Doggerland (Sam Applewhite Book 2)

by Heide Goody

  Sam gave a vague wave in reply, dumped the rubbish in the site bins and went inside to talk to the manager, Chesney Trout. As she crossed the car park, a dark Lexus swung out in front of her and fishtailed towards the road, spraying gravel as it went.

  10

  The Lexus might be a large car, but it responded to Greg’s touch like the hot young thing it was. It was childish to be sure, but he smiled at the woman’s surprised face as he swung past her. Doing community service was demeaning enough, but having it overseen by some unqualified clipboard-warrior from a nameless corporation made it infinitely worse. As punishments went he’d take his chances with prison next time.

  It had been a travesty of justice anyway. He, a respected businessman, dragged up before the courts for simply seeking what had been owed to him. That stupid woman not understanding the difference between VAT inclusive and VAT exclusive building quotes; not understanding that building work sometimes hit snags and costs went up; not having the foresight to put enough money aside to cover the increased cost of the build. And the prosecution somehow managing to dress his behaviour as ‘demanding money with menaces’.

  That reminded him. Time to make a house call.

  He cut inland along Church Lane and through the back roads of Ashington End and Orby to get to the sleepy nowhere village of Welton le Marsh. In the last few months, he’d snatched up a number of new-build properties which the owner had been forced to offload in a hurry. The occupants were already in, but there was money to be made from the final fix ups and finishing touches – gutters, fascias, driveways and paths. One of the new homeowners had called him with a query, the kind of query that needed nipping in the bud.

  Past the church, he turned into the wide access road he’d had built across land he already owned, and round to the first house in brand new Stickney Close. He stepped out, rang the doorbell and stepped back. A good clear ten feet between him and the door. Let no prying eyes accuse him of being demanding or of using menaces.

  Mr de Winter answered the door. He was an odd-looking character from his droopy moustache to his obvious penchant for silk shirts. Greg had initially been unsure if the man was a retired porn star or a bargain basement stage magician. It turned out the man was a jobbing psychic. Apparently there was a market for such things. Greg was surprised a bloody psychic could afford the mortgage on a two bedroom property.

  “Oh,” he said as greeting.

  “You rang, I came,” said Greg.

  “You didn’t say you were coming.” He seemed surprised.

  “Couldn’t you read it in the stars?” said Greg. “I’ve come about concerns regarding the last schedule of works and payment?” He had a copy in his hand. “I can go through them if you’d like me to.”

  De Winter adjusted his silk shirt. It was too darn nippy for such things. “I wasn’t expecting any additional payments. I paid for the house, the bill was settled with Frost and Sons. Bank transfer.”

  “Yes, it was.” Greg looked up at the shoebox house. “And you must be very proud of your new home. But it needed signing off with building regulations and there were additional works that needed doing, weren’t there? Drain covers. Timber supports. We talked about that.”

  “And I assumed that was included in the price. We paid the agreed price for the finished house. Miss Frost said—”

  “Jacinda Frost is on remand in Peterborough Jail, if I recall correctly. My company took over the properties. We don’t do extra work for free, Mr Winter.”

  “De Winter.”

  “Mr de Winter,” he said and smiled. No one could accuse you of demanding money with menaces if you smiled. “There were costs on the document I gave you.”

  “I thought they were for information only.”

  Greg raised a genial eyebrow at his naiveté.

  “It was eight thousand pounds,” de Winter said, as though the size of the number mattered.

  “Quality work costs,” Greg replied.

  “We didn’t sign a contract.” De Winter said it with a finality of someone who thought they had won.

  “We did not,” Greg agreed. “And I haven’t submitted your house for final approval with building regs at the council planning department. Currently – if we want to be picky about things – you’re living in an illegal building. The council could ask for it to be knocked down. At your expense, mind.”

  “But you’ve done the additional work.” De Winter’s brief bubble of victory evaporated.

  “And we could remove what we’ve put in, if you don’t want to pay for it.”

  De Winter blinked and Greg judged he’d said enough. He backed away, pleasant-like, to his car. “Just let us know what you’d like to do,” he said cheerily, and departed.

  As he drove back down to the main road and Skegness, Queen’s Greatest Hits II turned up high on the stereo, he couldn’t help but feel a warm glow. He’d put a customer straight, greased the wheels of business with a personal visit, and there had been no need for raised voices or conflict. The ridiculous Mr de Winter, who perhaps needed a few lessons in the realities of this world, would stew upon his situation for a day or two, then pay up. Everyone would be happy. He might have to make a number of similar visits to the other occupants of the new houses or, if he was lucky, word would travel and there would be no more truculent silliness from his new customers.

  11

  “What exactly is it you’re looking for?” asked Chesney for the third time.

  Chesney Trout was a man who always acted as if he wanted to be somewhere else. Sam knew him, although not specifically as the duty manager of the Otterside Retirement Village. She’d seen him up on stage at the Sand Castle pub venue, doing a stage performance of Tony Christie and Gene Pitney numbers. She’d also heard rumours that he worked as a taxi driver on his days off. Cabbie, singer, manager – he was always on his way to something else and seemed to have little enthusiasm for the here and now (unless the here and now involved wearing outdated clothes and belting out Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa to lacklustre pub audiences).

  Sam clicked back along the timeline and tried a different array of cameras.

  She sat in the little security room to the side of the manager’s office, scrolling through the security footage for the past day or so. Otterside didn’t use DefCon4 as their security contractors, but the offer of some free weeding, plus a little corporate gobbledegook about professional courtesy between security contractors was enough to blag her way in.

  However, the CCTV was of next to no use. The camera nearest to Delia’s fence, which might have presented some revealing footage of what happened in that back garden the night before last, was angled squarely down at the footpath running around the outside of the main Otterside building. It encompassed the main building, the path, and a row of retirement village outbuildings squeezed along that section. The bottom edge of Delia’s fence appeared as a shadow in the corner, but there was nothing more.

  Sam scooted along the timeline for the night in question. It would have been helpful if the camera had caught a masked figure in a stripy burglar shirt or a vengeful animal-killer in an ‘I hate Turkeys’ T-shirt, but no such luck.

  “Is this going to take long?” said Chesney.

  “Just trying to keep the residents safe and secure,” said Sam, which was a piece of empty nonsense.

  “I need to get off and pick up my dry cleaning.”

  “Performing tonight?” said Sam.

  “Maybe.”

  “I can do this without you,” she said. “I’ll lock up afterwards.”

  “If you like,” said Chesney.

  The CCTV revealed nothing. Sam clicked out of the archive and the screen flicked back to the live feed. One of the outbuilding doors was open and two figures were stepping inside carrying bundles of she-couldn’t-see-what between them.

  “That’s Ragnar and Hilde Odinson,” said Sam.

  Chesney glanced at the screen as he slid on his coat. “Yeah. Ragnar does some odd jobs for us around th
e place. The residents’ social committee get him to help out sometimes.”

  “What strange company people keep,” she mused.

  Chesney grunted, disinterested, and left.

  The CCTV had been no use. The other option was to ask the people who had rooms overlooking Delia’s garden.

  12

  Polly Gilpin heard the knock at her door and almost leapt to her feet in her excitement to answer it. She immediately felt sad and foolish.

  She recalled how, as a child, she would rush to the front door when the postman called, sometimes racing against her sister to get there first. Post had been an exciting thing, a letter addressed to her doubly so, a parcel triply so. Then she had grown up and post became something that was functional at best, though more often boring or worrying – junk mail, brown envelopes with little windows, red bills.

  And here she was, one day into her sentence at Otterside, and she was leaping up to get to the door because any visitor was better than no visitor at all.

  It was a young woman with sensible shoes and grass stains on her trousers.

  “Yes?”

  The woman stood on tiptoes to look past her, seemingly at Polly’s window. “Can I ask you an odd question?”

  “Isn’t that an odd question in itself?”

  “Point.”

  Polly realised she recognised the woman. She had been talking to the homeowner in the garden of the house next door: odd gesticulations and earnest searching in the grass.

  “Do you, by any chance, want to take a look at the garden?” said Polly.

  The woman looked surprised.

  “I saw you talking to the other woman,” said Polly. “You seemed to have lost something.”

  “Oh, you’re observant,” said the woman. “I like that. I’m Sam. I work for DefCon4. I have a card here somewhere.” The woman patted herself down.

  “You can come in,” said Polly.

  “Really? Letting strangers into your home, even in this place…”

  “Well, you can’t steal my family silver because I have none. I’m Polly Gilpin. I moved in yesterday.”

  “Yesterday? Yesterday yesterday?”

  “I think there’s only one yesterday,” said Polly. “The day before today.”

  “Damn it, that’s a shame.”

  “Oh, it’s not too bad,” said Polly, following her to the window. “This place seems nice enough. Lots of activities. Very active social committee. Walking groups. Sports tournaments. I think there’s a trip planned to Candlebroke Hall in a week or so.”

  Sam from DefCon4 pressed her face right up against the window to look down on the garden next door. “I was interested in what happened here the night before last.”

  “Before I arrived,” said Polly.

  “Exactly,” said Sam.

  “And what did happen?”

  “Someone killed a turkey.”

  “Is that a euphemism?”

  “Pardon?”

  “It sounds like urban slang.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not familiar with urban slang. I struggle with my memory enough as it is apparently, without learning jive talk.”

  Sam turned away from the window. “Was there perhaps a person in here the night before?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Polly. “The last occupant was a man called Bob. Ackroyd, I think. He didn’t die.” She smiled at Sam’s frown. “It’s all I know about him. Upped sticks and left.”

  Sam considered the window again. “Do you know the occupant next door?”

  “Occupant? Rabbits in cages are we now?”

  Sam had the decency to look sheepish. “Poor choice of words.”

  “I was a little tart. Mood swings. Bernard.”

  “Bernard?”

  “Next door. I think I’ve seen him the once. He’s more of a smoky presence. We’re not meant to smoke in the building, but I’m sure he does.” She went to the door and out into the corridor.

  “You’re coming with me?” said Sam.

  “If anyone’s got juicy information on a turkey murder then I’d like to hear it.”

  Polly went so far as to knock on her next door neighbour’s door for Sam. The man who opened the door was wearing flip flops, a white dressing gown hanging open, and what Polly charitably decided were swimming trunks. Bernard’s large belly was as brown and shiny as a basted roast. Was that a smear of tobacco ash on the upper slopes of his belly? There was undoubtedly the stink of a dedicated smoker coming from his apartment.

  “Oh, sorry,” said Sam. “We didn’t mean to disturb you while you were…”

  Her sentence trailed off with nowhere decent to go. Bernard’s attire would have been appropriate on a tropical beach but possibly nowhere else.

  “You weren’t disturbing me,” he said. “Who are you?”

  “This is Sam from DefCon4,” said Polly.

  “Who are they when they’re at home?”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Polly. “Never heard of them. Sam’s investigating a murder.”

  “Someone killed a bird in the garden next door,” Sam interjected quickly.

  “Don’t know nothing about it,” said Bernard.

  “Well, I was wondering if you might have heard something—”

  “I was in bed all night. Deep sleeper me. Twenty years in the army taught me to get shut eye whenever I could. Didn’t hear a thing.”

  “I didn’t actually say when—”

  “In bed all night,” he insisted. “Didn’t leave once. You can check the cameras.” He gestured along the corridor at the CCTV camera pointing their way.

  Sam was perplexed. “I … I can. I was only asking. It was the night before last and—”

  “I do have things to do, you know,” he said and shut the door.

  Both women stared at the door. Sam looked to Polly.

  “That was a really odd conversation, wasn’t it?” she said.

  “I’m glad you thought so too,” said Polly.

  13

  Greg Mandyke resided in a spacious house on Derby Avenue in the town. He rarely stayed in a single property for more than a handful of years. Houses were like shoes. You bought them when they were beautiful and pristine, wore them in for a while and then, with a bit of polish applied around the scuffed edges, passed them on and got yourself something new. Being in the trade, he had men working on various other properties which, given a year or two, he might step into while selling this one off for half a million of pocket money.

  If he did, there would be one thing he’d miss about the place. He’d had a spa room and pool constructed in the garden. The garden stretched a hundred feet out to a sea view, but the sea views in this flat landscape weren’t worth a damn so he’d had the spa room and pool put in instead. Its pine construction gave it a nice Nordic feel. The frosted glass in the domed roof provided all the privacy he desired.

  Greg kicked off his moccasins in the hallway and went through to the kitchen.

  “HomeHub, turn on kitchen lights,” he said, nibbling on a biscotti from the counter jar while he rooted around in the fridge for a beer. He opened the beer and headed into the garden. Evening was drawing in quickly. He stripped as soon as he entered the heated spa room. He didn’t bother with trunks. If you couldn’t enjoy being naked in your own home, where could you?

  The warm yellow lights of the spa room dispelled the gloom of the outside world. The underfloor heating provided a touch of summer, of carefree days. He took a long dive into the pool, all but glided its ten metre length, then hauled himself out to get into the hot tub at the far end.

  Greg loved his hot tub – not just the swirling heated water but the utter indulgence of it. It had cost several thousand to buy and install but the bitch drank electricity like she just didn’t care. Even more so when he pulled back the curved roof to relax beneath the open skies. Global warming be damned, a hot tub was Greg’s two fingers to a world telling him to cut back and compromise.

 
He slid over the side and into the waters. It immediately went to work on his tensions. The indignities and dirt of that pathetic community service crap were eased from his pores. The idiocy of others that he’d had to deal with were washed away. Already Greg could feel the cares of the day pouring from him.

  He sank to his neck and called out. “HomeHub, some music.”

  The smart speakers in the spa room should have blasted forth with classic driving rock or cheesy and cheerful Carpenters, but nothing happened.

  “HomeHub, play my music.”

  Still nothing.

  He sat up and looked round to the utility closet where the speaker system was connected to the main, He saw the figure in the shadows.

  “Jesus!” he gasped and made to stand.

  “Don’t move,” said the figure, stepping far enough into the light for Greg to see the pistol they held in a hand.

  “What the hell…?”

  The intruder had white-grey hair. The hand holding the pistol was wrinkled, gnarled. Were burglars getting older these days?

  “You want something?”

  The intruder said nothing. Was there an element of hesitation or nervousness in the way they stepped from foot to foot? Greg suddenly doubted this was any sort of burglar. His eyes were drawn repeatedly to the dark eye of the pistol barrel.

  “I have valuables in the house,” he said. “Cash. Some jewellery, I think.” He tried to stand again but the pistol was raised and aimed.

  “Stay where you are, Mr Mandyke,” said the intruder.

  He remained as he was.

  “Back in the water,” said the intruder. “I’m not going to talk to a man while I can see his meat and two veg.”

  Greg lowered himself into a fearful sitting position. The bubbles of the hot tub were no comfort now. He felt more like a missionary in a cannibal’s bubbling cauldron.

  “Do I know you?” said Greg.

  He studied the face, realising that the intruder had chosen not to wear a mask did not bode well. He wondered if he knew them from somewhere. Was it someone he had angered, bested in a career of business and financial victories? Greg realised he had a long list of names to pick from.