We talked some more, with me taking notes and my new client still snuffling as she supplied the details: address at the time of her pregnancy all those years back, the address of the Dartford General Hospital where she’d given birth (together with some unfortunate news concerning that particular place), Louise Broomfield’s contact address and phone number. We also agreed on my fee and expenses. When she left she was in better shape, although not much better: those smudged eyes were still anxious and her fist clenched the borrowed handkerchief as if to wring it dry. Nevertheless, there was a glimmer of hope in those eyes when I promised to call her the moment I had anything to report.
On the way downstairs to the ground floor she had to edge past the large frame of Ida Lampton, my third and last employee, who was ascending the creaky staircase with heavy breaths and even heavier steps. Standing at the office door I watched Ida turn her head and stare after our attractive client as she descended the next flight of stairs; no chance, I thought, and Ida looked up to catch me grinning. She smiled back and shrugged her meaty shoulders, then came all the way up, bringing her plastic bags full of light shopping with her, for all the world looking like a favourite maiden aunt returning from her morning’s shop. It was a great guise, especially for someone hired as store detective for the week.
I stepped aside to let her through, then closed the door marked Dismas Investigations behind us. When I turned, three sets of interested eyes were focused on me.
So. I’m Nick (Nicholas) Dismas and I run the Dismas Investigations agency, a two-room office with leaning walls and crooked door frames a couple of floors above a charity shop a few doors along from Brighton’s Theatre Royal. In the heart of the seaside town, we’re close to the train station, shops, seafront, and more importantly, a crush of solicitors’ offices, from which we get most of our business. Note it’s an investigations agency, not a detective agency: we don’t ‘detect’ anything – that’s for the big boys, who have more contacts, generally richer clients (in particular, companies and financial institutions) and who earn a whole lot more from a higher scale of fees than we humble investigators. Also – unlike us – they quite often get involved in criminal cases. The one thing we do have in common, though, is that neither party has any real power or authority: we’re ordinary citizens with no official status whatsoever.
The private investigator’s job generally involves process serving (handling writs and summonses and the like), tracing (tracking down certain people who had decided to go ‘missing’, usually because of financial or domestic difficulties), status and credit reports, accident and insurance enquiries, repossessions, debt collecting, surveillance (which includes anything from watching individuals or premises, to joining a company as an employee in order to catch out pilferers or industrial spies, to following errant husbands or wives). Mostly mundane, even boring, work that requires patience, care and an eye for detail. A sense of humour sometimes helps, too.
Henry Solomon was the agency bookkeeper and administrator, who occasionally took on fieldwork. He was tall, hooknosed, bespectacled (in fact, he was one of those types whose glasses seemed to be built into their heads – you couldn’t imagine the face without the attachment), balding, with a midriff bulge that mocked his overall leanness. He dressed neatly and conservatively, although when the mood took him he sported colourful braces and socks, or a flashy bow-tie, sometimes – when the mood really took him – all three. Henry was mad on old movies (in fact he looked a bit like the dead actor Henry Fonda) and ballroom dancing (watching, not partaking of) and lived with his elderly mother in the Kemp Town. He enjoyed a gin and tonic, although never to excess, and loved to try and catch me out on movie trivia. His downside was that he hated blacks, Asians, the French and Chinese, and socialists; to be honest, he was the only Jewish Nazi I’d ever met. His sense of humour was waspish-acerbic, but his basic nature – despite those imperfections mentioned – was benign (folks are complicated, right?).
Ida Lampton, the big woman who’d just climbed the stairs and who looked like that maiden aunt with her short greying hair and plump face, was my main asset. Equally good at serving summonses and injunctions or repossessing unpaid-for goods, she also made a great store detective, especially when dressed as she was that day in light summer frock and cardigan, with sensible brogues for walking. Six-foot one, big-boned and broad of girth (more than fifteen but less than seventeen stone was her last admission regarding weight), Ida could play the heavy – in trousers, neck scarf and reefer jacket you could be forgiven for taking her for a man – or the sweetheart (useful for debt counselling and collecting). In the latter guise she could be pleasantly persuasive, in the former she was goddamn intimidating.
I’d first clapped eye on Ida in a Brighton gay club called the Greased Zipper (no subtlety there, then), where she was serving behind the well-packed bar and I was searching for a runaway youth who was known to frequent such haunts, despite his tender age. His parents, my clients, were frantic and only too willing to accept his burgeoning lifestyle if only he would return to the nest, and I was showing his photograph around to either uninterested or excitable, mock-eager male clubbers, some of whom snatched the picture to show their giggling clique. As in any other city or big town club, straight or gay, there are many variations in type among members – the quiet, the flamboyant, the drunks, the troublemakers, the hard men and women – and in this particular one (I’d done the rounds that night) a combination of the last two types, all leathers and glory moustaches and naked arms (and that was just the women – joke), had decided I was an affront to their delicate (despite their muscles and blue jaws) sensitivities. If they’d stuck to verbals everything would have been okay – I could always handle that – but they’d become physical, shoving me around, giving me no chance to back off either with wit or reason before things turned any nastier.
Now I’m no pushover, despite my problems, but before I could retaliate, aware I’d come off worse and not giving a damn anyway, lovely big Ida stepped in. Five minutes before she’d given the photo I carried time and attention, even though she was mobbed at the bar, genuinely sorry she wasn’t able to provide me with a lead on the missing kid (she was only too aware of the predators that stalked the streets here for fresh, inexperienced meat), and now she’d noticed the trouble I was in. A swift knee into one bully-boy’s leathered crotch and a sharp big-boned elbow into another’s powdered nose settled the matter quickly enough (I learned later that Ida was also engaged as club bouncer as well as barmaid). One of the boy-bitches had screamed blue hell and Ida grabbed my arm to steer me towards the door. Outside I’d jabbered my gratitude and given her my card in case she happened to see the youth I was searching for. Two days later she’d called in with a sighting of the runaway selling copies of the Big Issue outside a Virgin record store, which led to my taking his parents directly to him (the record store had become his regular pitch). After contact he was their problem, but I had become interested in Ida herself. That she could take care of herself there was no doubt; that she had many contacts all over town soon became evident. I offered her a job with the firm and, after she’d consulted her live-in partner of twenty years, a sweet, gentle woman who taught pre-school infants in a small village eight miles outside Brighton and to whom I was soon introduced over a Little Harvester Sunday lunch, Ida agreed to give it a try. That was six years ago and she’d been with me ever since.
Young Philo Churchill was the newcomer to the agency, the sometimes hopeless but ever-enthusiastic novice. It’s usually a mistake to take on young apprentices in this game – in fact, most agencies won’t touch them – because once they’ve learned everything from you, every trick in the book, every procedure to be followed, often making themselves a pain-in-the-butt in the process by asking too many questions and fouling up too many times, they strike out on their own, setting up their own agency and taking some of your clients with them, promising a cheaper deal and more (ha!) care. But what the hell, Philo had left school at seventeen with seve
n GCSEs and two A levels and had vainly been searching for work for two-and-a-half years before turning up on my doorstep. Yep, I felt sorry for him. A little ashamed too, because I knew the fact that he was black – a light brown tone actually – hadn’t helped him in the job market. Besides, I needed an extra hand – the workload was good at that time – and he was willing to accept low wages. Almost twenty, he was a good-looking kid whose grandparents had arrived in Southampton shortly after the Second World War, when the country was in desperate need of young, manual labourers. They’d done their bit, and so had their offspring son, who eventually had married a Greek girl; now Philo, English bred and born – as English as his surname might suggest, in fact – wanted to do his bit, if only that residual prejudice, rump of a sorry past but still rampant in certain low quarters, would so allow. Philo hadn’t sought work to prove himself worthy as an Englishman; no, he’d never suffered from that foolish kind of race-paranoia. He simply wanted to work because that was the normal thing to do. Besides, he was ambitious.
Philo dressed smartly, despite his meagre earnings, and he looked good. Even Henry was impressed by his keenness, and working together, Henry, Ida and Philo, well, they made a good team.
So that just leaves me, Nicholas Dismas.
I was found, thirty-two years ago, among the dustbins behind a nuns’ convent in a poorer part of London. Found by the convent’s caretaker/handyman when he took out the trash early one cold winter’s morning. God knows what he thought of the misshapen little gnome lying there among the bins, barely a few hours old and not even wrapped in a blanket but swaddled in yesterday’s newspaper, although without doubt it must have given him one hell of a shock. Perhaps he even crossed himself, while muttering a prayer and wondering what demon had had the temerity to leave its hideous spawn on holy ground.
I was born a monster, you see.
I’m not shamed by the term, nor embarrassed. Saddened, of course. Made desperately bloody miserable by it. But that’s the way it goes. It’s what I am in most people’s terms.
Doctors told me in later life that my physical condition was probably due to birth trauma. I’m not diseased at all, there was never any sign of spina bifida or any form of deficiency: I was just born malformed. And as I grew older, the deformities augmented, became more defined and ever more distorted. The infant monster ripened into a grotesque.
My forehead overlapped my eyes, a Neanderthal protuberance that frightened children and dogs; my jaw grew more pointed, my mouth more leering, lips more twisted. The curve of my spine increased and veered to the right so that my shoulder was huge, the blade amalgamating with the hump of my back. I crouched further and further forward until crooked was my normal walking, sitting, resting stance, and my right leg was slightly – oh thank You God, only slightly – withered, so that I walked with a hobbling lurch. Even my chest was disfigured, breastbone and upper ribs on one side overlapping their neighbours, and hair spread down my back to form a tail between my buttocks, one that I kept shorn regularly, a DIY job because I’d have hated for anyone else to see my naked body.
Would the hair on my head were that thick, but no, His torment – did I thank God a moment ago, albeit ironically? – was far too comprehensive to allow such favour; it hung in loose drab strands over my scalp and forehead, the bushiness of my eyebrows mocking its very sparsity. My ears, too large even for this large cranium, looked as though they’d been chewed by a couple of unfriendly Rottweilers.
But there was nothing wrong with my brain, no lumps or dents in the bone had damaged its fibres; no, only bitterness bent my thoughts. My nose was flattened, but its shape was no worse than the nose of an incompetent pugilist’s, and my hearing, despite the gnarled receivers, was keen, as was the vision in my one grey/brown-speckled eye (its twin, the left one, was useless, mutilated in an incident which occurred in my younger years). I wasn’t tall, but was by no means a dwarf; somewhat below average height, I suppose, which was hardly surprising considering how crooked I was. So on the plus side, I was smart, could see and hear comparatively well, had an acute sense of smell, and my arms and left leg were exceptionally strong (nature compensates, right? Hah!). Despite these small compensations, it was difficult for me to believe that life was God’s precious gift. In fact, was my wretched body an indictment of His will? Did He issue some of us with faulty meat-machines on purpose? Or was it a mistake, an oversight? Or truly deliberate, all part of His Master Plan? Who knows? I only knew my mistake – if mistake it was – was worse than most, not as bad as some. I hardly felt grateful for that.
In the early years I used to wonder about my mother, mostly as I lay in my narrow cot at night in the dormitory of the boys’ home they – the authorities – had sent me to. Was she like me, a hunchbacked monstrosity, or was it my unknown father who bore the mark? Perhaps they were both like me. You know, it takes one to love another? Maybe they’d been freaks in some age-old circus show, the kind that would be banned for being politically incorrect these days (and how I agreed with that!). I didn’t often think of him, though. I don’t know why; he just wasn’t part of the reverie. My thoughts were nearly always of her alone.
In my fantasies, my mother was a princess, or the beautiful daughter of some wealthy lord, and it was they, the King and Queen, or the lord, who had forced her to give up the child who had been born with such hideous deformity. The shame for such grand people would have been too much to contemplate. So I’d been stolen away while she was sleeping, or perhaps dragged from her outstretched arms, her pleas, her tearful protests, ignored; and then I’d been lost somewhere, given to the captain of the guard or, more probably, the lowly groundsman to take me away to some faraway place to be left there with nothing to identify my august status. But someday she would defy all those around her and she would search and eventually find me. Then she would claim me for her own and we’d never be separated again. The tears of pleasure and misery those romanticisms would bring me.
As I grew older, such fancies dimmed to be replaced by the thought that my mother had had no one to help her in her desperate straits, that the unwanted pregnancy was the last straw in circumstances of abject poverty, and she had been forced to leave me on the nuns’ back doorstep, knowing they would not reject me, that I would be cared for if not by the nuns, then by the State, until I became a man.
And as I grew older still and unhappiness had moulded (and even mouldered) my psyche, that fantasy too, had faded. My mother had been shamed and repelled by the variant she had given birth to – perhaps she had even sensed my awfulness while I was still in her belly – and had dumped me as soon as the umbilical cord had been cut. She neither cared for me, nor was she curious about me: the search had never been undertaken and I was never to be claimed.
I believed all this until other visions started coming to me, uncertain revelations mixed with night-time dreams that made me wonder if the bitter discontent I had felt all these years, the resentment, the loneliness that only my kind could ever know, was finally leading to madness. Then again, they might only have been due to the drugs.
Philo was the first to speak: ‘So what was her trip?’
‘You’d think she would’ve invested in bawl-proof mascara,’ Henry added in his waspish manner. ‘All Coco and no class.’
‘Poison, actually,’ I corrected.
‘Hmn, with a nose like yours it’s a wonder you can tell.’
I could take that kind of remark from Henry – unless it was on a bad day, that is.
Ida flopped her bulky frame into our one and only guest’s chair and exhaled a rasping breath. She crossed her ankle over her knee and eased off a shoe. She rubbed her toes. ‘Who did her wrong? Is the lady after revenge or recompense, Dis?’
‘Nothing like that. Shelly Ripstone is a grieving widow.’
Henry peered winsomely through his spectacles as if interested in the woman’s status, that she just might be the one for him. We all knew that was pretence though, but we were never quite sure if Henry knew we
knew. ‘Of course, she is reasonably attractive, despite her kitschy style.’
Ida shot me a secretive glance, then let her eyeballs swivel towards heaven.
‘What is it then?’ said Philo, sitting on the corner of Henry’s desk. Henry frowned and moved his accounts books further away from the black youngster’s butt. ‘Problems with the will? Dodgy relatives turning up for a share?’
‘A trace,’ I informed them all. ‘A baby son she hasn’t seen for eighteen years.’ The answer was met by a collective groan.
‘I thought we never took on a trace for anyone missing more than ten years,’ Ida grumbled.
She was right: that kind of contact rarely earned out – too many phone calls, too many document searches, too many blind alleys; and often the client’s reluctance to pay the bill when we came up with zilch. To make matters worse as far as this particular assignment was concerned, we didn’t even have a photograph – let alone a description – of what the mark once looked like (and even if we had, what use would a picture of a baby be?).
Now I broke the really good news. ‘Our biggest stumbling block is that her son may not be alive anyway.’
‘Yes, I’d say that was a definite snag to finding him for his poor dear mum.’ Henry, as caustic as ever. ‘Dead people rarely turn up again, do they?’