There was one day when he could hear rain falling outside. The drip had increased to a small stream and he had been able to drink his fill. He didn’t like to think about what would happen if the drip stopped.
As his thirst abated, hunger reasserted itself. There was no food in the room. He had checked several times. In one corner there were wooden crates filled with hard, flat, square things. If he had been familiar with the words, he would have known that they were floor tiles. All he cared about was that they weren’t edible.
Occasionally, a rat or a mouse ventured into the room under the steel door. They sniffed around, looking for food, like him. He lay very still on the mattress and let them come to him, attracted by the smell of his sweat.
One day, when his hunger pangs were fierce enough, he waited until a fat rat had come right up to his face and was sniffing at his lips. Then he struck like a snake, pinning it to the mattress with his small, strong hand. It wriggled and tried to bite him, but he twisted its neck hard, and shuddered as it fell limp in his hand. He used his feet to smash one of the wooden crates to splinters. He took a long, thin splinter and rolled it between the palms of his hands with the tip touching another piece of wood. It took a long time for a spark to form because of the prevailing damp, but he managed it at last.
He skinned the rat roughly with his fingers and roasted it on the end of a stick over the fire. The meat tasted strange and unwholesome, but it was food and it gave him energy. As soon as he was finished, he stamped out the fire until not one spark remained. It was tempting to keep it going for warmth, but every child from the deep forest knew that you did not keep a fire burning in an enclosed space or you would not wake up in the morning.
That night, he lay on the mattress and hugged his body under the blankets. The rats and mice would keep him going for a while, but soon they would get clever. They would associate this room with death and they would start to avoid it.
A tear ran down the side of his face and made his ear feel cold. He missed his parents. He missed his friends. He missed his home. He didn’t understand why this had happened. All he could do was survive until something changed.
Eulalie woke up with the feel of damp concrete under her feet and the smell of charred rat in her nose. It was as though she had been in that cold, dark room with him. No, it was as though she had been him. She had seen what he saw, tasted what he tasted, felt his loneliness and fear.
It was six-thirty in the morning. She phoned the police station, still trembling with fear, and was told that the detective in charge of the child abduction case was Wesley Wright and that he would come on duty at eight. She was also told that Chief Macgregor was currently off-island. He had gone to Antananarivo in Madagascar to follow a lead. He had left by plane the night before and was expected back sometime today.
Eulalie was almost twitching with impatience as the minutes ticked by and the time moved closer to eight. Every now and then, she would stop what she was doing and close her eyes, trying to recapture that feeling of being back in the dream. What could she hear? What could she see? What could she smell?
When the air was still, she could hear water lapping nearby. She could hear the sounds of heavy vehicles – the beeping of trucks reversing. There was a bell that rang intermittently through the night, and the sound of a deep horn blast.
She wrote down everything she remembered. The memories were fading fast, as her dreams often did, but she would record them while she could.
At eight o’clock, she set off on foot for the police station. Manny, the desk sergeant was nowhere to be seen, so she went straight up to Lorelei Belfast.
“I need to see Detective Wright.”
Mrs. Belfast took one look at her face, and whatever retort she had planned died on her lips. “I’ll call him for you now.”
Within minutes, a middle-aged man was shaking her hand and introducing himself as Detective Wesley Wright. He took her through to his office.
“What can I do for you, Ma’am?”
“I have information about the disappearance of the village child, Bibi.” Eulalie sat forward tensely, her hands clasped together.
“Okay, shoot.” Detective Wright opened his notebook to a fresh page and held his pen poised and ready to write.
“He’s being held at the docks. It’s a cold, dark room with a concrete floor. There’s a slit of a window high up. At night he can hear the bell guiding ships into port. There are foghorns, and vehicles loading freight. The room is damp. He struggles to stay warm.”
Detective Wright had been writing down everything she said, but now his pen slowed and stopped.
“Ms. Park, if you don’t mind my asking, how do you know all this? Where are you getting your information from?”
Eulalie’s body jerked with frustration. “That’s not important. What’s important is that this is good information. This is probably the first proper lead you’ve had. You can’t afford to ignore it.”
“I’ll be the judge of that, and I’d be in a much better position to judge if you’d tell me how you know all this.”
“No one has been to see him since he was dropped there by two men about four days ago.” Eulalie spoke faster as though she knew her time were running out. “It’s almost as if they’ve forgotten about him. Or they brought him there to die alone. But he’s not dead yet. He’s drinking water that drips down from the window. That makes me think he is in some kind of underground or basement storage unit. He is catching rats and eating them. I know that sounds unbelievable, but children from the village are taught to hunt. Oh, yes - there are wooden packing crates in the corner. I nearly forgot about that. They contain floor tiles, only he doesn’t know the name for them.”
Detective Wright shook his head. “This doesn’t inspire confidence, Ms. Park. You’re talking like a TV psychic. I’m working this case as hard as I know how, and I don’t have the patience for time-wasters.”
“I’m not a TV psychic.”
“Then tell me how you know all this.”
“I just … okay, listen … if someone comes to you with a tip like this, aren’t you obliged to investigate it?”
“Well …”
“Sure you are. Every tip has to be looked into, no matter how crazy it sounds.”
Detective Wright rubbed his hands over his face. He looked as though he’d had a long day, but it was only nine o’clock.
“That’s the thing, Ms. Park. We get a lot of crazy tips, and we have to prioritize them. We spend more time and energy on the ones that sound legit. You’re sitting here telling me what’s going on inside this kid’s mind. The only way I’m going to take you seriously is if I start suspecting that you had something to do with his abduction. And since you’re my chief’s new favorite person, I’m reluctant to go down that road.”
“Can’t you just check the docks? Look for basement storage units used to store building supplies like tiles. That doesn’t sound so crazy, does it? To me it sounds like quite a likely place for him to be held.”
Detective Wright flipped his notebook shut.
“Sure,” he said. “Sure, Ms. Park. We’ll do that. Thank you for the tip, and I can assure you we will follow up on it.”
Eulalie tried to get her mind back on the Faberge case, but it wasn’t easy. She’d had such good momentum up to now, packing every day with interviews and investigations. She couldn’t afford to let that slide.
If only the dream wouldn’t keep slipping back into her mind. Was it the conversation she’d had with Angel the night before that had sparked it off? More than likely.
She was almost ready to go down to the docks herself to take a look around. She would do it too if she didn’t already know that it would be a wild goose chase. The docks were just too big and busy, with too many warehouses and storage units, both in use and abandoned. It would take the resources of a police force armed with search warrants to do the job properly. She imagined herself wandering around the docks, calling out to Bibi and listening for his resp
onse. Perhaps she could try it late at night when everything was still and quiet.
But that wasn’t enough for her. The police had to investigate this properly, and she intended to make sure they did. Whatever influence she had with Chief Macgregor would be used to the full. She wouldn’t rest until he was on her side and had ordered Detective Wright to conduct a formal search of the docks.
With that in mind, she managed to settle down to work at last.
Normally at this stage of an investigation, when all the primary interviews were done, Eulalie would be looking at loose ends, and deciding who needed to be re-interviewed. So that was what she would do now.
The loose ends were clear enough. This was a multi-faceted case and each part of it had generated its own unanswered questions.
There was the Leonov Corporation and the National Lottery bid. The loose end there was why she had been attacked by three Russian-speaking men, and why Sergei Leonov seemed to know nothing about who had authorized it. There was always the possibility that he was lying, but Eulalie didn’t think so. That meant someone else had hired them.
Then there was Faberge Industries itself, and the peculiar actions of the father-and-son Hugo team. Had it really been a simple case of cleaning up the mess left by their late boss, or was there more to it?
That led her to Jimmy the Knife and Marcel Faberge’s plan to take the anti-aging world by storm. The youth lily wasn’t valuable to anyone, except as a marketing tool. It was hard to see who would benefit from that scheme falling flat. There was no motive for murder there that Eulalie could see.
And what about the horses? It bothered her that someone had been confident that Legs-Alone would not have blood drawn on the morning of the Queen’s Cay race. If the drug testing protocol were really random, that person was running a huge risk by drugging the horse’s water on that day. It was more likely that the perpetrator knew they were safe. Legs-Alone’s name had been removed from the testing pool - Eulalie was convinced of it. That meant someone at the Horseracing Association knew more about this than they had admitted to. She needed to follow up on that.
And finally there was Marcel Faberge’s unorthodox sex life. The only thing to come out of her interviews at Trixie’s Bar was that Marcel Faberge took things a little too far for the comfort of his partners. But what exactly did that mean? What did going too far imply in the world of bondage and discipline? It was a question she should have asked at the time. She had been too ignorant about the world Trixie was describing to her, and unwilling to admit her own ignorance. That wasn’t a mistake she would make again.
She should also touch base with Chief Macgregor and see what progress his detectives had made. She was happy to share her own progress with them. This job was not about solving the case. It was about creating enough reasonable doubt that no prosecutor would be willing to go after Fleur for the murder.
Eulalie found it disconcerting how fast her leads were evaporating. The moment she thought she had found a motive for murder, it dissolved before her eyes. Instead of being bitter rivals, Sergei Leonov and Marcel Faberge were planning a corporate team-up. Instead of a trail of bitter ex-lovers, Marcel Faberge’s sexual partners seemed to have been rather fond of him. And the only person who should have cared about the drugging of Legs-Alone lived in the Middle East and didn’t know one horse from another.
Soon, Fleur would be the last suspect standing. Eulalie would do everything in her power to prevent that.
Chapter 14
According to Billy, the trainer of Legs-Alone, it had been nearly three weeks since the horse had had blood drawn. That increased the probability that it would be chosen for testing on race day, but somehow it wasn’t.
Eulalie could go down to the Horseracing Authority and demand answers, but she preferred the stealth approach. She would rather go in armed with information they wouldn’t expect her to have. She popped across the road and fortified herself with a long Americano from La Petite Patisserie. Then she settled down at her computer to explore the world of horseracing regulations.
It wasn’t easy to tell at first who was responsible for testing the blood of racehorses. The Thoroughbred Association seemed to think it was the Horseracing Authority’s responsibility, and the Horseracing Authority seemed to think the Thoroughbred Association was in charge. A detour to the website of the Sport & Recreation Department of the Governor’s Office, was more enlightening. The Horseracing Authority was responsible for scheduling and conducting the blood draws. The blood was then couriered by a security company to a laboratory at the Thoroughbred Association where it was tested.
The part that interested Eulalie the most was the scheduling, and that was carried out by the Horseracing Authority. Someone had known that Legs-Alone would not be tested that morning despite being due, which meant that person must have a friend in the scheduling department.
Prince William Island was a popular place for the breeding, training, and racing of horses. Something about the climate or the conditions made it a horse-friendly setting. But it would always be a small island, meaning that the organizations in charge were small too. Eulalie could turn up only five people who could possibly have influence over the scheduling of the doping tests. One of them had to be corrupt. It would help to know in advance which one it was.
As the level of her Americano dipped lower, she clicked on her credit-control software and did a deep dive into the finances of the five possible suspects. It wasn’t unusual for people to have a few dings on their credit record. In the current economic climate, most people had the odd late payment or unpaid overdraft on their records. Even a repossessed car or default judgment wasn’t that unusual. Eulalie was looking for something more - a pattern of erratic financial behavior that could leave someone desperate enough to consider an offer of bribery. It didn’t take her long to find a candidate.
Eliza Blackman was a low-level administrator in the offices of the Horseracing Authority. Eulalie had been looking for someone with more seniority, but reminded herself that administrators often had more access to confidential files than people realized. Six weeks earlier, Eliza Blackman had been in dire financial straits. She had missed three payments on her bond, and the bank was starting to make threatening noises about repossessing her home. She hadn’t met the minimum payment on her credit card for months, and had several store cards that were overdue too.
Eulalie saw she had two children at Queen’s Town Preparatory School. It was a public school, so the parents didn’t pay fees as such, but the school charged a monthly development levy that went towards textbooks and upgrading the grounds. She hadn’t paid her levy in nearly a year. The school didn’t have the power to exclude children for financial reasons, but they could make her life uncomfortable.
About a month ago, Eliza Blackman had received a substantial injection of cash. It no sooner touched down in her bank account than it was being used to pay off various debts. Now her bond payments were up to date, her store cards had been paid off, her credit card balance was down to zero, and the school had received several months’ worth of levy payments all in one go. It didn’t take a genius to flag this as suspicious.
It also didn’t take a genius to figure out how Ms. Blackman had got herself into trouble in the first place. She was an online gambler. Blackjack was her game, but she also dabbled in slots and Texas HoldEm.
After her windfall of cash, she had gone nearly a month without gambling. But three days ago, she had given in to temptation. Eulalie could see a payment of $35.00 from Eliza Blackman’s account to a company called WinMillions. She tried to remain detached, but it frustrated her to see someone messing up their life, especially when there were children involved. Gambling was an addiction, just like drugs and alcohol.
Eliza Blackman would soon have other things to worry about.
Eulalie expected the headquarters of the Horseracing Authority to be located on Queen’s Cay, along with everything else horse-related, but it turned out to be right there in Queen’s Town
. That was a bonus, and would cut her travelling time down to a few minutes on the Vespa.
The Horseracing Authority had a Dockside address. The days when living or working near the docks meant you had fallen on hard times were over. It was now one of the smartest addresses in Queen’s Town, both for residents and business-owners. The newest trend was multi-use buildings, such as old warehouses that had been repurposed as offices, apartments, and shopping malls.
The Horseracing Authority was housed in one of these. The ground floor featured a retro diner, an artisanal grocery store, and a dress shop. Above that were offices, and the top three floors were taken up by small, architect-designed apartments.
A brass plaque in the lobby told her that the Horseracing Authority was on the second floor. She took the elevator up.
“You must be the new girl from the feed company,” said a woman as she walked up to the information desk. “If you give me the invoice to sign, we’ll take delivery down in the basement.”
“I’m not from the feed company.” Eulalie put her business card on the counter. I’m a private investigator looking into the death of Marcel Faberge. I’d like to speak to Eliza Blackman, please.”
“You must mean her supervisor, Mr. Chang. If you wait a moment, I’ll call him for you.”
“I don’t mean Mr. Chang. It’s Ms. Blackman I need to speak to.”
“But she’s quite junior.” The clerk couldn’t seem to wrap her head around this. “She won’t be able to answer your questions.”
“That’s fine. She has special knowledge of a situation I’m investigating. Is she available?”
“Of course, of course.”
While Eliza Blackman was being summoned, Eulalie took the opportunity to have a look around. There were photographs of the president of the Horseracing Authority shaking hands with horse-owning celebrities. Eulalie even recognized some of them. No doubt, Fleur would recognize many more. Horse-racing attracted the rich and famous. People like Fleur and her parents were practically raised on horseback. It was a sign of having come from old money.
The Complete H-Series of The Eulalie Park Mysteries Page 13