She trailed off when the beep that introduced the message came over the phone’s tinny speakers.
‘Hello, Mr Banecroft, Simon here …’
Reggie’s hand flew to his mouth. Grace gasped and blessed herself.
‘I just wanted to let you know that I’m out working on a story and it’s going to be an absolute whopper! You’ll have to hire me after this! I’m just off to meet my source and then I’ll drop in tomorrow morning to tell you all about it. I’ve always wanted to say this … Hold the front page!’ He giggled. ‘OK, see you tomorrow. Bye.’
Beep.
The room was completely silent for a long moment.
Hannah nodded. ‘I need to check that the timestamp on this message is right, but if it is, that message was left at eleven thirty-four on Tuesday night. Which is, what – twelve minutes before he started climbing the stairs at the Dennard building and about forty-five before he … y’know. He doesn’t sound suicidal, does he?’
He didn’t. He sounded excited. Happy. Full of life. He sounded like someone who was doing exactly what he said he was doing.
‘We need to tell the police,’ said Grace.
‘No,’ said Banecroft. ‘We don’t. They’ve already made up their minds. We need to investigate this ourselves.’
‘To be fair,’ said Hannah, ‘DI Sturgess said he wasn’t ruling anything in or out.’
‘When did he say this?’ Banecroft gave Hannah a suspicious look.
‘I bumped into him on my way home last night.’
‘Did you? Well, I know Sturgess. I’ve known a hundred Sturgesses. They’ll say anything to try and trip you up, or to achieve whatever he was trying to achieve last night. What we need,’ continued Banecroft, ‘is a plan of attack. You!’ He pointed his crutch at Reggie. ‘What Simon was working on had something to do with an unexplained death in Castlefield on Monday night. Go down there and find out what happened.’
Reggie nodded nervously. ‘Of course, but I … It’s not really my field of expertise.’
‘It involves dead people, doesn’t it? That’s right up your street.’
‘Yes,’ said Reggie, wincing and nodding, ‘but not normally that recent. Could Ox come with me and—’
‘No, he can’t. You’ll have to figure it out without having your hand held. Ox has another assignment.’ Banecroft locked eyes with Ox. ‘You were friendly with Simon?’
The tension in the room grew. The two men hadn’t spoken since the fight. Ox gave a terse nod.
‘Excellent. Then go and find out what happened to that bloody camera of his. Meanwhile, the new Tina—’
‘Hannah,’ interrupted Hannah.
‘—is going to drive me somewhere.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘If Reggie is going to be sniffing around a crime scene then he needs somebody with him. Seeing as we’ve already pissed off the authorities’ – she tried not to look in Banecroft’s direction when she said it – ‘it makes sense to have two of us down there, and for one of us to be the only person who has a relationship with someone from the police force.’
Banecroft considered this. ‘All right, fine. Where are my car keys?’
With everything that had happened, Hannah had forgotten to give them back. She took them out of her handbag and tossed them to him. He, in turn, tossed them at Stella, who wasn’t expecting them – they hit her right in the chest.
‘What the hell?’
‘Yes,’ said Banecroft, ‘it’s those lightning-fast reflexes that make you the perfect choice for the job of my chauffeur.’
Stella’s face looked as close to happy as Hannah had ever seen it. ‘For real?’
‘Absolutely not,’ said Grace.
‘She needs to learn. She’s been bugging you about it for weeks.’
‘How did you know that?’ said Grace.
‘Because,’ said Banecroft, ‘I know everything that happens in this office.’
‘Really?’ said Grace. ‘What’s my surname?’
Banecroft hobbled off in the direction of the toilet. ‘I don’t need to know that – we’re on first-name terms. Everybody get going – we’re going to press tonight, come hell or high water. And why the hell do these trousers have no fly?’
Battered Sausage
Sharon Marmont, 23, from Essex has been arrested for assaulting her former partner with a battered sausage. Ex-boyfriend Liam Willis, 25, is a committed vegan, and calls have been made for the case to be dealt with as a hate crime.
CHAPTER 27
In what was turning out to be a week full of revelations, Hannah found herself having yet another.
Throughout her life, for reasons she had never understood, strangers would talk to her. Not just sleazy men – although, yes, that – but people in general. Her old college roommate Samantha had wanted to make a study of it. They could both be sitting on a train, wearing headphones while reading a book, and people of all manner and description would start talking to Hannah. Samantha said it was because she had ‘resting friendly face’ – the implication being that she permanently looked like somebody who was happy to chat. Samantha, on the other hand, had self-diagnosed ‘resting bitch face’, which meant she got to read her book undisturbed.
So it was that Hannah spent long-haul flights being shown pictures of strangers’ cats or grandchildren, or sometimes – to much hilarity – cats with grandchildren. She spent one long train journey discussing what it was like to be a widower with a man called Derek, aged eighty-two, who casually dropped in halfway through that he liked his women ‘large and in charge’. She would get stopped on the streets of London about every thirty minutes to give tourists directions, and once, memorably, she’d turned down an offer of marriage from a nice Indian man and then directed him to Piccadilly Circus. It had been a burden, until today.
Castlefield was a brisk fifteen-minute walk from the office. It was a collection of apartment buildings that wound along a slow-moving canal, which in turn was criss-crossed by railway bridges, the lines converging at nearby Oxford Road station. A mix of modern apartment buildings and converted mills offered balconies with views of the canal, which had tree-lined paths running alongside it and barges chugging happily along its waters. It was all rather lovely – a relatively calm oasis of waterside living that was only a few minutes’ walk from the city centre.
In a corner of her mind, Hannah made a note to check rental prices. She would need to find somewhere permanent to live. Come to that, she would also need to find out how much she was being paid. With everything that had happened, there hadn’t been a right time to bring it up. Plus, given the general state of disrepair of the office, a part of her didn’t want to know. She was still feeling good about having a job and she didn’t want to ruin that little boost by discovering it was a very badly paid one.
On the walk over with Reggie, Hannah had made the decision not to talk about what had happened with the Fenton brothers outside the Admiral’s Arms on Monday, which now seemed like a lifetime ago. She was, after all, someone who was trying to reinvent herself. If Reggie had decided to do the same, then who was she to judge? Besides, as she walked into the unknown, there was a little part of her that was reassured to know that, while he might not look it, her companion was able to handle a tricky situation. So instead, she had listened as Reggie happily ran down a list of restaurants he had visited and the reasons why they were terrible.
Hannah’s previous experience of investigative work stretched only to failing to notice her husband’s industrial-scale infidelity, and Reggie’s seemed to extend only to a thorough criticism of a second-rate wine list. This was how they had come to find themselves standing in the middle of Castlefield, looking about, not knowing where to start. It had, frankly, been rather embarrassing.
They’d started googling ‘Castlefield murder’ on their phones. The press reports had been scant. On the first day, little more had been said than the body of a fifty-two-year-old man had been fou
nd in the area and police were investigating. The following day, the reports had been only a rehash of the previous day’s, with the addition of one new piece of information: the man had been formally identified as John Maguire, a Manchester native of no fixed abode.
Hannah still had DI Sturgess’s card in her pocket, but the idea of ringing him was a non-starter. He didn’t strike her as the kind of man who’d cheerfully answer her questions – not without having rather a lot of his own. Also, while she would rather die than admit it, she had caught herself thinking about him every now and again since yesterday. It was probably some variation on Stockholm syndrome – after so many years in a dreadful marriage, she was wildly over-reacting to her first contact with an eligible male since her emancipation. All of which left her and Reggie standing around with no clue where to start.
Which is when Hannah’s lifelong ‘curse’ had revealed itself to be a blessing. Absent of any other ideas, she had been wandering around looking for police tape when a woman standing in the smoking area of a nearby office block, hugging herself to fend off the chill, took notice. ‘Y’all right there, love?’
Fifteen minutes later, Hannah found Reggie eating a breakfast roll by the canal while a trio of ducks gave him the evil eye. When Hannah appeared beside him, he pointed at a sign that showed a cartoon quacker thanking you for not feeding it bread. It went on to point out that bread made its tummy hurt, contained the wrong nutrients and caused algae in the water, which killed his/her fish friends and gave the ducks diseases.
‘All of that may well be true,’ said Reggie, ‘but I can’t help thinking that the massive flaw in this system is that nobody has explained it to the ruddy ducks. And it says we’re supposed to feed them half-cut seedless grapes. Who on earth has half-cut seedless grapes about their person?’
Hannah patted him on the arm and they both took a step back as one of the ducks quacked angrily in their direction.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘The body they discovered on Tuesday morning was found over there – some poor homeless guy. It was found first thing in the morning and they reckon that it happened Monday night, which tallies with what the papers said.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘Yes. See those workmen?’ Hannah pointed at two men up on scaffolding, fixing damage to a red-brick wall. ‘That’s the spot. The police had it closed off for all of Tuesday.’
They started to walk towards the wall. ‘How did you find all this out?’ asked Reggie.
Hannah gave a shrug and a sheepish smile. ‘Oh, y’know, I just asked about.’
They stood on the far side of the canal and watched the men work.
‘That damage can’t be related to the body, can it?’
Hannah looked around them. ‘I don’t know. I mean, the woman I spoke to said that the body was found right underneath where those guys are.’
‘Oh,’ said Reggie.
They both stared up at it for a couple of minutes.
‘OK,’ said Hannah. ‘Let’s think this through. Something about this death was suspicious, and somehow Simon got involved. That must mean it was the kind of suspicious he would’ve been interested in.’
‘Well,’ said Reggie, pointing across the canal, ‘that damage to the brickwork, fifteen feet in the air – that’d be rather odd, wouldn’t it?’
‘I guess.’ Hannah clicked her fingers. ‘He also said on the message that he had a source. What kind of a source could Simon have?’
‘That’s … I don’t know. I mean, the poor lad spent most of his time sitting outside our offices. Maybe there’s something in his notes?’
‘If there is, the police have it, and Banecroft was very clear about not involving them.’
They turned to scan the overlooking flats, the railway arches, the cranes in the distance. The brief period when it had felt as if they might know what they were doing was fast running out.
Just then, a figure shuffled up to them, carrying a sleeping bag.
‘Sorry to bother you, folks, but could you spare some change?’
Hannah had the suspicion it was nothing more than blind luck. When engaged in an investigation, she assumed it was unlikely that the most obvious line of enquiry, which you’d somehow missed, sidled up to you and asked for spare change. Not that that guy had been of much help, telling them only that John Maguire had been known as Long John and he’d been an all-right bloke who never did nothing to nobody. After some prodding, he’d also revealed a few different locations where they could find other members of the homeless community.
It was shocking at first, and soon it just became depressing. Even here, in a fairly well-to-do area, the issue was rife if you knew where to look. People who had fallen through the cracks of life, surviving by living in whatever crevices they could find. Hannah and Reggie passed two rough sleepers who had laid out actual mattresses in a pedestrian walkway under one of the several railway bridges in the area. Gaps between buildings, areas up on the far side of the canal across from the busy walkway, under railway arches – anywhere there was a little space and a little shelter, homeless people could be found.
As the pair walked further along the towpath, away from the apartment buildings with their prized canal-side views, they came upon a mini encampment of tents.
‘How is it so bad?’ asked Hannah.
‘Well,’ said Reggie, ‘people are allowed to be homeless here. In London, the richer areas do everything they can to make it all but impossible – installing spikes, moving them along, et cetera, et cetera.’
Hannah nodded, feeling dreadful. He was right, of course. In London, she’d lived in Knightsbridge with her husband, and the reason they’d not seen any rough sleepers was because money had been spent to hide, if not fix, the problem.
‘And,’ continued Reggie, ‘Manchester is a nice city. At a guess, if you have to be homeless somewhere, I’d imagine the thought is that it might as well be here.’
That did make sense. They’d spoken to a lot of people, and while there’d been plenty of Manc accents, there had been no shortage of people from elsewhere.
Reggie had had the presence of mind to bring a picture of Simon with him on his phone. They showed it around, receiving automatic shakes of the head from people suspicious about why they were asking. Reggie had explained to those who would listen that they weren’t the police, that Simon had been his friend, and that they just wanted to find out who had talked to him. Several people begrudgingly admitted having met him. He’d asked questions about Long John and whether they’d seen anything on Monday night.
Hannah wondered how long it had taken Simon to come up with the idea of asking the homeless what they’d seen, given the embarrassingly long time it had taken her and Reggie. Maybe he really would have made a good reporter.
They came to an abandoned barge moored in a run-off of the canal, which some homeless people had occupied. Two men sat on the deck, drinking cans of something Hannah didn’t recognize. One had a lot of tattoos and sported a cast on his right wrist; the other had a long, scraggly beard and wore an anorak over a ‘Frankie Say Relax’ T-shirt that had seen better days.
‘Hi there,’ said Hannah. ‘I was wondering if you’d mind having a quick chat? We’re asking about for people who might have met a friend of ours.’
The man with the cast spoke in a Yorkshire accent. ‘You the fuzz?’
‘No,’ said Reggie.
‘Then bugger off.’
Reggie held up the picture of Simon on his phone. ‘Honestly, it’ll be no trouble. We just want to find out who he might’ve been talking to. He worked with us.’
‘Don’t know him. Don’t want to know him.’
Reggie put away his phone. ‘I’m afraid you won’t get the chance now. He’s dead.’
‘Boo hoo,’ added the beard, in an accent with a strong dash of cockney. ‘Go on, get out of it.’
Hannah felt Reggie tense and she put her hand on his arm.
‘OK,’ she said in a cheery voice, ‘thanks very much for y
our time. We’ll be back up that way if you change your minds.’ She pointed in the direction they had come from. ‘We’re going to find a bench and have ourselves some lunch.’
‘Oh, la-di-da,’ said the displaced cockney.
They turned to go. Reggie spoke out the side of his mouth. ‘“Thanks for your time”? I’m all in favour of good manners, but they were dreadful.’
‘I know,’ said Hannah, ‘but it wasn’t them I was talking to. It was the girl who was looking out at us from the window below deck. Her expression when she saw the picture – she definitely knew Simon.’
‘Oh.’
‘So let’s walk slowly, find a bench, and then do as much hanging around as it takes for her to come find us.’
CHAPTER 28
As Ox entered the vestibule of the Church of Old Souls, there was an unmistakable scent of herb coming from the printer downstairs. On the rare occasions when Banecroft wasn’t on the prowl, Ox sometimes nipped in and joined Manny for a toke, but he wasn’t in the mood today. Instead, he headed up the stairs, automatically hopping over the fourth step from the top. As he climbed, his record bag banging against his hip, he could hear Grace’s booming voice on the phone.
‘Well, I am sorry, sir, but The Stranger Times cannot be held responsible for the products advertised in our publication. You should contact the manufacturer directly.’
Ox turned the corner. With her headset on, Grace was on her feet, giving the reception desk a vigorous polish. It was notable for being the only part of the office that ever looked clean. A couple of months ago, he’d made the mistake of leaving a bag from an Indian takeaway on it. For a fortnight he’d been pointedly left out of the lunch order as a result. Unusually, there was a big bunch of flowers displayed in a vase on it today. Ox didn’t know much about flowers, but they were a variety of colours and smelled nice.
Grace looked up and smiled at him, then her brow furrowed as she addressed the caller on the other end of the line. ‘You have done what? Well, I mean, that is not designed to go up there, is it?’
The Stranger Times Page 19
