by Penny Grubb
‘Wouldn’t they have put it in their statements?’
‘You are wet behind the ears, aren’t you? Look, if they got a whiff anything was dodgy about the death, I’m sure they’d have reported it. Well, most of them would. But they’re not going to go digging for complications. When a body’s found on your watch, you want it to be a clear-cut accidental death. Suspicious deaths are a nightmare all round.’
‘So how many police officers would have been involved?’
‘Mrs Martin said “they” came to tell them on Tuesday night, so I assume two. They likely dredged up a second officer from somewhere to go and break the news. It’d be unusual for more than one to have gone out to Milesthorpe initially.’
‘Even for a body being found?’
‘You need to grasp the scale of things round here, Annie. We’re not even talking Hull resources. Milesthorpe’s East Riding. Factor in people off sick, people called to cover elsewhere and you’re lucky to have two coppers on duty at night in that area. Might only have been one. That’s something like a thirty-mile stretch of coast. It’s a big area.’
Annie felt the weight of her bottom jaw. One police officer covering a thirty-mile stretch? It felt more as though she’d crossed continents than come a mere 200 miles north.
‘What did Terry Martin do? For a living, I mean.’
‘His mother said he worked as a journalist, but I don’t think he did. Not as a regular job anyway. I think he just bummed off his parents really.’
‘OK, I’ll see what I can get out of them face to face. Shall I ring and see if I can go now?’
Pat pushed her hands down into the cushions of the settee, shifting position in what seemed more of a habit than a real need to move. ‘I wouldn’t mind having a go at her myself, but it’s a bother getting anywhere with this blasted thing.’
Annie followed Pat’s gaze to the giant plaster cast and opened her mouth on the question she’d been at the brink of asking since she arrived. But before she could speak, Pat went on, ‘I suppose I could get you to drive me, but I’m not sure it’s worth the bother.’
Drive? Annie’s mouth shut as she lost the thread for a moment. She’d told Vince she had a clean licence. He hadn’t dug deeper and she hadn’t explained. In the five years since she’d passed her test in the driving school Corsa, she’d driven maybe half-a-dozen times. But – she straightened her shoulders and sat up – all cars were more or less the same and the roads were quiet round here. Not like London.
It struck her then what Pat had said … unless Mrs Martin had changed her mind. One wrong word … she’s on the edge … clutching at straws. If Mrs Martin backed out, there was no job for Annie.
When a man’s voice answered the phone Annie knew she’d been handed an advantage and mustn’t let it slip. His tone was weary but in control. She must deal with him and not let his wife into the conversation. ‘Mr Martin? My name’s Annie Raymond. I’m calling from Jed’s Private Investigators. You contacted us yesterday.’
There was a pause. ‘Oh yes. That was the wife. I’ll get her—’
‘No, no. That’s OK. I’m just ringing to say I’m on my way out to see you.’
‘Martha,’ she heard him call. ‘It’s that investigation firm. About that disk. What shall I…?’
Annie strained to listen but his voice tailed away and the response was muffled. Then he was back in her ear. ‘Just wait a sec, love. The wife’s on her way.’
‘No, that’s OK, don’t disturb her. I’ll be with you in … in twenty minutes. Bye.’ Annie raced the words out and put the phone down. If she could just get them face to face she’d convince them they needed her. About that disk … So there was more to this case than just a nebulous need to know what had happened that night in Milesthorpe.
She told Pat about the disk, but Pat just said, ‘Twenty minutes? You’d better bloody not be there in twenty minutes. If you’re clocked speeding, you’re paying the fine.’
Annie left the flat in a more buoyant mood than she’d have thought possible just an hour ago and clicked the key fob in her hand. It was no Corsa-clone that winked its lights back in reply: it was a sleek, silver monster that unlocked its doors and ran its BMW logo across her consciousness. She felt her shoulders tighten but took in a deep breath.
Pulling away from the kerb was a jerky affair with frantic wheel turning to avoid the car parked in front, and her halt at the end of the street was rather too abrupt, but, despite her clumsy-handedness it was a smooth ride and the biggest, glossiest car she’d ever been in. The afternoon sun bathed her in a warm glow. She imagined every passer-by followed her progress with envy. Soon, she was out on the main road heading for the coast.
‘Head east and follow your nose,’ had been the main thrust of Pat’s directions. She’d pooh-poohed Annie’s assumption that she could just key the address into the SatNav.
‘SatNav’s OK in town. It would have got you to Mrs Earle’s, but don’t try it in East Yorkshire, you’ll end up in a ditch.’
The bulk of the Salt End chemical works, a ‘can’t miss it’ landmark appeared through a tangle of concrete legs that hoisted a road over a large roundabout. The bright lights on the cooling towers and skeletal metal infrastructure lit the near-horizon like a vast pleasure beach. It lacked only the screams of revellers and booming beat of loud music from extravagant rides. If she tried to turn in here, Pat told her, she’d find the road blocked by gates and uniformed guards. She glanced across as she approached the island: an innocuous exit from a roundabout that sparked a feel of something hidden below the surface.
The road east out of Hull went on for longer than seemed possible, bypassing the town of Hedon, snaking through unlikely sounding villages, past interminable speed camera warnings and even through a pseudo-town large enough for complex junctions and civic flowers. How was it possible to travel so far east and not fall into the sea? If the signs hadn’t continued to say Withernsea she’d have been convinced she’d taken a wrong turn.
Forty-five minutes after her call, she found herself on a doorstep that led directly from the street and up against a hatchet-faced woman who made no move to invite her in. ‘Twenty minutes you told my husband,’ the woman said. ‘And anyway, I rang back and told the other woman—’
From the corner of her eye Annie saw a curtain twitch next door. ‘How do you do,’ she interrupted in strident tones. ‘I’m Annie Raymond from—’
‘Come inside.’ Mrs Martin grabbed her arm and with a murderous glare dragged her into a gloomy hallway where a man with lined features drooped in the background. A dark-wood hallstand crowded the space, but played no functional role except to hold a small white card the print of which Annie couldn’t read without staring, but first she must consolidate her position. Clearly Mrs Martin had contacted Pat and Pat had decided to give Annie free rein to try and retrieve the job.
‘Miss Thompson must have just missed me. But I’m here now. Let’s at least talk it through. Don’t you want to know … uh … what really happened?’
Mrs Martin pursed her lips. It was her husband who responded, his tone gentle, resigned. ‘We know what happened, love.’
Annie knew she’d lost them. Martha Martin had changed her mind just like Pat predicted. Mr Martin, she judged, hadn’t wanted them in the first place. If I can just get them face to face, she’d said to herself. Now she was here and had nothing to hold them.
Nothing. She glanced round the hallway. Wood panelling gleamed at her. The white card still shimmered just out of range. Dust particles danced in a shaft of sunlight. Nothing except Mr Martin’s words. A long shot that might alienate them more, but it was all she had.
‘I could just take a look at the disk while I’m here.’
Martha Martin spun round to give her husband an outraged glare. He turned helpless eyes upon Annie. ‘But how did you know about it?’
For a second, Annie thought he begged her not to let on that he was the culprit, the one who’d spilt the beans. But then she saw he w
as sincere. He’d never noticed his slip over the phone. She turned to Mrs Martin. ‘Didn’t you mention it when you spoke to Pat Thompson yesterday?’
‘No. I never said anything about … about any disk. We hadn’t made up our minds.’ Behind the words, Annie heard uncertainty. Martha Martin hadn’t been sure what she’d done or said since she’d heard the news about Terry.
‘It might help.’ Annie tried to speak gently. ‘A trouble shared and all that.’
‘The lass has a point, Martha.’
Martha Martin fixed her steady gaze on Annie for a moment, then seemed to come to a decision. ‘Come through here.’
The musty aroma of age and sweet smell of polish wrapped itself round her as she followed Martha across the hallway and through to a small sitting room. A tall-backed two-seater settee and matching pair of armchairs clustered round an elaborate fireplace that housed a small electric fire.
‘Sit down,’ Martha ordered, ‘but we’ve not made our minds up.’
Annie hesitated. The end of the settee nearest the fire was undoubtedly Martha’s; her territory marked out with a non-matching cushion placed to support her back, reading glasses balanced on the settee’s arm, a worn footstool. The armchair at the other side of the fire was marked equally clearly as Bill’s.
The other chair must have been Terry’s. Annie hesitated before sitting in it, but the only alternative was the other end of the small settee that would put her in awkward proximity to Martha.
Despite the weather, the room felt chilly, but Annie would lay money the fire wasn’t switched on from April to October. Unless, she thought suddenly, Terry had demanded heat. They’d have switched it on for him and never mind the cost. The room was too small for the three of them to remain standing, but their old-fashioned courtesy demanded they wait for her to sit. She took in a breath and sat in Terry’s armchair, seeing Martha stiffen as she did so.
Martha sat down with a small gesture to Bill. ‘Tell her about his disks.’
‘Our Terry did them for the newspapers, love,’ Bill told her.
‘Did what exactly?’
‘He took photos and wrote articles. Quite the roving reporter was our Terry. He did all the village shows.’
‘And it was always his stuff they printed, you know,’ Martha added with a spark of pride. She gestured towards a tiny television tucked almost out of sight by the side of the settee. ‘It was because of his films. He took moving pictures and then made photographs out of the good bits. He said it was the only way to get good shots of the livestock.’
Annie looked at the television. Both Martha and Bill would have to twist awkwardly in their chairs to be able to see the screen. Only Annie, in Terry’s chair, had an unimpeded view.
‘And this disk?’ she prompted.
‘It was by his camera. We didn’t find it right off, so we didn’t tell the police when they came.’
‘And they wouldn’t have been interested,’ Martha muttered.
‘Did he have the camera with him when…?’ Annie let the question fade.
‘No, love. He just had his notebook. The camera was in his room.’
‘What’s on the disk?’
‘We don’t know. Our Terry had a special machine to play his disks.’
‘Any idea what he might have been filming?’
‘He was set to do a story about Spurn, so it might be that. We’re not sure. It says “Spurn” in his book, the one he had with him.’
‘Spurn Point?’ Annie smiled as school memories surfaced. ‘A cyclic coastal landform,’ she recited.
Both Bill and Martha stared. It was Martha who spoke. ‘Do you know Spurn? I thought from your voice you weren’t from round here.’
‘Oh yes, we learnt all about it at school. One of our teachers took us on a trip there. He was a keen naturalist. We loved it; great stretches of beach and sand dunes.’
‘Terry loved Spurn,’ Bill said to Annie. ‘We used to take him there when he was a lad.’
‘It’s a wonderful place. It’ll be a real shame if they let the sea take it.’ For the first time Martha’s expression was friendly. By chance, Annie had said the right thing.
This was the time to slip in questions about who had found the body, what were the names of the police officers who’d broken the news, where exactly had it happened? They were too conventional a couple not to give her information now they’d invited her in. On the flip side was the resentment she’d build if she antagonized them. They hadn’t signed up to the job yet. She decided to keep quiet.
‘You’d better come and see.’ Bill got to his feet. ‘I’ll take her,’ he said to Martha. ‘You stay here.’
‘There’s the notebook too,’ Martha said. ‘She can look at it but don’t let her take it away.’
‘The notebook?’ Annie queried, as she followed Bill out of the room.
‘He must have had it in his pocket. They brought us back his things after … afterwards. There was mud on it and that.’
He stopped abruptly in the tiny hallway and Annie prayed he wouldn’t break down. She wouldn’t know what to do; how to console him. Impulsively, she reached out and put her hand on his arm. He gave her a smile; his eyes shone brightly through tears that didn’t quite fall as he said, ‘They all say it’ll be better when the funeral’s out of the way.’
Annie felt shock prickle her skin. ‘You haven’t had the funeral yet?’
Her eye was drawn to the wooden hallstand and the card that had been in her peripheral vision when she arrived. It was an order of service for the following day.
‘Funeral’s tomorrow. Things was delayed. They had to do a post-mortem with it being an accident on that site.’
She worked it out. Seven days from death to burial was too short a delay for there to be any doubts that the death was anything other than an accident.
He took her up the narrow staircase and led her into a large front bedroom. ‘This is our Terry’s room.’
She paused for a mental inventory of the dimensions of the house. This was the main bedroom. Martha and Bill must be squashed into a box room at the back. They’d never change things now though. This would remain a shrine to Terry for as long as they were here to look after it.
Bill opened a cupboard that was stacked with DVDs. ‘These are his disks, love. And this is his last one. It wasn’t in the cabinet with the rest.’
She took the shiny circle from him. ‘You say you haven’t watched it?’
‘Oh no, we wouldn’t know how. They’re special disks that our Terry got for his camera. He had a machine for getting photos out of them. We’d have loved to see them, but he couldn’t play them for us.’
Annie knelt down by the cupboard and looked closely. They were standard DVDs. And in the corner of the room sat a PC with a larger screen than the television downstairs. She could have this disk in the slot and playing for Bill Martin within a minute, but he’d already lost his purpose in life. She had no reason to destroy him completely by exposing his dead son as a liar. Still, it could be useful to know what Terry had kept on his PC.
‘May I look at his computer?’ she asked.
Bill hesitated. ‘He didn’t like folks meddling with his stuff, but you can have a look if you’re careful.’
Annie smiled her thanks, walked across and clicked the machine on. It hummed to life and invited her to enter a password. Damn. She tried all the combinations she could think of in case he’d picked something obvious, but without success, and reflected not for the first time that none of the IT courses she’d done had ever been of practical use. She shut the computer down.
‘Have you got what you need?’
She gave Bill Martin a smile and a nod and looked round the room. Terry’s presence hung over the house. Best seat downstairs, best bedroom. She did a swift calculation. Terry had been born in the late 1960s. His parents looked as though they’d been married forever and must be well into their 70s, touching 80 probably. She imagined Terry as an unexpected late baby, over-indulged a
ll his life. Their illusions about their son were like some precious, bone-china tea-service, irreplaceable and fragile. Annie must be sure that nothing shattered whilst in her care.
‘You said there was a notebook?’
Bill Martin pointed to a bookcase where A5 notebooks were neatly stacked. ‘He made them to go with the disks.’
As she knelt down to look, she asked, ‘Why exactly did you contact a private investigator, Mr Martin?’
‘To tell the truth, love, I don’t know that Martha knew what she wanted when she rang.’
‘And now? Do you want me to look into where he was and what he was doing?’
‘I don’t know. That’ll be up to Martha. The police weren’t interested in his notebook, so they won’t want his disk. But you can check it out if you like and let us know what he was working on. That’ll be a comfort to us.’
It wasn’t much comfort to her, but Annie gave him a sympathetic smile. Watching a single DVD wasn’t going to provide her with six weeks’ gainful employment.
‘What made you call Pat Thompson?’ she asked. ‘Call her direct, I mean, rather than call the agency.’
‘We don’t know anything about an agency. We got the number off one of our Terry’s friends. He called round after … after it happened. He hadn’t heard. Martha asked him if he knew anyone. It were just a whim really.’
‘Who was he, this friend?’
‘I’ve no idea, love. Our Terry mixed with some dodgy types. He had to, you know, with the line of work he was in for the newspapers. This one were only a young lad. From Hull by the accent. Said our Terry owed him money. Of course, we weren’t standing for that. Martha asked him straight out did he know a good private detective. You could see he was the type to mix in that sort of world and he give us that number for Pat Thompson. I think Martha slipped him something for that. He’s not been back. We didn’t encourage our Terry to bring riff-raff like that home with him.’
‘And you’ve no idea who he is or how to contact him?’
‘No, and we wouldn’t want to.’