by Issy Brooke
Her bad mood wasn’t being helped by the annoying proximity of three young women with glossy hair in a nearby corner who were clustered around a mobile phone that was playing amusing videos, and to the other side of her was a man dressed entirely in beige who was having a muttered and pointless argument with one of the staff about their lack of woodworking magazines.
She pushed the musty hardback book aside. A History of Upper Glenfield seemed to focus rather too much on the changing price of wheat over the decades. She began to leaf through the piles of maps, and had to stand up to unfold them, one by one.
She wanted to look at the land that Alf’s garage stood on, but now she was also curious about The Arches Hotel and Conference Centre – more specifically, the land that lay opposite to it, that Tina had bought, but could not build on.
The new maps showed only the roads and buildings. The old ones were faint and marked strange things like “gowts” and “hundreds.” She rested her knuckles on the table and straightened her arms, glaring down at the mess of paper and sighing.
“Can I help you with anything?” The library assistant, a middle-aged woman in neat, dark clothing, with enormous earrings in the shape of butterflies, stood on the other side of the table.
“I don’t know,” Penny said. “I’m interested in land ownership.”
“Oh!” The assistant smiled. “You’re not going to have much joy with the maps, except as a starting point. Let’s have a look. Do you have a name or a place in particular?”
“Brian Davenport.”
“And what era?”
“Current,” Penny said slowly. “But also going back maybe seventy years or so … a few generations.”
The assistant didn’t ask why. She simply nodded, and her eyes unfocussed as she gazed into the distance, thinking. “Right. Hang on. I’ll be back in a moment.”
The assistant bustled off, her whole stride suggesting that she was brought alive by such tasks. I suppose that’s why people go into this sort of thing, Penny thought, “Information Studies” and all that. It’s good to love your job.
Which made her think of Drew and the conversation they’d had only yesterday, Sunday. She’d rung him up and claimed it was just for an idle chat, but within moments she’d ended up telling him about Saturday’s exploits.
Of course, he’d heard all about the “drugs bust” and so when she told him that she’d also gone to see Tina, he was annoyed.
Except he claimed that he was merely “concerned” for her, which she believed, but still, as she had pointed out: she was certainly old enough to decide for herself.
And he hadn’t contradicted her, but the conversation had ended on an awkward note, and once again she was reminded that her meddling wasn’t normal and it probably wasn’t healthy.
The assistant reappeared. “I had a quick look but as it’s recent information that you particularly want, I think we’ll have more luck online.”
“I did a bit of Googling,” Penny said.
“I’m sure you did. But we have access to databases that we pay for; and not everything that you want to know will come up in an obvious way.” She smiled. “Please. Follow me.”
They left the mess of maps and books on the table, and went to a workstation that stood alone on one wide desk; it seemed larger than the usual PC.
And it didn’t take long for the expert library staff to unearth far more than Penny had done in less than half the time.
Once the assistant had brought up all the relevant pages, she returned to her post to help others, and left Penny staring at the screen and trying to make sense of it all.
Brian Davenport didn’t just own The Arches Hotel. No, he owned many patches of land dotted about the Upper Glenfield area. He didn’t own the land opposite, where the protesters had been, which Penny thought was curious.
He did own a small square of land in the centre of town, but it made no sense to Penny. She got up and retrieved one of the more up-to-date maps, and sat back down at the workstation. Her map-reading skills were somewhat lacking, much to the amusement of Edwin and the ramblers’ club, but it seemed to her that Brian owned the patch of land where Alf’s garage stood.
Did he sell it to Alf? If so, when? The records were recent and didn’t suggest that the land had changed hands. It looked as if Brian still owned it. Or he owned the land, at least. A little more searching revealed that the garage definitely belonged to Alf. How was that even possible? Did Alf know that Brian owned the land?
Did Brian know that he owned the land?
Maybe they were in a business relationship and there was nothing suspicious about it at all.
She rubbed her eyes and sighed. Then she turned to another tab that the assistant had opened in the browser and concentration on Brian’s online portfolio. Like most businesspeople, he was listed in various records such as with Companies House, with some of his annual accounts publically lodged, and he was also prominent on employment and networking sites.
Oh, haven’t you had a charmed life, she thought to herself as she read about his achievements. He’d excelled in both sports and academic studies at the exclusive private school he’d attended, and she had to suppress a snigger at an old photograph of him in a straw boater with some kind of 1920s-style blazer hanging casually from his twelve-year-old shoulders. He’d read a string of complicated things at Cambridge and rowed for them, too.
I wonder why he’s here and not in London, quaffing champagne and doing whatever else it is that people do when they have double firsts from Cambridge, she thought. She flicked back to the land records site.
He inherited much of the land, she saw. He hadn’t gone out and purchased it.
Oh. His family was rooted here, in Lincolnshire. She dug back deeper, broadened the search to just “Davenport family.” Now more information revealed itself; yes, his family was one of those minor rural gentry sorts.
She discovered more. There were some photographs of them at functions, although they grew scarcer the further back in time that she went.
Oh – now look at this. She realised she was holding her breath as she came across a hobby website that had lots of images of regional hunt balls and charity dinners and the like on it. The website creator was very keen on an effective tagging system, and “Davenport” was prominent in the tag cloud on the sidebar.
She brought up the gallery and scrolled through, seeking images of Brian’s family. There they were, a husband and wife, their thirty-year-ago faces so like Brian’s appearance now. The husband was tall and wore a morning suit like he’d been born in it. The wife was elegant, and had a warm and pleasant smile. She looked so delightfully natural, in fact, that Penny paused the slideshow. Her evident pure joy at being there seemed very different to the air of long-suffering patience showing on the face of her husband.
There was another couple to the other side of them, and they, too, looked haughty and bored. The caption said that this was Angelica and Bertram Gore-Smith. Neither looked like a barrel of laughs.
I’d invite Clare Davenport to a party, Penny thought, but the rest of them can stay at home, thanks.
She scrutinised the photo but no clues leaped out at her. She scrolled on.
There they were again – the Davenports and the Gore-Smiths, at a summer ball, with other families too; Fortescues and Cholmondeleys and other names that were probably not pronounced the way that you looked at them.
On she ploughed, looking now for any reference to either the Davenports or the Gore-Smiths.
There were no more images, so she went back to a general search, but this time, hunting for more about the Gore-Smiths, and when she found it, she was stunned.
Until the 1970’s, the Arches Hotel and Conference Centre had been a private house. A very large, fine private house. Owned, and lived in, by Bertram and Angelica Gore-Smith.
And their only son, Alfred.
* * * *
When Penny stumbled out into the bright light of the afternoon, her head was spinning
. She staggered into the first café that she came across which had free seats; a less-than-salubrious sort of place, catering to locals rather than tourists, with reasonable prices to match the low income of the area.
She ordered a mug of tea, which came by the half-pint, and a toasted tea-cake. The dumpy waitress, an older woman in a stained sheer blouse and jeans, peered at Penny in concern.
“Ee awright, love?” she asked. She placed the plate with its freshly-toasted currant bun on the table and slid a knife towards her. The butter had been carved off a block and put on the side of the plate. No expensive pre-wrapped pats here; no doubt whatever Penny didn’t use would be recycled onto the next customer’s order.
“I’m sorry?” Penny asked in confusion.
“Ee awright? Oo look a bit addled, like.”
“Oh. Yes, I’m fine, thanks. I’ve been studying in the library. My head’s all … addled.”
The woman sucked her brown teeth. “Awright. Oo need anything, just yell, love.”
“Thanks, yes, I will.”
Penny tried to look less addled, and reached out onto the windowsill for a creased and well-thumbed newspaper. The choice was limited; there were two shabby tabloids with far too many naked women and HEADLINES written in SHOCK capitals, and a regional paper. She chose the local paper as being less likely to contain CELEBRITY in midnight ROMP SCANDAL (pictures inside).
Her thoughts intruded as she buttered the tea-cake. She went over what she now thought she knew. Alfred Gore-Smith, treasured young son of the rich and well-respected Gore-Smith family of the Arches, was Alf Smith, now the owner of a struggling garage business. The revelation had stunned her. Now Brian Davenport owned the house that young Alf had grown up in; and he also owned the land upon which Alf’s garage was built.
Alf and Brian, Brian and Alf. Were their parents friends, she wondered. Did Alf and Brian have a link?
Crucially, did they know each other when they were boys?
It was too much. She glanced at the local paper, wondering who the influential families were in Lincoln, these days. It certainly wasn’t the Gore-Smiths any longer.
But the front page was nearly as bad as the gutter-press tabloids. “Ferg Smith escapes jail” was the headline. She skim-read the first few paragraphs, the only part of the story where the real information was. A large drugs and money laundering operation had been exposed, apparently.
Ferg … ah, she had heard that name before. Ian, Ariadne’s new landlord, had mentioned him as some kind of untouchable overlord. It certainly seems that way, she thought, as she looked at the grainy photo of a grinning man, his neck as wide as his shiny shaven head.
That’s a drug dealer, she thought resentfully. That’s what they look like. Not like me. Huh.
Suddenly she wasn’t in the mood to read the paper any longer, and she folded it to hide his face and the headline, and flung it back onto the window-ledge.
I wonder. Was Brian always a successful businessman? And when did Alf start to fail?
And why?
Chapter Fourteen
“I might be free on Tuesday lunchtime,” the text from Cath read.
“Might?” Penny texted back.
“It is cake-dependent.”
“Cake will be provided.”
“I like you.”
* * * *
So it was that at midday, Cath and Penny sat out in the small garden at the back of Penny’s garden, with Kali laid out in the shade under the table. On the top of the table was a rapidly-diminishing pile of sponge cakes with colourful icing.
“You definitely didn’t make them?” Cath asked, her hand hovering over a pink cup cake.
“Nope. Destiny has turned out to be pretty good at this sort of thing.”
Cath nodded, and risked a bite. “Oh, they’re nice. Do tell her.”
“You can take some back to the station. Maybe make it up to PC Patel. I still feel bad about that sort-of poisoning incident.”
Cath grinned. “I might take one back for him. The rest have an appointment with my belly.”
Penny stretched her legs out and let herself absorb the warmth of the sun’s rays. She was enjoying summertime. She had some work to do with her crafts, and her sales had slipped because of lack of promotion, but overall she was content.
Content in her professional life, at any rate.
“This is nice,” Cath said, interrupting her reverie. “Me, you, sitting here, just chilling.”
“It is,” Penny said. “So who tipped the police off about me and the car, then?”
The mood shifted instantly, although Cath didn’t move or speak for some long seconds. Then she put her half-eaten cake down on the table, and folded her arms.
“You are trying to bribe information out of me with a well-made cake.”
“No. I’m asking a simple question and it’s very important to me.” Penny sat forward and looked at Cath. The unfairness of everything made her feel quite angry. “I got dragged out of my car, in public, and basically now everyone is talking about me as some kind of drugs mafia type or something.”
“That is all an exaggeration,” Cath protested. “You weren’t dragged, for a start.”
“I can’t go into the mini-market now without people pointing and staring and whispering. Something’s going on, Cath. It’s more than just the fact that there was a tip-off to the police. There’s a campaign against me, don’t you see? And it makes absolutely no sense because I can promise you that I am not investigating anything. So who feels threatened by me, and why?”
Penny watched Cath intently. She could see the warring emotions on her usually implacable face, and she realised she was dealing with the friend, and the woman – not the police officer. It gave her hope.
Hope which was dashed when Cath shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry. I can’t tell you anything, even if I was allowed to. The call that came in was anonymous.”
“What the–”
“Steady now.”
“I’m sorry,” Penny said, almost hissing. “I don’t believe it, I really don’t. Anonymous? Do you really let people do that? You have ways of finding out. Can’t you trace the call?”
“Listen,” Cath said. “Don’t you think that we tried? We were suspicious as soon as it came in, but … we didn’t have time to do anything but act upon it. And when we acted on it, we tried to do so in a small way, and as discretely as we could. I mean, you weren’t woken up at five in the morning by a posse of action men with their big red key bashing in through your front door, were you?”
“Would you really have done that?”
“No,” Cath confessed. “Not on the basis of the intelligence that we received, no. It would have been a waste of resources. But afterwards, yes, of course we looked back at the call … but anonymous calls have to be anonymous, or people would lose faith in them, and stop making them.”
“Are they ever useful? I mean, people should give their names when they provide information. It stinks. The system stinks.”
Cath took a deep breath. “The system works, mostly, actually. Anonymity provides protection. Without that … people can die, you know. Information is dangerous. Imagine two guys in a prison cell. One of them talks in his sleep or gets drunk on some cell-toilet hooch or something. He reveals something about an unsolved crime. The other prisoner wants to alert the authorities – yes, it happens, don’t look so surprised. Everyone has morals … about something. There’s a pecking order in prison that puts the child-killers at the bottom and believe me, the other prisoners want to get to them to mete out their own brand of justice.”
Penny stared, fascinated in spite of herself.
Cath went on. “So the prisoner that overheard, he can use the free phones to call the information in, you know? It’s vital. But his safety would be compromised if he gave any clue away to his identity. And I know that’s an extreme and dramatic example, but there’s such a ‘them-and-us’ thing that still exists. There are whole families and networks out there that h
ave always prided themselves on never dealing with the police, but what happens when someone gets born into those families who wants to stop something bad happening? Do we ask them to choose between family or justice? No. I could go on…”
“No, I get it,” Penny said, tapping her fingers on her knee. “I don’t like it but I suppose I get it. But even so!” she exploded once more. “Even so! I’m … alarmed. Someone is out to get me, Cath.”
“No, they seem out to discredit you,” Cath replied. “Your physical safety hasn’t been threatened, has it? No notes or letters, no attacks? You would have told us.” She looked quizzically at Penny.
“That might be the next stage.” Penny didn’t want to say that she was slightly scared. “Do I have to end up at crisis point before something is done?”
“Like what?” Cath said. “What do you expect us to do?”
“I don’t know,” Penny wailed in frustration. “Something! You keep telling me to stay out of it, but I’m right in the middle!”
Cath lowered her head. Penny waited, trying to count her breaths and calm down.
“Okay,” Cath said at last. “Let me … just use you as a sounding board. Let’s talk. Will that help?”
“It’s a start,” Penny replied. No, it won’t help, she thought. But go on. Talk to me.
“Who do you have pegged for the murderer?”
“That’s not fair. I don’t know what you guys know.”
“Humour me,” Cath said.
“Right, okay. Alf Smith, he’s a major suspect. His name is actually Alfred Gore-Smith, in fact. Did you know that?”
“Everyone local knows that.”
“Oh, for goodness sake.”
“Sorry.
Penny rolled her eyes. Anyway, I am local. Now. “The car that was used as the weapon was at the garage. There’s your first big clue.”
“But why would Alf do that?” Cath asked. “It’s like he’s trying to frame Tina Fairmore – we did consider that – but we found no link at all between them.”