by Candy Denman
Once surgery was over and Jo had drunk more coffee and several glasses of water, she felt she needed to do something to soak up some of the caffeine coursing through her veins and making her feel distinctly jangly. She also discovered to her surprise that she was abso- lutely ravenous. Unfortunately, she had thrown away her by then cold and soggy bacon roll before starting morning surgery. She had also liberally sprayed her room with enough air freshener to make herself gag, and given herself a quick squirt of breath freshener. She didn’t want to give her patients the idea that she was better at giving out lifestyle advice than actually living it. Even if it was true. A quick trip down to Judges was needed again, for tea and a healthy chicken salad sandwich, which actually got eaten this time.
Once she was settled back at her desk, having dealt with all her routine paperwork, including another request for painkillers for June Springfield that left Jo feeling a little anxious about how much she seemed to be using and made her resolve to visit again sooner rather than later, she started trying to reach Doreen Ponting. It was unsur- prising that the personal number of the head of the CPS was unlisted; after all, she wouldn’t want every criminal she prosecuted leaving rude messages, so Jo had to be satisfied with leaving a message for her at the prosecution service office. She was realistic enough to realise she was hardly likely to get a response. Every journalist would be doing the same, in the hope of getting a statement, and she was sure none of the messages would be being passed on. Going to her home and trying to doorstep her was unlikely to be any more productive. If she had any sense, Doreen Ponting would have gone to stay elsewhere. As far away as possible, in fact.
Anxious not to go to Miller before she had something concrete, Jo was frustrated that she seemed to be reaching a number of dead ends. There had to be a way to find out if anyone had worked at both Wendlesham’s and either Townsend Bartlett or the firm in Tunbridge Wells where Giles had worked before moving to Hastings. Looking on their websites was no help, as they only listed board members or department heads and the like, and Jo thought she was probably look- ing for receptionists and administrators, or possibly junior staff. She could hardly ask the firms to send her a list of past employees, could she? She was sure they would just hide behind the data protection laws as everyone seemed to these days. If she had a name to begin with, she could try and trick them into verifying it, but she had nothing. Much as she valued her privacy, there was no doubt that current legislation didn’t help her sleuthing.
She wondered if she could persuade Penny to give her a list of pre- vious employees at Townsend Bartlett. She thought it unlikely, not to mention illegal. Meanwhile, she could try and locate Helena Dyrda, the one person that Penny had remembered having worked at the firm before her. The girl who had stolen the boy she wanted, and who now worked as a hairdresser.
Helena Dyrda, as Jo had hoped, was quite easy to find and very easy to get talking about her time at Townsend Bartlett.
‘They were a weird bunch,’ Helena told her as she carried on cut- ting a middle-aged woman’s hair. ‘I was only filling in before I got on a hairdressing course, but I was glad to leave, I can tell you.’
‘In what way were they weird?’ Jo asked.
‘Well, you know, that Mr Townsend, the one that died, he was a right pervert. I refused to take contracts round to his home for signing after the first time he flashed me, I can tell you. I mean, who wants to see something like that first thing in the morning?’
‘Absolutely.’ Jo could tell the lady whose hair was being cut was much more interested in their conversation than the old copy of Hello magazine she was pretending to read. ‘Was it one of the partners who asked you to go there with the papers?’
‘God no, there was only one other partner and a lady associate. The partner, Mr Bartlett, was so embarrassed when I told him what had happened, he promised he’d speak to Mr Townsend, but I don’t reckon he did. He was way too scared of him.’
‘The lady associate then?’
‘No. She was really upset about what had happened. She was the one who made me tell Mr Bartlett, but like I say, nothing happened about it and I left soon after.’
Somehow, being really upset about Giles flashing didn’t square with Antonia Hersham continuing to send staff to his home, but Hel- ena had finished cutting her client’s hair and was moving onto the blow dry.
‘Who did ask you to go to his flat?’ Jo shouted over the noise. ‘Well, he did, if course. Mr Townsend.’
‘Not Antonia Hersham?’
‘Who? No, no. It was Mr Townsend, He rang the desk and asked me to “be a love and pop them round to him”. Ha! Never again, I can tell you!’
‘Antonia wasn’t the associate when you were there?’
‘No, it was this other girl, really lovely, she was. Fiona, something or other. I’m terrible with names. Sorry!’
There was no point trying to continue the conversation over the roar of the hairdryer, so Jo left Helena to it and walked the short distance to Townsend Bartlett in the hope of catching Penny after work and getting more information from her about past employees.
Penny wasn’t keen to talk. She told Jo that she had handed in her no- tice and was due to leave the firm at the end of the week. She was ex- cited to have found a better job and was anxious about doing anything that could jeopardise her move.
‘Receptionist in a beauty salon. At least I might get my nails done for free.’
Jo could see the benefits of free manicures but it didn’t seem like that much to risk. When asked about getting a list of past employees,Penny said, with some relief, that the moment she’d handed in her notice she’d lost her admin rights and ability to get into any of the locked files like payroll, so she couldn’t help. Jo, if she was honest, was a little relieved too. She knew that asking Penny to get the names would have been a sacking offence at the very least and illegal to boot and she hadn’t really wanted to ask her to do it. But it was frustrating, none the less.
‘Do you know how long Antonia has been with the firm?’ ‘About two years, why?’
It was obvious that Penny was also beginning to wonder about why Jo was asking all these questions.
‘I was just trying to track down the associate before her, Fiona something or other, and wondered if you had any details?’
But Penny didn’t know who she was talking about, and Jo was left wondering what on earth she could do to find out more. The name Fiona alone wasn’t enough to go on, although the fact that she was an associate rather than a receptionist was interesting and Kate might be able to help track her down. At the very least, this Fiona had not ap- proved of Giles’ antics and might be willing to help Jo find others who had worked there and been sexually harassed.
Persuading Penny to talk about previous Townsend Bartlett employ- ees was a doddle compared to trying to get more information about the possible complaint that George had talked about at her mother’s dinner party all that time ago. She had even considered trying to use her mother as a go-between, but that would just open up a whole new can of worms, so she decided to go straight to see him and be upfront about why she needed to know. Even if all she got was the name of the firm involved, she might find she could persuade a receptionist or someone like Penny to help her. Unlikely as that seemed.
The crunch of her car tyres on the gravel driveway outside the con- verted oast house where Rita and George lived set their dog off into a paroxysm of barking. Lights were on in several rooms that Jo could see so, although there was only one car on the driveway, she was hopeful of finding them in. She hardly felt she needed to knock as the dog had quite clearly announced her presence, but she did and was rewarded, eventually, by the sound of someone coming to answer it. The door opened and a springer spaniel darted out and jumped up at her, tail wagging feverishly. Jo smiled and rubbed the dog’s ears which clearly made her a friend for life. She looked up and was dismayed to see who was standing there.
‘Hi Teddy,’ she said, with as much enthusiasm as she cou
ld mus- ter. To be fair, he didn’t look too pleased to see her either. ‘Are your parents in?’
‘No,’ he said and stood there waiting for her next move, pointedly not asking her in.
‘Are you expecting them back?’ The spaniel was demanding more attention so she bent and stroked her. The dog’s response was to lie down and roll over, exposing her tummy, and looking hopefully at Jo who obligingly bent down, much to the animal’s delight.
‘Not till late.’ Teddy watched as Jo continued to make a fuss of the dog, if only to stop herself from having to look at the man in front of her. He was dressed in grubby joggers and a tee shirt and his bare feet revealed that he hadn’t cut his toenails in quite a while. If Jo hadn’t fancied him before, she certainly didn’t now. ‘They’re at a Law Society dinner,’ he added, ‘so there’s no point waiting. Come in, Millie.’ He grabbed the dog who looked most put out at being dragged away from someone willing to give her the attention she craved, and went to close the door.
‘Tell them I called by, will you?’ Jo said as the door closed. She thought she heard a grunt of agreement, but that might just have been wishful thinking.
As Jo returned to her car, she wondered idly if he had a date in there, but she couldn’t really imagine that he would attract anyone dressed like that. Much more likely that he had a date with his computer.
As she drove out of the driveway, she wondered if she could get away with not dropping in at her parents, but she knew she would be bound to get caught out. Someone would have seen her distinctive car and mention it to her mother even if Teddy didn’t pass the mes- sage onto his parents, so she drove the short distance to her childhood home and parked once again. Unfortunately, her mother was in.
‘No, Ma, there isn’t something I’m not telling you. I just dropped by to see how you both are,’ Jo explained for the fifteenth time as she sat in the living room with her mother while her father washed up their dinner things in the kitchen. Jo had never understood why they didn’t get a dishwasher when she was growing up and all her friends’ parents had them. But she had begun to realise that it gave her father a break. A quiet time, alone with the pots and pans. Which was why he had also refused her offer to help.
‘You didn’t get to eat the dinner, so you don’t have to help clear up,’ was his firm response. ‘Go and sit down; talk to your mother,’ he said with a glint in his eye, knowing that was the last thing Jo wanted to do.
‘You should have rung before coming to visit, shouldn’t she?’ Mrs Hughes asked her husband as he came through with a tray of coffee. ‘We might have been out and then it would have been a wasted jour- ney.’
‘I popped in to see Rita and George as well.’ That silenced her mother. Jo was pretty sure she had marked Teddy down as ineligible after the dinner party.
‘You know,’ mused Mrs Hughes, ‘all that boy needs is the love of a good woman to sort him out.’
Charles spluttered into his coffee as Jo considered a number of responses from: I’m not a good woman, to: over my dead body. Fortunately, she was saved from having to reply by the ring of her mobile phone. Her presence was required at the police station to assess a pris- oner. Jo knew that it was most likely someone under the influence of drink or drugs, or perhaps who had managed to injure themselves before, during or even after arrest. Nothing of great interest, but at least it had cut short her visit home and stopped any further suggestion of how she might mould Teddy into marriageable material.
As she drove to the station, Jo had to concede that, on the whole, it had not been a particularly constructive day.
Chapter 19
It was not yet halfway through the week and Jo was already exhaust- ed. The call-out to the police station had proved to be more complex than she had anticipated. A regular of hers, both as a patient and as an habitué of the custody suite, Marcy Draper, had chosen a Tuesday evening as a good time to get completely off her skull on a mixture of drink and drugs and assault one of her customers. The customer in question was in hospital having a foreign object removed from his rectum. Jo was unsurprised to find Marcy high as a kite and proud of what she had done.
‘He said he wanted his money back because I hadn’t done a good enough job. The fucking cheek! Snatched the cash off the fucking table and wouldn’t give it back, the fucker!’ There had apparently ensued a bit of a tussle over the money, during which time the mini-vibrator somehow ended up internal. Grabbing his clothes, the man had run out of the room Marcy rented by the hour and into the street. The brawl continued as Marcy attempted to get her money back and the naked man tried to get a taxi, which was never going to happen. That was when the police had got involved.
‘Don’t know what the fuck it had to do with them,’ Marcy finished her full and frank confession to Jo, who knew that it was the drugs talking and making Marcy so honest now. Even if she allowed Marcy to be interviewed, any statement she made could and would be challenged in court. Once Jo had checked her over for injuries, of which there were many, of varying ages, but nothing requiring treatment, she told the custody sergeant they would have to let Marcy sober up and interview her in the morning. The custody sergeant was quite happy with that; they both knew that it was unlikely that the punter would want to press charges once the vibrator had been safely removed and he understood quite how embarrassing it could be.
To make her night later still, she had run into Miller in the carpark. He looked tired, exhausted even. The fact that he was at work this late told Jo that his wife had obviously not come home yet.
‘We’ve got nothing,’ he said bluntly in answer to her question about how the case was going. ‘We can’t find the woman from down- stairs, she seems to have completely disappeared, everyone from the office had access to his flat because the keys were kept in an unlocked drawer. Fingerprints confirm every-bloody-one had been in the flat, including the bedroom, but only Townsend’s prints are on the bondage gear.’
‘She can’t have just disappeared,’ Jo told him firmly.
‘Well you bloody find her then,’ he answered tetchily.
‘What was her name?’
‘Ms Paula Davison. Her name and everything checked out. She had bank accounts and a credit history, but on doing more checking, we found that she is a long-term resident in a psychiatric facility and there’s absolutely no way she could be the woman we thought she was.’
‘Someone stole her identity.’
‘But we have no idea who,’ he told her as he wiped his face with his hands, tiredness oozing from every pore. ‘I’ve got a press conference in the morning and nothing to tell them.’
‘You’d better get back and get a few hours sleep then.’ Jo wasn’t upset by his bad-temper so much as intrigued as to how someone could steal an identity and then drop out of sight like the woman downstairs had done. ‘You don’t want those bags under your eyes on television.’ He nodded and turned away.
‘She had to have had something to do with it,’ Jo told his retreating back. ‘And she must have had a connection to the real Paula Davison.’
‘Presumably. But I’m buggered if I can find anything.’ He wandered over to his car and left Jo thinking about the news. It gave her a whole new area to investigate. Someone with a link to both Giles Townsend and Paula Davison.
Sure enough, next morning, when Jo found time to call and check on Marcy’s status while taking a coffee break during morning surgery, she heard that she had been released and her customer had also been discharged from hospital, minus the vibrator and hopefully a wiser man. You should never enter into a dispute whilst naked, particularly with a prostitute and even more particularly with a bad-tempered prostitute like Marcy.
It was gone midnight by the time Jo had got back to her flat, and it had taken her a while to unwind. That, along with the disturbed sleep caused by excessive alcohol the night before, meant that she could really do with an afternoon nap. Like that was ever going to happen! The only thing to do was to keep moving, because Jo was sure that if she stopped
for a moment, she would fall asleep.
First stop was the mortuary, where one of her patients who had been a resident in an old people’s home was being autopsied. Aged ninety-two, no one had been surprised when he was found dead in bed, even though he had no real health problems other than being old, and Jo didn’t expect anything untoward to be found, but it didn’t hurt to check before the official report hit everyone’s desks. Besides, it gave her a chance to pump Billy Iqbal for more information about the ongoing investigations.
It was gratifying to see the smile on Billy’s face, and the twinkle in his eyes, when he saw who had come to visit him in his subterranean office. So few people seemed genuinely pleased to see her these days.
‘And what can I do for you, Dr Hughes?’ he asked and Jo could feel a blush start at the base of her neck and run quickly up to her cheeks. She wished, just for once, she could have a conversation with a man she felt attracted to without signalling her interest to the whole world, and, more importantly, the man himself.
‘Mr Candlish? I believe you did the PM this morning.’
‘Of course. Have a seat.’ Jo sat sideways on the chair in front of his desk, the only way she could comfortably fit without first removing her kneecaps, as he brought the relevant details up on the screen of his computer.
‘Ah yes, you were his GP. Well, he was generally fit for his age. No evidence of disseminated atherosclerosis. Just a major occlusion of the left anterior descending coronary artery.’
‘The widow maker.’
Billy nodded. ‘And not something you could have done anything about.’
‘Thank you. It’s always nice to know you haven’t missed anything. He’d certainly never complained of chest pain.’