Driven (Leipfold Book 1)

by Dane Cobain

  Leipfold shrugged. “And how are you going to do that?” he asked.

  Maile laughed and opened a new tab on her laptop. “Ever heard of doxing?” she asked.

  Leipfold hadn’t heard of doxing, but it didn’t take Maile long to bring him up to speed. It was a technique that she’d used before, something par for the course for a millennial like her with a passion for technology and a habit of poking her nose into other people’s businesses.

  “It takes its name from the same root word as ‘documents,’” Maile explained, remembering Leipfold’s love of language. It often helped him out with tricky crossword clues, although that was as far as his interest went.

  Leipfold didn’t understand what she was talking about until she told him that she’d be using the internet to find sensitive information about Tom Townsend, the sort of stuff that the theatre director would probably prefer to keep private.

  “These days,” Maile said, “you can file a request for search engines to hide results. It’s called the right to be forgotten. But that only gets you pulled from the search engines, and the information is still online if you know where to look. Luckily, I do.”

  “You’re wasting your time,” Leipfold replied. “You should focus on Eleanor Thompson, the victim’s mother. There’s something not quite right there.”

  “One of your hunches?” Maile guessed. But Leipfold said nothing, and Maile ignored his suggestion and carried out the research. It didn’t take her long to find something.

  Tom Townsend was no angel. At least, not according to the charity chairman who’d accused him of embezzlement.

  * * *

  It was later that afternoon, and Maile had finished her report on Tom Townsend and started to look into the ad agency. Leipfold read the report with growing interest.

  According to Maile, Townsend’s theatre company had agreed to put on a show at a local arts centre. The chairman had handed him a cheque to cover the expenses, but no one turned up on the day of the performance. Townsend had ignored their calls and left no forwarding address, so when they finally managed to track him down, they served up a summons. The results of the hearing had been reported by several local newspapers. He’d won the case and kept the money and then moved on with his life.

  Leipfold finished reading the report, stacked it neatly on top of his desk and then walked over to see what Maile was doing.

  “Good news, boss,” Maile said. “The cameras are still working. Well, most of them. One’s offline, probably because something’s interfering with the signal, and another is at a funny angle. It’s pointing in the wrong direction but it still gives us a view of the street.”

  “Have you got the house in shot?” Leipfold asked.

  “Of course,” Maile replied. “That was the whole point of it. Don’t worry. If someone enters or leaves the place, we’ll know.”

  “Good. A lot of criminals go back to the scene of the crime. They remember things that they left behind or they double back to see what the cops are doing. Sometimes they take the risk because they have to. Sometimes they do it because they’re stupid.”

  Leipfold didn’t care why they did it. He was just glad that it gave people like him a chance to catch people like them – the criminal class – in the act.

  The day dragged on, and Maile made a surprising amount of progress in the case of the ad agency before switching her attention to Marie Rieirson. Leipfold was about to ask for a coffee when she gestured excitedly for him to come over for a look at her screen. The cameras were grainy at best, but there was no mistaking what was up there.

  “That’s her,” Maile said. “It has to be.”

  “Who?” Leipfold asked.

  “The cleaner,” Maile explained. “She found the body. I saw her when I went to set the cameras up. They were loading her into a police car when I was leaving. I wonder why she’s back there.”

  “Are you sure it’s her?”

  “Positive,” Maile insisted. “I’m telling you, it’s her. Look, she’s just standing outside the house and staring right at it.”

  Leipfold glanced at the screen and arrived at a decision almost immediately. “Keep an eye on her,” he instructed. “I’m going after her. Call me if she looks like she’s about to leave.”

  He grabbed his coat and raced out of the office. With no car or motorbike, he hopped on his bicycle and pedalled as fast as his muscular legs could manage.

  * * *

  Maile called him as he was on route, so he answered the phone hands-free and followed her directions as he navigated through the busy London traffic towards Marie Rieirson’s house. He knew roughly where it was, but he’d never bothered to memorise the city like the cab drivers. Luckily, Maile knew exactly where he needed to go, especially with the route on her screen in front of her. She had the map on the left and the video feeds on the right so she could keep Leipfold updated throughout the journey.

  She started to panic when the cleaner finally stopped staring at the house and started to walk away, but Leipfold told her to stay calm and to concentrate on the job at hand. He was a couple of minutes away at most, so Maile focused on firing off instructions as he pushed himself even harder. The bike was in its highest gear and he was risking life and limb every time he flew past a turning, but he reached the end of Rieirson’s road in a minute and a half.

  He idled up to the house another ten seconds later, while Maile asked him frantically for updates. The cleaner was nowhere to be seen, but Leipfold knew that time was of the essence and so he took a chance, heading further down the street and slowing at the turn-offs. On the third left, he saw a woman halfway down the road. Without knowing for sure whether it was the person he was looking for, Leipfold chased her down and jumped off the bike beside her. She looked suspiciously over at him, alarmed by his behaviour.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “I hope so,” Leipfold replied, pausing slightly to catch his breath. “This might be a strange question, but do you happen to know Marie Rieirson? Her house is just around the corner.”

  Without warning, the woman burst into tears. Leipfold found himself offering her a literal shoulder to cry on. He stroked the back of her head half-heartedly until she started to calm down and catch her breath.

  “Sorry,” she said, dabbing at her eyes with the sleeve of her jacket. “I’m so sorry about that. I’ve had a rough day. Yes, I know Miss Rieirson. Or rather, I knew her.”

  “You used to clean for her,” Leipfold said.

  “How did you know that?”

  “It’s my business to know things,” Leipfold replied. “Don’t worry, Miss…uh…”

  “Frankowska,” the woman said. “But you can call me Jowie. Everyone does.”

  Leipfold scrutinised her closely. She was a good-looking woman in her twenties with Latin skin and a hint of something else in her blood and face. Leipfold thought she looked exactly like a cleaner ought to look, but his only experience of household help came from bad porn movies. She was wearing a short blue dress which ended just above her knees and a pair of plain black heels. She had a silver crucifix around her neck and wore her hair tied back in a ponytail. She didn’t exactly look dressed for the job.

  “Well, Jowie,” Leipfold continued, “I’m a private detective, and today is your lucky day. You’re going to help me to put someone behind bars. Come with me. I’ll get you a coffee and you can tell me all about that rough day of yours.”

  To Leipfold’s surprise, Jowie acquiesced, and the two of them were soon sitting side-by-side in a Starbucks with a couple of lattes. Leipfold chatted about the weather and the latest headlines to set her mind at ease, and then he started to press her once she seemed ready to talk. Jowie explained that she’d arrived at her usual time to give the flat a once over, and so she’d let herself in with the spare key and gone through to the kitchen to drop off her supplies. Marie was usually
at work when Jowie did the cleaning, so she wasn’t surprised that the house was quiet. But the silence was broken when she walked through to the hallway and prepared to climb the stairs.

  “She was there,” Jowie said, shivering slightly despite the heating, which was cranked up to the max to entice passers-by to come in from the cold. “Right there at the bottom of the stairs. She had blood in one of her ears. She wasn’t moving, so I called an ambulance and rushed over. The police said she was probably dead by the time that I got there.”

  “Did you notice anything suspicious?” Leipfold asked.

  Jowie looked at him while she decided how much to trust him. “I’m not sure,” she said, eventually. “Maybe. It might be nothing, it’s just…well, she just wasn’t right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was her expression,” Jowie said. “Like a cat that’s been backed into a corner. She looked angry, maybe a little scared. I was scared too, but not like that. I think she knew what was coming.”

  “You mean she knew she was going to die?”

  Jowie shrugged and used a napkin to wipe a tear from her eye, being careful not to smudge her eyeliner.

  “Is there anything else you can tell me about Marie Rieirson?” Leipfold asked, gently bringing her back to the present.

  “Not that I can think of,” Jowie replied. “She kept herself to herself. Only…well, there is one thing.”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s probably nothing,” Jowie explained. “It’s just that a couple of weeks ago, when I was cleaning the place, an old lady came by. She knocked on the door and was shouting through the letterbox. Something about money, but that’s all I remember. It seemed harmless enough at the time.”

  “Interesting,” Leipfold murmured. “Would you recognise the woman if you saw her again?”

  “I only saw her from the top of the stairs, so I couldn’t swear to it. But I can have a go if you think it’ll help.”

  Leipfold thanked her and pulled his phone from his pocket. He flicked through the apps until he found the one he was looking for, then booted it up and started flipping through the folders. Jowie didn’t recognise the first photo, nor the second or the third. Then she saw the fourth.

  “That’s her,” she said. “I’m sure it’s her.”

  “How sure?” Leipfold asked.

  “Pretty sure,” Jowie said.

  “But not entirely,” Leipfold murmured, glancing down at his phone again.

  “Who is that woman, anyway?” Jowie asked.

  Leipfold shook his head, slowly. “Her name is Eleanor Thompson,” he explained. “And before you ask, I have no idea what she was doing there.”

  * * *

  Leipfold was acting strangely and Maile was worried. He’d seemed okay the night before when he came back from his chat with Jowie Frankowska. But when Maile entered the office on a dreary Wednesday morning, nine days after Donna Thompson’s body had been found, Leipfold had the look of a man possessed. He’d spent the night in the office, working feverishly to map out the thoughts that were whizzing back and forth through his head and bringing on the worst migraine that he’d had since his drinking days.

  Maile gasped audibly when she entered the room and took in the scene. One wall was covered with scribbled Post-it Notes, blown-up photographs, newspaper clippings and web printouts. Leipfold had assembled them in some sort of order, then moved them so often and jotted so many notes on top of them that it was almost unintelligible. He’d skipped the cliché of setting up a cobweb of strings to connect them all together, but he’d made up for it by ruining the plaster with a thousand tiny pinpricks. If the current state of his debatable masterpiece was anything to go by, he hadn’t managed to get anywhere.

  He hasn’t even looked at the crossword, Maile thought. That’s not like him at all.

  He had the radio on, but he wasn’t listening to it. Maile thought that was probably a good thing. It was tuned to Radio 1, and Bieber was singing about it being too late to say sorry. The song set Maile’s teeth on edge, and she wondered – not for the first time – why teenage girls were so quick to jump on a bandwagon.

  Maile coughed, but the boss didn’t turn around.

  “Hello?” she asked. “Boss? Are you okay?”

  There was no response.

  “Jesus,” she said. “It must be bad.”

  Leipfold remained silent, so Maile reached over to the radio and fiddled with the buttons until she’d successfully switched it over to XFM. It wasn’t much better, but it would have to do.

  Who the hell still listens to the radio anyway? she thought.

  Maile wondered whether Leipfold was back on the bottle or whether he’d gone stir-crazy after staying up all night and working too hard. She’d heard stories about people cracking under pressure, but she never thought she’d have to watch as it happened. Not that she could blame him. Business was bad. While the boss never seemed too worried about money when they talked about the Thompson case, she’d caught him looking up payday loans and comparing repayment rates and terms and conditions.

  Another thought flashed unbidden across Maile’s mind.

  Shit, she thought. I hope he’s all right.

  Chapter Eighteen: A Grip on the Case

  LEIPFOLD’S MOOD changed quickly, like the flip of a light switch. He cycled home to grab a shower. Maile assumed he’d take the chance to get some sleep, but he was back within the hour looking fresher than ever. He breezed airily into the office like a new man, ready to go over the case all over again.

  Twenty minutes later, his mood changed again, and he snapped at Maile for humming a tune while finalising her latest report on the agency’s runaway creative. It was dull, unpleasant work, so she had her headphones half on and half off with one ear free to listen for the phone. She didn’t even know she was humming until Leipfold shouted, “Shut the hell up so I can think for a minute!”

  Maile acquiesced, and fifteen minutes later he was in a good mood again. He made Maile a cup of coffee by way of an apology and then sat down beside her to take a look at the day’s crossword. It took them eight and a half minutes.

  “Not bad,” Leipfold murmured, cutting it out of the paper and adding it to his collection, which he kept in a folder in his bottom drawer. “Not bad at all, especially with no sleep and not enough coffee. Today’s going to be a good day.”

  Leipfold started whistling a tune. Maile recognised it as the same one she’d been humming earlier, a nu-metal song from the turn of the century that her boss had probably never heard before.

  “I’m in a good mood, Maile,” Leipfold said. “A very good mood.”

  “You are? Why’s that, then?”

  “No reason,” Leipfold replied. “None at all. Listen, why don’t you take the day off today? It’s not like I’m going to need you.”

  Maile glared at him. Without meaning to, he’d hurt her feelings, just like everyone else always did. That’s why she hated getting close to people, but Leipfold was different, or so she’d thought. But he wasn’t being a dick. He was just tactless, and her gaze softened slightly as she realised he thought he was doing something nice for her. And so she did as he suggested and headed home.

  But she wasn’t done working. Not by a long shot. She had a couple of lines of enquiry to follow up on, as well as some new marketing ideas that might just save the business. Kat was out, of course. She had a proper job to go to in a shiny office in the city centre where coffee was covered by the company and bosses gave presentations about share prices and returns on investment. But that meant that Maile had the place to herself, and she could lounge around with her feet up while she trawled the net and made notes about whatever she was able to find. And because it was, after all, her day off, she also played a little Warcraft.

  * * *

  Jack Cholmondeley was worried.

  He was sit
ting alone in his office, squeezing blue stress putty between his powerful fingers. He liked to play with it while he was thinking, to stretch it out and swing it around or to flatten it into a vague sphere and to bounce it up and down off the surface of the desk. Strictly speaking, it was medicinal. At least, that was what he’d told Gary Mogford. It had been a gift from Mary one Christmas, the latest weapon in the battle against arthritis. Cholmondeley didn’t have arthritis, but he did have a hell of a lot of stress to deal with. The blue goo was as decent an aide as anything else, bar cigarettes, but Mary had made him give those up, too.

  There was a knock at the door and Constable Groves entered the room with an air of nervousness blowing after her like dust from the street into a shopping centre.

  “Constable Groves,” Cholmondeley said. He offered her a chair on the other side of his mahogany desk and waited for her to sink into it. “How can I help you?”

  Groves shook her head. “It’s the other way around today, sir,” she replied. “I can help you. We’ve had the results back on the Thompson girl’s mobile phone.”

  “I thought the tech boys already had a look at it.”

  “They did,” Groves said. “But forensics got their hands on it first. The DNA results were inconclusive, although they’re running more tests and they’re hopeful. But they did find something.”

  “What?” Cholmondeley asked. He leaned across his desk towards her, resting his elbows on the elegant woodwork. “What is it?”

  “They found a couple of fingerprints,” Groves said. “It took a little work to clear them up and they had to enhance them on the computer, but they got a match.”

  “Will it be admissible in court?”

  “Should be,” Groves said. “That’s what we pay them for. We got three sets of prints.”

  “Three?” Cholmondeley exclaimed. “Christ, the damn thing changed hands more times than a kilo of coke. Who did they match?”

  Groves grinned. She’d already printed out a copy of the report, and she handed it to the old man as she talked him through it.