Adam woke up and thought about the slap. Though it hadn’t been anywhere near hard enough to leave a mark, it did feel like remnants of Kyle’s sausage fingers remained.
Had it been a warning?
Adam didn’t know. Perhaps he was reading too much into it, but their terse exchange had come when discussing money, and more importantly, Gerald. Perhaps the slap had been a subliminal message to back off, and to stop all the questioning.
Kyle knew that Adam had done a bit of Sherlocking in the past, he’d alluded to the fact in the interview. Maybe he thought Adam was getting a bit too close for comfort, and was trying to keep him at arm’s length, though it wouldn’t work. Adam was like a shark with these things. Or if not a shark, at least a tenacious terrier. He couldn’t let it go.
And so, he resolved to do something today that, he realised, could get him fired, but he didn’t really care. The whole point in taking the job in the first place was to get access to Kyle Baldwin that he wouldn’t normally have been able to.
Today was the day to use the free pass to the limit.
After making sure that Helena was still asleep, he got out of bed and, like some sort of crazed hobbit, checked the wedding ring box was still in its hiding place. Thankfully, it was.
He tiptoed out of the bedroom, made some breakfast and then thought a little about what he was planning to accomplish today. He concluded, after running several scenarios, that he’d need to get very lucky.
The shop floor was hellish, and Adam was tempted more than once to jack the whole thing in anyway. The stress of two abandoned proposals, coupled with rude customers and the repeated playlist (which hadn’t been altered as promised), was really getting to him.
He was about to go and tell Lauren he was quitting when Lady Luck smiled upon him.
At three o’clock, he watched Kyle Baldwin make a beeline for the front door, car keys in hand. Adam assumed that meant he’d be gone for the rest of the day, which in theory meant he could have an uninterrupted snoop in the owner’s office. If there was something to be found to link Kyle to Gerald’s death, it was either going to be in there or at his home.
As casually as he could, he sloped away from the basket of clothes he was supposed to be hanging up and made his way towards the back. Unfortunately, his route to Kyle’s office was blocked by Lauren, who sat at her desk.
‘Alright, Adam? How’s tricks?’ she said.
‘All good,’ Adam replied. ‘How are you?’
‘Great, thanks to you. I had a class time with Colin yesterday, so cheers for introducing us.’
‘You’re grand. Are you seeing each other again?’
‘I’d like to, yeah. Things are a bit manic at the moment, but we’ll see how it goes.’
‘Good to hear,’ he smiled. ‘Umm… Is Kyle here?’
‘He’s had to nip out. Did you need him?’
‘Ah… Cathy said that there is something wrong with the front door. It’s not opening automatically or something. Thought I should tell Kyle.’
‘That bleedin’ door,’ she said, puffing out an indignant sigh. ‘I’ve told him so many times to get it replaced, but he’s too much of a skinflint. I’ll go down and take a look, see if I need to call someone.’
She got up from behind her desk and Adam followed her out, before peeling off and standing behind a shelf of bathroom items, watching her make her way towards the escalator. When she’d vanished out of sight, he ran to the back.
Kyle had left in such a hurry that he’d not locked his door. Or, perhaps he never did. Adam knew he didn’t have much time, so whirred around the office like a careful hurricane. He checked in the filing cabinet and the top of the desk. He rifled through notepads but was met only with order forms, HR reminders and pricing lists.
Lauren was bound to discover she’d been duped at any minute, and Adam gazed around hopelessly, when something jumped out at him.
Kyle’s bottom drawer was the only one that had a lock on it, though the key was stuck in it, defeating the point of having a locking drawer entirely. Adam turned the key and found a stack of papers, which he flicked through rapidly. It was mostly more of the same, but two pieces amongst the pile caught his eye.
They’d been shoved in at different places; one near the middle of the stack and one near the bottom.
Both looked like they’d been handled a lot. The corners were dog-eared and uncared for. Adam folded them, shoved them in his pocket and was about to leave the office when he spotted something else.
A notepad on the desk he hadn’t seen before. The corner of its pages were poking out from under an A3-sized envelope. He pulled it from its hiding place, and found that the top page had been torn off—remnants of it were caught in the spirals of metal. Whoever had written on it, though, was either in a hurry or angry, as the indentations on the next page down were clear as day.
Meet me tonight.
He took a photo of the page and hurried out onto the shop floor again, where he headed back to his bumper box of clothes, and not a moment too soon. He watched Lauren stride towards the back room, though couldn’t see her expression. Hopefully, she’d assume that Adam or Cathy had made a mistake, or that the faulty door had righted itself without the need for intervention.
He kept his head down for the rest of his shift, and when it was time to clock off, texted Colin to ask him to meet in the pub.
It was time to discuss the contents of the pages.
‘You did what?!’ Adam practically shouted when Colin had finished his story about breaking into Stu Finnegan’s house.
‘Keep it down,’ Colin whispered.
‘Why?’
‘Because one of his cronies could well be here and listening to you.’
Adam glanced around, and conceded the point. Colin was right. One of Stu’s gang of local bandits could be in here, and discussing it at volume was probably a silly thing to do, so Adam lowered his voice but recommenced his tongue-lashing.
‘Are you crazy?’ he hissed.
‘I just thought it would be helpful.’
‘You getting yourself killed is pretty far from helpful.’’
‘It’s just, it’s always you that finds the breakthrough. For once, I wanted to be the one to crack the case.’
‘It’s not always me that “finds the breakthrough”,’ Adam said, air quoting the final three words. ‘We’re a team.’
‘I suppose.’
‘And I need my best man’s head still attached to his body if I ever get the bloody question asked, so promise me that you won’t do anything as ridiculously dangerous as that ever again.’
‘Scout’s honour,’ said Colin, holding up a hand with parted fingers.
‘That’s the Star Trek sign, you numpty!’ Adam laughed.
He went to the bar and returned with a couple of drinks. When they’d both taken a few gulps, a corner booth was vacated by a group of lads, so Colin and Adam moved to the relative privacy afforded there.
Adam pulled the pages out and smoothed them on the table. Colin set his pint down and studied what Adam had found.
The scribbles on the first page were written in what looked like fountain pen ink. The paper had been torn from a spiral notebook, and had thin red lines on it. It said:
Jesus. What were you thinking?
The next message was written on a smaller piece of paper, and was tatty and torn in places. The writing was shakier, and looked more childlike. It said:
I’m going to need more. Remember what I know and who I could tell. GA.
‘I’m assuming GA is Gerald Agnew,’ Colin said.
‘I’d say so.’
‘So, he sent these to Kyle in the hope of getting more… what?’
‘Money, I think, though of course there’s no way of being certain.’
‘Does it feel like blackmail to you?’ Colin asked. ‘First, asking Kyle for more money and then threatening him with telling someone something.’
‘That’s what I thought when I read it.’
‘Which means that Kyle might have had something to do with his death? Maybe Kyle went to see Gerald, to pay him to shut up. Maybe things got heated and he ended up killing him by mistake.’
‘Or he went to find him to shut him up once and for all, intentionally.’
‘What about the first note?’ Colin said, pointing to the more legible handwriting.
‘They kinda link, I guess. “What were you thinking?”’ Adam pointed to the more legible note, and then the scrawled one. ‘“Remember what I know.” Maybe Gerald sent the first one to get Kyle’s attention and the second to get him to pay.’
‘But the writing is so different?’
‘Maybe Gerald got a friend to write one of them so that they couldn’t be linked if Kyle got the police involved.’
‘What a mess,’ Colin sighed. ‘You think we should go to the police now?’
‘For Whitelaw to tell us that we’ve been wasting our time and to take the evidence? I don’t think so. You and me are going to see this through.’
Colin nodded.
‘What’s next, then?’
‘Well,’ Adam said, shoving the phone his way with the picture of the indented notebook on screen. ‘Kyle is worried. And when someone is worried, they make mistakes. He’s meeting someone tonight, and I think we should be there. Helena is on nights, so I thought we’d head over and stake out Kyle’s house. We can follow him to wherever he’s going. Maybe he’s going to do something crazy.’
‘Dude, I know we are finally making progress, but I have an early start at work tomorrow. Do you mind doing this one on your own?’
‘No worries,’ Adam shrugged. ‘I’m sure it’ll be a massive waste of time, but you never know.’
They finished their drinks and hit the road; Colin to his warm, comfortable bed and Adam to the confines of his trusty Renault Cleo.