Weirdo (28 page)

“We might as well sit in here,” said Sheila, turning the dial on an old gas boiler, which responded with a foreboding rumble. “It’s the warmest room in the house.”

Sean sat himself down at the pine kitchen table, watching Sheila put the kettle on and fetch down willow-patterned china from the Welsh dresser. The cat slunk its way into its basket, turned three times and sank down onto a patchwork blanket, from where it maintained surveillance on Sean through half-closed eyes.

“My husband’s out doing home visits,” Sheila brought a homemade fruitcake to the table, “he won’t be back for few hours yet.”

Sean followed her glance to the smiling face of the man in the dog collar in some of the photographs, then back to the ornate, interlaced cross she wore around her neck. They were obviously a couple whose faith sustained them.

Sean often wondered if he could have benefited from such conviction himself. But his vision of a just God had shattered when his dad had come back from Goose Green in a box. Even in the darkest hours of his hospitalisation, he had not groped to find Him since.

Sheila sat down opposite him. She picked up a teaspoon and lifted the lid of the pot.

“Stir up tea, stir up trouble.” Her accent thickened as she spoke and she shot him a grin that was the opposite of pious.

“I’ve read the report you gave to Francesca Ryman,” Sean
nodded. “And I have to say, it disturbs me that none of this got to come out at the original trial.”

Sheila snapped down the lid on the teapot.

“If I have one thing to thank God for today,” she said, “it’s that after all this time, someone’s finally investigating who isn’t part of the bloody Ernemouth police force.”

* * *

In the basement of The Ship Hotel, Damon Boone sat at a laptop, his fingers rattling across the keyboard as a series of windows opened on the screen.

“Won’t be much longer now,” he said, flicking his long, greasy fringe out of his eyes.

“All right, boy,” Rivett, sitting next to him, gave a smile that was more of a grimace, his eyes travelling around the landlady’s son’s room.

There was nothing but computers in here, in various shapes and sizes, humming away from the racks of shelves, their innards connected by spaghetti junctions of thick grey wires and banks of blinking lights. Some of them had scrolls of numbers rolling up and down their monitors, others showed sequences of graphic images, lines folding into themselves, taking the eyes on a kind of fairground ride of optical illusion. It made Rivett feel uncomfortable, this
Tomorrow’s World
vision of the future come true – and what it had amounted to.

Bloody boffins ran everything now. From Einstein with the forensics to Q sitting here next to him, talking “three-way-encrypted passwords” and other such voodoo.

“Room four was the easiest one for me to set up,” Damon said. “The pelmet on the top of the bay window hides four spycams that just about cover each angle. There’s another one
in the headboard and, of course, one in the light above the desk. Which is just as well,” he pointed towards the screen. “Your bloke don’t half move around a lot.”

Rivett took in the series of images now being displayed in the windows on the screen. Each showed Sean Ward at work on his laptop in his hotel room from various angles, overhead and sideways. In some, he sat at the desk, in others he was lying across the bed, or leaning against the headboard with the computer across his lap. The most interesting one to Rivett so far showed him reading the case notes of a social worker.

“This is the magic one,” Damon clicked onto the window that showed Sean sitting at the desk, so that it expanded to fill the screen. “Look, you can see him logging on.”

Rivett peered at the grainy image.

“It’s his fingers that are important,” Damon leant in a little too close for Rivett’s liking, tapping something else on his keyboard that made the image on the screen slow down.

“By watching this carefully a few times, I could see exactly what he inputs on the keyboard to access his files.”

The look Rivett exchanged with his companion was one that prompted the younger man to stop trying to show him how clever he had been, and instead, cut to the chase.

“Which brings me to this,” Damon rapidly clicked all the windows closed, opened up another file instead. A page of emails spread out across the screen before them.

“His inbox,” said Damon, leaning back in his seat and swivelling his chair to the side, a slight churning in his stomach. “He deletes them as he goes along, but I managed to retrieve them. It’s all yours.”

Rivett’s eyes scanned down the screen. The most recent email had come in not five minutes ago, from FRANCESCA
RYMAN entitled ORGAN GRINDER/MONKEY. It took him a beat to place the name as he clicked it open, and then rapidly dissemble the implications of Ward’s correspondence with the
Ernemouth Mercury
editor.

Following the money
, he read.
Got an expert looking into R&S’s possible business dealings. If there’s something there, he will find it. About to call press office to set up interview with S now.

Rivett whistled through his teeth. These two were sharper than he thought. Which just went to prove the wisdom of always having a contingency plan.

“I always said you’d go far,” he told Damon. “Mind if I borrow your phone, while you go make us a cup of tea? Take a nice, long time about it, won’t you, boy?”

“Course.” Damon virtually pushed the landline into Rivett’s lap as he got to his feet.

Closing the door behind him, he heard Rivett say: “Hello, Pat?”

* * *

Out in the hall, a grandfather clock chimed five times. The fruitcake had been decimated over the past couple of hours, the remains of the third round of tea a mere dribble running out into Sheila’s cup.

She put the pot down and rubbed her eyes, smudging pale blue shadow over one cheek as she did so. Tired now, from the effort of unloading all that had been bottled up for the past two decades.

“Shall I make another?” she asked.

Sean shook his head. “No, you’re all right,” he said, putting his hand down on the tape recorder. “I should be thinking about going, really, I’ve got another appointment at six. I’m
sure we’ve covered everything. Oh,” he stopped short of turning the machine off, “but there’s just one more thing I wanted to ask you.”

“Yes?” Resting her head in her right hand, Sheila gave a faint smile.

“How did Francesca find you?”

Sheila frowned. “Through her father, of course,” she said.

“Her father?” it was Sean’s turn to look puzzled.

“Philip,” said Sheila. “Philip Pearson. You know, he used to be Corrine’s form teacher.”

Sean’s eyes widened. “She never said.”

Sheila bit her lip. “Oh,” she said. “Then …”

“But now it makes sense,” Sean cut her off. “Philip Pearson went to the nationals and told them some painful truths about Ernemouth, got hounded out of his job for his trouble. You tried the same with the local press and found yourself being shut down and slung out too. How old was Francesca when all this was going on – about ten, twelve?”

“Something like that …” Sheila hesitated, a frown creasing her forehead.

Sean pressed the stop button on the Dictaphone and forced a smile.

“No need to look worried, Mrs Alcott,” he said. “I’m not …” he stopped himself short of saying “Len Rivett” and instead, changed tack. “I’m just trying to figure her out. Francesca’s been very helpful to me, and I wondered if she had some ulterior motive. This job I have, you see, it gives me a suspicious mind. So, that’s the reason she became a journalist …”

“She was doing very well at it,” said Sheila, “until her mother got ill.”

Sean spooled back to the morning’s conversation with Nora
Linguard.
“It’s terribly sad; she died quite recently, Mrs Pearson. She was only in her fifties. Cancer, you know …”

“She came back to take care of her,” said Sheila, “only I think it was Philip who needed her help the most. That’s why she gave up her job in London and her marriage …”

Sheila’s fingers flew up to her lips. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. It’s too personal.” Then a fierce expression came over her. “But that’s the thing about Francesca,” she said. “I wish I could ever have been as strong as she is. I thought it was fate when that Sid Hayles died and she ended up getting his job.”

Her face softened again. “That’s why she didn’t tell you,” Sheila patted Sean’s hand. “She wouldn’t have wanted you to think she was doing this for any other reason but to get to the truth. None of us ever expected that this would ever get looked into again, you see. We thought it would die with us.”

“But,” Sean stared into Sheila’s eyes, “what is the truth, Mrs Alcott? You and Francesca have done a good job of convincing me that Corrine Woodrow is not the murderer and it seems we have evidence to back that up. But if she isn’t, then who is?”

The fear came into Sheila’s eyes again. She averted her gaze to the window where the grey gloom of the afternoon was darkening into night.

“That,” she said, “is the one thing I can’t tell you.”

* * *

Rivett was still talking when Damon came back with the teas. He stood outside his room, straining for the sound of the back door closing, his mother’s footfall on the stair. The churning in his stomach had worsened as the long minutes of the afternoon ticked on and he wrestled with what he had done.
The decades’ long string of favours that Rivett had spun out of him for one stupid teenage transgression.

Up until yesterday, Damon had thought that the worst thing that could happen would be for Rivett to show his mother the videotape. But now, he felt with a sick certainty, he had gone and got himself embroiled in something much worse.

“That’s right, Andy,” he heard Rivett say through the door. “Same as last time, that mad old fen famer Alcott … No, I don’t believe she has or ever will … Well, you know, all that rusty old machinery lying around out there. Accidents will happen …”

Only when he heard the receiver being slammed down with characteristic grace did he dare nudge the door open.

Rivett swivelled in his chair, smiling up at Damon. “Would you mind putting all this on one of them things for me?” he said. “Memory sticks, or whatever you call them.”

“Sure,” said Damon, putting the teas down on the desk in front of Rivett, fighting down the bile that was rising up his throat as he walked over to the filing cabinet.

Memory sticks
, he thought bitterly.
That’s all my life has been. One big dirt file in that bastard’s memory, where nothing can be hacked and nothing can be deleted.

The last time Damon had tried to break out of his control, Rivett had shown him what he called a souvenir, from that brief, happy evening he had spent in the Albert Hotel. A tyre iron, with something stuck to it. Black hair and matted blood. “Her crowning glory,” he had said. “Remember? Pity she had to step out of line …”

So Damon did as he was told, copying the private detective’s files across to a piece of plastic and metal, watching it disappear into the depths of Rivett’s sheepskin coat.

“Ta very much, Damon,” the older man got to his feet. “I’ll be round the same time tomorrow.” He made his way to the door and then stopped on the threshold, leaning against the frame. His dark eyes glittered as they ran up and down Damon’s waxy countenance. “You better get some rest, boy, you’re looking a bit green around the gills. Why don’t you have a nice, afternoon kip? You’re gonna need all your wits about you later, in’t you?” He winked. “
Spying
tonight …”

Damon forced the corners of his mouth up into a smile, and prayed that his guts would hold, at least until Rivett had seen himself out. When he finally heard the back door slam, he dived back into the filing cabinet, to the bottom drawer this time.

The one where he kept the vodka.

“Here he come,” DS Andrew Kidd passed the binoculars across to Rivett. “Home to his mum, like a good little cub.”

Rivett peered through the back window of the Transit van that Kidd and his partner, DS Jason Blackburn, were using to keep Wolf under obs. Posing as painters and decorators, with splattered overalls and ladders on the roof rack, an ashtray brimming with the dog-ends of roll-ups, tabloids open at page 3 and discarded food wrappers adding to their air of authenticity.

“The She-Wolf,” added Blackburn, as the spluttering of their target’s Norton engine brought a twitch to the net curtains in an upstairs window, a face appearing behind the glass. “Look more like Vera Duckworth, don’t she?”

“But don’t be deceived,” said Kidd. “We reckon this is where he keep the stash.”

Wolf cut his engine, kicked down the bike-stand and dismounted his iron steed. While he undid the strap of his open-face helmet, he surveyed the low-rise estate in front of him, his eyes travelling from left to right, pausing to acknowledge the blue-rinsed figure of his mother with a raised hand, and then looked around the car park.

The three men ducked as he glanced in their direction, then resumed their vigil as the biker leant down to take something out of the pannier on the side of his hog. A package, wrapped in a plastic shopping bag.

“In a whole week of watching him,” said Kidd, “that’s been the same every day. He don’t make no other regular stops and he don’t carry that package into anywhere else. That’s either drugs or money in there.”

Wolf took his helmet off and ran a hand through his unkempt mane of grey hair. He slowly turned his head, taking in another hundred and eighty degrees of his terrain before making his entrance into the stairwell at the side of the block.

“I see where he gets his looks from,” said Rivett, as the lights came on along the first runway and Wolf reappeared, making his way to where his mother now stood on her doorstep, narrowed eyes darting furtively around in a mirror image of her offspring’s sly demeanour. As he reached the door, she reached up to put a hand on his shoulder, plant a kiss on his whiskery cheek and then usher him inside.

“He go up there to kip,” said Kidd. “Don’t usually leave until late morning. And he don’t come out carrying nothing visible. We reckon she make up all the wraps for him, so he can hide ’em in his leathers.”