Grief Encounters (21 page)

Ennis said that Magdalena told him she was going to Leeds on business. A man had rung her but Ennis didn’t know who he was. Why hadn’t he asked? Why hadn’t he demanded to know who he was? I ran through the interview in my head. Twice we’d touched upon the phone call but it didn’t make sense. Magdalena told him she had to go to Leeds, on business, or to do some shopping, or to see a girlfriend, and she might bring a present back for him. That’s all, so how did Ennis know that this mysterious man had phoned her? That he existed? I cursed myself for a sloppy interview and reached for my mobile.

Towering pine-clad mountains; rickety bridges over terrifying gorges with nameless waterfalls; pancakes and maple syrup. Gwen Rhodes was in Canada, tucking into her breakfast as the train meandered through the picture-book scenery, but she had a deputy and he’d be trying her desk for size. He answered the phone second ring.

Prisons guard their charges jealously. Deputy governors with an eye on the top job more jealously than most. Eventually he agreed that Ennis could be supplied with a phone card and asked to ring me during association, which started at two. He would be offered the services of a solicitor or the probation officer, and told that he was perfectly within his rights to refuse to talk to me. I said I appreciated it was most irregular, and thanked him profusely for his cooperation.

‘One last thing,’ I said before ringing off. ‘Have you had a postcard from Miss Rhodes?’

‘No, not yet,’ he admitted.

Well ya-boo sucks, I thought as I broke the connection.

Ennis rang me at twenty past two, just as I was beginning to think the worst. ‘Thanks for ringing, Peter,’ I said. ‘Do you have a solicitor or probation officer with you?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘Did I ought to have?’

‘I doubt it. I won’t be asking you anything that could hurt you. First of all, why didn’t you report to the nick?’

‘Because I couldn’t hack it in the hostel, could I. Load of tosspots and stupid rules. Do this, don’t do that. You know where you are in Bentley.’

‘It was your choice. I want to know a bit more about this phone call that Magdalena received, that sent her dashing off to Leeds. Did you discuss it with her?’

‘No, not at all.’

‘So how do you know it was a man and about the money? It could’ve been her previous boyfriend for all you knew.’

‘Because I listened to it, didn’t I.’

‘You overheard the conversation?’

‘No, I listened. It was one of those phones that takes messages. A day or two after she’d gone I was messing with it, wondering if there was anybody I could ring, if her friends’ numbers were stored in it, when I made it repeat his message. He just said he wanted to see her, had something for her. I could hardly make it out, but that’s what he said. That’s all.’

I was silent, wondering if there was any relevance in this, until he asked if I was still there. ‘Yeah, I’m still here,’ I said. ‘What did you do with it?’

‘With what?’

‘The message. Did you delete it?’

‘No. Wouldn’t know how to, would I. I just left it.’

‘Was it a modern phone or one that takes a little cassette, do you know?’

‘No idea.’

‘Let me get this straight, Peter. You’re saying that you didn’t know this man had rung her until after she’d been missing for a day or two.’

‘That’s right.’

‘OK. Thanks for ringing me.’

‘Does this mean you believe me, Mr Priest? That I didn’t kill Magda?’

‘Let’s say we’re still looking. I don’t suppose you remember the Beverley number, do you?’

‘No, sorry.’

‘I’ll find it. Thanks again.’

I listened to it ringing, over and over again until the answerphone chimed in, for at least ten minutes. Telephone numbers are available on CD, these days, which is just as well because the Directory Enquiries system is a mess since it went public. Terrestrial numbers, that is: mobiles are something else. I’d nothing more important to do so I kept on dialling. Maybe the apartment hadn’t been re-let, I thought, or perhaps it had and the new tenant was out at work.

‘Hello,’ a voice said.

I clamped the phone to my ear. ‘Who’s that, please?’ I asked.

‘It’s the builder.’

‘The builder?’

‘Yeah. There’s nobody here ’cept us.’

‘Oh, right,’ I said. That explained the delay in picking up the phone. That explained why his voice was booming and echoey, as if he were speaking from inside a million-gallon water tank. The place was having a makeover. ‘I’m DI Priest, from Heckley CID, I wonder if you can help me. That phone you’re speaking into: is it the type with a built-in answerphone that has a cassette, can you tell?’

‘Have you rung about the phone?’ he asked.

‘That’s right.’

‘I thought you were coming to move it.’

‘Was I?’

‘Yeah.’

‘When?’

‘Today. We could do with it moving.’

‘Does it have…?’ I began, but he’d cut me off. What is it about builders? They show their arse cracks to the world like displaying baboons and think that gives them a licence to treat the rest of us like morons. I reached for the Almanac and tried to think of who I knew in the East Riding. I needed help there, and fast.

Nobody. The best way to get a favour done in this job is to call one in. I’d trained more detectives than most people have had sore heads, but as I ran my finger down the Humberside page I couldn’t recognise anyone who’d graduated in the Charlie Priest Academy of Sleuthing. My influence was fading; things had changed.

I rang a name that sounded vaguely familiar but he wasn’t in and the person who answered the phone had better things to do than help me. I looked at my watch: a quarter to three. I might just do it.

I guessed it to be about seventy, seventy-five miles to Beverley, and sixty of those would be on motorway. I scrawled a note saying where I’d gone, left it on my desk under the stapling machine, and hit the road.

The M62 suffers major gridlocks but I hit a lucky patch and settled in the fast lane, between the BMWs and white vans, until we were clear of the A1. Then it was pushing the ton all the way to North Cave. At five past four I was driving over Beverley racecourse with the Minster hovering in the distance, directly ahead, caught in the afternoon sun. Beautiful.

I suspected that Laundry Street would be in the old part of town, within the walls, and after driving round the one-way system and asking a woman pushing a bicycle, I found it and saw the tell-tale skip and builder’s van outside 11A. It was the narrowest street in Beverley, with long terraces of period houses crowding directly over the pavement. I didn’t intend staying long so I parked alongside the skip, blocking the road.

The front door was wide open and the air inside hung with plaster of Paris. Everything was white, like being inside a glacier, but strangely gloomy until my eyes adjusted. A wooden ladder was laid the length of the hallway and some steps leant against the wall. The floor was covered with a dustsheet that had once been white but now displayed evidence of a thousand colour schemes, every one a variation of magnolia.

‘Anyone here?’ I called, my voice hoarse with the dust in my throat, echoing as if in a cavern. No reply. I moved further into the gloom and called again.

A little rotund man appeared, carrying a sheet of plasterboard. He was wearing overalls in the same colour scheme as the dustsheet, and spectacles spattered with paint and plaster, and looked harassed because the walls were built before the invention of the plumb line. ‘Have you come about the phone?’ he demanded.

‘Yes.’

‘In there.’

I went through the doorway he’d indicated, into an empty room with a bare patch on one wall where a fireplace had stood until earlier in the week. No doubt, in fifty years or so, a different tenant would try to uncover it. The telephone sat in a corner, on the floorboards.

It was a BT Response 150, in cream plastic that had discoloured with age. A red light with
Power
written next to it was glowing, and a green one, called
Messages
, was blinking. Next to the handset cradle was a cover with a small tab indicating where to lift it. I fell to temptation and lifted the tab. There, underneath, was what I’d come for: a tiny cassette.

I was reading instructions under the cover when somebody outside started blowing their car horn. I had the road blocked. I unplugged the phone and its power supply, bundled the cables around it and carried it out of the room.

‘I’ve got the phone,’ I shouted. No reply, but the car horn sounded again.

‘I’m going. Where are you?’ No reply again, except for another, different car horn.

Ah well, I thought, I’ve got what I came for, and walked out into the street. I waved an apology to the first car in the queue and started my engine. As I looked in my mirror before pulling away I noticed that the second vehicle was a BT van. I’d just made it.

The journey back wasn’t so straight forward. I caught all the traffic and it was nearly seven when I parked in my spot outside the nick. Upstairs I plugged in the phone and its power supply and read the instructions under the cover.
Press Play/Pause,
it said,
and the unit will announce how many messages you have
.

There were ten messages, but nine of them were silent, presumably made by me earlier in the day. Number ten was a real call, but barely decipherable. The tape was worn out and the quality hopeless. After several plays I’d decided it said:
It’s me. I’ve something for you. When can you come
? The voice was male, but any accent or other characteristic was unintelligible. He sounded as if he had a duvet wrapped around his head and a small furry animal in his mouth. I felt certain it was Magdalena’s killer doing the talking, and was therefore a step forward, but how big a step was anybody’s guess. I put the phone in the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet and went home.

The tall stranger stepped out of the shower and pulled a towel off the rail. He dried his hair and worked his way down, rubbing his back with a sawing motion then attending to his middle regions and each leg. He brushed his teeth, making growling noises at his reflection in the mirror, then flexed his muscles in a parody of a bodybuilder working out, while trying to decide whether to eat Chinese, Indian or Italian. It had been a long day, and his shoulders ached. He rotated them one way and then the other and decided on fish and chips, in the restaurant, with a gallon of tea. Then home to a welcoming, if lonely, bed. He pulled on a pair of jeans, matched them with a blue check shirt and was looking in his sock drawer when the warbling of a mobile phone came whiffling up the stairs. He dashed down and pulled a phone from the pocket of his jacket, hung in the hallway, but the warbling continued after he pressed the button to accept the call. It was the wrong phone. He delved into the pocket again and retrieved a different one, one that he’d not used before. He looked at the caller’s number, pressed the button and put the phone to his ear. ‘Hello,’ he said.

There was a silence and he could hear the pulse near his ear booming and whooshing, until a tiny voice said: ‘Is that you, Torl?’

‘Ooh, it could be,’ he replied, ‘is that you, Teri?’

‘Yes, it is. You don’t mind me ringing you, do you?’

‘Of course not. I’ve got your number here in front of me. I was wondering whether to ring it but you beat me.’ He seated himself on the bottom step and brushed his hair back with his free hand.

‘Were you going to ring me?’ Teri asked.

‘I’m not sure; I hadn’t decided. I wanted to but wasn’t sure if I ought. I’m glad, though, that you rang. It’s been two days since I saw you. Two long days.’

‘I know,’ she replied, ‘and I’m going away at the weekend. I wanted to see you before then.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘The boring old south of France. I’ll tell you about it if I see you.’

‘When will that be?’

‘It’s up to you. I’m not doing anything now.’

‘Tonight it is then, but I need something to eat. Where can I pick you up?’

Teri gave him directions to a block of apartments that had once been a woollen mill, down by the canal. He found a pair of clean socks, buffed his shoes with them before giving each a squirt of aftershave and pulling them on, and collected his second-best jacket from the wardrobe. Pity I’m not in the Jag, he thought, but never mind.

She answered immediately he pressed her entryphone number and was there opening the door within seconds. Everything he’d remembered about her was true, but more so. If anything her impact was greater than before. She was wearing a short skirt and a bolero jacket, with a white blouse that emphasised her tan. He told her that she looked beautiful, but stumbled over the words.

‘Thank you,’ she said, looking into his face with a smile that sent his nervous system into meltdown, ‘and you look handsome.’

‘Oh, one does one’s best,’ he replied with a grin, wrestling his feelings under control.

He took her to an Italian restaurant that had a good reputation, a few miles out of town, and they had the chef’s speciality seafood pasta dish. Torl cleared his plate, explaining that he hadn’t eaten all day, while Teri barely touched hers. He resisted the temptation to ask her to pass it over to him.

‘So tell me about the south of France,’ he said as he topped up her wine.

‘Thank you. What’s to tell? It’s my husband’s idea. Some sort of reconciliation. We fly to Nice Sunday morning, then on to Cannes. I don’t want to go, but I suppose I have to.’

‘Most people would leap at the opportunity,’ he told her.

‘They don’t know my husband,’ she replied. ‘He’s a control freak. This is typical of him. He doesn’t ask, just assumes it’s all right. Sometimes he frightens me.’

‘He’s not violent towards you, is he?’

‘Not really, but it’s not far under the surface.’

‘Are you living together?’

‘No. He bought the apartment as an investment when they were first built, and I’ve moved into it. He’s living in the house.’ She could have added that he’d masterminded and financed the development of the whole mill, but didn’t.