Jack And Jill, PI

THE CASE OF THE STOLEN GRIMOIRE

“Why are you following me, you bitch?”

I took a short step back, not because of the words, but because of the not-insubstantial blade being waved around in my face. Unfortunately, I wasn’t Crocodile Dundee and so didn’t have a gigantic This Is A Knife of my own to whip out. So I just took a step back to avoid my precious mug getting cut.

My lack of response did not seem to make Mack The Knife there happy. He took a threatening step forward and held his weapon higher to make the edge gleam in the dim lamplight.

“I asked, why the hell are you following me, you fat dyke?”

Now, I admit to being a dyke – I don’t wear makeup, am crew-cut, and favour masculine clothing, nobody looking at me has reason to doubt my sexual orientation for one femtosecond – but I am not fat. All right, I’m big, not tall but broad, but most of that is bone and muscle. Calling me fat is one of the few ways absolutely guaranteed to annoy me.

But he had the knife, and though he didn’t look all that competent with it, I didn’t want any, make that any more, scars on my precious skin. So I just looked him up and down.

“Following you? I don’t know what you’re going on about, sir. I’ve never seen you before.”

“Don’t you ‘sir’ me, you whore. I’ve been aware of you trailing me from the bus stop tonight, and I’m almost sure I saw you yesterday and the day before as well. Answer me!”

I took a moment to decide if and how I should answer him. Should I tell him, “You’re right, I’m following you, because I was hired by your wife to find out if you’re cheating on her”? That would be the actual literal truth, but would not exactly calm him down. Even though my observations over the last few days had conclusively established that he wasn’t quite cheating on her, just spending the time he pretended to be at work in illegal gambling dens.

In my experience, honesty tends to be the worst policy.

I looked around the street for a moment, looking for inspiration. The only thing that came to mind was that I should’ve anticipated that a tall skinny businessman type with big crooked teeth and spectacles, wearing a suit, might not necessarily be the gormless clot he appeared to be. And I should have at least entertained the possibility that a man who went to illegal casinos in buildings opening on to seedy alleyways might take the basic precaution of carrying some kind of weapon.

Well, I didn’t, and so here we were.

“I think you should put the knife down, sir,” I told him. “It won’t do you any good to keep threatening me with it. Please believe me when I’m speaking in your own best interests when I say this.”

“I’ll decide what’s in my best interests, you obese trollop. I’ll ask you one last time: why are you following me?” He drew his knife back to strike.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” I told him, raising my hands to parry. I’d have to get those scars after all.

Then there was the whoosh of wind on feathers, and something very, very fast slalomed past me at shoulder level, parkoured off the wall to my right, slammed into him, and knocked him down. The next moment I was picking up the knife from the cobbles and looking up at the hooked talons, feathered arms, toothy snout, and wolfish eyes staring back at me from their perch atop his chest.

“Don’t eat him, Jack,” I said. “Let’s just get away from here.”

Sometimes it comes in handy to have a Velociraptor as a partner. Yes, it does.

_______________________________

“I could have handled it, you know,” I said. “You didn’t have to rescue me. Hell, you didn’t even have to follow me.”

“Good thing I did, wasn’t it?” Trotting along at my side, Jack snorted. The translator he wore around his throat managed to express his disgust. “Yes, I really wanted a partner with cut up hands who needs a few days off to recover.” I don’t know how, but he managed to programme his translator to speak with a Mongolian accent, even though he’s lived here since he was a fledgling. I suppose that he’s just proud of his heritage. “But you cocked that up right proper.”

“How do you mean?” If I wanted to, I could’ve reached out to trail my fingers along his feathered head and neck. I didn’t, because I value my fingers. People underestimate Jack because he’s small. He’s bigger than a pit bull terrier and has talons besides. Do you want to take on a pit bull? No? How about a taloned, feathered, sentient pit bull with an attitude, able to leap off walls to slam into you at neck level? Also no? There you are, then. “How have I cocked it up?”

“His wife engaged us for a week. This is only the third day.” He snorted again. “You really think she’s going to pay us for the remaining days, since we can’t follow him anymore?”

“…I suppose….no?”

“Brilliant! You mammals never cease to impress me with your intellect.” We waited for a Psittacosaurus to pass us on the pavement, not forgetting to throw us a sour look. We were on the main street now, and there were a number of dinosaurs around, many of whom were as bigoted against humans as many humans were against them. “Just a few more million years, and you might even achieve some level of sentience.”

“Oh, dear. Our finances aren’t that good, are they?”

“Let me put it this way. Unless we find another client by the end of the week, we won’t be able to pay rent this month. Clear?”

I swallowed. “Adequately clear, thank you.”

_______________________________

Let me introduce myself and explain a few things. I probably should’ve done so at the beginning of this tale, but I’m not a literary woman. My name’s Gillian Bell, or Jill to everyone except my father. My father insists that the name my mum and he bestowed on me is far too good to shorten.

And I’m a private detective or, as we call ourselves, a private inquiry agent.

I spend my time inquiring, you see.

Jack, he’s my partner, though of course not in a sexual sense. We’re business associates, and, if the term is applicable for two…persons…who are so different, close, albeit sarcastic, friends. We’d met at one of the Dinosaur Rights protests back when the government were still pretending that dinosaurs didn’t deserve equal treatment, though after the scientists had brought them back they’d immediately discovered that dinosaurs had human-level intellects and at least human-equivalent ethical standards. We’d bonded over ales at pubs where the owners weren’t bigots and served dinosaurs, and very soon we both decided that we wanted to work together. Once the regime, faced with popular discontent and defeat in the next elections, caved in, we quickly set up our agency.

His name is Borjigin Munkhchuluun, so you can understand why he prefers to be called ‘Jack’. I only discovered his real name when we were signing the documents to set up our agency. He threatened me with slow disembowelment if I gave out his real name, so please don’t tell anyone. I don’t want to be disembowelled. Think of all the intestines spilling out and the mess it would make. A lot of people have told me that I have guts. I don’t need to see them for myself.

And, so, this is what we are. The Jack And Jill Private Inquiry Agency, as is stencilled on the frosted glass pane on our office door.

Please laugh now and get it out of your systems.

I do not have a great deal of patience for this kind of thing.

Are you done?

_______________________________

The next day came around, like a wastrel prodigal son skulking home.

We were at the office. I was tilted back in my chair, feet un-ladylikely on my battered desk, nursing a glass of cheap whiskey. Rain trickled its way down the grimy windowpanes, reflecting my mood. As predicted, our client had neither been happy with my giving myself away nor with my report that her husband was not with another woman, just blowing his money on the baccarat tables. And it wasn’t as though we had any other case on hand, either.

“What does it look like?” I called over my shoulder.

Crouching on the cushioned platform we’d got him in lieu of the chair his anatomy wouldn’t let him use, Jack tapped at his laptop with the two styluses he held between the fingers of both hands. Unable to turn his wrists downwards to type like a human being, he’d long ago become expert at using the styluses, and, in fact, was more adept at typing with them than I was with my fingers. Quite apart from that, he was much more comfortable with spreadsheets.

“I told you last night,” he said. “We’ll have to take on any case we’re offered. Anything at all.”

I sighed. “Inclusive of missing pets or strange noises in the night?”

“Even if it’s a haunted house that needs checking, we’ll need to take it.” Jack began putting on the preachy tone he did whenever he was about to get on his favourite hobby horse. “I’ve told you over and over that we need to approach the insurance companies to offer our services to investigate fraud, but…”

“Uh-huh.” Still not looking back at him, I swallowed a gulp of the whiskey. It was horrible. “If I’ve told you before, I’ve told you a thousand times, we aren’t going to work for those bloodsuckers. I…” A shadow fell over the frosted glass pane in the door an instant before a sharp knock. I snapped my mouth closed, got my feet off the desk, slid open the larger bottom drawer, slipped the glass of whiskey into it, and pulled up my tie, all in one motion. I’ve acquired a lot of practice at this kind of thing over the years; someday we’ll make enough to hire a receptionist, and I won’t have to react like a startled rabbit; someday, but not yet. The knock sounded again, sharp and impatient. “Come in.”

My lower jaw didn’t actually fall open, but it sagged a few millimetres. The woman in the doorway was…a looker. Tall, slim, with a heart-shaped face framed by curls spilling over her shoulders in all the colours of the rainbow and some more. Her eyes, on either side of a nose I’d have called patrician if I’d known what the word meant, were blue as sapphires. Her mouth was a rosebud clad in blood-orange. Legs as slim and strong as a gazelle’s appeared above her shoes and disappeared into the bottom of her knee-length cream overcoat. She screamed trouble in every molecule of her being.

I desperately wanted to be troubled by her.

“I assume you are the detectives?” Her voice was like something I’d been waiting to hear all my life. “Jack and Jill. I assume you’re Jill.”

“She is,” Jack declared from behind me, when the silence began stretching out because I couldn’t make myself speak. “I am Jack. Would you please sit down, ma’am?”

She did, opposite me, since there were no client chairs at Jack’s desk. He’s the administration person, while I deal with clients. She looked at me and plonked a handbag on the table. “You have been…recommended. I assume that you can help me.”

I finally found my voice. “We do our best to provide satisfaction, ma’am. May I ask who recommended us?”

“It doesn’t matter.” She shrugged her dainty, overcoat-clad shoulders. “What matters is that I wish to retain your services on a delicate matter.”

“Which is?”

She stared at me with those sapphire eyes. “I am a witch. Someone stole a precious grimoire from me. You have to discover the person responsible.”

I blinked at her. She stared back unblinkingly.

“Ma’am,” I said, after it became obvious she wasn’t going to say anything more. “I’m afraid you’ll have to give us a little more detail than that.”

She heaved an exasperated sigh. “What do you want to know?”

“Well, first of all…you say you’re a witch?”

“I do. I am a very famous and well-known witch.” She looked at me as though daring me to contradict her. “Everyone knows the name of Dusk Malgorzata.”

“Dusk Malgorzata? Is that your real name?”

“It’s my witch name. It’s the name under which I’m known in the witch world.”

“The witch world, OK.” I glanced over my shoulder to make sure Jack was taking notes. He was, styluses flying over his keyboard. “And is, um, Dusk Malgorzata the name you use in this world?”

“Uh, no, to ordinary people I use my birth name.”

“Which is?”

She muttered it so quietly that I had to ask her to repeat it. “Mary Smith.”

“Ms Smith. You say you had a…grimoire…stolen? What is a grimoire?”

“I see you know nothing about witchcraft.” She did not look particularly put out at this realisation. “A grimoire is a book of magical spells and incantations. This one’s a compilation of all my work and others that I have collected through my…existence.”

“Your existence?” I frowned. “Is that different from your life?”

“Yes, my existence as a witch. It began when I was thirty years old.”

She looked little more than thirty, so she couldn’t have been a ‘witch’ long, but I didn’t say anything about that. Jack would kill me if I antagonised a client. “Ah, all right. So this grimoire was stolen from you in the witch world? How is it separate from this world?”

She looked at me pityingly. “You don’t understand, do you? The witch world is in this world. It’s like a bubble inside this world, the surface membrane of which you can’t see, but inside which we live.”

I blinked and reminded myself that we needed the money. “We, do you mean yourself and other, ah, witches?”

“That’s right, like those bitches Angelina and Dawn Ralitsa. Dawn Magdalena, too, but she’s disappeared for a long time now so I don’t think she’s directly involved. In any case, I’m sure that one of their lot stole my grimoire, or they know who did it.”

“I think we need to back up a little. Who are they, these people you’ve just mentioned?”

“Witches and bitches. Evil bitches. They hate me and are always plotting to do me down.” Her lovely mouth twisted. “They’re part of a…gang, I should call it. I wouldn’t dignify it with the name of a coven.”

“Um, OK. And this gang would want your grimoire, why?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I’m far more powerful than they.” She preened a little, tossing her rainbow hair over her shoulder. “I’m far more adept than they are. They are jealous, and they also want my power.”

I nodded. “I see.” I didn’t, not at all. “So where was this grimoire stolen from?”

“My home.” Her mouth twisted. “I’d thought it would be safe at my home, but obviously not.”

“All right.” I frowned slightly. “You’re certain that you didn’t just lose it?”

She stared at me. “Would you just lose your…detective handbook?”

I shrugged. “I don’t have one, but if I did, I don’t think I’d have to refer to it every day, so I suppose I might misplace it. But it’s probably different for witches, is it?”

She nodded curtly. “Powerful witches like me…” she stroked her rainbow hair as though she’d grown it magically. “…we need our grimoires all the time. I keep referring to it when I’m doing my spells, and note my results. It wouldn’t be safe otherwise.”

“I see. And…” I tried to make myself not stare at her lovely face. “And, when did you see this grimoire of yours last?”

She frowned.