‘I’m finishing that background check for that accountancy firm last week.’
‘And… what’s their potential new boss like?’
‘He doesn’t earn the salary he claimed on his application form, but, other than that, he’s the most boring person I’ve ever looked into. Everything checks out – wife, two kids, house, car, holiday to Disneyworld, no ropy investments… Boring, boring, boring.’
‘Never killed a prostitute then?’
‘Only the one – but we’ve all been there.’
Jenny took off her glasses and swivelled her chair to face him. ‘You ready to hear about Jack Marsh?’
‘Anything that gets me out of the world of accountancy.’
She clicked something on her computer and then turned back to the screen. ‘When this happened last year, there was loads of coverage. I’ve ignored some of the unsubstantiated stuff for now.’
‘Any obvious places to start?’
Jenny bobbed her head from side to side. ‘Maybe… there are people we could talk to.’
‘Let’s have it then.’
‘The Man City players were staying in the Radisson Hotel in the city centre on a Saturday night ahead of a Sunday game.’
‘Manchester city centre?’
She looked up. ‘Right – from what I can gather, even if they’re playing at home, the team will often all be in the same hotel the night before a match. It’s probably team bonding, or so the management can keep an eye on them – something like that.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘According to the reports, the police checked security cameras at the hotel and interviewed staff. From what it says, Jack Marsh was sharing a suite with another player and didn’t leave his room. It says they were playing cards and then they went to bed.’
‘It’s going to be hard to check that alibi in any more depth than the police have but we might be able to find a staff member or two.’
Jenny clicked through a couple of screens on her computer. ‘There are a few other places we can start.’
‘Go on.’
‘Pretty much everything Michelle’s mum said is what the reports say. She was on a Saturday night out and then the next thing anyone knew, she was being pulled out of the canal on Sunday. Coroner labelled it as accidental death, with the specifics that she ended up in the canal at some point in the early hours of Sunday morning and died through alcohol poisoning. There’s another bit saying the water temperature would have contributed.’
Andrew took a moment to think it through, then said: ‘So she drank enough to kill herself – and then stumbled into the canal?’
‘I guess – she was out with a friend, but they became separated and no one’s too sure what happened then.’
‘If she was walking close to the canal, she could have fallen in if she’d stopped to be sick or something like that. Or stumbled in? She wouldn’t be the first person to do that. People are always going on about a phantom pusher around here. How old was she?’
‘Twenty.’
He puffed out the required ‘so young’ breath. ‘Who’s the friend?’
Jenny looked back to her screen. ‘The last person to see her was Chloe Kilgallon. According to her Facebook page, she works as a waitress at Harvey’s Diner on Deansgate. She posted about an hour ago that she was off to work.’
She waved Andrew across and he stood at her shoulder, looking at the photo of the two girls.
‘They’ve not got those tans from Manchester,’ Andrew said.
Jenny pointed to the young woman in a red dress. ‘That’s Michelle,’ she said.
Michelle Applegate looked nothing like her mother. While the older woman was easily missable in a crowd, Michelle went out of her way to be unmissable. She had long blonde hair – likely extensions – claw-like nails, big heels, bigger hair, eyelashes larger than a butterfly’s wings, a tiny red dress and tangerine orange skin. Chloe had black hair with a black dress but was otherwise similarly kitted out for an ankle-breaking night out.
‘When was this taken?’ Andrew asked.
‘July last year – a couple of months before Michelle died.’
Andrew peered closer at the photo, taking in the tattoo that looped around Michelle’s left wrist. It looked like some sort of stylised Chinese writing. Chloe had something similar around her ankle. It was easy to sneer, but they were two young women looking to enjoy themselves. Nothing particularly wrong with that.
‘What else have you got?’ Andrew asked.
‘An interesting one. Jack Marsh’s childhood sweetheart was a girl named Megan Halfpenny. They were going out when they were both fifteen or sixteen. They grew up on the same estate together. He’s lived in the city his whole life, played his way up through the youth teams, that sort of thing. He has the accent, knows the city and he used to kick balls against garages across the road from his house. It’s why the fans love him so much now. There’s article after article about it. There was talk a couple of years ago about knocking down those garages to build more houses, but a group of locals kicked off, saying it was where all the local kids gathered to play football. There was a big debate about spaces for young people to play in the Herald. “Where will the next Jack Marsh come from?” – all that. Anyway, before that, when Jack got his first pro football contract and then made his debut, there was a lot of stuff about Jack and Megan being football’s new prince and princess, king and queen – that type of celeb magazine stuff. He was getting it from all sides. The sports sections were all over the local boy-come-good stuff; the showbiz pages wanted to hear about him and his girlfriend.’
Jenny clicked onto an article from a few years previously, showing a young couple in their school uniforms. Poor old Jack was riddled with a peppering of acne around his forehead and a shirt that was too big for him, the large flappy arms making his head look tiny. Megan had soft gingery hair in a ponytail and, contrary to her boyfriend’s clothes, was wearing a blouse at least one size too small. Andrew felt uncomfortable even looking at the photo, knowing how young she must be.
‘How old are they here?’ Andrew asked.
‘Fifteen, I think – it’s hard to know – but Jack got pulled out of school at some point. I think the clubs do a sort of home-schooling. Jack and Megan broke up once he got properly famous – I think it happened when he was about eighteen. There are photos of him falling out of a club with a girl on his nineteenth birthday, so I guess they were done by then.’
‘How old is he now?’
‘Twenty-three.’
‘Have you found Megan, too?’
‘She works in a local clothes shop. It’s not just her, though. There are all sorts of rumours around the web – posts on forums and the like. There are so many young women – always women – saying he’s done odd things.’
‘Like what?’
‘It’s all tittle-tattle. One person might give a story that’s either true or close to it, but somebody else wants to feel important, so they embellish their own encounter, or make up something entirely. It’s hard to verify anything.’
‘But…’
‘There’s a woman who says she met Jack in a club one night. They ended up in some hotel room and, when she woke up the next morning, he’d disappeared – and so had all her clothes.’
‘What? He’d nicked them?’
‘I don’t know – it’s posted by a random username on some football gossip forum. The IP is from Manchester, but that doesn’t mean much. Could be made up, could be someone who wants to get something off their chest. No way of tracing it to a person. I found an article from the Herald with one of Jack’s old neighbours, saying his car got trashed by Jack and a couple of drunken players. It was all denied and that was that. Most of this stuff is a couple of years old. It sounds like, if any of it is true, that he’s calmed down.’
‘Or – if anything Anna Applegate says is true about him beating up her daughter – he simply started doing it indoors.’
‘I guess.’
&nbs
p; ‘Anything criminal?’
‘He was done for speeding twice but kept his licence. There are a couple of stories about him getting into fights with people in clubs, but never any charges. Hard to tell if it’s true or just paper talk. Nothing really.’
Andrew glanced back towards his own screen and the details of Mr Boring and the accountancy firm. He still had a couple of days on that.
‘How about you call Mrs Applegate?’ he said. ‘Tell her we’ll start digging and see if she has anything else we might need. She might have a password for her daughter’s old email account or something like that. When you’re sorted, how do you fancy a wander?’
‘Are we off to a certain restaurant on Deansgate?’
Andrew patted her on the shoulder. ‘How’d you guess?’
Five
The month of April in Manchester, perhaps England in general, had always given off something of a schizophrenic vibe. Some days the wind howled, the rain lashed, the apocalypse descended; other times the tabloids proudly declared that the country was hotter than a random place in the Mediterranean – as if there was some sort of competition going on. The chances of Greek papers ever printing stories saying their temperatures were higher than Manchester’s for a day chosen completely at random seemed unlikely.
It felt like a summer’s day as Andrew and Jenny walked through the streets of Manchester. Those lucky enough to not be working were strolling around in sandals, shorts and T-shirts. Pasty, bare flesh was on display everywhere Andrew looked and it felt like it might be half-term or some other sort of school holiday. Either that or people were getting younger, which was an altogether more concerning issue.
Andrew and Jenny passed through a packed St Ann’s Square, emerging onto Deansgate. The stores lining the mile-long road were overflowing with people stocking up on summer clothes, convinced the sunshine would be around for the foreseeable future.
Harvey’s was an American-style diner towards the southern end of Deansgate. A row of tables and chairs adorned the pavement outside, with half a dozen people sitting around eating. A couple had a pushchair slotted in next to them. The man had his top off, displaying flabby mounds of tattooed flesh, while the woman was emptying the contents of a ketchup bottle onto her mountain of fries. Behind them was an Asian family: grandparents, parents and kids sitting around two tables, chatting and enjoying the sun as the shortest boy raced his toy cars across the pavement. On the furthest set of seats underneath a large parasol were two vest-clad, skinny jean-wearing tanned young men, one sitting on the other’s lap. They were feeding each other fries and laughing. It was Manchester in a nutshell.
Andrew stood at the window closest to the door that had a menu pinned to the inside glass, listening to the 1950s rock bursting through the open door.
‘They do great ice cream sundaes here,’ Jenny said, slotting in next to him. ‘Plus they have milk and cookies. Not just normal cookies – they’re the size of a plate. You can get chocolate chip, M&M, or half and half – plus you get unlimited refills on the milk.’
Andrew turned to look at Jenny, who stared up with big brown eyes.
‘What?’ she said with a shrug.
‘Do you judge a restaurant solely by its desserts?’
‘Who doesn’t?’
‘Normal people.’
‘Pfft. Normal people are boring. There’s this cake place in the Northern Quarter. Slices the size of your head.’ She held her hands apart as if Andrew couldn’t comprehend the size of a human head.
Andrew hadn’t been looking at the menu anyway. He twisted back, peering through the glass towards the counter. ‘Can you see Chloe inside?’
Jenny joined him, squinting through the slightly tinted glass before stepping sideways to look through the open door instead.
‘She’s serving a table at the back,’ she said.
Andrew and Jenny headed inside, standing next to the ‘please wait to be seated’ sign. Chloe was serving burgers to a table of teenagers in the furthest corner. She was wearing a pink uniform with a dress that had a flared skirt, white ankle socks and flat shoes. She seemed younger than in the photo Andrew had seen.
When she turned, Chloe spotted Andrew and Jenny. She smiled and held a single finger up, then left her tray on the main counter and crossed to them, grinning even wider.
‘Afternoon, guys – table for two?’
Andrew nodded towards the corner where Chloe had been serving. ‘Can we sit by the window?’
‘Absolutely!’
Chloe spun and led them to a booth a couple along from the teenagers and asked about drinks, calling them ‘guys’ again for good measure. Kids these days and all that.
‘I already know what I’m getting,’ Jenny said before Andrew had a chance to reply.
Chloe seemed surprised but pulled a small notepad from a pocket on her hip.
‘Milk and cookies, please,’ Jenny said. ‘Half chocolate chips, half M&Ms.’
Chloe skitched a note and then turned to Andrew. ‘And you, sir?’
‘Just a Coke… er, diet.’
‘Coming right up.’
Chloe disappeared off towards the kitchen, leaving Andrew and Jenny by themselves. Andrew realised he was frowning.
‘What?’ Jenny asked.
‘I wasn’t planning on staying.’
She shrugged. ‘This way we get to examine Chloe in her own habitat.’
‘She’s not a safari animal.’
‘Fair enough – this way we get a bonus afternoon cookie.’
‘We?’
Jenny grinned. ‘I didn’t stop you ordering anything.’
‘I didn’t get time to look at the menu!’
They were interrupted as Chloe returned, placing an empty glass in front of Andrew and pointing him towards the drinks fountains near the counter. Jenny’s milk was in a frosted glass, with condensation already dribbling along the side. Andrew felt thirsty just looking at it.
‘Your cookie will be right out,’ she said.
Jenny pointed towards her name tag. ‘You’re Chloe, right?’
Chloe glanced at her tag and then nodded, though one eye had narrowed. ‘Right.’
‘Can we ask you about Michelle Applegate?’
Andrew had planned on at least getting to the whole paying-the-bill part first, but sometimes it was better to let Jenny do her thing. She was only two or three years older than Chloe, which immediately gave her an advantage over him.
Chloe’s eyes narrowed to slits, lips pouted as she turned from Jenny to Andrew and back again. She checked over her shoulder, and when she replied, her voice had lost its chirp. ‘Who are you?’
‘Private investigator,’ Jenny replied, then nodded at Andrew. ‘Well, he is. I just sort of hang about and get in the way.’
Chloe rocked onto her heels, nodding. There was a ding of a bell from behind and she stepped away, nearly walking into the other waitress. They apologised to each other and then Chloe headed into the kitchen. A moment later and she was back out again, pizza-sized cookie in hand. She placed it in front of Jenny and then turned to her colleague.
‘Can you cover for five mins?’ she asked.
The other waitress shrugged, not appearing overly enthused but not refusing either.
Without being asked, Jenny shuffled along the soft bench, taking her cookie with her. A gentle trickle of steam was seeping from the top and Andrew couldn’t help but flash back to being a child. He remembered being in the kitchen of his Aunt Gem’s flat, back when the estate on which she lived wasn’t so run-down. He’d lick the bowl and spoon after making a mess on the counter, then sit in front of the oven and wait for the cookies to start turning brown.
‘You here because of ’Chelle’s mum?’ Chloe asked, still standing.
Andrew had been so lost in the memory that he could only cough, flailing like an amateur. He managed to nod and Chloe slipped in next to Jenny, who was picking at the cookie with her fingers.
‘I went through everything with the police,�
� Chloe said.
‘We’re looking to see if there are any alternative angles,’ Andrew replied.
‘What are you trying to find out?’
‘I guess we won’t know until we find it.’
She sighed, glancing out the window towards where the other waitress was cleaning the now empty table where the topless man and his ketchup-obsessed partner had been sitting. ‘What do you want to know?’ she asked.
‘You were the last person to see Michelle…?’
‘Right.’
‘Were you good friends?’
Chloe glanced back to the counter, making it clear she was looking at the clock. ‘I’ve only got a few minutes. ’Chelle and me had known each other since primary school – so, yeah, we were good friends. We saw each other pretty much every day and generally talked or texted on the days we didn’t. Can you get on with it?’
She didn’t sound aggressive, more frustrated. Andrew guessed she’d been through all of this many times before.
‘How about Jack Marsh? Did you know him?’
Chloe shook her head. ‘Not really. Only through ’Chelle – and not even then.’
‘But he was her boyfriend?’
‘It was complicated. He’d only be free on certain evenings and sometimes for just a couple of hours at a time. He’d say “hi” to me and then disappear off with ’Chelle.’
‘Did you mind?’
Chloe turned towards Jenny, who was a quarter of the way through her cookie.
Jenny answered for her. ‘It was fine because you had lads on the go as well, right?’
Chloe’s nod was slow and deliberate. ‘Something like that.’ She motioned towards Jenny and Andrew noticed her nails were a lot shorter than in the photographs. No longer glorified weapons. ‘You part of the crowd?’ she asked.
‘Which crowd?’ Jenny replied.
‘I’m sure I’ve seen you out once or twice. You have a familiar face.’
Jenny had a mouthful of cookie but nodded. ‘I get around.’
Something Buried: An absolutely gripping mystery thriller Page 3