Read Online The Day of the Jack Russell (Mystery Man) by Colin Bateman - Free Book Online Page B

for me.’
    He laughed suddenly, then abruptly hung up.
    I stood with the receiver in my hand, and my shirt stuck to my back.
    I stared at the phone.
    Billy Randall, having not yet settled his bill, was still theoretically my client. He and I were implicated in a double murder. He wanted to meet in my favourite coffee house. I didn’t like it, I didn’t like it one bit. I didn’t know what to do. I needed help. Advice. Another settler. I drained the Vitolink. There was nobody I could phone. Not DI Robinson, not Alison; the way my luck was running, even the Samaritans would rat me out. Nobody I could trust. Nobody I could lean on. Not one human being in the entire civilised world I could reach out to.
    Then Jeff arrived.

12
    ‘Fucking hell,’ said Jeff, ‘fucking hell.’
    ‘Helpful,’ I said.
    ‘And did you , like, blank out and beat them to death with your mallet?’
    ‘No!’
    ‘Because the odd time you have blanked out in here you haven’t remembered what you’ve done.’
    ‘And did I kill anyone? You, for instance?’
    ‘Not exactly, no.’
    ‘Not exactly? What did I do?’
    ‘You rearranged the bookshelves.’
    ‘I rearranged the bookshelves.’
    ‘Yes. But the point is, you didn’t remember, then flew into a temper and accused me of doing it.’
    As I recalled, they were rearranged out of sequence, i.e. they were normally alphabetical but someone had rearranged them into different categories of crime fiction – serial killers, cosies, pulp, golden age, etc. It’s an impractical way of displaying books; there are too many that belong in several categories. Yet Jeff was convinced I had done it.
    Which was worrying.
    The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde would have been infinitely less interesting if Dr Jekyll had merely reclassified his medical texts rather than hacked people to death, but I would have settled for that. The import ant thing, I suppose, was that while there might be evidence that I blanked out from time to time, there was absolutely none that it ever led to violence.
    Jeff reached under the counter and took out my mallet and meat cleaver and jackknife and claw hammer. I asked him what he was doing. He said he was checking for bloodstains and brain matter. I took them off him and replaced them, although checked myself as I did so.
    ‘What,’ I asked, ‘am I going to do about Billy Randall?’
    ‘Wear a wire.’
    ‘Wear a wire.’
    ‘In case he says something, not so much to incriminate himself, but something that might get you off the hook.’
    ‘But what if I say something that incriminates me ?’
    ‘But you say you haven’t done anything.’
    ‘But I could say something that might be read in a different way to what I mean. Sometimes I—’
    ‘Slabber. Okay. But we’ll have the tape. We can just edit it out or lose it.’
    ‘Not if he’s wearing the wire.’
    ‘Aha.’
    ‘If they think he’s involved in these murders, then they’ve released him pretty damn quick. Maybe they’ve done a plea bargain with him, if he can get me to admit the murders on tape.’
    ‘That makes sense. God, you’ll be trying to get him to admit something and he’ll be trying to get you. It’ll be like a game of chess. Two criminal masterminds trying to outwit each other.’ He blinked at me. ‘Not that you’re a criminal mastermind.’
    ‘Okay. But where on earth would I get a wire? I need a tape recorder or a dictaphone.’
    ‘Use your mobile, there’s bound to be a recorder on it.’
    I checked. It was old, but there was.
    ‘But what if as soon as I go in, he frisks me and finds the phone and sees that it’s recording.’
    ‘Keep it in your pants.’
    ‘He’ll be thinking the same, and be wearing his in his.’
    ‘You could, like, spill a drink over him. Short it out.’
    ‘Or you could go in first, hide it in the toilets. Then I let him frisk me, go to the toilet, pick up the phone, come back in.’
    ‘He’ll only frisk you again. Everyone knows that one. Maybe