Small Town Trouble (Some Very English Murders Book 4)

by Issy Brooke

  She knew they were linked. They were linked now, but had they a historic link? What had led Alf’s old home being in Brian’s possession now? She knew Alf had a grudge against Owen. Brian said he didn’t but maybe there was more to it. After all, she remembered in a flash, Owen had been to the hotel.

  Why? She had never really asked why or how the bar staff and Brian knew him, and remembered him. What would bring a weasel-like little man like Owen to a posh hotel he could not afford?

  It suddenly became an important question. Maybe the answers would be in Brian’s office. Her need to get there was now even more pressing.

  She listened intently, but was rewarded with nothing but silence, which was comforting. She was ready.

  She chose the door that was directly opposite where she stood, first pressing her ear to it, next trying to see through the keyhole. Nothing. Carefully she took hold of the handle. What could she tell from the apparently blank and clueless door? The metal was cool. So did that mean no one had gone in recently? Was that a legitimate deduction? How long did a metal handle stay warm from a human’s touch?

  She pressed down slowly, and then wondered if she ought to be quick and firm, flinging the door open, so she had the element of surprise if anyone was in there.

  She couldn’t bring herself to do that. The handle was depressed fully. She pushed.

  Nothing.

  Oh, so the door was locked. She released the handle and stepped back, exhaling, and feeling foolish. Well done, PI, she told herself. That was superbly done. Idiot.

  It was a strange let-down.

  Now the choice was whether to go left – up some stairs, or right – through another door. She wanted to get into Brian’s office and she knew that was placed on the ground floor, near to reception. She went to the right, trying to walk confidently (in case anyone was watching) and quietly (so that no one would be watching.)

  At the door that was ajar, she paused, straining her ears but the harder she listened, the more she was fixated on the drumming of her own heart.

  She peered through the gap. It opened into a wider area, with a few more doors that were helpfully marked this time: Dirty Utility Store, Laundry, Stock. She took a deep breath and went towards the only unmarked door. This was clearly the one to the public areas; a small laminated notice was tacked to the side of it, saying, “Is your uniform clean?” There was also a small mirror. Penny didn’t dare look in it and face the reality of what she was doing. She couldn’t risk making eye contact with herself.

  She slowly opened the door enough to peep out. She was at the far end of the large entrance area, and slightly tucked behind the sweeping arc of the main set of stairs. She recognised that she was standing where she had first seen Agnes with her mop bucket. She could see the edge of the reception desk, and the dark head of a staff member. They were staring at a computer screen.

  Click, click, click. The repetitive sounds of the mouse filled the echoing hall.

  They were playing solitaire, she realised. Excellent. She wasn’t sure how much noise her shoes were going to make on the floor; they were sensible walking sandals, designed for the comfort of a day on her feet, but she slipped them off anyway, and began to sidle into the concourse.

  The door to Brian’s office was this side of the reception desk, which was lucky. She didn’t fancy having to drop to her belly and worm her way along the floor.

  Still, it was a little too close to the receptionist to be entirely comfortable. She slid her feet across the smooth tiles, and this time, when she got to his office, she pressed the door handle as swiftly as she could, darting inside as the door opened. She closed it with infinite care, silently.

  And then she could breathe again. She could hardly believe it wasn’t locked, but then she noticed there was another door at the back of his office, behind the large desk. That, she was sure, would be locked.

  How easy is it to pick a lock, she wondered. On telly they just wiggled a hairpin in the hole. I’ll give it a go, she decided.

  I wish I had some hairpins.

  She leaned back against the door, and studied the office. It was neat, just like Tina’s. They had a lot in common.

  Behind the desk, on the wall, was a selection of framed prints. One was a family shot, and she assumed the smiling woman was his current wife. Next to that was a school photograph, faded but familiar.

  It was like a punch in the stomach. Cath flew into her mind; yes, when she’d looked at the new school photos that Cath had in her sun room, something had started to nag at Penny. It had itched at her for days. School photos!

  The connection was made. Alf had the same photo in his office.

  They surely had been friends, at least school friends, not just connected by upbringing. She’d seen the photos of their families together, yes. But they both remembered the past. And they both kept reminders of that. She was sure of it.

  She stepped closer, staring at it. She hunted for them, trying to picture them as young boys. If the photo had been very old, she didn’t think she would have had a chance. But the class seemed to be of fifteen year olds, and their future adult male faces were forming more clearly.

  There he was, already smiling with a businessman’s sincerity – Brian. He was tall, and he was a good-looking young man. He had heart-breaker written all over him. And next to him, the smaller figure of Alf. He was smiling broadly too. He had an emerging double chin but he wasn’t yet the portly man he presented as now. Their shoulders touched.

  The men were very clearly linked. The past – and the present.

  They were business partners, in a sense, with the garage being their connection right now.

  They didn’t act like friends any longer, and she had another bolt of remembrance when she heard Brian’s voice in her head, speaking disparagingly about other businesses in Glenfield. It drifted back to her. “The old, the chaff, the run-down garages and the shoddy markets, will be swept away,” he had said. The run-down garages.

  And yet, it didn’t all add up. Who was most interested in land in Glenfield? Tina. Tina’s car was the murder weapon. Tina was the one being framed.

  But Alf, too, seemed to carry guilt by association. It was his garage, after all.

  Penny was now convinced that Brian was the murderer. Alf had a reason to kill Brian – not Owen. All Alf wanted was his money back from Owen. Tina had no reason to kill anyone. And Gaz had his dodgy history but he was in Glenfield for other reasons, and had nothing to gain from Owen’s murder; if Owen had worked in some interesting corporate capacity, then maybe. But Gaz had nothing against a dead-beat with no job.

  So she just knew that Brian had done it. She even knew how he had done it – with Tina’s car.

  But – frustratingly – she just didn’t know why he had done it.

  * * * *

  She turned to the neatly-piled paperwork on his desk, trying to open her mind to clues. What made this man tick? What were his ambitions? Think, she instructed herself. What would Cath or Inspector Travis see?

  He liked money and he liked the finer things in life; that was obvious.

  He liked power and he liked winning. There were trophies in a cabinet for squash and for tennis. He had a tediously motivational poster on the wall by the door, carefully placed so that he could see it, not his visitors: the message was meant for him. “Work until your idols become your rivals.” She cringed.

  She began to flick through the piles of paper on the desk. There was a stack of invoices: mostly just stock for the hotel. Tissue paper, replacement glasses, boxes of croissants. Nothing struck her as interesting. There were bank slips, recording payments into the accounts. The latest was dated the previous day. The figures were high, but that was probably normal. What did she know of the hospitality industry?

  High? They ran to many thousands of pounds. She looked further back. More high amounts of cash being paid in.

  Cash.

  Cash.

  When was the last corporate jolly she’d been on? A f
ew years ago, now, down in Cardiff, working on some television miniseries. Had she paid for any drinks? Of course not. It had been added to the tab at the bar. She’d had to pay some stuff off at the end of the stay, on her own credit card, but most of the drink and all of the food was on the production’s bill.

  Certainly, no actual cash had changed hands.

  She turned to another pile of paperwork. This consisted of letters that had come in, and copies of letters that had been sent; liability insurance, fire safety checks, pension schemes for the staff. The everyday details of managing a business, she thought.

  A third pile was simply copies of payments received from the staff, which made her look twice, but they were just apparently duplicate records of the cash that the staff paid for accommodation and food.

  She turned around and stared at the door at the back of the room. A large filing cabinet stood next to it. She tried the handle of the door, wondering if she could send a text to Destiny asking for the loan of a hair pin, but to her surprise the door wasn’t locked, and it opened without a sound.

  It was dark and windowless inside, and she felt around for a switch but there wasn’t one on the inside or outside wall. She opened the door more fully but it seemed like an empty room, just six feet square.

  Disappointed, she returned to the main room, and stared at the filing cabinet.

  The top drawer was labelled “Property” and she knew, immediately, she had to open it. She pulled.

  It was divided into sections and she riffled through them, eagerly. She found a map and recognised Glenfield, with blue areas highlighted. The hotel was marked in blue, and so was a warehouse to the north, one of the shops on the High Street, a small block of flats, and the entire site of industrial units. She was amazed. He owned all this?

  But Alf’s garage was marked in purple.

  He won’t sell, she realised. That was it! Brian owns the land, but Alf won’t give up his garage, no matter how badly it is performing. Now Alf is sinking deeper and deeper into debt – he can’t keep up the security, he’s got not CCTV, and he can’t pay for staff – but he will not sell to Brian. That’s prime land in the centre of town.

  How utterly frustrating for Brian.

  She wondered how long Brian had been chipping away at Alf.

  He clearly wanted to destroy the man. He’d want to frame Alf for the murder, obviously!

  But then why use Tina’s car, not Alf’s? It added a layer of unnecessary complexity and deflected the focus away from Alf, surely. If I was the murderer, she thought, I wouldn’t have done it that way.

  Brian had said that he supported low-cost housing, and that he was behind what Tina was doing. But Penny had seen, with her own eyes, that a housing estate would ruin his view. Why, then, would he say that he supported it? He couldn’t, unless he was an idiot, and idiots didn’t get to be as successful as he was.

  She began to close the top drawer. He must have known it was going to fall through, she thought. Publically, he can support it, and seem all community-minded, because it doesn’t matter to him; he knows it’s not going to happen. He knew, all along, that the housing was never going to be built!

  Brian expressed admiration for businesswomen like Tina but in the end, wasn’t she just another rival?

  She bent to pull out the second drawer down. This one was unlabelled which immediately got her interest.

  And she froze.

  She could hear voices talking outside the room.

  A man’s tone, and then the lighter voice of the receptionist in reply.

  She had nowhere else to go. She darted into the small dark inner room, and pulled the door closed behind her. She pressed against the door, listening.

  Someone came into Brian’s office. Someone sat heavily in the leather office chair, and sighed.

  Someone began to talk on the phone, and that someone was Brian.

  Penny’s knees went weak and she slithered to a crouching position in the pitch-black of the empty room. At first she thought, what if there is no ventilation here?

  Cold sweat prickled her skin. And then she thought … did I close the second drawer of the filing cabinet?

  Chapter Eighteen

  Breathe, breathe, breathe, she told herself. As her eyes adjusted she noticed it was not completely dark in the small room. A rectangular outline of fuzzy light showed around the door. It reassured her that at least she wasn’t going to suffocate.

  She fumbled for her phone, and let the light from the screen illuminate the room. She’d missed a text, and a few keystrokes later discovered that she’d turned off both ringtone and vibrate in error, so she’d missed Destiny’s warning that Brian was on his way back in. At least, that’s what she thought the cryptic “Eagle is returning to nest” text message meant.

  She turned her attention to Brian’s phone conversation. It seemed very dull. “Product” apparently hadn’t been delivered. She was about to tune it out, and send a text to Destiny assuring her that she was okay, when something made her listen more closely.

  “…five years. So I know what I’m doing, all right? He’s got no need to send you after me.”

  Problems with a supplier? She pressed her ear to the door.

  “No.” He was sounding quite irate. “I don’t generally get involved with the product. I deal with more … more of the business aspects. And he knows that.” A pause, then, “Yes, but–”

  A longer pause. She could hear tapping. Was he nervously clicking a pen, or knocking his feet against the table legs?

  There was a squeak and a thump, and now his voice sounded closer. She pressed hard against the door, wondering what she’d do if he tried to come in. Shrink into a corner and hope the darkness hid her – or use all her strength to stop the door opening, and hope he would assume it was jammed, and go away?

  But then, the room was empty, as far as she could tell. Why would he come in?

  He was still talking, and he sounded annoyed. “Well, Ferg can…” He unleashed a torrent of inventive threats that revealed a whole new side to cool, calm Brian Davenport. Penny nearly smiled. “Yes, and then some,” he added darkly. “Right. I’ll move what needs to be moved tonight. No, not me myself. Steven has proven himself. Oh, the other one? Off the scene. No.”

  And that was it. The conversation ended.

  Penny stared, wide-eyed, into the dark. Things fell into place like dominoes. Ferg – she knew that name, and she knew who he was. Ferg Smith, the untouchable local gang lord. So Brian did some business – for him or with him? And Steven was in on it, too?

  Who was “the other one?” Kris or Agnes?

  He was very much mixed up in some dodgy business, she thought.

  And who could be dodgier than Owen? Perhaps he was the “other one.”

  She didn’t have any real evidence that Brian was the murderer but it was as clear as day that he was involved in things that he should not be. Her resolve tightened. She kept listening, hoping for him to leave.

  There was a sigh and a thump, but no obvious clue that he had left the room. She sent a text to Destiny at last: “I am hiding. Please text when you see Brian outside again.” She hoped that was unambiguous.

  Now, all she could do was to wait.

  * * * *

  Destiny replied with “Yeah, not seen him yet tho” and then Penny was alone in the silence. She strained her ears so hard that all she could hear was her own heartbeat and her blood swishing and pounding through her veins.

  She could imagine Steven being involved in illegal dealings. She wondered about Kris and Agnes.

  Wait a minute – what were the staff doing, paying for their accommodation? Steven had confirmed that he worked here because he got it for free. Yet she’d seen the receipts marking that all the staff had paid, in cash, for their bed and board.

  In cash.

  Were they paying?

  Or did it just look as if they were paying…

  And, what had Brian meant by being involved not with the “product” but
with the “business aspects?” She was starting to piece things together a little more, but she knew now that she needed more proof.

  A plan began to formulate in her mind. There was something to be said for total sensory deprivation, she thought. She couldn’t be distracted by anything. She was forced to simply think.

  * * * *

  She must have fallen asleep, or zoned out, or entered some weird meditative state. Now she was sitting with her back to the door, her legs straight out in front of her, and her bottom slowly numbing. She was jerked alert by the sound of Brian’s voice once more.

  “No, I’ll come out,” he was saying, growing fainter. Then there was the sound of his office door closing.

  She stared at her phone, waiting for a confirmatory text from Destiny. Nothing. She started to count to sixty in her head, trying to match the time on her phone, marking out minute by minute.

  “The eagle has landed.”

  I do not think that means what you think it means, Penny thought, and smiled to herself, feeling old. And there’s two films that I bet she hasn’t seen. She texted back. “Okay. Coming out now.”

  She struggled to her feet and stretched, the darkness making her slightly dizzy, as if her body wasn’t entirely sure which way was up. She listened again at the door, just in case the receptionist had some reason to be in Brian’s office.

  Nothing.

  So she pushed down on the handle, slowly, and …

  No, no, no. She pushed and then pulled. She tried it slowly and she tried it quickly. Nothing would give. Was the door on some kind of latch that she hadn’t noticed?

  James Bond would have noticed, she told herself angrily.

  She was locked in.

  She rested her forehead on the door and growled, firing up her phone once more. At least I get a signal in here, she thought.

  She was about to call Destiny, but stopped.

  I cannot involve them further. They are minors, and actually my responsibility in this instance. If anything, I need to do everything I can to downplay their involvement right now.