A Day in the Life of Louis Bloom Read online

  All McCusker had to go on was this fact of a young male in a black and yellow scarf. The rest of the office was in such a buzz and so he felt guilty for not having something to do while he waited until O’Carroll was ready to pay another visit to Mrs Elizabeth Bloom.

  So he set himself a task.

  Twenty minutes later, he was in O’Carroll’s battered, metallic-yellow Mégane, telling O’Carroll what he’d been up to, and she said, ‘Colour me impressed, McCusker – how did you manage to discover that?’

  ‘Well, I started off doing what everyone in the office does first…’

  ‘What, make a cup of coffee?’

  ‘No,’ he said, laughing, ‘I Googled it.’

  ‘Wait! What!’ O’Carroll screamed, as she nearly drove into the back of a bus, ‘you what?’

  ‘I Googled it…’

  ‘But McCusker, they didn’t have Google in the Seventies, so how did you manage to catch up with it so quickly?’

  He went to say something but O’Carroll continued, ‘it must be the positive influence of my sister.’

  ‘WJ uses it all the time – I spotted him at it and so I nicked the idea.’

  ‘That’s genuinely brilliant, McCusker. You know, I didn’t tell you this before, but I was starting to get quite worried about Grace dating such a complete Luddite. But here you are, proudly stepping into the 21st century.’

  ‘Just one tiny problem,’ McCusker admitted, reluctantly.

  ‘And what’s that?’ O’Carroll said, still buzzing with excitement at the news.

  ‘Google didn’t work,’ he deadpanned, ‘it wasn’t there.’

  ‘What wasn’t there?’ she replied, appearing not to hear him properly.

  ‘The information I was seeking – it wasn’t there.’

  ‘Of course it was there, you fool – everything is on Google.’

  ‘Well, I can testify here and now that “Which school or college or university in Northern Ireland has a black and yellow scarf?” is very definitely not on Google.’

  ‘But so how did you find out?’ she said, disappointment dripping into each and every syllable.

  ‘Oh, good old-fashioned police work,’ he offered, to the sound of a roll from the imaginary snare drum and a crash of a cymbal. ‘I remembered a constable up in the Portrush nick, who spent all his spare time taking his sons to football matches all over Norn Iron. He knew the colours of every opposing team his boys ever played against. So I rang him up and asked him who had black and yellow shirts, and he knew immediately: Magherafelt High School has chessboard black and yellow shirts, and he confirmed their scarves were black and yellow as well.’

  ‘You know, McCusker,’ she said, as she pulled up outside the gate to Louis Bloom’s house, ‘I did mean it when I said I was really quite worried about Grace dating a complete Luddite such as yourself. But not anymore.’

  ‘Oh really,’ he said, puffing himself up for a bit of praise.

  ‘No, I’ve very recently discovered that there’s something much worse than being a Luddite.’

  ‘Really? That’s progress coming from you,’ he said, waiting for the inevitable bit of back slapping. ‘And what exactly is worse than being a Luddite?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, opening the car door and starting to get out, ‘a smart Alec McCusker, particularly when my sister is dating the fecking smart Alec in question. Yes that is so much worse!’

  Chapter Fourteen

  By the time O’Carroll and McCusker had entered Louis Bloom’s house on Landseer Street, O’Carroll was all sweetness and light again. Like McCusker, she enjoyed their banter, if only as a way to distract themselves from the faithful departed.

  Al Armstrong had retired to his accommodation to, in his words, freshen up, and Elizabeth had just returned from her sister, Angela Larkin’s house. She seemed quite at peace with herself – not really the way McCusker imagined a very recent widow would behave. She certainly wasn’t being disrespectful, though – in fact, she was now dressed completely in black. McCusker figured that perhaps she felt she’d lost Louis quite a while ago. From what they had gathered so far, they seemed to live quite separate lives, so in practice it wasn’t really that he was there fully one day and then gone the next. Give it a few weeks, McCusker thought, and the realisation that she would never, ever see her husband again would sink in.

  ‘So I see your friend Mr Armstrong is a successful songwriter,’ McCusker said, as they all sat down in Elizabeth’s lounge for a cup of tea.

  ‘Sorry?’ Mrs Bloom said, as she let O’Carroll sugar her tea.

  ‘Mr Armstrong – he told us he makes a living as a successful songwriter,’ McCusker offered by way of explanation.

  ‘The big Jessie! He converts flats for a living. His biggest hit would have made him thruppence ha’penny.’

  McCusker and O’Carroll had to laugh.

  ‘No, seriously!’ Mrs Bloom continued. ‘Yes… he got some airplay for ‘Causeway Cruising’ on Downtown and Radio Ulster, and it made the Ulster Top Ten. But all that means was it sold 345 copies. And, yes, the group who recorded the song, Zounds, would have made some money from personal appearances and television, but my Louis reckoned that Al would have made 78 quid from the publishing, as the writer of the song – and that’s if he was lucky, very lucky.’

  She’d a wee chuckle to herself before she continued with, ‘you know, Al lives in his own wee fantasy world, and he’s got a recording of every DJ on the radio introducing that song. And he’ll bring the cassette over here with him and insist on playing it – not the song, you understand, but what all the DJs said about it. You know, he’ll say, “Listen, listen Elizabeth, here’s Ivan Martin saying how great the song is.” But then Ivan will come on and say something like, “And here’s another great wee home-grown group”, and not even mention the song. But I do like Ivan; he’s got a great wee show on every Sunday morning.’

  ‘So you say he converts flats?’ McCusker asked.

  ‘What, Ivan does that as well?’ Elizabeth said, sounding shocked, ‘I wonder does Al know.’

  ‘No, sorry,’ McCusker offered quickly, ‘I meant Mr Armstrong. Mr Armstrong actually makes his living converting flats?’

  ‘Well, he’s very handy. He’s always doing things around my house, always mending things, doing things a husband should have done, but then Louis was always very busy, wasn’t he?’

  McCusker couldn’t read O’Carroll. Equally, he didn’t know if he should pick up on the Louis tangent and see where that would lead.

  ‘So did Mr Armstrong work on a lot of properties?’ he said, his voice making the decision his mind seemed incapable of.

  ‘Well, you see it started off many years ago. He’d always buy a dilapidated flat for peanuts, but then spend a couple of years doing it up. Then he’d want a new one and so he’d sell the original at a great profit, buy another decrepit one and then do the new one up. Pretty soon he was successful enough to finance his lifestyle. Then he found a wee house he loved, and so he kept that as his home and would do up an additional flat one at a time to earn his keep.’

  ‘Can we talk about Louis?’ O’Carroll asked.

  ‘Oh, my Louis, of course we can talk about my Louis,’ Elizabeth said, sinking in to her comfortable armchair. ‘Let’s see now, where should I start? Well, he’d only eat his foods individually. For example, he can’t eat meat and potatoes and/or vegetables at the same time. Hates food mushed up – likes visible, separate portions of his food and his bites. He hates wearing new-looking clothes. He needs to always sleep on his side of the bed. He hates eating cold food, unless it’s rice pudding. He hates people who cough in public without using their hand or handkerchief or Kleenex to keep their germs to themselves. He hates people talking in the cinema, says it doesn’t allow him to get lost in the movie. He hates how at the end of the trailers the credits flash by so quickly that he doesn’t have time to read any of them. He hates people in classes, asking questions only for the purpose of drawing attention to either them
selves or their self-perceived intelligence; he usually shoots them down in very public flames. He hates people throwing rubbish on the ground in Botanic Gardens – “That’s what the bins are for”, he says. He hates it when other people – me included – read his newspapers first. He hates people who serve the public who clearly hate serving the public; they transparently feel it’s beneath them and should leave it who people who genuinely want to do it, the people who the former group of people are doing out of a job. He hates the new “entitled” generation, whose children grow up never knowing any other way to behave. But Louis would put his spin on all of the above by presenting it a different way. He loves people who live by the rule that “coughs and sneezes spread diseases, so trap your germs in a handkerchief”. He loves waiters who clearly love their job. He loves people in the Botanic Gardens, like himself, who take their rubbish to the rubbish bins. He loves people in classes who ask a question because they really want to know the answer, and he will usually start his response to the same with “Good question, Williams…”, or whomever. He loves genuinely humble people who never use the word “humble”. He loves wearing comfortable, non-eye-catching clothes. He loves people who keep quiet in the cinema, although surely he’s always totally unaware of them because…they don’t talk in cinemas.

  ‘He was a funny wee man,’ Elizabeth concluded, with a large smile, ‘you know, when he was young he was in the Boy Scouts and he has lived his life to their motto: “Be prepared”. Being Louis, though, he always had to take it quite literally to the extreme. Like, for instance, he would always re-fill the kettle just in case the water would be turned off at the mains in the middle of the night.’

  She stopped and laughed out loud.

  ‘Do me a favour, DI O’Carroll, go over there to that sideboard and open the door on the left and tell me what you see.’

  O’Carroll did as she was bid and she too laughed out loud when she opened the door to discover a stack of candles, boxes of matches and a few torches.

  ‘And he has a stash at the ready in every room in this house,’ Elizabeth claimed proudly. ‘But we did have our problems, and our Angela says I have to tell you all about that side as well. She says other people will tell you versions of it, but it would be best if I told you the facts, rather than you hear the rumours first.’

  ‘Okay,’ McCusker said, hoping he was sounding encouraging, ‘and your sister is 100 per cent spot on.’

  ‘And she speaks very highly of you and DI O’Carroll here,’ Elizabeth said, taking a sip of her tea, before noisily replacing the cup in the saucer, sighing and continuing: ‘I’m a lot older than Louis. When we got married it wasn’t an issue, and perhaps the age gap itself wasn’t the issue. No, the biggest problem we ever had was that Louis didn’t want any kids, while I did and so… because he wouldn’t let me get pregnant, I eventually stopped sleeping with him. By the time we’d put that major difference aside he’d… well, hadn’t the silly bugger only gone and gone off me in that… well… ah, shall we say, in the physical department.

  ‘Now, in all of this there were never any raging screaming rows or fall-outs. He’s always been… well, we’ve both always been very fond of each other. It’s just – and Angela says I have to spell this out for you because it might be very important in your investigation – that we’ve never had a physical relationship since the very early days. And you know what; after a time, it’s never been an issue. I didn’t know if he ever went anywhere else for those particular needs, and I never really wanted to know, to be honest. But we’ve lived as man and wife, in all other senses, all this time. We get on very well, always have. Now he’s always very busy and not around as much as most husbands, but he always sleeps here in our bed with me when he’s in Belfast. He’s always home for dinner and TV on Thursday nights and here for our traditional Sunday lunch, sometimes with friends and sometimes just the two of us.

  ‘You know, the thing I’ve found about being together as husband and wife is, if you get to stay with each other for long enough, like Louis and I did, sometimes – not because you want to, but because people don’t know anything else to do – friends start to celebrate these big anniversaries for you. Then, before you know it, the fact that you’re going to stay together forever seems to be taken for granted, and not just by everyone around you, but also by yourselves too.’

  Mrs Elizabeth Bloom seemed to reach a natural end to her thought.

  ‘Well look, Mrs Bloom, er… Elizabeth,’ McCusker started to a big smile which immediately washed away her earlier pensive look, ‘we want to thank you for being so honest with us, and if any of our questions are too troubling we can leave them for another time.’

  ‘Angela said that time is of the essence,’ Mrs Bloom offered confidently, ‘let’s do it now.’

  ‘Okay, please just remember, we’re really just looking for information,’ McCusker started off hesitantly. ‘Do you know if Louis saw other women?’

  ‘He was a randy wee sod in our earlier days so it was always my impression that yes, he did see other women. But he was too much of a gentleman to rub my face in it.’

  ‘But you didn’t know who any of these other women were?’

  ‘No, nor did I want to,’ she offered quickly, ‘I mean with all his travels he would have had an abundance of opportunities. Equally, Louis was very private; he wouldn’t have wanted anyone knowing his business. And he would have been very careful. As I told you last night, he was a hypochondriac, so he’d have… he’d have taken all the necessary precautions.’

  ‘Okay Mrs B…’ McCusker began, ‘of all Louis’ friends, do you think there is anyone in particular he would have shared this information with?’

  ‘Don’t you mean boasted about it?’

  McCusker really wanted to respect her willingness to go down this road so early in the investigation that he wanted to be seen to be giving her and Louis the benefit of the doubt. They were two ordinary (and on the surface) nice people who were only doing what everyone tries to do: live their lives the best they could. But perhaps Louis, either knowingly or unknowingly, had done something – maybe even as simple as having an affair with the wrong woman – that had triggered a chain of events, which in turn had led to his untimely and violent death.

  ‘No, no, not really that,’ McCusker suggested, ‘I suppose I was wondering if he had a friend who he could talk to about his personal issues?’

  ‘I suppose he would have been good friends with Harry Rubens and his wife, Sophie, too, but he was never the kind of man who would go down the pub, have a few pints with a bunch of mates and boast about what he’d been up to the previous evening.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘Well, the Vice-Chancellor and Louis were always thick as thieves.’

  ‘Okay,’ McCusker said, as O’Carroll sat back and wrote in her pink notebook. ‘I understand Louis didn’t get on very well with his brother, Miles.’

  ‘Chalk and cheese, oil and water, Borg and McEnroe, Paisley and Adams.’

  ‘Was there a particular reason,’ McCusker asked, ‘a reason they’d fallen out?’

  ‘Have you met Miles yet?’ she replied.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Let’s see if you still need to ask me that question after you meet with him.’

  ‘Anyone else he liked?’

  ‘Well, Louis always got on very well with women,’ Elizabeth started off tentatively. ‘Angela always said it was because he knew how to act like a true gentleman and there were never any undertones. If he liked a woman, he was genuinely interested in her as a person and not an object of desire or a possible conquest. Like Al, for instance; he’s always trying it on with the women he comes into contact with, but I think it’s because he feels he should. I also think if any of them said “Yes, come on, follow me I’m the Pied Piper” he’d run the whole way up to Napoleon’s Nose without once looking back.’

  ‘Could he be doing it to make you jealous?’ O’Carroll asked, when the three had stopped laughing at
the image of Armstrong running up Belfast Mountain in fear of a woman, ‘he seems very fond of you?’

  ‘And I him,’ she replied, just a beat too quickly for McCusker. ‘He’s been a good friend to me and, I hope, I to him. But really he’s as interested in all that stuff as I am.’

  ‘Is he gay?’ O’Carroll asked, as McCusker’s eyebrows nearly flew off his forehead.

  ‘I’ll tell you this, DI O’Carroll, if a man came on to Al he’d get to the Isle of Man quicker than Finn McCool did.’

  O’Carroll looked confused at that one.

  ‘You know, Finn McCool the legendary mythical Ulster giant?’ McCusker offered.

  ‘Well, I know you’re always going on about him but I figured it must have something to do with your lads up on the North coast. Okay, I’m biting, so how did he get to the Isle of Man so quickly?’

  ‘Well, legend has it that he was looking for his true love, Sadbh, who’d fled to Scotland. Anyway, Finn McCool lifted a sod of earth out of Mid-Ulster and flung it into the Irish Sea so that he could use it as a stepping stone to get across to Scotland. Now, because he was a giant, the sod of earth was a big sod, so big a sod, in fact, that it became known as the Isle of Man…’

  ‘…and the hole in Mid-Ulster created by the missing sod, filled in with water, became Lough Neagh, the biggest freshwater lake in Europe,’ Elizabeth added seamlessly.

  ‘Youse two should go on stage,’ O’Carroll suggested.

  ‘Oh, I only known about Finn because Al wrote a song about him and he went on and on about all of Finn’s legendary feats for nearly a year. I can tell you, I was quite relieved when he finished writing that song; I was beginning to feel like I’d lived every single line of the lyrics. It must be very tiresome living with a giant – I can see why Sadbh fled to Scotland.’