The following night, Susan decided she’d had enough of trying to make connections between obscure historical events and even more obscure art-historical non-events, and besides, if she had to put up with Paul moping around the house, getting alternately angry and depressed about losing his job, she felt she was going to scream. So they decided to go to the pub, where a band that a friend of one of Susan’s friends was playing, and have a night off.
The Oily Moon, a large building which wrapped itself in a dilapidated way round the corner of one of the main roads going into Eastwestchester, didn’t look like much from the outside, and that’s the way it liked it. There was a sign outside proclaiming Hot Food Served Cold Daily, and occasionally a couple of people standing outside buying heroin from each other, but otherwise it was fairly featureless. The original sign, which depicted the moon melting into a pond at night-time, and which according to local legend had been painted by Salvador Dali, had been stolen so many times that the landlord had given up bothering to try and get it back, and was currently (although hardly anybody knew this) hanging on the bedroom wall of Klimm Tangweiler, 26, an unemployed German techno artist who lived in one of the blocks of flats near the Moon and who’d thought it would be a good way to add some visual interest to his otherwise stark and empty room. Three months after all this had blown over with Susan and the cabinets and Opocapopopoulos’s house and everything, the police conducted a raid on the wrong flat, mistakenly battering in Tangweiler’s door with five feet of solid metal ramrod. They didn’t find the kilos of crack they were after, but the return of the Oily Moon’s sign was celebrated halfheartedly by its regulars, and typed into a police report where it was never read about again, but contributed to a small overall reduction in the local crime rate.
Inside the Moon, chaotic students mingled with builders, local office workers and everyone in between, although to be fair it was mainly chaotic students. There were four bands playing that night, one of which Susan knew about and the other three of which might be crap, but you never know, and it’s only £4 with a flyer (which someone was helpfully handing out as they came in) so you can’t lose really. Paul offered to buy her a drink while she went to the loo, and while he was waiting at the bar he suddenly caught sight of someone he was sure he knew. He stared harder at the man, trying to place him, but couldn’t. As Susan rejoined him, pushing her way through the throngs of people watching some football on a big screen, he pointed the man out. “Who’s that?”
Susan looked at him. “I think that’s Filimore Thimble,” she said. “It must be. I recognise him from the sketch you drew of the artist’s impression you saw on that website.”
“That’s who it is,” Paul said urgently. “I knew I knew his face. Let’s see if we can get him drunk and see what we can find out about him.”
“Careful,” Susan said. “Probably best not to get him too drunk too early. He’ll definitely be with other people, and you don’t want him remembering you.”
“No, good point,” Paul replied, and studied Thimble again as he turned away from the bar carrying a tray of pints. “Looks like he’s either with three other people, or he’s ragingly thirsty.”
They ordered drinks, and found somewhere they could perch and watch Thimble unobtrusively. He was out for the night, it appeared, as he showed no signs of going anywhere. A plate of nachos was delivered to their table, which the four of them tucked into enthusiastically, and then one of them went to get another round of drinks in.
“Who’s winning?” Susan asked him, indicating the football, to pass the time.
Paul glanced up. “I’ve got no idea,” he said. “You know as well as I do that I don’t know anything about football. You’d be better off asking me who’s winning the baseball.”
“There isn’t any baseball.”
“Exactly.”
Susan glanced at her watch. “Do you want to come and see some bands,” she asked, “or are you going to sit here all night?”
“I’m kind of fascinated to see what those guys do,” Paul said. “Aren’t you? I don’t want them to leave.”
Susan shrugged. “To be honest,” she admitted, “I’m not all that bothered. I thought we came out here to unwind, not to start following people like we were in some kind of film noir.”
“Look,” Paul said, “you go. I’m not sure I can justify spending four pounds on a bunch of shit bands, when I’ve just lost my job.”
“Are you joking? That’s the best reason to spend four pounds on a bunch of shit bands. Look, I need a night off… if you’re happy here, I’ll go in.”
Paul nodded, and sipped his pint as she disappeared towards the door to the back of the pub where bands played in a darkened, skanky room with sweaty walls that seemed to throb. He kept half an eye on the football, because even a TV that’s showing something you have no interest in is better than being sat on your own in a pub appearing to stare at everyone else, but his mind was elsewhere, a whirl of contradictory thoughts and odd clues that didn’t add up. Why had Susan been left a hugely valuable piece of furniture, and why was she being asked to destroy it? What dark secrets could Filimore Thimble fill him in on, and was evidence gathered when you were both drunk legally binding? Why had the paper said that Opocapopopoulos had been discovered in clothes he hadn’t even been wearing at the time he was killed, four days beforehand? Why was this woman Meredith so intent on finding the basement to the mansion, and what did she think she’d find down there?
Was Opocapopopoulos really dead? This one sent a chill down his spine. Surely, surely, he must be. If he wasn’t, who was the body that Dodecahedrus Grunt had found, which presumably had been formally identified by… whom? If Opocapopopoulos lived as a recluse, had cut himself off from his family, and at the time of his death hadn’t had a significant other who would have been able to identify his body, who had the police turned to – sorry, to whom had the police turned, he corrected himself – for identification? Was this whle thing a massive conspiracy involving the police force, every forensic scientist who’d been involved, all Opocapopopoulos’s supposedly invisible staff, his entire family and everyone he’d worked with, in order to provide cover for Opocapopopoulos himself to do something dastardly? And what was that?
He felt someone tap his shoulder, and turned to see Cheryl, the project manager from work, standing there with a couple of people he didn’t know.
“Hi there,” Paul said, again forgetting that she was called Cheryl and only remembering a fraction of a second too late to append her name onto the end of his greeting. “How’s it going?”
“Fine thanks, Paul. Saw you from behind and thought, that can’t be Paul Jameson on his own, can it? What are you doing here?”
“I actually came with my sister, Susan,” Paul explained, “but I wanted to – er – watch the football… she’s gone in to watch the bands.”
“Oh, I didn’t come here for that,” Cheryl said dismissively, “but I couldn’t miss the match. I mean I know they came back from two years of Chelsea dominance to win the Premiership for the ninth time last season, but do you really think a side like Ferguson’s got at the moment is better than any he’s had before?”
“Well –“
“I mean look at it,” Cheryl said, counting off on her fingers. “Contrast now with the ’94 team, when they won the double. You’ve got Gary Neville, Scholes and Giggs still in it. But Ronaldo’s suspended, Rooney’s been injured, Neville’s been out for the whole season so far, and there’s –“ she did a quick count – “five other players who either are out injured, or have been. I don’t see how that’s better than thirteen years ago, do you?”
“Er, no,” Paul said. “No, it doesn’t sound it.”
She cocked her head. “You don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, do you?”
“Nope,” Paul agreed. “You’re right, I’m a fraud. To tell you the truth,” he lowered his voice, “I’m still trying to find out what I can about Opocapopopoulos. I actually came here because I lost my job –“
“You what!”
“Oh, yeah – sorry, you probably didn’t know about that. I got canned for not turning up enough. Apparently they had a file about me that ran to about a hundred pages… they were keeping tabs on everything I was doing on the internet, the phone calls I was making, the lot.”
“Shit,” Cheryl said. “All I do all day is look at lingerie.”
“And then I came here,” Paul said, “and who do I see but Filimore Thimble, who was Opocapopopoulos’s gardener, and so far the only person who seems to have been definitely employed by him. That’s him, look,” he indicated Thimble, laughing and chatting in the corner with his friends, “and I feel like I need to speak to him.”
Cheryl looked at Paul for a few moments, a thought forming in her mind. “You know,” she began, “– and don’t take this the wrong way, but I think you getting laid off might be a good thing, in the long run.”
“Why?”
“Well, look. You’ll get another job, no doubt about that. In the meantime, though, you’re now free to satisfy your curiosity. Did you say you and Opocapopopoulos were related?”
Paul looked at her. “No, I don’t think I did.”
“Oh… maybe I was thinking about someone else. Happens all the time. Get IN,” she suddenly shouted at the football, and joined in the cheering as someone scored a goal or something. Paul drained his drink, got up and made a sort of “I’m just going to the toilet” hand gesture to Cheryl, but she wasn’t paying attention any more.
He hated urinals, for an obscure reason that had something to do with a school trip he’d taken, when, aged twelve, he’d gone for a day trip to a Roman ruin in Wales with a coachload of other kids. Susan, being in the year above, wasn’t there: she’d always been his protector and would have stood up for him in times like this. They’d stopped at a motorway service station near Bristol, and while he was standing at the urinal trying to force out some wee in the desperate knowledge that this was his last chance until they got to the visitor centre, one of the other kids had sauntered up next to him, unzipped his flies, and started peeing. This was in its own way disconcerting, mainly because the kid had come and stood next to him in a urinal with no other occupants, but Paul had been doubly unsettled when he’d seen, out of the corner of his eye, the kid trying to sneak a glance at his dick. He hadn’t said anything, of course, but had finished up as quickly as he could, and ever since then had preferred to use cubicles. They also had the advantage of occasionally having paper, to save the difficulties of embarrassing drips.
He was just reading through a long-winded graffito about gays – he couldn’t quite work out whether it was about wanting some nice fat cock, or hating people who wanted that sort of thing – when, over the dull throb of the music coming from one of the live bands, a conversation at the urinals caused him to prick up his ears:
“’Course, nobody else knows who done it, see.”
“You fink?”
“I know. Them forensic scientists’ve been crawlin’ all over the place for two weeks, but they ain’t found nuffin yet. They ain’t even found out about the cellar.”
“No shit.”
“Nah, I’m tellin’ yer. Safe as houses, they’ll never find it.”
“Gotta be careful, though,” the other grunted. Paul guessed that the first one was Thimble. “You’re sure they ain’t gonna find anyfink?”
“I got Baz livin’ down in the cellars at the moment,” cackled Thimble. “Keepin’ watch. ’E says ‘e give one of ‘em a bit of a fright the other day. She’s in the billiard room, innit, an’ she only goes an’ starts takin’ out all the books –“
“Fuckin’ what?” the other man shouted.
“Easy,” Thimble said, a bit taken aback. “She din’t find nuffin. ‘E put all the books back before she could go dahn, scared her right up.”
“And you fink that’ll stop her, what, ‘cos she’s gonna fink there’s a ghost in the place or summink?” the other man growled. “Bollocks, there you are one minute sayin’ they ain’t found the cellar, then the next she’s found the secret door. There’ll be a fuckin’ team of ‘em down there in no time. Why din’t you tell me this before?”
“That ain’t the actual cellar, though, is it?” Thimble protested. “If you go dahn there you don’t get nowhere, remember, that’s ‘ow Opocap built it. The real entrance is –“
“Yeah, shut up,” the other one cut in in a low voice, “you don’t know who’s listenin’.”
They both stopped speaking. Paul heard the door swing open and shut again, and then silence – apart from booming bassline and thumping drums.
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