Writing up the report for Rashford was necessary but not particularly thrilling, and I gave a yawn wide enough to make my jaw crack.
“Stay up too late, did we?” Stephen said, looking amused as he glanced my way.
“Actually, yeah. I was on a call with Sam till late, and there may have been wine involved,” I chuckled.
“Well, you’re not wearing sunglasses, so you can’t have hit the bottle too hard,” he said, and it felt good to have him teasing me again.
“Hey, I can hold my drinks,” I said.
“Yeah, you can hold your drinks about as well as a baby with buttery hands.”
I stared at him for a minute before I started laughing, shaking my head at his ridiculousness.
“You’re an idiot.”
“Yep,” he said, grinning proudly.
I was still chuckling when my phone rang, though I got my game-face back on pretty quickly when I saw who was calling.
“What is it?” Stephen asked, immediately alert.
“It’s Phil.”
I picked up the call and, after taking a breath to settle myself, put the phone to my ear.
“Hey Dee!” he said, as obnoxiously cheerful as ever.
“Phil, hi,” I said, trying to put warmth into my voice even though I wasn’t feeling it right now.
When it was just Phil and me, it had felt fairly easy to relax into talking like we used to, swapping comments back and forth about everything under the sun. But now, with me sitting at my desk in Hewford police station with my new best mate beside me, it was harder to pretend to be the reckless but lost twenty-year-old that Phil remembered me as.
But I forced myself to focus on the conversation, reminding myself how important this was, and managed to make a fairly good show of it, I thought. Phil rang off before long, claiming that a customer was demanding him, though I wasn’t sure I believed him. I’d wondered about the phone call that had him running off when I’d seen him at the garage, musing about who had been on the other end of the line and what had been so crucially important that he had to drop everything to attend to it. My overactive imagination could conjure up at least a few ideas.
“Well, what did he say?”
I hummed, frowning at my phone for a moment before I made myself put it down. I picked up my coffee cup, only to find that I’d already drunk all of it and set it back on its coaster.
“He said he kept some of my dad’s stuff,” I said finally.
“What, really? For, like, a decade? Wow.”
“Aye. It’s up in his loft, and he said I could come and pick it up.” I rubbed a hand over my head and couldn’t figure out why I was feeling quite so uneasy.
“I can come with you if you want?” Stephen suggested. When I looked up, I found his expression full of hesitant concern along with sympathy, and I gave him a grateful smile.
“I don’t know if that’s the best idea, but ta.”
“I could just be a good mate who’s helping you move your dad’s things. How much did this Phil guy say there was?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say. Probably not enough that I need to rope in a friend, though I appreciate it, Steph. He’ll probably be more likely to say something useful for the case if it’s just me and him, right?”
“Yeah, probably,” he conceded with a sigh, though he didn’t look happy about it.
I patted him on the shoulder, grateful for his support. I’d said some seriously unkind things to him not so long ago, and I was reminded how thankful I was that he’d accepted my apology so quickly and that he didn’t hold a grudge. I’d been damned lucky to get put with him as my partner when I arrived, even if we did get off to something of a rocky start.
“So what d’you want me to do while you’re nosing around in a dusty loft?” he asked wryly.
“I mean, this report needs finishing up, but I’ll do that before I go,” I said, checking my watch and finding that it was still fairly early.
It was earlier than I would’ve expected for Phil to be up, too, but he probably had to be more of an early bird now that he owned the garage compared to when he was an unemployed teenager.
“I wanted to get a bit of research done on Matt Hartley, actually. I don’t know if there’s much of anything out there but that bloke- he seems like someone worth keeping an eye on, you know what I mean?”
“I’m assuming it’s the kind of eye you keep on the poisonous spider that just wandered into your house, right?”
“Aye, alright, if you want to be dramatic.” I rolled my eyes but quirked a smile, regardless.
The report for the superintendent didn’t take long to finish up, so we were able to have lunch together before I needed to leave for Phil’s. He’d offered for me to go over anytime after midday, but I wanted to get it out of the way before the day was too far gone. I had a late enough night the previous day, and I was itching for a run this evening. No doubt after sifting through my dad’s things, I’d be jonesing even harder for some exercise to take the edge off of my busy mind.
“I’d better be heading off,” I said, checking my watch.
I had a new tiny microphone fitted by one of the folks in tech, and I briefly brushed it with my fingers, checking that it was still there and securely held in place. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than the wire coming loose and falling out of my shirt in front of Phil.
But that wasn’t going to happen, I told myself firmly as I finished off the last gulp of my coffee and got to my feet.
“Let me know how it goes, yeah?” he said, looking up at me with obvious concern.
“It’ll be fine.” The smile on my face felt tight, but Stephen seemed to accept it, and I headed out of the office alone.
The rain that’d come down so incessantly yesterday had let up, and the sky was a pristine, icy blue. It’d be a cold, clear night this evening, I reckoned, with the stars fully out and the moon full. There’d be a heavy frost on the ground by tomorrow morning, no doubt, but the salty grit on the pavements would keep them clear and safe for running.
Despite the persistent chill, I put the car’s window down a fraction and let the cool freshness in. Having the car’s heating on so much left the inside feeling stuffy and stale, and it felt good to feel a natural breeze raising the hair on my arms, rather than the artificial blasting of the car’s heating vents.
It wasn’t a long drive over to Phil’s place, and I pulled up outside, winding the window up before I stepped out. My feelings about seeing some of my dad’s old things again were complicated, and my stomach felt tight as I walked up to Phil’s front door. Still, the drive over had blown away the cobwebs, and I remained in a hopeful mood after making up with Stephen this morning, so it wasn’t too hard to summon a smile when Phil opened the door.
“Dee! You’re early, mate, but come on in. You always were one for turning up first,” he said, teasing. I came into the dim hallways and made to unlace my shoes, but Phil waved a hand at me. “Nah, don’t bother, leave ‘em on. I had dark carpets put down in this place for a reason,” he said brightly, laughing at his own words.
As he turned to lead the way into the house, I touched the wire at my chest to reassure myself it was still there and then dropped my hand, consciously reminding myself not to draw attention to it. Phil might be surprisingly trusting of me, but he’d moved in suspicious circles his whole life and was more observant than most people would give him credit for.
I had no desire to underestimate him and had triple checked my appearance before I came over here to make sure I looked like a smart-casual accountant and not like a police officer, including changing my clunky, black work boots for some chicer Oxford brogues that Stephen had leant me. His feet were a bit bigger than mine, but two pairs of socks had sorted that out.
“Tea? Coffee? Something stronger?” Phil said, rattling off the questions. He turned to give me a smirk and a raised eyebrow at the last one. “It’s whisky that’s your poison, right?”
“Ah, I’m more of a wine guy
these days,” I said honestly.
“Yeah? Huh.” He blinked, looking surprised.
As a teenager, I’d repeatedly insisted to my dad and friends alike that I liked whisky, but I’d never really been able to stand the stuff, nor the other stronger drinks my dad favoured like port and brandy. I reckoned now that all that smoking he’d done over the years had worn down his taste buds, making him prefer things with a strong taste. After he died, I’d realised that my dad had shaped and sometimes limited a lot of the things I thought I’d liked, foods, music, even books, and I’d branched out a lot.
I wondered whether it had been a good idea to tell Phil that, though. He had an idea of me in his head, and I didn’t want him to think that I’d changed beyond recognition since he’d known me, even if that was the truth of it. If he didn’t feel like he knew me, he wouldn’t trust me.
Still, he recovered quickly and pulled out a bottle of middling quality Rioja that he said his on-and-off girlfriend liked, pouring me a generous glassful.
“You’ll probably need that after you’re done with this,” he said, giving me a look that was soft around the eyes as he gestured up towards the loft.
I cleared my throat. “Aye, most likely,” I said.
We chatted back and forth for a while, with Phil sipping his beer, but he kept glancing at his phone, seemingly distracted.
“If there’s somewhere you need to be…?” I said after his phone beeped, and he spent a minute frowning at it. He looked up and gave what was clearly a forced laugh.
“No, no, it’s fine. Just a little side venture I’ve got going on.” He gave me a smirk and a wink in case it wasn’t evidently obvious that he was talking about something the wrong of legal.
“How’s your little venture going?” I asked, keeping my face neutral and my voice steady as if I was only mildly interested.
“Eh.” He grimaced, tilting his hand back and forth in a ‘so so’ motion.
“That’s the way of it sometimes,” I said with a nod like I knew exactly what he meant.
“Yeah, you put it all on the line and- and-” he struggled for an appropriate analogy, “you really hope there’s gonna be something on the end when you reel it back in!”
I laughed like he wanted me to. “Aye, I hear you, mate. Tough world out there, huh? But you’re doing pretty nicely with your garage and all.”
“Yeah, mustn’t grumble. When we were nineteen, bet you never would’ve guessed it’d be me having my own business an’ all, right?” he said with a short laugh.
“I don’t know about that. You’ve always had drive, ambition, all that.”
“Yeah, guess I’m a greedy sod after all, always wanting to be a big hitter,” he said, giving a shake of his head before he swallowed down the dregs of his beer.
I wanted to push the conversation further now that we were finally talking about his business, but his phone beeped again, and he set his empty beer can down to look at it. I hadn’t got halfway through my glass of wine, not wanting to let the alcohol affect my judgement, but I took a small sip as I waited for him to be done.
I tried to look at the screen of his phone upside down, but he’d put a privacy screen on it. The tacky bit of plastic was peeling at the corners and probably cost no more than a quid off Amazon, but it did the job of preventing me from seeing his phone from an angle. I turned my attention to my own phone before he could catch me looking and resisted the urge to sigh.
“Alrighty,” he said, finally finishing texting a response on his phone and tucking it into his trackie pocket. “Let’s go see what we’ve got, yeah?”
“Sure,” I said.
The effort of focusing on my conversation with Phil, and being very careful with every word I said, was wearing on me. I was looking forward to being done with it, but there was no way I was leaving before I’d seen my dad’s possessions.
“I honestly can’t believe you kept them all these years,” I said as I followed Phil down the hall. The loft needed a step ladder fetching from the cubby under the stairs, and I helped him carry it up the narrow stairs.
“You know how it is with stuff you stick in the loft,” he said with an easy shrug.
“I have an apartment, mate, so not really,” I said, and he laughed. He focused for a moment on setting up the ladder on the upstairs landing before he answered.
“Alright then, smartass. What happens is you toss a load of things up there that you don’t know what to do with, and then they get forgotten for a decade and covered in a foot of dust. You probably should have brought a bandana or something with you, a ski mask, maybe.”
“Just as long as there’s no asbestos,” I said darkly.
“Can’t promise anything,” he said cheerfully before heading up the rickety ladder while I held the base. He opened up the hatch and heaved himself up, flicking on the light up there.
I followed him up the ladder, being careful not to take a tumble, and shifted myself up into the cramped loft space.
“Crikey, bit chilly,” I said with a shudder. Those scientists might’ve said that heat rises, but it certainly hadn’t gotten up here into the loft, where I could practically see my breath misting on the air.
“We got some properly good insulation put in,” Phil said proudly, and I gave a grunt of acknowledgement.
Phil hadn’t been joking about the dust, which swirled in front of the bare, hanging lightbulb in a cloud thick enough that I could just about taste it in the back of my throat. It got worse as Phil went carelessly searching around, shifting boxes out of the way and shuffling around the small space.
“We’re not going to fall through the ceiling, are we?” I said, looking down at the dodgy loft floor.
“Don’t go too far into the corners, and you’ll be fine,” he assured me, still digging through dust-covered boxes. He unearthed a bunch of Christmas stuff as well as a bin bag of old toys from when he was a kid before he managed to dig out my dad’s things.
“Found it?” I asked.
“Sure have. Here y’are, mate.” He nodded towards the couple of unassuming cardboard boxes he’d dragged up and then looked at me, apparently uncertain. “Do you want to take them downstairs, like, or I can leave you to it up here?”
“Nah, let’s take them down. Any more of this dust, and I’ll start coughing up hairballs or something.”
He laughed at that, and we got ourselves and the boxes down the ladder without breaking anything. Both boxes weighed a fair bit, and he helped me carry them down to the living room, where we set them down. He cleared his throat and rubbed his runny nose on his sleeve before he gave me a nod.
“I’ll make us some tea then, yeah?”
He headed out before I could give an answer, and I was glad to be given a minute to look at the boxes by myself. My throat and eyes felt clogged with all the dust, but I ignored them as I knelt on the floor in front of the first box.
I wished that I could put this off for a little while, or at least look at the boxes’ content in the comfort of my own home. Time was of the essence, though, with this case hanging over mine and Stephen’s heads and, remote as the possibility might be, I couldn’t ignore the chance that there was something in these boxes that’d help us. Something on Matt, perhaps, that’d give us a better understanding of the guy, or some piece of concrete proof that would show what dad had really been up to all through my teenage years.
Most likely, it would be nothing more exciting than some old photographs and a collection of battered vinyls, and I tried to put aside the memories that came rushing back as I thought about what my dad might’ve left behind. I could picture the pinstriped shirts he’d wear when he wanted to look nice and the record player he’d kept so well-cared for in the living room, though no doubt Phil had sold that off at the time of my dad’s death.
I’d told him that I just wanted the house cleared and sold off and that anything he could sell, he was welcome to. Whatever was in this box would be the unsellable dregs, I supposed, or the sort of deeply p
ersonal things that were priceless in another way. My eyes stung, and not from the dust this time. I wished briefly that Sam or Stephen were here, but really I needed to do this alone.
After taking a long swallow from the wine glass I’d left on the table, I opened the box flaps and got started.
Fourteen
The first box revealed much of what I’d expected, including dusty clothes, an album of baby pictures that made my heart ache, a small, leather-bound book, and a tin of my dad’s more expensive cigarettes. My hands itched to open the little metal box and let the memories back in for a while, but I made myself press on, working my way through the box’s contents until I reached the bottom.
Phil came back before I was done with the second box, and I gave him only a brief nod when he handed me a cup of tea.
“You alright, Dee?”
“Fine,” I said, taking a sip of tea. It got rid of the dry, sticky feeling all that dust had left in the back of my throat, and I took another drink before setting it back down.
“What’ve you found? I can’t for the life of me remember what I put in there.” He scratched his head, coming forwards to look over the bits and pieces I’d already unpacked from the bag. “Blimey, look at that,” he said, looking at my dad’s folded-up wedding suit.
I swallowed thickly and left him looking things over while I dug through the last items in the second box. Whilst a strong part of me was looking forward to being done with this, the detective side was disappointed that there’d been nothing so far that’d help us in the case. Later, I could comb through the photo album and double-check the other things to make sure there was nothing of import hidden away, but it all looked discouragingly innocuous so far. I flicked briefly through the red leather book full of addresses before I set it back down.
Tooth and Claw Page 15
