by steve higgs
A little voice from inside told me I was compensating for the loss of yet another promising boyfriend and trying to look tough when I wasn’t. It got kicked in the whatnots and told to shut up. I was going to win.
Somehow, I was going to win. Winners make it happen, right?
Rochester High Street. Saturday, November 12th 1115hrs
Saturday morning in Rochester High Street is much the same as any other morning. As a tourist destination, it attracts people from all over the world, but its proximity to Dover meant that most of them were European. On any given day, a walk through the historic streets of Rochester will yield a plethora of accents and dialects. I was a big fan of the place myself, it was so pretty with its centuries old buildings and quaint cobbled streets. The pokey alleyways that hid wonderful shops selling baked goods or artwork were all marvels to explore. Somehow, when winter came, it was even more romantic and when it snowed it looked like a fairy-tale setting.
There was no snow today, but I had been too miserable to eat breakfast when Brett left and then too determined to get out of the house to remember that I hadn’t eaten. Now it was nearing lunchtime and I was hungry yet again.
The car had been left in its usual spot behind the office, but where I would then normally open the back door and go inside, I went around the building to the High Street in search of sustenance.
In a few weeks, the Christmas markets would be here every day, giving Rochester a new feel and smell as the scent of Bratwurst and onions or Gluewein filled the air.
For now, I would settle for a warm sandwich from the coffee shop. The bell tinkled as I pushed my way into the warm interior and joined the short queue at the counter. I checked my watch to see that I still had ten minutes before Jack’s half hour was up. I didn’t know where he had been when I spoke to him, but if he was too far away to arrive in thirty minutes, he hadn’t messaged to say so.
The queue moved forward, giving me a view of the sandwiches neatly wrapped inside the glass stand beneath the counter. I checked to make sure the brie and bacon panini I wanted was there and snagged it as the person in front of me took another step forward.
Serving at the counter was Hayley. I knew her name because it was written in big swirling letters on a badge pinned to her chest. I was fairly certain Tempest had enjoyed a fling with her a while back. They gave off a distinct vibe whenever they got near each other. Thinking about that though reminded me that Tempest never seemed to have any luck with his relationships either. He was seeing someone now, at least I thought he was, but if that was the case, he didn't talk about her and showed no signs of having had an amazing night the night before. I wondered about Tempest sometimes. He was good looking and successful and above all he was nice. He was just a really nice guy. I started to wonder what he thought about having kids when Hayley called "Next, please" and it was my turn to be served. It broke my train of thought and I squashed the idea when it resurfaced again after my order was placed.
I had just broken up with Brett, I didn’t need to start something new anytime soon and certainly not with my employer.
Five minutes later, I was inside the office and wishing I had come in earlier to switch the heating on before going for food. The timer was sensibly set to off for the weekends when typically, none of us came in. We could work from home if we were involved in a case. However, I wanted to confront Jack here rather than at my apartment since every time he went there, I was either naked or very nearly naked.
As I chomped through my sandwich, the warm cheese threatening to spill out, I powered up my computer.
A knock at the front door drew my attention. Expecting the person outside to be Jack Hammer and not a hopeful customer with a new problem, I stuffed the last bite of sandwich in my mouth and wiped my lips with the napkin.
‘Good morning, Jack.’ He was stood outside with his usual jovial expression as if nothing in the world could possibly dent his happy mood.
I was going to give it my best shot.
‘I know about the Polish driver.’ I said as he came inside.
I watched his face to see how it reacted, but his smile seemed to be painted on. It didn’t crack at all. He said, ‘Whatever do you mean, Amanda?’
‘The driver doesn’t exist. There is no such person as Milosz Kyncl. Who was the driver Jack? Was it Bob?’
‘What do you mean the driver doesn’t exist? I spoke with him myself.’ Then his expression finally changed as his eyes widened in disbelief. ‘Oh, my God. They got him already. Twenty-four hours and they already made him vanish and erased his identity. Oh, that poor man.’
‘What are you talking about, Jack?’
‘You think he doesn’t exist because he doesn’t. He did, but they will have kidnapped and murdered him and then destroyed all trace of him having ever existed. I bet if you went to his house you would find a new fake family living there now that would claim they had been there for years.’
Once again, Jack had an answer that defied logic but also made sense and he was sticking with it.
I wanted to ask who he meant when he said they but asking the question would just elicit another tirade of utter nonsense.
Instead, I asked, ‘Just how deep in are you, Jack?’
‘You have me all wrong, Amanda?’ I could hear the fake innocence dripping from his voice.
‘Jack it was you inside the alien suit. You are the one that was spotted outside Brompton Farm by Lara Fallon. I think you also faked the spaceship in the footage you are using to make yourself famous.’ The tactic of accusing him was a hopeful one at best. I believed what I was saying but I had not one scrap of proof. If he sounded scared and defensive now, I would know I had got close to the mark.
He laughed though. ‘Amanda, that is the most wonderful fantasy. How could I possibly have faked a spaceship?’
‘I’m going to catch you, Jack. I just hope you are not involved in the murder of Tamara Mwangi.
‘Good luck with that, Amanda.’ He made it sound genuine.
I turned and started walking across the room to my office. ‘Come with me, please.’
In my office, the computer was showing the video of his alien spaceship footage. I had pressed pause at a frame that showed the driver’s hand. It was only in the shot for a moment and I hadn’t seen it at all to start with. The evidence was one of those things that gets lodged in my brain and doesn’t reveal itself until later. I had only caught on when I read the report from Jane this morning.
I pointed to the screen. ‘What do you see, Jack?’
He leaned in to scrutinise the screen. ‘It appears to be a still from the footage poor Milosz Kyncl took. That poor, poor man.’ He was sticking with his story and making a great show of his sorrow for Milosz.
I drew Jack’s eyes to a point on the screen. On the index finger of the left hand that was caught in the shot, was a ring. Not just any ring though. ‘Jack that ring is a Southampton University Alumni ring. I recognise it because my father wore one. I still have it at home. They are not exactly common, but Bob wears one as well. That is Bob’s hand in the footage. Isn’t it?’
‘Do you think Bob can speak Polish?’ He laughed.
‘No.’ I looked squarely at him now. ‘I think you got a Polish actor to do a voice over.’
There it was!
His smile had faltered for just the barest moment. A tinge of doubt had crept into his eyes. He recovered instantly though.
‘Amanda, if all you have is a ring on a hand, I must beg you to admit that it is circumstantial at best. This is just coincidence.'
‘I’m going to catch you, Jack.’
‘And I am going to prove you wrong, my lovely Amanda. I’ll tell you what. If you can prove that I am a charlatan, with props and clever tricks, I will go on my show or on National TV or whatever you can arrange, and I will admit publicly that I faked the whole thing. However, when I prove that I am not the man inside the alien suit or somehow faking a spaceship flying over England, you will agree to come on my sho
w as co-host for ten episodes. We will be so big by the end of that run that you will not be able to walk away.’
He put his hand out for me to shake. I stared at it, looked back up at him and grabbed it tight. I squeezed his hand while imagining it was his neck.
‘Deal.’ I said through gritted teeth.
‘Super.’ He replied. It felt like he was all but laughing in my face.
Gordon McIntosh. Saturday, November 12th 1201hrs
Jack was gone, and the office was empty once more. I hugged myself against the cool air. It was just starting to warm up, but it was time for me to go.
As I picked up my handbag, my phone starting ringing. It was somewhere in the bottom of my bag and doing a very good job of evading my fingers as they scrambled for it.
If I didn't find it soon, it would go to voicemail. Annoyed, I upended the bag onto the desk and fished the elusive device from the debris. As I stabbed the answer button, I spotted a loose jelly baby that must have escaped its packet a week ago and had been living in hiding ever since. I popped it into my mouth as I took the call.
‘Hello, Kieron. Has there been a development?’
‘Sort of.’ He answered with a voice that held a tone bordering on panic. ‘Lara is in labour.’ To accentuate his claim, Lara screamed her discomfort. ‘We are on our way to the hospital. I wanted to let you know in case you tried to get hold of me.’
‘Turn off the damned phone and drive, you idiot.’ Lara shouted between breaths.
‘Gotta go.’ He said, and the line went dead.
Their baby was coming. I felt happy for Kieron and hoped that getting the pregnancy bit over with and having a tiny baby to love would improve Lara’s mood. I also felt an enhanced need to solve this case.
Talking to Kieron about developments had reminded me that the case was not only about glowing milk; there had been a murder. Or, at least, there had been an unexplained death and I had planned to call Neville Hinkley and ask him what his autopsy had shown.
I had the phone trapped between my shoulder and ear as I locked up the front door of the office. I needed a few groceries, which I could get from the shop two doors along instead of stopping on the way home.
As I got to the shop, the call connected.
‘Neville Hinkley.' I liked that he didn't feel the need to add the prefix Doctor every time he spoke.
‘Hi, Neville. It’s Amanda. I hoped you could tell me about Tamara Mwangi. What your autopsy found.’
‘Hello, Amanda. Still pursuing your little green men?’
‘Yeah.’ I drawled, showing my exasperation with the case. ‘The truth behind the mystery is still proving elusive. Do you think Tamara Mwangi was murdered?’
‘To put it simply, yes. The cells of the body react differently when slowly frozen compared to flash frozen, so I was able to quickly dismiss the notion of Mrs. Mwangi being shot by an alien with a freeze ray. There was some post-mortem bruising though, the type associated with moving a body after death. Poor Mrs. Mwangi was stuffed into a freezer somewhere and brought out for people to find her.'
‘Was freezing the cause of death?’
‘No, she was strangled. I believe they already questioned the husband over it, but he couldn't have lifted the body by himself and doesn't have a freezer that Mrs. Mwangi's body could fit in.'
I knew from my time in the police that it was almost always the spouse. Murders, apart from the ones perpetrated by drunk idiots with guns or knives at night, occurred due to money or passion or more accurately, being denied either one.
Glen had been genuinely upset when I first saw him, but hours later had done a marvellous job of pulling himself together. If he was the killer, who was the accomplice that helped him move the body and where was the freezer? Or, if it wasn't him, who was it? It had to be someone at the farm.
Then, someone walking toward me in the High Street caught my eye. I moved to the side and stopped moving to reduce the chance that he would notice me.
‘Neville, I have to go. Thank you for your help.’
‘No problem, Amanda. Good luck with the case.’
I slipped the phone back into my pocket and watched. Gordon McIntosh was coming my way and he was wearing a suit. He went by me and into a bank on the other side of the street. Jane hadn’t been able to turn up much on him, nothing that could be considered incriminating anyway, but he was no fan of his boss or any of the farm owners. Would he stoop to bankrupting them though? Did he have a plan?
I followed him into the bank where I saw that he was already being greeted by another man in a suit. This one was younger and had a badge on his lapel that identified him as a bank employee. He led Gordon into a glass-panelled office. As the door closed, I could see that written on it was Shaun French, Business advisor.
I checked my watch. I didn’t need to be anywhere until tonight when I was going out with the girls and all I had pencilled in for this afternoon was laundry and household stuff like do my grocery shopping, which I had been meaning to do for days but had never quite found time for.
I sat down to wait. When an efficient bank employee came to check if they could help me, I said I was waiting for a friend. It satisfied their curiosity and resulted in a free cup of coffee which I sipped while I fiddled with my phone and waited.
I watched Gordon through the glass of the small office but nothing in his movements suggested master villain and murderer.
Just as I was getting bored, the two men stood up, shook hands and Gordon was leaving. He strode out the bank door and turned left to go back the way he had come. I debated asking Shaun the business advisor what Gordon had been up to and whether he would tell me if I pretended to be Gordon’s concerned niece while batting my eyes at him. I doubted it would work, certain that bank workers are not supposed to discuss customer details no matter what. Instead, I was going to see where he was going.
Gordon never once looked back to where he had been. I doubt many people do, but it meant that following him was easy. My efforts were not rewarded with a big clue though. Along the High Street, he turned down the steps into the carpark opposite the casino and climbed into an old Land Rover Defender. It was the car of a professional farmer but looked out of place against his suit.
He was most likely going home. As the car came level with me on its way out of the carpark, I noticed a sticker on the back-right quarter. It had a picture on it, but it was the words on it that told me what I needed to know. I had my clue after all.
Laundry be damned, I had research to do. At home, I would get distracted by other tasks. Suddenly excited, I turned around and rushed back to the office. Saturday afternoon was going to be when I started stitching bits of this stupid case together.
Sitting at my desk, alone at the office while the world outside enjoyed its day off, it still took ages to find what I wanted. I could have called Jane, she would have found the information in seconds, but it was her day off too.
Finding information relating to the sticker on Gordon’s Land Rover didn’t solve the crime. It just filled in one small piece of a confusing mess. I needed to speak with him to confirm what I now believed though.
Another part of the puzzle was the crop circles. I reopened the pack of information Jane had sent me earlier in the week. There wasn’t much in there about Lee and Christian, but I remembered that they had a Saturday job, both together at a big, out of town entertainment equipment retailer.
It was Saturday, so I could expect to catch them there.
Just then, I heard a letter drop onto the carpet tile under the letterbox at the front of the office. I glanced up automatically. Above the frosting that went from the floor to a height of about five feet, was my mystery hooded figure, peering through the glass at me.
He had just put something through the door and was now waving his arms at me, gesticulating that I should get on with it or that he was getting impatient with me. I was getting fed up with the cryptic clues that weren't helping me at all.
I ran for the front d
oor, but I had locked it when I came back to stop people wandering in from the street outside. By the time I got it open, he was long gone.
I turned the new envelope over in my hands. It was unmarked, but that didn’t mean that the person hadn’t left a fingerprint on it. Or on the letter inside. I took it back to my desk, holding it carefully by one corner. It is notoriously difficult to get fingerprints off paper. They are there if the person has touched it with bare skin but almost impossible to make visible. It took clever equipment that had been specifically designed for the task. The type of equipment the chaps at the crime lab had.
I wanted to read whatever cryptic note was inside though, which I achieved with the use of some contact gloves and a pair of tweezers to keep my own fingerprints from entering the equation.
The note bore a new cryptic clue:
It’s all about fracking!!!
The triple exclamation point reinforced the frustrated gesticulation I saw through the window. Mystery hoody thought I was being thick and had missed the point.
The task of intercepting Lee and Christian at their Saturday job moved down the priority list as I settled into my chair once more and typed fracking into a search engine. I wondered how long this would take.
Getting Ready to go Out. Saturday, November 12th 1830hrs
Finally, I was home after what felt like a long, yet unproductive day, I set my bath taps to run, dropped in a bath bomb and went in search of food. As steam billowed out from my bathroom, I diced some veggies and threw them into my wok. I would have a Spanish omelette thing on a plate in ten minutes and be slipping into hot, soapy water in fifteen.
While I stirred the onions, peppers, zucchini, and mushrooms, I tried to focus on the case. I now had some parts of the puzzle clearly laid out in my head. Jack was the man in the alien spacesuit, I was certain of that. He had lied about everything so far and needed the publicity to save his rubbish show from obscurity. He wasn't the one doping the cows though. That task fell to someone else, but they couldn't achieve it alone, so although I suspected someone, I couldn't work out who their accomplice was or why they might be helping unless it was money.
