‘Superintendent Jeffries seemed to think it was worthwhile, sir.’
‘Well, maybe that’s why Superintendent Jeffries is gone and I’m here,’ said Clyde sharply. ‘That case was a bloody embarrassment to the force, to be frank. From beginning to bloody end.’ He sighed, then went on more kindly, ‘The trouble with the Evans case, John, is that you want it too much.’
Marvel stared at him in mute wonder.
The fucking idiot.
How could you want to solve a murder too much? It would be like being too keen on world peace; too anti-cancer.
He suddenly knew he wasn’t dealing with a reasoned argument, so he stopped and reassessed the situation.
Superintendent Clyde was a prick. A lamb-scented prick with a fat wife, a gay dog and a bull’s cock on his living-room wall.
But Marvel wanted back on the Edie Evans case, and he still wanted that promotion. And he needed Clyde on his side on both counts.
The Mitzi strategy had gone wrong on him but there was still leverage in the matter of the reward – whatever Robert Clyde said. When the kid who’d brought the dog home finally came back for his money, Marvel would be all over him like acne. He’d show the super that when he was given a job to do, he finished it and got results.
So, although it churned him up inside, he backed down. ‘Maybe you’re right, sir.’
Clyde looked somewhat mollified. ‘Good man,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘That’s the spirit.’
Arsehole, thought Marvel.
Screw Superintendent Clyde. If he couldn’t do it with his superior’s support, he’d do it alone. He’d ask some questions. Get some answers.
Be a bloody detective!
He couldn’t wait to see Clyde’s face when he unravelled the Mitzi Clyde scam – and handed him back his thousand pounds for good measure. And when he’d done that – then they’d be back in business on the Edie Evans case.
Psychic or no bloody psychic.
32
ANG WAS CRYING in the kitchen and putting all his worldly goods into a carrier bag.
‘Hi,’ said James.
‘Hi,’ Ang said through his tears. He cried in long, monotonous strings of sound, not unlike his singing.
‘What’s wrong?’ said James.
‘I’s fired,’ he wept. ‘To China.’ He rolled up his mother’s story cloth and tucked it carefully between half a pack of Penguin biscuits and his Goal aftershave.
‘For peanuts?’ said James cautiously. Maybe Brian Pigeon had changed his mind and decided to cut Ang in on the whole getting fired thing.
But Ang just shook his head and carried on keening.
James went to find Brian. It wasn’t hard – he was standing under a VW Beetle, shouting at someone on the phone about the old pit and the new lift.
James laid out his tools and waited for him to finish.
When he had, Brian snapped his phone shut and shouted, ‘What?’
‘Did you fire Ang?’
‘No!’ he yelled. ‘Jesus Christ!’
James ignored the yelling. It was Brian’s default. Once you ignored it, it usually went away. ‘He thinks you fired him and he’s going back to China.’
Brian laughed and waggled his phone. ‘Well, I might have said I was calling immigration.’
James pursed his lips. He caught Pavel’s eye and Pavel shrugged as if it didn’t matter to him one way or the other.
‘He’s packing his stuff,’ said James.
‘Let him! What a little drama queen.’
‘He’s crying.’
‘Good!’ said Brian. ‘I’m the one who should be crying. He bumped the bloody Alfa.’
James glanced across the garage at Brian’s green Alfa T-Spark. ‘Shit,’ he said.
Ang’s first job every morning was to move the cars out of the garage and on to the forecourt, so there was space to work. But he had to sit on a cushion to see over the dashboard, and James knew he couldn’t possibly have passed his test, given that he was an illegal immigrant. And Brian knew those things too, so James’s sympathy was not with him, even though this was not the first car Ang had bumped, and was unlikely to be the last.
‘Expensive?’ he asked.
‘Nah,’ said Brian. ‘It’s a scrape. But I’m not made of bloody money and Nicole wants to go to Prague for Christmas.’
‘Very beautiful,’ said Pavel.
Brian looked at him. ‘You what?’
‘Prague is very beautiful,’ shrugged Pavel. ‘But everybody steal.’
‘Oh, fucking great. Just what I need. More foreigners with their hands in my pockets.’
‘If it’s just a scrape,’ said James irritably, ‘why scare the shit out of him over it?’
Brian rounded on him. ‘Don’t you start! This is my garage, and if you don’t like the way I run it you can piss off and find another job, and another place to live too!’
James didn’t answer him. He just turned and headed back towards the kitchen to explain things to Ang.
‘Don’t you bloody mollycoddle him!’ yelled Brian. ‘He’s a grown man!’
33
OFFICIALLY, MARVEL WAS back on the Tanzi Anderson case. He’d asked to review the file to bring himself up to speed, and did just that – while he sat in Jimmy the Fix’s BMW and watched Robert Clyde’s house.
It was three days before the boy who’d found Mitzi came back for his money.
He was a thin white boy, with neat brown hair. He was wearing jeans, big white trainers and a Spurs shirt. Marvel was a West Ham fan, but that wasn’t the only reason his suspicions were raised. The boy looked about thirteen or fourteen – certainly young enough to be accompanied by a parent in the matter of a thousand pounds, if he really had been denied a legitimate reward.
But this boy was alone.
He went up to the door and knocked on it and Marvel slid lower in his seat, although he was across a road that was cluttered and narrowed by parked cars.
Clyde himself opened the door. Even from here Marvel could hear Mitzi yapping.