The Elephant Girl (Choc Lit)

by Gyland, Henriette

  The bottom drawer was locked. Using a trick she’d learned at the children’s home she’d lived in for a while, where everything was always under lock and key, even food, she pulled out the drawer above it, then lifted it out of the catch which stopped it from sliding all the way out, and put it on the floor. Then she ran her finger inside the bottom drawer, flicked the locking mechanism at the front, and pulled it out.

  The drawer was full of papers and folders. Helen began riffling through the contents. There had to be something important in here, what, she didn’t know, but the fact that the drawer had been locked spoke volumes.

  ‘Aha,’ said Charlie.

  Helen looked up. ‘You found something?’

  ‘Did I find something? I hit the jackpot!’ She pointed to a spreadsheet on the screen, similar to the one they’d found on Letitia’s office computer. ‘And there’s more.’ She minimised the open document and clicked on the directory. File after file appeared on screen, each given a name and the year which the figures covered, stretching back years. Evidence that Letitia’s little scheme had been going on for a long time.

  The numbered files didn’t go as far back as the year Helen’s mother was murdered, so whatever had led to that, it couldn’t be this. Unless it was because they didn’t use computerised records back then.

  ‘She didn’t even have a password on this directory,’ Charlie said with a disgusted snort. ‘Probably thinks she’s completely safe.’

  ‘By why would she keep the information going back that far? If she was investigated, it’d be an open and shut case.’

  ‘To keep all these people on their toes, I imagine. See all those names in the file? And I bet this isn’t the only copy.’

  Helen ran her eyes down the list, looking for one particular name, but Moody wasn’t on it. Now she definitely was disappointed – he’d fitted the bill of the cold-blooded killer so well.

  ‘It looks like our lady boss likes to live on the edge,’ said Charlie. ‘Or maybe she just likes to open a file to see how clever she is. Personally I think she’s being bloody stupid, but there you go.’

  ‘So do we print this out?’

  ‘I’ll e-mail it to my hotmail account. And don’t worry, she won’t even know I was here.’

  Charlie opened the e-mail, sent the file, then deleted any traces of her intervention, her fingers working so fast Helen couldn’t keep up.

  ‘Let’s see who talks to your aunt,’ she said, and opened the most recent e-mails, skim-read them until she stopped at a subject heading entitled Final Stage. ‘This was three days ago.’ Charlie read out pertinent bits. ‘“delivery of the statues … Warehouse 14, off Nine Elms Lane … time 2.00 a.m., date 27 July.” That’s in two hours’ time. Is this warehouse one of ours?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘We need to go there.’

  ‘How do we get in? I don’t have any more keys.’

  ‘We’ll figure it out when we get there. I’ll just forward this to myself, then we can go.’ Charlie’s fingers flew across the keyboard, and when she’d sent the e-mail, she took a picture of the screen with her phone, as well as of the computer with recognisable items in the background. ‘There,’ she said, ‘now it’ll be obvious where and when we read this e-mail.’

  Grinning to herself, Helen went back to the papers in the drawers. She sensed Charlie was getting nervous. She was anxious to get out of here too, but still hoped to find something to point the finger at Moody. Nothing stood out, nothing that she’d understand at any rate, although an officer in the Fraud Squad might.

  At the bottom two empty foolscap folders had been jammed in sideways, stopping whatever was underneath them from accidentally spilling out. Helen removed the folders as carefully as she could without ripping them, then lifted up a flat, biscuit-coloured item.

  She turned it over, then sat back on her haunches in shock. Her heart beat loudly against her chest, and her head echoed with a cry she hadn’t uttered. She was holding something she thought she’d never see again.

  Her mother’s elephant bag.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  There was no doubt, it was Mimi’s old shopping bag. Hugging the rough canvas to her chest, she allowed it to invoke memories of her mother, the house they lived in, the life they had with all its ordinariness. Memories so strong she was transported back to the car, to that moment of childish anxiety where she’d fretted over the medicine and not wanting to disturb her mother about the lady in the other car.

  With her adult’s hindsight, those worries seemed so pointless now. How she’d give anything to have that moment back no matter how imperfect it was, knowing that if she’d only spoken out, she might have changed the course of her entire life and never been any the wiser.

  Instead it had ploughed on relentlessly to this painful point where she could do nothing but hug her dead mother’s bag and mourn her loss.

  Unable to stop herself, a strangled sound escaped her throat.

  ‘What is it?’ said Charlie.

  Helen didn’t answer, couldn’t answer. The words stuck in her throat as it constricted until she could hardly breathe. Waves of nausea rolled over her, smoke clouded her vision. A star exploded behind her eyes.

  ‘Oh, shit, not here!’ Charlie tried to shake her back into consciousness. ‘Come on, for God’s sake!’

  Her panicked voice was the only fixed point in this black hole. Helen tried to hang on to that, concentrated on Charlie’s voice, on Charlie’s hands on her shoulders.

  ‘I’ve got to get you out of here!’

  Through her numbness Helen sensed Charlie lifting her off the floor, placing her in a chair, heard crashing and banging although it didn’t really register.

  Slowly the sensation returned to her fingers, then her arms, torso, neck. Her joints were leaden, and she felt bone weary. The world began to make sense again. She saw that Charlie had switched off the computer, everything was what it had been like before, pristine and impersonal, except the bottom drawer which was still open. The only real difference was the jute bag in her arms.

  She took a deep breath and exhaled raggedly.

  ‘You scared the hell out of me,’ said Charlie.

  Helen opened her mouth to apologise but nothing came out.

  ‘Is it always like this?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Charlie put her hand on her shoulder. ‘I think we’d better get out of here. We got what we came for. What’s this bag?’

  ‘It was my mother’s.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘As sure as I can be. I was only five when she died.’

  Charlie frowned. ‘You need to put it back where you found it.’

  ‘No! I want to keep it! I want to show it to the police as proof.’

  ‘Proof of what?’

  ‘That my aunt killed my mother!’

  ‘I thought you had Moody down for that.’

  ‘I don’t know, I just don’t know, okay!’ Helen clutched the bag.

  ‘Don’t lose it, all right,’ said Charlie. ‘Listen, it doesn’t prove anything. Maybe Letitia has the same sort of bag. She probably bought it in Marks & Spencer’s or John Lewis or somewhere like that. There are probably hundreds of them and—’

  ‘Then why hide it?’

  ‘Maybe she isn’t hiding it. She just keeps it there for, I dunno, carrying stuff around. Anyway, why would she keep it if she killed your mother? She’d have thrown it away. I know I would.’

  Charlie reached for the bag, but Helen held it out of her reach, and she sighed.

  ‘Okay, let’s say for argument’s sake it is your mum’s bag. If you take it, to show it to the police or whatever, Letitia will know you were here and wonder what else you’ve seen. You want to risk that?’

  She shook her head, still clutching the bag. Even if Charlie was right, leaving it behind would mean cutting the ties to the only true memory of her mother. She couldn’t do it. ‘It may not be proof enough for the police,’ she
said, ‘but at least I’ll have something of hers.’

  ‘You can’t take it,’ Charlie insisted, ‘but tell you what, we’ll take a picture of it.’ She used her phone again and snapped a picture of the bag. ‘Now, can we please get out of here?’

  They checked everything was back in place and left. They’d found no link to Moody, but maybe they would have more luck at the warehouse.

  What Helen had found was proof of how easy it was for the picture she’d built up about her own world to be smashed to pieces. Again. She’d suspected her aunts of being involved in her mother’s death, then dismissed it, then suspected it again, and now she had proof of … well, exactly nothing, as Charlie had put it, because there could be hundreds of bags like this one.

  Her life wasn’t an Agatha Christie mystery where one clue after another was uncovered, leaving no doubt in the investigator’s mind of the guilty party and how they should be punished. People were complex. They had both good and bad in them. Accepting that was the first step towards growing up, she saw now with a sudden clarity.

  The moment she was the closest to finding out what happened was ironically also the moment she realised she’d been five years old inside for the past twenty years. Perhaps her mind had filled in the gaps between what happened, and what she thought happened, so it wasn’t all just a big empty space, but she was pretty certain the bag wasn’t a false memory. She’d sat on the back seat next to it and seen it for herself, stuffed full of papers and computer discs. The bag in the drawer was identical, if not the bag, whatever Charlie said, or Wilcox would said. It wasn’t her ‘desperate mind’ making things up …

  As they slipped out of Letitia’s apartment building, an engine revved on the other side of the road, startling them both.

  ‘What the hell was that about?’ said Charlie.

  A cold feeling curled down Helen’s spine, and she followed the sleek, dark car with her eyes as it sped down the road where it turned a corner in a screech of brakes. The image of Fay’s broken body came back to her, and she swallowed hard.

  I’m seeing ghosts, she thought. The world was full of dark cars. Nothing to worry about.

  ‘Probably nothing. Someone in a hurry.’

  ‘Made me jump, I can tell you.’

  ‘I don’t think we should go to that warehouse,’ said Helen. ‘I have a really nasty feeling about this.’

  ‘Oh, come on, we want to find out what Letitia is up to. Now’s our chance. And we may get Moody too. That’s what you want.’

  No, Helen thought, I want my mother’s killer. Whoever that may be.

  Jason woke feeling cold and found himself sprawled on his stomach, clutching a cushion. The room was dark apart from the street light across the road, but he needed no light to tell him he was alone.

  He sat up and felt the space on the other half of the bed where Helen’s warm naked body had been, but the bed cover was quite cool. She hadn’t just slipped to the bathroom, then; she’d been gone for a while.

  Fumbling on the floor for his clothes, his hand bumped against something. Helen’s rucksack. Some papers and a notebook had spilled out of the open top. He switched on the bedside light and gathered up the papers, putting them back in the bag without looking at them. He’d already gone through her personal things once, and didn’t want to do it again.

  The notebook, bound by silver-green Indian silk and tied with a ribbon, intrigued him, though. For a start, it was very girlie, unlike Helen, and also because it looked like the sort of notebook a woman might use for a diary. He’d be a right shit if he intruded on her private thoughts, but what if it contained some information about his father? He wanted to know what she knew.

  He was disappointed. The notebook contained nothing more than a few notes detailing various tasks relating to her job, a couple of shopping lists, and a loose piece of paper with a list of clothes shops – no, boutiques – in the most expensive part of London, and not her kind of places at all.

  He was closing it again, when he noticed a pocket on the inside cover with what looked like a business card sticking out of it. Pulling out the card, he whistled when he saw the logo for Scotland Yard and the name of a Detective Inspector K. M. Whitehouse. Detectives didn’t just give out their business cards to the general public. Whoever this chap Whitehouse was, he must have a good reason to expect Helen to call him.

  Hearing footsteps, he grabbed a pen from Helen’s desk, copied down the number on his hand, then quickly put everything back as it was. But the footsteps turned out to be from the house next door, the walls not being thick enough to muffle the sound completely.

  ‘Jumpy or what?’ he muttered, thinking it might help if he stopped sneaking around.

  He leaned the rucksack against the bed, dressed and left the room. Helen was probably downstairs, and she’d better have a good excuse for leaving him like that. Any decent girlfriend would at least cover up her naked man.

  Not that he knew much about having a girlfriend.

  She wasn’t in the kitchen either. He touched the kettle; no one had boiled it for some time, so he went back into the hall and knocked on Charlie’s door. He waited a few moments before knocking again, then broke his own house rule and opened the door, but the room was empty. He checked the bathrooms and Fay’s room. There was no sign of either of them.

  Strange, he thought.

  On the top landing he knocked on Lee’s door. After a moment there was a muffled reply, and he pushed it open just as Lee was sitting up in bed, rubbing his eyes.

  ‘Whassup? Fay okay?’

  ‘Concussion and a fractured hip. Plus some other trauma, but they reckon she’ll recover.’

  ‘G-good. I’m glad.’ Lee swung his legs out of bed and reached for a pair of tracksuit bottoms from the back of a chair.

  ‘You haven’t seen Helen and Charlie anywhere, have you?’ Jason asked.

  ‘They w-were here earlier. Didn’t they c-come back with you?’

  ‘Shortly before me, but they must’ve gone again.’

  ‘It’s in the m-middle of the night!’

  ‘You’re telling me.’ Back on the landing he recalled the nurse’s message from Fay. They’re up to something.

  Probably. But what? And where were they at half past one in the morning?

  A feeling of dread crept up on him. Had they discovered something and decided to look for themselves? It was exactly the sort of thing Charlie would do, just go for it and bugger the consequences. And Helen? He knew the answer to that. If she thought she was getting closer to what she needed to know, whether real or imagined, that anger he’d always sensed in her, lurking right below the surface, would propel her forward despite any dangers. He’d felt deeply uncomfortable about the meeting with the dog owner in the pub, but nothing like he was feeling now.

  Or had it been the other way around? Had trouble come after her? Cold sweat trickled between his shoulder blades, and his heart was pounding.

  He returned to the kitchen where he’d left his phone and dialled Helen’s number, but it went to voicemail after a couple of rings. Either she couldn’t hear it, or she’d switched her phone off. Hesitating for a moment, he weighed up his concern for her safety against the invasion of her privacy, then sent the text message beacon he’d configured her smartphone tracker to listen out for. Obviously it wouldn’t work if she really had switched hers off, but he hoped she hadn’t. And if she realised he was tracking her by GPS, he hoped she’d understand his reasons. He waited a few minutes, then finally her phone pinged back its location.

  ‘Yes!’ He punched the air, relieved. ‘I’m a genius!’

  Then he saw the location and frowned. His father used to have a warehouse almost in that spot, but how accurate the tracker was he couldn’t tell.

  A coincidence? He didn’t think so.

  The moment had come where his loyalties would be put to the test, just as Helen had predicted, but she’d been wrong in assuming he would hesitate.

  Quickly he dialled the number he’d
copied down on his hand. He expected to be given the run-around, but Detective Whitehouse – who turned out to be a woman, and whom he’d clearly woken – listened to his ramblings without interruption. Not pausing to draw breath he told her how Helen’s mother had died, mentioned the company she worked for, as well as the hit-and-run.

  ‘I think my father might be involved, at least with the hit-and-run.’ A sick feeling churned in the pit of his stomach as he said it, knowing that he might just have condemned his own dad. ‘I’ve been tracking her phone, and the GPS coordinates show that she’s at his warehouse. I’m on my way there now,’ he added.

  ‘Whatever happens, you stay outside. Got it? We will be there.’ All sleepiness had gone from her voice now, and Jason heard the jangling of keys. Then she hung up.

  Warehouse 14 was on an industrial estate backing onto an elevated over-ground railway near a postal sorting office and a large fruit and veg market. Behind loomed Battersea Power Station, its four chimneys bone-yellow against the sky as if a giant animal had keeled over and died.

  The warehouse was a modest storage facility at the end of a row of identical buildings, with a sectional door designed to fold to one side when open, and square windows at the top, too high to look inside.

  The place bore signs of not having been used in a while. Disintegrating cardboard boxes and crates were stacked in front of the door, and the air smelt rotten. Something dark and nimble scurried among the boxes, and the shiny black button eyes of a rat stared back at them before it scuttled away.

  Helen picked up a ball of shredded packaging from the ground. It was fresh and springy, so someone must have been here recently.

  ‘Let’s hide behind those bins over there,’ she said to Charlie, and both of them ducked instinctively as her words echoed back from the empty buildings.