Like False Money

by Penny Grubb

  ‘What? Chance of what?’

  ‘Look, I don’t want to get your hopes up. Vince dropped in last night after you’d gone to bed. He half hinted he might find you something. But I probably shouldn’t even mention it. He won’t do anything about it, but he wouldn’t have said it if you hadn’t impressed him. I assumed he thought you were sitting round here playing general factotum, but he must have been keeping a closer eye on you than I realized.’

  This must have sprung from their friction-laden conversation in the car on Orchard Park. Vince had told Pat he was impressed with her? It was the last thing she expected. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said he’d like to have seen you in action a bit more. That if he’d seen you through three meaty cases with a good result on each, then he’d have offered you a job with the agency.’

  ‘Why three?’

  ‘Because he knows there’s no chance of you doing it, so he’ll never have to deliver.’

  ‘I suppose we could advertise again. See if we can bring anything in.’

  Pat laughed and Annie knew she hadn’t taken the suggestion seriously.

  ‘Before I go, I need to show you this key.’

  Annie told Pat how Maz had had the key made. ‘The Milesthorpe girls, thank heavens, got cold feet about taking it off him.’

  Pat took it from her and turned it in her hand letting the light glint from its different faces. ‘It’s a nice job,’ she said.

  ‘Should it go to the police?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so, but keep it with you for when you have a go at those kids. Spring that on them and they might blurt out all sorts. Ah, was that the door?’

  Annie turned to see the door open and Barbara’s bulk fill the gap. ‘Hi.’ She gave Barbara a smile and raised a hand in acknowledgement.

  In return, she received a glare and a grunt.

  ‘You’re early,’ was Pat’s greeting.

  ‘I have to be early to get you out of your pit, or we’d never get anywhere. We’ve things to talk about.’

  ‘I’m ready. I’ve been waiting for you.’

  ‘You were complaining I was early a minute ago.’

  ‘Well, that’s no …’

  Annie eased herself out of the room and slipped into her bedroom to get Mrs Earle’s keys. She had no illusions that she’d get anything approaching gratitude for her efforts, but handing over the keys would be a kind of closure to what had, after all, been her first proper case.

  She tossed Maz’s key in her hand. There would be a betrayal of trust in giving it to the police, but what other option was open? She’d have liked to hand it to someone she could talk to informally. Twenty-four hours ago that would have been Scott. Now, she didn’t even know if Jennifer trusted her.

  While she waited in her room, half aware of the sisters arguing their way out of the flat, Annie pulled together the clothes she’d ruined in her foray on to the roof. She wondered if the tarry substance would come out. She pulled off the loose bits and checked through the pockets. Screwed-up paper tissues and an envelope.

  An envelope? Of course, Maz had handed it over just before they’d talked about the key. Then Vince arrived and events snowballed on under their own momentum. What had Maz said? Some crap letter she wrote you. One of the girls, obviously, but which one?

  She slit it open and stared at it, puzzled. A torn page … except it was whole. The paper was flimsy. It was old-fashioned fax paper. One of them had fed a torn and partly scorched page through an old fax machine and sent her the result. The only non-fax-copy elements were the words ‘see e-mail’ written in a round childish hand in the top corner.

  A few part-words remained undamaged either by fire or the rip in the copied sheet. They were hard to decipher. Annie squinted at them as she walked through to Pat’s room where she switched on the PC.

  Mally. She would put her money on the letter being from Mally. But there was no e-mail from Mally, or from any of them.

  She turned the machine off and looked again at the murky fax. Pat’s reading glasses lay on the desk. Annie used them as a magnifying glass. The page had been torn through the middle of a line but some of the half-letters became decipherable as the lens enlarged them. She made out z-a-b. Then a smudge and t-h. Then the word ‘at’.

  Zabath at? Zabeth at? At where? There was something earlier that might be an E.

  A shiver ran across her skin as she realized what she was looking at.

  E—zabeth At. Before the page had been torn and then burnt, it had said Elizabeth Atkins. The woman Doris Kitson told her about; the woman Terry Martin had asked about although he hadn’t known her.

  What one of the girls had fed through the fax machine was the missing half page from Terry Martin’s last notebook.

  CHAPTER 23

  ANNIE STARED AT the page. Here was her handle on Terry’s missing days. Elizabeth Atkins. Who had ripped the page out and tried to burn it? When? How and where had the girls found it?

  She itched to get on the road at once, but knew her meeting with Mally, Laura and Kay must seem accidental. This afternoon at the stables she’d have a captive audience. It was all tied in with the church connection she kept hearing about. Doris had mentioned it. Maz, too.

  If she had to spend all night at those stables interrogating the three girls, she’d do it. She wouldn’t end the day without answers.

  As she drove to Orchard Park, theories spun in her head, but nothing added up. It wasn’t until she stepped out of the car and saw the bulk of the tower in front of her that she was caught by a sudden constriction in her throat as though the structure itself watched her, ready to draw her in and force her back up to its highest point. She looked up and up until she faced out the height of the building … waited for the flashback of panic, but the memory was a panoramic view out over a city that couldn’t see her. Unexpectedly, the feeling inside was power, not fear.

  She walked into the lobby and jabbed the lift call button. It was automatic to pull in a breath as the lift jolted to a halt on the sixth floor, to give herself a lungful of air to avoid breathing in the stench of the landing.

  Noise banged into her as she stepped out, expelling the held breath as she skipped to avoid an open paint pot. Instinctively her hands rose to meet a threat, then she realized there was no menace here just the overpowering thump of music and nostril-stinging tang of fresh paint. People everywhere. A thin youth in baggy overalls swung a wide paintbrush at the wall from the top of a stepladder; another balanced on a contraption that gave him access to the patchwork of glass and hardboard that separated the landing from the stairwell. Repairs and refurbishment. Was this a special refit for the sixth floor, or part of some maintenance juggernaut that rolled up and down the building across the seasons?

  None of the half-dozen gangly figures in overalls took any notice so she picked her way round their ladders and knocked at the door of Mrs Earle’s flat. The key was in her hand but she was reluctant to use it knowing Mrs Earle would be comatose on a bed inside. Letting herself in to spy on the men in the van was different. She knocked again louder.

  The door opened a crack. It wasn’t Mrs Earle who peered out, but her brother. His expression was surly, his face unshaven. He looked her up and down and said, ‘She ain’t here,’ just the way he’d greeted her the first time she’d called.

  She made her decision on the spot. She’d come to see the woman, to try to explain things face to face. She’d tried. That was enough.

  ‘I’ve come to return her keys,’ she told the man, thrusting them at him.

  He took them from her with a grunt and shut the door. She stood there for a moment. It was a disappointing way to end the case, but she shrugged and turned away.

  Mrs Earle had gone from her thoughts before she was back in the car. Her mind teemed with the implications of the page one of the girls had sent her via Maz. She was early for her appointment with Tina, but no one would notice in the busy stable yard. She pulled the car in between a gleaming Shogun and a battered T
rooper and stepped out into a patch of mud. The storm that had threatened since yesterday evening, hadn’t broken yet. Someone had been busy with a hosepipe. The ground at her feet sparkled with scraps of tinsel. The air was heavy with the smell of horses and cut grass.

  A fat pony plodded its way towards her the other side of the fence, but as she watched, its head shot up, its eyes opened wide and it bounded away. Annie felt a jolt of alarm. What had panicked it? A woman marched past with a bundle of heavy-duty tinsel glittering in her arms, Tina’s eccentric method for subduing her charges with festive spirit.

  She walked down the track towards the stable blocks, her gaze raking every corner, looking for the girls. Tina emerged from a door in a wall and raised a hand in greeting.

  ‘My last appointment didn’t turn up,’ said Annie, ‘so I’m a bit early.’ She spoke the lie to Tina’s back and saw the woman was too busy shouting orders across the yard to take in what she said. Early had no meaning round here, but Annie guessed that late was a cardinal crime.

  ‘Come and talk while I plait up, if you like,’ Tina threw over her shoulder.

  Annie followed to one of the big stables and watched as an enormous beast, four times Boxer’s size submitted to some complicated work on its mane.

  ‘What have you decided to do about the three girls?’ she asked. ‘I was talking to Colonel Ludgrove and it was clear he knew nothing about the cheating. I don’t want to put my foot in it.’

  ‘Officially I’m doing nothing. I don’t want any talk outside the stables.’ Tina gave a vicious tug at the horse’s mane. Annie watched the animal brace its neck. ‘The Tunbridge brat is trying to pull a fast one, but she’ll get a rude awakening when I get my hands on her this afternoon. I’ve the reputation of the stables to keep up. It’s a knife-edge business these days, running a place like this. There are people who’d take advantage.’

  ‘So they get away with it?’ Not that Annie cared, she just wanted Tina to keep talking.

  ‘No way. I’ve threatened all three of them to within an inch of their lives. I suppose Laura’ll spill the beans to Ma and Pa at some stage, but they won’t want it broadcast. And I’ve barred them all from riding out for a fortnight. They’re to have a lesson with me in the school once a week. First one today. That’ll quieten them down. They’ll have to shell out extra, too.’

  ‘But Laura and Kay were out on their ponies on Saturday. We saw them.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Tina spoke with barely suppressed anger and another tug at a handful of coarse hair. The horse gave Annie a reproachful look. ‘I hadn’t had the chance to speak to them and they slipped out. Laura didn’t bring Boxer back, the little minx. She had it figured I’d ground her.’

  Annie felt frustrated disappointment at Tina’s words. ‘She’ll not turn up this afternoon then, will she? None of them will.’

  ‘Oh, they will. She acts without thinking, that child. If she wants to keep her footing in the area, she’ll not cross me. I could have her out of the Pony Club. I haven’t gone running after her. She’ll have to come down this afternoon and eat humble pie.’

  ‘What will she have done with Boxer?’

  ‘They all have stables at home. She probably took him to Colonel Ludgrove’s to start with, but she might have taken him to her place. Her parents are away. I’d put money on Mally being in on it. Mally can get away with murder while she’s with her grandfather.’

  ‘Won’t Kay be in on it, too?’

  ‘She wasn’t at the time, no. Kay came back. She told me Laura had nipped round to Mally’s and she’d be back later. Kay’s no actress. I’d have seen it if she’d been trying to pull the wool.’ She glanced at her watch and then out over Annie’s shoulder to the yard beyond. ‘They’re late. Probably huddled round the corner talking tactics.’

  By the time Tina had finished with the big horse and come back out of the stable, her expression was hard. ‘I don’t know what they think they’re playing at, but they’re not getting away with it. D’you have a phone on you? I’ll get on to the Dearloves, Kay’s people.’

  Annie handed her phone across and followed Tina as she raced across to shout more orders at more people and horses, whilst speaking into Annie’s phone.

  ‘Yes … yes. OK, thanks.’

  She clicked it off and handed it back. ‘Kay’s in bed ill. That explains why she isn’t here.’

  ‘Isn’t Laura staying with her?’

  ‘No, she’s gone to Mally’s while her parents are away.’

  ‘I thought her parents disapproved of Mally?’

  ‘Yes, especially with her mother away. They know Colonel Ludgrove’s too old to cope. But the girls will have done as they pleased once Laura’s parents had gone.’

  ‘I had the impression Laura was better friends with Kay than Mally.’

  ‘You never know who’s best friends in that trio. Mally can be a bit wild, but she’s not bad for Laura. Laura gets wrapped in cotton wool. If she were a bit bolder they might not have needed to cheat. I blame Mally’s father. He promised to take her part of the time, but then gave her some cock and bull story about a business trip. Then again, Ludgrove can’t abide him so he’d keep hold of Mally just to prove a point.’

  A point that might be the death of him in the end, thought Annie, remembering the drawn features.

  Tina led Annie to the house and picked up her own phone. ‘I’ll try Ludgrove, but it looks as though they aren’t going to show.’

  Annie struggled to hide her frustration. She had to find a way to talk to those girls.

  ‘No reply.’ Tina put the phone down. ‘But still, it’ll mean you haven’t had a wasted journey. I’ve time to tell you whatever it is you want to know.’

  Annie smiled and cast about for a question with a credible link to Terry Martin that would get Tina on to the technicalities of her horses. Then she could let Tina rabbit on for long enough to make her visit seem legit.

  ‘I don’t understand why they cheated or how it worked,’ she lied, knowing that Tina’s anger had burnt so bright when she’d discovered it, she wouldn’t remember what she had and hadn’t already told Annie.

  Tina explained again that Boxer was near-phobic about the concrete blocks that made up that particular obstacle. ‘Mally tried to coach Laura to get him to jump them in line with Kay. I think they got him going in the colonel’s garden, but he wasn’t going to touch them in the dip in the field. That’s why she had her little insurance policy of stewarding that fence so she could mark them clear and trust to luck no one noticed.’

  ‘Why didn’t it work in the field if it worked at Colonel Ludgrove’s?’

  ‘It looks different, smells different. He’s an odd little tyke. He’ll trust a rider with most things, but not those blocks. He jumps blind with Laura, no problem.’

  ‘Blind?’ Annie imagined the small pony with a flapping cloth blindfold.

  ‘When they can’t see what’s at the other side, where the land falls away, or it’s just too big to see over. A pony that trusts its rider’ll jump anyway.’

  ‘Why in that bit of the garden? Why couldn’t they have used the proper paddock round the back?’ Annie, who just wanted Tina to keep talking and who’d never had a garden in her life, felt a measure of indignation on the colonel’s behalf at the wreckage they’d left of his lawn.

  Tina laughed. ‘Have you tried shifting one of those blocks? That’s why we always have that jump down in the dip.’

  ‘Where do they come from?’ Annie asked, suddenly curious. Now she thought about it, memories popped up everywhere. Those elaborate painted structures in Doris Kitson’s garden were based on the same shape. ‘They’re all over Milesthorpe.’

  ‘There are loads of them up on the cliff where the camp was. Military thing. It was abandoned some years ago. Most of it’s fallen over now. Heaven knows what they used them for but once Milesthorpe cottoned on, there were car suspensions groaning with the things. I don’t know how many people put their backs out. You can still see them al
l along the cliffs, right up to where poor old Charles Tremlow popped his clogs.’

  It jarred to hear Tina speak about him so casually. ‘That’ll be a blow to Mally’s grandad, won’t it?’

  ‘Oh yes. It’s like the end of an era to see that trio gone. We called them Last of the Summer Wine. Charles Tremlow was the timid one. And Balham was the scruff. I don’t know what the colonel’ll do for company. He won’t even have the church to fall back on now Tremlow’s gone. Doris’ll grab his place as church warden. She’s been after it for years.’

  That church connection again. Annie took a surreptitious look at her watch. She’d done enough now for the visit to appear genuine.

  From Tina’s, she headed to Colonel Ludgrove’s. She couldn’t target Kay, who was ill, and didn’t know what she’d say to the colonel, but she had to try and find at least one of the girls.

  Annie knocked at the colonel’s door and listened to the sound echo through the house. After a moment, she heard Mally’s voice, ‘It’s all right, it isn’t Tina. It’s Annie,’ and understood why Tina’s call hadn’t been answered.

  The door opened and Annie followed Mally through to the living room.

  ‘No, no. Don’t get up,’ she said to Colonel Ludgrove, who huddled in a chair by the unlit fire. ‘I heard you weren’t well. Are you feeling better now?’

  ‘Oh, not so bad. Old bones, you know. Not as young as I was. Just got up as a matter of fact.’

  Mally slumped ostentatiously into a chair, lower lip protruding.

  ‘I’ve just been down to the stables,’ Annie said. She ignored the poisonous glance Mally shot her and smiled at the girl. ‘Tina expected you this afternoon.’

  ‘Huh! Go on my own and have old Hain in my face? No thank you. I’ll wait till Kay and Laura can go, too.’

  ‘Isn’t Laura here?’

  ‘Nah, she was going to stay, but that old fart Tunbridge got all sniffy just ’cos we’re poor now and made her stay with Kay.’