by Nina Jon
“One of those villages riven with enmities and blood feuds going back centuries, you mean?” joked Hugh, not entirely convinced that British rural life equalled bucolic loveliness.
Despite his teasing, twenty-five-year-old Hugh Hetherington was as keen to move as his wife. He’d just passed his accountancy exams and wanted to make his mark in a firm where he hadn’t done his training. He found a job advert for the position of a newly qualified accountant in the Times. “The job’s in Southstoft,” he read.
“Where on earth is that?”
“It says here,” he patted the paper, “that the fine cathedral city of Southstoft is the administrative centre of the County of Hoven, and home to the newest university in the land. It’s a new position. It’ll mean my specialising in agricultural-based work. But you said you wanted to move to the countryside and farming tends to be what they do there.”
The couple drove down together for the interview. They flung back the soft top of their MG. Jane wore a headscarf to protect her hair and clutched details of a three hundred-year-old pink thatched cottage in nearby Failsham. She intended to visit the property during the interview – much to her husband’s disapproval.
“Don’t you think you should wait until I get a second interview before you start property hunting, Jane?”
“I have complete faith in you. You’re perfect for the job. You said it was a new position. You can make it your own, just like we can make this cottage our own,” she said of the as yet unseen cottage with which she was already in love and where the couple would live until death did them part.
On the journey home Hugh repeated what the firm’s senior partner had said to him once the interview was over and the two men had shaken hands on the doorstep of the firm. “He said, ‘Pick up some estate agents’ details before you go back to the smoke, young man.’ I had to admit rather sheepishly that you already had,” Hugh added.
“And what did he say?”
“As my father used to say, always let the lady choose the home,” Hugh quoted.
“I like him,” Jane said. “I think we’ll be friends.”
III
Months before the thought of becoming a private detective was to enter her head, sixty-two-year-old Jane tied back her bedroom curtains, and opened the bedroom window to allow fresh air into the room. Behind her, the Macmillan community nurse was helping Hugh into a sitting position after he’d said,
“I’ve spent half my life tending that garden – I want to be able to see it in all its glories.”
It was the spring and in the rafters above the couple’s bedroom, two nesting birds had built a nest and two adult birds continually darted to and from it, while the chirping of their young filled the room. The nurse checked Hugh’s morphine feeder one more time before she made ready to leave. “I’ll be back tomorrow, Hugh,” she said, giving his pillow a pat.
When Jane returned to the room after showing the nurse out, Hugh extended his hand in her direction. “Jane, come here, I want to talk to you.”
She walked across the room and sat down on the bed beside him, her hand in his.
“We both know I’m not going to survive this,” he said.
Jane felt her eyes fill with tears. She turned her head away. She didn’t want Hugh to see her cry. She had to be strong.
“Jane,” he said gently. She turned to face him and allowed him to wipe the tears from her cheek. Jane closed her eyes. She felt him squeeze her hand tightly.
“You’ve drawn the short straw in this,” he said. “I’m taking the easy way out.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
“I want you to promise to do something for me after I’m gone. When you wake up in the morning, I want you to get up, brush your hair, shower, dress, eat your breakfast. You must do all the things you do now. You won’t want to, you won’t see the point, but you must. Tidy the house, make the bed, and buy flowers, do the garden. Focus on what needs to be done and do it. It will give you a sense of purpose and will keep you going. It will help. Promise me, Jane.”
“I’ll try.”
He died shortly afterwards.
IV
Jane heeded her husband’s advice, and it did help keep her going in those first desperate months after his death, when she’d been almost paralysed by grief. But the loss of a man to whom she’d been joined at the hip for decades was a vast void to be filled. She needed more than a routine; what she needed was something to take her completely out of her world and into another, where the problems which consumed her were not hers, but someone else’s. But what, she thought as she cut back the roses – and then she had an idea.
After squeezing the rose thorn from her finger, she moved inside to hold her hand under the cold tap – the idea of becoming a private detective now firmly in her head. First things first, she thought. Before you make any decisions, find out what a professional private detective does these days, and how they go about it.
She logged on to the internet and studied her competitors’ websites. The words: ‘discretion’, ‘spouse’, and ‘whereabouts’ were the most common words she found there. She came across the blog of a real-life private detective. From this she learned that there were many tools available to assist the private detective in the modern age. There were magnetic trackers, which could be placed on the underside of the car, although they could only be placed there by the client, not the detective, the blog warned, unless the detective was prepared to break many of the laws created to protect the privacy of law-abiding members of society.
There was also software which could detect every key hit on a computer keyboard, or which could retrieve every deleted e-mail or text message – again, the writer warned these could only be used lawfully in certain circumstances: for example, during employment, and only then if the computer or mobile phone was provided by the employer to the employee. Oyster cards could be analysed to establish every journey taken, but only lawfully by the police. This in turn, the blogger cautioned, led to the thorny issue, also outside the law, of hacking into someone else’s e-mails; answer phone messages; intercepting their credit card bills to check for flight, restaurant or hotel payments; intrusive photographs taken on other people’s property without their consent; the obtaining of someone’s address from their car registration number; their medical history; their criminal record or confidential employment details. All these things and much more were possible, but not always lawful, the blogger reminded his readers. The blog finished with advice about rummaging through someone else’s rubbish. Always useful on a surveillance exercise, he wrote, but not always pleasant or within the law.
Therefore, it concluded, what you may want the private detective you hire to do for you, and what he or she may be prepared to do for you, may be different. ‘Remember, your private detective wants to be able to sleep soundly at night, and in their own bed, not one supplied at her Majesty’s pleasure!’
Jane decided there and then, not only would she always keep within the law, but she wouldn’t be prepared to do anything which she considered to be either immoral or reprehensible (this being something she would have to decide on a case-by-case basis). She’d rely on observance and surveillance to gather information, and on her analytical powers and natural intuition, to make sense of it all.
This decided, her mind was made up – she’d embark on a new career as a private detective immediately. But how to get business, she wondered. An advert in the paper or the Yellow Pages possibly?
“A webpage, that’s what you want,” Jack, her next-door neighbour’s kid brother, had suggested.
“Yes, of course. Hugh’s nephew, Ben, can create one for me.”
Jane approached Ben on the subject. He did no more than raise an eyebrow and say, “A private investigator? Cool.”
“I thought wording along the lines of this,” Jane said, handing him a form of words she had come up with.
Do you have need for the services of a private investigator, but would feel uncomfortable using
a conventional detective agency? Maybe a grandmother who believes she’s seen enough of the world to still be of some use to it, known to family and friends alike as the Indomitable Mrs Hetherington due to her uncanny ability to get to the bottom of the most impenetrable conundrums, can be of help?
All enquiries initially by e-mail.
(Fees on enquiry).
PS: I don’t possess a magnifying glass, or a deerstalker, but if I’m instructed, there’ll be lots of old-fashioned sleuthing.
“I’ve never heard anyone refer to you as the Indomitable Mrs Hetherington,” Ben said.
“That’s because no one ever has,” Jane said. “However, I like the sound of it so much I’ve decided to use it. I think it gives me a certain authority.”
“If it’s authority you want we could post a picture of you dressed up like Kitchener pointing at the camera, above the words,
‘You need Jane Hetherington!’”
In the end they settled for the photograph of Jane in a black suit over a white silk blouse, smiling serenely, her hands demurely crossed in her lap; and so on the first working day of the first month of the New Year (a couple of weeks after Jane’s sixty-third birthday) she officially went into business as a private detective.
CHAPTER THREE
INSPECTOR HUBRIS
I
The second person to respond to Jane’s website was a twenty-four-year-old Chinese woman living in the UK, called Foo Yong. Her e-mail to Jane merely asked if Jane could meet with her in a restaurant owned by Foo Yong’s uncle. ‘It easier for me to speak than write English,’ she explained. Jane knew the restaurant well. It was in Southstoft and she and Hugh had eaten there many times. ‘I’m visiting Southstoft today as a matter of fact. I could call at the restaurant this afternoon, if that’s con- venient?’ Jane suggested to Foo Yong. ‘Very. Uncle will be at the Chinese supermarket at this time, and I prefer him not be there.’ ‘I look forward to meeting you,’ Jane typed. Her e-mail sent, Jane picked up her car keys and left for the twenty minute drive to her appointment at the Southstoft Magistrates’ Court, where she was sitting as a lay magistrate. She’d been a magistrate since long before her decision to become a private detective. She enjoyed the work, believing it allowed her to return something to society, and intended to continue with it for as long as she could.
Todays was a special sitting. Only one defendant would appear before the bench – a man charged with the murder of a petty criminal called Harrison Monk, whose body had been found sprawled at the bottom of a multi-storey car park.
The arrest and charge of the defendant Callum MacCallum, was reported across the world. The announcement that he was to appear briefly before the Southstoft Magistrates’ Court had caused Jane’s thirteen-year-old neighbour Jack, to run from his house to hers and hammer on her back door.
“ You’re going to meet Callum MacCallum!” he’d said when she opened the back door to him.
“ That’s not really how I’d describe it Jack,” she’d replied, inviting him in.
“ Do you know who he is? He’s Inspector Hubris!” Jack had said, pulling up a chair.
Although she hadn’t said so to Jack, Jane knew that the defendant was an actor who played the popular TV police detective Inspector Hubris.
“He’s called Inspector Hubris because he brings down to earth anyone whose vanity makes them think they can get away with murder,” Jack had continued. “It’s one of my favourite shows. Everyone at school watches it. They’re saying MacCallum met Monk at a party one evening while filming in Southstoft. I didn’t know they filmed it near here. I’d have gone and watched the filming if I’d known. According to the blog I read, MacCallum spent the weekend with Monk, following which he received a blackmail demand. They met up so MacCallum could pay over the blackmail money, but an argument broke out which ended with MacCallum killing Monk. Are you going to send him to jail for the rest of his life?”
“I’m a magistrate, Jack, and magistrates don’t try murder cases,” she’d explained patiently. “Our job tomorrow is to hear the defendant’s application for bail and commit him to stand trial at the Crown Court at a later date.” She’d been about to add, “But that won’t be for many months yet,” when she realised he’d stopped listening and was sending a text message.
II
Jane arrived at the court complex to discover media there from across the world. This didn’t surprise her. The irony of ‘Inspector Hubris’ being charged with murder hadn’t been lost on a gleeful media. She slowly picked her way through a maze of outside broadcast units, cameras, cameramen and journalists surrounding the court. Just as she reached the court entrance she heard someone shout out: “He’s on his way!”
She turned around. Cameramen and journalists, microphones in hand, scrambled back to their places. The general public, cordoned off from the courthouse by a series of metal fences, jostled for position, their cameras to the ready, where necessary held over the heads of those in front of them. In no time the police van ferrying the defendant to the court, together with the convoy of police cars which surrounded it, sirens wailing, roared through the court’s gates, across its car park and into the court building’s underground car park, past a thousand or more flash lights.
The spectacle over, Jane slipped quietly inside the court complex to meet up with her fellow magistrates for the day: Anthony Dillard, always known as Ant, and Amy Marston. Suspecting she might be photographed, Jane had taken extra care with her appearance that morning, and couldn’t help noticing that she wasn’t the only one to have done so. Dillard sported a new suit and tie, freshly trimmed hair and a clipped beard, whilst Amy had abandoned the mismatched tweed skirt and jumpers she normally wore, for a smart black suit, albeit an obviously borrowed and ill-fitting one.
A few minutes after arriving, the three made their way in succession from the antechamber to the modern court room, led by Ant Dillard, to take their positions behind the magistrates’ bench. Dillard nodded to the court usher who telephoned the cells, instructing that the defendant should be brought to the courtroom.
III
The court room fell silent as Callum MacCallum walked over to the witness stand, a police officer on either side of him. He was tall, clean-shaven, and his shoulder-length brown hair newly washed. He wore jeans, a white t-shirt and a waist-length denim jacket. In one ear, he wore a single diamond stud earring, and in the other, a gold loop. Around his neck, he wore a gold crucifix and three gold chains. His fingers were covered with numerous rings. He was even better looking in real life than he was on the screen, Jane realised. Now she understood why his many female fans called him ‘Inspector Heartbreak’.
“Please confirm your name to the court,” Dillard asked MacCallum.
MacCallum’s repeated attempts to reply to the question shocked the crowded court into silence. Few there had known that when not in front of a camera, the famous actor spoke with a pronounced stammer. Jane hadn’t. She caught Ant and Amy make brief eye contact then look straight ahead again immediately. They hadn’t known this either, she realised. At least no one in court seemed to find the defendant’s stammer amusing, she thought. When she finally made eye contact with MacCallum, he quickly lowered his head, his embarrassment and frustration at his stammer obvious. Could this vulnerable, damaged young man, really be capable of such a violent act as he had been charged with, she wondered to herself.
MacCallum’s defence lawyer Russell Stone, rose, and resting one hand on his large belly, asked for the court’s permission to speak on his client’s behalf for the rest of the hearing. Jane hadn’t come across Stone before. With his silver-hair and a large white beard, she imagined he wouldn’t ever be short of offers to play Santa Claus. After conferring, the magistrates nodded their agreement at his request. Stone then confirmed his client’s name, address and date of birth, and made an application for bail.
Jane, Ant and Amy retired to their antechamber to consider it.
“He doesn’t have a stammer in his
show, does he? Wonder why not?” Amy asked.
“He isn’t playing himself,” Jane said. “He’s acting.”
They spent some time discussing the request for bail.
“Are we agreed then?” Ant asked.
Both Jane and Amy nodded and three returned to the courtroom.
“We commit you to trial at the Crown Court on a date to be decided. Due to the seriousness of the offence, and because the police consider you to be a flight-risk, bail is refused,” Ant Dillard told the defendant.
IV
As Jane and Ant walked back across the car park together, Russell Stone hurried over to catch up with them.
“It seems to be an open and shut case, doesn’t it?” he said. “But it’s not, you know? How do you know if anything is what it seems?”
CHAPTER FOUR
CHINESE TEA AND DUMPLINGS
I
The Chinese restaurant run by Foo Yong’s uncle was on a busy thoroughfare, just down the road from the mag- istrates’ court. Jane walked the ten minutes it took to get there. It was a pleasant day and the walk helped clear her head of what had been a troubling morning. At a circular table laid for service with a starched white linen tablecloth and silver cutlery, Jane and Foo Yong shared a pot of Chinese tea and a bamboo bas- ket of tiny sweet Chinese dumplings. Jane popped one of the dumplings into her mouth. It was made from some sort of sweet bean paste, if she wasn’t mistaken. She washed it down with some tea. The restaurant was closed and they were alone in the dining room. “I wish to talk to you about my betrothed, Cheung Kin,” Foo Yong explained, fi ngering the cup of hot tea in her hands nervously. She spoke good English, but with a pronounced Chinese accent. “He worked here as a chef,” she continued. “Some days ago, when we closed and I not here, uncle question him about his intentions towards me. My parents in China and sometimes uncle act like he my father. Uncle later tell me he drink too much rice wine, and was harsh on Cheung Kin. Uncle say Cheung Kin promise he truly loved me and his intentions were honourable, but uncle say he not believe him, and tell him so. Uncle admit he pass out after so much rice wine. When uncle wake up, he have bad headache and Cheung Kin not there. He last seen by my cousin outside in tears. Cousin not remember time but it very late. He hear argument between uncle and Cheung Kin and stay upstairs to avoid. He hear Cheung Kin leave and look out window. He ask Cheung Kin everything all right. Cheung Kin wave him away and run down street. No one seen since. He not turn up for work next day, or day after, or since. No one know where he is. I hear nothing from him. I know only few days, but normally we speak or text every hour, sometimes more.”
