by Nina Jon
“What?” one of the boys said.
“We were meant to be having coffee. I was so looking forward to it,” Jane said, with the sigh.
The boys looked at each other, clearly annoyed.
“Told you we should get him a mobile phone,” one said to the other.
“What we going to do? I ain’t waiting,” his friend replied.
“Maybe I can pass on a message?” Jane said.
“You one of his girlfriends?” the first boy asked Jane, suspiciously.
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” Jane said. “But we are very good friends.”
“What we meant to do with this?” one demanded of the other holding the plastic bag aloft.
“I’ll ensure he gets it,” Jane said. “It’ll give me a nice excuse to call round.”
One of the boys looked at her with a mixture of pity and mild contempt, while the others said, “Yeah – give her the stuff – I ain’t coming back again this evening.”
The other boy wasn’t so certain that Jane was to be trusted.
“We can’t just give her his stuff.”
“It’s his fault if he’s not here,” the first said indignantly. He turned to Jane and said, “If you don’t mind, love?” holding the plastic bag out to her.
She took it. As she did, the boy grabbed the other by the arm and said, “Come on.”
The two turned on their heels and walked away, whispering conspiratorially to themselves, turning around now and then to stare at Jane. She gave them a few minutes after they had disappeared from sight, before returning to her car, which she’d parked some way from Greenfields.
Once there, she looked inside the plastic bag the boys had given her. She found ten packets of tobacco in plastic pouches, which she presumed were probably smuggled. There was also a sealed white A5 envelope. Jane very carefully opened it, taking care not to damage the seal, so she could reseal it if necessary. She took out the contents and stared at them. The envelope contained a new driver’s licence. The photograph on the plastic card was of Charlie Moon, but the name and address on it weren’t his, nor the date of birth, unless he was only fifty-three. The card was clipped on to a gas bill and a statement of annual earnings, giving Charlie Moon an annual income considerably higher than the state pension he actually got. Both the gas bill and the statement of earnings were addressed to a person of the same name and address as that appearing on the fake driver’s licence.
“Oh,” Jane said to herself, continuing to stare at the paperwork in her hand. “Oh dear me,” she said, realising the envelope contained a completely new I.D for Charlie Moon. A false
I.D would allow him to obtain credit cards and run up balances which he would never need to pay back. Unlike the last time. Then he’d nearly been caught. He’d had to think on his feet when the threatening letters arrived, cleverly pretending to be the victim, and probably because of his age, everyone had believed him. A few others had maintained they too had been the victims of crime. Maybe they had been, or maybe they too had spent more money than they cared to repay.
Charlie couldn’t keep doing that every time he needed money. He needed someone to help create a false I.D, which wouldn’t lead the police straight to his door. The boys, she presumed, were go-betweens for professional criminals. People who could get anybody anything they wanted. Jane couldn’t be certain how Charlie Moon had come across them, but in the circles he moved in, it wouldn’t have been that difficult. Once the new bank account was opened, a debit or credit card would be delivered to the false address. From there, it would be run over to Charlie’s flat. He’d withdraw the money over a few weeks and spend it over a few months. From what Jane had seen and been told about Charlie Moon, she suspected that in his younger days, he hadn’t been a stranger to crime. She doubted he was concerned about the police catching up with him, if they ever did. He knew he was unlikely to be sent to jail for very long at his age, so what did he care?
Jane slipped the paperwork back into the envelope and carefully resealed it. She couldn’t give it to Charlie Moon, so what could she do with it? Pass it over to his grandson and let him take care of it, she decided.
II
She didn’t go straight home, but decided to return to Greenfields for the start of the evening dance. She wanted to see Charlie’s entrance. She hid from view, and waited.
Charlie was one of the last to arrive and when he did, dressed in a dark tuxedo, blue bow tie and matching cummerbund, he did so triumphantly escorting not one, but two women, as elderly as he, both wearing long evening dresses and clutching a single red rose. This sight caused Jane to say,
“And I was worried my best was over!”
III
While she sat in her car outside the drab tower block where Dean Moon and Liz lived, Jane thought back over the events of the last few days. A downside to her job was the unpredictability of her clients’ reaction when she unearthed something they really didn’t want to hear. This had happened to her the previous month, when a client didn’t care to learn what Jane had discovered. The same dilemma faced her again as she wondered how to tell Dean about his grandfather’s ‘double life’. Would he even believe her?
In the living room of a flat much nicer than the concrete tower block which contained it, Jane calmly told Dean and Liz everything she’d learned, before passing the envelope over to them to read. They stared at its contents for some time.
“What made him to it?” Dean asked eventually.
“It’s quite simple,” Jane said. “He needed the money. I’ve spent the last two days following your grandfather, and I can tell you that he’s doing his damnedest to live life to the full, as much of the constraints of age will allow him to, but unfortunately he can’t afford it. I very much doubt he considers himself as a criminal.”
“Yeah, but the police will,” Dean pointed out. “I’m going to pay granddad a visit this evening and tell him I know what he’s up to and if he doesn’t stop it, I’ll put him in an old people’s home under twenty-four-hour supervision,” he went on, pointing his finger at Jane. “That’ll clip his feathers.”
“At least we don’t have to worry about the police ringing us up to say they’ve arrested your granddad for grievous bodily harm,” Liz said.
“Let’s wait to see how he reacts to what I’m going to tell him this evening before we say that, eh?” Dean replied.
Jane left happy. One case down – two to go.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Cauliflowers and Cabbages
I
Jane woke up the next morning with one task in mind. Her stake-out of Charlie Moon had convinced her that she needed more than just the bog-standard mobile phone she currently used. She needed a Smartphone. A small shop just off the Market Square (run by a local man, a few years older than her daughter) sold such gadgets. She set off for the shop.
On her way there she passed an estate agency. She studied the properties displayed in the agent’s window. Old Jimmy Anderson’s bungalow was on the market, she noted. The photograph of his bungalow brought a smile to her lips as she remembered the morning, almost thirty years earlier, when she’d come across Jimmy, then well into his eighties, standing on a pair of stepladders, propped up on the footpath outside his front garden, trimming his yew hedge with a pair of handheld hedge trimmers.
II
As always, thirty-four-year-old Jane Hetherington was dressed in the height of fashion. She wore a high ruff-necked, long-sleeved lace blouse and a lambswool jumper, over an ankle- length tweed skirt. For the first time in her life she’d taken to wearing flats. She still didn’t like them, but they were Lady Di’s favourite footwear, so what was a girl to do? A simple row of pearls and a velvet headband completed the outfit.
“How are you Jimmy?” Jane asked him.
“Someone keeps stealing my vegetables, that’s how I am,” he replied, climbing down from the step ladder to face Jane.
Jimmy grew vegetables in his own back garden and sold them to passing mo
torists from a small stall erected in his front garden.
“Soon as I step out in front, they steal from the back. They’re probably there now, stealing. But soon as I leave the front garden and go to the back, they steal from the front!”
“What about the money in the honesty-tin?” Jane asked, referring to the small tin he sometimes left on the stall in the front garden, to allow passers-by to purchase vegetables if it was unattended.
“Untouched,” he said. “This carries on, I’ll be leaving them vegetables to rot in the ground, Mrs Hetherington. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders. See if you can find the culprit. If you do, you can have free cauliflowers for the rest of your life,” he promised.
Jane wanted to help. She was also intrigued by the unusual nature of the crime. She agreed to take on the case.
When Jane picked Adele up from school that day, she told her all about the bad people who were stealing from old Jimmy.
“They shouldn’t do that,” Adele said. “Stealing is very naughty.”
“It most certainly is,” her mother agreed, Adele’s tiny hand in hers. “If mummy can find the bad men doing it, she’ll get given lots of cauliflowers by Uncle Jimmy.”
“Cauliflower cheese for tea every night, yippee!” squealed Adele. Cauliflower cheese was her favourite meal.
“You must help him. Poor old bugger,” Hugh said later on, after Jane told him of her conversation with Jimmy. “It’s bad enough him trying to struggle on alone, at his age, without all this.”
Jimmy’s wife had predeceased him some two years earlier, leaving him a widower at the age of seventy nine. The couple had no children. Jane could still remember her Memorial service. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without her,” Jimmy had said to Jane and Hugh. “I really don’t. I feel like my right arm’s been cut off.”
Jane visited old Jimmy the next morning. She began by asking him to show her the scene of the crime.
“Crimes,” he reminded her.
They walked around to the back garden. His property was the last on the street. The empty property next to his was for sale.
“They still not found a buyer for that property yet?” Jane asked.
“The agents think the couple who looked round yesterday are going to make an offer. It’ll be nice to have neighbours again,” he said.
Jimmy’s back garden was long and narrow. Unlike the bungalow next door, Jimmy’s property hadn’t been extended, and it was almost half the size of the neighbouring property. It still had a septic tank in the back garden. Most of the garden was laid to lawn, and the few flowerbeds which remained were overrun with weeds, or hugely overgrown shrubs which had been allowed to run wild. As well as the septic tank, there was a large shed, a broken greenhouse, and a derelict chicken coop in the back garden. The majority of the greenhouse windows were broken and tall weeds were sprouting where plants would once have been cultivated. The lawn was overgrown in patches and bare in others. It was obvious that things had become too much for Jimmy and he couldn’t cope. He must have noticed the look on Jane’s face.
“The garden’s really too much for me at my age,” he confided.
“I’m sure Hugh would be only too happy to run the lawn mower over the lawn for you, Jimmy. That’ll keep the grass down at least, and I’m sure I can find the time to tend flower beds for you,” she added. There was one area of the garden, however, where Jimmy could be justifiably proud and that was his vegetable plot. This he tended night and day. Raspberries and runner beans grew alongside onions, carrots, potatoes, cabbages and cauliflowers. “It’s only the cabbages and cauliflowers that keep being nicked,” Jimmy explained. “Whoever keeps taking stuff ain’t interested in the little vegetables, as I call ’em, only the cauli flowers and cabbages, although I grow all of them, as you know.
Strange thing is, the thieving doesn’t happen all the time. Just now and then, early evenings and weekends mostly. And only when it’s still light. Never night, when you’d expect a thief to strike.”
“I see,” Jane said, even though as yet she didn’t. She didn’t at all.
Jane and Jimmy made their way to the front garden. This had been turned over to gravel some years earlier, although weeds poked through, even so. Jimmy sold his produce from a table covered with a cloth, protected by a gazebo. Jimmy’s bungalow faced a fairly busy road and for as long as anyone could remember, Jimmy had piled his stall high with whatever he’d produced that year, and sold it to locals and passers-by. Many stopped at his stall to purchase its produce, truthfully marketed as having been picked that day. Sometimes, he’d even walk his customers around to his vegetable plot at the back of the house and harvest his produce for them there and then. Once, he’d sold newly laid eggs from his brood of chickens, but the chickens had stopped laying at about the time his wife passed away, and he’d given them away to a good retirement home, to, as he put it, ‘live out their old age in comfort’.
“They were always her girls,” he’d said at the time. “If they couldn’t lay for her no more, they weren’t going to lay for no one no more.”
Jane studied the terrain. Jimmy’s bungalow was set a little way back from the road. On the opposite side of the road where Jimmy lived, there was open farmland – an easy escape route, she thought. The back garden had once been surrounded by the same yew hedge that grew in the front, but that had been ripped up years ago and replaced by a wooden fence. The property backed on to a quiet lane. The lane led back to the town centre, as did the road at the front of the house. The back garden was overlooked by trees. Jane noticed sand spread out in front of the fence. When she asked why it was there, Jimmy admitted to putting it down in the hope that he might find a footprint left in it, but none had been. Jane walked over to peer at the sand. It was undisturbed. The thieves were getting in and out another way.
They moved inside his kitchen.
“Tell me more about the crimes, Jimmy,” she said, a pot of tea brewing on the table. Jane donned a pair of rubber gloves she’d bought with her, and started working her way through what must have been a month’s worth of washing-up piled up in the sink and the surrounding worktops. Jimmy dried up. In no time, it was done.
“Things have got on top of me, Mrs Hetherington,” he admitted. “What with me missus passing away and now all of this thieving.”
Jane poured him a mug of tea and sat him down at the table. She glanced around the kitchen. When Jimmy’s wife had still been alive, the house had been spotless. Anybody could literally have eaten their dinner off the floor. Not so now. It was filthy and cluttered. It was no good, she’d have to come back again and tackle the grime before it got out of hand. An afternoon should do it, she thought, wondering how much food he had in his fridge and resolving to return later with a casserole. “You’re managing very well, Jimmy,” she said, opening a packet of digestive biscuits she’d bought on the way, and offered them to him. “Now, let’s get back to these missing cauliflowers of yours.”
“And cabbages,” he reminded her.
“Cauliflowers and cabbages. Tell me everything you know about the crimes, Jimmy.”
Jimmy helped himself to three of the biscuits. He dunked one in the tea and ate it. The most recent crime had happened at about four in the afternoon, the day before last, he explained. A family of four had seen a sign he’d put up, offering fresh runner beans for sale, and had stopped to purchase some. Jimmy had taken the family around to his back garden, leaving a cauliflower, cut only an hour before, on the stall. The family had picked as many runner beans as they’d wanted, while Jimmy had dug up some potatoes and onions. As he spoke, Jane took notes. When Jimmy and the family returned to the front garden, they found the cauliflower gone, but the honesty-tin and the money in it, untouched. As with the previous incidents, there was no sign of anyone nearby. “The worst part about it, Jane, was that when I returned to the back garden, a cabbage had been stolen from there too. It had still been there when I’d been in the back garden with the family. They must have
taken a cabbage when we were in the front garden, having gone and pinched the cauliflower when we were in the back. When we were in the back garden, they were in the front, and when we were in the front, they were in the back. I can’t see how none of us saw or heard anything,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “I wouldn’t have minded too much, Jane, I grow more than I need, but I’d promised that cabbage to old Mrs Flaxman up the road.”
“I think there must be more than one thief, Jimmy,” Jane said, tapping a ballpoint pen against her lips, sagely. “No thefts since?”
He shook his head. “Nothing’s gone missing since then.”
“I see,” she said, even though she still didn’t. “To solve a crime, Jimmy, one needs to understand it. By that I mean, one needs to understand both methodology and motive. One often leads to the other, I find. Do you mind if we take another stroll around the property, Jimmy?”
Minutes later he and Jane were walking along the narrow country lane which ran behind his house. Properties lined one side, a hedgerow the other, then fields. In the field nearest to the lane, a herd of cows were grazing. “Used to walk my old dog along here,” Jimmy said “when we were both nippers, relatively speaking.”
A young couple who lived in the town were coming the other way. They stopped to talk to Jane and Jimmy. “Find out who’s taking your cabbages yet, old boy?” the young man asked.
“Not yet, but expecting to any minute, now I’ve called in the big guns,” Jimmy said, nodding in Jane’s direction.
Jane, by now, had stopped at the base of one of the old oak trees which overlooked Jimmy’s garden and the lane. The tree was a couple of centuries old. Its trunk was enormously wide and the tree towered over both man and property. A rope swing dangled from one of the sturdy branches over the lane below. Although the branch from which the rope was dangling, didn’t hang over Jimmy’s garden, some of the tree’s branches did. The branches concerned were high up, true enough. If someone wanted to use them to jump into the garden it would involve some very daring acrobatics and a big drop to the ground, but it would be possible. Jane stared up at the tree and recalled a conversation she’d had with her husband a few weeks earlier, when he’d chanced to remark: “I used to love fence jumping when I was a boy.”