by Heide Goody
Sam looked at the sheet. It was the cascading tree-diagram of a knock-out competition, but where there might normally be team names or individual competitors, there was something else entirely.
“Coffee creams versus malted milk?” said Sam.
“It’s going to be a tough one,” said Cesar and removed two unopened packets of biscuits from his desk drawer. “True, neither’s going to be in the final. There’s some heavyweights – your bourbons, your Fox crunch creams – that neither stands a chance against. But which of them is better?” He found two cups on a shelf and peered inside them to see if they were clean.
“This is what you wanted me to help you with?” she said indignantly. “I came on proper business!”
“Oh?” he said, surprised.
“That trainer at Seal Land. I’ve seen a print near a house where a woman’s gone missing and—”
“The trainer?” said Cesar and sighed. “It’s done. It’s dusted. It’s been bagged and filed away as evidence.”
“I’m not sure how, but I think a crime’s been committed.”
Cesar was genially shaking his head before she even got to the end of the sentence. “No, no, no, no. It’s all fine. It was just a trainer.”
“There were toes!”
“Could have been a screwed up tissue.”
“We were both there!”
Cesar shook his head again. “If you’ve been a police officer as long as I have, Sam, you realise that, in the long run, things just sort themselves out. Society is like a machine, the world is like a machine. It just keeps ticking along.”
“Is this your excuse for doing nothing?”
Cesar looked affronted. “Doing nothing? We oil the machine. We guide things, a touch here, a nudge there.”
Sam prodded the cat poster. “By finding missing cats?”
“Small acts make a big difference.” The kettle clicked off. “Now, I judge biscuits on five criteria. Taste, texture, crumbliness—”
“The trainer,” said Sam.
He sighed again. “It’s like everyone’s worried about that global warming. As I say to my wife, if it was really all that bad, then the government would do something about it. And she’s a doctor and she agrees with me. If we all just stop worrying, relax a little and—"
“A woman’s gone missing,” Sam seethed.
“You know this?”
She wanted to say ‘yes’ but stopped herself because it wasn’t true. She screwed up her face in annoyance.
“Now, how do you take your tea?” he asked.
She exhaled angrily through her nose. “I would just like to see the trainer.”
Cesar paused and looked at directly. He had the round, well-meaning face of a complete idiot. A mooncalf, her grandma would have called him. He was a well-meaning soul but that just made his unhelpfulness all the more annoying.
Cesar nodded slowly and pulled a circular bin from under his desk. He removed a trainer-sized object wrapped in a Morrisons carrier bag.
“You said it was filed as evidence,” she said.
“The circular file,” he said and gave her an embarrassed grin. “But I did bag it, see?”
She snatched the trainer from him, unwrapped the supermarket bag and pulled the wet trainer out.
“There’s no evidence a crime has been committed,” said Cesar.
There was a receipt for coffee cream and malted milk biscuits stuck to the heel of the trainer. Sam ripped it away and looked at the sole. She compared the Morse code pattern on it to the picture on her phone.
37
The body was hidden. Sort of. Sort of out of sight and sort of out of mind.
Jimmy knew it was time to attempt to re-engage with the real world, even if that unfortunately involved going to speak to Jacinda Frost. His phone had been kaput since the night they’d killed Mrs Skipworth. There were probably a thousand texts and a dozen angry voicemails waiting for him in the telecommunications ether.
The Frost family home was near the village of Friskney, a dozen miles south of Skeg. It sat in a featureless landscape that had been reclaimed from the sea over the years and had little use except as a nature reserve and RAF bombing range.
Bob Frost and his wife, Di, had owned various villas out in Spain and brought a smidgeon of that Spanish feel back to the house they built on the bleak fens. It was a Brit’s interpretation of Spanish style. British brick painted white, sloping red roofs. A peculiar driveway that swept up over a humpbacked bridge, round to the first floor entrance, so the ground floor was accessed through an archway tunnel. Cartwheels had been pinned to the front walls. Hanging baskets of pink bougainvillea hung from the eaves. It was kitsch. It was ugly.
And while Bob and Di had been alive it was Jimmy’s second home.
Now, Jacinda didn’t let him through the door. Jimmy never even saw her in there. She was always in the big office shed out back. Jimmy pulled round to the chalky yard at the rear of the house. The yard was huge – there was no pressure on land use round here – and was fenced off twenty yards further on with warning signs about RAF land and unexploded ordnance.
“Wait here,” Jimmy told Wayne as he got out.
Wayne popped another Tic-Tac ‘painkiller’ and nodded.
There was the report of a shotgun; one barrel, then the second. She was in a shooting mood.
Jimmy stilled himself and went into the shed. Bob had constructed the shed to be an office and a workshop. It was fifty feet long, and at one time had been kitted out with workstations, power tools and table saws. That had all been cleared out by his daughter. The desk and chairs, the computer and phone, had all been moved to the centre of the single room. The remainder was bare concrete floor and cinderblock lined walls.
Various sections of the wall were pitted and scored by shot. When they were almost blown through, Jacinda had them replaced. There was a small mountain of grey rubble out behind the building. She had also erected a number of cinderblock pedestals around the place. An eclectic array of objects had graced those pedestals: vases, garden gnomes, old TVs, potted plants. None of them lasted long.
One of the lads on site once told Jimmy about these places they now had in the cities: rage rooms. Hipsters and other stupid urban wankers would pay top price to spend ten minutes in a room with some breakables and a baseball bat. And Jimmy knew more than one bloke who had a dartboard in their office with an ex’s face, or a hated footy team’s picture pinned to it. Jacinda Frost has simply combined both these things and added a shotgun.
She stood by her desk, red ear-defenders on, the over-and-under shotgun broken over her arm as she reloaded.
“Jacinda!”
She had her back to him and appeared not to hear. He approached her carefully.
“Jacinda!”
When he was close enough to touch her, she whirled, snapping the shotgun closed in reflex. Surprise made her large eyes, accentuated by heavy mascara, larger still. “Where the hell have you been?” she said.
“Phone problems,” he said.
“It’s been two days, Jimmy.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Those stones in Welton moved?”
“No, but—”
“That was job number one, Jimmy.”
“And it needs doing … covertly.”
“You can work nights, can’t you?”
Before he could answer, Jacinda turned away, took aim at a wooden carving on a pedestal. Jimmy wasn’t fast enough putting his hands to his ears. The boom echoed off concrete walls and came back in painful force. The wooden carving, a stylised praying woman, exploded into splinters so fine it was little more than smoke. Jimmy recalled it having pride of place over Bob and Di’s mantelpiece.
Jacinda turned and took out a cheap brass golfing trophy with her second shot. A piece of shrapnel pinged off the far wall, nearly bouncing as far back as Jimmy. It was the little model golfer’s head.
Jacinda broke the shotgun and lowered the ear defenders around her neck.
“Listen,” he said. “When we do that job, we have to make sure no one finds out.”
Her eyes narrowed, heavy black ovals. “Does someone know?”
Jimmy found he had the mental strength to meet that gaze. “No,” he said, which was true. The word ‘know’ was present tense, and whatever Mrs Skipworth might have seen, there was nothing present tense about her anymore.
“Then you get on with the job,” said Jacinda. “I’ve got a guild event Wednesday night.”
“Oh, you don’t want me to go to that one then?” he said, flippantly.
She laughed. “You? Ready to grease the wheels of business, are you? I’ve got to sway a few more people before the voting. The backers say they’re definitely coming to the awards evening.”
“They’ll back the Shore View project regardless.”
“Oh, I’m glad you’re so confident,” she sneered. “Without Welton plots sold there isn’t the funding for Shore View. Without something to show at Shore View, the backers won’t uphold their end of the bargain. Without our out of town friends supporting it, there won’t be any tenants in those damned container homes and our current cashflow situation will become terminal.”
“Sure.”
“It’s a line of dominoes, Jimmy.”
“Yeah…”
“Any tiny slip-up could ruin it.”
She pulled spent shells out of the gun with long fingernails.
“Wayne killed a woman,” he said.
He didn’t mean to say it. Or, he did mean to say it, but his brain didn’t give him any advanced warning.
Jacinda eyed him cautiously. “What?”
“Wayne killed a woman. An old fogey in Welton. She saw us. We went to talk to her. Wayne panicked. He whacked her with his shovel.”
Jacinda picked up two fresh shells from the box on her desk. “And?”
“And?” he asked.
“And?”
“We’ve disposed of her. Hidden her for now. No one else saw us. We left no trace.”
“Anything else I should know?”
Jimmy considered the question. “Wayne had his foot bitten off by an alligator. He’s sat in the van now. Wayne, not the alligator. We had Sacha stitch him up so you might get some odd calls from him about that. And … yeah, that’s it.”
Jacinda reloaded the gun slowly. The shells dropped into place with audible taps. “And if Wayne is arrested…?” she said.
“Then they’d find out about our, um, jiggery-pokery in Welton, at least.”
“The dominoes.”
“Exactly.”
She nodded and took a deep, cleansing breath. “Everything you’ve just told me… I’m going to pretend you didn’t tell me. If anyone asks, this conversation never happened. I hate you for even thinking it was acceptable to tell me.”
“I understand.”
“Nothing stops this deal,” said Jacinda.
“You can’t make omelettes without breaking some eggs,” he said.
She snapped the gun closed forcefully. “Fuck omelettes. Fuck eggs. We’re doing good here. Building houses, giving people a fresh start.”
She raised her ear defenders, took aim at a piece of Home Sweet Home embroidery in a glass frame that had once hung in the family hallway and blasted a hole through its centre, utterly obliterating the middle word.
“Get a new phone,” she said before taking a second shot which tore the frame apart completely. “And move those stones. Pronto.”
Jimmy left, his ears ringing.
38
Human beings were like magic tricks, thought Sam as she sorted through the collected papers making up her dad’s finances. Human beings drew the eye and invited interest. Other people were fascinating – their lives, their views, their personal quirks, their histories and back stories. It was human to be interesting. And be interested. And, like stage magicians and their tricks, human beings invited others to look, but only at certain aspects. Look at this, not that. Pay no attention to the mysterious curtain at the back of the stage. Humans presented what they wanted the world to see and tried to hide the rest.
But humans, like magic tricks, were too interesting and one could not help but want to delve deeper, to go behind the curtain and see…
Sam first recalled uncovering the secret to one of her dad’s magic tricks when she was about six or seven years old. It had been at rehearsals for a variety show in London. Sam remembered little of it, except that her dad had a five-minute set (between Joe Pasquale and Lulu) and on one of her visits on a rehearsal day, while her parents were arguing in loud whispers some distance away, she had stepped on stage, smiled at Linda (who was smoking a crafty cigarette) and looked at the apparatus for zig-zag girl illusion. The illusion involved Linda being locked in a cabinet and the middle section slid out to the side, thus apparently cutting Linda into thirds.
“Oh,” six-or-seven-year-old Sam said in sudden realisation. “When that box is moved, the bit at the edge, the black bits – there’s still enough room for you to stand in that and still be in all three boxes. If you stood really straight and held your tummy in.”
Linda gave her a wry smile. “That’s why you never see Aunty Linda eating chips, munchkin.” She contemplated her cigarette. “No calories in these, though.”
Young Sam had been struck with what she later recognised as guilt. She had peered too closely without asking; she had uncovered something hidden about her father the great magician and somehow it had … diminished him.
Here and now, a quarter of a century later, in the dining room of Duncastin’, with a near complete picture of his financial situation, she felt that same guilt, the same sense of invasion. All laid out in painful tiny details.
There were bank statements with ever decreasing balances. There were long-term investments, stock portfolios and even a pension: all been cashed in. There were hire purchase agreements and reclaimed goods. There were letters from stage prop companies either making payment for returned items or demanding money. There was a letter from an American organisation, signed ‘Magic’ Kingdom, reminding him of his financial obligations. There was even a little note from the window cleaner dated only a couple of months ago, thanking Marvin for being his customer for years and reminding him the previous month’s final payment was still due. Sam grunted at that; she thought the windows had been looking grubby of late.
There were some hard conversations ahead and tough decisions to be made, including the almost unavoidable sale of Duncastin’. But for now she could make a positive and practical contribution to the situation. Sam went through to the kitchen and filled the bucket from under the sink with hot water and a squirt of washing up liquid.
“What you doin’ there, pardner?” said Marvin, unable to snap out of the faux-American chirpiness he’d been practising on her all morning. He sat at the kitchen table, in an identical position he’d been in last week, surrounded by the components of a drone, the American instruction video playing on the tablet before him.
“I’m going to wash the windows,” said Sam. “Are you going to talk like a cowboy all week?”
“I surely am,” he said. “Oh, and there was a phone call for you earlier.”
“Yes?”
“A Holly Skipworth in Grantham. She said she hasn’t spoken to her aunt – Wendy, was it…?”
“Wendy Skipworth,” Sam nodded.
“She hasn’t spoken to her in a few weeks. Reading between the lines I gathered they’re not particularly close. Not spoken to her in a few weeks and this Holly wants to know if she should be worried.”
“No,” said Sam, immediately thinking that probably wasn’t true. “No,” she repeated softly. “I’ll give her a call and tell her everything’s all right.”
“And is it?” said Marvin.
Sam smiled. Damn, the man could read her at times. “I don’t know. But maybe it’s none of my business. Too bloody nosy for my own good. Always wanting to peer behind the curtain.”
“What curtain?”
“Ignore me,” she said and went outside to clean windows.
Duncastin’, sprawling and winding bungalow that it was, had far more windows than Sam cared to count, but some time and three buckets of water later she had nearly completed a full circuit of the house.
“Is this another thing DefCon4 has you doing?” It was Delia, coming up the path and looking very pleased with herself. “Washing windows for retired stage magicians.”
“Trying to avoid paying for a window cleaner.” Sam dropped her squeegee in the bucket.
“I brought you a gift.” Delia waggled the shopping bag she carried. “Well, it’s for you and your dad. Something for the house.”
“This had better not be a turkey,” said Sam.
“No, it’s something I made.”
“Dad’s in the kitchen. I’m sure he’ll want to see as well.”
Delia followed Sam indoors. Marvin was unpacking more electronics from their plastic bags.
“Howdy, Delia!” he said
“Morning, Marvin. A new drone? Where did that one come from?”
“It arrived by courier,” said Sam. “Several of my tasks have been re-scheduled to get back on track with this beast. It seems the company really wants to use these. I thought there would be more questions about what happened to the first one, to be honest.”
“It means I get to spend more quality time with Hank,” said Marvin, looking up from the scattered components. “You know, I’m not only talking like him now, I swear I’m starting to dream about him, too.”
“Dad’s loving it, obviously,” said Sam. “Dad, Delia’s brought a gift for us.”
Marvin sat up straight. “Is that so?”
Delia put her shopping bag down and bent to lift something out. “I was inspired by your lovely garden, so I’ve made a prototype windchime, and I wanted you to have it.”
She pulled away the tissue wrapping with a small ta-da flourish and revealed her creation. It hung from a metal loop; the top part formed from something that might well have been recycled wire coat hangers. It was the hanging parts which caught the eye though. Twelve dolls’ heads bobbed from lines of transparent filament. They all hung at different levels, facing in different directions. Did their pouty precocious faces look mildly put out to have parted company with their bodies? Sam thought they did.