But Calvin could tell she was thinking something completely different. ‘Something up, ma’am?’
DCI King sat back on her heels and scanned the room. ‘It just feels a bit . . . too easy.’
‘It was hidden under a tea towel,’ he pointed out, and she laughed, and he blushed and said, ‘Sorry, I just mean, it wasn’t right out in the open.’
She smiled. ‘No, you’re right – it did have a tea towel on it.’ She stared at the tea towel, then at the cabinet, then at the tea towel again. ‘But that makes me almost more suspicious than if it didn’t. It’s almost as if he wants us to feel we’ve found something he was trying to hide, and so maybe we’ll stop looking.’
‘What else do you think there might be?’
‘Well, there doesn’t seem to be any record in here of Exiteers’ names and numbers, for a start.’ She flicked quickly through the cabinet before sitting back on her heels again. ‘That makes no sense. He must have that somewhere.’
‘I just keep all my contacts in my phone,’ Calvin shrugged. ‘Did Skeet have a phone with him?’
‘An ancient Nokia,’ she said. ‘Leatherette case and everything. It was so bad Tony Coral thought it was good.’
Calvin smiled. The desk sergeant was so retro he was almost back in fashion.
‘How are you with computers?’
‘Not terrible.’
She jerked a thumb at the monitor. ‘See if you can fire up that dinosaur. I’ll have a look upstairs.’
Calvin got on his hands and knees to switch on the suitcase-sized grey box under the desk. He hadn’t seen a computer like this since he was a kid, when his brother Victor had had one with a dicky fan that hummed so loudly that nobody could watch TV at the same time. Not that they’d wanted to watch TV of course; they’d all been huddled around the monitor – agog at the text-only web page revealing itself at the speed of a quill pen.
This PC wheezed into life in just the same old way, and the keyboard was just as grubby and over-used, with the E rubbed completely off. It was so slow that he had time to take apart the gummy mouse and clean it on the buffalo tea towel before the computer had finished booting up.
He poked around for a while but there didn’t seem to be much on the system. Not even a browser. There were ancient versions of Word and Outlook Express and a few folders containing random files. Nothing seemed to be password-protected and as soon as he opened the email program, messages started to arrive.
After about twenty minutes, Kirsty King came downstairs and stood at his shoulder, so he showed her all he’d found. ‘There are a couple of personal emails in the inbox but they’re about railway stuff. Some old eBay receipts . . . but most of this is spam and even the stuff that’s not hasn’t been read since March.’
DCI King tapped her teeth with her forefinger while she thought. ‘Who has a computer and doesn’t read their email?’
‘Nobody,’ he said. ‘Not even pensioners. And I didn’t need a password either.’
‘Strange.’
‘Another tea towel, ma’am?’
‘Maybe,’ she nodded. ‘Fooling us into thinking we’ve found all there is to find . . .’ She sighed. ‘I think we should assume we’re looking for another phone and computer. The real ones.’
Calvin watched her think.
‘Right,’ she finally said, ‘let’s search again, every room, systematically. There must be something here. The files in the cabinet link Geoffrey to the work of the Exiteers, but he obviously knows his way around the law, which probably means we’re going to have to connect him to whoever went into the Cann house to make a case against him.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Calvin. ‘And what if we can’t?’
‘If we can’t,’ said King, ‘we’ll have to let him go.’
Amends
Geoffrey had told him to lie low, but lying low – even thinking the words ‘lying low’ – made Felix feel like a fugitive from justice.
Which he was, of course, so he really should be lying low . . .
He’d been up since six, and had spent most of the morning perched nervously on the hard bench in the hallway next to the phone, waiting for Amanda to return his call.
On his knees, the front page of the North Devon Journal shouted Police investigate ‘suspicious’ death of OAP. There wasn’t much more to the story. Felix knew because he’d read it twenty times. Mr Albert Cann had been found dead at his home in Abbotsham and police were appealing for anyone who had seen any suspicious activity to come forward. An anonymous neighbour had allegedly said the usual thing about never thinking this kind of thing could happen there, and that was all there was.
It was a strange feeling, to know more about a story in the paper than the paper did. Than anybody did, apart from Amanda, or whatever her real name was.
Of course, he didn’t know everything. He knew what he’d done, and that was about it. What had happened before or after he and Amanda had been there was a mystery to him. He had made a terrible mistake, but hoped there was a good reason why. He just hadn’t found it yet.
He kept unfolding and refolding the list of Exiteers he’d stolen from Geoffrey’s house. He wanted to call them all, but wasn’t sure what to tell them or how they might help. He also didn’t want to tie up the phone in case Amanda rang.
Which she didn’t.
At nine, Felix stuck his Post-it note back on the door and took Mabel with him to the corner shop, although she had no desire to leave the house – at least not via the front door. She had spotted a ginger intruder lurking in the back garden and since then had been transfixed at the French windows – her wet nose leaving slug-like trails of intent in its quivering wake.
At the shop, Felix bought cat food, frozen peas and two pints of milk. On the way home he gave the gardens marks out of ten, but few had really got going yet, and mostly they scored threes and fours. A few pots of old daffs here, a desultory row of pansies there. Weeds everywhere. It wasn’t an impressive line-up. Until he got to the Martins, of course, where once again Mabel stopped for an investigation of the low wall, which seemed to be some sort of doggy noticeboard.
While he waited, Felix reduced the Martins’ score to a seven because the grass hadn’t been cut since his last assessment. Maybe the Martins were on holiday and that’s why the place was starting to look a little neglected. The tulips would start to go over in a day or two, which made him think it would be a shame if there was nobody home to appreciate them.
So he picked one – leaned over the wall and plucked a single pink tulip, not yet fully unfurled from the bud. It was just perfect, and Felix threaded the fleshy stem through the ring on the zip of his beige jacket and walked on, feeling oddly . . . unfettered.
Miss Knott was opening his gate.
Felix cut her off. Blocked her way and glanced nervously at his own front door. Even from here the Post-it note was eye-catching . . .
‘Hello, Mabel,’ smiled Miss Knott. ‘How’s my beautiful girl?’
Mabel wagged her stumpy tail.
‘Hello, Miss Knott,’ said Felix guardedly.
‘Been somewhere exciting?’
‘No, no,’ he said, holding up Margaret’s string bag. ‘Just the shop.’
‘Very handy, isn’t it?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Very.’
‘What a lovely tulip.’ She nodded at his jacket.
Felix looked down at it. He felt rather bad about picking the flower now. Especially as all he’d done was worn it for the last leg of his walk. He would remove his jacket in the house and hang it on the hook in the hallway, and by nightfall the bloom would droop and die and its dusky petals would wilt. It seemed rather a high price to pay for half a block of swagger.
So he pulled it from his jacket and held it out to Miss Knott.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘You have it.’
Miss Knott l
ooked at him as if he were playing a trick on her. As if she might reach for the tulip, and it would squirt water in her face.
‘Are you sure?’ she said.
‘Of course,’ he reassured her, and Miss Knott smiled and took it and said, ‘Thank you,’ and Felix said, ‘Don’t mention it,’ and then there was an awkward silence before she suddenly reached for his chest and said, ‘You have a . . .’
Felix drew back from her hand and frowned down at his jacket.
The dark blob.
‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘it’s mascara.’
‘Oh.’
There was another, much more awkward, silence, and Felix wished she would go. What if the police came to arrest him now? It would be so embarrassing. He willed her to go.
But instead she held up a key. ‘I brought you my front door key.’
‘Oh,’ said Felix.
‘You said I should bring it round.’
‘I did,’ he said, and tried to take it, but his hands were restricted by the dog and the shopping, and Miss Knott bent a little and tried to place the key in one of his hands, and then the other, and they both jerked their arms like marionettes before Miss Knott eventually slid the key into the pocket of Felix’s beige jacket.
‘There!’ she said, flustered.
‘Thank you!’ he said, flustered.
Then he said his peas would thaw, and Miss Knott said goodbye to Mabel and he hurried up the path and took the Post-it note off the door, and went inside.
Honestly!
Felix stood behind the front door for a moment, feeling as if he’d been buffeted by a high wind. His top lip had broken out in a light sweat and he had to totter through to the kitchen before he could put the shopping and the dog lead down, to blot it with his hanky.
After he’d put the shopping away, he labelled Miss Knott’s key and hung it on a hook, then finally spooned a little mound of cat food on to a saucer and left it outside the back door, much to Mabel’s outrage. His plan was to lure Buttons out of the shrubbery, then grab him, put him in a box, and take him back to Exeter before Geoffrey got home and found him gone.
Felix put an egg on to boil, and buttered some bread and cut it into soldiers. He checked the answering machine but Amanda hadn’t called so he called her again. Again, she didn’t pick up, and he started to worry that she was never going to. He wouldn’t blame her. She was young and obviously frightened of being dragged back into an unpleasant tangle when she’d already escaped it so cleanly. He understood. After all, he was trying to do the same—
He straightened up and frowned at the very idea.
No!
He wasn’t trying to escape the tangle. He was just trying to understand the tangle before attempting to untangle the tangle. They were two completely different things.
Weren’t they?
Felix stood at the stove and felt a growing sense of unease.
Geoffrey – a disabled innocent – was at this very moment languishing in police custody, while he was standing here staring at a small brown egg bobbing and dancing, with his soldiers lined up dutifully on a side plate, ready to be dipped and to die.
He should really be doing something more. Something better. Something . . . else.
But what?
Felix didn’t know.
What would Margaret do? he wondered – and had the answer in a flash.
Margaret would not be boiling an egg and waiting for someone to call her back. Margaret would take the bull by the horns, find out what had gone wrong – and do her best to make it right.
Felix didn’t know what had gone wrong, and he couldn’t bring Albert Cann back from the dead. But there were things he could do to make amends.
And he could start by fixing the fence.
Without further ado, Felix switched off his egg and pardoned his soldiers and drove back to the scene of the crime.
The Fence
Abbotsham was a twenty-five-minute drive from Barnstaple.
Felix made it in forty.
This is not like me, he thought nervously all the way there. This is not like me.
He kept glancing at his toolbox on the passenger seat. He hadn’t used his tools since Margaret got sick because that had taken up all his time. Before that he’d been quite the handyman – always repairing this or improving that. So much so that Margaret used to call him Fixit Felix. Watch out, here comes Fixit Felix! Or Stand aside, Jamie, and let Fixit Felix have a go . . .
His tools had been there waiting for him in the garage exactly where he’d left them nearly a decade earlier. It had felt good just to carry the toolbox to the car.
From Bideford he drove up the hill into Abbotsham and turned right into Black Lane. As he approached the Cann house he slowed down – and then saw a young man in the driveway, buffing the windscreen of a little red sports car. He didn’t look up, but Felix had lost his nerve anyway, and went past. Fifty yards up the road the street narrowed to a mere lane again, bordered by high hedges, and winding vaguely towards the cliffs and the ocean.
Felix pulled the Rover into a field gateway and took a moment to regroup. He wanted to fix the fence, not engage with anybody. But now there was this young man in the driveway. Felix didn’t know if he was a member of the family or a neighbour – or possibly even a police officer. He only knew he couldn’t go in while he was there.
Felix glanced at his watch, then put the Rover into gear. He performed a five-point turn between the hedges and drove back down Black Lane.
The little red car had gone . . .
The key was not under the mat but the door was slightly ajar so, after a moment of dithering, Felix knocked.
No answer.
Inside he could hear a television blaring.
‘Hello?’ he called.
No answer.
Mabel hopped up on to the step and shouldered open the door and Felix hurried after her, trying to hiss at her to stop and come back, but she didn’t. Instead she snuffled around the skirting and then wandered into the front room, where the little black-and-tan dog trotted over to her with its tail aquiver.
Felix peered around the doorway. A young woman sat on the sofa with a tube of Pringles resting on her tummy. She was watching that show where a rude chef shouted at Americans.
‘Hello?’ he said cautiously.
She looked up, startled. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Hi.’
She was buxom and pretty in a way that many local girls were – round-faced and rosy-cheeked. Felix thought she might be eighteen, but her shortish blonde hair was held out of her eyes by a little rainbow clip, like something a child would wear.
‘I’m . . . Felix,’ he said after a brief hesitation, during which he debated calling himself John and got so confused in his own head that he decided just to go with the one name he was sure to remember.
‘Hiya,’ she said with a slightly puzzled smile. ‘I’m Hayley.’
‘Hello, Hayley,’ he said. ‘I’ve, um, come to fix the fence.’
‘I didn’t know it was broken,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Felix. ‘A bit of it fell down. Because it was rotten. Apparently.’
‘Yeah?’ she said. ‘Are you from social services?’
‘Hm,’ said Felix. He hated to lie, but the truth was not an option. ‘Do you live here?’
‘No,’ she laughed. ‘I’m the cleaner.’
Felix’s eyes flickered around the messy room and the girl reddened. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I do try, but I feel so tired ’cos I’m pregnant, see?’
She pointed at her tummy.
‘Ah,’ he nodded but didn’t look. No need.
‘To be honest,’ she went on, ‘all I want to do now is eat Pringles and cry.’ And to demonstrate the point, her chin wobbled and her eyes flooded with tears and she gave a big ready-made sob – as if it had been threatening
to burst out of her for a while, like a bubble in mud.
‘Now, now . . .’ said Felix. Margaret had had a terrible time carrying Jamie – cried and cried, as though she’d known from the start how sadly it would end.
He offered Hayley his handkerchief and she pressed her eyes and blew her nose and then used it to wipe the Pringles off her fingers for good measure.
‘Thanks,’ she sniffed, holding it out to him.
‘You keep it,’ said Felix. Time was you could lend a lady your handkerchief, certain in the knowledge that she would have the decency barely to pat her brow before handing it back unsullied by anything more than perfume and gratitude.
Those times were obviously gone.
The girl nodded her thanks and then tapped her knee at Mabel. ‘What a cute little dog! What’s his name?’
‘Mabel.’
‘Oh!’ She laughed. ‘Hello, Mabel.’ And Mabel gave her best wag – the one she reserved for anyone who looked like a promising source of grease.
Felix looked around the chaotic room. He supposed that this was what happened when you did away with National Service.
‘Let’s give you a hand,’ he said, and began to tidy up.
He started by taking all the dirty crockery and cutlery through to the kitchen, while the girl got up and ran a sink full of hot water. Felix found a bin bag which he took into the front room and filled with rubbish. Old newspapers, wrappers, random bits of plastic. Anything that wasn’t obviously rubbish he divided into flat things and lumpy things and put them in two rough piles on the coffee table. The first was made up of bills and junk mail. Most of the bills were addressed to Albert Cann and remained unopened – even the red ones. The thought of not opening a bill immediately was anathema to Felix, and it took all his self-restraint not to open them himself, but instead he stacked them in a neat pile. The other pile was more random – DVDs, computer bits, plastic action figures, dirty clothing and, weirdly, a brick with an elastic band around it.
Felix stared at the brick, wondering why it was there and which pile he should put it in, if any. ‘Do you think they want to keep this?’
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