by Jo Smedley
Frustratingly there wasn’t an IMDb for the rest of society. My internal software still kicked in when I met strangers, and without an ap to identify people I spent the rest of the day trying to work out where I’d met someone before. I remembered chatting to a lady for nearly thirty minutes in a coffee shop once, greeting her like we were old friends, chatting over recent family developments, what we were both doing now, and it was only when she left I realised she’d simply been our check out assistant in the local supermarket for a few weeks in a row. We didn’t actually know each other at all.
“Someone should invent an IMDb for people.” I told Irene. “ You could store people by several categories, how you met them, hair colour, length, name of spouse, where they worked …,” Irene had just laughed and said the only users of that ap would be her and me - everyone else probably wouldn’t even notice they’d met someone before.
I glanced at the faces. Irene had spoken to all of the office girls at the funeral, and while I recognised most of them there was one here that didn’t look familiar. Perhaps she’d been on annual leave, or was back at the office holding the fort while the others waved the company flag. I tried to remember if she’d been in the photo in the foyer. I couldn’t be sure. I’d need to check when I got back to the car.
They all looked at me, and a few smiled. Probably assessing whether I would be a friend or foe should I get the job in a few weeks.
“Come on,” Phil broke the deadlock. “I’ll give you the whistle stop tour of the rest of the building. I’m not sure how big your last place of work was, but we’ve got a huge team just in accounts. We’ve a massive export team, too.”
I let myself be ushered out of the purchasing section and true to her word, began a whistle stop tour of the rest of the building. We dipped our heads in and out of different open plan office spaces, saw various members of the management team, and took a look into the rest area, checked out the tea and coffee making facilities and locker room before she finally slowed down as we approached a large gallery wall.
“This is where the firm started out.” Her finger rested on a small grainy black and white photograph of a staffing group taken somewhere near the docks. I recognised some of the ice conveyors (now derelict on the quayside) in the background of the photo. True to old staffing photos, this one was taken outside to make the most of the natural light, and everyone was formally arranged on chairs, or standing to give the same tiered approach that school photos used to have. I scanned the faces. One of these could have been Lesley’s father.
The wall appeared to track the progress of the group over the last fifty years, and it moved from black and white photos to colour photos, with the fashions changing as the board progressed. Towards the right of the wall was the current staffing, a large photo, posed as an aerial shot with all of the staff arranged to make up a fish shape. Very artistic, but very difficult to actually see the faces as they were all so distant. It must have been taken from a building window or hi-jack platform. But the images between that first black and white shot and the last fish posed one were closer, so much so we could see the faces.
“Isn’t it funny how the fashion’s change,” I said, mainly to cover my reason for staring so intently into the groups of faces on the board. “You don’t seem to have much of a staff turnover.” I added, as I noticed the same faces cropping up in several photos.
“We’re quite proud of our staff retention actually. We lose the odd few each year, promotions, pregnancy, that sort of thing, but most stay with us. There are a lot of staff incentives and the pay is comparable with the other firms in the area.”
I spotted Lesley in one photo near the far right. And tracking back, found a man’s face that looked very similar, could that be her father?
“Are there still a lot of the original team here then?”
Phil laughed. “No. Some of these photos are from the early 50s when the fishing boom hit Grimsby. Most of those people have long since died. There’s a core team that’ve been here a while though. It was originally a family firm, and the family still have a seat on the board, though they’re not so much hands-on now.”
Phil reached across and pointed out a face standing right next to the one I was interested in. “That’s Donald Ramsden there. He’s the grandson of one of the founders. He’s still on the board now. A little grey around the edges, but still going strong.”
“And who’re these either side of him?” I asked as innocently as I could.
“Ah, that’s Geoff Allenby,” She pointed to the face that looked so similar to Lesley. “And the other there is Len Crossley. Len’s still with us, still managing Finance. Well, Finance Director I should say. He took over from Geoff when he - when he left,” she finished abruptly.
I looked up at her and realised I’d probably pushed her as far as I could. Her eyes were cold now, calculating, weighing me up. I wondered if I’d shown too much interest. She was meant to be interviewing me after all, not the other way around.
“So… that’s it. Tour over,” she said. “I’ll look forward to receiving your application.”
She struck out her hand again and I held my own as best I could.
“Thank you for showing me around.”
“I’ll see you through the door. It’s got a security latch.”
Just like my own faithful border collie she was going to escort me off the premises. There would be no time to snap a photo of the board. I turned and followed her retreating back. Geoff Allenby, Len Crossley, both of them in finance.
Len Crossley, Len Crossley, Len Crossley, I repeated the name to myself, hoping to hold it there until I could get outside and write it down in the notebook inside by handbag.
I wondered if the firm was hiding something; whether Lesley thought so too, and if that was why she’d applied to work here. Perhaps she wondered if the firm had anything to do with her father’s disappearance.
I traced my steps back past Marie on the desk and out into the car park. The cool breeze was welcome after the warm air conditioning of the office and I left my jacket loose around me, letting the wind push through my blouse, cooling me off.
Len Crossley, Geoff Allenby, I repeated to myself as I let myself back into Irene’s car. I fell into the seat, slammed the door behind me, and reached into my handbag in one fluid movement to write down the names before they slipped my mind, and then added the names Janice and Nicholas, too. Finally we had the break we were looking for.
Chapter Eighteen
“Oh, I didn’t find out much,” Irene said as we discussed the interview and her internet research over a cup of tea. She had a twinkle in her eye, and as she had insisted on feeding back first, I knew she’d found something, even though she was attempting badly to underplay it.
There was a loud crash behind me, and I turned and saw Lillian had tipped out her plastic food. She had tired of Irene’s cupboards and I had returned from Group Seafood to find her in Irene’s arms, little legs gripped either side of her waist, biscuit in hand. The cupboards had lost their interest and they’d been “nursery rhyming” for a while.
We’d returned to my place for feedback so Lillian could ransack her various play boxes and be among her familiar toys which might give us a little longer to talk. The plastic food was her current favourite. She could post it inside her various hamper-lid style boxes and gnaw on it when her teeth were playing up. And it was safer than matches, which for some reason I found Lucus explaining to her the night before. Why he thought showing her fire on sticks was a good idea I didn’t know. Must be a male thing.
I turned back to Irene. “There was a short court report the day he was declared dead,” she said. “It went into some of the history of the case. The last time he was seen, the circumstances of his disappearance. It was all a little vague and about what I’d expect. But…,” she said, “It did say he worked at Group Seafood, as Finance Director.”
She’d stolen my thunder. Typical.
“So I looked up Group Seafood, and
other than the promotional editorials in the Telegraph there wasn’t anything of note about the firm. So I went onto Companies House.”
“Companies House?”
“It’s where all the companies have to file their annual returns. All limited companies anyway. Group Seafood is limited, so their annual returns were on there. You can find out all sorts if you know where to look. Anyway, there was steady growth in the company looking at the filed accounts, except the year Geoff Allenby went missing. That year the returns looked a little low. I plotted them out, see?”
Irene brought out a hastily sketched graph. There had been a steady climb in the returns except one, which Irene had circled.
“Couldn’t that be expansion or something? They’ve moved premises through the years. Maybe they just invested back in the company that year, or changed offices, hired more staff?”
“Perhaps.” Irene folded up the piece of paper, which I had every reason to suspect would end up on our incident board, and pocketed it.
“Were there any reports of embezzling?” I asked. Something that big would surely have featured in some sort of newspaper report.
“No.”
“And there’s no way to find that out?”
“Not without auditing the accounts or having someone on the inside who can find out. But it’s a coincidence, don’t you think?”
“You think someone at Group Seafood killed him because he was embezzling from the company?”
“No… I think that’s highly unlikely. You’d normally just report that to the police or something. No, it’s more likely HE found out what someone else was doing.”
“Len Crossley’s the man to look at then,” I said, pleased at the eyebrow raise that prompted from my co-conspirator. “He became finance director after Lesley’s father disappeared.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“What else did you find out?”
“Nothing much.” I said. And unlike Irene, I meant it. “But I did bump into Janice, from baby group,” I added. “She works there.”
“Could be useful. Do you still see her?”
“I think so. She’s part time, and they’re still working out her hours. She used to be pretty regular, but she’s not so much now,” I said, trying to remember how often I’d seen her at group over the last few weeks. “We don’t really have anything in common.”
“Really?” Irene looked at Lillian.
“You haven’t met her,” I said. “She’s a yummy mummy.” I pulled a face, just in case the distaste in my voice hadn’t been apparent. Irene laughed.
“Another cup?” I asked.
Irene nodded and I popped the kettle back on and then gave her the blow by blow account of my tour of the office, showing her the photos I’d managed to snatch on my phone, and describing the timeline photo montage to her I had seen at the end of my visit.
“So this Phil woman said that the firm was still family owned?”
“Yes. Only they just have a presence on the board now. Most of it is run by directors by all accounts. It was a Ramsden, I think.” I said. “Donald… Douglas… David…,”
“Easily found out,” Irene said. “It’ll be on Companies House somewhere I’m sure.”
“So where does this leave us?” I asked. “We know Geoff Allenby has disappeared. We know he and Lesley both worked in the same firm. But it’s Lesley’s murder we’re trying to solve,” I reminded her,“not Geoff’s. That is by any definition a cold case,” I said, borrowing parlance from TV. “And we don’t have the police resources we need to investigate something like that.”
“No. But we’ve seen the connection.” Irene dunked a bourbon in her tea. I would have to start giving up on biscuits soon. I had lost all the pregnancy weight through breastfeeding, but that was all over with now and my clothes were beginning to get tight again. This would have to be the last packet. If there weren’t any in the house, I couldn’t eat them. I took another. Just to reduce the supply and therefore hasten the date there were no longer any biscuits available.
“Seeing the connection could be enough. It might mean the same killer. In which case we’re looking for someone older, not younger.”
“Equally there might not be any connection,” I reminded her. “It could be a coincidence.”
“And Lesley working in the same firm as her father?”
“That too,” I said, playing devil’s advocate. “She might just have a head for numbers. Things like that run in families and it’s a big firm, they’ve got lots of staff. So lots of vacancies come up.”
Irene shook her head disbelievingly. “No.”
“It doesn’t hurt keeping an open mind.” But I could see Irene had already connected the two murders. Somehow or other they were both part of the same puzzle, but as to what that puzzle looked like when completed neither of us knew.
“I think John mentioned he was collecting for the British Heart Foundation this month.”
“Sorry?”
“Neighbours. We need to get to know the neighbours. Find out how long they’ve lived there, what they’ve seen? Money just doesn’t vanish,” Irene said. “Money gets spent. Who had it? Where did it go? We need to find out. Do you have a telephone book?”
“I think so… somewhere.” Since the age of mobile phones and the internet, I’d not looked in a phone book for years. I was pretty sure they still arrived and if they did, and if Lucus had put it somewhere, it was sure to be in one of his many piles, probably one of the piles in the only in-built cupboard the house had arrived with. It was one of the many original features we had fallen in love with. I’d spent days stripping it back to bare wood and restoring it to its original glory.
I flipped the hook which held the second door closed, and started riffling. I usually went through Lucus’s piles once every six months and often found a mix of junk mail, bank statements, important letters and credit card offers. It was always a mystery why he kept some things and threw out others. We’d even had one instance where he’d taken cash back at the supermarket, pocketed the receipt and thrown away the notes.
Underneath all the paperwork, important or otherwise, I located what Irene wanted. The telephone directory.
“Is anyone even in it these days?” I asked, handing it over.
I watched Irene flipping through the directory. “Crossley… Crossley… there are two Ls, but he could be under his wife’s initial. It depends on who does the bills I suppose.”
I saw her running a finger down the list, counting.
“There’s only fifteen in total. We should be able to get around them all in a day. Which leaves us with -” She turned back to the front of the directory. “Al, Al, Al…no… she’s remarried, hasn’t she?” Irene looked up. “Not Allenby anymore.”
“No.” And Lesley’s surname was Cooper, that being Russ’s surname, so that didn’t help. I put my hands to my face thinking and looked up to find Lillian covering her eyes. She peeped. I smiled. I hadn’t meant to initiate peek-a-boo, but she’d taken the gesture as a game. I returned my hands to my face and purposely covered my eyes again, and then… peek-a-boo…, I opened them both wide like flaps either side of my face and smiled broadly. Irene smiled at me. Lillian squatted down behind her plastic kitchen.
“Where’s she gone?” Irene asked.
“I don’t know.”
I wasn’t sure how much Lillian understood in terms of our language, but she was good at picking up on the tones in our voices. It would have been a fascinating study if we could actually know for certain what children understood at this age.
“Maybe she’s disappeared?” I looked at Irene watching, waiting for Lillian to spring up, the telephone directory momentarily forgotten. She must have experience with children of her own, she must have… but there weren’t any photographs of family in her house, at least, not downstairs.
“I can’t see her. Can you?” We winked at each other.
“I wonder where she could have gone?”
“Ma
ybe we should send out a search party?” Another shared look, and then we both turned to the kitchen, where Lillian was quite visible. I loved the way children thought just because they couldn’t see you, you couldn’t see them. It was definitely one of their more redeeming features. That naivety. Why could other people see you, if you couldn’t see them? It was perfectly logical in many ways.
We didn’t have to wait much longer. That pause was what she was waiting for. With comic timing, counted down by our repeated questions, Lillian sprang up, grinning from ear to ear.
“Oh! There she is!” We shouted in unison, and were rewarded with an even wider toothy grin. Irene was a natural. She must have had some first-hand experience.
The problem with children of course, was that once they got your attention, they wanted to keep it. So we had to run through the whole procedure another five times before her jump up finally sent her toppling over the kitchen, and being a cheaper version of the better known brands, picked up in the supermarket for £19.99 instead of Mothercare for £79.99, it didn’t hold her weight and the kitchen went crashing forwards, taking Lillian with it. I picked her up before she could let out an ear piercing wail and did my best to calm her down before it dawned on her what had happened.
“Maybe we should pick this up tomorrow,” Irene said. “I’ll go back through the clippings at home, see if I can find mention of her mother’s new surname, and I’ll call John. See if he wants a little help with his collections.”
I nodded. If there was one thing I had learned from this amateur investigation, it was that I was never going to look at a charity collection person in the same way again.
Chapter Nineteen
We hadn’t actually fixed up when and where we were going to meet, but I wasn’t surprised when Irene joined me on the morning dog walk.