The Bookshop Detectives: Dead Girl Gone, page 17
‘I’ve thought about this a great deal. I like to imagine she ran away with the circus, left her pig of a father behind and started afresh. But I don’t think she’d just abandon her mother. She spoke of her with a great deal of affection. I can only draw the conclusion that something awful befell her. Something there was no coming back from.’
A tūī swoops through the garden, landing on a nearby harakeke bush. The black-sheened rascal tips back his head, stretches his pretty throat and announces his chiming news to the world. Stevie looks up, momentarily alarmed, then bends his head to continue his retrieval of abandoned biscuit crumbs. It’s so peaceful I’m loath to leave, and I can see Garth is too.
‘Come on, old fella,’ I say to Garth, rousing myself from my chair and patting his leg. ‘We’d better get back on the road and leave Mr Meek here in peace.’
‘You will let me know what you find out, won’t you?’ Trent says. ‘I still think of her every day. I’m scared to know what happened, but I think I need to for some kind of closure.’
‘I don’t know how far we’ll get, Trent, but yes, we’ll stay in touch.’
Stevie, keeping a keen eye on our movements, senses an imminent trip in the car and pulls hard towards the gate, curtailing any protracted goodbye. That suits Garth right down to the ground.
Garth: 13 days until Isabella Garrante book launch
I’ve been asleep for most of the drive back, partly because being unconscious is the best way to experience Eloise’s driving and partly because when I die I want to die in my sleep. I am, however, rudely awakened as Eloise negotiates the roundabout at the Napier Road and Romanes Drive intersection in some sort of sling-shot manoeuvre. I sit straighter, adjust my seatbelt and grip the edge of the seat.
‘Nearly home,’ says Eloise cheerily.
‘Statistically speaking, seventy-five percent of car accidents happen within three kilometres of home,’ I reply.
‘Someone’s woken up in a grump.’
I don’t think I’m being grumpy, not that I can always tell, and am about to point out the unfairness of this accusation when I’m caught by a flash of red and yellow beyond the trees on the Village Green. A hot-air balloon? In Northampton we had a yearly festival when forty-plus balloons would launch in quick succession. It was a spectacular sight and an event I enjoyed policing until the year a propane canister exploded and I was first on the scene of carnage.
The Tomato speeds closer. It’s not a balloon, it’s something even better: the canvas of a big top being winched up two king poles. The circus is in town.
I’m transported back twenty-plus years to when the circus was here in Tracey’s day, tiers of seats thronged with people laughing at the clowns, oblivious to the trauma about to haunt the Village. Before I can fully commit to this image, another thought intrudes. How many people can a big top hold — hundreds? Thousands? However many, it would make a fabulous venue for Isabella Garrante’s book launch.
As we pass, I peer back over my shoulder at the caravans, lorries and tents to see if I can spot the name of the circus.
‘What is it?’ asks Eloise. ‘Have you seen those Black Dogs again?’
‘Black Dogs?’ My train of thought has not just been derailed but is crashing down the embankment and freefalling into a crevasse as I clock the name: Maloney’s.
‘I thought I saw those bikers again on the Napier–Taupō Road. But I couldn’t be sure.’
‘The same ones?’ I grasp my head in a moment of sensory overload.
‘They were too far back to tell, but there were three of them and one was a chopper with ape-hangers like before.’
‘Ape-hangers?’
‘That’s what they call those really high curved handlebars.’
Realising that we are too far along this conversational path to backtrack I park the issue of the circus name for now. ‘And you know this how?’ Even after all these years together, Eloise can still surprise me with the things she knows and the things she doesn’t know.
‘I used to date a guy who had a chopper.’
The last thing I need now is a stab of unreasonable jealousy. I push it down. We both had lives before we met at Police College and, to be fair, I was no angel either.
‘Did you now? Nice. But no, I didn’t spot any motorbikes. And this circus here looks like it’s the same one in town as when Tracey disappeared.’
‘It’ll only be the same circus in name. It’s not going to have the same people as when Tracey disappeared.’
‘Why not? Family tradition and all that.’
‘I don’t think it works that way anymore. They mostly hire acts in for the season.’
‘And how do you know? Were you going to be the amazing tattooed lady or something?’
‘How very dare you? No one’s ever accused me of being a lady.’
The Tomato judders up the kerb and onto our drive. Eloise jabs at the button for the garage door opener. ‘Here we go again,’ she says with a degree of resignation as the door steadfastly refuses to open.
‘You just have to believe. It can sense your fear.’ I take the opener and press the button, holding it down. With a shudder the door begins to lift upwards. ‘See?’
My self-satisfaction is premature. I have committed the other cardinal sin of the garage door, which is being too optimistic. It grinds to a halt halfway up. Stevie, who has pushed into the front and is virtually sitting on Eloise’s lap, lets out a whine which pretty much matches my own. I get out, re-click the opener and manually assist the door upwards, somewhat negating the whole point of the automatic device.
As soon as I’m back in the house, I charge up the stairs to our impromptu incident room to check the name of the circus associated with Tracey’s case. Tama has organised the evidence into sections pertaining to particular lines of enquiry, and I hurriedly sift through the folders: Trent Meek, School, Franklin White, Redwoods, Maloney’s Circus.
‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ Eloise pokes her head through the door.
‘It’s the same circus.’ I wave the folder back at her.
‘A curious coincidence?’ She comes in, grabs a marker and writes ‘Maloney’s’ on the board.
When we were policing, coincidences were always a paradox. On one hand, if you had two pieces of evidence that seemed to support each other, it would bolster your case. On the other hand, coincidences happen more often than you like to think. I was once surprised in the bookshop when a copper I had known twenty-odd years ago on the other side of the world wandered up to the counter to buy the latest Jack Reacher. It turned out his brother lived just down the road and he was visiting him.
‘And what would Gibbs say?’ asks Eloise. We were obsessed with NCIS for some time until it jumped the shark.
‘Rule thirty-nine: There is no such thing as a coincidence.’
Eloise: 12 days until Isabella Garrante book launch
I really need a day off from Tracey; she’s doing my head in. As soon as I articulate this thought, I feel guilty — she’s vanished without trace and I’m begrudging her a bit of brain space. I should also be grateful that she’s taken my mind off Pinter, though less grateful the IFG launch has gone on the back burner again. We really need to get that sorted.
Amelia’s chatting with someone in the Young Adult section holding a copy of Heartstopper to her chest as if it might actually stop her heart. The words ‘delightful’ and ‘wholesome’ hang on the air, and the customer is intrigued.
A gentleman in some kind of uniform of black trousers, black ribbed pullover and work boots arouses suspicion. He’s staring at a wall. It takes me a moment to realise he’s holding one of those beepy things with a laser that estate agents use to measure rooms, and a clipboard with a pen on a string.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask.
‘Measuring,’ he replies, just as bluntly.
‘Let’s start again. Hello. I’m Eloise and this is my bookshop. Who are you and why are you measuring it?’
He sighs. ‘Hello Eloise. I’m Barry from Jones and Brown Hawke’s Bay. I’m doing a rent assessment.’ He continues past the cookbooks and aims his gadget at the wall behind the counter.
‘Watch where you’re pointing that thing,’ says Amelia, who has just been beeped at.
‘What’s through here?’ he asks, reaching for a door handle.
I hold a hand up. ‘Hang on a minute, Barry. We’re not due a rent review for at least another year, so I very much doubt that our landlord has sent you.’
‘I’m just doing my job,’ says Barry, looking at about a 2 out of 10 on the job-satisfaction scale.
‘I’m not comfortable with this . . . unannounced inspection or whatever is going on. I’ll ring the landlord, and you can come back when it’s been sorted out. And after an appointment has been made.’ I feel a bit sorry for Barry, but who just wanders into someone’s space and starts measuring up?
‘Fine,’ says Barry, and with a thump of beepy thing onto clipboard, off he stomps down the steps and out of the shop.
I turn to Amelia.
‘The cheek!’ she says.
‘I’ll say,’ I reply.
‘Do you think that’s got something to do with Franklin White trying to freak us out?’
Bugger. I’d thought it was just me being paranoid.
‘No. Someone will have mixed up the dates of the review, that’s all.’
‘Okay.’ She pats me on the shoulder as she squeezes past to help out a lost soul in the Cookbook section. My attempt at denial and deflection has not fooled her for a second.
Invoices, bills, information sheets for new books, a self-published picture book for my perusal. I flick through the book, and I’m reminded of the late Belinda of Waipukurau and the boxes in her garage — and immediately wish I hadn’t been.
‘You got the new C.J. Tudor in?’ a sombre voice intones behind me.
I spin around to see Dead Girl Deirdre.
‘Jesus, Deirdre, you frightened me to death.’
‘And yet, there you stand, as alive as ever, unless there’s something you’re not telling me.’
I don’t know how to respond. It’s funny, but also not funny.
‘C.J. Tudor,’ I mutter. ‘Yes! Just in and utterly fabulous. I read it overnight.’
‘Probably why you’re such a zombie today,’ comes the dour reply.
‘No change there love, eh,’ I say, smiling.
I really like Deirdre. She’s strange as all hell but drops some interesting comments into the conversation sometimes. Nothing about herself — she keeps the enigma intact — just fun facts about the many types of maggot that can infest dead bodies, and that people smoke embalming fluid to produce a hallucinogenic effect. See, fascinating woman.
‘I’ll take it. Anything else I should know?’
We wander the shelves together, talking through the books she’s recently read and loved, checking out the latest in mortuary non-fiction and medical memoirs: I. See. You. gets a yes, Take a Chill Pill gets a no. I share her interest in death, which I don’t think is as morbid as it sounds. Most people who are drawn to the end of life are really interested in living it to its very fullest and intend to have a wonderful life and an equally wonderful death. Knowledge is power.
Deirdre is looking rather marvellous today. Spiky, aggressively straightened black hair, painted-on eyebrows and eyelashes, a black-and-white stripey tee-shirt tucked into her black jeans. A studded collar graces her pale throat. It’s quite a look. I notice a piece of Glad Wrap poking out from her sleeve, a tell-tale sign.
‘You’ve got a new tattoo.’
Deirdre inches her sleeve up and peels the wrap away. It’s a small circus tent, red-and-yellow striped, fluttering bunting and all, with the words the circus never leaves town dancing beneath in a fine cursive script. It’s lovely work, but it gives me an uneasy feeling. Deirdre stares, gauging my reaction.
‘Did you get it at Maloney’s Circus?’
‘Yes. They’ve had the same tattooist for years. I always get something from her when they come to the Village. She’s very good.’
‘What’s with the text?’ I ask.
‘You’re a clever girl. You can work it out.’
I think about it, but all I can really think about is Tracey and whether she did run away with the circus or if she never left town. It’s a circus in my bloody head at the moment, so maybe that’s what it means.
We talk tattoos for a bit, what healing cream is best, the pros and cons of colour versus black and white, and head around to the fiction.
‘Have you ever read Isabella Garrante?’ I ask, wondering how far the elusive novelist’s reach goes.
Deirdre stares at me, silent. I stare back for a moment then, taking her silence as a ‘No’, we move on and she picks out a handful of Deirdre-looking books: Daisy Darker, Women Talking, Livid, and, surprisingly, the first in the Thursday Murder Club series.
‘I like something cosy sometimes. Thought I’d give it a go,’ she says.
We share something akin to a smile.
Deirdre pays up, proffering hundred-dollar bills as is her wont, bags up her books and glides off out into the rain. As I’m turning back to the emails, Amelia pops her head out from the stock room.
‘Is she gone?’ she whispers, gesticulating with a faux-skeletal arm covered in rotting flesh. She’s preparing the window display for Halloween, ahead of the game as ever, and in true Amelia style it will be no-holds-barred spectacular. Oh god, that’s another thing I have to do. I’ve been tasked with finding books with mostly orange and/or black covers: we’re going full pumpkin, spiders, skeletons, witches and zombies this year. I don’t know if Deirdre will love it with all her heart or think it impossibly twee — I’ve never been able to work her out, which is one of the reasons I like her so much.
‘Yes, Amelia. It’s safe. I don’t know why she gives you the willies so much. One of your favourite books is A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. You should be best buds.’
‘I know. I find her intriguing but it’s the way she just looks at you and doesn’t talk. What’s she hiding?’
‘A rich inner life.’
‘Or a regularly re-landscaped back garden,’ counters Amelia, eyes narrowing.
‘I never thought I’d say this, but you might be reading too many murder books, our Amelia.’
‘Never!’ Amelia brandishes the arm. ‘But it wouldn’t surprise me to read in the papers one day that the police have discovered a body farm in her back garden.’
‘A body farm?’
‘Yes, you know, like they have in the States. The FBI started them. They put a load of bodies in a wood to see how they’d decompose. I mean it’s kind of cool, but surely it’s got to be high on the list for ground zero of the zombie apocalypse.’ Amelia waves the zombie arm again and retreats back into the stock room.
That was a cool tattoo of Deirdre’s; fine, delicate line work and vibrant colour. Lovely, and a bit disturbing, quite like Deirdre. Maybe I could get something done while the circus is still in town? Matching detective tattoos with my clever husband, perhaps? Never. Garth’s terrified of needles and is not convinced when I tell him it’s not a needle as such. Next best thing might be to get to a circus show together. I get my phone out.
Me: Ayup. Want to go on a date to the circus?
Garth: To investigate Tracey? Garth.
Me: Just to have a fun night out really. There’s popcorn. You love popcorn.
Garth: K. Garth.
Romance isn’t dead then.
It is, of course, another distraction from panicking about the book launch. We’ve both been waking in the night, worrying. We still don’t even have the venue sorted, though Garth reckons it’s in hand. And what if we don’t have enough stock? What if she cancels and we have way too much stock? What if the mobile Eftpos machine craps out with a ‘critical error’ like it did at Cristina Sanders’ book launch and we had to get everyone’s email addresses and invoice them? I should be looking forward to such a dramatic event — embargoes and lawyers and such — but I’ll just be glad when it’s all over. I try to employ a trick I’ve used before with a degree of success: borrowing from my future self. Future Eloise and Garth will have had excellent book sales and the kudos of hosting one of the world’s most famous authors. It’ll be incredible. I hold this thought deep in my heart for a while, and my breathing calms.
Then I start thinking about Tracey, then, worse, Pinter.
Garth: 12 days until Isabella Garrante book launch
Maloney’s Circus is as much a travelling fair as a circus. The big top is surrounded by children’s carnival rides, food trucks and sideshow games of skill and chance, albeit that chance is greatly stacked against the punters thanks to a surprising insight into the laws of physics and downright trickery.
Eloise is getting some piece of tattoo flash added to the sleeves that are creeping down her arms, so I take in the sights and ponder the logistics of the IFG launch. I have emailed the publisher suggesting the big top for the venue but have yet to hear back and probably won’t do until Monday, which will leave us just over a week. In other circumstances this wouldn’t be anywhere near long enough, but we are embargoed from promoting the launch until next weekend so maybe still have a bit of wiggle room. To be honest, IFG is such a big name and the mystery around her so intense that we could advertise the event the day before the launch and still expect to sell out. Even so, it would be a massive relief to have the venue confirmed so that we can finalise the other arrangements and put a stop to the incessant angst.
I meander among the stalls, letting the sounds of revelry and the shouts of the hawkers calm my nerves. The flashing lights, the smell of candy floss and diesel-generator fumes send me back nearly a half century to when my Grandad would take my sister and me to Banbury Fair. Dodgems, waltzers and a toffee apple on the way home: it really was the highlight of my year.
The dulled crack of air-rifles firing draws my attention, and despite my better judgement I part with five dollars for ten pellets. It’s many years since I’ve held a firearm of any description, but I ease the stock into my shoulder and adjust my foregrip and sight picture like a pro. Exhaling, I increase the tension on the trigger, releasing the shot as my lungs empty and the foresight and hindsight align. With a satisfying clack, one of the white metal targets on my lane falls. I allow myself a smile.
