Chapter 41

When Baxter arrives, I’m wondering when to show him the article and the note from Fletch.

“Tiggy, Tiggy, I’ve had another letter from Tom-Tom.”

He takes it out of his backpack and puts it on the table. As we look at it together, Raider pushes between us and plants his chin.

“Not too close, Mr Wet-nose,” I say.

It’s a painting of what look like two human hands with fingers spread. The fingers are painted green.

“Are they fingers?” I say. “Or the leaves of a plant?”

“I think both. They do a lot of gardening in prison, like as a job to grow food. And it makes you feel good, getting your hands dirty, like making mud pies when you’re a kid. I thought this was a message about that and when I looked up the meaning of green fingers, a film came up. It’s about some prisoners who won a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show. But it’s from ages ago and Tom-Tom’s too young for it to mean that.”

“Well, here’s another message. From Fletch.”

He looks at both contents of the envelope. “He says: ‘work it out’. It’s a code.”

He’s excited. He loves codes. And after Zaylee’s jibes about him not being a real PI, I know he’s feeling extra frustrated about how to find work in this field, work that’s interesting and not just chasing cheating spouses. It’s why he started the camera club – to keep busy with projects related to investigation.

Baxter talks while he puts on Raider’s lead. “Timothy Bale, Tim for short. Tim Bale. Never heard of him. I’ll think about it while we walk. Then we can talk when I get back.”

As I try to concentrate on Piper, I realise I need more codes in her book. I can thank Fletch for that at least but his code looks like it’s going to be trouble.

An hour later, Baxter and Raider bounce in. “Tiggy, Tiggy, I’ve been thinking about how to ‘work it out’.” He flops onto an armchair. “Fletch wrote tim bale without caps. That’s the clue. It could be an anagram but let’s put all the letters together first and see what we get.” He works his phone for less than a minute. “On no. I think I know what his nickname is. It’s a shock and you’re not going to like it.”

“Tell me.”

“Put the two words together and the letters spell something else.”

I look over his shoulder.

Timbale.

The definition is there.

“A kind of drum,” Baxter says. “Like a tom-tom is a drum. It looks like Fletch has found out I’m pen-friends with Timothy Bale. How did I get to be his pen-friend? He smashed up a house! And no-one in our group is supposed to know who the inmates are.”

I start pacing.

“Fletch knows the answers.” And it suddenly feels very deliberate. “The other person who isn’t going to like this,” I say, “is Jack.”

Baxter’s step-father takes his call. Baxter explains, then puts me on.

“Tiggy, thanks for directing Baxter to call me about this. This is potentially disastrous. It could ruin the whole pilot program and make it much harder for my unit to get funding for something else. It looks like our screening of the participants was flawed and we put these young volunteers at risk. Bear with me, I’m thinking on the fly.

“So far, it just involves Baxter and Fletch and I’ll get a colleague to review all screenings. We can terminate Baxter’s link with Tom-Tom and Fletch’s with his pair. And remove them both from our group meetings. The other pairs can continue but we need to stop this identity leak spreading within the group. Baxter can keep a secret, but Fletch is our loose cannon. And I need to know how this happened. He’s very withdrawn and I think if I meet with him, he’ll just clam up. You’ve had dealings with Fletch …”

Jack stops. And I work well with Baxter who’s also on the spectrum.

“I can sit in as Fletch’s backup buddy …” I say. And Jack’s?

“With his permission. Thank you. I’ll be in touch.”

Jack rings off.

“What I don’t get, Tiggy,” Baxter says, “is why did Fletch find out who my pen-friend is? And not his own? Because Tim-Tim, that’s my new name for Tom-Tom, is more interesting to Fletch? Because he’s inside for smashing things up? Like Fletch smashed up that mug just to have a photo for the camera club theme. That’s what I call extreme. It’s violence against an innocent mug.”

“He might already know Tom-Tom and he wanted to be his pen-pal but you got him instead.”

“But anyone can write to their friend or family member in jail. You can even visit. You don’t have to do it all clandestine and everything. We did it that way because it’s a pilot study of neurodiverse young people, inside and outside, helping each other through friendship. And for studies like this, you have to be anonymous.”

“Maybe Fletch will tell Jack what’s happened.”

And if Fletch knows Tim personally, has he told Tim who Baxter is? One of the reasons for the anonymity is to keep the outside pen-friends safe. Zaylee knows where Baxter lives – she picked him up the other day – and she’s working with Fletch on the Porkie surveillance. I don’t like this chain of connections.

“I’m sad,” Baxter says, “because I really like Tim-Tim’s art and he was helping me get more adventurous in mine. I don’t know if I’ve been helping him yet. Except I got him the paint pens. And it was pretty cool the way he found out his name is a kind of drum and made his alias. I think he’s a bit like me.”

Poor Baxter. He’s lost Zaylee and Tom-Tom all in the one week. Tough.

“Now I won’t get any more letters, thanks to Fletch. I know this is dumb, Tiggy, but it’s fun getting letters. Like having a dumb phone. Snail-mail is cool again. I have to hide them from the twins. That’s why I save them on the flash drive. The twins are like paper shredders you don’t have to plug in. You just wish you could turn them off.”

No more letters. And when I look across at the Dunlin photo leaning against the wall, I realise the whole trust issue around Fletch is back, too. He didn’t tell Baxter about Tim. He told me.

“And I’ve been thinking,” Baxter says, “what if Fletch doesn’t even know Tim-Tim, he just knows his name? Why did he even have to tell us and spoil everything?”

“Fletch is a serious person,” I say. “I don’t think he did it for a joke or to spoil things. I think he’d have a good reason.”

But I wonder if Tom-Tom really is Tim Bale. Could Fletch have wondered about Tom-Tom’s nickname and joined the wrong dots to a prisoner whose name spells timbale? It’s the kind of nerdy thing he might do. And at the same time, I hope this has nothing to do with paying Baxter back for the Porkie fiasco. I can imagine Zaylee doing that but not Fletch.

Baxter leaves for the bus and I return to Death by Deception, keeping an ear out for a call back from Jack.

After Jack messages back and forth with Fletch, we all meet at the community hall.

“Tim Bale needs help,” Fletch says. “He’s not guilty of smashing up that house. No-one will listen.”

“How did you find out who he is?” Jack asks. “All the inmates in the pen-friends study use aliases.”

“I knew him already. It’s why I joined the study. I know Zaylee. She was in the PI course and she heard about the study. No-one asked me if I was friends with a prisoner so I thought it was OK to sign up. Then I told Tim to say he wanted to join. I thought it might help him if more people know what happened to him. He was framed. But all we do in the group is write letters and read them out. And no-one knows who anyone is and why they’re inside. It sucks.”

“Thank you for being so honest with all the details, Fletch,” Jack says. “I know it’s hard for you.”

“It’s not hard if I’m helping Tim.”

Jack looks at me.

“Zaylee knows Tim too?” I ask.

“Not Zaylee as well,” Jack says.

“We’ve been working together,” Fletch says, “to try and get the case reopened but no-one cares that Tim is innocent. Except Zaylee and me.”

“The study has very strict rules about anonymity,” Jack says. “We’ll lose our funding if we don’t comply with them. I’m sorry if we didn’t make those rules clear enough at the beginning. I’ll let Zaylee know we’re removing both of you from the study and your pen-friends will be helped to find other letter-writers. And please don’t tell anyone else in the study group who Tom-Tom is.”

“Does Baxter know?” Fletch asks.

“Yes, and he’s had to leave the group too. Anyone who knows Tom-Tom’s identity has to be removed.”

Fletch shrugs. “No-one cares about Tim. Even you Jack, even though you’re a good person working with neurodiverse prisoners in your precious study. You haven’t asked me how I know he’s innocent, even though you have contacts in the prison system who might be able to help him. You have only one thought on your mind. Saving the study. I’ve learnt a word that fits Tim, now that he’s a convicted criminal even though he’s innocent.” He pauses his long speech then says it. “Pariah.”