StillWaters:Book4oftheSophieGreenMysteries (24 page)

Exhausted, and not just from the endless digging she was doing into my increasingly sore back, I saw my opportunity and dived in.

“No, actually, we were in Cornwall the other week,” I said.

“Really? Me too!”

Fancy.

“Whereabouts?”

“A little village, steep as you like, not like the lowlands around here, eh pet?”

“On the north coast, or the south?” I asked. “I was in a little village called Port Trevan—d’you know it?”

Laura squealed in delight. “I was exactly there!”

And she was off, talking about the pub, the steep streets, the walks, the old buildings, the sea, the harbour…

“Were you there when that girl was killed?” I asked, and she fell silent.

“Aye,” she said, falteringly, although it could also have been “I”. “I knew her.”

“You did? Oh, how awful.” I was glad my face was hidden in the massage table. I am such a bad liar I don’t know how I didn’t get shot months ago. “Was she on holiday with you?”

“Aye. There were six of us. All worked here, except for Molly.”

“Molly? Was that her name?”

“Aye. Gav’s girlfriend. Ever so pretty, she was, but a bit of a…” Laura sounded uneasy, guilty about speaking ill of the dead, “…a bit of a drama queen, ye ken?”

I noticed her accent getting stronger and stronger, and knew she was distressed. When my parents were upset or angry, they went full-on Yorkshire, throwing thees and thous and owts in all over the place. Same with some of the foreign girls at the airport; their flawless English disintegrated into Franglais or Spanglish when they were stressed.

“Were you close?” I asked.

“Well, not really. She wasna a bad lass, and I can get on with anyone, me, but she kept herself to herself.”

“Even though she was on holiday with the lot of you?”

“Gav said she was upset,” Laura said shortly. “Work stress.”

Oh, Christ, I hadn’t even thought about workmates. This investigating stuff was hard.

“What did she do?”

“Nothing—that was the stress. She used to work for American Airlines but she got laid off, after the crashes, ye ken?”

Yeah, I kenned. I knew that tune. Even in the low cost sector, I knew plenty of people who’d lost their jobs after September 11th. Terrorism hit hard and deep.

“And she couldn’t find another job? Weren’t they even hiring in the summer?”

“Aye, but… Well, she didna want to work. Said the airline business was too fast and rude for her.”

Too fast and too rude for anyone who wasn’t Ruby Wax, actually, but I kept that to myself.

“So she’d been unemployed for two years?”

“No, well, about a year and a half. Little jobs here and there. Temping. Not happy. I canna think why she’d kill herself though.”

My eyebrows went up. “She killed herself?”

“Aye—well, they’re investigating like a murder, but they told everyone it was a suicide, so as not to alarm them.”

Yes, because suicides are so much more reassuring.

“Do you think it was a murder?”

Laura Jones’s hands paused kneading my shoulders. “I canna think of anyone who’d kill her,” she said shortly.

Not helpful.

I decided to stop asking questions for now, mostly because she wanted me to turn over so she could massage my shoulders and head from the front. It occurred to me that it was slightly risky to be putting my neck in the hands of someone who could, theoretically, be a murderer, but somehow I felt safe with Laura Jones. And my impulses are not usually so far off.

I nearly nodded off in the new silence of the room, broken only by the soft fluty, harpy music burbling away in the background. Laura left me for a few minutes to put my robe back on and drink some water, and when she returned, had to wake me up.

“Have you not been sleeping?” she asked, laughing.

“Erm, well, it was just so relaxing,” I said.

“Or has this lovely Luke been keeping you up?” she winked.

I closed my eyes. If only she knew.

She took me out to the Relaxation Room, a big conservatory looking out at the chilly Zen garden, settled me in a big squashy chair and gave me some sweet orange juice to drink.

“I’ll be back in ten minutes, when I’ve sorted out your manicure things,” she said, and off she went, leaving me to sit there and sip my drink and sink into the chair and wonder if my plan for this afternoon was going to work. How Rachel was getting on. If Luke had got in to talk to Michael Varley. If he was still mad at me, or if he just didn’t care any more.

Laura returned and nearly had a heart attack when she saw the state of my hands.

“I had a bit of an accident with some wasps,” I said.

She peered at the tears where I’d pulled the stings out. “Wasps with half-inch stings?”

“Well.” I frowned. “I had to pull them out.”

“Bees leave their stings in,” Laura said firmly, “not wasps.” She got up and went out the door of the treatment room, and came back shaking her head and a large bottle of ammonia. “Was it by any chance a big cooler full of bees?”

I stared at her, suddenly frightened. Where was my gun when I needed it?

“Rumour came from reception someone chucked a cooler full of bees from Parsonage Farm up the road into one of the lakes,” Laura explained. “They were out looking for them. Expensive things, apparently, especially in winter.”

Bees from a bee farm. Of course.

“And I guess you came across them?” Laura asked.

I nodded meekly. “I was curious.”

“Well, of course you were.” She dabbed stinking ammonia on all the stings, then worked on my nails, talking all the time about when she was a little girl and stepped on a bee, och that hurt, and her cousin who was allergic to stings, and how once on holiday they’d found a nest of them—or was that wasps?—anyway, that was how she’d discovered ammonia was the best thing, one of those acid/alkali things, did that feel better?

Yes, actually, it did.

Laura washed it off and bathed my hands in sweet lavender scented cream. She wrapped them in heated mitts and told me to lie back on the tilted bed. Then she got out a whole entire pharmacy of goodies and started to smear them all over my face.

Nearly an hour later, feeling cleansed and radiant, with perfect nails and significantly more comfortable hands, I trundled back to the Relaxation Room, waited for Laura to disappear, then scurried back to the changing room for my bag.

I had allowed myself an hour between treatments for lunch, and the spa had its own healthy little café where I sat and ordered a jacket potato as I got out my phone, ignoring the rest of the guests, and called Rachel.

“My God, you owe me,” she said as soon as she picked up.

“Is it that bad?”

“I’m making a papier-mâché voodoo doll of him as we speak.”

I laughed. Maybe kids weren’t so bad after all. “Have you spoken to him?”

“Oh, yeah. He just talks down to me all the time. Like I’m a little kid.”

Wonder why that is?

“So you haven’t got anything useful?”

“Well, he—just a
minute
,” she said furiously to someone else, and lowered her voice. “Listen to it. About a half hour in. I—” another furtive pause, “damn. Just listen.”

“Is he there?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay. I have to go anyway. I have a jacket potato going cold.”

“Poor baby. Would a man die faster if I did voodoo on his throat, or his balls?”

“Throat.”

“Excellent. Balls it is.”

I ended the call, laughing. I hoped Harvey and Angel made up. I liked Rachel.

I got out the tiny, slim MP3 recorder and scanned the instructions Harvey had scribbled for me. No wonder America is so much more powerful than us when they have agents like him and we have, well, me.

Then I settled down to eat my potato and listen to Rachel’s crèche.

The first half hour was boring, meaningless chatter. Rachel made bored answers to everyone’s enquiries, even Gavin Beasley’s questions about where she was from and why she was here (Rachel told them her father had dumped her with me, her aunt, for the day, but I was a cow and had chucked her in the crèche while I had some beauty treatments. I wasn’t sure if I was pleased with her deadpan delivery or annoyed with her accuracy).

But she countered his questions with her own. “Where are you from?”

“I live a few miles away,” Gav said.

“Alone?”

“Yes, I have a little flat.”

“No girlfriend?” Rachel sneered. “Aren’t you married?”

There was a small pause, then Gavin said, “No, I’m not.”

“Why not?”

“Because I haven’t met the right girl. Ah, Jamie, that’s a lovely picture…” and he faded from the recording.

“Asshole,” Rachel muttered, and for the next twenty minutes answered aimless questions about where she lived and how many new episodes of The Simpsons she’d seen that hadn’t made it here yet, and had she ever been to Sunnydale or Disneyland?

And then, in the background, a phone rang. “His,” Rachel muttered, and there was a slight rustling noise, and the volume suddenly turned up sharply, deafening me with white noise.

“Hi, babe,” Gav’s voice said, muffled by children’s chatter. “No, I’m working… Yeah, they are.” He laughed. “Right precocious set of twats they are too… Yeah, sure, go ahead. Not like anyone’s going to be paying attention.”

Oh, the irony.

There was a longer pause, during which Rachel muttered, “He looks pissed off.” And then Gavin’s voice again, quieter, making me strain to listen.

“You’re joking. Shit. Thought they’d finished with us. What does he look like? …
really
hot? Excellent. No, I’m joking, love. I only have eyes for you… Is his body as good as yours?” Gav laughed. “Well, I should hope you don’t. No, no one’s asked me. ’Cept for a kid, and you know what they’re like. What, the Met are employing little Yank kids now?”

Rachel muttered something under her breath that I mercifully missed. But there was no more to hear from Gavin. A quick
See you later
, and he was off the phone and talking to the kids again.

I stopped the recording and forced myself to swallow the arid piece of potato in my mouth. Okay, maybe I got this wrong, but did it sound to you like…

I replayed the last bit again.

Like he was talking to a lover?

A
male
lover?

Had we got all this horribly, horribly wrong?

I hauled out my phone and sent a text to Rachel to call me as soon as she could. Then I listened to some more, but there was nothing of interest on it.

By the time Laura came to collect me for my seaweed wrap, I was very confused. So Gavin had been going out with Molly Stanton. This was police information. I had heard people I am now sure were Gavin and Molly, arguing the night she died. And yet now, a week and a half later, he was talking to a boyfriend on the phone.

“Is his body as good as yours?” You don’t ask a girl that. That just doesn’t make any sense. As good as
mine
, maybe, if you were a bloke. A jealous one. But he didn’t sound jealous. He sounded playful.

Not grieving.

God, I was confused.

I showered off the smelly seaweed wrap and my phone bleeped at me, reminding me to go and meet Angel. Padding out to the marble reception area, I found her wrapped in a vintage cream wool coat and big dark glasses, despite the dull drizzle outside. The reason for this became clear when she followed me into the changing rooms and revealed a pair of pink-rimmed eyes. They clashed with her pretty blue irises quite badly. I’d never seen Angel looking so wretched.

“Oh, sweetheart,” I gave her a hug, and she sniffed and attempted a smile. “What is it?”

“Clippings,” she sniffed.

What?

“Magazines,” she clarified, dabbing at her eyes with a balsam tissue. “I have a cuttings service?”

Vaguely, I figured out what she was talking about.

“You got sent some clippings today?” She nodded. “Of you and Harvey?”

“At Livvy’s birthday party. He had a green shirt on and he looked so good…” Her pretty face crumpled and dissolved into tears. I sat her down on one of the glossy wooden benches and put my arm around her.

But I didn’t know what to say. Hadn’t it all already been said? It will get better soon, you need to talk to him, things are not as bad as they look. Which one was I going to trot out next?

Thankfully, I was saved by one of the white-uniformed girls coming in and whisking Angel away to have her feet pampered. I squeezed her shoulder and promised to wait for her in the Relaxation Room when my own feet were pretty.

This took quite some time. My feet are generally just there to stop the ends of my legs looking silly. In the summer they get themselves tarted up a little, but in winter things tend to take a decline. I guess they do have a lot of weight to carry.

And they weren’t the only things feeling heavy. My head was hot and dull, like when you have a cold, only the things bunging me up were the problems and secrets I had swirling around me. Angel’s pregnant. Maria’s gay. I’m unemployed. Someone is trying to kill me. Luke—I don’t know. I don’t think he hates me. I just have the awful feeling he’s lost all respect for me.

“You all right, hen?” Laura asked me as she filed away at the dead skin on my heels. “That friend of yours, she looked in a bad way.”

“Oh, yeah, she’s—she’s having some problems. If—” I hesitated, then plunged in. “If you were with a perfect guy, and you found out he had an eight-year-old daughter he never told you about, would you be mad at him?”

She looked surprised. “I don’t know. I suppose I might be. This perfect man, he’s not still married to the wee one’s mother?”

I shook my head. “She died a long time ago. He wants to make amends, but she’s still really cut up he didn’t tell her.”

“Well, if he’s that perfect—other than this, of course—maybe she should get over it. Get back with him. There aren’t too many good men out there.”

“No, you’re right.”

“My friend Eleanor, lord, she’s having a bad time of it.”

Oh, aye?

“Boyfriend mistreating her?” I asked sympathetically.

“Och, she knows—we all know—he’s been carrying on with someone else. And she knows who.”