by steve higgs
‘Jack it was you inside the alien suit. You are the one that was spotted outside Brompton Farm by Lara Fallon. I think you also faked the spaceship in the footage you are using to make yourself famous.’ The tactic of accusing him was a hopeful one at best. I believed what I was saying but I had not one scrap of proof. If he sounded scared and defensive now, I would know I had got close to the mark.
He laughed though. ‘Amanda, that is the most wonderful fantasy. How could I possibly have faked a spaceship?’
‘I’m going to catch you, Jack. I just hope you are not involved in the murder of Tamara Mwangi.
‘Good luck with that, Amanda.’ He made it sound genuine.
I turned and started walking across the room to my office. ‘Come with me, please.’
In my office, the computer was showing the video of his alien spaceship footage. I had pressed pause at a frame that showed the driver’s hand. It was only in the shot for a moment and I hadn’t seen it at all to start with. The evidence was one of those things that gets lodged in my brain and doesn’t reveal itself until later. I had only caught on when I read the report from Jane this morning.
I pointed to the screen. ‘What do you see, Jack?’
He leaned in to scrutinise the screen. ‘It appears to be a still from the footage poor Milosz Kyncl took. That poor, poor man.’ He was sticking with his story and making a great show of his sorrow for Milosz.
I drew Jack’s eyes to a point on the screen. On the index finger of the left hand that was caught in the shot, was a ring. Not just any ring though. ‘Jack that ring is a Southampton University Alumni ring. I recognise it because my father wore one. I still have it at home. They are not exactly common, but Bob wears one as well. That is Bob’s hand in the footage. Isn’t it?’
‘Do you think Bob can speak Polish?’ He laughed.
‘No.’ I looked squarely at him now. ‘I think you got a Polish actor to do a voice over.’
There it was!
His smile had faltered for just the barest moment. A tinge of doubt had crept into his eyes. He recovered instantly though.
‘Amanda, if all you have is a ring on a hand, I must beg you to admit that it is circumstantial at best. This is just coincidence.'
‘I’m going to catch you, Jack.’
‘And I am going to prove you wrong, my lovely Amanda. I’ll tell you what. If you can prove that I am a charlatan, with props and clever tricks, I will go on my show or on National TV or whatever you can arrange, and I will admit publicly that I faked the whole thing. However, when I prove that I am not the man inside the alien suit or somehow faking a spaceship flying over England, you will agree to come on my show as co-host for ten episodes. We will be so big by the end of that run that you will not be able to walk away.’
He put his hand out for me to shake. I stared at it, looked back up at him and grabbed it tight. I squeezed his hand while imagining it was his neck.
‘Deal.’ I said through gritted teeth.
‘Super.’ He replied. It felt like he was all but laughing in my face.
Gordon McIntosh. Saturday, November 12th 1201hrs
Jack was gone, and the office was empty once more. I hugged myself against the cool air. It was just starting to warm up, but it was time for me to go.
As I picked up my handbag, my phone starting ringing. It was somewhere in the bottom of my bag and doing a very good job of evading my fingers as they scrambled for it.
If I didn't find it soon, it would go to voicemail. Annoyed, I upended the bag onto the desk and fished the elusive device from the debris. As I stabbed the answer button, I spotted a loose jelly baby that must have escaped its packet a week ago and had been living in hiding ever since. I popped it into my mouth as I took the call.
‘Hello, Kieron. Has there been a development?’
‘Sort of.’ He answered with a voice that held a tone bordering on panic. ‘Lara is in labour.’ To accentuate his claim, Lara screamed her discomfort. ‘We are on our way to the hospital. I wanted to let you know in case you tried to get hold of me.’
‘Turn off the damned phone and drive, you idiot.’ Lara shouted between breaths.
‘Gotta go.’ He said, and the line went dead.
Their baby was coming. I felt happy for Kieron and hoped that getting the pregnancy bit over with and having a tiny baby to love would improve Lara’s mood. I also felt an enhanced need to solve this case.
Talking to Kieron about developments had reminded me that the case was not only about glowing milk; there had been a murder. Or, at least, there had been an unexplained death and I had planned to call Neville Hinkley and ask him what his autopsy had shown.
I had the phone trapped between my shoulder and ear as I locked up the front door of the office. I needed a few groceries, which I could get from the shop two doors along instead of stopping on the way home.
As I got to the shop, the call connected.
‘Neville Hinkley.' I liked that he didn't feel the need to add the prefix Doctor every time he spoke.
‘Hi, Neville. It’s Amanda. I hoped you could tell me about Tamara Mwangi. What your autopsy found.’
‘Hello, Amanda. Still pursuing your little green men?’
‘Yeah.’ I drawled, showing my exasperation with the case. ‘The truth behind the mystery is still proving elusive. Do you think Tamara Mwangi was murdered?’
‘To put it simply, yes. The cells of the body react differently when slowly frozen compared to flash frozen, so I was able to quickly dismiss the notion of Mrs. Mwangi being shot by an alien with a freeze ray. There was some post-mortem bruising though, the type associated with moving a body after death. Poor Mrs. Mwangi was stuffed into a freezer somewhere and brought out for people to find her.'
‘Was freezing the cause of death?’
‘No, she was strangled. I believe they already questioned the husband over it, but he couldn't have lifted the body by himself and doesn't have a freezer that Mrs. Mwangi's body could fit in.'
I knew from my time in the police that it was almost always the spouse. Murders, apart from the ones perpetrated by drunk idiots with guns or knives at night, occurred due to money or passion or more accurately, being denied either one.
Glen had been genuinely upset when I first saw him, but hours later had done a marvellous job of pulling himself together. If he was the killer, who was the accomplice that helped him move the body and where was the freezer? Or, if it wasn't him, who was it? It had to be someone at the farm.
Then, someone walking toward me in the High Street caught my eye. I moved to the side and stopped moving to reduce the chance that he would notice me.
‘Neville, I have to go. Thank you for your help.’
‘No problem, Amanda. Good luck with the case.’
I slipped the phone back into my pocket and watched. Gordon McIntosh was coming my way and he was wearing a suit. He went by me and into a bank on the other side of the street. Jane hadn’t been able to turn up much on him, nothing that could be considered incriminating anyway, but he was no fan of his boss or any of the farm owners. Would he stoop to bankrupting them though? Did he have a plan?
I followed him into the bank where I saw that he was already being greeted by another man in a suit. This one was younger and had a badge on his lapel that identified him as a bank employee. He led Gordon into a glass-panelled office. As the door closed, I could see that written on it was Shaun French, Business advisor.
I checked my watch. I didn’t need to be anywhere until tonight when I was going out with the girls and all I had pencilled in for this afternoon was laundry and household stuff like do my grocery shopping, which I had been meaning to do for days but had never quite found time for.
I sat down to wait. When an efficient bank employee came to check if they could help me, I said I was waiting for a friend. It satisfied their curiosity and resulted in a free cup of coffee which I sipped while I fiddled with my phone and waited.
I watched Gordon through the gl
ass of the small office but nothing in his movements suggested master villain and murderer.
Just as I was getting bored, the two men stood up, shook hands and Gordon was leaving. He strode out the bank door and turned left to go back the way he had come. I debated asking Shaun the business advisor what Gordon had been up to and whether he would tell me if I pretended to be Gordon’s concerned niece while batting my eyes at him. I doubted it would work, certain that bank workers are not supposed to discuss customer details no matter what. Instead, I was going to see where he was going.
Gordon never once looked back to where he had been. I doubt many people do, but it meant that following him was easy. My efforts were not rewarded with a big clue though. Along the High Street, he turned down the steps into the carpark opposite the casino and climbed into an old Land Rover Defender. It was the car of a professional farmer but looked out of place against his suit.
He was most likely going home. As the car came level with me on its way out of the carpark, I noticed a sticker on the back-right quarter. It had a picture on it, but it was the words on it that told me what I needed to know. I had my clue after all.
Laundry be damned, I had research to do. At home, I would get distracted by other tasks. Suddenly excited, I turned around and rushed back to the office. Saturday afternoon was going to be when I started stitching bits of this stupid case together.
Sitting at my desk, alone at the office while the world outside enjoyed its day off, it still took ages to find what I wanted. I could have called Jane, she would have found the information in seconds, but it was her day off too.
Finding information relating to the sticker on Gordon’s Land Rover didn’t solve the crime. It just filled in one small piece of a confusing mess. I needed to speak with him to confirm what I now believed though.
Another part of the puzzle was the crop circles. I reopened the pack of information Jane had sent me earlier in the week. There wasn’t much in there about Lee and Christian, but I remembered that they had a Saturday job, both together at a big, out of town entertainment equipment retailer.
It was Saturday, so I could expect to catch them there.
Just then, I heard a letter drop onto the carpet tile under the letterbox at the front of the office. I glanced up automatically. Above the frosting that went from the floor to a height of about five feet, was my mystery hooded figure, peering through the glass at me.
He had just put something through the door and was now waving his arms at me, gesticulating that I should get on with it or that he was getting impatient with me. I was getting fed up with the cryptic clues that weren't helping me at all.
I ran for the front door, but I had locked it when I came back to stop people wandering in from the street outside. By the time I got it open, he was long gone.
I turned the new envelope over in my hands. It was unmarked, but that didn’t mean that the person hadn’t left a fingerprint on it. Or on the letter inside. I took it back to my desk, holding it carefully by one corner. It is notoriously difficult to get fingerprints off paper. They are there if the person has touched it with bare skin but almost impossible to make visible. It took clever equipment that had been specifically designed for the task. The type of equipment the chaps at the crime lab had.
I wanted to read whatever cryptic note was inside though, which I achieved with the use of some contact gloves and a pair of tweezers to keep my own fingerprints from entering the equation.
The note bore a new cryptic clue:
It’s all about fracking!!!
The triple exclamation point reinforced the frustrated gesticulation I saw through the window. Mystery hoody thought I was being thick and had missed the point.
The task of intercepting Lee and Christian at their Saturday job moved down the priority list as I settled into my chair once more and typed fracking into a search engine. I wondered how long this would take.
Getting Ready to go Out. Saturday, November 12th 1830hrs
Finally, I was home after what felt like a long, yet unproductive day, I set my bath taps to run, dropped in a bath bomb and went in search of food. As steam billowed out from my bathroom, I diced some veggies and threw them into my wok. I would have a Spanish omelette thing on a plate in ten minutes and be slipping into hot, soapy water in fifteen.
While I stirred the onions, peppers, zucchini, and mushrooms, I tried to focus on the case. I now had some parts of the puzzle clearly laid out in my head. Jack was the man in the alien spacesuit, I was certain of that. He had lied about everything so far and needed the publicity to save his rubbish show from obscurity. He wasn't the one doping the cows though. That task fell to someone else, but they couldn't achieve it alone, so although I suspected someone, I couldn't work out who their accomplice was or why they might be helping unless it was money.
The fracking clue had turned the case on its head but in a helpful way. My mystery hoody might have been getting frustrated with my lack of progress, but I was never going to work it out by myself.
As I chased the veggies around the wok, I considered what I knew. I knew that it wasn't aliens putting bioluminescent medicine into the cows. This was a big piece of the puzzle, but so far, the one person that had access to medical supplies, Tamara Mwangi, was dead. Her career in the pharmaceutical industry would have given her the opportunity to obtain the bioluminescent drugs that were getting into the milk. I was sure I knew what was causing the lights in the sky and needed only to ask a few questions to prove it, but my efforts to question Lee and Christian had still not yielded a result. The crop circles were proving to be less and less likely to be connected to the milk and the murder and the alien. I was still pursuing them because I wanted to close the case completely and have all the questions answered. It was what Tempest would do.
I kept going with my mental checklist as I served the omelette to a plate and sat down to eat it. I remembered BARF. They were real. It sounded ridiculous, but I had heard their name from more than one person now and had witnessed vehicles with the name emblazoned on the side as they sped by me.
Alien. Crop Circles. Light in the sky. Glowing Milk. A murder. BARF.
By the time I had soaked in the bath for forty minutes, cooled down and dried off, I had still not developed a working theory for how the elements were connected. I put some music on, banished the case from my thoughts and got dressed ready to go out.
Despite what Patience thought of my outfit choice, I went with the satin blue halter neck top from Hobbs and my best pair of skinny blue jeans. I plugged in my hair straighteners and pulled out the stool I used to sit at my dressing table. I had a folding three-sided mirror for putting on makeup and checking my complexion. I looked at my skin now, critically examining it to see if I was aging. Someday a wrinkle would appear at the corner of my eyes. I didn’t want that day to come, but the horror of it made me check myself to make sure it hadn’t happened.
As my hair straighteners beeped to let me know they were ready, there was a knock at my door. I wasn’t expecting anyone and the last person I found outside my door was Brett.
I wasn’t wearing any makeup so whoever was out there was going to have to put up with haggard, tired-looking Amanda. The person outside rapped hard on the door again.
‘Okay, okay.’ I muttered as I crossed the room.
I peered through the spy hole to find Patience outside. She had on a party dress that was two sizes too small for her enormous boobs and had probably been bought for exactly that reason.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked as I opened the door. Then I saw that she wasn’t alone. I had never met her sisters but if the two women with her were not related to her then I was going to be shocked.
‘Have you ever met my sisters?’ Patience asked as she barged in uninvited, a bottle of sparkling wine in one hand and a bottle of apple sours in the other.
‘Hi, I'm Charity.' Said Charity, as she followed Patience into my apartment. She was the same height and the same shape as Patience but a c
ouple of years older and had children where Patience did not. Her hair was braided into long strands that might have fallen to her waist but were wound around and onto her head where they were pinned in place with dozens of sparkly pins. She had on killer heels that made her at least six feet tall and a sequinned black dress beneath a faux fur, full-length winter coat. She looked ready to party hard.
I knew Charity was Patience’s older sister which made the third woman her younger sister, Hope.
‘I'm Hope.' Her younger sister said helpfully. Unlike her sisters, she didn't invite herself in but put out her hand for me to shake. ‘Thanks for looking after Patience. She talks about you all the time, about how you keep her out of trouble and all.'
I wasn’t sure I did any of that, but it was nice to hear, nevertheless. Hope was dressed much the same as her two older sisters, but her figure was more athletic and her bust less gigantic, and she was tall. She had on heels as well, but she had to be six feet tall in flats.
I invited her in and turned to find Charity sitting on my couch getting comfortable and Patience wrestling with the cork of the sparkling wine. It popped out and banged on the ceiling before coming to rest by my toaster.
‘Wine or apple sours?’ Patience asked, holding both bottles, a wide grin plastered all over her face.
‘I thought we were meeting at Bar Nineteen?’ That was what we had arranged. Bar Nineteen at eight o’clock. I remembered the conversation quite distinctly.
‘Uh huh.’ Said Patience. ‘I knew if I didn’t come over to help you get dressed, you would pick out some dowdy old outfit and scare away all the men.’
Dowdy?
‘I look okay, don’t I?’ I asked the room.
‘You look lovely, honey.’ Said Charity from her seat on the sofa. She gave me an encouraging smile like I was six and had learned to spell something difficult. ‘But,’ she drew the word out, ‘It’s more of a going to the launderette outfit than it is a going to the club to make men stare at you outfit.’