by Penny Grubb
In the old town bars, bright young things rest temporarily cheek by jowl with old men supping their nightly pints; the mood cheerful as the wave flows inward homing in on the cheap drinks deals of the new town where night is an irrelevance to the lights and noise and throbbing beat from outlets designed to attract in a crowd that’s on its way regardless, laughing, swaying, priming itself for Friday night.
Around midnight, the tide turns towards the clubs, celebratory cheer still recognizable, but faces glassy-eyed. Come the small hours, it’s a baying pack that surges out, wild, robotic, frightening; disintegrating into staggering groups to shout and weave about, arms flailing for taxis, clashing with the weekend shift police to a background wail of sirens.
Annie took herself straight to the new town, estimating where her mates would be by the time she was ready to join them. She loved the buzz of the pounding music, the swell of sound that engulfed her, that made her a component of the crowd. She didn’t do drugs, not these days, and automatically turned away the offers that came as she pushed her way into the bars.
Her mates would be well ahead, forging their way into postworking-week euphoria, but she could catch up easily. She fought through a press of bodies, and screamed her order over the cacophony.
A bottle of beer? Momentary glances. Quizzical. But she didn’t do vodka shots these days, either. The crowds could make her feel old if she wasn’t careful; a staid old matron like Barbara, forever fretting over minutiae, missing the big picture.
The stagnation of the business threatened to creep into her bones even here. The sisters would vegetate forever, earning just enough to kid themselves that good times were around the corner, with more and more work channelled through Vince Sleeman. Was his aim to make them so dependent they couldn’t function alone? Then what? Shut them down for good? Or had he another plan?
The hell with it. She would not slide into the trough of acceptance that sucked Pat in. She would complete this case for Jennifer and Nicole Perks, then find a way out. End on a high. That was the key. Never let anyone say she quit because she couldn’t hack it. She would get at the truth about Michael Walker before she turned her back on the firm.
And as for the Longs, she would get in touch first thing in the morning and be absolutely honest with them. Pat would disapprove. Barbara too. The sisters would want to milk these clients as dry as they could, just like their father would have done. Ron Long was prepared to shell out money because some woman had given his wife a funny look. Well, more fool him. Annie would bounce the ball right back into their court. The woman Sheryl Long saw had had every reason to look harassed by an imminent family wedding, and had probably not even registered the Longs as they’d driven past. But if Ron and Sheryl wanted her to continue with the case, then fine, but they would sign up for a full-scale investigation with their eyes open.
She wriggled her way through the mob, straining to find familiar faces to help her make a proper fist of celebrating Friday night.
Saturday, mid morning, found Annie sitting in the office, slightly thick-headed as she stared at the file labelled Ron Long without really seeing it. Pat, at the other side of the desk, sat engrossed in paperwork. Annie drummed her fingers on the table wondering how best to tackle Jennifer to persuade her to look out old police files. Michael Walker was the innocent victim of a brutal murder. The court had thrown no doubt on that. They had taken the murderer’s accusations against him as the ranting of a madman. But if Annie was to lay these accusations to rest once and for all, she needed to know what was behind this story of Michael having been reported for child abuse six years ago. Maybe Jen had already looked for old files. The problem was that Jen didn’t leak this sort of stuff. Not until now anyway.
‘Annie! Do you have to do that? I’m trying to concentrate.’
‘Sorry.’ Annie raised her fingers from the wooden surface and pulled the Longs’ case file towards her. Pat had accepted early closure of the case with a tight-lipped ‘Hmm’, but said nothing more. Annie felt the folder, thin and insubstantial, representing a single hour of paid work. Ron Long, when she’d rung him, had been more than satisfied with what she’d found and happy to pay for a full hour. If she’d charged for three hours, he would have been dissatisfied at paying over the odds. This way they looked good and built a reputation for efficiency. No point saying this to Pat or Barbara who would carp on about the lost two hours’ fee and point out with some justification that the Longs were from out of the area and unlikely to be back.
Pat pushed her paperwork aside. ‘How did it go with that contact from Vince? What’s the Brittany Booth woman like? Is she mad like the other one said?’
‘She’s incredibly intense. Very troubled and out of her depth. Heaven knows if we can get a result for her and if we do, she might not like it.’
‘No big revelation then?’
Annie thought of the note in the file, but said, ‘No. Yates sounds like a real head case. I think she just got caught up in the thing. She’s very naive, knows no better. But she’ll pay us to find the truth so I’ll have a go.’
Pat nodded her approval. ‘D’you think there’s anything in it, Walker – I mean? The police would have sussed it out, wouldn’t they?’
‘Yeah, that’s where I’m going to start. Find out what they looked into and when.’
‘You can go to Vince for inside info on this one, you know. After all, he passed it on to us.’
Annie made a face. ‘Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll see what I can get out of Jen.’
‘Strait-laced Flanagan? You’ll be lucky.’
‘I think she might help me on this one, and at least anything I get out of her will be the truth, not a version that she wants me to hear.’
Pat conceded the point with a wry smile. She knows Vince through and through, thought Annie. Why won’t she make the effort to break free?
As Pat heaved herself to her feet, the buzzer sounded from downstairs. Annie got up too and headed for the door. Before she reached the top of the stairs, the buzzer had sounded twice more and whoever was out there kept their finger pressed to it as she descended. Halfway down, she paused. By leaning across on tiptoe it was possible to see the reflection of the person outside.
Sheryl Long. And clearly in a state.
Annie opened the door and Sheryl practically fell into her arms in a move that seemed dramatically staged. ‘No, it won’t do,’ Sheryl blurted out. ‘You don’t understand. Quick, I need to talk to you.’
‘You know your way.’ Annie waved Sheryl up the stairs, then put her head outside to look down the street. Sure enough, she could see a hurrying figure in the distance. Ron Long hot on the heels of his wife. She left the door ajar to save herself another trip down and followed Sheryl upstairs.
‘You can’t leave it,’ Sheryl panted, out of breath. ‘Ron told me what you said. Wedding … wasn’t that …’ She flapped her hands ineffectually as though to cool herself.
‘Sit down and catch your breath.’
‘No, I have to tell you. Ron will guess where I’ve gone. Can we go in there?’ She indicated the back office where they’d first met, and shot a wary glance at Pat.
‘Pat’s the boss. You can talk in front of her.’
Pat looked across from where she was packing her bag preparatory to leaving, and jerked her thumb towards the door. ‘Go in there if you want, but Annie can only give you a minute.’
Annie saw that the same thought was in both their minds. Sheryl would tell them to take the case back, but Ron held the purse strings, and there was nowhere for the case to go. Pat had no inclination to pander to someone who was not a paying client and only temporarily in the neighbourhood. Annie assumed Sheryl was about to come clean about her real reasons for not wanting to come to the area. Hence the urgency for her to get it out before Ron caught up with her.
Sheryl remained in the chair she had slumped into and looked from one to the other of them. Now she had permission to use the back office, she seemed to have lost the en
ergy to get up.
‘You have to do more,’ she said. ‘They’re up to no good. I know they are.’
‘Is there something you haven’t told me? I’ve found ample reason for the woman you saw to have been looking stressed.’
‘Yes, there is, I–’
A clatter of footsteps up the stairs cut the words off. The door burst open and Ron Long threw himself inside. Annie watched him flounder to get words out. He looked with wild eyes from her to Pat to Sheryl, but could only pull in his breath in desperate gasps.
Annie exchanged a raised-eyebrows glance with Pat and pushed a chair towards the man she hoped was not about to have a heart attack in their office.
‘Sit down. Catch your breath. I’ll get you a drink.’
Sheryl watched her husband sip water as the rise and fall of his chest eased. ‘Ron, you’ve got to let them carry on investigating. You won’t want to stay anywhere near those people once you know what they’re up to.’
‘Now, Sheryl, they’re up to nothing. You’ve got to stop this.’
‘There’s no point in an investigation into nothing,’ Annie pointed out.
Sheryl turned to her. ‘I wanted you to find out without me having to say anything, but if you need a reason, I’ll give you a reason.’
‘Sheryl!’ A clear warning accompanied the look of alarm Ron Long shot at his wife.
‘It’s nothing to do with that, Ron’ she hissed back, as though lowering her voice might allow the words to reach her husband’s ears whilst bypassing Annie and Pat.
She turned to Annie, who felt she could read the swift calculations behind Sheryl Long’s eyes. What story would Sheryl come out with?
‘They’re murderers,’ Sheryl burst out, her gaze bouncing from Pat to Annie to Ron as though to gauge their reactions, to see if she’d done enough. Annie felt only curiosity to see how on earth Sheryl would back this up.
‘They’re both in on it,’ Sheryl went on earnestly, when no one else spoke. ‘I don’t know which of them does the killing. They bludgeon them to death, hit them over the head. I didn’t want to have to say that. I warn you, I won’t be a witness in any trial. I’ll deny it. I wanted you to find it out for yourself. I’m not staying anywhere near them. You didn’t see that look she gave me. She wasn’t worried about any wedding: she was worried that we’d find the bodies.’
Annie glanced sideways at Ron, who was staring at his wife, open-mouthed. She lifted her gaze to meet Pat’s and they exchanged the ghost of a sceptical look. Ron gaped as though fearful his wife had flipped over some mental edge.
‘But, Sheryl, what can you mean? Murderers? They’re just an ordinary couple.’
‘You read about it all the time in the papers.’ She appealed to Pat. ‘Some ordinary person keeping body parts in their fridge, killing all the neighbours, don’t you?’
Pat zipped her bag with an air of finality. ‘Not in the papers I read. Don’t keep Annie too long or we’ll have to charge you for another hour. See you on Monday.’ With that, she went out leaving the three of them to listen to the grunts that always accompanied her lumbering descent. The outer door slammed.
Annie pulled a third chair forward and sat down. She was curious to see how Sheryl would work her way out of the tale she had begun. The Morgans, she knew, were incidental. Sheryl had fastened on them as a reason not to stay because something in the hidden agenda scared her half to death. Maybe she aimed to spin a story Ron couldn’t dismiss and Annie wouldn’t be able to prove. If so, she should have gone for something more subtle.
‘OK,’ said Annie. ‘Tell me everything.’
‘We went to watch them one night, didn’t we, Ron?’
Ron looked shamefaced and nodded. ‘I wanted to still Sheryl’s fears. She said this woman had given her a look.’
‘If you’d seen it, Ron, you wouldn’t doubt me.’
‘I thought if we go out there at night, it’ll be obvious nothing’s going on. See, it’s night that worries her. I’ll have to be away sometimes while we’re down here. But we didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.’
‘How can you say that? We saw them both with a wheelbarrow in the small hours. Is that what you call normal behaviour?’
‘I’d dozed off, Sheryl. I didn’t actually see–’
‘The wedding would only have been days away,’ Annie pointed out. ‘They must have had a lot on their mind.’
‘Wedding nothing! There’s something I haven’t told you … either of you. I went into the yard, Ron. The next morning when you were still asleep.’
Annie read the disbelief on Ron Long’s face, hastily smothered into a look of concern.
‘I went into that shed we saw them go in,’ Sheryl went on. ‘I found the wheelbarrow. It was under a big heavy sheet. I saw what was in it.’
Annie watched the byplay between them: Ron, desperate not to upset his wife and tip her into any indiscretions; Sheryl, desperate to find a way to make him change his mind about this trip. Sheryl’s gaze swung briefly to meet Annie’s then returned to rest on her husband’s face.
‘What was in it?’ he asked.
‘A body, Ron. We saw them wheel a body across that yard.’
Ron Long’s eyes briefly met Annie’s. Sheryl looked with growing desperation from one to the other of them, then burst into theatrical tears and put her face in her hands, the intricately patterned purple of her nails making her fingers a flower closing around her head.
Chapter 5
Annie saw no point in contacting Pat over the weekend to tell her she’d reopened the Longs’ file. Pat would be fine with it, because they were paying clients again. Sheryl had accused the Longs of murder. On paper that made it a police matter, and Annie had considered telling them she would have to treat it that way, but Sheryl’s tale was too thin, too clearly fabricated. And she would receive no thanks for kick-starting the paraphernalia of a murder enquiry when she knew the evidence didn’t stack up. Instead, she would complete the job they wanted her to do. It would mean a trip out into the wilds of rural South Holderness to see the place the Longs planned to spend their few weeks in the area; their allegedly casual break for which they’d come all this way to case out the holiday home. Even Ron Long had looked uncomfortable spinning that line. No, the truth of it was that Ron wanted them both to drop out of sight for a while, and Sheryl didn’t.
But the Longs could wait. She’d said she could do nothing for a few days and they’d accepted that. Annie thought that anyone who had really seen a body might protest that it could be moved and hidden in that time, but Sheryl hadn’t said a word. Maybe she realized that a disappearance could be quite convenient. If she held to the fiction she’d seen it in the first place, Annie would be left to prove another negative.
She shrugged the Longs out of her mind, not ready to let them cut into what was left of her weekend.
Saturday afternoon found her slouching round the supermarket in the St Stephen’s mall annoyed at herself for shopping in amongst the crowds again. She’d left a message on Jennifer’s phone, inviting her round for a meal on Sunday so had to have some food in. She wanted Jen on her own so they could chat privately about Michael Walker; whether he had really been reported to the police six years ago and if so, what sort of enquiries had been made.
She paused in the fresh veg section. The aubergines had beautifully smooth dark skins, their colour reminiscent of the deep intensity of Brittany Booth’s hair. Annie had had flatmates in the past who did wonders with this sort of stuff; Jen herself could knock up an impressive meal from real ingredients, but it required such an array of specialist equipment, knives and chopping boards and so on, that Annie always did what she did now – ran out of motivation before her thoughts were beyond an embryo idea and left the fresh veg section empty-handed.
Automatically, she dropped tins into her basket, tuna, sardines, baked beans; things that could be tipped in a bowl and microwaved, or eaten straight from the tin. Jen had developed a liking for pink wine which Annie found s
ickly, but she grabbed a bottle along with a few cans of beer.
The weight of the basket cut uncomfortably into her arm, so she balanced it along the edge of the freezer cabinet as she peered in, reading the labels on the boxes.
A frozen honey mustard chicken dish caught her eye and she scanned the directions. The picture on the box looked succulent and tempting and it could be microwaved without the bother of thawing. She played with a mental image of sitting Jen down with her pink wine and bringing the honey mustard chicken out of the kitchen in a fancy dish as though she’d cooked it herself. It was almost worth a detour back to the kitchen aisle to buy a serving dish, but she’d had enough of the crush of the big shop with its regimented aisles decked out to tempt shoppers as though they worked on nothing but an instinctive, magnetic draw to the bright colours.
As she waited in the baskets-only queue, the things Annie had read about the murderer, Joshua Yates, and the way Brittany Booth had repeated them played in her mind. It wasn’t just the potency of the belief she saw in Brittany, nor the detail of Yates’s allegations, nor even the confidence with which they both claimed the existence of a witness, but some combination of all these things added to an anonymous note that might or might not be for real. Something inside Annie made it impossible to reject Yates out of hand. The story held together in a weird way she couldn’t dismiss.
She would very much like to meet Joshua Yates to assess him face to face, eye to eye. She had floated the idea with Brittany who said she would arrange it.
The queue shuffled forward and Annie could at last put her shopping down. She rubbed at the red lines across her forearm where the handles of the basket had bitten and wondered where all this left Nicole. She and Charlotte were equally convincing in their confidence of their guy’s innocence and the law was behind them. How much behind them? Annie hoped to find out tomorrow from Jen.