by Penny Grubb
Facing her, the big window gave a broad canvas on to the estuary and far bank. The small craft she’d seen from the bedroom had vanished upriver. The treachery of the Humber showed itself only in the snaking patterns on the water’s surface.
Despairing of the snores ever stopping, Annie went to explore the kitchen. The worktops gleamed up at her, the neat layout posed like a showroom. She opened cupboards and found them packed. One held nothing but tins of Campbell’s soups; another contained a stack of cellophane-wrapped French bread. She broke off a large chunk and chewed it hungrily. A shower of crumbs speckled the floor round her feet. Her search eventually turned up a kettle and cups but no coffee, only a packet of Yorkshire Tea. She settled for a drink of water.
Wandering back to the living room, her gaze lighted on a wooden sideboard, one of its two drawers not quite shut on its bulging contents. The stuff trying to escape looked like official paperwork.
She’d got away with snooping in Sleeman’s briefcase. Here was easier prey and her chance to find out about this odd outfit she’d come to work for.
Alert for any break in the rhythmic snores from Pat’s bedroom, she ran her tongue over her lips, eased the whole drawer silently out of its housing and set it on the floor. Keeping her mind focused, she went through it sheet by sheet running a mental commentary.
Sleeman asking for something to be signed … what? Doesn’t say. Pat must have signed it and sent it back to him. Account with a taxi firm. KC … Kingston Communications, bill for broadband services. Bills, bills, bills … Here’s a flyer for the firm … Jed’s Private Investigations … who’s Jed? Remember to ask Pat. Hospital appointment card … must ask about her leg, too. I wonder if it was anything to do with the case….
As she worked her way down the heap, the story became more structured. Jed turned out to be Jed Thompson, who she tentatively categorized as Pat’s father before finding confirmation in a letter to him from Pat that started ‘Dear Dad’.
There were no case notes. No sign of activity on Pat’s part other than as a payer of bills. This random set of papers didn’t fit the mental model Annie had built of Pat as a dynamic operator.
At the bottom of the drawer were copies of legal documents. Certificate of Incorporation of the company, its original Memorandum and Articles. She ran her eye down the list of shareholders: George – presumably Jed – Thompson, Vincent Sleeman, Patricia Thompson and Barbara Caldwell. And tucked at the very bottom, a death certificate for George Thompson dated just over a year previously, cause of death myocardial infarction. He’d been 62. If he were the size of his daughter, premature death from heart disease wasn’t so surprising.
The Mem and Arts listed George Thompson as managing director and Barbara Caldwell as company secretary. According to the Companies House information she’d looked up before her interview, Vince Sleeman held both these positions now.
And what did any of this say about her own role? Last night, she’d felt the excitement of stepping into a real job no matter how lowly the pay or odd the circumstances, but the morning light brought a disturbing clarity with it. A single case? Did those few notes she’d read really constitute six weeks’ full-time work? Sleeman had had a contract drawn up that assumed whoever signed it would live in, but she’d seen no sign of six weeks’ worth of work to be covered.
Had Sleeman brought her here to look after Pat? He’d asked as much about her ability to care for others as about her thin CV. But if he’d wanted a carer, he would simply have brought one in from a local agency.
What other role could possibly fit the facts? Part of the puzzle was that Pat herself didn’t seem to know.
A bodyguard to keep Pat from further harm? If so, she was an unlikely choice.
A prison warder to make sure Pat stayed put? Hardly.
To be here as an independent witness? But witness to what?
None of it fitted. As she tried to find a credible answer, she dealt herself a mental slap. Bodyguard? Prison warder? What a drama queen!
She replaced the papers, carefully recreating the chaotic jumble at the top of the heap, and slid the drawer back into place.
What she’d seen was a random snapshot. It wasn’t official paperwork in any bookkeeping sense. It was clear from what she’d read that Pat’s father had founded the firm. Was that why Pat was a director, why she was still a part of it? The real work of the agency went on in the office in town, at the address on the letterheads, wherever that was. Somewhere else to look up as soon as she got her hands on a map. Maybe Pat was just dead weight. Weight being the operative word. Vince Sleeman was clearly in charge. Pat wasn’t the experienced PI of Annie’s imagination. She was just a hanger-on in her late father’s firm.
It was close to midday before Pat emerged hobbling on her crutch and with a huge bag over her shoulder. She heaved her bulk to the settee and slumped into the cushions. Pat in the flesh, stripped of her glamour as an experienced PI, was simply gross. Annie felt a stab of revulsion as she said, ‘Nice morning,’ and nodded towards the big window.
Pat grunted an indeterminate reply, then said, ‘Get me a coffee and something to eat, will you? You may as well earn your crust while you’re here.’
Annie tensed, annoyed at Pat’s tone, but it was too early to burn bridges, and Pat’s order held the promise of coffee in a secret stash, so she held back a sharp retort. ‘There isn’t any coffee. I looked.’
‘Freezer, top shelf. And put some soup on. Cupboard over the sink.’ As she spoke, Pat fished a remote control from under the cushions and the television blared into life.
Annie threw Pat an exasperated look. Whoever heard of keeping coffee in the freezer? The blare of the television turned the flat from sterile and empty to overcrowded and busy. Annie stomped through to the kitchen, made coffee for them both and heated a tin of asparagus soup which she carried through on a tray with one of the French sticks and a giant carton of Anchor Spreadable.
Pat shot her a narrow-eyed glance. ‘Thanks.’ She spoke tersely, but seemed to make an effort to take the rough edge out of her tone. ‘Look, I don’t do mornings, OK?’
As Pat broke the bread and lavished it with butter, Annie savoured the taste of real coffee and tried to ignore the lip-smacking and crunching from the settee. A crackle of paper made her look across. Pat had taken a packet of chocolate digestives from her bag. Annie’s gaze was riveted as Pat dunked the biscuit in her soup and stuffed it in her mouth. The thought of living in close proximity to this hulk of a woman was impossible.
Annie’s thoughts were interrupted by the click of locks from the lobby, followed by the slam of the door and locks sliding home again. She twisted round. Whoever had come in had relocked the outer door. Was that to keep intruders out, or someone already here from leaving? As the living-room door opened, she found herself staring at the rugged misshapen face she’d last seen in a London office.
‘Ms Raymond,’ Vince Sleeman greeted her. ‘Annie, isn’t it? Settling in?’
‘Mr Sleeman.’ She acknowledged his query, taking in the coldness of his eyes, the unnatural flatness of his tone.
‘Vince, please. I hope you two have got to know each other, sorted things out. You’ll work here with Pat, Annie. I’m sure she’s made that quite clear. There’s no cover needed elsewhere.’
‘You can give me those keys back now,’ Pat mumbled, through a mouthful of bread.
Sleeman said nothing as he slipped the keys into his pocket. Annie intercepted a shaft of venom in the glance Pat shot at him. She looked into his cold blue eyes to the backdrop of Pat gulping soup and crunching bread and biscuits. She’d walked into the clutches of two strangers without a clue about either of them, blinded by the chance to get something solid on her CV. And now she sat locked in an upstairs apartment with them.
Vince’s head turned to Pat but his stare stayed on Annie right to the point when he started on a new speech that didn’t include her. It felt like an order to leave the room and had her on her feet before she could thi
nk.
‘Excuse me,’ she muttered, and slipped through to the inadequate refuge of the tiny bedroom.
Deep breath. Think this through. She was sure Vince Sleeman had brought her here for some purpose of his own. The memory stood before her of the phone call she’d walked in on back at the flat in London. Kara’s gossipy chat with Sleeman. How much had Kara told him about Annie’s family circumstances? A father she hadn’t met in years, an aunt now in sheltered accommodation. Had Sleeman read it as no one to notice if she disappeared? It was time to bail out. She took out her phone. She would let Kara know she was on her way back. It gave her a fallback, someone who knew, in case her imaginings had substance.
The voice that answered was unfamiliar.
‘Could I speak to Kara?’
‘Sorry, she’s out. Can I take a message? I’m her new lodger.’
Annie knew she shouldn’t be surprised. She’d made no secret about the prestigious new job and maybe she’d exaggerated the wonderful things it would lead to. There’d have been a queue for her old room.
‘It’s OK. It wasn’t important.’
As she ended the call, Annie realized that she’d known all along she was never going back. The bridges behind her were well and truly ablaze. The duo the other side of the closed bedroom door lost their sinister gloss. They became an obese thirty-something woman and an ill-tempered hulk of a man whose agenda Annie neither knew nor cared about. They didn’t give a damn if she stayed, or where she laid her head tonight. It was time to grow up, cut the drama and make something special out of this scrap of a job.
She faced herself in the mirror and flicked her fingers through her hair making it bounce back into shape, then she pulled in a breath, straightened her shoulders and marched back through.
Pat lay back into the cushions, the picture window framing the curve of the river behind her. ‘Oh, there you are. I wondered where you’d got to.’
Annie shot a glance around the room. Sleeman had gone. ‘Should I go down to the office? I know what Mr Slee— uh … Vince said about working from here, but I’ll need paperwork. You’ll have your own templates, affidavits and so on.’
‘Vince won’t want you down at the office.’
‘OK, no problem. As long as you have everything we need, I’ll work from here.’ Annie knew her smile was too bright, her manner too chirpy, but she couldn’t tone it down.
‘You think you’re going to stay, do you?’ Pat’s voice mocked her.
‘Yes, of course.’ Annie looked at Pat in alarm. ‘Why on earth wouldn’t I? What’s Mr Sleeman said?’
‘Don’t you know? I assumed you’d been listening at the door.’
‘No, of course I wasn’t. What do you take me for?’
‘I thought you wanted to be taken for an investigator. In your place, I’d have listened at the door.’
Annie dropped her gaze, annoyed with herself. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I know Vince Sleeman thinks I’m an airhead. I may not have all the bits of paper, but I can do a good job. This drug dealing …’ – she pointed to the folder – ‘you give me the equipment, camera and so on, and I’ll soon get to the bottom of it.’
Pat laughed. ‘So you came here to do a real job? Well, I think I’d have let you run with the Orchard Park case, but that’s one of the things Vince came to say. He’s called the job off. So, though he seemed to think I should keep you on anyway, there’s nothing for you to do any more. You may as well pack up and go.’
‘But he can’t do that.’ Annie felt indignation rise. This was her case, not Sleeman’s. ‘Why?’
‘I can’t say he came out with a very convincing reason,’ Pat conceded. ‘I think someone called in a favour, and Dad’s cronies have their own ways of doing things.’
Dad’s cronies? Was the ghost of Pat’s father still a key figure round here? ‘That doesn’t mean they’re right,’ Annie muttered, half under her breath.
‘You really want this job, do you?’ Pat turned away, almost seemed to ask the question to herself. ‘But there’s no need for anyone now. The agency can handle all the work that comes in. It was only because this one came directly to me that we needed anyone.’
Annie’s fingertips drummed on the arm of the chair. Questions rushed her. Why would a case come directly to Pat? What was the dynamic between Pat and Sleeman? What did she need to say in order to keep this berth for long enough to sort herself out?
‘Why does he want you to keep me on if there’s no work?’
‘He seems to think I need someone here to look after me.’
‘I’m no good at that sort of thing.’ The words were out before Annie weighed her immediate need for accommodation, but it didn’t matter. She couldn’t play carer to this woman for any price. ‘Isn’t it worth waiting to see if something else comes in? Just a day or two?’ A day or two was enough time for her to re-find her feet. ‘I could go shopping and that sort of thing.’
Shopping. She could do shopping, but none of the personal stuff, helping her move about, touching her, all that. Just one more night. If she could wangle just one more night, then she’d have all of tomorrow to get her head together.
For the first time, Pat’s face relaxed into a real smile, and then she grimaced as she shifted position yet again. Annie held her breath and looked out across the river until the rustle of paper brought her gaze back. Pat had pulled another folder from her voluminous bag. ‘As it turns out there is another case. I hadn’t got round to telling Vince about it. Came in yesterday just before you arrived. An odd one. Nothing to it really, but I could let you run with it for a day or two. Maybe.’
Annie kept her tone even. ‘I’ll make a good job of it.’
‘You don’t know what it is yet.’
‘Even so …’ Annie subsided, but under the surface she bubbled with anticipation, a mix of anxiety and excitement. There was no going back. It was time to let go of the sides. Of course she could do it. What did lack of experience matter? It was time to test the confidence she’d always claimed to have in herself. She waited as Pat slid a sheet of paper from the file.
‘It’s a Mr and Mrs Martin,’ said Pat, reading from the page in front of her. ‘Their son died in an accident on a building site. They want to know how it happened.’
‘Here in Hull?’
‘No, in Milesthorpe, one of the outlying villages. You can go out and see them this afternoon.’ Pat looked again at the paper. ‘Terry Martin. The son was called Terry Martin.’
CHAPTER 2
‘MILESTHORPE?’ ANNIE CLOSED her eyes to grab the memory. A headline … upside down text. The half-glimpsed newspaper in Vince Sleeman’s case.
The Martins’ file comprised a single sheet of paper; handwritten notes Pat had made when she took the call. Annie read it through. Terry Martin had been found dead in Milesthorpe the previous Tuesday evening and had last been seen at his parents’ home in Withernsea last Sunday.
‘Last seen by whom?’ she asked.
‘His mother, Martha Martin. He left after Sunday lunch. Didn’t come back. They didn’t hear a thing until they had a visit from the police Tuesday night.’
‘Was it a regular thing, Sunday lunch? Would they have expected to hear from him during the week?’
‘Oh yes; he lived there. As far as I could gather he’d never left home, not properly.’
‘So did they report him missing or anything?’
‘No, they didn’t. And that’s something to look at. I assume it wasn’t unusual for him to stay out – hell, he was thirty-seven years old – but she was a bit hazy about it when I asked.’
Annie scanned across the scribbled words. Scaffolding collapse … trespassing?
‘What sort of site is it? What are they building?’
‘She didn’t know. Or rather couldn’t remember. She wasn’t focusing on anything really except a sort of desperation not to face the fact he was dead. It won’t take much digging to find out.’
‘And was he trespassing?’
‘I a
ssume so. She said he wouldn’t have gone there without good reason. She said it before I’d had a chance to ask, and I don’t think she just meant Milesthorpe in general. It wasn’t a long call, she cut it short. Sad really. They’ve no other children. She wasn’t going to break down for me to hear, but she was right at the edge.’
Annie looked again at the notes.
Police … Health & Safety … work suspended … Surely everything that could be done was already in hand.
‘What exactly is it she wants from us?’
‘Like I said, it’s an odd one. Probably nothing to it. She’s lost her son and she’s grabbing at straws; kept telling me, everyone says it was an accident.’
‘And she thinks it wasn’t?’ Annie felt a frisson of something close to excitement run through her, but Pat’s next words damped it down.
‘Yes, she accepts it was an accident, but what was he doing there, that’s what she wants to know.’
‘Won’t the police investigation find that out?’
Pat threw her a raised-eyebrows glance. ‘What investigation would that be? If it was clearly an accident they’ll leave it to Health and Safety who’ll be all over the site. If they find anything that warrants criminal charges, it might go further. They might investigate the builder, but no one’s going to put resources into finding out what Terry Martin was doing there. No one except his parents, that is, and they’ve come to us.’
Annie’s mind raced through the angles looking for ways in. ‘Can we get at any of the official reports? Witness statements, that sort of thing.’
Pat nodded. ‘I’ll get hold of the post-mortem report. You’d be better talking to whoever found the body than reading their statement. And the Martins’ll know who that is. They know far more than I got out of the mother. Like I say, she was on the edge, cut things very short. They’re your starting point. Get the name of the coppers who dealt with them as well. It might be useful to talk to whoever went out to Milesthorpe that night. They could well have picked up gossip about what Terry Martin was up to.’
