by Dane Cobain
Maile laughed and Leipfold gestured to the menu. “What are you having?” he asked.
“Depends who’s paying,” Maile replied.
* * *
It was later that day and Maile had a problem. She had a good lead on the Fisher case, and she thought she knew who was responsible, but she needed some muscle to go after her suspect. Unfortunately, her muscle came in the form of James Leipfold, a man who’d let himself go since his glory days in the army and who was barely five foot six to begin with. But she couldn’t think of anyone she’d rather have beside her.
Will Rickman had sent her an address in Putney. Maile couldn’t drive and Leipfold no longer had a motorbike and so, with no money in the kitty, they had to take the tube. Along the way, Leipfold busied himself with the papers while Maile pulled a Palahniuk novel from her handbag. She managed seventy pages before they alighted at Putney Bridge and walked past a couple of hooded youths in the underpass. One of them, Maile noticed, was taking a leak while the other one kept watch. Leipfold and Maile walked straight past them and found themselves on the high street.
Baxter’s address was on Disraeli Road, round the back of Nando’s and just down the road from the Putney School of Art and Design. With the daylight slowly fading and the streetlights flickering to life, it looked deserted and unwelcoming. Maile thought she saw a curtain twitch on the other side of the road as they walked up the path towards Baxter’s front door.
When Maile knocked at it, there was no reply. Leipfold checked his watch and chuckled softly. If Baxter had a job, which he doubted, then that might explain why he wasn’t in. On the other hand, Leipfold supposed it was possible that Baxter was hiding inside the building. But he didn’t think it was likely.
Maile knocked at the door again, but there was still no response. She sighed and flashed a glance at Leipfold, disappointed that her lead had amounted to nothing. But Leipfold’s eyes were bright and excited. He nodded at her and said, “Just give it some time. Get your book out if you want. We’ll wait an hour or so to see if Baxter shows up. If he doesn’t, you can set up a couple of cameras and we’ll head back to the office.”
But as it turned out, they didn’t have long to wait. On Leipfold’s instructions, Maile hid in the foliage while Leipfold himself leaned nonchalantly against a lamppost, thirty yards away from the door. Neither of them knew what the man looked like, but they both spotted their mark as he approached the door with a key in his hand. He was humming a Metallica tune and paying no attention to the world around him.
Maile stepped out from behind him, blocking off his only exit. He looked at her cautiously and then tried to make a break for it, pushing Maile out of the way and jogging straight towards Leipfold, who launched himself at the man in a flying tackle that sent them both crashing to the ground.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Leipfold groaned, feeling the weight of the years express itself through his aching limbs and angry ligaments. He pulled himself on top of the man and used his weight to pin him down. The man shouted again, this time in an unintelligible mixture of fear and pain.
“Mark Baxter, I presume,” Leipfold said.
“What’s it to you?” he replied, twisting painfully to try to free himself.
“I think you’d better let us in,” Leipfold said. “I’d like a word with you.”
Baxter wasn’t too happy about it, but Leipfold and Maile gave him little choice. He opened the door of the house with the two of them at his back and glanced longingly over their shoulders at the freedom that he’d just walked away from.
Maile, meanwhile, was talking to Leipfold in a quiet undertone. “How did you know it was him?” she asked.
“I didn’t,” Leipfold admitted. “But he fit the profile, the address was right, and as soon as he tried to run, I had to stop him. It’s an old habit. If someone tries to run, they’ve done something. If you’re innocent, you don’t run. You have no reason to.”
“Perhaps,” Maile murmured.
Baxter, meanwhile, had finally admitted who he was. “Better make this quick,” he said. “Mum’s working a day shift. She’ll be back soon.”
“You live with your mum?” Leipfold asked.
“Yeah,” Baxter replied. “Don’t get me wrong, I hate it here. But I’m skint, so I have no choice. What do you want?”
Leipfold drew himself up to his full height, which still left him three inches shorter than Baxter, who looked at him, confused.
“Information,” Leipfold said. “Ever heard of a woman called Doreen Fisher?”
Mark Baxter flinched and his face lost its colour. Maile noticed him glancing at a photograph on the mantelpiece, so she walked across and picked it up, turning the heavy frame over in her hands. She looked a little closer and gasped. It was their client all right, as well as a younger woman that Maile didn’t recognise and a scruffy-looking eight-year-old kid. Maile thought it might have been Baxter, but she’d never mastered the unusual art of mentally ageing photographs. To Maile, all kids looked the same.
She held the photograph out so he could see it and said, “Perhaps this will refresh your memory.”
Baxter groaned. “Yeah,” he said, reluctantly. “Yeah, I know her. She’s my grandmother. And that’s my mother, Linda.”
“Linda Baxter?” Leipfold asked.
Baxter shook his head. “Linda Fisher,” he said. “She changed her name after my father left. Can’t say I blame her. My dad was a liability. He wasn’t around much.”
“But you kept his surname,” Maile said. “Why?”
“Why not?” Baxter replied.
Leipfold sighed and straightened up again. Baxter hadn’t invited them to take a seat, so all three of them were still standing. Leipfold didn’t want to show any weakness, even though his knees were on fire from the tackle. He just wanted the interview to be over and done with, quickly.
“Okay,” he said, “let’s cut the shit. My assistant and I have reason to believe you’ve been using a false name to contact your grandmother. Sound familiar?”
Baxter just looked at him and said nothing.
“The silent treatment won’t work,” Leipfold said, scowling at the young man like a boxer trying to psych out his opponent before the bell rang for the opening round. “We can tie Fulwood Scientific, your fake company, back to you, and we can tie the scammer’s email address back to Fulwood. If it wasn’t you, who was it?”
Baxter shrugged and said, “No comment.”
“Listen, Mark,” Leipfold said, leaning closer and making no attempt to disguise his contempt. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. You see, I’m in a unique position. I’m not a cop. I’m a private detective. Your grandmother asked me to look into this case, so that’s what I’m doing. But, of course, if you’re not going to cooperate, we can always call the police. I’m sure they’d like to hear about the scam you’re running.”
Leipfold’s threat had an instant effect. Baxter slumped like he’d taken a punch to the gut. Maile found herself supporting his weight as he collapsed into an armchair. Once Baxter was down, Maile stepped back and Leipfold stepped forward until he was cornered in, unable to get up or escape.
Baxter sighed and buried his head in his hands. “I don’t know how much you know,” he said, “but you seem to know enough. I guess I take after my dad and not my mum. If – and this is all hypothetical – but if I could return the money, would that be the end of it? Would she promise not to prosecute?”
“She’s your grandmother,” Leipfold reminded him. “She won’t prosecute, not if she can avoid it. That’s why she approached me and not the police in the first place. She must have had an inkling that she’d been scammed by someone she knew.”
Baxter sighed again. He took a moment or two to weigh up the options.
“Okay,” he said, eventually. “You got me. But please don’t tell her it
was me. I’ll give you the money, you can say it was returned anonymously, and everything’s okay, right? Nobody prosecutes, nobody argues, and nobody tells my mum or my grandma what I did and why I did it.”
“And why did you do it?” Maile asked.
“You have no idea what it’s like,” Baxter said, his voice shaking because he needed to cry but he couldn’t get started. “There’s no future for people like me. Oh yeah, I pretend to be an entrepreneur and tell my mum I make a killing, but that’s just a lie to keep her off my back. Then I found out about the old lady’s savings. She keeps it in a shoebox beneath her bed, for God’s sake. If I didn’t take it, someone else would have done it. Better to put it to some use instead of leaving it there to rot.”
“Why didn’t you just ask her?” Maile said. “She is your grandmother, after all. Why go to such elaborate lengths?”
The young man laughed bitterly and hung his head. “She would never have agreed to it, not in a million years.”
“Why not?”
“I used to steal from her,” Baxter admitted. “I still do, I guess. I mean, it’s not like she needs the money. The old crone lives off her pension, and the rest of her cash is just sitting around and waiting for someone to nick it. I figured it was better to take it myself than to leave it behind for some crook to steal.”
“You’re a crook yourself,” Leipfold growled. “You stole from an old woman. You’re the lowest of the low, you horrible scumbag. I should call the cops on you.”
Maile looked at Baxter like he was a piece of dirt on the bottom of her shoe. She was about to say something when Leipfold cut in to say, “Return the money and we’ll call it quits. Your grandmother hired me to get her money back. She didn’t say anything about finding out who took it.”
Baxter smiled slightly and a little of the colour returned to his face. Still seated, he offered a hand to Leipfold. “We’ve got a deal, Mr. Leipfold,” he said.
“That we do,” Leipfold replied. He shook the man’s hand. “As long as you return the money. Where is it, anyway?”
Mark Baxter smiled ruefully and said, “It’s in a shoebox. Beneath my bed.”
Leipfold laughed a long, deep laugh that built up steam in his stomach and hit his diaphragm like a freight train bursting out from the depot and rolling through the station. The crosswind set Maile and Baxter off, too. Then they all stopped, as suddenly as they’d started. They’d all heard the same noise, and they turned to look at the doorway in unison. It opened a split second afterwards and Baxter’s mother, who had barely aged a day since the photo was taken, walked into the living room. She looked at Leipfold and then at Maile, then finally at her wayward son, who was still sitting sullenly in his seat and looking like he wished the sky would fall in.
Ms. Fisher looked sternly around the room and asked, “What’s going on here, then?”
* * *
Later that evening, Leipfold disappeared on a mysterious errand and presented Maile with a set of keys to the office.
“I trust you,” he said, “and it takes a lot for me to trust someone. Just don’t burn it down while I’m gone.”
Maile took it in her stride and ceremoniously added the keys to the chain she wore, which jingled and rubbed against her thigh as she walked. Leipfold had joked about it, until she’d told him that if she ever got in trouble she could wrap it around her fist before she punched someone. After that, the jokes didn’t seem as funny.
Maile worked an hour late in the hope that Leipfold might return and save her the job of locking the bars on the windows and setting the alarm, but he didn’t show up and she didn’t want to be stuck there forever. She had a date with her Warcraft clan and a bottle of red, and Kat had said something about a takeaway. So she shut down her computer and stacked the paperwork on her desk into an orderly pile. Then she picked up her stuff, unclipped the chain from her belt and got ready to leave the building.
Although the solstice had passed and the nights were getting shorter, it was dark outside, and it was raining like hell and blowing up a storm.
Like it was the night that Donna Thompson died. Maile’s thoughts had been drifting of late, focusing more on Marie Rieirson than Donna Thompson, whose death had started the whole thing off. She thought about the car that had hit her, the invisible driver who’d stepped out of the vehicle long before it was used as a murder weapon, and she shivered slightly as she buttoned up her coat and walked out into the night.
It didn’t take her long to realise that someone was following her. She’d seen enough cop shows to know that it was the people who looked casual that she had to worry about, and no one in their right mind would be walking the streets at this time of night, especially not like she was, purposelessly drifting left and right as the mood took her while she thought about the Thompson case.
Maile hit another left and then immediately feinted a U-turn. She caught her pursuer by surprise, although he was hooded and difficult to see in the half-light. For a brief moment, the face was lit up and Maile saw the devil. The man was wearing a mask like a Mexican wrestler or the villain in an old horror movie. Then the shadow passed before the light and reached for her. His fist hooked around her shoulder and pulled her towards him. His fingers felt pneumatic, machine-like. They pinched her so hard that they brought blood to the skin and left long, thin marks on her shoulder. Maile felt the same warm flush of adrenaline that she felt when she was lining up a headshot on her Xbox.
She reacted on instinct, geared up for fight or flight like when some troll left a comment. She’d always preferred to fight, even when she was a little girl, and it was that instinct that dipped her hand into her bag. It came out with her chain wrapped around it, and she punched blindly at her attacker. The impact sent shockwaves up her arm and she dropped the chain while her assailant was falling to the ground. She rifled through her bag again and came back out with her pepper spray. Still on autopilot, her finger pressed the trigger as her attacker pulled himself up and lunged towards her, flinging an arm up at the last second. Maile didn’t stick around to see whether she’d hit his eyes or not.
She knew him. In that single split second, she knew him by the way he held himself as he shied away from the streetlight. And then she was gone, back along the street towards Leipfold’s office. She glanced back again before she rounded the corner, but her attacker was nowhere to be seen. That knowledge didn’t comfort her. It meant he was out there somewhere, maybe even trying to head her off. But she prided herself on her willpower, so despite the mounting panic, she was able to keep her head.
She slammed the door shut and locked it from the inside, then hit the lights and leant, panting and shaking, against the wall. She was still catching her breath when she realised with mounting panic that the alarm was off.
I set it before I left, she thought, subconsciously reaching for her pepper spray. I swear I did. So who’s in here?
Chapter Twenty-One: Trapped
MAILE POKED HER NOSE cautiously into the office with one hand on the aerosol. She saw nothing and then something, a figure in black beside the coat stand. She raised the aerosol defiantly. She was just about to pull the trigger when—
“Maile,” Leipfold said. “Put that down. You’re going to hurt someone.”
She’d never been happier to see him. Leipfold knew something was wrong when she threw herself at him and wrapped her arms around his neck. He hugged her back half-heartedly and asked, “Is something the matter?”
“Yeah,” she replied, disengaging from him and sitting shakily down at her desk. “Someone tried to jump me.”
“What?” Leipfold exclaimed. “Are you sure? Should I call the police?”
“No,” Maile said. “Not yet. I think it’s connected to the case. I want to tell you about it while my memory’s fresh. You’ll want to try and get hold of the footage as well, if there is any. I think I spotted a camera. I’ll get the address for
you.”
While she was talking, Leipfold walked over to his desk and reached into the bottom drawer. He took out his emergency bottle and poured a small amount into a plastic cup. Then he handed it over to Maile, who drained the harsh spirit and nearly choked on it. When she could talk again, she told Leipfold what had happened, starting with her departure from the office and culminating with her return when she’d peered inside.
“Jesus,” Leipfold murmured. “And you’re sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine,” Maile insisted. “Although I wouldn’t mind another hit.”
Leipfold grunted and poured another shot before stashing the bottle back in the drawer. Out of sight, out of mind, he thought. We all need our little reminders.
“Do you think it was connected to the case?” Maile asked.
“Maybe,” Leipfold replied. “In fact, I think it’s likely. But we can’t be certain. This is a dangerous city, Maile, and the world is a dangerous place. It could have been a random attack or some sex pervert trying to get his end away.”
“That’s why I carry pepper spray,” Maile said. “I made a promise to my mum. She said that knives get you arrested and guns are for fools, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.”
“Sounds like wise advice.”
Leipfold watched impassively as Maile downed the last of her whiskey and took a couple of deep, expansive breaths. He recognised the trick. She was trying to calm herself, to force her heart and her breathing to slow so she wouldn’t hyperventilate.
“I can take care of myself when I have to,” Maile said. “I might be short, but I can pack a punch. You think we should tell your policeman pal?”
“Are you kidding?” Leipfold asked. “We have to. If it’s connected to the case, Cholmondeley needs to know. And if it’s not…well, that gives us even more of a reason to tell him. If this is just a random act, there’s someone on the streets who might strike again.”
“You’re right,” Maile said. “As usual. So how do we do this?”
