Byker Books

The two heavies kicked my office door open like they hated it, then stomped in waving their guns like they meant to use them. I didn’t stand up to welcome them. My knees were shaking too much. The question I’d been struggling with – how to pay the rent on said office slid from top to bottom of my list of things to worry about. Between the men and me was my desk, computer and two matching clients’ chairs: they couldn’t grab me – but what does that mean to a bullet?

‘Where is it?’ The tall fat one had a falsetto voice and wore a well-wrinkled grey suit. Some of the wrinkles had escaped into his face – like one of those sad-looking dogs you’d pay a fortune for if you had the money and wrinkle-loving taste.

‘Yeah. Where is it?’ The short swarthy one sounded more manly, but looked gorilla-like. He made an attempt to prowl up and down but there isn’t room in my office for a meaningful prowl, so he stopped and leaned against the door, as if to prevent anyone else coming in – unlikely on a late Friday afternoon in the last office at the end of a corridor on the fourth floor of a building with no lift.

‘What is "it"?’

‘Don’t fool with us, Sallinger. You’re the private eye. You know what we want.’ Tall-fat put his pudgy left hand on my desk; used his left arm as a prop on which to lean round the computer. His face was a foot from mine. He advanced his gun so that its snout was an inch from mine.

Mr Gorilla added, ‘Yeah. And we want it now!’

I ran my memory through my recent cases – all two of them – but it came up blank. I don’t think well with a gun nosing my schnozzle. My mind kept screaming, ‘Please don’t shoot me, please don’t shoot me’ and I had to concentrate to stop my mouth copying it. I’d’ve taken off the stop if I’d thought grovelling would achieve anything, but considerable past experience told me it wouldn’t.

I leaned back in my straight-backed chair; I would have looked nonchalant if I hadn’t been trembling. I looked down my nose – my moustache was handsomer than the mouth of the gun – and pulled one of my most useful accents out of store.

‘My deah Sir,’ I should have reached for a cigarette but I don’t smoke. ‘One can detect you’re desperate, but I assure you I have nothing of interest heah.’

They changed tack.

‘If McGinnerie’s box isn’t here, we’ll have to search your house, won’t we?’

‘Yeah. We can see there’s nowhere to hide it here.’ Mr Gorilla’s face sneered but he sounded reasonable.

*****

‘It’s gone! Some bastard’s stolen it!’

‘Don’t try to fool us!’ Tall-fat was doing the close-approach with the gun again.

He’d done it all the way to my place, in the back of their car with his gun to my ribs, while Mr Gorilla drove. Now we were standing in my garden shed, but the box wasn’t.

Little Albert McGinnerie and I go back a long way – not quite to kindergarten but near – at my age that’s a long way. We didn’t see each other often. I knew little about his career since school: he made a living somehow and the somehow took him away a lot. About every six months he’d appear with, ‘Hi, Lon, how about going down the pub?’ or, ‘Hey, Lon, can you lend me a fiver?’ or, very rarely, ‘Here, Lon, here’s the fiver I owe you’. It wasn’t strange that he asked me to store something for him.

The plywood box had filled the boot of his Fiesta, but one person could lift it. I wondered what it contained – but it was locked, it wouldn’t be in the way in my shed and it wasn’t my business. He bought me a pint. I agreed. The box sat in the shed – for a while.

‘It’s true!’ I sounded almost as falsetto as Tall-fat. ‘Someone’s stolen it! I don’t know what’s in it but it must be worth stealing. You two are going to a lot of trouble to get it.’

They saw the force of my argument. They weren’t stupid: just one-track minders.

‘You better tell us who took it.’

‘Yeah, and we want to know now!’

I still wasn’t thinking clearly but as my memory fumbled through my few visitors it had an inspiration. Mucky Mike.

I don’t call him that to his face, but anyone who pushes drugs to kids is mucky in my book. He kept coming to mine, in fact he easily won the ‘most frequent visitor’ stakes, with vague threats, telling me not to mix with him in any professional way. He knew if I had evidence it’d be jail for Mike. Handing him over to these two might get him, and them, off my back. If I got lucky they’d all shoot each other. They liked the idea of Mike as the thief. His public face was as a middling successful fence and they knew his public face.

Mike was slow coming to the fake-antique studded door of his four bed semi. As he eased it open, Tall-fat, gun to my ribs again, shoved me into the stagily-lit hall. Mr Gorilla leapt after us and slammed the door. Mike rolled his eyes in a ‘here we go again’ manner and said nothing. If he was afraid, he was better than me at hiding it.

The gun-wavers repeated the discussion they’d forced on me.

‘We want it.’

‘Yeah ….’

‘What …?’

‘Don’t fool ….’

‘Yeah ….’

I got bored.

‘They want the box you stole from me.’

I wasn’t going to let on it belonged to Albert.

‘But Joe and Chris, surely you don’t believe I sink to stealing!’

Mike’s pasty face, a mask of innocence, loomed above Tall-fat. I learned what a sinking heart feels like. It hadn’t occurred to me they might be on first name terms: the two gunmen didn’t smell like locals. Joe and Chris weren’t to be side-tracked by friendly noises.

‘Don’t fool ….’

‘Yeah ….’

Then, outside in the street, wailed the sound I least expected to hear – a police siren. It appeared Mike had phoned the police before opening his door. His friendliness to Joe and Chris had been a stall. The two policemen cuffed the gunmen and towed them doorwards. One of my problems was solved. But Mike was likely to be even more on my back after this.

‘I want my box,’ I said. ‘Mike stole it.’

The police believed me: they too knew Mucky Mike’s public face. But he knew his rights and they’d need warrants coming out of their ears before they could search. Then Mr Gorilla twisted free, and sprinted for the kitchen where there ought to have been a back door. The police sergeant, Mike and I chased him. Both Gorilla and Mike were out of luck – there was no escape route and the box was on the table.

I stepped forward to collect it. The sergeant stopped me.

‘If it’s yours, Sir, you must know what’s in it.’

Sod it. I didn’t want to bring Albert into anything to do with police. I arranged myself into a casual pose, opened my eyes wide and selected the Essex Neutral accent as the easiest to do ‘innocence’ in.

‘Oh, just stuff that belonged to my grandmother,’ shrugging, ‘bits and pieces, the sort you collect through life.’ The sergeant was gullible. He believed that was a description he could check. He opened the box.

His day was made.

*****

Three months later, here I am sitting in my living room while Albert makes a big production of the emptiness of his box.

‘I trusted you!’

‘Not enough to tell me your box was full of …’

‘Anyway, what happened to Mike?’

‘Don’t try and side-track me. They arrested him of course. What else could they do, finding a box full of human skeleton in his kitchen.’

For a while it had looked as if I’d join the other three in the cells, without bail, but Joe and Chris were so peeved with Mike for setting the police on them that they both swore the skeleton was his. Search warrants abounded and the cops found Mike’s real supplies. He’ll be in prison for a long time to come.

‘So where’s the skeleton now?’ Albert opens another can of my beer.

‘When forensics discovered it was old, they dropped the murder charge against Mike and sent it back to the museum you stole it from.’

‘The real thief is the museum. That skeleton belongs to my client – the chief of his tribe. It’s his ancestor. Mike was working for a big-time collector. Who knows who employed the others.’

There’s a gleam in his eye I don’t like.

He goes on, ‘We must get it back and return it to its rightful owner.’

I put down my can and jab a finger in his direction.

‘A bit less of the ‘we’. I’m all for aboriginal rights, but not to the lengths of burglary. If you’ve done something disgusting like develop a social conscience keep it away from me.’

Albert sits back in his chair and smirks.

‘Let me tell you about my client.’

The tale contains a lot of stuff about gilt edges, oil wells and round-the-world banking.

‘He has everything – except the bones of his ancestor. And he belongs to a tribe that believes in expressing gratitude in proportion to its cause. Anyone who helps restore his ancestor will be able to buy several mangy office buildings, not just rent a very small part of one.’

Damn bloody Albert and his bloody tribal chief. If I don’t resist the temptation, I might be breaking the habits of a lifetime, and risk joining Mike, Joe and Chris.

(c) E A M Harris 2009