Free The Day of the Jack Russell (Mystery Man) by Colin Bateman Page B

record button?’ Billy Randall leaned a little closer. ‘What I mean about the piper is, he who pays the piper calls the tune, capiche ?’
    ‘Technically, it’s capisce . . .’
    ‘Just . . .’
    ‘It’s important to . . .’
    ‘Listen to . . .’
    ‘Because misunderstand—’
    ‘QUIET. Listen to me. I am a very rich man. Rich men have enemies. I am being implicated in a double murder. I am innocent. And as the police are doing the implicating, I can’t run to them for help. I need you to find out who is really responsible for these murders. I need you to bring them to justice. That is what you do, right?’
    I looked at him. He was right. It was what I did.
    I had sworn never again to get involved in cases that were in any way dangerous, that even hinted at murder or violence. I would concentrate exclusively on safe little puzzles, almost like animated crosswords, where ultimately it didn’t matter if you solved them, but you got a nice little glow if you did. Something to while away a winter’s evening with one hand while mopping up your mother’s drool with the other. But here I was, within six weeks of that declaration, once again implicated in murder, and yet again through absolutely no fault of my own. Alison had hurled me into the maelstrom last time by insisting on breaking into the mysteriously shuttered detective agency next door and discovering the dead body of its owner; this time I had merely tried to track down a couple of vandals. Now I was going to have to find my own way out of it. If Billy Randall wanted to maintain the charade of me being his employee then that was fine with me, but I would be working to my own agenda.
    ‘I said, that is what you do, right?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I said . . . Do you by any chance have a short attention span?’
    ‘I was thinking about the case.’
    ‘Oh – I like that. You’ve got tunnel vision. I’m a bit like that with my business. You know, I think we’re quite alike.’
    Behind me, Alison snorted.
    ‘I think,’ he continued, ‘that once we set our mind to solving a problem, we don’t let anything stop us, we’re super-focused. That’s how I built my business, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let anyone take me down, and that’s what this is about: someone wants in, and the only way they think they can do that is by framing me for this, because they know they can’t beat me at business, I’ve got it all sewn up. So what do you say, are we a team?’
    He held out his pork fingers to me.
    I squeezed them again.
    ‘Sucker,’ said Alison, and we both turned to her. She made an elaborate show of tickling Jeff. ‘I am not a sucker,’ she giggled, ‘you’re the sucker!’ Jeff squirmed away as she attacked him again.
    Billy Randall shook his head. ‘Young love, eh?’

14
    Before I started the interrogation, I told him I’d need him to be completely honest, to answer each and every question without asking why, to show patience and courtesy, and most importantly, in order to get me back on track, he had to get me a caramel macchiato. He agreed to these conditions, except for a variation on the last, by which I mean he sent his bodyguard down to get it. Nobody tried to assassinate him while he was gone.
    I said, ‘So these guys, did you kill them?’
    ‘No, don’t be daft.’
    ‘But the police think you did. What did they say?’
    ‘They? Him . A DI Robinson. My solicitor says he’s a law unto himself. He says the other detectives have a nickname for him. They call him Mr Marple. He’s like a pernickety old woman. He said that when he entered there was blood everywhere, looked like a real slaughterhouse, but one thing that caught his eye was the computer, still switched on, with YouTube on the screen and paused on a video of my billboard being defaced. He said it didn’t take a genius to work out that the victims were responsible for the graffiti. I mean, Christ, that was enough to haul me in? If there’d been a video