by Penny Grubb
‘Sure, and a number. I’ll ring him if you want.’
‘No, I’d rather go and see him face to face.’
‘Your call. He’s not dealing drugs again, is he?’
‘I don’t think so. It might be something bigger. I think he might want my help.’
Daylight had begun to fade as Annie made her way down a street that had once been familiar stamping ground. She headed for the pub that had been her favourite place to relax after a hard day; somewhere to gather her thoughts with the taste of good beer in her mouth. She wasn’t sure it would still be there.
The route took her through an industrial landscape of high red brick walls, with occasional gaps where stout lattice fencing crowned with rolls of barbed wire showed empty sites and ramshackle sheds. A heap of classic car bodies lay abandoned in a corner plot. A huge derelict building towered over its surroundings, showing how prosperous an area this had once been. It wasn’t so far from here that she had had to dive out of the way of that car, but her guard was up. She wouldn’t be followed again without being aware of it. And with any luck they, whoever they were, thought she was hundreds of miles away.
At this time of night, the area was quiet and deserted and it was with a small glow of satisfaction that she saw the unassuming outer façade as she rounded the corner; the word WHALEBONE in outsize letters above the street.
She pushed the door open on to lights and laughter, and sniffed appreciatively at the tang of hops in the air. The pub still brewed its own beer.
A mini queue had formed, but there was no one behind the bar. Annie assumed a change of barrel and sat down to wait, allowing her mind to rerun the events of the afternoon. After leaving the lorry, she had chased after Lance Malers / Carl Sleeman and seen him disappear over a rise. By the time she’d caught up, he was gone, but a trail of dust and the receding sound of a car engine marked his path. She had noted this patch of scrubland apparently accessible without using any of the marked entrances.
After returning the borrowed helmet, she had waited in the low building. It was close on two hours before Jean, sweat-streaked and blowing out a sigh, pushed her way through the door and made for the kitchen. Annie had followed and they’d talked while Jean boiled the kettle and threw sandwiches together.
Annie allowed herself to be told about Lance Malers’s appearance and strange message, then probed to see what Jean had made of it.
‘It’s as though he knows I’m on the case,’ Annie tried at one point, but wasn’t surprised at Jean’s blank shrug. Carl Sleeman had had his information from Pat, who had thought nothing of his enquiries, given it was supposedly Vince who’d brought her in on this job.
But Barbara was in on something that Pat wasn’t. And there was Scott. She’d heard him on the phone. He’d said the name, Lance Malers. Did he know it was really Carl Sleeman? How could he not, but then why refer to him by a pseudonym? Whom had he been talking to?
She shook the puzzle out of her head and cast her mind back to Jean, to the way she’d reacted. Her obvious mistrust of Carl Sleeman. I couldn’t make head nor tail of that stuff about a horsebox, she’d said. It doesn’t make any sense to me.
Nor did it to Annie, but she’d assured Jean she would follow up whatever she could.
She tried to weigh the options that lay before her. She couldn’t chase after a horsebox when she knew nothing about it except that it wouldn’t be at the racecourse. Scott was clearly holding out on her but she was wary of falling into a trap. Scott always went by the book. It made her uneasy to see him trying to do things off record.
Maybe, above everything, she needed to figure out who was working with whom.
Seeing that the barman was back at his station, Annie approached the bar, her eyes scanning the blackboard, her mouth curving to a smile at the sight of some old favourites.
‘You used to come in years ago, didn’t you?’ the barman greeted her. ‘No, don’t tell me …’ He narrowed his eyes for a moment, then plucked a pint glass from the shelf. ‘You used to chop and change, but … pint of Neck Oil. Am I right?’
Annie nodded with a laugh. It felt comfortable to be back where she was known but no one pushed for more than she was prepared to tell.
As she returned to her seat with her beer, she wondered if Carl Sleeman was really working with Barbara behind Vince and Pat’s backs. It was still her preferred theory and made some kind of sense with the events of the past of few days. If she was right, there was no London link, which was reassuring. Some kind of anti-Vince faction? With Vince down, was Barbara planning a coup? If so, she had more gumption than Annie had ever credited her with. When would she be in a position to talk? Would she confide in Annie? Well, why the hell not, she thought crossly, having brought her all this way and dropped her into the middle of it.
Her mind went back to the time when Pat and Barbara first set up on their own, after Vince had levered their father’s firm from under them. She remembered the anger and resentment that had burnt bright, that she thought would give the three of them the drive to create a vibrant business of their own. She’d seen herself becoming a partner, but it had all evaporated in the face of the sisters’ lethargy and laziness. They bickered with each other, while Vince was astute enough to keep them afloat with bits of jobs so that they became dependent on him, the more so after Annie left. But she remembered how they’d been, particularly Barbara, who had been company secretary when her father was alive, pushed aside to be a nonentity in a business going nowhere. Maybe at last the worm had turned and Barbara had decided to fight back.
If Annie stayed, she would be working with Barbara and Carl Sleeman – a lazy cow whose competence she’d never rated and a kid whose arrogance had almost undermined his uncle’s business several years ago.
And she would be working against Vince Sleeman, a man she’d never liked but for whom she had learned to have a healthy respect. When she’d been too young and inexperienced to know better, she’d urged the sisters to go head to head with Sleeman, to get back what was rightfully theirs to avenge the memory of their father. But she’d seen her error as she’d come to know more about him. Vince wasn’t a man to mess with. You circumvented Vince, you didn’t push him aside.
Annie sighed as she gazed into the rich depths of her beer. Where had Barbara of all people found the courage to take this stand? And surely even Barbara wouldn’t have set off on this course without something behind her, something concrete with which to fight Vince.
She drained her beer, and stood up. She would follow the trail Barbara had laid for her. The decision came easily; the question was how. She couldn’t trust Scott but needed a way to get information from him. She would trust Jean as far as she needed to, but Jean knew nothing. With Barbara out of commission, a face to face with Carl Sleeman was inevitable.
She didn’t see him as the type to spend his evenings in, but if she found him at home, she intended asking some pointed questions.
And if he were out?
Annie disapproved the illegitimate means so readily used by others in her profession. It was no way to build respect or better standing in public perception, indeed phone and computer hacking had led to high profile jail sentences for a handful of her peers, but her pursuit of Carl Sleeman had nothing to do with any legitimate case, and if he were out, she would not miss the opportunity to find answers by whatever means were at hand.
Annie let her gaze run over Carl Sleeman’s house as she drove past. An upmarket semi, tall gateposts standing like sentries at the bottom of a substantial drive. Family money had bought this, not anything he had earned for himself. A showy alarm system winked its single red eye at her. She smiled as she pulled up a couple of doors down. Carl Sleeman had always liked a good show. It was day-to-day detail that bored him. There’d be gaps aplenty in his defences.
She walked purposefully, but without hurry, her head down as she fiddled with her phone, her face obscured from the gaze of any nosy neighbours who might be peering through their curtains. Sha
dow dappled the pavement where the glow from the streetlights filtered through the trees that lined the road. Outside Carl Sleeman’s house, a gash in the kerb bled crushed concrete into the road. Annie marched in between the imposing gateposts, to all the world an expected visitor. Her feet felt the change from paving slabs to smooth, solid tarmac; a quality job to go with the conservatism of the area, except that the pristine surface was cracked down one side, the edge shattered to blend with the soil. Someone, probably Carl himself, had driven in before the tarmac was set.
A path curved round to a stout front door beneath the winking eye of the alarm system. Access to the back was obscured by a high brick wall that held a panelled door. Annie avoided the main pathway and marched towards the wall. She breathed out a sigh of relief as the door clicked open. The area was too exposed to start picking locks or scrambling over high obstacles.
The high wall blocked out the glow from the streetlights and she stepped through into darkness, pulling on a pair of thin, dark gloves as the door closed behind her and her feet told her they trod on wooden decking this side.
Now hidden from prying eyes, she paused to let herself adjust to the gloom, before easing forward, edging her way, alert for hidden objects.
It was as she felt her way round the corner to the back of the house that she heard the whisper of a click high above her and light blazed, bathing her in brightness.
Her heart thudded as she froze, her eyes blinking in the sudden glare. Security lights. She should have anticipated that.
A quick glance all around showed no sign of life. No lights flashed on inside Carl’s house or in the house next door. She shielded her eyes as she strode towards a rickety conservatory that guarded the back entrance. Its door was locked, but the plain glass panel showed the key in the other side. Christa Andrew would have taped a corner of the pane to muffle the sound of breaking glass and had her hand through, which was why, thought Annie as she extracted a pair of thin tweezers from her pocket, they should avoid Christa like the plague. An old-style lock like this one never warranted criminal damage, and confirmed the carelessness she had assumed in Carl Sleeman.
It was the work of seconds to grasp the end of the key through the lock. It turned smoothly and the door swung open with no protest.
Annie stepped inside and across to the back door proper. Her hand was on the handle, just as the security light blinked out, leaving her in total darkness. She cursed under her breath as her eyes struggled to adjust back to the gloom. She felt the door give way.
Too easy! She leapt back and sideways expecting an attack out of the darkness inside. But everything remained still. After a moment, she reached out again and pushed the door, feeling it give under the pressure.
Surely this meant he was in. Even the Carl Sleeman she’d built in her mind wasn’t as careless as this. She felt along the wall for a light switch and clicked it on, bracing herself for a shout of protest from within the house. A well-appointed but slightly old-fashioned kitchen met her eye. A range cooker gleamed, showroom new, its surface piled high with empty pizza boxes.
Room by room, she made her way through the house. She had no feel for hidden watchers, sensed no tension from anyone hiding from her, but she wouldn’t lower her guard until she’d covered every floor. A first-floor bedroom was kitted out as an office, the locks on the filing cabinet putting the house security to shame. She clocked it as her first port of call once sure she was alone. It was not until she was on the top floor in a room whose walls sloped with the curve of the roof that she saw any sign of life. A dim glow showed through the cracks of a door to a second attic and when she approached, she saw stout padlocks holding the door shut. Maybe this and not the office space was the real centre of operations in this house.
She crept closer, keeping to the edges of the room in case someone was the other side peering out through one of the cracks in the wood. When close enough, she crouched down and put her eye to the keyhole. Almost at once she was on her feet, blowing out an exasperated sigh. The other side of the door was Carl Sleeman’s personal cannabis farm; the enterprise that would probably be the undoing of the business he ran for his uncle from the office a floor down.
Now sure she was alone in the house, she went quickly down to the office and looked around. A huge plasma screen dominated one wall and a stack of games consoles lay at its feet. No difficulty in guessing how Carl spent his time in here. She turned to the filing cabinet. It was modern, locked and secure. Without trying she knew it wouldn’t succumb to any of the tools she carried. She would need the key. Given Carl Sleeman’s track record, it was worth a search.
On a wall at an angle to the huge plasma screen was a bank of six smaller screens. Carl had his own security cameras by the look of it. But he couldn’t lock his back door. Annie shook her head as she searched the desk, the cupboards, the nooks and crannies where people often kept their spare keys. Her search uncovered the CCTV console but no key, so she turned on the small screens and sat at Carl’s desk to see what he valued enough to record.
Two of the small screens flickered to life. One of these was trained on the locked door in the attic. Another showed the driveway. She would keep half an eye on that as she worked.
Annie had seen no camera in the attic and tried to judge from the angle, where it was hidden. She frowned as she worked the console, unsure whether these cameras ran continuously or only when the console was on. Playing the footage back showed the one in the attic to be triggered by movement sensors; and she watched herself approach the door and lean down towards the keyhole. Would it be possible to erase that stretch? Carl Sleeman wouldn’t notice it was missing. He didn’t do detail.
Then another screen lit up, showing her own head bowed over the console. Instinctively, she looked up, giving the camera her full face, though she couldn’t see where it was hidden. If she were to remove all trace of her visit, she’d have to erase that footage, too. She gave a mental shrug. If it had to remain here as a record, so be it. What would he do, after all?
She found the manual switches for the dark screens, which crackled to life, one remaining black, the others playing static snowstorms. One of them at least must watch the back of the house, but Carl hadn’t bothered to readjust them or clear the lenses when they’d become obscured. His security blind spot was truly blind.
Turning back to the ones that worked and starting with the office camera, she ran the images back. Carl, sometimes alone, sometimes with a mate, marched staccato in and out of the office fairly regularly, mostly playing games on one of the many consoles, but occasionally heading for the desk where she sat now. He checked the cameras, but briefly and lazily. He might miss her visit, but if he didn’t, she’d live with it. She hoped to see him approach the cabinet, pull a key from some cranny she hadn’t discovered, but in a high-speed fly-through of days of footage, he never once went near.
She looked again at the filing cabinet, modern, four-square and secure. Carl was here to guard whatever was in there, but maybe he had no access to it. It made sense. She wouldn’t trust Carl with secrets that warranted such a secure berth. With sudden misgiving, she wondered about the camera images. Were they being transmitted somewhere? Was someone watching her right now in real time?
A fingertip search of the console reassured her. No sign of any connection or transmitter. These cameras were Carl’s baby. If anyone else had routine sight of the footage, they’d have repaired the dodgy ones and cleared the lenses.
She turned next to the driveway camera which should show her who came to visit. This camera looked inwards and must be set on one of the tall gateposts.
Again she watched the high-speed swoop back over the hours and days, and saw the arrival and departure of both Carl and his games-playing friends. Her attention strayed to the plaster moulding high on the wall. In her peripheral vision one of the screens showed her face staring directly out, yet she could see no trace of a lens up there. If she were to chuck some dirt about up there she could probably obscur
e that lens too. But that wouldn’t erase the images already recorded and she couldn’t see how to do that without wrecking the whole console.
A movement from the other screen diverted her. She reached out to slow the playback. Carl was there in his own drive. How long ago? A few weeks, she estimated. The images weren’t labelled but she’d gone back a long way on this one whilst mulling over the possibility of hidden keys.
She leant forward to watch closely. Carl was upset, angry. She hadn’t seen him like that before; had thought of him as too laid back to do real anger.
She slowed the playback to real time, watching as the top of a lorry edged into view backwards. Then Carl was there, waving his arms and shouting, all in mime. A small woman appeared, maybe from the cab of the lorry that was out of shot. Carl’s demeanour changed as though she was so small and slight he couldn’t hold on to his anger. His gestures and expressions became more conciliatory, but still firm. Whatever had upset him, was still upsetting him. He pointed at the lorry, his mouth working overtime as the tempo of his gestures rose again. The woman’s back was all Annie could see, but it was clear that Carl fell silent every time she spoke. He seemed to accord her respect, but she couldn’t dampen the embers of his anger and they flared alight time and again.
Eventually, the woman waved her hands in apparent surrender. Carl seemed to slump as though exhausted by victory. The next move was so quick that it jerked Annie upright in her chair. The tiny mouse of a woman darted forward and dealt a blow from which Carl reeled back, surely just in shock, the woman was too slight to knock a matchstick aside. Annie stared at the image of Carl clutching his hand to his face.
A shudder ran down her spine. It had been madness to come here, to the heart of Vince Sleeman’s operation. She’d been lulled by the laid-back persona Carl turned to the world, but he was a thug like his uncle. And Vince might be down but he was far from out. She had Carl’s number. She’d ring him and arrange a meeting somewhere public.