The Golden Pig Read online

  Part Three

  Sixty-four Rotten Park Road looked like any other Fifties semi. The district was fairly affluent, indeed it had been tipped as “up and coming” by the local firm of estate agents, Brown, Darling & McHaggis, if you could believe a word they said.

  Unbeknown to many, Sixty-four was the home of a premier-league sleuth, the detective giant of the Metropolitan Constabulary, Inspector Ray Decca. The fact that he rarely set foot in the place was more a reflection of his dedication to duty than to any disaffection with the neighbourhood, although having a wife who could have nagged for Britain may have tilted the scales in favour of the police station.

  Promotion had come quickly and easily to him; easier still after he’d joined the secret Mah Jong society. So what if he’d had to swear allegiance to the Mighty Jong while wearing a traffic cone on his head with his left trouser leg rolled up to the knee? It was all part of the rich tapestry of police life.

  That night he and his wife sat up reading in bed. Decca was reading a detective novel by Simenon. In fact it was lying open in his hands on page 53, where it had stubbornly remained since last Thursday. It wasn’t so much that page 53 was particularly brilliant or exciting; simply that Decca’s mind was elsewhere. Sometimes he was on the verge of solving a major case and being congratulated by the Chief Constable, at other times, such as after a particularly bad day, he was spending his early retirement on a sun-kissed beach in the South Pacific, surrounded by dusky maidens in little grass skirts with large coconuts.

  Mrs Decca, or Sheila as she was known among her friends at the Woman’s Institute, was gently nagging in the background as Decca’s mind raced across the globe to Paradise.

  “Did you pay my car insurance like you promised, Ray?”

  “Hmmmmmm…”

  “Is that Hmmm yes or Hmmm no?”

  “Hmmmmmm?”

  “You’re not paying attention to me, Raymond!”

  She always called him Raymond when she was working up to a really big nag.

  “Sorry dear…?”

  “My car insurance?”

  “Yes dear, it’s all sorted.”

  “Did you remember to book a table at “La Bistro”? You haven’t forgotten it’s our anniversary next week, now have you?”

  “Hmmmmm…”

  “Don’t bother! There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for some time…”

  “Hmmmm, yes dear.”

  “I’m leaving you. I’ve found someone else; someone who appreciates me!”

  “Hmmmm, that’s nice dear.”

  “You’re not listening to a word are you, Ray?”

  “Hmmm, yes dear…I mean, no dear. What did you say?”

  “Why don’t you just get the hell back to the office?!”

  “Hmmmm?”

  A few short minutes later the sound of raised voices, followed by breaking furniture could be heard from number Sixty-four. A dishevelled man in a Crombie overcoat appeared at the front door. Closing it behind him he climbed into the driver’s seat of the blue Ford Mondeo in the driveway, revved the engine in a belated gesture of defiance, and drove away. Net curtains were twitching all along the road. The Neighbourhood Watch committee would have something to say about this.

  Part Four

  A shaft of light illuminated the cracked lino. The noise from the street below was deafening. Janis had phoned, to confirm, what he already knew, that the bailiffs had taken his remaining furniture. Hymie told her to take the day off. He could be generous to a fault, when it didn’t matter.

  He sat on the floor of his office, wondering whether there was any point in buying more furniture for the bailiffs to repossess. He tried to lift the loose floorboard to see if he still had a laptop, but his screwdriver had been in the drawer of the desk the bailiffs had taken and his fingernails were too chewed to get any grip. The best ruddy website in the whole investigations universe and he couldn’t get onto a computer to see if he had any enquiries! What kind of a tin-pot firm was he running? He shrugged and stood up; it didn’t do to dwell on things he couldn’t change.

  “Up and at ‘em H, there’s work to be done!” exclaimed Hymie.

  He often talked to himself. It had become a bad habit; a legacy from childhood days when imaginary friends had brought him some kind of comfort. These days he didn’t even know he was doing it.

  He enjoyed being his own boss and loved working as a detective, but he had a talent for failure and knew deep down that he would never be rich. Even the prospect of an Indian venture capitalist, with an open cheque-book, couldn’t dispel the fear that whatever happened, he would lose.

  Despite this he was a survivor. He fleeced the occasional punter for as much as his conscience would allow and wrote frequent grovelling letters to his bank manager; Tony Talbot from the bank that liked to say yes, except to him.

  In his rented lock-up at the back of the alley he climbed into the driver’s seat of his Zebaguchi 650; a five-litre gas-guzzling fuel-injected monstrosity that belonged in a prehistoric automobile museum and had long since eaten him out of house and home. It looked like an early prototype of a De Lorean and drove like a Chieftain tank.

  He switched on the VDU. Lights flickered in the console. Encouraged, he typed in the ignition code and presto! music drifted from the left hand speaker.

  “Nessun flippin’ Dorma!” he cursed, switching off the CD player.

  He flicked the transmission switch and turned over the engine. At the third splutter an explosion erupted from the twin chrome exhausts and the car lurched forward belching smoke and flames. Now that was something like a car.

  After a cursory glance at the scrap of paper provided by his client, he put his foot to the floor. Four bald tyres span on wet tarmac and the rust riddled dream machine careened down the street in a cloud of purple smoke.

  An hour later Hymie Goldman, private investigator, pulled up outside a quaint olde worlde cottage in South MimMs It seemed quiet enough, but you could never be sure. He parked around a nearby corner, a few hundred metres away, then retraced his steps on foot. Approaching the front door with studied indifference, he rang the bell and waited.

  Nothing.

  His plan was to avoid climbing through any windows. He would fill in the details as he went along, but first he would have to get inside the house using some plausible cover story. His name was John; a gas-meter reader from Enfield. He rang the bell a second time and a third, beginning to imagine himself in the part; he was married with two kids, who attended the local comprehensive school. No reply. He rang the bell continuously until it stuck in the “on” position, then beat a hasty retreat around the back of the house. John pegged it on the way to the back door and he became Hymie again. That didn’t help much, but at least he knew who he was. He tried the door handle nervously and was surprised to find it open; not generally a good sign.

  Adopting the bluff manner of an invited but clueless guest, he breezed through what appeared to be the kitchen and made his way into the lounge.

  Trivial Pursuit lay face down on the shag pile, a TV dinner slid tortuously down the far wall and a man’s decapitated body sat bolt upright in the comfy chair, blood still oozing from the severed neck.

  The wallpaper was liberally spattered with blood and the stench of death hung in the air. Hymie surveyed the room in stunned silence until his gaze was arrested by another horrific spectacle; the sight of the dead man’s head, sitting grotesquely in a plant pot on the mantelpiece, its features frozen in a macabre grimace. It was the final straw.

  “Blllaaaaaaaaa...yeeuuuuuurrrk!”

  He vomited last night’s pizza everywhere. He had been a detective for eight years without once seeing a dead body. He’d heard about such things of course. He’d even seen the odd dead pet; Mrs Timmins’ cat Tiddles, which had jumped out of a beech tree and broken its neck as he was shinning along the branch to retrieve it. Yet nothing had prepared him for this.

  It was only then he became aware that he had company.
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  “Banzaiiiiiieeeee!!”

  Hymie turned to find himself staring into the wild-eyed face of his would-be executioner; a diminutive oriental dressed entirely in black, the finely honed blade of his ancient samurai sword poised to create two H. Goldmans where before there had been but one.

  Flip! he thought, with panic-stricken understatement, and then he fell to the floor and grovelled pitifully.

  “I’ve seen nothing; I’ll say nothing…to no-one, never. Look, I have money…take it; take my car, my life insurance…anything you like. I only came to read the meter” he gibbered, method-acting as John the gas-man to the last.

  His assailant appeared unmoved. Lifting the sword until it was stretched at arm’s length above his head he began its murderous descent on the southernmost slopes of Goldman’s neck.

  Hymie closed his eyes and began to think of his schooldays.

  “Boy, what a shit life!”

  BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

  Three gunshots rang out and the room was bathed in cordite fumes. Hymie opened his eyes. The smoke cleared to reveal his attacker, prostrate on the floor and wearing three rather large holes. Most of his anatomy was now vacationing in different parts of the room.

  Standing behind the corpse and racking the slide of an outsized handgun stood the remarkable Miss Turner.

  “J.J.J.Janis.”

  “Hello Mr Goldman, I thought you might need some help.”

  “But how, why, when? What I mean to say is…I thought..?”

  “You thought that after those guys had taken the last of the office furniture you’d never see me again. You told me to take the day off, because you couldn’t face telling me I was out of a job, but you’re wrong you know; it’s not over yet.”

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  “After I thought it through, I went into the office just in time to see you driving off in your car, so I followed you. Easy.”

  “And the gun?”

  “Oh, I always carry that. Well, you have to when you live in Finsbury Park.”

  From the corner of his eye he caught sight of a glittering golden figurine on the mantelpiece. He pocketed it hastily. It might be a pig and it might not. Either way, it would pay for some new office furniture.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here.” he said.

  “There may be more of them; we’ll have to be careful how we get out.”

  “That’s not what I wanted to hear, Janis.” He was starting to hyperventilate.

  “Where did you park your car?” she asked.

  “Just around the corner, on Coleridge Way.”

  “Right, you climb through the window and I’ll provide covering fire,” said Janis.

  He looked at her as though she had gone mad.

  “I don’t do windows Jan.” said Hymie emphatically. “Not since I was nearly killed, leaning out of one as a kid.”

  “There’s no time to waste, Hymie. We all have to face our demons sometime. I’ll make sure we’re not being followed then meet you at your car in five minutes.”

  He looked at her dubiously, then at the gun in her hand and finally at the vomit-strewn carpet.

  “We don’t want to be here when the owner gets home,” he said, reflectively.

  He pushed open the window, climbed out onto the crazy paving and ran as though his life depended on it for his car. Gunshots rang out in the cottage. Once back in the driver’s seat he closed his eyes and put his head in his hands. He hoped Janis was okay, because he was about as much use to her as a chocolate teapot. The next five minutes seemed to last for hours, but then Janis arrived, climbed in beside him and he drove off as quickly and unobtrusively as it was possible to do, in a car that sounded like the mating call of an African bull-elephant.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “There were two more of them upstairs,” said Janis. ‘He will believe anything’ she thought.

  “And you killed them?” He couldn’t quite believe any of this was happening, but he didn’t doubt the facts for a minute.

  “It was purely self-defence,” she said.

  He drove in no particular direction, for miles, ending up at a motorway service station, where they sat in the cafeteria, talking in hushed tones.

  To the casual observer he looked just like any other deadbeat; pale complexion, staring eyes and with the indefinable aroma of regurgitated pizza. To the trained eye, however, Hymie Goldman was a man in shock, a man who had come too close for comfort to the Grim Reaper.

  He sat motionless in the hard plastic chair, staring into the cold black depths of his neglected coffee. It seemed to mirror the bottomless void within him.

  Janis by contrast was perfectly relaxed, or as relaxed as one can be in a motorway service area. She leant back, drawing steadily on her Havana cigar and released perfectly formed smoke rings above her erstwhile employer’s bowed head.

  “Come on, pull yourself together. You must have seen a corpse before now,” she said.

  “Never. Look Jan, I’m just not that sort of detective. If I’ve given you that impression then I’m sorry. I’m allergic to guns, bullets, knives, swords and anything else whose sole purpose is to kill. I’ve got to take this to the police. Will you come with me?”

  “Are you crazy? After your last court appearance they’re just looking for an excuse to pull you in. Given half a chance they’d lock you up and throw away the key! Your only option is to see the case through to the end. Then go and see the police if you must, but only when you know and can prove all the facts.”

  She was so cool, so level-headed, so worldly to be someone’s assistant, let alone his.

  “I could be dead by then!” Hymie protested.

  “So? End of story. Do you want to be a missing pet-investigator all your life? Live a little!”

  He didn’t look exactly convinced.

  “I have a phone call to make,” he resolved finally.

  “The police?” she queried.

  “My client.”

  “Now you’re thinking straight. Better still, let’s go and see her together,” volunteered Janis.

  “What makes you think my client is a woman, Jan, when this is a new case and you’ve never met the client?”

  He was sharper than he looked, but Janis retained her composure.

  “Just call it feminine intuition. You could certainly use some.”

  They made an unlikely pair heading for the service station car park; the short, overweight scruff-bag and the elegant young woman smoking a cigar. They could have passed for a circus novelty act, but not much else.

  Hymie revved up the Zebaguchi’s six cylinder engine until all eyes around them were fixed on the source of the apocalyptic noise. Having no social awareness and little environmental conscience, Goldman remained in a pitiful state of ignorance about the state of the ozone layer and thought that “CFC” was a Welsh football team.

  Since by now he had lost his client’s business card, Hymie was forced to drive around the district aimlessly, in the hope of recognizing some familiar landmark that would lead him to Lucy Scarlatti. On the whole he would have made a better vacuum-cleaner salesman than he did a private investigator.

  Perhaps he should be looking out for a trail of dazed-looking males, he reflected.

  Some hours later he finally spotted the tell-tale black Porsche and pulled over. Taking Janis with him for protection, he rang the bell.

  A Big Ben door chime? He didn’t remember it, but the last time he’d been there, he was with his client.

  There was no reply, so he rang again, wincing as the chime resumed its assault on good taste. The door opened very slightly, held close on a security chain.

  “Who is it?” asked Lucy Scarlatti.

  “The man from Del Monte, who do you flamin’ think!”

  Hymie’s nerves were beginning to unravel.

  “Goldman! About time, where the hell have you been?”

  “To a funeral, lady, and it was nearly mine. Now let me in, I need s
ome answers!”

  Lucy Scarlatti led him into the lounge of her inexpensively furnished apartment. Outside, Janis loaded six rounds of ammunition into the chambers of her pistol, slipped the gun into her handbag and walked casually into the flat.

  Meanwhile, Hymie sprawled across an enormous scarlet satin bean-bag, while Lucy Scarlatti mixed two extra-dry Martinis at her cocktail bar, blithely unaware of the approaching peril now lurking in her reception hall.

  “Did you bring the statuette?” she asked.

  “Sure, but things weren’t exactly straight-forward,” he replied.