by Jack Benton
Slim considered the date. Nothing important popped out. ‘Your birthday?’ he guessed, although he didn’t remember being told.
Lia rolled her eyes then laughed. ‘Come on, Slim. How could you possibly forget?’ She leaned forward. ‘It’s our ten-day anniversary. Although,’ she added with a smirk and a flick of her right eyebrow he found hopelessly alluring, ‘it feels like ten years.’
‘Is that a good or bad thing?’
‘Depends what time of day it is. You make good scrambled eggs. I’ve not found a greasy spoon yet that does them better.’
Slim sat down. With a small smile, he said, ‘As a matter of fact, I didn’t forget.’ He reached into his pocket, pulled out his old Nokia. He took a paper napkin out of a holder beside a basket of dressings, wrapped the phone in it and slid it across the table. ‘I got you this. It’s a vintage model. Collector’s item and a family heirloom. Dates to the mid-eighteenth century.’
Lia grinned as she took the phone out of the tissue. ‘It’s your phone.’
‘And my second most valuable possession after my sanity.’
‘Which you frequently lose?’
Slim shrugged. ‘And find again. Bits of it, at least.’
Lia passed the phone back across. ‘I could never accept such a valuable gift. I’ll settle for you buying lunch.’
‘Done.’
‘How’s the case going?’ Lia asked, after they had ordered.
Slim saw no point lying to her. ‘I’ve been fired,’ he said. ‘The lady who hired me isn’t happy with the progress I’ve been making. To be fair, I’m not best pleased with it either, but I’m not the one paying for it.’
Lia’s face dropped. ‘So that means—?’
Slim lifted a hand. ‘I’m not leaving, not yet. I’m going rogue, we would say in the army. At least until the end of the week.’
Lia frowned. ‘Are you the love-and-leave sort, or is there a point in trying to make something between us work?’
‘To be honest, I’m not sure what sort I am.’ He gave the back of her hand a squeeze. ‘I try to wake up in the same place where I fell asleep and take it from there. But, and I can say this with all honesty, you’ve come to mean a lot to me. I can’t promise I’ll be there for you or I won’t hurt you, or I won’t press a self-destruct button on my life and whatever part of yours is attached to it, because these are things I can’t promise to myself. But I can promise that I’ll do my best to treat you how you deserve.’
‘There’s something about you, Slim,’ Lia said. ‘You’re like a box someone has broken open. Most men, they’ve always got something to hide. They reveal themselves a layer at a time, and it’s all fine until you get to a layer you don’t like. With you, Slim, I feel like I’ve already seen the worst.’
‘I imagine I could add a few bells and whistles,’ he said. ‘But if you’re prepared to accept the considerable rough, maybe we could make something work.’
Lia’s smile was confirmation of her agreement. ‘I think the only thing I don’t know about you is why people call you Slim.’
‘Do you really want to know? Well—’
His phone, lying on the table between them, buzzed. Slim recognised Toby’s number.
‘I can call him back later,’ he said.
‘It’s fine. It might be important.’
Slim took the phone and answered the call outside the restaurant’s entrance. Toby sounded flustered as he said, ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you for days.’
‘I’m sorry. I’ve been busy catching up on interviews.’
‘Have you found anything so far?’
‘Nothing I would bet my life on.’
Slim still felt reluctant to open himself up to Toby. The writer brought with him an invisible wall of uncertainty Slim felt disinclined to climb. He appreciated that Toby wanted to help, but was afraid of the other man’s unpredictability.
There was one thing, however, that Slim wanted Toby to confirm. He arranged a meeting with the writer for later on that afternoon, recalling as he did a telephone conversation he had had earlier that morning with Denise Layman.
‘I’m sorry if it feels like I’m cold calling,’ Slim said. ‘But I’ll get straight to the point before you cut me off. I was passed your email by a man named Peter Edwards, whom I believe you went to school with.’
‘Oh yes,’ Denise said. ‘Peter called me yesterday and said to expect your call.’
Slim was glad some of the explaining had been done for him, but nevertheless went over what he had told Peter one more time.
Denise laughed. ‘I suppose it’s not that often a writer becomes famous enough for people to want to know beyond the books. Toby must have joined an elite club. What in particular would you like to know?’
‘Peter told me you were something of a … girlfriend?’
Denise laughed again. ‘Oh, nothing like that. I was a bit of a tomboy, and Toby always got on better with girls than boys. Platonically, I mean. He was no ladykiller, but he had the gab. He was the kind of guy you’d ask about what you wanted to wear because you’d get a straight answer.’
Slim frowned. ‘Peter told me Toby was untrustworthy.’
‘That’s because Peter’s a man. With girls, Toby was always straight up.’
‘Did you go to his house often?’
‘Regularly. We’d hang out in his room and look at magazines.’
‘His family? What were they like?’
‘Nice as pie. His parents doted on him. He used to wind them up something chronic, but they just laughed it off.’
‘Did you ever get the impression things weren’t what you saw?’
There was a pause on the other end. ‘What are you implying, Mr. Hardy?’
‘I heard a rumour that his father might have been abusive.’
‘Who on Earth did you hear that from?’
‘Believe it or not, from Toby himself.’
‘That’s interesting.’ There was another pause. ‘Don’t forget, you’re a man. He might have been trying to impress you.’
‘I don’t know Toby or his family. I can only go on what I’m told.’
‘I know he took medication, and he was absent from school more often than most kids. He’d have a day off at least every couple of weeks. He had endless colds and fevers, but I think that was a side effect of his medicine.’
‘What was he taking medicine for?’
‘You’d have to ask him, but it was probably for behavioural problems. ADHD, that kind of thing. He never really talked about it, but I’d be at his house and his dad would remind him to take his medicine, which would start an argument. He didn’t like it being talked about in front of me. Toby would throw a bit of a tantrum, refuse to take it, which would then escalate into a shouting match until eventually I’d get asked to leave. It was only a couple of times, though. We were friends right up to sixteen. I went off to college, he stayed for A-Levels. Our friend groups changed and we fell out of touch.’
‘Interesting,’ Slim said. ‘Did you never get the impression that there were things going on that you weren’t hearing about? Things he might have been in denial about? Repressed things?’
‘Never.’
‘Did he have siblings?’
‘A sister four years younger and an older brother, eight or ten years older, and working by the time I started hanging around Toby. The brother no longer lived with the family, but on the couple of occasions I met him, he was nice enough. And Toby’s sister was always cheerful. They argued a lot, but it was nothing unusual. At least not to me.’
Toby’s guesthouse stood on the corner of the adjacent road to Slim’s. Slim had asked Toby to meet him at the Station Master, and had Lia call him to confirm Toby had arrived. Certain he wouldn’t be disturbed, Slim went in through the front entrance of Toby’s guesthouse and rang the bell outside the reception counter.
When a lady appeared from an office behind the counter, Slim smiled and introduced himself. ‘I’m a friend of Mr. Firt
h’s,’ he said. ‘I was due to meet him this afternoon, but I got called out on an important appointment. I have something, however, which I’d like to leave for him.’
‘I can pass it to him later,’ the lady said.
‘I’m sure you’re busy,’ Slim said. ‘It’s just an envelope. If you tell me his room number I’ll slide it under his door.’
‘Well, if that’s no trouble … it’s room six. Second on the left up the stairs.’
‘Thanks.’
As the lady indicated a door into the guest hallway and then returned to her office, Slim moved quickly, his old military instincts returning to give him a brief reminder of the man he had once been. He vaulted up the stairs, landing on soft toes to hide the speed of his movement. He had a military-issued lock pick in his hand before he even reached the door, a small metal device which would make short work of an old lock such as these houses had. Pausing to check, however, he found Toby had left the door unlocked, either an oversight or a sign of trust in these quiet little towns.
Inside, Slim quickly established the room’s layout, then moved to a bedside cabinet. He opened the second drawer—because no one with anything to hide ever hid it in a top drawer—and got the luck his planning deserved.
Slim carefully lifted a pinch-width of papers to reveal two pill bottles beneath. Without touching them, he pulled a small digital camera from his back pocket, switched it on with one hand, and took a snap with the labels clearly visible.
He replaced the papers exactly as he had found them—a fraction of disturbance might be invisible to the naked eye, but if Toby had taken precautions it would be obvious to a digital camera—and was about to close the drawer when a typed title on the top sheet caught his eye, arousing his curiosity.
It was an article about Tom Jedder. Slim scanned the text, the stylistics identifying it as a historical narrative account, like an encyclopedia entry. However, rather than having the telltale footnotes to indicate a web page downloaded and printed, it had all the formatting marks of something written on a computer.
The first few lines sounded like something he had read online. Had Toby authored it, or just copied it and then reformatted it for printing?
The thud of a closing door downstairs cut off Slim’s investigation. He closed the drawer, wiping the handle with a white duster he pulled from a pocket, then returned to the door walking backward, smoothing the scuffs made in the carpet pile by his boot treads as he went. Outside, after closing the door and wiping the handle, he withdrew an envelope from another pocket and slid it under the door as he had promised the landlady. Contained within was a simple apology for missing their appointment and an explanation for not using his phone blamed on messaging glitches.
Finally, to complete the brash, hopeless effect of an aging, alcoholic, disgraced former soldier, he reached into his pocket, withdrew a few pieces of dried dirt he had picked from his boot tread this morning, and scattered them on the ground outside the door in exactly the spot he would have squatted. He dropped a couple more pieces on the stairs for good measure, before thanking the landlady on the way out.
The whole operation had taken less than two minutes.
Then, ignoring the appointment with Toby he still had time to make, he headed for the library to do some more research.
45
Late nights or early mornings were the most interesting times to visit train stations. With the fewest people and the dust of the last or first train still billowing in the empty gap between platforms, the history on display was allowed to plume its feathers, and the ghosts of a million long gone commuters had the space to come out and play.
Of the two, Slim preferred the dawn. He always struggled to get up from a familiar bed, but having been invited to stay over at Lia’s, he found himself awake in the pre-dawn shortly after the street lights had switched off. He woke her just enough to excuse himself, then made his way down to Holdergate Station with the night’s last stars still shining overhead.
This early, there was no one on duty and the first couple of trains worked on trust, the ticket gates standing open, a box for used tickets next to the ticket counter. No one was waiting for the 0457 to Sheffield, however, so Slim was alone on a deserted platform.
In the pretty but limited town museum he had seen historical photos of the snowdrifts brought in by that blizzard on that long-ago January day. Dated the 16th, they showed waist-high trenches dug in the piled snow drifts to allow the trains to escape. Slim walked up and down the platform, remembering where the drifts might have been. While much of the front of the station building—the waiting rooms, gift shop, and ticket counter—had been refurbished, the platform area dated back to the 1930s. Aside from a few advertising hoardings promoting local sights and attractions, the platforms looked the same today as they had the day Jennifer stepped off the delayed train and disappeared.
If his theory was right, Jennifer had run back into the station after seeing the man by the park fence, but for some reason had felt no safety among a crowd of people. She had fled back onto the platform, but with no way under the train, she had been presented with two options. Climbing over a drift of snow … or exiting through a gate at the end of the platform which led into the goods yard.
These days, the goods yard was visible through a wire mesh fence, but Slim had seen in historical photographs that it had previously been hidden from view by a tall steel slat fence, which would have also provided shelter from the southerly winds that rattled down out of the hills at night. By the way the snow had drifted in the photos Slim had seen, it would have left a clear space roughly a metre wide along which Jennifer could have run without leaving tracks.
Slim climbed over a low gate and followed the line of the fence, trying to retrace the path Jennifer might have taken. It curved around to end at the buffers for the final pair of rails in the goods yard. This last section of track now held three decrepit box cars, much of the wood walls rotted to nothing, leaving only the metal wheels and the frames. Beyond them, the fence reached an overgrown corner and headed back to end at the main line tracks. Backed up in the corner was the small, tumbledown shed Slim had noticed from the window of the Station Master.
He picked his way towards it through the grass, brambles and weeds, catching his feet on buried pieces of machinery, the remains of another abandoned siding track now rusted to the colour of earth, and a lump of protruding concrete where buffers had once been embedded.
The shed’s door was long gone, the roof so collapsed Slim had to duck down to peer inside. He pulled a torch from his pocket and waved it around, revealing only corrugated iron and brambles. What dimensions the shed might have once had were impossible to see.
Getting on to his hands and knees, he started to crawl forward, pausing when his jacket sleeve caught on a metal peg halfway up the door frame. He guessed from its height that it had once been used to hook the door shut. Frustrated, he turned to tug his jacket free and felt a sudden shiver of cold as though a gust of wind had blown down his neck.
Careful not to touch it with his hand, he used the already damaged section of coat to twist the peg free from its rusted fitting before dropping it into his pocket.
Had Jennifer reached the end of her own line in this tiny shed in the back corner of Holdergate’s goods yard? It had the feel of a last chance saloon. Here, Jennifer would have found herself cornered, unable to go any farther without leaving a trail.
But why?
What would have made her so afraid of the man she saw that she couldn’t trust to her safety in a crowd numbering several hundred?
Slim shook his head and gave a brief shrug, then turned and made his way out of the goods yard before the first arriving workers could discover him.
46
‘I was just about to call you,’ Don said. ‘Believe it or not, I managed to dig out what you asked for. Don’t ask me where I got it or I’ll double the fee for your next request. If you give me a fax number I can send it through right away.’
Don gave a short laugh. ‘Easy after that last one. I’ll be in touch again in a day or two.’
Slim hung up, then headed down to the post office.
True to his word, Don had come up with the goods. Faxed were ten photocopied pages of old ledgers from a transportation company, complete with driver names, dates, goods being transited, and the destination address.
Slim took the faxed documents up to the library, where he photocopied a local regional map and spent a couple of hours drawing pencil lines from the company offices in Manchester to locations including Sheffield, Stockport and Huddersfield, each assigned to Jeremy Bettelman.
Between the dates of December 1977 and January 1979, Bettelman had undertaken more than fifty assignments to locations that required him to cross the Peak District. There were few decent roads and on any occasion he could have taken a route that took him through Holdergate.
On more than a dozen occasions, a comment had been added in an extra column stating something to do with a delay. Five occasions mentioned lateness due to getting lost en route, three more mentioned mechanical problems, and another couple simply said LATE DELIVERY.
Interestingly, a line drawn in black felt-tip, one Slim assumed had been added by a police officer during the investigation, marked an abrupt shift in the locations from distant towns and villages requiring a couple of hours’ drive, to mostly Manchester metropolitan area-based. A circled note said that at this point Bettelman had become a full-time employee. Following this were four starred entries with other police-added notes claiming them as the likely disposal dates for the four murder victims.
Slim gave a slow nod. ‘You knew when your schedule would take you back up there, didn’t you?’ he muttered. ‘You killed them, and then you took them up into the hills to dump. But what were you doing up there before then?’