Dead Woman's Shoes: 1 (Lexy Lomax Mysteries) (2 page)

“Hi. I’m returning that call you just made about discreet services,” Lexy announced matter-of-factly. “I think I should tell you…”

“Er… I want a surveillance job done,” the voice cut in, nervously.

Surveillance job, eh? She’d never heard it called that before. “As I said,” she reiterated coldly, “I think I should tell you…”

“I’ll pay over the odds for a quick result.”

Lexy’s mouth set. Quick result? She’d give him a quick result, all right. “Look – you’re talking to the wrong person, mate,” she snapped.

“It’s my wife. I think she’s… up to something. I just need you to follow her when she goes out.”

Lexy stopped in the act of forcibly replacing the telephone receiver.

“Follow her?”

“Er – I did phone the right number, didn’t I? Discreet undercover investigations?”

Lexy closed her eyes slowly. The poor sod wanted a private detective, not a private massage.

She snapped them open again. If that was the case, why was he calling Otter’s End? Lexy hadn’t quite recovered from the notion that Glenda Doyle might have been an ageing call girl. The idea that she could have been an ageing private eye seemed, if anything, even more bizarre.

But it would at least explain the presence of a large magnifying glass in the kitchen drawer.

She had to quell a sudden snort of laughter.

“As I said,” continued the voice, “I will pay over the odds.”

Lexy hesitated. If Glenda really had been a private investigator, and this injured ego thought he was talking to her, and, more to the point, was prepared to hand over some cash, it might not do any harm to play along for a minute. Just see what the deal was.

“So you need your wife… tailed?” she queried.

The relief in the man’s voice was almost tangible. “That’s right. I just want to find out… you know… what she’s doing. I’ll give you fifty in advance, and two hundred pounds to follow if you can get me some photographic evidence. Cash in hand.”

Two hundred and fifty pounds? For following a woman about for the night? Lexy whistled under her breath. Could she get away with it? It would certainly get her out of a tight spot. She only had a handful of loose change to her name.

Not counting the half million quid in the suitcase under the bed, of course. But she couldn’t touch that – she had some morals. Anyway, she didn’t want to risk getting her prints on it.

Through the open kitchen hatch she glimpsed the near-empty larder. The chihuahua was watching her intently. He was down to his last can of Pedigree Chum. And it was a small one.

“All right – make it a round three,” said the voice, sounding slightly exasperated at her silence.

Lexy took a deep breath. How difficult could it be to spy on a straying housewife?

“Three fifty. A hundred in advance. That’s my last offer.”

“OK. I’ll do it,” Lexy said quickly. She resisted saying that she’d throw in a private massage, too, at that price.

“Right – I’ll bring the details over. Where’s your office?”

Office? Lexy was thrown. “Er… I work from home, actually. Otter’s End. Top of Cliff Lane.” Damn. She shouldn’t have given her address out.

“Fine,” said the voice. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

2

Lexy stared incredulously at Kinky, the green plastic receiver still in her hand.

“And I was worried we’d starve to death in this shack. It’s not even nine-thirty and I’ve already made three hundred and fifty quid.”

The chihuahua gave her a dubious look, then, large bat-like ears pricked, he jumped down from the sofa and trotted up to the door leading out to the back veranda, looking round at her expectantly.

“Oi, you might show a bit of interest,” Lexy chided. “We’re talking here about the first proper job I’ve ever had, and all you can think about is your bladder.”

He gave her a toothy grin.

Kinky had belonged to Gerard’s mother until she had become too ill to look after him, a year back. Her dying wish had been for Gerard and Lexy to take care of the dog, but when the time came and Kinky was deposited at their house in a small wicker dog basket, Gerard was all for taking him straight to Battersea. He’d never liked lap dogs. Lap dancers – now, that was different.

Chihuahuas weren’t really Lexy’s cup of tea either, but to her a promise was a promise. The relationship was on a strict understanding, though.

“I’ll come clean with you,” Lexy had told him. “I don’t like small dogs. And they don’t come much smaller than you, pal. But I’ll make you a deal. You yap, you go. You don’t yap, you stay. And for my part, I promise that, unlike your previous owner, I won’t tote you around in a shopping bag and I won’t make you wear a designer coat. Or a necktie. Or a retractable lead.”

Kinky looked as if he could stand the offer, so an uneasy truce had mellowed over the months into respectful friendship.

In fact, in many ways, Kinky was the perfect companion, always polite, sympathetic and loyal. There was just the one small problem.

Still, thought Lexy, eyeing him apprehensively, perhaps the calming influence of the countryside would help him grow out of that particular habit.

She replaced the receiver and followed the dog. As she unbolted the door and pushed it open a wall of heat and brilliance hit them.

When Lexy’s eyes adjusted, the view that met them eased the disturbing events of the past twenty-four hours aside like a soothing bedtime lullaby.

Otter’s End had been built on the very edge of a cliff. In front of Lexy lay the jade green sea and forget-me-not blue sky of a child’s painting. There was even a round yellow sun at the top right hand corner.

She took a few more steps forward, gazing at the smooth muscles of water rolling hypnotically towards the shore. It was tempting to clamber down the cliff face there and then, rip off her clothes and run straight in. But the salt water, she mused, would play havoc with her new tattoo.

She stretched out her arm, twisting it this way and that, to admire the intricate Celtic knot work. Gerard would have hated it, she thought with satisfaction. She was tempted to send him a photo.

She made her way around the veranda, her ebullient mood only mildly quashed when she discovered that the cabin itself wasn’t such a pretty sight.

Its wooden side panels were bleached and rotten, strung about with unpleasant grey skeins of long-abandoned spiders’ webs. The roof on the leeward side was green and slippery with lichen, patched up in several places with polythene sheeting. The guttering sagged ominously below the eaves. Still, she could fix it up. She’d bought the place for a song, so she couldn’t expect much. And that view was second to none. But, a small voice annoyingly reminded her, the cabin had still cost her all the money she possessed. All the money she had inherited when her dad died last summer.

Lexy moved swiftly off again around the cabin. On the far side she found a complicated-looking electrical junction box, together with a large, ugly red gas cylinder. It was half-empty. She’d have to find out how to get it refilled, or replaced. She didn’t even like to think what the sewage situation might be.

The cabin had a garden of sorts, long-neglected, enclosed by a low picket fence. Beyond lay a tangle of gorse, heather and young birch. Lexy threaded her way through an open gateway to a small grass clearing. Nearby on the cliff edge she could see the top of a set of wooden steps that she assumed led down to the beach. All pretty much as Derek Flint had described. But not quite as she had imagined.

Something was missing.

People. There was no trace of any other log cabins, or for that matter any sign of human habitation at all. But she wasn’t complaining. As it happened, it would suit her very nicely to live in splendid isolation. It reminded her of when she was a kid, living in the caravan, picking the quietest spots they could, the places where they were less likely to be moved on.

“You know, I haven’t stayed by the sea for years, Kinks,” she mused. “Except abroad, of course.” She felt a spear of guilt. The Caribbean Islands, Acapulco Bay, Madagascar. All-inclusive, sanitised resorts where the illusion of paradise was unspoilt by the inconvenient sight and sound of the native people. “No – the last time was about eighty-seven, when Dad and I fetched up in Norfolk. That was a great summer.”

She was thinking about her dad again, and an upbringing she had vowed to forget, when, thirteen years ago, she turned her back on him and the caravan. The day she let herself be driven away in a flashy Range Rover by Gerard Warwick-Holmes, like some exotic artefact he’d discovered in one of his precious attics.

“She’s got gypsy blood, you know,” Gerard would murmur suggestively to his friends, as if that made her dynamite in the sack.

Well, that novelty soon wore off. With a snort, Lexy scanned the grass margins, where yellow tormentil flowered in profusion. What did her dad call it? Blood-root. Another memory from her childhood: she and her dad collecting wild plants, making ointments, salves and lotions and selling them from the van. Must have been good, too, because the same people came back for them year after year, as the caravan did its annual rounds.

But then there were the others, the people who called them gyppos and pikeys. Smug, ignorant hypocrites who didn’t understand the nomadic way of living.

Lexy kicked at the grass, angry that she’d allowed herself to be persuaded that the travelling life was something she had to be rescued from.

Lexy’s grandmother, Lal, had come from a old Kent Romany family. Lexy had the blood running through her veins, all right. Thing was, Lal chose to settle with a
Gorja
, a non-gypsy man. It wasn’t the accepted custom to marry outside the Romany community, so rather than give her man up, her grandmother had become estranged from her roots.

Lexy’s dad, Lal’s only child, never knew where he fitted in. He didn’t belong with the Roma, nor with the New Age traveller set; but he still had an instinct to hit the open road. He bought a caravan and made a living doing anything he could – carpentry, gardening, making and selling potions, stewarding at the summer festivals. He met Lexy’s mother, Angelica, at Glastonbury. Admired her humanitarian principles and lustrous black hair. Nine months later Lexy was born in a tent, with the sound of an anti-hunting demonstration kicking off in the background. Angelica, by all accounts, had been pretty annoyed to miss that demo.

Martyn Lomax handed on to his daughter everything that Lal taught him about the countryside from the old Romany knowledge. It seemed like a long time since Lexy walked with him in the woods at dawn and dusk. But she hadn’t forgotten. Neither had she forgotten how she used to spend hours on end tracking badgers, foxes and owls, trying for candid shots with the old SLR camera her dad had given her when she passed her exams. Secret surveillance. A skill that might come in handy in the near future.

In fact, one might even say that she had a talent for that sort of thing.

Half an hour later Lexy was washed, dressed in her spare jeans and a clean t-shirt, and gazing at the selfsame camera from her youth. She hadn’t taken a shot with it for years.

The sound of car wheels scrunching along the rough gravel path outside made her look up sharply.

“Here we go then,” she said to Kinky, taking a deep breath. “Try to look like we run a professional outfit here. No scratching or leg-lifting.”

She placed the battered old camera out of view.

A car door was slammed, and moments later there was a quiet rap on the wooden door.

Lexy opened it, Kinky sitting watchfully on the arm of the sofa.

A small, bald man in a blue suit stood on the threshold, clutching a Jiffy bag.

“I called earlier,” he said. “About my wife. Name’s Roderick Todd.”

“Lexy Lomax. Come in.” She offered her hand. His was both damp and limp. Lexy dropped it quickly.

“I’ve never done this before.” Mr Todd stepped into the living room.

Join the club, mate.

Up close he had eyes as large, soft and violet as pansies, in a face that was the colour and texture of a field mushroom. He was probably, guessed Lexy, in his mid-fifties, and, judging by his nervous tic and champed nails, he wasn’t comfortable in the role of injured spouse.

“Have a seat,” she offered. Some minutes earlier she had hastily whisked the living room surfaces with an old flannel she’d found in the bathroom, and plumped up the cushions on the chintz sofa.

They now seemed to be moving in a world of dust, thousands of disturbed motes swirling lazily in the sunlight that striped the living room. She fervently hoped Roderick Todd didn’t have an allergy. He’d be leaving Otter’s End in an ambulance before he even had a chance to say ‘marital infidelity’.

“Is he all right?”

Lexy wrenched her mind from the dust. Mr Todd, hovering by the sofa, was indicating Kinky, who was regarding this stranger with genial interest. “I mean, he won’t bite or anything?”

“No – he’s fine with… people,” Lexy assured him, but she shooed Kinky from the sofa anyway. He sat in the middle of the room instead, and began scratching himself loutishly.

Lexy gave him a murderous look, and turned back to Mr Todd, who was struggling awkwardly in the sofa’s sagging embrace.

Pretending not to notice, she sat opposite him.

Once he’d gained an upright position, Mr Todd, looking discomfited, opened his Jiffy bag, shook the contents on to the coffee table and slid them towards her. A couple of glossy photos and some handwritten notes.

“Self-explanatory, really,” he mumbled. “The pictures of my wife, Avril, are fairly recent – last year, in fact, at the Clopwolde-on-Sea summer fete.”

Lexy examined the photos. It had obviously been raining heavily that day. Summer fete, England, stood to reason. The woman pointed out by Mr Todd was a big, beefy type, with a pile of rust-coloured hair and a blue two-piece outfit. She was one of the tallest in a group of drenched and wry people, overshadowing her small, fretful husband, who stood next to her, by at least four inches. And she was the only one not cracking a smile.

Lexy glanced up at Mr Todd with a new sympathy.