Dr. Yes Read online

  Dr. Yes

  Colin Bateman

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  Copyright © 2010 Colin Bateman

  The right of Colin Bateman to be identified as the Author of

  the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 2010 by

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  1

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication

  may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any

  means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case

  of reprographic production, in accordance with the

  terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9 780 7553 7859 3 (Hardback)

  ISBN 9 780 7553 7860 9 (Trade paperback)

  Typeset in Meridien by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays, Chatham ME 5 8TD

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

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  For Andrea and Matthew

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  * * *

  Chapter 1

  It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.

  Spring was in the air, which was depressing enough, what with pollen, and bees, and bats, but my on/off girlfriend was also making my life miserable because of her pregnancy, which she continued to accuse me of being responsible for, despite repeatedly failing to produce DNA evidence. She whined and she moaned and she criticised. It was all part of a bizarre attempt to make me a better man. Meanwhile she seemed content to pile on the beef. She now had a small double chin, which she blamed on her condition and I blamed on Maltesers. There was clearly no future for us. In other news, the great reading public of Belfast continued to embrace the internet for their purchases rather than No Alibis, this city's finest mystery bookshop, while my part-time criminal investigations, which might have been relied upon to provide a little light relief, had recently taken a sordid turn, leaving a rather unpleasant taste in the mouth, although some of that may have been Pot Noodle.

  I will not detain you with the details of the Case of the Seductive Sweets, other than to say that it had started out as something which, while undoubtedly distressing for the family, was still apparently quite innocuous, at least until I became involved. A thirteen-year-old boy's life at a local secondary school was being made hell because someone had written this graffiti legend about him on a toilet wall:

  Mark Bruce will bum for dolly mixtures.

  The school immediately had it removed, but it kept reappearing in different locations. Schools are notorious for either covering things up or seeking internal solutions, but it was taken out of their hands when a local confectionery wholesaler, aware that children had taken to asking for 'a packet of Bruce' rather than dolly mixtures in local shops, and who had cornered the market in this generic brand, grew concerned that lasting and permanent damage might be caused to his business. He was undoubtedly aware of my recent successful history in tracking down graffiti artists, as detailed in the Case of the Cock-Headed Man and the Case of the Fruit on the Flyover, and so I was engaged to track down the culprit. This was not difficult. Children are notorious little squealers. When just the right amount of pressure was applied, they wasted no time in pointing their grubby little fingers at another thirteen-year-old boy, who, as it turned out, had undertaken his malicious campaign not merely for the purposes of bullying or for reasons of innate badness, but because of jealousy and for revenge. His voice had recently broken, and the affections visited upon him by one of his teachers had rapidly shifted to his higher- pitched classmate. Thus I exposed a thirty-five-year-old geography teacher, metaphorically speaking, and it is safe to say that he will never work in this town again, though he has accepted a position south of the border. However, the confectionery wholesaler was not at all amused by my revelations, fearing that they would be plastered all over the newspapers and internet if the case came to court, thus bringing his confectionery in for further ridicule, and he refused point blank to pay me. In fact, I have my suspicions that he actually helped the teacher flee this jurisdiction. They were, fundamentally, very different people, but like the Japanese and Nazi axis of evil during World War II, at the end of the day they enjoyed a common purpose, in their case, the corruption of children, and I suppose it was inevitable that they should suppress their mutual distrust and dislike in order to further their cause.

  On this spring day, with not a sniff of a customer, I sat around the counter with Alison, my expectant girlfriend and seller of bangles, and Jeff, my part- time book-stacker, Amnesty International apologist and conspiracy-theory devotee, debating crime and punishment. The secondary-school paedophile had indeed fled the country one step ahead of the law, but we were trying to decide what would have been an appropriate punishment had he been apprehended in time. We had already dismissed the usual suspects - counselling and chemical castration - and moved on to actual physical violence involving metallic objects that had to be swung.

  'A claw hammer,' was Alison's suggestion. She pointed at her forehead, the side of her skull, and her nose, and said, 'Here, here and here.'

  I disagreed. There were better hammers. I proposed a sledgehammer, or a jackhammer, or a steam hammer, or a trip hammer, or a ball-peen hammer used in metal work; a gavel would probably be quite appropriate, or a blacksmith's dog-head hammer could certainly do some damage. It really depended what kind of injury you wanted to inflict. I explained that the amount of energy delivered to the target area by the hammer blow is equivalent to one half of the mass of the head times the square of the head's speed at the time of the impact. The formula for this is:

  Alison and Jeff looked at me for a little bit, then Jeff said, 'Anyway, I think a much better punishment would be to glue steaks to him, and then throw him into shark-infested waters.'

  'Steak's too expensive,' Alison said admirably quickly, which boded well for the future. 'You'd be better off with stewing steak,' she said. 'Or mince. Mince is relatively cheap.'

  'You might have difficulty actually securing the mince to his body,' Jeff pointed out. 'You would have to keep it in its original packaging, you know, with the Styrofoam base and the cellophane. But then how would the sharks smell
it?'

  'Some blood would leak out,' said Alison. 'It always leaks out in my fridge.'

  'Maybe they wouldn't be attracted to it. Maybe sharks only like human blood. They might not like cow blood. I mean, has a shark ever eaten a cow?'

  They both looked at me, the fount of all knowledge.

  'They've probably eaten a sea cow,' I said.

  'Can you milk a sea cow?' Jeff asked.

  'Would the milk be salty?' Alison asked.

  'They're not like our cows,' I said, although I suspected they probably knew that. 'They're more like seals.'

  'Can you milk a seal?' Jeff asked.

  'That's how they feed their young,' I said.

  'Once they hatch,' said Alison.

  'We're getting off topic here,' I said.

  They both nodded.

  'Okay,' said Jeff. 'Have we agreed that we can tape a paedophile to a seal and then release him in shark- infested waters?'

  Alison pointed out that you would have to catch the seal first. 'I suppose you could get one from a circus or like a water park. A performing seal. He could keep a ball up with his nose. He could put on a bit of a show to attract the shark, because maybe not enough blood would have trickled out of the mince, and even if it did, it could be carried away by the tides and currents.'

  I summed up. 'So we're taping the mince to the paedophile, and taping the paedophile to the seal?' Alison and Jeff both nodded enthusiastically. I smiled. The flaw in their logic was obvious. 'If this is designed to be a punishment for the paedophile, and you've taped the mince to him and secured him to the performing seal and released the performing seal in shark-infested waters, don't you think the paedophile will have drowned long before the shark hears about the performance, watches the show, and then gets to tear both the paedophile and the seal to shreds? Doesn't it seem like an awful lot of trouble to go to if he's going to drown in less than a minute?'

  Alison looked rather crestfallen. Jeff was going the same way, but he suddenly brightened. 'You're forgetting - the seal, and the paedophile, they could quite easily be caught in nets.'

  'What, by fishermen, you mean? How would that ... ?'

  'No, no, no - Atlanteans.'

  'Right. Atlanteans. They would be the ...'

  'People of Atlantis. If the Atlanteans spotted a man taped to a seal, they'd want to rescue him. They'd think we were being quite barbaric, taping mince to a man and securing him to a seal and releasing him in shark-infested waters. They already hate us for pollution and dragnet fishing; this would just reinforce their negative opinions of us.'

  'They might have negative opinions,' said Alison. 'It doesn't mean they're going to condone paedophilia.'

  'Maybe Atlanteans have no laws against it,' said Jeff. 'Maybe they're quite liberal, like the Dutch. Besides, they wouldn't know he was a paedophile; he's hardly going to confess, even after he's learned Atlantean. He'll probably tell them he was the victim of a travesty of justice, like the Birmingham Six and anybody from Guildford.'

  'Is Amnesty International protecting paedophiles now?' I asked.

  'No, I'm only making the point that he's not going to tell them what he has or hasn't done.'

  'We would have to brief the seal,' said Alison. 'She could tell them.'

  'She?'

  'Absolutely, you'd need a sex you could depend on. And the Atlanteans have lived underwater so long they probably converse with the sea creatures.'

  'Yeah, the way we converse with cows?'

  'Land cows?' asked Jeff.

  The possibility of a customer to interrupt proceedings was remote, so it could have dragged on for ever. Fortunately it was at precisely this point in our discussion that I was distracted by a figure walking past the

  No Alibis front window. In truth I could equally have been distracted by a fly or a dust mite, such was the level of our conversation, but in this instance, even though I only had the briefest glimpse of him, there was something familiar, and yet unfamiliar, about his face, and gait. For several moments I struggled to place him, but then suddenly the penny dropped, the cash register opened, and I was out of the door and after him.

  Now, looking back, after all the trouble that followed, I know that I shouldn't have moved a muscle, that I should have let him go, and then I would never have become involved in what became my most difficult and distressing investigation to date, the Case of the Pearl Necklace, a case that would ultimately put Jeff's life, my girlfriend's life, her unborn baby's life and, much more importantly, my own life on the line.

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  Chapter 2

  I have never in my whole life actually physically pursued a case, because any kind of activity requiring increased motor function is something I have to be wary of, but I could hardly help myself. Of course I didn't know it was a case then. Then it was just a man walking past my window - but what a man! You see, in my field of crime fiction, Augustine Wogan was an enigma, a myth wrapped up in a legend, a barely published novelist and screenwriter who was known to so few that they didn't even qualify as a cult following, it was more like stalking. He was, nevertheless, Belfast's sole contribution to the immortals of the crime-writing genre. His reputation rested on three novels self-published in the late 1970s, novels so tough, so real, so heartbreaking that they blew every other book that tried to deal with what was going on over here right out of the water. Until then, novels about the Troubles had invariably been written by visiting mainland journalists, who perhaps got most of their facts right, but never quite captured the atmosphere or the sarcasm. Augustine Wogan's novels were so on the ball that he was picked up by the RUC and questioned because they thought he had inside information about their shoot-to-kill policy; shot at by the IRA because they believed he had wrung secrets out of a drunken quartermaster; and beaten up by the UVF because they had nothing better to do. He had been forced to flee the country, and although he had returned since, he had never, at least as far as I was aware, settled here again. I occasionally picked up snippets of information about him from other crime- writing aficionados, the latest being that he had been employed to write the screenplay for the next James Bond movie, Titter of Wit, but had been fired for drunkenness. There was always a rumour of a new novel, of him being signed up by a big publisher or enthusiastic agent, but nothing ever appeared in print. The books that made up the Barbed-Wire Love trilogy were never republished. They are rarer than hen's teeth. I regarded the box of them I kept upstairs as my retirement fund. In those few moments when I saw him pass the shop, I knew that if I could just persuade him to sign them, their value would be instantly quadrupled. They say money is at the root of all evil, but I have to be pragmatic. I am devoted to crime fiction, but I am also devoted to eating, and Augustine Wogan was just the meal ticket I was looking for.

  By the time I caught up with him, I was gasping for breath. It was only twenty yards, but if God had intended me to be a long-distance athlete, he wouldn't have given me a collapsed lung and rickets.

  'Mr Wogan?'

  He stopped, he turned. It was indisputably Augustine Wogan, though he had dropped a hundred pounds and lost several chins since we had last spoken. He was gaunt now; he looked twenty years older when it should only have been five; he wore a long, thin beard and clasped a leather briefcase to his chest with a defiance that made him look as if he'd taken a job amongst the Hasidic Jew diamond-sellers of Antwerp and run off with the merchandise.

  'What?'

  Irritated, distracted, paranoid.

  That's just me, so it's always nice to meet a brother in self-harm. You can tell. It's in the eyes. I'm good with eyes. I had recently been unmasked as a charlatan by the Support Group for People Depressed Because They Have Been Rejected by their Cornea Transplants. I kept telling them that I was seeing ghostly images of murder victims during those brief weeks before rejection set in, and that the dead man's eyes I wore were those of a killer. But they refused to believe me, mostly because the paperwork showed they had belonged to a traffic warden from Sion Mil
ls. It was a small group, but torn by power struggles. Not so much a case of the blind leading the blind as the hazy leading the indistinct. As it turned out, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man truly was king, and he had me out on my arse.

  'What do you want?'

  I had drifted. I shook myself. 'Mr Wogan, it's me . . .' I turned and pointed back at the shop. 'From No Alibis? You did a reading about five years ago?'

  'What of it?'

  He was glaring at me.

  'Sorry - I didn't realise you were in a rush.'

  'Why not? Wasn't I rushing?'

  'Yes, you were, but ...'

  'What do you want?'

  'I was hoping you might sign some—'

  He was all set to growl something else at me, and I was all set to sink to a new, lower level of grovel, when there was a little ping off to his left, nothing more than the tiniest piece of gravel rebounding off a car windscreen, but by his reaction, ducking down and scurrying towards me for protection, you would have thought, and he clearly did, that someone had taken a shot at him. It was not a shot. Or if it was, Action Man was on the loose. But for the purposes of getting what I wanted, I was quite prepared to accept that it was a gunshot, and I quickly ushered him towards the safety of Belfast's leading crime emporium.

  To their eternal discredit, Alison and Jeff were still discussing the taping of mince to a paedophile and the paedophile to what had now become a dolphin - without apparently noticing that I had left the building. They certainly noticed my return, but only because I was bustling a terrified-looking Rasputin through the door and ordering Alison to get him a chair.

  Alison blinked at me.

  I next ordered Jeff, who, being an employee, of sorts, was much more compliant.

  'Have a seat, have a seat,' I said as Jeff put it in place.