Dead Woman's Shoes: 1 (Lexy Lomax Mysteries) (6 page)

“Hello. My name’s Doyle. I’d like to check on a small ad I have running in Personals.”

“’Ang on a mo’,” said a bored-sounding female voice. After considerably longer than Lexy’s understanding of a ‘mo’ the voice returned.

“Mrs G Doyle is it?”

“Yes,” said Lexy, smoothly.

“I got the original order here. Repeat until September first it says. It’s on a bank order. All paid for.”

“Right. Thanks.”

She replaced the receiver thoughtfully.

Glenda Doyle’s ad would keep running for three more months.

5

Lexy went into the kitchen and unpacked her meagre shopping. She needed something fresh and green to supplement it. And she knew exactly where to get that.

She went back out into the midday sun and cast around, collecting soft young leaves from a hawthorn tree, dandelion greens from a flowering clump growing near the cabin, and a bunch of tender nettle tips, protecting her hands to pick the latter.

Lexy gave a wry grin. If only Gerard could see her now, transformed from yesterday’s sophisticated city blonde to a dishevelled ragamuffin, revelling in the delights of Mother Nature. She’d gone full circle.

Lexy had met Gerard Warwick-Holmes thirteen years ago, when she’d just turned sixteen. Angelica had left for China, intent on joining an ongoing campaign on behalf of beleaguered wildlife, and she stopped writing after a while. Lexy’s dad went into a decline, and became snappish and withdrawn, neglecting his awkward teenage daughter just when she needed him.

As they did the annual rounds in the caravan, Lexy took to visiting towns on route, just to watch the other teenagers – the ones who had homes and normal parents, and went to regular schools with their friends. The ones who wore trendy clothes, and always seemed to be laughing and joking, as if they were enjoying some hilarious party that Lexy couldn’t go to.

One day, a scorcher in mid-August, Lexy was mooching around a Sunday market in a small county town near their pitch. Her dad hadn’t wanted to walk the two miles into town and back – he was trying to fix the tow hitch or something. There was always something.

Lexy, wearing a dowdy old hippy skirt and a t-shirt which had seen better days, was looking at the second-hand video tapes. She glanced over to the next stall, a big one, selling bric-a-brac. A man was examining a stack of old pictures. Her glance turned into a stare. Wasn’t that…?

He turned around and clocked her. A smile hovered over his lips. It was an expression she would get to know very well.

“Hiya.” He wore expensive-looking pre-faded jeans, with a white shirt open at the collar. His white-blond hair was gelled into fashionable untidiness, and little rectangular glasses framed his pale blue eyes. He looked like an advert for Gap, except he was about thirty. And he looked even taller in the flesh than he did on the box.

Because it was definitely Gerard Warwick-Holmes, from
Heirlooms in Your Attic
– the antiques expert currently making a name for himself discovering lucrative hidden treasures in people’s lofts, attics and cellars.

Lexy swallowed and managed to mumble a greeting. She’d never met anyone famous in her life. His sheen of glamour instantly put everyone around him into the shade.

He was giving her a long stare now. “Have you got a name?”

“L… Alexandra.”

“You’ve caught me doing a bit of research, Alexandra. What do you reckon to this?”

He didn’t even bother to introduce himself, so confident was he that she recognised him.

Lexy focused with difficulty on the framed painting that he was holding.

“It’s a… p… print,” she faltered. “Probably only worth a couple of quid, but the frame’s a good one. You could get a tenner for that.”

“I can tell you’re a fan of the show.”

She nodded, letting Gerard Warwick-Holmes think she’d learned that stuff from him, rather than from her dad, who’d been to a few antiques sales himself in his time.

Gerard took a quick look at his watch. “Lunchtime by my reckoning. Would you like to come for a drink with me, Alexandra?”

She reddened. “I’m only sixteen.”

He stepped back, glancing around. “Sorry. Sorry. You… look older.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve had a hard life.”

He smiled at that, not realising that she wasn’t joking, then caught her bleak expression. “OK,” he said, seeming to understand, obviously thinking rapidly. “How about a trip to London instead? Tomorrow? See the sights. And I’ll get you back by bedtime. Your bedtime that is,” he added, hastily.

“Are you kidding?” Lexy blurted. She had only been to London three times, all for demos. It had been kind of hard to see the Trafalgar lions from the middle of a yelling, placard-wielding crowd of peace protesters.

“No. I mean it. We can get a boat trip down the Thames, stop off at the Tower, go up the West End…” His pale blue eyes were hypnotically persuasive. That was the trouble.

Lexy felt her entire spirit soar at the thought of doing all those things with Gerard Warwick-Holmes. He was quite a bit older than her, but that didn’t make it bad, did it? It wasn’t as if he was married. Lexy knew that, because his divorce from a TV soap star had been all over the tabloids. What she couldn’t understand was why he was asking her out when he could have anyone. But why worry about that when…?

Then a problem far more pressing than Gerard’s age and recent history enveloped Lexy like a shabby old anorak. “I can’t come,” she said dully. “I haven’t got anything to wear.” And there was the small matter of her dad.

“Don’t worry,” Gerard said, quickly. “We can fix that. Quick trip to Monsoon or somewhere, before we get the boat. What are you, a perfect size ten?”

No one had ever described her as perfect before.

He left her a mobile number and prowled away through the stalls like an albino tiger, throwing her back a meaningful blue glance.

Lexy sneaked out of the van early the following morning, leaving her dad a note to say she was going to town. She just didn’t specify which town.

When she got back that evening she was wearing designer jeans, a funky blue sequinned top and jewelled flip-flops. A new mobile phone resided unseen in a new beaded shoulder bag. Gerard had dropped her off in a quiet lane a couple of hundred yards out of sight and sped off immediately. He seemed to relish the cloak and dagger stuff.

“Good time?” her dad asked. He was leaning on the van door, smoking a roll-up.

“Yes.” Lexy gave him a brilliant smile.

Her dad squinted at her. “Those new clothes?”

“Just a couple of things.”

“How much?”

“A few quid. I got them from the cheap shop. Used my bracelet money.”

Martyn Lomax looked almost convinced. He was aware that Lexy braided brightly coloured bracelets in the evenings, and sold them for cash where she could. He hadn’t questioned her any further, and she and Gerard Warwick-Holmes managed to meet a few more times behind his back. Lexy even visited his smart South Kensington flat one afternoon.

That was all until her dad picked up a newspaper and saw a photo of his daughter and Gerard Warwick-Holmes in the gossip column.

TV’s Mr Heirloom seems to have acquired a bijou treasure of his own
, the column ran.
But she’s no antique
…

After a barrage of furious questions about how and when and where they had met, and how the hell long it had been going on, and how the hell old Gerard was, Martyn Lomax had finally thrust the paper in her face.

“Has this bastard tried anything on with you?”

“Nope,” Lexy replied, brick-red and unblinking.

“So why don’t I believe you? Oh Lexy – he’s got you lying already. We’re talking about someone who lives in the shallow, material, narrow-minded world that we rejected years ago.”

“That you rejected,” Lexy burst out. “I never got a chance. Anyway, you’re happy enough to watch his shallow, material, narrow-minded TV show every week.”

“That was before I realised he’d been screwing my sixteen-year-old daughter.”

There was a horrible silence.

At that moment Lexy hated her dad, hated him for making what she and Gerard had sound grubby. She just wanted to hurt him, and keep on hurting him. “Actually, he’s asked me to marry him.”

Martyn Lomax went pale. He glanced down at the crumpled newspaper again, spoke quietly. “What would your mother think?”

“This would be the mother I haven’t heard from for eighteen months because she’s more concerned about saving the planet than being with me?”

It was too close to the truth.

Lexy stared at her dad’s receding back, already regretting her words, but too proud to admit it. Her campaigning mother was never coming back, and they both knew it. She was probably in the Philippines by then, trying to stop illegal logging. Or chasing a Japanese whaling boat. Stuff Lexy used to care about. But what was the point? We were all going to hell in a handcart anyway – at least that was what Gerard reckoned. Might as well enjoy the trip. Lexy groped in her beaded bag for her mobile phone.

“Can you come and get me? Now?”

She never saw her dad again.

Lexy walked slowly into the log cabin, washed her green bounty and simmered up a pan of couscous.

“I’m gonna make a hedgerow salad just like we used to in the van,” she called to Kinky, a little too brightly. “And it’s as well my old man taught me my aconite from my elder, or you might be following Mrs Todd on your own tomorrow.”

When she had finished eating, Lexy leaned back on the sofa next to Kinky, and picked up her old camera again. It had a new film in it, never used. Touching the wooden coffee table for luck, she took off the lens cap.

“Smile,” she said to Kinky. He glared at her, but she took the picture anyway, relieved to hear a familiar click.

Lexy leaned back, allowing Roderick Todd to swim into view. She wasn’t able to pinpoint exactly what she found wrong with the man, but he was definitely odd. One of his oddities, she decided, was the way he had phrased things when talking about his wife’s transgressions.

She might be getting into something she can’t control.

Lexy scrunched up her face. Avril Todd looked like a woman who was entirely in control of her world, definitely not the sort to make a fool of herself with a bout of uninhibited passion.

She checked out the photos again. They hadn’t quite done Avril justice. She had been a lot more morose in the flesh – one of those perpetually discontented middle-aged women, with scowling eyes and a mouth permanently wedged down at the corners. The sort of woman who always looked at the cloud, never the silver lining.

But someone other than her husband must have discovered a quality in Avril that floated his boat.

And what else had Roderick Todd said? Something about wanting to nip it in the bud there and then? Not wanting to have to move again.

Move? If everyone moved because their partner had an affair the whole country would be in perpetual motion.

Lexy frowned. Mr Todd even seemed to know who his wife was meeting. What he really wanted – and this was the other strange thing – was photographic evidence of exactly what they were doing. As if he couldn’t guess.

But at least Roderick Todd had been civil during their exchange, unlike Hope Ellenger.

Even though Lexy had met the receptionist on what was clearly a bad day for her, she had been inexplicably rude. Particularly when she discovered that Lexy had moved to Clopwolde from London.

Lexy shuddered when she remembered the singular look of hatred the woman had thrown at her when she realised that Lexy was ‘seeing’ her brother that coming Saturday. Even though this was genteel Suffolk, it occurred to her that she was a tad exposed up here on her own with half a million quid under the bed and the world’s smallest guard dog.

She shifted uncomfortably. She really ought to do something about that money, but she needed a contact. Perhaps the vet could help out there. He probably knew the right people.

Guy Ellenger, Lexy considered, seemed to be everything that his sister wasn’t. Engaging, kind, funny, understanding. And he had called her Ms. He was almost too nice.

Although, when she had accidentally blabbed that she was a private eye, he had been quick enough to take advantage of it and ask if she could look into the disappearance of that deformed cat. It was clearly preying on his mind. Lexy was no cat expert, but she knew from the number of posters on lamp-posts she had seen in her life that cats had a tendency to disappear from home, even those kept under lock and key. And how would a pampered moggy like that fare in the countryside around Clopwolde, if that’s where it ended up? Finding the thing might prove a little more tricky than she first thought. She rubbed her nose. With any luck it might turn up of its own accord before Saturday and save her the trouble. It wasn’t that she didn’t want a full refund on the money she gave to the vet – just that the iniquities of Avril Todd were more than enough to cope with for someone only pretending to be a private investigator.

She found herself squinting at the Todds’ address again.

4 Windmill Hill, Clopwolde-on-Sea.

“Better take a quick trip over there this afternoon and check out where this house is,” she said to her canine companion. “Don’t want any wrong address balls-ups.”

Kinky’s eyes conveyed the information that he wasn’t going anywhere with this stupid funnel on.

“Hope she doesn’t drive too fast when I’m following her,” Lexy went on, now pacing the living room restlessly. “Her Volvo’ll leave the Panda standing. How embarrassing would that be?”

Lexy had spotted the lime green Fiat Panda in a driveway in Ealing a few days ago. She needed a car as part of her escape bid, and this one was taxed, MOT’d and a bargain at one hundred and fifty pounds. She bought it on the spot with her rapidly-dwindling cash reserve. Didn’t drive as well as the Mercedes Coupé she’d been used to, but she wasn’t going to keep anything Gerard had bought her. Anyway, it got her to Suffolk in one piece. Just about. Protesting a lot.

She glanced down at Roderick Todd’s notes again. Perhaps this whole private surveillance gig might not be quite the piece of madeira she had originally thought. She could do with a bit of advice right now, as it happened. How would Glenda Doyle have gone about it? She began to pad around the cabin, checking what Glenda had left, as if that would give her some kind of clue. There wasn’t much. A brown waxed jacket, size sixteen, hanging in the hall cupboard. Might come in handy if Lexy put on a couple of stone and lost all her dress sense. A knobbly walking stick propped up by the front door, looking like it had been made from the root of some alien vegetable. The stout brown brogues. All seemed to suggest a lot of footwork. The large magnifying glass in the kitchen drawer, of course, although Lexy had a feeling she wouldn’t need that on her first job, unless Avril Todd had hooked up with a very inadequate lover.