The Overlooker (6 page)

‘I don't like to think about it,' he said darkly. ‘I wonder what would happen if one of them had an accident? I somehow don't think our Mr Harrison would be calling 999 and getting the emergency services involved. Imagine it. Police. Medics. Factory inspectors. All wanting to know what happened and how. He wouldn't want to take the lid off that particular can of worms.'

‘But he'd have to, wouldn't he? What else could he do?'

Nick got up and began to pace restlessly. ‘I know it sounds a bit melodramatic, but . . . dispose of the evidence?'

‘How?'

‘How would I know? Drop the body in the canal? Bury it out on the moors?'

‘And if she wasn't dead?'

There was a long silence.

Suzie shuddered. ‘We're letting our imaginations run away with us. There's probably a quite ordinary explanation. But I still think we should report it and let the police decide.'

Millie opened the front door behind them. ‘Tea's up. Thelma let me do fancy decorations with the leftover pastry for the meat-and-potato pie.'

‘I can't wait,' said Nick, jumping to his feet.

His mobile rang.

‘Go ahead,' he told Millie and Suzie. ‘I'll join you in a minute. I remember Thelma's meat-and-potato pies.'

He glanced down at the phone. Number withheld. That always rang a little alarm bell.

‘Hello?'

‘Is that Mr Nicholas Fewings, B.Arch., RIBA, AABC?'

It was strangely put question. The voice was disquieting. Harsh. Demanding.

Still . . . He shrugged. A potential client?

‘Speaking.'

‘Well, Mr Nicholas Fewings. I would strongly advise you not to tell anyone else about what you saw today. It would be particularly foolish to report it to the police. Accidents can happen. To any of your family.'

The call ceased abruptly.

Nick had scarcely had time to take in the startling message, let alone to ask questions. He was left staring stupidly down at the phone in his hand. The screen was normal. There was no trace of the life-threatening message.

To any of your family.

His heart was thudding as he made his way back indoors. He saw Millie facing him across the table, the long swing of Suzie's brown hair from behind. Thelma's comfortably welcoming face. He hardly remembered to say thank you as she passed him a generously loaded plate.

The phone was back in his inside jacket pocket. He was aware of its pressure scarily over his heart.

Nick hardly noticed what he ate. He was aware that he was not joining in the account of their day as enthusiastically as he should. He was grateful to Suzie, who kept up the discussion with Thelma about his mill-working ancestors, as though these older generations of Fewings and Bootles were her family, not his. Once or twice he caught her looking across at him with curiosity. Nick cursed himself that he was not making a better show of hiding his anxiety.

Mercifully, by the time they had cleared away the meal, it was just past the start of one of Thelma's favourite television programmes. The conversation came to an abrupt halt. They settled down to watch.

It was impossible for Nick to concentrate. If he left the room, would Suzie follow? He badly needed to talk to her. But it would look strange if they both absented themselves. He sat through a documentary on Buckingham Palace, hardly taking in what he was seeing.

‘Look at this.' Suzie's voice called him out of his troubled thoughts.

Belatedly, he realized that the programme had finished. He looked across at the book in her hand, without real interest.

‘I found it on that bookshelf.
A Childhood in Belldale.
'

Thelma looked round from the television screen. ‘That old thing! I seem to remember Dad picking it up in a second-hand bookshop when we were off in the dales one day. We've got family buried at Briershaw Chapel out that way.'

‘It's got some wonderful pictures,' Suzie said. ‘Prints of watercolours. They give you a good idea of what it must have been like growing up in these dales nearly two hundred years ago. Look. There's a little girl jumping across the stepping stones over the beck. And that one of the village school. But this is the one that really intrigues me.'

She found the page and turned the book round to show Nick.

A lean, bespectacled figure with a long beard sat leaning over a workbench in front of a window. He was holding a glass flask of yellow liquid. Strewn around the bench were bundles of herbs. More hung from the beams. The shelves behind him were lined with books and with stoppered bottles of many colours.

‘Do you see what it says underneath?' There was excitement in Suzie's voice. ‘
The Herbalist.
'

Nick stared at it stupidly. He could tell that she was expecting him to respond with surprise and delight. But his anxious mind could make no sense of the picture in front of him.

‘The herbalist?' Suzie persisted. ‘James Bootle? Handloom weaver and medical botanist?'

The little piece of family history fell into place. Suzie's work on the censuses of 1851 and 1861. The self-employed weaver put out of work by the Industrial Revolution and reinventing himself as a herbalist.

Against the background of the sinister goings-on in Hugh Street and the threatening phone call, it seemed far away and unimportant now.

But he made an effort. ‘That's great. I couldn't really picture him before.'

Millie leaned over the sofa to see. ‘Looks just like Geoffrey Banks to me. Take away the beard.'

She was right. The bony figure, the head slightly too large for the body, the spectacles slipping forward on his nose, the pale, slightly bulging eyes in the hollow face.

Suzie looked up in surprise. ‘I never thought of that. And in a way, I suppose it's the same sort of thing, give or take a century or two. I don't know exactly what an industrial chemist does, but I suppose it has to do with brewing concoctions of some sort. Just on a bigger scale. The only difference is that James Bootle took up herbalism when his work as a weaver was taken away from him. Poor Geoffrey was a chemist, but there's no work for him now.'

‘And not likely to be, I'm afraid,' Thelma said. ‘He's taken it hard.'

At last they were alone in the small back bedroom. Nick closed the door.

‘Right.' Suzie turned to face him. ‘Are you going to tell me what this is all about? It was that phone call, wasn't it? You came back indoors looking like death.'

It was on the tip of Nick's tongue to deny it. But he took one look at the determination in her hazel eyes and gave in.

‘You're right.' He told her the threatening message. The order not to contact the police about what they had seen. The warning that accidents could happen to his family.

Suzie sat down on the bed, as though her legs no longer felt strong enough to support her.

‘It was that man, wasn't it? The one in Hugh Street. The woman we met was clearly terrified of him. And you saw enough to make it clear that something illegal was going on.'

‘Enough to resort to death threats?'

‘We were only guessing about the sweatshop. Maybe it's something worse. I don't know. And even if it is, if he's that sort of controlling bully, exposing an illegal workshop and getting it closed down would make him really angry. He'd certainly be fined heavily. He might even end up in prison. He's not going to take that lightly.'

‘Of course, it could be a bluff. Just to scare us off.'

‘And will it?' She raised her eyes to his. ‘Nick, we have to decide. Either we report this to the police, both what we saw in Hugh Street and this phone call, or we let cowardice get the upper hand and say nothing.'

Fear crawled through Nick. He had known all along that telling the police was a clear duty. That Suzie's sense of justice would demand it. It was another thing to steel his courage to defy that threat. It had not just been levelled at him. It was the danger to his family. To Suzie. Millie.

He heard again that harsh voice in his ear.
Accidents can happen.

Suzie got up and walked to the window. It was dark outside. Their room faced up the hill, away from the town. Only a few lights glowed in houses higher up.

Her fingers fiddled with the edge of the curtain. ‘Nick. Don't you see? There's something not quite right. This man rang your mobile. He knew your phone number, your name, your architect's qualifications. How could he find all that out? He only saw us for a couple of minutes.
Who is he?
'

He stared at her, speechless. It was not just the shock of what she had said. It was the realization that not once this evening had it occurred to him. The threat had been so immediate, so convincing. He had not dared to ask those questions.

His mouth felt dry. His voice was like the rustle of paper. ‘I could kick myself. Why didn't I think of that?'

Suzie turned back to face him. Her normally rosy face seemed paler than usual. ‘We didn't have the car with us in Hugh Street. He couldn't have traced us through the number plate, even if he had access to that information. So how did he learn about you? About us?'

Nick concentrated on the memory of that unexpected voice. Just half a dozen sentences. There had been something chilling in its harshness in that first question about Nick's identity, even before he issued his warning.

‘I think . . . it may have been someone else. It was a very short call, but I'm not sure it was the same voice as our Mr Harrison. The one who shut the door in my face.'

‘So there's a gang of them. This is getting seriously scary. Ring the police now.'

Nick hesitated. ‘It's half past ten. There'll only be the night staff at the police station. We need to get there first thing in the morning, to talk to someone with sufficient clout.'

Her eyes were darker now, troubled. ‘I don't like this. You don't think he can really know our movements? Where we are now? Whether we do go to the police? I might have thought he was just saying that. Talking big to frighten us. But if he knows so much already, what else does he know about us?'

They slept that night with Nick's arm protectively across Suzie.

N
ick told Thelma only that they would be going into town in the morning.

‘We'll be up at the hospital to visit Uncle Martin at half past two.'

‘I've rung the ward. They say he had a good night. He's looking forward to seeing you.'

Nick breathed a sigh of relief. In spite of the disturbing events of yesterday evening, he had still found time to worry about his great-uncle. Ninety-three. A major stroke. There was still the possibility – to put it no stronger than that – that another cerebral haemorrhage would put an end to that long life before Nick could get to his bedside.

‘I don't like hospitals,' Millie said. ‘They smell funny. And there are all those people, like, at death's door. It just makes me want to turn and run out again.'

‘There's nothing to be afraid of,' Suzie told her. ‘At least, not if you use their disinfectant washes. But that's more about you not bringing bugs into the hospital as picking them up there. And they put curtains round anyone who's poorly.'

‘Dad is so looking forward to seeing you,' Thelma said. ‘He'll be that disappointed if you don't show up.'

Millie said nothing more. But Nick had seen the obstinate set of her mouth.

I hope she isn't going to play up about it, he thought. I don't want to leave her behind. After that phone call, I want to keep all my family under my eye. Besides, there's Uncle Martin. It sounds as though this is really important to him as well.

‘Tom's coming over as well at the end of the week. We'll have the whole family then,' Suzie said. ‘I rang him to put him in the picture about Uncle Martin. He says his last lecture finishes at twelve on Fridays. He wasn't sure which train he'll be getting, but the station's near the hospital, so we've arranged that he'll meet us there.'

‘Little Tom!' Thelma exclaimed. ‘I remember him from when I came down for your grandfather's funeral. My Uncle David, as was. It seemed a long way to travel down south in those days. Tom must have been about five. But he had that lovely wavy black hair and blue eyes, just like his dad.' She smiled across at Nick. ‘I don't remember Millie, though. She would have been a baby.'

‘Yes. We didn't think it would be a good idea to bring her to the funeral. A neighbour looked after her.'

‘I get to miss out on all the exciting things,' said Millie. ‘Just because I'm the youngest.'

‘A funeral's not exactly what I'd call exciting,' Thelma reproved her. ‘Especially for someone who's just said she's scared of hospitals.'

‘It's not the same,' Millie muttered.

She hunched over her toast. This morning she looked more like a moody schoolgirl than the glamorous platinum-blonde young woman Nick was becoming used to. Teenagers. They lived on a roller-coaster of emotions, still discovering hourly who they were, or wanted to be. He smiled across at her, but got no response.

Nick had his leather jacket in his hand. He was staring out of the back bedroom window, without really noticing what he saw.

‘Nick!' There was a little edge to Suzie's voice, as though this was not the first time she had said it. ‘We said we'd go to the police station first thing.'

The present came rushing back to him. He had almost been afraid to leave his phone switched on, in case there was another unsettling call.

In the clear light of a sunny autumn morning, he began to have doubts. He tried to imagine himself recounting the bizarre events of yesterday to a sceptical police officer. Did they have a stream of nutters coming through the doors with stories as improbable as this? He wondered now how seriously he should have taken that tearful woman, the one occupied house in the boarded-up street, the enigmatic Mr Harrison.