At Risk

19

As they left the Headland Hall driveway Liz glanced at her watch. It was 3 p.m. “I’ve got to get back to London,” she told Whitten. “But before I go, could I see where Ray Gunter lived?”

“Sure. I’ll get one of my people to walk you over there.” He turned up his collar against the returning rain. “What did you think of the Lakebys?”

“I think I preferred her to him,” said Liz. “You were right.”

He nodded. “Never underestimate the upper classes. They can be much nicer-and much nastier-than you’d think possible.”

“I’m sure,” she smiled.

Ray Gunter, it turned out, had lived in a flint-walled cottage behind the garage. The front door had been taped off by the police, and the WPC from the village hall let Liz in with a key.

The outside of the cottage was attractive, but the interior was decidedly unprepossessing. The walls were grease-flecked, and the ceilings yellowed with cigarette smoke. In the kitchen the gas stove had not been cleaned for months, and a stack of washing-up languished in the stoneware sink. Liz’s gaze moved from the discarded boots and waterproofs which lay heaped in one corner of the kitchen table, where a sliced white supermarket loaf spilled across a copy of the local paper. Beside it lay a tub of margarine, an open jar of marmalade, and an ashtray made from an unwashed Chinese takeaway carton.

She opened the large free-standing freezer. There was nothing inside except frozen fish, sealed inside plastic bags and painstakingly hand-labelled. Pollack, huss, rock salmon, codling, whiting… In this, if in no other department of his life, Ray Gunter had been assiduous.

At the bottom of the stairs was a small table with a telephone on it. Around the table, roughly inscribed on the wall in ballpoint and pencil, were a score of telephone numbers. Amongst these, Liz found the single name Hogan and a number, which she noted.

Upstairs, the cottage was no more appetising. Gunter had slept in an iron single bed, covered by a grime-shined duvet. A stale, mildewed smell hung in the cold air. There was a second room, not much more appetising. On its door a small plastic sign read “Kayleigh’s Room.”

The sister, thought Liz. Who’ll presumably inherit the place now. And sell it-it would be worth a bit, cleaned up and restored. It would make the perfect weekend cottage, as Gunter must have known. Why had he hung on to it? Had he had some significant source of income beyond the fishing?

Returning downstairs, she searched the place for a local telephone directory, eventually locating one on the kitchen floor. Looking up the name Hogan she found and noted an address in Dersthorpe which corresponded to the telephone number written on the wall.

Outside, after returning the key to the WPC, she looked at the surrounding cottages. All bore the signs of gentrification, with neatly kept borders, ornaments in the windows, and antique knockers on the shiny front doors. Ray Gunter’s passing would not be greatly mourned by his neighbours, she guessed. Kayleigh would have the place on the market by the spring, and by midsummer it would be identical to the others.

On the way back to her car, Liz looked in at the Trafalgar. The place was almost empty, and there was no sign of Cherisse behind the bar, only a middle-aged man in a cardigan whom she guessed to be Clive Badger. A strange object of desire for a girl like Cherisse, she mused, especially if he was the sort of employer who made her balance the till out of her own pocket.

A glance into the public bar told her that Cherisse wasn’t there either. The busy times would be lunch and evening. She probably went home for the afternoon.

Dersthorpe was a couple of miles to the east of Marsh Creake. Liz slowed down as she drove past Headland Hall, but there was no sign of Peregrine or Anne Lakeby, just the dark trees bending before the sea wind.

It didn’t take Liz long to find the council block where Cherisse Hogan lived. Outside it, in the rubbish-strewn car park, two youths were desultorily booting a punctured football around. Dersthorpe might have been just down the road from Marsh Creake, Liz reflected, but culturally it was another world. No one, surely, had ever bought a weekend cottage in Dersthorpe.

Cherisse lived on the third floor. She had changed from her work clothes into a crumpled black sweater and jeans. A tattoo of a baby devil was visible in the sweater’s deep V-front.

“Yeah?” she asked, frowning, flicking her cigarette ash out of her front door.

“I was in the pub this morning,” said Liz.

Cherisse nodded warily. “I remember.”

“I want to talk about Ray Gunter. I’m working with the police.”

“What’s that mean, working with the police?”

Liz reached inside her coat and found her Civil Service identity card. “I report back to the Home Office.”

Cherisse stared blankly at the card. Then she nodded, and took the door off the chain.

“Is this your place?” Liz asked, squeezing through the proffered gap.

“No. My mum’s. She’s out at work. My nan lives here too but she’s gone into Hunstanton on the bus.”

Liz looked around her. The air in the flat was close, but the place was comfortable. A three-bar electric fire blazed beneath a mantel-shelf decorated with glass ornaments and photographs of Cherisse. The wall held a framed print of waves breaking by moonlight. The TV was wide-screen.

Cherisse knew Gunter, she told Liz-she knew pretty much everyone in Marsh Creake-but denied that there had ever been anything between them. Having said that, she admitted, it was perfectly possible that Gunter had gone round telling people that there had been. In the public bar at the Trafalgar he liked to give the impression that she was his for the asking.

“Why?” asked Liz.

“He was that sort,” said Cherisse blithely, stubbing her cigarette out in a tin ashtray. “When you’re… busty, people think they can say what they like. That you’re just there to make jokes about.”

“Did you ever put the record straight about you and him?”

“I could have done. End of the day, though, he’s a paying customer, and I’m not put behind that bar to make the customers feel like tossers, even if they are. Basically, Ray Gunter thought that if he wanted to impress someone all he had to do was start on me.”

“So who was Ray Gunter wanting to impress?”

“Oh, various odds and sods. You know that house of his? There was always people trying to get him to sell to them. Like he was some sort of moron and didn’t know the value of the place to the nearest penny. He’d take them down the Trafalgar and have them buying drinks for him all night.”

“Anyone else?”

“There was one guy… Staffy, I used to call him, because he looked like a bull terrier.”

“Do you know his real name?”

She nodded. “I’ll remember in a minute. Cup of tea?”

“That’d be nice.”

The kettle whistled. The electric heater seemed to shimmer in the radiated heat. Cherisse came back with two mugs.

“Thanks for this morning,” she said hesitantly. “Helping me out.”

“It was a pleasure,” said Liz truthfully.

Cherisse grinned. “He didn’t like the look of your friend, that’s for sure.”

“I thought it was me he was scared of,” protested Liz.

“Well,” said Cherisse, “perhaps it was.”

There was a short silence, broken by the manic revving of an engine in the car park below. “Do you have any idea what Ray would have been doing at the Fairmile Café last night?” Liz asked.

“No idea.”

“Do you know if he was into anything illegal? Anything to do with his boats?”

She shook her head again, her expression vague, and then brightened. “Mitch! That’s what his name was. I knew I’d remember.”

“Who was he?”

“I don’t know. Like I said, he wasn’t from round here. The reason I remember him is that when he came in Ray never sat at the bar like he usually did.”

“Where did they sit?”

“Off in a corner. I asked Ray once who he was, because he’d been having, like, a good stare at me, and Ray said he was someone who bought from him. Lobsters and that.”

“Did you believe that?”

Cherisse shrugged. “It wasn’t a nice stare.”

Liz nodded, and laid her empty mug on the table.

After the heat of the Hogans’ flat, the sea front was bracingly cold. The phone box smelt of urine, and Liz was grateful when Wetherby picked up on the first ring.

“Tell me,” he said.

“Things look bad,” said Liz. “I’m coming back now.”

“I’ll be here,” said Wetherby.