Under Parr

by Andrea Bramhall

  Kate pursed her lips. “Not that I want another person to die, but that may be the only way to put all our minds at rest.”

  “Unfortunately, I think you’re right. That’s why I put out the alert.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No need to thank me. I need to know as much as you do.” She closed the file on her desk. “I’ll let you know if and when I know anything more.”

  “Right.” She closed the door behind them and walked slowly back towards the car.

  “That wasn’t what we were hoping for,” Gareth said.

  “No. But not really a huge surprise either. I mean if, and I do mean if, there is someone popping off old folks, then whoever it is has been getting away with it for quite a while. At least three years. To do that, they’ve got to be pretty good. So this was never going to be easy.”

  “I guess.”

  “Let’s see what Grimshaw has to say. See if we can resolve this case his way instead of Dr Anderson’s.”

  CHAPTER 20

  “Will, can you check the stopcocks up at the top loos, please? We really need to shut the water off now. It was freezing last night, and I don’t want to risk a burst pipe on top of everything else,” Gina said into the small handheld radio.

  “I’m already up here, Gina.”

  She pushed the button and lifted the handset again. “You’re a star, Will. Don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “Don’t worry, G. You’ll never have to find out.”

  Gina put the handset back in the charging unit and turned to the spreadsheet she was trying to fill in. But she couldn’t concentrate.

  She hated payroll at the best of times, but she managed to take comfort in the fact that this would be the last cycle paying Sarah, Emma, and Rick. For the rest of the winter it would just be her and Will, and that would make her life so much simpler. But right now life didn’t seem very simple at all.

  All she could think about was her earlier meeting with Jodi. It was funny but she didn’t see Jodi’s face as a patchwork of scars now. She couldn’t describe how she did see her. But it wasn’t covered in scars. Yet for herself it was as though all she could see were scars. Even where there weren’t any.

  Her phone pinged, distracting her from her maudlin thoughts. She reached for it, half expecting it to be from Kate, but she didn’t recognise the number. She opened up the app and clicked on the message.

  Drinks tonight, gorgeous? xx

  She frowned, and double checked the number against Kate’s, then against any of the others in her phone, just in case. It didn’t match any.

  Who is this?

  She put the phone down and grabbed the tax book full of national insurance contribution codes. Connie had called it a bible of sorts. She called it penance.

  You know who it is. See you tonight xx

  A picture came through at the same time as the message. A picture of a well-muscled male chest, stomach with cut abs, and an erect penis.

  “Ew.” She deleted the conversation, deciding that there was no point in getting drawn into a long text conversation to point out that whoever that picture belonged to was sexting the wrong number.

  A sharp tap on the door drew her attention, and Sarah poked her head around. “Got a minute?”

  Gina indicated the chair opposite her desk.

  “I was, well, I was wondering if we could make a deal.” Sarah looked more than a little sheepish.

  “What kind of deal?”

  “Well, this new job doesn’t offer any accommodation with it.” She paused, seemingly giving Gina a chance to jump in and save her from whatever she wanted to ask.

  “And?”

  “And the rents around here are humungous, and I really don’t want to go back to my mum’s.”

  “I repeat myself, and?”

  “Well, can I stay here?”

  Gina shook her head. “You resigned, Sarah. You’re leaving as of tomorrow. Your decision. I can’t let you stay here if you’re not working here. You know as well as I do the insurance company won’t go for that.”

  “They wouldn’t have to know if I was registered as a guest.”

  “If you can’t afford the rent around here, you can’t afford to stay here permanently as a guest.”

  “That’s where I was hoping we could make a deal.”

  Gina shook her head. “You’ve got to be kidding. You tried to blackmail me into making promises I didn’t know if I’d be able to keep, increasing your wage, and now you want a favour from me after dropping me and Will in the shit?” She pointed at the door. “Get out.”

  Sarah scowled at her. “No need to be nasty about it, Gina.”

  “I’ll show you bloody nasty. You’re no longer required here at Brandale. Pack your crap and get out. Now.”

  Sarah paled. “You can’t do that. I’m owed—”

  “You’ll get everything you’re owed, Sarah Willis. Now get the fuck out of my office and off my campsite!”

  Sarah offered her a fake smile. “It isn’t yours, Gina. You’ll only ever be a hired hand here.”

  “Which is a damn sight more than you are. Now get out before I call the police and tell them we have a trespasser.”

  Sarah slammed the door behind her. Then the gate.

  Shit. Gina knew she was right. While she was running this place and making decisions as though it were hers, she was only another member of staff. And she had no more job security than they did. If they got a letter from HMRC they could be closed down, or an heir could be found who could come in and take over, or sell out from under them. Should she do what Sarah and the others were doing? Was that actually the wisest move? Close up the campsite and move on with her life. Let everyone fend for themselves. Including herself.

  How would she support Sammy? Pay her rent? Put food on the table? How would she manage without this place? Without Brandale, she simply couldn’t. She didn’t have the luxury that Sarah and her pals did. She had responsibilities and no one else to turn to if she didn’t meet them.

  Her phone pinged again. She stared, not wanting to look at another penis, but Kate’s number flashed on the screen. She smiled as she looked at the message.

  Thinking about you. Wish I was there to give you a big hug right now xx

  Me too xx

  CHAPTER 21

  Simon Grimshaw looked like he’d just rolled out of bed, grabbed his dirty clothes off the floor, and shoved a ratty beanie on his head to hide the fact that he hadn’t brushed his hair. Ever. Kate almost didn’t want him in her car. No, scratch that, she didn’t want him in her car. Ever. Not without putting down plastic sheets to catch anything that was going to drop off and become a science experiment. She expected him to be very young underneath the unkempt beard and hair hanging in his eyes from under the rim of his hat. He wasn’t. Well, he was compared to Len, but he probably had ten years on her. The moniker “Young Grimshaw” was obviously Len taking the piss again.

  She watched him connect cables to his laptop with ease, seemingly oblivious to, or definitely uncaring of, the stares he garnered from Kate and the rest of the team. Stella’s lip was slightly curled, her nose wrinkled, and Kate saw her reach for the bottle of alcohol gel that she kept on her desk for sanitation purposes. She stifled the snigger with a cough.

  “Okay, so I’ve gone through all the data on the hard drive you brought me. I ran a few bots over it too, to make sure I hadn’t missed anything—”

  “Bots?” Stella asked.

  “Yeah, these cool little programmes that automatically check for stuff. They’re a lot more efficient than I am, and they don’t miss anything. So we checked it all, and I found some weird stuff and some cool stuff.”

  “Cool,” Tom said with a grin.

  Gareth’s jaw clenched. He didn’t say anything though. Good boy.

  “Yeah, it is. Your informant was right about the 3840 number. The money from the government is being sent to an overseas account, the National Bank of Poland in Warsaw.”

  �
��And the payments have been going there since the eighth of December 2013?” Stella asked.

  “No. The payments started going there at the end of January 2014, but they were back dated to the eighth of December.”

  “How?”

  “Well, I can explain it if you want, but it’s all pretty boring and complicated at the same time. The basics of it are that the NHS’s system back then was pretty easy to do almost anything you wanted with it. All you needed was the account password for the nursing home and the approved paperwork for the resident. Once you had that in the system, whoever accessed the account could change whatever details they wanted. It’s not that easy now, by the way. There are multiple layers of access needed for this sort of thing now.”

  “Okay, let’s start simple. Is 3840 our Alan Parr?” Kate asked.

  “Yes. Your fraudster’s told you that quite clearly,” he said tapping the number.

  “I’m sorry?” Stella asked.

  “The number itself, 3840.” Grimshaw looked at them all incredulously. “His date of birth, 3.8.40. You didn’t see it?”

  Kate banged her forehead down in the desk with a groan. “No. We didn’t see it.”

  Grimshaw looked smug. Really fucking smug. “Well, I managed to access the records of the NHS’s accounts—”

  “Legally?” Stella asked.

  Grimshaw coughed. “And when I accessed them, it was there in black and white who the reference code referred to. All his details were on there. According to his medical records he’s showing as still living at Brancombe House Nursing Home.”

  “Right. And the bank account in Poland, do we have the name of who that belongs to?”

  “No. I haven’t been able to access those records. I have put in a request to get the data, but it will take a little while. Official channels take time, as we know.”

  “Do you have a rough idea?”

  “Could be a few hours, could be a few days,” he said with a shrug.

  “Poland, though?” Kate asked.

  “Yes. Definitely.”

  “And it stays in that account?”

  He shrugged again. “Until I get the data from that account, I can’t tell you.”

  “Okay.” She turned back to her notes. “Who on the staff is from Poland?”

  “We’ve got three blokes and eight women,” Jimmy said.

  Tom whistled. “Out of how many full-time staff members?”

  “Twenty-five,” Kate said.

  “So we have eleven suspects to question and see if we can beat you to the information, right, Mr Grimshaw?” Stella said.

  He sneered. “Good luck.”

  His haughty attitude told them all exactly how likely he thought that was. Given that they hadn’t even spotted the reference number was the victim’s date of birth, she had to concede that he had a point.

  “Actually, we don’t,” Gareth said.

  “We don’t?” Tom queried.

  Gareth shook his head. “Three of the women didn’t work there until April 2014 or later, so they couldn’t be our embezzler-slash-possible murderer.”

  “Good point. Anyone else we can rule out?” Stella walked over to the board and grabbed a marker pen.

  “The sarge and I’ve already interviewed Maja Hanin.”

  “Okay.” She turned to Kate. “You’re confident she’s clean?”

  “She’s five foot, and if she weighed eight stone I’d be amazed. There’s no way she could carry out something as physical as this body dump would have to be.”

  “If it was a body dump,” Stella said.

  “True. But if it wasn’t, then that means Alan disappeared and no one reported him missing, but our thief has enough knowledge of what happened to him to steal his subsidies.” She shook her head. “It seems like too big a risk for it to be a separate crime.”

  “Desperate people do desperate things, Kate.”

  “True. But given her educational background and everything we saw at her flat, I’m pretty confident that she wouldn’t have the skills to pull it off.”

  “Okay. Collier, read me off the names we need to interview.”

  “Stefan Podolski, Michal Boruc, Jacub Pazdan, Eva Kutenova.”

  “Jimmy, is she the one we met when we first went there?” Kate asked.

  “I think so. Name sounds about right. Why?”

  “I thought she was Czech or something,” Kate said.

  “Or something,” Gareth said. “Polish. Says so in her employment records, sarge.”

  “I believe you. Carry on.”

  “Ola Dykiel, Anna Kolak, and Krystyna Cedinska.”

  Stella wrote the names as Gareth called them out. “Right, I want a full work-up of each of them. Don’t leave anything out.”

  “That’s going to start clocking up the phone bill, sarge,” Tom said.

  “Doesn’t matter. We’ve a case to solve. Any luck finding a next of kin for Mr Parr yet?”

  “Nothing. Looks like he didn’t have a soul in the world looking out for him,” Gareth said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Now that, that’s bloody criminal,” he muttered under his breath.

  Kate heard him, but she didn’t think anyone else had. Certainly no one took any notice if they did. That could be me. Forty years from now, that could be me. She shuddered. No it won’t, I’ve got Gina and Sammy to care about now. I don’t have to end up like this. Alone and forgotten.

  “Want me to run you back to King’s Lynn, Mr Grimshaw?” Gareth offered.

  “Thanks, that’d be great.”

  “That okay, sarge?”

  “Works for me.” She fished in her pocket and pulled out a twenty-pound note. “Get some coffees on the way back. The crap they’ve got in the cupboard downstairs is giving me a headache.”

  “Too much caffeine in it?”

  She shook her head. “Not enough. I can’t drink enough to get my fix without my eyeballs floating in my head and needing to pee all day.”

  “TMI, sarge.” Gareth tapped his pants pockets checking for his keys, stuffed the note into his jacket pocket, and winked at Kate as he left.

  Two hours later, they were comfortable with the information they had on each of their suspects, suitably caffeinated, and ready to talk to them all.

  “So how do you want to do this, Stella? Get them all in here or go and see them?”

  “I’m inclined to think getting them all in here would be more likely to rattle a cage or two.”

  “Agreed, but if we don’t get our guy in the first couple, we’ll have tipped our hand and they might run.”

  “Good point. Sounds like you have something in mind.”

  “Interviews at the nursing home, but get them all together and hold them in a waiting room until we get to them. Tom and one of the plastic policemen can watch them while we question the rest.”

  Stella nodded. “Yep. Works for me. Everyone else okay with that?”

  Everyone agreed and quickly grabbed their coats as Stella called the home and set things up with Diana Lodge.

  CHAPTER 22

  Tom stood by the door. Arms crossed over his chest, his bald head gleaming under the fluorescent lights of the staff break room, and his eyes doing that creepy non-blinking thing that was such an effective interrogation tool for him. It creeped Kate out, and she hadn’t done anything wrong. She could only imagine what it must feel like to someone with a guilty conscience.

  She shuffled through the photographs that Sister Lodge had managed to find. Not looking at the pictures. She was looking at the people in the room. Some looked relaxed. Leaning back in their chairs, leafing through magazines, chatting to one another. Others looked worried. Sweat beaded on foreheads, trickled down necks, and grew in large stains under armpits. The odour in the room was stagnating quickly towards unpleasant. There were too many nervous people in the room. They only needed one, after all.

  “Mr Podolski, would you come with me please,” Stella said, and led the overweight, sweating man into a different room.

 
; Jimmy closed the door behind them.

  “Mr Boruc, would you come with me,” Kate looked him directly in the eyes. They were bloodshot and half-lidded. Not overly surprising as the poor chap had been on the night shift last night and obviously hadn’t had much sleep.

  He was thin, maybe wiry was a better description, and not much taller than her own five-foot-eight. He yawned as he followed her up the stairs to a small sitting room on the second floor. Diana Lodge had done a good job on clearing spaces for them to set this up. Clearly she was as eager to have this over with as they were.

  One of the portable recorders that Stella had organised sat on the small table. “I need to record this interview, Mr Boruc. Is that okay with you?”

  He nodded and Kate pressed record. She quickly introduced herself, Gareth, and Michal Boruc, dated the recording, and stated their location. “May I call you Michal?” she asked as he sat in the chair furthest away from the door. Gareth sat next to Kate, between Michal and any means of escape from the room.

  “That is fine,” he said, his accent thick and heavy.

  “Thank you.” Kate quickly introduced herself before continuing, “I believe Sister Lodge told you we needed to speak to you about the man who has been missing from the home for some time—”

  “I already told your baldie friend in there, I don’t know the guy. I don’t recognise him. If he ever lived here, I didn’t have nothing to do with him.”

  Kate nodded. “I understand. We just have to be absolutely sure.” She shuffled through the pictures until she found the one of Michal taken at Christmas 2012. She pointed to the picture. He smiled out from the page, a paper crown on his head and a broken cracker in his hand. “Is this you?”

  He squinted at the image. “Yes. This is one of the Christmas parties we have here.”

  “Do you know when this picture was taken?”

  “I would think, from haircut, maybe 2011.” He shrugged. “Maybe 2012.”

  “It was 2012. It says so on the back of the picture.”

  “And?”