Single Handed (Gareth Dawson Series Book 3)

by Nathan Burrows

  They sat in an awkward silence for a few moments before Gareth spoke again.

  “How are you really doing, little sis?” His voice was low, almost a whisper. Annette could feel a lump forming in her throat and was worried that she was about to burst into tears.

  “This is shit,” she replied, swallowing. “Absolutely shit.”

  “I know.” Annette looked at him as he said this, but he was staring into his mug of tea. “When Jennifer died, I just went completely off the rails.”

  “But at least you had somewhere for your anger to go.”

  “How d’you mean?” He was looking at her, eyebrows raised.

  “Well, you went after the bloke that killed her. You did something about it.”

  “Anger’s a natural reaction, Annette.”

  “Were you angry with Jennifer? For dying?”

  “No, not at all. I was angry with everything else, but not her.” Gareth took a sip from his mug. “Are you angry with Philip?”

  Annette paused, not quite sure how to answer. She wasn’t angry with him for dying, but because of what she’d since found out he was. But that wasn’t something she could discuss with her big brother.

  “I just feel useless,” she said eventually. “Like I need to do something, but there’s nothing that I can do.”

  “It gets easier, Annette. With time.”

  “But I need to do something.” Annette thought for a moment, Gareth seemingly content to leave her alone. In that moment, she made a decision.

  “Gareth, do you know how I get back an e-mail I’ve deleted?”

  “It’ll be in your trash folder. You use Gmail, right?”

  “I’ve emptied it.”

  “And now you want it back?” he asked, frowning. “Why?”

  “It doesn’t matter. But do you know how to do it?”

  “I don’t,” Gareth replied, “but I know a man who does. Will I get Dave to call you? He’s my tech bloke in the office.”

  “Will he be able to get it back without reading it?”

  “If I tell him to, he will.” Gareth’s frown deepened. “What’s going on, Annette?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” Annette replied, forcing a smile onto her face. She pulled the laptop onto her lap and tapped at the keys. “Right, I’ve sent you a friend request. What was Laura’s surname again?”

  25

  Gareth leaned back in his chair, which squeaked in protest. He looked across the table at Laura, who was staring out of the pub window watching a cruiser make its way along the Norfolk Broads. They were sitting in the Adam and Eve, a pub in the centre of Norwich. The pub itself had been there for hundreds of years under one name or another, and served some of the best food in the area.

  “My God,” Gareth said, rubbing his hands across his stomach. “I’ve eaten too much.” The plate in front of him was almost empty, with just a tiny bit of the pork belly and apple infused mashed potato that he’d put away left on it. “That was fantastic. How was your salad?”

  “It was lovely,” Laura replied, looking at him with a smile, “and I don’t have to undo my belt to breathe.”

  “Very funny,” Gareth said, sipping his pint. “Are you up for pudding?”

  “Of course I am. It’s a separate stomach, so doesn’t count.”

  They ordered dessert from the waitress and sat in a companionable silence for a moment before Gareth spoke.

  “Tell me something personal about yourself, Laura?” She looked at him, and he caught the slightest hint of reticence in her face.

  “Such as what?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just, I was thinking, you know a lot about me. My history. But I don’t know that much about you.”

  “How many pints have you had?”

  “Only a couple. Come on, humour me.”

  “I don’t know what to say. You’ll have to think of something.” Gareth paused before replying. He needed to ask her something—he’d started it, after all—but he’d not really thought it through.

  “Have you got any tattoos?”

  “Really?” Laura laughed, and her eyes twinkled in the light from the candle between them. “You’ve brought me here for dinner, and you’re asking if I’ve got any tattoos?”

  “Yeah,” Gareth replied with a wry grin. “Annette’s got one on her wrist. Have you got a tramp stamp hidden away anywhere?” Laura’s laughter got louder, and she picked up her glass.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” she asked him, looking at Gareth over the top of her drink.

  “I would, actually,” he said. “Maybe a pair of slag’s antlers across the small of your back? You look the type.” Her laughter turned into a cackle, and she almost snorted on her drink.

  “No, Gareth,” she replied when she had composed herself. “I do not have a pair of slag’s antlers, or indeed any other tattoos anywhere. Try again.”

  “Okay,” Gareth said, thinking again for a moment. “Who was the first person who broke your heart?”

  “Oh,” Laura replied, her smile vanishing in an instant. “That one I wasn’t expecting. Why?”

  “I’m curious.” He watched her as she considered the question for a few seconds. She wasn’t trying to remember who it was, Gareth realised, but she was trying to decide whether to answer the question or not.

  “That would be Sam.”

  “Okay, cool.” Gareth considered his next question. “Was Sam your first, er, partner?”

  “That’s starting to get a bit personal, Gareth.”

  “Is it? Sorry. I withdraw the question, Your Honour.”

  Laura’s face crinkled into a smile. “Yes, Sam was my first ever proper partner. Your turn.” Gareth paused for a second before starting to laugh.

  “You might not like this, but her name was Laura.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yep. Laura Hutchinson. I was only fifteen, and madly in love with her.” Gareth watched as Laura considered his statement.

  “So what was it like?”

  “How’d you mean?”

  “What was it like, your first time.”

  “Oh, now who’s being personal?”

  “Your turn to humour me.”

  Gareth sipped at his drink while he thought about the next way to respond. The truth was it had been awful the first time, and not that much better the second. There’d never been a third time. Not with Laura Hutchinson, anyway.

  “You used to be a runner, right?” he asked Laura. Her eyebrows shot up in surprise.

  “How do you know that?”

  “You’ve got a trophy on the mantelpiece in your flat. Two hundred metre champion at Thorpe High School,” Gareth replied. “I was going to nick it, but it’s not real silver.”

  Laura laughed. “I think you’ll find it is,” she said. “But what has my athletic career at school got do with you losing your virginity?”

  “Well, imagine sex is a race, right?” Gareth replied. “The first time, my partner was still doing up her shoelaces when I crossed the finish line.” He watched as Laura processed the statement, a slow smile creeping across her face.

  “Oh,” she said mischievously. “You were a bit quick out of the blocks, then?”

  “I was fifteen, Laura,” Gareth replied. “Full of hormones and absolutely no idea what went where. I mean, I knew the theory, but not the practical.”

  “Does that count as losing your virginity, though? If you don’t actually, er, participate in the race itself?”

  “Well, if you’re going for anatomical accuracy, then the first proper time wasn’t much better,” Gareth replied. “Lasted a bit longer, but at the end of it all, it was all kind of, disappointing. I wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about.”

  Gareth watched as Laura sat back in her chair to let the waitress place a lemon cheesecake in front of her. He had gone for a cheeseboard, probably not the best choice when he was stuffed already.

  “Thank you,” Gareth said to the waitress as she retreated. “So, come on then, your turn,” he
said as soon as the waitress was out of earshot. Laura paused, a spoon full of cheesecake half way to her mouth. “Tell me about your de-flowering?” She put the spoon back onto the plate and looked at him, a mock expression of horror on her face.

  “Did you actually just say that?”

  “Say what?” Gareth replied, spearing a piece of stilton with his knife.

  “De-flowering? I don’t think I’ve ever heard that used in normal conversation before.”

  “Come on, don’t dodge the question because I’m using cultured language.”

  “This is hardly a cultured conversation, Gareth,” Laura said, lifting the spoon again. “But if you really want to know, there was a lot of oohing and aahing, followed by a lot of fumbling. Sam was quite self-centred, much more experienced than I was, and definitely came out the more satisfied partner.”

  Gareth was surprised by Laura’s sudden honesty, especially given her earlier reticence.

  “Oh,” he said, momentarily lost for words. “Right.”

  “How’s your stilton?” Laura asked with an impish smile on her face.

  26

  “Jon? It’s Malcolm.”

  “I kind of guessed that when your name popped up on the screen.” Malcolm laughed at his friend’s reply. “You’re working late, mate. It’s nearly nine.”

  “I know, sorry to call at such an unsocial hour.”

  “Don’t worry about it. All I’ve got for company is a microwave cannelloni and Eastenders on the telly. What’ve you got?”

  Malcolm shuffled the bank statements in his hands and looked again at the notes that Kate had made on them.

  “I got one of my youngsters to go through those statements,” he said. “She did find a couple of things. First one is that although it was a joint account, only Philip McGuire used it.”

  “Very good,” Jon replied. “Anything else?”

  “The payments to a bank in Bali.”

  “Yep. That’s what caught my eye, too.”

  “What are you thinking? Blackmail?”

  “Almost certainly, yes. Put that together with the credit card payments, and it makes sense.”

  Malcolm paused for a moment, thinking.

  “So,” he said, “McGuire was being blackmailed by someone who knew he was a paedo. Any way of tracing them?”

  “By the NCA, do you mean?”

  “Well, that is your sort of thing, mate,” Malcolm replied.

  “It is, but the fact he’s dead makes us a lot less interested in him being blackmailed. Not enough resources for that sort of stuff. You know how it is.” Malcolm sighed. He knew only too well. “Plus, if the blackmailer’s hiding in Indonesia somewhere, it’ll be harder than finding a needle in a haystack.”

  “Have you got anything else on him?” Malcolm asked.

  “Nope, just the credit card purchase.”

  “Which could have been made by anyone.”

  “Not really, he’s the only one with access to the account. Him and his wife, who didn’t use the account, anyway.”

  “As far as we know.”

  “What’s she like, the wife?” Jon asked. Malcolm thought for a few seconds, remembering Gareth’s comments to him about Philip.

  “Hard to say, to be honest. McGuire was a bit of an arsehole, by all accounts. Knocked her about, that sort of thing.”

  “She’s probably glad he’s dead, then.”

  “There’s nothing to suggest that she was involved at all, Jon.” Malcolm thought back over the discovery at Cley-next-the-Sea. “Unless she managed to poison his scuba tanks and hope we never find them.”

  “Bit of a stretch, that one,” Jon replied with a laugh. “You’ve been reading too many fiction books, mate.”

  “Yeah, I can’t see her for it. So it’s case closed on your end, I take it?”

  “Yep. The NCA will be closing it down. At least, this strand of it. The primary operation’s still going on though. We’d rather have the producers than the consumers, anyway.”

  Malcolm thanked his friend and ended the call. He spent a few moments on the internet, looking at various cases where scuba divers had died, but couldn’t find any cases where they’d been poisoned deliberately. There was one case in Australia where a diver had been killed by carbon monoxide in his tank, but that was an error in the way the tanks were filled. Not a deliberate act.

  His thoughts turned to Annette McGuire as he got to his feet and grabbed a can of beer from the fridge. Malcolm poured it into a glass, shaking his head at the amount of froth he managed to generate while he was doing it. Annette McGuire was, Malcolm reflected, a battered woman who was married to a man who controlled her. That much was obvious. Gareth had told him about the way Philip had treated her when they came back from Australia. Classic manipulative behaviour.

  A few years previously, there had been a particularly nasty case involving a paedophile ring in Norwich. One of the main players in the whole thing had been a man not unlike Philip. Domineering and violent—a really nasty piece of work. Malcolm cast his mind back to the case as he took a sip of his frothy beer. What had made the case very unusual was that of the people involved, several of them were women.

  Malcolm couldn’t remember the name of the man in the case, but he managed to find a newspaper report on it. It had made the national news, as had a subsequent police investigation into the children’s services department when it was discovered that several social workers had changed their reports. Malcolm hadn’t been involved in either investigation, but knew several of the officers who had been. It was, by all accounts, one of those cases that could not be easily forgotten.

  He grimaced when he opened the web page from the Independent newspaper’s website and saw several members of the group staring back at him, including one of the women who had claimed to have been under the control of the ringleader. It turned out that she wasn’t, but was a key player herself. Malcolm smiled grimly when he read to the bottom of the article where her life sentence was detailed.

  A comment that Jon had made during their call about going after the producers, not the customers, was niggling Malcolm. What if Philip McGuire wasn’t just a consumer, but was a producer? That would make him a larger target for a blackmailer, purely because it would involve more people, and the more people who knew, the more there were to become blackmailers. He strummed his fingers on his laptop, thinking hard. There was something at the back of his mind, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

  Frowning, he got to his feet and fetched his notebook from his coat pocket, flipping it open to the pages where he’d made some notes after informing Annette McGuire of her husband’s death. At the top of the page, he had made some comments about the person he was interviewing. It was a trick he’d been taught years ago—to write down first impressions as soon as possible—and one that he did almost subconsciously, even with interviewees.

  Annette McGuire

  5 ft 5, slim, blonde, pretty

  Mid to late 20s (conf 27)

  No dist features

  Works for council

  When he read the last line of his notes, he clicked his fingers. That was it. She worked for the council—in children’s services. She couldn’t have been involved in the earlier police investigations as she would have been in Australia. Besides, the investigation had been into the conduct of social workers, not because any of the paedophile ring worked for the council. But if Philip McGuire was a producer, not just a consumer, he would need one thing. Access to vulnerable children.

  Maybe it was time for them to have a closer look at Annette McGuire?

  27

  “Mrs McGuire?”

  Annette held the door open only a few inches so she could see who was visiting her so late. On her doorstep was a young man, mid-twenties, dressed in a pair of skinny black jeans and a t-shirt with a picture of a Pokemon on it. Standing a few feet behind him was a woman of a similar age. Her clothes were far more flamboyant, as if she was dressed up for a night out on the tiles.
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br />   “Who are you?” Annette asked, making a conscious effort not to slur her words. Although it was only just nine o’clock in the evening, she was already a bottle of wine to the good and had plenty more where that came from.

  “My name’s Dave,” the young man replied. “I work with your brother. He mentioned something about an e-mail?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Annette said, opening the door a bit more. “I wasn’t expecting you so soon.”

  “If it’s not a good time, he can come back tomorrow?” It was his companion speaking, and Annette had to concentrate to understand her, not helped by the wine and the fact she was talking so quickly. “I’m Charlotte, by the way. Pleased to meet you and all that.” Annette blinked at the woman a couple of times. “Only me and him are going into the city for the evening and we had to walk past yours, and Dave saw a light on. So, we thought we’d chance it.”

  “No, that’s fine,” Annette replied. “Come on in.”

  She stepped back from the door and walked into the lounge, followed by the two visitors. Too late, Annette saw the empty bottle of wine on its side on the carpet, but if either Dave or Charlotte noticed it, they had the good grace to not say a word.

  “Blimey, it’s lovely in here, isn’t it?” Charlotte said, looking round the lounge. “Only it looks a bit shit from the outside.”

  “Charlotte,” Dave said sharply.

  “No, not properly shit. Just a bit tired, like. Not your house, though. I mean the estate.”

  “Have you got the laptop, Mrs McGuire?” He glanced at Charlotte with a frown. “Sorry about her, she’s a bit forthright.”

  “She’s right,” Annette replied, “the estate is a bit shit. I’m moving as soon as I can.”

  “Ooh, where to?” Charlotte said. “Only me and Dave are looking for somewhere. Aren’t we, Dave?” He didn’t reply. Annette looked at him. The man had to have the patience of a saint. She’d been in Charlotte’s company for a few moments and was already developing a headache.

  “Cringleford, hopefully.”

  “Very nice,” Charlotte said. “Bloody expensive, though. Full of old people, too. Even the bus stops smell of wee.”