Containment

by Vanda Symon

  I was, but it wasn’t something for my house. ‘Yes, but I’m here on police business. Actually it’s to do with the shipping accident, and that weekend. I’ve been visiting all the antiques stores around Dunedin, working on the recovery of some items stolen from the household goods of a collector. Needless to say, he’d quite like them back. I’d be grateful if you would take a look through this portfolio of goods to see if any have been offered to you.’ I waved the folder I was holding. ‘And also we’d like you to keep an eye out in case someone comes in trying to sell any of them.’

  ‘Sure, I can do that.’ I handed the folder over and he started flicking through the pages. ‘Nice collection here,’ he said. ‘Quite eclectic. Did they lose the lot?’

  ‘Some boxes were recovered on the beach, and the larger furniture items were too big to make off with.’ Although some people had made a valiant attempt at carting off a massive sideboard, but all they succeeded in doing was scratching it to buggery with the sand. ‘You may remember the skull the old lady found on the beach that caused a bit of excitement? That was part of this collection too, so he certainly had a bit of variety. We estimate there would be over a million’s-worth missing.’

  ‘Ouch,’ he said. ‘That’s a substantial collection. Have you managed to recover anything?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve located several things through online traders. I’m hoping this little trip around the dealers will bring a few more articles to light. Anything look familiar?’

  ‘Not so far,’ he said as he leafed through the pages.

  I went for a little wander around the shop while he kept looking. I almost laughed out loud when I saw the most enormous harmonica I’d ever laid eyes on. Gawd, the small ones were bad enough. Imagine the noise that came out of that thing. I walked quickly past a dark-timbered, ornate clock that gave me the heebie-jeebies, and finally found a cabinet of fine bone-china cups and saucers that brought back memories of frilly tea with Nana. Our farming crockery was far more utilitarian than that. You didn’t serve up fine china teacups to farm workers with hands the size of footballs. It had been Dad’s mum who put on the fancy teas, bless her. Even though she was a farmer’s wife, she said there were some standards that needed to be maintained, and frilly tea was one of them. Looking back I think she suspected I never got to enjoy playing tea parties with Mum and was trying to make up for it. Nana was special like that. That brought another face into my consciousness, and I experienced the familiar lurch as I wondered how Dad was.

  ‘There’s nothing here that’s come into the shop, I’m afraid, but I’ll certainly keep an eye out for you if anything does. Have you got a card?’

  I pulled out my police business card, then grabbed a pen from the counter and scribbled my work email address on the back. ‘I’d appreciate that. Like I said, this family’s lost a lot, so it would be good to recover as much as we can. Some of it’s very valuable, but Joe-average looter probably won’t know that. I’ve got the second-hand marts to trot around too, so it’s going to be a long day.’

  ‘Have fun,’ he said, ‘and good to see you looking a bit better.’

  ‘Yeah, thank heavens. Wish the headache would go though.’

  That was three antique shops down, a squillion to go. Why on earth wasn’t a uniformed officer doing this legwork? I could have been put to far better use elsewhere. Actually, I knew damn well why. DI Johns had to have his little power games and was the master when it came to strategic condescension.

  Reality sucked.

  65

  I walked out the door into the teeth of the howling southerly and was so intent on assuming the hunch-over-and-protect-myself-from-the-wind pose, I walked headlong into a rather broad chest. The chest smelt of myrrh and wood and warm spices, and when I looked up I saw it was attached to Mr Peter Trubridge himself.

  ‘Detective Constable Shephard, watch yourself there, now.’ He braced me by the shoulders to steady me. ‘We must stop meeting like this.’ The voice and the close contact had its predictable effect on my endocrine system.

  ‘Yes, we must, people will talk,’ I said and gave what felt like one of those pathetic, nervous girl laughs. It didn’t seem so cold any more.

  ‘Where are you off to in such a hurry?’ I was quite disappointed when he let go of my shoulders and left me to stand on my own two feet.

  ‘Duty calls, people to see, crooks to catch, that kind of thing.’ I reached up and brushed the wayward, wind-assisted, loose strands of hair off my face. It was a futile gesture.

  ‘Working hard on my case, I hope.’ He reached out and wiped aside a strand that had eluded me. His action seemed unconscious and natural, but the effect on me was somewhat shocking.

  ‘Actually, I am. Yes, exactly that. I’m working hard on your case, of course I am.’ I sounded babblier than a besotted teenager. I tried to slow my speech down and lower the tone. Now I sounded stilted rather than silly. ‘I’m visiting. All the local antiques dealers. And second-hand places. Seeing if they’ve had any items turn up. From your inventory.’

  ‘Well, I’d better not hold you up from your work then, had I? You have a good day, Detective.’

  I will now, I thought.

  I walked a little further down the street, my mind still preoccupied with the feeling of his hands and the smell of him. I had a momentary pang of guilt about my body’s reaction and mental disloyalty to Paul, especially considering he’d stayed the previous night. But then I thought, how bloody stupid, there’s nothing wrong with window-shopping, as long as you look and don’t touch. And I just had to look. I couldn’t resist any longer, the carnal creature in me just had to turn around and appreciate the view. I wasn’t disappointed and caught his very nice derriere in action as it entered Curio Antiques. Well that was curious; maybe he was already looking to fill the gaps in his lost collection. I supposed if that was your thing, it was your thing. But I was intrigued. I was going to have to check it out now. But how? Peeking around the corner would be a bit obvious. I could do the old ‘I left something behind’ ruse in order to go back into the shop and see what was going on, but I was afraid that would look a bit like I was a stalker. So I took the ‘oops, I meant to go this way’ approach instead. I hoped to hell no one was watching. It felt like one of those smile-you’re-on-candid-camera moments. I waited until I was halfway along the shop front before I turned my head to have a surreptitious gawk in the window.

  They were embracing like old friends.

  66

  After a day of wandering around old junk shops, I was all antiqued out. It had gotten to the point where the continued exposure to the aroma of advanced age had given me a thumping headache and my skin was crawling with imagined dust mites or borer, and I had an overwhelming desire to wash its lingering taint off my body. But, alas, there was one more to go on today’s quota before I could call it quits and head back to the relative sanctuary of my clean-smelling, deliciously modern workplace. I stood outside my target, took several breaths to psych myself up and physically propelled myself through the door.

  The eyes of the poor guy behind the counter nearly bugged out of his head, even more so than usual, at my Krameresque entrance. Frog didn’t look that delighted to see me. Cash for Crap had lost none of its charm since my last visit, and neither had Frog. His demeanour and colour palette remained the same; only the print on the black T-shirt had changed. This time it was a band by the unlikely name of My Chemical Romance. I thought it was a bit sad to think the only way to shore up a romance was to add chemicals, but hey, I was hardly the one to profess authority in the love department.

  ‘Hello, Josiah, is your boss in today?’ I asked.

  ‘No, he’s away until Monday.’

  ‘So it’s you in charge today, is it?’

  The poor guy blushed, and I wondered at the owner’s wisdom at putting someone in charge of his business who dressed like that and acted a little immature. The only compelling reason I could think of for his employment was that there was a spot of nepotism inv
olved.

  ‘Er, yes.’

  ‘Well, maybe you can help me, then. I’m not here to talk about Clifford’s case today.’ His shoulders relaxed a fraction at that news. ‘I’m here on other business. You remember the containers that washed up at Aramoana the weekend of the party we talked about.’

  They hunched back up. ‘Yes?’ The timorous tone in his voice confirmed for me that Frog was the friend in the second-hand business Felix had alluded to.

  ‘I’m in the process of tracking down some belongings stolen from one of those containers, so I need you to have a look through this portfolio and see if you recognise any of the goods.’

  His face was by now suffused with a charming red, so I was guessing a number of the goods were likely to have gone through here, or still were here. With that in mind, I thought a little tour was in order.

  ‘How about you have a look through the folder there, while I take a little look around the shop? Then we can compare notes.’

  Frog looked slightly relieved that I wasn’t going to hover over his shoulder like a blowfly; he didn’t seem like the type to function well under pressure. But he still had a hint of panic in his eyes; at least, from what I could tell, considering his fringe mostly covered them up and he wasn’t making any eye contact anyway.

  By the time I got to the end of the first aisle there were three items I recognised from the portfolio. In fact, I was seriously thinking of shuffling the other customers out and closing the doors, when a turn around the end and into the next aisle clinched it for me.

  ‘Shit.’

  I pulled out my cellphone and pulled up the contact name.

  ‘Smithy?’

  ‘Yeah, what?’

  ‘You’re going to want to get down to Cash for Crap right now, and bring your friends.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Let’s just say you might want to do a spot of painting.’

  Frog looked mortified when I started ushering the customers out, then spun the ‘open’ sign to ‘closed’ and locked us in.

  ‘What did you find?’ he asked.

  ‘Enough of the articles from that,’ I said, tapping the folder, ‘to be of concern, and enough cans of a certain kind of paint to be dangerous.’

  He gave me a baffled look.

  ‘Some of my colleagues are going to come down soon and will want to know where it all came from, so I hope for your sake you are going to be exceedingly co-operative. Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Am I going to be in trouble?’ he asked.

  ‘That depends on the level of your involvement and how helpful you are to the police.’

  Frog added scared to his repertoire of demeanours.

  ‘I don’t think I can impress upon you enough how much it is in your best interest to be co-operative.’

  The kid didn’t know what was going to hit him when Smithy and the gang arrived, so I thought I’d occupy his time and get some ticks off the list in my caseload.

  ‘While we’re waiting, what did you recognise from the folder? You’ve been here full-time for the last two weeks?’

  ‘Yeah, Monday to Friday, with my cousin on for half-days on Saturdays and Sundays.’

  ‘And the boss has been away all this time?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I bet the boys couldn’t believe their luck having a no-questions-asked outlet for their acquisitions. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. I imagined Frog would have been promised a cut of the proceeds, and everyone would have been happy. Though, when I thought about it, Clifford must have been the one to drop the stuff around, otherwise Leo would presumably have mentioned it when he was being interviewed. It did say a little something about the nature of Frog, though. He’d kept the stock on the shelves, trying to flog it off even after he found out his mate had been killed. Maybe he wasn’t as sensible as I’d picked. I wondered if he was planning to clear the unsold items off the shelf come Sunday, before his boss came back, and then flog them off on Free-Market.

  ‘Okay, Frog, level with me. Are you going to show me which of these items you tried to flog off?’

  He had enough gumption to realise there was no point trying to hide anything from me, so he pointed out the items I saw, plus a few extras.

  ‘So some of these items have come in and been sold already?’

  ‘Yes, a few have already gone.’

  ‘And do you keep records of who you sold things to?’

  ‘Urm … no.’

  ‘Not even the till-paper trail, or credit-card or electronic records?’

  He seemed to be suddenly fascinated with his shoes. ‘I didn’t exactly put those ones through the till,’ he said eventually.

  A weighty silence followed.

  ‘So you were collecting money for those on behalf of…?’

  He read my look enough to know I was onto his game. ‘Clifford, Leo and Felix.’ As suspected.

  ‘But it was Clifford that dropped these things in to you, not Leo?’

  He gave me a how-did-you-know-that look. ‘Yeah, it was Clifford.’

  ‘And you kept them out for sale despite Clifford being killed?’

  Frog didn’t answer.

  ‘How did the customers pay?’ I figured that if they’d used a card it would have left an audit trail.

  ‘Well there was one guy mainly, four or five days ago, and he paid cash, so I didn’t have to worry about that.’

  ‘What did he buy?’

  Frog pointed out several items in the folder, whose insurance value totted up to well over forty thousand dollars.

  ‘And how much did he pay?’

  Frog dropped his eyes and mumbled. He must have been doing the mental arithmetic too.

  ‘Sorry, what was that you said?’

  ‘About a hundred.’

  ‘A hundred what?’

  ‘Dollars.’

  I felt the beginnings of a giggle start around boot level, and by the time it burst out of my mouth it was a full-on guffaw. ‘Jesus bloody Christ, you sold forty-thousand-dollars-worth of prime goods for a hundred bucks?’

  It was like a scene from Antiques Roadshow, except in reverse and gone feral. The guy who found these things, he must have recognised them for what they were worth if he’d picked out the gems from the rest of the crap. He must have been laughing all the way to the bank.

  ‘And what else have you sold for a song?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I flicked off some of the paint.’

  At that, I stopped laughing real fast. ‘When, and how much?’

  He must have detected the change in my voice, because an edge of caution replaced the resignation. ‘Yesterday. Some guys came in and bought up all the tins we had out; there were eight I think.’

  ‘Can you remember what these men looked like? Do you have them on security tape?’

  ‘We haven’t got security. My uncle keeps meaning to get around to it, but hasn’t yet.’ I was right about the family ties. ‘They were quite rough, and I didn’t like the look of them. They asked me if there were any more, but I told them no, that was it. They wanted to know where we got it from, so I just said I didn’t know, that I just worked here.’

  His scary-o-meter probably saved him from a nasty fate; that and perhaps the presence of other customers, and therefore witnesses. It paid to listen to that small paranoid voice called instinct.

  ‘And they haven’t been back today?’ I suddenly felt glad I’d locked the doors until Smithy got here.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would you recognise them again if we showed you some photos?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Okay, that’s good.’ If he could pick someone from photos it would be an immense break in the case. ‘You’re in for a busy afternoon at the station I’m afraid.’

  It was with quite a sense of relief that I spotted the unmarked car pull up outside, with Smithy’s bulk behind the wheel. Once they got into the building, my involvement would once again end. I thought I might as well try and get my money’s worth
before that happened. ‘Was there anything else you wanted to tell me?’

  ‘That other guy, who bought the ornaments, I did recognise him.’

  That got my full attention.

  ‘It was that guy who looks like a walrus with the antique shop out at Port Chalmers.’

  67

  Cash for Crap had turned into the equivalent of a three-ringed circus, and I was right about Frog: the poor guy had the look of someone in sensory overload, desperately wishing he was elsewhere. In an attempt to jog his memory Billy Thorne was busy filling him in on how fortunate he was to still be breathing. As a general technique for improving recall, it sucked, and Frog looked like he was about to break down altogether.

  ‘Do they have to be so harsh?’ I said to Smithy, who was in the cheap seats with me.

  ‘Yes.’ He didn’t elaborate further.

  ‘Frog said he might recognise the people who bought the paint from photos. I don’t know that what Billy’s doing to him is going to help any. But you know Frog did recognise a chap who came in and brought up some of the collectables and antiques from my insurance file.’

  ‘Well, you’re lucky then.’

  I turned and stared at Smithy, then gave him a good thump on the arm.

  ‘Ow, what was that for?’ he said, rubbing it and giving me the evils.

  ‘That’s for being so bloody grumpy. Cut it out.’

  ‘I’m not being grumpy,’ he said. ‘I’m always like this.’

  ‘You bloody well are not. You’re worse than a petulant two-year-old. If you were a bit smaller I’d stick you in time out. How’s it going with Veronica?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘Well, I’m making it my business.’

  ‘No you’re bloody not, so fuck off.’

  His vehemence shut me up. After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, he must have realised that statement ranked pretty high on the rude-o-meter.