Sealfinger (Sam Applewhite Book 1)

by Heide Goody

  “She secure, Wayne?” asked Jimmy MacIntyre, entering the building with Jacinda Frost at his side.

  “Yes, mate,” said the stinking injured man. Wayne had a look on his face, halfway between teeth-gritted determination and dreamy delirium. Sam wondered if it was an effort for him just to remain upright.

  Jacinda’s resting bitch face occasionally broke out in fleeting moments of panic and anger. She definitely wasn’t happy with this situation.

  Jimmy’s face, by comparison, bore almost no emotion at all.

  Sam couldn’t quite work out the dynamic here, or the circumstances which had led them to kidnap her. But given that only one of them seemed to be regretting the situation, she guessed she was in a lot of danger.

  “Jacinda. Jimmy,” she nodded, putting on as brave a tone as she dared. “Nice to see you both. Off to the awards ceremony tonight?”

  Jacinda tried to pretend she wasn’t there and turned to Jimmy. She opened her mouth to speak, stopped, held up a finger for silence and went to the home hub smart speaker on her desk. She unplugged it. Only then did she speak to Jimmy.

  “Find out what she knows and then…” She made a mostly incomprehensible but unsubtle series of gestures that Sam guessed added up to a cowardly instruction to have Sam killed.

  “You want to know what I know?” said Sam. “Maybe I’ve got questions too.”

  “Shut up,” said Jimmy.

  “And I understand most of it.”

  “Shut up.”

  She fixed him with a look. “You brought me here alive. I’m not worth any ransom money. My dad’s skint and my rich boyfriend left me. Well – I left him. It was sort of mutual, I think. Point is, you want me to talk.”

  Jacinda put a silencing hand against Jimmy’s chest. “Talk, then.”

  Sam tried to line up the pieces of the puzzle in her mind. She didn’t want to get any of them wrong. If they thought she knew everything, though it might mean she was in more danger, it would give her some dominance over them. If they thought she held all the cards…

  “You moved the headstones in Welton le Marsh. That’s what this is all about.”

  She looked from one to the other. No flickers of denial.

  “You had to make your own plans, change things to save your building project?” She modulated the tone of her voice at the last moment, making it more of a statement than a question. “What was it?” She thought about what she had seen beyond the rejigged boundary of the graveyard. “Was your road not wide enough?”

  “She’s dead clever, in’t she?” said Wayne.

  “Shut up, Wayne,” said Jimmy and Jacinda as one.

  “Is that it?” said Sam. “Your road wasn’t wide enough?” She almost laughed. “Is that it? What? Didn’t it meet the customer’s specifications, or the planning regulations or something?”

  “You don’t have to say it like that,” said Jacinda.

  “Like what?” retorted Sam, channelling some of her fear into anger. “Like, it’s the stupidest bloody reason for killing a woman I’ve ever heard?” She looked from one to another to another. And, with that, the floodgates opened. Pure emotional, whistling fury, poured through her. “You did! You killed Wendy Skipworth! You murdered a defenceless woman because she happened to notice that you were playing silly buggers in the graveyard! You went to her house and … and…”

  She would have whirled on each of them, arms outstretched in rage, if she wasn’t actually tied to an office chair.

  “What did you do? Which of you did it?”

  Before she could remember herself, remember she wasn’t the one who had been kidnapped, Jacinda half-raised a hand to point to Wayne.

  Sam glared at him. “Fucking monster.”

  Wayne blinked (or maybe winked – he only had the one eye) and looked like a kicked puppy: shocked, bewildered, distraught. “I didn’t mean to. She surprised me and I only gave her a tap.”

  “A tap?”

  “But Jimmy said—”

  “Enough,” said Jimmy.

  “And we tried to do the right thing by her,” Wayne continued. “We took her out of the ghost train and put her in that big oven.”

  “Enough!” barked Jimmy.

  Sam was starting to get the measure of them now. Jacinda was the boss, the company owner, notionally in charge. Wayne was the muscle – all brawn, no brain, and with only fifty percent of the normal number of legs and eyes. But Jimmy… Jimmy was the will of the group, the driving force. If they were caught and tried one day, he would plead he was only doing what Jacinda told him and that all the grisly deeds had been carried out by Wayne. But without him, none of this would have happened.

  “We’re the ones asking questions here,” he said.

  “I think I’ve heard enough anyway,” Sam sneered.

  “She knows too much,” said Jacinda. “What are we waiting for?” She put her hands on the shotgun lying broken open on the office desk. Beneath it were maps and plans. Even from this angle, Sam could see Shore View in cross-hatched yellow, further similar sites also drawn in up and down the coast.

  “Obviously she knows too much,” said Jimmy. “Point is, who else knows?”

  “Like I’d tell you,” she said.

  Jimmy rushed forward and, with a speed she did not expect, slapped her hard across the face. She heard her own teeth clack together like the roll of dice. She was stunned, mentally and physically, and it took far too long for the pain to arrive. It came slowly, like a huge locomotive, signalling its arrival with distant whistle toots. But when the pain train arrived at Sam Station, it was enormous and overwhelming.

  “Jesus,” she whimpered and wished she had the saliva to spit. Her mouth had dried in an instant.

  “Who fucking knows?” Jimmy yelled.

  Sam blinked tears and looked past him at Jacinda, wondering what the woman would make of the man’s sudden violence. Shit. There was excitement gleaming in Jacinda’s eyes, evil vicarious excitement. The woman was a bloody psycho. For the first time, Sam happily wished death on all three of them.

  “What about your weird friend from the beach?” said Jimmy. “You tell her?”

  “Delia?” Sam shook her head. “Just a business contact.”

  “Your dad.”

  Sam forced a mirthless laugh. “He’s senile. Doesn’t know what day it is.”

  “That’s not what you said before.”

  “I lied,” she growled, finding some old fire, and spit to wet her whistle. “It’s a nice lie, to pretend everything’s okay.”

  “She’s told no one,” said Jacinda.

  “What about work colleagues?” said Jimmy.

  Jacinda grunted. “I don’t know if anyone else works at that office.”

  Sam shook her head automatically.

  “Right,” said Jimmy, then hesitated. “Doug. There’s a Doug.”

  “Doug Fredericks,” said Sam.

  “You tell him anything?”

  Sam looked up at him and realised the vision in her left eye, just above where he’d struck her, was blurry. She shrugged. “Yeah. I tell Doug pretty much everything.”

  Jimmy spun away from her, swearing. “Shit. Shit shit shit!”

  “What’s the matter?” said the dumb oaf, Wayne.

  Jimmy, hatred etched into every line of expression, pointed a finger at Sam. “You’d better not be fucking lying, sweetheart.”

  She sighed and tried to work her throbbing jaw. “I’m not. I showed him the shoe.”

  “Have you got my Yeezys?” said Wayne.

  “I showed him the shoe. I shared my theory. I told him about Edith Vamplew and other names on the graves.” This was all remarkably close to the truth. She saw no reason to mention Doug Fredericks was a cactus.

  “Fuck!” said Jimmy. “Then we’re screwed.”

  “No,” said Jacinda with greater calm. “You picked up this bitch while she was looking at the graves. At the point when she realised you’d moved them.”

  “On your instructions,” s
aid Jimmy.

  “When she realised you’d moved them. She hasn’t told this Doug character the whole story. She didn’t even know the whole story herself until you helpfully filled in the blanks.”

  Jimmy was silent for a moment or two. “He might not know anything at all, really.”

  “We could question him,” said Jacinda.

  Jimmy moved towards Sam. She flinched, expecting another assault. He didn’t hit her. Instead, he went through her pockets and, from her jacket, took her office keys.

  “What are you going to do?” said Jacinda.

  “You stay here,” he said to Wayne. “Don’t let her move.”

  “Sure thing, Jimmy,” said Wayne.

  Jimmy turned to Jacinda. “I’ll go speak to this Doug Fredericks, pretend I’m a prospective client or an old friend. I’m good with people.”

  Jacinda snorted at that.

  “I’ll be subtle,” he insisted. “Keep her here and alive until I know what’s what.”

  “I have an awards ceremony and an award to pick up soon,” said Jacinda, as though that somehow mattered in the scheme of things.

  “Oh, I’m sure Cinderella can go to the ball,” said Jimmy bitterly. “Let me check out the lay of the land and then – only then – will we deal with her.”

  Sam didn’t bother to ask what ‘deal with her’ meant. It was all perfectly clear. She had as long as it took for Jimmy to work out that Doug Fredericks was a cactus and then she was dead.

  62

  Jimmy drove into Skegness and parked up on the broad sweep of pavement outside the DefCon4 office. It was just a doorway between a café and a tattoo parlour.

  “Easy,” Jimmy told himself. “Go in. Genial chat. Ask a few questions and—”

  There was a rap on the window. It was that copper from the StoreWatch, the one with a seal bite on his hand. Hackett. Sergeant Cesar Hackett. Jimmy cracked the window. “Hi.”

  “This your van?” Cesar asked.

  Jimmy held himself back from any sarcastic retort about him clearly sitting in its driving seat. “Yes.”

  “You’ve had a prang,” said Cesar, pointing at the wheel arch that still scraped on the wheel.

  “Ah, yes. I’m off to get that fixed in a short while.”

  Cesar looked down at the wheel, then peered in through the window, taking in the van’s interior. Jimmy had the sinking feeling he was about to be busted. He wasn’t sure what the cop had picked up on, but something had caught his interest. Could he take out a police officer as well? It would be a lot harder to get away with.

  “It’s your lucky day,” said Cesar.

  “Sorry?”

  “I see you’ve got nothing in your van that could pull the bodywork away from the wheel. It’s making quite a noise when you drive along, did you know that?”

  “Yes, I was aware.”

  “Well it just so happens that I have the very thing.” He pulled a baton from his side. “I bought my own off the internet because it looked better than the ones we get issued with. It’s made from aluminium, see?”

  Jimmy could see he was expected to admire Cesar’s baton. It wasn’t the way he’d expected things to go, but he could roll with it. He reached through the window and rapped it with his knuckles. “Yeah. Quality.”

  “Allow me,” said Cesar. He bent down to the wheel, inserted his baton under the arch and levered upwards, intending to bend the crumpled metal away from the wheel. The baton snapped in half.

  Cesar looked crestfallen but tried to put on a brave face. “Ah. Hmmm.”

  Jimmy climbed out of the van. “Well, look at it this way, mate. Better you tested it before you tried to use it on some villain, yeah?”

  Cesar straightened. “You’re right. Yes. Thank you. I’ll leave you to it then.” He picked up the two halves of the baton and sauntered off.

  Jimmy went to the office door and tried it. It was shut, locked. Jimmy tried the bell. It rang, but there was no reply.

  Nobody in. Time for a rethink. Jimmy looked at the café. Yes. He’d sit in there with a cup of tea and watch the entrance to DefCon4 until Doug came back or came out. He’d find a way to casually bump into him on the street. That would work.

  63

  Wayne sat in a folding chair opposite Sam. They faced each other directly. She watched him. She couldn’t be sure what he was watching, whether he even remembered she was there. He was burbling quietly to himself. Possibly semi-delirious from his injuries. His missing foot had been replaced with something that looked like one of the little fences that were sometimes put round trees in a park. It had been squashed out of shape, and a mass of dirty bandages and black-brown lumps squeezed through the gaps. What had happened to his eye? Whatever it was looked bad, as there were rotten-looking fluids crusted on the bandages sagging from his face. He was a fat bloke anyway, but his whole body had a jaundiced and bloated quality, like something that had been dead in a river for weeks. He didn’t look well. He looked barely alive.

  Off to Sam’s side, Jacinda was still in the room, sitting at her desk, working on a document. Presumably it was her acceptance speech for the award she was so certain she was about to win.

  “Hey, Wayne,” said Sam quietly.

  His head snapped up, a surprised look on his face. “Hi!”

  “I really liked that shoe of yours. Yeezys, right?”

  Wayne grinned at her. “Yeah! You’ve got the other one.”

  “I have.”

  “I really want it back.”

  Sam nodded enthusiastically. “Why are they so special?”

  Wayne shrugged as if it was really obvious. “They’re like a collectors’ item. Kanye designed them. Not easy to get hold of.”

  “Ah, nice. I had no idea. I would love nothing more than to re-unite you with your lost Yeezy.”

  He nodded, his head bouncing. The man looked so sickly she wouldn’t have been surprised if it rolled off its rotten mounting and fell to the floor.

  “Let’s have a think about how we could make that happen,” she said.

  “I’m getting a bionic eye soon though.”

  “Uh-huh.” Sam didn’t know what to say to that. He clearly wasn’t orbiting this particular planet right now. Sam weighed the likelihood of Wayne being a biddable ally versus the likelihood of him keeling over unconscious at any moment. He was obviously built like an ox to have got this far.

  “I’m really good at I-Spy,” he said.

  “Oh. Right.”

  Sam considered her needs. She was tied to a chair, although if she was left unsupervised for any length of time, she reckoned she could loosen those bungees enough to hobble away and find something to cut the cable ties. She needed to know where they were. The way they’d been talking, it was somewhere remote, but it wasn’t that far out of Skegness. What about phone or internet access? Maybe Jacinda’s desk had something.

  “How about you start?” Sam said. “It’s pretty boring in here though. Do something you can see out of the window.”

  Wayne’s brow knotted in thought. “Yeah but ... but how will you guess it?”

  “Let’s see how smart I really am,” said Sam. “Go on, let’s give it a try.”

  * * *

  Jimmy was fifteen minutes into a phone call with DefCon4’s unhelpful phone line.

  “For purchasing, press one,” said the electronic voice. “For contracts renewable, press two. For contracts foreclosing, press three. To hear about our Y2K coverage package, press four.”

  Jimmy stabbed at the asterisk and zero.

  “You have made an incorrect selection,” said the voice. “For purchasing, press one…”

  He gritted his teeth at the thing. “I don’t want any of them. I just want to speak to Doug Fredericks.”

  “No joy?” said the woman at the counter. “Another pot of tea.”

  Jimmy looked at his empty cup. He was awash with the stuff, but he needed to keep his spot at the only table with a clear view of the doorway to DefCon4.

  “You
could do with a book to read, the amount of time you’ve been sitting there,” said the woman.

  “Not sure I’ve got the time to read,” said Jimmy. He didn’t want to engage in conversation. People expected you to look at them while you were chatting and he knew he couldn’t afford to miss anyone leaving or arriving at the office.

  “Oh, we should all make time for reading,” said the woman. “Although I need to be careful what I read while I’m writing my play. I read a Dan Brown novel while I was working on one of the scenes and would you believe I found myself with a subplot about the Knights Templar?”

  Jimmy didn’t respond, hoping she would take the hint. He pressed two on his phone.

  “You are through to the contracts renewable menu. If you have a two-year contract press one. If you have a one year contract press two…”

  “A lot of people want to know what my play’s about,” the woman continued as she brought a pot of tea over.

  Jimmy willed himself to be silent to ignore her but a stubbornly polite “Uh-huh” slipped out.

  “All I’m prepared to say is that it’s going to be the one play that everyone will love. It crosses genres, you see.”

  Jimmy didn’t see. What’s more, he didn’t want to. He continued to stare at the doorway, the phone pressed to his ear.

  “If you don’t know who your account manager is, press seven.”

  “Of course, when they press me about what kind of play it is,” said the woman, “I’m going to suggest that it belongs in every genre. It’s got dragons for the fantasy fans, big guns for anyone who likes military stories, and I’ve started to realise that it’s a multi-generational family saga as well, so it would make an excellent TV adaptation. Although I don’t watch that kind of thing myself.”

  “Do you know Doug who works next door?” Jimmy asked. He wanted to shut her up as much as anything else.

  “Oh Doug. Mmm, yeah. Been there for years.”

  “Any idea what sort of hours he keeps? Maybe it’s too late in the day to catch him?”