she saw, the BMW parked across the road, and the doors opening, and the suit coming towards us.

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