The Vinyl Detective--Flip Back, page 28
I came back into the hexagonal room. I looked at the hexagonal table and the folder lying on it.
How to Return.
I circled the table as though it was a pond of icy water and I was trying to nerve myself up to plunge in. I was breathing very rapidly and my heart was pounding at a ludicrous speed. I forced myself to stop walking.
I found it remarkably difficult to reach down for the folder and open it.
But that is what I did, albeit with shaking hands.
As you might imagine, I stared at the contents of the folder for quite a long time.
Inside was a leaflet neatly printed in black ink on white paper. It read:
HOW TO RETURN
We want you to be happy with your Frigloo™ Air Conditioning Unit, but if you are not 100% satisfied after installation according to these instructions, please call Customer Services on the number below within one month of purchase. Or log into the Frigloo website using your unique customer number and we will provide you with your returns authorisation number. Please fill in the ‘Returns form’ slip below and include this with the unit you are returning.
Your satisfaction is our goal!
In retrospect, finding the air conditioner leaflet was the best thing that could have happened to me. Because its ironic reminder of how suggestible we all are came at exactly the right moment.
It left me smarting at allowing myself even the hint of the possibility of believing any of that crap, and thus feeling even the most tiny, exploratory tremor of fear.
In other words, I was at my most angry and sceptical. Which was very lucky, considering what would happen soon.
I walked down a short rope-matted hallway and into the kitchen. The windows in here were sealed with folding wooden shutters, which had warped and didn’t quite fit, so thin brilliant slices of daylight fell across the room at odd and irregular intervals.
But they provided me with enough illumination to make my way through the darkened kitchen without actually falling over any of the angular and potentially painful rustic wooden chairs, and reach the sink, which was a vast white rectangle with elaborate antique brass taps and a long, swivelling spout that extended over it.
I considered which of the two sunflower-shaped taps was more likely to be cold water—the one on the left, I guessed, even on Halig Island, and I reached out and twisted it.
Or tried to. It didn’t want to budge.
I leaned forward and began to work on it with both hands, keenly mindful of the situation-comedy possibility of it coming off in my hand with a jetting arc of water spouting from it in the joyful commencement of a full-scale kitchen flood.
But that didn’t happen. The tap eventually shuddered and squeaked and rotated and water spilled thankfully from the spout.
I let it run for a long time. I held my hands under it. At first it felt warm and, although this might have been my imagination, a bit gritty. Then eventually it was cold and clear and I put my open mouth under the thin stream and drank. Doing so required bending my head at an odd angle and, as I did this, I saw something across the room.
There, in a narrow ribbon of white light, was the damp dark gleam of an eye.
I paused, closing my mouth, letting the water flow across my face. I told myself it was just something that looked like an eye. Or possibly the eye on an ornament—a stuffed animal head that had been taken down from the wall and placed in a corner…
Then the eye closed lazily and opened again.
A vast portion of the darkness in the corner of the kitchen raised up slightly and began to move. It was about the size of the coffee table in our sitting room in London. A coffee table big enough to comfortably accommodate two cats, numerous books and even the odd compact disc. So… big.
The shadowy bulk of the pig moved across the kitchen towards me. Its eyes were relentlessly focused on mine, first in light, then shadow, and then light again, pitiless and inhuman. I remembered the stories of the demon pig and I felt a tremendous rising wave of panic in me.
And then I remembered the Frigloo air conditioning leaflet.
And the panic abated a little.
The pig had paused, turning its head away from me. It was probing for something on the floor, invisible in the shadows. There was a small grinding, screeching sound, and the pig resumed its approach, but with its head bent down. I realised that it was pushing something with its snout.
It came towards me, grunting, nosing the object across the floor. I saw that it was a large water bowl, of the kind you might have for a big dog.
And it had the word Perky printed on it.
It was, of course, bone dry.
The pig pushed the empty bowl across the tiles, quietly screeching as it came, until it touched my toes. Then the pig backed away and looked up at me with its disconcertingly soulful eyes.
I got it.
The tap was still running, so I lifted the bowl into the sink and filled it with water. Then I set it down carefully and stood back. Perky came forward and began to drink with such obvious enthusiasm and relief that I began to feel thirsty again myself. The bowl was empty in a few seconds and the pig raised his face to look at me. I refilled it and, while he was drinking, stuck my own head back under the tap. Then I kept filling the bowl for him until, finally, he emptied it one last time and then shoved it aside with his snout.
Then Perky lumbered forward a little closer to me and set his chin down across my feet, the way one of my cats might. He lay there happily, his ears twitching slightly. His head was heavy, but the weight of it on my feet was oddly comforting. I looked down at him and wondered if a pig perhaps really was like a big cat.
To test this theory I reached down and scratched him behind the ear.
He didn’t purr, but he did give a long, contented sigh. I rubbed him behind the ear until my arm got tired and my back began to ache, and then I straightened up. Perky gave me a ‘fair enough’ look and lifted his head off my feet, then set it back down on the floor and continued to lie there. On this hot day I imagine the cold tiles felt good against his skin, what with not having any sweat glands.
When scratching behind his ear I noticed that he was wearing a collar. It was made of greyish pink plastic, much the same colour as Perky himself, which is why I hadn’t spotted it straight away. It didn’t look particularly comfortable, and in fact appeared to be digging into his flesh. I decided to take it off him at the earliest opportunity.
But right now I walked gingerly around him, making sure I didn’t step on his tail in the darkness, and went to the door that led out into the garden.
The door had a large dog-hatch in it, easily big enough to have allowed access for Perky. Of course, that is what it had been designed for. I wondered if he had come in because he’d heard me in the house.
I held the door open and turned around to look at the kitchen with the daylight flooding into it. Perky gazed up at me from his spot on the floor.
The poor pig had been running and hiding all over the entire island, but finally he’d come home.
* * *
I went outside and Perky followed me with such speed that it suggested he was thirsty for company as well as water. I found an old rattan chair on a blue and red brick patio, which was mostly overgrown with weeds, and I sat down in the sagging chair and the pig eased his bulk down on the warm, weed-grown bricks in a patch of sunlight beside me. His ears twitched and he looked up at me speculatively as I took out my phone and made a call. He kept watching me for a while after I put the phone away, then finally seemed to make up his mind about something, and relaxed and went to sleep.
That was the way Nevada found us an hour later. By then I’d gone back into the house and made a final search for Pete Loretto’s record collection, and I’d found it. A hundred or so LPs on a shelf in what looked like it had once been a spare bedroom but had now suffered the fate of spare bedrooms everywhere, being given over to storing random junk. The records were an uninspiring lot—largely disco, if you can believe it.
I was more relieved than ever that I hadn’t had to actually break into the house. Going to prison for disco records would have been the last straw.
After I’d made sure that these were the only LPs in the house I’d accepted defeat and selected a paperback from the bookcase by the front door and gone out to read with my faithful pig at my side.
I was gainfully engrossed in a Fritz Leiber story when Perky stirred and lifted his head. Then I heard the sound of a vehicle pulling up, and doors opening and closing. A moment later Nevada came around the corner of the house. When she saw us, her face lit up.
“You’ve found a friend,” she said.
She tried the ear-scratching thing, which the pig seemed to like—even better coming from Nevada than me—and then, when she heard about the incident with the water, she went into the kitchen and came out with the drinking bowl filled to the brim. She set it down beside Perky and he raised his head and gave it a token slurp or two. But it was obvious he was just being polite, which charmed Nevada all the more.
I showed her the plastic collar I had cut off his neck with a pair of kitchen scissors. It had turned out it wasn’t just a collar. It had some kind of technology attached to it. “It looks like a supersized Fitbit,” said Nevada. “But I don’t suppose it is.”
“My best guess is that it’s some kind of GPS device,” I said.
“Like an ankle tag on an offender?”
“Or a LoJack device on a car.”
Nevada took the grubby collar and examined it. “Do you think someone could track Perky using this?”
“Not anymore,” I said.
Nevada smiled. “So Perky is a free man at last. Or rather, a free pig.”
Then we had the challenge of coaxing the free pig into the back of the van Nevada had arrived in. Luckily Ms Bramwell had brought a ramp along.
When I heard about Ms Bramwell I realised that today had seen one bona fide return from the dead after all.
She was the other ‘B’ in the B&B B&B. We’d thought she was deceased because Miss Bebbington was in the habit of speaking of her very emphatically in the past tense. But it turned out this was the result of a rather messy breakup rather than any actual demise. Ms Bramwell, a slender fiftyish woman, now lived on a farm of her own on the other side of the island. A rather unique farm in that the animals on it weren’t called upon to die, any more than she had been.
They provided contributions in the form of eggs or milk, or were simply pets. “A vegetarian farm,” said Nevada. “When I rang Miss Bebbington and asked for advice about what to do with Perky, she immediately offered to get in touch with Ms Bramwell. Apparently they hadn’t been on speaking terms, but they immediately set aside their differences when they discovered the fate of an animal was at stake.” Nevada smiled happily. “Now that they’re back in touch, I’m thinking romance might reignite.”
We were chatting as we walked back to Miss Bebbington’s together, having seen Perky safely on his way to his new home, and we’d just reached the gate to the allotments. I took out the key and let us in. With evening coming on, the smell of fresh growing things in the place had become quite wonderful. We walked through it, hand in hand, as Nevada told me how the visit to Tom Pyewell’s had been a bust both vinyl- and wine-wise.
“He had a lot of bottles in his cellar, but it was all very expensive and rather dull. Bordeaux and Burgundy. Nothing from the Rhône. As for the LP, Tinkler and I carefully scrutinised every record in the place, but there was no copy of Wisht with a flap back. Don’t bother correcting me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said. “But that means we’re almost out of places to look.”
“So, one way or another, we’ll be going home soon.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll rather miss this island,” said Nevada. “They’ve only tried to kill us here once.”
That was about to change.
26. ESTABLISHING SHOTS
Nevada went to take a shower and I settled down to continue reading my Fritz Leiber story—yes, I’d stolen a book from a dead man’s house, but I rationalised this as fair payment for pig rescue—when the doorbell rang.
Miss Bebbington was out, as we’d discovered on our return. Nevada was in the shower. So I went to answer it.
While you could look out the window in the breakfast room and see people coming in through the garden gate, once they had approached a little more closely to the front door it was impossible to see them from any window in the house.
If you wanted to know who was out there, you had to open the door.
I assumed it was Tinkler having forgotten his key, or perhaps Miss Bebbington herself, ditto. So I didn’t hesitate. I opened the door wide.
And a figure came muscling in, brushing past me in a peremptory fashion. It was a man with a hoodie pulled down low over his face and both hands jammed deep in his pockets. Presumably for anonymity. In which case he should have chosen a hoodie that wasn’t a bright raspberry shade of pink.
He also wore frayed, stained blue jeans and honey-coloured Timberland boots with flopping laces and a backpack with a skateboard logo on it.
All this I absorbed in that first surprised moment as this newcomer bulled his way past me in the narrow hallway. Only when he was halfway along the corridor did he turn back towards me, allowing me to see his face. Indeed, he pulled the hood of his hoodie fully down so there was no chance of me not seeing his face.
Stinky Stanmer.
His mousy hair was now dyed a blatantly phony peroxide blond, but the original shade was still prominently on display because, astonishingly, Stinky had grown a full beard. A very full beard. It was the sort of beard that Gareth sported. But not as successful as Gareth’s.
Because this beard made Stinky look not like a Mormon Hipster but rather a rabbi engaged in a disastrous attempt to transform himself into a surfer dude. Amidst the beard and above it, the thick fishy lips and the preternaturally bulging eyes were unchanged. Now more than ever, Stinky was no one’s idea of a prepossessing physical specimen.
Yet, fame being what it is, he was apparently dating Maxine Shearwater.
Stinky’s beard shifted and those fish lips opened to reveal expensively white and even teeth in what was presumably supposed to be a smile. “Well met, wanderer!” he said, and moved his left arm in a strangely stiff circular gesture of greeting, as if he were holding an invisible rag with which he was wiping an invisible window.
“Stinky…” I said.
“Hello, mate,” said Stinky. “You feeling better? After the food poisoning?”
In the shock of seeing Stinky I had completely forgotten about the food-poisoning ruse. Suddenly I was at a loss for words as my mind whirled with alternatives. Should I fake stomach cramps, bending over and moaning? Or just alter my facial expression to one of pained, pale strain? The latter would be easy enough, given to whom I was talking.
But any need to shore up my cover story vanished because Stinky instantly forgot about my food poisoning, in fact forgot he’d even asked me the question as he moved briskly on to his favourite subject. Stinky Stanmer.
“We’re here on the island filming a documentary.”
“So I understand.”
“About Black Dog. You know, the band.”
“Yes, Stinky, I know who they are. In fact, I believe this entire enterprise is based on an original idea by yours truly.”
“Well, you do have the best ideas, bruv.” Stinky did the thing again that was meant to be a smile and stepped closer to me and clouted me lightly on the elbow. I think this was supposed to be a comradely slap on the shoulder, but he hadn’t quite mastered it yet. “You just lack follow through,” he said, and chuckled. “So that’s what we’re doing, me and my team. My film crew. We’re here following through. We shot some preliminary footage today and it looks great, great. You know, establishing shots and so forth. Local colour. And my researchers—they came here a few days early—”
“I know. One of them vamped Tinkler so she could find out what we were up to.”
“Vamped! I love your turn of phrase, mate. Love your turn of phrase. That would be Alicia, our sound recordist. You know what? She and Sydney—”
“Is Sydney the giantess?”
“Giantess? Ha ha ha. Well, yes, she is a bit on the tall side. But I like a tall girl. There’s more of her to love, if you know what I mean. She’s our camera operator.”
“She’s been hanging around outside,” I said. “Right there outside in the street. Just across the road from us. All day.”
“She’s scouting locations, bruv. Scouting locations. Busy girl. Very talented. She and Alicia got some great footage the other night. Of that beach barbecue. Your beach barbecue. For your mate Tinkler’s car. I mean, barbecuing a car! You’re mad, you lot. I heard about what happened, by the way.” Stinky suddenly put on his serious expression. It was not a pretty sight. “You’ve got to be careful, mate. You could have all got drowned. They could be fishing you out. That road to the island is dangerous, bruv. It’s under water several hours a day. But there’s a website with the times, and a sign down there. You’ve really got to check it before you go driving along there, mate. You could have died. So next time, check the times.”
I opened my mouth, getting ready to say all sorts of things. But it was just too much effort, and Stinky wasn’t interested in listening anyway, so I just said, “Good advice.”
“The best vice is good advice,” said Stinky, and barked with laughter. “We’re the advice squad. The good advice squad. No charge. Not for old friends. Free of charge. So, anyway, what were we saying? Oh, the filming. Yeah, it’s going great, bruv. And you know what we’re going to film tomorrow?”
“Your colonoscopy, perhaps?”
“Ha ha ha. Already been done, mate. Already been done. But not by me. Jonathan Ross, mate. No, we’re going to Pete Loretto’s house.”
That shut me up, very effectively. Perhaps Stinky took my silence for incomprehension, because he said, “He was the drummer with Black Dog.”
