by John Bayliss
There is an unwritten law in the world of private detection: the most dangerous of adversaries always arrive in the most innocent of packages. Think distressed damsel that transmogrifies herself into psychotic avenging angel, or poor little rich girl that consequently reveals herself to be the queen of the femmes fatales, and you'll know exactly what I mean. All things considered, of course, I should have been well aware of this - and I suppose if I had been then I would have been better prepared - but as I had already made up my mind that this job was going to be nothing more taxing than just a simple 'collect and deliver a package' type of errand, I suppose that must have allowed my guard to slip a bit. Well, that's my excuse, anyway; if you want to believe it then that's up to you.
The most innocent of packages in this case manifested itself in the form of a sixteen year old girl. She answered to the name of Emma and appeared perfectly harmless on the outside - dressed in blue denim on the bottom half and red cotton on the top half and with a pack slung across her back that bore an uncanny resemblance to a squashed sheep. When I first saw her, she was wearing that juvenile sensory deprivation device commonly referred to as a Walkman, and she was also energetically chewing gum. As far as I recall, there were no signs saying 'Warning! Approach Only with Extreme Caution!' though there damn well ought to have been.
'So where's Daddy?' Emma said, once I'd finally persuaded her to remove the Walkman's headphones and had obtained a positive identification that this indeed was the package I had been sent to collect.
'He can't come. He's too busy. He sent me instead.'
She eyes me up and down with this suspicious look and appears not to come to any encouraging conclusion.
'So who are you?' she asks.
'The name's Stringer,' I reply in a friendly tone of voice. I offer a hand to shake, but she doesn't take it. In fact, she eyes it with a certain amount of suspicion. 'I do… er, a few odd jobs for your father.'
The incredulous look on her face was a picture. 'You're the odd job man?' she said.
That's not quite the job title I would have given myself, but I suppose that in an extremely broad sense of the term then, yes, 'odd job man' was a pretty good description of what Charlie Kingdom employed me to do. Not that he did actually employ me, as such; not in the conventional signed job contract sense of the word, and any money that I received for services rendered tended to be a bundle of notes, sometimes (though not always) in a brown paper envelope. I am still very much a freelance; it was just of late that Charlie Kingdom tended to give me more work than most.
'Actually, I'm a private detective,' I explained, convinced that this revelation might bring forth at least a modicum of respect from the girl. It didn't; instead it brought forth a evil little laugh. Admittedly the laugh did appear to be involuntary, but it was still enough to get my hackles up.
'How do I know if Daddy really sent you to meet me?' she said. 'You could just be a cruising pervert, preying on any lone teenage girl that happens to take your fancy.'
'Would a pervert know your name and be expecting to meet you here?' I said.
She pondered this for a moment. 'Maybe,' she said. 'A particularly clever pervert might.'
I could sense already that she'd be capable of extending this particular line of argument into something that was theoretically inexhaustible, so I changed the subject. 'Is this your case?' I said, pointing at a trunk that would have been perfect for the purpose of disposing of a very large body, if that's what you wanted to do. Indeed, this case was big enough to cope with an eighteen stone man and you wouldn't have needed to cut him up first.
She did not want to talk about luggage. 'You try anything,' she said, 'and I'll scream. I can scream a hundred and twelve decibels, easy. I know, because we tried it with the decibel meter in the physics lab at school. A hundred and twelve's enough to burst an eardrum at close range, so if you don't want blood pouring from your ear, I'd keep your distance, if I were you.'
'Yeah, I'll, er… remember that. Shall we find a taxi?'
'Taxi? So where's Daddy's Jaguar?'
'Your father's using it. Like I said, he's had to go and see someone.'
'So he'd rather go and see this someone instead of meeting me from the train?' There was this accusatory tone to her voice that was getting very hard to ignore.
'It's business,' I explained.
Considering who her father was, I assumed she would understand that perfectly; but Emma simply responded with a wordless sound that, if it had emerged from the lips of some prehistoric proto-humanoid on the plains of Africa, might have been interpreted as a promising first attempt at communication. She was, sadly, about five million years too late.
I imagine that you've already worked it out for yourself, but just in case you haven't, I ought to mention that the foregoing frank exchange of views took place on platform 2 of the Paradise Junction railway station. The time was two fifteen in the afternoon - though that's by the station clock so if you want to believe it, it's up to you. I had arrived just as Emma's train was departing (the train obviously had no intention of sticking around in this neighbourhood for any longer than strictly necessary) and my way had been blocked, momentarily, by a stream of Emma's fellow passengers filing out through the exit barriers. They all bore the expression of people who would rather be somewhere else.
The name of the station, you see, conjures up completely the wrong image. There is nothing even vaguely paradisiacal about the station, or the railway junction, or the community that it purports to serve. Even the word 'Junction' is a misnomer, ever since the closure of the branch line that used to intersect with the main line nearby. So what about: 'Minor Halt Serving a Deprived and Neglected Inner City Area?' Only a name like that could truly satisfy someone with a literal turn of mind like mine.
That doesn't detract from the fact that the place really is called Paradise. The people who live here just treat the name as being one very sick joke; one that they would much prefer not be reminded of, thank you very much.
Anyway, none of this is exactly relevant at the moment. I had succeeded in the first part of my mission by making contact with the person I had been sent to collect; the next step was to get Emma and her luggage to their ultimate destination. Emma was the easier half of the problem, as she at least was able to move under her own volition. All I needed to do was give her adequate instructions.
The luggage, however, was less cooperative. For one thing it weighed enough to suggest that it really might contain a body, and Paradise Junction being a railway station under the current regime, there were, naturally, no porters available and neither was there anything on wheels that could conceivably be utilised as a trolley. That left me to manhandle the trunk as best I could through the exit barriers and towards the taxi rank. Emma's sole contribution to the exercise was to tell me repeatedly to be more careful.
Being the last people to leave the station, it came as no surprise to discover that there were no taxis left in the taxi rank. So we had to wait until one condescended to return. While we waited, I felt obliged to make some sort of an attempt at conversation. It was not long before I began to wish that I hadn't bothered.
'So,' I said, 'you've just got back from boarding school, have you?'
She sighed, deeply, as if to answer such a banal question was far beneath her dignity.
'Good school is it?'
'S'okay.'
'Happy to be on holiday now, though, I suppose?'
'I'd rather be going to Ibiza.'
After a brief glance around me, I could certainly understand that sentiment.
'I'd rather be staying with Mummy,' she added. There was slightly wistful tone to her voice this time, as if I had finally caught a glimpse of the real Emma beneath all the layers of teenage dissembling. Curiosity got the better of me. 'So why can't you stay with your mother?'
'Not her turn, is it?' And then, in case I hadn't understood, she added: 'They're supposed to take turns having me, otherwise Daddy gets angry and threatens to take her to court again.'
'Oh, I see,' I said.
Then, after a long, suspense filled pause, she added solemnly: 'I hate being sixteen.'
'Oh, it's not too terrible being sixteen,' I said. 'I was sixteen once. I was pretty pissed off with it at the time, I can tell you, but looking back at it, wasn't that bad. Now, you know how in any group of youngsters there's always one that always gets picked on, always teased, always made the butt of their jokes. Well, that particular kid was me. But it wasn't very long before I was grown up and all that was behind me. It didn't do me any harm in the long run, either. I mean, it didn't leave any permanent scars or anything.'
From the withering look she was giving me I decided that a change of subject was in order.
'Have you decided what you're going to be when you grow up?' She gave me a cold, solemn stare of the type that probably originally inspired the invention of laser guided weaponry. 'Rich,' she replied, swirling the syllable around her mouth and then projecting it at me like a particularly sticky gob of spittle.
And that was pretty well as far as the conversation went.
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© 2002 John Bayliss. All rights reserved.