Emotionally Weird(95)

A weak sun had managed to dissolve the last of the snow and it had polished up the Tay to a gleaming silver. A faint aroma of sewage perfumed the air. The bridge was empty of trains but in the distance, on the sandbanks in the middle of the river, seals were sunning themselves. From here they looked like amorphous lumps of sluggish rock but I knew that if I was close to them I would see that they were freckled and speckled like birds’ eggs. A heron lifted itself delicately off a sewage pipe and flew away.

I closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face. Suddenly (and quite illogically as far as I could see), I felt my spirits lift. I was aware of the strange feeling I’d experienced at the standing stones in Balniddrie – a kind of bubbling in the blood and an aerating of the brain – as if I was on the verge of something numinous and profound and in one more second the universe was going to crack open and arcana would rain down on my head like grace and all the cosmic mysteries were going to be revealed, perhaps the meaning of life itself and – but no, it was not to be, for at that moment a dark shadow fell across the world.

The icy interstellar winds whipped rubbish along the footpath and caused a great tsunami to travel up the Tay, overwhelming the road bridge and sweeping the rail bridge away. Volcanic ash rose into the air and encircled the earth, choking out all the air and blotting out all the light. The terrible figure that was the cause of this stood before me. Dressed in widow’s weeds like an unravelling shroud, this daughter of Nemesis was gnashing her teeth and wringing her hands and rending the air with lamentation and woe. Black smoke rose from the top of her head and her aura was composed of nothing but scum and scoria. Yes, it was Terri.

She was waving a black ostrich-feather fan in an agitated manner and wearing long black gloves and jet earrings as befits a woman in mourning, for she had discovered the fate of her beloved – encountering the Sewells in the street, in the company of a docile Hank/Buddy trotting along on a lead, and had engaged in a vigorous wrestling match with Jay’s six-foot-two inches of jogger’s flesh from which he was lucky to emerge the winner and only did so because Martha threw her dignity to the winds and started brawling and scrapping like a streetfighter.

‘I’ve lost him,’ Terri said forlornly, sinking onto the bench and lighting a cigarette. ‘So now we have to get him back,’ she added, glaring at Fife in the distance.

‘ Kidnap Hank, you mean? It didn’t work with the goat, did it?’ I reminded her.

‘All the more reason to make it work with the dog, then.’ Terri threw the stub of her cigarette away and stood up. ‘So – do you know how to break into a house?’

‘No,’ I said wearily, ‘but I bet I know someone who does.’ We had walked all the way up Roseangle before Terri wrinkled her nose as if smelling something bad and said, ‘Where did that baby come from?’

We still had Chick’s grubby card – Premier Investigations – all work undertaken, no questions asked . The address for his office was up a close, off a cobbled side street, in the jumble of small side streets around the skirts of the Coffin Mill, whose sad ghosts were lying low today. ‘Kinloch House’ a sign on the door said. You could imagine that the building once housed large mysterious machinery – saw-toothed cog-wheels and hammering piston shafts. Now the place was a warren of dilapidated business premises, all of them dingy and most of them abandoned or acting as dubious registered offices for even more dubious-sounding businesses.

We had acquired Andrea on the way, fleeing the madness of the McCue house. She was wary about the whole kidnapping enterprise, her father being a Malton magistrate, and was only persuaded into it by the argument that it would be good experience for her as a writer – Anthea Goes Kidnapping kind of thing. I was thinking she could be some help on the babysitting front as it’s quite hard to be a criminal when hampered by a large, fat baby, but I realized I’d probably made a mistake when she grew green at the sight of Proteus covered in food, even when I explained it was only Robinson’s chocolate pudding.

On the very top floor we found one of Chick’s Premier Investigations cards stuck on a door with a piece of chewing-gum. The door was locked and the glass in the door covered by a blind made of waxy blackout material. Terri hammered on the door and after a considerable interval Chick, looking even more seedy, if that was possible, opened it cautiously.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said.

He seemed to be in the middle of manoeuvring an old filing-cabinet across the frayed linoleum of the floor, panting with the effort, droplets of sweat exuding from his balding head. He looked as if he was on the verge of a cardiac arrest – pasty and damp – but that was how he looked every time I saw him.