by Jo Smedley
“But we don’t know who killed Lesley,” I said.
“No.”
“So what now?”
“I guess we just have to start trying to piece together the other murder as well. There’ll be an overlap somewhere. Has to be.”
She drove off, weaving in and out of the parked cars on both sides of the road. She’d bought Rose’s story completely. I was less convinced. There was nothing to indicate the father had been murdered other than Rose’s pronouncements. While they might have made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end within her room, outside, in the car, away from the enclosing walls of her office, her utterances seemed silly. She could have made them up for all we knew. Overplaying her role in Lesley’s murder, somehow keen to link herself to it to lend credence to her spiritualist practises.
She wasn’t what I thought of as a spiritualist. There were no obvious signs of séances. Her office was far too exposed on the corner to be gathering people around a table and saying is there anybody there who’d like to speak to anybody here sort of stuff. Instead she seemed to be pulling in a variety of alternative therapies, reiki, crystals, spiritual counselling and utility selling, the last just confirming to me her own mistrust of her “true calling”. If her other practises were genuinely bringing healing to others there would have been no need to sell utilities ,too. There would have been a stampede of bereaved, ill and infirm people at her door. As it was, her diary was empty. I’d seen that much when I’d walked in and glanced across at her desk.
As far as I was concerned Rose was a dead end. The only useful information she had provided was that Lesley’s father had vanished, missing and presumed dead. But people vanished all the time. You only had to be on social media for a week to see how many people disappeared from various locations in the UK every day. Few were ever found. If Lesley’s dad had walked out on the family, he could well be living somewhere else in the UK or abroad. He could have had a mental breakdown. He might even have thrown himself off the Humber bridge, which was a well-known jumping spot locally for a coastal area with no natural cliffs.
He might be dead. I could concede that much. But we were still a long way off proving that he’d been murdered, and as to whether Lesley had seen anything, well, we were even further away from understanding what she saw, if anything. I felt it was time to get our investigation on more stable footing.
The visit to her office was tomorrow. Maybe I could establish something there that would persuade Irene away from this new angle.
Chapter Seventeen
I glanced at my watch again. I still had fifteen minutes to go. Fifteen minutes was far too early to walk into any appointment. I cursed my overly cautious time keeping and tried to relax in the driver’s seat of Irene’s car as best I could. Her back rest was far straighter than I was used to, but I didn’t want to adjust her seat too much while I was driving her car. It was her car after all, and I was only borrowing it just this once.
I wriggled about trying to get comfortable and my movements made the air freshener hanging from her rear view mirror sway from side to side. I wasn’t sure which scent it was supposed to be, but all car fresheners smelled the same; an overly pungent fragrance of “new car plastic”. We didn’t have one in our car. The smell made me feel nauseous on long journeys.
The car park was full around me, but everyone was working and I only had myself for company. Straightening my skirt I attempted to calm myself with some deep breathing.
I rubbed my sweaty palms on my skirt; I knew it had to be done, and I knew it had to be me, but I could feel the tips of my fingers going numb. I kept reminding myself this wasn’t an interview – I was just looking around. They might not even ask me any questions. At least… I hoped not. I pulled down the drivers sun screen so I could check my face in the flip up mirror.
My mascara’d eyes looked back at me. They can’t tell. I told myself in the mirror. You’re just another in a long list of candidates.
I checked my lips, the gloss was holding. It was the first time I’d put make up on since Lillian’s arrival. We just didn’t go anywhere that needed a “face” these days and I wasn’t one of those women who used it every day. Working in the hospital make up had been banned, which meant I only used it on special occasions, and there had been very few of them since Lillian’s birth.
I flipped the mirror closed again. It didn’t matter how bad an impression I made. I didn’t want the job. What I needed to do was take a look around the office, see if I could work out where Lesley had sat, who she was closest to, what the staff thought about her murder, if such an opportunity arose.
I glanced down at my watch, took a deep breath, grabbed my handbag, and swung out of the car. The sun was bright and warm. It would have been easier to scuttle into the building under the cover of rain. With full sun I felt ridiculously exposed.
I smoothed down the skirt, tugged at my blazer, swung the handbag over my shoulder and marched towards the main door and the big “Group Seafood” sign. I felt my stomach flip over and swallowed hard, trying to rid the bile from back of my throat. There was no going back now.
The foyer was wide with pictures of various staff members, news cuttings and press photography arranged around the walls. I smiled at the receptionist behind the welcome desk. There was a glassy open plan feel to the building. With the beech work top, magnolia walls and standard reception chairs, I could have been entering an airport lobby. The only give away was the fact that the pictures were all photographs of fish in various states of meal-readiness. I’d never seen such a decoratively tempting shot of fish fingers in my life!
The carefully manicured girl behind the desk looked up as I walked towards her.
“Hello?” She said, in both greeting and enquiry. She looked younger than me, but then, everyone looked younger than me these days. Twenty-somethings looked like they were still in school, and as for teenagers… well… it was hard to believe that some of the waitresses I’d seen recently didn’t have a curfew of 8pm imposed on them. This girl, Marie Shipley her badge said, looked like she’d only recently left school and wouldn’t have been out of place in MacDonald’s with a few stars on her happy-to-help-you badge. Her face was well made up with a dash of liquid eye liner to extend her lash line into something vaguely oriental.
I smiled back, hoping my mouth wasn’t too dry for me to talk.
“Are you here about the job?” she asked. Clearly I was easy to spot; overly presented, anxious, clutching a handbag like a life belt in a storm. She had probably seen a few candidates by now.
I nodded and smiled, I didn’t quite trust my dry throat to many any appropriate noises of greeting right now.
“Take a seat over there, please.” She gestured to the empty waiting area. I wandered over and took a seat. Fraud. The seat seemed to hiss as I sat down. I glanced around me trying not to look too apprehensive. I wondered if I would have been more or less nervous if I was applying for the post.
Sitting there I could feel myself breaking out into a new sweat. What would they do if they discovered I had no intention of ever actually applying for the position, that I had no actual qualifications for the job advertised; if they found out I was here spying?
I glanced up at the door. It wasn’t too late. I could leave again. Claim I felt ill or feign an important call. After all we’d already ruled out her workmates. At least I know I had. Maybe Irene still thought there was someone at her work who knew her well enough to sneak around behind her in the kitchen with that knife… maybe she was right. I thought back to the cupboards, saw the post it notes flutter in my mind’s eye. Other than the family, we had no other real suspects. Which meant we needed to find some new suspects, a motive, or some new facts soon or our investigation was dead in the water.
Irene was back at the house looking to see what she could find out about Lesley’s father’s disappearance on the internet. I wasn’t sure she would find anything. The internet only really started around the time of his disappearance, newspap
ers wouldn’t have been digital back then, and I didn’t think the local telegraph would have taken the time to start archiving all their old papers on the internet. Perhaps the library had the old style microfiche of past papers. It could be somewhere to look next.
I looked around the waiting room, breathing deeply, trying to still my nerves. The company had helpfully placed some photo boards of the staff employed within the building on the walls in the waiting area. The people were all bunched into groups, smiling; typical corporate shots. I stood up again and started looking through the staff groups for the ones we wanted. Marie glanced up; I paced a little and smiled at her. “Sore back” I said. Rubbing my hand into the hollow of my spine. She smiled and then looked back down again at her desk. I wondered what a girl like her did on reception all day. Was there a glossy magazine stuffed somewhere under the desk where visitors couldn’t see?
I looked back at the photos. It was there, middle right. The title “Accounts Department” was written underneath and the photo proudly sported faces of everyone within the organisation including Lesley. I recognised her face from the local papers. The board hadn’t been updated since her death. Without individual photos I suppose it would have been hard to have adjusted them all. I wondered if they took a new photo each year, or whether the photos were all very much out of date and didn’t reflect current staffing.
I took my mobile phone out of my bag and made a show of looking as if I was checking Facebook. When Marie glanced away I swiped across to the camera and fired off a few shots. We could use the composite as a way of identifying the individuals within the department.
Just as I lowered the phone I heard the sliding doors swish open and a young lady came in I thought I recognised. She paused at the reception desk and I could just make out some friendly chit chat, the tones carrying rather than the words. Clearly the two girls knew each other. Smiling, the woman turned towards me and made her way over. I smiled at her, my eyes scanning her face. Familiar. Where did I know her from?
“Hello!” She stuck out her hand. I grabbed it and shook, aiming for a firm and hopefully not too sweaty handshake. “I didn’t know you did accounts too. Janice.” She clarified. “I have Nicholas.” Ah… baby group. I should have known.
“Sorry – I didn’t recognise you all smarted up!” I said. Out of context I should have added. Janice was one of the ‘I love this shit’ camp. Trilling Hello Joe how are you? with the rest of them. She loved baby talk. Which at least meant I had something to talk about that wasn’t job related. It might just get me through.
“How’s he doing?” I asked.
“Oh. Fine. Can’t believe I’m back at work really. He’ll be walking soon. I’ve told him he’s got to wait until I get home.” She giggled to herself. We both knew full well that he’d do it when he wanted to whether she was there or not. It must have been a huge emotional pull for her, she loved being a mum much more than I did and even I didn’t want to miss the milestones.
“Marie says you’re here about the job. There’s a few candidates,” Janice confided, as if she was giving me the inside track, mother to mother.
“Are you showing me around?” That would have been very useful. We could have talked baby and avoided any accountancy topics at all.
“No. Phil’s doing that. I just thought I’d pop over and say hi. I’ll probably see you as you get shown around, but the vacancy isn’t in my department.”
“It’s a big department then,” I said, hoping that was the right sort of thing to say.
“Yes. Two offices, purchasing and invoicing are separate.”
“You didn’t know…,” I pointed vaguely at the picture which included Lesley. Janice followed my finger.
“Lesley? Yes. Terrible wasn’t it. Did you read about it in the papers? Awful. She was really well liked at the office. Her dad used to work here too.”
“Her father?”
“Yes. The older staff remember him. They’ve been talking about it since, well, since Lesley, you know. ” Janice suddenly looked uncomfortable, as if she’d said more than she’d meant to. Did she know Lesley’s father had disappeared? She looked as if she knew something. There was a shiftiness about the eyes, they kept looking behind me as if she was trying to slip out of the conversation.
“Hmmm” I said, trying to appear less interested than I really was. I didn’t want her to completely clam up, and now that I knew where I knew her from, I might be able to chat to her about things again, away from work. She was the first real break in the investigation we’d had. I didn’t want to push her too hard before Irene and I had had time to think it through.
“Are you coming to baby talk this week?” I said, wondering if it was a coincidence that Lesley had come to work at the same place as her father. Irene didn’t believe in coincidences. Even I had to admit it was rather odd. Especially as he must have died long before he could pull any strings to get her employed here. Maybe there was a family connection to the firm we didn’t know about, a director somewhere in the family line.
“I’m not sure,” said Janice. “We’re still ironing out my working pattern and I’m not – oh there’s Phil now.” Janice indicated a smart suited woman heading in our direction, clacking across the linoleum on shiny heels. Phil, short for Philippa, it seemed.
She looked every ounce the professional - hair scraped back into a tight pony tail, a little masculine in appearance, understated eyes, full red lips. A professional woman in a man’s world. Had the name change been motivated by the glass ceiling that still existed in the business environment, or had she grown up a tom boy?
“Enjoy the tour,” Janice said, and smiled warmly as Phil closed on my position, teeth bared in a wide smile, hand striking out ahead of her.
“Philippa Marston. You must be Lesley.” I grabbed at her proffered hand, almost wincing at the tight masculine grip. It felt like a test. The bones of my hand slid against each other inside the grip of her fingers. She probably worked out. I could imagine this woman on a treadmill in Lycra each morning before work, pony tail swinging behind her as she ran.
“Yes,” I said. “Pleased to meet you.”
“I’ll leave you to it,” Janice said, smiling and backing away. I watched her leave. Janice was round and pink and comfortable compared to the stick thin, all-business Phil. I felt like I was being abandoned to a shark.
“How long have you been working in accounts?” Phil asked. It was supposed to be a friendly starter question, but it felt like I’d instantly been placed under a hot spotlight, under interrogation like a candidate in mastermind, only my specialist subject was something I knew absolutely nothing about.
I looked at her, my smile fixed, and hoped she wouldn’t be able to tell a lie this early on. Irene had rehearsed a few small talk pleasantries with me, the problem was, if the questions were going to go beyond those few getting to know you style openers I would really be fudging things.
“Not long, I’m afraid. I fell pregnant within the first three months of my first contract.” Irene and I had decided to hide my lies in semi-truths. They would be easier to palate.
“First and last,” I added. Employers never liked to employ a baby machine.
“Where were you?”
“Intellect in Lancaster,” I lied, barefaced. Irene suggested we pick a firm she would never have heard of and claim I’d recently moved across. I didn’t have a Grimsby accent and it was very feasible I could have been a recent incomer. When we were setting up my back story I had been fairly sure I didn’t know anyone who worked at Group Seafood. Janice was unexpected, but then she didn’t know that much about me anyway. I didn’t know very much about any of the baby group contacts other than the age of their child, how many teeth they had, when they started solid food, what week they decide to roll, crawl, walk…
Philippa nodded at my lie, clearly happy with the response.
“Let me show you around.” She held out her right arm and gestured towards the double doors beyond the reception desk, whic
h I had just seen the fluffy warm Janice disappear through with a little thumbs up and a wink for me.
I walked beside her in silence. I wasn’t sure I wanted to attempt any conversation. The more I said, the more likely I was going to trip myself up.
We passed Marie on the front desk, who gave us both a smile. Phil was her boss after all. It paid to be extra polite.
Beyond the double doors the floor shifted from washable linoleum to carpet tiles but remained as brightly lit and magnolia. The fish dish theme pictures continued down the hall past various beech doors with reinforced glass windows. Behind each door I could see an office of men and women hard at work behind matching desks. It was clearly a new office complex. The furniture and telephones all coordinated. The last department I’d worked in had a miss-match of chairs and desks, evidence of a slowly growing NHS department on a limited budget which took what it could get from various other departments who were downsizing. Everyone would have loved these matching offices. Everything looked so industrious and yet so clean and tidy, even if the desks were awash with paperwork.
We went through another set of fire doors and down another identical corridor, before branching right and entering a large room filled with desks.
“This is where you’d be working,” Phil said. “This is purchasing.” A few staff looked up and smiled. There were a couple of empty desks. I recognised a few girls from the funeral, but Irene was extremely doubtful they would have recognised me.
“People don’t look at people the same way you do, Ruth,” she’d said. “They just don’t. Trust me. Besides, your hair is up and you’ve got make up on, they won’t recognise you; added camouflage.”
I had always been good with faces. Names not so much, but faces were my thing. We could rarely watch a drama on the television without me turning to Lucus at some point and saying Where do we know him from? Thank goodness someone had invented IMDb. These days a quick tap on the mobile phone and I had the answer within minutes and could settle down and watch the television without thinking about it anymore. The perks of modern life.