The Basque Head Case

By Paddy Bostock

Following the accidental discovery of a “head” afloat on the Regent Canal, London, PI Dr Jake Flintlock is seduced into taking on a case which draws him to Northern Spain and its darker history. There, in the company of his sidekick Dr Bum Park, Jake faces a mystery wherein an ancient Basque legacy of vengeance and strife intersects with a private vendetta — one with Jake himself as its unwitting target.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781613097526

Book preview

Dedication

To Dani, with love.

One

It was four-thirty-six p.m. according to my iMac’s clock and I was in a poor-cum-foul mood as a result of the raindrops leaking through the roof above my writing eyrie after the battering it had taken from the worst winter and spring since 1776. I didn’t think meteorologists had been invented in 1776, but their grinning twenty-first century counterparts were adamant the U.K. had never had it so bad since that date, and we weren’t to expect summer any time soon either.

I mean, what’s the point of global warming if you don’t get warm?

And, as if that weren’t bad enough, my partner, Claudia, was refusing to get the leak fixed, arguing she was too busy pondering the intricacies of her latest client’s lunacy to be bothered with such minutiae, and—furthermore!—that the vicissities [sic] of the English climate had nothing to do with her, seeing as she was Italian, so if I wanted the roof fixed, I could get it fixed myself. Claudia used to be a stock-market whizzgirl, which is how she made the money to buy our Primrose Hill mansion. Now she’s a self-proclaimed psychotherapist with a two-hundred-pounds-an-hour interest in anybody’s mental welfare bar mine.

All you have to do is pick up the phone and call Albert, I protested, having stamped downstairs to her study where she was cuddled up on a sofa, dry as a bone and peering at a Penguin reissue of some classic Freud with the old git’s face on the cover. Albert is our little man who fixes everything—busted windows, rotting sills, blocked drains, pigeon-wrecked TV aerials. Anything that goes wrong, Albert’s your man.

"You call him. You the big sluice," she riposted.

Sleuth, I corrected, but she wasn’t listening.

Apart from writing unpublishable crime fiction and pay-per-page plagiarism for academics who fear they’ll perish unless they publish, I am also a private detective. I had to find some means of making a living after I’d been first downsized and then excised by the university I’d worked for man and boy. However, neither the sleuthing nor the plagiarising amounts to a hill of beans by comparison with the cash Claudia makes from her mind manipulation. And as for the crime fiction, I have yet to earn a red cent. The only publisher who deigned a scribbled reply to my latest idea for a story found it asinine and suggested a lobotomy. And that after nine months. The other fifty didn’t even reply, or if they did, sent one-line e-mails claiming their lists were full until the year 2050, by which time I will be dead.

It’s your house, ergo your responsibility, I argued. "And you know how much Albert likes coming here."

Because he want my body. This is why.

I nodded. The point was hard to deny. Albert is egregious as the local randy handyman, and Claudia’s body is nothing like what you would expect from a regular shrink. None of that frumpy stuff with saggy bits and wild grey hair. Claudia’s body looks a lot like Sophia Loren’s in her heyday and is the envy of the neighbourhood. Even so, I wasn’t prepared to succumb that easily.

"So titillate him. Call him, tell him the roof needs fixing and titillate him. Weep if you have to. I mean, bloody hell, Claudia, this is a postfeminist world we’re living in, right? Women can cry again now."

"Don’t fool with me, Jake, okai? I am busy. You want the roof fixed, you tittify him. You don’t wanna call him, put a bucket under the rain. I think this is your crime-writing time, no?" she barked while licking a finger to turn over a page.

I can’t write crime with drips coming through the roof. They distract me.

Pffaff!

And a bucket wouldn’t be any good because it would fill and then I would have to empty it. And what if I have to empty it at the very moment the plot is beginning to gel?

That’s when Claudia became so feral I was obliged to put my hands over my ears. My active Italian is restaurant level, and its passive equivalent is gleaned from Claudia’s telephone conversations with her mother, Loredana, so I am unable to transliterate with any accuracy the fusillade of epithets suddenly unleashed in my direction, although I reckon there were references to goats, popes, a number of saints, whores, the mother of Jesus, priests, nuns, and the imaginative forms of excreta Claudia intended introducing to my pasta later that evening.

When Claudia gets angry, she gets very angry. The din was enough to awaken the dead, let alone Binkey, our Battersea Dogs Home Doberman-Dachshund cross, who rocketed upstairs from his bed far below in the mega-kitchen and growled meaningfully. Binkey hates it when Master and Mistress row because of his traumatised past, and I can’t say I blame him.

So I patted the beast buddily on his ruff, left Claudia to her struggles with Sigmund and stumped off down to the en-suite garage whence I extracted a red plastic pail before returning, followed by a capering Binkey, to my leaky eyrie.

Plip, plip, plip, plop, plop, plop, the drips went as they hit.

I hoped at least the dog would empathise. Fat chance. Seemingly oblivious to the Chinese-torture potential inherent in dripping water, he just took one withering look at the filling pail, sighed, and plonked himself down on my oriental rug with his tail draped over the Epson printer that hadn’t printed a single crime-fiction word in months—okay, years—okay, ever.

Dispirited, I stared through the window at the tops of the sodden trees in the mansion’s garden, the poor-cum-foul mood degenerating into a sort of splenetic ennui of the kind the poet Baudelaire notes—that paralysing double whammy of not only being incapable of action but also knowing you aren’t, which gets inaccurately translated into English as boredom.

Meanwhile the rain kept plip-plopping.

Bugger, I said, staring at the blank screen of my iMac with its irritating cursor that kept blinking as it awaited the next word—all right the first word—of my next oeuvre.

Sod it, I then said, flipping the machine the finger and springing from my chair to pace about thoughtfully, which caused Binkey to begin thumping his tail against the Epson. Binkey thinks once human beings are vertical and ambulant, they’re about to take him walkies.

Don’t even think about it, I said as he joined me in my pacing.

Lie down! I commanded, pointing at the rug.

But Binkey’s vocabulary is minimal, and even those words he knows he represses when the mood suits him. All words except din-dins, bikkies and walkies, that is. Those he never forgets, so you have to be careful not to say them unless you mean them, otherwise you get a faceful of demented dog.

It was therefore unfortunate, what with the plip-plopping, my uncooperative partner, the sick spleen, and the underperforming creativity, that I should overlook this cardinal rule and tell him we weren’t going for bloody walkies because Master was thinking, so he could bloody well lie down again and like it.

And the only word Binkey picked up from all of this?

Yup, you’ve got it—the W-word.

"For fuck’s sake," I said as Binkey started in on his pre-walkie warm-up—press-ups, leaping at walls, mastication of carpets, that type of thing.

Down! Sleep! I hollered, a command that met with selective deafness plus headbutting of the shelf on which I store my outline crime-fiction scenarios.

Cretin, I then growled, which you dog-lovers out there will no doubt find cruel and unusual.

Well, fine, so you come around sometime and take Binkey walkies and see how you like being dragged from lamppost to lamppost while Binkey homes in on scents left by previous canine piss artists and then lifts his leg to post his own message which, as I understand it, reads, ’My territory now, Fido’. No way we’re gonna discuss this.

Or how much you would enjoy playing sticks in the park with a dog whose idea of the game is firstly to wrestle you to the ground in order to extract the stick from your hand; secondly to gnaw it to splinters; and thirdly to run away so you can chase after him looking like a prat as you try to retrieve whatever sliver of wood is left between his clamped jaws.

Make no mistake, taking Binkey walkies is not a cushy number. By comparison, Foot patrol in Helmand Province is a stroll in the park. On the other hand, I wasn’t making much progress staring at a flickering computer screen empty apart from the words: Chapter One. PI Jack Footloose was having a bad day and it was soon to get worse...

Okay, you win, I therefore told Binkey. "We’ll go for bloody walkies—only you’ve got to behave," I added, killing the screen, which caused Binkey to roll on his back, raise his paws to the ceiling and fart before morphing into a dervish with a tail like a helicopter rotor blade and blasting off downstairs to hurl himself at the collar-and-lead cupboard we’ve given up all hope of repainting.

In the name of all the saints, their mothers, the angel Gabriel and his bastard brothers, Claudia screeched from her warm, dry, Harrods couch.

Just taking Binkey out for walkies, darling. Won’t be long.

Long as you like, Claudia growled, after which I heard a door slam.

Claudia isn’t always this vituperative. When not angry with me, she’s only too happy to listen to my garbled accounts of the horrorshow dreams from which I regularly awake screaming in the small hours, having featured, for example, as a chicken with avian flu being stuffed into a sack by a bloke in a white coat and gas mask, and then turfed onto a raging pyre alongside thousands of other chickens—geese, turkeys, cocks and the like—where I die badly. On such occasions, she’s sweetness and light as she extracts from the drawer of the four-poster-side table her Jakie’s Nightmares iPad and takes the extensive notes she reckons will one day form the basis of her best-selling revisionist analysis of Freudian therapy, which will fast-track her to international acclaim even greater than that she’s already attained as inventor of the twelve-step CBT programme for recidivist bankers, thereby earning her even more squillions than she made on the Square Mile.

I don’t like her calling me Jakie or her stealing my horrorshows for her action research, you understand, but what can I do in the crepuscular murk when I’m demented? Complain? No, I’m only too glad to stammer out my stories. So I have reasons to be grateful to Claudia.

Only just now I was cross at my summary dismissal from the homestead, and thus unwilling to dwell on such little unremembered—albeit self-interested—acts of kindness.

Hrrrmmph, I therefore muttered as a finally leashed and straining Binkey and I made our way into the watery outside world, me wearing my raincoat and John Lennon working-class-hero cap, and Binkey wearing nothing apart from his collar and a daft grin.

~ * ~

There are two major dog-walking venues in our area and Binkey and I have been banned from both. The first is Primrose Hill Park with its fine views over the capital and adjacent period homes for which people with more money than sense are prepared to pay obscene prices, but we can’t set foot in there on two counts:

1) Binkey’s attempted buggery of an in-my-view overtly androgynous Lurcher named Lex owned by a local peer who took us to court, won, and lumbered Claudia with a £500 fine plus costs,

and,

2) Three weeks later, Binkey being nicked in flagrante delicto by an undercover canine poo-cop for crapping on a sapling, which landed us back in front of the same magistrate, who tutted a lot and handed down an even stiffer fine plus a lifetime exclusion order.

The other no-go zone is Regent’s Park where Binkey also blotted his copy book on the one hand by pissing in another dog’s ear, and on the other by biting a swan who’d spat at him. Binkey doesn’t like being spat at by swans and I’d reckoned him to be perfectly within his rights to bite it. But the same bloody magistrate didn’t agree. And what with the previous, Sir Percy Montmorency was minded to send us to jail, only the jails were sadly all full.

So it was that the only place Binkey and I could still legally walk was along the Regent’s Canal that runs past Claudia’s mansion on its way from Camden Lock to London Zoo and then Little Venice. I don’t know where it goes after that. Manchester, maybe. I don’t know where it comes from before Camden Lock either. Dover possibly.

~ * ~

We exited the mansion to the accompaniment of Stormin’ Normin, our computerised alarm system named after the famous Gulf War general, who wished us a pleasant walk and a safe return. Fortunately Stormin’ wasn’t in his burglar-terrifying John Wayne mode, in which he cites some of the tastier lines from the Books of Job and Ezekiel, but mercifully in his mansion-welcome setting, where he’s a pussy cat with a voice modelled on Gregory Peck’s in To Kill a Mockingbird. Something of a schizophrenic, our Stormin’, but then what else would you expect from an alarm system invented by a wannabe Freudian?

Claudia conceived the idea from a lorry with a speaking reverse system saying: "I am now reversing, so get the hell out of here or I’ll crush you like roadkill," and has since exported the idea to the majority of American states where folk since 9/11 live in constant fear of intruders, thereby increasing her already immense fortune by a factor of n.

Anyway, once past the portals of the mansion, Binkey began his tugging-Jake-to-a-lamppost routine, but I showed my mettle by jerking hard on the lead and yelling he was a spoilt twat who would bloody well go in the direction I chose, which was going okay until we met my neighbour from hell—nonagenarian, born-again Christian fundamentalist ex-thespian, Dame Jemima Dawkins—whose sole purpose in life is to make mine miserable by hectoring me on the legion ways my existence contravenes God’s master-plan. Hair too long for a person my age, language too coarse, all in all a disgrace to the neighbourhood—and God.

And here I was, shrieking at one of the humblest of God’s creatures.

Apologise or meet thy Maker in trepidation! she was intoning until Binkey reckoned pissing on her foot would be a good plan, after which she changed her tune sharpish. Called him a filthy beast and started screaming—heretically in my view—Oh my Christ, oh my sodding Christ! and waggling her leg about like a Tiller girl.

Chuckling, I left Dame Jemima to cope with her smelly foot issues, and continued dragging Binkey along Prince Albert Road to the steps that would take us down to the canal, which was when Binkey started barking fit to bust at an object bobbing in the water.

Let’s be clear about this, all sorts of objects bob in the oleaginous waters of the Regent’s Canal, but this one was different. At first I thought it was a football with a face painted on it. Only it wasn’t. It was a human head unattached to a body and I swear to this day, as I dropped Binkey’s lead and shrank back in horror, one gunge-clogged eye winked at me.

Two

My first instinct was to slope off and let somebody else deal with the problem. I’m not one of those private detectives who goes around looking for trouble. But then, attracted by Binkey’s howling, a couple of Germans stopped to investigate. And after them, like moths to a flame, the rest of their party.

Camden Lock is on the tourist itinerary, so gangs of foreigners come over by the planeload to ogle at the tawdry trinkets and Goth memorabilia in the market, and then roam on down the canal gawking at the backs of the fine homes in St. Mark’s Crescent, thus inhibiting the free passage of locals and their dogs. Chattering Mediterraneans, grinning Belgians, gloomy Dutch. But this lot had to be Germans with their officious civil obedience, didn’t they? Clustering about wanting to know what was going on.

"Nichts, I told them, seeing as I had a smattering of their language. Kein Problem," I added authoritatively.

But ze dock iss senssink zomesink, said a hulking Hans. Vy iss he barkink uzzervise? In my opinion, ve do heff a proplem here. Maybe it iss zat opyect in ze vater.

Quite all right. Nothing to worry about. The dog’s just potty and the water’s always full of objects, I explained. Now if you’d just like to move along...?

I don’t sink so, Hans demurred, peering around me at the head that was being caused to bob even more by the backwash from a canal-cruise narrowboat.

That’s when Hans’s Frau, who’d sneakily crept behind me to get a better look at the opyect, fainted and had to be revived by other members of the group. Germans come prepared for all eventualities. Apart from the smelling salts, they hauled from their fannypacks a couple of oxygen cylinders, a box of plastic syringes, and an inflatable nurse. But not even Vorsprung Durch Technik can counter the fear engendered by what looked a lot like a dead head.

"Aaaaagh, ach, mein lieber Gott," a number of them therefore started screaming once they’d revivified Frau Hans and spotted the grinning head, which had also attracted the attention of a passing Spanish couple who, following the line of the Germans’ startled eyes, started taking pictures of it with their iPhones. Pretty soon I had the makings of an international incident on my hands and, being the sole English person on hand, was obliged to take control.

For years I refused to carry a mobile telephone, but now I’m edging towards my dotage, Claudia insists I carry one on my person at all times in case I drop dead. How I’m going to speak on a cell phone when I’m dead beats me, but Claudia tells me channels must be kept open, which is why I caved in and accepted the mobe strapped to the belt of my jeans as a fashion item. I rarely use it, because I find it hard to remember which button to press, but there it hangs and, in my current predicament, I had to admit to being grateful for Claudia’s persistence.

So it was that, palming air and telling the Germans to keep calm and carry on, I yanked the mobe from my belt, tapped in 999 and held the instrument to my ear with one hand while gesturing for quiet with the other.

Not that this latter goal was achieved. As I was sorting out which emergency service I required and then waiting to be patched through to the police, a number of Germans had already started retching, slapping themselves on the head, and shrieking. I wasn’t best pleased, I can tell you. Particularly not when, after a further fifteen minutes of hanging about in the rain observing the Schadenfreude of those taking snapshots of the bloated head even whilst vomiting, I found myself being approached by a bunch of gruff schoolboys dressed in Kevlar jackets.

I don’t like policemen at the best of times, but this lot took the biscuit. Walking the walk. Fingering the cudgels. All of them bald beneath the helmets they took off to scratch their heads at the thing in the canal. What’s wrong with young men these days that so many of them should be bald?

Doctor Flintstone, I presume, said a burly teenager with a squawking walkie-talkie on his shoulder as I tugged at Binkey’s lead to prevent him leaping into the grungy water in pursuit of the head, which he was trying to bash with a forepaw much in the way a cat taunts a mouse. And still howling fit to bust.

Mind stopping your dog doing that? said Sergeant O’Leary.

What?

’Olwin’.

Choking back my initial response, namely You try telling him, Baldy, I commanded Binkey to be silent with the expected effect, i.e. ff on the bark scale.

The lad was wise enough not to ask me to repeat the command. Instead he shouted over the racket, Doctor Flintstone, right? The person what called in about the hobject in the canal.

"Flinklock, I corrected. Doctor Jake Flintlock."

Ah-hah, said O’Leary, sinistrally scribbling something on a pad he’d withdrawn from his flak jacket.

And when did you first spot this hobject? he added, staring up at me seeing as I am six-foot three and he can’t have been much more than five-foot eight. Younger, balder, and smaller, bobbies are these days.

About half an hour ago, I replied. D’you think it might be a good idea to clear these people out of the way, Officer?

"My decision, sir. Are they foreign? They look foreign."

German mainly. With a sprinkling of Spanish, I said, although when I looked again the Spanish couple had vanished. "All German," I therefore corrected.

Ah-hah, he commented, scratching away at his notepad.

If you like, I could tell them to go away in their own language.

Don’t fink that’ll be necessary, Doctor Flatbrick. It’s the police what tells people to go away...or not.

I stared off.

Might need ‘em for statements, narmean? the pubescent policeman continued as I checked out clouds.

Look, I said, "these people are here on holiday. There is no reason for them to be kept hanging about."

"We are not tellin’ the police ’ow to do their job ’ere, are we, Doctor Fartblock?"

Not at all, Officer. Far be it from me, I said, all swivelly-eyed and everything.

Good. Long as we’re clear.

As day.

Right then. So foreign, you say?

German. But, with your permission, I could help to dispel them.

"Dispel?" O’Leary said, eyes narrowed, pencil at the ready.

Tell them to go away.

Ah-hah, he repeated, jabbing at the notepad with the peculiar action that involved holding the pencil in his fist as if it were a knife.

While the copper and I were exchanging these inanities, the crowd was growing restive. It was Hans who assumed the role of Gruppenführer and voiced their concerns.

Iss now ze time to take ection, he shouted.

What’s he sayin’? What lingo’s that? O’Leary wanted to know.

English, I said.

Don’t sound like English to me, the policeman said, staring suspiciously at Hans.

"His version of English. And he wants to know what you’re going to do. About that," I added, pointing at the leering head.

You tell ’im, you’re so bleedin’ clever wiv lingos.

"I don’t know what you’re going to do because you haven’t said."

Hrrumph, O’Leary said, squaring his shoulders and twirling the pencil between the index and second fingers of his left hand.

So vot are you goink to do? Hans said, as one of his fellow countrymen took to assaulting the blow-up nurse, presumably in search of sedatives.

Just ’old your bloody ’orses. This is English law what you’re dealin’ wiv ’ere, O’Leary shouted.

So it was that Hans stood back politely, and it was only when two more of his party collapsed that he called over again to explain he was a crime correspondent for Die Welt, and unless something was done pronto, he’d be filing this story with his editor.

Dee what? O’Leary asked me.

"Welt. Big-time German newspaper. Wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when Scotland Yard gets wind of the article."

Hmmmm, he said, chewing at his pencil and frowning as he computed this information.

But then, after maybe five minutes of walkie-talkie consultation with some superior, a decision was reached.

Right then, came my fresh instruction. "Tell the Bosch and ’is friends in their own lingo to leave their names an’ addresses wiv one on my hofficers and then to piss awf out of ’ere. But don’t you go nowhere, Doctor Finkdick. We’ll be needing to talk to you," he added, as if I were the one responsible for the floating head.

I’ll need a couple of your colleagues to accompany me if you don’t mind, Constable.

Sergeant.

"Fine. Jolly good, Sergeant. It’s just that Germans like it better when instructions come from people in uniforms."

All right, then. Smiff, Wilkins, over ’ere, O’Leary bellowed. ’Elp this bloke to get this lot’s names and addresses and then ‘dispole,’ them, he said checking his notebook.

Wilko, Serge, Officers Smith and Wilkins grunted as they lurched along the towpath with their clunky weaponry and intercom equipment and placed themselves on either side of me—a manoeuvre I had, after all, requested, and one which might have passed off without incident had Binkey not chosen that moment to turn his attention from the winking head, misinterpret the situation and—what with his previous with the poo-police and everything—intuit that Master was being arrested again, which Binkey reckoned Master really, really did not deserve.

I should have seen the signs sooner, the baring of the teeth and the warning sotto voce growls, but what with one thing and another, Binkey was currently off my radar, and so it was only as he was in mid-air and homing in on Officer Smith the penny dropped.

Noooooo! Leave! I commanded, but by then Officer Smith was already teetering on the brink of the canal clutching his chewed leg with one hand while waving the other around like a novice tightrope walker in a desperate attempt to maintain balance—a feat he failed to achieve hence the spplooossh as he tumbled into the canal right next to the head which, as it had done with me, winked. The Regent’s Canal is only six foot deep, and there was little chance of Officer Smith drowning, but nonetheless it was clearly a parlous situation.

Ooops, I said, as Binkey paced about, preparing to bite anyone else who might want to arrest Master.

Meanwhile Hans and those of his fellow-countrypersons still compos mentis enough were staring in renewed bewilderment and clustering together into a discursive huddle, which was when O’Leary decided enough was enough.

Just fuck off out of ’ere, he bawled at them, indicating with his truncheon for the benefit of those who didn’t know what fuck off meant the direction he wanted them to take.

"Now! Immediamentalich," he screeched in his idea of German.

And off they fucked back towards Camden Lock. I imagined the kind of stories they’d be telling friends over Glüwein back in Munich or wherever. Wondering how, um Gottes Willen, they’d managed to lose the war.

Distantly, vaguely, O’Leary’s overstretched neurons must have sensed something similar because, once Smith had been extracted from the canal by Wilkins and both of them were dripping miserably onto the towpath while Binkey kept them at bay through further full-on barking, he marched over to me and said, Bit of explaining we’ve got to do ’ere, sir, innit?

"Me? I’ve got explaining to do?" I was expostulating when my irritation was drowned out by a sudden BOOOOOOOM-PHHHHLLLUUTTT.

"Jesus Christ, what the bloody ’ell was that?" asked the startled O’Leary, clutching at his walkie-talkie in case he needed to call in armed back-up. Rubbernecking about in one of those crouch-and-glower stances coppers learn from TV.

You’re the bloke in charge, I said. You tell me.

It was pretty obvious to anybody with half a brain what had caused the BOOOOOOM-PHHHHLLUUTTT was the Germans’ abandoned blow-up nurse blowing up. Why? Because she’d been daft enough to topple over onto Binkey who, still in Master-protection mode, had quit his police-guarding duties and bitten her in the bottom. The BOOOOOOM from the initial incision, and the PHHHHLLUUTTT from the resultant deflation. All in all, a sad end for a would-be helper of humankind, albeit an inflatable one, but with Binkey on current form only to be expected.

"Sit," I ordered as he capered about, chewing at the remnants of the ex-nurse and tossing them into the air—Binkey’s idea of the sticks game (see above).

Grrrrrr, he said, kneeling expectantly over the corpse and taunting me to chase him.

"SIT!!!" I hollered, at which he frowned, growled some more, and then sat. Well, sort of sat. Binkey’s idea of sitting is always to keep his bottom at least a foot from the ground just in case.

Sorry about that. You were saying? I told O’Leary after I’d filled him in on the exploding nurse and told him it was safe to stand up.

Right then, he said, springing to his feet and continuing to peer about shell-shockedly. Patting himself down for possible wounds and so on.

Right then, he repeated when he was satisfied he wasn’t dead. "So...let’s start at the beginning ’ere, Doctor Footflap," he said, raising the single hirsute eyebrow that ran straight across the space over his eyes. Probably some rogue gene that had sucked all the hair out of his head and thrust it into his eyebrow instead, I reckoned.

"Of what?"

"Of this hincident. Of what you was doin’ down ’ere in the first place, that’s