by Peter Helton
Both had their warrant cards out. ‘Mr Honeysett. I’m DI Reid, this is DC Cookson. I’ve come to have a word,’ he said menacingly.
‘If it’s just the one …’ I walked back to the kitchen. They were following slowly, dawdling and sticking their noses into doors on the way, so I sat down and made a start on my pancakes, which I like to eat without the aid of cutlery. When the two came into the kitchen, both looked around appraisingly at the colourful mess before taking a chair each at the other end of the long and cluttered table. I lifted the plate towards Reid. ‘Want one? They’re quite oily; you’d like it.’
Reid pulled a disgusted face. ‘What are they?’
‘Jewish potato pancakes.’
‘What makes them Jewish?’
‘I sing “Hava Nagila” while I grate the onions.’
Reid ignored that. ‘Where’s the drone?’ he asked, sounding bored.
‘Must be the fridge – it’s quite ancient.’
‘Don’t mess us about, Honeysett, I’m a busy man and I don’t have time to waste on nonsense.’
I waggled half a pancake at him. ‘You’re a busy man but not too busy to come all the way out here to make a nuisance of yourself over a flying toy.’
‘Interfering with a police investigation is a serious matter.’
‘I’m sure it is, which is why I wouldn’t dream of it.’
‘You flew a drone straight at two of my officers, then made off from a police vehicle, refusing to stop.’ He motioned to Cookson who whisked a video still from the folder as if it was a magic trick. ‘Taken from the solo unit that pursued you.’
‘Rubbish. No one asked me to stop, so there was no refusal to stop and no pursuit. The solo unit, also known as “motorbike” to normal people, stopped at the sight of an accident. I naturally assumed that was what he was responding to. As for flying at your officers, the drone footage will show that I was never even close enough to annoy them.’
‘What were you doing at the travellers’ site and why were you flying your drone in an irresponsible and illegal manner? You’re not supposed to let it out of your sight or fly it within fifty yards of any dwellings.’
‘You really have read up on it. First of all, I never lost sight of it, and, second, I think you’ll find “dwellings” does not apply to buses and towed caravans. But I freely admit that I’m not very good at it. I think I’ll find a different hobby.’
‘We strongly recommend it. Now explain what you were doing there in the first place. You haven’t started working for the Chronicle, have you?’
I started on another pancake. They really were oily; I had forgotten to pat them dry on kitchen roll. Still nice, though. ‘Does the name Joshua Grant mean anything?’
‘Chap who got fried in his bedsit the other day. The two fires have nothing to do with each other as far as I can see.’
‘That’s because you can’t see very far if you’re busy looking down your nose at poor people’s pancakes. Have you arrested anyone for Joshua Grant’s murder yet?’
‘We’re asking the questions, Mr Honeysett. What were you doing at the travellers’ camp?’
Could I really eat all six of them? They’re quite nice cold, I tried to tell myself, so leave a couple. I decided to have a fifth and spare one for later. ‘There is,’ I said attractively through a mouthful of pancake, ‘a connection between Joshua and Sam.’
‘Which is?’
‘Verity.’
‘Who?’
‘Verity Lake.’
‘Oh, hang on; the Super mentioned something when he called. Wasn’t she a life model who ran out on you?’
‘You could put it like that.’
‘I am. And the connection being?’
‘She has slept both at Joshua’s and Sam’s place.’
‘She probably slept in lots of beds – yours too, I shouldn’t wonder. I’ve heard you’re none too bothered with conventions yourself. A slut who takes her clothes off in front of people. You think she set the fires?’
‘No.’
‘There you are. The fire at the camp was either set by the farmer – and who can blame him, frankly? – or is down to some squabble between the hippies themselves; you know what they’re like – off their heads most of the time.’ He stood up and looked about at the mess. ‘I do advise you, Mr Honeysett, to be very careful. You don’t want this mess to catch fire, do you? You arty-farty types really are a disgusting breed.’ His sidekick, who had not said a word so far, had stood up too. I thought they were ready to leave, but they decided to stand on the other side of the table, looking down on me as though deciding what to do next.
‘Who else is in the house?’ asked the DC. His voice had an unnecessary edge of sarcasm that the question did not warrant.
I had suddenly gone off pancakes and wiped my hands on a tea towel. I felt an urge to invent a guest, preferably one trained in karate, but thought better of it. ‘No one.’
‘Then whose is the other car?’ asked Reid sharply.
‘A friend’s. I borrowed it.’
He sighed and half turned towards his sidekick. ‘You know, we may have to search this place. Long-haired superannuated hippies often have a lax attitude to the law.’ Reid started wandering around the kitchen, poking among the baking things I had failed to put away, the open cookbooks and rolls of kitchen foil. Slowly but surely he was working his way towards the drawer where I had chosen to keep my revolver. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t find a few cannabis plants growing somewhere on all this land or, failing that, a bag of herbal stashed away in the house?’
I rose too. ‘Are you sure you don’t want the last pancake?’ I offered. ‘Ah, well.’ I stuffed it in my mouth and crossed with the plate to the sink, thereby cutting Reid off from the kitchen drawer. He opened a cupboard door instead and peered at the bags and cartons inside, then checked his fingers for paint stains, puffing out his cheeks and giving me a what-are-we-to-do-with-you look. I ran water into the sink and collected mugs and plates for washing-up, reaching around the two and herding them away from my gun.
‘All right,’ said Reid as though he had come to a decision, ‘we’ll let it go this time. Keep out of this. I don’t want to see your ugly mug anywhere near either of these investigations. If I do, we’ll charge you with obstruction. Stick with unfaithful husbands and missing persons and you’ll stay healthy.’ He turned away and left the kitchen.
The DC lingered to throw his weight around. ‘We could make life quite uncomfortable for you, you know.’ He reached into the open cupboard and picked up a carton of Puy lentils. ‘I mean, imagine we turned up with a team to search this place for drugs?’ He upturned the open packet and let the lentils dribble on the work surface where they sprang away in all directions. ‘We’d have to turn everything upside down.’ He picked up an egg from an open carton and broke it against the work surface. He let the raw egg drop into the mess, then pretended to examine the empty shell. ‘We’d have to look inside everything. And we usually find something if we need to. Think about it.’ He gave me a smile, wiped his hand on the back of a chair and followed his boss out of the house.
I closed the tap and dried my hands, not being in the mood for washing dishes. I suddenly felt more than a little queasy, and not just because I had wolfed down six oil-soaked pancakes. The warning had been quite clear: stay away or we’ll make sure we find a bag of puff at your house. A feeling I had never experienced before spread over me – I began to miss DSI Needham.
SIX
Stick with missing persons had been DI Reid’s recommendation for my continued good health and I decided to heed it; Verity was missing and I intended to find her. I wasn’t at all optimistic for her continued good health, should she be unwise enough to sleep in anything flammable. I went over and over the all-too-short conversation I had had with Sam. All he had said was that Verity would not model for me again because she ‘didn’t have to now’, that they had been planning to buy a houseboat together but she had disappeared. It
sounded to me as though Verity had somehow laid her hands on some money – and it wasn’t from her aunt, real or fake – and had decided she was better off without Sam, if indeed she had ever seriously considered a future with him. Had she just strung him along for a place to sleep or had he reasonably expected to share in whatever money she had acquired? Houseboats weren’t cheap, I presumed. Sam had asked me, ‘Are you one of them?’ and the two characters who had escorted me from the camp site had also assumed that I was. Who was ‘them’? And did ‘they’ by any chance drive a dark-blue Porsche?
Since Verity could by now be anywhere in the whole wide world and Sam’s remarks were all I had to go on, I would start to look in the one place I knew I would find a houseboat – at the marina on the River Avon.
The marina turned out to be a lot more than just a parking place for narrowboats. It was situated in a basin on the north shore of the river and attached to a caravan park. Dozens of boats were moored there, some beautifully painted, with flower pots and log piles on their roofs; some looked more drab and functional. Not all of them were narrowboats; several were wider boats of varying construction.
The woman at reception, who was obviously in the process of packing up for the day, nevertheless did a good job at selling me the place. ‘We have moorings for over forty boats, not all of them residential. As you might expect in a place like Bath, we provide first-class facilities, both for boaters and caravanners. Electricity hook-ups, diesel and other fuels, there are showers for berth holders, pump-out and chemical toilet facilities, naturally, a water point and we sell bottled gas on site.’ She paused after her sales pitch and gave me a questioning look. Perhaps I simply looked too much like a landlubber. ‘I’m afraid there is a long waiting list for berths. What exactly were you after, sir?’
‘I was wondering whether you sold narrowboats.’
‘Of course. We sell new-builds and also act as broker for clients wishing to sell their boats. Were you thinking of a new-build or—’
‘I’m not actually looking for a boat. Not to buy. I’m looking for a person, a woman called Verity Lake.’ Her eyes widened for a moment but then her face became professional again. ‘Did she by any chance buy a narrowboat from here recently?’
‘And what is your interest in the young lady?’
‘She has gone missing and I’m concerned for her welfare. I’m a private investigator.’ With some difficulty, I extracted a slightly bent business card from the lining of my leather jacket to where it had retreated through a whole in my pocket.
She gave it only a cursory glance before dropping it carelessly on her desk. ‘I’m afraid, Mr’ – she squinted at the card – ‘Honeysett, that we cannot give out customer details, whether they are buyers or berth holders. That would be quite unprofessional.’ With a decisive push, she closed a desk drawer, then turned off the computer in front of her.
‘I understand your dilemma,’ I said, trying to look understanding. ‘The woman in question may be in danger.’
‘Yes, from a man, no doubt. If you are concerned about the girl, I suggest you contact the police and tell them about your worries.’
‘Perhaps you are right,’ I conceded. ‘Thank you anyway. Just one thing …’
‘Yes?’
‘Could I possibly use your toilet?’
She tutted but said, ‘Very well … erm, you can use the one here.’ She showed me through an open door that led to an unlit corridor. ‘Second on the left. But please be quick; I’m about to lock up for the day.’ She disappeared into a room to the right.
I quietly opened the first door on the left: a broom cupboard full of cleaning products, buckets and mops. Someone had also shoved in a five-foot-tall stack of mineral water in two-litre plastic bottles. The next door led into the promised toilet. I waited inside for sixty seconds and flushed, slipped out and into the cubbyhole next door. Squeezing behind the stack of mineral water and cowering down with an upturned bucket on my head, I felt stupid but – I hoped – invisible to anyone casually glancing inside.
If the conscientious marina people were reluctant to tell me about Verity, then I was even more reluctant to take no for an answer. It was pretty obvious that Verity had at least been here. All I had done was mention her name, but the receptionist had immediately called her a ‘young lady’, which meant she had at least seen her and recognized her name. If I wasn’t discovered, I would wait until the office had closed for the evening and have a snoop in the files.
Earlier, I had strolled along the moorings to look at boats for any sign of Verity and asked the few boaters I saw, but none of those I spoke to admitted to knowing about her. It was a small enough community for at least one of them to have heard of her if she had been a recent addition to the berth holders. I did not really expect Verity to be mooring here if she had bought a boat; the place was too exclusive, and mooring costs ran into several thousand pounds a year, as one boater had told me with something akin to pride.
The bucket I had chosen to wear for my cunning disguise smelled aggressively of some kind of cleaning product, with undertones of blocked drains. Due to the smallness of the space into which I had crammed myself, I could not sit down but had to squat. After about five minutes in the cupboard I was beginning to feel uncomfortable, after ten minutes my ankles were killing me, and after another few minutes my calf muscles joined in. Even worse, I now really did want to use the toilet. Beyond the oddly amplified sound of my own breathing I could hear a distant door and indistinct voices, then footsteps; someone was coming down the corridor. A knock on the toilet door. A few seconds later, the cupboard door briefly opened and almost immediately closed again. ‘Must have left while I was turning the drinks machines off,’ said the receptionist’s voice. ‘Honeysomething. OK, I’ll lock up. Lots of warm weather ahead, apparently, I’m glad we managed to restock the—’ Her voice was cut off as a door closed. All remained quiet. I stayed under my bucket for a while longer to let them walk away from the building, to their cars or boats or wherever they were going. To pass the time, I imagined having a normal life, going to work without a bucket on my head in some place with interesting colleagues, driving home at the end of the day in a newish car with music on the radio, looking forward to a microwaved ready-meal and an evening in front of the telly. A ready-meal and telly? I was becoming delirious.
It stayed quiet. After shedding my bucket, I unfolded myself with some difficulty and a rhapsody of groans, then carefully opened the door and peered into the corridor. All was quite dark and still. Half an hour of the cupboard-and-bucket treatment appeared to have aged me considerably; I hobbled painfully into the office with its half-glazed entrance door and two small windows. I could see several lights out in the marina but no movement. The sun had set and I ought to be invisible to anyone out there. The problem was that I could also see virtually nothing apart from the dark silhouettes of the furnishings. I bumped painfully into the corner of the reception desk, then groped my way to the computer and sat down on the office chair. The light from the screen would, of course, illuminate my face, and that wouldn’t do at all, which is why I pulled the monitor towards me, covered it and my head with my leather jacket and then furtled around in the dark until I found the power switch. After the darkness of bucket and office, the light was painfully glaring; I dimmed it until it would go no dimmer and hoped not too many chinks of light escaped from my cover. This would definitely be classed as burglary or attempted burglary if I got caught. A ready-meal and telly suddenly didn’t seem so bad. How had my life departed this far from the norm?
I found the accounts and clicked on ‘Sales’. With an unpleasant warning sound that made me jump, a dialogue box appeared. It was password-protected. What had Tim told me about passwords? Nearly fifty per cent of people use the same twenty-five passwords. The only two I remembered were ‘football’ and ‘password’. Neither worked. I typed in ‘boat’, ‘narrowboat’, ‘lock’ and ‘marina’. No luck. I was about to give up when I remembered another one from Tim
’s list: ‘QWERTY’. Bingo. I felt like James Bond. In ‘Sales’ I went straight to ‘Pre-Owned’ – I doubted Verity would stretch to a new boat – and slowly wormed my way into the accounts until I found the sale, only three days earlier. Verity Lake had bought a forty-eight-foot Springer – whatever that meant – called Time Out for £18,000. The description of the boat included the expression ‘in need of updating’. There was a note at the bottom of the page explaining that ‘the client’ (Verity) bought the boat without commissioning the usual survey because she was ‘in a hurry to complete the sale and move on to the boat’. And she had paid in cash.
By the light from the screen I found my business card and pocketed it, then I switched off the computer and put my jacket back on. Having stared at the computer screen from two inches away, all I could see now, wherever I turned my gaze, was an after-image of the accounts page detailing Verity’s purchase of the boat.
At last, now I knew where to look for her. The girl was somewhere out there on a boat. If someone was after her and she knew about it, then perhaps a boat was not such a daft idea, especially if no one knew what it was called or what it looked like. Now I knew both, it couldn’t be long before I would find her to make sure she was safe.
First, though, I had to get out of the building and the marina. I had imagined that I would simply open a window and climb out, but when I tried, I found that, being ground-floor windows and modern, they were restricted to opening no more than four inches. Even twenty years younger and five stone lighter, I would not have been able to squeeze through the gap. A Victorian street urchin would have struggled. Upper-floor windows would not have this security feature; sadly for me, there was no upper storey to jump out of – or perhaps just as well, considering my athletic deficiencies. Just on the off-chance and because you never know your luck, I groped my way to the front door. As expected, it was locked. Just as I tried the handle, an elderly couple, both using torches to light their way, appeared around the corner. I quickly ducked down.
