by Dane Cobain
“Go to hell.”
“I have money,” Leipfold would lie, and he’d either be invited inside or told, with a look of regret, that there was no such equipment on the property.
He hadn’t been expecting to find anything, but he was pleasantly surprised after a quick chat with an elderly couple who’d hired a security firm to set up some cameras. It was easy to see why they’d bothered. They were the last of a dying breed, the rare upper class, people who’d been born into money and had continued to earn it. They had two cars in the driveway and their garden shouted opulence. They didn’t invite him inside, but Leipfold glimpsed artwork on the walls and an expensive pair of Louboutins tucked carefully into an upcycled shoe rack. They had money all right.
And Leipfold had nothing, no money and no footage. But he did know that the Poplars of The Old Moat House on Wentworth Road had a home security system. And that they’d give him the footage if he could make them an offer.
* * *
Cholmondeley was looking curiously at the tyre marks when Leipfold arrived at the scene. The detective coughed and Cholmondeley looked up at him. They stared at each other for a couple of seconds and then Leipfold laughed and broke the silence.
“Jack Cholmondeley,” he said. “You old bastard. How the devil are you?”
“Leipfold,” the policeman grunted. He didn’t look pleased to see him. He nodded a terse acknowledgement before turning back to look at the tyre marks. “How long has it been?”
“Too long,” Leipfold said. “I bet I can guess why you’re here.”
“You’d win that bet, so I’m not going to take it,” Cholmondeley said. “You’re here for the same reason, I assume?”
Leipfold nodded. “I read about it in the paper,” he said.
“Looks like a pretty standard case to me,” Cholmondeley said. “What brought you out of that shit-heap office of yours?”
“Is the station any better?” Leipfold asked. “At least I don’t have to work with idiots.”
“Is that so?” Cholmondeley mused. “And who are you working with now, I wonder?”
Leipfold said nothing, taking the opportunity to duck under the police tape to get a closer look at the tyre tracks. Cholmondeley made no attempt to stop him. He knew from experience that trying to stop James Leipfold was like trying to stop a dog from digging up a bone.
“So what do you make of the case?” Cholmondeley asked. “I’ve got my best men working on it. Right now, my priority is finding the driver.”
“You won’t find the driver,” Leipfold replied. “You should focus your search on the car.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“Is it?” Leipfold murmured. “I wonder.”
He spun around and looked at Cholmondeley like he’d never seen the man before. “As you’re here, Jack,” Leipfold said, “I need a favour.”
“Why should I help you?” Cholmondeley asked. Leipfold hunkered down to take a closer look at the tyre tracks and then took out his mobile phone to snap a couple of photos.
“For old times’ sake,” Leipfold replied. “My business has gone to shit and I need a favour from an old friend. I’m not being paid for this job. I’m just doing it to survive. When I prove that this was no accident, the press will pick up on it. And when the press picks up on it, business will go through the roof. Until then, I’ve got nothing better to do than to start my own investigation. I’ll keep you in the loop if I find anything. What do you say?”
Cholmondeley looked shrewdly across at him. “Sounds like wishful thinking to me,” he said. “It’s not like you to ask for help.”
“Don’t get any funny ideas, Jack,” Leipfold said. “It’s just the once, and it’s not like I’ve never helped you out before.”
“Well that’s true,” Cholmondeley replied. “How did you know I’d be here?”
“I didn’t.”
Cholmondeley grinned. “Hell,” he said, “what’s the favour?”
“I need you to pay a visit to The Old Moat House on Wentworth Road,” Leipfold replied. “Talk to the couple there. They have some footage I want to look at. I think your boys will want to see it, too.”
Cholmondeley grunted and picked up his phone to call Mogford at the Vic. While his attention was elsewhere, Leipfold stepped outside the police tape and walked over to the flowers that the public had piled at the roadside. One or two of them had names on them, and a couple more included a scribbled prayer or a message of hope and condolence.
Leipfold read through them and took a step back to snap a photograph. Then he turned back to look at the flowers. His eyes alighted on a small bunch of lilies. They were partially hidden, but Leipfold brushed the other flowers aside and picked the lilies up by the stems. Then he read the message that was attached to them.
It simply said I’m sorry. Leipfold took a photograph of each side of the card, being careful not to touch it, as well as photos of the flowers themselves and their place amongst the rest of the displays. Then he walked back over to where Cholmondeley was finishing off his phone call.
“Now,” the policeman said. “Where were we?”
But Leipfold just smiled and said nothing.
* * *
Leipfold was idling at the lights when his mobile phone beeped. He reached into his pocket, glanced down at the screen and read the incoming message from Jack Cholmondeley. I’ve got the footage. Will send you a copy after we’ve processed it.
Leipfold smiled and put the phone back in his pocket. So far, so good, he thought.
The lights turned amber. He revved the engine before hitting two rights and a left as he looped his way back to the office on Balcombe Street. As he approached it, he idled the bike to a standstill and then flipped up his visor, removed his helmet, locked up the bike and walked towards the door.
A young woman was waiting outside.
She didn’t look like a typical client. She was insubstantial for a start, too thin by half and in need of a healthy dinner. She had messy black hair down to her shoulders with at least a half-dozen piercings across her face. She was wearing a tight-fitting leather jacket, a little like the one that Leipfold wore when he cruised the streets on the back of Camilla, and he could just make out the tip of an angel’s wing, tattooed across her skin and peeking out above her collar.
“Hello,” Leipfold said, uncertainly.
“Nice bike!” the stranger replied.
“She’s called Camilla,” he told her. “Don’t ask me why.”
“Good name.” She scrunched up her face and leaned in to get a good look at him. “You’re James Leipfold, aren’t you?” she asked.
“So what if I am?” Leipfold replied.
“I’m here about the ad you posted,” his visitor said. “You know, for an intern. My name’s Maile O’Hara. I do computers and stuff, and I think I can probably help you.”
Leipfold looked her up and down, all five and a half feet of her if you counted the boots she was wearing. He said, “I think you’ve come to the wrong place.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. She looked him up and down again. “You are James Leipfold. I know all about you. You served time and now you work for yourself because no one else will employ you. But you’re not a bad guy.”
Leipfold did a double take. Then he laughed. “How do you know all this?”
“Like I told you,” Maile said, “I’m good with computers.”
Leipfold looked her up and down again, then stepped around her to slip his key into the lock. He opened the door to the building and ushered Maile inside.
“Come on in,” he said. “Show me what you can do.”
Chapter Five: A Little Detective Work
IT WAS AN UNORTHODOX INTERVIEW, but Leipfold was an unorthodox employer. He didn’t know what to ask and Maile didn’t know how to answer him.
He looked over at
her appraisingly. Maile was in her mid-twenties, an alternative girl with a dozen tattoos. She was wearing a T-shirt and a sweater, as well as a pair of black jeans with a chain through the loops of her belt. Her hair was short and swept across her face. She was carrying a small black handbag with a yellow smiley face on it and wearing black plimsolls on her feet, black bands around her wrist and black nail varnish on her fingertips.
Leipfold, meanwhile, was a typical bloke, relatively short and somewhat stocky. He had short, ginger hair and steely blue eyes. The worry lines on his forehead stretched all the way up to his scalp, where his hair had already started to recede. So far, Maile hadn’t seen him smile. He just frowned at her while absentmindedly clicking the button of a pen in his breast pocket. After a long silence, Leipfold removed the pen, opened up his notebook and tried to figure out what to ask the woman who wanted to work with him.
“So,” he said, looking across at her. He’d offered her a seat in reception on one of the plastic chairs that he’d saved from a skip outside St. Martin’s. Leipfold stayed on his feet and loomed over her. It put him in a position of power, but Maile didn’t seem rattled. “Who died?”
“You got a problem with the way I look?”
“No,” Leipfold said. He coughed and pretended to write something down inside his notebook. “Okay then, next question. Why do you want the job?”
“It’s a challenge,” she replied. “Isn’t that enough?”
Leipfold smiled. “Perhaps,” he said. “And you can work for free? For now, at least?”
“Sure,” Maile replied. “Buy me a sandwich and find me a space for my computer. You do that and I’m yours.”
“I see,” Leipfold murmured. He was impressed by her spark and vivacity and won over by how she was willing to work for nothing. “If all goes well, we’ll bring in some new business and I can put you on the payroll. In the meantime, you’ve got yourself a deal. The sandwiches are on me. Now listen up. I need help with something.”
“Well, yeah,” Maile said. “If you didn’t, I wouldn’t be here. What do you need?”
Leipfold grunted and gestured for her to follow him to his computer. He pulled up the photos he’d taken of the flowers at the crash site.
“Your first task,” he explained, “will be to follow up with these. Find out who sent them and how they paid.”
“That’s it?” Maile laughed. “That’s easy. I’ll get right on it.”
“Great,” Leipfold said. “Consider the task a test. Get it done, then send me the results and head home. If you’re good enough, you start tomorrow.”
“Sure thing,” she replied.
“Well, go on then. What are you waiting for?”
Maile grinned. “The Wi-Fi password,” she said.
* * *
“I’ll try my best, darling,” Detective Inspector Jack Cholmondeley said, “but I can’t make any promises.”
Cholmondeley barely listened to his wife’s reply. He only called her in the first place because she’d left a voicemail saying she urgently needed to speak to him. It turned out to be about what he wanted for dinner. That would have been the end of the conversation, but she wasn’t happy because it took him six hours to get back to her. After twenty minutes on the line, she was still rambling on and on.
But Cholmondeley had a job to do. He made the usual sympathetic noises and ended the call with a brisk “love you” before putting the phone down. He wheeled around in his chair and almost had a coronary. Sergeant Gary Mogford was standing just inside the door, watching him with wry amusement.
“All right, boss?” he said.
“Mogford,” Cholmondeley growled, ignoring the look on his subordinate’s face. “How can I help you?”
“You can’t,” he replied, handing his boss a coffee in a Help for Heroes mug. “But maybe I can help you. Constable Groves is back from the crime scene with the footage you asked for.”
Cholmondeley grunted his approval. “Is it any good?”
“Not sure, boss. Couldn’t say. Haven’t seen it. There’s a hell of a lot of it and we’ll need someone to process it. To see if we can’t find something useful.”
“I have someone in mind,” Cholmondeley replied.
“Sir?”
“I’ll fill you in later. So where’s the footage?”
“It’s in the Cloud,” Mogford said.
“The what?”
“It’s been uploaded to the internet,” Mogford explained.
“Is that safe?”
Mogford shrugged. “It must be,” he said. “The order came down from above. It’s part of an effort to boost collaboration between stations. Something about miscommunication costing lives.”
“But if it’s on the internet, can’t everyone see it?” Cholmondeley asked. “Like the bastards we’re trying to catch in the first place, for instance?”
“God no,” Mogford said. “It’s encrypted and password-protected, all of that stuff. But you can log in with your badge number. I’ll send you the link so you can check it out. Groves has already had a look. She thinks she’s found the car, but…”
Cholmondeley looked up as the inspector trailed off. “But what?” he asked.
Mogford shrugged. “It’s weird, boss. She said there was no one behind the wheel.”
Cholmondeley stared at him, and Mogford took the hint and pulled up the footage on his laptop computer. The new recruits liked to joke about Mogford’s computer because it looked so fragile and delicate when he picked it up or typed away at it with his pudgy hands. When he was sitting at his desk, he hit the keys so hard that it shook, and yet he’d never mastered the art of typing with more than two fingers.
They watched the footage and then Mogford put it on a loop so they could look at it again and again. He put the machine down on a nearby table and looked at his superior officer.
“What do you think?” Mogford asked.
“Hmm,” Cholmondeley said. With the footage right there in front of him, it really did look like the black sedan had no one in the driver’s seat. “Let me look at it again.”
He watched it again and then again, and then he ordered Mogford to show him the two minutes before and the two minutes after. They watched it together in silence. There was no need for them to replay it.
“There was another car,” Cholmondeley said. “See if you can run the plates and find out who the driver was. It looked like a black cab, so check the register.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Mogford replied. “Even if it is a cab, we can’t do much without the plates. There are twenty-one thousand registered cabs in the city, guv. Or there were, last time I checked.”
“I’ll get Constable Cohen to ring every rank in the bloody city if I have to,” Cholmondeley said. “And who was that at the end of it?”
“Who, sir?”
“Rewind it,” he ordered. Mogford quickly did so, and they both stared intently at the screen. The last three seconds told a story of their own.
“There’s someone there,” Cholmondeley whispered. “A man, by the looks of it. Show me the rest of the footage. I want everything you’ve got. We need to find out who that is and what they saw.”
* * *
When the CCTV footage fell into Leipfold’s inbox, he clicked the download link and called Maile over to take a look at it. She perched herself awkwardly behind his shoulder while they waited for the attachment to download.
“You need to get high speed in here,” Maile said. “We’ll be here all day.”
Leipfold just grunted, and Maile resisted the urge to wander back over to her desk beside the door. She hated inactivity, and she could see from the download speed that they’d be waiting at least six minutes for it to finish. Six minutes was enough time for her to do a little more digging on the Thompson case, but instead she spent it sat behind Leipfold in silence, biting her fi
ngernails as he waited for the file to open.
When it did, her heart sank. She could see from the first few frames that the angle of the shot wasn’t great. Worse, there was no timestamp, which meant that they’d have to check through the footage until they found what they were looking for.
“Where did you even get this?” Maile asked.
Leipfold shrugged. “From an old friend,” he replied. “Someone who’s just as determined to solve this case as I am.”
“So it’s a race? I’m down with that.”
“It’s not a race,” Leipfold said. “Cholmondeley isn’t convinced there was even a crime, but I disagree. The silly old fool thinks it was some sort of accident. I’m trying to find out what really happened so that the case stays open until they find out who did it.”
“So, you think Donna was murdered?” Maile asked.
“Donna?” Leipfold asked, glancing across at her.
“Yeah, Donna,” Maile replied. “You know, Donna Thompson. The victim?”
“How did you know her name?” Leipfold asked. “It hasn’t been released yet. I’ve been through all the coverage I can find and it was withheld from every single article. So how did you find it out?”
“I have my sources,” Maile said. “You can find anything online if you know where to look.”
Leipfold smiled. “You’re pretty good,” he said. “If I had the cash, I’d keep you on.”
“If I needed cash, I wouldn’t be here,” Maile replied. “I’ve got something else for you, too. I did a little research on the flowers at the crash site. Found a florist who remembers the order.”
“Jesus,” Leipfold said. “There must be a hundred of the damn things in the city.”
“A couple hundred at least,” Maile replied. “More, if you count the petrol stations and supermarkets that sell cheap flowers to guilty husbands. But I ruled them out pretty quickly. The photo you took told a story to anyone who was ready to listen. The flowers were wrapped up and tied together with a little ribbon. Definitely not your typical low-end stuff.”