by Penny Grubb
‘Sit down.’ Annie pushed the chair forward. ‘I’ll make coffee. We have to talk.’
‘Talk nothing! I need to get Barbara’s case files sorted out. At least you’ve come to your senses, but what’s he doing here?’
‘Yeah, OK, I’ll help you out, but first we need to talk. We need answers. For starters, why am I here?’
As Annie asked the question she was aware of Scott’s heightened attention. He wanted to know, too.
‘Don’t ask me,’ said Pat. ‘Vince brought you in to help out on that horse job.’
‘Horse job?’ Scott looked at Annie.
‘Oh, that’s nothing.’ She waved it aside. ‘Pat, you know it wasn’t Vince. He hates my guts. He’s the last person who’d call me in. And anyway, I heard he was at death’s door in a hospital somewhere.’
‘Yes, he is, but Barbara said …’ She stopped and looked pointedly at Scott. ‘Maybe we should talk privately.’
‘I’m not here in an official capacity, don’t worry. Annie can vouch for me.’
‘You’re working together?’ Pat’s glare swung round, but before Annie could open her mouth to frame an indignant denial, the phone rang. Pat reached across for it. ‘Thompsons,’ she barked, then immediately straightened up, her face frozen.
Annie strained to hear the faint gabble of the voice at the other end. Pat pressed the handset to her ear, turned and hurried out. As her footsteps receded down the corridor outside, Scott and Annie exchanged a glance.
Half a minute later, Pat was back. ‘Vince isn’t in hospital,’ she said. ‘He discharged himself an hour ago. If I were you, I’d make yourselves scarce.’
It was Pat’s tone, rather than her words that had Annie on her feet. ‘Where’s your car?’ she asked Scott.
‘I got a mate to drop me.’
‘Come on. Mine’s outside.’ To Pat, she said, ‘I’ll be in touch. Don’t ring me. Oh, and I’m not working with him and I can’t vouch for what he’s doing here. Not yet, anyway.’
They clattered down the stairs, Annie watching the street door, half expecting it to fly open, a gang of Sleeman’s henchmen to crowd in. Outside, she glanced up and down the street. A couple of people strode in the direction of the town centre; a few more leant against walls, pulling on their cigarettes, sending clouds of smoke back up towards the office windows.
‘Which is yours?’ Annie heard puzzlement in Scott’s tone. The only vehicles in sight were delivery vans.
‘Back road. I cut through the tenfoot,’ she rapped out, lapsing easily into Hull slang as she marched towards the alley between the buildings, gritting her teeth against the pain in her leg and hearing Scott’s footsteps behind her, keeping pace.
As they made their way along the walled path, he spoke. ‘She’s shit scared of Sleeman. Did you see her face when she took that call?’
Annie answered him with a half-nod but said nothing. Pat had never been scared of Vince Sleeman in all the years she’d known her. Pat had never been scared of anyone. But Scott was right about that call, only it wasn’t Vince Sleeman. The fragment Annie heard had been a woman’s voice.
CHAPTER 6
Scott sat across the table, his forearms resting on the plastic cloth, his hands cupping his mug of tea. Behind the counter at the far side of the room a man polished crockery whilst whistling tunelessly against the background chatter of the Lara King Show on Radio Humberside. They’d missed the breakfast rush and it was too early for lunch. For the time being, this roadside café was their private space. Annie listened to Scott as the smell of coffee rose from her cup, slightly bitter. She breathed it in, wanting the aroma rather than the coffee itself, and felt irritation as Scott’s words washed over her. She was content to let him talk it out of his system, justifying his actions more to himself than to her, but now he tried to make out he’d followed her out because she needed his protection. You ran too, she wanted to say. We both wanted out before Sleeman’s henchmen turned up. Hench-woman, she corrected herself, remembering the high imperious tone she’d heard barking orders at Pat.
Was it paranoia? Someone had tried to wipe her out less than twenty-four hours ago. Was she overreacting now? She remembered the look on Pat’s face; the tone of her voice. Pat who was scared of nothing and no one. No, she wasn’t overreacting. This was self-preservation.
Was this the moment to pin Scott to specifics? He was hardly in a position to deny her. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She glanced down at it beneath the level of the table and clicked the ignore button. Pieternel. A reminder that they hadn’t spoken since Monday night; a reminder too of where she was really needed.
‘Who knows you’re still here,’ Scott asked, ‘other than me and Pat Thompson?’
‘No one,’ she said. Pieternel didn’t count.
‘Will Thompson keep quiet about seeing you?’
She threw him a raised-eyebrows glance as she nodded, yes. He knew Pat well enough to have no doubts.
‘Then you could just leave. Come back with me like we planned, sort yourself out and then go.’
She gave a brief laugh but said nothing. Like we planned? Scott’s plan, which she had no intention of going along with, was that they should both return to his house: the home he shared with his wife and twin boys. Annie hadn’t asked, but assumed he had married the DC from West Yorkshire, the one with whom Annie had nearly come to blows a few years ago. No, she would drop him close to home and then head back to the racecourse. He was right about one thing though. If she were to go now, then whoever had been after her would assume they’d scared her off. Again she felt her phone vibrate an incoming call. She slipped it far enough out of her pocket to see it wasn’t Pieternel calling back, but Jean Greenhough. Again she ignored the call.
Scott gabbled on, saying everything about nothing. If she wanted information from him, she would have to work for it, but did she want to know? This wasn’t her mess. Barbara had called her in but hardly made her welcome. Pat seemed to be out of the loop. Pat? She thought about her ex-boss; the relief on her face when she’d arrived to see Annie sitting in the office; the fear that had flooded her face when she took that call. She reached into her pocket and cradled her phone. Interrupting Scott mid-sentence, she stood up and said, ‘Excuse me a moment. I’ve a call to make.’
Traffic streamed past the front of the café, its position on this main road securing its existence as long as it served food that was half-way decent. Annie leant against the wall, watching the scraps of straw and paper that eddied around the car park in the cool breeze, and clicked Pieternel’s number into her phone. ‘I couldn’t take your call earlier,’ she said. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Nothing urgent. I wanted to give you the latest; see what you make of it.’ There was laughter in Pieternel’s voice. She sounded cheerful.
‘Go on.’
‘I reported in as planned. Gave them the guy’s movements for twenty-four hours. Gave them everything except that he’d clocked us.’
‘Were they pleased?’
‘Ha! Good question, Annie. They should have been pleased, shouldn’t they? And yes, he pretended to be, once he’d got over his shock. See, I had an idea I’d be handing him something he didn’t expect, so I did it face to face. I’ve never seen someone work so hard to swallow back what they really want to say. Then it was all, ah yes, that’s good, much as we expected. And he couldn’t get rid of me fast enough.’
‘What d’you think he really wanted to say?’
‘A stream of profanity for sure. He was mad as mad. Did you meet him? No, you didn’t. Old-fashioned city-gent type. The sort who doesn’t do anger at work. Takes it all out on the family back home. I tell you, if he’d been armed, I’d have needed some nifty footwork to get out in one piece. Whatever it was they wanted, they sure as hell didn’t get it from us.’
‘So what did they want?’
‘Well, I’ve been thinking about it. I reckon they knew we’d been clocked, maybe even had something to do with that themselves, and they ex
pected a report from whatever wild goose chase we were meant to be led on.’
Annie felt a prickle of indignation. ‘Someone told them to expect a crap job from us.’
‘Yup, and they came to the wrong outfit. They’ll have to go elsewhere if they want a shoddy job doing. So that’s that, whatever it was about. How about you? What’s going on?’
‘Quite a lot, but I can’t go into it all now.’
‘That sounds like you’re going to stick it out.’
‘I’ll stay on for now, but if anyone chases me up, say I’ve come back to London, will you? I’ll fill you in later. Hopefully I’ll have something concrete to tell you. All I know at the moment is that Pat’s in trouble. Bigger trouble than she realizes. I can’t just desert her.’
Annie glanced through the window to check on Scott. He hadn’t moved, so she made a second call. Jean Greenhough answered on the third ring. ‘I don’t have long,’ Annie said, ‘but I noticed you’d called me.’
‘Can you get to the racecourse this afternoon,’ Jean kept her voice low. Annie could hear shouting in the background. ‘Lance Mailers has been in touch. He’s coming to see me.’
‘Not sure if I’ll be able to, but get what you can from him and I’ll catch up with you.’ The pony camp was no longer high on her priority list, if it figured at all, but she wanted to keep in with Jean, because that out-of-the-way bolthole was going to be useful.
Annie re-entered the café and walked towards Scott. She needed what he knew, and wished she didn’t feel so tired. It would be a relief to have an excuse to leave it till later, but she’d been behind the curve since she arrived in Hull and had to catch up.
‘Scott, we need to talk. Seriously. About what’s going on.’
‘With respect Annie, I don’t know if I can trust you.’
She smiled. He hadn’t said, what the hell are you talking about? That was half the battle won. He stood up. ‘Let’s get home. I want to get out of these clothes. I’m sure you want to change too. I can probably find you something.’
‘I have stuff in the car. Listen, Scott, is this a good idea? Your family … uh … wife?’
‘She’s at work. The boys are at the childminder.’
‘Oh, OK. In that case, let’s go.’
Half an hour later, Annie found herself perched uncomfortably on the edge of a hard settee in Scott’s living room. The security she’d felt in knowing that Scott’s family would be out all day disappeared as soon as they pulled up outside the smart semi. It was exactly as she’d imagined. An estate of neat brick houses on a network of winding roads and cul-de-sacs. She saw curtains twitching as she and Scott walked up the path to the front door. He was oblivious to the scrutiny from neighbours who must be his wife’s friends and confidantes. The phones would be going; Scott would get a call within minutes, thought Annie, or his wife might turn up in person.
She wasted no time as he sauntered back into the room from upstairs, now in jeans and T-shirt, towelling his hair. ‘I’ll tell you everything I know, Scott, but it’s precious little. And I need you to be open with me. I’m mixed up in this thing whether I want to be or not. I don’t like being the object of someone’s target practice.’ She paused to see if he’d speak, but he remained in the doorway between living room and hallway, waiting for her to go on. ‘I was called in to work for the Thompsons. The official line is that it’s Vince Sleeman who’s picking up the tab, but we both know that’s garbage. I’m pretty sure it’s Barbara but before I could have it out with her, she was knocked down. And like you told me, it was no accident.’
‘Well, I only said—’
‘I already knew it wasn’t an accident, Scott. You weren’t telling me anything new.’
He leant against the doorjamb and looked down at her, as though weighing her words. ‘But if you genuinely know nothing …?’
‘That’s not the point. I’ve been brought here for a reason and if I can stay out of the way of the people who don’t want me to know, then I’m going to learn something very soon. The question is, do you want me to share it when I find out?’
‘Of course I do. You’d be a fool not to. You’re the one who’s stepped into a trap.’
She stared up at him. He’d lost nothing of his ability to annoy her. She ran a couple of ripostes through her head. If you want something from me, don’t call me a fool … I could have your whole career on the line after last night. Most of all she wanted to shout at him that he might think they had hours to play this out, but his wife could be back like an avenging fury within minutes. ‘I’m going to find out one way or another. I’d rather have something from you to get me started or to keep me from asking questions in the wrong places, but I’ll get to know, with or without your help. And you know I can open doors that you can’t. But you can get at official records that aren’t accessible to me. If this were all above board, Scott, you’d have the drop on me, but it isn’t. You have to be desperate to have pulled a stunt like last night. If you’re still the person I used to know, then we’re on the same side. Let’s work together on this before anyone else gets hurt. But if you don’t want to, fine.’
As she began to get to her feet, she saw that she’d tipped the balance. It hadn’t been so hard. He’d been halfway there to start with.
‘Sit down, Annie. And we’ll have one thing straight from the off. I’ve not told you anything. I’ve not even seen you. No one’s seen us together.’
‘Half the street watched us come in here.’
‘I mean no one who matters,’ he said impatiently, so she let it drop and waited for him to tell her what was going on.
For a moment, she thought he would come properly into the room and sit down, but he just shifted his stance in the doorway and took a deep breath. ‘It was just over three weeks ago,’ he began. ‘A Sunday night. I went off on a fortnight’s leave the next day. Do you remember Rob Greaves? He’s been around for years. I can’t remember if you knew him.’
Annie narrowed her eyes. ‘Vaguely. Is he Sergeant Greaves now?’ Jean Greenhough had mentioned a Sergeant Greaves.
‘That Sunday night, we were out down Withernsea way when he had a call. Tip off about something being landed on one of those remote beaches. We were nearest. It wasn’t our case or our area. I should have been back home by then, anyway. I’d been taking a statement and some kids had got at the car. I was calling it in when I spotted Rob, so he took me back to town. We’d neither of us have been anywhere near usually.’
‘Whereabouts?’ she asked instinctively, but knew exactly where he meant.
‘That’s not important,’ he snapped and Annie nodded as though deferring to him.
‘What was it, drugs?’
‘No, people. Illegals.’
‘That’s unusual.’ When this had been her patch, she’d known of the landing site on a deserted stretch of the coastline. But it had always been drugs, small time, small operation. She’d never heard of people-smuggling other than sophisticated operations through the big ports. ‘Did you catch them?’ she asked.
‘Yeah. We parked at the top and walked down; found two weirdos with a barbecue and a bunch of fairy lights. Hardly the weather for it. There was nothing to see. I thought we’d missed them but Rob spotted something.’
‘Didn’t you have back up? Coastguard or whatever?’
‘It was all taken care of. We were just the skivvies called in because we were close by. I guess they didn’t know exactly where the landing would be till the last minute. I don’t know if they got the boat. It was all a bit of a rush.’
From the faraway look in his eyes, he relived the events of that evening as he described them to her. She wanted to tell him to come properly into the room, to sit down where she could watch him without twisting round in her seat, but she didn’t want to distract his account. As she tried to picture the scene herself, she asked, ‘Were you in uniform?’
He nodded. ‘We walked down to the water. I didn’t see her at first, then she just appeared out of the dar
kness … out of the sea … wading ashore like I don’t know what. Fully clothed, big holdall thing.’
‘Had she come from a boat, or waded out to get away from you and come back?’
‘God knows. I couldn’t see anything out there. You know how it is at night. Bits of lights playing off the surf. She didn’t try to run or anything.’
Annie knew that people giving their own account often wanted to be selective in what they told her. She’d learnt to spot the pauses, the tiny gestures that signalled something hidden. Yet listening to Scott, it was as though he was the one weighing every word of his story, trying to see what he’d missed first time round. It increased her sense of unease.
‘So did you arrest them all?’
‘No. We just took the woman back to town. Immigration wanted her. She was a cog in a bigger case. And like I say I was off on leave the next day.’
‘I can’t see where I fit in to any of this. Or the Thompsons.’
‘It was after I got back, just a week ago. I asked Rob what had happened to the woman. That’s when he told me it had gone seriously pear-shaped and there was all hell on. He’d kept our names off the paperwork pretty much. He told me to keep quiet and keep my head down or we’d get caught up in it. Which I did … more or less.’
‘More or less?’
‘OK, I did a bit of digging, but I didn’t like what I found.’
‘Which was?’
‘Nothing. All we’d done was fish her out of the sea and then hand her straight on. We didn’t arrest her or anything. But there was nothing in the record to show we’d been there, that anyone had been there. I couldn’t find her arrest, detention, anything.’
‘Surely you asked someone.’
He was silent for a while, his expression troubled. ‘I know I should have, but I talked to Rob and he said if I didn’t leave it, we’d both be right in the shit.’
‘Are you saying Rob Greaves is mixed up in it, whatever it is … was?’
‘Hell, no. We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But something went badly adrift. I kept quiet because at first I thought I might be risking my job. I’ve a young family to think of now. But then, I thought if Rob and I go together and pick who we talk to, we can have this out properly. I put it to him. He said he’d been thinking on the same lines but he wanted to dig a bit further first. Like he said, no point throwing our careers down the pan. Turned out to be worse than we thought. The girl had been snatched and the word was there’d been a leak from somewhere, that they’d had inside help.’