by Kim Fleet
‘I’m so sorry about Lewis,’ Eden began. ‘It must be an awful shock for you.’
Tracey reached for the glass and took a slug. ‘Lee. He was always Lee to me.’ Tears poured down her cheeks and she sobbed into her hands. ‘He was my little boy.’
Eden went over to her and rubbed her back while she wept. ‘I know you don’t feel like talking right now, but Lee hired me to help him and I want to find out who did this.’
‘The police said they were robbing him. Little bastards.’
‘That’s one line of enquiry,’ Eden said. ‘I’m not so sure.’
Tracey’s head shot up. ‘You think someone did it deliberately?’
‘Maybe. Can you think of anyone who …’
‘No! No one! He was a beautiful boy. No one would ever want to hurt him.’
‘OK.’ Eden waited while Tracey cried, then when it seemed the fit was over, she gently offered to make her a cup of tea and went down the hallway to the kitchen.
She snooped while the kettle boiled. Half a pint of milk, a hunk of cheese and half a tin of baked beans in the fridge. A freezer stuffed with microwave meals. The sink was full of washing up: it seemed Tracey saved it all up throughout the day and did it in one go. A pot plant that had once been a geranium squatted on the windowsill, its soil crammed with cigarette butts. A stash of empty vodka bottles under the sink. An ordinary, depressing life.
Hunting for something sweet to combat shock, Eden found the biscuit tin was stuffed with bills. She flicked through them. About a dozen credit- and store-card statements, all of them with several thousand pounds outstanding, many with ‘Final demand’ stamped across the top. There were statements from pay-day loan companies, too, showing interest that had rapidly built to an astronomical amount. A quick calculation and she almost dropped the biscuit tin: Tracey owed almost fifty thousand pounds. She stuffed the bills back in the tin and carried two mugs of tea into the living room.
‘When did you last see Lee?’ she asked.
‘Yesterday. He come round about six.’ The thick Gloucestershire accent rolled the words into soft pellets.
‘How was he?’
‘Excited. He was always excited, he was that kind of boy,’ Tracey said. ‘But yesterday he was mega excited.’
‘About the documentary?’
‘Nah, something else. He wouldn’t tell me what it was, he just kept on saying, “Ma, we’re nearly there”.’
‘Nearly where?’
‘I dunno. He liked to keep secrets, my Lee. Liked to surprise me.’
‘What time did he leave?’
‘Let me think. About seven. Maybe half past.’
Eden sipped her tea. The milk was on the turn and left a rancid taste in her mouth. She put the cup down. ‘Tell me about Lee.’
‘I was nineteen when I had him,’ Tracey said. She dug a photo album out of a cupboard and showed Eden a picture of a fat brown baby with a wide smile. Just a few days old and already Lewis’s ready charm was discernible. ‘Look at him. Lovely, isn’t he? Even when he was a runny-eyed kid he was lovely.’
‘What was wrong with his eyes?’
‘Conjunctivitis. Soon as he got rid of one bout he had another. You won’t believe how many pillow cases and towels I had to wash.’
‘Was Lee close to his dad?’
‘His dad never hung around long enough to see him.’ She sighed. ‘He knew I was pregnant, then soon as I started to show and talked about settling down together, he was off. Never heard from him again.’
‘Must’ve been hard, bringing Lee up on your own.’
‘It was. And lonely, y’know? That’s when I started drinking. Something to do in the evening when the baby was asleep, and it helped me get off to sleep, too. Pretty soon I needed more and more to get me off to sleep, and when I was awake, I forgot I had a kid. He was off with his friends, out on his bike getting up to mischief, like boys do.’
‘What happened?’
Tracey shrugged. ‘The Social come round, said there were concerns, and they took him away.’ Her voice cracked on the last word and her shoulders heaved. When she’d recovered herself, she continued, ‘He came back here for a while, then I’d make a mess of it and they’d take him away again. Poor little kid, never knew where he was going to be, who he was going to be with.’
Eden remembered what Simon Hughes had told her. ‘Didn’t he stay with one family for a longer time, though?’
‘Her! Yes, she looked after him for about a year. Bloody Godbotherer she was, always dragging him off to church and telling him to ask forgiveness or some nonsense.’ Tracey blew her nose into a tissue. ‘I’ll say one thing for her, though, she made sure Lee saw me regular. Said it was important for him to know his family, so she organised for us to see each other. At the Social office, mostly – like you can talk to your boy in an office with all those people sitting round and listening and making notes.’
‘Sounds grim,’ Eden said, swamped by a wave of sympathy.
Tracey nodded. ‘I used to save up things to tell him – things I’d done, what the neighbours were up to, what I’d been watching on TV y’know, so there was always something to say. And you know he never rolled his eyes or acted moody, like most teenagers would.’ Tracey gave her a fierce look. ‘I loved him for that, will never, never forget it to the end of my days.’
‘He loved you,’ Eden said.
‘He did. When things went wrong for him and they sent him to Borstal, he wrote to me every week. Ma, he says, I’m making a film and it’s brilliant. And then he went off to college and made more films and next thing my boy’s in TV. He’s somebody. But he never forgot his Ma. Come home when he could, rang me every other week. “Don’t you worry about a thing, Ma,” he said. “Everything’s going to be fine. I’ll see you right”. That’s what he said yesterday when he came round. “I’ll see you right”.’
‘What did he mean by it?’ Eden asked.
Tracey shrugged. ‘He’d helped me out with money before. I thought he meant that.’
‘He was going to give you some money?’
‘He didn’t say exactly, but that’s what I thought.’
Eden hesitated before she asked the next question. ‘Did Lee tell you whether he’d made a will?’
‘A will? He didn’t need a will. He was too young.’ Tracey wiped her eyes. ‘Besides, I’m all he’s got. I knew it would come to me.’
Tracey gave her the name of Lewis’s last foster family, who he’d lived with for a year. She couldn’t remember the address, but thought it was somewhere in Warden Hill. Eden dashed home to run a check online, and turned up two potential addresses. Picking up the phone, she dialled the first number.
‘Hello, is that Mrs Taylor? Can I just check that you’re the Mrs Taylor who used to be a foster parent? No? I’m sorry, I’ve got the wrong number.’
No one answered the second number, but Eden was keen to get as much information as she could before Inspector Ritter twigged what she was up to and closed down her investigation. She scooped up her Cheltenham street map and headed out to Warden Hill.
The area had a backdrop of hills cloaked in cloud. The streets themselves seemed flat, hunkered in the valley; lines of low-lying houses and regimented bungalows. Rose Taylor lived in a street perpendicular to a row of shops: a small supermarket, a café, and a shop that sold disability aids. Her house was a 1950s bow-fronted semi of award-winning ugliness, iced with beige pebble-dash and with the front garden paved over with pink and cream cracked paving slabs piped with weeds.
Eden went up to the door and rang the bell. There was a handwritten sign waterproofed with Sellotape next to the bell: No cold callers, no sales persons, no junk mail, and no flyers, please.
She rang the bell again, listening for movement inside the house. Nothing. There was a side gate into a back garden, a peeling wooden affair the height of her head. It was bolted on the other side, too far down for her to reach over. As she came back up to the front door, a neighbour pulled into the n
ext driveway.
‘Hello!’ Eden called. ‘I’m looking for Mrs Taylor.’ She went over and flashed her private investigator’s ID.
‘She might be at work,’ the neighbour said.
‘Do you know where she works?’
‘One of the hotels in town.’
Something crashed in Eden’s mind. ‘Which one?’
The neighbour shrugged and hefted a shopping bag out of the boot. ‘I don’t know. One of the posh ones, I think.’ She hauled the bag to her front door. ‘Course, she might be out with her daughter.’
‘Is it just her and her daughter living here? No Mr Taylor?’
‘He died years ago.’ The shopping was unloaded now and the neighbour turned away.
‘Thanks for your help,’ Eden said. She left her car where it was and went to the café to think. It was hours past lunch time and her stomach was complaining about the lack of service. She ordered a jacket potato and tuna mayonnaise and a mug of builder’s tea, and spent a few minutes reviewing what she’d learned so far about Lewis Jordan.
Sweet Fanny Adams, that was what. Twenty-five years ago he’d been in trouble and had gone straight. His mother was a debt-ridden alcoholic and he seemed to be a devoted son. He hadn’t made a will, but the only relative he had anyway was his mother. He was charming, full of himself and a one man shagathon, but none of this added up to enough to get him killed. Maybe the police were right: it was a robbery gone wrong. But when she searched Lewis’s hotel room that morning, it hadn’t seemed like a typical robbery. Nothing had been disturbed, no drawers hanging open, no furniture turned over. Perhaps they’d killed Lewis before they’d started and simply fled, but instinct told her there was more to Lewis’s death than ordinary robbery. The poison pen letters, for a start. And his burnt out eyes, for another. How had that happened? It would be a tremendous coincidence for Lewis to be the victim of two separate crimes in the same day, and she didn’t trust coincidence.
She paid for her lunch and returned to Rose Taylor’s home. This time, a yellow light shone through the porthole in the front door.
‘Rose Taylor?’ Eden said, when the door was answered by a well-built woman in her sixties. ‘I’m Eden Grey, I’m a private investigator. Can I ask you some questions about Lewis Jordan?’
‘Who?’
‘You knew him as Lee Jones.’
‘What’s he done now?’
‘Can I come in?’
Rose waddled as she walked, throwing out her left leg to the side, and her skirt was hitched up on her hip bones so it was higher at the back than the front. The room she showed Eden into was crammed with furniture that was too large, and too copious, for the space available. Every inch of the walls was covered with photos of children: school photos and family snaps of up to fifty children.
‘Are these all the children you’ve fostered, Mrs Taylor?’ Eden asked.
‘Yes, every one of them. Even if they were only here for a week.’
‘Which one is Lee Jones?’
Rose shook her head. ‘Not him.’
On the settee, sitting close to the fire, was a woman in her early forties. Life had evidently not been kind to her: her face was thin and drawn, with the droops and lines of someone who’s suffered from long-term depression. There was an air about her, too, of hopelessness and defeat. She barely looked up as Eden came in and said hello. Eden took a seat in an armchair covered with tapestry fabric.
‘Can I ask you where you work, Mrs Taylor?’
‘I’m housekeeper at a hotel.’
‘Which hotel? The Imperial?’
Rose blinked. ‘Yes, as a matter of fact, though what it’s got to do with …’
‘And you fostered Lee Jones?’
‘A long time ago.’
‘Lee Jones, now called Lewis Jordan, was found dead this morning, in the hotel where you work,’ Eden said, watching Rose carefully.
‘I had heard that he’d died,’ Rose said.
‘When?’
‘It was on the news earlier.’
‘So you did know that Lee Jones was Lewis Jordan?’
Rose was flustered by this. ‘Yes, they must’ve said on the news … or someone told me that Lee had changed his name.’ She tangled her fingers in the folds of her skirt. ‘I can’t remember now, but I knew before.’
‘Before what?’
‘Before you told me.’
Eden let the silence swell, then changed tack. ‘It’s a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it? The boy you fostered dies in the hotel where you’re housekeeper?’
‘I didn’t kill him!’
Eden held her gaze. ‘I never said he was killed,’ she said. ‘I told you he’d died.’
‘On the news, they said he was killed.’
That might be true: she’d check when she got back home. Eden let it go for now, and pressed on. ‘Were you at work on Tuesday?’
‘Yes, I was on earlies. I finished at twelve-thirty.’
‘Did you go back to work that day? Maybe left something behind and you went to fetch it?’
‘No.’
‘Why aren’t you at work today?’
‘I don’t work Wednesdays.’ Rose’s voice sharpened. ‘And I don’t appreciate you coming here and firing questions at me.’
‘It looks like murder, Mrs Taylor.’ Rose took in a sharp breath. ‘Were you in touch with Lee?’
‘No.’ The word was spat out with such vehemence Eden recoiled.
‘When did you last see him?’
‘Twenty-five years ago.’
‘You didn’t keep in touch with him? This boy you fostered for a year?’
‘No, I didn’t.’ Rose clenched her hands together tightly in her lap.
The woman on the settee cast her an anguished look, then got up and left the room. Her footsteps went up the stairs and across the room above their heads, then there was the creak of a bed.
‘Who would want to harm Lee?’ Eden said.
‘Any number of people,’ Rose said. ‘He was into all sorts of things. Drugs, probably, knowing him. And he knew some rough people. If you play with fire, you get burned.’
‘You’re not sorry he’s dead?’
Rose hesitated, then said softly, ‘That boy ruined my family.’
‘What happened?’
Rose glanced up at the ceiling as if afraid the woman upstairs could hear. She dropped her voice when she said, ‘Before he came here, I had two lovely children and a wonderful husband. And a year later I had a son in prison and a daughter … pregnant. At sixteen!’
‘And it was Lee Jones’ fault?’
‘He was a bad lad before he came here, I knew that. I didn’t realise he’d get my Tom involved. I thought he had more sense, but Lee worked on him, told him they’d get away with it, no one would ever know. So Tom went along and they broke into a warehouse and stole a lot of televisions. And they all got caught, but because my Tom was eighteen, he went to prison.’
‘And what happened to your daughter?’
‘I promised we’d stand by her. There was no question of getting rid of the baby.’ Rose’s shoulders slumped. ‘The baby was stillborn and the doctors told her she’d never have another. She’s never recovered. She’s been in and out of hospital more times than I can remember.’ She lifted her head. ‘So no, I’m not sorry that Lee Jones is dead, God help me.’
‘You had access to his hotel room.’
‘I have access to all the rooms; I’m the housekeeper.’
‘So you could have gone into his room.’
‘And attack him? Why should I do that now? Why wait twenty-five years?’
Eden shrugged. ‘You tell me.’
‘I will tell you.’ Rose stared her straight in the eyes. ‘I didn’t do it.’
She was convincing, Eden granted her that, but it smelt all wrong. That instinct she’d developed when she worked undercover was still primed and alert, and it told her there was something in all this that she was missing.
Rose’s story of her
daughter’s stillborn baby cut her. She’d lost a baby herself, had called her Molly though she’d died before she was full term. The loss of Molly had been the beginning of the end of everything. Her husband Nick, blamed her, said the stress of her work caused the miscarriage and couldn’t forgive her for refusing to stop work while she was pregnant. And then when Nick was gone, she’d thrown herself into the dangerous undercover work with Hammond’s gang. Hammond, who’d found her despite her new identity. Hammond, who’d sworn revenge.
Shuddering as she remembered the form Hammond’s revenge took – a messy, long and agonising death – she darted back to her car and went home. At least she could check out Rose’s story.
Her flat was as she left it, the hair in place across the doorway and the drawers left open a precise amount. No one had breached her sanctuary. She let go of the deep breath she’d been holding, drew the chain across the door, and made herself a hot chocolate. It was chilly in her flat and she hiked up the heating. Outside the day had turned dank and dusk was already creeping in at the edges, like an ink stain spreading across the sky.
She took out the staff roster and DVD she’d pinched from the Imperial Hotel that morning. A quick glance at the roster showed her Rose was telling the truth: she worked the early shift yesterday, and today was her day off. It didn’t mean that she hadn’t snuck back and clobbered Lewis Jordan, though. Let’s face it, she had every motive for doing so.
Eden slid the DVD of the hotel’s CCTV into her laptop and pressed play. The picture appeared as four squares: the entrance to the hotel, the car park, the garden at the side where they served afternoon tea in summer, and the staff entrance at the back. The picture was grey and grainy, and had a date and time stamp in the bottom right-hand corner.
Lewis left the Cultural Heritage Unit before six yesterday, and was with his mother shortly afterwards. He left her around seven or seven-thirty, according to Tracey. At seven thirty-three, Lewis Jordan stepped out of a taxi and bowled into the hotel. Eden kept watching, fast forwarding through the footage and jabbing the play button any time someone entered the hotel through either the staff or main entrances.