Ian Sansom - The Case of the Missing Books

'I'm sure Linda'll square it with you.'

'Aye. Well, you may be, but I've had enough dealings with Linda Wei and the so-called council to know better. Expect nothin' off a pig but a grunt.'

'What?'

'I'll have my money now, thank you.'

'Well, I'll…' began Israel. 'I'll have to owe you then, I'm afraid. Can we sort it out tomorrow?'

'No, no,' laughed Ted. 'Don't you be getting cute with me.' He extended a huge open hand out of the window into the cold night air: he really had tremendous fists. 'I'm not as green as I'm cabbage-lookin'. Let's see the colour of your money, and I'll be on my way. They'll be paying you good wages at the council, unless I'm mistaken. You're not working for free, are ye?'

'No.'

'Aye, well, you want to watch 'em and make sure you're not.'

'OK.'

'So, the money?'

Israel dug into his suit and duffle coat pockets and handed over all his remaining cash: £22.76. Now he was skint.

'That'll do rightly,' said Ted, counting the money, before starting up his engine and heading out of the farmyard.

'Arsehole,' shouted Israel, in a last-minute mustering of rage and defiance as the car pulled off.

The car stopped immediately and started to reverse. Israel froze. Ted reversed neatly alongside Israel's craven, apologetic form. His window was wound down.

'Come again?'

'What?'

'Did you just say something?'

'Me? No, no.'

'I thought I heard you say something.'

'No.'

'You sure?'

'Yes.'

'Well, you forgot these,' said Ted, going to hand Israel his glasses out of the window.

'Right, thanks,' said Israel, relieved he wasn't going to be bundled into the boot of the car and his body dumped in a river. 'Great. Cheers.'

And as he leant down towards the window to take the glasses Ted grabbed him by the toggles on his duffle coat and pulled him close up to him.

'If you don't want your other eye to match the one you've got, you want to watch your mouth, eh.'

'Yes,' gasped Israel.

'I don't like auld dirty talk.'

'Right. Sorry.'

'This is a Christian country.'

'Right.'

'And you'd do well to remember that.'

'Right.'

And he let Israel go. 'There you are,' he said, handing him his glasses.

'Thanks,' mumbled Israel.

'See you tomorrow morning!' called Ted cheerily as he pulled off in the car, orange plastic bear illuminated. 'Nine o'clock. At the library.'

'Right,' said Israel. 'Great.'

The farmyard was deserted and dark.

George had disappeared.

And Israel's eye was swelling like a marrow in shit, and he stepped forward with his case and trod in something soft. He bent over to sniff it.

Oh, God.

It made no difference. He no longer cared.

And then he saw a light go on in a window on the dark far side of the farmyard, and he slipped and slid his way over.

A stable door opened into a whitewashed room and George was in there, wearing wellies, her high heels in one hand, a frozen choc-ice in the other; she held out the choc-ice towards Israel as he entered.

'No, thanks,' said Israel. 'I couldn't-'

'It's for your eye, you idiot. It's all we have.'

'Right. Thanks,' said Israel, pressing the choc-ice up to his face. 'Aaggh.'

'You bring the yard in with you?' said George, pointing at Israel's manured shoes and trousers.

'Yes. Sorry.'

George tutted and then went to leave the room.

'Look,' said Israel to her retreating self. 'I'm sorry we got off to a bad start. I mean, I'm from London. I've met lots of people with funny names-not that George is a funny name, of course. I mean, for a woman, it's-'

'It's late, Mr Armstrong.'

'Call me Ishmael-no-Israel,' he said, correcting himself.

She looked at him then with pity and stepped momentarily closer towards the light and Israel enjoyed his first proper one-eyed look at her. She was red-haired and bare-shouldered in her velvet evening dress, a dark green shawl slung over to keep her warm.

'I'll stick with Armstrong, thank you,' she said. 'This is you, then.'

'This is where I'm staying?'

'That's correct,' she said crisply. 'Goodnight.' And with that she shut the door, and was gone.

Israel stood and looked around him. At last he was home. His new start in Ireland. He sniffed. He thought he could smell something funny: fungus; straw; longstanding neglect; fresh paint; damp; and-what was that? He sniffed again.

It was chicken shit.

Israel had never before been woken by the sound of a cock. And certainly not by the sound of a cock in the same room, perched like the Owl of Minerva on the end of his bed.

His eye hurt. His head hurt. His back hurt. It'd be easier in fact to say what didn't hurt: his toes, they seemed fine, but that was because they were so cold he couldn't even feel his toes. He was just assuming his toes were fine. His nose, also. He felt for his nose-it was fine. But where were his glasses? He needed his glasses.

He was feeling around frantically for his glasses when the cock crowed again and started strutting boldly up the bed towards him. Any chickens he'd ever met before had tended to be already either safely roasted with their cavities loosely stuffed and their juices running clear, or well boiled in soups with carrot and onions, so this living, breathing, full-throated, fully feathered chicken was something of a shock to his already shell-shocked system. It looked bigger than the chickens he was familiar with: you certainly couldn't have fitted it comfortably into the average-sized roasting tin or casserole. Maybe it was the feathers that did it.

He tried shooing the fat clucking chicken by flapping his hands, but it wasn't until he wobbled his tired, cold, beaten body up out of bed and turned nasty, throwing stuff from his suitcase-books, mostly, including his hardback Brick Lane, which he'd lugged around for years, trying to wade through-that he managed to chase the damned thing to the door and escort it outside. In the end it was his paperback edition of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time that did the trick. He knew that'd come in useful one day.

Outside it was drizzling rain and whipping winds again, and there were lights on in some of the outbuildings around the farmyard, and the sound of unoiled machinery, and thrumping motors, and animal noises, and Israel peered at his watch and it was six o'clock in the morning: 6 a.m.

Oh, bloody hell.

Israel had never exactly been renowned as an early riser-it was always Gloria who'd been quickest off the starting block, showered and hair-washed and away to work by the time Israel had surfaced usually-and by his own calculation he had enjoyed only four hours' uninterrupted sleep during the past forty-eight hours, which was not good. Which was torture, in fact, probably, under the UN Convention of Human Rights-he could check that with Gloria.

He needed a lot of things right now: something good to eat, a bath, more Nurofen, a new job, a plane ticket out. But above all he needed more sleep. Lots more. Lashings of sleep.

He'd been so cold in the night that he'd got up and unpacked all his clothes from his old brown case and piled them in layers on top of himself, a kind of clothes sandwich, but that hadn't worked: the clothes had all just slid off, leaving him cold again, so in the end he'd got dressed again; shirt and jumper and his best brown corduroy suit, including the trousers ankle-deep in shit which he'd had to roll up past his knees, two pairs of socks, and the duffle coat to weigh him down. He'd used his pyjamas rolled up as a pillow-the pillow had got soaked through with melted choc-ice.

So now he was lying there again, fully dressed, warm and comfortably immobilised, and just beginning to drop off when he heard what sounded like an explosion outside.