The Bug House by Jim Ford Read Free Book Online

apartment on the top floor of an Art Deco building in the upmarket suburb of Jesmond. From his living-room window, he looks out over the verdant slash of Jesmond Dene as far as the Armstrong Bridge, where every Sunday he visits the arts and craft stalls. He shops at the local delicatessens and listens to eclectic live music at the Sage Centre in Gateshead, and he is a patron of the independent Tyneside Cinema, where once a week without fail he will watch a foreign language film. If it is in French or Italian, he will not need the subtitles.
    Mayson Calvert is very much a Renaissance man, a connoisseur of culture.
    But compared to normal people he is a little weird. There is no doubt about that.
    It is 4 a.m. and Mayson is sitting upright in his armchair, staring at his mobile phone, which is held in both hands in his lap. He is debating whether or not to call the number on the screen. The number is DCI Vos’s. He has been debating this for two hours. He presses a button and a second number appears. Acting Detective Sergeant Bernice Seagram’s.
Click, click
. Vos, Seagram, Vos, Seagram. He settles for Seagram and his thumb hovers over the Send button.
    The time is irrelevant to Mayson Calvert. Since he was a child he has been able to exist on four hours’ sleep, and it doesn’t matter to him when he takes them. They don’t even have to be consecutive. But he knows that, in this respect at least, he is different to most people. Their sleep requirements are set in stone and he knows from bitter experience that you disturb them at your peril. It is four in the morning, and that means nothing to Mayson but everything to Vos, Seagram and everyone else in this city.
    He sighs and puts the phone on the armrest of the chair. There is no point in calling either of them. There is no point in calling anyone. Everyone is dead to the world and will be for at least another two hours. It never ceases to baffle him why, when there are so many things to do in life, the hours in which it is deemed acceptable to do them are restricted to a narrow window between nine in the morning and five in the afternoon.
    Mayson turns his chair to the window and looks out through the open blinds. The room faces east, and in a little under two hours the sky will begin to lighten.
    His news will have to wait until then.
    John Fallow turns the corner of his street and sees the welcome sight of his own front door a hundred yards ahead. He checks his watch and notes to his dismay that he has added a whole minute to yesterday’s time for his two-mile morning run. This is not supposed to happen.
    Paah! Whoargh! Paah! Whoargh! Ah-aach! Thwaoarf!
That is the sound of Fallow’s breath, followed by a hawk, followed by a full-blooded, foamy gob onto the pavement before him as he heads for home and the sanctuary of the shower.
    Fallow has always regarded runners as the most unsavoury characters imaginable, with their red faces, their startled expressions, their gasping and gobbing, their sweat-soiled groins, chests and armpits, and the malodorous smell that broils in their wake. He still does. But at the age of thirty, he lives in fear. He was scared to start running because he was so unfit; now he is scared to stop in case all his good work goes
sproing!
like the innards of a watch.
    Most of all, he is scared of Phil Huggins.
    It is two weeks since the CID piss-up. Two weeks since he and Huggins emerged from the Memories of Punjab at one in the morning, the last two standing. Two weeks since he categorically stated: ‘Nah, mate. I’ve had enough. I’m going home.’
    Huggins had looked at him with disgust. ‘Whassa matter with you, Johnny-boy? Clubbing, man! Fuckin’ Aces High!’
    ‘Nah, I’m off home,’ Fallow had said, pulling his coat sleeve away from Huggins’s insistent grasp. ‘Shirley will kill me.’
    ‘Ah, fuck Shirley, man!’
    ‘She’s my fucking
wife
, Phil!’
    But later, inevitably, Fallow had found himself in the dimly lit, half-empty