Too Close For Comfort

by Niamh O'Connor

  Liz leaned forward, as far away from those hands as she could. ‘Sorry, what did you say your name was?’ Her heart was still racing.

  He offered his hand between the seats. ‘George Byrne.’

  She’d sooner have run her hands over a snake, and she hated snakes. ‘What’s so important it couldn’t wait, George?’

  ‘I need to talk to Derek. Where is he?’

  ‘He’s at work, George.’

  George hesitated, like he had something on his mind. ‘He’s not answering his mobile.’

  ‘He’s working! He’s not supposed to. I have to turn mine off in work, too. What’s this about? Why did Derek give you his number, anyway?’

  ‘I want to take this car off your hands. I saw the “For Sale” sign on it. My girlfriend’s learning to drive, and I could do with an old banger.’

  Liz blinked. ‘And this was so urgent, you had to jump in my car and nearly give me a heart attack?’ George nodded, completely missing the irony. Liz sighed. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘I’ll pay you in cash now – five hundred euro. That’s good money at today’s prices.’

  Liz tucked her hair behind her ears. Her skin was crawling and her mouth was dry. But she wanted rid of this car even more badly than she wanted George out of it. ‘You’ve got a deal, George,’ she answered, ‘on one condition.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I want the change of ownership details backdated to last week.’

  George screwed up his face.

  ‘Derek’s got a supplier pursuing him for a job he can’t pay,’ Liz lied, babbling as she watched George’s eyes narrow. ‘This supplier has a court order entitling him to an evaluation of our assets … On paper the car is worth a lot more than even Derek wants, though you and I both know nobody’s buying anything for its true value these days.’ She forced a smile.

  ‘Deal,’ George said, looking pissed off. ‘I’ll drop around tonight for the keys.’

  10

  SEXTON SAT READING a newspaper on a fake-leather couch alongside a half-dead Swiss cheese plant in the reception of Mervyn’s Meats while Jo quarrelled with the receptionist.

  ‘Would Mervyn Van Dyke come to reception?’ the blonde with dark roots had just asked in a Dundalk accent. Her red lipstick, which matched her fingernails, smeared the wire mesh covering the microphone.

  Jo leaned over her counter. ‘I asked for Derek Carpenter. Is he here or not?’

  ‘I’m not at liberty to say. Mervyn’s the gaffer. He’ll be here any second.’

  Sexton transferred his feet to a pine-effect coffee table, crossing them at the ankles.

  ‘Either page Derek Carpenter immediately, or I’ll have you charged with obstructing a police inquiry,’ Jo warned.

  A set of swing doors to their right opened, followed by a waft of fried food. ‘You’re interrupting my lunch, Tiffany,’ a portly man in a butcher’s white overcoat and cap said.

  Jo held up her ID. He glanced at it, and then took a bite of the sausage sandwich in his hand, and spoke through a mouthful of food. ‘You can either join me, or wait ten minutes.’

  ‘We’re investigating a murder, Mr Van Dyke,’ Jo said, not hiding her annoyance.

  ‘This is about Derek and that girl murdered in the mountains, right? I’ve already had a call from your lot this morning …’

  Jo glanced at Sexton in surprise. He put the paper down, and stood up.

  ‘… and like I already said, he doesn’t work here any more,’ Mervyn continued. ‘He was sacked two weeks ago. If you want the details you’ll have to join me in the canteen.’

  He was gone again before Jo could argue.

  Jo shot Sexton a look as they headed past a pokey cabin on a scaffolding balcony that had a bird’s-eye view of the factory floor, where eviscerated halves of pig carcasses were being chopped into joints by men in white coats. Jo headed into a stainless-steel kitchen with red quarry tiles that Mervyn’s runners squeaked on. ‘I ran Carpenter’s social security number on the system before coming out,’ she told Sexton out of the side of her mouth. ‘He can’t be gone long, because he hasn’t claimed unemployment benefit yet.’

  Mervyn pulled out one of two free chairs at a long white Formica table, and sat down. The rest of the places were filled by male workers all dressed in the same white coats and caps. Jo sat in the last remaining chair, opposite him. Sexton dragged a chair over from a different table and straddled it.

  ‘This is Tom, our security man,’ Mervyn said, pointing to the man sitting beside Jo.

  A man in his seventies, with thinning hair, wearing a navy jumper and trousers, looked down quickly after a brief nod and then continued to slurp soup from a stainless-steel bowl. His spoon clinked every time it hit the metal.

  ‘We’re under pressure,’ Jo told Mervyn, glancing at her watch.

  He pulled one flap of bread off the half of his sandwich still on a plate, and squirted ketchup all over it before reaching for the brown sauce and doing the same.

  ‘Tell the chief superintendent here why we got rid of Derek, will you, Tom? I would, but as it is, I get sued if I don’t have the right number of toilets, if my fire plan isn’t satisfactory, or if I’m too touchy-feely with the female members of staff. The last thing I need is a cop accusing me of making inappropriate comments. You never know these days what a judge will decide is worth compo. I should never have given Derek the benefit of the doubt for bumping off all those missing women from years back. If he’s to blame for this one vanishing, for all I know her family could come after me.’

  Tom covered his mouth with a rolled fist as he began to cough. A flush spread up his neck.

  ‘I don’t know if Tom’s going to be able to rise to the occasion,’ Mervyn scoffed, laughing at his own private joke.

  Jo put an arm out to stop Sexton from standing up and grabbing him by the scruff of the neck. She leaned across the table on her elbows. ‘Get on with it, sunshine,’ she told Mervyn, nonplussed. ‘We don’t have all day.’

  A matronly waitress arrived with a tray and began to transfer some of the empty dishes on to it. ‘Derek was caught downloading dodgy stuff on the gaffer’s computer,’ she said in a tired voice.

  ‘Is that it?’ Jo turned to Mervyn for confirmation.

  He nodded, grinning and picking food from between his teeth.

  ‘You live a sheltered life if you think that’s going to shock me, sunshine. I thought from your name and accent you came from one of those liberal countries, like Holland.’

  Mervyn’s face became grave. ‘I’m from Copenhagen, actually. I grew up on a pig farm. I’m more Irish than the Irish themselves.’

  Jo eyeballed him. ‘What brought you here?’

  ‘The green pastures,’ he said, deadpan. ‘If you want to ask me any more questions, I want my solicitor with me.’

  ‘It’s Derek I need to know about,’ Jo said. ‘What exactly did he do here?’

  Mervyn sneered, and drew a finger across his throat. ‘He worked in the abbatoir.’

  ‘According to our records, Derek worked as a builder before he joined your firm,’ Jo said, unfazed. ‘So what I’m wondering is why you employed someone with no experience in the meat trade, who’d been in and out of the papers after his wife’s sister disappeared?’ She looked around the room, and let her gaze settle on a man opposite whose face had been tattooed to look like a skull. ‘He doesn’t look like he’s got an agricultural background, either. There’s a distinct lack of female staff on your factory floor, and, no offence to you, Tom, but you’re no Arnie Schwarzenegger, suggesting to me that you don’t have to worry about security at all, Mervyn. Why would that be?’

  Mervyn didn’t blink.

  Jo pulled out a pad and pen. ‘I want the name of your recruitment company.’

  Mervyn threw his half-eaten sandwich back on the plate. ‘I believe everyone’s got the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. We all make mistakes. As far as I’m concerned, when you do the time you’ve
paid your debt to society. So, yes, most of the people who work here have criminal records. I source them from PACE, you see, a halfway house that rehabilitates prisoners back into the community. Call me altruistic, I don’t mind. I like to do my bit. I’m like one of those secret millionaires on the telly, without the million.’

  Jo held his stare. ‘Like I said, it’s Derek I’m interested in. I want his mobile number, Mervyn. He’s not on a contract with any of the mobile-phone companies, I’ve already checked. That means it’s a pay-as-you-go number. You give me that and I’ll be on my way.’

  Mervyn reached into his pocket and started to scroll through his contacts.

  Jo made a note of it as he called it out. With a number, she could have Derek’s whereabouts pinged to within a few yards, triangulated between the nearest masts. Whatever dodgy operation Mervyn had on the go would have to wait until she’d found Derek. Jo was starting to come around to the possibility that Derek might be up to his neck in what had happened to Amanda.

  11

  ‘IS THIS THE only organic onion you have?’ the customer asked.

  Liz reached back for the vegetable she’d just swiped, switching hands to shrug her arms out of her coat. She’d just arrived in Supersavers, and hadn’t had a chance to catch a breath after taking a seat behind her till. She might as well have been a million miles elsewhere, though, with everything else going on in her head. Why had Amanda’s scarf been in her car? Had Derek really been working late last night? Why was the car so dirty? Why had he been so dead set on washing his clothes? Had George followed her to the garage?

  ‘She’s not paying a blind bit of notice,’ the woman told her son. Liz knew Nigel and Maud to see from Nuns Cross. Maud was in her sixties, with a severe bob and one of those big-headed, little-bodied dogs lodged under her arm. Nigel was late thirties, with sideburns, thinning hair, and a bright-yellow golf jumper knotted over his shoulders. They’d called to Liz’s door once, looking for a contribution to pooper-scooper bins for the estate. Liz had sent them packing. ‘The only thing that would be worse than stepping in dog poo would be having to pick it up and hermetically seal it,’ she’d told them.

  Lifting her foot off the pedal that operated the conveyor belt, she entered the numbers of the barcode on the label stuck to the onion to delete the purchase.

  ‘She didn’t say she didn’t want it,’ Nigel said.

  Behind them, Frieda, a banker’s wife who lived across the road from Liz, snorted and folded her arms impatiently. Liz glanced from her to Dolores, sitting at the till alongside, reading her horoscope in a magazine. She wished Dolores would get her finger out. She was in her late forties and permanently single, big into angels and country music. She came into work every day looking like Dolly Parton. Her hair had got even higher since a cringe-worthy audition on The X Factor, but in true Dolores style she’d taped photos to her till like a shrine to the highlight of her life.

  With a sigh, Liz beeped the onion through again.

  ‘Mum didn’t say she wanted it either,’ Nigel piped up. ‘She wants to know if you have any others we could change it for in the back.’ He was enunciating his words as if he was talking to a foreigner, or someone who worked a till because they didn’t have the brains to do anything more taxing.

  Liz bit her tongue because she needed the job. Everything in her life had changed since Derek’s business had gone bust. His building company had specialized in extensions and renovations at a time when the banks were writing to homeowners pleading with them to borrow money. Those years had enabled them to buy her dream house. He’d worried she’d find it humiliating to have to serve their yummy-mummy neighbours wearing a shiny blue pinafore with her hair scraped up under a cap, but Liz wasn’t like that. A job was a job. She wasn’t going to let anyone take her home without a fight.

  ‘I heard on the radio that a woman on your estate was strangled with her bra,’ Dolores said. ‘But there’s not a mention of it in the papers.’

  The old lady at Liz’s till clicked her tongue. ‘We drove up the mountains this morning for a look just before coming here. We couldn’t get near it, though.’ She sounded disappointed.

  Liz was appalled. Bloody rubberneckers. She held up the onion belligerently.

  ‘It’ll be all right in a stew,’ Maud grumbled.

  Liz put the onion to one side, ready to be packed. Then she wiped her eyes on the back of her sleeve. There was a George Michael song playing on the store’s radio that had been Ellen’s favourite. ‘RIP,’ she said.

  Frieda stared. Liz hardly knew her. She was always flying in and out of her house, packing her three sons into a people carrier and carrying TK Maxx bags. She ran a personal shopper and styling business from home. She’d put a flyer in Liz’s letterbox once, offering to ‘detox her wardrobe’. Usually, she appeared on the other side of her griselinia hedge when Derek was cutting the grass or washing the cars, joking – with come-to-bed eyes – that she’d have to bribe her own husband to do the same.

  ‘Your Derek renovated her offices, didn’t he?’ she asked Liz.

  Liz looked up, conscious it sounded loaded. ‘That was a few years ago—’ she muttered.

  ‘Was the onion kept out the back?’ Maud interrupted. ‘I wouldn’t want anything a rat might have peed on.’ Her bulgy-eyed dog started to yap.

  Liz pressed yet another button to summon David, her spotty manager, in his twenties, with more self-importance than brain cells. He was on the phone at the customer-service counter, beside a poster-sized photograph of himself on the wall. He caught her eye and turned his back, continuing the conversation.

  Liz rubbed the back of her neck, unnerved because Nigel was standing right behind her waiting to pack. He was always in the shop, reading the magazines and newspapers from cover to cover because he was too cheap to pay for them, or holding his arm out by his mother’s side. Usually, he didn’t utter a word; he just packed, and reacted to his mother’s directions not to put anything soapy in with anything edible with the patience of Job. There was a whole generation of men just like him who would never leave the nest now that the banks didn’t give mortgages to anyone any more.

  Dolores looked back over her shoulder again. ‘I heard that she had some very dodgy clients,’ she whispered, with a twitch of the mouth.

  ‘Oh, give over,’ Liz snapped. ‘Whatever happened to not speaking ill of the dead?’

  Liz scanned the customer-service desk. David was off the phone now, but still showing no sign of paying her a blind bit of notice. She put her finger on the buzzer, and this time kept it on. When that didn’t light a fire under him, she re-entered the onion’s barcode to cancel the sale, ripped its sticker off, and stuffed it in Maud and Nigel’s shopping bag with the other items, saying, ‘Tell you what, I won’t say anything if you don’t.’

  David sauntered over. His shirt collar was so tight it looked like it was going to shear his Adam’s apple off.

  ‘This aisle is free, madam,’ he told Frieda.

  Dolores put the paper down.

  ‘No, I want to talk to Liz,’ Frieda said.

  Liz glanced at her in surprise.

  David put his hand on Liz’s shoulder to cut in. ‘When you finish up here, you can take your break early,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ Liz asked him, looking at her watch. It was only half twelve, and she had barely been there five minutes.

  ‘I took a phone call for you just now. Your Derek’s had some kind of accident in the car.’

  Liz jumped to her feet.

  ‘No need to panic,’ David said. ‘His was the only car involved. He went off the road and straight into a wall. He’s in St Vincent’s.’

  ‘Are you OK to drive?’ Dolores said as Liz grabbed her coat.

  ‘Let us know …? ’ Frieda called after her.

  Liz didn’t answer them. The words just wouldn’t come out. She hadn’t felt this scared since Ellen had vanished.

  12

  2000: Wapping, London

  THE COPYBOY
STEPPED into the elevator – arms bent at the elbow, bales of morning newspapers stacked up to his chin. Neither of the two suits standing side by side asked him what floor he needed, and his elbow was too big for the buttons. The suits were going to the top floor, the one that made the hacks move like condemned prisoners when they got summoned up – accounts.

  ‘What if that mob had killed her?’ the bald one was asking.

  He was wearing Right Guard Sport. The copyboy was an expert when it came to aerosol brands, from years spent searching for the perfect high.

  ‘We’d have to do a giveaway of free dictionaries,’ Nivea Cool Kick joked back.

  Right Guard wasn’t amused.

  Nivea put his fist up to his mouth and tried to turn a laugh into a cough.

  ‘I know the circulation is up, but if you ask me it’s a step too far,’ Right Guard blustered. ‘I realize naming and shaming is giving readers what they want, but we’re dealing with ignorami here.’

  ‘Ignoramuses,’ Nivea corrected. He looked like he’d just remembered his place, and tried to make light of it. ‘Paedophile … paediatrician. You have to give the peasants some credit for getting the “pae” bit right.’

  ‘Yes, because paedophiles put brass plaques on their gateposts declaring their predilection so anyone who didn’t get their copy of the News of the World will know exactly where they live.’ Right Guard argued. ‘We can’t condone vigilantism …’

  They passed the second floor. The copyboy was still trying to find a way of pressing ‘5’.

  ‘Blair was asked about it during Prime Minister’s question time,’ Right Guard blustered.

  ‘I’ll organize a dinner,’ Nivea suggested. ‘Reassure Westminster we’re on top of it.’

  They were at the fourth. If the copyboy didn’t hurry, he was going to be in the shit. With a shunt, the elevator stopped, and the doors slid open. The editor stepped in. The copyboy’s load started to slide; he just about saved it with the tip of his chin. Her arm stretched out. Her finger pressed ‘5’.