He sniffed. “Latvian lad. There’s been a rush of them in these parts. Nobody seems to say anything...”
Grogan thought he should join in, for credibility’s sake if nothing else. “He was hired help, then, not someone she knew?”
“Right.”
“Strange that she didn’t take you up on your offer,” I said.
“To be fair, I think she knew I’d had problems. Back, double hernia...”
His wife smiled over the bone china. “I’ve since heard that her father, Gareth Jago, lives in the Isle of Man.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Tax.”
“What bloody tax?” her husband said with disdain. “Man had no money. Always on the scrounge, always fishing.”
“A bit of a parasite, you mean?”
He looked at me as if I’d gone mad. “No. Fisherman. He had a thing for salmon.”
“You can take the man out of Grimsby, but you can’t take...” I began and stopped.
“You know what I think?” Eric said. “I reckon that for all his faults Gareth Jago put his foot down, moment Sarah and that Aaron Flaxman got lovey-dovey. It’s what I’d have done.”
His wife sighed and corrected him. “You might’ve tried, love, but she’s a grown woman.”
“She’s a bloody kid...”
“But romance was in the air, then?” I said to Anne with a smile.
“More of a crush, really. All over and done with now.”
I turned to Grogan. “I don’t think we need take up any more of these good people’s time. Thanks for the tea, Mrs Draper.”
“You’re welcome.” She pointed at me, as if a light had suddenly been switched on. “You do know she’s got a sister, don’t you?”
“Really?”
“Emma Wesley, Jago as was. She’s head waitress on The Amethyst. It’s a restaurant in one of the docks, an old battleship converted...”
“Cargo ship,” her husband said. “Bloke who runs it’s a great fat Norwegian bugger.”
“And there’s the pot calling the kettle,” Anne quipped.
“Well, thank you for the information.” I turned to Grogan, reproachfully. “We’ve somehow missed the sister, Mr Andrews, possibly because of the different surname.”
I stood up and reached for the leather document case. “The van, Mr Draper, the one Sarah hired to move her furniture. A local firm, I imagine. Can you remember the name?”
He tugged at his braces, stretching out his self-importance. “I can. Sheraton. Don’t let the name fool you. The owner’s a Bangladeshi called Rahman.”
Mrs Draper saw us to the door and I turned and thanked her again.
“Drop in again if you think we can help you more, or if you just fancy a cuppa.”
“Certainly will.”
We made our way to the car in silence and were both settled and strapped in before one of us spoke.
“That was quite a performance,” said Grogan. “Runs in the family, then.”
“The ability to bullshit, you mean?”
“I meant acting.”
“So did I.”
Sheraton Motor Hire was based on a new business park just outside Grimsby on the A180. At the front there was a man-made lake, almost perfectly round, the excavated earth plonked down beside it, like a giant poached egg. A few dismal trees stood guard, bent towards the west by the prevailing wind off the North Sea.
We’d dressed down for the visit, back to normal. Grogan was in sweater and anorak, me leather jacket and T-shirt. I hadn’t packed a jumper and was regretting it. Grogan offered the observation, “You should’ve brought a pullover, guv.” It wasn’t worth responding to.
Sheraton Motor Hire was busy, with it being early in the day. There were twenty or so vehicles standing on the tarmac, all shapes and sizes, none of them shouting too loud that they were hired: just the company name on the doors with a phone number below it.
Inside, the front office was pretty standard: white walls, grey carpet tiles and a chrome and black leather sofa. Beside that was a glass-top coffee table bearing some car magazines and the local paper. On the other side of the panelled counter sat a woman of forty called Jackie, according to a name plate. She was trying to look younger than she was. Her hair was a shade too black to be real, her face heavily made up, mascara like a panda. She’d put on weight lately, or simply bought clothes that she planned on slimming down to. Meantime, they wrinkled slightly at her stomach. None of that prevented her from handling customers with knife-like efficiency, one eye on her computer, the other on those who had just walked in through the door.
She smiled at us and I asked if we could speak to Mr Rahman. She reached under the counter and pressed some kind of intercom through to his office, I imagine, before asking the nature of our business. We were anxious to trace a van rented from this firm in the first week of September, I said. In spite of my smiles and frankness she kept her finger on the intercom. I nodded at Grogan and lowered my voice. It was the only place we could think of that he could have left his briefcase, I told her.
“We’ve had nothing handed in,” said Jackie.
“I pushed it well under the seat,” said Grogan. “I mean if my head wasn’t screwed on, well, you know...”
Jackie didn’t know and waited for the rest of the sentence.
“...I’d have left that in your van as well,” he said.
“If you’d like to take a seat...” she began.
Sajid Rahman appeared at the door through to the workshop and took over. He was a baggy-looking man in his mid-forties, with real black hair and eyes to match. His face was puffy, the skin rough as if pitted by some childhood epidemic.
“Can I help you gents?” he said.
“Hope so,” I replied.
Jackie lifted a counter flap as Rahman beckoned us to follow him.
The workshop was small but alive, three or four mechanics calling to each other, yelling along to music from a local radio station. Rahman’s office was a partition in one corner, glass and plasterboard, and was furnished with a single desk, two chairs, a telephone and a portable computer. Nothing else, not even a carpet: no files, no records, no proof that he’d ever been there, should proof be called for. He offered us the chairs and perched on the desk.
He smiled, something he did with untrustworthy ease. “You didn’t leave no briefcase in one of my vans, mate.”
“No, no, we didn’t,” I replied.
I’d made a quick judgement. The best way to handle this guy was to give him a version close to the truth. It throws some people off balance, usually liars, and Sajid Rahman was as tricky as they come.
“We’re ex-coppers,” I said.
I felt Grogan flinch.
Rahman remained as smiley as ever. “So?”
I lowered my voice to a paternal level. “We’re trying to trace a young woman. Her disappearance is worrying an awful lot of people.”
He laughed. “You don’t look like the worrying type, mate.”
There was a slight pause. My eventual response surprised Grogan, surprised me as well. The demon on my shoulder was urging me to take Rahman’s head and introduce it to the desk. A louder voice said we were close to getting the information we needed.
“The van was hired on the third of September, probably used over...”
“She in trouble?” he asked, the smile suddenly gone. “She used my van for dodgy business?”
“No, no, moving furniture to a new house.”
“And she forgot to give you her address?”
“I’m sure it was an oversight, but yes...”
He nodded and weighed up his options. The smile returned, though not quite as readily as before. “So?”
“We’re just wondering if she told you where she was heading or if you keep mileage records.”
“We check everything that concerns us, mate.” He held up a fist and raised fingers as he counted off the points. “State of the vehicle, petrol in the tank, mileage before, mileage after.” He spread both hands and
explained. “Some guy drives five hundred miles a day, five days? I don’t care where he goes, but I should pay the wear and tear? Fuck, no!”
“So you can’t tell us where she went, but you could tell us the round trip mileage?”
He let his head fall to one side. “Sure I could, but I ain’t heard no reason to do that.”
“How’s about fifty quid?”
“Sounds promising.”
Grogan stood up. His eyes were roaming the room, focussing on various points as he went. I’d seen it before. It was a sign that he was about to lose control, and Rahman must’ve felt the same vibe. He tapped on the glass and a series of calls went across the workshop, directed at a young man, white, bald and the size of a buffalo. He ambled towards the office.
“Two hundred quid,” said Rahman.
“Hundred and fifty,” I said.
He smiled and nodded, then turned to the window and waved the buffalo back to work. The situation became a little tense again as I checked my wallet. I was about sixty quid short of the agreed price and turned to Grogan, who just looked at me.
“Gents, no problem. I take a credit card, you get a receipt for services rendered. We all know where we stand. Follow me.”
We went back to the front office where Rahman took my credit card, then asked Jackie to bring up the details for the first week in September.
“A van,” I said. “Second, third, fourth of the month.”
Her hands flashed across the keyboard and ten vehicles were listed on the screen, seven of them cars. Three vans.
“The Transit,” said Rahman. “The other two are runarounds, postman size.”
“What name did the lady give?” I asked.
“Mrs V Smart,” said Jackie. She saw the simple irony at the same moment I did, only she thought it was amusing. “Mrs Very Smart. I like it...”
“Not smart at all,” said Grogan. “If you want to stay under the radar, you don’t get clever.”
“Your PIN number, please,” said Rahman. “Then press enter.”
He pushed the card machine towards me. I could’ve been at a restaurant, a filling station, a Waitrose checkout and any second now he’d ask if I wanted cashback. I entered my PIN, kissed 150 quid goodbye and took back my card.
“Miles on the clock when hired,” said Jackie, writing the figures down on a slip of paper, “8,742. On return, 9,146. That’s 404 miles driven. I’ll do you a receipt.”
What we needed was a ten-year-old, not just to do the cutting and pasting required but the maths thereafter.
On the way back to our hotel we stopped off at a Martin’s. Grogan stood beside me as I chose four Ordnance Survey maps to cover the land north, south and west of Grimsby. I then bought a small roll of Sellotape for sticking them together, a roll of parcel string, a small deck of thumb tacks, a twelve-inch ruler and a hard pencil. It all came to about fifty quid. My investment in finding Vic and Freddie’s murderer was increasing and I wondered if I’d ever see a return on my money. Grogan wasn’t helping. The look on his face was asking what he’d done to deserve this.
“Bill, for fuck’s sake, could you be a little more optimistic?” I muttered as we stood in the queue to pay.
“I haven’t said a word.”
“That’s kind of the point.”
“Sorry. I’m hopeful. Very.”
Our relationship was turning into a bad marriage, the kind where one partner wants a fight and the other refuses to be drawn.
Back at the hotel we went up to my room and laid out the four maps on the floor.
“Sod it!” I said. “We didn’t buy scissors. We need to cut the edges off the maps.”
He said he had a tool in his bag that would do the job and popped next door to fetch it. He returned with what he called a multi-tool, an object which owed its design to the Swiss army knife. This creature was far more elaborate, though, and could saw, screw and drill anything that crossed its path. He found the scissors on it and went to work. When he’d finished we Sellotaped the edges together and ended up with a pretty acceptable map, the size of a hearthrug. We tackled the maths.
“What’s the scale on this thing, Bill?”
He picked up one of the trimmings.
“One in 250,000,” he said. “Two point five kilometres per centimetre.” He chose the moment to vent some of his frustration. “In the last five hundred years, every time we fought the bloody French we won. How come we use their measurements?”
I nodded at his iPhone. “What’s 202 miles in kilometres?”
In time he said, “325.087488. See what I mean? It makes things twice as complicated.”
I closed my eyes to keep the basics from drifting away. “Three hundred and twenty-five divided by two point five. That’s...”
I lost the thread.
“One hundred and thirty centimetres,” his phone told him.
“Cut me a piece of string ten centimetres longer.”
He measured out the parcel string with the ruler I’d bought. I tied one end of it tightly around the pencil, looped the other end round a thumb tack and pressed it right through the heart of Sheraton Motor Hire. We measured the Heath Robinson device to exactly 130 centimetres, winding any surplus string round the pencil. He then drew a circle while I held the thumb tack in place.
“Mind if I ask why I’ve done that?” he said.
“Is there anywhere on that radius that rings a bell?”
“Eastwards, you’re out into the North Sea. Most of the west covers the Irish Sea. Above that, the Scottish borders; below it, the South Coast...”
“I want names.”
“Bristol, Southampton, Bournemouth, Dover. Northwards, Dumfries, Kielder Forest. Can’t see a young couple starting a new life in those places...”
He took a moment to correctly phrase the point he wanted to make.
“Nathan, this may be the bleedin’ obvious, but we’re measuring as the crow flies, 130 centimetres. There’s no such thing as a straight road to anywhere. And what if she took a detour?”
“Take twenty kilometres, eight centimetres, off the string, draw me another circle.”
Again, he wound the string to length and I asked what he’d got.
“You’re still in the North Sea one side, Irish the other. You just make Wales and south you hit London, for Christ’s sake. North you nick the Lake District.”
“Do it again, another twenty kilometres.”
We ended up with five concentric circles, meaningless names of towns, forests, national parks, and a sense, rising from the pit of my stomach, that I’d been mad to believe such a crude device would bear fruit. In spite of knowing its risks, we fell back on Grogan’s original idea, a trip to The Amethyst to obtain from Emma Wesley her sister’s address. Maybe we could cajole her, frighten her, sweet-talk her into secrecy, into believing it was all for Sarah’s own good. We folded up the hearthrug map and cleared away the paraphernalia.
Grogan drove slowly to Fish Dock, presumably because he didn’t want us to get there. We drove in silence which he was the first to break. He turned and smiled at me.
“I never had the ears for that.”
He was referring to the pencil which I’d tucked between head and ear and forgotten. I removed it, dropped it into the side pocket of the car door. Then I took it out again and looked at it. I’m not claiming some kind of sixth sense or third eye, not even an exceptional gift for joining up dots. Even less do I know how the brain is wired when it comes to memory. I’ve always considered it to be a series of jagged lines, twisting, turning, sometimes going back on themselves, and if that sounds too rich a way of alluding to what happened next, too bad.
All I know is I kept looking at that pencil and for the next minute or so became the victim of a childhood flashback which, even as I tried to reject it, I knew was taking me somewhere useful. It involved a holiday in Keswick, world-famous for its mountains, lakes and ... pencils. I was nine years old and my parents could barely afford the break from their growing busines
s in North London. On the very last day my mother took me into a local shop and bought me a tin of coloured pencils, a dozen in all. I didn’t use them for a month; I just opened the lid ten times a day and looked at them. Eventually she persuaded me to draw with them, pictures that would recall our holiday in the Lakes. On our trip to The Amethyst I could see those pencils lined up in perfect order, I could see the first picture I drew: mountains, a lake, trees, a few birds in the sky...
“Bill, pull over, will you?” I said.
He was more than happy to do so. We bumped up onto a verge. He even switched off the engine.
“That second circle you drew, you said it nicked the Lake District. Type into your GPS, Grimsby to Cartmel.”
“Why there?”
“It’s the only place Flaxman ever mentioned. I’d never heard of it, so I asked him where it was. The look he gave me, I thought it was reproof for cutting into a childhood memory. It was fear that I knew something he didn’t want me to.”
Grogan tapped my request into his GPS. “What’s Cartmel to the Flaxmans?”
“A family farm, belonging to Carrie’s brother. They could’ve taken it over at one point. Carrie wanted to, so did Aaron. Joe vetoed it.”
He showed me the screen, the heavy blue line of the route between Grimsby and Cartmel, a zig-zag of 185 miles. The spare seventeen, taking it to 202, could easily be accounted for with to-ing and fro-ing, Sheraton Hire to Freshney Terrace, turns off the motorway for a break, getting lost...
“This farm, you think they inherited it?”
“No idea, but take another five years off my life, I reckon we’re getting warm.” I waited. “Say something.”
He said he liked it, mainly because it wasn’t inspired ‘or any of that crap’. What I’d done was listen to Aaron, words and tone, then read between the lines. He fired the engine, made a U-turn and drove back to the hotel.
- 27 -
I’m sure the drive from Grimsby to Cartmel is a pleasant one, but for Grogan and me it was spoiled just before Scunthorpe when Marion Bewley phoned in a high old state of excitement.
“Guess what!” she said. “It’s over! He’s done it!”
Evil Turn (Nathan Hawk Mystery) Page 21