The Good Mayor by Andrew Nicoll Read Free Book Online Page B

not—just the usual drunks and wife-beaters, I’m told.”

    “It’s been ages since we had a good murder!”

    “And luckily that would be out of my league,” said Tibo. “But listen, Barni, I was hoping I’d run into you here. There’s a bit of something out of nothing that I wanted to show you—might make a tale for the paper. Here, tell me what you think.” Tibo reached into his jacket and took out his wallet. There was Agathe’s second copy of the letter to the Umlauters, bent to fit with “Private. In confidence” scrawled over one side in pen.

    “No, that’s not it,” said Tibo and he put the slip of paper on the broad wooden lip of the press box. Barni was slow to notice so poor Tibo had to keep up a pantomime of burrowing into his wallet for quite a time. “No. No, that’s not it either.” Good God, there were only four pockets to go through. Small wonder Barni had never graduated to a big-league paper. “Maybe I should just take everything out and start from the beginning.” Finally, Barni casually picked up his folded newspaper and flicked the letter on to the floor of the press box and covered it with his foot. “Does that man never polish his shoes?” Tibo wondered. He put everything back into his wallet. “Sorry to have wasted your time,” he said. “It’ll turn up.”

    “Don’t worry about it, Mr. Mayor.”

    At the far side of the room, a door opened and the black-robed clerk nodded at Tibo. “We need you on the bench now, sir. Business is about to commence.”

    Tibo signalled his agreement. “Sorry, Barni, got to go. Busy, you know. Sorry. I’ll be in touch about that other thing.”

    When Tibo took his seat on the court dais at precisely ten thirty, he looked across at the empty press box and smiled.

    By eleven o’clock, Tibo had dealt with the first two cases of the day—an old drunk who had spent the night in the cells and a docker who’d come home from a night’s drinking and hit his wife with the kitchen table when she asked where his wages were. The drunk was easy enough. There was no helping him. He had no money for a fine—every penny that he could scrounge from playing a wheezing accordion on windy street corners went to the cheapest rotgut vodka he could find. You could see him every day, sitting on a bench under the big holly tree in the old graveyard, guzzling it straight from the bottle. Nobody bothered him andthat was how he liked it. Next winter would find him frozen to the ground on a shroud of stiff brown holly leaves and nobody would mourn—least of all him. But, last night, some zealous new constable had found him asleep, nursing a bottle wrapped in lilac tissue paper, and decided to do his duty.

    “So you spent a night in the cells?” said Tibo in the sort of voice people reserve for deaf old aunts.

    “Yezzor! Yezzor!” The old drunk spoke through vocal cords scorched by vomit.

    “Better than sleeping in the graveyard, I suppose.”

    “Yezzor! Yezzor! Nuffadat to come. Yezzor!”

    “Did they give you a good breakfast?”

    “Yezzor! Yezzor, but I din eat it. I’m not muchava one fer fewd.”

    “No,” said Tibo, “I imagine not. Right. Listen. This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to let you go with time served. But I don’t want to see you again or the consequences will be severe.”

    “Yezzor.”

    “Is that understood?”

    “Yezzor.”

    “Right, out you go.”

    The old man shuffled out of the dock. All around him, as he passed, others held back from him and the stench of his thick tweed coat, a vile blanket greased with years of his own filth. From his high chair at the front of the court Tibo could read on their faces exactly what he had felt for them. As low as they had gone, they were not so poor as to have nobody to despise. Tibo wondered who was looking down despising him.

    “Next case!” yelled the clerk. “Pitr Stoki.”

    A little man with a swaggering stride sat down in the dock. Tibo watched him.