Mallory

Paxo stared at the blank screen for several moments before lighting a cigarette and pouring another Glenmorangie. How many fingers? Who knew. Depends if you’re talking toddler's or boxer’s fingers. 

It was such a difficult time of year to settle. Christmas Day was done, thank God, but it was not quite the time for resolutions. The little writing table was set parallel to a window which looked out on a cemetery, and within this Hammer Horror backdrop, nothing moved. The tombstones listed and leaned like a mouthful of bad teeth, but even the trailing ivy did not stir. It was still and grey, with only the odd robin to pitch a cheerful note. 

Paxo didn’t mind the weather. It suited his mood. It was the encroachment of spring he dreaded, when the sun’s rays served as a rebuke for all that you should be but never were. 

He turned his eyes to the blank screen again. It was his habit to begin with a title, but he couldn’t even think of that. There was not a plot that hadn’t been written, no twist in the tale that hadn’t been knotted. He had written one very successful novel about a poor kid living with an alcoholic mother, but it had been a bore to write and was, in every sense, indicative of the malaise in the writing business. Everything was trite and contrived. There were only three motives for murder: love, money or revenge, and having been literally done to death, there was little left but narcissistic introspection, and tales of individuals who are deemed to be ‘different,’ but by their elevation, have now become banal and mainstream themselves. They beg to be victims, when really no one gives a shit about them at all. He could not write another like that. 

It left murder and mystery, and of the three motives for murder, only one of them was plausible. It is possible to live without love and revenge, but no one has ever found the trick of living without money. In the US true crime shows he watches, there is always a life insurance policy and a doomed trip to Walmart either before or after the deposition of the body. The format does not vary in the real world or the fictional. 

He put his glasses on and looked at the cemetery again. There he was, the little brown and white dog sitting on a grave like Greyfriars Bobby. Let his loyalty and devotion be a lesson to us all. 

Two hours later, Paxo was admitted to Maggie’s flat on the middle floor, which exuded the best sort of gloomth. She favoured the Victorian interior, over-stuffed and highly-foliaged, but it always looked so well against his more stark, Ikea bachelor’s pad upstairs. 

It was Maggie’s turn to host this year. It had been decided a decade ago that on the 28th of December, the residents would congregate in one flat or another and have a little drinks party. Of course, when it was first built this Georgian town house would have housed a single family, but now there were six of them in separate apartments, quiet, decorous people who worked hard in their different ways to afford the rents or the mortgage which came with the desirable location. 

Paxo was the last to arrive, and his head was swimming a little from the whisky. They were used to that - he was a writer, after all, and he was greeted with affection. 

Pin-jui, Taiwanese by birth, was playing chess with Sean, an Irishman by birth. Pin-jui always won. Paxo hated chess. The calculated deviousness of it made him nervous.

The other guests were Frank, a saxophonist in a jazz band, a man of avuncular nature with cheeks like sides of ham, and then lastly, there was old Mr Cheeseman, who wouldn’t go by any other name. He was widowed. Paxo vaguely remembered the wife and fondly imagines that Mr Cheeseman did away with her and buried her in the garden. That began several years before when they’d had a discussion about which one of the residents would be most capable of murder. It had been Pin-jui, with his analytical mind, who casually put forward Mr Cheeseman, because he refused to leave the flat although it was far too big for him now, and the garden was the perfect place to bury a body.

Of course, Mr Cheeseman had been out of the room at the time. 

‘I keep thinking of the 70s,’ Maggie said, looking at the spread of food on her gatefold table. ‘Vol-au-vents and cheese and pineapple on sticks …’ 

‘Those fucking holiday slides,’ said Sean, recently beaten by Pin-jui. 

‘Paper chains,’ said Mr Cheeseman. 

‘Cliff Richard on Top of the Pops,’ said Frank.

Pin-jui had been in Taiwan in the seventies and Paxo hadn’t been born, so they stayed quiet. 

The evening wore on, engaged in small talk and a little solo dancing by the fireside. Mr Cheeseman had fallen asleep and woke up with a start when his dentures slipped. Maggie pressed a glass of port on him and he drifted off again. It was now pitch black outside and when Maggie asked Paxo to throw a window open for a few minutes, he breathed in the air that had not moved since the afternoon. It smelled faintly of petrichor, and in the light of a streetlamp he saw small flakes of snow beginning to fall. 

‘I saw that dog again today,’ he said, with his back to the room. 

‘Poor thing,’ said Frank. ‘I’d take him myself, but we’re not allowed pets.’ 

‘What’s the story there?’ asked Paxo. 

Maggie, who was a member of the Friends of Regent’s Cemetery, rolled her eyes. The booze had maybe made her a little sharper than usual, telling Paxo that it might just be that he couldn’t find a plot because he wasn’t living his life anymore. ‘You don’t have any material because you’re not out there looking for it.’ 

‘I see hundreds of plots everyday,’ he remarked. 

She sighed, and took a salmon blini. 

‘The dog,’ she said patiently, ‘is called Mallory. He’s an English springer spaniel who, up until eighteen months ago, was a police dog. When his handler retired from the force, Mallory went to live with him and his wife. He worked for the Drug Squad. This breed are particularly noted for their sense of smell, and so Mallory was trained to sniff out various substances.’ 

‘The dog couldn’t have stayed on the force?’ asked Pin-jui. 

‘He’s getting on a bit himself,’ Maggie said. ‘He didn’t immediately take to another handler, so the policeman asked to have him and the force agreed. It’s not uncommon for dog and handler to retire at the same time.’ 

‘Okay,’ said Paxo. ‘So why’s he grave-sitting?’

The other five residents looked at him with something like pity in their eyes. The whisky had dulled him. Mr Cheeseman, recently awake, picked up the narrative. 

‘Six months after Mr Zbíral retired, he died from a bleed on the brain. He was fine one minute and gone the next. I knew him from the pub.’ 

Sean picked up the thread. ‘So Mrs Zbíral buried her husband. She took Mallory to the funeral, and when it was finished, the dog at first refused to leave. She eventually managed to coax him away, but they visited everyday. She would sit there on one of those camping stools, and the dog would lie on the grave - at first on the mound of earth, and then later, on the slab itself. The police, you knew, they paid for it all.’ 

Paxo felt tears unaccountably come to his eyes. He always hated the idea of sad animals. Like children, they live for the moment and so any sadness should be fleeting and easily cured. He wondered why he hadn’t witnessed this moving scene from his window, until he realised that it would have been in the summer months when he drew his curtains tightly closed against the light. 

Maggie took pity on him. ‘Come on, Paxo! You haven’t even touched your stuffing balls. I made them especially for you …’

‘It’s a childhood nickname, Maggie,’ he told her. ‘You know, when the other kids were spooning out the cake mix, I was eating the stuffing. I honestly haven’t eaten it in years.’ 

‘Still,’ she huffed. ‘Paxo is a better pen name than Tim Ward, wouldn’t you say?’ 

‘It served me well,’ he conceded, before taking a ball and placing it in his mouth. Dear God, but he’d forgotten how wonderful it tasted. Why must he always deny himself? 

‘And then,’ Maggie said, ‘Mrs Zbíral was robbed when she was upstairs sleeping. This was on Bonfire night, November the fifth. She’d taken Mallory to her sister’s because of all the fireworks we get around here - the dog didn’t like them at all. So she was all alone in the house when someone broke in and took just about everything that was portable: some money in a kitchen table, silverware, laptops, bits and pieces that probably didn’t amount to much, but all the same …’ 

‘She killed herself,’ said Pin-jui, who did not share the English love of drawing a story out. 

‘And so,’ continued Frank, ‘They reopened the grave and she is buried with her husband. Since then, the dog won’t leave. People bring him food.’ 

‘Won’t the dog people take him?’ asked Paxo? ‘The pound, or whatever it’s called these days?’ 

‘They’ve tried,’ said Maggie, ‘but it’s too distressing. They think that when the … when the …’

‘When the scent desists, he might leave,’ said Pin-jui, pushing his glasses up his nose. 

‘Greyfriars Bobby didn’t,’ said Sean. 

Paxo was awake for most of the night in his funky bedsheets. The whisky had given him indigestion, which led him to the bathroom more than once to throw up bubbles. Worse than that, it had given him the anxiety he would once have laughed at. He went to his table by the window, but the cemetery was invisible to him. All he could see, in the light from the scented candle he had lit, was his own haggard face looking back at him. He tried to write something, but the words were ridiculous. He would need to get a proper job soon, but who, what and where would employ him? He had no references or experience beyond bar jobs and retail jobs when he was younger. His agent was losing faith. He could not write another story like the successful one. There is only one story a person can authentically tell, and the booze and the loneliness prevented him from writing something crisp and creative. Something new. He thought of the policeman’s wife, and how sometimes in life, that option was the only palatable one left. 

He thought of the dog, and his heart broke. Let his loyalty and devotion be a lesson to us all. 

He didn’t wake up until three in the afternoon of the 29th. And such was his state of anxiety that he knew he must go out and walk or die. It was that simple. He threw on some clothes, an old beanie from his cupboard, and entered the gates of the cemetery. There was an hour and a half of light left in the day, and people were visiting graves, laying flowers, paying respects. The dog was there. He lifted his head and growled at Paxo’s approach. Paxo tried to pat him, but the dog became vicious and barked enough to attract attention. A passerby noticed the interaction. And the beanie. 

On the 30th December, the police knocked on Paxo’s door. He was so unused to visitors that he hesitated to answer it. He certainly owed money, not to anyone nefarious, but the usual utilities and credit card providers. He was in a sorry state with a chest infection, an abiding nausea and a raging thirst for alcohol which required frequent trips to the shops, gasping for breath. He had given up on befriending the dog, but watched from the window as people cleared the falling snow from the grave and gave him food and blankets. 

They could see he was unwell and assured him that they were there merely to ask questions. He offered them tea, but one of the officers took over the job. Paxo was embarrassed about the state of his kitchen. Embarrassed about everything, really. He was asked why he was trying to get friendly with the dog, and Paxo explained that he often visited the cemetery for a walk and to read the epitaphs, and he felt sorry for the animal. He had only recently heard the story about the policeman and his wife. 

They knew he was a writer and referenced his best-selling novel, the one about the boy who was sent out stealing for his mother. Paxo tried to explain that it was purely a work of fiction; that he’d had quite a happy upbringing. He even admitted that he felt a fraud for writing it. 

‘I see. So you didn’t go out stealing for your mother,’ the DI stated. Not a question but a fact. 

‘I did not,’ Paxo confirmed. ‘It was an article I read. It moved me and I didn’t have any problem imagining it, but it didn’t happen to me.’ 

‘And if we were to take your laptop and phone, would we find anything suspicious?’

Paxo thought about it briefly and realised that of course, they would. ‘I wrote one novel that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize,’ he said. ‘Since then, I had tolerable success with a scratchy romance, just riding on the coat tails of the first, and now I can’t write anything at all. I want to get into crime writing, so yes, you will probably find all sorts of odd questions on my Google search. Please feel free to take it, although, of course, I’d rather you didn’t.’ 

They took his devices and told him to get to the doctor’s for antibiotics. Before they left, they showed him a photo of a good looking, healthy woman of late middle-age, smiling at the camera. Outside somewhere, her nose a little pink from the cold. Paxo recognised the beanie she was wearing which was almost generic but for three vertical embroidered stripes in bright yellow. It was the same as the one in his closet. They watched him closely. Paxo’s thoughts were often muddled with alcohol but they were rarely obtuse. He realised that the hat must be why the dog barks at him and that some sort of surveillance must have been on that grave, however sporadic or part-time it might have been. The police will always look after their own. 

The question was, where did he get that hat? 

He agreed to go voluntarily to the station the next day for further questioning and agreed that the police could search his flat without warrant. He didn’t think he’d done anything criminal, but then … how many days had he lost this winter staring at a blank screen and drinking while the short days turned shorter and the only measure of time was the TV droning in the background: the afternoon quiz shows, the early evening news, the diet of true crime dramas which followed. The empty bottle, the walk to the corner shop, the hope that he was not served by the same person who’d served him earlier in the day. 

During the short ride to the police station, Paxo thought about the hat. They were not unlike umbrellas in their habit of just turning up in your closet. He knew he didn’t buy it - he’s never bought a hat in his life, but it’s hardly something he could prove.

As they turned into the forecourt of the station, Paxo’s memory restored itself. It had been Maggie who’d given it to him. She’d collared him as he’d walked down the stairs, tutting at his uncovered head and the strength of the wind outside. Maggie, with her flat full of things, every drawer stuffed to the gunnels with things, with jewellery and prints and things and more things. 

And so now it all comes down to a dog and the scent or the sight of a hat. It was all they had on him. And he thought of Maggie and all her kindnesses. As he straightened himself up and breathed in the midwinter air, the smell of snow and the grey leaden skies, Paxo briefly wondered just how much of a gentleman he was prepared to be.