Cath Staincliffe - Looking for Trouble

I arrived at the Dobson’s at the same time as the young policewoman. No-one I recognised. Jackie showed us the side door, which had been forced open, the wood shattered, the frame split. The door had been locked and bolted but the intruders had simply battered their way in.

‘Didn’t you hear anything?’ I asked.

‘We were all out. Once in a blue moon. The twins had a party, Grant and I went to the pictures, the other two were in town. We got back just after eleven and went straight to bed. We didn’t even check the door – stupid, I know, but it’d been locked when we left and everything was the same as usual. I noticed the smell of paint, though.’ Jackie led us along the hall to the door leading down to the cellar. ‘I thought you’d had a sudden burst of DIY again,’ she added. ‘Sal, it’s a bit of a mess.’

Mess. It was an abomination. Paint had been poured and daubed over everything; my desk, telephone, the carpet, filing cabinets. Pictures from the wall, my dead geranium in its pot, had been smashed and mixed in. The two old dining chairs had been broken and scattered around.

I drew breath in sharply and clutched Jackie’s arm, memories again. Knife glinting, spittle on his lips, wetting my pants with fear. ‘Oh, God.’

‘Bit of a mess,’ ventured the W.P.C. ‘Can you tell if anything’s missing?’ Her mundane practicality brought me back to the present.

‘I don’t think so, I didn’t have much here. Nothing valuable.’

‘Looks like kids,’ she said. ‘We’ve had a lot of this recently.’

‘Come on upstairs,’ said Jackie.

While Jackie provided cups of tea, the young policewoman listened to me speculating about whether it was a random break-in or whether I was the target of something more sinister. I explained that the woman I’d been working for had been murdered. Could it have been to keep her quiet? Maybe they thought she’d told me something I shouldn’t know. I could tell I sounded paranoid. She didn’t even bother to make notes. She asked if I was still working on the case. I denied it. After all, so my silent rationalisations went, no-one was paying me, I wasn’t trying to solve Janice Brookes’ murder or even JB’s overdose. I was simply trying to deliver a letter and find out a bit more about a woman who’d hired me under false pretences. Besides, I didn’t want Detective Inspector Miller hearing that I was still nosing around. I shut up when the tea arrived.

She repeated her assertion that it looked like the work of kids, that there’d been a lot of mindless destruction of property over the last few months and advised Jackie to think about fitting an alarm and an outside sensor light. Jackie saw her out and returned to the kitchen.

‘God, Jackie, I’m sorry. The mess and…’

‘Don’t worry about that.’

‘But it’s your home.’

‘My cellar.’ She laughed. ‘Sal, our school gets this sort of treatment every month. She’s right. There’s a lot of it about. I don’t let it get to me anymore. I’d go loopy. At least they didn’t touch the rest of the place and nothing seems to have been stolen. And they didn’t leave a calling card.’

‘What?’

‘They often have a shit for good measure.’

‘Oh, no.’

‘What was all that about it being a message for you? What’s going on? Can you talk about it?’ Bless her cotton socks. It was just what I needed. I swore her to secrecy.

‘It’s a bit confusing. I started off with a woman called Mrs Hobbs. She wanted me to find her son, Martin. I find him and he wants nothing to do with her. Two weeks later this woman is murdered and it turns out she’s not Mrs Hobbs at all. Not Mrs anything. She’s Janice Brookes and I haven’t got a clue why she wanted me to find Martin. The man who gives Martin a lift home denies ever having seen him and a friend of Martin’s who never touches drugs is found dead from a heroin overdose. Meanwhile, the real Mrs Hobbs does exist, she has got a son called Martin and he has left home. But the family are putting it about that he’s in hospital, a schizophrenic.’

‘What?’

‘Plenty of deception, eh?’

‘So the dead Mrs Hobbs is the impostor?’

‘Yes, really Miss Brookes. She did a hell of a job acting the distressed mother. I fell for it. Right from the word go.’

I told Jackie the lot, starting with that first visit from the nervous ‘Mrs Hobbs’, right up to calling on Fraser Mackinlay. Then I talked myself out of breath about whether the attack was just a random crime or a warning to me.

‘It’s a bit oblique, as far as warnings go,’ said Jackie.

‘Yeah. You think they’d have made it plain. Slogans on the wall or a wreath in the mail.’

‘What?’

‘They send people wreaths or hearses,’ I said. ‘I read it in a book.’ Suddenly the idea struck me as funny and I had a fit of the giggles. ‘I suppose headstones are too expensive,’ I spluttered, ‘and coffins would be a bugger to wrap.’

When I’d calmed down, Jackie asked me what I was going to do.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Clean up. I can’t afford to replace anything. I never renewed the insurance.’

‘Oh, Sal.’ She shook her head at me, got up and began to get potatoes from the veg rack.

‘Don’t say it. It hardly seemed worth it and I never had the money to spare. I only took it out for the first year ‘cos I thought the Enterprise Allowance people might check.’

‘Well, if there’s anything in the other cellar you can use, feel free. But what are you going to do about these loose ends, as you put it?’

‘I don’t know. Sleep on it. Work out whether I’m being paranoid or stupid.’

‘I think that policewoman was right, you know.’ She began to scrape the potatoes. ‘It did look like kids messing about.’

‘Coincidences do happen,’ I sighed. ‘I’m going to have another look.’

As I stood in the doorway and surveyed the mayhem, I began to wonder whether it was really worth replacing anything. My work paid the bills if I was lucky and frugal. There were aspects of it I relished: No two days the same; out and about; no boss peering over my shoulder; following people; checking things out; adding them up; the challenge of unravelling each trail. I loved the look on people’s faces when they asked what I did. The whole seedy romance of being a private eye.

And then there was the rest. The long wait in between jobs, red herrings and false starts, the isolation, the potential for nasty situations. I was starting to get maudlin.

How the hell had I come to this? After the stabbing, I’d sworn to myself I’d only take safe work. Checking on erring spouses, watching light-fingered employees, tracing missing persons. No murders, no violent crime, no security stuff.

Martin Hobbs had started out as a missing person. It’d all seemed so straightforward. Cast about a bit, see if anything bites. If not, no loss. Since then, JB had gone looking and he was dead. Janice Brookes had gone looking and she was dead too. I’d gone looking and some prat had sloshed lilac emulsion all over my office.

The bathos made me smile. Sod it. Time enough for big decisions. Time to go home. I’d take the kids to the park, wear them out. And once they were in bed, I’d get well and truly drunk.

I walked into the kitchen to find Ray mopping the floor.

‘Oh, shit, your mother’s coming. Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I forgot all about it. My office is a right mess, paint everywhere. The police reckon it’s the local youth. Where are the kids?’

‘Out doing over someone’s house.’ Ray straightened up and brushed his dark hair back. His forehead was gleaming and he was breathless.

‘Good exercise, floor mopping, you ought to do it more often.’