by Tim O'Rourke
Producing the photograph given to me by Mrs. Lovelace, I waved it under the man’s nose and said, “This is how we know.”
Pulling a pair of spectacles from his suit pocket, he put them on and studied the picture.
“Take a look at the victim,” I said. “That could easily be your mother sitting in that picture. Is your mother still alive?” I asked him.
“Well, yes…” he started.
“Lucky you,” I cut in. “So she’s not alone then, like this poor woman. See the guy in the picture?”
The owner nodded.
“Well that was her husband. Married for best part of sixty years,” I told him. “But he died just six months ago and someone steals the wedding ring that he gave her. Now who would do a thing like that?”
“I don’t -” the owner said, but this time it was Sparky who cut in.
“So you don’t keep records of who you buy from?” and without waiting for the man’s reply, Sparky said, “That’s very remiss of you.”
Then looking around the shop at all the other display cabinets, I said, “So, if you don’t keep records or receipts, how can you be sure that none of this other stuff hasn’t be stolen? I guess we had better get a warrant and come back and seize the lot. What do you reckon, Constable Miles?”
“Gee, and there seems to be so many pretty items in this shop to go through,” Sparky said looking at owner. “It could take months to work our way through all this stuff – I mean this place could be closed down for God knows how long!”
“Okay, okay,” the man sighed. “He came in last Thursday with it.”
“Who did?” I asked.
“Didn’t give his name,” he said.
“CCTV?” John asked.
The man nodded.
“We’ll be taking that, and the ring,” I said, and held out my hand.
We drove back to my rented room, and while John fixed us both up with a mug of coffee and a sandwich, I watched the CCTV disc on my DVD player. There was a camera right above the counter and it gave a clear view of anyone that approached it. I sped through the disc to the previous Thursday. At 15:22 hours that day, my man came into the shop and produced Mrs. Lovelace’s ring.
“I have him!” I shouted over my shoulder at John.
After a quick call to the number I had taken from Mrs. Lovelace’s phone, I sat back in my favourite chair by the window, with John sitting opposite me, and we waited. Within half an hour, the buzzer on the door below sounded. Pressing the intercom button, I told the caller to come up. Leaving my door ajar, I went back to my seat. Moments later, a plump-looking middle-aged man, wearing overalls and muddy boots, stepped into my room. His hands were rough and dirty-looking, with mud under his fingernails.
“Mr. David Evans?” I asked, not getting up from my seat. “Owner of ‘Tidy Gardens’ who can be contacted via Tidy Gardens dot com, whose business address is fifteen Hayfields Road, Havensfield?”
“Why, yes,” he said, looking at both me and Sparky. “You called me about some gardening that you need done?”
“That’s correct,” I said, not taking my eyes from his.
“But I don’t understand,” he said, scratching his untidy hair, “you live in a flat – you don’t have a garden.”
“No, I just like watching people dig themselves holes,” I said back at him.
Looking at me totally confused, Evans said, “Is this some kind of joke?”
Placing Mrs. Lovelace’s wedding ring onto the small coffee table that sat between Sparky and me, I said, “I don’t think stealing from a seventy-eight-year-old woman is a joke.”
The gardener looked down at the ring then back at me, his face white – the colour of paper. He opened and closed his mouth like a drowning fish.
“What have you got to say about that?” I asked him.
“‘I-I don’t know…” he stammered. “I’ve never seen it before.”
Snatching up the ring, I said, “Have it your way, Mr. Evans, but this gentleman over here is a police officer and is ready to take you into custody.”
Hearing this, Evans dropped to his knees at my feet and gripped my ankles.
“Please, I beg you!” he cried. “This will ruin me – my family and my business!”
Kicking him away, I shouted, “Pull yourself together, man. It’s only yourself you have to blame for the situation that you now find yourself in. You have tears of pity in your eyes, now that you have been caught – but where were your tears for Mrs. Lovelace?”
Still on his knees, Evans looked at me and, through his tears, he said, “I’m so sorry. I have been a fool. These last few months or more have been difficult for me. What with the credit crunch, most of my business has dried up. People can’t afford to have their gardens tended to by me. It’s a luxury that most people can now ill afford.”
Showing him no pity, I said, “And so it is hard for millions of people up and down the length of the country, but do they all take to stealing from the elderly to supplement their wages?”
Sniffing, the man wiped his eyes with his dirty hands. “No they don’t – but you must understand, I was desperate. Never before have I stolen anything. But I am behind with my mortgage and the bank is close to repossessing my home. My wife and children will be thrown out onto the street.”
I didn’t doubt that what Evans was telling me was the truth. I could tell that he was no hardened criminal, but still, I was angry with him for what he had done to Mrs. Lovelace. I looked at him; he was pathetic and a very small part of me felt sorry for him.
“Get up!” I snapped at him.
Like an obedient child, Evans stood, while Sparky and me remained seated. Then wringing his hands together, he looked at me and asked, “How did you know I had taken it? What led you to me?”
“Mrs. Lovelace contacted me as I am in the occasional business of solving…how can I put it? Little problems for people. I got her to work backwards in her mind and remember exactly where she had last seen it. She led me to the kitchen windowsill, where she had removed it last Thursday so she could wash the dishes. After a very brief examination of the windowsill, I could clearly see one muddy fingerprint, which suggested that it had been taken by someone with dirty hands. It wouldn’t have taken a genius to have worked out that someone who spent much of their time with their hands in soil had removed it. After examining the flowerbed beneath the kitchen window, I found boot prints in the earth.”
“But of course my foot marks would be there, I’m her gardener,” Evans sniffled.
“You do a lot of your work standing on tiptoe, do you?” I asked him. “There were a set of prints that showed you had been standing on tiptoe just beneath her window. This is where you stood and reached in and took the ring.”
“But…but,” he said sounding astounded. “How did you find the ring?”
“The fact that Mrs. Lovelace didn’t report any other missing valuables, suggests to me that this was a crime of impulse. Just as you have told us, you are struggling financially and on seeing the ring, you saw a way of solving your problems – albeit a mere quick fix. But you weren’t thinking of the long-term consequences or of the outcome should you be caught for your crime. I knew that this theft was a crime of impulse – to make a quick buck, dare I say. Therefore you would want to get rid of the ring as quickly as possible and convert it into some cash. You wouldn’t sell it to friends – they would have wondered where you had come by it – no, you are an amateur – you don’t mix in criminal circles and wouldn’t know anyone to pass it to. So needing the money quickly, you took it to the only place in town that would be interested in buying such an item – the pawnbrokers. So that was the next stop and there was the ring. You were smart enough not to leave your details, but the CCTV proves that it was you.” Then smiling at him wryly, I added, “The chain of events weren’t very hard to follow.”
“I see,” said Evans, sitting slowly into an armchair by the door. “So what happens now? There has been no real harm done, don’t you th
ink? Mrs. Lovelace has her ring back.”
“Thanks to me and my colleague over there,” I snapped. “If Mrs. Lovelace had not contacted me then your hope was that she would believe that she had misplaced the ring. Then what? The following month when you were short of money – would you have helped yourself to her pension money – taken a few notes from her purse when she had her back turned?”
“No!” Evans said, his voice wobbling again as if on the verge of more tears. “I swear. You have to believe me.”
“Why should I take the word of a man that would stoop so low as to take something so precious from an elderly woman such as Mrs. Lovelace?” I scowled.
“Please don’t arrest me!” he begged, sitting on the edge of his seat. “Please don’t make this official.”
Looking at Evans, I could see that his face had drained of all colour and he seemed almost near to collapse. Standing, I crossed the room to him. Looking down at him I said, “You disgust me Evans, but I do believe that you lost your head that day in the garden. You saw the ring and believed you saw a way out of your problems. I believe that you have led a previously good life and it is not my wish to destroy what has, up until this point, been an unblemished life. If my colleague were to arrest you, it would only harm the very people you so foolishly believed you could protect – your wife and children. But my main concern is with my client, Mrs. Lovelace. She could well do without the trauma of having to provide a statement to the police, and perhaps take the stand in court. But would be the realisation that you – someone she speaks so highly of and believes to be her friend – could steal her most precious possession, which would destroy her. I have no wish to break that poor woman’s heart, when it is still healing from the death of her husband. Therefore, I will not be taking this matter any further.”
Dropping from the armchair, and clasping hold of my trousers, Evans sobbed. “Thank you! Thank you.” Kicking him free, I dragged him to his feet and grabbed him by his dirty overalls. Unable to make eye contact with me, Evans said, “How can I ever thank you enough?”
“There is still the matter of the pawnbroker – he is still five hundred pounds out of pocket thanks to you. You will repay him the money. I will be calling him in the next day or two to see that you have. And you are never to go back to Mrs. Lovelace’s home again. That is a customer you have now lost and by the sounds of it, you need as many as you can get.”
“I promise,” Evans snivelled. “I promise.”
Releasing him, I shoved him towards the door and said, “Now get out of here!”
With his shoulders slumped forward and his head cast down, Evans skulked from my room. From behind me, I could hear the sound of clapping. Turning, I saw Sparky, still seated in the armchair and slapping his hands together. Smiling at me, he said, “I’ve got to give it to you Hudson – you’re a class act.”
“It was nothing,” I said, crossing back to my chair.
“I could see how you followed each step of the case, but how did you know his website and home address? You only had his telephone number.”
“That was easy. It’s written down the side of the van that he arrived in.” Then smiling to myself, I looked out of the window.
I returned the ring to Mrs. Lovelace that evening. Once again, I went back to the flowerbed beneath her kitchen window, and making out that it had been there all along, I handed it to her. Slipping it back onto her finger, she wept with relief at having her wedding ring again.
“Whatever your fee, young lady, it would never be enough,” she sobbed. “How much do I owe you?”
Taking her by the arm and leading her back inside, I told her she owed me nothing. In the following days, I hired another gardener for Mrs. Lovelace, giving him my bank account details so he could charge me directly for his labour.
“She’s is to have the prettiest garden in Havensfield,” I told him.
I reached the newsagents just as it was closing.
“I didn’t think you were coming today,” the paperboy said, as he opened the door to me.
“I got delayed, Jack,” I said.
“Want a copy of each?” he asked, taking the pile of newspapers from the counter.
“As always,” I smiled.
“What I can’t figure out,” the young lad said, “is how come you need so many newspapers every day. They all pretty much say the same old thing.”
“I don’t have a social life,” I said, taking the papers from him.
“Fancy going on a date then, Kiera?” he said, trying to make his offer sound like a joke.
“Maybe in a couple of years,” I winked at him and left the shop. Taking one of the papers, I rolled the others up and tucked them under my arm. Then looking at the headline splashed in thick black letters across the newspaper, my heart almost stopped.
Passenger plane crashes over Atlantic Ocean!
Then, just like so many times before, those bright lights began to flash behind my eyes. And in those bright lights I could see an airline pilot screaming into his headpiece, “Mayday! Mayday! They are trying to breach the cockpit!”
As quickly as they had come, those blinding images had gone, leaving me feeling punch-drunk and dazed. Then I heard the pitter-patter sound of raindrops splashing down onto the newspaper in my hands. Looking down at the headline, expecting to see black ink running across the page, I was startled to see that it wasn’t rain that had dripped onto it, but crimson-coloured tears from my eye.
Chapter Three
Placing the newspapers on the table along with all the other cuttings and clippings I’d amassed over the weeks, I went to my poky bathroom and ran a sink full of water. Cupping my hands, I splashed some of it onto my face, and wiped away the red streak that ran from the corner of my left eye and down my cheek. Some of it had splashed onto my top, and pulling it off, I threw it into the wash basket.
The dizziness that I felt after these episodes had begun to fade, and I was left with a dull thud throbbing away behind my temple. Rolling my head from side to side on my neck, I rubbed my forehead with the tips of my fingers and went to my bedroom. Pulling a clean top from the wardrobe, I pulled it on. Sitting in my favourite seat by the window, I eased myself into it and turned on the T.V. I would go through the newspapers once my head had cleared. It had become my nightly habit of sitting in my armchair, the news playing on the T.V in the background, and methodically going through every newspaper looking for stories, anything that might lead me to Luke, Potter, and Murphy. With scissors in hand, I would cut out anything of interest and pin them to the living room wall. There were so many cuttings now attached to the walls, that if you stepped back and at a glance, the room looked as if it had been decorated with newspaper. Faces of the missing and murder victims stared back at me. Sparky said that it freaked him out just a little and he once asked me why they were there. I told him that I was fascinated by serious crime, and that I was writing a study on offender profiling. If Doctor Keats had ever made a house call, then my chances of ever returning back to the force would’ve been something close to zero. But I didn’t have to worry about Keats anymore and she didn’t have to worry about me – if she ever had.
The T.V. flashed images of the ocean. Rescue boats were racing towards what looked like the fragmented and broken pieces of an airliner. Cushion seats floated on the waves, along with yellow-coloured life jackets. The strap line running across the bottom of the screen read:
Air Atlantis Flight 281 crashes into sea 80 miles off the coast of Ireland. All 232 passengers and 12 crew feared to be dead.
Leaning forward in my chair, I turned up the volume to hear the reporter speaking over the images being played out on the screen.
“The investigation is still ongoing,” the reporter said. “The cause of the crash is yet to be formally determined. A statement by the BEA says that the last verbal contact was made with the aircraft at 11:52 hours BST. It is unclear what was said during that last transmission.”
Slumping back into my chair, I could h
ear the sound of that voice inside my head. It wasn’t like I was hearing with my ears, but like a distant radio signal hissing and spitting inside my mind. Over and over I could hear a voice screaming, “They’ve breached the cabin…they’ve breached the cabin!”
Was the voice I could hear that of the pilot from the plane that crashed into the sea? It couldn’t be. Why would it be? And who had breached the cabin? But as I sat and tried to make sense of the changes that were taking hold of me, the buzzer on my door hummed, waking me from my thoughts. Placing the newspapers on the floor and turning down the volume on the T.V., I got up from my chair and peered out of the window and down at the street below. It was starting to get dark outside. The long shadow of someone standing at the door stretched up the street like a deep crack in the pavement. The buzzer sounded again.
Pressing the intercom button, I spoke into it.
“Hello?”
“Ms. Kiera Hudson?” the voice asked, and it was female.
“Yes,” I said back, wondering who it could be.
“I was hoping I could speak with you,” the voice crackled through the intercom.
Peering over my shoulder at my room, the piles of old newspapers scattered across the floor and stacked beside my chair, and the news cuttings covering the walls, I turned back and said, “This isn’t a good time for me at the moment. Couldn’t you come back -”
“You’ve been recommended to me,” the voice cut in. “I’ve heard you’re good at…how can I put it? Solving little problems?”
“Erm,” I stammered.
“Please, Ms. Hudson,” the voice came again. “I’ve travelled a great distance to ask for your help.”
Releasing the latch, I spoke into the intercom and said, “Okay, come on up.”
Hurrying around the room, I kicked some of the scattered newspapers under the chair and sofa, and scraped my hair into a ponytail. Before I’d even had the chance of finishing my hair, there was a woman standing in my open doorway. Closing the door behind her, she stepped in.
Glancing at all the hundreds of newspaper cuttings, she said, “Thank you for seeing me, Ms. Hudson.”
