by Penny Grubb
‘No. They answered our questions. She did, anyway, but she wouldn’t let us tell her anything. It was as though she couldn’t bear us to know things about him that she didn’t. Wouldn’t you think “How?” would be the first question you’d ask? You could see her close her mouth on it, then she just held us off, kind of gritted her teeth until she could get us out of the house. We told her to get in touch if she wanted to, but she hasn’t.’
Annie saw her chance. ‘I don’t think she’s kept your contact details. Could I take a card? I might get the chance to pass it on and I’m sure she will want to talk to you. She needs to know what happened that night.’
Annie hoped this might prompt Jennifer to say something about the events in Milesthorpe, but she nodded without speaking and reached into her bag. As she passed Annie a business card, she said, ‘Can I take one of yours?’
‘Uh … yes, of course. Only I’m afraid it’s my boss’s. I’m new in the job, haven’t had any cards made up yet. My number’s on the back.’
Pat would be pleased with progress so far and Annie decided to devote some time later to the map of Milesthorpe and the electoral register. She’d like to build a mental image in her mind. She had two surnames to work with, Tremlow and Ludgrove, and might have more before the day was over.
She looked over at the three girls. The tallest raised her head and raked the church with a lofty glance. Annie wondered if they were relatives and, if so, why they sat in an isolated bunch. ‘Not much of a turnout, is it?’
Jennifer shrugged, then shushed Annie with a gesture as canned music started and there was a flurry of movement at the church door. Annie hoped to see a crowded funeral cortège enter, but the half-dozen pallbearers outnumbered the following mourners two to one. Behind Bill and Martha Martin came a woman Annie was certain must be the sister of one of them, but they were all so alike she couldn’t have said which.
Bill caught her eye and gave her a nod and half a smile. Martha looked neither left nor right as she followed her son’s remains towards the altar.
Just as the coffin settled on its trestle, there was a commotion from across the aisle and Annie saw the smallest of the three girls scramble to her feet and rush out. Neither of her friends made a move to follow, so Annie got up and crept out after her.
The girl, ashen-faced, leant against the wall of the church. Straggly dark hair hung forward partly obscuring her sallow features. Annie looked for any familial resemblance to the Martins but saw none. The girl, eleven or twelve years old, breathed in great gulps. Her cheeks were tear-streaked.
‘Hey, hey, relax. Come on, deep breaths. These things are never nice. Did you know him well?’ Annie smiled and put a hand on the girl’s shoulder.
‘I didn’t want to come. I hated him. I can’t bear to think about it. His head all bashed in. I think I’m going to be sick.’
Annie took a step back. ‘Come on now. Breathe deep through your nose. You’ll be fine.’
The girl turned big trusting eyes up to her. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think. I shouldn’t have said I hated him, not with him being … you know. My mother says I should think before I say things.’
‘That’s OK. I don’t always think before I get myself tangled up in things. There are worse faults. My name’s Annie Raymond.’
The girl took her hand in a limp handshake. ‘I’m Laura Tunbridge.’
‘How old are you, Laura?’
‘I’m twelve. So were you his girlfriend?’
Annie smiled and knew she could harvest the names of everyone in the church, and maybe a few who weren’t, from a garrulous child like Laura. She had an easy hook to reel the girl in. ‘No, I didn’t know him at all. I’m a private detective. I’ve been hired by his parents.’
A grin lit Laura’s tearstained features. ‘Oh wow, a private detective. That’s so cool. Anyway, I don’t think he had a girlfriend.’
No, thought Annie, it doesn’t look like it. ‘How did you know him, Laura?’
‘I didn’t know him. Not really. Not like introduced and that. I mean I so didn’t want to know him. He just hung about. Mally knew him best.’
‘Mally’s one of the ones you came here with?’
‘Yeah, the other one’s Kay. Kay’s my best friend. I so wouldn’t have come at all if Kay hadn’t. Only Mally’s grandad said it would be a kindness to Mr Tremlow, to show him some support, so me and Kay got a lift with Mrs Kitson.’
Annie employed no subtlety as she questioned Laura for her friends’ surnames – Dearlove and Fletcher – and confirmation that Mrs Kitson was the woman with Tremlow in the church. The colour crept back to the girl’s cheeks and her face broke out in a delighted grin.
‘But wow! A private detective. That’s so cool. Will you wait and tell them? Mally’ll so not believe me. She’ll say I made you up.’
Annie laughed and pulled one of Pat’s cards from her pocket. ‘That’s the agency I work for.’
‘That says Patricia Thompson. You said your name was Annie.’
‘Pat’s my boss. I borrowed some of her cards. My name and number are written on the other side.’
Laura scrutinized the card front and back, then put it in her pocket with an air of importance. ‘I’ll let you know if I find out who did it.’
‘The police are satisfied it was an accident,’ Annie said gently.
‘So what do they know?’ Laura dismissed the official investigation with a wave of her hand before giving a great gasp and staring up at Annie. ‘Oh look, it wasn’t us. It so wasn’t anything to do with us. Mally didn’t mean it.’
‘What didn’t Mally mean?’
‘When she said she’d kill him. She so didn’t mean it. Not like really kill him.’
‘Why did she say it? What had he done?’
Laura’s gaze slid away to one side, her whole body radiating wariness. ‘Oh nothing. He was just a creep.’
Annie smiled, amused. Some childish transgression preyed on Laura’s mind. Interesting that she knew Terry Martin well enough to dislike him. A thirty-seven year old impinges on the lives of a group of twelve year olds from a village almost ten miles from his home. Her amusement faded. The implications weren’t pleasant.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Do you feel strong enough to go back in?’
It was late morning when Annie drove across Hull towards Orchard Park.
As Pat instructed, she’d rung Mrs Earle who’d said through an exaggerated yawn, ‘Yeah, anytime. I’m not going anywhere today.’
The neat rural scene with twisty roads and huge expanses of crop fields changed first to pockets of buildings crowding the road and then to the industrial landscape that was east Hull. The road surface deteriorated as she neared her destination. The tarmac gave way to concrete slabs that sat uneasily as though disturbed by something beneath. Narrow roads threaded through open spaces surrounding low rectangular terraces and towering blocks up to twenty storeys high. The concrete landscape sucked in the sun’s rays and held them tight creating an arid desert. Nothing rural about the grass here. It was short, tamed town grass trodden to dust along well-used paths, and strewn with litter. Two boys ran back and forth around the skeleton of a burnt-out car. A scrappy feel. Just like Terry Martin’s send-off. His parents, one elderly relation and remnants of people he’d only half known. The only ones remotely near his own age had been Annie and Jennifer neither of whom had met him.
She bounced Pat’s car over speed bumps and wondered how on earth a funeral procession left this area with any dignity. Bill and Martha had at least been spared the ignominy of speed bumps, though their pathetic cortège, a hearse and a black car that swallowed the three of them into its huge interior, had been forced to an abrupt halt as it tried to leave the churchyard for Terry’s final journey.
Annie felt anger rise as she remembered the red Fiat that had screeched up packed with adolescent boys, blaring loud music from its open windows and caused the hearse to stop. Their antics were more suited to the battered environment of this ed
ge of Orchard Park, but it had been Terry’s funeral they’d disrupted briefly while the few mourners stood awkwardly about waiting for the Martins to go so they could slip back to their everyday lives.
The car had been gone in seconds in a squeal of tyres and a hail of shouted comments that were drowned by the booming beat from within. It was over too quickly for anyone to do anything. Annie had seen Laura slap out at one of her companions who’d laughed. ‘It so isn’t funny!’
Annie had tried to shake off the emptiness she felt, and the guilt that she could walk away while the Martins started a life sentence without their son. Maybe she could unearth the big story that he’d been after. Or more likely make one up. Would posthumous publicity be any consolation? To Martha perhaps. And she couldn’t do that unless she could make the leap from watching Terry’s last DVD to getting them to agree to an investigation.
Annie pulled up in the shadow of one of the tower blocks. A group of children slouched at the fringes of the car-park. They looked Laura Tunbridge’s age but tougher, more worldly-wise. Slowly she turned her head in the direction of their bold stares, but kept her own gaze on the row of houses across the way, until at the last moment when she snapped her eyes to meet theirs – an imitation of the tactic Vince used with her. She felt gratification in seeing their stares drop as she climbed out of the car. Body language was wary now more than defiant. Fine. Let them think her a drug dealer with an army to call on. It might keep Pat’s car in one piece while she interviewed Mrs Earle on the sixth floor.
A crowd at the entrance jostled about laughing. Annie slipped inside in their wake, noting a security system that should lock the doors against all comers. Probably it hadn’t worked in a long time. A uniformed guard sat behind a glass wall in a security booth. Annie took in the shabbiness of the over-elaborate jacket and complete lack of interest in anything but the newspaper on his lap.
The stench in the lift made her pinch in her nose, but six floors meant twelve flights of stairs. No joke in this heat. It wasn’t as complex an estate as some she’d seen. She’d rented a room in a block in East London which had been a nightmare of complicated walkways, twisting streets and alleyways providing cover and escape routes.
This was on a smaller scale, but clearly had its hotspots. The question was what could she do about it? She and Pat didn’t have the muscle behind them to go after any perpetrators and warn them off. Find out who they are, Pat had said, and get a handle to move them on. Or if she found real wrongdoing, and could produce the evidence to match, it would surely be a police job.
A large man in shirtsleeves and rumpled trousers answered her knock.
‘Annie Raymond. I’m here to see Mrs Earle.’
‘She ain’t here.’ The man made no move to elaborate the bald statement or to invite her in.
Annie looked at her watch. ‘But I arranged it with her on the phone less than an hour ago. Will she be long? Can I come in and wait?’
‘You from that private eye place?’ He looked her up and down and grinned. ‘I suppose you’ll fall lighter than the fat bint. Broke her leg, didn’t she?’
Annie stiffened. So this was where it had happened. Involuntarily she glanced back towards the concrete staircase she might have climbed on a cooler day. She didn’t like it that this man knew about Pat’s accident, much less that something in his tone implied it hadn’t been an accident at all.
‘So will Mrs Earle be long?’ she asked again.
The man shrugged and yawned. ‘She went off with her mate. No point waiting. She might stay over. Says she doesn’t like it here with all the bother at nights.’
Annie let out a huff of exasperation. ‘That’s what I’m here for. Where does her friend live? I’ll call and see her there.’
Another shrug. ‘Somewhere Sutton way.’
‘Do you have an address?’
‘Nah.’
Annie stared. Was that the best he would offer when she’d gone to all this trouble? ‘If you see her, tell her I called. I’ll give her a ring later.’ She snapped the words out as she turned on her heel and retraced her steps.
With an unexpected gap in her day, she decided to drive into town and find Hull’s main library. She could spend an hour with Milesthorpe’s electoral register and telephone directory.
When Annie returned to the waterfront apartment an hour and a half later, it was with a dissatisfied feeling of business undone. The funeral had gone to plan as far as talking to people was concerned, but it was all for nothing unless she could find a way to bring the Martins back round to the idea of an investigation. And the Orchard Park job had hit an unexpected dead end. Horribly unreliable, Pat had said of Mrs Earle. The comment was spot on.
‘Hi, d’you want coffee?’ she called, as she made straight for the kitchen and flicked the kettle on.
No reply.
She set out the cups and went through to the living room. ‘That woman on Orchard Park, she …’
An empty room lay before her. ‘Pat,’ she raised her voice and called through towards the bedroom. Nothing. She was alone in the flat.
Annie made coffee for one. No reason Pat shouldn’t go out, of course, and she was under no obligation to tell Annie her movements, but it felt unsettling. It hadn’t occurred to her that Pat could get herself down the stairs and where would she go then? Annie had the car and anyway Pat couldn’t possibly drive with that thing on her leg.
What should she do now? She decided to raid Pat’s store of French bread and make a sandwich, but as she turned towards the kitchen, sunlight speared through the big window and caught a pool of silver on the top of the TV. A disk lay there. The Martins’ DVD.
Pat had been going to make a copy. Annie’s obvious next task was to do it herself, but the PC was in Pat’s bedroom and it would mean breaching the boundaries of Pat’s personal space, something for which she should get the OK first. She decided to play the disk anyway.
She slid it into the DVD player and sat back to watch. If Mrs Earle continued to play silly buggers there was little else for her to do.
Crash! A silver-foam-topped rush of waves flooded the screen making Annie sit up in alarm, her hands gripping the chair arms as though the water were a here and now threat. A voice that must be Terry Martin’s, a slightly nasal whine, filled the room.
‘Spurn Point,’ he announced, over jerky shots of the pebbly beach.
The camera drew back at dizzying speed, the water receding, the pebbles rushing away, becoming sand dunes and tough grasses. Annie tried to recognize the scene, but couldn’t.
‘Ah bollocks!’ The profanity broke the mood as did the sudden disorientation of the camera angle, swooping up to face the sky, then taking a dive into an unfocused close-up. Terry Martin had tripped.
After the contrived drama of the opening sequence, the following shots of beach, grassland and marshes lacked continuity. Terry’s few remarks sounded lacklustre as though he knew he would bore his audience. He began a couple of commentaries on the breached road; on the isolation of life in the tiny community, but they petered out, incomplete. Annie thought back to the schoolteacher whose enthusiasm might have imbued her with a love of natural history if her heart hadn’t been long sold to the world of private investigation. She wasn’t sure why Terry Martin bothered. It was a big enough story in its way, the instability of life on this outpost with the North Sea’s constant battering that might separate it from the mainland at any moment; the debates over whether the sea would inevitably claim it and what would happen to the shipping lanes in the Humber if Spurn were swallowed by the waves. But it was a story done to death and Terry Martin had no new angle to hook it on.
An abrupt cut took the film from landscape to close up. ‘Rumour has it this place sees some interesting night-time activity. Let’s see what evidence we can find.’ Terry Martin’s voice dropped to a whisper with a sly undertone. Annie stared as the camera closed in on a small concrete bunker. A war relic, she thought.
The camera approached the opening an
d Terry Martin lowered his voice further. His words were carried away on the rush of pebbles under the waves. Annie strained to hear, but couldn’t make out more than the occasional phrase. ‘What goes on … dead of night …’ She found herself at the edge of the chair as the camera swung round into the dark interior.
An empty McCoy’s crisp packet flapped gently in a corner. ‘Naff all,’ whined Terry Martin back to normal volume.
The film cut to a different time of day, indoors now, a close-up of a giant onion filling the screen. The following shots swung from smiling faces to prize-winning entries; a proud smile, a marrow, then a pot of jam with a frilly top and rose-patterned label. Over it all Terry Martin intoned a laborious roll call of winners, spelling out some of the names.
After ten minutes of this, Annie’s eyelids grew heavy and hunger gnawed at her so she turned up the volume and went through to the kitchen, leaving the door open so Terry Martin’s commentary made a backdrop to her breaking bread rolls and slicing cheese. These sorts of shots, she had no doubt, were the basis of the reports that appeared under Terry Martin’s byline in the local press. Local show reports had to be accurate. They might record someone’s sole claim to fame and mustn’t do so with a misspelt name.
As she balanced a pyramid of three sandwiches on a small plate, Annie realized that Terry Martin had gone silent. The thought had barely formed when a woman’s voice from the living room screeched, ‘Just fuck off!’
She jumped with the shock and had to juggle the sandwiches to keep them on the plate. She raced back through to a momentary view of a face contorted with rage before the scene snapped to a sunlit field crowded with vehicles and ponies weaving their way through brightly dressed people, trestle tables and flapping tapes.