‘So,’ says Tish, relaxing on my sofa and flicking through a magazine called You and Your Dog, ‘the Case of the Missing Chihuahua is solved – and a little girl’s life saved in the process! Plus, more importantly, a fabulous front page exclusive for yours truly!’
‘Yes. Well. I live to serve,’ I say, swiping her feet off the sofa so I can sit down too.
It’s almost a week after we found Coco and Cupid hidden in the cellar. The egg on the back of my head has receded. Dorothy and Harley are my eternal pals. I’ve been paid a nice bonus. And Wilhelmina Wanderlust has confessed all.
‘Love …it’s a killer, right?’ says Tish, flicking through the pages.
‘It can be,’ I say, ‘for the wrong person, I suppose.’
It turned out that Billy and Kevin Doyle – or Mystery Marilyn, as I’d know him – had been an item for months. At least in Billy’s version of events. Kevin’s whole macho gangland world – not to mention the fact that he was married with a kid – didn’t exactly lend itself to either coming out, or having a fling with a ladyboy. For Kevin, who knows what drove him. Maybe it was just a bit of fun. Maybe he’d been struggling with it his whole life. Maybe, as he claimed, he had been roofied, and dressed up in a woman’s frock by a mystery assailant while he was molested by random trannies.
He apparently claimed all of this with complete insistence, but it doesn’t exactly ring true. Nobody seems to be buying it apart from Kevin and Annemarie Doyle. Still, what he says to his wife is his business, and what she chooses to believe is hers. The truth – several versions of it – will all come out in the legal wash.
Poor Billy, it turns out, was a man of many layers – not least of which was a history of obsessive behaviour with past partners that had resulted in several restraining orders. His relationship with Kevin – whether it was a long-term affair, as he claims, or a drugged-up mishap, as Kevin claims – pushed him over the edge.
He’d managed to convince himself that if the family was out of the picture, then they could be together. It was crazy – there was no way that was ever going to happen. But Billy wasn’t exactly thinking clearly.
He’d enticed Coco away with Cupid, and gagged and tied her in the back of his van. He’d swiped some Diazepam from his mother, and used them to keep her quiet in there for the rest of the day. The CCTV footage I’d seen had shown him coming back with Cupid – and I’d even seen the van, not knowing she was inside it.
The police had claimed the recording, and if I’d just watched a little longer – about 4 a.m. – you see him come out, in full drag, and carry what looks like a very large gym bag into the club. That’s why he’d been so dirty the next day – he’d been walling poor Coco up in the cellar, shoving Cupid in there to keep her quiet.
I’d been down there looking, and spotted nothing. It was only a chance photo taken by the landlord of the Napoleon that had tipped me off, along with Tish’s phone call. Who knows what would have happened otherwise? Billy seemed to have no idea, no plan – other than somehow using Coco to get his man.
The girl herself was scared, traumatised, and desperate for her mum – but she would survive.
All things considered, it had been quite an eventful Valentine’s Day – though not in the way my parents might have hoped.
‘Right, what about this one?’ says Tish, shoving the magazine onto my lap and poking one of the glossy pages with an even glossier nail.
I look down in confusion, and see a hideously blingy handbag with a tiny dog’s head peeking out of it.
‘What about it?’ I say. ‘The bag is revolting, and the dog looks like Rowan Atkinson with appendicitis.’
She grins at me, and pulls her phone out of her bag.
‘You’re right. He does. I’m going to call up some Chihuahua breeders right now. I’m getting a puppy, and I’ll call him Mr Bean.’
‘Fine,’ I reply. ‘Just don’t call me if he goes missing.’