She tells Felix about the podcast, how she is afraid her life will be ripped apart if he can’t help her put a stop to it. When she’s finished talking, he remains quiet for so long she wonders if he’s going to hang her out to dry on this one.
“Jessy,” he says eventually, “I wouldn’t do this for anybody, but you know I think of you as family. I can help you, but I think it would be best if we meet to talk about it. You know I don’t trust phones. Can you come and see me tomorrow?”
She doesn’t want to. The thought of it makes her skin crawl, but she doesn’t see that she has a choice, if a meeting is what he wants. This favor is on a bigger scale than the last time. It’ll be more difficult for him. They agree on a lunchtime appointment. It means she can be back in Bristol by the time Erica gets home from her course, which is something at least.
Once the call has ended, Jess goes to the bedroom and sits at her dressing table. She gazes at her reflection in the mirror, then gently pushes the skin on her cheeks back and upward and glimpses a version of her younger self.
She glimpses Erica in her own features, too. They look alike. She has raised Erica so differently from Charlie, and she wonders again if she should have taught her daughter to be more streetwise. It was a conscious choice for Jess not to raise her daughter that way, but to protect her instead. It was a decision she made because Charlie was more savvy and streetwise than he should have been and it didn’t help him in the end, but for the first time Jess wonders if a different upbringing would mean Erica was less vulnerable to threat. Because a threat is exactly what the podcast feels like.
She releases her skin and it settles back into place. She wonders what Felix will think of her now. She wonders what she will think of him and whether there will be any attraction between them after all these years, and immediately feels guilty for the thought. She opens her wardrobe and begins to lay clothes on her bed, putting together outfits that might work for the trip to London. In the end, she narrows it down to two possibilities. Both cover as much flesh as possible.
Chapter 10
Fletcher takes the Peter Dale case files home and dumps the crate on the dining table. The high sheen his wife used to rub into the table every week has been gone for as long as she has. The surface is dull and marked by a pattern of pale interlocking rings left by the bases of mugs, wineglasses, and the noodle pots Fletcher has been eating most nights, interspersed with a bit of frying. Fletcher decants the contents of the crate onto the table and sits down before remembering he’s forgotten to take his coat off. He can’t be bothered to get up again so he wriggles out of the coat and drops it on the floor. Since his wife left, he’s found bittersweet pleasure in doing things she would have chided him for.
He fixes himself baked beans on toast and eats it at the table. He drinks a glass of wine with it and finds himself staring at the space on top of the upright piano where the family photos used to be. Two sons, he thinks, and neither one loyal to him after the divorce. He expected it of Theo, his younger child, always a mother’s boy, but for his elder son, Andrew, to side with his mother feels like a sharp betrayal to Fletcher. Andrew is a son to be proud of. Fletcher tries to give him a call, but Andrew’s voice mail picks up with its familiar and never-fulfilled promise that he’ll return the call ASAP.
In the silence after he’s left his son a message, Fletcher once again considers the photograph of Hazel Collins, the secretary of the missing man. He estimates she must be in her seventies by now. He hopes she’s alive because she’s a person of immediate interest to him. She reported Peter Dale missing and she worked closely with him. He pours another glass of wine and begins to go through each and every paper carefully. He intends to build a list of persons of interest. Hazel Collins is the first name he writes down.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING starts well. Good news and the buzz of the office help Fletcher shake off the blues after a sleepless night. Hazel Collins proves easy to track down even though she has moved from the address they had for her originally. Her new home is on a smart street overlooking the Clifton Suspension Bridge. It’s the best view in town. Danny speaks to her daughter Annabel, who lives with Hazel, and learns that the older woman is in reasonable but not entire possession of her faculties and will be happy to see them at any time after eleven A.M.
At ten minutes past eleven, Fletcher and Danny climb the black-and-white-tiled front steps of Hazel Collins’s address. It’s a four-story Georgian house painted pastel blue. The original decorative balcony adorns the first floor and its black-and-white-striped awning has been freshly painted. Hazel Collins’s property is on the ground floor. Inside the building, the staircase in the atrium is ornate. Wood paneling wraps around the space to waist height, with striped wallpaper above it. Three letter trays are neatly arranged on a console table, labeled with residents’ names. Hanging above the table is a large watercolor of the suspension bridge in a gilt frame. This place isn’t what Fletcher imagined based on the photograph he saw of Hazel Collins in the case notes. He wonders where the money has come from.
A woman stands in the doorway of the ground-floor flat. She’s young but well dressed in ballet pumps, formfitting jeans, and a tucked-in shirt. “Annabel Collins,” she says. Her handshake is firm. At her invitation, they step directly into a generous-sized sitting room. Fletcher takes in a grand piano and floor-to-ceiling windows offering a spectacular view of the bridge. Sunlight glints on the bridge’s parabolic steel girders, and behind it, the sheer face of the densely wooded gorge is in shadow, creating a still, dark backdrop.
Annabel Collins shows them through a formal dining area and a midsize but grandly appointed kitchen to a courtyard garden, where an elderly woman is kneeling beside a bed of roses. She’s mulching them carefully. Fletcher’s nostrils curl at the mild whiff of manure. “She still likes to garden,” Annabel says to the detectives and then, louder, says, “Mum! Do you want to come in and have a chat? About Peter? Remember I told you the detectives were coming.”
Annabel Collins seats Fletcher and Danny in the sitting room, and they wait an age while she helps her mother get out of her coat and boots and the older woman washes her hands. When Hazel finally takes a seat opposite them, Fletcher can’t help noticing the bloody wounds on her liver-spotted knuckles where the rose thorns have caught her. She’s wearing a soft knitted turtleneck sweater in pale blue and a generous string of pearls. Her pure white curls look windswept after her gardening efforts, but they’ve been carefully tended at some point this morning. There’s a hint of vacancy in her cloudy eyes. She looks very old to be Annabel’s mother.
Annabel serves tea from a pot and milk from a solid silver creamer. She hands the detectives tiny teaspoons for stirring and Fletcher feels as if he’s walked onto the set of Downton Abbey.
“Mummy!” Annabel says when Hazel appears to doze. “The detectives are here to talk about Peter. Remember?”
Hazel Collins looks from Danny to Fletcher and says, “Peter ran away to Venezuela.”
“Well, that’s the thing,” Danny says. “I’m afraid we’ve got some news about Peter.”
The old woman’s expression remains blank. It’s impossible to know how much she’s taking in.
“Did you know Peter Dale?” Danny asks Annabel. She shakes her head. Danny focuses on the old lady and speaks exaggeratedly clearly. “Ms. Collins, I’m so sorry to tell you that Peter died.”
“Peter’s dead?” she asks.
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
Hazel Collins shuts her eyes abruptly, as if the thin skin of her eyelids was a shield against reality. Perhaps, Fletcher thinks, that’s what it comes down to at her time of life: your last line of defense is your eyelids. When she stays that way for a few moments longer than is comfortable, he and Danny exchange a glance and Fletcher can tell Danny is thinking the same as him: Is she alive? Hazel Collins’s sweater lies loosely across her chest, held aloft by breasts that must be encased in a formidable bra. It makes it difficult to see if she’s breathing.
/> “Mum?” Annabel Collins asks. “Mummy!” She pats the back of her mother’s hand gently. Fletcher notes she’s careful to avoid the bloody scrapes from the rose thorns. There’s tenderness between these two. Hazel’s eyes snap open. Her eyes look milky. Fletcher searches her face for signs of lucidity, feeling his frustration build. A cabinet clock ticks dully while they wait for her response. It comes in the form of a gesture. Hazel Collins reaches a trembling, liver-spotted hand toward Fletcher. “Was he murdered?” she asks. Fletcher feels as if he catches the words a few seconds after her mouth has formed them.
“What makes you say that?” Danny asks.
Like a nodding dog ornament on a dashboard, she moves her head laboriously to look at Danny. Everything she does is so slow it makes Fletcher’s joints feel as if they’re liquefying under the strain of being patient.
“Peter would have taken the rings off a dead man’s fingers,” she says. Annabel Collins’s eyes widen. Her mother laughs, as if delighted. “He knew how to treat a lady in bed, though,” she adds. Fletcher thinks he sees her wink, but he’s not sure. Danny shuffles forward in his seat, paying close attention. “Is that right?” he says, all cheeky dimples and mischief in his eyes—nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Thank god he’s got the energy to run with this. Fletcher finds it too surreal. Hazel Collins seems to live as if she were born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but talks like a bawdy fishwife. “Best lover I ever had,” she says.
“Mummy! That’s not appropriate. Really, it’s not.” Annabel flushes. “Sorry,” she mouths to Fletcher.
Danny ignores her. He’s totally focused on Hazel. “Were you lovers?” he asks.
But Hazel’s eyelids have begun to droop, even though traces of a smile linger at the edges of her lips. She forces them open again and manages to answer with a bit of vigor. “Were we ever!” she says. “He wasn’t much to look at, but then nor was I. But between the sheets looks don’t really matter, if you know what I mean? It’s what they can do for you.”
“You’re not wrong,” Danny says, though Fletcher notices even he’s pinking up a little on the cheeks now.
“Happy days,” Hazel Collins says, “happy bloody days.” Her eyelids droop once again and this time they remain shut. It’s as if she’s delivered a definitive pearl of wisdom and considers her work is done. Her mouth falls open wide as if her jaw pivots on a broken hinge, and Fletcher notices her dentures slacken. Within seconds, she’s snoring.
“I’m so sorry,” Annabel says. “I don’t know what got into her. She’s not normally crude.”
The way Annabel says crude makes it sound as if it’s a rude word itself. She’s prim, Fletcher thinks. He can see her reflection in the raised lid of the baby grand piano as she stands up. Polished to a shine, it reminds him of his ex-wife.
“Do you play?” he asks Annabel. He’s on his feet now, peering into the piano’s guts, all of those taut, perfectly placed strings and orderly hammers that have the potential to create such wild, beautiful sound.
“I do,” she replies. She doesn’t elaborate and Fletcher feels a bit piqued. He knows his Chopin from his Beethoven well enough, but he also knows he probably doesn’t give that impression. When he was young, he had a fire in his eyes that elevated him in people’s estimation in spite of his scruffy appearance. They excused his sartorial failings as part and parcel of his brilliance—it was allowed when he was getting results—but age and the ebbing of ambition have robbed him of that exemption. Painful as it is to him, he understands how unappealing he can seem to the young, so he resists the temptation to say anything more.
Annabel walks toward the door, words tossed back over her shoulder as she does: “I’ll get your coats. You’ll have to come back if you want to talk to Mum. She’ll be asleep for a few hours after the gardening and everything.”
On the doorstep Fletcher wraps a scarf around his neck and buttons up his overcoat. He takes his time. No rush on this job, with the body being twenty years old. He sucks in the cold air.
“Did you notice?” he asks Danny as they walk.
“What?” The penny hasn’t dropped for Danny, probably because he hasn’t studied the file in as much detail as Fletcher.
“Annabel Collins is the spit of Peter Dale.”
Danny stops. “No shit,” he says. He forages around his mouth with his tongue as if he’s got something stuck in his teeth, and the crease between his eyes deepens. “Did the original investigators know that Hazel Collins had a relationship with Dale?”
“It’s not in the files,” Fletcher says.
“Who ran the case?”
“A DS, I’ll have to remind myself what his name is. He’s long gone. He retired in 2003.” They’ll be referring to me like that soon, Fletcher thinks as he says it, as if I never existed. It pains him to think that the only legacy you could leave after a lifetime career in CID is to be a forgettable name in the archived file of an incompetently run case. “It would be good to speak to him.”
“If you’re right, it puts Hazel Collins front and center as a suspect,” Danny says.
“It does. And she’s come into money from somewhere. Her address twenty years ago was for a property worth a quarter of the value of that flat. She was working as a PA. It’s not the kind of job that offers an obvious salary jump.”
“Do you think Annabel Collins is aware of who her father is?”
“I don’t know,” Fletcher says. “But I doubt it.”
He cracks his fingers one by one, and feels like he might finally be ready for the day. “Want me to drive?” he asks. Danny chucks him the keys and Fletcher catches them with one hand. “Gonna be a long, long sunshiny day,” he croons as the car indicator thumps and he eases into the traffic. He takes a steep road down the side of the gorge toward the city center. Blades of sunlight cut through the trees and flash across the windscreen as they descend. “Gonna be a long, long drive if you keep singing,” Danny says, but he’s smiling all the same. There’s nothing they like better than a break in a case.
“Is it nature or nurture?” Howard Smail asks. Fletcher can tell he doesn’t want an answer because Smail doesn’t even draw breath before adding, “You’d never know with a kid like Charlie Paige because his mother hasn’t given him a chance, not a hope in hell. I’m not saying that kid is better off dead, God knows I’m not, but you know how he would have ended up, don’t you, with a start like this?”
Smail selects a statement from the stack he has in front of him. “This one’s from the woman who runs the newsagent’s on the estate: ‘Scott and Charlie and Cody were into nicking. They used to nick sweets from the shop and milk from the van in the morning, and from the stalls in the market. They were bold as brass.’” Smail plucks another statement from the pile. “This one’s from a Mr. Dennis George. Runs a stall at the market. Says the same thing.”
“I wouldn’t trust Dennis George as far as I could throw him,” Fletcher says.
“There are more. They’re all variations on the same theme. It makes me think, did those boys do something to somebody that crossed a line? Did they push things too far and somebody snapped?”
“Could have,” Fletcher replies. “Though might it have just been mischief? Boys being boys and all that?” He checks his watch.
“Time to visit Paradise?” Smail asks.
Fletcher nods. He’s feeling stretched. This won’t be the only moment during the investigation when he wishes he could be in two places at once. He could do with time to look over the sheaf of statements in more detail alongside Smail and to work on their evolving strategy. He’s running on cups of instant coffee and canteen sandwiches that have been refrigerated long enough to turn the bread to rubber. A visit to Paradise Casino is important, though, and they’re about to open their doors for the early crowd. Fletcher wants to be there when they do.
The casino is a single-story nondescript building that looks more like an industrial warehouse than a gambling mecca. It sits on a bit of undeveloped land beside the floating
harbor and a stonemason’s yard. The parking area is almost empty. At the door, Fletcher has a low-key word with a security guard who could have been picked out of central casting. Fletcher wants cooperation, so he’s careful not to draw overt attention to the fact that he and Danny are police officers. Not that there are many punters to take notice.
While they wait, Fletcher takes a look around. It’s lunchtime, but it could be the middle of the night. There are no windows. Everything is artificially lit. Camera lenses glint amongst the mirrored tiles in the ceiling. There are rows of one-armed bandits and five blackjack tables. A game is already under way at one of them. The dealer’s a kid who doesn’t look old enough to have left school. He’s wearing a bow tie and a waistcoat over a crisp white shirt that has picked up a blue hue from the lighting. His hair is slicked back with something oily. A middle-aged woman and a man in his twenties sit on the other side of the table. Smoke curls from a cigarette that’s resting on an ashtray on the edge of the baize. The woman makes eyes at the dealer. Fletcher doesn’t think she’s here just for the gambling. The young man stares at his cards and plays with his chips. He cups them in his palm before dropping them onto the table, one upon another—a paltry stack. Dinner money. Beyond their immediate environs, Fletcher can see a bar and the entrance to at least one other room, where he suspects more serious gambling takes place. The bar is empty apart from a woman who’s pushing a vacuum cleaner across the floor. A cascade of electronic sounds from the slot machines drowns out any noise it might be making.
The security guard returns and deferentially ushers Fletcher and Danny through a door you wouldn’t notice unless you knew it was there. The scene behind it is a world away from the casino floor. They walk down a bare-walled corridor. The walls have been glossed in off-white so long ago they’ve acquired a creamy hue and a greasy texture; the gray linoleum floor has seen better days.
They reach a door that has a paper sign pinned on it. It says THE BOSS. The security guard knocks, opens the door without waiting for an answer, and shows Fletcher and Danny into a decent-sized office. A man steps out from behind the desk. He is wearing a sharp gray suit jacket that he buttons up with one hand as he offers them the other. Fletcher suspects he’s had a hair transplant. He doesn’t smile, but Fletcher isn’t sensing hostility either.
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