by J. S. Spicer
Then he’d spotted it, that same taxi, coming towards him; but Jennifer was no longer sitting in the back seat.
His frustration had been so intense angry tears pricked the corners of his eyes. But then it was chased away by reason. It had been only a matter of moments since he’d seen her in the cab. She must have got out nearby.
He was methodical in his search, wandering in and around the bars, peeking into the restaurant windows. Within minutes he spotted her.
That’s when he’d taken up his vigil across the street, tucked into a doorway. Lucky he had his binoculars; best to always be prepared. For a few minutes he’d relaxed, relishing the visible access. When she was home he rarely caught sight of her, the occasional glimpse as she was coming or going, a shadow across the window, little more than that. Here, aside from the odd waiter flitting across his line of vision, he had a largely unimpeded view of her. He could drink in the details of her face, her movements. She looked gorgeous. She also looked nervous, which sounded warning bells in Joseph’s head even before her dinner companion arrived.
Who was he? Where had she met him? Joseph thought there was something familiar about him but he’d carefully catalogued all her family, friends and acquaintances and this guy didn’t slot into any of the categories.
He used the binoculars to full effect, hungrily watching. Now though it wasn’t just Jennifer he focussed on, he took almost as much interest in the man she was with. He studied him carefully. He was dressed casually in a grey shirt and jeans, very average in many ways, not tall but not short, not fat but not skinny, just average in dimensions. But he moved easily, smoothly, comfortable in his own skin, and Joseph couldn’t deny he was handsome. He found himself inevitably making comparisons. Joseph was bigger, stronger, but he was also awkward, stiff and self-conscious as he moved about the world.
Even the way the man ate was natural and confident. Most people, sitting in a restaurant, wouldn’t wolf down their food like that. They’d take small bites, watch their elbows and use the cutlery correctly. This guy attacked his food like a starving man.
Jennifer though barely ate.
She didn’t look happy; a fact that both angered and pleased Joseph. Of course he didn’t want her to have a good time with this interloper, but on the other hand he didn’t like to see her upset, and this man seemed to be upsetting her.
As he stood, rigid and quietly fuming, in his shady place across the street, Joseph began thinking of ways to hurt the man in the restaurant. He was certainly bad news. If anything happened between Jennifer and him...
Joseph couldn’t complete that thought. He would wait. He would watch. If necessary, he would act.
As Jennifer Kim’s evening improved over dessert and coffee, Joseph’s went downhill. Every time she smiled at her companion it was a shaft through his heart. The way she looked at that man was the way she should be looking at him.
To make matters worse when they left he had no way to follow. Jennifer got into a car with him and they drove off. There was no convenient bus this time for Joseph to hop. He didn’t know where they were going; a bar, her place, his place? It could be anywhere.
With no other choice, Joseph ran.
Despite the cold evening by the time he reached her flat sweat poured down his face and back. His legs shook and his lungs screamed from exertion. He paused to catch his breath, scanning the street as he did so. There was no sign of the car. He looked up at Jennifer’s flat but the front windows were in darkness.
Still panting slightly Joseph made his way around the back. There were yards rather than gardens at the back of the flats, places to hang washing, or keep the bins, or store bikes, and lots of shadows to hide in.
Joseph crept to a handy vantage point and looked up; counting the windows to be sure he had the right one.
His heart leapt; her bedroom light was on. She was home. But was she alone? Probably. The car was nowhere to be seen, so in all likelihood she’d just been dropped off then that man had left.
Joseph stood in the darkness listening to the thump of his own heart.
He knew he wouldn’t rest until he was certain.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The house looked run-down. Travers sat in the car for a few minutes, taking in the familiar scene, the home he’d grown up in. The hedge skirting the front garden, once thickly vibrant, had thinned and spread from lack of pruning. Small weeds squeezed through gaps in the path. Downstairs the window frames looked recently painted, but the upper stories and front door were tired and peeling. Travers sighed. His father refused to get people in, refused to pay for work that plainly needed to be done. Travers had offered to pay, offered to organise, to get quotes, make arrangements, handle everything. But the old man was stubborn, unreasonable.
Max identified with the house; basically sound but a little rough in patches. In need of some TLC. Sensing the onset of self-pity he gave himself a mental shake. This was just because he’d spent another frustrating day making no headway with the safety deposit box theft.
He got out of the car. The sun was setting beyond the rooftops of suburbia. The last rays like jewels, glinting off cloud edges and staining the sky, as if in defiance of the darkness about to swallow it up.
Pushing his key into the lock set off Barny, his father’s golden retriever. As Travers opened the door he was engulfed in a mass of sandy fur and subjected to a bout of licking and snuffling.
“Down, Barn,” he ordered. As usual the dog paid no attention. Travers manoeuvred through the doorway, easing Barny back into the hallway so he could shut the door behind him.
“Dad,” he called out. It was no surprise when the muffled reply came from the doorway to the left. Travers hovered on the threshold of the room, taking in the chaos. This was his father’s study.
As a child it had been the dining room. His mother had treated each meal as an event. They always sat at the table, always ate together as a family, and she did her best to make mealtimes as sociable as possible. She’d had her work cut out for her there. His father was a professor of history, a commendable and respectable profession. Unfortunately, he was also utterly obsessed with his work. Penny Travers would manage to coerce her husband to the dining table, but rarely without a thick historical volume in his clutches; God forbid he should abandon his studies for half an hour. As Travers’ took in the books, piled onto shelves, tables, even stacked on the floor, and the maps and pictures tacked to the wallpaper, sadness gnawed at him. His father had quickly filled this space, not so much transforming as covering what had been there before. The old dining table, once a proud, shiny centrepiece, was pushed against the wall. A laptop, lamp, and dozens of books covered most of the surface. What was visible was dull and scratched. A far cry from his mother’s pride and joy.
Travers sometimes mused on whether his father even noticed she was gone; he rarely surfaced from the pages of the past long enough to notice real life.
“Hi, Dad.”
Augustus Travers peered over the top of his reading glasses. He assessed his son, loitering in the doorway.
“Maximillian. You look peaky, boy. Had a bad day?”
“Don’t call me that, Dad.”
“Why ever not? It’s your name, after all.”
Max chose not to debate the point; it was a tired old argument anyway. He’d come to believe his father only insisted on using his full name because he knew it annoyed him.
Max ventured a few steps into the room. He always felt like he was intruding in here. It was so quintessentially his father’s domain.
His father didn’t often ask Max about his day, or his work, or his life in general. It had always been this way. Throughout Max’s whole life getting his father’s attention was no easy task; the man was too absorbed in the past, immersed in his own work and his own little world. However, when Gus Travers did occasionally peek out from the pages of history, he was disconcertingly perceptive.
His father was still watching him, one eyebrow cocked in demand of a
response.
“It was OK.”
“Just OK? What unsavoury crime are you looking into this time?”
“I’m investigating a bank robbery.”
“Really? You mean armed robbers, with ski masks and sawn-off shotguns?”
Max shook his head, smiling at the old man’s stereotype. “No, someone emptied out a safety deposit box. It happened out of hours.”
“Out of hours?” Gus Travers’ eyes lit up behind his spectacles. “I think you mean a burglary then, lad.”
Max didn’t rise to that
“They bypassed the alarm system?”
He nodded. “In and out without a trace.”
Gus waved a pen in his son’s direction. “Inside job, I’ll bet.”
The same possibility had occurred to Max, but he didn’t feel like discussing it with his father. They each had their own fields of expertise; Max had no interest in his father’s studies, and he certainly didn’t want his father sticking his nose into Max’s cases. Especially when, unbidden, Jennifer Kim had leapt to the forefront of his mind. But he was certain she wasn’t involved. Her background check was clear, and he trusted his gut. He’d spent time with her the night before; she was an open book.
“I’ll put the kettle on,” he said, suddenly wanting to get away from Gus and be alone with his thoughts.
As he walked back out of the room his father sank back into his work and Max was already forgotten.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
With his experience it was easy. He slipped silently over the back fence, down the tidy garden, and was soon at the back of the house.
No security light. Good.
No barking dog. Excellent.
It took only a minute to slip the catch on the kitchen window. It was one of those high, narrow windows, the sort people usually assume a burglar can’t squeeze through. Aubrey wasn’t as slight as he’d been in his youth, but he could still gauge whether he’d fit through a gap or not in a split second. His biggest concern was an alarm. The box fixed to the front of the house was convincing enough at a glance, but Aubrey was almost sure it wasn’t wired in.
He slithered through the high window, catching hold of the worktop he lowered himself silently into the kitchen. He knew the husband was out, had made sure of it. The house was in darkness, no-one home. It wouldn’t really matter if he made a little noise, but habit and pride kept him stealthy.
He flicked on his torch, keeping it low, the beam narrow, confined, picking out the pine table, the tiled floor, the white fridge-freezer and washing machine. A suburban kitchen, tidy, clean, homely. Floral canisters clustered next to the kettle; tea, coffee, sugar. The draining board held the washed up remnants from dinner; a plate, glass, some cutlery.
One plate. One glass. One knife and fork.
Aubrey had watched the house, seen Hugh Bishop leave a little after 8pm. There’d been no sign at all of Carol.
He moved on, through the hallway, momentarily switching off his torch, very aware of the glass panel in the front door.
He was quick but thorough.
The lounge gave up no secrets so he moved upstairs. Everywhere that same vibe, that same atmosphere; domestic normality, mundane and unremarkable. Aubrey had given some thought to what he wanted to achieve with this ‘visit’. Carol’s abrupt departure, or disappearance, had niggled at him mercilessly. In the end he’d decided to break-in and find out what he could, for his own peace of mind.
He followed his plan, checking the bathroom, bedrooms, drawers and cabinets. He found what you’d expect in the home of a middle-aged couple; toiletries, medicines, toothpaste, creams and lotions, and of course their clothes, underclothes, shoes. What was worrying was that nothing actually seemed to be missing.
Two toothbrushes dangled from the holder over the bathroom sink. In the bedroom the dressing table held brushes and makeup and a tub of cottonwool balls.
If Carol had gone away, then why hadn’t she taken anything with her?
He felt a coldness trickling through his insides, a growing dread.
Perhaps he was mistaken, some people had extras didn’t they? A spare toothbrush, travel sized toiletries, that sort of thing. Maybe that explained it all.
He’d seen enough. He found the air in the place suffocating. Something about its cleanliness, the aromas of furniture polish, air freshener, clean laundry, all seemed mocking, a sanitary lie, hiding the dirtiness beneath.
Aubrey returned to the kitchen, intending to leave the same way he’d arrived. Here the smell was worse, and something stronger that hadn’t registered fully when he’d entered. The tangy bite of disinfectant or bleach hung thick in the air.
He was now so keen to leave he decided to just use the back door, the key poking from the lock too good to resist. Bishop would think he’d forgotten to lock it. As he approached something caught his eye. Tucked into a corner of the worktop, stuffed alongside the bread bin, was a handbag, Carol’s handbag. He’d seen it before. It was the one she always carried. He pulled it towards him, easing open the zip.
He checked through the contents with the torch beam. Purse, keys, makeup bag, tampons, tissues, store receipts, and her mobile phone, switched off. The phone he’d been calling for the last couple of days. The phone that all this time must have been sitting right here, in her bag, on this worktop, and switched off.
Aubrey had hoped to alleviate his fears by breaking in, to find some answers to help him understand what was going on. He still didn’t know where Carol was, but he was in no doubt something terrible had happened.
He was almost out of the door, his gloved fingers wrapped around the handle and his heart pounding in his chest, when something else caught his eye. A block of whiteness in the dark kitchen, a pale rectangle on the back of the inner door. He stepped back across the tiled floor, pushed the ‘on’ button again on his small torch.
A calendar.
Aubrey played the beam of light across the page. Most days of the month had something written on them, tiny notes squeezed into the small square blocks. He recognised her writing, a bit scrawny, scrappy, an unexpected script for the ever-immaculately turned out woman. Perhaps the untidy handwriting reflected an untidy mind.
He lifted the pages, checked the month before, the month after. He noted it was just her hand that wrote the messages, reminders of birthdays and due bills. For some reason that made him sad. Why didn’t her husband scrawl on the handy calendar too? Didn’t he have anything to contribute, or was that her task. He let the page fall back to where it had been; February.
Then he looked carefully at what was written for the coming days.
‘Weekend at the van’.
The van? A caravan?
Could it be that simple? His worries, his fears for Carol, his paranoia when she hadn’t turned up for their rendezvous, was it all misplaced? Was she simply enjoying some time away?
Aubrey felt foolish, even though there was no-one around to see it. He was guilty of breaking and entering, all out of concern for the stupid woman. He’d risked going back to prison, risked his future, and she was off taking a holiday.
He should just walk away, fence the jewellery, take all the money and disappear. But that’s what he’d told himself after the no-show at The Wheatsheaf. Why was he being so tenacious about this?
Aubrey continued to wonder about this as he searched the rest of the kitchen, rifling through drawers, checking a stack of post on top of the counter.
Nothing.
He went back through the house, again. This time with a new goal.
Where had she gone for the weekend? He had to know.
He was there for a while, much longer than he’d normally risk, constantly alert for any sight or sound which heralded the return of the husband.
He finally found what he wanted in the smallest bedroom.
It served as an office, cheap pine desk, small swivel chair. It was nothing fancy, but on the desk a leather-bound diary and deep mahogany letter rack took pride of place. The
whole room stank of the husband; unjustified self-importance, pretentious, lacking. Aubrey had at first resented Carol, sensed her privileged upbringing, the polish provided by an expensive education, the naivety borne of a sheltered childhood. How could she understand him?
The husband seemed worse; he just tried too hard. It was obvious he was mediocre, middle-class, desperate for respectability. The semi-detached house, the Volvo the man drove, the off-the-peg suits, all were the best he could afford, but not enough to satisfy his ambition.
Pathetic details all around the house smacked of his attempt to better himself. Aubrey found these attempts laughable.
One good thing about this feeble excuse for a man; he was meticulously organised. It made searching through his personal files that much easier.
Aubrey started with the bank statements, offering up a word of thanks that the Bishops still received paper copies. He noted, pulling out the wad of statements, that the accounts were all in Hugh Bishop’s name, none in Carol’s. She’d told him as much once, told him her husband controlled every single thing. He’d supposed she felt the need to give some sob story, some justification for the theft. Maybe not, maybe she really had become a prisoner in her own life.
Several pages in something jumped out, something aside from the utility bills and supermarkets. It didn’t say what the payment was for but the name caught Aubrey’s interest; Holiday Enterprises. A quick cross-reference in Hugh’s helpfully efficient filing system quickly found an agreement. A swift read through told him that the Bishops owned the caravan, but they rented the plot where it was kept. He tore off the bottom of the page, the portion with the address of the site.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A safety deposit box was a personal thing. A standard bank job, swiping bags of cash, was bad, but the individual customers ultimately wouldn’t be left out of pocket. But safety deposit boxes contained other kinds of valuables, items or documents that were important, precious, maybe private.