Falling into Crime

by Penny Grubb

  She turned towards the kitchen with thoughts of raiding Pat’s store of French bread to make herself a sandwich, but as she did so, sunlight speared through the big window and caught a pool of silver on the top of the TV.

  The Martins’ DVD. Pat had been going to make a copy. Annie decided she couldn’t breach the boundaries of Pat’s personal space to find the PC to do the job herself, but she could watch the disk.

  She slid it into the DVD player and sat back to watch.

  Crash! A silver-foam-topped rush of waves flooded the screen making her sit up in alarm. A voice that must be Terry Martin’s, a slightly nasal whine, filled the room.

  ‘Spurn Point,’ he announced over jerky shots of the pebbly beach.

  The camera drew back at dizzying speed, the water receding, the pebbles rushing away, becoming sand dunes and tough grasses. Annie tried to recognize the scene, but couldn’t.

  ‘Ah bollocks!’ The profanity broke the mood as did the sudden disorientation of the camera angle, swooping up to face the sky, then taking a dive into an unfocused close-up. Terry Martin had tripped.

  After the contrived drama of the opening sequence, the following shots of beach, grassland and marshes lacked continuity. Terry’s few remarks on the breached road, and the isolation of life in the tiny community, petered out incomplete. Annie wasn’t sure why he’d bothered. It was a big enough story in its way, the instability of life on this outpost, but it had been done to death and Terry Martin had no new angle.

  An abrupt cut took the film from landscape to close up. ‘Rumour has it this place sees some interesting night time activity. Let’s see what evidence we can find.’ Terry Martin’s voice dropped to a whisper with a sly undertone. Annie stared as the camera closed in on a small concrete bunker. A war relic, she thought.

  The camera approached the opening and Terry Martin lowered his voice further. His words were carried away on the rush of pebbles under the waves. Annie strained to hear, but couldn’t make out more than the occasional phrase. ‘What goes on … dead of night …’ She found herself at the edge of the chair as the camera swung round into the dark interior.

  An empty McCoy’s crisp packet flapped gently in a corner. ‘Naff all,’ whined Terry Martin back to normal volume.

  The film cut to a different time of day, indoors now, a close-up of a giant onion filling the screen, an echo-y announcement crackled across a public address system. The camera swung from smiling faces to prize-winning entries: a proud smile, a marrow, then a pot of jam with a frilly top and rose-patterned label. Over it all Terry Martin intoned a laborious roll call of winners, spelling out some of the names. These were the basis of the show reports that would have appeared under his byline in the local press.

  After ten minutes of this, Annie’s eyelids grew heavy. She barely realised she was slipping into sleep until sudden awareness of silence jerked her upright.

  A woman’s voice screeched ‘Just fuck off!’

  She stared disorientated at a momentary view of a face contorted with rage. Cut. The scene snapped to a sunlit field crowded with vehicles and ponies weaving their way through brightly dressed people, trestle tables and flapping tapes.

  ‘Milesthorpe Green,’ said Terry Martin’s voice.

  Annie grabbed the remote and froze him.

  She took the film through jerky backward movements until she hit familiar jam and fruit territory.

  The mundane recital of show winners cut abruptly to an outdoor scene at dusk. The camera faced a house front. No sound but the soft wheeze of Terry Martin’s breathing as he zoomed in on one of the windows. When he spoke, his voice was the surreptitious murmur he’d used to stalk the disappointing concrete bunker at Spurn. Without the rush of the sea Annie could make out his words.

  ‘Beckes split over brook.’ That sly undertone again and a soft laugh.

  The picture wobbled. He stopped zooming in on the house from a standstill and approached on foot.

  ‘Who’s the lucky guy? And how much does Mr Becke know, I wonder.’ Something about the furtive satisfaction in his tone made Annie’s skin crawl.

  ‘Just fuck off!’

  Though she’d heard it before, the shriek made Annie jump again.

  From the gasp and the jolt it was clear Terry Martin had thought himself alone. The lens swung at dizzying speed, gave one brief shot of the enraged woman. Small, slim, late twenties maybe thirty. Her face filled the screen for just a second then the film cut from the still of dusk to the crowds and noise of a sunny afternoon on Milesthorpe Green.

  She remembered the notebook with its torn page. What she looked at on the screen now was surely Milesthorpe Show. He’d filmed these sequences on the Sunday of the show. And he’d died nine days later, exactly a week ago. As he’d strolled across Milesthorpe Green with his camera Terry Martin had nine days left to live. Was it his report she’d glimpsed in Vince Sleeman’s briefcase?

  The scene changed again. Still Milesthorpe Show but this must be a different part of the Green. Small children clad in huge hats and padded protective clothing raced through the heat on their ponies like old-fashioned knights in miniature.

  The crowds were incidental background now. Terry Martin concentrated on the ponies, mostly at a distance. Occasionally, a horse and rider flew by close at hand and leapt a pole balanced across a line of concrete blocks. She supposed he might have culled some good action shots from this sequence. But suddenly, events hit closer to home. Two ponies raced at the obstacle. Terry Martin was unprepared for them to swerve out at the last moment and almost run him down. Annie couldn’t help laughing as he backed off hurriedly and went over backwards in a tangle of legs as the ponies flew by. No good stills from the close up of hoofs and flying clods of mud.

  Cut again to a familiar sequence. The winners in groups. She smothered a yawn. How long would this last?

  The sight of a grinning Laura Tunbridge grabbed her attention. Laura sat astride a small brown pony and accepted a red rosette and a cup.

  Annie waited for Terry Martin to speak and maybe spell out her name, but he remained silent. Of course, he already knew her, but he seemed to lose interest. The camera swung away from the winners, raked the crowd, then drew back. She realized he’d filmed this from quite a distance. The background boom of tannoy announcements was audible but not clear enough to make sense.

  The camera swung in lazy arcs and zoomed only occasionally, once to focus on a group of three girls leaving the field. Two rode ponies, the other a bicycle. Annie recognized Laura Tunbridge again, but couldn’t say for certain whether the other two were Kay Dearlove and Mally Fletcher – the best-friend and the one who’d said she’d kill Terry Martin. She felt uneasy that Terry had chosen to pick them out of the crowds.

  Another close-up was on a couple talking by the dismantled remains of an awning. The woman was the one who’d told Terry Martin to fuck off, presumably Mrs Becke. Maybe the man was the secret lover.

  It took a moment to realize that one of Terry’s random cuts had taken the film away from Milesthorpe Green; away from the sunny outdoors. One moment the screen had shown the tired crowds, the next it was dark and all background noise had gone.

  Terry Martin was in a cellar. Annie had to squint at the screen to compensate for the lack of light in the shot. She made out a corridor and ragged lengths of timber hanging from dilapidated walls. The only sounds were Terry Martin’s breathing and a steady drip of water.

  ‘Got you now, Mr Balham.’

  Annie allowed herself a sigh of exasperation. That was Terry Martin’s surreptitious voice again, but constrained as though something restricted his breathing.

  There was a flurry as the camera wobbled. Annie had the impression he’d swapped it to his other hand.

  A wooden door swam into focus from the shadow. The shot dropped to floor level and steadied at an angle. Terry Martin had put the camera on the ground while he dealt with the door. Annie watched as the Martins’ son appeared from behind the camera. She stared closely, cur
ious to know what he looked like, but in the gloom he was little more than a silhouette, a small man bent over in the darkness, his back to the lens. Sound as much as movement told her he wrestled with a key in the lock. Then the camera was hoisted to shoulder level and the door pushed open. The murkiness lifted a little as though the light were better beyond the door.

  Annie took in the briefest impression of a largish room as ramshackle as the corridor before the picture dropped.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Terry Martin’s cry choked itself in a gasp.

  A flurry of movement. The camera slewed through bizarre angles. Terry Martin retched and choked as he fought for breath.

  Annie heard his feet slip on the rubble of the floor, saw his backward stumble in the sudden upward swing of the lens. Then it steadied. One clear shot into the room. A second and a half.

  ‘Oh my God!’ The words came involuntarily as Annie clapped her hands to her mouth and echoed Terry Martin.

  A large woman, Pat’s size at least, slumped backwards. All elements of the scene hit simultaneously. The splayed legs, the skirt ridden high, the hint of lace beneath it. The woman’s head lolled at an impossible angle, her eyes stared, her tongue protruded gross and blackened. And at her neck a ligature bit deep.

  The camera’s incoherence charted Terry Martin’s fight to escape; to keep to his feet. His frantic flailing must have caught the camera controls. There was a sudden zoom. A momentary close up of what was left of an eye in a gaping socket. A fat white worm wriggled and took centre stage.

  Cut.

  Chapter 4

  Annie stood in front of the television, no memory of the move that had taken her from sitting to upright. For a few seconds, the screen played a frantic blizzard into the room, then it blanked leaving no trace of the bloated features now etched on Annie’s mind.

  He’d found his big story. The thought whirled in her brain. Terry Martin of all people had uncovered a murder.

  A part of her wanted to pull the disk out and smash it to pieces. The Martins didn’t need this. They’d seen Terry’s big story in terms of a learned treatise on Spurn Point, him as a David Attenborough figure giving a weighty commentary. Annie thought of Terry stalking a concrete bunker, looking for evidence of sinister night-time activity; creeping up to Mrs Becke’s house at dusk with his sly comments about a secret lover. Uncovering a gruesome murder was exactly the sort of thing he’d dreamt of doing. She thought of his panic as he’d entered that cellar. Living the dream hadn’t been so good.

  And how did she tell his parents what he’d found?

  At the same time, a small part of her mind stood back and began to analyse. What had he unearthed? Whose remains had he found? Had he filmed the woman alive? If Annie were to rerun the film would she find the victim in an earlier scene grinning from behind a giant onion, or wandering about in the crowds on Milesthorpe Green?

  The woman’s body had begun to decay, but given the sweltering weather, not that much. Her death wasn’t ancient history. Whoever strangled her had done it recently. Terry Martin had filmed Milesthorpe Show on the Sunday and nine days later he’d died. Sometime in that nine days he’d found and filmed the woman in the cellar.

  ‘Oh my God. Pat …’

  But Pat wasn’t here. Annie was alone. She grabbed at her phone and dialled Pat’s mobile only to hear the tone sing out from the empty bedroom.

  ‘Yeah, great,’ she shouted out at the chirpy ring-tone. ‘So much for keeping your phone on at all times.’

  She paused to take a deep breath, rerunning the advice she’d given Laura Tunbridge outside the church. What were her options? Easy answer. There weren’t options, plural. She knew exactly what she had to do. This had crossed official boundaries without ambiguity. She had to call the police.

  Still she hesitated. It seemed wrong that she, the new employee, the temp who hadn’t been employed to get involved, should call the police into the heart of the agency’s business. Pat should be here to take the reins, to make the call. What would Vince say when he found out?

  The television hummed gently, ready to spring to life and replay the disk at the press of a button. Annie retrieved the remote from the floor so she could turn it off. She watched herself hold it away from her body between thumb and forefinger as though the images had leaked out to infect it.

  Get a grip. Do what has to be done. She stood up straight. There could be no question of ersatz drama here. And anyway, she had no need to speak to an anonymous voice in a call centre. She grabbed her coat and scrabbled through the pockets. Where was that card?

  Her fingers felt the size of fat sausages and the buttons on the phone shrank to pinheads, but she fumbled through the number and listened to the ring tone. Charles Tremlow, the nervy man at the funeral, hadn’t managed to get out a coherent story when he’d phoned in a panic to report finding Terry Martin’s body. Jennifer implied they didn’t even know how many bodies he’d found. There was something about talking to a stranger … maybe Tremlow had felt it, too. Calm. She must be calm.

  Answer. Please answer. Don’t let it be voicemail.

  ‘Hello? Jennifer Flanagan here.’

  ‘Jennifer, it’s Annie Raymond from the PI agency. We met at Terry Martin’s funeral. I need your help.’

  Annie paced back and forth wearing a track across the longest stretch of carpet the flat had to offer. Jennifer had promised to come out with a colleague as soon as she could. But why weren’t they here? She paused to stare out at the estuary where rippling patterns in the water wove around and through each other painting the surface of one of the world’s most treacherous shipping lanes. So much hidden beneath the surface. Then she rushed back to the other side of the flat, to the kitchen where the window looked out over the road, where she’d see Jennifer arrive, or Pat.

  Annie kicked herself for not sounding more panicked on the phone. She’d gone to the opposite extreme from Tremlow, but now realized she’d been every bit as incoherent downplaying the enormity of what she’d found.

  ‘But how urgent is it? What is it you’ve found? I don’t understand.’

  ‘It’s evidence of a crime. A serious crime. One of the cases I’m working on.’ The memory of the decomposing body inhibited her. If she tried to describe it, she’d have broken down; couldn’t even bring herself to say Terry Martin’s name aloud.

  ‘We have to come into Hull to get a witness statement. We could call in. About half an hour … maybe an hour. But if it’s really urgent then you should call direct.’

  How urgent was it? Too late for the woman in the cellar. ‘That’s fine. Half an hour’s fine.’

  Only it wasn’t. Pace – pace – pace.

  The sound of a car slowing to turn the corner had Annie at full stretch straining to see. Not a police car. She followed the course of the large blue people-carrier as it approached and pulled up across the road.

  Pat!

  Annie was out of the door and taking the stairs in huge three and four step bounds. Thank God Pat was here first so she could explain what she’d done. ‘I didn’t know how long you’d be,’ she would say. ‘I had to call the police.’ She arrived on the street to see a large woman heave herself out from behind the wheel and on to the pavement.

  Was it Pat? No … yes … no … It looked like Pat but …

  No, definitely not Pat because there was Pat, granite-faced in the passenger seat, pushing off the hands that tried to help her swing the plaster-cast round and on to the tarmac. Sunlight glinted off the roof of the car. Sweat glistened on the faces of the two women as they bickered their way out of the vehicle, wrestling with each other and bundles of bulging Sainsbury’s carrier bags. Annie watched a mime show as the stiff breeze from the estuary took their voices out of reach. The other woman had to be Pat’s sister if not her twin, and was so intent on pressing unwanted help on Pat that Annie thought they were sure to fall into a squabbling heap on the roadside long before they reached her.

  They came near enough for Pat’s words to reach Annie,
‘And there’s no need to …’ just as Pat spotted her and stopped.

  ‘Annie?’ Pat frowned puzzled, then took a closer look and hobbled nearer. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

  Annie had barely started a reply when the sound of another car spun her attention to the far end of the street. A police patrol car turned in and sped towards them.

  Both Pat and the Pat-clone at her side stared first at the patrol car then at Annie. ‘Are they here to see you?’ Pat said, reading the answer in Annie’s face.

  The other woman pursed her lips. ‘I knew it meant trouble. I told Vince we should get you a proper woman in, but–’ She stopped abruptly.

  Pat turned a triumphant glare on her. ‘I knew it! I knew you were in on it.’

  ‘Well, someone’s got to look out for you. You can’t look after yourself.’

  ‘Says who? Vince! Well, when did you start taking notice of him?’

  ‘And that’s another thing. I called into the office. He’s changed the lock on Dad’s safe. I’m not at all happy with–’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with you any more, Babs. And if you’re so unhappy with him, why did you gang up against me?’

  ‘He was right about you needing someone in. He should have left it to me. Someone to cover the work, huh!’ The woman’s gaze raked Annie from head to toe. ‘Just look what she’s done and she’s only been here five minutes.’

  The woman looked across to where the police car had parked and now disgorged two uniformed officers, Jennifer and a darkhaired man.

  Annie’s mind grabbed at the disjointed information and pulled it together. Babs? So this was Barbara Caldwell who’d been a director of the firm and its original company secretary and who was clearly Pat’s sister.

  Pat turned to Annie. ‘Come on, you can play carer for thirty seconds and help me in. Let Babs deal with this lot.’