by Jo Smedley
One long buffet table took up one wall, it’s surface filled with sausage rolls, quiche, crisps, carrot and cucumber sticks and slightly dry sandwiches with cheese, ham, tuna and egg fillings, all of which had a darkened crust about the edges where the filling had crisped under the warm lighting. Along the other wall stood the bar, and beside that the doors which lead to the toilets. There really was nowhere to stand but the middle of the room and it left me feeling somewhat vulnerable.
Had I realised it was going to be like this I would have asked Irene to drop me at the corner, rather than carrying on with her to the wake. This was no place for a new toddler and, truth be told, while intellectually I liked the idea of solving the murder, when the rubber hit the road, I wasn’t sure I was completely cut out for this type of investigative work. A house break was one thing. The house was empty. There were no interpersonal skills needed. A wake was something entirely different. I needed a cover story, an ability to lie blatantly in full view, and interview skills which could wheedle information out of the unsuspecting without them realising what was happening. I had no training for this type of work. When I worked in the hospital, we’d always had a list of questions we asked, and the authority to ask them. We could ask people, do you live alone? And they would answer without batting an eyelid.
I looked around me again trying not to appear out of place, hunting for Irene among the sea of faces. The walls were dark, with some modern patterned wallpaper which was now all the rage in trendy establishments, but looked wholly out of place here. Leaves and branches snaked across the walls in purple and dark brown, reminding me of the park we had passed on the way here.
The park had looked cool and inviting, but as we drove past it in the convoy Irene’s face had been animated, recounting all she had found out from the work colleagues, and any ideas I might have had about her leaving me and Lillian in the woods and coming back for us later died before they even reached my tongue.
She’d identified a number of possible sources of information she hadn’t managed to speak to at the funeral, and was on a mission to uncover as much as she could before the wake dwindled in number to the point we’d both attract too much attention. She’d apologised briefly in the car as we pulled into the car park. Well, not so much apologised, but indicated that she would need to leave me to fend for myself somewhat. The buffet would be good, she had said. They used the same butcher she did.
I chanced Lillian with a bit of ham from another sandwich; she stuffed it into her mouth and gave me a toothy grin. Clearly she agreed.
“Oh! What a charming girl.” I turned and groaned inside. It was the poor girl’s mother. What on earth could I possibly say?
“They did a lovely job,” I chanced. She smile-frowned back. It was the expression of funerals, a sad smile that somehow seemed to convey grief and acceptance at the same time.
“Did you know Lesley well?”
“I er…,”
“They live nearby.” Thank goodness for Rose with her auras I thought to myself, as her comfortably padded shoulders came into view. I hadn’t seen her sneaking up behind us, but given how quickly Lillian’s head had turned to follow her as she greeted the murdered girl’s mother, I realised she must have been stood behind me making faces at her for some time. Lillian giggled appreciatively as Rose crossed her eyes and puckered her mouth for her benefit.
“It was lovely of you to come.”
Lesley’s mother touched my arm in dismissal and quickly turned to leave. Had I had any hint this had something to do with Rose’s arrival, it was confirmed when Rose reached out to grab her arm.
“Wait.”
She turned back, her face bubbling with undercurrents I could only begin to imagine.
“Rose,” she said. “Now is not the time.” And with that, she walked away.
In truth I wasn’t sure who was more embarrassed, me for witnessing what was clearly a difficult exchange, or Rose who hadn’t seen it coming. She pulled another face at Lillian as if to break the awkwardness.
“It’s a good turn out.”
“Yes,” I said, pleased to be in conversation with someone, even if it was Rose. At least Irene wasn’t here to catch my eye. Despite our age differences we found the same sort of thing funny. ‘Camp entrance,’ ooh I say. ‘Course fishing’ – polite fishing over there. ‘Board meetings’ aren’t they just. And ‘Declarations of interest’ No I’m not interested in the slightest. Irene was NOT the person to be standing next to when someone was going to give you a blow by blow account of your aura. But Rose was behaving herself and keeping to pleasantries, perhaps cowed by the response she had just received moments ago.
Yes, the weather was nice. No, I had not been to the sandpit in Cleethorpes yet. Yes, Lillian was walking, albeit unsteadily. Yes, she was an early developer in that regard. No, she wasn’t yet talking. No, I didn’t know Lesley.
Ah… whoops.
“Why are you here?” Rose asked me pointedly.
“I came with my mother.” I said, the lie came quickly to my lips as Irene dropped into view suddenly from among a throng of sherry waving grey-haired people. I hoped my pained, eyebrow waving expression would usher her across the room fast enough to extricate me from the tricky situation I now found myself in. Fortunately she could read my mind better than Rose, and swam through the steady current of people making their way to the bar with prowess that would have earned her as set of golden fins from a salmon.
“Hello again,” she said as she reached us; “It’s a lovely spread.” And with that innocuous statement she managed to rescue the situation. If it was one thing I’d learned about Irene it was that she could effortlessly insinuate herself into a conversation without ever really giving away anything about herself, and Rose left us very happy, sure in the knowledge that Irene and I were related, though Irene had never confirmed that, and also equally confident that Irene somehow knew Lesley well enough for us to be in the room at all.
*
“So…,” Irene said as I threw myself, exhausted, into the front of her car. “That was all very informative.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” Irene looked at me. I had a cheese sandwich mushed onto one shoulder and I knew there were chewed up carrots somewhere in my hair.
“Sorry,” she said, “but you were invaluable.”
I’d hardly have described myself in that way, but clearly Irene had a different interpretation of my standing around aimlessly in the centre of the room.
“Lillian looked a lot like Lesley as a girl, at least, so her grandmother said. Did you know her real father was missing?”
“I thought Rose said dead.”
“Well… they never found the body. He had to be declared legally dead by the courts. Her mother remarried after that went through. It’s amazing what you can learn, grandma to grandma.”
“But you aren’t my mum.”
“I know… but they didn’t. We look alike, don’t you think?”
I looked again at her face, I didn’t have her freckles, but we shared the same colour eyes and I supposed the shapes of our faces were similar. But then, I was once mistaken as the sister of our next door neighbour because we were running a car boot sale together. So perhaps it was a situational thing rather than based on appearance. People assumed a connection because of the age difference between us and the fact we were friends. It was the logical assumption.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“She had a new boyfriend, at least, so her colleagues thought. She hadn’t said anything as such, but they were sure she was seeing someone.” I could see Irene had gripped a finger tighter to the steering wheel, and expected a list. I wasn’t disappointed.
“Her sister is in Thailand. Couldn’t get back for the funeral, they’re expecting her sometime later this week.” Another finger tightened on the wheel. Irene had a fantastic numerical led memory. Shopping lists were always stored in numerical order in her brain, we’d go shopping for eight things, and until she’d ti
cked them all off on her fingers we wouldn’t leave the supermarket.
“She had anxiety problems and was on tablets. Something Russ hadn’t been aware of. Possibly started after she threw him out. ”
“If only her doctor had known she hadn’t really been hearing things,” I said.
“Hmmm,” I saw another of her fingers curl in with another point coming.
“She didn’t get along with her supervisor at work.”
“Rose said she always wanted children,” I added. Irene curled another finger.
“She was on the clubbing scene at the weekends. Quite the party animal by all accounts. And she’d changed a lot since she’d ditched Russ apparently.”
“And you think…?”
“Drugs maybe?”
“Drugs? Just because she’d had a new lease on life after ditching a sponging husband? She hardly needed drugs to feel differently.”
“No. I suppose not.”
Irene glanced at me and relaxed her fingers on the steering wheel. Her face was a blank slate. I had no idea what she was thinking behind those steel blue eyes.
“Play area?” she offered, as we turned towards the park again, heading homeward.
“Why not?”
The sun was still out and the air seemed clear and fresh. A big tractor mower was doing its thing, and there was the smell of freshly cut spring grass on the air. The crocuses which were planted in big blocks on the outer edges of the park had faded, and the daffodils were just about to break. I looked across those to the newly refurbished play area. It was still shiny amongst the greenery.
The coffee shop was open I saw, tables and chairs sitting out in the sun. After the cloying atmosphere in the pub I needed a little “blow” outside. I turned around to look at Lillian. She was still awake and staring out of the car window.
“Why not?”
Irene indicated left, the orange light on her dashboard flashing faster than usual, indicating a faulty bulb. She didn’t seem to notice.
I glanced at her. Her fingers may have been relaxed now, but Irene was thinking again, which meant it was likely to be quite a solitary play time.
I wasn’t wrong. I took Lillian around every piece of playground equipment, twice, then Irene and I shared a pot of tea while Lillian munched on a biscuit in a high chair. We didn’t say more than ten words to each other. Irene was back on autopilot, her methodical mind slotting in all the information she had gleaned at the funeral into a coherent mass. I waited. She would drop back out of her internal musings when she was ready, and until then I just had to bide my time.
She picked up her teaspoon and started poking at the tea bag I’d left on top of the pot. There was nothing I hated more than stewed tea and as soon as it reached the appropriate brew, I’d hefted the bag out of the pot and balanced it precariously on the lip of the opening before dropping the lid back down to keep it in place, tidy, but away from the water so it couldn’t add any more tannin to the brew. I didn’t bother at home, but when out, tea cups were never big enough and you invariably had a second cup, by which point your tea was stewed to orange unless you’d taken precautions.
I watched as she worried at the bag, pushing the corners and nudging more and more of the bag towards the lip until plop, it dropped back inside the pot and the lid dropped back into place.
She looked up. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right,” I said, “I’ve already had my second cup. So have you,” I added as I saw a vague flicker of hurt cross her face. I’d actually poured hers at the same time as my own, but she hadn’t noticed. In fact, she’d drunk the entire second cup without noticing.
She opened the tea pot and looked inside. “You’re right. Goodness that went quickly! Home?”
I nodded. We were both ready.
Irene pushed back her chair and waited while I lifted Lillian out of the high chair and into my arms. She looked tired.
“I might just sit in the back and keep her awake,” I said as we walked towards the car.
“Sleepy?”
“I think so. It’s all the fresh air.”
“Mine?”
I looked at my watch. I still had at least three hours to kill before Lucus came home and the whole dinner time, bath time, bed time routine began. Three hours was a long time to kill with a vaguely tired and grumpy Lillian. And I’d missed the Little Readers group at the Child Care Centre thanks to the funeral. It had the potential to be a long, dragging afternoon.
“We can sit down and go over the case.”
“OK then. But I’ll need to be home by four.” A hot meal prepared on time would reduce the chance of questions from Lucus about my day. It was easier to hide lies if you never had to tell them.
Chapter Twelve
“We’ve got to start eliminating people somehow,” I said.
On the post-it note incident boards Irene had crossed off Lesley’s sister, and despite my views to the contrary, there was a small note containing the word drugs? stuck off to one side. Work now had a section of its own, with a special post-it note for “supervisor”. And yet another post it note had “Boyfriend ?” written on it. On the whole we seemed to be opening up avenues for enquiry rather than closing them down. Was this what it was like in the police force? An ever expanding investigation in the early stages until you found the right avenues to pursue? I felt sure the incident boards on the crime dramas I watched were a lot smaller than ours. The suspects were always much more limited. Half of Grimsby seemed to be implicated on Irene’s cupboards.
“We’ve got too many to investigate,” I said. “There has to be some way to whittle it down.”
Russ’s sketch of the crime scene meant we knew the perpetrator had to be someone she knew. Going on that information we had identified all of Lesley’s family, friends, work colleagues and other contacts. The problem was, she knew so many people.
“Means, Motive, Opportunity,” I said. “That’s how they do it in the TV dramas. MMO.”
“We know the means,” Irene said, her finger stabbing at the knife in the crime scene.
“But nothing else. Who had opportunity? What was the motive?”
“We need to start going at this more systematically. We need to start speaking to people. Work out what any motives might be, where people were at the time of the murder, that sort of thing.”
“Yes, but how are we going to do that? We can’t just walk up to total strangers and ask that sort of stuff.”
“No… but…,”
“What?” She had started rummaging under a pile of papers.
“Group Seafood, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. Why?” Irene extracted a copy of the Telegraph. It looked well thumbed. I glanced at the date. Three days ago. The murder was no longer front page and instead the paper was displaying a picture of one of the Ward Councillors standing on a patch of scrubland with the Caption: Petition of 15,000 names can’t be ignored. Irene folded the paper. She’d found what she wanted and showed me. Her finger pointed at a small advertisement in the job section.
Purchase Ledger assistant wanted : Group Seafood
“And?”
“You could apply,” she said.
There was an enormous plastic rattle and I looked across at Lillian, who was engaged in pulling a host of Tupperware pots out of one of Irene’s lower cupboards and spreading them over the floor in a little plastic avalanche. She giggled.
“Erm…,” I pointed in her direction. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“You don’t need to go for an interview. Just take a look around.”
“But I know nothing about accounts!”
“You don’t have to. Just pay them a visit as a prospective candidate. Take a look around. People still do that don’t they?”
I wasn’t sure. We had still had prospective candidates visiting the hospital for jobs right up until I left. And I knew it was common practise in teaching as Lucus had done it himself. It gave you a foot in the door at interview if you’d already had a lo
ok around, but we both worked in the public sector, not the private sector. I wasn’t sure if people did that in the private sector too.
“Why can’t you go?” I asked.
“Me?” She gestured at her grey hair. “Nice though the compliment is, I don’t think I’d actually pass as employable age any more. Besides… I made a point of speaking to all her colleagues at the funeral. They didn’t meet you; no one will know who you are.”
Suddenly my reticence at the funeral to engage in small talk pleasantries with total strangers seemed foolish. Had I done what she’d asked instead of talking with Rose, I might have been off the hook now.
“But…,”
“I’ll look after Lillian. You’ll only be gone an hour or so. And I’ll put you on my insurance, so you don’t even need to ask Lucus for the car.”
“But I don’t know anything about accounts.” I knew I was repeating myself, but it was the best excuse I had. I didn’t know anything. I had no experience, no jargon, nothing that could even get me past first base when it came to working with numbers. I wasn’t even involved in budgeting within the department. I worked in rehabilitation, getting someone independent in daily living activities like putting on their trousers, not working out how to reconcile cash-flow. I didn’t even know the difference between NET and GROSS, or what the current VAT rate was!
“They’ll assume you do,” said Irene. “Besides, it’s not like you’re actually going to interview. You’re only going to see the department with a view to applying for the job. They’re hardly going to quiz you. It’ll give us a closer look at her work colleagues.”
I looked at her. Sometimes Irene’s logic was unassailable. I knew she was right, but it didn’t make me any more inclined to do what she wanted. Lucus always said I had a stubborn streak. Push me too hard and I would just become immovable. No amount of reasoning would change my mind once I hit that point. Irene obviously knew me well. She backed off.