A Private Investigation Read online

  Jo said, ‘Not only do they know that you play – if that’s the case – they know where you live. And you’ve never had anything like it before?’

  Straightening up then, he picked up his cup and saucer and took it to the kitchen table – Jo followed and they sat down.

  ‘No, not like that. I made some friends in Belfast who got in touch a couple of times in fairly unconventional ways, but that’s over and done with. Private investigations? A friend of mine offered me a job as a glorified PI a couple of years ago but this isn’t his style at all.’

  ‘No odd text messages or emails lately?’

  Smith shook his head and smiled, and she knew why – she was back in detective inspector mode for a few moments.

  ‘Only from some dodgy woman down in Cockfosters…’

  She chose to ignore that and said, ‘You’re linking it to the case, then? Because if you’re right, it’s crucial evidence, David, and-’

  ‘And it’s also Friday night. Even though we now have two ambitious and competitive DCIs leading the one investigation, we’re still only talking a missing teenager. I can’t see anyone pulling forensic staff into the labs in Norwich tonight or even over the weekend for that, not to look at an anonymous letter sent to a retiring sergeant known to have a significant number of eccentric acquaintances.’

  She shrugged – difficult to argue with that, and he knows his own station and set-up better than anyone. Then he said, ‘But you’re not wrong either,’ got up and left the kitchen. When he came back it was with two unused, clear plastic document covers – the letter went into one and the envelope into the other.

  He said, ‘I’ll take them in on Monday, see if anyone’s interested. There might be a print, other than mine, but…’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘The way those letters were cut out? He won’t have left a print.’

  ‘Or she.’

  ‘God, yes, I haven’t begun to think about all the women it might be.’

  ‘It must awful, that trail of broken hearts.’

  He nodded sadly.

  ‘It is a responsibility. I always give them fair warning but somehow…’

  Jo shook her head in mock disapproval. But she knew there were not broken hearts as much as disappointed ones – she knew that few women would have got as close as she was now, a few inches away from him in his own kitchen. It was not an opportunity that she intended to waste.

  She said, ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing if Sandrine’s has a table tonight.’

  ‘They do or rather they did, the one in the alcove by the window. Eight o’clock.’

  Sometimes you wanted to punch him a little, but it was good to be known like that. She looked up at him then but already his attention was back at the work surface. She knew that what he really wanted was to go and examine the contents of those plastic wallets again.

  It was after 11.30 before they finally went up to bed – late for Smith but there we are, he’d better get used to doing things at odd times of the day and night. And by then, as happens, because he was usually in bed an hour earlier, he had gone past the point of tiredness. He found the book he had just begun to read, switched on the overhead light and propped himself up with an extra pillow.

  “Laidlaw” by William McIlvanney. Crime novels had never had much attraction for him for at least five good reasons, but some of those, too, were about to come to an end. The thought of becoming addicted to them the moment he retired from the job was appealing, or at least it appealed to his senses of irony and the absurd. He was certainly prepared to give it a go, and there was a second-hand bookstall on Lake market every Saturday that sold them by the bagful, so it would be a very cost-effective new interest.

  This one, however, he had purchased new and online – it had been recommended in a recent article in the arts section of his Sunday newspaper. McIlvanney had been described as ‘The Father of Tartan Noir’ – that and the extracts in the review had been enough to tempt him to buy the first in the Laidlaw trilogy. He had begun it two nights ago and been suitably impressed, so another fifteen minutes or so tonight was something to look forward to – he was already of a mind to order the two novels that followed this one.

  The knock at his bedroom door took him completely by surprise. In the following four or five seconds, Smith wondered whether he should say “Come in” and remain in bed, say “Come in” but get out of bed – though ready then for what eventuality he had no idea – or to say “Just a moment” and seize control of the doorway. Fortunately, it being late December, he was wearing pyjamas.

  It must have been the silence itself that caused Jo to open the bedroom door a few inches – better to see if he was actually asleep than to keep knocking and wake him up. As she peered in she said, ‘David, I’m sorry. If you’re – oh, you are awake.’

  “Guilty, couldn’t sleep. Knew I shouldn’t have had the lobster. What’s up? Are you alright?’

  ‘Yes. I’m really sorry to disturb you. But…’

  He waved her into the room and she came forward, wearing a plain pink T shirt and surprisingly flowery pyjama bottoms that ended just below her knees.

  She said, ‘I feel stupid now!’

  And he thought, it’s an hour or two since the heating turned off and I don’t like a hot house anyway, but surely she isn’t going to suggest getting into bed to keep warm. That would be too – too – but the word, whatever it was, simply escaped him.

  She stopped midway in the space between the door and bed, a sort of no man’s land or no woman’s land, and said, ‘Just tell me the name again – the name of the man who drove the burger van, the one they interviewed yesterday.’

  Smith put down the book and sat up straighter in bed. He’d already realised that he had got into the habit of telling Jo more details about cases than he had told Sheila, no doubt because she was a former detective and because she was, as a writer and probably as a psychologist, good at asking questions. Was he telling her too much?

  ‘Paul Harrison. Why?’

  ‘That’s what I thought you said. I didn’t notice at the time but it’s been bugging me for the last few minutes.’

  Smith waited, watching her and feeling awkward, him being in bed and her just standing there a few feet away. He ought to get up, do something.

  She said, ‘You remember when I stayed at the caravan with my aunt and you came down to see us for the day?’

  He wasn’t likely to forget – the day had ended with a kiss of sorts on the caravan steps, and that had been bugging him ever since. He nodded.

  ‘Right, well, that was the day I told you that Andretti’s lawyers were looking at an appeal because of an incident in Hunston. It involved Andretti’s cousin, didn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Paolo Harris. I looked into it a bit. It was nothing. Any judge would have dismissed it as a frivolous appeal and that’s if he or she was being polite. It was nonsense.’

  ‘OK, maybe, but I didn’t come in here to discuss the legal niceties.’

  And Smith thought, we’re bound to have a proper argument at some point – it could be quite an experience. But not now, not at nearly midnight after an excellent dinner.

  He said, ‘Alright, I’m still listening.’

  ‘Some girls had reported him, or rather their parents did. They thought he was a bit too friendly, trying to get the girls into his van. His burger van.’

  It was a detail he had forgotten, something that had been told to him by a uniformed officer at Hunston when he made an unofficial inquiry after Jo told him the story. There had been no investigation and no caution for Harris – he had simply been advised that a complaint had been made and to avoid situations that might lead to further complaints. There were only two mysteries, Smith had concluded; one, how had Andretti’s lawyers ever got to hear of it, and two, how did they ever imagine it would be of any use to them?

  Jo said, ‘That’s not what I remembered first, though. It was the names – Paul Harrison? Paolo Harris? They seemed too similar to�
�� But you interviewed Harris at the time, didn’t you? So you’d have recognised him yesterday. He wouldn’t have changed that much in, what, twelve years?’

  ‘Thirteen.’

  To call it tenuous would be to give it more credibility than it could possibly deserve. A burger van and a bit of a surname? It was ridiculous. Still, he now had a confession to make, thanks to Detective Inspector Simon Terek.

  ‘I’m sure I’d have recognised him if I’d seen him. But I didn’t, and I never got to watch the video.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Obviously it’s nothing, though. I feel like a complete idiot now!’

  She looked as if she felt cold too, and he was about to say something when she turned towards the door, still apologising even as she said goodnight once more.

  Smith said, ‘Tomorrow morning, I will take that letter in, if it’s OK with you. It won’t actually be me going to work, I’ll just drop it off.’

  Of course, she said, she’d like to come, see the place where he worked before he left it forever. When she had closed the bedroom door, he wondered whether she had guessed his intention once he was back in the office. Probably. She was pretty smart.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was four minutes past nine in the morning when Chris Waters’ phone began to ring. The display on his dashboard told him that it was Smith, and he pressed Accept; the signal here in Rutland was better than he ever got in Norfolk and the traffic was light as he headed west.

  Smith said, ‘Sounds to me as if you’re driving. Have you pulled over? You don’t want that on file with a sergeant’s exam in the offing.’

  ‘Mum, it’s OK, I’ve got this on hands-free, through Bluetooth. What’s up?’

  ‘Through what?’

  ‘Bluetooth. Don’t pretend I haven’t explained it before. Or maybe you have genuinely forgotten.’

  ‘What I don’t understand is how it ever got the name Bluetooth. Can I get it fitted into my motor?’

  ‘The Peugeot? Yes, but it would involve rebuilding the thing from scratch. A good project for your retirement, DC. Are you in the office? You’re not on this weekend – or are you?’

  None of team Smith were on duty over the weekend. It was likely that at some point in this conversation Smith would ask where Waters was driving to, and then he would have to decide whether to give an honest answer – Smith could sometimes appear forgetful but it was sod’s law that he would remember where Janey Cole was in her final year of university. There was no earthly reason why, if he knew, Smith would then go and report the matter to Sam Cole, Janey’s large, heavy-handed and highly protective uncle, but even so, at least one of the principles of detective work he had learned from Smith himself should also apply to one’s personal life – assume nothing.

  Smith said, ‘No, I’m not. But I need to drop in at the office for a couple of things. The video of your interview with Harrison – where’s the best place to find it?’

  ‘On the video recorder.’

  ‘God give me strength…’

  ‘No, seriously. The new one has a massive hard drive and its own miniscreen. Switch it on if it’s off, and you can navigate to the recorded files. Just look at the dates to narrow it down. Double click and it will play. Why?’

  A pause then and Smith was definitely talking to someone, a woman.

  ‘Just curious, really.’

  ‘On your weekend off, you’re going in to look at witness interviews? I’d say get a life, DC, but fortunately that is going to happen very soon. What’s the other thing?’

  ‘What other thing?’

  ‘You said you had to go in for a couple of things.’

  A mild expletive and a laugh at the other end of the phone call, and Waters read Smith’s thoughts perfectly – they had come a very long way since that first morning when the new arrival had waited nervously with Charlie Hills at the reception desk, and the small, wiry detective sergeant had appeared and asked him whether he had lost his tricycle.

  Smith said, ‘I got a letter yesterday, anonymous, made up of bits from a newspaper.’

  ‘Is it threatening?’

  ‘I’d say more puzzling, and probably nothing to do with work but – you know, check everything. It could be from Superintendent Allen, of course.’

  The number of bars for the phone signal strength started to fall as Waters began descending a steep hill. He said, ‘Anything new on Zoe Johnson?’

  ‘Not that I’ve heard. I’ll let you know if there is when I get into the office.’

  ‘OK, thanks.’

  ‘One more thing, Chris.’

  ‘Yes?’

  The voice was breaking up by then but there was enough left for him to hear Smith saying, ‘…and watch that one-way system in the centre of Leicester. It’s easy to get lost in there…’

  Jo offered to stay in the car but he wouldn’t hear of it. She had the feeling he wanted her to see inside the place where he had worked for almost thirty years, wanted to share it with her in some way, and so she followed him into the building. There were no seats in the reception area and he said she couldn’t stand around in there, she might as well come up for ten minutes and wait in the office while he logged in the letter and tried to find the video recording. He was, it seemed, entirely unconvinced by the young detective’s assurances that it was merely a matter of pressing a couple of buttons.

  ‘The office’ was a large room with a dozen desks grouped into twos and threes, surrounded by all the usual paraphernalia of investigative work. Jo Evison’s past professional eye took it all in and concluded there had been relatively little recent investment here – it looked a little tired, outdated, and she remembered Smith saying that he knew everything would be turned upside down the moment he walked out of the door for the last time. Here and there she could see small decorative gestures to the season of goodwill to all men – a few cards on desks, a few strands of tinsel and a little plastic reindeer whose nose flashed red on and off in perpetuity.

  There was one person in the room, and Smith introduced her to him – ‘Jo, this is Mike Dunn. Mike, this is Jo.’

  Mike Dunn took her hand and smiled, but there was no concealing the surprise on his face or the quick glance at Smith – she had the sense she was a complete novelty, that DC Smith simply did not do things like this, ever.

  Smith said, ‘Mike, can you look after Jo for a minute or two? I need to nip down to the recording suite – something I should have checked yesterday,’ and then to Jo, ‘If he offers you tea or coffee, my advice is to refuse.’

  Then he handed her the two plastic wallets and was gone.

  They had been standing by what turned out to be Smith’s own desk. Mike pulled out a chair for her and made polite conversation about whether she knew Kings Lake well – which was a detective’s way of finding out where she was from, so she told him anyway. When she said she was ex-job, he relaxed visibly and made the usual comments about what it was like out here in the sticks compared to the Met, and that’s what they were talking about when another detective entered the office.

  This was a sharply dressed, younger man, round-faced and a little overweight under the pinstripe suit. Mike Dunn glanced at him and then away – and she thought, no love lost there. How do we know these things in an instant?

  The new arrival had short legs and a busy, officious walk as he came across to them. He spoke curtly to Mike and then asked her who she was, clearly assuming she was an officer or at least an employee of the force in Kings Lake Central. Mike Dunn explained, saving her the embarrassment. This was followed by a moment of awkward silence before the man asked Mike to speak to him at his own desk on the other side of the room. As they went away, Mike gave her an apologetic glance, and Jo Evison sensed trouble.

  Words were exchanged in voices low enough for her not hear most of it, but Smith’s name was mentioned more than once – the suit was firing questions and Mike was answering them. Then the officious walk was heading back in her direction, alone.

  ‘There see
ms to have been a mistake, madam. Would you follow me, please?’

  He turned, expecting her to comply – he even took a couple of steps before noticing she had not done so.

  ‘Follow you where, exactly? And I’m sorry but I didn’t catch your name.’

  Somehow he managed to make the two return steps into a march – this was a man who had that air of being permanently offended by the independent existence of others.

  ‘I am Detective Sergeant Terence Christopher. Please follow me down to reception. You’ve entered a restricted area. These offices are not open to members of the public.’

  Ah. One of those. Jo stood up, seeing the embarrassed look on Mike Dunn’s face over the pinstripe’s shoulder and smiling her lack of concern back at him. She said, ‘Fine, I can wait in reception. I’m sure it was not intentional on anyone’s part.’

  She followed him and he had almost reached the door when it opened and Smith appeared. He stared at Sergeant Christopher and then said to her, ‘Where are you off to?’

  Christopher said, ‘I’m escorting your guest down to reception. There has been a breach of-’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A breach of security. Members of the public are not allowed to wander around the building, as you must know, DC. I will have to-’

  Smith looked past him and said to her, ‘Were you wandering?’

  ‘No, I was sitting at the desk and talking to-’

  ‘Right. Not wandering, and not just a member of the public either. Can you see what this person is holding in her hand, Sergeant?’

  Christopher hadn’t noticed the two plastic wallets.

  ‘Yes. But no-one-’

  ‘Takes the trouble to find out the facts, which is all very well unless you happen to be a police officer. Miss Evison is a witness to me receiving an anonymous communication which might be pertinent to a current investigation. I’ve just been making arrangements to formally interview her about this.’