by Penny Grubb
‘I don’t know. I can’t remember. I heard what was in them. That’s all I could think about at the time. I wanted to go and snatch those papers out of her hand, believe me. But they’d have just made a fuss. I held back. See, I knew where she kept them and I was going to get them out later and have a proper look for myself.’
‘So when did this happen? When did you find out about them?’
With Donna half defensive, half upset, it was a while before Annie had the timeline clear. Six years ago, Donna claimed to have seen evidence of Michael Walker’s guilt. She’d taken her suspicions to the police. They’d looked into it and found nothing. Then some eighteen months ago, she had met and confided in Joshua Yates who had set his pseudo-religious zeal on to getting justice for the supposed crime. Soon after May Gow’s death, he had stabbed Michael Walker.
‘Why didn’t you tell the police about the evidence in the box six years ago? They could have found it if it was there to find.’
‘Oh yeah, and how long would I have kept my job if I’d done something like that? I nearly lost it through that cow as it is.’
‘You never liked Michael Walker, did you?’
‘No, I didn’t. And I was proved right.’
‘What you learnt from May Gow’s papers, was it new or did it confirm what you already suspected?’
‘I hadn’t a clue what he’d done … what he was. If I had, do you think I’d have let Charlotte go off with him? I knew I didn’t like him. I told Charlotte time and again not to trust him, but she wouldn’t listen.’
‘How soon did you get the box after May Gow died?’
‘I didn’t think I’d ever see it again, frankly. I contacted her daughter, but she was very stand-offish. Then out of the blue I had this call and she turned up with it.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Nothing much. Snooty cow. Just that it had been found. She wanted to honour her mother’s wishes and she handed it over.’
‘How did May Gow know Michael Walker?’
Donna shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Why didn’t she go to the authorities herself?’
‘It’s that old-fashioned thing, letting sleeping dogs lie. Only Michael Walker wasn’t a sleeping dog. He was wide awake and my daughter was in danger.’
‘So you thought you had the evidence when Susan handed over the box.’
Donna, who had become quite animated, now dropped her head as she spoke. ‘Yes.’ Her voice was almost too low to be heard.
Annie thought back to Susan Gow telling her about the hasp being rusted shut; how she’d forced it open with a screwdriver. She looked at the box in her lap, flipped the old hasp back and forth. It was a tight fit, even now. Suppose Susan Gow had pushed it closed again and it had stuck. Annie lifted the box, weighing it in her hand. Could she tell, simply from the feel, whether there was anything inside? The wood made it heavy.
‘You didn’t know it was empty, did you?’
Donna leant further forward, her hair falling to obscure her face as she shook her head.
‘What happened? Did you tell Yates you had the proof before you’d managed to open it? What did you do when you found it was empty? Did you try to tell him?’
‘He’s a madman.’ Donna’s voice thickened and Annie saw a tear splash down on to her hand. ‘Susan Gow must have burnt the papers. I tried to get back on to her to find out. See, she stayed in May’s house while she was seeing to everything, but she’d left. I took copies of May’s records from the agency so I could get back in touch, but she wouldn’t speak to me. And then the next I know …’ She stopped on a sob and gulped in a breath. ‘Then my daughter went home and found Michael’s body. Can you imagine what it did to her, finding someone like that? And then Joshua’s calling for me to come forward with proof and I have none.’
Annie sat in silence for a minute, giving Donna space to compose herself. Then she said, ‘Tell me about the time you saw this proof?’
‘I was there when May got it out to show to a friend. It was a few days after her eightieth birthday. If I’d just known. I’d shifted that box I don’t know how many times, going in the cupboard for her medicines, but after that, when I looked for it, it was gone.’
‘Who was it she showed it to?’
Donna shook her head. ‘Some old cow. I don’t know. I wasn’t her regular carer. I didn’t know her friends. I tell you when I got that call, when she told me she’d found May’s box and she was bringing it, I thought, that’s it. I’ve got him now. I’ll have my Charlotte back off him.’
Annie heard grim satisfaction as the woman in front of her talked of the events that had led to a brutal murder, and thought that in her own way, Donna was as guilty as Yates.
Chapter 17
Early evening found Annie back in the upstairs office, the box on the desk in front of her. There was a forlorn quality to it. It had been hugely important to an old woman who had kept it all her life. Mother’s locked box. What had been in it? Why on earth would she leave it to Charlotte, a woman she’d never met? If she’d wanted someone to act on the evidence held there, why not her own daughter? Susan Gow struck her as the sort not to quail if action were needed.
The wood was thick with grime, the hasp covered in rust. When she pushed it home, it jammed shut and was hard to wrench open. Annie’s hands were grey and sticky from handling it. Again, she ran her fingers over the surface and felt the years of effort smoothing such rough-hewn timber; hours of polishing, inside and out. It could only have been May Gow.
On impulse, she went to the tiny kitchen they shared with the downstairs office and raked through the cupboards, returning with a bowl of steaming hot water, a cloth and scourer and a bottle of abrasive floor cleaner. She laid them out on the desk and set to work. The cream cleaner took the grime from the wood in a gloopy grey mass that turned the water black. She worked carefully, not quite sure why she was doing it. It seemed an inappropriate tribute to the late May Gow, an atheist whose motto was to spend what you have while you’re here.
She held out no hope of finding the hidden compartments Donna had searched for, indeed she began to nurse a worry that her cleaning efforts would dissolve the timber, and she rubbed the surfaces more gently.
Rubbing at the wood with the damp cloth infused with white paste was soothing work. Annie relaxed into a rhythm and allowed her thoughts to roam over the case. Joshua Yates … Donna Lambit … the bloody murder of Michael Walker. Charlotte with her air of calm despite her being the one who had walked in to find her lover’s body after Yates’s frenzied attack. Nicole Perks, Jennifer’s friend, more edgy than Charlotte, more openly driven to lift the slur from Michael.
The lid was done. Annie looked at the portion of the hasp she had cleaned. It shone out, a triumphant vindication of her efforts, and a sign the floor cleaner she’d used was a good metal polish. It struck her then that metal polish might not be ideal for cleaning old timber, but May Gow had laboured over this box for decades, and Annie felt obliged to finish the job she’d started.
The phone rang. She glanced at the time, saw she could legitimately claim to be gone, and let it ring through to voicemail. After a minute, the beep-beep of a new message began to sound. Annie reached across, set it to speaker-phone and pressed the button to retrieve the messages.
As she heard Charlotte’s voice, she paused.
‘Charlotte Liversedge here. Nicole’s gone out to the Nag’s Head. I said I might go too, but it’s a trek and I probably won’t. She’s still pissed off with you but she’s ready to listen if you want to go and find her.’
Annie’s cloth resumed its movement, rubbing back and forth across the surface of the wood as she digested this. The Nag’s Head? A trek for Charlotte? She must mean the pub out in Preston village. Nothing to lose by giving it a go. Yes, she might head out there.
She looked down at the box, knowing now she wasn’t going to clean it all, it would take too long, and thinking that if the wood could express an opinion, it would
probably be relieved. But for the moment, she continued with her polishing, concentrating on an awkward area inside the box, below the hinge. As she worked, she saw her efforts uncover a tiny circle carved into the wood.
Lethargy gone, Annie pulled the desk lamp across and looked closely. The real value of this box, the reason it had been treasured for decades, had been known only to May Gow, and she was gone forever. Yet maybe the box had held on to a tiny secret of its own, something to reveal from across the decades.
She worked gently on the wood. The mark that looked at first like a tiny circle, became a letter e. Now she was looking for it, she could see an indistinct inscription across the inner surface close to the hinge. Next to the e, she uncovered an h, then a t. She had pulled the word backwards from years of grime. T-h-e. She looked at the neat, childish shapes of the letters and then set to work on the rest of it.
Someone, a long time ago, had etched something into the surface of the wood. Slowly she uncovered it until the inscription was clear. It was written in the neat, round hand of a child. It meant nothing to her. It probably meant nothing to anyone still living.
She reached out with her finger and traced along the words.
The Jawbone Gang.
Chapter 18
Annie climbed the stairs to her flat, the box in her arms. Two of her neighbours came down as she went up. They exchanged hellos and glanced at what she was carrying, probably wondering what on earth she had in the battered wooden box.
Once inside, she stood it on the table, its lid propped open so she could see the words carved into its inner surface, then she pulled a chair in front of it and sat down.
‘Who wrote that?’ She felt foolish speaking the words aloud, but she wanted all the information this box had to give, and could think of no better way than to interrogate it. And at least there was no one to hear.
The answer to her question, she had to assume, was May Gow.
‘When did she do it?’
The letters were neat but childish in form. How old would May have been? Weren’t children taught to write in a neat uniform script when May was at school? Somewhere between eight and twelve, Annie guessed. That would mean it had been written between 1927 and 1931.
‘Why did she write it?’
There was no way to help the box with an answer to that one.
‘Does it have any bearing on what she kept in there as an adult?’
Almost certainly not, Annie decided. The box had been a treasured possession from childhood. Once she’d grown up, it would be natural for May to put it to use to keep confidential papers safe.
The question she had to answer remained the same as when she’d talked to Donna. What had May kept in there?
She walked through to the shower room, pulling off her top and scrunching it into a ball to lob across towards the heap of clothes waiting for the launderette.
Who had the answer? May, Donna and who else? Maybe Susan, maybe not.
As she washed and changed, she reran the story Donna had given her. Six years ago, so she claimed, she’d seen the contents of the box, but had taken no note of what sort of papers they were. Was that credible? Had she been so shocked at what they revealed about Michael Walker that she hadn’t taken anything else in? Of course, she said she’d planned to look later, to check it out at her leisure, but the box had vanished.
As Annie set off in her car to look for Nicole, she imagined Donna in May’s house and reran the words Donna had told her.
May wouldn’t say where it was. She might not have known. She was a bit senile by then.
The words, and the tone in which Donna said them, painted a disturbing picture. Donna alone in the house with May. Donna with the power in the relationship. Maybe May’s encroaching senility was the only weapon she had against her carer.
Could she trust Donna’s account? The story of the locked box was a bizarre one to have made up.
Annie headed east along Holderness Road, its bumpy surface a legacy of the floods that had devastated the city in 2007, and a reminder of cases that had bubbled up out of the foul water as it receded back to the drains and sewers. She turned off at the village of Bilton and drove past the out-of-town supermarket, still busy with shoppers. Bilton merged into Wyton, the route carrying her beyond the streetlights and on to the dark country road. The last vestiges of daylight leached away into the landscape, an overcast sky obscured the moon, even the glow from the Saltend chemical works, usually a sparkly landmark from across the fields, was dimmed.
She slowed as the lights marking the outskirts of Preston village appeared, and drove towards the Nag’s Head pub, where it sat at the junction of two roads. She drove slowly past. It was a chilly night and most people were inside, but half-a-dozen or so sat round the tables outside, smoke from their cigarettes curling up into the night.
Sitting alone, well-wrapped in a thick coat, was Nicole, staring into the middle distance as she raised her hand to her mouth to draw on her cigarette, making the end glow red.
Annie drove to the back entrance where Nicole would not see her arrive and made her way through the pub where she picked up a glass of lemonade and ran her eye down the bar snacks menu before going outside.
Nicole jumped when Annie walked up and sat down at her table. Then her face hardened.
‘What do you want?’
‘To talk. To reassure you we’re not working for the other side against you. To find a way forward.’
‘Huh.’ Nicole spat out the syllable and stared stonily into the distance.
‘I’ve spoken to Charlotte. She understands that–’
‘Yes,’ Nicole snapped, speaking over her. ‘Obviously you’ve spoken to Charlotte. How long did it take you to badger her into telling you where I’d be?’
‘I didn’t mean that. She left me a message telling me where you’d be. She wants us back working together.’
Nicole tossed her head as though irritated. ‘What have you told the Booth woman about us? I suppose you’ve had a good laugh with her.’
‘Of course not. I haven’t spoken to her about you. The same as I didn’t talk to you about her. I’m not allowed to. Our clients are entitled to confidentiality. We have a code.’
‘Yeah, and this code lets you work for both sides, I suppose.’
‘It’s unusual certainly, but there’s nothing says we can’t.’
‘PC Ronsen said you could lose your licence.’
‘She’s wrong, of course,’ Annie said, wishing she had as much confidence as her words implied. ‘And it’s DC. She’s precious about that.’
Nicole sniffed. ‘Not that I care. All I wanted was a good job doing.’
‘And that’s what you’ll get if you let me do it. You’ll get nothing from the police, you know that. It isn’t something they’d touch. You trust Jennifer, don’t you? She wouldn’t have recommended me if she didn’t have confidence.’
‘I bet she didn’t know you were working for that cow.’
‘We weren’t when we took your case on.’ Annie wasn’t sure that was strictly true, but certainly she hadn’t known about it when she’d first met Nicole.
‘Weren’t you? PC Ronsen said…’ Doubt clouded Nicole’s face. ‘Well then, shouldn’t you have turned Brittany Booth down when she asked you?’
‘The thing is, she didn’t ask me. She approached another side of the firm and they took her on.’
‘What do you mean, another side of the firm? There’s only two of you.’
‘Three,’ Annie corrected, though noting silently they would be all the better for just being two. ‘Both contracts were signed before any of us realized. And after all, it works in your favour. You’re the ones short of money. We’re not going to duplicate work. Anything we find out for her is a result for you.’
‘That’s what you meant when you said that doors would close once that murdering git’s sentenced. She’ll stop paying you.’
Annie opened her hands in a gesture of admission.
‘Bu
t when you find the proof that Michael’s innocent, she won’t want to pay you, anyway.’
‘There are lots of things I don’t want to pay for. It doesn’t mean I don’t have to. And anyway …’ Annie thought back to the fracas in the office. She didn’t remember any talk about licences. ‘When did Kate Ronsen say all that about licences and when we took the cases on?’
‘I bumped into her that evening.’
‘Oh, right.’ Annie kept her voice even. So Kate had engineered a second meeting to twist the knife she’d planted in Annie’s back. Just how obsessed was this woman? Stumbling into bad relations with the local police was one of the worst things she could do, and Scott would have to take Kate’s side if he really wanted to marry the woman. The reasons kept stacking up to cut her ties and go, but she would leave the area with her integrity intact. Kate wouldn’t rob her of that.
‘Did you ask Jennifer to recommend a PI?’
Nicole shook her head. ‘I wanted her to get something official done about Brittany Booth. I didn’t know there’d really been a complaint. But Jennifer said she couldn’t do anything. The cow hadn’t broken any law. In the end she told me it would have to be a private investigator or nothing.’
‘Have you known her long?’
‘Yeah, Jennifer and I go way back.’
Annie suspected that Jennifer’s recommendation had come when her own discreet enquiries had uncovered Donna’s role. There was a streak of garrulousness in Nicole that spelt danger in the wrong hands. Jennifer would have foreseen Nicole’s loose tongue betraying her own unauthorized digging. Far better to let Annie do the deed.
‘I could easily persuade Charlotte we should go elsewhere. You’re not the only firm in the area, you know.’
Annie nodded her acknowledgement, but wondered if anyone else would take Nicole on.
‘PC Ronsen recommended someone.’
‘Yeah? Who’s that?’
‘A guy called Vincent Sleeman.’
Annie struggled to feign indifference as she felt a flush of anger creep up her neck. In the half light of evening, she could only hope Nicole wouldn’t notice. Vince Sleeman had enough of a hold over the firm already, without handing him Nicole who would go to him with a burning sense of injustice and a tale of unethical behaviour. And it would be the worse for Nicole if Vince agreed to take her on. He wouldn’t get out of bed for the sort of money she and Charlotte had to offer. He would clean them out of every cent they’d earmarked for their business and probably a bit more besides. But there was no way to warn Nicole that wouldn’t sound like sour grapes.