Jonathan appeared to be one of the younger members of the company and had a personal profile page that was more extensive than most others. He was the head of the liquidation department and had accepted the position five years ago, bounced up from a more minor position in the department.
Opening a second browser window, Diane ran a search on the duties and requirements of a liquidator. After several false starts with well-disguised advertisement pages, she came across an encyclopaedia-type page that very quickly became extremely technical. However, the first paragraph was clear enough for her to realize that a liquidator was involved in the aftermath of a failing company. Their task was to take control of the company and steer it along one of several paths, though usually either back to profitability or selling the company on. This immediately piqued Diane’s interest, as she knew from her own past leadership roles that stepping into someone else’s shoes who may have been forcibly removed from a position could lead to some heated emotions. While death threats had never come her way, there had been unsavoury language and malicious rumours spread about her several times.
Jonathan had been in charge of the liquidation of quite a few smaller local businesses, nothing national or international. In the last year, he had overseen the restructuring of a textile firm who were back in profitability for the first time in several years due to his intervention. The company had been sold to an Indian conglomerate; Jonathan’s intervention had saved jobs in Birmingham, though top management had been replaced quite aggressively. Before that, a small auto manufacturer had passed into Jonathan’s hands and seemed to have disappeared after a sale to an investment group. Some comments on the message boards suggested that a severe dismantling had taken place very quickly with assets sold off within a year of purchase.
Diane did not see any particular pattern in his activities that showed he was malicious in his work. However, she realized that even in his apparent successes, Jonathan would have made enemies, people that had not prospered under his guardianship. If something had happened to him, the list of potential suspects would be more than one woman, energetic as she was, could possibly scour through. Only Inspector Crothers and his Shrewsbury and West Midlands counterparts would have the resources to touch on every lead. Diane would be a distant partner in such a group if they even allowed her any information.
Her pencil hand began to ache as she scribbled company and upper management names on her small notepad. A stack of identical notebooks lined a squat bookcase on her right with handwritten titles along the spine, such as ‘Poison List’ and ‘Exotic Rituals.' While competent in using a computer, Diane still preferred to write her research notes on paper. The tactile sensation reinforced the information in her mind, and she could easily recall when and where she had added a titbit of knowledge to the collection.
Within the bookcase was a grouping of seven notebooks placed separately from the rest. These had dates along the spine and were Diane’s notes on actual cases that she had been involved in, dating back to the death of her husband and her involvement in apprehending his killers.
Diane finished her search on Jonathan Carstairs as Albert scuffled back into the room and flopped himself into an armchair. He shook open the magazine that had come with the Sunday paper and noisily browsed through descriptions of seasonal fashion and travel hotspots. He stared at a photograph of a range of mountains that reflected in lake waters with a clean blue sky above. As Diane flipped the notebook and inscribed the date in bold numbers, Albert waved the picture in her direction.
“What do you think?”
Diane glanced up briefly before returning to her writing.
“About?”
“A holiday. To this place.” He pulled the paper back and moved it around in front of his face, squinting increasingly harder as he looked at a caption in a small font. “Austria.” There was a small note of triumph in his voice at being able to read the location.
“Austria?” said Diane, looking up from her work again. “What’s brought this on? The closest you’ve ever gotten to the continent is Dover.”
“I’ve eaten French bread,” replied Albert, his face showing mock insult. “I just feel like we need some adventure, explore the world.”
“Adventure? Explore the world? Who are you and what have you done with Albert?” Diane stood up from her chair and brandished the pen in a threatening manner. “I’ll have no pod people in my house.”
“I may have opposed foreign holidays in the past,” admitted Albert, his hands raised in a defensive gesture. “I admit it. But, and maybe it’s the dampness from my slippers, I think my feet are getting an itch.”
“You can get a powder for that from the pharmacist.”
“Wanderlust!” exclaimed Albert. “You see, fluent in German already. It’s a sign!”
Diane shook her head, a feigned show of despair for her poor Albert.
“Pod person!” retorted Diane. “Out with you!” She menacingly jabbed the pen in Albert’s direction.
“Come… join us, human. I mean Diane.” Albert had opened his arms in a Frankenstein-ian embrace. “Come, Earthling… err Diane.”
“Back to your veggie patch,” said Diane while advancing with fencing thrusts of the pen.
Albert reached for Diane who deteriorated into laughter and dropped the pen on the carpet.
“I am lost,” she chuckled as Albert embraced her, making biting noises towards her neck.
Diane’s phone pierced the frivolity like a pin into a balloon, its ring sounding overly loud, rattling teeth and nerves with its insistence. Albert froze while Diane’s laughter stopped in her throat. A second call on a Sunday morning was unheard of. There was an unspoken rule that said no calls should be made before noon on a Sunday out of respect for peace and sanity. That this was the second call immediately gave the sensation of alarm, cracking the serenity of the Apple Mews phone prohibition.
Extracting herself from a deflated Albert, his arms hanging limply across her shoulders, Diane stepped up to the computer table and answered the phone, restoring a modicum of peace to the air.
“Hello?” Diane had not recognized the number.
“Miss Dimbleby, oh my god, what do I do?” The voice was shrill and edged with panic. “What do I do?”
“Monique?” said Diane. “What is it, what has happened?”
The breathing on the other end of the line was rapid, too quick for words to form between breaths. Diane paused, giving Monique a little time to get herself under control.
“Are you alright? Is it Jonathan?” Diane’s questions were short and sharp, Monique’s agitation transferring to Diane.
“Someone - someone broke into my house.” Monique did not so much say the word ‘house’ as wail it into the phone.
“Who did?” asked Diane. “Are you safe?”
“I don’t know, but there’s no-one here now.” Slowly Monique was gathering her senses again, though Diane could still hear the closeness of hysteria in her responses.
“Go to a neighbour,” advised Diane, “Call the police.”
“I… I…“
“Go to your neighbours,” insisted Diane.
“I can’t,” blurted Monique. “I… I think it might have been one of them.”
“What? Why?”
“I thought they liked me,” continued Monique, bypassing Diane’s questions. “But now…” Her voice trailed off, leaving the sentence for Diane to hang on.
“Monique,” said Diane firmly, “you need to tell me what is going on. What makes you think your neighbours broke into your house?”
“I can’t explain it. It just… there’s…“
Monique went quiet as if thinking about how to describe what had happened to her home. Diane’s phone beeped a tune that told her a text message had arrived.
“See, I sent it to you,” said Monique. “Don’t you see.” Her voice was becoming strained again.
“Get in your car and drive to me,” said Diane. “We have to get you to safety if you
r neighbours are involved.”
“Yes. Yes. I’m on my way.”
As Monique hung up the phone, Diane heard a door slam and heels clicking rapidly.
Albert leaned over Diane’s shoulder and said:
“Is she okay?”
“I think there’s something very not okay going on and she’s gotten caught up in it. She’s on her way here. Would you go and check the spare bedroom? I have a feeling she will need a place to stay for a little while.”
“Of course,” said Albert as he turned to leave the room. Stopping, he added, “You’re going to help her, aren’t you?”
Albert did not expect a response as he continued out of the room. He was not even certain why he had asked the question, or even if it was a question and not a statement. This was what Diane did for anyone that needed her. His job now was to take care of everything else while Diane applied herself to the situation. This was what he did, and he enjoyed it.
Diane flicked her fingers over the phone screen, pulling up a message from Monique’s number. An image was attached, and Diane looked at a thumbnail while the image loaded. All she could make out was a living room that seemed to be badly arranged.
As her phone screen filled with the image, Diane gasped. Not only was the furniture out of place and upended, but it had also been slashed in multiple areas, the stuffing pulled out by the handful and scattered liberally around the room. Red paint streaks covered the sofa, the walls, and the windows. It looked as if a savage killing had taken place there but without the body. In the centre of the main window, in two-foot jagged letters, daubed in the same red paint, was the word, “TRAITOR!”
After some time of staring at the image, taking in the anger and passion that showed in it, Diane began expanding the picture on different areas and reached for her notebook again. There was no clear sign of the weapon or the paint can. Paintings knocked from the walls, stood propped against them beneath areas streaked with paint. A side table had been tipped over and a golden statue that was the base of a lamp lay on the floor beside it, the lampshade crushed by a stamping foot. Next to the shade was a wedding photograph with a web of cracks spreading out across the glass in the frame, another stamp that seemed very purposeful. Even the carpet had seen the lash of a brush and splashes went off in all directions.
Diane focused on the single word, as descriptive with its surroundings as a paragraph of text. There was hate here. Who was the traitor? Was it Monique? It seemed more likely to Diane that, following Jonathan’s disappearance, it pointed more clearly in his direction. Someone saw Jonathan as a traitor, but to what or who? There was an excess of possible work-related options, though breaking into the home seemed an odd choice, especially if they had been the reason for Jonathan’s vanishing act. She knew only Monique could shine a light on it and why this gave her the impression her neighbours were involved.
Hitting a menu, Diane forwarded the image to Inspector Crothers with a small note about who and what this image was associated with.
The response was nearly immediate as Diane’s phone began to ring with the Inspector’s number.
“What’s going on?” said the Inspector curtly.
“That’s a popular question today,” replied Diane. “I wish I had answers for you.”
“This picture is from Monique Carstairs?”
“Yes, she came to see me after you sent her here and I packed her off home to wait for her husband. That’s what she found when she arrived.”
“And her husband?”
“No word at all. But Monique seems to think that the person that did this to her house lives in the neighbourhood with them.”
The Inspector was silent, and Diane could almost picture the quizzical look on his face. He would be trying to puzzle through Monique’s assertion about the culprits.
“Where is she now?”
“I’ve told her to come to my house. I’ll let her stay here for a while if necessary.”
Crothers grunted his approval.
“Have you seen or heard of anything else like this recently, Inspector?”
“No, nothing like this. It seems very personal though, not someone that was just breaking in for the kicks.”
“Indeed it does, Inspector.”
Albert returned to the room and gave Diane a thumbs up. The bedroom was ready. Diane smiled in return, and Albert nodded before heading into the kitchen. Putting the kettle on, thought Diane. The cure for all ills: a cup of tea.
“Is there anything else I can do, Inspector?”
“I don’t think so. This just got serious very quickly. This bumps her missing husband up a whole lot on our radar. There're no coincidences in situations like this.”
“So true,” replied Diane. “Everything is evolving far too rapidly for my liking. We need to find Jonathan Carstairs.”
“Leave that to me,” said the Inspector. “You make Monique as comfortable as you can, settle her nerves. I’m going to head over to you as soon as possible. There are too many questions that need answers, and she is the only one that can come close to answering them.”
“Albert is already preparing the tea,” said Diane. “She should be here in about twenty minutes.”
“Tell her that I am contacting the Shrewsbury station and I’ll make it clear that we need a scene of crime team at the house ASAP. I have a couple of friends there that should be able to get things moving.”
“As you wish, Inspector. I will text you when she arrives.”
Diane picked up her notebook again and began making notations as her printer sprang into life to make a copy of the photograph from her phone. Her hand wrote quickly in the barely legible cursive of someone whose thoughts are coming too fast for their pen to keep up.
A series of boxes appeared on a page with text in them, arrows pointing back and forth between them. Angry employee? Traitor? Neighbour? Jonathan? Monique? More and more boxes appeared as Diane filled the page with suspicions and very little actual information. Her frown grew deeper as the depth of her ignorance became clearer and clearer.
“Going to be a busy few days, eh?” yelled Albert from the kitchen.
“Looks so,” replied Diane quietly, distractedly.
“You might need these,” said Albert as he stepped into the room.
Diane looked up, still frowning, and looked at Albert’s hands. In one, the ever-present soothing tea, and in the other were two of her tiny white blood pressure pills.
“To prepare you for battle,” said Albert with a soft smile. “Once more unto the breach.”
Chapter 3
The silence between the ticks of the clock stretched ever longer for Diane. She looked from her chair to the mantelpiece where an ornate golden clock sat shielded beneath a thin glass dome. Diane peered closely at the mechanism, concerned that there had been a malfunction and the almost imperceptible movement of the hands had ceased. Small balls rotated back and forth under the clock face, the light from the window flicking towards Diane as they marked the progress of time.
“Stop looking at the clock,” said Albert from his position by the window. His hand lifted the net curtain over the window, and the same front garden image appeared that he had seen every other time he had looked.
“She’s taking too long,” replied Diane as she balled a hand into a fist on her lap. “Much too long. Something may have happ…”
“Now don’t go thinking like that,” chided Albert. “You’ll get yourself all worked up for nothing.”
Diane looked at Albert as he leaned against the wall. His foot tapped rapidly, a clear sign of his own agitation. Inhaling deeply, Diane closed her eyes and with a conscious effort relaxed the muscles across her body, starting from her feet and legs and progressing upward, branching along her arms and up her neck. She exhaled the stress and immediately the clock resumed its usual rhythm, the ticks coming in a steady stream.
“I wonder what is keeping Monique?” Her tone was without the panic that had started to creep upon her unwittingly. “A
nd the Inspector is running late too.” She detected a note of impatience when mentioning the Inspector. He was the police; he should be the very essence of urgency in a crisis. Diane knew she was being hard upon him, yet the thought made her gently smile.
Albert pulled the curtain aside again, and only the shadows had moved with the progression of the autumn sun. He bit down on his molars and let the curtain drop back into place.
“Come and sit down,” said Diane. “You won’t make anything happen more quickly hovering there.”
Albert looked over at Diane and realized that he had become the tension in the room. He had never quite understood how she could change frames of mind so quickly. It was most definitely a skill he had not acquired through his proximity to her. If he stilled his tapping foot, his fingers would take up the beat. If he gained control over his fingers, his jaw would start working his teeth together. He could not remove the tension once it was in him; he just shifted it from one spot to another until the nervous energy dissipated through friction.
Rufus strolled casually into the room having decided that his people had been left to their own devices for too long that morning. The small dog sidled across the carpet, stopped alongside a sideboard and surveyed the room. The look was critical of the lack of response his arrival had garnered. He could tell something was amiss with his people and it displeased him, so much so that he decided to remove his presence from them to teach them a lesson. His claws clicked disapprovingly across the kitchen floor as he went to find a late breakfast.
Albert’s fingers drummed against his leg through the lining of his trouser pocket. Does it really take this long to get from Shrewsbury? He wondered if he should call the police to see if there had been an accident on the road somewhere. She’d said that she had been close to causing one when first coming to see Diane and she had to be as upset this time. His free hand reached for the curtain again, as much for something to do as to check the street. He barely lifted his eyes to the bright gap, expecting a repeat of the scene he had been looking at for the previous half hour.
The Diane Dimbleby Murder Collection Volume 2 Page 16