Falling into Crime

by Penny Grubb

  ‘The notebook?’ Annie queried as she followed Bill out of the room.

  ‘He must have had it in his pocket. They brought us back his things after … afterwards. There was mud on it and that.’

  He stopped abruptly in the tiny hallway and Annie prayed he wouldn’t break down. She wouldn’t know what to do; how to console him. Impulsively, she reached out and put her hand on his arm. He gave her a smile; his eyes shone brightly through tears that didn’t quite fall as he said, ‘They all say it’ll be better when the funeral’s out of the way.’

  Annie felt shock prickle her skin. ‘You haven’t had the funeral yet?’

  Her eye was drawn to the wooden hallstand and the card that had been in her peripheral vision when she arrived. It was an order of service for the following day.

  ‘Funeral’s tomorrow. Things was delayed. They had to do a post-mortem with it being an accident on that site.’

  She worked it out. Seven days from death to burial was too short a delay for there to be any doubts that the death was anything other than an accident.

  He took her up the narrow staircase and led her into a large front bedroom. ‘This is our Terry’s room.’

  She paused for a mental inventory of the dimensions of the house. This was the main bedroom. Martha and Bill must be squashed into a box room at the back. They’d never change things now though. This would remain a shrine to Terry for as long as they were here to look after it.

  Bill opened a cupboard that was stacked with DVDs. ‘These are his disks, love. And this is his last one. It wasn’t in the cabinet with the rest.’

  She took the shiny circle from him. ‘You say you haven’t watched it?’

  ‘Oh no, we wouldn’t know how. They’re special disks that our Terry got for his camera. He had a machine for getting photos out of them. We’d have loved to see them, but he couldn’t play them for us.’

  Annie knelt down by the cupboard and looked closely. They were standard DVDs. And in the corner of the room sat a PC with a larger screen than the television downstairs. She could have this disk in the slot and playing for Bill Martin within a minute, but he’d already lost his purpose in life. She had no reason to destroy him completely by exposing his dead son as a liar. Still, it could be useful to know what Terry had kept on his PC.

  ‘May I look at his computer?’ she asked.

  Bill hesitated. ‘He didn’t like folks meddling with his stuff, but you can have a look if you’re careful.’

  Annie smiled her thanks, walked across and clicked the machine on. It hummed to life and invited her to enter a password. Damn. She tried all the combinations she could think of in case he’d picked something obvious, but without success, and reflected not for the first time that none of the IT courses she’d done had ever been of practical use. She shut the computer down.

  ‘Have you got what you need?’

  She gave Bill Martin a smile and a nod and looked round the room. Terry’s presence hung over the house. Best seat downstairs, best bedroom. She did a swift calculation. Terry had been born in the late 1960s. His parents looked as though they’d been married forever and must be well into their 70s, touching 80 probably. She imagined Terry as an unexpected late baby, over-indulged all his life. Their illusions about their son were like some precious, bone-china tea-service, irreplaceable and fragile. Annie must be sure that nothing shattered whilst in her care.

  ‘You said there was a notebook?’

  Bill Martin pointed her to a bookcase where A5 notebooks were neatly stacked. ‘He made them to go with the disks.’

  As she knelt down to look, she asked, ‘Why exactly did you contact a private investigator, Mr Martin?’

  ‘To tell the truth, love, I don’t know that Martha knew what she wanted when she rang.’

  ‘And now? Do you want me to look into where he was and what he was doing?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’ll be up to Martha. The police weren’t interested in his notebook, so they won’t want his disk. But you can check it out if you like and let us know what he was working on. That’ll be a comfort to us.’

  It wasn’t much comfort to her, but Annie gave him a sympathetic smile. Watching a single DVD wasn’t going to provide her with six weeks’ gainful employment.

  ‘What made you call Pat Thompson?’ she asked. ‘Call her direct, I mean, rather than call the agency.’

  ‘We don’t know anything about an agency. We got the number off one of our Terry’s friends. He called round after … after it happened. He hadn’t heard. Martha asked him if he knew anyone. It were just a whim really.’

  ‘Who was he, this friend?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, love. Our Terry mixed with some dodgy types. He had to, you know, with the line of work he was in for the newspapers. This one were only a young lad. From Hull by the accent. Said our Terry owed him money. Of course, we weren’t standing for that. Martha asked him straight out did he know a good private detective. You could see he was the type to mix in that sort of world and he give us that number for Pat Thompson. I think Martha slipped him something for that. He’s not been back. We didn’t encourage our Terry to bring riff-raff like that home with him.’

  ‘And you’ve no idea who he is or how to contact him?’

  ‘No, and we wouldn’t want to.’

  Annie picked a notebook off the shelf at random and pulled it out. She had to grab at it to avoid it coming to pieces in her hand. The sheets were all loose.

  ‘Sorry, love, I should have warned you. Our Terry tore the pages loose when he’d done with them.’

  Annie picked out a couple more and carefully flicked through them. From the varying thicknesses she surmised that a lot of pages had been thrown away. The final book was easy to identify. Its cover was twisted and torn, its page edges ragged and smeared with mud. It, like the others, comprised headings and a few scribbled notes. Spurn was there along with a list of village shows, the last being Milesthorpe Show just over a fortnight ago. She wondered if Terry Martin had written the report she’d glimpsed in Vince Sleeman’s paper.

  ‘It must have come out of his pocket when he fell,’ Bill Martin said.

  The final page was torn, a few random markings around the tear suggesting its missing half had been written on. Annie looked a query at Bill.

  ‘We told the policeman about that,’ he said. ‘We thought it might have been destroyed on purpose with it being the only one missing, but he didn’t think there was anything in it.’

  Annie looked at the book again and gave Bill a neutral smile. It had survived a fall that had killed its owner, so there wasn’t anything remarkable in its being torn. She flicked through it once more, concentrating on where the pages fitted into the spine and felt a glimmer of surprise. Bill Martin was right. That last half page was the only piece completely missing.

  Chapter 3

  Annie didn’t hurry back to Hull. The roadside signs with their nationally recognizable camera icons were a useful excuse to keep her speed down. She wanted the time to think. How should she report to Pat? The Martins had cancelled the job, but Pat, who could easily have called Annie and told her to turn back, must have decided to let her have a go at keeping them on board. And how far had she succeeded in that? Only insofar as they’d given her the DVD to watch.

  It wasn’t just her own need to carve out a useful role that drove her, but also the need she’d identified within the Martins. As things stood, they would never move on, not a millimetre from the huge frayed end that was their son’s death. His funeral wouldn’t bring closure. Maybe nothing would, but the only chance they had was to find out why Terry had gone where he’d gone the night he died and just what had happened there.

  Annie felt a flicker of pride. Her instinct had led her away from the direct questioning she’d gone out there for, and as a result she’d made a real connection with the Martins. Martha with her granite features, her hard outer shell that repelled all offers of sympathy and help, had to a tiny extent allowed Annie in. Her spontane
ous comment about Spurn Point had been the trigger.

  Could she explain any of this to Pat? And would the Martins give the go-ahead for a full investigation into the circumstances of Terry’s death? If they did, would she find anything beyond the official version? Had his fall ripped half a page from his notebook? But she knew nothing of the physical circumstances of his accident, had no parameters on which to pin a theory about how a notebook might tear.

  Not sure if she held any delegated authority from Pat to do so, she’d agreed to watch the DVD and report back on it. Idle imaginings over the years had danced around what her first autonomous decision as a PI might be, but her wildest guesses had never come close to this.

  As she drew up outside the flat, her mind rested briefly on Bill’s words about the ‘young lad’ who’d given Martha Pat’s number. Who was he? Why Pat’s number and not the agency’s?

  Pat, from her accustomed position slumped in the cushions of the big settee, pulled herself upright and greeted Annie with a hard stare, her tone sharp. ‘Why did you turn your phone off? I expect to be able to contact you any time when you’re working for me. If you need your phone off, you tell me so I know. If you’re out in the field and I can’t contact you, it might be a sign you’re in trouble. I could have had the troops out looking for you.’

  ‘But I didn’t. I …’ Annie scrabbled through her pockets for her phone and pulled it out. A blank screen looked up at her. ‘Oh hell, I’m sorry, I don’t know how that happened. I must have caught it by mistake.’

  She sent up a silent prayer and held her breath as she pushed the on-switch. Her phone had been on the blink for weeks. It flickered to life with a tinny jingle.

  ‘The Martin woman rang the moment you were out of the door,’ Pat said. ‘Could have saved a journey if you’d had the blasted thing on.’

  Annie tried to look abashed as she rubbed its casing like a good luck charm and put it back in her pocket.

  Pat sighed and shifted position. ‘OK then, how did you get on? Did you manage to talk them into giving you the job?’

  ‘Well, sort of.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Annie outlined the events of the visit as accurately as she could, trying to give Pat a feel for the ambiance, the sense that the Martins really did need this job to be done. She looked out over the river as she spoke. The water spread out calm and smooth, just the twists and turns of the sunlight dancing on the surface giving a hint of the turbulent currents beneath. She felt as though she’d seen those shafts of sunlight dancing on the grave Terry Martin wouldn’t inhabit until tomorrow, but of course tiny snags disturbed the surface of the calmest settings at times. It didn’t necessarily mean anything.

  Pat let her finish then held out her hand for the DVD. ‘It’s been well-handled,’ she said.

  Annie imagined Bill and Martha clutching it as though it were some precious silver coin whose currency they didn’t understand, studying it from every angle, wondering what to do with it. The last link to their son’s life and one more segment still hidden from them.

  ‘And you think you can get a job out of them on the back of this?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve a good chance. I made a connection with them. I don’t think they’ve got anyone else.’

  ‘I’ll make a copy of it when I go through.’ Pat nodded her head towards her bedroom. ‘Keep the original as untouched as possible when you work with anything like this. You realize what you’ve done, don’t you? If you’re to have a chance of talking them round, it’ll have to be face to face. You’ve committed us to another round trip to Withernsea. Vince and his cheap labour. Huh!’

  Annie noted Pat’s comments with interest. Equipment that would copy a DVD must mean a PC and access to email and internet when she needed them.

  ‘Right then, the funeral,’ Pat went on. ‘What time is it? Where?’

  Annie told her.

  ‘You’d better leave by eight. The traffic’ll be bad that time in the morning.’

  ‘You want me to go?’

  ‘Yes, if you’re to have a chance at this. And make sure you look sad, caring, all that kind of stuff. Check who turns up. With luck there won’t be many there so you’ll stand out for making the effort. Don’t make a nuisance of yourself but talk to whoever’s there, see what you can find out. Then when you contact the Martins you’ll be in a stronger position to get a signature out of them. We’ll give them a day or two. I hope you’ve something suitable to wear.’

  ‘Uh … yes. Yes, I have.’ She’d brought every stitch she owned. ‘By the way, I asked Bill Martin how come he’d chosen to contact you.’ Annie told Pat about the young lad whose name Bill didn’t know, who had passed on Pat’s number.

  Pat looked blank. ‘No idea. I suppose he must have seen the advert.’

  Annie narrowed her eyes. Adverts would surely have the agency number not Pat’s. She didn’t have to voice the question.

  Pat shrugged. ‘I shoved an advert in one of the local rags a couple of weeks ago. Mrs Earle was the only answer I got, until yesterday that is when Martha Martin rang. I only needed the one. I wasn’t expecting anything after the first couple of days. Those things have a short shelf-life and it was only a one-off. Maybe that kid had had the page wrapped round some chips.’

  ‘But why did you put the advert in? Surely the agency advertises.’

  ‘I was having a go at Vince, if you must know, giving him a nudge.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About the cases he was passing on to me. Nothing you need worry about.’

  ‘Did it work?’

  ‘Well, who knows? I went and picked this thing up.’ Pat gave a nod towards her leg. ‘We’ll see when I’m up and about. And don’t get the wrong idea. Vince is OK, just needs a nudge now and then. We’re OK, me and Vince.’

  Annie changed tack and asked, ‘How did it happen? Your leg, I mean.’

  ‘I fell down some stairs. Going too fast, not taking care. I probably slipped.’

  ‘Probably?’

  ‘I slipped, OK?’

  ‘The stairs here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It looks to be a nasty break.’

  ‘It is, but I can manage.’

  ‘That’s what Vince brought me here for, isn’t it? It wasn’t to cover for your cases; it was to look after you.’

  Pat gave a mirthless laugh. ‘It took me about two seconds to suss him. And I’ll tell you this, if I’d seen so much as a hint in you of this caring bollocks I’d have had you down those stairs so fast you’d have broken both bloody legs!’

  ‘But you could have got someone in from round here if you’d needed anyone.’

  ‘Which is just the point I can’t get across. I don’t need anyone. I can look after myself. I can’t abide people fussing about. It’s not only Vince behind this. It’ll be Babs, too, though she denies it. Someone to cover the work was a different matter. I agreed to that. Just didn’t expect him to land me with a house-guest.’

  Babs? That must be the Barbara Caldwell she’d seen on the company papers. ‘Is that why he picked me, because I’d have to live in? What if I’d found somewhere to rent for the six weeks.’

  ‘Could you? On what Vince is paying you? Or are you rich enough not to have to worry?’

  It was too good an opportunity to miss. Annie confessed her parlous financial circumstances. ‘It’s the car that worries me,’ she ended. ‘When it needs petrol I’m not sure I’ve enough cash to fill a tank that size. I don’t want to risk my card. It’s right at its limit.’

  Pat’s laugh this time was genuine. ‘Broke enough to have to live in, desperate to get PI experience, and on Vince’s scale an airhead. Do you think he knew all that before he saw you?’

  Annie felt herself colour up, remembering the chatty conversation she’d walked in on as Kara passed on her life story to a stranger who’d rung to arrange an interview. ‘Yes, I’m sure he did.’

  ‘Then I imagine he just stumbled upon you and snapped you up. They knew I would
n’t have anyone in to look after me, but I wasn’t going to object to someone in to cover the work. Anyway you’re here, Vince is paying, and there are a couple of cases for you to get your teeth into. If you try any of the caring malarkey, mind, you’ll be out quicker than you came.’

  ‘A couple of cases?’

  ‘Yes, I had a call from Mrs Earle on Orchard Park. She wants to know why the hell no one’s been back to see her.’

  ‘But Vince said–’

  ‘I know, but he can’t have cancelled the job, so maybe he’s changed his mind. Oh, and that doesn’t mean we need to go blabbing to him about it.’

  Annie digested this. A nub of excitement grew inside her. From nebulous bits of jobs that might evaporate and leave her in limbo, things were beginning to look up. And whatever this thing was between Pat and Vince, Pat was clearly telling her they’d be working behind Vince’s back. ‘Vince expected you to cancel the Orchard Park job, didn’t he?’

  Pat tossed her a sideways glance. ‘He told me it was cancelled. Not my fault if no one told the client. I’ve said you’ll go round tomorrow. Give her a ring on your way back from Terry Martin’s funeral to make sure she’s there. She’s horribly unreliable.’

  The funeral the next morning was a quiet affair. Annie arrived ahead of the coffin to see only a thin sprinkling of others in the church. Three young girls sat near the back where they whispered and stifled occasional giggles. An elderly couple sat midway down; the man pulled continually at his shirt collar and cast worried glances at the woman beside him.

  Just settling into a pew at the back was a tall woman about Annie’s age, her small features framed by mid-length dark hair. There was something graceful about the way she moved as she tried to create more legroom, yet she awkward in a tweedy suit more suited to someone Martha Martin’s age and far too fussy a style for her majestic form.

  Annie slid into the seat next to her, gave her a nod of acknowledgement and held out her hand. ‘I’m Annie Raymond. How d’you do?’

  The woman looked surprised but returned Annie’s handshake. ‘Jennifer Flanagan.’