The sea was calm and silky. Not a breath of wind stirred the surface. But it was still bitingly cold, the kind of cold that took a hachet to your breath. My fingers were numb, my eyes watering from the cold and the brilliance of the winter sun. It was a day of contradictions.
In January 1907, the temperature had plummeted to something unregistered in Latching and the sea foam froze along the wooden groynes on the beach, forming sculptures of incredible beauty. There were dim photographs of crystal droplets petrified into cascades of ice, and Edwardian fishermen breaking off chunks of frozen sea to prove it had happened.
I tried to put a briskness into walking, so that my blood circulated a bit faster. It was reluctant to move into any area that had less than three layers of clothing.
Boots photography counter was warm enough for me to unwrap marginally and hand over the camera. I ordered the fast service even though I could hardly charge it to any client’s account.
Then I put an advertisement in the local free newspaper.
WANTED: Chihuahua puppy, must have excellent pedigree.
I added my phone number and the woman at the counter said it would be in tomorrow’s newspaper. She asked for my name and address.
“We have to ask these days, purely for our own records,” she explained. “We get such a lot of crackpot adverts. You never know.”
“This is not a crackpot advertisement,” I said.
“How am I to know it’s genuine? Chihuahua might be a code for something else. Y’know, drugs or porno.”
“It’s a very small dog.”
“That’s what you say, miss.”
My investigations had more or less ground to a halt without wheels. I was too mean to hire a car and too cold to get out on my racing bike. Since both clients were paying me by the hour, I could with a clear conscience spend the rest of the morning in my shop, keeping busy, warm, and refuelling my brain.
I switched on both heaters, which was sheer extravagance, and the coffee percolator, in that order. As I sipped a strong black, I wrote up my notes. It was easy to forget details if they were not written down. I included the insurance-scam incident. I was my own client in this case. And if I didn’t get myself some justice, I would be disappointed.
Customers drifted in and out, handling things, asking questions, buying, not buying. Even shoplifting. Someone lifted a china frog out of the window display when my back was turned. And I had no idea who it was because I didn’t notice the empty spot till some time later.
“Someone has lifted a frog,” I told Doris, indignantly. I was buying more soup. I was living on tinned soup. It was a sign of appetite deprivation.
“Looking for a prince,” she nodded.
“What?”
“You know… kiss a frog.”
“It was a china frog.”
“Maybe they want a china prince.”
I gave up on this conversation. Doris looked pleased, as if she had won on points. She dug out a carton of cuppa soups and pushed it over the counter.
“It’s a new soup, broccoli and Stilton. They give you an extra packet free, special offer. Do you want to try it?”
Not really. I did not fancy reconstituted broccoli and Stilton. I did not see how they could manufacture such a combination. It was a soup I often made with fresh ingredients, sometimes for James, in the days when he had sat on the floor of my front bedsit with a huge china bowl of home-made soup and crusty bread. Those days seemed to have gone, along with all the dirty water under bridges.
Love is a kind of illness, I suppose. An obsession with a love object, alternating with manic happiness and depression. And the falling in love was a fall from normality. I was in the melancholy love state. After Ben’s death, I was much less interested in the manifestations of romantic love and was wary of loving James too much. I had become frightened of being in love. It held the seeds of pain and hurt.
“Are you listening to me, Jordan? Your eyes have gone off somewhere.”
“Sorry, Doris. What were you saying?”
“I was saying I had a boy in here just now wanting to buy puppy food. Didn’t seem to know what he wanted. Of course, I don’t sell cat or dog food. No shelf space. Thought you might be interested, seeing that you’re after some stolen puppies.”
I woke up. “This boy, where is he? What did he look like?”
“I’ve no idea where he is, because he has gone. And he looked like any ordinary boy does these days. Skinny, baggy clothes, baseball cap on backwards. About fifteen or so.”
“Earrings?”
“What?”
“Any earring or stud? Boys wear them too.”
Doris shook her head. “I’m sorry, Jordan. If you want me to give you accurate descriptions of my customers, you’ll have to send me on a course or put CCTV in the shop.”
I was on my way out. He might still be in the road. I’d take a chance on not locking up my shop. There was no time if I was going to catch him.
“Sorry, I’ll be back for the soup.”
“He had the letters H-A-T-E tatooed on his fingers,” Doris called out as I left.
One day, I would buy Doris a really big present. I flashed her a thank-you grin and ran out on to the pavement. It was not busy, the cold having thinned out the normal crowd of shoppers. Fifteen? He should be in school, or was it half term? Was he truanting? Buying puppy food. It was such a slender chance. Hardly worth bothering about but I was desperate.
The boy was sauntering along, hands lost in baggy pockets, chewing gum. He stamped on a mineral-water bottle and the plastic exploded with a satisfactory bang. Then he kicked it into the gutter. No wonder Latching Council go bananas spending a fortune on street cleaning.
“Hi,” I said cheerfully, as if I knew him. “I hear you’ve got a puppy for sale.”
“How d’yer know?” he said, glaring at me suspiciously.
I tapped my nose. “Grapevine, or should I say dog-vine?” He was oblivious to any form of wit, however pathetic. He had foxy eyes. They swiveled.
“How much?” he asked.
“How much what?”
“How much you gonna pay?”
I stalled for time. “For what? I haven’t seen your puppy yet. I don’t know what it’s like or what breed. I’ve got to see the puppy, haven’t I? Is it a pedigree?”
“Pedi-what?”
“History, parents, etc.”
“It ain’t got no parents. It’s an orphan.”
This was a losing battle and I was nearly lost. Yet I hung on, hoping for some glimmer of information that would justify this conversation. I glimpsed the letters H-A-T-E on his fingers as he scratched his head.
“I’m looking for a very small puppy. They are called chihuahuas. Flat-owners like them because they don’t grow very much, never more than about five inches high at the shoulder, and they are Mexican.”
His young face brightened a fraction. It was an extraordinary sight as the blankness lifted like a veil. “Look like rats, do they? Large pointed ears and big eyes? No fur, all skinned like a rabbit?”
“Well, not quite… you can get long-haired ones as well.”
“There’s a bloke down our street got puppies like that. Wot you said. Chi-hahas? He wanted to sell me one for forty quid. I said, you’re bonkers. I like proper dogs. My puppy is a bull mastiff. Right macho.”
I could not stop a shudder. I had once been locked in a room with a raging bull mastiff dripping saliva over my ankles.
“Chihuahuas may be small but they are not short on courage,” I found myself saying. “They have brave hearts.”
This went past him. He was getting restless, moving the chewing gum in his mouth, feet shuffling.
“Well, if you don’t want a bull, I’m off.”
“Where do you live?”
“Springfield Close.”
“And what’s your name?” He was already moving away. A conversation of longer than two minutes was brain-draining.
“Norman.”
Bet he li
ked that.
I went back to my shop, collecting the soup on the way. Nothing else had been lifted. Springfield Close. I found it on the street map and plotted a route. Not one of my usual haunts. I could cycle there and start logging time for FCI. At this rate of earning, I was going to be very, very poor. If only the winter would end, then spring might bring a few lucrative cases. Cases where people would pay, up front, not counting the pennies, like the vandalized garden on Updown Hill. I’d made a profit on that one.
DI James was waiting on the pavement, his car parked close to the kerb. He was in a patrol car so there was no warden hot on his heels.
“Can I come in?” he asked.
Could he come in? Anytime. Anywhere. Didn’t he know? I was drinking the free cuppa soup. It tasted like free chopped cardboard.
“This fishing case that you have… any news of the missing angler, Dick Mann?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I don’t have a case on Dick Mann, only the missing rods.” I didn’t say I’d been on the way to his home when the Vauxhall staged the accident scam. Nor did I mention the barn boot photos in case they were a failure. Failure is my middle name.
“We’ve a report of a body, no identification.”
My insides did their usual plunge. I’d never forgotten the shock of finding the nun on a meal hook at Trencher’s Hotel. It would stay with me for life. I would never forget her feet slowly turning in the air above me.
“And there are no missing persons from that particular neck of the woods?”
“We’ve no missing persons fitting the description. And no one has reported Dick Mann as missing, except you. And that’s not on record, as you reported him as a disappeared person. Disappearing people are not necessarily missing people.”
“Perhaps Dick Mann doesn’t have any wife or partner,” I said. “No one to notice that he was not around any more. He hasn’t turned up for work at the hospital, but then that’s to be expected, since he gave in his notice last week.”
DI James was sitting on the edge of my desk, long legs crossed at the ankle. I had not invited him to sit there. He had his usual gaunt, no sleep, no food look. I could offer him both but the odds on being turned down were high.
“Would you like some cardboard soup?” I asked.
“No, thank you, Jordan. But a mug of your high-octane Brazilian bean coffee would be acceptable.”
“Too much coffee is not good for you.”
“Let me decide that.”
I switched on the percolator, added freshly ground beans and water, praying it was not a day for scummed water. Shopping list: one of those filter jugs for water. Latching had not yet got its water supply right. Local factories poured effluent into the sea. I dreaded to think where it came from or what the scum consisted of. Sometimes, my tea was swimming with oily blobs.
He drank the coffee without comment. I took the slight relaxation in his body language as a degree of appreciation. It could have been sheer fatigue.
“Tell me what Dick Mann looks like.”
I got out my notes. It looked efficient even if the description of Dick Mann was sparse. I could barely remember his face. His clothes were more memorable.
“Aged about forty, maybe a few years younger, I don’t know. Height about five ten.” I tried to think what it had been like, dancing with him. Zero recall. “Ruddy complexion. Round face. Straight nose. I think. Eyes… no idea of color, except there were two. Light-brown hair cut in a short, spiky style with gel. Oh dear, that’s not much to go on, is it?”
“Not much for a detective. You are a detective, aren’t you?”
“Okay, I challenge you to get a better description of someone done up to the neck in waterproofs and every device known to man for keeping out the cold. There was nothing showing. He was walking waterproofs.”
“Do you remember any other clothes he wore?”
“Brown slacks and a fleece jersey. Green. Dark green like Sherwood Forest.”
“Very medieval, Jordan. Anything more?”
“I’m sorry, James. I really didn’t take much notice of his clothes. How was I to know that he was going to disappear?”
James put down his mug and half smiled at me. Half smiles were all that I usually got and they were disturbing enough. It was a haunting sort of smile. I wondered about his past life and all the traumas that he had barely hinted at. What had happened that put him off women, even me, for the duration?
“So where has this unidentified body been found?” I asked. “Are you going to tell me? You’ve asked enough questions.”
“In the bell tower at St Luke the Divine, the church on the road to Patcham. The bell-ringers found him when they arrived for practice yesterday evening. Not a pretty sight. They were very shocked.”
“Had he hung himself?”
“Not exactly. More the opposite. He was suspended by his right ankle, upside down, some thirty feet above ground. He’d been there some time. Apparently he’d died from dehydration and drowning.”
“Drowning?”
“That’s what happens. I’m told. If you are left hanging upside down for any length of time, water drains into the lungs and you drown.”
“Not suicide then?”
“It looked more like some sort of punishment ritual in a house of correction, you understand? If we find who strung him up, it’ll be murder.”
“And you don’t know who he is… he was?”
DI James slipped off the desk and stood up. He was cradling the mug, keeping the last vestige of heat against the palm of his hand. His face gave nothing away.
“He was wearing a dark-green fleece, the green of Sherwood Forest, and the only item in his pocket was a copy of the tide timetable for Latching.”
A tide timetable. A hollow feeling of quiet despair spread through my limbs.
Eight
Was it Dick Mann? Who else but an angler would carry around a tide timetable? I told James about his cottage in North Mill Lane. He made some phone calls on his mobile, rinsed out the mug in the sink and made to leave.
“You’d better come with me,” he said. “I have an unidentified body and you have a missing person. It’s crucial that I get the earliest identification in a murder investigation.”
“Yes, I understand,” I said, my heart sinking. I hated the chilly, vaporous atmosphere of the morgue. “When?”
I pulled on an anorak, mentally reminding myself to update my clothes with a trendy fleece. I followed him out to his car. Even a drive a deux with James did not lift my spirits. We did not talk much. I can’t even remember what we talked about.
I followed him everywhere like a tame dog, down corridors, through swing doors, into the hospital morgue. We had to put on protective clothing. By this time, I did not care how I looked.
I hate those refrigerated shelves. I hate the clanging doors. The sliding body trays made a rasping sound. I’d probably hear that nerve-twanging sound even if I was dead.
James turned back the cover from over the face. The hair still had gel on it.
“That’s him,” I said. “Dick Mann.”
“Thank you, Jordan. That’s saved us a lot of time.”
Outside the hospital, he was on his mobile, making tracks to leave me stranded. “Where are you going?” I asked, almost on his wavelength.
“To Dick Mann’s cottage in North Mill Lane.”
“Can I come with you?” I asked. “The mechanic hasn’t brought my car back yet. I’m cycling everywhere.”
He narrowed his eyes. “This is a police investigation,” he said. “We don’t take civilians along.”
“But I’ve been very helpful and saved you hours of fruitless enquiries. The missing rods are my case. There might be a clue in Dick Mann’s home. You owe me.”
He paused. “All right. But no weird stuff, Jordan.”
“No weird stuff,” I promised.
“And don’t touch anything.”
“As if I would.”
He took me via the shop. I put
up the CLOSED FOR REDECORATION notice and locked the door. DI James said nothing. Maybe he thought I did have the decorators in. The shop was beginning to look shabby. Shopping: tin of paint, apricot white; brush; a magic product for mopping up drops.
I sat beside James in a flashy yellow and blue patrol car, trying not to look as if I was being taken in for shoplifting. At least he had turned off the sirens. The radio link was on, crackling with messages that were difficult to understand.
“I don’t know how you can make out what anyone is saying,” I said. “It sounds like a foreign language.”
“It is a foreign language,” he said. “Who’s fixing your car?”
“A teddy bear,” I said. “A teddy bear who is into old cars.”
“You mean Bert? That’s the mechanic I was going to recommend. He’s good with cars and reliable. Knows what he’s doing and doesn’t overcharge. It’ll be interesting to see the claim from Derek Brook, how much they go for.”
I said nothing about the barn boot. “Yes. it will. I suppose they’ll add on injury time.”
“That’s the point of these staged accidents,” said James, negotiating the roundabout that led to North Mill Lane. I tried not to look at the crash site. “The damage to the car is the least of their worries. They probably bought it for next to nothing and they’ll write it off. They’ll claim for loss of earnings, legal costs, compensation for injuries. There have been payouts of more than a hundred thousand.”
“I don’t have to pay that, do I?” I said, going cold.
“No, your insurance company pays out. Norwich Union, Royal and Sun Alliance, whoever they are. But they don’t like it. If we could nail someone, it would be a big plus.”
I began to feel a glimmer of hope. Perhaps I could be the big plus PI who nailed these fraudsters. Another career opening. Investigator to car insurance companies. It sounded dull and boring but if being bored meant a regular pay cheque, then I’d sit at a desk and investigate car claims all day.
James was turning into North Mill Lane. It was an ancient parish road, narrow and twisting, laced with overhanging trees. I could imagine horses and farm carts making their way up the lane to the mill. It was meant for horses, not cars. But the muddy track had been tarmacked and the cottages had lost some of their front gardens to accommodate the rise of four-wheel-drive ownership. The cottages were scattered along the lane, built higgledy-piggledy over the years with different angles of frontage, before the days of planning permission and urbanization.
Ring and Die (Jordan Lacey Mysteries Book 6) Page 7