Where There's Smoke

by Penny Grubb

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘OK, come on, what’s all this about? What have you brought me here for?’

  Pat looked up, surprised. ‘The horsey job,’ she said. ‘Why, what did you think?’

  ‘What’s horsey about it, apart from it being on racecourse land?’

  ‘It’s a pony camp. Didn’t she tell you?’

  Annie shrugged. ‘She probably assumed I knew. But I didn’t mean that. You didn’t bring me all this way for that. It’s a nothing of a job. Either of you could have done it unless you’ve got so lazy you can’t be arsed to shift for anything that takes you out of the office any more.’

  Pat’s eyes opened wide. She gave a half smile. ‘Hello, what’s rattled your cage? If you didn’t want the job, why come all this way?’

  ‘Because …’ Annie began and then stopped. Because of how much you’re paying us, were the words on her lips but she held them back. For the first time, she considered Barbara as a possibility. No one had been specific about which Thompson sister had been in touch. One of the Thompson sisters … Miss Thompson … she doesn’t want her sister to know … She’d assumed Pat because it made more sense, but Barbara had always remained Miss Thompson for business purposes. Could it have been Barbara? Barbara had never liked her, never even acknowledged that she was good at the job. And Barbara would be very wary of crossing Vince Sleeman.

  ‘I heard that Vince is ill.’

  Pat gave her a hard stare as she changed tack but said, ‘Yes, hard living caught up with him.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘His liver’s packing up.’ Pat clicked at her keyboard, then pushed it aside and levered herself to her feet.

  ‘That’s serious then?’

  ‘Oh, I think he’ll be out of hospital again in a few weeks. His number’s not up yet. Not quite. But yes, this’ll be the death of him. Leah’s fuming.’

  ‘Who’s Leah?’

  Pat looked surprised. ‘His wife.’

  It was Annie’s turn to be surprised. ‘Vince got married? When?’

  ‘1980. Didn’t you know he was married?’

  Annie was amazed. Vince had been married longer than she had been alive. But then, she’d never known him well. He was just a slightly sinister figure haunting the sisters’ lives and business dealings. ‘I suppose it must be tough for her,’ she said at random, imagining an elderly woman with iron-grey hair accustomed to a lifetime of fading into the background.

  ‘Well, yes,’ Pat said without malice. ‘It’ll change things when he pegs out.’ Pat reached for her coat. ‘I’ve people coming round this afternoon, so if there wasn’t anything else.’

  ‘Yeah, OK.’ Annie wanted to tell Pat how much her company had shelled out to bring her north, apparently for nothing, and about the hotel she was booked into at their expense just to find out whether Pat knew, but what if it were Barbara? She reciprocated Barbara’s dislike but would keep her confidence, not knowing what on earth the hidden agenda might be. She would stay until tomorrow; get Barbara on her own and give her a chance to come clean. It occurred to her that the scales might finally have fallen from Barbara’s eyes about Vince Sleeman. Maybe she wanted Annie’s help to wrest back control of the firm once Vince died. But it was hard to generate any real curiosity. Her real business was 200 miles south of here.

  ‘If you’re off to London, post the keys through the door,’ said Pat in farewell as she made her way out.

  Left to herself, Annie looked around the Spartan office. Typical of Pat to treat so casually her reappearance in their lives and the possibility that she might be gone again by nightfall.

  She ought to call Jean Greenhough one last time, and there was Pieternel, too. Christa’s enthusiasm might get results but had to be curbed before she went too far. Annie decided they could all wait while she went back out and found something to ease her hunger pangs.

  She locked the door, went down the stairs and out through the shared lobby where she listened to the bustle of the downstairs office, wondering who was in there now, what they did, remembering the wonderful coffee they used to brew and share in the early mornings.

  Stepping outside was like coming out of a cave into the light, especially on a bright day. She blinked as her eyes adjusted and felt the breeze, cool on her face, as a tantalizing whiff of frying bacon caught her nostrils, and she wondered if the sandwich bars she remembered would still be there.

  A man had been standing against the wall. It took a second for her to register that he was in uniform. At the sound of the door, he turned, and with a shock that rushed the blood to her face and neck, she recognized him.

  ‘Scott,’ she said, hearing the surprise in her voice, as she looked him up and down. For several years, she and PC Scott Kerridge had conducted an on-off affair that had tailed away into an uneasy friendship after he became engaged to someone else, determined upon the settled existence that was anathema to her. The physical attraction between them had not immediately died and had led to resentment against her from Scott’s new partner.

  In the fraction of a second that their eyes met after she had spoken his name, Annie took in his thickened waistline, the hint of slack skin round his face, and knew there was nothing left of the attraction that had once made him irresistible to her.

  He’d clearly been waiting for her. She wondered what he wanted; who had told him she was back.

  As he stepped close, he put up his hand as though to stop an embrace she hadn’t thought of making.

  ‘Annie.’ His voice was cold. ‘I know why you’re here. For old time’s sake, I’m warning you. You have no idea what you’re getting into. Leave it alone. Leave the area. Go back to London.’

  Taken aback, she said, ‘I’m about to. That’s what I’ve just told Pat.’

  ‘Good.’

  With that, he spun on his heel and marched away.

  As Annie watched, slightly open-mouthed at the unexpected encounter, she thought of a man with a tuft of hair out of place, of Christa and Pieternel, of Jean Greenhough and her baseless fears; of all the reasons she had to leave.

  Her gaze tracked Scott Kerridge as he crossed the road, climbed into his car and drove away; followed the path of his car down the street until it turned out of sight. And for the first time since Pieternel had told her of the call from the Thompsons, she experienced a real gut–deep desire to know why she’d really been brought here.

  CHAPTER 3

  Annie drove up the ramp into the car park that occupied the first six floors of the Premier Inn tower. Bypassing the lift, she made herself jog up the stairs to the 7th floor reception and restaurant, savoring the light and airy space after being cooped up in the Thompsons’ office.

  A smiling waitress led her to a table by the sweep of glass that looked out over the Humber as it stretched its banks wide on its way to meet the North Sea. Recession? What recession, she thought as she looked out on to a prosperous landscape. So much had changed since she’d been here last. The angular roof of the Deep, the aquarium whose silhouette she’d once mistaken for a sinking ship, was dwarfed from this height, but its entranceway bustled with customers.

  She felt perplexed by the events of the day, as though someone had tossed her a handful of brightly coloured jigsaw pieces and dared her to guess the full picture. A couple of hours ago, she would have dismissed the Hull end of the puzzle, but Scott’s intervention had changed everything. Why had he warned her off? He couldn’t have had the pony camp in mind. Who had told him she was back? What did he think she had come here to do? She recalled the deserted car park behind the racecourse. Jean Greenhough was no fool. She too was infected with the jittery unease of someone aware of strings being pulled behind the scenes.

  Her gaze wandered over the panorama of the waterfront. Downriver, the fat ferries would be herding passengers and vehicles into their capacious bodies, ready to set off on their overnight journeys to Holland and Belgium. Seven storeys down, tidal waters pushed their way up the estuary, creating a surge up the River
Hull, through a hidden underbelly of the city where the Thompsons eked out an existence, and on into rolling countryside where spring tides threatened floods miles inland.

  The waitress returned bearing a steaming plate. Annie needed no urging to enjoy her meal as the smell of the rib-eye steak flooded her mouth with saliva and she realized just how hungry she was. For a few moments, she surrendered to the succulence of the beef. If she were to stay, she would eat her way right through the menu. But she’d yet to answer the question, why was she here? The little she knew didn’t fit with Scott’s clumsy intrusion. She had to fill in some gaps.

  She pulled out her phone, and rang Jean Greenhough. The woman was tremulously grateful to hear her voice, almost tearful in her expressions of gratitude that they hadn’t abandoned her. Annie pushed for the whole story again; the young guy who’d approached her; the supposed grudge match between cousins; the link back to college friends.

  ‘You know you have to give me his name now; the name he gave you, anyway?’

  ‘Yes, of course. It was Lance Mailers.’ The name meant nothing to her. She scribbled it on a scrap of paper.

  ‘And the cousin, the one who’s the link back to the kids?’

  ‘I don’t know. I thought I did, but when I checked … it didn’t add up. The policeman, Sergeant Greaves, said he couldn’t give me any names. I understand that, but I know all the kids … all the families … I don’t feel I can go back to him now. I mean, I know they’re busy. Real crimes to deal with. But I was so worried.’

  Nothing concrete, thought Annie. Nothing to get hold of; nothing to justify the level of worry in Jean Greenhough’s voice. But as she listened, spearing a mushroom and swirling it in the sauce that smothered her steak, it was Christa Andrew all over again. Christa had seen nothing, heard nothing overtly wrong, but something had spooked her enough for her to ring Annie to check. And now she recognized the same in Jean Greenhough. Not that the woman recognized it in herself.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she kept saying. ‘I know I’m worrying over nothing, but—’

  ‘I don’t think so, Jean,’ Annie broke in. ‘Something’s going on here. You’re right to be worried.’

  Jean’s relief was palpable. ‘I can’t tell you how much better it makes me feel to hear you say that. I really need your help.’

  ‘You need someone, but there might be a problem in it being me.’

  ‘If you need to be discreet, I can arrange for you to have a billet out here. No one need know.’

  That hadn’t been what Annie meant, but she sat back for a moment, picking up a chip and crunching it between her teeth. An out-of-the-way bolthole might be useful.

  ‘Sit tight,’ she said. ‘Wait for me to get back to you.’

  A short while after saying goodbye to Jean Greenhough, Annie had Pieternel on the phone. She asked about the man who was desperate to be followed.

  ‘I sent Christa out again, told her to act wasted and to follow and lose him. She said it wasn’t easy. Meanwhile, we’re clocking just where he goes. Nowhere remarkable as yet, but we’ll have a name for him by this evening. I’ll send her out again tomorrow and then I’ll report back; give them his details and all his movements for twenty-four hours. Everything. The places we followed him and the places he went when he got fed up trying to keep Christa on his tail.’

  ‘Is he going to swallow it? How incompetent does he think we are? He must have known I’d clocked him when I ran out on him.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s a risk. That’s why I’m not going to play it more than a day more. Christa’s good at looking wasted. He probably thinks she’s all we can afford.’

  ‘And …’ Annie prompted into a pause.

  ‘I don’t know. Something’s not right. I’ll give it a couple of days, then report back to the client, see what reaction I get. How’s it going with you? Have they really brought you all that way so they don’t have to get their feet muddy?’

  ‘I don’t know, either.’ Annie told Pieternel about Scott, about Jean, about her misgivings about the whole set-up. ‘I’m going to get Barbara on her own tomorrow,’ she ended. ‘Looking back, I think she was putting on an act for Pat this morning. It didn’t register because I wasn’t expecting it.’

  The next morning, neither sister showed up at the office. Annie waited until mid-morning and then rang Pat.

  ‘Are you coming in today?’

  ‘Yeah, later. Are you still here then? I thought you’d pissed off back.’

  ‘I’m just off now. I came in to leave your keys.’ Annie wasn’t sure what made her speak the lie.

  She rang Barbara’s home number.

  ‘Oh, it’s you. Pat said you’d left.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t. Not yet. I want to talk to you before I decide what I’m doing.’

  ‘Talk about what? Why?’

  Annie listened carefully. Was there anything under the slightly irritable tone Barbara usually used when talking to her? She couldn’t say for sure. ‘Were you planning to come into the office today?’

  ‘What’s it to you? I’m off out shopping for an hour if you must know, and after that I’m working from home.’

  ‘I want to come and see you. We need to talk.’

  ‘About what?’ Barbara asked again and Annie wasn’t sure if she heard an underlying panic or if Barbara was just amazed at this unprecedented request.

  ‘I need to know what’s going on; why I was brought here. The real reason I mean.’

  She cut across Barbara’s blustered denials, saying, ‘I’ll see you in a couple of hours,’ and rang off.

  Whilst in the office, Annie searched round, flicking through the filing cabinets, checking the desks, switching on the PCs and going through the firm’s e-mails and online documents. For someone accustomed to thorough searching at lightning speed, an hour was more than enough to go through everything the office had to offer. She was left with looking for loose floorboards, things secreted in the toilet cisterns and hidden safes, but even being this thorough she was done long before Barbara would be home from her shopping trip. And all she’d uncovered was the detritus of a stagnant business.

  She decided to kill time by walking. It would give her some fresh air and exercise and remind her of the days she used to walk everywhere in Hull. Three-quarters of an hour, she judged, would get her to Barbara’s door.

  Walking raised her spirits and she increased her pace, keeping deliberately to the back streets, trying to remember the cut-throughs and short cuts she used to know so well. Twenty minutes from the office took her to a narrow street in a run-down area not far from the river.

  This part of her route was quiet. Buildings awaiting demolition rose directly from the narrow pavement, their walls hemming her in along this deserted stretch of road. No CCTV, no office workers looking out, just blank walls and boarded-up doors. A little further along, a makeshift fence skirted an old cemetery, and somewhere near by was the River Hull. She could hear the background splash of tidal waters slapping against some obstruction.

  It was the sound of a car that alerted her; a background hum that had been the baseline to her thoughts. How long had it been on her tail?

  As she turned to look, the engine roared. A blur of flashing headlights swerved towards her.

  Blind instinct took her into a dive out of its path. Broken tarmac rushed to meet her, shredding the skin up her arm. She scrambled to find her feet.

  A high-pitched shriek charted the scrape of metal against brickwork as the car mounted the narrow pavement and screamed along the side of the building where she’d been walking.

  She was barely up on hands and knees when she heard the crash of the gearbox and the engine’s reverse whine.

  No escape … no doorways … no hope of outrunning it. The abandoned cemetery was all that broke the blank face of the high walls. She leapt at its corrugated-iron fencing, pulling herself up, careless of the blood that ran from her hands as she grabbed at the sharp edges.

  With a deafening crash, the rear end
of the car rammed the panel below her and she clung desperately, hearing the air forced from her lungs in an involuntary scream.

  For a second the damaged panel hung in the air, as though about to fall back into the road taking her with it. She scrambled over the top and threw herself towards the unkempt ground with its lopsided gravestones, hitting her arm hard on a splintered fence post.

  Off the road. But nowhere to go.

  She had seconds … as long as it took them to get out of the car and come after her.

  Her eyes took in the whole of the scene. The spread of the old graves, tangled undergrowth too thin to hide a rabbit, patches of bare earth and rubble. A slope down towards the river. The faraway buzz of voices … the sound of traffic. There was access to another road somewhere down there. But she had only seconds to act.

  Careless of broken glass and sharp edges or the stinging of the cuts she’d already sustained, Annie grabbed as big an armful as she could of the loose earth and rubble at her feet and flung it towards the slope. A second armful followed as tears coursed down her cheeks from the pain.

  As the debris she’d thrown crashed and skittered down the slope and out of sight, she dived sideways and crammed herself back against the fence, away from the broken panel, wriggling face down into the tangle of briers and nettles.

  Hardly breathing, she listened to the fence panel being ripped aside as her pursuers forced their way through and sped towards the sounds of the tiny avalanche. She identified two people racing past her and off down the slope towards the river, but she had no idea how many had been in the vehicle. What if there were three, one waiting with the car? She was in no shape to stand up to a child, never mind whoever had driven that car at her.

  It felt like hours later that she heard their footsteps crunching back up the slope, but in her mind she’d been counting from the moment they’d rushed by and knew it was barely a couple of minutes.

  They were panting, out of breath. She could only rely on staying perfectly still and that they weren’t looking for her here.