by Adam Carter
A yell split the gloom and something lunged for me. I probably screamed, although things moved so quickly that I don’t remember much of it. I know I must have screamed because afterwards my throat was raw and my heart was hammering. At the time I did not have a clue what was happening, much less how to respond.
The dark shape did not collide with me, but brushed past, and while I could see a flailing arm, nothing connected. I dropped to the floor, only partly through design, and fought against collapsing into a quivering wreck. I knew that such would only get me killed and even though I was terrified I forced myself to concentrate on where I was and what was happening to me. I could not see a face, could not hear anything except the rush of the figure’s passing, the faint whiff of cologne almost choking me with its nearness.
A cry sounded through the room but the figure was already past me. I felt something grab me and I fought, shrieking as I subconsciously clawed at the hands grasping me.
“It’s me, it’s me!” Lewis was saying, and released me, holding his hands up in surrender.
I looked up at him, aware I was sitting on the floor, my senses reeling, my breathing haggard. Anger surged through me, burning through my adrenalin, and as with most people I just snapped at him. “Where the hell were you when I was being attacked?”
“If you’re all right, I’m going to go chase the felon.”
Suddenly I felt incredibly stupid, and in my fury could not abide the fact Detective Lewis was standing around tending to me when he should have been out running down whoever had just attacked me. “Go, go!”
Lewis ran, and I struggled to my feet and stumbled after him. We made it to the back of the room within seconds and charged out into the light of the outside world. There were old materials dumped out there, broken shelves and the like, while one wall was lined with bins. I could just catch a glimpse of a youth wearing trainers and a dark hoodie vaulting over one of the walls, and saw that Lewis was already in pursuit. I ran after Lewis, for I kept losing sight of my attacker and just hoped Lewis knew where he was headed. But Lewis did this sort of thing for a living, and even if he lost sight of the lad for several moments he would still have a better idea of how to track him than I ever could.
Within the span of a minute I had a terrible stitch in my side but knew I could not afford to stop for even a moment’s rest. Lewis barrelled ahead as though he was attempting a record for the fifteen hundred metres, and I was suddenly glad I didn’t even own a pair of high-heels.
I saw the youth again then, leaping, grabbing hold of a wall and pulling himself up. Before he had the bins to clamber across, but this time he struggled and I felt for sure we had him. But then he was up and over the wall and Lewis was only seconds behind him. He too strained to pull himself up, but then he also was gone. Pushing my body to its limits, I made the leap myself and felt my body slam into the wall, sending waves of pain through my chest. My fingers clung tenaciously to the wall, however, and I steadfastly refused to let go. Instead I concentrated my efforts as much as I could and pulled hard, as though I was attempting to draw the wall down towards where I was hanging. But it was no good, and the more I strained the more tired I became and the farther Lewis and the youth managed to get from me.
Giving it one final effort, I strained for all I was worth, but it was no use and my fingers slipped. I landed hard upon my backside, my hands raw, my fingers stinging. Breathing heavily, I got back to my feet and walked about the wall, trying to find a way around which might still get me close to where the others had long since fled.
Walking slowly, I listened for any sign of them, although there was no way I was going to catch them now. They were long gone.
Resolved not to surrender, I finally managed to follow the wall all the way around, and found it ended at a crossroads anyway. Even if I had made it over the wall, I would have been delayed so badly that I would not have known which way to head.
“Hey!”
I jumped, literally, and almost struck out, but once more Detective Lewis was holding up his hands to placate my somewhat violent tendencies. I collapsed against the wall which had so easily defeated me, bloated in its victory. My lungs felt as though they were shortly to burst, my throat was raw and I could feel my voice was going to be strained.
Lewis shook his head sadly. “Sorry, he was too quick for me.”
“Did you ... get a look?”
“Not really. I think he was a teenager though. He kept his hood up the whole time so I didn’t get to even see a skin colour.”
I swore, punching the wall which had denied me my easy solution. The wall resisted and fresh pain surged through my hand. I’m sure the wall was even laughing at that moment.
“I’ve put an alert through for him,” Lewis said. “He won’t get far. Hopefully he’ll be picked up by some local constables or something.”
I didn’t like to work in hope, but since we’d let the kid vanish there was hardly much else to focus on.
“What was he doing in the shop?” I asked, my breathing returning to normal at last. “I mean, why would someone shoot Mr Polinski, then go straight back there?”
“Maybe he didn’t get what he wanted the first time around, I don’t know. Look, the truth is he’s not going back to the shop again. He’d be an idiot to, now we know he’s interested in hanging around that place. I’ll get someone watching it just in case, but he’s not going back there. And that means we don’t have any further leads on where he might be going.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“I suggest you go home and think about what you’re doing. If I wasn’t with you today, who knows what might have happened? He could have had a knife or anything. Looks to me like he jumped you and panicked when he realised I was there as well.”
“He didn’t seem to panic to me,” I said, thinking back and at last being able to properly analyse precisely what had happened. “In fact, he just seemed to want to get away from us. I don’t think he even touched me when he jumped out. If he attacked me and got scared when he saw you, he would have made contact with me before running off.”
Lewis was looking at me with a helpless expression I found quite odd. “So what else was he doing?”
“I don’t know. But the more I think about it, the more I’m certain he wasn’t attacking me.”
“Of course he was attacking you. He jumped out from behind some shelves and ...”
“You saw where he leaped out from?” I asked with raised eyebrows.
“I ... No, I didn’t see him leap at you. But where else would he have been hiding?” He adopted an expression which told me he was about to say something gentle and nice, yet something which would be anything but what I wanted to hear. “Look, maybe you should just leave this to the professionals, yeah?”
That certainly qualified.
“Like you and Carl?” I asked, sounding tarter than I had intended. “You need the help, Detective. At least Carl was man enough to admit that to me.”
“We need trained help. There’s a difference.”
“Well this is only making me more determined to see this through.”
He looked away and I could see that was not what he had wanted to hear.
A sudden idea tugged at my annoyance factor and threatened to tip it to spilling point. “Hold on a minute,” I said. “You set this up, didn’t you? That was supposed to scare me off, make me go home and curl up under the duvet and pretend none of this had ever happened? That kid was working for you wasn’t he? It wasn’t even Nathan.”
“Who’s Nathan?”
I realised I had said more than I had intended, and Lewis’s face became serious then. I had been withholding evidence from a police officer during an ongoing investigation and if Carl didn’t take kindly to that sort of thing I was certain a complete stranger wasn’t going to cut me any slack at all.
“Carl didn’t tell you the kid’s name was Nathan?” I asked without mentioning that it was I who had told Carl to begin with.
; Lewis still looked monumentally annoyed, but I could tell he intended to ask Carl about this before berating me any further. It bought me a little time, which I could use to get as far from these detectives as possible. But first I had to know just what I was up against.
“If I phone Carl right now,” I said, drawing my mobile and stabbing it at his chest, “what’s he going to say about this set-up?”
“There was no set-up.”
“Sure. And yesterday I had tea with the Easter Bunny.”
“Fine, whatever. Yes, we set you up. Carl doesn’t want you getting hurt, I suppose. I was just doing him a favour by agreeing. You happy now?”
He was angry and had every right to be; but then so did I. Lewis had stopped trying to be so nice to me, which was something to be thankful for, although at least with his smarmy, solicitous nature I knew where I stood with him. I had never been able to abide people who pretend to be something they’re not. It was one of the good things about my relationship with Carl. Actually, I don’t think you could find a more honest person than Carl. That was what really rankled about the whole affair: that Carl could have been involved with setting me up like that.
I stormed off, heading back to my car. All the way I toyed with my phone, wanting to call Carl and demand to know whether he was involved. But any idiot could have seen that he was, and I didn’t want to place myself beneath the idiots.
Carl’s betrayal stung, but as I got back into my car I decided I was going to get over it. I would solve the murder myself, without Carl’s input, and shove his face right in the truth that I could do something he never thought I could. Maybe even do his job better than him.
As I drove off, I realised I had no idea where I was even going. Not for the first time in the investigation, my leads had all run dry.
CHAPTER SIX
The Busybody
Mr Polinski had been a caring, talkative, sometimes charming man. He was this way because he wanted to make sure his customers were happy, because he knew that happy customers were returning customers. In short, Mr Polinski was a good businessman. These thoughts played through my mind as I drove away from Detective Lewis. I don’t know how long I cruised around for, possibly an hour. I didn’t have a destination, but the constant motion helped me think and the more I thought about things the more I came to understand that whatever the solution was, it was all going to rest with Mr Polinski himself. I may have lost faith in Carl and I may not have trusted Lewis in the first place, but I was not on my own. Mr Polinski would extend his hand and help me from beyond the grave; regardless of what Carl believed about him being past caring for such things.
My thoughts formed a river of possibilities, all churning into one mass and rushing headlong through my mind. Sometimes an idea would crash against the rocks and come apart, sometimes three or four notions would merge and form a stronger current. I’m not trying to be poetic here: I actually was thinking of things in terms of flowing water. It’s a trick which has always helped my mind concentrate in the past. If I stop thinking about the thing I desperately want to think about, it suddenly pops into my head when I’m least expecting it.
Good businessmen kept stringent records.
The thought hit me so hard I braked suddenly, my eyes wide, my heart pounding. I don’t know what you would term the epiphany: maybe in the context I’m using you would call it the river ending in a massive, powerful waterfall over which I suddenly dropped in a barrel. I don’t really care for metaphors and didn’t think that far. All I could concentrate on at that moment was the fact that something important had just flashed into my mind, and I had to run with it.
Mr Polinski would never have employed anyone without keeping a record of it somewhere. Even if he was for some reason keeping everything off the books, he would have kept a record. Maybe not in his shop, but maybe in his house. Maybe not even there: maybe just under a rock somewhere. Regardless of the location, Mr Polinski would have kept records about this Nathan he was employing. And if I could find them I might not be able to discover an address, but I could certainly learn a surname to go with the forename.
Deciding a return to the shop would be a bad move, I tried to remember whether Carl had ever run through the procedures for this sort of crime. Would Mr Polinski’s house be watched by the police under these circumstances? I knew Carl would have gone into great detail about such a thing at some point during one of his harangues, but I had only ever paid the minimal amount of attention to him at those times and could not resurrect the relevant information now.
Even if I could have remembered, it would not have done me any good, because the fact was I needed to find this information and I couldn’t find it by sitting in my car. Gaining entrance to Mr Polinski’s house, however, would not be easy, and I could think of no way I might legally accomplish this. That I was willing to step outside the law in order to bring his killer in was not something which sat well with me, but also something I knew I would have to do. And, as Carl had said, Mr Polinski was beyond caring.
I parked two roads down from his house, just in case the police were watching, and headed in on foot. I ran through all the possibilities in my head of how I was going to approach this, yet none of them made me feel any better. Two methods were fighting for dominance in my thoughts and as I slowed my pace I worked through each of them carefully.
Option one: I could break into the house. Highly illegal, yes, but I reasoned that I might be able to find a window at the back of the house or something which I could pry open. It would not be too difficult if I could find such a thing, and terribly difficult if I couldn’t. I’d never broken into anywhere before, and a part of me wished I had indeed bought some form of junior detective kit during my time with Carl: or at least a book which explained the art of lock-picking. The ramifications of breaking and entering were that I could face prosecution. I did not know whether it would ordinarily be a prison sentence, but since I was interfering with a murder investigation I was not about to pretend that this would not become a possibility. Also, if I broke into the house I would have to leave everything the way they had been, which would unfortunately include the locks and windows. If the police had to investigate the break-in, they would lose all their precious time doing that and running after the wrong leads when they should have been out themselves looking for Nathan. Breaking and entering seemed, then, a very bad idea.
Option two: I could knock on the door of the next-door neighbour and pretend to be a detective. If, for some reason, they had a key, no locks would have to be broken. I would then have the run of the house and not have to worry about leaving locks in place. Of course, either way my fingerprints would be all over the house, so I would have to be very careful indeed. Still, it would give the neighbour a legitimate belief of my being there, so I would not have to sneak around like a thief. I had just decided on this course of action when I remembered I had already been to the next-door neighbour and they would recognise me and therefore know I was not a detective.
I slowed my pace a little more, trying to buy myself further time to think. I slowed myself so much that I was hardly moving, and still I knew it would not be enough time to work something out. I could see no way out of this, and the reason for that was because I simply was no good at deception.
So I reasoned that perhaps deception was not the answer after all. Maybe I could get through this without having to lie to anyone.
By this point I had almost reached Mr Polinski’s house and I chastised myself for having strolled right up to it: if there were officers watching the house they would assuredly think my behaviour peculiar. Ignoring the house, I opened the gate of his neighbour and marched boldly up to their door. The same kindly old woman answered as before, and she smiled in recognition of me. If I had decided to pretend to be someone I wasn’t that would have been the worst possible reaction I could have had from her, but my honesty was rewarded in that I needed her recognition.
For the life of me I couldn’t remember the old woman’s name
.
“I was here before,” I said with as beaming a smile I could muster. “I was asking about Mr Polinski?”
“Of course, dear. Has something happened?”
I should point out here that I don’t think she called me ‘dear’. To be honest, I don’t remember much about my talk with her: I was always trying to remember all the pertinent evidence and I could not see that the old woman’s words would mean much. I just have this stereotypical view of old women calling younger women ‘dear’ and for all I know she may well have done so.
“I need to get into the house,” I said.
“Well come in, come in.”
“Not your house. Mr Polinski’s.”
“I don’t think Mr Polinski would much like that.”
“I don’t think he’s going to complain, either. I need to find some information which might help me solve his murder.”
“Oh. The police were after that as well.”
“Yes, they tend to be. I, uh, don’t suppose you have a spare key to his house, do you?”
“A spare key to Mr Polinski’s house?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“You do?”
“Yes.”
“Could you possibly let me in for a while? I just need to find out something.”
She looked uncertain and I could see she was not going to agree to this at all. I fought for some incentive I might offer her but if she didn’t want the killer found for the sake of the killer being found I was not all that sure what else I could have tried.
“What do you want from his house?” she asked with curious suspicion.
“I don’t want to steal anything,” I protested perhaps a little too emphatically. “I just need to find something. I won’t take anything and I’ll try not to even touch too much. Maybe you could help me find it. You could come in with me.”