What had she found so far? She had certainly learned that Bob Leng wanted her to stop meddling in his affairs and that his wife wanted her to carry on. She’d seen a lot of newspaper reports, including Jane’s many aggressive letters to the press. She had seen a lot of character analyses of Steven’s friends in Gran Patterson’s scrap books, and she had discovered that one of those friends had died in an horrific accident. And she had visited two yobbish brothers who wouldn’t give her the time of day.
Maybe her stupid disguise as a brash Australian long-lost cousin of Steven’s hadn’t been such a clever idea after all. Maybe she should have gone down to the haulage yard done up to the nines and dazzled one or both of the Wilkins brothers with her charms.
She shuddered. No thanks, matey. She certainly wouldn’t have wanted to get in either of their clutches. Slimy gits.
She wondered how soon it would be before Jane Leng contacted her again, and decided that the least she could do would be to write up a detailed report of her meeting with the Wilkins brothers, and the information about John Barnett. It would be more detailed than the actual facts warranted, perhaps, but with the help of Ray’s meticulous file on Gran’s scrap books, she could do it justice. At least Jane could see that she hadn’t been idle since coming here.
But not now. Not tonight. Tonight she was going to take a leisurely bath and then curl up on the sofa with a drink and a box of chocolates — to hell with a few extra pounds on her thighs — and watch anything on the telly that would make her laugh. She’d had enough of morbid investigations for now.
*
She had just emerged from her bathroom, wreathed in the glorious scent of exotic oriental bath foam, when she realized her answer machine light was flashing. With her radio turned up full, she hadn’t even heard the phone ring. She sometimes wished she could be the kind of person who could ignore doorbells and telephones and letters on the doormat, but she couldn’t, and never had been.
There were two messages. One was from Jane Leng.
‘I’m sorry to speak to you like this, Miss Best, and I don’t really like these things, but I thought I should warn you that Bob’s in Somerset for a few days, and I’m afraid he may come to see you. He knows all about you now, and he doesn’t like it at all. He’s becoming even more impossible to live with, and as soon as he gets back I’m coming down myself to see how the workmen are getting on with the house. It has to have some rewiring and pointing, so I’ll be staying with my sister for a few days, and I’ll come and see you then.’
She had hung up while Alex was still digesting the fact that Jane even had a sister. Why hadn’t she told her before? It might have given her a different angle on the affair if she could have interviewed the sister. As it was, she didn’t even know her name.
She tuned in to the second message. It was Charlie Adamson. For a few seconds Alex couldn’t think who he was, and then she got a vision of him in the dungeons of the newspaper offices immersed in his beloved archives.
‘Just thought you ought to know that we’ve had another letter from Jane Leng and it’ll be in the paper tomorrow. Nothing different from the usual, except that she says she’s now got you on the case. I presume you were aware of it.’
No, she bloody wasn’t, Alex fumed as the message clicked off. What the hell was Jane playing at, brandishing her name about as if it was some kind of trophy? But that was it, of course. After years of getting nowhere with the police she’d got a tame monkey to do her dirty work for her now, and Alex was it.
Without stopping to think, she found herself dialling Jane’s London number. The woman answered cautiously.
‘Oh, it’s you, Miss Best.’ The relief was obvious when she discovered who the caller was. ‘Thank goodness. I thought it was going to be him.’
‘Him?’
‘Bob, of course. He may not be here in person, but he’s still victimizing me over the phone every night.’
Alex ignored the pertinent word. ‘Mrs Leng, am I to understand that you’ve sent another letter to the local newspaper here and named me in it?’
‘That’s right, dear —’
‘Why on earth have you done that? How can I go about doing my job if everyone knows who I am and what I’m doing? I thought you understood the nature of my work.’
‘Well, are you working for me or not? If I’m not paying you enough, then you must say so —’ she said, almost petulantly.
‘That’s got nothing to do with it.’ She was beginning to dislike the woman more and more. As if payment counted for everything when she could manage very well without her kind.
But of course she couldn’t, not entirely. To stay in business, you had to take on the clients you disliked along with the ones you desperately wanted to help. She tried again.
‘Mrs Leng, I would appreciate it if you would withdraw that letter.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t do that, dear. Steven wouldn’t like it.’
‘Steven wouldn’t know.’
As soon as she had said it she bit her lip, knowing it was heartless and insensitive, but she recognized a growing arrogance in the woman’s attitude. In her eyes, she was right, and the whole world was wrong. It was more than a belief that her son was still alive. It was a blind ambition to be somebody in this affair, instead of being the little nonentity that she really was. And if that was demeaning to the woman, Alex didn’t care.
She might have been a good wife and mother once, but she had turned into a harridan now. You had to see people for what they really were, and that was exactly the way Alex was seeing Jane Leng.
‘I’m sorry if you think my letter will be a problem, dear, but I’m sure it won’t harm you in any way.’
She was bland again, completely enclosed in her own little world, and she had hung up before Alex could say any more, proving to Alex that her assessment wasn’t far off the mark.
Filled with frustration and anger that perhaps she was being taken for a ride, she drank more glasses of vodka and lime than was good for her, and ate a whole box of chocolates before she rolled into bed with a huge bout of indigestion that she knew she deserved.
First thing next morning she went down to the corner shop and bought a copy of the local newspaper.
‘Hi, Alex, long time no see,’ Mavis said delightedly, even though it had only been a few days since the last time she had been in there. She was as perky as usual, wearing a mauve sweater and matching eyeshadow, with silver and gold stars stuck haphazardly over her pale cheeks. Presumably the shopkeeper indulged these weird looks at nine o’clock in the morning. It might even attract customers, but the sight of her — young, bright, thin — depressed Alex.
‘Hi yourself,’ she croaked, her throat as dry as a husk.
‘You look as if you’ve had a night on the tiles,’ Mavis went on with a laugh. ‘I see you’re mentioned in dispatches, as Gran calls it.’
Alex groaned. She didn’t need to ask what she meant. She just paid for the newspaper and some aspirins and went back to her office, with Mavis’s shrill voice calling out behind her to let her know when she fancied a night out.
Right now all Alex fancied was another night in bed, in total silence, completely alone and in a darkened room. But the minute she got back to her office, she skimmed through the newspaper and found the letters page. And there it was, in all its glory.
It seemed as though Jane Leng was a virtuoso in letter-writing now, because hers was square-boxed with star billing at the top of the page. It said the usual stuff that Alex recognized. Her son had never been found and the police had never done their job properly, but now she had Alexandra Best looking into it, one of London’s most successful private investigators, who had now moved to Bristol.
Christ Almighty. The woman was giving her top status as a PI, and implying that she had come here especially to sort out the incompetent police force and solve the mystery of Steven Leng for once and all.
The phone rang even as she was counting the minutes until she heard from some eager newsp
aper reporter to get her reaction. She was surprised they hadn’t done so before.
‘Frank Gregory here, Alex. Have you seen the paper?’
‘I’m reading it now. This was not my idea, Frank, and I’m furious. The last thing I wanted was to have my name blazoned all over the newspaper —’
‘Yes, well as far as that goes, the damage is done. My advice now is to back off and issue a statement, playing down the whole thing.’
‘I can’t do that. Mrs Leng is still my client,’ she protested.
‘Well, I can’t force you to do it, but I just hope you know what you’re doing in dealing with this madwoman. I’ll speak to you soon.’
Alex hung up slowly, not quite knowing what to make of that last sentence. What she did know was that the police didn’t want this case reopened. They wouldn’t be at all pleased to know that the Lengs were returning to their neck of the woods either. Sleeping dogs — and mutilated hands — should lie. Lie being the operative word, Alex thought, going off at a tangent.
Who was lying over what had happened to Steven Leng? Somebody must know something, and it all came back to his companions on the camping trip. John Barnett couldn’t answer. The Wilkins brothers had clammed up the minute she mentioned Steven’s name. She still had to track down the others — the chap who now had a hardware shop in Bath, and the elusive Lennie Fry, so-called rock musician and God knows what else — and that should be her next priority.
However, it would all have to wait until she had made some toast and taken some aspirins and black coffee to clear her head, and tried to stop her nerves from juddering so much. She had gone to the shop before doing any of it, and the throbbing in her head was a steady reminder.
By mid-morning she was feeling fractionally more alert, and getting down to some work. Though it wasn’t proper work, she thought guiltily. Courtesy of Ray’s help she now had an e-mail address and the facility to get on to the Internet, and she spent a considerable time looking at websites that may never be any use to her, but were interesting, anyway. One day soon she was going to send an e-mail to Nick and startle him out of his complacent belief in her inability to master anything so complex. Not that she could blame him. She had always been adamant in stating that she would never succumb to it — and now she had. C’est la vie.
Her buzzer made her jump and she spoke quickly into the intercom.
‘I’d like to see Alexandra Best, please,’ said a voice that was vaguely familiar. She couldn’t readily place it, but since she was sure it wasn’t Bob Leng she told its owner to push open the door.
And then she was face to face with Clifford Wilkins.
‘You!’ he said furiously, placing his fists on his hips aggressively.
‘I’m afraid so,’ Alex said, keeping as cool as possible. ‘And what can I do for you, Mr Wilkins?’
‘Well, you can drop the charade of being Steven Leng’s Australian cousin, for a start. It was a hammy accent if ever I heard one.’
‘It fooled you though, didn’t it?’ she said, deciding there was no point in not brazening it out.
‘Not for one bloody minute.’
Oh yeah?
‘Would you like to sit down?’ Alex said, gesturing to a chair.
‘No I bloody wouldn’t. I want to know what you’re playing at with that fool of a woman.’
‘I take it you’ve seen the local paper then. And I do prefer it when people don’t swear at me all the time, Mr Wilkins.’
She stared him out, knowing that her emerald green eyes and the sound of her cut-glass voice was often enough to quell the most irate client. And she was using every bit of her equipment to keep him in his place.
It didn’t work with this one, though. He strode forward and thrust his face close to hers, in much the same way as Bob Leng had done.
‘You’re wasting your time. Steven’s long gone and that mother of his wants putting away.’
‘I do hope that’s not a threat to Mrs Leng’s safety.’
He continued to glare at her, and she gave a small sigh, forcing herself to speak more confidentially as she leaned forward, under cover of sliding open her desk drawer a fraction, and pressing the On switch of her tape recorder.
‘Mr Wilkins — Clifford — I’m just doing what I’ve been retained to do. Mrs Leng only wants to know what happened to Steven, which is a perfectly natural thing for a mother’s peace of mind, and if you can throw any light on the subject, it would be enormously helpful. You were there at the time of the incident, weren’t you? You and the group of friends who were going on the camping trip?’
‘Steven never came with us,’ he snarled.
‘I know that. So you just went off and continued with the trip without trying to find out if he’d been hurt in the explosion, I believe?’
God, it was hard to say it calmly and not to condemn. Even though she felt the utmost contempt that the others could have done such a thing, she made herself remember that at the time they were kids, and they were scared. They had been consorting with down-and-outs and winos, and God knows who else — maybe some of these Followers whose name cropped up from time to time — and they would have feared the consequences.
‘Steven was already backing out of the trip. He was tied to his mother’s apron strings and wishing he’d never agreed to come with us and was going home. It was no big deal when he did just that, as far as we knew, anyway. It was a bloody relief, if you must know,’ he added.
‘Why do you say that?’ Alex enquired.
‘He had some weird ideas. All that stuff about going to India and suchlike. Finding himself. Him and — well, it was all a load of tripe, anyway. He’d never have gone. His dad wouldn’t have let him. A right bastard, his dad.’
He caught sight of Alex’s raised eyebrow and scowled.
‘Anyway, all I came to say is you’re wasting your time, and if you want my advice, you’ll lay off.’
‘You know, I’m being offered so much advice on how to run my life lately, I wondered how I ever managed without you all. Even the local police are in on it now,’ she said casually, watching him.
He stood up at once, his face dark and mutinous. ‘Just keep out of things that don’t concern you. They had their say when they got the chance, and a fat lot of use they were.’ She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she heard a note of triumph in his voice. As if he — or the group — had somehow beaten the police at their own game.
‘I may need to speak to you again sometime, Mr Wilkins,’ she said, as he neared the door.
‘You’ve already said enough as far as I’m concerned. Don’t you ever know when to quit?’ he snapped.
‘Of course I do. When the case is over.’
He slammed the door on his way out, and Alex immediately got out the tape recorder and rewound the tape. She listened to it all over again, and towards the end there was one special bit that interested her.
‘All that stuff about going to India and suchlike. Finding himself. Him and —’
Him and who? That was the question. Him and Lennie Fry, who was also a bit of a free spirit as they called them in the sixties, and didn’t seem to fit in anywhere? And she was damn sure that the vague reference to Steven’s weird ideas included his interest in the Followers.
It had been a revealing conversation though, and perhaps it wasn’t all bad news that Jane Leng had mentioned her name in her newspaper letter after all. It had produced a reaction from Frank Gregory, and it had made Clifford Wilkins hotfoot it to her door. You might have expected friends of Steven to show an interest in what had happened to him, to want to know, even to have done a bit of detection work themselves. Instead of which ... well, John Barnett might have shown an interest in his time, but he wasn’t around to tell her anything now. And the Wilkins brothers were clearly going to clam up, closing ranks. Or covering up.
Her telephone rang, and she picked it up, going straight into professional mode. She relaxed as she heard Mavis Patterson’s voice for the second time that day.
‘Oh Alex, Gran just popped into the shop, and she wondered if you’d like to come and have supper with us tonight. She does a lovely shepherd’s pie, and her special onion gravy to go with it. She thought you might like a bit of home cooking. Not that you can’t cook yourself, of course, but she reckons it’s never so much fun cooking just for one, is it? If you’re busy, just say so, mind, but I know Gran would love to have a natter with you and find out how things are going —’
‘Mavis, I’d love to come to supper tonight,’ Alex broke in as soon as there was a pause for breath at the other end. ‘What time?’
‘Oh, about seven o’clock will be fine. Gran don’t like to eat too late because of the wind —’
‘That will be wonderful,’ Alex said, before Mavis could expand on Gran’s wind. ‘I’ll see you both then.’
She immediately forgot her need for an early night. Having seen the paper that morning, Gran would naturally have been impressed by the status of successful London Private Investigator that Jane Leng had bequeathed on her, but it was more than that. Gran Patterson was naturally interested in people, and especially in the kind of people who committed crimes. They had a lot in common.
Meanwhile she had to keep her mind on the job. Checking Ray’s detailed instructions of how to get onto the Internet, she switched on her computer again and went through it step by step. It was still pretty much of a mystery to Alex, but if it worked, it worked. That was the best way to handle technology, Nick always said: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and if it works, don’t question it.
After a considerable time of trial and error and getting nowhere except for being offered a million things to buy online that she didn’t want, she clicked on to a line that said Find People, and typed in Followers.
She didn’t really have much hope, and sure enough it was a non-starter. Then she had a tiny burst of inspiration, found one of the search engines Ray had listed, and looked for Religious Organizations or similar. If that didn’t do it ... but then up came ‘Search For?’. Alex typed in Followers, and held her breath.
Deadly Suspicions (Alexandra Best Investigations Book 3) Page 12