Grace Smith Investigates

by Liz Evans

  I could see where this was going. My departure from the police had been precipitated when I inadvertently provided an alibi for a local villain who subsequently turned out to have been involved in an operation where another officer had been seriously injured. I know I should have owned up, but by the time anyone found out just how badly that other officer had been hurt, it was too late. I’d frozen and stuck to my original story. I don’t know whether I was deliberately set up or not, but to add to the suggestion of corruption, several thousand pounds had mysteriously appeared in my bank account shortly afterwards (and yes - I did keep it). The point is, that operation had been a joint one with Customs and Excise too. It would seem that it wasn’t just the police who believed in giving a bitch a bad name, et cetera.

  ‘If you have got yourself involved in something ... unethical, let me help, Grace. Tell me now and I’ll do what I can.’

  ‘Look, I appreciate the offer, Jerry, and the fact that you’ve stuck your career on the line here, but I honestly haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.’

  We held eye contact for a few more seconds. Then he shrugged and said: ‘If you say so. Shall we go?’

  It was a twenty-mile drive back. The sea hushed softly to our right. A few hundred years ago this area had been under the waves, but over the centuries the coastline had silted up, and now we were cruising through waterlogged marsh flats with the moon glinting off pewter pools amongst the reed-pierced islands. Jerry reached over and snapped the radio on. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘It’s your car.’ I was aware that had come out rather more offhand than I’d intended. There was a pair of tiny leather football boots dangling from the switch. To make amends I asked: ‘You play?’

  ‘My son does.’ He flicked the boots. ‘His first try-out for the Seatoun Minnows Under-Fives Playgroup tomorrow. Otherwise known as the Milk-Teeth Marauders.’

  ‘Great.’ That was the extent of my social chit-chat. We rode the rest of the way in silence, listening to jazz on Radio Two.

  Once we reached Seatoun, Jerry drove past my door, his eyes scanning the pavements. To make sure he wasn’t spotted consorting with the notorious Ms Big of the Meat Trade, presumably. I told him to drop me off in one of the back streets. I thought that was the end of it, but as I was about to walk away, he called through the window: ‘Grace. Have you got something to write on?’

  I located an advertising flyer for a pizza place in my shoulder bag. Jerry passed me a pen and reeled off his mobile number. ‘Call me. If you want to talk.’

  ‘I’ve already said it all, Jerry. But listen, thanks again. Wish the kid luck from me. Hope he scores a hat-trick.’

  ‘That seems unlikely. He’s in goal.’

  I went to bed feeling good that night. OK, the down side was that Jerry Jackson thought I was a closet smuggler - but at least he’d cared enough to break the rules for me. And anyone who knew Jerry knew just how much that meant. I resolved to return his pen, which was currently in the bottom of my bag.

  Huddled in my makeshift bed on the floor, I mulled over the puzzle of who would phone from the Royal Oak about little ol’ me.

  Come to think of it, they could have used the phones in the Bell. It wouldn’t be difficult to slip inside when the refurbishing team were elsewhere and help yourself to the public boxes. If it was one of the Bentings, they wouldn’t even have needed to sneak in. Kelly’s mum had a foreign-sounding name and an un-English way of speaking. Were they into introducing her fellow countrymen to the delights of the British countryside?

  And then there was Luke: a bloke whose phone had been cut off and who didn’t pay his bills but had enough cash to splash on expensive electronic equipment and his beloved sports car. And who’d died suddenly and messily recently. He hadn’t inherited much spending cash from Uncle Eric if those bank statements were to be believed; the cottage hadn’t been sold yet; and he didn’t seem to have a job - just grand plans for a career in the movies - so where had he been getting his financing from? Perhaps he’d had a falling-out with the rest of the organisation. Or simply become too greedy.

  I felt myself drifting into that dreamy state just before sleep. The police would hardly have missed the connection if it was there. And yet the whole investigation into Luke’s murder had always seemed strangely laid-back. Had they been holding off on an arrest in order not to jeopardise the rest of the operation? If they had, what were Faye Sinclair’s chances of keeping out of it? Slim to none, probably.

  I woke at eight, still with that up-beat feeling that comes when you discover someone really likes you, and an irresistible craving for fried food, ketchup and frothy coffee.

  The big news on the television was a series of raids that had taken place early that morning. An operation involving several hundred police, Customs and immigration officers. A number of arrests have been made in south coast towns, the Midlands and Home Counties,’ the breathy newsreader informed us. ‘And quantities of drugs and firearms have been recovered. A large collection of persons believed to be illegal immigrants have also been held in the swoop. It is alleged that the origin of the recent diphtheria outbreak ... ’ With any luck they’d got the mysterious caller from St Biddy’s and cleared my good(ish) name with Jerry.

  I sloshed a bottle of water over the succulents on my way to the high street. The kiosk shops were just opening: buckets, spades, sandcastle flags, shrimp nets and jelly sandals were being piled into dump bins marked ‘Special Offers’. It was last-chance weekend before the town sank into the sub-arctic bleakness of low-season desolation.

  Pepi’s already had a dozen customers. Including Annie, who was halfway through an enormous All-British Fry-Up. I signalled to Shane to bring another plate of the same, and enquired: ‘Late night or early start?’

  ‘Bit of both. I drove Zeb over to my parents in the wee small hours of this morning. They discharged him once that container firm he was working in was raided.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Recovering. Won’t be returning to CID for a few more weeks yet, though. Mum was in her element pampering her baby when I left,’ Annie said, forking up a generous portion of mushroom and black pudding.

  ‘You still not back on the diet, then?’

  ‘I have abandoned diets and men. I am now celibate, fat and happy. What have you been up to?’

  Hitching up the chair opposite her, I brought her up to date on the Life and Times of Grace Smith - Not-So-Super Sleuth. In consideration of the big risk Jerry had taken on my account, I left out last night’s tete-a-tete.

  ‘It’s time you got your life together,’ Annie said, licking off a cappuccino moustache with the tip of her tongue.

  ‘Thanks.’

  We ate in silence for a while, whilst the jukebox crooned a selection of slower numbers that Shane considered suitable Sunday-morning music. Eventually I raised my voice over Elvis’s protests that we gave him fever, and asked what she had planned for the rest of the day.

  ‘I’ve got to go into the office. I’m working on a couple of Vetch’s cases.’

  ‘How come? What’s happened to my favourite gnome?’

  ‘In bed for most of the week. Together with the Delaney woman.’

  ‘I didn’t think the little letch had the stamina.’

  ‘Food poisoning, you idiot. They’ve both had it. Dodgy seafood last Sunday.’

  I laughed. With the horrors of my own bout of poisoning already fading, I could see the irony in the situation. For years I’d existed on junk food and warmed-up leftovers and I’d never had a single stomach bug. As soon as I hit the high life, I was pole-axed by botulism, or whatever the darn thing called itself.

  ‘It’s nature’s way of telling you that you were born to be common,’ Annie remarked as we left to the strains of ‘Blue Moon’. ‘Talking of being born, I seem to be speaking to your mother more than I do to mine. You didn’t call her, did you?’

  ‘I tried. The phone was out. I’ll come into the office with you. Do it now. It’s closer.’


  ‘And cheaper.’

  She checked the answering machine whilst I nabbed Jan’s extension to ring my mum. Our conversation was short - if not sweet. Once she’d established I was OK, she couldn’t wait to get off the line. I could hear my dad’s voice calling to ask who it was as she hung up on me.

  ‘There’s a message for you on the tape,’ Annie said. She headed across the hall and let herself into Vetch’s office. I listened to Barbra Delaney asking where the hell I’d been.

  ‘. .. I’ve not heard a bloody word all week. I told you to keep in touch. When I spend money on something, lady, I expect to get what I’ve paid for. You get your arse out here and tell me what’s happening, pronto.’

  ‘Firstly,’ I said as soon we were connected, ‘you haven’t paid me - yet. Secondly, if you want something that comes when whistled, try Battersea Dogs’ Home. And thirdly, I haven’t phoned you because you gave me food poisoning and half killed me.’ Even though it was a good two days before I’d succumbed, it was too much of a coincidence for it to be anything else but Barbra’s infamous aquarium a la Andreas that had pole-axed me.

  ‘Oh? Sorry. It’s shit, isn’t it?’ Barbra said. ‘I didn’t mean to mouth off at you like that. I was feeling rotten. I’ve been stuck out here all week on me tod. No one’s been near except the doctor and a couple of calls from Vetchy.’

  ‘No Lee?’

  ‘No, but ... Look, can you come out? There’s something odd been going on.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I’d rather do it face to face.’

  ‘Are you going?’ Annie enquired when I relayed the gist of the conversation to her.

  ‘I suppose I’ll have to. She is paying the bills.’

  ‘How lucky someone is.’ Annie flicked through a sheaf of papers in front of her. She’d seated herself at Vetch’s huge leather-topped desk and was making herself very much at home in his files. ‘You don’t seem to be. In fact, as far as I can see, I seem to be about the only person in this business who pays up on time.’

  ‘Really?’ I wished I’d known that earlier. I’d have held out for even longer. I looked Annie over. She was in casual sweats rather than her normal business suits; with her hair scrunched back and her face shiny behind the glasses. Nonetheless, she radiated efficiency as she pored over Vetch’s accounts.

  ‘Any chance of you putting the tycoon act on hold and giving me a lift to Wakens Keep?’

  ‘Go tidy your pit upstairs for a couple of hours whilst I finish up here, and then you have a deal.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  We’d shut the main door because we weren’t officially open on Sundays. I opened it to take a few breaths of sunshine-touched ozone before plunging into my least favourite occupation - housework.

  The day-trippers were struggling down to the beach, lugging picnics and whiny kids. A couple of cyclists free-wheeled past, thigh muscles rippling and sweat crystals glistening on their hairy legs. (They were probably nice girls when you got to know them.) The window of a passing car was lowered as it came opposite our offices and a greasy sack with a motorway services logo was pitched out, spilling half-eaten burgers, polystyrene containers and paper beakers as it spun. It missed the rubbish bin - probably because the nearest one was fixed to a lamp-post two streets away.

  Perhaps it was the combination of those cyclists and the sack seen together, but fragments of memories started to crowd into my mind. They broke into pieces and then re-formed in my head, making new patterns. It was like watching a kaleidoscope spinning, taking the same segments of colours but making a completely new picture with them. I didn’t like the finished result veiy much. But I had to check to see if I was right.

  I sprinted the few streets to the flat, dragged Grannie Vetch’s monster up to the road and kicked the pedals into position.

  They’d finished the planting out around St Biddy’s. Rows of cauliflower seedlings sprinkled the coffee-cake-mix-coloured earth like pale green hundreds-and-thousands. It didn’t seem possible that they’d soon fatten up into plump little farm-subsidy magnets, but what did I know?

  Harry answered the door to me. He was in his shirt sleeves; a stained tea towel flung over one shoulder.

  ‘Can we talk?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Vegetables.’

  He led me into the kitchen. There were old china bowls on the table containing peeled and quartered potatoes and cauliflower florets. A pile of scraped carrots was sitting on the chopping board.

  ‘I was getting the dinner ready to go in. Do you want a cup of tea?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Best sit down, then. What’s this about?’

  ‘You remember that day I first came here and ended up in the barn? How did you get home?’

  He started to cut the carrots into neat circles, slicing the blade towards the ball of his calloused thumb each time. ‘I’ve a truck. Gave you a lift in it, remember?’

  ‘But you didn’t use it that day. You can hear a motor coming up that road of yours. Especially yours; it makes a bigger racket than mine.’

  ‘So I got a lift to the end of the lane. What’s it matter?’

  I nudged the bowl of cauliflower. ‘It matters because of this. You told me yourself you harvested your first crop six weeks back and it was taken straight to the wholesaler’s. And you’ve only just put the next one in. So what the hell was a Timpkin’s Farm Fresh delivery truck doing up here that day?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Come off it, Harry. It’s a one-track, one-house road. Where else could it have come from? It was you who ran me off the road that day, wasn’t it? When I - quote - “came into contact with the last shipment”.’

  He kept his back to me, taking a saucepan to the sink to run cold water into it. ‘I waited to see if you were hurt. I’d not driven anything with that big a turning circle before.’

  ‘First cargo, was it, Harry?’

  He still wasn’t looking at me. Fussing over the cooker, he muttered no.

  ‘What went wrong this time?’

  ‘The proper driver took sick. Laid him down upstairs for a few hours, but he just kept worse. I thought he was going to croak on me. I had to get them all out of here fast.’

  I recalled the distinctive smell of diarrhoea that first day. I’d unfairly blamed it on Atch. ‘So you stuck them in the van and dumped it somewhere.’

  ‘I left them at a motorway service station and phoned ... someone ... to tell them where to find the load. Hitched back. Had to walk the last couple of miles.’

  ‘How long have you been doing this?’

  ‘Eighteen months. I get a load every few weeks; except during planting out and harvesting times. Too many others coming and going then. I watch them, feed them, give them somewhere to sleep, until their papers are fixed up. Then someone comes, picks them up and takes them off. Don’t know where. Never wanted to.’

  ‘Why?’

  He finally looked at me again. ‘I needed the money. To get care for Dad. Dozens of arrests, they said on the radio. I’ve been listening all morning. Thought somebody would turn up eventually. Carter told me how you’d been trying to find out if I’d been in prison. I guessed you were undercover.’

  I should have seen it as soon as Jerry told me about that phone call. It had all been there: that delivery truck when there was no delivery to be collected; the cupboard full of more food than the Rouses could possibly get through and all those tins carefully placed in the recycle bins well away from St Biddy’s so the rubbish collectors wouldn’t start to wonder about the amount of food consumed up here. And, of course, that bag of mints he’d brought home the day he’d freed me from the barn. It had had a motorway service station logo on it. And nobody gets to those gulags of loos, petrol and fast food on foot.

  Harry gave me a slow, sad smile. ‘What happens now? Am I going to get arrested?’

  ‘Not by me. I’m strictly freelance. But if you were so sure they were on to you,
I’m surprised you’re still here.’

  ‘Where would I go? This is my home. I don’t want anything more than this. Never did.’

  ‘You telephoned someone about me. From one of the pubs in the village. Who was it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He turned from arranging two pork chops in a much-blackened pan. ‘I’ve a contact number I had to ring if anything went wrong up here. I never knew who they were. Driver told me that’s how they operate. What you don’t know, you can’t tell.’ He was smearing lard and salt over the meat. There were no concessions to healthy eating in this household. ‘They said not to worry about you. Said you could be bought off if necessary. I thought maybe they’d done it.’

  I saw the flicker of hope behind the words. Perhaps he was half hoping I’d come up here in the expectation of being handed a plain brown envelope. But he didn’t have one. And I wouldn’t have taken it (I think). ‘How did you get involved in all this, Harry?’

  Quarters of potato were neatly arranged around the perimeter before he set the pan inside the oven and lit the gas. ‘A woman came a few years back. After I started advertising for someone to help out. First off she asked about the job. Then later, she came back..

  ‘And suggested you might like to board illegal immigrants instead?’

  ‘Said it was a chance to make easy cash. They’d a dozen or so other houses, all making good money. No one asks questions in this country. All too busy minding their own business. Nobody ever comes here except the casual when we’re planting or harvesting. Apart from young Carter, you’re the first visitor in five years.’

  ‘What about Atch? Weren’t you scared he’d say something?’

  ‘Who’d believe him? He lives in the past. Who’s to say who the strangers are he sees?

  That was true enough. He’d asked me whether the police were looking for ‘the others’ the night of Luke’s death, and I’d put it down to his half-crazy ramblings.

  ‘Was Luke involved in all this smuggling business?’

  ‘No. Least, not that I know of. Why?’ He seemed genuinely surprised by the question.

  ‘Just seemed like a bit of a coincidence. Two unconnected crimes in one very small village.’