by Mark Eklid
As he completed the check, he watched as Zoe hobbled by, wearing a grey plastic hard boot to stabilise her broken foot. It looked even more obtrusively ungainly attached to someone of such a slight physique. She dragged the boot through the wide warehouse doors and turned left, away from the main body of the depot yard, and, as she did, Graham noticed that she dropped one of the handful of sheets of paper she was carrying.
He scurried after it as it began to flutter away in the breeze, but before he could call after her, she had disappeared from view round the corner of the warehouse.
She was taking a first drag on a newly lit cigarette when he caught up with her and she shot him a guilty look as he rounded the corner. Her youthful appearance added to the feeling of a caught-behind-the-bike-sheds moment.
Zoe was, though, in her early twenties. Her momentary alarm at realising she had been rumbled quickly dissipated when she saw it was only Graham and she tipped her long mane of dyed cherry-red hair to release the lungful of smoke towards the clear skies.
‘I know. I shouldn’t,’ she said, as if anticipating his disapproval.
He gave no judgement. ‘You dropped this.’ He recognised it as a proof of delivery note and offered it to her. The rest of the handful of sheets were folded over and tucked under her arm and she had to put the cigarette between her lips to accept the other back and put it with the pile.
‘Thanks,’ she said, the cigarette still in her mouth. She replaced the sheets under her arm, freeing her hand to pinch the cigarette between her fingers and take another drag.
‘They’re a prop. I always grab a handful of papers to make it look like I’m doing something. I don’t know why. I suppose Rebecca makes us all jumpy.’
Graham had really taken a shine to Zoe. She had cultivated the veneer of a rebellious, not to be messed with, out to shock young woman, but there were no layers to break through with her. He found her to be a refreshingly open book from the first morning they met and it was clear, seeing her jousting with the drivers, that she was pin-sharp smart too. Other people – notably Rebecca – made more of a show of parading their presumed value to the smooth running of the company, but Zoe was the one who made sure all the small, important details were tended to. She was the glue.
‘How are you enjoying the job so far then, Graham? You must have been here about a month now, haven’t you?’ She leaned casually against the warehouse wall and bent her left leg to take the weight off her injured foot.
‘This is my fourth week,’ he replied. ‘Yeah, I’m enjoying it so far. It’s never a dull moment here, is it?’
She blew out her latest intake of smoke with a laugh.
‘We don’t get surprise sackings and visits from the coppers all the time, you know. It’s usually pretty uneventful.’
He too leaned against the warehouse and put his hands in his pockets.
‘I got the impression everybody was a bit shocked when it came out that Chris Yates had been sacked.’ Graham saw an opportunity to gain a little more perspective on the former driver and his unnerving visit a couple of days earlier, but was keen to dress his curiosity as offhand conversation.
‘Yeah. Didn’t see that coming. Mind you,’ she lowered her voice. ‘I can’t say I was all that sorry to see him go.’
‘Oh?’ He turned his head to show she had caught his attention, inviting further explanation.
‘I always found him a bit creepy. When you’re a woman in a depot full of blokes, you get used to, you know, having them saying stuff to you, but you know they’re mostly just larking about and you give them plenty back to keep them in their place but Yates was different. He’d look at you and you’d feel proper grossed out by him. Ugh!’ She shuddered. ‘Creepy.’
‘I see.’ In his very short experience of encounters with Yates, Graham could see how people would not choose to spend too much time in close proximity.
‘He’d been here a few years, though, hadn’t he? You too. How long have you been with the company now, Zoe?’
The end of the cigarette glowed again as she sucked on it. ‘Five years,’ she said. ‘I came here when I left school. I love it here. Harry and Lena were great to work for.’
‘So everybody says. I wish I’d have known them myself.’
She cast him a sideways glance. ‘You knew Lena, though, right? I mean, I heard before you got here about how you and her ...you know.’
‘That was a long time ago,’ Graham explained, his cheeks reddening slightly. ‘And we didn’t really know each other all that well then, to be honest.’
Zoe chuckled to herself, enjoying his flush of embarrassment.
‘I don’t really know Andreas that well either, yet. He showed me the pictures of his mum and dad in his office and he’s told me a little bit about them, but I haven’t asked a great deal about them or the accident yet. It doesn’t seem right. You can tell it’s still raw for him. It must have been terrible for everybody when the news came through. Andreas must have been on his own when he found out and that must have been so hard for him.’
‘He was at a do, as I remember,’ Zoe recalled. ‘Some sort of dinner for one of the customers. I remember getting a phone call from them the next morning and they were concerned for him. They said he was in a right state when he took the phone call.’
‘I bet.’
‘Yeah, poor Andreas, but it took a lot of character to keep the business going, as he did, after a shock like that. He must be made of strong stuff.’
Graham nodded. ‘For sure. As I said, I’m still only just getting to know him and I’m finding out little bits to add to the picture every day. Somebody told me the other day he was a biker, for example. I didn’t know if they were trying to have me on.’
‘No, that’s legit. He used to come in on it sometimes. Big, powerful thing it was. Don’t know if he’s still got it.’
Interesting. Graham still had no idea if that was a significant piece of information, but it was interesting all the same.
Zoe took a last puff at her cigarette and extinguished it on the ground with her foot, then picked up the stub.
‘Don’t want to leave any incriminating evidence,’ she explained, holding it up.
That afternoon, the buzzer at the outer door sounded. All the personnel carried a security card to let them in. Unannounced visits were rare. Sparky went to the door to see who had buzzed and Graham’s attention was drawn when he heard the crackly voice coming through on one of their radios.
He spun around in his chair. Two policemen, wearing flat hats and solemn expressions, were following Sparky through into the reception.
‘It’s just down there. Second door on the left.’
Sparky directed the officers to the corridor and they headed down, towards Andreas’s office, leaving the hiss of another indistinct instruction over the radio behind them.
‘This is becoming a bit of a regular occurrence,’ said Sparky with raised eyebrows as the policemen disappeared out of earshot and he returned to his desk.
‘What’s this about?’ asked Graham.
‘Dunno, mate. They just said they needed to see Andreas.’
Sparky set about his warehouse admin again, but Graham stared towards the quiet corridor with concern. This was, indeed, becoming a regular occurrence.
Twenty minutes later, the sound of the two officers could be heard coming back up the corridor. As they walked past the partition, the second of them turned to the three on the other side of the divide, who were all trying their best not to stare.
‘Thanks very much. We’ll see ourselves out.’
Rebecca came to her door.
‘What did they want?’
Graham shrugged. Zoe tapped at her keyboard. Sparky felt obliged to take the lead.
‘They said they needed to see Andreas.’
‘Oh!’ Her eyes darted towards the corridor, as if she was considering heading straight down to ask for a more fulsome explanation but then she thought better of it and turned back inside, closing
the door behind her.
The three of them settled into their regular work rhythms, disturbed only by two telephone calls, which Zoe dealt with. More than half an hour passed and Graham decided he could stand the suspense no longer.
He didn’t feel brave enough to go straight through to Andreas this time. He decided to head out into the yard to see if any of the drivers were around. The drivers always seemed to know everything that was going on.
He slipped the high-viz vest over his shirt.
‘Just popping out for a bit of air,’ he said.
Outside, in the warm sunshine, he could see no-one at first but then he saw a group of four in a huddle by the mechanics’ workshop. Two of them he recognised as drivers.
One of them saw him coming towards them and the others quickly picked up on the non-verbal warning of his approach. Quite a few of the drivers, warehousemen and mechanics still regarded him with an edge of suspicion. His genetic association with the boss made them wary of him.
‘All right, fellas?’ Graham did his usual best to sound as normal and non-confrontational as he could. ‘How’s it going?’
One of the drivers gave him a half-smile in response. The others were stony-faced, not prepared to make eye contact.
‘Did you see the coppers just then? Any idea what they were after?’
He could tell that they knew something, but were reluctant to share. Graham stood, expectantly. He was about to abandon his attempt when one of them spoke.
‘You haven’t heard, then?’
Graham shook his head. Plainly not.
‘It’ll be about Chris Yates, I should guess. He’s been murdered.’
13
‘Murdered!’
Janet put her hands to her face in shock. He had led her from her office to a quiet spot in the warehouse to tell her. He had to tell her straight away, partly because he didn’t want her to hear it from someone else first. He also needed the comfort of being with her to share his own sense of horror at the news.
‘That’s just horrible, Gray. The poor man.’
Tears welled in the corners of her widened eyes and she dabbed at them with her fingers.
Graham could not stand still. He paced, a couple of steps one way and a couple of steps the other, agitated. He was finding it difficult to absorb the information. His mind was already racing with its potential implications.
‘One of the lads said he was found at the side of his car in a lay-by just off the road to Hathersage on Sunday morning and that he’d been hit over the back of the head. It’s only three days ago since he was there at the gates, telling me those things, and I didn’t want to hear them at the time but what now? He said he knew stuff that people here didn’t want to get out and what if that was what got him killed?’
Janet took a step towards her husband and grabbed hold of his forearm, her expression filled with a new terror.
‘Oh god, Gray! You don’t think Andreas could have done this, do you?’
He stopped moving and pulled her towards him in a hug. It would have been a lie to say the thought had not already crossed his mind.
‘I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what to do. This is just all too awful.’
They held the embrace. What are you meant to do? What are you meant to think?
‘Do you think you should go to the police? Tell them what he said to you at the gates.’
He had been thinking about that all weekend. It was a dilemma he hadn’t yet found a suitable resolution to.
‘I’m really not comfortable with that,’ he said. ‘On one hand, I can see it’s the responsible thing to do but, then again, what would I be telling them? What if, like we said the other day, Yates was just a bitter former employee who decided to get his own back? We have no proof to back it up. All we have are wild allegations aimed at Andreas – and not only suggesting there was some sort of criminal activity going on in the business but implicating him in the death of his parents as well. I can’t tell that to the police because I’d be landing Andreas right in it and, for all we know, what Yates said could be completely unfounded. If we told the police what Yates said and then I get pressed by them to tell them anything else I think is relevant about Andreas am I supposed to tell them I’ve got a nasty feeling he might have organised a thug to beat up Bentley? He’d go right to the top of their list of suspects then and, for all we know, Andreas is completely innocent. Imagine if he got dragged over the coals by the police and then he worked out it was me who set them on to him. His reputation would be ruined and our relationship would be over. How could he ever trust me again if I did something like that to him with no good reason?
‘No. I say we let the police do their job, do their forensics at the crime scene, gather their information. They know what they’re doing. For all we know, they might already have a good idea who killed Yates.’
Janet was quiet, processing Graham’s reasoning. She could see the sense in what he said.
‘You could confront Andreas direct. I’m not saying you accuse him of anything, but you could quiz him – try to get a feeling for whether or not he’s telling the truth.’
‘Could do,’ Graham conceded. ‘The problem with that is how do I do it in a way that doesn’t make him think I suspect him? Whether he’s innocent or has got something to hide, it’s hard to get that right. Besides, I’m not sure I could look him in the eye right now. I’m too confused by all this.’
‘We could just leave.’
Janet pulled away from the embrace to look into his eyes.
‘We could say we’ve made a mistake and can’t settle up here. Blame me, if you like. Say I’m homesick. We go back to live in Derby, I see if I can get a job back at Royce’s and we can look again at other jobs for you. Maybe there are trucking companies in Derby you could apply for jobs with, now that you’ve had this bit of experience. I’m sure Andreas would give you a good reference. Maybe Rebecca would as well.’
He scoffed, amused by that thought.
‘But seriously, Gray, we could do that. I know we’ve not been here five minutes and we said we’d give it a while to make up our minds whether or not this move is right for us, but we didn’t think we’d be letting ourselves in for this, with murder and beatings and people setting trucks on fire and suggestions of criminal goings-on. We didn’t sign up for all that. It’s frightening, Gray. It could get dangerous for us. I’m scared for us, Gray.’
He pulled her close again. He understood her fear. He felt it too. Running away from it would be the simplest solution but it didn’t feel like the right thing to do. Not yet, anyway.
‘I’m frightened as well, love, but I don’t think we should just give up on it like that. The scariest part for me is that stuff is happening which is unexplained but I really don’t think we’re in danger. We’ve done nothing wrong. Besides...’
Graham let out a deep sigh.
‘...whatever Andreas is and whatever he is or isn’t mixed up in, he’s family now. We’ve not known each other for long, I know, and we still don’t really know each other, but he is my son and you don’t just give up on family at the first sign of trouble. I couldn’t just run out of his life again because I haven’t got a handle on what kind of a person he really is yet. It obviously meant an awful lot to him to come and find me and for him to have me – us – as part of his life after everything he’s been through and it would be so harsh to throw everything he’s done for us back in his face – and for what? My half-baked theories about who he is and what he might be capable of? The ramblings of a sacked driver who must have been up to his neck in something nasty or he wouldn’t have ended up dead in a lay-by? It doesn’t add up yet.
‘One of the things Andreas said to me that really stuck in my mind when we saw each other at the coffee place that time was that I’m the only family he has left and that really struck home with me because, do you know what, he’s the only family I have too. I know I’ve got your family and they’ve always been very good about making me feel
like I belong and I do feel like I belong but there’s nobody really on my side. My parents are long gone and I’m not counting Auntie Rose.’
Janet smiled. ‘Good old Auntie Rose!’
‘I know. Mad as a fish. But take her out of the equation and Andreas is all I’ve got on my side and, like I used to find when I was researching my family history, you don’t have to know someone to feel like they are part of you. As soon as you start to find little pieces of their stories – just a marriage certificate or an old photograph, whatever – they become part of who you are. That’s why you see the subjects on “Who Do You Think You Are” break down in tears over sad stories of people in their family trees who died long before they were born. It’s because they have awakened a part of themselves they never knew existed before but once you find out about Great-Uncle Fred or Great-Great-Grandmother Edith, they are with you forever. You can’t let them go, even if you wanted to. I always got such huge pleasure from helping people discover their ancestries and one of the most rewarding aspects was seeing them understand that we are all part of something much bigger than ourselves. I only discovered Andreas a few weeks ago, but we’re interwoven in each other’s stories now and I can’t just abandon him.’
They held each other in the quiet corner of the warehouse. Janet had never shared her husband’s enthusiasm for digging up the past, but she could always see how much pleasure it gave him and how much it meant to him.
‘You’ve got your answer then.’ She released herself and smiled, taking hold of both Graham’s hands. He looked back at her, quizzically.
‘How many times have you said that the answer is always to research more thoroughly? Never assume you know what happened or you understand the cause of events in the past until you can back it up by gathering all the available information – that’s what you’ve always told me. That’s what you’ve got to do. You’ve got unanswered questions – well, find out what the answers are. Do your research, Gray. That’s what you do best.’