The Girlfriend: A Josie Cloverfield Detective Novel

by Jack Carteret

  “You’re dead.” She said, so vehemently that she spat a little bit. Man, I hate that.

  “Don’t threaten me.” I said with an antagonistic smirk, despite feeling a little freaked out.

  “I’m watching you.” Fliss came very close to actually evaporating me with her sizzling eyebeams, as my own imagination helped her out with a flashback to the message in the steam on my bathroom mirror.

  Suddenly, my mouth went a little dry. Could Fliss really have strangled Hannah to death? Was she even strong enough? I remembered Richard’s description of her vile temper, not to mention the face scratching that Amelia had suffered.

  “Move along, Miss Hardcastle.” A voice I recognised snapped me back into the here and now. It was Dale.

  “What? No!” Fliss clearly didn’t recognise Dale in his every-day-human-wear.

  “Now, or I’ll lock you up.” Dale held his warrant card out in front of him; so close to Fliss that I had a sudden mental image of him actually inserting the stiff badge into her left nostril.

  “Oh, I…..” Fliss suddenly faltered. How cool was it to have a cop buddy! She looked a little panicked. “Look, officer, I was just questioning her, that’s all.” Fliss sniffed importantly, and I almost laughed.

  “Oh, I see. I’m sorry, I didn’t recognise you from the nick. Which department?” Dale said, totally sarcastic.

  “I’m not a police officer. I just wanted to…..”

  “I know what you wanted to do, Miss Hardcastle. You wanted to vent spleen and harass Josie. You wanted to entertain yourself with a bit of spiteful sport instead of mourning the loss of your friend.”

  “How dare you?” Fliss tried to be assertively outraged, but was looking satisfyingly unsure of herself.

  “Oh, I dare, Miss Hardcastle. If you’re not careful, the same people who saw you flouncing about like a self-important reality TV celebrity at Hannah’s vigil will see you flouncing about causing trouble just hours after she was found dead. You don’t look like best friend material to me, and the rest of the world won’t be fooled for long, either. So, I suggest you wind you neck in and go and find something else to do.” Dale spoke in a low and vaguely menacing tone.

  Clearly this was not uniformed officer procedure, but more like something that DI Thorn might say behind closed doors, out of the gaze of the public. However, on this occasion, I was all for it. Double standards, but still, Fliss deserved it.

  And Dale was pretty magnificent! I mean, I’d never heard him playing bad cop before, but he did it really well. He looked even taller and broader than normal, not to mention just a little bit hot somehow.

  As she spun around to walk off, Fliss gave me the sort of look that could blister gloss paint. I kid you not, my stomach flipped. It was the sort of look that said you’re next.

  “Are you ok Jose?” Dale said, leaning over the counter at me just as Fliss had done, but without any of the negative connotations.

  “I am now.” I said, breathing a big old sigh of relief. “Apart from being jobless.”

  “Huh?”

  “Bunty has disappeared off out the back.” I said, inclining my head sharply. “Presumably to ring head office to get me fired off.”

  “Bunty? Are you serious? Bunty?” Dale said, his eyes wide like saucers and the corners of his mouth turning up.

  “Yeah, I know. But don’t make it worse with any Bunty-related guffawing. I’m in enough trouble as it is.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll talk to Bunty.” Dale said, getting ready to rescue me for the second time that day. “Just as soon as I come to terms with her name.” Dale took a couple of comical, steadying breaths before ducking under the counter and joining me on my side. “What’s her second name?” He whispered in my ear.

  “Golightly.” I said, my heart dropping like a runaway lift plummeting its way towards the ground floor. I was about to be jobless…..

  “Oh, please.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “How am I supposed to deal with that?” Dale said, his shoulders starting to bounce with conspiratorial mirth. “Oh well, here goes.” And he strode off to the door at the back office and knocked loudly.

  Five minutes later, Dale emerged with a rather smitten looking Bunty sweeping along behind him.

  “Thanks so much for your help, PC Webb.” Bunty crooned, and I almost laughed.

  “No, really, thank you, Miss Golightly, for your understanding. It’s always a great help to receive support from members of the public, particularly in a case of harassment.”

  “Oh yes, of course. Well, it was a pleasure.”

  “I’m very grateful, as I’m sure Miss Cloverfield is.” Dale said, winking at me as a cue for my overt gratitude.

  “Yes, thank you Bunty. It really was very embarrassing. It was a good thing that PC Webb happened by.” I said, so keen to get her back onside that I almost curtseyed.

  “It certainly was.” Bunty said, gazing up at the new star of her every fantasy.

  “Well, I shall leave you to it.” Dale said, giving me a get-me-the-hell-out-of-here smile.

  “Thank you, PC Webb.” I said, wanting to chat a bit longer, but knowing that there would be no shaking Bunty off now.

  As it happened, the rest of my shift was spent talking about PC Dale Webb to an over-excited Bunty Golightly. By the end of it, I was totally sick of the man. PC Webb said this, PC Webb said that, isn’t PC Webb attractive?.... you get the picture.

  I was desperate for Bunty to bite through her tongue, because I was starting to get over my shock at Fliss showing up, and I wanted to turn my brain back onto the investigation, especially since I felt sure that Fliss was now a legitimate suspect.

  I needed to speak to Rich Richard. I don’t know why, I just felt he needed to know that Fliss had known about Hannah all along. I knew it was right that Richard should know, but I was being thoroughly Bunty’d to death, and couldn’t think straight enough to work it all out.

  I was also having other ideas poking and prodding at my tired brain. If Fliss was the killer, was she also Dirty Harry of Facebook fame? Was that even possible? I mean, it very much seemed as if Trixie Sunday and Dirty Harry had already met.

  So, did you enjoy the show? Surely, she can only have meant the strip show? Or had she? She hadn’t exactly been explicit, after all. Things were not making sense.

  Unless Dirty Harry wasn’t the killer. I mean, he’d arranged to meet Hannah in that building, but could it be possible he hadn’t been the one who strangled her? They could have been followed.

  Or Hannah could have been followed and killed before Dirty Harry even arrived. Oh, for God’s sake! I was just confusing myself and Bunty’s blithering wasn’t helping one little bit.

  I needed a plan. I needed to find out more. Somewhat controversially, I really was starting to think about a trip to the Duchess of Devonshire. Pub, not aristocrat. Maybe there was something to be found out there.

  Maybe someone there would be able to describe Dirty Harry? Or anyone who’d paid any kind of interest in Hannah. I know, it was a strip-pub…. There was likely to be a great list of goggling turnip heads who’d fit the bill.

  I looked at my watch. It was nearly two o’clock. My six-hour stint was drawing to a merciful close.

  “Oh look, here comes Dave.” Bunty said, smiling as the two-till-eight guy appeared. “You might as well get going, Jose.” Bunty smiled at me. Jose? Really? Well, I never. Finally, Bunty liked me. Good old Dale Webb.

  “Thanks Bunty.” I said, resisting the urge to respond in kind and shorten her name to Bunts in the interests of new found friendship. “I’ll see you next Saturday.”

  As I struggled out of my green overall and unreadable name badge and grabbed my rucksack from the back office, I realised that I had told Bunty nothing of my last twenty-four hours.

  Even the most reticent of people would surely have told the person they were stuck with for a whole six hours that they’d found a dead body the day before. I smiled at Bunty as I duc
ked under the counter and sped towards the door, wondering all the while if there was actually something wrong with me.

  Not medical, but like psychological, or even just social. Was I actually normal? In truth, I wasn’t overly concerned. But maybe that’s all part of the condition.

  Before I tied myself in knots with inconsequential nonsense and hypochondria, I decided to head straight over to the Duchess of Devonshire and see what I could find out.

  After all, it was Saturday, not Sunday. I’d be perfectly safe and, if my outfit was anything to go by, none of the punters would mistake me for the new girl.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Fortunately for my dwindling coffers, the Duchess of Devonshire was only a twenty-minute walk out of the town centre where the dry cleaners was. I didn’t have an actual visual memory of the outside of the pub.

  I’d seen it before, but had never been in and certainly never paid it any heed. It was kind of like the council offices or something; I knew they were there, but had never been interested enough to commit the finer details to memory.

  Of course, when I pitched up outside the crusty old pub, it seemed suddenly familiar. I’d be a terrible witness to a crime. I’d be making up outfits and hair colours.

  Everyone would be medium height and medium build. I had a great memory for facts and figures, and even great swathes of conversation. But faces and places, not so much. I don’t know why; it just is as it is, I guess.

  Well, it has to be said that even my mum and Snatcher Harris might think twice about spending quality time in the Duchess of Devonshire public house. It was just about the most run down looking place imaginable without it actually being abandoned and derelict.

  To say that the paint on the doors and window frames was peeling would be a huge understatement. There were great curls and strips of bottle green paint snaking their way down the woodwork.

  The exposed wood underneath looked grey and dry and almost as if it was shrinking somehow. Not all of the windows had glass in but, for the ones which didn’t, somebody had thoughtfully nailed slabs of plywood right across the frames.

  As I said, it looked more run down than a derelict building. In fact, to begin with, I thought either I’d made a big mistake, or Matty Jameson had mixed up his pub names.

  I hung about outside for a few minutes, looking incredibly suspicious. My heart felt a bit skippy, and I had serious doubts about my courage. Honestly, if you’d have seen it, you wouldn’t have wanted to go in either.

  Finally, the door opened and someone came out. For an awful moment, I thought it might be the proprietor coming out to see what I thought I was doing. I think, perhaps, the word proprietor is maybe lending the place too much of an air of respectability.

  Anyway, this guy came lurching out through the doors. As he did so, there came the faintest waft of music on the air. Country and Western music to be really, truly, and horribly precise.

  As the man carried on past me, I breathed a sigh of relief. He wasn’t the proprietor, and the slow closing of the front door put an end to the Country and Western.

  So, now I knew that the pub was open; there were people inside and, presumably, drinks being served in the normal way. Bracing myself for the sight of the interior, I forced myself in through the doors.

  I walked with as much confidence as I could muster, and hoped I was going in the right direction to finally meet with the bar; it was really very dark, you see.

  I tried not to look left and right as I went in. The fact that they had a stripper in the place on a Sunday seemed to have tainted it for the entire week in my eyes.

  I’m not too judgy about folk as a rule, but the idea that some or all of the people in the pub now would happily watch a young woman whip her gear off in such maudlin surroundings did, for good or bad, make me think a little less of them.

  I finally made my way to the bar. The young woman serving at it stood with her back to me for ages, but I didn’t want to try to aggressively get her attention.

  I have to admit that I felt horribly out of my depth in the Duchess of Devonshire pub. It just had a very rough feel to it; even worse than the Dalton Arms where my mum and Snatcher tended to go. Also, there was the whole deal about being totally out of place. As much as I detested the Dalton Arms, it was not entirely unfamiliar to me so, as unpleasant as it was, it didn’t make me feel afraid to go into it.

  The Duchess of Devonshire was very different; I didn’t know the place and I didn’t know anybody in it. There was a horrible uncertainty creeping over me, having much to do with not knowing what would happen next.

  As I continued to actively shrink into the bar, lest I anger the bar tender for trying to get her attention, I decided to un-clench just enough to have a quick look around. The pub did, as I had long suspected, smell of the worst kind of cooking; school dinners.

  Also, if you closed your eyes and took in a really deep breath, you know, like a wine connoisseur but in vastly different surroundings, you could isolate various aromas. In the case of the Duchess of Devonshire, these were beer-soaked carpet, cigarettes, despite the ban, and, I almost wince at telling you, urine.

  I tried to limit myself to nothing more than shallow breaths as I continued to look around and noted, with a certain amount of horror, that the door to the gents’ toilet was wide open, affording the casual observer a superb view of the urinals.

  Mercifully, they were not currently being used. I was having enough trouble staying on the high-up barstool as it was.

  The seat was covered in that shiny mock-leather stuff in a grim shade of pub-furniture-green, and I was slip-sliding about. Had I clocked some brazen chap piddling freely, I would most likely have slipped right off and plummeted towards the beer soaked carpet.

  All in all, I could not begin to imagine anyone stripping in this vile place, much less someone as prim and pristine as Hannah Davenport.

  Once again, I had to wonder if Matty had made some mistake with pub names. That was until the girl behind the bar turned to finally look my way. This time, I really did come very close to falling off my stool, for there, right in front of me, stood Hannah Davenport.

  I gasped, well, shrieked, actually.

  I was instantly sweating from head to toe and my scalp was tingling so furiously that it felt almost sun-burned.

  “Are you alright, love?” The girl said in an even rougher regional accent than my own. Despite the kindness of her words, her expression spoke volumes about how she actually couldn’t have cared less if I was alright or not.

  The voice alone told me it wasn’t Hannah, and my brain backed it up with an unwanted mental image of Hannah’s dead body. However, the knowledge didn’t make the likeness any less shocking.

  This girl was the spitting image. I quickly did a top to toe of her; very much in the same way that Hannah, Fliss and Amelia used to do to me when we all met up in the canteen.

  Still, I comforted myself that my gawping was definitely not spite-related; more shock related. However, the more I studied her clothes, the more I could see the differences.

  This girl had not been raised with the same attention to detail that Hannah’s family had undoubtedly insisted upon. This girl did not have the barely-there expensive jewellery. Instead, she wore cheap, dangly earrings that were supposed to look like silver.

  They were a bit tarnished and just a bit too big to be anything other than coloured metal. Her outfit was all a bit revealing. Her skirt was on the short side and tight side, although it has to be said it suited her.

  Her top was a cheap stretchy thing, cut pretty low. Over that she wore a sleeveless gillet which was fluffy and mink coloured. I’m not being a clothes bitch, I’m just describing her.

  The difference between this girl and Hannah in terms of style and, more than likely, disposable income, were obviously huge. However, the differences in face structure and eye colour and beautiful glossy brown hair were non-existent.

  They could have been sisters. I was feeling really very confused,
but something still told me that Hannah Davenport and the bar tender at the Duchess of Devonshire were unlikely to be sisters. Oh, but they were related, and there was no doubt about that. It was giving me the creeps.

  “Erm….” I said, pretty much still shocked to the core of my being and doing my best to get on top of so, so many questions that were all bouncing around in my skull.

  “D’you want a drink or what?” She said, losing patience faster than a mean old lady with a wolfy fleece in need of de-bobbling.

  “Yes, please. Could I have a gin and tonic?” I had not dared ask for my customary lime cordial and tap water; not in a place like that, they’d probably kill me and make a necklace out of my teeth.

  “A what?” She said, with a sneer.

  I don’t know why I picked Rich Richard’s tipple of choice. I don’t normally buy alcohol, so I stupidly didn’t have a drink in mind when I trotted into the Duchess of Devonshire. The words gin and tonic just rolled off my tongue.

  Judging by her expression, I might just as well have asked for a mug of Ovaltine. I decided to stay firm in my choice; if I changed it to a beer or something socially acceptable in that place, this woman would undoubtedly lose whatever tiny shreds of respect she might have for me, and I would be able to get nothing out of her.

  As it was, my hopes weren’t high.

  “There’s no ice or lemon. It ain’t that kind of place.” She snapped, thrusting the glass across the bar at me and holding out her hand. “Four twenty.”

  “Thanks.” I said, when what I really wanted to say was What? Four twenty for a warm G&T in a dive like this? You’re stiffing me!

  I handed her a fiver, praying that tears would not spring to my eyes as I parted with the note. I calculated that drink to be more than half an hour in Bunty Golightly’s company. At least this wasn’t the sort of place where you felt obliged to leave a tip.