The Girlfriend: A Josie Cloverfield Detective Novel

by Jack Carteret

  “It’s really not what you think.” Matty spoke first whilst I was still making myself comfortable.

  “Look, I don’t really have any conclusions, to be honest, but I’d still like to know. You see, my best friend has been hauled in by the Police and treated really very badly.”

  “Oh, you’re Liam’s friend.”

  “Yes.”

  “Josie, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Josie Cloverfield.” I was somewhat on the back foot.

  Either he knew my name because I was the subject of gossip amongst the lecturers as well as the students, or Hannah had spoken of me previously. Either way, I would wait until I had wrestled some of the more important facts out of him before I satisfied my curiosity in that regard.

  “Can I just start by telling you that I don’t know where Hannah is or why she went missing. Whatever has happened has nothing to do with my painting her portrait.”

  “Were you sleeping with Hannah?” I said in as flat a tone as possible. I didn’t want to seem to be judging him.

  “No, I wasn’t.” Matty said without any of the agitation I might have expected the question to illicit.

  “Did you try to?” I said, as gently as possible.

  I’d seen his look of desolation out on the Quad when he’d had no idea he was being observed.

  “Well, no, I didn’t. I don’t think Hannah was particularly interested in me. I mean, she liked me, I guess, but not in the same…..”

  “Not in the same way as you liked her?” I finished for him.

  “That’s right.” Matty looked suddenly defeated, as if he might just as well tell the truth of it all.

  “Did she know you liked her?”

  “Yes, I’m sure of it. I think she liked the idea of being adored by someone she had very little regard for.”

  “Mmm.” I said, absently thinking of Liam.

  But Liam hadn’t really adored her, had he? At least, that’s what he’d said.

  “As much as I thought of Hannah, she could be quite cruel.”

  “Yes, I know.” I was still speaking absently and my lack of investigative professionalism made me suddenly concentrate. “I mean, was she?”

  “Yes, she was. Hannah was silently mocking me and I knew it. I knew it, and I didn’t care. I would have done anything to have been around her. Just in her company, you know?”

  “Yes, I know.” I lied. I had never particularly wanted to be in Hannah’s scratchy company and could not understand the sentiment at all. “So, did you and Hannah spend much time together?”

  “No, not really. It was mostly just while she sat for the portrait. I suppose just a couple of hours a week for three weeks.”

  “Not long then.” I said, more to myself than to Matty.

  “No, not long. At first, I’d really thought that she liked me, but I soon realised that she would be off as soon as the painting was finished.”

  “Really?” I straightened in my chair, as if to somehow comprehend all the better. “So, Hannah was keen to be painted, then?”

  “Yes. She asked me, not the other way around.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes, I know that sounds odd, but it’s true. It would be totally stupid for me to approach a student with the suggestion of a nude project. Hannah had come to me and asked…. well, demanded, actually, to have her portrait painted.”

  “Demanded?”

  “Yes, she could be quite forceful.”

  “But surely a student is not in a position to demand that her lecturer of just a few weeks paint her in the nude?” I was incredulous. There was more to this than he was saying. As I studied him, his cheeks flushed again and his eyes darted away from mine. “What aren’t you telling me, Mr Jameson?”

  “Well, Hannah was rather holding something over my head.”

  “What?”

  “Well, let’s just say that it was something that the administration here would certainly frown upon. Maybe even find a way to get rid of me.”

  “Let’s just say more than that, shall we? Let’s just say exactly what it was Hannah was holding over your head.” I couldn’t believe how firm my voice sounded.

  Betty would have been so proud.

  “Oh, I might as well tell you. After all, you’ve got more on me than Hannah ever had.” Matty spoke more to himself. He sighed with a sort of purpose, ready to tell me it all. “Hannah had seen me in a strip club. Well, not a strip club exactly, but more of a rundown, dirty old pub in town where they have a stripper on every Sunday afternoon. The Duchess of Devonshire.”

  “Oh, right.” I said flatly, hiding the most terrible and inappropriate urge to laugh. At first, you see, I thought he was suggesting that the Duchess of Devonshire was the stripper.

  “It’s not what you think. I only go in there to study the female form.”

  I bit my tongue, all the while thinking that his reason was probably the same as that of every other saddo punter in the place.

  “I mean, for paintings. It helps in my nude paintings, because I very rarely work one to one with live nude models, unless it’s in an open live model class.”

  “Oh.”

  “Because in open group classes or sessions with live models, you cannot pose them yourself. You simply get to sketch or paint whatever tableau the art tutor decides upon. It’s rarely anything inspiring.” Matty finished on kind of an elitist, almost snobby note.

  I wondered if he meant that the models were rarely inspiring, or if the poses were. Maybe it was both.

  Judging it not to particularly matter to either me or my investigation, I more or less let it go. I say more or less, because I had a sudden image of poor Matty trying to paint an elderly nude dude.

  After all, live classes, as Liam had previously told me, rarely contained the sort of stunning models you might imagine. Liam said that you had to learn to draw and paint reality, and reality included wrinkles, chubby bits and all sorts.

  “So, you went to this pub to watch the Sunday stripper for artistic inspiration?” I made my question sound like a statement. I really didn’t want to seem like I was mocking him. In truth, I sort of felt for the guy.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “But I can’t imagine that the Sunday afternoon stripper would draw too many female patrons to that pub, surely.”

  I was trying to place Hannah there in some seamy spit-and-sawdust pub watching a stripper with the smell of roast potatoes and cabbage cooking in the background, assuming the Duchess of Devonshire did Sunday lunches.

  In my head, I was imagining the Dalton Arms, where my total role-model of a parent spent a good deal of her time and benefit money. It always smelled of school dinner type food and a general sour fustiness.

  I would have laid odds that this rundown, dirty old pub which Matty had been to smelled exactly the same. Wowsers, imagine stripping somewhere like that!

  “No, none at all. I suppose it’s not surprising, really. Most women would feel rather uncomfortable with it all, I daresay.” Matty seemed to be thoughtfully mulling it over.

  “But Hannah wasn’t uncomfortable?”

  “No, not a bit.” Matty seemed oddly surprised by my question.

  “So, who had she gone into the pub with?”

  “Gone into the….. oh, no, no, Hannah wasn’t a patron.” Matty rolled his eyes in a kind of oops, silly me way, which felt totally surreal. “Sorry, I forgot to say! Hannah wasn’t drinking in the pub and watching the stripper; Hannah was the stripper!”

  Chapter Nine

  By the time I had once again traversed the old town of Grantstone, I was starting to feel exhausted. The last couple of days had seemed to fly by in a whirlwind of shock, anger, fear, frayed nerves, and lines crossed, all of which had rather taken it out of me.

  As the second bus rumbled on towards the edge of the Moss Park Estate, I contemplated the fact that I was detecting my heart out on very little sleep.

  In just two days I had snooped about at a Police search, stolen evidence, had that evi
dence stolen from me by an intruder, slept fitfully, discovered a warning on the bathroom mirror, discovered the possible betrayal of my best friend, discovered the identity of the instrument of betrayal, and then discovered it wasn’t betrayal at all. Well, not the bog-standard type of betrayal I had thought it to be.

  All in all, I was knackered.

  I let my head rest against the glass of the bus window without once considering who might have lolled there last. Ordinarily, I was a bit twitchy, and was one of those people who tries to back out of a public toilet without touching the door handle.

  As my head bounced lightly off the glass, the mild thumping sensation was curiously soporific, and I had to guard against closing my eyes for fear of waking up at the bus station in town an hour later.

  As I stepped down off the bus and started the twenty-minute walk through the estate, I looked at my watch; it was nearly ten o’clock. I was so glad that tomorrow was a Friday. I had no lectures to attend at all.

  Ordinarily, I would have spent the day at uni anyway, working away in the silent study area of the library. I loved it there, and I loved the fact that I finally had a place to study which wasn’t in my bedroom with some sort of dreadful goings-on in the house all around me. Once I was in that silent and solitary little booth, the world felt like it was totally mine.

  However, Friday would not exactly run to my routine; I would need to get a decent sleep of some sort before I made my next investigative move. I knew I had to work my shift at the dry cleaners on Saturday, so my investigation would be necessarily halted whilst I put in six hours of smiling politely in order to rebuild my tattered coffers. The flask was definitely coming back into play, as were the Euro-Saver crisps.

  So, a good lay in followed by a day of chasing leads. Decision made.

  As I neared home, I decided to take a detour and go to Liam’s. I hadn’t really thought about the intruder too much, since my day had been so full to bursting that I hadn’t had time to dwell on it.

  The idea of going home and trying to sleep with chairs against the doors did not exactly appeal. Of course, my mum might have returned home in the meantime but, honestly, the idea was not more much more appealing than sharing house space with a crazed intruder.

  As I took a detour away from my home, I pulled my phone out of my bag and sent Liam a text. I knew he would still be wide awake and, as for the rest of his family, some of them would only just be getting up.

  In short, there was no-one who would take offence at the lateness of my arrival.

  “Just around the corner. Can I come round to your place?”

  I kept walking, totally sure of finding myself welcome.

  “Sure Dude. Back door open, just come straight up.”

  I did as instructed, and let myself in through the back door into the kitchen. The layout of Liam’s house was exactly the same as the one me and mum lived in. The Attwood place seemed smaller, somehow, but I reckoned it was because it was always full. Full of things and full of people.

  I smiled at Mrs Attwood as I opened the door and peeked in.

  “Hiya Josie, love. He’s upstairs.” Mrs Attwood always seemed to speak on an outward sigh, as if life was way too hard and speech was a mere afterthought.

  “Thanks Mrs Attwood.” I smiled as I closed the door up behind me and stepped around a great pile of boxes.

  Well, boxes of brand new toasters, to be precise. In fact, boxes of brand new stolen toasters, to be truly thorough in my description of the scene. Mrs Attwood, as always, showed no hint of even noticing the boxes were there. It was as if the activities of her sons were none of her business.

  For the most part, I wasn’t sure I could blame her. With a husband in prison, and three of her sons constantly stealing, fighting, and evading the law, I could quite see why she had decided to look without seeing.

  But she applied the very same ethos to Liam; Liam, the son who had fought for the great armload of GCSEs he had achieved, not to mention the A-levels, and now a place at university. All without a single word of encouragement.

  As much as I pitied Mrs Attwood at times, I was still almost overwhelmed by an urge to take hold of the back of her neck and ram her forehead into the nearest hard surface; table, wall, whatever. I knew this urge well; I had the very same one concerning my own mother.

  In their own ways, both women had definitely had hard lives; no arguments from me. But instead of encouraging their own children on to better things they either ignored effort, in the case of Mrs Attwood, or actively denigrated effort, in the case of my own mum.

  Instead of belting her head on the table, I shot past Mrs Attwood with a grin and ran off upstairs to find my mate.

  “Well, I was trying to work, anyway.” I could hear Liam’s angry tone as I was half-way up the stairs.

  “On what, you swatty little geek?”

  “Why do you care? Just get out, Jack.”

  “What if I say no?” Jack was not blessed with brains or any kind, and had certainly not evolved one iota in the last ten years or so. He’d just got bigger.

  “Mind out of the way, Jack.” I said sharply as I made for Liam’s room.

  Jack turned to look at me but moved aside, as he always did. Jack had never really known how to deal with me and, whilst we had never connected on any level, he afforded me a certain amount of grudging respect.

  “Move back a bit, I want to shut the door.” I said as soon as I made it into the room.

  Once again, Jack did as he was told, and I was able to gently close the door in his face. I stood for a moment or two, waiting for some kind of objection. When it didn’t come, I wasn’t particularly surprised.

  “How was the vigil?” Liam said, putting down his art history textbook and moving his other books off the bed to make room for me to sit down.

  Liam’s room was even more Spartan than my own. He had a bed and a chest of drawers, and that was it. He used to have a little portable telly; you know the really old ones with the round wire aerial and the tuning dial?

  But either his dad or one of his brothers had pinched it from him a couple of years back, presumably to sell. In these days of digital everything and HDMI cables everywhere, I wondered who exactly had bought the old antique of a set, and how much they had paid whichever Attwood had stolen it.

  Anyway, Liam hadn’t bothered to replace it; what would be the point? Instead, he, like me, had invested hard-earned money in a smart phone. It might seem like a luxury but, to us, they were lifelines.

  They were communication, internet, books and TV all in one, and neither one of us ever carelessly let these valuable commodities out of our sight for a moment. I never went to the bathroom without taking my smart phone with me.

  My mum, or some Snatcher Harris type of a character, would have no qualms whatsoever about stealing mine and selling it.

  “The vigil was kind of cheesy.” I said, plopping down onto his bed.

  “What, a bit cheesy, or the sort of cheesy that gives you bellyache?”

  “The bellyache one.” I said, with a tired little laugh. “Well, no, that’s not fair, really. There were lots of people there who really did seem to be genuinely concerned.”

  “But?”

  “But Fliss wasn’t one of them. She was lapping up every drop of attention she could get out of it. And she’d had this big photo of Hannah set on a tripod. I don’t know, it kind of felt like…..well, like a wake or something.”

  “Jeez. Poor Hannah.” Liam looked down at his hands.

  I felt sorry for him; Liam didn’t have the connection to Hannah that I’d assumed he’d had, and I was getting the impression that he was feeling guilty about it. Either that, or he was wishing he’d never told me about his feelings, or lack thereof.

  “Yeah. I honestly wonder if she had one real friend in all the world.” I said, and meant it.

  “I know.” Liam looked up from his hands. “I guess we’re luckier than we realise sometimes, huh, Dude?”

  “Yeah, we are.” I smi
led at his sad little mush before scooting across the bed to give him a hug.

  It seemed to take forever to tell him all the evening’s events, especially the Matty Jameson stuff. Liam, as was his custom, kept interrupting; either to ask questions, or to take the mickey out of me and me and my new self-appointed detective status.

  “You did what? You crawled through the ceiling?” Liam was holding his belly whilst he laughed hard. “Like some kind of spy, Dude! MI6 or something!” He was wiping his eyes now. “Dude – Ace of Spies!”

  “Yep. That’s me.” I gave him a few moments to thoroughly enjoy himself with it. “Until I slid down the wall on the other side and landed on my butt!”

  “Smooth, Dude! Very smooth.”

  I told Liam about all the paintings, trying to gauge his reaction to my discovery of Hannah’s naked oil-on-canvas. Liam seemed really shocked by it, but not hurt. I guessed it was more or less the same as earlier that day when I told him that Hannah had maybe cheated on him.

  “I just can’t imagine it. I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem like something Hannah would do.”

  “But I guess you didn’t know her too well, Liam. Neither of us did, did we?”

  “No, I suppose not.” Liam sat up straighter, something else had clearly occurred to him. “Dude, we need to tell the Police about this.”

  “Wait a minute….”

  “No, listen, Dude. He’s a suspect now. He has to be, surely.” Liam seemed a little more relieved than I was comfortable with.

  “Why?” I said cautiously, waiting for the chunky eyebrow of doom to race up his forehead and totally chastise me.

  “What do you mean, why?” Hello Mr Eyebrow, what took you so long?

  “Liam, just wait for the rest, ok.”

  “There’s more?”

  “There’s more.” I hurriedly cantered through the rest of the tale.

  “A stripper? Are you serious?” The eyebrow had forgotten itself and had slid back into neutral.

  “Yes, but just on a Sunday afternoon.” I really have no idea why I said that.

  “Oh well, if it was just Sunday’s, Dude!” Liam spread his hands wide and his tone was sarcastic.