Attack and Decay, page 35
She hurried over to us, smiling, whispered in Tinkler’s ear, and smiled at us again as she led Tinkler away out of earshot, where they stood and began to talk.
Nevada and Agatha and I looked at each other. Nobody thought this looked good. In its own modest way, it was an unbearable moment. So, to distract everyone, including myself, I said, “She didn’t set out to be a plagiarist.”
“Barbro Bok?” said Agatha.
“That’s right,” I said. “She only intended to bump off one poor self-published priest.”
“But as soon as she realised that there was the possibility of expanding the body count, she went for it,” said Nevada. “She liked what she was doing.”
On this uncheerful note, Tinkler came back to us from where he’d been standing with Ida. Ida remained where she was, watching us. Her gaze was unreadable at this distance.
“Tinkler, what’s happening?” said Agatha.
Tinkler looked at us, blinking slowly, then looked down at the floor. “Ida said she can’t come to London with me. She’s been thinking, and she’s decided not to come to London. She said, ‘I’m sorry, but after everything that happened to me, I just think it’s too dangerous to be hanging out with you.’ Except she said it in a cute Swedish accent.”
Tinkler looked up now, and to our amazement, he was smiling. “It’s just too dangerous hanging out with me,” he said, apparently savouring the words. I realised we were witnessing his transformation, in his own mind at least, and to be honest probably at most, into Jordon Tinkler: International Man of Intrigue.
None of us pointed out the obvious…
That the danger to Ida, which had been real and plentiful, had mostly arisen out of her own connection with a certain strip club pizza joint and was little to do with our Tinkler. But perhaps Ida had shrewdly chosen exactly this way of dumping him as the method least likely to break Tinkler’s heart.
As for Tinkler, was he perhaps even a little relieved? After all, this way he wouldn’t have to clean the bathroom. “Why is she still standing there, Tinkler?” said Agatha.
“She sent me over here to see if she could come and say goodbye.”
Nevada said, “She did what?”
“She’s worried you might be angry at her.”
We beckoned to Ida and she hastened over eagerly to join us for a series of florid hugging and kissing farewells. Saying goodbye to me last of all, Ida leaned forward and whispered into my ear, her breath hot and ticklish, “I am going to give you a screw.”
As she said this, she pressed something clandestinely into my hand and at the same time kissed me under my ear. Her lips were soft and warm, and she’d chosen a remarkably sensitive spot.
All of which undermined my attempt to collect my wits. What did any of that mean? How was I supposed to respond?
This problem, at least, was solved because Ida turned and started walking away, turned back and waved and then turned away again, disappearing into the airport crowd.
I didn’t actually see her go. I was looking at what she’d pressed into my hand.
It was a screw.
I started to chuckle.
Then I looked at it a little more closely and saw it was a more profound message than just a reminder of that evening, when the face of a dismayingly oversized hell-beast seemed about to swing its full regard on us in a burning tower in a snow-clad town…
Because it was a special kind of screw.
It combined both what she called the star head and what we call a flat head. It was universal. Any screwdriver would work with it.
I showed it to the others, and they got it right away.
“She’s a bright girl,” said Nevada, handing the screw to Agatha. “Profound message suggesting a subtle and interesting intelligence?” she suggested.
“We certainly can’t discount that possibility,” said Agatha.
“Okay,” said Tinkler. “But what does it mean?”
I said, “I take it to mean she’s wishing us safe. Because we’d have been safe in the fire if we’d had these to deal with. So, she’s wishing us well and wishing us safety in the future.”
Nevada nodded. “That’s what I read into it, too.” She looked at Agatha.
“Sure,” said Agatha. “But what does the Tingler think?”
“I just thought it meant she was bisexual,” said Tinkler. “Like, you know, she works both ways…”
“Don’t you already know whether she is bisexual or not? From your exciting time together?”
“It seemed rude to ask during our first few weeks,” said Tinkler. “It seemed somehow unromantic. So I was waiting…”
“But it turns out your first few weeks were also your last few weeks,” said Nevada.
“Ouch,” said Agatha.
“That’s true,” said Tinkler. “There aren’t going to be any more weeks.” His head had begun drooping. His voice was forlorn. “Dang it.”
“Now, Tinkler,” said Nevada very firmly. “I think we’ve established that your friends expect proper swearing from you.”
Tinkler perked up. “That’s true. Fucking well fuck it.”
“That’s more like it,” said Nevada. “Much more like it.” We began moving towards the departure gates. A woman in an oyster-coloured raincoat stood up from the bench where she was sitting as we approached.
It was Kriminalinspektör Eva Lizell.
“I thought I’d come and see you off.”
“That’s very decent of you,” I said.
“I also felt you might have some questions and I might be in a position to answer some of them.” She looked at us with level brown eyes. Was the worry line across her forehead carved a little less deeply now?
“Actually, as it happens,” I said, “we do have a question.”
“What was Barbro’s beef with the self-published priest?” said Tinkler.
“That’s right,” said Nevada. “This all began with her wanting to blow up Christer Vingqvist in his car. But she never explained why.”
“Although we did get the distinct impression that she was angry with him,” said Agatha.
“Out of patience,” said Eva Lizell. “That is how I would describe it, more than angry. Out of patience after a long, long dispute over some detail of Church policy.”
“You mean,” I said, “someone got killed because of a doctrinal dispute within a Church?”
“Yes,” said Eva Lizell.
I said, “If only there was some kind of historical precedent for such a thing.”
It was the first time I’d ever head the Kriminalinspektör laugh out loud.
“What about Röd and Röd?” said Nevada.
“What about them?” said Eva Lizell, something in her manner shutting down. She was suddenly cagey.
I said, “We think they sold Barbro her gun.”
“For her ‘Active Shooter’ spree,” said Tinkler.
“And the C4 she used to make her bombs,” added Nevada.
“We think you should arrest the two Röds,” concluded Tinkler.
“I cannot comment on an ongoing investigation,” said Eva Lizell. But it sounded a lot like confirmation.
Certainly to Tinkler, who said, “Don’t put them in the same cell. They might start braiding each other’s beards.”
Then we said our goodbyes. She embraced each of us in turn, not lingering notably longer with Nevada.
And then she waved a quick final farewell, and as she did so, perhaps because she was feeling warm or perhaps to make a point, she unbuttoned her raincoat to reveal underneath the sky-blue leather jacket she’d bought from Nevada.
The flight back to London was swift and uneventful, except briefly on our arrival at Heathrow, when we paused in horror to watch a news report unfold on a large screen in Arrivals.
A revered and beloved broadcaster was saying, “You just seem to have the knack of being in the right place at the right time, right before a story breaks.”
The horror began when the camera revealed Stinky Stanmer nodding seriously, and replying modestly, “I suppose one just develops an instinct for this sort of thing.”
Agatha, being Agatha, had arranged a paying gig in the form of collecting a luxury vehicle at the airport’s short-term car park and returning it safely to the home of its owner while they were off on a foreign jaunt. This meant she could drop us at our own home in comfort and style, but couldn’t linger with us because she had to deliver the car.
So it was just me, Nevada and Tinkler walking the familiar path to our front door. On the little row of houses where we lived, there was a vine-shrouded corner we would pass on our way home—an unruly, towering, flowering vine in whose shadowed recesses our cat Fanny would often lurk. She liked to pop out and ambush us as we walked past, getting the drop on us.
It was now fully night, and the only light was some minimal estate lighting, so Fanny found it very easy to appear out of nowhere, a trick she could perform even in broad daylight given some half-decent cover.
She darted out of hiding now, proudly squeaking and full of herself. “You have some explaining to do, young lady,” said Nevada, as Fanny fell into step with us. “I mean, not doing your sink-drinking trick for my mum. She was so looking forward to it…”
“I’ve got a sink-drinking trick I could do,” said Tinkler. “Do you want to hear about it?”
“No thank you, Tinkler.”
Tinkler was tagging along with us on the assumption that he could score a home-cooked meal, which would be of a surprisingly high standard given how quickly it was going to be assembled, and also quite possibly receive some commiseration about the stripper that got away into the bargain.
And he was right on both counts.
We reached our front gate and began to open it. Normally this would have elicited a response from our other cat Turk if she, like her sister, was anywhere in the vicinity.
Usually that response would consist of racing to join us and then charging hell-for-leather through the now-open front gate as if this was the only way she could ever possibly gain access to our lodgings, despite the fact that she could not only easily jump over the aforementioned gate at any time, but she could also easily slip under it, as supple as a mongoose.
On this occasion, though, Turk’s response was very different. Instead of racing to join us, she was evidently staying put wherever she was, and giving voice to the most pissed-off yowl I’d heard from her since—
We looked over to the source of the sound and saw the corpse-faced motherfucker standing beside a large concrete planter full of shrubs in front of one of the buildings opposite. As soon as he saw us looking at him, he fled into the night.
“That was the corpse-faced motherfucker,” said Tinkler.
“Right,” said Nevada.
“What’s his name?”
“Jaunty,” I said, not very happily. Even though he’d been demoted in our minds from fiend of the night to financial comptroller, this was not a welcome visitation.
“What the hell is he doing hanging around here?”
Before anyone could propose an answer to that question, Turk finally emerged from hiding among the shrubs in the planter and raced to join us.
We unlocked the front door while the cats, who could have both gone in through the cat flap several times and been waiting comfortably for us inside, instead waited patiently for us to open the door for them. Nevada finally held it open, and the little geniuses scooted in. We all followed.
There was music coming quietly from the sitting room. Edith Piaf on vinyl, it sounded like. Penny had been briefed on the use of the turntable, so that was fine. I idly wondered where she’d picked up a vintage record, which is what this sounded like. No doubt in one of the charity shops which, like her daughter, she regularly plundered for high-end clothing and masterpieces of world cinema.
Penny herself appeared as we sat down in the sitting room, while Piaf sang about love and loss. Nevada and I and the cats sat on the sofa, Tinkler in an armchair. Penny was wearing a silk dressing gown I recognised as belonging to Nevada. She looked flushed with rude health, as if she’d just emerged from a sauna after a brisk round of tennis.
“Hello everyone,” she said. “So lovely to see you all.”
“So you didn’t manage to kill the cats, then?” said Tinkler. He was making small gestures of enticement to try and lure Fanny from the sofa, where she lay snugly tucked between Nevada and myself, watching him with silent contempt.
“No, they’re fine,” said Penny. “Everything is fine. I was just a bit wrong-footed because I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow…”
“Mum,” said Nevada, “I sent you a message.”
“I know, I just checked and you did and it’s all my fault. Sorry, the place is a bit of a mess, the bed is a bit of a mess.”
“Oh, we’ll sort it out,” said Nevada. She slumped over on the sofa, abandoning all pretence of sitting upright, instead lying down, curled up, her head in my lap. The cats immediately divided the spoils from the opulent new range of places available to snuggle in comfort.
“And I opened one of your good bottles of wine,” said Penny. “The Domaine de Thalabert. But I’ve ordered a replacement from the Wine Society.”
“Same vintage or younger?”
“Younger,” said Penny.
“Good,” said Nevada. “I think it’s better and fruitier when it’s younger.” The discussion of wine had caused her to lift her head from my lap and look at the bottle of wine in question, now empty, standing on the dining room table.
Suddenly Nevada sat bolt upright. The cats launched off the sofa like a pair of affronted, hairy sprites. Nevada was staring at the bottle on the table. “Has someone been here?” She was right. There were two glasses with the empty bottle.
“Well, yes, there was,” said Penny, a mite defensively. “He just left, in fact. He’s very nice. His name is Jaunty.”
A silence ensued that was so total we could hear one of cats exhaling breathily as she yawned. “Jaunty?” said Nevada.
“Yes,” said her mother. “He’s very nice. And he’s been paying visits while I’ve been here… in fact, he’s been staying the night now and then. He stayed last night and in fact he only just left. I’m sorry the place is in a state. But as I say, I wasn’t expecting you back until tomorrow.”
“Staying the night?” said Nevada.
“I’m a grown-up,” said Penny, rather indignantly. “We’re both grown-ups.”
“Jaunty has been staying the night?”
“Yes,” said Penny.
Tinkler chortled. “The corpse-faced motherfucker,” he said. “Quite literally.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to thank the following people.
Anna-Maja Oléhn provided invaluable help with details about life and language in Sweden, as did Jonas Tistelgren (who also provided a surname for Ida!) Joel De’ath (yes, his real name) was a rich source of background information about the Scandinavian extreme metal music scene.
Matt West organised our trip to Sweden and talked me into going in the first place. Heartfelt thanks to Cherry Koivula and Jonas Anderson, Kristina Rudbjer, Johan Ingebäck and Lee W Lundin for making us so welcome. Also Barbro Bornsäter, who provided the first name of another character.
I hope the inhabitants of Lidköping won’t mind me transmuting their lovely town into the purely imaginary Trollesko. I should also hasten to add that there is no pizza strip club there or indeed, to my knowledge, anywhere in the fair nation of Sweden.
Big thanks to Ken Kessler for reading the books and for chatting hi-fi with me. And to Carol and Martin Piper for suggesting a novel murder weapon. Not to mention Gordon Larkin, for suggesting troll malarkey.
Last but not least, many thanks to Jerome Lewis and, most recently, his brother Nico for their continuing support and help with the Vinyl Detective series.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Cartmel is a novelist and playwright. He is the author of the Vinyl Detective series, which was hailed as “marvellously inventive and endlessly fascinating” by Publishers Weekly. His work for television includes commissions for Midsomer Murders and Torchwood, and a legendary stint as script editor on Doctor Who. He has also written plays for the London Fringe, toured as a stand-up comedian, and currently has a play entitled Glacier Lake scheduled to open this spring. He lives in London with too much vinyl and just enough cats. You can find Andrew on Twitter at @andrewcartmel.
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Andrew Cartmel, Attack and Decay
