CHAPTER SIXTEEN

 

Tess Pemberton’s house was about a third of the way along a row of almost identical two-up-two-downs, each with its own postage stamp excuse for a front garden. Ms Pemberton, however, didn’t seem to be at home. From what I could see as I bent almost double and peered through the letterbox, she wasn’t the tidiest of people either. The hallway floor was partially covered with a liberal smattering of books, magazines, unopened mail, a couple of coats and a few other articles of clothing as well as several pairs of boots and shoes – except not in their pairs.

‘Give it another go,’ I said, and Alan rang the doorbell for about the fifteenth time.

There wasn’t the faintest whisper of a sound or movement from inside the house.

‘Nobody home,’ said Scratch, stating the bleeding obvious.

‘She could be dead, of course,’ said Alan.

My lower back was starting to ache, so I let the metal flap of the letterbox slam shut and stood upright.

‘Dead?’ I said. ‘Why would she be dead?’

Alan gave his theory less than a moment’s thought. ‘Everybody dies sometime, Max.’

‘Yes, but why her? She can’t be any more than mid thirties.’

‘How d’you know that?’

‘Because she was at Danny’s collecting an urn at the same time as Scratch and me, and her granddad called her Tess, which happens to be the same name as in the folder Sanjeev gave us.’

‘Yeah,’ said Scratch. ‘The girl with the dragon tattoo.’

‘The girl with the—?’

‘Yes, Alan,’ I interrupted, ‘but not the one you’re thinking of.’

‘Oh.’

Alan looked strangely disappointed and lifted his chin while he adjusted the position of his brand new, gleaming white neck brace.

‘So now what do we do?’ said Scratch. ‘Bugger off and come back later?’

‘Not a bit of it,’ I said. ‘In fact, her being out might well be a blessing in disguise, so why don’t you go and see if there’s a back way in?’

Scratch signalled his understanding with a click of his fingers and headed off towards one of the side alleys that presumably led to the back of the terrace. Rather pointlessly – although I didn’t say so – Alan reprised his role as chief bell-pusher while I climbed onto the low wall of a flowerbed in front of the big bay window. I cupped my hands against the glass to cut out the reflection, but there wasn’t much to see other than a small living room that, if anything, was even more untidy than the hallway.

‘She’s not in, dear.’

I very nearly lost my footing at the sound of the woman’s voice but managed to avoid an embarrassing tumble with a bit of equally embarrassing arm flailing to keep my balance. The woman was standing about six feet to my right and was inserting a key into the door of the next house along. Her hair was snow white and heavily permed, and her face had more wrinkles than an elephant’s nutsack. Eighty if she was a day.

‘Not long missed her actually,’ she said as she unlocked the door and pushed it open.

I stepped down from the wall of the flowerbed and gave her one of my honest-as-the-day-is-long smiles. ‘Any idea when she’ll be back?’

In response, I got an ear-piercing, high pitched shriek as she fiddled with the volume on her hearing aid.

‘Sorry, dear, you’ll have to speak up,’ she said when the intense Metallica feedback eventually subsided. ‘I’m a little deaf.’

I upped my own volume half a dozen notches and enunciated every word with exaggerated mouth movements in case she might be able to lipread. ‘Do – you – know – when – she’ll – be – back?’

‘Went off in that van of hers. Her and her granddad.’

‘Where to?’

There was a faint twinkle in the old woman’s eyes as she patted at her hair without actually touching it. ‘Oh, that’s nice of you. Most men wouldn’t even notice, you know.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Mind you, many moons ago when I was in my prime, so to speak, all the young men used to say how lovely my hair was. Of course, it wasn’t this awful white colour in those days. Dear me, no. In fact, it was—’ She broke off at the sound of breaking glass in the not far distance. ‘What was that?’

‘What was what?’

‘I thought I heard a noise.’

‘I didn’t hear anything,’ I lied and turned to Alan for confirmation. ‘Alan?’

Alan shook his head. ‘Nope.’

The breaking glass must have meant that Scratch had got himself in at the back of the house. Obviously, I’d forgotten to add the word “quietly” when I’d given him his instructions. He’d be letting us in through the front door at any second. Time to get rid of Mrs Wrinkly.

‘Well, it’s been really nice chatting to you but—’

‘Oh, that is odd,’ she said, suddenly shifting her focus to Alan.

I thought for a moment she’d never seen a neck brace before, but then I realised her gaze was a couple of feet lower down and in the approximate area of the cremation urn Alan was holding.

‘She had one exactly like that,’ Mrs Wrinkly went on. ‘Her poor old granny, God rest her soul. Mind you, she’ll get terribly shaken up going all that way.’

‘How do you mean “all that way”?’

‘In that van of hers. All that bouncing around. Terribly shaken up, poor soul.’

This wasn’t sounding good at all, and I don’t mean the shaken up part of “all that way”.

‘Do you know where she went?’ I said. ‘Miss Pemberton.’

‘Oh no, dear,’ she said. ‘I’m not Miss Pemberton. She lives next door.’

Christ, give me strength.

I tried again with the volume cranked up. ‘Where – did – she – go?’

‘Scotland,’ snapped the old woman. ‘I just told you. It was her granny’s dying wish, apparently, to have her ashes scattered in the place she came from. She was Scottish, you see. The granny, that is, and not Miss Pemberton. She’s English as far as I know, but I’ve never been a great one for recognising accents.’

At that precise moment, Scratch appeared at the bay window – but unfortunately the bay window of the old woman’s house and not the one we were trying to get into. If she turned to go in through her front door, she’d spot him immediately, so I had to keep her talking until Scratch got himself the hell out of there. Besides, if she knew that they’d gone to Scotland, maybe she could give me something a bit more specific. If we were to stand any chance of tracking down Danny’s coke, I needed to get as much out of her as I could.

‘Any idea where in Scotland?’ I said.

‘The west, I think she said. Somewhere near... Ooh, where was it now?’

She looked down at the ground while she struggled to remember, which gave me the opportunity to glare at Scratch and mouth the words “What the fuck are you doing?”.

He shrugged and pointed towards the dividing wall between where he was now and the house he should have been in but wasn’t.

‘Glen something or other, wasn’t it?’

Mrs Wrinkly still had her eyes to the floor as she spoke, so I gave Scratch a sideways nod and mouthed at him that he should get out of the house – now!

“What?” he mouthed back, pulling a face that indicated he hadn’t understood my mouthing.

‘Dumpees. That was the place. I remember thinking it was a funny sort of—’

The old woman cut herself off mid sentence as she looked up and caught me mouthing some choice words of advice at Scratch. She twisted her head in his direction but slowly enough that he had plenty of time to dodge back out of sight.

I needed to get her attention back in case Scratch was stupid enough – as he probably was – to show himself at the window again. ‘She was in a van, you say.’

‘That's right, dear. One of those camper things. A white one. And between you and me, I'm not sure if it'll make it all that way. Nearly as old as I am, it is.’

She chuckled like she was having a mild attack of asthma, and I flashed her a smile to acknowledge the joke.

‘That was quite funny too,’ she said, still chuckling. ‘P - O - T.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I noticed it as they drove off.’

‘P - O - T?’

‘The whatchamacallit – registration number. Pot. Just like her old gran was in.’

The chuckle was just beginning to develop into a guffaw when she suddenly nipped it in the bud and said, ‘Oh dear. You don't think that's like speaking ill of the dead, do you? Laughing, I mean.’

I really didn’t have an opinion on the matter, but I did at least have part of the van’s registration number. I asked if she happened to remember the rest of it, but she shook her head, seemingly too preoccupied with resolving her moral dilemma to be bothered with such trivialities.

‘You all right, mate?’

Hearing Alan’s voice, I turned to see that Scratch had returned from his breaking and entering and was sucking the blood from a cut on his hand.

Mrs Wrinkly had spotted him too. ‘My, that's a nasty cut you've got there. Why don't you all come in for a nice cup of tea and I can put a bandage on it?’

It was unlikely we were going to get anything else useful from her, and the priority now was to try and catch up with the camper van before it got too far on its way to Bonnie bloody Scotland. And we also didn’t want to be around when she discovered her broken window.

‘That’s very kind of you,’ I said, ‘but we’re in a bit of a hurry, I’m afraid.’

Poor old biddy looked genuinely disappointed. ‘Oh, that’s a pity. I made some scones this morning and forgot to quarter the quantities, so there’s far too many for me on my own.’

‘Another time perhaps,’ I said, getting the words out quick when I saw that Scratch and Alan had already begun to salivate.

‘That would be lovely,’ she said, brightening a little. ‘And at least you know where I am now.’

‘Of course. And thanks for your help.’

‘My pleasure, dear.’

I set off towards the Beamer on the opposite side of the street, noticing with a twinge of satisfaction that my handiwork had done a pretty good job of patching up the bullet holes. The strips of black tape wouldn’t have held up to closer inspection, but from this sort of distance the car didn’t look quite so much like it had just been through a war zone. Sure, I knew people who could have done a proper repair job on the quiet, but their discretion was the better part of a few hundred quid, which was a price I could ill afford. I did shell out for a new back window to keep the weather out, and I got the smashed rear light replaced because I didn’t want to get pulled over by the cops. The knackered radio stayed knackered, partly because I hadn’t got the cash for a new one, but mainly so that Toby couldn’t use it to deafen the rest of us with the kind of shit music he’d probably describe as “awesome”.

He was sitting on the back seat, farting about with his smartphone, as Scratch, Alan and I got into the car.

‘What the fuck d’you think you were doing?’ I said to Scratch the moment the doors were all shut.

‘I made a mistake, all right?’

‘Oh really?’

‘There was this alley along the back, yeah? But there weren’t any numbers for the houses, and I must’ve miscounted.’

‘So you smashed in some poor old biddy’s window,’ Alan chipped in.

‘It wasn’t deliberate, for Christ’s sake,’ Scratch yelled, but then he dropped the volume and almost mumbled when he added, ‘And anyway, I’ll come back later when she’s gone to bed and stick a few quid through the letterbox to pay for the damage.’

‘What?’ said Alan. ‘And scare the crap out of her even more than you have already?’

‘Well, what the fuck else do you want me to—?’

‘I’m not sure that’s gonna be possible anyway,’ I cut in before the argument got out of hand. ‘Not if we’re halfway to Scotland by then.’

‘Eh?’

While Alan began to fill Scratch in on what he’d missed, I started the engine and returned Mrs Wrinkly’s cheery wave – but not quite as cheerily.