Kill Job: 1960s London Noir by Huw Collingbourne

Author:Huw Collingbourne [Collingbourne, Huw]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dark Neon
Published: 2021-05-27T22:00:00+00:00

…The Whispering Land

I bought a pork pie at the corner shop and came back to eat it in the office. The cat, ‘Straker’ (I’d decided to keep the name that Meek had given him), mewed piteously so I threw him a crumb. He ignored the crumb and carried on mewing so I retrieved a half-empty tin of cat food from a drawer in my desk and was just about to scoop its contents into a saucer when the phone rang. I put the cat-food tin on my desktop and picked up the phone: “Kennick Investigations. Good morning. How may I help you?”

“You can start by feeding the cat.”

“What?”

“Feed the damn’ cat.” It was the Amazing Alfini.

“Alf, how did you know that I was going to feed the cat.”

“Professional secret. Feed it. Then we can talk.”

I lay the phone receiver next to the cat-food tin, picked up the tin, fed the cat, then picked up the receiver again. “Did you work it out?”

“The message in the book? Of course I worked it out. Simplest thing in the world. I don’t know why you didn’t figure it out yourself. You want to know what it is?”

“Of course I want to know what it is.”

“Get a pen and paper then.”

I rummaged about in a drawer and found a leaky biro and a sheet of foolscap. He read out four names and I jotted them down: Derek Smith, Ainsley Carter, John Harding, Gina Baron.

“Who are they?” I said.

“How should I know?”

“You are a mind-reader, aren’t you?”

“Ha-bloody-ha. Look, I found the names. Now it’s up to you to find the people. If you happened to want to make a small contribution for my efforts, however, I would not want to discourage you.”

If the names were real, I knew they were probably worth more to the Old Man than a small contribution. But for all I knew they were just the first four names that had popped into Alf’s head. I didn’t think the Old Man (or his sidekick McJay for that matter) would be too thrilled if I told them I’d got the names from a mind-reader.

“Where did you get these names?” I said.

“Professional secret.”

“Come on, Alf, I have to have some proof that this is genuine.”

“All right, all right. It’s the curse of my profession. People think I do miracles when they don’t know my methods. As soon as I tell them, they say ‘Oh, is that all it is?’ The names, my boy, were in the book. The one you gave me about animals in Patagonia. Good book, by the way.”

“I’m glad you enjoyed it. But what do you mean, the names were in the book?”

“Look, son, there are all kinds of methods you can use to get information out of a book. Like I did the other night. You thought of a word in the book and I told you what you were thinking of. As far as you could tell, there was no way I could know what word you’d picked from the book.

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