A Day in the Life of Louis Bloom Read online

  A Day in the Life of Louis Bloom

  by Paul Charles

  Published by Dufour Editions

  First published in the United States of America, 2018

  by Dufour Editions Inc., Chester Springs, Pennsylvania 19425

  © Paul Charles, 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Except for public figures, all characters in this story are fictional, and any resemblance to anyone else living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Cover photo by Paul Charles

  E-Book ISBN 978-0-8023-6033-5 (MOBI)

  E-Book ISBN 978-0-8023-6034-2 (EPUB)

  Thanks are due and offered to:

  The Dufour fab four: Duncan, Christopher, Miranda and David.

  Also Gary Mills, David Torrans, Clair Lamb, Lindsey Holmes, Jeff Robinson, Lucy Beever, Adrienne Armstrong, my magic wife Catherine and, my hero, my father, Andrew.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter One

  The Day: The Third Thursday in October

  This is not the beginning of the story; it is just where we join it.

  ‘Guess what the last thing I said to Louis Bloom was?’

  McCusker clearly must have felt that wasn’t a real question, because he didn’t attempt to answer it.

  ‘“Oh Louis Bloom, you’ll be the death of me, you will,”’ Elizabeth Bloom volunteered, in answer to her own question. ‘He’d left the door wide open and the wind was angry last night, so that’s why I called out after him as he scooted out through the front door. All I heard in return was him laughing back at me. That was the last I heard of him. He just disappeared into the night.’

  McCusker sat opposite the woman in the cosy living room of her Edwardian house on the corner of Colenso Parade and Landseer Street. The living room was tidy yet littered with photographs, paintings and ornaments. The spick-and-span house overlooked the glorious Botanic Gardens in the campus area of Belfast.

  Lily O’Carroll was off somewhere else in the house brewing up, no doubt, a sugar-generous cup of tea.

  ‘Mrs Bloom,’ McCusker started, only to be interrupted by:

  ‘Elizabeth, please call me Elizabeth — everyone calls me Elizabeth.’

  ‘Right, Elizabeth, okay,’ McCusker started back up again slowly, ‘what time did Louis run out the door at?’ McCusker was not as conscious of his Ulsterism as he was of making sure he followed her lead by pronouncing the “s” as an “e” in her husband’s Christian name.

  ‘It was at 8.55,’ she offered immediately. ‘The reason I’m so convinced of that is because we were just about to start to sit down to watch The Fall — we both just love that programme. Never miss it, and that starts at 9.00 on BBC. The BBC shows always start sharp as scheduled; I suppose that’s something to do with their no-adverts policy.’

  McCusker looked at his watch. It was coming up to 01.00 a.m. Just four hours since Louis Bloom had gone missing. Normally a Misper (missing person) wouldn’t be treated as an official missing person until forty-eight hours had passed. Not every Misper, though, was a lecturer at Queen’s University, whose wife had a sister named Angela, who had married an RUC man called Niall Larkin, who was now a superintendent in the PSNI and, subsequently, the boss of both DI Lily O’Carroll and McCusker — the very same Grafton Agency cop currently looking at his watch.

  Elizabeth Bloom, wife of the aforementioned Louis Bloom, was usually the most relaxed and self-confident of women but had now confessed to being, ‘at my wit’s end’ since her husband hadn’t returned from dumping their daily rubbish in one of the bins in the (very) nearby Botanic Gardens. She had waited a good three hours before ringing her sister, Angela. Angela, keen to return to her slumber, immediately nudged her husband, Superintendent Niall Larkin, awake and successfully passed the baton on to him. Larkin nearly dropped the baton at that point, feeling the Misper, husband of his wife’s sister or not, could wait until the morning. He eventually showed that behind every great man is an even greater wife. Consequently he thought better of his first instinct to return to slumber-land, choosing instead to ring O’Carroll. Larkin conceded to overtime for her and agency-cop McCusker before turning off his bedside light. He then drifted off into a nightmare where he reviewed the Grafton Recruitment Agency’s invoice for McCusker’s time on the case, only to find his entire annual budget for the year had been blown on this Midnight Hour Case.

  O’Carroll, in turn, called in-person to McCusker’s student-style accommodation in University Square Mews, just off Botanic Avenue.

  Maybe O’Carroll was hoping to catch out McCusker and her sister, Grace… as in catching them in, and together, which only went to prove that both McCusker and Lily O’Carroll were thinking about her sister at the exact same moment. And no, Grace O’Carroll had not been in McCusker’s rooms when Lily came calling. Whatever had been on McCusker’s mind as he enjoyed – as in really enjoyed – his early morning mind-set and coffee, disappeared by the time DI Lily O’Carroll had given his quarters a quick, but thorough, once over. O’Carroll was hyper and fidgety during the very short drive from University Square Mews to Botanic Gardens.

  As a Grafton Agency cop, and unlike O’Carroll, McCusker could have refused the overtime and returned to his slumber. This wasn’t an option he even considered due mainly to the fact that both Superintendent Larkin and DI O’Carroll had gone out of their way to make him feel very welcome at the Custom’s House over the past year or so. This most certainly wasn’t always the case with agency personnel. If anything the rank and file of the PSNI went out of their way to make them feel inferior and unwanted. Larkin though was a good friend of Superintendent Thomas “Tommy” Davies, McCusker’s ex-boss in Portrush. When McCusker had found himself in an awkward predicament 18 months previously, Davies had contacted Larkin and called in a favour to secure McCusker, via the Grafton Agency in the Customs House, a job. The fact that in the intervening year McCusker and O’Carroll had formed a very successful team had undoubtedly helped his situation. But the unescapable simple fact was that he was still an agency cop. So wh
en O’Carroll came calling in the early hours of the morning as the behest of Larkin, McCusker was happy to be there - and not just to be there – but, to be there with bells on.

  ‘It’s okay for you, McCusker,’ she began, carelessly, noisily, shoving her car into gear. ‘If we don’t solve this case quickly, you’ll just be replaced, but I’ll have to stay on in the PSNI in deep humiliation, watching every other fecker who started after me fly past me on the promotion ladder.’

  ‘Praise seldom comes to those who seek it,’ McCusker said, as much to the raindrops on the side window as to his rattled colleague.

  ‘Ah man… pleazzzze… I’m really in no mood for your beer-mat philosophy.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ McCusker started, desperately seeking for a direction, ‘let’s not worry about solving the case just for now. Let’s just get stuck in with collecting as much information as we can and see where that takes us.’

  ‘Now that works big time for me, McCusker,’ she said, relaxing into her seat like she’d just taken a greedy first drag on a much desired ciggy, ‘that’s what I needed to hear.’

  Two and a half minutes later they were in Mrs Elizabeth Bloom’s handsome three-bedroom period house and the owner’s anxiety immediately washed away all of McCusker’s early morning concerns.

  Chapter Two

  McCusker and O’Carroll worked well together. On paper, as McCusker was an agency cop – also unaffectionately known as a Yellow Pack – O’Carroll was senior, but they worked happily as equals. In real terms that usually meant that the senior member of the partnership was gracious to a fault. For McCusker’s part, he never stood on O’Carroll’s toes or tried to upstage her. He wouldn’t really know how — his singular priority was to solve the mystery of the crime. That was his one and only drug, well, apart from the occasional pint of Guinness.

  As he looked around the lecturer’s comfortable house, he pondered whether Louis Bloom had perhaps done a midnight-flit — as in done a runner from his wife — or perhaps he had been kidnapped, assassinated, murdered or terminated? He then wondered if assassinated, murdered and terminated could be considered to be one and the same.

  ‘Mrs Bloom…’

  The missing lecturer’s wife nodded her head negatively from side to side.

  ‘What did we agree?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘We agreed you…

  ‘We agreed I was going to call you… Elizabeth?’ McCusker replied, just before he imagined a big gong was about to go off.

  ‘Correct,’ she replied, quite feisty for someone an hour after midnight, and like she didn’t have a care in the world.

  ‘Elizabeth, was your husband wearing a jacket when he went out to dump the rubbish?’

  Elizabeth rushed out into the hall and nearly bumped head-on into O’Carroll, who was making her way into the sitting room with a wooden tray, laden with tea, milk, sugar and maybe even, if McCusker’s nostrils were not deceiving him, several slices of toast.

  Mrs Elizabeth Bloom’s voice returned to the sitting room a few seconds before she did. ‘Yes, he took his black Barbour jacket and his New York Yankees baseball cap. It’s not that he supports the Yankees, or any baseball team for that matter, it’s just he feels the Yankees have a proper-shaped cap with a solid peak. He really hates the local style of baseball caps, which are nothing more than bad copies of flat caps.’

  ‘Does he have his wallet, credit cards, or money in his pocket all the time, or does he take them out of his pocket when he comes home?’ McCusker continued, as O’Carroll poured the tea.

  ‘Always in his trouser pockets, cash on the left, credit card wallet on the right, keys in his jacket pocket.’

  ‘Mobile phone?’ McCusker suggested.

  ‘Certainly not,’ she replied, immediately.

  ‘Really?’ McCusker pushed.

  ‘No, my husband is forever saying that sometime during the day all humans should be, uncontactable… no sorry, that wasn’t the word he used… yes that was it. Louis said that humans need to be unconnected for part of their day. We all need space to breathe and to just… to just… be humans.

  ‘Would you know what credit cards he has?’ O’Carroll asked in an effort to return to the original thread, as she passed over a cup of tea to both Mrs Bloom and McCusker.

  ‘MasterCard credit card, Visa debit card and that’s it,’ Mrs Bloom replied, as she insisted on sugaring her own tea, choosing just the one spoon-full.

  ‘What age is Louis?’ McCusker asked.

  ‘Fifty-three at his last birthday.’

  ‘Did your husband have any illnesses?’ McCusker continued.

  ‘Oh, let’s see now,’ she started off slowly, as she returned her tea cup to the saucer, ‘he has bad eyesight; sciatica in his left leg; a bad back; lack of hearing in his left ear; he is prone to catching a bad cold if anyone so much as looks at him — Louis is convinced that each and every cold he catches will develop into full-blown pneumonia.

  Oh, and arthritis in his left hand. In addition to all of that, he’s a terrible patient. He used to say, “I’m not looking forward to this dying malarkey. I think the trauma of it all will most likely kill me.” He’s a habitual hypochondriac but generally he’s a lot healthier than he thinks he is.’

  ‘But there’s never been any sign of Alzheimer’s?’

  ‘No!’ Mrs Bloom said, shooting up out of her chair. She then seemed to freeze in thought, ‘Oh, you think that when he went out he forgot who he was and he’s wandered into someone else’s house and just sat down with someone else’s wife to watch The Fall?’ she added while keeping a poker face.

  ‘Well, it would be an explanation,’ Lily O’Carroll offered.

  ‘Oh, don’t be a silly moo,’ Mrs Bloom chuckled.

  McCusker couldn’t work out if she was presenting a brave face or that she genuinely wasn’t worried. But, if she genuinely hadn’t been worried, then why had she rung her sister — the wife of Superintendent Niall Larkin — in the middle of the night, thereby setting up the process of stirring others from their nocturnal slumbers?

  McCusker imagined from Mrs Bloom’s glazed eyes that she was on some kind of medication, some form of mother’s little helper. Physically she was clearly trying to be friendly, upbeat, even, and all in an attempt to be of help to her husband. But her eyes told a different story. To the detective Mrs Bloom’s eyes betrayed not so much a story but more a nightmare of someone whose insides were screaming in quiet desperation.

  McCusker was impressed by O’Carroll; she’d probably been woken from the middle of a deep sleep, yet here she was, looking a million dollars in her fresh make-up, dark red trouser suit with a pink, polo-necked, woollen jumper and her outfit complete with her sensible fawn Birkenstock laced shoes. For his part, McCusker had enjoyed a little more notice than O’Carroll, in that she had to drive over to him to pick him up, so he’d a shower and a very quick electric shave to go. He found electric shavers very unrewarding in that they could, with a lot of effort, remove the physical signs of your stubble, but they never, ever offered you the refreshing and cleansing feeling of a blade and shaving cream. McCusker had several suits that he rotated through; today’s was a dark blue, smart, non-designer label number, which was his current favourite. He wore a fresh shirt every day, currently a blue and white striped one, with a bottle green tie. He wore a pair of Prada sports-like black shoes, but the regular use had betrayed their main flaw in that the leather toecap scuppered just a wee bit too easily. To complete the picture of a modern-day Ulsterman, McCusker’s solid frame was topped by straw-like hair, which had made do with its early morning finger-comb.

  ‘Is Louis a religious person?’ he asked.

  Elizabeth Bloom smiled a large, gentle smile, clearly reflecting before answering the question.

  ‘Well all I can tell you is that Louis passionately believes that Heaven is what we have today, here and now on Earth. He believes this is Heaven. He thinks that life is perfect and we should all slow up and enjoy it mor
e, before it’s over.’

  ‘What does Mr Bloom do for a living?’ O’Carroll asked, as McCusker considered the Heaven on Earth concept.

  ‘He’s a lecturer at Queens University.’

  ‘But of course he is,’ O’Carroll replied, remembering how the investigation had started.

  ‘Does Louis have a study in the house?’ McCusker cut in, proceeding to look around the room as though he had X-ray eyes and he could see through the internal walls of the house to where a study might be. As he studied the room, O’Carroll gave him the briefest of nods in acknowledgement of the fact that he’d successfully distracted Mrs Bloom from focusing too much on her own minor gaffe.

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs Bloom gushed, ‘he only went and commandeered our spare bedroom upstairs, the one at the front with the brilliant view of the Botanic Gardens. He doesn’t have a phone up there, nor internet or even television. I have occasionally heard what I imagine to be the sounds of Radio Four coming out from behind his frequently closed door.’

  ‘Can you show us where the study is?’ McCusker asked.

  ‘Of course I can! But it wouldn’t do you any good.’

  ‘Oh?’ McCusker offered, in relatively harmless shock.

  ‘Yes, he always locks his room and keeps his key on his key ring.’

  ‘Would there be access by a window?’ O’Carroll asked, appearing to grow a little frustrated with Mrs Bloom’s apparently unproductive cooperation.

  Mrs Bloom shook her head.

  ‘Do you have a cleaner who comes around?’ McCusker asked, trying another angle to open the door not just to Louis’ study but also to their faltering investigation.

  ‘Do we heck as like. Can I remind you we’re talking about Queens, in Belfast, and not Harvard, in Cambridge?’

  ‘So does Louis clean out his own study?’ O’Carroll asked, sounding like she was preparing to give up with this line of questioning’