Playing James (27 page)

'Don't say anything in there.'

'I never say anything,' I whisper indignantly.

'I think "never" might be a bit of an exaggeration,' he mutters.

We sit in silence for a second. I take in the slightly faded floral wallpaper, the old desk the secretary was sitting behind and the rather ancient typewriter that should have been retired and replaced by a computer system long ago. There is a slight air of refined shabbiness and the distinct impression that the offices, along with Elephant Insurance Company, have seen better days.

I glance over at James. He is quietly surveying the scene before him. This morning, I would guess in anticipation of this interview, he is wearing a smart blue shirt and tie coupled with faded beige chinos. His boyish, short-haired good looks are somewhat at odds with the room.

He looks over at me under the intensity of my glance and smiles. 'What's up?'

I quickly look back to the floor. 'Nothing. Bit nervous, I think.'

I mentally give myself a shake. Good Lord, for a moment there I was almost lusting after him. Try not to make a complete tit of yourself, please, I tell myself firmly. He's getting married to Fleur in a matter of weeks, Robin is doing a passably good impression of
The French Lieutenant's Woman
and now even you are starting to hum 'Another One Bites The Dust'. Get a grip. He barely tolerates me, let alone likes me.

The pink-frosted secretary comes back and tells us Mr Makin will see us now. As we get up to follow her through to another office, James asks if Mr Makin owns the company and the secretary answers in the affirmative. The room we are shown into is a complete contrast to the reception. A bejewelled chandelier hangs from an ornate ceiling and thick-sashed drapes hang at the windows. A gentleman, whom I presume is Mr Makin, rises from a fine antique desk where a laptop lies open and moves towards us holding out his hand. He smiles jovially.

'Morning, morning! How do you do?'

I would place him in his late fifties. His grey hair is thinning, terrible bags hang from his brown eyes and he has a ruddy complexion that to my mind speaks of too much alcohol. There is a faint smell of cigar smoke in the air. He is wearing a three-piece, dark, pin-striped suit with a perky red handkerchief poking out of his top pocket.

After shaking hands, James flips open his ID. 'I am Detective Sergeant James Sabine and this is Holly Colshannon.' He waits for a reaction and apparently not in vain. A look of horror comes over Mr Makin's face and his mouth drops open.

'It's not my wife, is it?' I don't think this was the reaction that James was hoping for and certainly not the one I was expecting. Without me even being aware of it, I think I had all but sentenced Mr Makin.

'No, Mr Makin,' James says quickly. 'We're here about a business matter. We've made an appointment.'

Mr Makin lets out a stream of air and stares at the ground for a second. He fishes the red handkerchief out of his pocket and mops his forehead.

'Thank goodness. I thought you were about to tell me my wife had been in an accident or something.'

'I'm sorry to have alarmed you, sir,' replies James. I think we've got the wrong guy – I was naively expecting him to hold out his hands to be cuffed and say, 'It's a fair cop, guv'nor'.

Instead Mr Makin does none of that. He strides over to the door and pulls it open. His secretary almost falls in. He ignores her apparent over-enthusiasm and says calmly from his elevated position, 'Ah! Miss Rennie. Could you kindly get us some coffee?'

She quickly nods and disappears off on her mission. He returns behind his desk and looks from one to the other of us.

'Now, I'm afraid I only have half an hour as I have to go out to an appointment later. So how can I help?'

'Damn. Damn and bugger,' says James furiously once we are out on the pavement and striding towards the car. We both get in.

'He didn't seem very guilty.'

'No, he didn't.'

James sits behind the steering wheel and stares into space. I don't like to say anything just in case he's about to solve the whole case. You know, like when Miss Marple is talking about knitting and then suddenly,
voilà
!, she knows who the murderer is! The minutes tick by and I start to worry that maybe he's thinking about how to achieve that ribbed effect on his latest sweater.

'Er, James?'

'Hmm?'

'Anything wrong?'

'Something,' he murmurs. I leave him to his contemplation of the moss stitch for a little longer. After a few more minutes I can bear it no longer. 'What? What's wrong?'

He shifts in his seat and turns his body towards me. 'Nothing's wrong. Nothing at all on the face of it. There's just something … Did you notice all the clocks?' he says suddenly.

'The clocks?'

'Yeah.' He looks at me intently.

'Well, there were a couple …'

'There were five in his office alone.'

'Were there? Maybe he's late a lot.'

James looks at me impatiently and sighs.

'Sony,' I say. 'Well? What do you want to do?' I add after a bit longer. I'm getting a little impatient of this sponsored silence stuff.

'I want to see where he goes on his appointment.'

'Fine. So, er, what does that entail?'

'Sitting here and watching where he goes.'

'I knew that.'

James starts the car and drives off, just in case the secretary is watching us from the window. We go once around the block and then park further up the street where we can't be seen from the windows of the office but we can see who comes out of the door.

'How do you know there isn't a back door?'

'I counted the number of doors in each room,' he explains patiently with a glimmer of a smile. 'It's something I learnt at detecting school.'

'So could you call this a sort of stakeout?' I ask excitedly.

'If it makes you happy. The term "stakeout" imparts a sort of glamour though. And I don't think you could describe a ten-minute session sitting in a Vauxhall as glamorous.'

'We could be here for hours though!'

An hour and a half later I have called the paper, called Lizzie, called Vince and made a start on today's diary instalment on my laptop (and if we sit here much longer, boy am I going to be pushed for subject matter). James also has called his office, Fleur and his office again. Once the mobiles have fallen silent for a couple of minutes, I say, 'Do you want some coffee? I can go and see if I can find some,' 'That would be great.'

'Do you want something to eat as well?'

'I'm starving. Didn't have a chance to have breakfast this morning.'

'What do you want?'

'Surprise me.' He gets out his wallet and shoves a ten-pound note towards me. 'Hurry up, because I'll have to go without you if Makin leaves, and don't walk past his offices.'

'I may not have been to detecting school, but I am not stupid,' I say haughtily. I wander off down the road and find a little corner shop about three hundred yards away. After loading myself up with goodies, I make my way back to the car.

'No coffee,' I say as I drop my purchases into the foot well, 'but I do have … a banana milkshake!' I triumphantly produce it from my carrier bag.

'Thanks.' He takes it from me and shakes it vigorously in the manner of someone completely au fait with banana milkshakes, his eyes still trained on Mr Makin's front door. 'Got any crisps?'

I chuck a packet of salt and vinegar and another one of cheesy puffs at him. 'No Monster Munch?' he asks, aghast.

'You are not going to stink out our stakeout with Monster Munch.'

I curl my feet up under me and we munch in silence.

'Fleur tells me your folks are coming to the wedding.'

'Yeah, sorry about that. They always seem to turn up where you least expect it.'

'I'll look forward to …' James never finishes his sentence because a figure suddenly looms up outside my window, waving some black hardware around. I almost literally jump out of my skin and in a reflex action grasp my handbag to me (you can always count on me in a crisis). James leaps out of the car, runs around to my side and before I know it has thrust the figure into the back of the car. The figure is giggling to itself and wearing a particularly fetching pair of leather trousers and a pink shirt.

Vince leans between the two front seats. 'What's going on?' he whispers theatrically.

'Vince!' I say hotly, smacking him with my handbag, 'you complete parsnip. You scared me. We're on a stakeout.'

'How exciting! Can I be on it too?'

James gets back in the driver's side. 'Vince, what the hell are you doing? We're trying to keep a low profile.'

'I can keep a low profile,' Vince says indignantly.

'No, you bloody can't. The only profiles you know are loud and conspicuous.'

'Oooh, you cad.'

'How did you know where we were?'

'Holly called half an hour ago and happened to mention it.'

'I didn't mean for you to come down. Anyway, where did you get your leather trousers from?' I interject, more weightier matters pressing on my mind.

'Do you like them? There's this little shop on the Bath Road and …"

'Holly! Vince!' says James heatedly. We both look at him in surprise. 'Do you mind?'

'He
is
a cad, isn't he?' I say to Vince.

'I should say so. Can I have a crisp?'

Once James has forcibly ejected Vince from the car and forbidden him to come back, we continue with the important business of watching the offices.

'Flapjack?' I proffer.

'Thanks.'

I fight with the wrapper and remark, 'Flapjacks always remind me of my childhood. My mother used to give them to us after school. She can't cook to save her life though; used to take us half an hour to clean our teeth afterwards.'

'Do you have any brothers and sisters?' he asks without taking his eyes from Mr Makin's building.

'Yeah, I've got three brothers and one sister.'

'Blimey. Your mother probably gave them to you to shut you all up.'

'Meal times did get a bit noisy.'

James takes a bite of his flapjack, his eyes still firmly fixed on his quarry. 'Tell me about them.'

So I tell him a bit about my childhood, and how we used to move around with my mother's career because she insisted on having us with her when she was on tour. I tell him what fun we all used to have as we moved from town to town and how the rest of the actors and actresses in the tour group became our surrogate aunts and uncles. I explain how my father was a consultant, so his posts only lasted for a year or two before we moved on, which suited my parents' wanderlust perfectly. But I also mention how miserable it was to keep on moving from one school to another, constantly leaving friends behind and having to make new ones. I tell him how we finally settled permanently in Cornwall when my father retired and I was able to go to the same school for a number of years. In turn, I ask him about his childhood. He tells me about an existence that is completely alien to me, generally due to the fact that it all took place in one spot. We laugh at his tales of woe concerning an unrequited crush on the barmaid at the local pub and he even tells me a little about Rob, his brother who was killed last year.

'I suppose you see a lot of horrible stuff?' I say randomly.

'Yeah, I suppose I do.'

'So why do you do it? Why did you want to join the police force?' I ask, suddenly curious.

He glances over at me, probably suspicious of my question and my motive for asking it. After a second, his face relaxes and he says, 'I've always wanted to join the police force.'

'Why?'

'Something happened when I was a kid.'

'Tell me?'

He hesitates for a second. 'Well, I grew up in Gloucestershire. My folks had a farm in a village where absolutely nothing ever, ever happened. In fact, Rob and I used to daily berate the fact that nothing ever happened. Imagine it – two spotty, hormonal teenagers moping around, chucking themselves on to the sofa like the archetypal Kevin, griping about how bored they were. Not that we didn't have plenty to do; there is always loads to be done on a farm. But then one day this little girl from the village just vanished, just disappeared. The manhunt was enormous; everyone turned out and we searched with the police day and night for about twelve days until they called the search off. Then the people from the village searched by themselves for another five days until one by one we all went home. But we all grieved for this little girl and the community was never the same again. This village, where nothing ever happened, had been violated. The parents of the little girl were so traumatised and harassed that they moved away. I just felt so helpless throughout the whole thing. There was nothing I could possibly do to alleviate any of the pain. So I joined the force as soon as I could, thinking, I might perhaps be able to help somebody in the future.' He shrugs and looks a little embarrassed.

'You said the parents of the little girl were harassed?'

'Yeah. By the press.' He glances over to me. 'They camped on their doorstep, waiting to catch their pain on camera and in words. It was horrible.'

'So that's why you don't like the press very much.'

'Correct.'

'Did they ever find out what happened to the little girl?'

'Yeah, they found her body a month later. Raped and strangled.'

We sit in silence for a few seconds and now, at last, I can understand why he hated this diary idea so much and why he was so antagonistic towards me. And I don't blame him at all.

'So, have you ever regretted your decision? To go into the police force?'

'Never. I love it,' he says with a warmth that surprises me. T like the fact that I meet people, you know, normal people, and although we can't solve every single case, it's really satisfying when we do.'

'You said your folks
had
a farm. What do they do now?'

'They sold it last year and retired early.'

There are a dozen more questions I would like to ask him. But not for the diary, for me. I would like to know. But I don't want to look as though I am being the delving reporter, the 'I'm your best friend so bare your soul to me and then you'll see our intimate conversation splashed all over the news tomorrow' type. So instead we fall into a companionable silence and both stare ahead, lost in our own thoughts. My head is full of images of his childhood and I wish I could see pictures of him back then.