Jane Hetherington's Adventures In Detection

by Nina Jon

  “Let me know if you track the weasel down, won’t you?”

  “I will, Stella.”

  Jane replaced the receiver. She caught Maria watching her, clearly having overheard the whole call. The smirk she wore said, told you. Jane ignored her and went to her study.

  Her internet search for Johnny Franks revealed some entries. Jane quickly scanned down the list. She didn’t think any of them were her man – they were either too young or the wrong nationality to be Johnny’s father. She leaned back in her chair and thought for a few moments. She typed in ‘Dockworkers + Franks’ but this didn’t bring up any entries. Not another dead end, she thought, but then she had an idea. From the desk drawer she took out the Blackpool postcard and looked at it again. She turned it over. An Amusement Park, Blackpool was the card’s only description of the photograph on it. She studied the photograph again. She could see the letters LL’S in the background. She knew it had been taken twenty-six years earlier. Jane, what an idiot you have been, she thought typing, Amusement Parks, Blackpool, and the decade in question.

  A number of entries appeared, the first of which related to a Howell’s Amusement Park in Blackpool. She opened the entry but didn’t need to read it because a photograph of its wrought iron entrance gates, with the name Howell’s emblazoned across them, told her this was where the photograph had been taken.

  The name rang a bell. She quickly typed, ‘Dockworkers + Howells’. The fourth entry on the list was the one she wanted. It related to the secretary of the North Eastern branch of the Retired Dockworkers’ Association – Tom Howells. She’d read the entry before but hadn’t made the connection.

  Jane clicked on the link to the Association’s secretary. This bought up a bio of Tom Howells, but unfortunately no photograph. Jane read on and learnt that as a reward for his tireless efforts on behalf of retired, disabled or deceased dockworkers and their families, Tom Howells had been unanimously elected as the secretary general of the Newcastle and North Eastern branch of the RDA for the tenth year running.

  Did she have her man, she wondered? Tom Howells was a retired dockworker and probably about the right age. How could she establish for definite he was Johnny’s father though? E-mail was no good – she’d have to visit Newcastle and speak to him face-to-face, but if he denied it flat out, then what?

  She looked out onto her garden and over to her summerhouse, where she had spent most of the last month setting traps. This gave her an idea. If she could set a trap to catch a mouse, she must be able to set a trap to catch Tom Howells. And not just one to catch him, but one which would tell her, one way or the other, whether Pete Lambert and Tom Howells were one in the same. Only what? She watched as Charity’s cat, Addison, crossed her lawn. Like her, Addison was hunting. A plan started to form in her mind.

  II

  Jane, Miles Dawson-Jones and his mother Mirabella, gathered around the hearth of the rectory’s drawing-room, warmed by a roaring wood fire. Mirabella poured the tea, while Jane explained what she wanted and why.

  “I need help in setting a trap, and knowing how good you are on the computer Miles, I wondered if you could help. I need someone to prepare a poster for me, purporting offer ing a prize, with which to lure someone out of his lair.” Jane explained in more detail the nature of the trap she wished to set, “Remembering Johnny and Jack trying to trap my harvest mouse with an old game of Mousetrap gave me the idea,” she said. “We’ll need a webpage so he can get in touch.”

  III

  Miles and Mirabella called at Jane’s cottage the very next day, with Miles clutching a laptop. Jane showed them into the living room.

  “I had fun doing this,” Miles said of the poster and web-page he’d prepared.

  “Before we start,” Jane said, “let me pour everyone a drink.”

  She returned from the kitchen moments later holding a tray on which stood a gin and tonic for Mirabella and herself, and even though he wasn’t quite old enough to drink alcohol, a bottle of stout for Miles, half of which she’d poured into a pint glass. She placed both bottle and glass on the table next to him, with the words, “Don’t tell your mother.”

  Miles opened the laptop to show Jane the poster he’d designed. The postcard featuring Johnny’s father as Tom appeared above the words:

  To celebrate the launch of our exciting new game of cat and mouse

  CAT-TRAP!

  We’re looking for the Tom in this postcard. Is it you? If you think it is, please let us know and a holiday for two will be yours.

  Proof of identity will be required before the winner is declared.

  Part of a CAT-TRAP! promotional offer.

  www.cat-trap@cat-trap.com

  Jane thought the fake webpage Miles showed her next, even better than the poster. He’d based it on the home page of a well-known toy manufacturer. It featured a team of mice wearing army fatigues, trying to drop a giant tin of cat food over a sleeping cat, who suddenly sprang into life, his claws opening into an arsenal of weaponry, scattering the mice in every direction, and the caption:

  See if you can catch Tom – but remember this cat is a light sleeper and if you wake him up – you’re cat food!

  Available as both a board game and online-gaming.

  Miles had even added a Contact Us address, and the game’s purported release date. A link led to The Tom and Jerry poster, and a tantalising promise of more promotional offers to come.

  “Miles, you’ve excelled yourself,” Jane said.

  “I told him he should copyright it,” his mother said, “it looks such fun.”

  “I only hope it works,” Jane replied. “It will entail a visit to Newcastle to put the posters up near the Dockworker’s Association, and possibly another one if he sees them and gets in touch. But my time is nothing if it helps Johnny put his demons to rest.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Jane Sets Her Trap

  Jane travelled to Newcastle by train, taking the scenic East Coast route along the coastline. She left Southstoft by the first train, and arrived by afternoon, taking a taxi straight to the Newcastle branch of the Retired Dockworkers’ Association.

  This turned out to be on the ground floor of a Working Man’s

  Club. Jane wasn’t sure they’d allow her poster to be displayed (a bit capitalist, she thought) but there was no harm in asking.

  The hallway of the Working Man’s Club couldn’t have been redecorated at any time during the last forty plus years. Its khaki curtains were thread bare, its walls covered in cheap wooden panelling under hound-tooth-patterned wall paper, paint peeled from the iron stairwell running up the middle of the wide double staircase, the ceiling was nicotine stained and what purported to be the club’s official notice board was no more than gold letters stuck onto green felt. Swing doors, to the right of the stairs, led to the club’s bar. Jane pushed open the doors and found herself in a large dingy room, laid out with tables, where a solitary barmaid was setting up for the evening.

  Jane showed the barmaid the poster, explaining that she was employed by the toy company to find places to display the posters, in exchange for which, she had authority to pay a small fee. This seemed to do the trick, and she left with a poster displayed on the bar’s wall.

  A ‘greasy spoon’ type cafe serving all-day English breakfasts, called the Butterfly Cafe, adjoined the Working Man’s Club.

  The cafe’s nameplate touched the nameplate of the Working Man’s Club, causing some wag to take it upon himself to cross out the words, The Butterfly Cafe, and write in its place The

  Gentleman’s Club. Jane thought it likely Johnny’s father would visit the cafe given its proximity to his workplace. She peered through its window. At one table a man hungrily devoured a bacon sandwich, washed down by a mug of tea. At another, a group of gentlemen enjoyed full English breakfasts, despite it being late afternoon. Jane wondered if any of them could be Johnny’s father. She walked through the doors and over to the counter where she repeated her story to the lady serving there
. She turned out to be the cafe’s owner and readily agreed to display a poster in the cafe’s window for a small cash sum.

  Jane left the cafe happy. She managed to get two posters displayed prominently in places likely to be frequented by Tom Howells/Pete Lambert.

  Although she spent the remaining part of the day putting up posters wherever she could, including on the poster board of a nearby underpass and some lampposts, she knew that if Johnny’s father responded, it would most likely be to the posters in the Working Man’s Club or the Butterfly Cafe. By now it was early evening and growing dark and so she took a taxi to the hotel she’d booked for the night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The Bait is Taken

  The first thing Jane did after breakfast the next morning was check her messages. Unsurprisingly, given she’d only put the posters up late the day before, Tom Howells hadn’t responded to the bait. She decided to remain in Newcastle for a few days in the hope that he would get in touch.

  Her hotel overlooked the River Tyne. It was impossible for the eye not be drawn to the art gallery on the other side of the river. That it had once been a quayside grain warehouse was clear from its architecture. Lest there be any doubt, the words Baltic Flour Mill remained carved on the front of the building in enormous black capital lettering. Enormous banners advertised an exhibition by Adelaide Kincaid. Adelaide Kincaid was an artist who was about the same age as Jane. Her cartoon-like paintings of ordinary people behaving outlandishly always made Jane laugh, however miserable she was feeling, just as Stanley Marshman’s poem’s did. Knowing she would spend a very enjoyable morning at the art gallery, she made her way there, stopping briefly on the quayside to admire the very modern bridge (two curved steel arches, supported by suspension cables, creating a near-perfect semicircle) she was about to cross.

  Jane stared along the river. Although a cargo boat sailed towards the bridge, unfortunately it wasn’t large enough to warrant the bridge opening – something Jane understood to be a spectacular sight – and she carried on.

  The bridge was busy. When half-way across it she decided to sit down and people watch, one of her favourite occupations. Two Muslim women swathed in their traditional burkas passed her at the same time as two other young women, defying the cold in their miniskirts and short cropped tops, crossed in the opposite direction. One had a chain looped through her bellybutton, the other a tattoo covering most of her lower back, although Jane couldn’t be sure what of.

  A young woman pushing a pushbike on the cycle path below caught Jane’s eye. The cyclist stopped a short way from Jane, and seemingly transfixed by something on the bridge, started to push her bike backwards and forwards. Jane leant forward to establish what she was targeting. She was left feeling rather disconcerted when she realised the girl was deliberately squashing some unfortunate flying ants under the wheels of her bike. Two other girls, sitting nearby, squealed in disgust when they too realised what she was doing. Jane heard one of them say to the other, “I’m a bit Buddhist, about stuff like that.” The ant-killing girl appeared oblivious to the effect she was having on her audience, and seemed determined to carry on crushing innocent insects under the wheels of her bike until all were annihilated. Jane felt it was time for her to move, however, no sooner had she stood up than her phone buzzed to tell her she’d received an e-mail. She studied the screen. To her astonishment, Tom Howells had sent an e-mail to the Cat -Trap website. She moved to another bench (so as not to be distracted by ant-girl) and read the message.

  ‘I’m your man! The one in the postcard!’ it began. ‘I’m the one playing Tom. Don’t know how that became public. Boy, that must have been taken nigh on twenty-eight years ago. I was working there at the time – on the dodgems. I can send you other photos of me taken at the same time. I’ve got another one of me as Jerry, if you want to see it, as proof like…’

  The message rambled on, but Jane didn’t read any more. She sent him a holding e-mail, purportedly from the toy company which Miles had prepared, acknowledging receipt of Tom Howells’ e-mail and promising a call from a representative within the next few days. She had an e-mail of her own to send Tom Howells – one she’d prepared before she left Failsham – but contacting him immediately might raise his suspicions. She’d go to the gallery first.

  Well, well, well, Jane thought, as she crossed the bridge, in only a few hours she might finally meet Johnny Lambert’s father.

  Jane spent the next few hours at the exhibition, and found herself smiling at almost every painting she stopped to look at. She ended her visit by purchasing a couple of brightly coloured Adelaide Kincaid prints in the gallery’s shop. Both were typical of the artist. In the first print, a very large young lady tried to squeeze herself into a pair of stiletto shoes, clearly at least a size too small for her feet. In the second, an elderly couple, grey-haired and stooping, hobbled down a street arm-in-arm. The old man ogled a poster of a skimpily dressed young lady on to a nearby advertising hoarding, whilst his wife ogled a life-size cardboard cut-out of a good-looking young man, dressed in Bermuda shorts, displayed in a shop window. Jane decided to send the first print to her daughter as a present, and keep the other herself.

  From the gallery’s restaurant she sent Tom Howells her e-mail. She used her own e-mail address and sent it to the contact details given as his on the Dockworkers’ Association webpage.

  ‘Dear Mr Howells,

  My grandfather was a docker on the London docks during the 1920s. He perished after falling from scaffolding where he’d been working without a safety harness, something which was all too common in those days. I’ve been doing a great deal of online research and have come across your name. I’m interested in learning more about the lives of the men who work on the docks, and I wondered, as you clearly have first-hand knowledge, if we might meet up? I’m in Newcastle this afternoon, if that’s any good for you?

  Mrs Jane Hetherington.’

  Everything in the e-mail was pretty much true, up to a point. Whilst Jane was interested in learning more about the lives of the men who worked on the docks alongside her grandfather, she wasn’t interested in learning it from Pete Lambert/ Tom Howells. Nonetheless, Jane had no hesitation in sending the e-mail. If Tom Howells was really Johnny’s father then he clearly played by a different set of rules to other people and honesty didn’t appear to be amongst those rules.

  She received a reply by return.

  ‘I’d be delighted to meet you whenever you’d like. I’m around all today.

  Tom Howells.’

  She replied immediately. ‘Two o’clock this afternoon?’

  ‘See you then -- T. H.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Pete Lambert

  Jane arrived at the Working Man’s Club where Tom Howells had his office in good time for their meeting, only to learn that he was running late. She suspected he was one of a group of men she’d just passed standing outside smoking. Hopefully this would put him in a relaxed state of mind.

  “If I ever feel like taking up smoking again I’ll just come here and inhale instead,” Jane joked with the young man escorting her to the waiting room. Despite the smoking ban, years of heavy smoking in the Working Man’s Club had left its indelible mark.

  “You what?” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  Jane followed him down the hallway to the small reception room, where she was instructed to wait until Mr Howells arrived. The waiting room had nothing more in it than a few hard plastic chairs and a table. Jane picked up the only magazine there -the Socialist Worker-and flicked through it. She hadn’t realised it was still going.

  Her sister Jill, rebelling against her petty, middle-class, bourgeoisie upbringing (as she’d put it) had joined the Communist Party the day she turned seventeen, something their more-amused-than-bemused parents had thought no more than a phase. Jill once dragged Jane to a meeting of her local Communist Party branch. Not before, nor since, had Jane seen so many people smoke so many cigarettes filled with so many diff
erent substances in such a confined space. Nor had she ever heard the words Dialectic Materialism and Capitalistic Imperialism (could Stan use these words in a poem, she now wondered) spoken so many times, or indeed at all. The evening had ended with Jane desperately attempting to keep a straight face, whilst everyone else in the room, including her sister, got to their feet to give an earnest rendition of the Red Flag, each with their eyes closed, heads bowed, and right fists raised in the air.

  Jane’s parents had always blamed the people in that room for their daughter’s early death. Jill’s boyfriend, whose reckless motorcycle driving at high speed whilst high on marijuana caused both of their deaths, had been a member of the Communist Party, and through him Jane’s sister converted to the cause. But Jane did not blame him, nor anyone else for what happened to her sister. Jill had been born with a death wish, and that was all that was to it.

  “It’s my destiny to die young!” the beautiful Jill had often said, twirling around the bedroom the girls shared. “I love to dice with death, otherwise why be alive?”

  Jane knew she couldn’t start crying again. She had to focus on the job in hand. She put down the magazine and took out the photograph of Johnny’s father. She propped it up in her handbag in a position where she could surreptitiously compare it with the Tom Howells she was about to meet.

  He arrived moments later. He did not look a well man. He was out of breath and had to stop to puff at an inhaler before he could even shake her hand.

  While they were still in the waiting room, she stared at the photograph in her bag, then back at him. There seemed little doubt that they were one and the same person. The man in the photograph given to her by Johnny was a younger, slimmer version of the heavier, older man in front of her. The features were the same in both: the eyes, small and dark; the eyebrows, bushy and black; and the nose which looked as though it had once been broken. His hair hadn’t receded very much, and in many ways, Jane could see a resemblance to Johnny more in the later photograph than the earlier one.