by Bud Craig
“Posted on 22nd April.”
I took my diary out of my briefcase and opened it.
“That was the Tuesday after Easter when Vicky Monroe was having an interview at Ordsall Tower.”
The day United sacked David Moyes, I thought, and all this trouble started. Debbie shook her head, struggling for words.
“So on the day she sent this postcard she was in Salford?”
“She can’t have been,” I said, “there must be some other explanation.”
“Such as?”
I sighed and tried to work it out.
“Is that Vicky’s handwriting?”
“It looks like it. She wrote out her contact details for me before she left.”
I thought a bit more.
“Maybe somebody else posted it for her.”
“But why?”
For no good reason I could discern.
“Hang on,” said Debbie. “There’s one sure way to find out.”
She took a phone from her handbag.
“I’ll ring the restaurant.”
I wished I could have afforded to turn down this job. Like many of my investigations, it hadn’t taken long to become impossibly complicated.
“Is that Vicky,” asked Debbie?
There followed a minute or two of social pleasantries.
“Listen, Vicky, this is going to sound weird, but a friend of mine thinks you were in Salford in April.”
She listened for a moment then covered the mouthpiece.
“She hasn’t been back to Salford since she left,” she whispered.
“Can I have a word with her?”
Having got Vicky’s permission, Debbie handed the phone to me.
“Hello, Vicky, my name’s Gus Keane. I’m a private investigator.”
“Oh, yes?”
“I need to talk to you about one of my cases...”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Debbie filling the kettle at the tap and plugging it in.
“What?”
Vicky sounded outraged.
“I saw you in Salford on 22nd April,” I went on, “you were...”
“Listen, Gus, or whatever your name is,” she said, “I came to Scilly in March and haven’t left since. I haven’t had bloody time for one thing...”
“But I saw you, you had your handbag nicked and I got it back for you...”
“You’re mad or drunk or something...”
She spoke with a distinctive West Country accent, quite unlike the ‘Vicky’ I had met. Debbie got mugs and a jar of coffee from a cupboard then spooned some into the cafetière before getting a jug of milk out of the fridge. Why were ordinary things still going on when I appeared to have landed in a parallel universe?
“No, I’m neither. There’s something going on here and I’m gonna get to the bottom of it.”
“Well, I hope it keeps fine for you. All I can say is whoever you saw in April, it wasn’t me.”
I sensed she was about to end the call, but I couldn’t let her go without making some attempt to find out more.
“Are you coming back this way any time soon?”
“I very much doubt it and...”
“Could I come and see you?”
She let out a cry of exasperation.
“What for?”
Lots of reasons, I said to myself. Partly to convince myself she was telling the truth, partly because I thought she might just be able to help me.
“To find out more,” I said. “I could come over this weekend if I can get a flight.”
I knew it would be expensive but assumed Ellen Gallagher wouldn’t mind footing the bill. There was silence on the end of the line. I thought for a second she had hung up on me.
“Let me talk to Debbie again.”
I handed the phone back to Debbie with a word of explanation and went upstairs to the loo.
“I convinced her you weren’t a mad axeman,” said Debbie when I got back.
“Thanks.”
She poured coffee into the mugs.
“I think in spite of herself, she was intrigued by what you said, as am I, and she’s willing to meet you.”
She gave me Vicky’s phone number and directions to Hugh’s Place, the restaurant.
“That’s something anyway,” I said as I put milk into my coffee. “The move to the Scillies must be permanent if Vicky’s selling the house.”
“Oh, it’s not her house, she was just Will’s lodger.”
“Will?”
“Yeah, Will Trader.”
So Will Trader was Vicky’s landlord. Why was he always rearing his ugly head? Before I could consider this point further, Debbie’s phone rang.
“Hello...Hi, Vicky...right...OK, hang on.”
She turned to me.
“Vicky says there’s a room vacant in their B&B while you’re over there, do you want to book it?”
I thought quickly and made a decision.
“Yeah.”
Debbie spoke into the phone.
“He says yes ...I’ll ask...one person or two?”
“One,” I said, knowing Marti would be working on her album with Ellen.
Debbie raised her eyebrows at this, as she made the final arrangements with Vicky and ended the call.
“Now then, Gus Keane,” Debbie said, sipping her coffee, “as you’ve reappeared in my life so mysteriously, I want to know all about you.”
* * *
I left half an hour later, having told Debbie my life story since I’d last seen her over thirty years ago. I’d learned that Debbie was divorced and had a daughter. She had recently left her job as a translator for the EU in Brussels with a generous pay out. Now she was wondering what to do next and thinking of travelling for a while. She had a brother in Brisbane she wanted to visit. Thinking about all this, I knocked on Will Trader’s door on the way to the bus stop. He was still out. I needed to see him, but he would have to keep.
CHAPTER TEN
“So how do you know Debbie?” asked Vicky Monroe the following day.
In bright sunshine we were walking along a gentle incline up a winding path on the island of Tresco. In a couple of minutes we would reach Cromwell’s Castle, a 17th century tower. Vicky had turned out to be a bundle of enthusiasm, seemingly unable to keep still. No wonder she was so skinny.
“We went out together when we were seventeen, eighteen,” I explained.
A gull flew overhead, its squawk the only sound apart from our footsteps.
“A teenage romance,” she smiled. “How sweet.”
I pictured Debbie and me in the seventies and wondered where the years had gone.
“Hard to imagine now,” I said.
Strange, I thought, that Debbie was back in my life. Even stranger was the thought that I might have married her. Lots of blokes I knew had married girls they’d met when they were barely old enough to shave.
“What broke you up,” said Vicky.
I shrugged.
“I honestly can’t remember,” I replied. “Neither of us said anything. Debbie went to Oxford University. I signed to play rugby league for Salford.”
“Really?”
“Maybe we just drifted apart.”
And now Debbie was involved in one of my cases. That meant I would have to see her again to tell her how I had got on in the Scilly Isles. Why did the thought please me? Best not to think about that.
When we arrived at Cromwell’s Castle we sat on the ramparts and watched the waves lapping on the almost white sand for a few moments before we got round to talking about the reason for my trip. Vicky had presumably offered to accompany me on the boat trip to Tresco, because that would give us the time and privacy to talk. I had told her about Tim’s murder but we hadn’t gone into it in any depth.
Now I asked her about how she came to be here and what had happened before she left. She tried to explain the sequence of events, including the split with Hugh and her decision to move from Devon to Manchester where she had friends.
“How
did you end up living in Will Trader’s house?”
“He’s, like, a friend of a friend,” she said. “He needed a lodger to help with the mortgage, I needed a place to stay.”
“What did you make of Will? He seems a pretty calm bloke to me.”
She pulled down the brim of her white sun hat.
“Yeah, he is most of the time. I always wondered what went on underneath that urbane exterior.”
“Oh?”
“I don’t know him all that well,” she said, “he was hard to make out.”
“How do you mean?”
“I was never sure what he did all day, how he made a living and stuff,” she said. “I heard he was a professional gambler.”
“Maybe he was. I find it hard to believe he made much out of that but what do I know?
“He talked about writing a novel, but lots of people say that.”
“You sound sceptical.”
“Not really, like I say, I don’t know him all that well. I never thought he was all that happy, you know.”
“Really?”
She smiled before going any further.
“I’m probably guilty of the social worker’s besetting sin, over-analyzing, reading too much into things, wanting to carry out an assessment on everybody I meet.”
I smiled in recognition at this behaviour which I had been guilty of myself, but decided I had heard enough about Will.
“Anyway, what about the other Vicky?” I asked. “Have you worked it out yet.”
I was bloody sure I hadn’t.
“I’m as puzzled as you are,” she said.
“That means very puzzled.”
I looked across the blue-green sea to Bryher, the island that ran parallel with Tresco, creating a sheltered harbour for boats. It had always been one of my favourite views when I came here with Louise. I watched the waders skittering along the shoreline as an oyster catcher swooped down to join them.
“I can’t believe that someone pretended to be me to get a job,” she said. “What would she get out of it?”
She sat with her chin in her hands trying to puzzle out this conundrum. She had dark hair with a fringe so bore a superficial resemblance to the woman who’d impersonated her.
“As it turned out, nothing,” I said, remembering that the ‘Vicky’ I met hadn’t turned up for work.
“I suppose so.”
In a more fundamental way the two women were completely different. The real Vicky had greeted me the previous day with a smile as if meeting a close friend after a long separation. I could tell her welcome was genuine; what you saw was what you got. I would never have mistaken the two women for each other. Somebody who had never met them might have been fooled, I reckoned. And whoever interviewed her would not have been expecting an impostor.
“Listen, Vicky” I said, “I’ve been wondering how she got away with it. I mean, procedures for job interviews are really strict these days.”
“Yes.”
“You have to have proof of identity,” I went on. “Show your passport.”
“Well, when I got to Exeter Airport to fly over here,” she said. “I realized I’d forgotten my passport. As it turned out it didn’t matter. They accepted my driving licence.”
“Where is your passport then?”
She shrugged again.
“When Hugh and I decided to get back together, I... oh, I guess I didn’t want to blow it again. I just wanted to be with him as soon as I could.”
A look of shyness passed over her face as if she were revealing too much.
“What I’m getting at is I left in a bit of a hurry,” she said, “I didn’t tell Will where I was going, just sent a text to say I was moving out. Some of my stuff is still at his place.’
“So your passport could be among that lot?”
“Suppose so. I haven’t really thought about it until now. I keep meaning to get in touch with Will, but never seem to have the time.”
Where did that get us, I asked myself? No further forward was the answer. It didn’t tell us how the impostor had succeeded in passing herself off as Vicky or why.
“This woman, whoever she is, would need to have a reason for doing this,” I said. “And it’s not only a question of convincing people she was you. She’d also have had to convince an interview panel she was up to the job.”
We sat in silence, admiring the view. Then I remembered something Debbie had said.
“Debbie said you’d made lots of notes for the interview,” I said, “and you got her to do a mock interview.”
“Yes.”
And she said she knew as much about it as Vicky by the time they’d finished. But surely Debbie couldn’t be mixed up in this, could she? It wasn’t her who attended the interview. I give up, I said to myself.
“What about Tim Greenhoff,” I said, “did you meet him?”
She scowled at the mention of Tim’s name.
“Andrea’s husband? Yes, I met him. Look, I’m sorry the guy’s dead and everything but he was a total creep.”
I smiled at her words.
“At a guess I’d say you didn’t like him.”
She smiled back.
“Whatever gave you that impression?” she said. “I met Andrea first, she’s, like, an old friend of Will. That didn’t stop Tim ‘God’s gift to women’ Greenhoff from coming onto me.”
“Yeah?”
“I think he did it automatically on the assumption I’d be bound to succumb.”
“But you weren’t tempted?”
“Was I hell. If I ever get that desperate, you can shoot me.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The afternoon after I got back from the Isles of Scilly I was at Ordsall Tower, taking an unwieldy file from the cabinet opposite what I still thought of as Jimmy’s desk. I’d had regular updates from Marti about his mental state – not good – but hadn’t been to see him since my trip to Haddon House. After a moment’s thought I sat in my old friend’s seat. Nobody else was using it and I could always tell him I was keeping it warm for him. Anyway, I was familiarising myself with the Dickens family for his benefit. Just then my phone beeped. I read the text:
Thanks for the postcard. Can’t wait to hear about Scillies trip. I’m away for a while. I’ll give you a call when I get back. Debbie x
I had meant to go and see her, but that would have to wait. I opened up the Dickens file and tried to find my way round it. It took a little while as somebody had had the bright idea of changing the layout for the umpteenth time. After half an hour or so I had discovered nothing I wasn’t expecting. It was all as Karen described it. Tim had been involved for a month at most. Hardly enough time to invoke such hatred. I noted the Dickens’ address and thought for a moment.
I went through the points in my mind: Wayne lived near the place where Tim was killed; he knew Tim was there; he had a strong motive. I thought back to the brief conversation Jimmy and I had had about the footballing Greenhoff brothers. One of us had said the younger one was dead. Hadn’t Dickens said another Greenhoff would die if he got his hands on him? If that wasn’t a threat to kill Tim, what was?
* * *
A few minutes later, I was knocking on the door of a council house in the Ordsall estate.
“Hello, Wayne,” I said, “Remember me.”
He looked at me without much curiosity.
“You look a bit familiar. Who are you?”
He scratched his stomach through a faded purple t-shirt. I took a GRK Investigations card from my wallet and handed it to him.
“GRK? What’s that mean?”
I didn’t see any point in explaining that GRK stood for Gus Risman Keane, or that I was named after my dad’s favourite Salford rugby league player.
“I’m Gus Keane, a private investigator,” I told him as he continued to peer at the card with some puzzlement.
“Oh, aye?”
Having been shown such overwhelming indifference, I could see this might be hard work.
“I wonder if
I could come in and ask you about a case I’m interested in.”
He looked at the card again, then back at me.
“What’s it about?”
Mentioning Tim’s murder now could, I reckoned, put him off.
“It’s a private matter. Be better if we talked indoors.”
“Come in then,” he shrugged.
The living room he took me into was less of a mess than the garden, quite tidy in fact.
“I’m looking into the death of Tim Greenhoff,” I said as I sat on a red armchair.
“How can you be?” he asked. “They’ve charged someone for it. Feller from social services.”
“He didn’t do it. I aim to find out who did.”
He sat in an identical chair and frowned thoughtfully, scratching the back of his left arm.
“The cops have already spoken to me,” he said. “I don’t see how I can help you.”
“I saw you outside Mangall Court not long before Mr Greenhoff died,” I said, ignoring his comments.
“I remember you now.”
That was something, I thought.
“You were threatening him,” I said. “You were angry about your kids being taken into care.”
He stared at me, his eyes wide with alarm.
“Now, wait a minute,” he said, “let’s get one thing straight. I didn’t kill the little fucker. I wish I had, but I didn’t.”
Somebody else who would like to have killed Tim. I remembered Jimmy using almost the same words as Wayne.
“Anyway,” he went on, “after I talked to you and your mate, I went home. You saw me.”
He sat back and folded his arms, looking smug. l could see he wasn’t about to break down and confess.
“I don’t know where you went,” I countered. “Even if you did go home you could easily have gone back any time. It’s not far, about ten minutes walk, I reckon.”
“I often go that way,” he said, “it don’t mean anything.”
“Were you near Mangall Court the morning after I’d seen you there?”
I thought it was worth pursuing the point just in case.
“Could have been,” he said, “hard to say.”
“See anything unusual?”
He thought for a moment.
“The only thing I remember,” he said, “was a car going like the clappers. I thought ‘he’s gonna kill someone’.”