by Nina Jon
“You mean like clothes and stuff?”
“Yes,” Jane answered.
“Dunno, a few hundred, something like that.”
And the rest, Jane thought. “To recap. You do not have a mortgage, you do not have any debt, you do use a credit card, but you pay it off at the end of each month, and you spend hundreds each month on non-essential items, in addition to your expenditure on essential items?”
“That’s right. I’m my own woman. Kept by no one!”
Lucy sounded a little smug. Ordinarily, Jane would have been rather impressed by hearing a woman of Lucy’s age make such a statement, but in this case, it left her feeling more than alarmed. “Oh, I see, so you earn quite a lot, then?” she said.
“Not really. I just got lucky recently, that’s all.”
Really? Jane thought to herself. How exactly?
“Do you mean you inherited some money?” she asked.
Jane knew this was most unlikely, for surely Jodie also would have inherited, or at least known about it.
“Sort of like an inheritance, but not an inheritance, if you know what I mean?” Lucy answered.
Jane didn’t.
“Can I ask what you mean by that?”
“No you bleedin’ well can’t, Lady! You got any more questions or can I get back to sleep?”
“I think I’ve asked you everything. You’ve been most kind. Most kind.”
Jane replaced the receiver and sat back in her chair. She replayed Lucy’s words in her mind: I just got lucky recently. Sort of like an inheritance, but not an inheritance, if you know what I mean?
Lucy’s words raised a whole plethora of possibilities. Jane realised she was going to have to get a hold of a bank statement, and check Lucy’s story out before she could do anything else. Unfortunately, she could only think of one way to do this – rummaging through Lucy’s rubbish bags – and probably the rubbish bags of half of Lucy’s apartment block, as well.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Stella Barnes
No sooner did her call to Lucy end, than her phone rang again. This time the caller was Pete Lambert’s half-sister, Stella Barnes.
“Johnny wants to know where Pete is?” Stella said, once Jane had explained the reason for her call. “Bloody hell! After all this time! I’m not sure I can help you very much. I haven’t seen Pete since the day he left Johnny’s mum, Sue. She rang me and started screaming down the phone that Pete was leaving her. I ran from my place to hers – they only lived round the corner. Time I got there, all hell had let loose. Pete and Sue were outside, along with half the street. Pete was sat astride his motorcycle. Sue was holding the little-un, screaming at him not to leave. The kiddie was howling. One of their neighbours was trying to make him see sense. I ran up to Pete and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing, leaving his wife and kid. He looked straight through me, like I wasn’t even there, fastened his helmet and roared off, like he was going to work or somewhere. Apart from a letter I haven’t seen or heard from him to this day forth.”
“Letter?” Jane asked.
“Yeah, it arrived about a year or so after he left, maybe longer. I hadn’t heard a word from him, nor had Sue, since the day he went, then out of the blue this letter from him dropped on my mat. Inside was this handwritten note. It was definitely his handwriting. It was typical Pete – ‘Meet me in Gote, 27th, 5.30 in the Fleet, Pete’ – nothing more. At first I didn’t know where Gote was – I had to look it up on a map. Turns out, it wasn’t that far away from where we were living. I didn’t tell Sue, because I thought it more likely than not he wouldn’t show, which turned out to be the case. I couldn’t even find anywhere called the Fleet, but someone there told me it was the old name for the Hare and Hounds, so I went there. I got there before five and I stayed until after closing time, but needless to say, he didn’t show. He didn’t specify the month, but the letter arrived on the twentieth, I remember that. Like the mug I am, I even went back the next month, but the same thing happened. Typical Pete – the hours of my life I’ve wasted waiting for him not to show.
“I’m just glad I didn’t tell Sue. Whenever I saw her she asked me if I’d heard from him. She was always convinced I knew where he was, but I didn’t. I remember bumping into her in the street a little later. First thing she said to me, ‘Have you heard from Pete?’ I said I hadn’t. She walked away without saying anything. I felt so sorry for her. Being the idiot I am, I kept going back to Gore to see if I could find him, but I never did. I looked his name up in the phone book and everything, but I never found a trace of him.
“From that day to this I’ve heard nothing from him. I have no idea where he could be. I don’t even know if he’s still alive.
It beats me why Johnny would want to see him again ’cept to punch his lights out,” she said.
“Did he ever share any secret dreams with you that he had, which might shed some light on where he might have gone after he left Johnny’s mother?” Jane asked.
“He was full of bullshit that one. He was going to join the army, move to the Costa Del Sol, open a pub on the South Coast, a motorcycle repair shop, you name it, he was going to do it. Even if he did any of those things, I can’t believe he’d have stuck at it for very long. Pete couldn’t stick at anything that was the problem.”
“Did he have any nicknames or ‘nom de guerres’ he liked to be known as, that you can remember?” Jane asked. She was running out of ideas.
“None,” Stella said. “Not that I can think of, sorry.”
Jane came off the phone, feeling frustrated and disappointed in her failure to help Johnny. “Dammit!” she said out loud. “Dammit! Dammit!”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Bin Woman
At two in the morning, Jane walked over to the two communal waste disposal bins, at the rear of Lucy’s apartment block, wearing a dark blue overall, a black woollen hat, yellow rubber gloves and a face mask. She wasn’t sure what she’d say if the police caught her. She’d have to hope they didn’t.
Each wheelie bin held dozens of rubbish bags. With a torch in one hand, Jane pushed open the lid of a bin, and removed one of the bags. Before she opened it, she ripped off a black plastic bag from a roll she’d brought with her and, to stop rubbish from spilling everywhere, she put the bag she’d just retrieved from the wheelie bin inside it. She cut open the rubbish bag using a penknife. She searched through the rubbish until she found an envelope addressed to one of Lucy’s neighbours. She tied the bag up and put it to one side. She removed another bag – from another neighbour. She carried on, opening bag after bag. Most of the next hour was taken up with her rummaging through other people’s rubbish. Her face mask did little to stop the smell, but hopefully it would stop her from inhaling something noxious. In her search she came across some quite extraordinary items: unopened cans, unworn clothing still in packaging, electrical goods still in their boxes, an unbroken kitchen drawer, and in one bag, a beautiful tiffany necklace still in its box, which Jane decided she would give to a charity shop. The residents of the block had very different personality types, judging by the contents of their rubbish bags. Some of the residents clearly sorted their rubbish carefully into recyclable and non-recyclable items, others seemed to discard everything, recyclable or not, including most of their unopened weekly food shopping. Some shredded confidential paperwork, others weren’t concerned. Some seemed to wash cartons before throwing them out, others didn’t bother.
Jane glanced at her watch. Time was flying by, yet she’d only looked through one of the bins, with little to show for it. This summed up the case to date, she thought. As quickly as she could, she put the rubbish sacks back in the bin and closed the lid. At the second bin she repeated the process again. This time it was more fruitful. She found Lucy’s rubbish in the third black plastic bag she ripped into – she recognised the pizza box. She rummaged through the rubbish bag until she came across a stained, soggy credit card statement. A little further down she found a damp bank statement. Ne
ither had been shredded. She put both in freezer bags, then hurled the black refuse bag, face-mask and the rubber gloves into the bin and returned to her car. Once home, she put the statements in her airing cupboard to dry out, and went to bed.
The next morning, she studied the dried-out statements.
They confirmed that Lucy was spending a lot of money – hardly a surprise. What was more of a surprise though was the tens of thousands of pounds in Lucy’s bank account. Nothing on the bank statement indicated where this money had come from.
It certainly wasn’t from the modest, regular salary which was being paid into her account every month. She was certainly spending it at quite a rate, though. Jane put the bank statement down, and re-read the credit card statement. Lucy had spent close to a thousand pounds that month, as she had the month before. This balance, and the balance from the month before, had both been paid in full, which confirmed what Lucy had told her.
Jane looked at the bank statement again. One thing was clear – the money in Lucy’s bank account wasn’t being replenished at anything like the rate at which it was being spent. Jane could only speculate how Lucy had come by so much money. A number of solutions presented themselves to her: maybe she’d checked her lottery numbers when her sister was helping the neighbour, found she’d won and scarpered, rather than feeling obliged to share it. Maybe she’d checked her bank account, discovered the bank had paid some money into her account they shouldn’t have done, and knowing her sister would tell her to pay it back, left abruptly. Or maybe there was a man around after all, paying money into her account in exchange for something. The man at work? Maybe this is what she’d been about to confess that evening at Jodie’s house?
Even more worrying was the possibility that she’d allowed someone to launder money through her account. Even worse, she might have simply helped herself to someone else’s money when the opportunity had presented itself – her employers possibly. She might have done this alone or with others. If so, what would Lucy do when the money ran out, Jane mused. Help herself to some more? Or be pressurised into doing so? This might explain why she was still going into work every day. Questions! Questions! Questions!
The only thing Jane knew for sure is that she couldn’t go back to Jodie at this stage with what she had. She needed more evidence, although how she would find that evidence, for the moment escaped her. But somehow she would, for this was exactly the kind of mystery she loved getting her teeth into.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Tricky Mickey
Jane’s mood dipped slightly upon flinging open the summerhouse door to discover the mouse had returned. She’d moved her books from the summerhouse into the conservatory for safekeeping, and covered her comfy chairs with plastic sheets, but these were ripped in places and a corner nibbled, as was a chair leg. Droppings and fur covered the floor. Any more of this
Mickey and its Warfarin for you! she said darkly, returning to her cottage to fetch a dustbin and brush. On her way back she spotted Jack leaning over the garden fence. “I knew he’d come back,” he said. “They home.”
It wasn’t long before he joined her in the summerhouse.
“Johnny sent me over with this,” he said, pushing a plastic bag into her hands. Jane looked inside it. It contained human hair. Lots of it.
“It’s from Charity’s clients, with a bit of ours thrown in,” he explained. “Mice hate it apparently. Can’t stand it! Human hair, loud noises and lion dung – but we didn’t think you’d want us turning up with a bag of lion dung! If you sprinkle it all over the floor, he’ll scarper.”
“Well, I suppose it’s worth a try,” Jane said sceptically.
“Johnny also suggested setting your smoke alarm off. Loud noise drives them to distraction.”
“Me also,” Jane said.
“Does the summerhouse have a smoke alarm?”
“It does,” she said, motioning towards the ceiling.
“If you swap its batteries for ones which are almost flat, it will go off,” Jack said sagely. “We’re always leaving our batteries in too long. Our smoke alarm’s always going off.”
Living next door to them, Jane already knew this. “Swapping the batteries does seem a much better alternative to lighting a naked flame in a wooden building adjacent to a thatched cottage,” she replied.
“I’ll get it down for you,” Jack said, jumping on a chair to remove the alarm from the ceiling. He handed it to her, saying, “Johnny’s ordered a humane mouse trap for you, in case this doesn’t work, but we think it will.”
Jack gave her a wave before he disappeared out of the door, leaving her to stare into the bag of hair. Sprinkling human hair over her summerhouse floor probably wasn’t worse than what was crawling all over it, she decided, draping a row of hair around the summerhouse walls. She tipped the remains from the bag over the floor and furniture.
Back in her kitchen, she swapped the batteries from her smoke alarm for some she had removed from her remote control the week before, after she’d had to keep turning them around and around to get the remote to work. Almost immediately the kitchen was filled with an intermittent shriek. This is enough to drive anyone out of their home, Jane thought, hurrying over to her summerhouse, the alarm in her hands. She left it leaning against the inside wall and left the summerhouse door propped open. She wasn’t worried about someone hearing the alarm and calling the police. Charity and Johnny knew what was going on, and the family next to them were on holiday. Her other neighbour was a field of sugar beet.
She decided to have an afternoon away from her private detective work to clear her head. She knew how she’d take her mind off things – she’d sew some marigold seeds for the summer – an African variety, whose packet promised ball-like yellow blooms, and some orange French marigolds. The two varieties should complement each other nicely, she thought, on her way to the greenhouse, the smoke alarm still ringing off and on behind her. To block out the noise she closed the greenhouse door.
Jane didn’t care what others thought about marigolds. She had always liked them, finding them an attractive feature of any summer garden. Using an old trick she’d learnt years ago, she put a layer of used tea bags along the bottom of two propagator tubs, covered these with soil into which she dropped the seeds, gently pressing the soil down over them, and covered that with the layer of gravel. She wrote labels for both tubs, knowing she wouldn’t be able to remember which was which once she’d stepped out of the greenhouse. This done, she went outside to fill a watering can from the tap in her back garden. She could still hear the alarm ringing off and on. It had now been ringing for some time. The mouse must have left by now, surely, she thought. Nothing could stand that much noise for that length of time could it? She looked over to the summerhouse, but couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. She didn’t know what she’d expected to see – legions of mice streaming down its steps, maybe? She returned to her greenhouse, watering can in hand, having decided to leave the alarm ringing until its batteries went completely flat.
She left the tubs standing in water and went back to her cottage. She could still hear the alarm ringing, but much more faintly than before – its batteries almost spent. As she walked across the garden she thought about her conversation with Stella Barnes, mulling over what Stella had told her. One thing stuck in her mind – Johnny’s father’s love of motorbikes. He’d left on a motorcycle. He’d told Stella he’d wanted to open a motorcycle repair shop. Johnny himself was a keen motorcyclist. It was possible his father still had an interest in bikes after all these years? A love of motorcycles wasn’t something that men really lost, was it, she asked herself. If Johnny’s father was still a keen motorcyclist, maybe he went to motorbike rallies? There was bound to be one nearby sooner or later. It might be worth her while going to one and wandering around. Who knows? She might recognise him from his photograph alone, or someone else there might.
She was half way down her garden when a police car drew up alongside her house. A police officer got o
ut off the car and walked over to her.
“Are you the house owner?” he asked her.
“I am,” Jane replied, drying her hands on her jeans.
“We’ve had a report of an alarm ringing in your house. Someone walking across the field heard it and called us. They were worried you were being burgled.”
“It’s just the smoke alarm in my greenhouse,” Jane explained. “I am trying to get rid of …” she stopped. Did she really want the police to know she’d been trying to drive a wild mouse away? She didn’t. “I left it out to change the batteries, but got involved with other things. I do apologise if you’ve been put to any trouble.”
“You’re trying to get rid of what?” the police officer asked her.
“Some insects overwintering in my greenhouse. I was trying to persuade them to leave and forgot all about the smoke alarm.”
“Well as long as you’re okay, love,” he said.
“I most certainly am,” she said, even though she was beginning to doubt her own mental state. She turned around to see Johnny staring out over the fence – with the corner of his collar in his mouth to indicate embarrassment and remorse. The police officer bid her goodbye and turned to leave, before stopping briefly to remind her how important it was that batteries in smoke alarms be changed regularly, adding, “My missus swears by rosewater as an insecticide. Gets rid of nasties without killing them.”
“I’ll try and remember that,” Jane said. She looked over to her backdoor. Her Estonian home help, Maria, had arrived.
In her younger days, Jane did all her own housework. She’d enjoyed it, finding it cathartic and deriving pride on a job well done. But nowadays her sciatica made it less enjoyable and the demands her new job put on her, left her without enough time to do it as well as she’d like, and so she now employed Maria.
“Are you all right?” Maria asked, in her clipped Estonian accent, hurrying over to Jane, just as the police officer took his leave. Jane explained what had just happened.