‘I don’t suppose you had any cuttings about that boy who was never found — except for his hand, I mean? It was a long time ago now, and it didn’t happen around here, of course.’
‘No, it was down Somerset way,’ Gran said vaguely. ‘It was big news at the time, but what really happened to the lad was a mystery. His mother still writes daft letters to the newspaper, swearing she’s seen him somewhere. She’s dotty, I reckon, but it makes interesting reading,’ she added with a chuckle.
‘I met her once,’ Alex said.
‘Did you? Then you’ll know what she’s like.’
She found her scrap books, and started turning the pages. Alex could see she would be here all day as Gran went through them, page by page, and she must have had cuttings of nearly every crime ever committed in the local area. She was better than an encyclopaedia. It was too much to hope that all the Leng cuttings were together, of course. They weren’t. It had been front-page news at the time, but then the interest had waned, and only occasional, mostly gossipy, bits of information had caught Gran’s eye.
Mavis brought in the tea, and Alex forced herself to remember that she was here to chat with her as well, and to make contact with people outside the narrow spectrum of her work. She asked Mavis about boyfriends, and what she did when she wasn’t working, while still turning the pages of the scrap books and being mildly frustrated at the way Gran kept pointing out items of interest to herself, such as the fellow from down the road who was caught for shoplifting, and the flashy tart who turned out to be no better than she should be and ran off with the local vicar.
‘Gran, I don’t suppose you’d be kind enough to lend me some of these scrap books for a few days, would you?’ she asked finally. ‘I would take great care of them, but they might be very useful to me in my work. I uh — like to know the kind of area I’m working in.’
Gran pursed her lips as if considering, and then nodded.
‘I daresay ’tis all right. I can see you’re a steady kind of person — not like our Mavis here, with her daft clothes. As long as you take good care of ’em you can keep ’em as long as you like. Well, for a week or two, anyway. Good-looking young woman like you can’t have much time for reading —’
‘I do when it’s for my work,’ Alex cut in before she went off into a long spiel again. ‘But I won’t take the wartime ones, thank you. I’m sure you like browsing through those yourself.’ Old people did.
Gran gave a throaty chuckle that brought on a cough and a wheeze, and sent a florid hue to her cheeks.
‘Oh ah, I could tell you a few things about them times, my lover —’
‘Alexandra don’t want to hear none of that old stuff, Gran,’ Mavis put in, and then: ‘Oh Lord, you don’t mind if I call you Alexandra, do you?’
‘I’d rather you called me Alex.’
‘Oh, OK. And maybe we can go to the pictures sometimes.’
‘That would be nice,’ Alex said, already edging towards the door with the precious couple of scrap books in her hand, and itching to get back home and devour them properly. You never knew what nuggets you might find in the most unlikely sources.
‘I’ll see you around then,’ Mavis called, as she got out of the house.
The blast of cold air hit Alex’s cheeks with a welcome burst of oxygen. She hadn’t realized quite how cloying it had been in the small house. No wonder Gran wheezed so much. A healthy dose of the outdoors would probably benefit her.
Then she forgot all about such thoughts as she closed the door of her flat behind her and prepared for a good long session with Gran’s scrap books.
Chapter 7
Jane Leng was perfectly aware that folk thought her completely barmy. Her doctor had warned her so many times that her nerves were at breaking point that she wondered why they just didn’t snap and be done with it. She didn’t have any truck with her London doctor, anyway. He talked with a plum in his mouth and she always expected him to wear white gloves every time he had to touch her.
He handed out pills as if they were sweets too. Anything to send a neurotic woman off with a Prozac prescription and get her out of his office. Oh yes, she knew. She never took them, anyway. She had quite a store of them now. She’d even toyed with the idea of putting them in Bob’s tea now and then, just to shut him up when he bawled at her.
Jane much preferred their old family doctor in Chilworthy, who’d known her and Bob since long before their late baby Steven was born, a puny little thing who’d nearly torn her insides out at the birth, but thankfully had been the means of putting a stop to further torment. After Steven’s birth, there should be no more babies, Doctor Davey had told her severely, much to Jane’s huge relief.
Which had made it all the more reason for her to dote on Steven, of course, and all the more reason for her to totally disbelieve that he could be dead. Children didn’t die before their parents. Not lovely boys who were only sixteen with all their life ahead of them. It was the wrong order of things ...
Doctor Davey didn’t believe in pills, either. He always said talking things out was the best medicine, and he’d always had time for a gossip, and to pass the time of day and discuss the price of bread.
‘Are you going to stand about dreaming all day, woman?’ she heard her husband’s sarcastic voice. ‘For God’s sake, get that overall off and tidy yourself up. You look as if you’re going out scrubbing instead of getting ready for my presentation this evening.’
She glared at him venomously. She hated him more than ever now, even though she had got her way and they were leaving London and going back where they belonged; where she could still feel the presence of Steven all around her, even if he couldn’t — or wouldn’t.
And this presentation, she thought scornfully. They’d brought it forward a couple of weeks because the Fire Chief was going on holiday on the day Bob retired, and they had to do things right according to protocol. It was a lot of fuss, according to Jane. Just a group of blokes dressing up in uniforms and slapping Bob on the back as if they liked him and were sorry to see him go, which was a laugh, since he’d managed to upset most of them in his time.
After the speeches, he’d be handed a medal or a clock or whatever it was they were giving him, and by the end of the week it was a sure bet that nobody would remember Bob Leng had ever existed.
Then there would be just the two of them ... for a minute Jane felt the bleakness of the thought wash over her as usual. There would be only Bob and his hatefulness, and her and her memories. And the young woman with the posh voice who was going to help her, she remembered.
She felt slightly less frazzled at the thought. She had been totally disillusioned by the police who thought her nothing but a crank, and the stupid newspaper that still printed her letters, but didn’t see the seriousness of what she was saying. She knew very well they only kept printing her letters when there was nothing else to fill the pages. She was a joke to them.
But all her hopes were pinned on Alexandra Best now, and the minute she got out of this horrible place she was going to go and see her and find out what she had discovered. If the worst came to the worst, and it was proven beyond all reasonable doubt that Steven was dead, then at least she’d know someone had tried.
In her secret heart, Jane knew very well what the truth of it was, but it was something she would never admit, not even to herself, and certainly not out loud. If you didn’t have hope to cling to, what did you have?
And while she could still look at all the photos of Steven that she surrounded herself with, he was still alive, still about to walk in the door at any minute and ask her what was for tea.
‘Put that fucking thing down, will you? You disgust me with your stupid mooning about, and your tight-arsed face,’ she heard Bob shout, and she hadn’t realized she had picked up one of the framed photos and was running her fingers over the glass as sensuously as if she caressed a lover.
She flinched as if he had struck her, the way he had struck her a few nights ago. She clutched t
he photo to her chest, her eyes glittering with loathing. Even more so now, because he had defiled Steven’s memory by using that horrible word.
‘You won’t stop me having the photos,’ she screamed. ‘I won’t put them away, and I won’t stop talking about him as long as there’s breath in my body.’
As he lunged towards her, she wondered fearfully for a moment if she had gone too far with her dramatics. But this time it wasn’t his wife he was after. He wrenched the framed photo of his son out of her hands, and hurled it at the stone fireplace, where it smashed into a thousand pieces.
‘You bastard!’ Jane howled. ‘You rotten, stinking bastard. But you’ve only broken the glass. I’ve still got the photo —’
He strode over to the fireplace and ground the whole thing to pieces under his boot, while she let out an animal cry of anguish as she saw her son’s image become twisted and torn. Her screams became more shrill.
‘Well, that’s finished it. You can go to your precious presentation alone, because I’m not leaving this house tonight —’
He turned on her at once, gripping her arm so tightly she was sure all the blood would drain out of it.
‘You will come with me,’ he grated. ‘You’ll behave yourself and you’ll smile, if it’s the last thing you do. Do you hear me, bitch?’
He overpowered her, the way he had always done. He threatened her, frightened her, and since she often wondered fearfully if he really would do for her one of these days, she caved in at once.
‘All right, I’ll go,’ she said sullenly. She had often thought of going missing at such times, but she knew she’d never have the courage to go through with it. She always felt lumpy and unattractive alongside the other wives at functions. In this case, there might not be too many of them, Jane thought. Not like the Christmas do, when she had felt so out of place and nondescript.
‘Go and wash yourself and do something with your hair,’ Bob said freezingly, pushing her away from him. ‘You stink of fish and chips.’
And you didn’t fill your fat belly with them? Jane thought furiously. God help me if I don’t do for you one of these days.
At least she was getting a bit of a reprieve for a little while. Tomorrow, Bob was going down to Chilworthy to sign the final papers for their new place, and to sort out the gas and electricity people, so she’d have a bit of time to herself. Thank God for small mercies.
*
Alex knew she had struck gold as soon as she settled down to study Gran’s scrap books in more detail that evening. Gran had clearly been intrigued by the mystery of the lonesome hand and kept everything she could find about it. At least, the juicy bits, Alex noted with a smile, and there were plenty of photos. Gran was obviously hot on photos.
The newspaper cuttings were useful in their reports, but it was the photos which told her more than anything about the six boys who had intended going camping together.
There were single shots and many school groups, in which Gran had circled the relevant boys — good old Gran — and during the investigations there had been many character-witness accounts from anyone who knew any of the boys, including other school friends, teachers and neighbours.
It just went to show that people only saw what they wanted to see, thought Alex eventually. If you believed all you read, you’d deduce that Steven Leng had been a mummy’s boy, easily led, though not averse to doing a bit of bullying himself, the way some mummys’ boys were. Some called him a loner, which contrasted with the fact that he was supposedly popular. He was certainly a strange one though, and that came through loud and clear from every side.
‘And what about you, John Barnett, killed on your motorbike six years after the event?’ she murmured over her third cup of coffee laced with vodka which was keeping her fully awake. That was her excuse, anyway.
She looked at his photo. He’d been a handsome lad, not like the Wilkins brothers, who were bruisers if ever she saw them. They were big and burly, and clearly destined for ownership of a family haulage firm, she guessed.
And there was Keith Martin, who had a hardware shop in Bath, and looked like an earnest type. A nervous type too. And finally Lennie Fry. Alex studied his photos with interest.
Lennie looked different from the rest. While the rest of them were tidily casual, he wore frayed jeans and a vest top, like some relic from an earlier hippy age. She could easily imagine him dossing down at the Glastonbury Festival, wreathed in clouds of smoke of the more suspicious kind, spaced out, stoned out of his head, happily incandescent ...
‘Are you clairvoyant now?’ Alex asked herself out loud. ‘Don’t you know anything about not judging a book by its cover? And kids by their clothes? He was probably just your normal teenage rebel.’
She may not be clairvoyant, but she had always thought herself pretty shrewd when it came to sizing somebody up, until she had been proved wrong in the past, Alex remembered feelingly. People are never what they seem ... that was one of Nick’s reminders. But this boy certainly looked like one of the more interesting characters in the group. She flipped through Gran’s scrap books to find out what people had said about him.
‘Lennie was always a bit weird. He wanted to be a musician,’ said a school friend. ‘From the way he mutilated his guitar I don’t think he’d have got anywhere. He and Steven had some wild idea of going to India, and then they got caught up in that other stuff, but they were always falling out about it.’
Alex sat up. So those two — Lennie and Steven — were caught up in the same thing, were they? Big ideas of going to India — and that other stuff, which she interpreted as being the link with the Followers. It was always interesting when groups fragmented for whatever reason. It may or may not lead to problems on either side. In this case, Steven Leng’s death had ensued, which was some problem!
She spent the evening going through the scrap books, knowing she should put these findings into some kind of order, with half her mind on the arrival of Ray Smart, assistant, in the morning. Now that she had got him — on a temporary basis, no more — she had begun to wonder what the hell she was going to do with him.
He would have to act as dogsbody, though she wasn’t sure that was what he had in mind. He’d want to do some detecting, seeing this as the first step to becoming a latterday Poirot — if he even knew who that was. She was still wondering if this had been such a good idea. At least it was only for a month. After that, she would know if she preferred to continue going it alone.
*
Ray arrived on the stroke of nine o’clock, not exactly as frisky as a Red Setter pup, but getting there, and she let him into the office with a bright smile and a mental query as to how she could shorten a month to a fortnight.
‘Ready and eager then, Ray?’
‘Oh yes — er — Alex.’
It was painful to watch the slow colour creep up his neck. For a moment she wondered just how he and the dynamic, sporty Philip Cordell had ever hit it off. They seemed like complete opposites.
‘Right then. I’ll show you around, and the first job I want you to do today is to sort some old cuttings into date and character order and put them on to a computer file for me. I’ve put Post-its on the relevant pages in these old scrap books. There are masses of cross-references, mind. Think you can do that?’
The look on his face was almost one of glory. The enthusiasm for computers shone through, so at least Phil had got that right.
‘Piece of cake,’ Ray said, more breezily than he had spoken before.
‘Good. And speaking of cake, which we weren’t, I usually start the morning with coffee and a biscuit. OK with you?’
‘Oh — yes, fine,’ he said, fiddling with the scrap books Alex handed him.
‘So before you get started I’ll just show you how to work my coffee machine, then you can do it in future.’ It was obviously going to take time to get Ray organized into office routine, including the pecking order of who did what, and she just hoped he was better with the computer files.
*
She was still making phone calls to various sources of information when he appeared at her desk with a number of printed pages later in the morning, and she revised everything she had ever thought about him.
‘Ray, you’re a genius!’ she exclaimed. ‘This is exactly what I wanted.’
He blushed at her praise.
‘It was easy. What do I do next?’
‘Well, first of all, let me remind you that what you’ve done here today is confidential. An elderly lady loaned these scrap books to me. I don’t think I need to keep them any longer, so perhaps you could return them.’
She certainly needed space if he was going to spend every non-working moment hovering over her to see how she operated.
She scribbled a note of thanks to Gran before giving Ray the address.
‘Oh, I know the place. There’s a girl who lives there, isn’t there? Works in the corner shop?’
‘I can see you’ve been doing a bit of detective work on your own,’ Alex said teasingly.
‘Oh no. Not really. I just saw her, that’s all.’
Oh God, he certainly wasn’t a bundle of laughs. Mavis is right out of your league, kiddo, Alex thought, and she wasn’t planning on acting as matchmaker. She put the scrap books and the note into a large envelope and handed it to him.
‘Don’t hurry back. In fact, it’s nearly lunchtime, so why don’t we call this a short first day? When you’ve had your lunch and delivered the envelope to Mrs Patterson, go on home, and I’ll see you in the morning, OK?’
It wasn’t the way to conduct business, but he was starting to oppress her with his earnestness. She needed to get out of the office too, and upstairs in her flat was a delicious cheese and tomato pizza just waiting to be heated in the microwave.
‘Don’t I have to work this afternoon?’ Ray said doubtfully.
‘No, nor tomorrow, because I have things to do,’ she lied. ‘But on Friday we’ll be doing some fieldwork. I have to interview some people, so I shall want you to accompany me as my backup, OK?’
Deadly Suspicions (Alexandra Best Investigations Book 3) Page 9