by Penny Grubb
‘Fair enough. So what do you want me to do?’
‘Leave it with me. I’ll get it ready then you can take it round one evening. That makes us look busier. Where are we now? Thursday. I’ll set up an appointment for next Tuesday. OK?’
They moved into the main office to hear a burst of laughter from the small annexe they used as overflow office, store and kitchen. Casey’s voice, kept low, floated out to them. ‘Time for a quick coffee? Mein Fuhrer’ll be closeted with Annie for hours yet.’
Annie tried not to smile as she met Pieternel’s eye, and Casey’s voice, this time in an unmistakable impersonation of Pieternel came to them again. ‘For fuck’s sake, Casey, use the damned spoon.’
Pieternel glanced at Annie with a look of distaste. ‘Come on, we’ll go across the road and get a proper coffee. There’s something I want to run past you.’
As soon as they were settled in the coffee shop, Pieternel turned to Annie and said, ‘You know what you were telling me about your aunt, this job she wants you to do. Tracking down a guest who did a moonlight. I think we should take it on.’
‘Pieternel, we’re talking about one week’s half board. The job’ll cost them more than that in travel expenses.’
‘You can warn your aunt in advance, can’t you? She’ll still want the woman tracking down.’
‘That’s not the point.’ Annie was annoyed because she knew Aunt Marian would be with Pieternel on this one. It’s the principle, dear, not the money.
‘I’m clutching at straws here, Annie. I can’t disguise that we’re a tiny outfit, but I can make out we punch way above our weight. I could make a job like that look really good. I know it’s not much on its own, but nothing’s much good on its own. I’m desperate to pull in everything we can possibly use. Your aunt’ll have to pay, of course, full whack plus expenses, unless you want to pay it yourself. We don’t have any slack.’
Politics was Pieternel’s side, fieldwork Annie’s. They didn’t interfere in each other’s spheres. When Annie said ‘It’s just a feeling,’ Pieternel supported her. Now she was asking Annie to trust her in return. She tried to get her head into the idea. The job itself was nothing. Tracking and search jobs had been her bread and butter at the PI agency
‘Are you sure it’s worth it, Pieternel? A bit of a fee and me tied up hundreds of miles away from the action.’
‘If you must know, I’ve given the impression we’re setting up new offices. So if they wanted to check up, I could send them to Scotland to see you.’
‘No you couldn’t. What do you want me to do, pretend we operate from my father’s? And you know I can’t do all that PR stuff talking to clients. It’s not what I’m good at.’
‘You underestimate yourself, Annie. Anyway, no one’s going to go all that way. Maybe a phone call. I just want you to be based in Scotland for a few days. Trust me on this one. Please.’
Annie shrugged.
‘I don’t need you to go straight away, but we mustn’t leave it too long and risk the woman turning up again. Stay and work with Dean for a couple of days so I can get Casey out of his hair. The last thing we need is him with his head all over the place again.’
That night Annie dreamt she had to carry cash from the supermarket to her car, but the cash was a viscous liquid and the trolley made of straw. Her hands struggled to weave the strands tighter. If the weave was thick enough and springy enough it would hold, and she would find her way out of the labyrinth. She felt the delicious squidge of fat, tightly bundled straw beneath her fingers, then the plumpness she’d created sagged again into empty dry strands.
It’s my doll! It’s mine. Mummy, it’s mine!
She spun in triumph. Her mother stood behind her. Mummy. A hand reached out. A might-be smiling face. Then a roar of anger. It’s my doll! The face changed just before it came into focus, a clawed hand ripped the doll from her arms. Alarms rang.
She found herself sitting up in bed, trying to interpret the sound. The phone. She fumbled for the handset, pulled it to her ear and mumbled, ‘Hello?’
‘Annie? It’s her. I’m sure of it. No one else knows.’ It was Aunt Marian’s voice, full of tension. But before Annie could speak, the phone went dead.
She sat up, breathed deeply and blinked the sleep out of her eyes. It wasn’t unusual for her aunt to ring with half a story and a promise to keep Annie up to date as events unfolded, though this one was more disconnected than most. Prior to ringing back to find out what it was about, she went through to the kitchen and flicked the switch on the kettle. If the day must start with an intense conversation with Aunt Marian, she would have coffee to sustain her.
‘Hi, Mrs Watson, It’s Annie. Can I speak to Aunt Marian?’
‘You’ve just missed her, Annie. She’s gone out.’
‘Oh … That’s OK, it wasn’t important. I’ll ring later.’
Annie spent the morning working with Dean. Casey’s name was never mentioned, but Annie didn’t have to ask if the relationship was on again. His usually dour countenance wore a smile; he initiated conversations that weren’t confined to the bits and bytes of the doctored system they unravelled. Pieternel was wrong. It would do no harm to anyone to have Dean happy, and if Casey could turn him round, then she was a better woman than either of them. Maybe Dean would repay the debt and help her to clean up her act.
In the afternoon she rang the guesthouse. The phone rang and rang and was eventually answered rather tentatively by one of the guests. No, he didn’t know where Mrs Watson was and sorry, he wasn’t sure he knew her Aunt Marian at all. Annie left a message for her aunt to ring back.
When she arrived home, she took in the flat’s chaos. Cups heaped in the sink, the work surface invisible beneath the remnants of curling-at-the-edges sandwiches and Mars bar wrappers stuffed at random between stacks of clean and dirty crockery. Something didn’t smell too fresh, maybe the battered carton of milk balancing on half a loaf of bread. She picked it up, wrinkling her nose at the clogged mess round the opening, and carried it to the bin where she tried to push it through the swing top. The bin was so full, the lid wasn’t secure and tipped off, leaving Annie to recoil at the stench that rose from the packed contents.
She toyed with the idea of ringing someone to suggest a night out. Maybe Mike, maybe not. It wasn’t wise, the way she’d come to rely on him. It would be great to have a wild night out with Casey, but she couldn’t risk the aftermath. She skipped mentally through the list of friends who might be up for an impromptu fling, before realizing it would take more money than she could justify spending, given she was about to charge her aunt for a job she should offer for free.
With a feeling of giving in, she phoned Mike and left a message on his voicemail telling him to come round if he wanted to.
She jammed the bin lid down, balanced the milk carton back on the bread and looked in the fridge. It didn’t smell too sweet either, but provided coffee. She’d need a good strong cup to face this lot, and wrestled the kettle into the gap between the tap and the stacked crockery, so she could fill it.
Invigorated by the thought of imminent caffeine, Annie hauled the rubbish down to the bins and started removing fur linings from inside the cups. When the phone rang just after nine, it reminded her that her aunt hadn’t rung back. She dried her hands and picked up the handset.
‘Annie?’ said her father’s voice.
Her father rang on Sunday mornings, and only then if he wasn’t on duty, so she knew it meant trouble before she heard more.
‘What is it, Dad? What’s wrong?’
A pause. ‘I’m sorry to call so late, Annie, but I’m a bit worried about your aunt. Has she been in touch?’
‘Well … yes, this morning. What’s happened? Is she all right?’
‘Yes, yes, she’s fine. Mrs Watson told me you’d rung. Apparently, there was a break-in at the guesthouse last night.’
‘Oh my God! She never mentioned it.’ Annie struggled to remember what her aunt had said. ‘She wasn’t hurt, wa
s she?’
‘No, no. Nothing like that. It was the girl who cleans who noticed someone had been through one of the bedrooms. No damage done that I know of. But Mrs Watson rang me when your aunt stayed out all day. She rang again now to say she’d just got back.’
‘Just now!’ Annie glanced at her watch. Her aunt had left just after she’d phoned in the morning. If she’d been out till now …?
‘And she wouldn’t say where she’d been, but Mrs Watson saw a ferry ticket.’
‘She’s been over to Tarbert?’ Even that short trip seemed impossibly adventurous for Aunt Marian these days, but if she was upset …
‘No, not Tarbert.’ Annie heard the echo of her own disbelief in her father’s tones. ‘She’s been all the way to Glasgow.’
Chapter 9
The next morning, Annie phoned the guesthouse as she and Mike zigzagged across each other’s paths getting dressed and making coffee. ‘Hi, Mrs Watson. Is Aunt Marian–?’
‘Och, she’s not up yet, Annie. She was exhausted after yesterday. I haven’t woken her.’
‘OK. Tell her I’m on my way. I’ll be with you before the end of the day.’
‘Will you want your usual room?’
Annie had no intention of doing another stint in Mrs Watson’s uncomfortable box room. ‘No, I’ll take Aunt Marian away for a few days. Up to my Dad’s.’ Fingers crossed that she could persuade her aunt and that her father wouldn’t go off pop about it.
As she replaced the handset, Mike said, ‘You don’t seem to have been home five minutes,’ and gave her a smile that said he didn’t want her to go.
Annie shrugged. ‘I told Pieternel I’d go.’
‘Does it make any sense, Annie? Travelling all the way from London for the sake of a week’s half board?’
‘Don’t forget the two packed lunches.’ She gave him a grin. ‘No, of course it doesn’t, but I’m glad of the excuse to go. Aunt Marian went across to Glasgow by herself. That’s a hell of a journey. She hasn’t done anything like that in years.’
‘I suppose at her age, a break-in’s quite an upset.’ Mike stood up and headed for the hallway. He returned and tossed a pile of post on the table. ‘I guess I should get going.’
Annie flicked through the letters. Bills, bills and more bills. None she could pay, and none she would open in front of Mike.
A fat brown paper package. Name and address handwritten. She froze for a moment as she took in the handwriting and then the Glasgow postmark. ‘What the hell …?’
She tore off the paper and ripped the flimsy cardboard box. ‘It’s from Aunt Marian. What on earth?’ She held up the straw doll for Mike to see.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s a doll. A post office doll.’ The box and wrapping, upended and thoroughly shaken out revealed no explanatory note.
Mike looked at her, a crease appearing between his eyebrows. ‘How worried are you, Annie, on a scale of one to ten?’
‘I can’t help thinking she might be getting to the stage where … uh … where she can’t manage on her own.’ She couldn’t bring herself to say words like senile and dementia. Too close to madness, too wrapped up in lost memories.
‘The break-in must really have upset her.’
She didn’t want to discuss this with Mike. It wasn’t his family, wasn’t his problem. She pointed to the Margot jacket slung over a chair. ‘Hang that back in the wardrobe for me, will you?’
She tried her father’s number before she set off, but he’d left for work so she told the answer-phone she was using Mrs Watson’s missing guest as an excuse for another visit. Her plan to bring her aunt to stay with him was news she would break face to face.
Annie arrived outside Mrs Watson’s late in the day, hot, tired and cross. She was here for her aunt, but knew she should be hundreds of miles away for just the same reason. If the business was to survive, it needed all experienced operatives on the front line fighting hard.
But Pieternel had been emphatic. Annie had rung again before she’d left. ‘I’ll get back as soon as I can, Pieternel.’
‘No, Annie. I told you. I need you based up there for a few days. Just make sure you’re back by Tuesday evening. OK?’
Mrs Watson’s conspiratorial welcome irritated Annie as it became clear she and Aunt Marian had been winding each other to white heat over the break-in.
‘We feel sure that Charlotte Grainger was a courier, Annie. She must have stashed drugs here and sneaked back for them. You’ll get to the bottom of it, won’t you? I don’t want the good name of the guesthouse dragged through the mud.’
Annie’s gritted teeth did service as a smile. She knew Mrs Watson would lose interest at once should anyone suggest that she foot the bill.
As soon as she was alone with her aunt, Annie pulled the doll from her pocket. ‘Why did you go all the way to Glasgow to post this?’
‘I’m sorry if I worried you, dear.’ Annie watched as her aunt turned towards the window. ‘It’s a lovely peaceful view, isn’t it? I’ve always liked it. But there was a killer down there just a couple of weeks ago. It’s funny to think of it; it makes it all look different.’ She let out a sigh, before turning back to Annie. ‘I don’t really know, dear. I was in a bit of a state about the break-in. I didn’t want to trust the local post.’
Annie looked at her aunt perplexed. These weren’t the actions of the sane, down-to-earth woman who’d brought her up. The age gap between her mother and aunt was almost twenty years, and her aunt was now an old woman, maybe one who could no longer manage even in the cosseted environment of Mrs Watson’s. ‘But why send it at all, Aunt Marian?’
‘With Charlotte and everything. Her being so secretive, and stealing those tapes. Someone might have been after me and I wanted you to have it.’
‘But why a doll?’
‘Not just any doll, dear: it’s your mother’s.’
‘My mother’s! But why …? Where did she get it? Who gave it to her?’
‘She came home with it, dear, just a few days before she was … just a few days before. I kept it afterwards. I always wondered. Your father didn’t think it was important, and I couldn’t press him on it, not with what had happened, but I’ve never forgotten.’
Annie looked at the doll in her hand. Its plump lopsided form was a parody of the dolls that stalked her dreams. ‘I never knew,’ she said. Not that she’d ever known anything. Her mother was a 2-D image from photographs she couldn’t remember, a face just out of sight in a dream. There was nothing left in her memory of the real person who must have been the centre of her world. ‘Did she have a lot of dolls?’
‘No, dear. Just that one. Why do you ask?’
‘Sometimes I dream about her, only it’s someone else when she turns round. And she has great armsful of dolls, but I’m not allowed to touch them.’ She stopped, as she heard her voice catch.
‘You wouldn’t remember, but your mother took quite an interest in the Doll Makers at one point. An unhealthy interest. It was the lad. He nearly led her astray. You’d have been about four and she’d had another miscarriage, so she wasn’t herself, but I had to have some quite sharp words.’
‘What lad?’
‘He’ll be a grown man now. I don’t think he’s there any more. I haven’t seen him in years. He was one of the ones they took into care.’
‘Not Mr Caine?’
‘No, no. Cain’s brother, Kovos.’
‘Kovos? What sort of name’s that?’
‘Biblical, dear. I forget which bit though. He was younger than your mother by five or six years.’
A cold blade of suspicion sliced through Annie. Had her mother had an affair with one of the Doll Makers? The thought of it left her numb, not knowing how to react. It fitted with the sorts of things Mrs Latimer used to throw at her in anger. She put the doll on the sideboard and pushed it away. Her aunt’s gaze tracked the doll’s movement across the polished surface.
‘I didn’t think of it before, but I’d like you to have the d
oll when I die. I never thought to put it in my will, and it’s something that would just get thrown away otherwise. But I’m glad you brought it back for me. I’d like to keep it for now, as a keepsake, but you be sure and have it when I go.’
Annie gave her aunt a smile to drive away these demons, and tried to turn the conversation. ‘There can’t be many people living up there now. You never see them these days.’
‘I was glad when they stopped pushing themselves on the community. It’s not a normal life they lead, however clever the old man was. But I’m sorry for young Beth. I do wish you’d have a word.’
‘I did. I spoke to her last time I was here.’
‘That’s good. How did she seem?’
‘Uh … fine. Aunt Marian, do you think you could get Mrs Watson to do some coffee? I could do with something to pick me up after that journey.’
‘Yes, of course, dear. I’ll nip down now.’
While her aunt was gone, Annie tried to call her father, but couldn’t get a signal so was forced down to Mrs Watson’s hallway and the house phone.
‘Dad? I’m with Aunt Marian.’
‘Will you be calling up here, Annie?’
‘That’s what I’m ringing about. Aunt Marian and Mrs Watson are spinning each other off planet with their spy theories. I need to get her out for a while. Can I … well, what I thought was that I could take her across to town for a wander round and a bite to eat, then can I bring her back to you for the night? She needs a break from the Watson woman.’
His pause was so brief, Annie wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t been listening for it.
‘Yes, of course. She’d better stay a couple of nights. I’ll get Mrs Latimer to make something nice for supper tomorrow night. I might challenge her at the backgammon board if I’m not called out. Then I can run her back the next day. It’s my day off.’
‘Oh no, it’s OK, Dad.’ He’d got the wrong end of the stick. ‘I’ll stay too. I won’t land her on you.’ Except I will if Pieternel can’t work her magic …