Like False Money

by Penny Grubb

  Now she’d got over the need to crouch down into the tarry surface, she stood up straight, let the wind try to drag the hair from her head as it lashed round the strange world up here. The city lay spread out below her. It couldn’t see her but she could see it.

  Tell me your secrets, she urged.

  She laughed. As the gusts grabbed the laughter from her throat and whipped it away, she laughed louder, shouted out to the world that she was alive.

  The need to be practical pulled her up and she reached into her inside pocket for her phone.

  ‘Pat, it’s Annie.’ The strange high from where she’d shouted out over the city dropped her without warning. Her voice wobbled.

  ‘Annie? What’s up? What’s happened? Where are you?’

  Facts. Stick to the facts. ‘I’m on the roof of Mrs Earle’s tower block.’ Why didn’t the howling of the wind grab the catch in her voice and dissolve it into the sky before it reached across the airwaves to Pat?

  ‘On the…? Sounds like you’re in a railway tunnel. What the fuck are you doing up there!’

  How could she begin to answer that? ‘Look, can I tell you later? The thing is … can you get me down?’

  ‘What d’you want me to do? Come round with a rope and crampons? How did you get up there? Can’t you go back the same way?’

  Flashback to a spinning landscape. Sharp intake of breath. ‘No. I need someone to bring the lift. Someone with an access key.’

  ‘Does it need a key from the top?’

  Brilliant! Whoosh! Right back on that high. Was it the bullying air currents that affected her mood so unpredictably? And why hadn’t she thought of checking the lift first? She spun round, gaze speeding over the roofscape as she spoke. ‘I don’t know. I’ll check.’ She ran towards the nearest of the two structures.

  As she approached, the door in the side wall swung inwards. Annie skidded to a halt and flattened herself round the back of it. The high still held her. No fear, just grim satisfaction that if it were Vince, she’d outflank him before he’d taken in a breath. Despite almost wishing to see the man who – if her earlier fears were founded – could only have come up here to finish the job, she let out a sigh when the slight figure emerged. It was Maz. Vince must have gone and he’d come to look for her. She stepped into view and saw relief spread across his face as he beckoned.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she told Pat. ‘I can get at the lift. I’m on my way. We’ll talk when I get back.’

  As she clicked the phone off, she caught the words, ‘Count on it.’

  ‘Quick, quick,’ Maz hissed at her with frantic hand signals. ‘You’ve gotta get out before he knows.’

  He dashed across the roof surface towards the ladder. So that’s what had brought him up here; he wasn’t on a rescue mission. Vince was still around but diverted for long enough for Maz to retrieve the ladder.

  As the lift door opened on the top floor, he jabbed at the ground floor button in a show of gallantry and told her to, ‘Gerrout quick. He don’t know you been here. Watch out in the car-park. He’s gone to get summat.’

  Annie smiled and let him dash off, but as the doors began to slide shut, she stepped out between them and stood once again on the top landing. She moved back from the lift, away from the entrance to the flat. She waited.

  It was a while before the lift returned. She was ready for it, calm now. She watched Vince step out, heard angry mutterings below his breath, saw him march towards the flat.

  She let him disappear inside, then walked towards the reinforced door confident that he wouldn’t invite her in. The spy hole faced her as she knocked. She made sure she was visible to anyone looking through it.

  Bolts slid back, locks clinked. The reinforced panel opened a crack and Vince’s face appeared, glaring into hers.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ His gaze raked her up and down and she realized that she’d brought a lot of the roof with her. She’d just have to hope the garbage she wore wasn’t identifiable as roof debris.

  ‘I followed you.’

  He looked shocked and then amazed. Before he could speak, she went on, ‘I want to talk. Shall I come in, or shall we go back down?’

  Breath held now because there was no way she’d cross the threshold of this flat ever again. But he must believe she didn’t know what was in there. And this time it wasn’t him catching her out, she’d caught him. For all he knew, she had backup. Surely, he wouldn’t risk anything silly.

  ‘I’ll come down,’ he snarled.

  At once, Annie said, ‘I’ll see you in the car-park,’ and rushed off so as to get the lift before he’d got his act together. She didn’t want to have to stand in that small box with him on the journey down the building.

  Less than five minutes after she’d made her way back to Pat’s car, Vince appeared in the entranceway. His tall, solid form sauntered across the concrete expanse. In front of the car he paused to give her a hard stare then he walked round to the passenger side and climbed in.

  ‘Well?’

  She told him about the drug dealing, about Tuesday and Friday nights.

  He didn’t try to contradict her and only interrupted to ask questions about the timing, the amounts, who bought the stuff. She didn’t have answers to most of it. He sat looking out through the windscreen. It was impossible from his face to get any sense of how he felt, how much was news, how much he already knew. Somewhere inside her Annie had the impression she’d shocked him.

  The seesaw of emotion held Annie in its grip as she drove back across the city. By the time she pulled up outside the apartment block, she felt nervy and on edge; wished she’d never made the call to Pat. She needed the security of the nearest place she had to home, but wanted to be alone, not to have to explain. Not yet.

  Half a hope that Pat would be engrossed in a film died as she clicked the door open. Pat’s greeting was bawled at full volume. ‘I told you to come straight back after you’d seen the Martins.’

  Annie thought about the excuse she’d rehearsed as she’d sat in the car in Withernsea. It no longer had any substance, but she used it anyway. ‘I thought you meant …’

  ‘No, you bloody well didn’t!’

  ‘How should I know what you mean?’ Annie yelled back. ‘You never tell me anything!’

  ‘You’re employed to do as you’re bloody well told!’

  The argument raged back and forth until Pat suddenly sat up and stared hard into her face. ‘Have you taken something? You’re all over the place.’

  ‘No, of course I haven’t. What do you take me for?’

  ‘Then what’s the matter with you?’

  ‘It’s being on that roof. Have you any idea how bloody high it is?’

  ‘Did you go and look over the edge? You did, didn’t you? Idiot. What did you do that for?’

  ‘No I didn’t. I mean not like that.’

  Flashback … the ladder … the awful stretch to reach it.

  ‘You’ve gone white as a sheet,’ Pat said. ‘You didn’t say how you got up there. I assumed the lift. Was it the lift?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Then how?’

  ‘Off the veranda of their flat.’

  ‘Jesus! You idiot! What the fuck possessed you? You could have been killed!’

  ‘You think I don’t know that?’ Annie screeched out the words and slammed out of the room. In the bedroom she paused. What was the matter with her? She looked down at her hands. They shook and felt cold as though she’d crawled through snow. She’d never felt like this before … never done anything like this before. A wonderful rush of triumph took the shivers right up through her body. She must get off this rollercoaster. She’d pushed beyond some sort of limit, shown just what she could do. But forget it … it would never happen again. Never. Where was the route to equilibrium? In normality. Getting out of these mucky clothes covered in streaks of oil and tar from the rooftop would be a good start.

  Ten minutes later she re-entered the living room. ‘Sorry abo
ut that. I …’

  ‘OK, no sweat. Tell me what you found. What is it they’ve got up there?’

  Annie breathed out a sigh. Somehow she and Pat were on the same wavelength when it came to what really mattered and what could just be left.

  She told Pat what she’d found, how she’d identified the familiarity of the faces she’d seen.

  ‘Pirate radio?’ Pat said. ‘I see.’

  Annie looked up sharply. Pat’s tone seemed to find logic in what she heard, but when she didn’t elaborate, Annie went on, ‘Then Vince turned up.’

  ‘Shit! Did he see you?’

  ‘See me!’ Annie felt the emotion rise once again. ‘Hell, he tried to push me off the roof.’

  ‘What! Vince tried to push you off the roof?’ Pat looked horror-struck.

  ‘Well no, but … but he would have if he’d found me. I’m certain he would.’

  ‘But he knows you were there?’

  ‘No, he didn’t see me in the flat. He doesn’t know I’ve been in there.’

  ‘Thank God for that. Vince might have been mad at you, Annie, but he isn’t an animal. He wouldn’t have pushed you off a roof. You leap to some dramatic conclusions.’

  ‘But where does Vince fit in?’

  It seemed a long time before Pat replied. ‘There was some paperwork Vince sent me a while ago. I don’t want to go into the detail. Suffice to say things had been a bit fraught between us all. It looks like the agency owns that flat. By the look of it, Vince has set up his nephew there.’

  Annie struggled to piece together what Pat was saying. Was this about misuse of company funds or something more? She tried to guess where it led. ‘You told me someone from the agency tipped off whoever ambushed you. Are you saying it was Vince?’

  ‘Oh no. That was just by the way. I doubt if Vince has a clue about the drug dealing.’

  Annie opened her mouth, then shut it again. Pat didn’t know she’d talked to Vince after her adventure on the roof. She hadn’t meant not to tell her, but with all the turmoil in her mind, it had happened that way.

  ‘One of the others is involved,’ Pat went on. ‘And probably knows about the dealing too. He’s likely the supplier. Vince’d kill him if he found out.’

  ‘So should we tell Vince?’ Annie eased the question in wanting to confess to the car-park discussion on the back of a ‘yes’ from Pat.

  ‘Hell, no. Let’s keep this under wraps. Pirate radio? I wonder.’

  So much for that. ‘What do you mean? It is a pirate radio. I saw the setup. And those guys they take up there, one of them’s been on the local TV, and I think I know the other from the music press. Whatever their sins, they’ve made a name for themselves. You don’t get names like that on air without a good audience.’

  Pat shrugged agreement as though Annie had missed the point. ‘I don’t want to go into it any further, Annie. Whatever Vince is up to I don’t want to know. I’d lay odds he doesn’t know that the little twats are dealing drugs though, putting his setup at risk.’

  ‘It is a pirate radio,’ Annie persisted. ‘Even if it’s something else too.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I’m not saying it isn’t. One of the guys you clocked, the ones doing the dealing, I can’t swear to it but I’m pretty sure it’s Vince’s nephew, favourite nephew, I should add. Vince took him under his wing when his brother died. It all adds up. The lad always had ambitions in the music business. It’s the sort of thing Vince would do for him, but there’ll be a payoff for Vince in it, and like I say, I don’t want to know what that is.’

  ‘But what if the agency’s involved?’

  A troubled look crossed Pat’s features. ‘Not your problem,’ she murmured.

  ‘I’ll help if I can.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Pat made an effort to shake off a cloud of gloom, and smiled across at Annie. ‘You’re a good kid. Vince hadn’t a clue what he’d got when he hired you.’

  Annie thought back to the way Vince had ordered Maz about in that flat, the way he’d waltzed in as though he owned the place, the way Maz had recognized him. A classy pirate radio setup for the son of his dead brother? It half added up and half didn’t. Vince’s cold eyes. All that equipment. Pat was right. At this early stage in her career, she didn’t want to tangle with a pro like Vince. This was a boundary she didn’t need to cross.

  ‘We need to back off the Earle case, don’t we?’

  ‘It’s a shame really given how far you got. We won’t be able to bill her now. She’ll be pleased about that at any rate.’

  ‘I’ll drop her keys back in sometime and let her know.’

  It was an unsatisfactory end to her very first case, but she’d try and see it as a useful lesson in how things panned out. Expect the unexpected, someone had told her, probably the guy in Birmingham. He was right.

  Late that night, she and Pat slumped in front of a film. Annie had no interest in the drama that unfolded on the screen, but was glad of the distraction that meant she could sit in silence with her own thoughts. She lay back in the chair, closing her eyes then opening them again, practising for sleep although it felt foolish and irrational. The dizzying swirl of a miniature landscape far below lay in wait for her at the edge of slumber. Conscious, she could push it away, but as she floated into sleep would she spin back into the nausea of hanging over that drop?

  Get up … walk across the room … get undressed … go to bed … sleep.

  The longer she sat, the more tiredness seeped into her and the more enticing the prospect of a night in the chair became.

  A click from somewhere behind jerked her to full awareness. A key turning in a lock. Footsteps in the lobby. A heavy tread she’d recognize anywhere. Vince!

  She shot to her feet, gabbled out to Pat, ‘I’m off to bed. Good night,’ and bolted for the sanctuary of her room.

  Once safe in the tiny room, she sat on the bed, door ajar so as to hear what went on. Muffled voices … the film playing out behind them. Vince’s growl … Pat’s snappish responses.

  The events of the day raced up from behind and swept over her. Leaden tiredness laid itself across every fibre of her being. But no, she couldn’t think about sleep. Any minute, one of them would shout her name, call her back through. When they did, she’d obey, because the alternative was having Vince come to get her. She lay back on the pillows. Not to sleep, just to rest her body. She was determined to stay alert for the summons.

  CHAPTER 22

  AS ANNIE WOKE, relief filled her. The bright morning sunlight streaming through her window had driven the demon of Vince away. There was relief too that she felt refreshed. After yesterday, she hadn’t expected to sleep at all.

  She thought about Orchard Park, about two young guys hiding behind the indulgent uncle of one of them; about a pirate radio hiding behind the façade of an ordinary flat; and about those huge aerials masquerading as necessary accoutrements to illegal music broadcasts. So much hidden …

  Case closed.

  This was the opportunity to put all her efforts into finding where Terry Martin had been. He had to have left his footprints somewhere in those two days. Tremlow, too. Where had he been since Friday?

  If she followed Tremlow’s footsteps, she felt she’d have a handle on Terry’s missing hours. Tremlow was surely a creature of habit and the person to know his habits was his old friend, Colonel Ludgrove. As soon as morning reached a reasonable hour, she picked up her phone to make the colonel a concerned call to express her condolences about his friend.

  The voice that said hello wasn’t the one she expected, or wanted.

  ‘Oh … Hi, Mally. It’s Annie. Can I speak to your grandad?’

  ‘Grandad isn’t well. I’m not to disturb him. Can you ring later?’

  No surprise there. The old man was worn out with caring for his granddaughter in amongst all the chaos of first Terry Martin and now Tremlow’s death.

  ‘That’s OK. It wasn’t important.’ It was on the tip of her tongue to quiz Mally on Terry Martin and the money that
had changed hands, but she held back. If she were to question them, it must be casually, informally and appear to be unplanned, because they were minors and could get her into real trouble.

  She knew just the place to find them. Not even the fallout from the cheating would keep them out of the saddle. She knew that because she and Pat had seen Laura and Kay out riding on Saturday. All she needed was a reason to talk to Tina Hain again. The stables were an ideal place to hang about unchallenged. She clicked out Tina’s number.

  ‘I wondered if I could pop out and run through things with you again. All that business at Milesthorpe Show.’

  ‘Those blasted girls. Yes, no problem. I’ve the three of them in for a lesson this afternoon, but I’m free afterwards.’

  ‘Laura, Kay and Mally?’ Annie felt her fist clench in triumph. She’d have some answers by this evening.

  When Pat clumped through from her bedroom later, Annie was ready with the coffee pot. She stood back and watched from a distance until she judged Pat’s caffeine level high enough, and then told her about her plan to go to Milesthorpe, to quiz the three girls.

  ‘Be very careful. Have you got a legitimate excuse to talk to the Hain woman?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll ask her about the cheating. Not that there’s anything more I need to know, but it’s part of what Terry Martin was doing.’

  ‘OK, but remember. Delicate handling. These things can backfire.’

  ‘I’ll call and give Mrs Earle her keys back on the way.’

  Pat sighed. ‘Vince had a point. There was never a cat in hell’s chance of getting anything out of her. Jobs like those should be invoiced up front.’

  Annie didn’t like the note of defeat in Pat’s voice. It was all tied up with Vince and family feuds.

  ‘So then I’ll just have the Martins’ case,’ she said eventually. ‘Unless anything else has come in?’

  ‘No, sorry. I’ve had enough of going out on a limb. No more adverts. I know what you’re thinking. This suicide thing: it wraps up the Martin case, too. But don’t worry. Vince said he wanted you for six weeks and I’ll hold him to it. There’s an outside chance—’