by Nina Jon
Judging from what Jane had just read, Lucy seemed be a perfectly normal teenager. Jane did notice one thing, though. Lucy’s social networking site hadn’t been updated for months.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Think Out of the Box
I
The next morning, Jane tentatively opened the door of her summerhouse. Chaos greeted her. It was as though a demolition derby had taken place inside her summerhouse. The hinged door to the toy box remained wide open, but the grain inside was gone. In its fury to escape the Inescapable Box, the mouse had eaten through the tape and glue holding it together and it lay in pieces. The cistern lay on its side. Cardboard and plastic littered the floor. The mouse had worked his way across the room, eating whatever he found, before pushing, climbing or gnawing his way out of anything he ended up trapped inside. The mouse trap was in pieces – the threads snapped or gnawed through. Only the bin remained upright, having fallen over the pole. Fur, scattered grain, mouse droppings and a few mouse footprints surrounded it. The mouse himself though, was nowhere to be seen. Without thinking, Jane picked up the bin to see what was underneath. It was the mouse. He gave a squeak, she also. She tried to cover him with the bin again, but again he was too quick for her. This time, however, instead of running for cover behind the bookshelf, he ran out of the open door. She hurried after him and saw him running across the lawn, and disappearing through the hedge at the back. She couldn’t believe it. Johnny’s trap had worked. Her foe had gone. After gathering her thoughts, she returned indoors to fetch her dustbin and brush.
After clearing up after the mouse, she deposited the mess in her wheelie bin, making a mental note to buy her neighbours a new game of Mousetrap. Jack must have heard her because he poked his head over the fence and asked, “Did it work? Did we catch the mouse?”
“We did, but I let him slip from my grasp. He was last seen heading north.”
“If he comes back, you know where we are,” Jack said, wandering off to the kick a football against the wall.
Jane returned indoors to text Johnny. One task may have been completed, but Jane still had many others to do.
‘Do you mind if I call your father’s half-sister, Stella? She may know something helpful?’ she asked.
Johnny, sat at the kitchen table with the job-page spread open in front of him, replied immediately – ‘I don’t mind, no, and she’ll soon tell you if she does.’
Upon receiving the go-ahead Jane called Stella, but got her answer phone. She left a message, explaining who she was, and why she was calling. She could do little more, until and unless Stella returned the call. She went to pack, for her stakeout of Lucy Erpingham was to start the next day.
II
Johnny studied the job’s page.
The whereabouts of his missing father wasn’t the only thing on his mind. Johnny needed money, and he needed it badly. He wanted to take Charity away skiing, to try and make amends, but he was skint. What money he hadn’t used up in travelling to South America, he’d used to buy his ticket home. He’d sold all his possessions. He’d even swapped his motorbike for a van so he could go back to work as a tree surgeon. He was sure work there would slowly pick up, but not quickly enough for him to take Charity skiing. He knew Jane would lend him the money, but he didn’t want to borrow it. He wanted to show Charity and Jack that he really had changed by earning it himself. He studied the job’s page again. If he were to take any of these jobs, it would take him months to raise the money he needed. He closed the paper. Think laterally, he said to himself. Think out of the box. Box! he said, jumping to his feet and running out of the house towards his shed at the end of the garden.
CHAPTER NINE
Dabney Farm
I
At half-past six in the evening, a motorist stopped by the side of the Southstoft Road to read the hand-painted sandwich board Johnny wore around his neck. This car was the first stop in an hour. The driver read the sign out loud, “Need money. Will do (nearly) anything to earn it,” then asked snidely, “Got debts have you?”
“Nothing like that, mate,” Johnny replied. “Need to make it up to the girlfriend. Want to take her skiing.”
“Kick you out, did she?” the driver asked.
“Yeah, then she let me back in again, and I want to make sure she lets me stay.”
The driver burst out laughing. “I like your attitude, son,” he said. “I run Dabney Farm. Two of our temporary workers have gone sick. I can give you a night’s work, if you want it. It’s not easy work though, and I can’t pay you no more than the minimum.”
Johnny leaned up to the car window: “Cash?” he asked.
II
“She’s a bit energetic,” Johnny said of a young woman exercising in the field, turning to look at her out of the back windscreen. The land was flat for miles – green, undulating, stretched out below a sky as empty as the landscape below it. Even though it was growing dark, and he couldn’t see anyone else in the field, the young woman was turning round and round in a circle, her arms outstretched.
“She don’t approve of Dabney farm. She wanted me to give her my chickens but I refused so she’s trying to put a hex on the place.”
“A what?” Johnny said, just as the girl fell over. “Think we should go back – make sure she’s okay?” he asked.
“Na. Tan’t nothing wrong with her but one too many magic mushrooms! Here we are, Dabney Farm,” the farm’s owner said of the row of enormous corrugated iron buildings they were driving towards, each about the size of ten football fields, which lit up the night sky.
“You’re doing okay for yourself,” Johnny said, wondering where he’d gone wrong in life.
“I’m an opportunist me. Bought half a broiler unit twenty years ago now and I ain’t never looked back. Chickens – can’t make enough of them – but where there’s chickens, there’s chicken poo.”
“Don’t need to ask what my job is, then?”
Within ten minutes of arriving at the farm, Johnny was waiting outside the empty broiler unit he’d been assigned to scrub out, dressed in wellington boots, a rubber apron, and elbow-length rubber gloves. A head scarf was tied around his hair, over which he wore a plastic cap. He and the other temporary workers gathered around the foreman.
“High-pressure water’s been spraying down the unit for weeks now,” the foreman explained. “We call that phase one. But phase one don’t get everything. Takes an old-fashioned scrubbing brush to do that. We call that phase two. That’s you lot!” He pressed the remote control in his hand and the unit’s doors swung open, revealing a river of sawdust, feathers and chicken poo running down the unit’s walls and over its the floor. “In you go my lovelies,” he said.
The smell made Johnny step back. Not so his colleagues.
Unfazed by sight or smell, each ambled into the unit. Johnny reluctantly followed them. He took his cue from them, scraping away anything still left on the perches and walls. The job wasn’t hard – everything came away easily – just unpleasant. Particularly the smell. It was vile, clawing. He couldn’t stand it. He threw down his brush and ran outside to get some fresh air.
“Time out’s deducted from your wages,” the foreman said, upon his return.
“What!” Johnny said, spinning around. The sharpness in his movement caused him to slip and fall over backwards into the slimy mixture of muddy water, feathers, sawdust, and poop. He got to his feet again, soaked through from the putrid sludge.
“You can go and clear up if you like, but it’ll be another deduction,” the foreman informed him.
“I’ll stay.”
“That wall, over there,” the foreman instructed.
Johnny joined some others in scrubbing down the enormous eastern wall of the barn. He extended the handle on his scrubbing brush until it was tall enough to reach to the top of the wall and began scrubbing. Great job you’ve landed yourself here, mate – he thought to himself – cleaning chicken shit off a tin can!
By the time break time arrived, ever
y part of his body ached, he was ravenously hungry, covered from head to toe in a mixture of poo and straw, and was coughing furiously, not that this prevented him from accepting a cigarette from a workmate. He smoked it on the way to the shower block, where he cleaned up as best he could. From there he quickly made his way to the staff canteen, to discover he only had enough money on him to buy two apples and a cup of tea for his evening meal, unless he wanted his wages deducted by the cost of something better. He also learned that meal breaks were unpaid for temporary workers. Minutes later, an apple in each pocket, he was inside another huge corrugated iron barn.
This unit was the size of a mere five football pitches. A waist-high conveyor belt carried partially-feathered chicken carcasses slowly across the room. Johnny stood behind it, dressed this time in a white overall, face mask, and plastic gloves. At the other end of the barn, people fed unplucked chickens into a machine from which they emerged moments later, freshly plucked, except the wings.
“The machine can’t get the wing feathers,” the fore man explained. “Also you’ll find that every now and then an unplucked chicken gets through. Pluck anything with feathers anywhere on it and put it up there.” The foreman pointed to an overhead conveyor belt from which plucked carcasses hung.
The smell inside this unit was almost as bad as the smell inside the other unit. The air was full of feathers, and despite the face mask, Johnny coughed even more than he had when cleaning out the chicken coup. He was also shivering, and his hands turning blue.
“Yeah we have to keep the place as cold as we can. We don’t want the chickens barbecuing do we?” the foreman said. “We expect fifteen an hour, and any where the skin’s torn will be a deduction from your wages, ’cos we get less for them,” he explained, picking up a chicken to show Johnny how to pluck it. “See how you get on.”
Johnny didn’t get on very well. He tried to keep up with the others, but they were all much quicker than him. He glanced to his right and then his left. For some reason, the feathers on his chickens didn’t seem to come out as easily as the feathers of the chickens being plucked on either side of him. If he didn’t tug hard enough, the feathers didn’t come out, but if he tugged too hard, he risked tearing the skin and being docked money.
“You have to pull them out at an angle,” a girl standing next to him explained. “See?” she said, twisting a chicken in one direction, and deftly plucking out its feathers in another. But Johnny didn’t see. He tried, but twist and pull as he did, the feathers still refused to come out. The cold wasn’t helping. It was like trying to work in a freezer. By the next break time, he’d only managed to pluck six chickens, two of which were only good enough to be made into pies. He soon found himself on packing duty, struggling to keep awake and it wasn’t even two a.m.
III
“That had to be the worst job I’ve ever done!” he said to Charity the next morning, as he stretched out in the bath tub. “I’m twenty-nine and feel ninety-eight. I’ve got frostbite in my fingers. I can hardly move. And there was me thinking I’d get offered work as a naked bartender or something equally upmarket…”
“I don’t think Failsham has bars like that, Johnny.”
He ignored her and continued, “… instead of which I end up working from six p.m. to six a.m. – on a Sunday – without a break or a meal, for a pittance – less deductions! And they didn’t even want me back.”
Charity, sat on the toilet seat, giggled.
“I’m glad you find it so funny.” He wriggled his toes.
“They’re about the only part of me which still moves.” He bit into the last slice of the family-sized pizza he’d returned home with.
“You don’t need to do this, Johnny.”
“I’m going to earn enough to take you skiing if it kills me, darlin’.”
“Well in that case there’s only one thing for it.”
“What?”
“Back to the sandwich board!”
CHAPTER TEN
Lucy Erpingham
Lucy caught the bus to work from the bus stop outside the apartment block where she lived and therefore Jane began her surveillance of Lucy Erpingham by parking near the girl’s apartment block. She made her way to Lucy’s bus stop on foot, at eight o’clock, Monday morning.
Lucy needed to catch the eight twenty bus to be on time for work, but on the first morning of the stake-out, a flustered- looking Lucy didn’t leave her apartment block until gone nine. Unfortunately for Lucy, she wasn’t the only thing running late that morning. The late running of the bus left Lucy looking at her watch and stamping her feet, whilst muttering, “Come on! Come on! I’m going to be late! I’m behind on my flexi already!” over and over again, much to the amusement of her fellow passengers.
Jane watched this from the end of the bus queue. She had to resist the temptation to laugh out loud, when Lucy telephoned her office to explain she was running late because, “The stupid bus hasn’t turned up again!”
By the end of the week, Jane would be left wondering why on earth Lucy even attempted to get to work for nine a.m. because not a day seemed to go by when Lucy managed to reach her office before ten. Not that her tardiness seemed to cause
Lucy much concern. Quite the contrary. Even when she got off the bus, Lucy did not make her way straight to her office, instead she dawdled along the High Street, finding the time to window-shop, and purchase a breakfast muffin and a latté from a local deli. Jane wondered why nobody in the office asked her how it was she managed to find time to stop off at a coffee shop to purchase breakfast, when she was already late for work? It was almost ten o’clock when Lucy entered the modern office block, where she worked. Lucy’s office was open-plan, and her desk was near a large window on the ground floor, which overlooked the High Street. This conveniently allowed Jane to sit on a park bench quite near the office, from where she could watch Lucy at her desk, from a discreet distance.
From her surveillance point, Jane could see photos on Lucy’s desk. From what she could tell, these looked like photos of the family Lucy had suddenly cut out of her life. Jane spent the morning watching Lucy sitting in front of a computer screen, tapping away at a keyboard. Her job, Jane assumed, must involve providing some type of advice to customers, because she wore a headphone and seemed to spend most of her time speaking into it. Lucy took the occasional short breaks away from her desk, but spent most of the morning sitting at it, working diligently. That first day, Lucy spent a shortened lunch break with colleagues in a bistro next to the office. Jane was able to loiter outside the bistro long enough to see Lucy take a large slurp from a glass of white wine, whilst eating from a plate of chips topped with melted cheese. Jane herself ate a packed lunch in her car.
When Jane returned to the park bench opposite the office, Lucy was already back at her desk. Her afternoon seemed to pass in much the same way as the morning, except that this time much more time was spent away from her desk and much more time was spent standing at a colleague desk, arms folded, laughing and joking. That the lunchtime wine had obviously made her colleagues’ small talk highly amusing.
Lucy’s working day ended at six p.m. In the end, she’d managed to work an eight hour shift. Jane was ready to call it a day. She had spent most of the time sitting at a park bench, either reading a newspaper and looking at her watch impatiently (as though waiting for somebody) or knitting. Jane was certain she must have been captured on a CCTV camera, but hoped her behaviour would be put down as lonely/eccentric. This was one of the advantages of age. Unusual behaviour was put down to something pitiful, rather than threatening or concerning. Lucy had not seemed to notice Jane sat there, but Jane knew she could not spend the rest of the week sat at the same park bench, staring into the office window, without either Lucy herself, or one of her colleagues, noticing her and becoming suspicious. She’d have to move somewhere else.
Jane may have been ready to go home, but for Lucy, the day was just starting; and before long, Jane was sitting alone at a table in a wine bar,
with a coffee in front of her, whilst three tables away, Lucy and her colleagues were beginning their evening by ordering three bottles of wine. Jane noticed the wine was paid for by Lucy on Lucy’s credit card. Jane eventually left the tiddly girls noisily piling into an Indian restaurant at eleven o’clock at night. No wonder she’s late for work in the mornings. Jane thought, letting herself into her car.
The next day Lucy arrived for work at just before ten in the morning. Jane sat on a different park bench, making herself as comfortable as possible, this time with the help of an inflatable cushion and pretended to engross herself in a book, from which she looked up now and then to ensure Lucy was still at her desk. The second day of her surveillance seemed only to differ from the first, in that Lucy spent her lunch hour in a small family-run boutique, down the road from the office.
The busy high street, on which Lucy’s office was located, contained many such shops, which ranged from tiny boutiques to large national chains. Jane watched Lucy try on almost every jacket in the shop, while Jane pretended to be interested in some dresses on a rail. Now and then she selected one and held it up against herself. The assistant watching her had stopped smiling. Jane was going to have to either buy something, or leave the shop. She chose the latter, leaving a full twenty minutes before Lucy did. When Lucy left the store, she did so clutching a very large store bag, leaving Jane to wonder which jacket she’d eventually bought. No doubt she’d find out when Lucy returned to the office as she would undoubtedly end up showing the purchased item to her colleagues, as was the way with almost any woman who had purchased something nice and new in her lunch hour. On the way back to the office, Lucy popped into a sandwich bar and bought herself some lunch.