by Penny Grubb
Kate’s stance was confrontational, Pat’s was to stonewall and Scott tried to go softly-softly whilst backing up his colleague. Watching them, Annie lost the drift of what was being said, until jolted back to attention when Kate turned to Nicole.
‘And what’s your business here?’
Outraged, Annie pulled in a gasp. ‘You’ve no right–’
But Nicole, looking scared, launched at once into an explanation.
Kate smiled at her, and spoke gently. ‘You want to unearth the truth about Michael Walker?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Nicole, looking up at Kate with sudden hope.
Annie too, found her protests stilled. How odd that Kate should have a smile that so completely transformed her face, just like Scott. And was she going to give Nicole something they could use?
The thought had barely formed when Kate turned to look at Annie. Her mouth still curved to a smile, but her eyes had hardened, making her expression more sly than pleasant. Her stare remained on Annie, but she spoke to Pat.
‘Be sure and get in touch, Ms Thompson, should anything come to light.’ She then looked back at Nicole, her expression softening. ‘You must be fed up with that girlfriend of his and her campaigning.’
‘Oh, you mean Brittany Booth? Yes, I wish there was a way to lock her up along with Yates. She’s every bit as dangerous.’
‘Interesting you should have chosen to work with Annie Raymond,’ Kate said. ‘You know she’s working for Brittany Booth’s campaign, don’t you?’
Nicole’s eyes snapped open. Shock leached the colour from her skin. ‘No … that’s impossible.’
‘Oh yes. They’ve been with Booth from the start.’
Nicole swung round to Annie. ‘It’s not true. Tell me it’s not true.’
‘Nicole, listen, it’s not like it sounds. It–’
‘Are you working for Brittany Booth?’
‘Nicole, I can’t tell you who else we are or aren’t working for. We have to respect–’
‘My God! You are! How could you?’ With a cry that was half a sob, Nicole leapt to her feet and flew out, leaving the four of them to listen to her footsteps clattering down the stairs.
‘Right,’ said Kate, pleasantly, ‘just a few routine questions and we’ll be on our way. Both of you,’ she added sharply, as Annie took a step towards the door.
Opening her mouth to protest, Annie caught a brief movement from Pat. Her boss was signalling her to leave it. She felt anger, clamped her teeth together and clenched her fists, but sat back down. Nicole wasn’t the only one who would need explanations. This would get back to Jennifer.
Chapter 13
By the following morning, the heat of anger within Annie had become a hard knot. If Kate wanted war, then war it was. She determined she would get to the bottom of this case, money or no money, if she had to stay in Hull forever to do it.
Her immediate objective was to find Nicole, but she’d been trying since yesterday and had no luck. Nicole’s phone remained off.
Annie stood now outside Nicole’s flat, but the place lay empty. She clambered round the narrow outside space to peer into the windows, and toyed with the idea of breaking in, on the off-chance Nicole had seen her and was hiding inside, but crushed the idea as it was born, seeing in her mind’s eye a picture of Nicole calling the police and Kate arriving.
If Nicole wasn’t here, the obvious place to look was Charlotte’s.
Charlotte opened the door to her knock, looking dishevelled as though she hadn’t been up long.
‘Hi, come through. I wasn’t expecting you. Has anything happened?’
Annie hesitated a moment but then stepped inside. Better that Charlotte heard this from her than from Nicole. They sat at the table in the kitchen. Glossing over the exact timings, Annie explained that Brittany Booth had approached the firm for help after they had already taken on the job for Nicole.
‘And now Nicole’s found out about it from a third party. She’s very upset. I need to find her.’
‘Are you allowed to work for different sides like that?’ Charlotte seemed surprised, but not angry, just interested.
‘Well, it’s unusual,’ Annie murmured. ‘But…’
‘I suppose you have different people working on each bit.’
‘Um…’
‘Oh, and it could be good, couldn’t it? Your colleagues would tell you if they found anything that was useful for us, so you wouldn’t have to find it all again. It could save us some money.’
Annie laughed uneasily. The situation was far from a model of good practice and could harm their reputation.
‘She doesn’t know, does she? The Brittany woman? That you’re working for us?’
‘No, no. Client confidentiality. I wouldn’t have told you about her except for Nicole finding out. It’s Nicole who signed us up and I’m not sure she wants us to carry on with it.’
‘Don’t worry about her. She’ll come round. She gets emotionally tied up in things, but I’ll talk to her. You carry on.’ Charlotte looked into Annie’s eyes and gave her a grin. ‘And I’ll expect to see a nice light touch on our invoice.’
Annie made herself smile back, but wasn’t sure it reached further than the curve of her lips. Before she could speak, Charlotte said, ‘Ah, yes!’ and jumped to her feet. ‘I have something for you. I was going to ring.’
Charlotte walked across the kitchen to rummage in a large floppy handbag that sat on the work surface. Annie watched her, reflecting that she hadn’t wasted a moment worrying about divided loyalties, just homed in razor-sharp on the unethical aspect and used it to her own advantage.
‘I went round to Mum’s last night.’
‘Oh right. That’s good. Did Nicole tell you what we said?’ Annie spoke lightly, but kept her eyes on Charlotte, who wasn’t supposed to have spoken to Nicole since the meeting in Annie and Pat’s office.
‘I haven’t seen Nicole. I told you. What was she supposed to have said?’ Charlotte sounded surprised and Annie relaxed. Mustn’t look for conspiracies where none existed.
‘With time being tight, we thought it would be quicker for you to talk to your mother. She’s not too keen on talking to us. And we need to know more about what happened six years ago.’
‘I didn’t think you’d get anything out of her.’
‘So did she tell you why she made the complaint?’
‘Hell, no, we didn’t talk about that. We’d have ended up scrapping.’ Charlotte pulled a sheaf of papers from the bag.
‘What did you talk about?’ Annie asked.
‘This and that. Nothing much.’
Annie saw Charlotte’s gaze slide away as she made a pretence of rummaging through her bag again. She became more like her mother on every visit.
‘I brought you these. When she nipped up to the loo, I went through her work files.’
Charlotte handed Annie a crumpled wad of papers. Annie smoothed them out on the table top. The page in front of her was printed with a grid of about thirty rows. Each row was initialled and each recorded a date, a time and a short commentary. Several different pens and hands had written in the narrow boxes.
Gave May her dinner, steak pie and peas…
May says her water tablets don’t agree with her…
Supper and COT…
‘C-O-T?’ Annie queried.
‘Cup of tea. But it’s the info page you want. I just grabbed the lot to be sure I had it.’
Annie riffled through the sheets. The info page was headed with a smudged logo that made no obvious sense. She hoped the care agency put its money into training its carers. It didn’t spend much on its stationery. She recalled Charlotte’s remarks from her earlier visit.
They’re always short-staffed. My mum’s one of the few who keeps the job on.
The grid on this sheet was a different shape and had some pre-printed captions, starting with name, address and date of birth.
Annie read down the list. May Gow had been born 14th April, 1919 and seven years a
go had signed up for the Gold Care Package, which entitled her to four visits every day. Hadn’t Charlotte told her Donna was not her prime carer? But at four visits a day, a number of people could have come to know May. Annie flipped back through the other pages and checked down the edge of the lists, deciphering the scrawled initials. The overall pattern was a dozen the same, then a few different. Annie surmised days off for the regular carers. Donna’s initials, DL, appeared several times across the half-dozen pages in short blocks of two, three or four. It fitted with Donna covering someone else’s time off.
‘Who’s this?’ Annie held the sheet out to Charlotte and pointed at the initials that occurred oftenest.
‘I’ve no idea. Those sheets are years old. I’ll bet every one of those people have left bar my mum.’
Annie turned back to the front page and read down the list. May’s GP was logged, along with a detailed record of medication.
‘Shouldn’t this stuff be at the agency?’
Charlotte shrugged. ‘You’d be surprised how careless people can be. It stays at the client’s house while they’re live on the books, but you get relatives shoving it away into drawers and cupboards and no one knowing where it is. It’s not unusual for the carers to keep it with them if they happen to be doing a long stint with the same person.’
‘But shouldn’t this have gone back to the agency when May Gow died?’
‘I suppose, but I guess no one asked.’
It all seemed far too casual, but if Charlotte had a better explanation, she wouldn’t give it to Annie, who concentrated on the page in front of her. She reached the bottom without finding anything of particular interest. She noted May’s GP’s name but knew that medical records confidentiality would bar her from anything useful from that source.
‘Can I take these away with me?’
‘No. I need to put them back in Mum’s file before she notices.’
At least she had May Gow’s address. She could try the neighbours and see what they could tell her. As the thought formed, she flipped the page and there at last was something useful.
Next of kin: Susan Gow, and a mobile phone number.
Annie wrote down the number, not knowing if it would still be current, or if Susan Gow would be able or willing to shed any light on what had happened six years ago.
As she said her goodbyes, the difficult conversations she had to face with Nicole and Jennifer sat at the back of Annie’s mind, but she felt a growing curiosity about Susan Gow and what she might have to say about her mother’s carers. She’d had no hint that mother and daughter had been close, so maybe the best she could hope for would be something she could use to loosen Donna’s tongue.
On the way back to the office, Annie’s mind buzzed with plans for a lightning background search on Susan Gow prior to ringing her. Thankfully, her name wasn’t Smith or Jones, but it wasn’t unusual enough to make for an easy search. Sometimes mobile phone numbers could be matched up to their owner’s personal information and sometimes they couldn’t. It might not even be Susan’s phone any more. And maybe there would be a link back to Susan from her mother’s address in one or other of the databases to which they had easy access.
A police patrol car cruised by. Annie watched it as she rehearsed different opening comments. It was always harder to cold call by phone than face to face. No body language to use to modify an approach or tailor opening questions.
The distinctive livery of the patrol car was swallowed up in the busy road ahead, and, as it disappeared, she realized she hadn’t given Kate a thought since she’d arrived at Charlotte’s. Instinctively, she pursed her lips to try to re-stoke her resentment, not wanting to let the foolish woman off the hook by allowing her anger to subside so soon, but it was gone. Kate had become an annoying distraction to the real business of the day.
She would curse Kate anew if things went sour between her and Jennifer, but she was confident Jennifer would give her a hearing and would understand. She must make clear that Brittany Booth came to them after she’d first seen Nicole, and explain to Jen how Vince had sent her. Jen knew the deal with Vince Sleeman and the Thompson sisters. She and Annie had had occasional conversations over the years where they’d shared oblique references to Sleeman, neither quite bold enough to voice their real concerns.
The thoughts of Jen, about the constant dance around people to prise out the information that they sometimes didn’t know they held, became the catalyst that took her mind back to Kate and Scott’s clumsy intrusion. Words she hadn’t registered at the time now began to make sense. Kate had given away little detail, but she’d mentioned a few snippets. They had been after someone from outside the area.
On this flimsiest of evidence, Annie became certain that the person Kate was after was Ron Long.
Ron, uncomfortable with his stilted tale of a quiet holiday, but needing to reassure his wife. Sheryl, with her very real desire not to be involved in whatever was planned, and with her ridiculous story about murderers and bodies in wheelbarrows. Annie’s musings stalled for a moment as Tim Morgan’s face came to her mind, but she dismissed it. He was a bit part in the Longs’ drama, nothing more.
If Kate hadn’t behaved so badly, Annie would probably have contacted someone, maybe Scott, to have a quiet word. But the reality was that Kate had allowed her dislike for Annie to get in the way of a constructive exchange. She had not given Pat enough information for her to draw any useful conclusion. Instinct told Annie it was Ron Long they were looking for, but it was all supposition, and she decided she would keep her options open and say nothing.
Chapter 14
As Annie ran lightly up the stairs to the office, she could hear Pat moving about. She paused. Was it Pat? Yes, the telltale huffing and puffing was audible over the creaking of the floorboards under the heavy footfalls. As the outer door swung shut with a bang, she had a sudden sense of a conversation cut off above her. Pat must have been on the phone.
But when Annie entered, Pat was at the far side of the office nowhere near the phone. Her boss nodded an acknowledgement and said, ‘What’s new?’
Annie explained about her meeting with Charlotte and her plan to contact Susan Gow. ‘I want to see how much background I can get on her before I ring.’
Pat glanced at her watch. ‘We’ve nearly an hour before lunch. Let’s see what we can dig out. Did you get that, Babs?’
Annie looked across in surprise as Barbara came out from the back office. Was it her imagination, or had Barbara been around a lot more lately. It couldn’t be pressure of work that was the cause. She saw the briefest of glances flash between the sisters.
‘Yes,’ said Barbara. ‘Susan Gow, May’s daughter. That case for Vince.’ She rubbed her hands together. ‘Where to start?’
Annie felt a stab of resentment. Case for Vince! She watched as the sisters wedged themselves at one side of the desk. It surprised her that Barbara had even agreed to help out.
Without Barbara, she and Pat could talk each other through what they were doing and what they found. But with Barbara in the game, it was best just to keep quiet and work alone or it would become a competition, where Barbara argued against any suggestion Annie made and they ended up working against each other.
She started with the quick basic searches that could cut out hours of work when they struck gold, but although Google turned up couple of thousand entries for Susan Gow, the list shrank to nothing when she added geographic information. She tried Susan and May together with no success. It was no surprise that May did not turn up on any social networking sites, and a disappointment that Susan too seemed to have no web presence.
One of Annie’s tenuous leads seemed to link with May Gow’s family in the late 1940s. She couldn’t be sure, but followed the electronic tracks across the decades. Could May have married and moved abroad? That could explain why there was no trace of Susan in the area. The gentle clatter of keyboards overlay the background sounds of the city. Occasionally, one or other of the sisters threw out a question
.
‘What was May Gow’s maiden name?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Did she marry in Hull?’
‘Don’t know, but I’m wondering if she married and moved abroad.’
‘Is Susan Gow married?’
‘She was down as Gow on that form, so maybe not, but I don’t know.’
Then, after quarter of an hour, it was Pat who murmured, ‘Ah ha! Got her.’
Both Annie and Barbara stopped what they were doing and looked at Pat, who carried on pecking at her keyboard and peering at the screen for some moments before raising her glance to meet theirs. ‘That’s interesting,’ she said. ‘Gow was May’s maiden name.’
‘May? The mother?’
‘Yup.’
‘Why is that interesting …?’ Barbara began.
Pat shot her a glance. ‘Think about it, Babs. Annie, how old’s Susan?’
‘I can’t be exact, but she must be in her fifties minimum. So she’d have been born in the early 1960s.’
‘Oh right, child out of wedlock. Big deal back then.’
Using the link Pat had found, Annie followed a different route to pick up another trail.
‘May went to Spain by the looks of it.’ She studied the information on the screen in front of her. ‘She might have married abroad but I can’t find anything. She came back to live in Hull when she retired.’
‘Retired from what?’
‘I don’t know. And I don’t know if Susan came back with her. She might still live over there.’
‘Have you enough to have a go at her?’ Barbara asked.
Annie nodded. It was precious little for a cold call, but there was no time for a full search. And it had been a long time since the three of them had worked together without tangible friction.
When the sisters left for lunch, she picked up the phone. It was answered on the third ring.
‘Hello. I’m not sure I have the correct number, but I’m trying to trace Susan Gow.’
‘Yes, I’m Susan Gow.’
