Anyone familiar with Popeye Ducannon’s track record might have forecast what happened next.
As always, chaos, catastrophe, corpses, and blood on the forest floor.
And, equally as always, when the gunsmoke settles, Popeye pops up out of the forest with nothing worse than a couple of flesh wounds, a crease along the side of his skull, and a bad headache.
All this and more he tells his one surviving colleague, Jimmy Amis, known as Amity James because of the friendly way he has with him when blowing off your kneecaps.
And all this and more Amity tells us when we pick him up and shake several credit cards under several names out of his pockets and point out that having qualified for early release under the Good Friday Agreement does not disqualify him from early return under the common law.
The more he tells us is that Popeye heard Chiquillo, the other survivor, telling someone on his mobile that he’d be with them at somewhere called the CP in two to three hours.
If he made it, that was. For according to Popeye, Chiquillo had taken a hit.
More importantly to Popeye, he’d taken both the weaponry and the bagful of coke which was payment for it.
Having worked all his life in a twilight world of deceit and betrayal, Popeye isn’t much bothered by the whys and wherefores. All he wants is what he regards as his pension fund back. The only clue he has is what he knows about Chiquillo’s negotiator. This, together with what the Cojos know about Chiquillo himself, might well lead them to both the man and the arms.
Alliances with Jorge Casaravilla are notoriously dangerous.
But so are alliances with Popeye Ducannon!
The last thing he said to Amity James was, ‘I’m just off to see a man about a dog. Or maybe it’s a dog about a man. Mind the shop while I’m gone, will you?’
Since then, absolute silence.
Except in our work as in nature there is no such thing.
Have you heard that silence where the birds are dead, yet something pipeth like a bird?
There’s always something piping.
And here I sit, Sibyl in her lonely cave, recording and replaying till finally I recognize the tune.
Piper, pipe that song again!
They’re still here, that’s what my sensors tell me and that’s what Gaw wants to hear, those arms and the man who stole them, and the drug fortune he didn’t pay for them, all still here hidden away somewhere connected with something contracted to CP. What does my Word Search give me?
Canadian Pacific? It’s a long way round to Colombia!
Cape Province? As above only more so.
Central Park? Worth checking which northern cities have a Central Park.
C.P. Snow? Does anyone still read him, I wonder.
Chelsea pensioner? At least it’s vaguely military.
Command post? So’s this. Right place for arms, I suppose.
Common prostitute? Hardly.
Communist Party? An office? Do they still have offices since glasnost?
Perhaps it was sea followed by something beginning with P?
Or maybe it was Spanish. Si pez? Yes fish. Si pie? Yes foot.
You’re getting silly, girl.
Face it, you’re not expected to work things out, just sit here and feed things in.
While the great giant Gaw is striding around out there, making sure he doesn’t tell anyone, including me, more than they need to know.
Oh, there are things you need to know, Gaw, and one day soon I look forward to telling you them. Then perhaps you’ll realize that walking over people is not a vocation for a true man, or even a grotesque imitation of one.
I’m Popeye the pop-up man
Let them hit me as hard as they can
I’ll be here at the finish
’Cos I eat up my spinach
I’m Popeye, the pop-up man!
ix
bag lady on a bike
Shirley Novello lay back in the front seat of her Fiat Uno.
Well, maybe lay back was stretching it a bit, which was more than even a medium-sized woman like herself could comfortably manage in such a small car. At least she could drive it comfortably, which longer legs would have made difficult. Mind you, a bit of discomfort would have been a cheap price to pay for longer legs. She looked down at hers with a critical eye. Even with ninety-five per cent of them visible as they emerged from a leather skirt hardly broader than a lumberjack’s belt, they couldn’t be termed long. What they could be termed was muscular. And what the hell was wrong with muscular? Muscularity was a quality she greatly admired in men. She found it a turn-on, and saw no reason to bother with people who didn’t return the compliment. Anyway, above the waist she could compete with anyone, she thought complacently, raising her eyes to the straining buttons of her sun top. Not many of those in a kilo ho ho, as the wet wankers in the canteen would say if they ever got wind of the battened-down bounty lurking beneath the sack-like muddy-brown T-shirts she favoured at work. These, plus a matching selection of baggy trousers, had dampened down awareness of her as a woman to the point where the sexist cracks were conventional rather than focused. A cop-out? Not really. A cop-in, more like it; meaning you sussed out the best way to permit yourself to function most efficiently as a cop. Like Sergeant Wield. There were still plenty of mutt-headed myopes around the station who didn’t realize he was gay, and were ready to give you an argument about it. How could anyone who looked like him and talked like him and put the fear of God into you like him be gay? Stands to reason. Wankers!
It was because of Wield that she was here on duty now, dressed in play gear rather than her workaday drabs. She’d been clocking off at four when he’d grabbed her.
‘Shirley, I need a body to spell Seymour watching Mrs Pascoe. Any chance?’
At least he framed it as a question.
She said, ‘Sarge, I’ve got plans for tonight that it’ll cost hearts to break. I can give you till eight if that’s any good.’
‘That’ll do fine. Thanks,’ he’d said.
So he was grateful which was nice. But was he trustworthy? She was due to meet a new boyfriend at a new club, both of which she had high hopes of, at eight thirty. Thirty minutes wasn’t much to get home and changed in even if her relief turned up on time. So, working on the principle that she wasn’t going to be under the gaze of the station neanderthals, she’d come on duty dressed for partying.
Privately she thought this watch on the Pascoe house was overkill. Chummy, who was probably this lad Roote, wasn’t likely to come back for a third go. She’d dug up the case file and he sounded a real nut. It had been back when Pascoe was still an unmarried sergeant and La Pascoe was teaching at a college where the Principal had been topped. Roote had evidently assaulted both Pascoe and the Fat Man, breaking a bottle of Scotch over the latter’s head. Just went to show there was good even in the worst of us! So, bang him up and fix for a patrol car to crawl past maison Pascoe every couple of hours!
Still, overtime was overtime. She turned on Radio One full blast and settled back to fantasize about the muscular young man who was her escort that night.
Then, just before seven, she saw the bag lady.
She was on a bicycle, but she was undoubtedly a bag lady. There were three plastic carriers dangling from the handlebars