"The Bullet That Missed"

[fiefoe]

Richard Osman's third act in the Thursday Murder Club contains many cutesy but not too cutesy moments. The two strands (cold case and present headaches) of the novel meet up well

• says Ron. ‘I’ve earned this face, it tells a story.’ <> ‘Horror story, if you don’t mind me saying?’ says Pauline,
• ‘Hello, Pauline,’ says Joyce. ‘You’ve got your work cut out there.’ <> ‘I’ve seen worse,’ says Pauline. ‘I used to work on Casualty.’
• Looking down at her phone, Connie sees that one of the men who works in the prison admin block is on Tinder. He is balding and standing next to what appears to be a Volvo of all things, but she swipes right regardless, because you never know when people might come in handy. She sees immediately that they are a match. Quelle surprise!
• If the angels were to carry her away this very moment – and if her heart rate was anything to go by that was a possibility – she would let them scoop her up, while she thanked the heavens for a life well lived.
• Laser quest: ‘That children’s birthday party didn’t know what had hit them.’ <> ‘It’s a good lesson for them,’ says Bogdan. ‘Fighting is mainly hiding. It’s good to learn that early.’
• * ‘Everyone wants to feel special, but nobody wants to feel different,’
• ‘It’s homework for Elizabeth. She wanted to know my thoughts.’ <> OK, that makes sense. What a relief. Bogdan is not a homicidal maniac; Elizabeth is.
• ‘Anything where you don’t have to touch the body, that’s where forensics will get you. Or a gun, nice and simple, one shot, blam, and get out quick, the whole thing away from security cameras. Plan your escape route of course, that’s essential too. No forensics, no witnesses, no body to bury, that’s how I’d do it. Phone off, or leave your phone in a cab, so it’s miles away when you’re committing the murder.
• Actually, he doesn’t smile for the murders. Then he does a serious face, which he is also very good at. I actually prefer his serious face, so if there has been a murder, at least that’s a silver lining.
• He eats salmon and broccoli now. He eats so much broccoli he can spell it without looking it up.
• * Pauline puts a finger to Ron’s lips to help him out of his cul-de-sac of a sentence. He nods gratefully... In telly, the women all date their cameramen, and the men all date their make-up artists.’
• ‘Thank you, Officer,’ says Connie and turns back to Ibrahim. ‘I’m so bored here, let’s do it. Give me everything you’ve got on Heather Garbutt. I’m still going to kill your friends, but until that happens let’s all agree to get along and have a bit of fun.’
• ‘Are there no ethical drug dealers?’ <> ‘In Brighton there’s a fair-trade cocaine dealer. He gets all his wraps stamped and everything. Cocaine from family-run farms, no pesticides.’
• * ‘You know, perhaps I could bring Ron in to see you? You might not want to kill him quite so much if you really got to know him.’ Ibrahim thinks this through for a moment. Actually, Ron often has the opposite effect on people.
• * She knew people who had died for the blueprints to agricultural machinery. Very few things are so important you would risk your life for them, but all sorts of things are important enough to risk somebody else’s life.
• * ‘I’m sure,’ says Elizabeth. ‘If murder were easy, none of us would survive Christmas.’
• Stephen shrugs. ‘We all go at some point, my Viking friend. I’d rather she wasn’t killed by a cowardly Swede, but best to bow out doing something decent. I’m sure I’d miss her, but someone else would turn up soon enough. Beautiful spies everywhere you look. Falling out of trees.’
• There were other black people in Brighton, and that was nice to see. Though still few enough for a subtle nod to be exchanged as they passed each other.
• Bogdan goes quiet for a moment. ‘Google says three hours and forty-five minutes. So I will be there in two hours and thirty-eight minutes.’
• But you can’t smoke now everyone has an HD television. It is very ageing.
• Mike finds it hard to cry, because he started having Botox treatments before they’d really got the hang of them, and his tear ducts are blocked. But he knows the tears are there, and he welcomes them. The tears only exist because Bethany existed.
• Connie knows the life of a prisoner is one of unexpected visitors and unwanted interruptions. The life of a normal prisoner, at least. Connie has got a doorbell.
• And when the CCTV picks up the car again near the cliff, there appear to be two figures in it, not one.’
  ‘Very blurry though,’ says Pauline. ‘To be fair.’
  ‘The next morning,’ says Elizabeth, while registering Pauline’s intervention,
• * ‘Just be patient and show yourself the same kindness you show others. It’s difficult, and it takes time, but you can practise until you get good …
• I have sent the photographs to Viktor Illyich. The clock is ticking. Two weeks. You kill Viktor, or I kill Joyce. Tick tock. Tick tock. <> One thing at a time please, thinks Elizabeth. I’m solving a murder here.
• * Ron looks up at Jack again, and sees another old man whose friends have died around him. ‘Me too, Jack.’ <> It’ll be just Ron’s luck if his potential new snooker partner turns out to be a murderer.
• ‘Black-red blood pooled around the body, limbs were splayed at grotesque angles, like a swastika of death.
• ‘Although,’ says Ibrahim, a new thought having clearly occurred to him, ‘when you say she keeps her head, is that an allusion to the beheading of the real Catherine Howard?’ <> ‘No,’ says Andrew Everton. ‘I hadn’t really … no.’
• A number of hands shoot up at this. Ibrahim turns and faces the rest of the crowd. ‘A QR code is a “Quick Response” code that can be read by a computer and link you to a specific URL. A type of matrix barcode would be the simplest way of putting it.’ <> Most of the hands go down, but three or four remain. Ibrahim turns back to Andrew Everton. ‘The remaining questions will be about the specific nature of the discount.’
• But just because I’d like to meet Fiona Clemence doesn’t mean she isn’t a murderer. Lots of famous people are murderers.
• * because ‘No one drinks cow’s milk any more, Mum.’ I protested and said I think quite a few people do still drink cow’s milk, dear, but Joanna’s definition of ‘no one’ and my definition of ‘no one’ are probably different.
• ‘They’re all concentrating more on offshore accounts than trousers,’ says Joyce. <> ‘Well, that’s why you’re a gang,’ says Pauline. ‘You don’t all have to concentrate on the same thing.’
• He once sulked for an entire day because we didn’t ask him to see the corpse of an assassin someone had shot at Coopers Chase.
• * I see you are on the train to London, Elizabeth. I have people everywhere. Please don’t let me down. <> It is meant to sound threatening, but it is starting to come across as needy.
• ‘Are we doing therapy?’ says Connie. ‘Or are we investigating a murder?’
  ‘I thought we could mix the two,’ says Ibrahim. ‘In therapy you must never waste a crisis.’
  ‘People being frightened is not my thing,’ says Connie. ‘Thank you for my Grazia by the way, it’s perfect. I don’t get a kick out of people being scared of me, I just do it because it’s easy to monetize.’
• Of course, even while she’s thinking it through, Connie knows what Ibrahim is doing. The mirror he’s providing. He’s letting Connie speak to herself. To see herself. And he’s helping her understand that if you’re fooling everyone, you’re really only fooling one person, and that’s yourself. Ibrahim had said to her, ‘Our great strengths are also our great weaknesses,’ and Connie had rolled her eyes.
• Viktor told the concierge that he was dead, and she nodded and asked how long he would be dead for, so he looked at Elizabeth, and she said that a couple of weeks or so should do it.
• A schedule is a schedule is a schedule. A laminated schedule even more so.
• ‘We meet up every Thursday,’ says Ibrahim. ‘Usually at eleven in the Jigsaw Room, but you are forgiven on this occasion. And we try to solve murders. Though today seems to be about committing murders, so the remit is elastic.’
• ‘Excellent,’ says Viktor. ‘Let us dig a shallow grave and throw me in it.’ <> ‘And for a final touch,’ says Elizabeth, turning to Ron, ‘I wonder if anybody knows a make-up artist who might be able to help us out?
• Apparently aromatic herbal scrubs and Turkish cleansing rituals were real things that real people paid real money for. Every time Ron has walked past this spa before, he had just assumed it was a brothel. Neither spas nor brothels were of any interest to Ron. If someone wants to touch you, they had better be your doctor or your wife, or, at a push, a stranger next to you in the pub when England score.
• * Viktor, being a professional to his bones, has insisted on being buried naked. He knows that any self-respecting murderer would leave as few clues in the grave as possible. If they are to raise no suspicions with the Viking, then it is the right thing to do.
• * She had asked if what they were doing was illegal, and Elizabeth had said ‘define illegal’, and that had been good enough for Pauline.
• The recording heard by the Viking would leave him in no doubt that Elizabeth had shot Viktor from behind. Which is why Pauline was now kneeling beside him in a grave, turning an entry wound into an exit wound. If Pauline had been surprised at how accurately both Viktor and Elizabeth could describe the exit wound of a bullet, it didn’t show in her face.
• ‘Of course we will need to talk about filters,’ says Ibrahim. ‘Personally I think Clarendon would be perfect, because of the earthy browns.’
• Perhaps this photo will be enough to satisfy the Viking, and Viktor can just change his name, leave his old world behind and move down to Coopers Chase? Nothing like lying in your grave with a bullet hole through your head to make you think about your life.
• And the word “around” can often signify the letter c in a cryptic crossword, from the Latin circa.’
• * Or Elizabeth and Viktor could be playing him. Two old spies thinking they can take a newcomer for a ride. Sometimes the Viking lacks confidence in himself. He curses his impostor syndrome.
• ‘Isn’t this something? Have you ever been on television, Elizabeth?’ <> ‘I was once called to give evidence to the Defence Select Committee,’ says Elizabeth. ‘But, legally, they had to blur my face. And I was once in a hostage video.’
• ‘In a library, in a big house in Staffordshire? You saw these books?’ <> ‘I feel like I did, yes,’ says Stephen. <> ‘Of course,’ says Stephen. ‘He had the Timurid Quran, for goodness’ sake, and a volume of the Yongle Encyclopaedia. Not my area, but he had a Shakespeare First Folio. So, yes, I remember the names. I haven’t gone loco.’
• I had chamomile and raspberry, because it was the first one I was offered and my brain switches off when someone reads me a long list.
• The snooker is over for the evening. The first, everyone hopes, of a regular game. Three old men, three new friends. The gangster, the KGB colonel and the trades union official.
• He hadn’t lived in it, hadn’t rented it out, hadn’t renovated it and hadn’t sold it at a profit. <> So it seemed that Jack Mason must have bought the house simply to stop anyone else from living there. From living there and, let’s say, re-laying the patio or deciding on a whim to dig a pond or two?
• ‘What was the other favour?’ asks Andrew Everton.
  ‘There’s a money-launderer trying to kill me,’ says Elizabeth. ‘Trying to kill Joyce too, but that’s between us. I wonder if you might spare a couple of officers to guard us for a while?’
  ‘A money-launderer?’ says Andrew Everton.
  ‘Best in the world, they say. Let’s hope he’s not such a good assassin.’
• Elizabeth stands to leave. This has all been most satisfactory. If anyone can get permission to dig up a back garden, it’s a chief constable. Andrew Everton rises with her.
• ‘I only use the laptop for trading and for writing my diary,’ she says. ‘You’ll be in it tonight if you don’t kill me.’ <> ‘I’m not going to kill you,’ says the Viking, but he knows he still might have to. He checks Joyce’s Ethereum account, currently worth just under two thousand pounds. ‘Do you mind if I move things around a little? I will need your password.’
• A rainbow of gender and sexuality, and freedoms unimagined by his generation. Ron is all for it. If you let people be themselves, you let them flourish. But even in these happier times if you offer a man a choice between a motorcycle mug and a flower mug, he’s going to choose the motorcycle mug. Lucky thing too: if Viktor’s tablets could floor the Viking, God knows what they would have done to Joyce.
• I live in the past because I’m old. I am old, my Viking friend, and you know what that means? It means you don’t have to kill me, you just have to be patient. The cells in my body, they atrophy as we speak. Everyone you see before you will be dead before you know it.’ <> ‘Keep it light, Viktor,’ says Pauline.
• ‘Because I never kill anyone,’ says Viktor. ‘Honestly, once you start, that’s it, you have to keep killing.’ <> ‘That’s like lip salve,’ says Pauline. ‘Once you start using it, your lips dry out, and so you have to keep using it.’
• ‘I’ve known you for just over two weeks, and I’ve already been in a grave with a KGB colonel, I’ve seen a tiny old woman drug a Viking, and I’ve shared a bed with the most handsome man in Kent.
• ‘We were digging in Vladivostok once,’ says Elizabeth. ‘I forget why, a warlord had buried something or other. Anyway, we uncovered a prehistoric moose. Intact, antlers and all. We were all set to fill the hole back in, but the head of the Russian Service at the time was on the board of the Natural History Museum, and in the end we released a Russian spy from Belmarsh Prison in return for the moose. It’s on display if you go there now.’
• Viktor rolls off his chair, and crouches behind a sofa with his gun drawn. Mike raises one eyebrow. Henrik takes a moment, and then taps Viktor on the shoulder.
  ‘Viktor,’ he says. ‘You have to stop doing this. I’m the one who was trying to kill you. And I’m here.’
  Viktor thinks for a moment, then accepts the truth of this observation, and puts the gun down the back of his trousers.
• In his book Given in Evidence, I think I told you about it, the main character is a gangland boss called Big Mick. And Big Mick’s full name? <> Michael Gullis.
• I told you Ibrahim cracked ‘Carron Whitehead’. It was simple really. <> It’s an anagram of ‘Catherine Howard’. The teak-tough detective. Clever Ibrahim.
• ‘Guilty,’ says Andrew Everton. ‘I was writing a book. I write, for my sins, and I came up with this scheme, just a plot really. But the more I thought about it, I realized, you know what, I’m not going to put it in the book, I’m going to do it for real.’
• An acclaimed author, also, under the pen-name Mackenzie McStewart. I have recently read, and much enjoyed, To Remain Silent, a tour de force, in my opinion. Like John Grisham. Further to this list of accomplishments, we now discover you are a master criminal? Cop, crime writer, master criminal. I imagine the skills overlap somewhat?’
• Connie had thought quickly. Ibrahim and his gang were on the trail of Bethany Waites’s killer, and, in her estimation, would probably find the killer. She was right about that, wasn’t she? Connie figured it wouldn’t do any harm to get involved. To help out. The court might look a bit more kindly on her if she’d helped track down a murderer. <> So she’d torn up Heather’s note – Farewell, can’t take it any more, something or other like that, she’d only skimmed it – and written her own. Made Heather sound like a murder victim, and cast herself as someone with information. A saviour. <> Now Connie knows that Andrew Everton killed Bethany Waites, she can put part two of the plan into action. She just has to invent a bit of evidence to show he killed Heather Garbutt too.
• It is safe to say that Andrew Everton is today’s newest ‘Most hated man in Britain’. Though Donna notes that To Remain Silent is currently number one in Amazon’s ‘Movers and Shakers’ book chart. <> What a masterstroke from whoever hacked Fiona Clemence’s Instagram.
• ‘There was no comeback. No one was accused of the murder, no harm done to anyone, and I kept quiet. Then you lot showed up, and there’re people dying left, right and centre, so I tried to drop a few hints. I knew I couldn’t tell the truth after all this time, but I thought you lot might figure it out, and Mike might have to face the truth. Thought it was about time.’
• A German police investigator had told her that the best alias for a fraudster was that of a famous person. ‘It makes you impossible to Google,’
• She learned an awful lot more than that little trick too. Learned so much, in fact, that not only could she follow the trail of the VAT money, but also access it herself.
• And the name is what had finally made her mind up. Because the name scratched into the bullet was not ‘Bethany Waites’. She could have handled that. <> The name was ‘Mike Waghorn’.
• Netflix have bought the TV rights. It’s true what they say about publicity. He’s not seeing a penny of the money, though. It’s all being held by the court until he pays back the ten million he stole.
• So many bodies and he had only murdered one of them. He’d told Jack and Heather he had murdered Bethany, sure. That was a masterstroke: blackmail them with a corpse that was never there. The coastguards had told him that if the body hadn’t washed up within a week, it was probably not going to be washed up at all, and that’s what gave him the idea. Such a clever idea. Too clever in the end; it was so unfair. You shouldn’t be penalized for being too clever.
• Whatever the reason, it is going to be very hard for Andrew Everton to explain where traces of Jack Mason’s DNA have just been found. <> On the cute, shiny badge and the cute, velvet pouch Andrew Everton had handed to Chris at the Kent Police Awards.