One Way Ticket (12 page)

“I have. I’ve got the barman from the
White Hart coming in. It seems to be somewhere Tina hung out a lot, thought it
would be worth having a word with him.”

I had a feeling this wasn’t going to go
well.

14 All Falls Down

Of course, it was Stig that
arrived. I tried to hide in my office but Addi called me in to ‘translate’. I
took my place at the desk without looking at either of them but I knew it
couldn’t last long.

“Hello,” Stig said. “Didn’t know you
worked here.”

Addi looked between the two of us. “You
know each other?”

“I’ve had a drink in the White Hart,” I
said.

“Last night, it was good to see June
again. Did you find Roger in the end?”

Addi looked at me and I wished they had
invented an invisible switch I could use right now.

“You were there with your aunt last
night?” he asked me. There was a tone in his voice that made me uneasy.

“Yes?” I squeaked.

“Excuse us a moment please,” he said to
Stig. “I need to speak to you outside,” he told me.

We exited the room and I followed Addi
down the corridor. Instead of stopping he continued round the corner, out the
back door, and onto the path to the sea.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Freezing to death.”

“This isn’t funny, Jennifer. You went out
to that bar with your aunt last night.”

“She fancied a drink. There was a match
on.”

“And you just happened to speak to the
barman about someone called Roger?”

For someone who came across as not too
bright, he could be pretty sharp.

“Look, I was worried that Roger was innocent.
We just went to check if he’d been there with Tina.”

“You took your aunt to talk to potential
witnesses. Without me.”

“I just asked a couple of questions. Aunt
June watched the match.” As I said it, it didn’t sound quite so reasonable
anymore.

“This is too much. I know I asked for help
but that didn’t mean you could take over the questioning and bring your aunt
along.”

“Alright−”

“No. That’s it. Thank you for your help
but I won’t be needing you any more. I’m sorry, you’re off the case.”

He walked back into the building before I
could form my response. I had to make do with a hand gesture instead.

Going back to my normal work was a let
down after my couple of days on a murder investigation. Vara thought I must be
homesick.

“I wish I had some news that will cheer
you up, but I don’t think this will,” she told me.

“Not a public holiday coming up? I could
do with a day off.”

“We have to redo the filing system.”

“What?” And I’d been worried it was going
to be a crap day.

“It’s a new system the sergeant has come
up with. I have the instructions here. Sexual deviants or insurance fraud?” she
asked. (Worryingly this isn’t the strangest question I’ve been asked since
starting work in the police station.) She was indicating the filing cabinets
that lined one side of our office.

“I’ll take insurance fraud,” I replied,
too frightened I might find Aunt June in the other files.

It’s astonishing how many
tourists carry not only cameras and expensive phones around with them on
holiday, but also iPods and iPads too, all at the same time. Amazing! And you
lost them all along with your antique diamond watch and platinum ring?
Incredible! No wonder the price of insurance had gone up.

            It was an exciting day going
through those files, trying to put them in a new order according to a system Sergeant
H. had devised. I can only assume it makes more sense in the native language
because it was all Greek to…, no let’s not go there. Let’s just say, the new
filing system was very creative.

            And we got to do it all over
again the next day, and the next, until we’d gone through all the filing
cabinets. How lucky were we? All the time Addi was out there no doubt screwing
up the murder investigation.

“Are these distraction thefts meant to be
here?” Vara asked on the third day. “I think something’s gone wrong somewhere.”

As we stepped through the instructions
again we both began to realise we’d missed a step. “We’ll have to go through
the lot again,” Vara wailed.

We were on the last filing cabinet and
today was meant to be our last day of ‘fun’. No way was I going through this
again. I grabbed some of the remaining files and dumped them back in the
cabinet drawer, repeating this action until they were all back inside. Vara
watched, hopping lightly from one foot to the other.

“What’s the sergeant going to say when he
finds out?” she asked when I’d finished.

“He isn’t going to find out. You can’t
tell me he’s going to go through all these cabinets. It’ll be our little
secret.”

I took the instructions from her, put them
in the middle drawer of my desk and closed it firmly. Giving her a smile, I pulled
the next set of investigation notes from my in tray, and started to type them
up. Vara smiled back and returned to her own desk. I hadn’t been an
administrator for nothing, you know.

Just as Vara had settled behind her desk,
Addi came into the office. I perked up a little, wondering if I had been given
a reprieve. He ignored me and sauntered over to Vara.

“Some notes for you,” he said, plonking
them down in her in-tray.

Vara looked at him in surprise then at me.
Addi turned round and left without another word.

So it was going to be like that, was it?

Naturally, I was facing defeat
on the home front as well.

“How’s the case going?” Aunt June asked when
I got in from work.

“Oh, you know,” I said, joining her on the
couch and flicking through the tv channels.

“No, I don’t. That’s why I’m asking. Hey, I
was watching that.”

“What? The bear cartoon? Look, that
cookery programme’s on,” I said.

“I don’t know why you watch it, you can’t
understand what half the ingredients are. You thought he was making pastry with
grated soap the other day.”

“I’ve never seen lard like that before,
that’s all.”

“What is happening with Tina’s murder?”

I tried to concentrate on the rather
bizarre looking dish the chef was making. “I’m not really allowed to talk about
it. Does that look like aubergine to you?”

Aunt June put her glasses on. “Why would
he be spreading jam on it? You were happy to talk about the case before.”

“That was then. It’s not jam, that’s some
kind of olive tapenade. Why do you bother with your glasses?”

“You’re in a good mood, I see.”

“I’ve just spent all day re-filing a whole
cabinet of case notes. It’s not been a good day.”

“Filing? I thought you were helping Addi
track down this murderer?”

“No. I’m not exactly working with him at
the moment.”

“Messed it up, have you?”

“No,” I told her, outraged. “Well, yes,
sort of. He found out about us going to the White Hart without him. He wasn’t
very happy.”

“I told you so. You are an idiot sometimes.”

“Thank you. I don’t know if anyone’s ever
said this before but ‘I told you so’ isn’t a great comfort.”

“He’s slicing banana on top of your
aubergine and olives.”

I hate it when my aunt is right.

“I suppose the murderer won’t be found
now,” she went on.

“I wouldn’t bet on it, no.”

“This is serious, Jennifer.” She took off
her glasses to emphasise her point. “Tina’s death will be hanging over this
community forever. These rumours and whispers will go on, blaming people like
Roger, yes I heard about that. Everyone knows he was brought in. He’ll never be
treated the same now, not till someone’s convicted.”

“I know, but there’s nothing I can do about
it. Addi doesn’t want my help and that’s it.”

The dish on the television was being
served up with scoops of ice-cream. “I guess that wasn’t moussaka, then?” I
said.

My aunt crossed her arms and looked
unhappy.

“Okay,” I said, “what are these rumours
and whispers you’ve heard?”

Aunt June was right of course
(not that I’d admit it to her). Chances were that Addi wouldn’t be able to
solve the case. Every day that he wasted was another day that the case got
colder. It’d already been through two other detectives, if it wasn’t solved
soon it was likely to be closed unsolved.

Even if Addi had relegated me back to the
admin office, that didn’t mean I couldn’t still take part. What was to stop me
going through the file and reviewing the evidence? I didn’t have access to all
the online case notes, but the paper version was sitting in a filing cabinet in
my office. He’d already interviewed half the population, he may well have
spoken to the murderer already and not realised it. It needed someone to go
through the notes with the proverbial fine-toothed comb to find the obvious
information that so far had been missed. Alright, I wouldn’t be able to
interview anyone, officially, but I bet I could find a few important details.
That would show him.

My new plan came into action the next day
when Vara went out for lunch, she often did a little shopping in her lunch
break. I gave her enough time to leave the building before jumping up and
retrieving the case file from its home.

I’d noticed when I went through the file before
that the notes were a bit random. Each detective seemed to have approached the
investigation in a different way and the result was a haphazard mess of
partially progressed leads and half completed notes. It was an affront to my
sense of organisation to see it in such a state. Before I knew it, I was
re-organising it.

To start with, I took the witness
statements out and divided them into neighbours, associates and those from out
of town. Then I pulled all the forensic data together before starting to read
through it again.

The file now contained the forensic reports.
They seemed to be fairly comprehensive - autopsy report, analysis of stomach
contents, murder scene findings. Tina Lloyd’s cause of death had been cerebral
hypoxia as Addi had said. Murder weapon was yet to be determined but was
thought to be a type of thin cord or belt. The report stated her weight at
death had been nearly 81 kilos (roughly 178 pounds in old money). At 5 foot 4
inches, she’d been classed as obese but the pathologist didn’t feel unusual
strength would have been needed to kill her.

I put down the sandwich I’d been in the
middle of eating when I saw the photo of her dead body. It was awful, her skin
all pale apart from the livid marks around her neck. It made me feel sick to see
what had happened to her. There were also photos of her apartment. It looked
expensive, cream walls and faux suede upholstery, tasteful art on the walls.
She had obviously been a good housekeeper, everything seemed clean and tidy.

Tina had been murdered in her apartment sometime
after 2.10pm (the last sighting of her by two women in her local corner shop).
Her body had been found about 5.30pm on the same afternoon. There were no signs
of forced entry and little sign of violence in her home. There was also no sign
of robbery, as Addi had said, her purse, tv and dvd player were still present. The
stomach contents indicated she had eaten a lunch of ham, bread and tomatoes not
long beforehand, the remains of which were still in the kitchen. One plate and one
cup had been used.

Did this really mean anything? As Addi had
pointed out, her door was unlocked so there was nothing to force. And couldn’t
someone have washed and replaced a cup to make it look like Tina was alone?

I quickly turned to the next report. Sickening
as it was, at the same time, I couldn’t deny there was something pretty compelling
about trying to solve a murder. If only I could forget this involved a real
person and pretend it was a game.

I read on. For a retirement community, her
neighbours were really unobservant. No one had seen anything. How was it
possible? My aunt knew the comings and goings of all her neighbours and she
couldn’t even see the front door of most of them.

There also wasn’t much about the woman
herself. The case file contained only a sketchy biography – 65 years old, moved
to Cyprus from Essex five years ago, volunteered for a few local charities, widowed
some years ago in England, no children, no boyfriend and, according to the
report, no enemies. But that couldn’t be true. Someone, somewhere, hadn’t told
the truth.

“What are you doing?”

I looked up to see Sergeant H standing
over me. Where had he sprung from?

“Sorting case notes,” I told him. “They’ve
gotten mixed up.”

He looked like he was considering me for a
minute, perhaps he had seen a guilty look on my face. I brazenly held his gaze.
“You’d better have these as well,” he told me and handed over a bunch of
reports. He left, after I thanked him, and I had a look at what he’d just given
me.

The top few sheets were notes for an
altercation in the supermarket but underneath it were, and my heart quickened
when I saw this, Addi’s recent notes on Tina’s murder.

Thank you, sergeant.

15 Friend Is A Four Letter
Word

In the end, the notes weren’t
much to write home about (not that I do that anyway). Addi still hadn’t located
Louise Allen or even gotten the phone number she’d used to call her mother. For
someone who’d gone missing and could be a possible second victim, finding her
didn’t seem to be a huge priority. I tried not to worry. Instead of instigating
a major search for Louise Allen, Addi had interviewed the secretary of a
charity Tina Lloyd had done some voluntary work for a couple of years ago. Apparently
Tina had been in a running dispute with one woman over the choice of biscuits for
the refreshments table. Not exactly something anyone would commit murder over.

It was just as I’d feared. The
investigation was foundering without me. I checked my watch and saw our lunch
break was almost over already, Vara could be back any moment, and I was only
halfway through the file. Tearing myself away, I placed the new case notes in Vara’s
in tray and put the improved (I like to think) file back in the filing cabinet.

Not a moment too soon as Vara came back
just minutes later. I wasn’t sure if Addi had actually told her not to give me
his notes but I decided not to risk it. I gave her my best innocent smile as I
started entering the other notes Sergeant H had given me onto the system.

All afternoon, whilst typing up details of
noise complaints and a stolen parrot (the two were not necessarily connected),
I considered what I’d read in that case file. I positively racked my brains for
a cunning detail Addi had missed. And what did I come up with? Nothing. A big,
fat zero. I hadn’t had time to read through all the interviews so I didn’t have
enough information to identify who should be top of the suspect list. My eureka
moment would have to wait until I could read the rest of the file. But when
would that be? I was itching to get back at the filing cabinet (and I never
thought I’d say those words) but Vara settled in for the afternoon with a large
stack of files and showed no signs of budging.

I did consider staying behind after hours
but without a decent excuse - impending earthquake/major court case/royal visit
– I wouldn’t be able to justify being there one minute after 5 o’clock. It wasn’t
fair, Sherlock Holmes didn’t have to wait for people’s lunch breaks to do his
investigations.

To make matters worse, Vara had other
ideas of how she was going to spend her lunch break the next day.

“I’ve hurt my back,” she announced the next
morning when I got to the office. Leaning back, she rubbed the offending area
to stress her point. “I helped a friend change the engine in his car last night
and when I got up this morning my back was so sore.”

“You changed what? Engine oil?”

“Not oil, the engine. We swapped it for a
turbo version. Any running around today, I’m afraid you’ll have to do it.”

 “Right. That’s awful.” It was, I needed
her out of the way to get access to the file. It felt like there was a
conspiracy against me solving this crime. “You’re meant to keep moving with a
bad back. Why don’t you have a walk at lunchtime?”

“I was going to go shopping but I can’t do
that now. I’ve told my mother she’ll have to get the bread today.”

“You don’t want it to seize up, why not
try a little walk later, down to the seafront, get some fresh air?”

“No, not today, I’m going to rest it.” She
eased herself down into her chair. “Maybe I’ll try a walk tomorrow.”

Tomorrow? I couldn’t wait that long.
Depositing my bag in the desk drawer, I sat down. This meant plan B. There was
nothing else for it. I would have to sacrifice my turn at ordering the stationery.
I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t see any other way. Uninterrupted access to the
stationery cupboard was a cherished thing (not only was it a little variation
on the day but you also got first pick of the post-it notes) and Vara and I
took it in turns to do the order. It was a little perk I was just going to have
to forego this week.

It still required a large breath before I
could get the words out. “I don’t think I’m going to have time to do the
stationery order. Can you do it?” I asked.

“Ooh, are you sure?” Vara asked, her eyes
lighting up like a fruit machine.

“Yes, it needs to be done today though,
someone said we’re running low on pens again, and with your back…”

“I think I can manage to get to the
cupboard,” Vara said, standing up slowly and stiffly, grabbing her notepad and
pen. “Yes, I’ll be careful but I should be able to do it okay.”

That was it, bye-bye orange post-it notes
(they were her favourites).

“Walk slowly,” I called behind her as she
moved awkwardly out of the office. All the better for giving me more time with
the filing cabinet.  

Stocktaking the stationery didn’t take
long, even at a snail’s pace, so there was no time to lose. I was up and in the
files in a flash. To be sneaky, I opened the folder still in the drawer and flicked
to the witness interview sheets where I’d left off the day before.

I found the interview notes of Tina’s
sister, nephew and niece, the ones taken before Addi and I visited. They
weren’t particularly interesting until I got to the part where the niece had
told the police officer before Addi that Tina had mentioned a man called Paul she’d
met with a few times in the couple of months before her death. The police
officer had gone back to Tina’s sister about it, but she hadn’t known any Paul who’d
been friends with her sister. It was the same name as the man on the birthday
card. I flicked through the rest of the file to see what else had been found
out about ‘Paul’.

Nothing. There were notes on some of the
other men my aunt had identified but nothing on what had been done to find this
Paul bloke.

It was taking a long time to read through
the pieces of paper because the notes had all been made differently -
presumably because of the different officers involved - some pages had
handwritten extras scrawled around the edges, some had headings which showed
what they were about, others you had to read through to find out. It was all a
bit frustrating. Anyway, my head was firmly in the filing cabinet trying to
decipher some writing along the top of a page so I didn’t hear the door open or
someone walk up behind me.

“I hope those aren’t my case notes,” I
heard Addi’s voice ask.

I looked up. What would he do if they
were? “No, course not,” I told him, quickly closing the file and pushing it
back in its place.

He didn’t look too happy. “They were,
weren’t they? You’ve been reading the notes!”

“Is it a crime?”

“Yes, you’re not on the case,” Addi
started, pointing at me which I knew couldn’t be good.

“Which is a death knell for it, isn’t it? I
bet you don’t even have a clue who did it. Again.”

Ooh. Where had that come from? I had a
feeling I’d gone a bit too far. By the look on Addi’s face, I’d say he thought
that too.

Vara chose that moment to come back in
with two mugs of coffee. “Thought I’d bring back a drink,” she announced,
handing me a mug. “Save me having to get up again this morning. Oh, did you
want one Addi?”

“Outside,” Addi snarled at me, turned and
walked out the door.

I put the mug down and followed him out,
to Vara’s astonishment.

There we were, standing on the path at the
back of the building that led down to the seafront again.

“How dare you!” he started as soon as the
door closed behind me.

“How dare you,” I countered. “I have an
interest in this case, you know. My aunt is an old lady, she doesn’t need to be
worrying that she’s about to be bumped off.”

“So you’re telling me you’re doing this
for your aunt? Really? What have you done for her since you arrived?”

“I help her out a lot, actually. I’ve done
a lot of d.i.y. around the house for a start.” Well, I’d started a lot of
projects around the house (I’d even finished a couple of them.) “I make her
life easier.”

“Easier? She drives you around, I’ve seen
her. She’s always cooking your meals, she even does your laundry, doesn’t she?
You tell everyone you’re here to look after her but the fact is, you’ve made
more work for her since you arrived.”

“Rubbish. I cooked dinner only last night actually,”
I told him in a smartass sort of way. “And your mother does all that stuff for
you as well, you hypocrite!”

“At least I treat her friends well. I’m
not sick in their house.”

“I was not sick in their house!”

Addi gave me a hard look.

“It was their pond, get your facts right.
Look, maybe it’s a British thing, we like to see justice done.”

“There you go again. You can be so
patronising sometimes. And you talk to people as if they are stupid because British
isn’t their first language−”

“English, the language is English.”

“−and for your information,” he
continued quickly, “you are the foreigner here, not us. You only see us as…,”
he held his hand up, “what’s the word – stereotypes!”

He’d done it now. “At least I’m not all up
myself,” I countered, a bit childishly but I couldn’t stop now.

“What does that mean?”

“You’ve gotten very bigheaded since
I
solved that case.”

Addi pointed his finger at me again. “Jennifer,
stay out of this investigation or I may have to report you to the chief.”

Oh-ho, resorting to threats, were we?

“Well, good luck trying to solve it on
your own.” Wrenching the backdoor open, I stormed through it.

Arriving back at the office, flushed and
angry, I was surprised to realise I was close to tears. I’d just had a big row
with the only person who passed for anything like a friend around here.

“Is everything alright?” Vara asked
tentatively.

Of course everything wasn’t alright.
Swallowing hard, I pulled together my stiff upper lip again and told her yes.

I don’t know what Addi told the chief but
the next day the case file had been removed from the filing cabinet and it
didn’t return. No more notes from the case were handed to me or Vara. I could
only assume they were being handled by the admin staff in another office. Online
access to the case notes had also been revoked. I was off the case and no
longer had access to what was going on. I hadn’t handled things very well after
all.

As I watched Addi bumbling
around on the case from afar, the world outside moved quickly into winter
(don’t get excited, it wasn’t like winter back home, this was mild with no snow
or annoying Xmas jingles), and I was shocked when I found it was the middle of
December already (probably because there hadn’t been any annoying Xmas jingles
to remind me). Colourful lights started appearing outside shops and houses, signalling
that the season would soon be upon us.

Unlike back home, Christmas here didn’t
appear to be about how much you could spend on pointless items people would
never use, but more about appreciating family and friends, and spreading good
will. It’ll never catch on. The locals didn’t even go in for Christmas cards
much, Aunt June explained. What a result! No more having to write out the same
thing twenty times over (did I say twenty, I meant thirty, erm, thirty five
times, whatever sounds like a lot of friends).

My party season wasn’t looking too festive,
being a bit lacking on the friend front, so when our neighbour, Helena, invited
us to her home for a Christmas drink, I happily agreed to relieve the boredom
for a few hours.

“Get a grip on yourself tonight,” I warned
Aunt June as we walked down the road to Helena’s house. Helena had a son around
my age who was almost good looking and, most importantly to my aunt, single.
“Just because we’re having a drink with her doesn’t mean I’m getting engaged to
her son, alright?”

“I don’t know what you mean. You’re the
one who needs to get a grip on themselves after Frank and Kate’s party.”

“Let it go already, that was weeks ago.”

“You could at least have worn a dress,”
she berated me for the third time that evening as we walked up the driveway.

“There’s nothing wrong with what I’m
wearing,” I hissed, looking down at my shirt and posh jeans.

“People are very conservative here, they
like women to wear a dress.”

“Well, I’m very conservative; I like to think
it’s up to me what I wear.”

“You’ll never get a man, dressed like
that.”

“Promise?”

The front door opened suddenly and we both
chorused “Merry Christmas!” with big smiles.

It was a slightly larger gathering than I’d
expected with a dozen or so other people plus our host. The others all appeared
to be locals which was a welcome break to me from the usual expats. For a start,
I’d get to spend an evening not being interrogated about the Tina Lloyd case.

I was careful not to be patronising and
assume they wouldn’t speak very good English. Not that Addi’s words had had any
effect on me, he was totally mistaken and obviously didn’t understand me at
all. The fact that I had started cooking a little more, and even done the
laundry on my last day off, had nothing to do with what he’d said. We still
hadn’t spoken since our argument, which was some feat considering the size of
the police department. I just hoped he didn’t try crawling back asking for help
again; I hated to see grown men cry.

Helena’s son, Michalis, a tall, dark,
not-exactly-handsome-but-attractive-in-a-craggy-way thirtysomething, was in
attendance. Despite my threat, Aunt June still managed to engineer it so I was
standing next to him. She looked mighty pleased with herself as she made a pathetic
excuse and walked off, leaving us alone together.

“Nice lady,” Michalis remarked.

“Sometimes.”

We stood awkwardly in silence for a few
seconds.

“Are you here for Christmas?” I asked.

“I live in Demitra but I’ll be here on
Christmas Eve. My mother and my Yiayia will want me to take them to the church,
of course.”