Demon on a Distant Shore (15 page)

Her voice came faintly as I reentered The Hallows. “Don’t go anywhere? Ha bloody ha.”

Cooper’s office was not far, in the biggest building in the alley between a small upscale boutique selling classy-looking clothes and a real-estate office. White plaster crumbled off the wall in places to reveal old brick beneath and dust adhered to the insides of the windows. Six small, dull brass plates beside the door bore the occupants’ names.

Peter Cooper, Private Investigator.

I kept watch while Royal used his lock picks on the door and it open with a creak. We eased inside a brick-floored hall and closed the door behind us. Royal relocked it, lest the local police checked doors on Sundays.

Two offices occupied the ground floor and a sign to Peter Cooper, Private Investigator, pointed us up a narrow, uncarpeted staircase. Like the outside, the walls inside the building needed work. Marked with grubby smudges, dowdy blue wallpaper peeled away in thin strips. The paint on the staircase’s handrail had worn away to the wood beneath.

We reached the first floor and were on a narrow landing. The board floors creaked and the place smelled musty. Cooper’s office was first on the right. The privacy window in the door didn’t let us see inside. Royal picked the lock.

The paneled walls were painted white, perhaps to give the illusion of space to the small, cramped office. Two windows overlooking the street let in inadequate light. Disturbed by our entry, dust floated on air. The place had been ransacked.

We couldn’t move in a straight line and not have to step over something. Drawers spilling papers and cardboard dividers jutted open in file cabinets. The drawers of the solitary desk had been pulled out and thrown down, the contents dumped on the floor. Telephone, desk blotter, pens and pencils, papers and folders lay all over the place, as if a hand swept them off the desk. Two upright chairs and an office chair were on their backs. Pictures and certificates had been torn from the walls. A small, worn rug crumpled in the middle of the office, and another in the corner of the room below a window. A dingy white microwave lay on the floor, the door torn off from the impact. A small fridge had been moved away from the wall. Packets of sugar, sweetener, instant coffee and creamer scattered the floor like confetti.

Someone had done a thorough job of searching Peter Cooper’s office. They even moved the rugs.

“Well,” Royal commented.

“Well indeed.” I gnawed at my lower lip for a moment. “I wonder what Peter Cooper has that someone wants this badly.”

“Trying to look through this would probably be a waste of time.”

I nodded my agreement. Whatever they were after, either they found it or it was never here. We would likely never know.

Sent to find recently discovered relative. Relative missing. Told to find Peter Cooper. Cooper’s office trashed.
The mystery deepens
, I thought melodramatically.

We left Cooper’s office and walked back to the town square, footsteps echoing in the silent alley. Not another person was about now, though music and laughter from a nearby pub drifted on the air. Furiously tapping one foot on the pavement, Carrie waited outside the tiny shop.

She started in on me. “
You
have no manners! You bring me here and
leave
me! If I - ”

“
You
are an uninvited guest,” I responded as we walked past her. “
You
should know better than to hang back from the person to whom you attach yourself.”

“I know, but I saw this.”

Looking over my left shoulder, I slowed to see her gesture at the boutique’s plate-glass window. She dropped her hands, then clasped them to her chest as her bosom heaved.

I joined her. We stood shoulder to shoulder looking in. “Saw what?”

She stabbed a finger at the glass. “The dress, you idiot! I don’t half like it. It’s me.”

I cocked my head on one side, considering. The soft, flowing bronze A-line would flatter her curves rather than make you feel they would knock you flat if you got too close, like her negligee. What a pity shades are stuck with the clothes in which they die.

“It is you,” I agreed.

“And you? Which one do you fancy?”

I eyed a short-sleeved gray midi with a subtle sheen. I could wear it in Clarion on a hot summer day. “I’m a jeans and T-shirt gal.”

“The gray, I can see you in it. You have the figure and those long legs. But you’d knock them dead in the mini.” She indicated a pale-blue wisp of material draping a bald-headed mannequin.

I chortled. “It’s a dress? I thought it was a scarf!”

Standing on the sidewalk, looking at me, Royal waited farther on. “Tiff? Are you coming?”

“I liked to dress up when I wasn’t so . . . when I was just a
teensy
bit sleeker. You should have seen me when Barry and I went to Stockholm, I knocked them dead, those Swedish men. Have you been to Sweden?
That
was an eye-opener. I thought we were broadminded here in the UK, but we’re not
that
blatant! Their Red Light district - ”

“Come on. Now,” I told her, and scurried to catch up with Royal.

The small industrial park outside Devizes seemed deserted, with everything locked up for the weekend. Pegasus Van Lines was a blocky warehouse painted green inside a yard enclosed by a ten-foot chain-link fence. It looked like a big operation which provided traditional haulage as well as self-move rentals. Huge dirty-white shipping containers almost filled the yard. The double gates were padlocked. As well as rolling doors atop three loading bays, a sign identified a small entrance as the place to make inquiries. We drove by slowly and took a right down a side street. Royal parked at the curb.

He nodded at the main street. “Three cameras focus on the yard, two on the loading bays, but none on the office entrance.”

I didn’t spot any, but I trust Royal’s sight better than mine.

He opened the car door. “I’m going to take a quick look. Back in a second.”

A car parked on a side road in an otherwise deserted industrial park was conspicuous, so I took the driver’s seat lest someone came along. I reckoned I could circle around Pegasus on the wrong side of the road without hitting anything. A wind came out of nowhere. Dark clouds scudded from the north. A large sheet of shiny red paper slapped the windshield, making me start, then blew away.

Royal got in the passenger seat. “No surveillance inside. I got the door open.”

“You broke into yet another building? You naughty man. What am I going to do with you?” I gasped in mock alarm.

“I like a man of many talents,” Carrie remarked suggestively.

He twitched his eyebrows. “I do not know. What
are
you going to do with me?”

“Guess you’ll have to wait and see,” I crooned.

He leaned until his breath wafted my hair. “The best thing about sedans, even British models, is they have a back seat.”

I flapped a hand at him. “Oh, tush! What a shame we’re on the clock.”

I sidled from the car as he pretended to lunge at me. He got out with an exaggerated sigh.

“I think you should point out the passenger seat is already taken,” Carrie said. “And while you’re at it, remember I have to watch you two salivating over each other.”

“We didn’t invite you.”

“I’m well aware of that, but a little common courtesy wouldn’t go amiss.”

I’d reminded Royal we had a passenger. His tone was tight. “Is she going to be with us wherever we go?”

“I hope not.” I glowered at Carrie. “We warrant
some
privacy.”

“I’m not a voyeur,” Carrie said indignantly.

“And she - ”

“Mind you, Barry had some video-cassette tapes  . . . well . . . I don’t think I need to describe them. But he expected - ”

“Can you not ignore her?”

I tilted my head in his direction. “Imagine you’re in the bar at The Hart and Garter. A local comes in and talks to you. You totally ignore him.”

“That would be rude. As rude as cutting in on someone’s conversation,” Carrie said, followed by a sniff.

Royal stuck to his guns. “Would not happen, because he would be a real person.”

“The nerve!” from Carrie.

They are real people,
I wanted to say, but bit my lip
.
He stood with one hand on his hip, the other pinching the bridge of his nose. My interaction with Carrie was getting to him and I didn’t blame him.

He threw his hands up in a gesture of defeat and marched across the road.

I don’t know how he got us over the chain-link fence. The brief spurt of speed was a blur to me, until we stopped at the entrance. Royal pushed the door open and stood aside to let me enter first. What a gentleman.

“Whew!” Carrie exclaimed. “That’s what I call a ride!”

Drat. I thought we’d lost her.

We three stepped inside a small room with blue industrial-grade carpet, a brown couch and low teak coffee table. A counter and sliding glass window in the back wall with a door ajar next to it looked into an office just big enough for a paper-strewn desk and four small gunmetal-gray filing cabinets. We went in, and looked through another door to a slightly larger office. This one had two facing desks and more file cabinets. Royal jerked his head and went in there. I nodded as I flicked on a small desk-lamp.

“What a mess! Don’t they have a cleaning service?”

Apart from an un-vacuumed carpet and finger marks on the windows, the place looked fine to me. Carrie would not like the look of Peter Cooper’s office.

“Why are we here?”

I didn’t see any harm in telling her. She couldn’t share the information with another person. “We’re detectives. We came to Wiltshire to track down Paul and Sylvia Norton. But the - ”

“Nice couple, Paul and Sylva. I know them from the sidelines, if you see what I mean. They adore each other. He calls her
Mo Anan Cara
. It’s Gaelic, it means
my soul mate
. Isn’t that sweet? And you’re detectives? With the police? But you’re from America so you can’t be British police. Why are American police interested in the Nortons?”

“Private detectives.”

She clasped her hands at chest level and scrunched her shoulders together. “How exciting! Why are you after the Nortons? Did they break the law? How could they break an American law?”

“Their uncle hired us to bring them a message, but they left Little Barrow two weeks ago and nobody seems to know where they went,” I continued. “The Nortons used Pegasus Van Lines to self-move.”

“Come to think of it, they did break the law when they did a moonlight flit. That was a surprise.”

“They
what?
”

She made spider-leg motions with her fingers. “Sneaked off in the middle of the night.”

“Carrie says the Nortons snuck off in the middle of the night,” I called out to Royal.

He joined us. “Really?”

“Any idea why they’d do that?” I asked Carrie.

“Could be because they were skint. They owed money everywhere. They worked for Winters Industries till it closed. The morning shift arrived and found the gates padlocked and a sign said the place had gone out of business. No warnings, no nothing. Four hundred people lost their jobs. Paul and Sylvia didn’t have a penny between them. Wilf Carmichael is still furious, he’s out four month’s rent.”