Scot on the Rocks Read online

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said, as he had so often in our whirlwind romance and extended honeymoon, about biros and Bramleys and the actual The Office, long after I’d got to grips with Sharpies and college lines and learned that no one went to sea in an HMO.

  ‘Try,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t trust the police,’ he began. I think I managed to hide the mixture of surprise and delight, at hearing him in tune with me while not getting why it mattered. ‘And I don’t want to go to a private detective. It’s so tacky. But I have to find her, Lexy. I’ll die without her. And if someone’s hurt her … If someone’s harmed her …’ Now he really was crying. He sucked in a big fluttery breath that made his bottom lip wang against his teeth and blew a bubble out of his left nostril as he let it go again.

  ‘Brandeee’s gone,’ I said. Unbelievably, he still didn’t twig. He thought I was sharing his pain or thinking aloud. He nodded and gave me a watery smile. This man, I often reminded myself, was a dentist. He’d been to college and passed exams in chemistry. He was one notch off being a doctor. I remembered Noleen agreeing my visitor might be a nurse and reminded myself to give her props for intuition when I saw her next.

  ‘And I know you sorted out that thing,’ he said. ‘And then you sorted out that other thing.’

  ‘How did you know that?’ I said. ‘And that?’

  ‘From all the publicity,’ said Bran. He took a tissue at last and blew his nose with an elephantine honk and a lot of success. ‘You were in the Voyager. All three of you.’

  I stared at him. Trinity Life Solutions got a good deal of positive press. Todd saw to that any day the sun came up. And we had been mentioned in passing in connection to two suspicious deaths as well, but I truly did not know until that moment that we had gained a reputation around town as … whatever Bran thought we were.

  ‘There would be a cost,’ I said. ‘If it was up to me then mate’s rates all the way. But my partners are hard-headed businesspeople.’

  ‘I thought you were in with that disgraced knockout jockey,’ said Bran. ‘And the chick from the laundromat.’

  Ah, there he was! There was the man I divorced, so very happily, so very recently. ‘Yes, Todd is an anaesthetist,’ I said. ‘You have to have one doctor to do the anaesthetic when the other doctor’s doing more than pull out a grey molar. And he’s not disgraced, Bran. He’s diversifying. Now, do you have time to come to the Skweeky Kleen with me and call Kathi a chick to her face or will we do it next time?’

  ‘Gotcha,’ he said. ‘You won’t help. Still too bitter. Gotcha, Lexy. Coming through loud and clear.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll help you,’ I said. ‘I’ll work my buns off to find Brandeee and bring her home to you. I’ll even eat my personal cut to do it on the cheap, if you need a break on your bill.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. He smiled and did that thing he always did, hitting himself in the forearm to bounce the wet tissue out of his other hand and into the bin. Or rather, at the bin. He missed every time. This time included. ‘Thank you,’ he repeated as he stooped to retrieve it. ‘You’ve no idea what this means.’

  But he was wrong. He had no idea what it meant, but I was very clear. It meant that I still hated him so much that I was willing to track down the tedious, prattling, shallow puddle of ketogenic me-time he was lumbered with by his own efforts and plop her back in his life to ruin every day until one of them dropped dead from the crushing weight of their own vapidity. How dare he call me bitter.

  ‘We’ve got a case,’ I said to Todd, as he said it to me, as we met on the doorstep of the Skweeky Kleen ten minutes later.

  ‘Snap,’ said Kathi. She was inside at the big table, folding shirts on to card and pinning them. ‘Did anyone come for grief counselling, Lex?’

  ‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Not yet, anyway.’

  ‘And have you knocked out your five hundred yet?’ she added.

  Behind me, Todd was gesticulating lavishly. I could see him in the reflection off the washing-machine doors along the back wall. Kathi kept this place too clean for surreptitious gestures.

  ‘I might not have mentioned that yet,’ he said. ‘But, since Kathi brought it up, the Voyager wants a piece on our attachment to symbols and emblems, and how to heal after desecration. For tomorrow.’

  ‘Well then, let’s hope the person who agreed to submit it is feeling creative,’ I said. ‘I’ll read it over for you and check the spelling, if you get it to me before teatime.’

  ‘You mean happy hour?’ said Kathi.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ I said. ‘That’s not on the list.’

  ‘Should be,’ she mumbled through a mouthful of pins.

  ‘Todd?’ I said. ‘Pick a side.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Todd said. A win for me. We were trying to annoy each other a bit less by not saying the words that bugged us all most – super-cute, binmen, mindfulness, that sort of thing – and there were fines involved.

  Kathi blew a quick raspberry but accepted the result. ‘And when you say “a case”,’ she asked, ‘you don’t mean a client, right?’

  We already had plenty of clients. At first, it had been a revelation to me, the number of people in emotional distress who also wanted new clothes and a tidy kitchen, but I was getting used to it now. There was Marsha, whose depression went away along with her collection of gift bags and lidless Tupperware; Roy, the lonely mailman, whose head cleared as soon as Todd got him to stop hitching his trousers up to his windpipe, as if it was his belt that had been keeping him from speaking to women in coffee shops, offering them biscotti. Personally, I thought we had gone too far with Roy. He was getting to be a bit of a menace, and no one in his sixties should be in low-rise skinnies.

  ‘I don’t know what Lexy means,’ Todd said, ‘but I mean a case. I got the manager of the smoke shop to let me see the CCTV footage.’ He was scrolling on his phone again. It was just as well for his dignity that he didn’t have even the first hint of a bald spot, because he’d be showing it to the world most of the time. ‘Huddle in and watch this,’ he said, joining Kathi behind the folding table. The film was already running. Mama Cuento stood with her bare feet spread and her broad arms on her hips, gleaming very faintly here and there as the light of the nearest lamp post found its way to her forehead, chin, breast, knee and fateful toe.

  ‘Did she say you could film it?’ I asked. ‘This manager.’

  ‘He,’ said Todd. ‘He’d have let me film him in his bubble bath, if I’d asked. Seriously, is there a straight person left in this state?’

  ‘Yeah, but did he?’ I asked. In the course of our first two adventures Trinity had made the Cuento cops look a bit more Keystone-esque than they’d cared for and Detective Mike was itching to stick something on us.

  ‘At the moment only I know,’ said Todd. ‘Do you want to know too, in case it comes up later?’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Kathi. ‘When does something happen? Oh!’

  Something was happening right now in the gloom produced by the street trees, the midnight hour, the crappiness of the smoke shop’s camera and the inevitable added crappiness of Todd filming it off the screen with his phone. ‘Atmospheric’ was an understatement. It was like those seasons of The X Files when Gillian Anderson was pregnant and they just dimmed the lights instead of having her stand behind things.

  But as near as I could make out, someone had sidled up beside Mama Cuento and was festooning her. It looked a lot like a yarn bomber caught in the act except that whatever was being festooned had glints of metal about it here and there.

  ‘Tow straps,’ said Kathi. ‘But unless that’s the world’s strongest man …’

  ‘Wait,’ Todd said.

  The festooner strolled nonchalantly into the street light and off along the road. I scrutinized his black beanie, black sweats and black shoes. And it was about as worthwhile as that sounds, believe me. A moment later, someone else turned up in the shot, carrying a bulky load over one shoulder.

  ‘Is that a grenade launch
er?’ I said, squinting hard at the tiny image.

  ‘Jeez, drama queen of the month is in the bag,’ said Todd. ‘It’s a chainsaw.’

  ‘It’s a skill saw,’ said Kathi. ‘A chainsaw would have woken up the neighbourhood.’

  I wasn’t so sure. By the time anyone who lived in the downtown had woken up, nudged their partner and said, ‘What’s that racket?’ it would all have been over. Even the skill saw made short work of the bolts holding Mama Cuento to her plinth.

  There was one interesting moment. The guy paused, bent down for a closer look, swiped something up off the ground and pocketed it. Then he finished the job, put the saw over his shoulder like a rolled umbrella and went the same way as the first one. Black beanie, black sweats, black shoes. Also black gloves, I noticed, pointlessly.

  ‘Maybe the toe was an accident then,’ Todd said. ‘Maybe he found it in his pocket later and thought he’d have some fun.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘When do they actually—?’

  Todd shushed me. ‘You’re going to want to watch this next bit.’ The intersection had been deserted throughout the strapping and sawing, but now a pickup truck, one of the ones with a fat arse and double tyres that they call a ‘doolie’, came along the street towards the smoke-shop camera. It had no front number plate but then there’s a lot of that about. In less than the time it would take the average driver to stop at the fourway, check for pedestrians and get going again, it had mounted the pavement and pulled up close to Mama Cuento, unfurling a crane from the middle of its truck bed, like a fern head in stop-motion. Someone who’d been lying down in the bed jumped up and did something out of sight of the camera, but it didn’t take Sherlock to guess they were attaching the tow straps to the hook on the crane. When the truck started moving again, Mama Cuento leaned forward, as if she was keening, yearning for it to stay, then she rose up into the air, clear of the trees that usually sheltered her, and sank gently down beside the crane as it fell flat. The guy in the truck bed swung a tarp over the whole lot with a practised swirl of his wrist and, as the doolie raced away, the last thing we saw was him swinging himself round the back of the cab and in through the passenger-door window. We watched the tail lights until they dwindled to nothing and the tape stopped.

  ‘The back plate was covered,’ Kathi said.

  ‘We’d never have been able to read it anyway,’ said Todd.

  ‘But they wouldn’t have wanted to go far like that is my point,’ she went on. ‘They must have stopped somewhere else pretty soon and uncovered it. I hope you’re right about every man in downtown gagging for you with his tongue out, Todd, because we’re going to need to see more CCTV.’

  ‘The police will be so far ahead of us,’ I said, ‘I think we should attack it from another angle.’

  ‘Such as?’ said Todd.

  ‘No clue,’ I said. ‘Kathi?’

  ‘Such as,’ Kathi said, ‘look at the way they got Mama Cuento out from under the trees, up in the air and down on to the truck bed without smashing her against anything. They must have practised. Scoped it out. I think we should ask the wait staff at the Cockroach if they’ve seen anyone hanging about.’

  ‘Ssshh!’ I said, pointing furiously at Todd. It wasn’t like Kathi to be so thoughtless.

  ‘It actually freaks me out less in English,’ Todd said.

  ‘I can’t believe they named a restaurant that in any language,’ I said.

  ‘This was before your time, Lexy,’ said Todd, ‘but it never got above third place in the Worst Name in Cuento competition.’

  ‘El Mono always scooped second,’ Kathi said.

  ‘Was the Last Ditch Motel the winner?’ I said.

  ‘Not even an honourable mention,’ said Kathi. ‘First place went to El Salmòn. Their name’s picked out on a roundel with a bit of a squiggle between the two words so it looks like Salmonela, no two ways about it. And like they can’t spell.’

  ‘Which is why the competition got shut down,’ said Todd. ‘Three Mexican restaurants winning all three prizes? Between the woke brigade, who think Latins can’t laugh at ourselves, and the old-school racists, who hate us winning anything, it got ugly.’

  ‘Do you think that’s got anything to do with this?’ I said. ‘I mean, Mama Cuento isn’t Caucasian, is she?’

  ‘And the guys in the beanies must be white,’ Todd said. ‘Carrying a chainsaw through town in the night and not getting stopped?’

  ‘Skill saw,’ said Kathi again.

  ‘I’ve just thought of something,’ I said. ‘Wind it back to when they’re driving away.’

  ‘Wind!’ said Todd, scraping the frames backwards with a finger until the beanie boy was throwing the tarp over Mama Cuento, then slithering round the edge of the cab and in through the passenger-door window.

  ‘Can you open the doors on a low-rider?’ I said.

  ‘That’s not a low-rider,’ Todd said. ‘Learn the culture, Lexy!’

  ‘No, but look at him!’ I insisted. ‘Could you get yourself out of a truck bed and in through a window, on the move, in the dark? I was just thinking he must do it all the time.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t you be able to open the door on a low-rider?’ said Todd.

  ‘In case you scrape it on a high kerb,’ I said. ‘It was just a thought. Don’t bite me.’

  ‘Yes, you can open the door on a low-rider. And of course I could do that in-the-window move.’

  ‘Let’s see it,’ I said. ‘Show me. On Noleen’s truck. Because I don’t believe you.’

  We spent ten minutes in the car park, with Todd standing up in the back of Noleen’s Ford F-150, thinking it over, assessing the challenge and looking at the angles. Kathi and I watched him. Even Noleen came to the office door and watched him. A couple of tourists who were staying at the Last Ditch en route to Napa came and watched him.

  ‘Yeah, I can’t do it,’ he said at last. ‘Come up and look at it from here. You’ll see.’

  I swung up on to the bed and marched purposefully to the front. How I wished I could launch myself, à la the guy on the footage, slipping into the cab like a greased eel and bowing to the applause, but even thinking about it made me start to sweat.

  ‘Certain death, right?’ Todd said.

  ‘Maybe it’s easier if it’s moving,’ I said. ‘Compensating … G-force … or counter …’

  ‘I’ll drive it round the parking lot,’ Todd said. ‘But I’m not driving you to the ER if you’re dumb enough to try.’

  ‘So,’ Kathi said, ‘this is a bona fide clue. Whoever that was has either been practising a whole lot or they took Mama Cuento away to the Cirque du Soleil.’ Then she glanced at her watch. Kathi always wears a watch. She thinks it’s more hygienic than forever touching your phone. As if she’d ever touch her phone. She keeps it in a disposable sleeve and still puts a latex glove over one finger, chopping off the contaminated bit of the glove afterwards and binning it, until all five are used up. Then she gets a couple of phone touches out of the palm section before she’s done. ‘For the environment,’ she said, the first time I saw her at it. She wasn’t joking. ‘Right, gotta go,’ she said. ‘Big day for sheets, the day after Valentine’s Day.’

  ‘Bleurgh,’ said Todd. ‘But you better go too, Lexy. Big day for people finally getting therapy, I imagine. And you’ve got a date tonight, remember.’

  ‘Yes, I have,’ I agreed. ‘But not with Earl. I’ve made my own arrangements. Ask Nolly.’ I’d pay later when he pieced it all together, but later was better than now. ‘Oh, and by the way,’ I said, as I headed back to the boat. ‘I’ve got a case for us too. Let’s all have lunch at the Cockroach and I’ll tell you.’

  FIVE

  I had told Bran I would go round to his house – my ex-house! – later in the day, on two conditions. One: he had to tell the police that Brandeee was missing. I agreed that they wouldn’t take it very seriously, since she was an adult and no one who ran away from him could be blamed, but they’d be able to do something, surely: check to see
if her cards had been used or if she’d left her bag on a cliff with her driver’s licence inside. Two: I was bringing my partners with me. Which shouldn’t have been controversial, but Bran felt such an extreme level of shame about his woman taking off that he could only bear to discuss it with his other woman who’d also taken off. I think.

  ‘No deal,’ I’d told him. ‘Trinity, Bran. Clue’s in the name. It’s all of us or none.’

  ‘I’d be happier if I could talk to you alone, Lexy,’ he said.

  ‘Is there something that’ll be tough to say in front of strangers?’ I made my face very open and welcoming. I even put my head slightly on one side.

  ‘Kinda,’ he said.

  ‘I see. Well, I can assure you Todd and Kathi are the most accepting, least judgemental individuals you could ever hope to meet.’ In truth, Todd rated everything about everyone, from who-wore-it-besting babies in pull-ups to ranking multiple wives on how decoratively they all cried at a bigamist’s funeral (Bravo channel’s got a lot to answer for), and Kathi’s withering stare could strip the white off rice. The point was that I loved them both and Bran had hurt me.

  ‘Before we get there,’ I said, ‘I’d like you to assemble contact numbers for Brandeee’s friends, colleagues, relations, acquaintances. I’d like a copy of her appointment diary for the last couple of weeks and any recent text exchanges with you. You said she’d taken her phone, right?’

  ‘I said her phone’s gone,’ said Bran. ‘I don’t think she took it, because I don’t think she left.’

  I’d forgotten how pedantic he could be. He was so pedantic that the one and only time I called him a pedant he corrected my pronunciation.

  ‘Until then – we should be there about three-ish – why don’t you go to work and keep busy?’ I hesitated over that advice, actually. Was a distracted dentist such a great idea?

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I need to keep the practice afloat for her to come back to. That’s what Brandee would want.’