‘Only if you’ll tell me exactly what this so-called incident was all about,’ she replied smartly. ‘Fair’s fair.’
While she was dressing, she tried to imagine what it could be. Firemen had many gruesome jobs, just like policemen. Often worse, in fact, because they had to go into burning buildings and drag people out who were more dead than alive. They had to drag out corpses, and bits of bodies. Once, she had heard of a fireman who had got stuck in a drain trying to rescue a child, and the trauma of finding the child choked to death on dirt and his own vomit had stayed with him for the rest of his life.
Nick came back, casually draped in a towel, his broad shoulders gleaming with traces of water, his dark hair still dripping on her carpet. She ignored it. What the hell? It was going to be left for the next occupant, anyway.
He dropped the towel with his usual confidence, and shrugged into his clothes. Every time she saw him naked she was never less than impressed ... but now wasn’t the time, and she turned away as her treacherous hormones stirred.
‘So tell me,’ she demanded over a breakfast of instant coffee and toast.
She refused to register that even this meagre feast gave out a sense of cosy domesticity. It was like one of those perfect TV adverts, where vicarious aromas of steaming coffee and warm toast practically shrieked love and harmony at you. She could get to like it ... and she squashed the thought.
‘You can’t stay long, Nick,’ she went on, glancing at her watch. ‘I’ve got a hell of a lot to do.’
‘It’s Sunday, remember? Day of rest and all that?’
‘Not for me. I’ve still got boxes to pack.’
‘I could help you —’
Like how? Persuading me back to bed ...?
‘You could hinder me, you mean. And stop putting off the answer to my question. What happened to Bob Leng?’
‘OK. He was involved in a shout ten years ago. A gang of kids had set fire to an old makeshift hut in the woods where druggies and winos used to sleep rough. The kids threw fireworks into the hut, doused it with petrol and set light to it, then stood back and watched the fun.’
‘Good God. What happened?’ Alex said, horrified.
‘Well, the fireworks went up like rockets, of course — pardon the pun — which luckily alerted people in the village nearby to contact the fire brigade. But the hut quickly burned to the ground. There had been a long hot spell of weather and the woods were tinder-dry, so you can imagine how quickly the fire spread.’
‘Was anybody inside the hut?’
‘They didn’t think so at the time.’
The way he paused for effect invited the obvious question.
‘But?’
‘But later on, there was a bit of a hassle about a group of kids from the local Comp school. It was the summer holidays, and they’d gone camping on Exmoor, but after six weeks some of them failed to return home as expected. A storm in a teacup really, as most of them eventually turned up, though a bit hetup, clearly expecting an ear-bashing from their parents, and rightly so.’
‘But was there any reason to connect them with the druggies and the fire at the hut?’
Nick shrugged. ‘Oh, it was the same lot all right. No doubt about that. They’d been seen hanging around the hut before. You know what kids are like. They see the glamour of living rough, doing your own thing, whatever the hell else they call it. In the sixties, they used to call it ‘finding themselves’. Bloody nonsense. Anyway, these kids had frequently been warned off getting involved with them, and especially about experimenting with drugs. They get regular talks in schools from us nowadays, for whatever good it does. Unfortunately, what Bob Leng found was far less glamorous than a packet of speed or a few Ecstasy pills.’
‘Why didn’t the police move these druggies on?’ Alex said, ignoring what Bob Leng had found for the moment. ‘It sounds to me as if they were condoning their presence.’
‘Not at all. They were never found to be in possession, and they’d long gone by the time of the incident in question.’
‘All right. So what did Bob Leng find?’ Nick glanced at her. ‘Sure you want to hear this?’
She nodded. ‘You can’t stop now.’
‘It was his dog who actually found it, ferreting in the undergrowth one morning when he was taking him for a walk in the woods near the burned-out hut. There was this hand.’
He stopped, waiting for her reaction.
‘And?’
‘And nothing. Just a hand. Bob didn’t recognize it for what it was at first because it was half-eaten away and covered in filth and slime. He thought the dog was worrying something alive until he realized the thing was heaving in the dirt because it was crawling with maggots.’
‘Oh, Christ!’ Alex whispered.
‘You can imagine his horror when he saw what it was. He was never the most stable of men, in quite the wrong job for someone of his temperament. It turned his guts, and he went ranting to the police like a madman to come and check it out. It had to be sent to forensics, and it wasn’t an easy check, as you can imagine. It had been there for some weeks by then, probably through all the hot school holidays.’
‘So what’s your point?’ Alex said, trying her best not to picture that putrifying, disembodied hand.
‘The point is, Bob Leng kept going back over the events in his mind, and he was convinced that he might have helped towards destroying evidence that would have led to a murder conviction. It began as a routine fire call, but now it began to look as if there might have been a more serious crime committed than just kids larking about.’
He glanced towards her, seeing her questioning face.
‘In case you don’t know, a fierce attack with water hoses blows the ash of burned bodies to smithereens. Destroying the evidence. Leaving no trace.’
Alex began to feel sick. ‘So did this hand belong to one of the missing kids then? If it wasn’t one of the druggies, was it one of the Comp school campers?’
For a second her words sounded appallingly like something out of St Trinian’s, but she knew it was anything but ...
‘That’s what they concluded,’ Nick said grimly, and she knew how much the police hated crimes involving kids. Even those with the strongest stomachs could be deeply affected, needing counselling. Not that she thought any of it did any good, but this wasn’t the time to voice her opinions on that score.
‘But there was no reason to think the druggies were murderers, was there? And what about the other kids? You said most of them returned home.’
‘All but one. Steven. They were all questioned, of course, but they all swore that after a big bust-up he hadn’t gone on the camping trip. Apparently that was nothing unusual. He was sixteen. Only child. Good grades at school. Very self-sufficient,’ he added, in clipped police procedural note-form. ‘Always threatening to go off to India or some such nonsense. The other kids reckoned he was in a bit of a sixties time-warp. Big fan of John Lennon and all that guru rubbish. When the truth finally came out, it left his parents in shreds.’
‘It was the boy, then? The hand, I mean. Did they ever find the rest of him?’
And what if they hadn’t? What did anyone do in such circumstances? Hold a burial service for a hand? In a shoe-box? The thought was so ludicrously terrible that Alex didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
‘Never,’ Nick said. ‘His mother cracked up, and his father took to drink. Classic, isn’t it? Hell on earth for them, of course. The guy was lucky to keep his job at all, though in a much lesser capacity than before.’
‘Yes, but what about Bob Leng?’ She had to get her mind away from the vision of that hand and those poor bloody parents ... ‘Where does he come into all this? Why does he still have nightmares after ten years?’
‘I thought you’d have guessed by now, babe. Steven Leng was his son.’
Chapter 2
Ten years ago Alex had been living in the Yorkshire Dales with her parents. Ten years ago she had still been Audrey Barnes, farmer’s daughter, a
nd had been a long way from reinventing herself after his death and the legacy he’d left her.
It hadn’t been on the scale of lottery money, but it was enough for her to realize a dream — that of moving to London and turning herself into Alexandra Best, Private Investigator.
She discovered she had a talent for adopting whatever accent she needed, and it was almost natural to her now to sound more estuary-English than broad Yorkshire. It went with the job. Regional accents might be ‘in’, and TV presenters might make a million out of using them, but people in trouble had more faith in a woman PI who spoke crisply and with style ...
As the words came into her head she gave a small smile, remembering one of her father’s favourite old TV sitcoms, ’Allo ’Allo. Although the pet phrase of the French undertaker played by Kenneth Connor was ‘swiftly and with style’, she remembered. And with the thought, her smile faded.
She shouldn’t be having frivolous thoughts now, after what Nick had told her. She was still shocked to think that ten years ago Bob Leng had been the one to find the gruesome remains, or rather remain, of his son. How could anyone get over something so terrible? No wonder he still had nightmares. And no wonder his wife wanted to speak to someone about it.
All the same, Alex really didn’t want to get involved with Jane Leng, and it did no good to try to revive old crimes, whether real or imaginary. The police would have wrapped up the case long ago and wouldn’t exactly welcome a female PI poking into their files.
She couldn’t even remember hearing or reading anything about it at the time, although it must have been headline news. But why would she, ten years ago, when she had still been Audrey Barnes, helping her father on a remote Yorkshire farm, and not overly interested in unsavoury crimes? Nor yet avidly watching TV crime series or devouring the Self-Help Manual of Detection she had later discovered at a car boot sale. Ten years ago, she hadn’t had the remotest notion that maybe she too could solve crimes ...
‘Damn you, Jane Leng,’ she muttered when Nick finally left her that Sunday, and had told her as much as he chose to about the ‘incident’. ‘But by Tuesday I’m going to find out everything I can before I get your version.’
Since Nick was so scathing of Jane Leng’s continuing approach to anyone who would listen, she decided not to ask him for any more information. She needed to keep an open mind. He’d be able to search out any police records still on file, but as soon as she showed too much interest he’d be on her like a ton of bricks, and tell her to stop wasting her time.
The hell of it was, she’d been born too damn curious for her own good. She needed to know if the Leng boy’s killer had ever been found — or if there had been a killer at all. Nick’s view — and the general consensus at the time — was that it was probably no more than a tragic accident which occured during the firework incident at the burned-out hut. And that was the eventual conclusion. No foul play suspected. No trace of the rest of the body, possibly due to the efforts of the firemen, which would certainly have traumatized Bob Leng. But no body, no inquest. QED.
At any rate, it could still be a missing person case and not murder at all. But if it wasn’t, and the kids had closed ranks to cover up what had happened, one or other of them might eventually crack. They would all have been questioned closely by the police, but there could still have been a bad apple among them that the others had vowed to protect. Kids could be devious as well as being adept liars, no matter how many doting mummies and daddies might think otherwise.
So why did all Alex’s instincts tell her there was more to this than a closed case? She answered her own question: because she had become addicted to watching too many bloody crime movies and TV programmes and preening herself when she solved them before the final credits came up, that’s why. And because there was no satisfaction in leaving a crime unsolved. She applied logic to what she already knew. If the Leng boy had actually gone to India he must have had a passport. He must have got a plane ticket. People must have seen him, registered his details. Nobody simply disappeared without trace these days.
But logic also told her that the police would have checked on those things. So that was a non-starter. Therefore her first stop on Monday morning was the reference library to get out every microfiche newspaper record of a long-ago incident where a boy’s mutilated hand had been found.
*
When she found what she was looking for, she saw that it had made national news at first, but then became more localized. Murder was clearly not suspected. It seemed to have been assumed that there had been an accidental death — despite losing most of the body. But the local papers had made far more of a splash with the human interest stories, interviewing Bob and Jane Leng at length, until she could imagine them at screaming point from the intimate, painful questions.
Alex’s mother had always hated such intrusive stories, while her father had tried to dissuade her from taking what he called an unhealthy interest in criminal affairs, so they had probably played it down at the time.
She made copies of the relevant articles and took them home to study. It wasn’t her case ... there wasn’t any case, she reminded herself, but by now she was completely caught up in the horror of that day when Bob Leng had made his discovery.
She also had far too much to do to get involved with some neurotic woman’s problems. But on Tuesday afternoon she was in her office before two-thirty, and awaiting her client.
*
Jane Leng arrived flustered and nervous, armed with various plastic bags with the names of Oxford and Regent Street shops emblazoned on them — including Hamleys, Alex noted.
‘Please sit down Mrs Leng,’ she said, trying not to wince as the faint whiff of perspiration wafted towards her. Jane had obviously had a busy day.
‘I see you’ve finally done your Christmas shopping,’ she went on, smiling to put her at her ease. ‘Do you have young relatives to buy gifts for?’
It was none of her damn business, but it was an ice-breaker, since the woman looked as if she would rather be anywhere else than here. Now that she was confronted with the business-end of a PI’s world, Alex guessed she had begun to realize what she was taking on.
‘It’s for Steven,’ his mother said. ‘I always buy him something nice at Christmas. He’s not a child any more, but it will be his birthday on the same day, you see. And a son’s always a boy to his mother, isn’t he?’
It wasn’t so much that she always bought a gift for her dead son, as the fact that she spoke of him in the present tense. The woman was clearly as cracked as her husband ... and then Alex saw the anguish in Jane Leng’s face, and handed her a box of tissues.
‘It’s all right,’ she said gently. ‘I know what happened to Steven, Mrs Leng, and I can understand your need to keep his memory alive.’
‘He is alive, Miss Best.’
‘Well, of course he is to you —’
‘You don’t understand.’ She dabbed her eyes with a handful of tissues. ‘But if you know what happened ten years ago, then you’ll know that Bob’s dog found something.’
‘Yes,’ Alex said, determined to be as businesslike as possible now. ‘And also that it was positively identified as belonging to Steven. Forensics can’t lie, Mrs Leng.’
‘Well, in this case, they did. I know they did. I know Steven’s still alive, because I’ve seen him.’
Oh no, not again, Alex thought. Her last case involved oddballs, and she’d vowed to keep well clear of them.
The memory of the psychic Eleanora Wolstenholme and her equally weird daughter Moira, whose respectable florist trade hid her sleazy other life of high class call-girl, was something she’d rather forget. Particularly as the outcome of it had resulted in the traumatic court case where she had been called as a witness, facing the cold-blooded eyes of the High Court Judge killer who’d tried to kill her too. That was headline news, if you like, and pushed her into an unwelcome limelight for a while.
She gave Jane Leng a more sympathetic smile now.
; ‘I’m sure you know it’s a common phenomenon to imagine you see the face of a loved one who’s passed over, Mrs Leng,’ she said, cringing inwardly at the twee terms she thought the woman would appreciate.
‘Oh, I know all about that,’ Jane said, more briskly than before. ‘It’s what everybody says, but they don’t know what they’re talking about. Bob says I’m driving him back to drink again, because he insists I’m going mad and I’ll probably be committed before I’m done. But I know what I saw.’
Christ, it was getting worse, Alex thought, wondering how long this interview was going to last. She’d offered an hour’s consultation, and so far they’d hardly got through five bloody minutes, and she was already wondering if she was dealing with a madwoman.
‘Would you like some coffee?’ she asked in desperation, but Jane Leng shook her head. ‘Tea, then?’
At the same negative response, Alex knew there was to be no respite.
‘All right. So you think you’ve seen Steven —’
‘I don’t think. I know. Why does nobody listen to me?’
‘I’m listening, Mrs Leng.’
God, she was Frasier Crane at his best now. ‘So why don’t you tell me where you’ve seen him?’
‘On the television. In the middle of a football crowd.’
‘Is that the kind of place Steven liked to be?’
‘No, not at all. That’s what makes it so odd. He preferred different sports, and his school was progressive like that. They were a Grammar once, you know, and they kept up the old standards. They promoted things like fencing and squash, and even fishing instruction. He was good at that. He liked being by the river. But I know it was him I saw. I know my own son, don’t I?’
‘When was this sighting, Mrs Leng? Was it recently?’ Alex said, noting the unconscious snobbery in her mention of a Grammar school.
‘Last year. And before you ask, I went to the police, and they said they followed it up, but I’m sure they didn’t. Bob won’t believe me. He’d like to forget all about Steven, but I can’t. And now he’s started getting the nightmares again, even worse than before, and he says it’s all my fault.’
Deadly Suspicions (Alexandra Best Investigations Book 3) Page 2