by Penny Grubb
‘You don’t remember it, surely?’
He didn’t, but his grandmother had told him all about Hull in the early years of the last century. Queen’s Gardens, now in the heart of the city, had once been a natural harbour. ‘People were very iffy about the idea of filling it in and building on it. Even now they have a terrible time building into the clay. There’s nothing underneath, nothing to pin anything to. Most of the buildings are on huge concrete rafts.’
She smiled because the city’s past seemed to mean a lot to him, but his words resonated with more recent events. Nothing underneath, nothing to pin anything to. She’d grasped for substance in the Terry Martin case and found only a false foundation. Would Orchard Park, so close to resolution, crumble in the same way? The cityscape had talked to her from the start. She’d woken on her first morning to the view across a calm surface on a treacherous shipping lane. Her journeys out of Hull took her past security gates at an ordinary roundabout and led to villages where houses stood with their backs to the road as though holding on to secrets that casual observers mustn’t share. Nothing much to see, but so much hidden.
‘What’s that?’ She pointed to the giant sculpture of a ship slipping beneath the waves that she’d spotted on her first evening in the city.
‘The Deep. It’s an aquarium thing. Sharks and all that.’
The drive through areas of the town she hadn’t seen or suspected caught her interest. Sweeping tree-lined roads gave glimpses of imposing dwellings behind high walls and mature densely planted gardens. She felt the contrast with the areas she’d come to know. Orchard Park with its cracked jigsaw of concrete streets simmered against the shaded velvety tarmac of these more prosperous areas. She saw patterns she recognized from the hopscotch of moves she’d made when a student. Familiar areas in a city she’d never explored. Like the men on Orchard Park. Familiar faces on people she’d never met.
‘What’s up?’
‘I was just thinking; it’s like London really. In miniature.’
And just imagine if she’d rushed to him with her theory about the mystery man on the scaffolding. Drama queen! She’d been as bad as Terry Martin chasing his big stories.
‘Do you miss London?’
‘No, not at all.’ The readiness of her answer surprised her. It was true. London seemed an age away.
‘So, will you stay when the six weeks is up?’
‘It’s not that simple. I can’t stay without a job.’
‘You don’t have to work for Sleeman. There are other firms … other jobs. How come you know him anyway?’
Something in his tone alerted her to history between him and Vince. It startled her. Something else she hadn’t suspected. She stole a sideways glance. He stared ahead, eyes narrowed.
‘I answered a job advert. Why?’
‘Just wondered. You don’t know him well?’
She blew out a sigh and thought of the wing and prayer that had carried her here. ‘Hardly at all. I’ve only met him a couple of times.’
‘But you work at the agency in town? While you’re not out and about, that is?’
This had morphed into an interrogation. Silently she closed down the shutters. In theory they trod the same professional line of the law, but she knew all about the suspicion between parallel professions. ‘Just routine stuff,’ she murmured, then continued on before he could speak again, ‘How about you? D’you think you’ll stay in the force? What made you join up? You never look enthusiastic when I see you in uniform.’
He shrugged and she waited for him to explain how he’d fallen into it for want of anything better to do, but he surprised her. ‘My grandmother bought me a policeman’s helmet when I was two. It’s my earliest memory. I’ve never seriously considered anything else.’
Annie turned to him with a spontaneous smile. It echoed her own aspirations so perfectly. Never seriously considered anything else. He’d had the courage of his certainty where she’d failed in hers. She’d kept her ambitions a secret because they were tied up in confused early memories and meant talking about her family. People invariably jumped to the wrong conclusions.
Her upbringing hadn’t been textbook, but whose was? She and her father had been strangers for years. He hadn’t been able to cope with her mother’s death, not that she’d known it at the time, being too young to understand adult despair. She felt no resentment that he’d palmed off his small daughter on to his sister-in-law, too old even then to raise a child. There were no psychoses or stress disorders battling within her, but people wouldn’t believe it.
‘We didn’t starve,’ she used to say in the days when she talked about it at all. ‘I wasn’t born into a famine-stricken war zone. I was looked after.’
So she’d nursed her passion for the world of private investigation like a shameful secret. She’d let her elders and supposedly betters discuss her future career. She’d even joined in. If she’d only been upfront in the days when there were people around able and willing to help, maybe she’d have all the right bits of paper now and be setting up her own business. She remembered the excitement of landing her first temporary post in a PI’s office. It was a big city firm; she no more than coffee-maker and gopher, but the excitement still glowed as a physical memory though the job had been gone in a fortnight. It remained as a line on her CV, a talisman more than a position of substance. Two weeks in a real job at last.
She’d told her aunt; remembered the buzz, the elation. ‘It’s a big firm.’ The exhilaration shone out of the simple statement.
‘Never mind, dear. It’s all experience. You’ll soon get a proper job.’
Crushed.
‘What are you thinking about?’ Scott’s words cut into her musing.
‘Nothing.’
‘Come on. You were laughing at me when I told you about the helmet my grandmother bought me. Then you looked really down. It was like a cloud going over the sun.’
She had to explain because she couldn’t leave him thinking she’d laughed at his memories. ‘It made me smile because it sounded so much like it was for me. I don’t remember a time I didn’t want to be a private investigator.’
‘What was it for you, a toy spy-glass and funny hat?’
She laughed and murmured, ‘Don’t be daft.’
‘There must have been something. PIs don’t usually hit the radar till you get older.’
He didn’t sound as though he was about to analyse her, or to mock. He just sounded interested. In a move that felt like unclipping a safety rope, she told him that her mother had died and she’d been sent to live with her aunt. ‘When I look back on it, my need to be an investigator feels like the only thing I took with me to my aunt’s house.’
‘Did your father hire a PI to look into your mother’s death?’
He said it so simply, as though it were the easiest thing in the world to talk about.
‘I’ve always assumed so.’
‘And how … uh … how did your mother die?’ She sensed his sideways glance.
‘I don’t know. No one talked about it. I’ve never tried to find out.’
She tensed ready to field the usual outburst, that people must have talked to her about it, why hadn’t she asked questions … but he just nodded as though he understood.
‘Were you living with your aunt before you came to Hull?’
‘Christ, no. I got out years ago.’ She laughed at her own words. ‘That makes it sound awful. It wasn’t. She was fine. I was happy there.’
It was true, she had been as happy as any of her peers when just a child, but despite material comfort, the sedate atmosphere of her elderly aunt’s world stultified the teenager in her. She’d scrabbled through college prospectuses looking not to kick-start her career but for any course that would take her far away and into a bustling metropolis.
‘Do you see much of her nowadays?’ Scott asked.
‘No, not really. I was on a tight budget when I left to go to college so I knew I wouldn’t be able to visit regularly.’ S
he remembered the buzz of standing alone on a station platform in London, aged seventeen, her case at her feet. ‘And now it’s even harder. Soon after I left, she moved to a residential home so there isn’t really anywhere for me to stay.’
She thought back to the shock that had coursed through her when her aunt told her the news. It’s time I had a real retirement, dear. Someone to look after me for a change. But I wanted to see you safely off my hands first. Shock had turned into the realization that she’d valued a place to call home, even if she hadn’t wanted to be there much.
‘It must have come as a bit of a shock,’ Scott said, his tone matter-of-fact.
‘It was a bit. She was at sea with all the technicalities of college and me going away. She knew I’d taken a room in hall, but she didn’t realize that meant I’d counted on the option of going home in the long holiday if I couldn’t afford to stay. But it was OK. I’d got my own life and I soon found myself a place.’
She remembered the awful spell of sordid bedsits, of feeling rootless and cut adrift, but she’d picked herself up, found better places to stay.
‘So what did you do at college?’
Wasted my time, Annie thought, whilst silently thanking Scott for his change of topic. ‘Computing. It was supposed to make me marketable.’
‘Did it?’
‘It helped get me temporary posts, but it meant they shoved me into IT, so I stopped mentioning it on my CV, which didn’t help at all because it made it look as though I hadn’t any qualifications to speak of.’ She laughed, thinking back to the frustration of first realizing this. ‘Hey, maybe I should sign up with your lot if I can’t get fixed up with anything else.’
‘Not round here you won’t.’
‘Why not? It could be fun trying out the other side of the coin. Being a PI should be a good grounding for a police officer.’
‘People usually do the reverse career move. Just don’t join up round here. Go back to London.’
‘Why? Do you find it that bad?’
‘It’s all right for me, I’m a man.’
She felt her jaw drop as she stared across at him. Had she moved 200 miles north or 200 years back in time? The conversation skirted a side of Scott she might not want to see. She’d accepted his invitation mainly because she thought she liked him, but also because she wanted his take on Terry Martin. If he turned into someone she didn’t like after all, questioning him would become deceitful.
The car climbed a hill past a barrack-like hospital. Annie glanced at the Portakabins scattered in the grounds of imposing old buildings. Functional side by side with imposing … tattered hardboard … polished stone. Was it the converted remains of a stately home, or had it once been an asylum, and did tortured ghosts shriek in the fabric of the carved stonework? So much hidden …
Scott said nothing as he slowed at the top of the hill to manoeuvre the car out on to a roundabout that took them to a wide river of tarmac sweeping its way up between fields and trees. Abruptly, they’d left the city behind.
‘It was my dream,’ he said. ‘Always. I can’t remember not wanting to wear the uniform. I thought about it all the time, but in some ways I never thought about it at all. I mean that it wasn’t until the reality hit me that I knew what the dream was all about. Like my whole life hung on making it in, then I had to face the truth of it. Like going hell for leather down a wide road and suddenly you can’t see what’s ahead. It all looked like plain sailing and then you don’t know where the hell you are. Courtland Road was where reality hit for me.’
‘Courtland Road?’
‘It’s where you go for local training.’ A thought cut into sombre reflections and he flashed her a smile. ‘It’s on Orchard Park.’
She smiled back recognition of a shared experience.
‘You do two-week stints in between all the other stuff. Physicals, law study, out on the beat, all that.’ He paused as the traffic congealed round a tractor and trailer. ‘There was only one woman in the group I was with out of a couple of dozen. We were a good way into it. Six months at least.’ The tractor pulled over and they streamed past with the rest of the cars. ‘One of the cases she’d been on had blown up and she was called out.’
‘Called out?’
‘Called out of the room. You all sit round in this big room. A couple of the guys made some stupid comments. 1970s stuff about the way she looked. All she was doing was walking out of the room, for God’s sake, but they made it into a big deal. You could see it got to her. I thought they’d get a real slap down from the guy in charge, but he joined in. It kind of hit me in a way … I don’t know, hard to describe. Almost like they’d punched the guts out of my childhood dream. I know it was silly, but it was the first time I’d really stood back and thought, hang about, is this really what I want to do? What if I’ve spent my whole life blinkered on this one thing and it isn’t what I wanted it to be.’ He gave a hollow laugh. ‘I got over it, but it bugged me. It still bugs me.’
‘And it’s worse here than other places?’
He shrugged. ‘I’m pretty sure there’s better forces. We had to liaise with West Mids not so long ago. They were a joke at one time, but they’ve cleaned up their act. At least that’s how it seemed. She left, the woman who was at Courtland Road with me.’
‘Jennifer Flanagan seems fine with it all.’
‘Yeah, if you’re a woman like Jen you can hack it. She doesn’t let anyone get to her.’
This conversational detour had run its course, Annie decided, as a chalkboard sign outside a pub – Happy Hour – focused her thoughts. ‘Scott, you know the guy who fell off the house, Terry Martin? How did he climb up there? His blood alcohol was through the roof.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Why shouldn’t I know it? Is it classified?’
A look of annoyance briefly clouded his features and he shrugged. ‘If you’d seen the drink-drive cases I’ve seen, you wouldn’t bother to ask. People do incredible things, then they just flop down unconscious. Or dead in his case.’
‘But as drunk as that? Didn’t anyone think it was odd?’
‘It explained why he was clumsy enough to fall.’
Annie opened her mouth to respond, but was cut short by a muffled ring from her bag.
‘Sorry,’ she murmured, pulling out the phone and glancing at a number she didn’t recognize. ‘Annie Raymond.’
A gruff voice spoke from the phone. ‘You’re supposed to call me.’
The boy. She felt irritation tense her lips. ‘Yeah and I might when I’m ready.’
‘Yeah, but I need you to do something.’
‘You don’t lack nerve, I’ll give you that. What is it?’
‘You’ve gotta meet me. An’ I’ll show you.’
Annie toyed with calling him Maz. That would shock him. ‘Actually, I haven’t got to do anything. Tell me what you want and I’ll decide.’
‘Nah, listen. You gotta come and meet me.’
Annie glanced at Scott. ‘I might call you back, but I’m not talking to you now. I’m with someone.’
‘Who?’ Wary now.
‘The police.’
‘Uh … See you then.’ Annie laughed at the alacrity with which he ended the call.
By reminding her of Orchard Park, she found the boy had crystallized something in her mind. Pat had said, you’re allowed weekends, but she would go back to Orchard Park tonight. Not by taxi. Just quietly in Pat’s car and wait to see who turned up on Saturday nights. The alternative of a few extra hours’ sleep was attractive, but she wanted the full picture. Details mattered.
Scott pulled off the road and into the car-park of a small pub. ‘We can get something to eat here. I wanted to take you further out really but …’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I can’t be late back tonight. This bloody job. It is what I want to do but it plays havoc with any sort of social life.’
Annie smiled and put her hand on his arm. ‘That’s fine, don’t worry. I have to go out on a case later, too.’
She was glad he wasn’t too pushy. She didn’t want to be rushed. There was a frisson to being in his presence and she found herself looking forward to seeing him, but underneath that there was unease because she still wasn’t sure whether she liked him.
Annie woke the next morning far too early. It had been late when she came in after sitting yawning outside Mrs Earle’s block until the white van appeared, a minute or two late, and disgorged three men. Her theory strengthened with every visit. Two men on dealing nights, three every other. But not the same third man. Who were they? Why did she think she’d seen them before? The man last night had been in shadow from van to entranceway. She hadn’t had a good look. If she had, maybe she’d have found him a complete stranger.
She’d planned a lie-in but once she’d woken, she knew sleep wouldn’t return. The boy had demanded a call. Odds on, he’d be dead to the world somewhere, but she said she’d call him and it would serve him right to be roused at this hour.
The phone rang for a long time before a croaky and befuddled voice said, ‘Yeah?’
Annie smiled. ‘Hi,’ she said brightly. ‘I said I’d ring back. So what’s it all about?’
She expected curses, but after a moment’s mumbling, he got his act together. ‘You’re that Annie from the investigation place, right?’
‘Yes, and you’re Maz, aren’t you? What do you want?’
A small gasp of surprise confirmed her guess. Then his words came quickly, his tone anxious. ‘It’s about that guy, Terry. That Terry Martin. You’ll meet me, won’t you? Look, they can’t stick him for it now, can they?’
‘Can’t stick him for what?’
‘They can’t stick him for doing in that Balham guy.’
It interested her that rumour stayed with the original theory that Terry Martin had murdered Edward Balham despite lack of official word about the body. She’d thought the silence might have got the grapevine working overtime with new theories. It hadn’t even leaked that it had been a woman’s body.
