The Trawlerman

by William Shaw

  ‘I’m just trying to figure out how exploited I was.’

  ‘I promise you it was not about that. If it was, it was a ghastly mistake, because here you are, breaking into my house, with all these . . . allegations.’

  ‘You’re not denying any of it?’

  ‘Nor am I admitting any of it. It was Ayman Younis who invested the money. Not me.’ He turned. ‘Look. I need a drink, even if you don’t. Are you sure?’

  ‘A hundred per cent.’

  When he was gone, she sat still, looking over at the neatly made bed they had slept in.

  He returned with whisky and sat on the end of the Egyptian cotton duvet, looking at her. ‘Well, this is awkward,’ he said and took a gulp.

  ‘Give the money back.’

  ‘You’re joking, obviously.’

  ‘No. Absolutely not. Do the decent thing and give the money back. You don’t need it.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘I’m ashamed to have known you.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that.’

  ‘Give the money back.’

  ‘Or else what?’

  She stood. ‘I guess I should be going.’

  ‘I’ll change the alarm code just in case you try coming back.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I won’t.’

  She was just at the end of his bed when she stopped. ‘You took money from Bill South, too, didn’t you?’

  ‘No comment. Isn’t that what people say? Besides, as I said, it was Ayman Younis who took the money.’

  ‘Bill is a friend of mine. He’s had a shit life and it’s probably about to get a great deal worse. That was his savings. It wasn’t a lot, but it was all he had.’

  ‘Some people make poor investment decisions. It’s not my fault.’

  ‘Thirteen thousand pounds. You could afford to give the money back.’

  He squinted at her. ‘You’re kidding me, aren’t you?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘This is ridiculous.’

  ‘I don’t like to beg, Terry, but he deserves something, at least.’

  ‘I think you said you’re leaving.’

  She nodded and walked to the end of the room and down the stairs. ‘Close the door on the way out,’ he said.

  The hot summer rain started on the way home, soaking her through; headlights glared off the wet road. It was a twenty-minute ride home. At home she yanked off the soaked clothes, showered, then lay on her bed listening to the sound of water.

  Forty-four

  The next day, Alex travelled to London to see her mother. It had been too long.

  Helen lived alone in Stoke Newington in a house that was far too big for her. She let herself in; sometimes her mother didn’t answer the doorbell because she was playing music too loud.

  The bed in the front room was new. Her mother was in the kitchen, sitting at the kitchen table playing patience, listening to music on the radio. There was a pile of washing-up in the sink and knickers drying on the back of the chair.

  ‘Oh,’ she said as Alex walked in. ‘It’s you. No Zoë?’

  ‘There’s a bed in the front room,’ Alex said.

  ‘Yes,’ her mother answered. ‘Put the kettle on, love.’

  ‘That’s where you’re sleeping now? In the front room?’

  ‘I can’t be bothered going up and down the stairs,’ she said.

  She walked up to her mother and gave her a kiss. Her mother tolerated the embrace. When her father was alive, the house was spotless. He had done most of the housework. Her mother was never really much concerned about that kind of thing. ‘Come on, get your coat on. I promised to take you for lunch.’

  ‘You look very tired,’ Helen said. ‘Are you ill?’

  Alex laughed. ‘Yes. I think I am. I just broke up with a man.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  While her mother was getting ready to go out, Alex washed up the dishes in the sink and told her about Zoë’s starfish in the fridge, which made her laugh. ‘I miss that girl,’ her mother said. On the 73 bus, Helen said, ‘Seriously, love. Are you all right? You look unwell. Zoë says you’ve been seeing a counsellor.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Her mother made a face.

  ‘It’s because of work and stress. It’s been good, I think. I found myself talking about you and Dad a bit.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Helen. ‘That’s the trouble with all that stuff. It’s always our fault. They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’

  ‘Maybe you do.’ Her parents had both been police officers. Her mother quit when she became pregnant with Alex, but her father spent his working life in the Metropolitan Police. ‘What I’ve been thinking about is that maybe I’ve been trying too hard to live up to Dad.’

  ‘Maybe you have. He wore me out with it, that’s for sure.’

  ‘He never let it get to him,’ said Alex. ‘I wonder if we’re just weaker than your generation. He never suffered from stress.’

  Her mother snorted.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What do you mean, he never let it get to him? That stuff you do. It eats away at you. It ate away at him, too.’

  Alex blinked. ‘Really? He always seemed so calm and on top of everything.’

  Her mother stood and took hold of one of the yellow grab rails near the door; they were almost there now. ‘You see what you want to in your parents. You always adored him. You didn’t see him some nights after the lights went out. Terrible nightmares sometimes. It passed in the end, but there were a couple of years when he was a wreck.’

  ‘I never knew.’

  ‘You built him up,’ her mother said. ‘You’re still trying to live up to him. Maybe that’s your problem.’

  ‘I don’t really see that as a problem,’ said Alex.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ said her mother.

  They ate at a gastropub in Islington, sitting at a table outside so her mother could smoke. ‘Was he nice, the man you broke up with?’

  ‘Absolute scum of the earth.’

  Her mother smiled. ‘Life’s a lot better without men, sometimes, I find.’ That stung a little. Alex still resented it – how much her mother seemed to enjoy life now her father was gone. She had some financial business she had to discuss with her mother. Her mother never liked talking money, but Alex forced her to do it. She took out documents and a pen, and watched as her mother signed them.

  ‘Are you sure you’re going to be all right, Alex? You’re worrying me, you know.’

  A busker was setting up a pitch close to where they were eating. He had a large, green metal frame with a small seat on it.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong. Your father was a very good man. But he wasn’t perfect all the time. He just hid that part well.’

  Alex reached out and put her hand over her mother’s.

  ‘Is there any wine left in the carafe?’ Helen stared at her daughter. ‘You shouldn’t measure yourself against your father all the time. I know how much you two had this thing together. I was always a bit jealous of it, you and him. He was a good, kind man, and I suppose I was lucky with him, but sometimes I wish he’d have taken the stick out of his arse, know what I mean? You’re your own person, Alex.’

  Helen picked up her wine glass and took a decent gulp.

  ‘It’s so easy to pull the wool over people’s eyes when you just show them what they want to see, isn’t it?’

  For a second Alex thought she was still talking about her father and was about to start an argument, then she realised that her mother was not looking at her at all but at the busker. He had hauled himself up onto the metal chair, a metre above the ground, and tugged a Yoda mask over his face, then pulled on green rubber hands and rested one on the pole that held the chair. With the cloak falling around him it looked like he was floating in the air. Within a minute, the coins started fa
lling into a copper pot he had left on the ground in front of him.

  ‘It’s just a trick,’ said Helen. ‘People are so stupid.’

  ‘That’s what it all is,’ said Alex, smiling at her mother. ‘A very neat trick.’

  Afterwards, she made it down to Waterloo and caught the train back to Kent. She was trying to think things through, over and over, but she kept getting distracted by a young couple who were taking photographs of each other with an old Nikon camera, laughing. And then, before she realised she had fallen asleep, the girl with the camera was shaking her awake, saying, ‘Is this your stop?’

  The train was at Folkestone. She had meant to get off at Ashford. She had barely time to leap up, disoriented, thank the girl, and jump out of the door before the train started moving again. On the platform she looked at her phone:

  Where are you?

  Are you OK????

  Jill had been waiting at Ashford station to pick her up and drive her home. Alex called her. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t sleep that well, and I’m tired all the time now . . .’

  ‘Wait there. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be there in thirty.’

  But with half an hour to kill in Folkestone, she took the opportunity to walk up the hill to the east of the station. She found the house again, and emerged through the arch into the space behind the old houses, where old street cobbles showed beneath worn tarmac. It was quiet. There was nobody around.

  Lining the far side of the yard were several old workshops, most of them disused. From Bill’s description it was easy to see which the Hogbens’ lock-up had been. It still had the big wooden door, but there was a fat padlock on it and no way to get in.

  She walked up to it, bending down to try and see in through the crack between the smaller door and its frame, but though she caught the whiff of old oil, it was too dark inside to make out anything inside.

  ‘And what do you presume you’re doing?’

  Alex stood up and looked round. The woman she had disarmed at the Light Railway Cafe in Dungeness stood behind her, hands in the pockets of a faded purple housecoat.

  ‘Mrs Hogben,’ Alex said.

  ‘Do I know you?’ The woman leaned forward a little. There was a blob of spittle on her lip. From the puzzled expression on her face, it seemed she didn’t even remember the encounter they had had at Dungeness.

  ‘You live here still?’

  ‘Why not? It’s my fucking house. My son doesn’t need it any more.’

  ‘What about this lock-up?’ Alex asked, gesturing behind her.

  ‘That’s my son’s. Used to be his father’s. Both fucking dead now.’ She swore as old people do sometimes, when the fabric of their minds is worn too thin to hold the words in check.

  ‘Who uses it now?’

  Mandy Hogben shook her head. ‘It’s that woman’s. She kept it.’

  ‘Tina’s? Do you know what’s in there?’

  ‘That bloody car.’

  ‘A Ford Escort?’

  ‘Yeah. Max loved that car more than he ever loved me. Same with Frank. Little bastards, both of them. Stupid car.’

  Alex nodded. If she was right, the car that had killed Frank Hogben was still in there. ‘I’ve a question for you, Mrs Hogben. Have you seen her using it recently?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Tina. Your daughter-in-law.’

  ‘Ex-daughter-in-law, thank fuck. No. She’d never bloody dare come round here. She hasn’t been back since he disappeared. She fucking killed my Frank.’

  ‘You think she did, don’t you?’

  ‘Killed him,’ the woman said. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can I ask something? How do you know that?’

  The woman leaned in a little again. ‘Do I know you?’ she asked again.

  ‘How do you know she killed your son, Mrs Hogben?’

  ‘Stands to reason.’

  Alex nodded. This woman had dementia, but she was right. It stood to reason. Alex looked around. ‘Has anybody else been here?’

  The woman took her hands out of her pockets, looked down at them for a little while, and put them back again. ‘Apart from that boy?’

  The wind blew rubbish up into the air behind the houses. A yellow sweet wrapper floated in the air for a second, then sank back down. ‘What boy?’

  ‘Hangs round with Tina and that lesbo. I told them it’s my Max’s car. They’ve no right to it.’

  ‘A friend of Stella’s?’

  ‘Her brother, I think. Looks like her. I don’t know. Sometimes at night, he comes here. I can see him.’ She pointed to a window at the back of the house.

  ‘Do they ever take the car out?’

  ‘You smoke?’

  ‘No.’

  The woman looked disappointed. ‘Who are you, anyway, snooping around here?’

  ‘What’s he look like, Stella’s brother?’ asked Alex.

  The woman sniffed the air. ‘You smell like a copper. You’re a copper, aren’t you?’

  The back door to the Hogbens’ house opened and a young woman with a cheery smile came out dressed in a blue nylon top; a carer on a home visit.

  ‘Is she bothering you?’

  ‘Not at all,’ answered Alex.

  ‘Well, she’s bothering me,’ muttered Mandy Hogben, and turned away, leaving Alex on her own.

  Alex didn’t need an answer, anyway. She had a pretty good idea of what Stella’s brother looked like; she was pretty sure it was him she had seen up at the memorial.

  She had plenty of time to get back to the station and wait on the bench, eating sandwiches from the newsagent, before Jill’s mint-green Fiat pulled up outside.

  Alex folded herself into the passenger seat for the first question. ‘How was your mum?’

  ‘Drinking and smoking like a good ’un. Tell me. Have you made any progress on who the con man was at the golf club?’

  ‘Jesus. You don’t bloody give it a rest, do you? Not our department any more, but no. We’ve passed that one on to another team now. Good luck to them with that.’

  The traffic was heavy going through Hythe. The queue of cars waiting to get into Waitrose had backed out into the main road.

  ‘We’re used to winning,’ Alex said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Murder’s simple most of the time. We’re used to getting convictions. Financial fraud is so much more complex. People get away with absolute murder there.’

  Jill scowled. ‘What if I come round tonight? Stay over, drink some pink wine, and you tell me about your love life and talk about nothing else to do with murder or money. ’Cause there’s nothing going on in mine.’

  ‘Not tonight, Jill. I’m too tired.’

  Jill indicated and pulled out, past the queue of cars, foot working the accelerator hard. They drove past Bill South’s little house; a For Sale sign had gone up. There was an estate agent’s Mini outside, and a new Audi. The only people who could afford to live around here these days were the ones rich enough to have two homes. ‘Is he selling?’

  ‘He says he needs the money.’

  ‘That’s bloody awful. Oh, Jesus.’

  ‘I know.’

  When Jill dropped her outside her house, she said, ‘Sorry. You know. I just need a little more time to myself.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Jill, though Alex could tell she was hurt.

  And it wasn’t true either. Because that evening, instead of going to bed early like she should have done, she put on a little make-up, a nice black shirt and trousers, did her hair, and booked an Uber.

  Forty-five

  The look on Terry’s face when she came into the bar was worth much more than the price of her wine. At first puzzled, then anxious, and then angry too. She liked to see the way his head jerked around the room to see who else was in here.

  He ordered himself a gin. When the barman�
��s back was turned, he muttered, ‘I didn’t really expect to see you here.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you did,’ she said.

  When the barman came back with Terry’s drink, she held out a note to him. ‘My treat,’ she said. ‘I insist.’

  Holding out his card, Terry hesitated, then brought his eyebrows together in a way that she would have once thought attractive. ‘Well. OK then.’ The barman took her note instead and returned with change.

  ‘I want to talk,’ she said.

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Just ten minutes of your time. Then I’ll leave you alone.’

  He looked around. It was a weekday evening. The bar was fairly quiet, at least. ‘Over there,’ he said. To one side of the old fireplace there was a small round table, beneath a wall of photographs of men and women holding trophies. It was far enough away from the bar for them to talk in private. Ever the gent, in appearance at least, he took both glasses and put them on the table.

  ‘It’s about Bill South,’ she said when they were sitting down. ‘He’s in a bad way. Like I said, I want to help him.’

  ‘You’re a good woman. I appreciate that.’

  ‘You took his money. I am asking you again. I want you to give it back to him.’

  He looked up towards the whitewashed ceiling. ‘I don’t have it. How many times do I have to tell you that?’

  ‘As a favour. Please. Just give him the money. Just tell him that you, or Ayman, hadn’t had time to invest it yet. Or put it into his bank account anonymously, no questions asked.’

  His smile was full of condescension. ‘If I did, which I can’t, it would be an admission that I had somehow taken the money from him. Which, obviously, I haven’t.’

  She paused, took a deep breath. ‘OK. Listen to this. What about if I give you the money, will you give it to him?’

  He laughed. ‘What?’

  ‘He’s a good friend. He’s desperate. He has no money now. He’s going to have to sell his house. I’m the one who lost him his pension. This is your fault, but some of it is my fault, too. I am trying to heal wounds. I feel like unless I do something about this . . . I’m kind of lost here, Terry.’