In a story I posted earlier in the year – ‘Life at Tethers End’ – I had my main character as a writer of racy stories. I’ve had a chat with Adam, and he has allowed me to post the first four stories as listed in that one. They are heavily edited to cut out the more explicit sexual details. This is the first story. They run to a total of 19 chapters and are sequential.
Marianne
Body Of Water – A Max Force Story
Chapter 1
My name is Maxine Fawcett and I had been, not long ago, a policewoman. I had done well throughout my training at Hendon, as well as my rookie days on the force. I had two redeeming qualities. One was a female intuition which I pretended was my power of deduction. The other was my personality, that attracted men to me like moths to a flame. I called that one my power of seduction.
It was the second power that had led to my enforced retirement from the police. So, I set about using my first power. I had studied the laws regarding setting up as a Private Investigator, had sat an examination to show that I was a fit person to take on that job, paid the fees and got my license to investigate.
I had created my own website as the way to attract customers. I had called my business ‘Max Force’ as a tip of the hat to my name. It just said, ‘Max Force – whatever it is, we can move it for you.’ I had originally meant it to mean obstacles but had some calls asking me my rates to shift furniture around the country. I added ‘Obstacles to your happy future a speciality.’ That’s when I started getting calls asking me my price to carry out hits.
In the end, the website had ‘Max Force – whatever it is, we can move it for you. You have a problem; I make it go away. You need help, I can get it for you. You need protection, I can keep you safe.’ That’s when I had emailed a link to all the boys and girls on my old phone, before I traded it in on a newer one. You never knew what would arise from old friendships.
I kept my old phone number, then waited for it to come alive with queries about my taking on other people’s problems. Of course, nothing happened, so I put up posters around Islington, where I had a flat in a block of dozens. I had been able to save enough to keep a roof over my head for six months, with a small amount left over for food and petrol for my battered Cortina.
I started to get queries about lost dogs, lost children, lost keys, lost husbands. It seemed like my clients had always lost something. I didn’t lose my own way, however, and tracked down as many lost items as I could. The best paying ones was finding lost husbands, usually so that someone else could give them legal papers regarding a divorce or maintenance payments.
I started to earn enough to keep the flat and run the Cortina, as well as eating reasonably well. That’s when I got a call from a girl that had been to school with me. Her name was Susan Brinkford, and her nickname had been ‘Ovens’ because she was so hot. She had been the queen bee of every year, with her long blonde hair and statuesque figure, even from an early age. I had often wondered about that, until I saw a shop that sold accessories that added shape to a young girl’s body.
By the time we had left school, she didn’t need the accessories any longer, and had been believed to become a Super Model and earn squillions before she retired at thirty, with a handsome husband and a bank balance to die for. I, on the other hand, had earned the nickname of ‘Flatback Fawcett’ by being found behind the cycle sheds with the captain of the soccer team taking my virginity. After that, I was expected to end up on the street, wearing very little and caring even less.
Needless to say, I didn’t bother keeping in touch with those I had left behind when I signed up to be in the police. None of them would have understood my reasons. My father had been a detective, years before, and had been stabbed by a murderer as they were making the arrest. He had been given a proper police funeral. Which didn’t really help my mother and the four-year-old me at the time. I had admired my father.
I didn’t admire my mother, although she kept me fed and dressed while I was at school. She was a Social Worker, and I had read enough about what they would do. I really don’t know if she had taken children from crying mothers and put them in institutions, but there were enough stories circulating in school to make me wonder. She had a no-nonsense character that reinforced my thoughts, but we got on reasonably well, until the day I told her I had joined the force.
“No daughter of mine is going in the police. You know what happened to your father! The best thing they did for him was his funeral. If you enter the force, you can exit the home!”
So, I did. I had some money that my grandmother had left me, which I could receive at eighteen, and I had some money I had saved from my summer job of the last three years, working as a check-out chick in a local supermarket. I had enough for the bond on the flat and enough to feed me until I started to get paid.
A boyfriend with a van helped me move. It was odd to be using the van for what it had been designed for, rather than our usual twice a week lay. We just had to push the old mattress to one side to get my bed and side-table in. The flat already had a fridge and a washing machine, both small but big enough for me. We christened my bed in its new home, but he went cold when I told him I was joining the police. I think that he thought I might grass on his little greenhouse in an allotment where he grew weed.
For a while, I remained aloof and chaste as I studied hard and exercised more than I had ever done before. By the end of the course, I had done well enough to be sent to a good station. I don’t know how much my odd nights with a few of the lecturers helped in that. I learned everyday policing with some good coppers and was doing well until my fall from grace. It was such a simple thing, but bad enough to be asked to leave.
Which leads me back to Susan. I was cordial and she sounded worried. She asked me what I charged, and I told her it was two hundred a day for old friends. She told me that she would pay me for ten days, minimum, if I could come up to her home in Norfolk. I could stay at her house while I was there and that she would tell me her problem when I arrived. The directions were easy to follow, head out of London, through Chelmsford and Colchester and get to Lowestoft. She lived on a farm on Hall Lane, which was a turn left off the Millenium Way. I made notes and told her that I would be there the next day, about lunch time.
I looked for her home on Google Maps and saw that it was a farm, near Oulton Broad. It certainly wasn’t the sort of place that I had expected her to be living in. If she had achieved a fraction of her potential, she should have been living in a country manor with her titled husband.
The next morning, I had breakfast and dressed in my usual Max Force outfit. Black boots with black leather jeans, with a black satin top over black underwear. With my raven hair, I thought of myself as a Gorgeous Goth, but used normal deep red lipstick and nail polish, rather than black. I packed a bag for ten days away, made sure I had my phone and charger, the laptop and charger, and locked up.
It would be interesting to be out in the countryside, as I was essentially a city girl. Tina, my old Cortina, performed well on the open road. It hummed along quite well once I got over fifty miles an hour. The trip was uneventful, and I arrived in her driveway just before twelve. There was an older farmhouse to my right and a newbuild directly in front. When I got out of the car, she came out of the newbuild and gave me a big hug.
“Maxine, honey. It’s so good to see you, come on in and I’ll put the kettle on. We can catch up first and then you can bring in your things. I’ll tell you what my problem is over a cuppa.”
I followed her into a rather nice house, if a little too unkempt for my taste. She had worn well and still had her model looks. The peasant dress and slippers were not something I would have thought I’d ever see her in. We went through the house to the kitchen where she pointed to a chair. As she fussed with the kettle, she started to talk.
“You know, Maxine, I was jealous of you at high school. There I was, the best dressed and classiest girl in school, and there you were, being a proper woman and getting laid. I had made myself too good for any of the boys but yearned to have the experiences that you were obviously enjoying. That’s what led me to this backwater dump!”
“What about the modelling?”
“Hah! When I told my parents that I wanted to model, they told me in no uncertain terms that this wasn’t what a good Catholic girl did. My mother had won a beauty contest at a holiday camp in the sixties, and that’s why she insisted that I look my best in school. It became my normal to be well dressed, well made-up and wear enhancing attachments to look like a film star. She would inspect me before I left home every morning and when I got home every night. If I had a hair out of place she would growl and tell me that I was letting the family name down.”
“That must have been tough?”
“You bet it was tough. The thing was, although I didn’t know it, I was slated to work for my father at the farm products store in Ipswich. My parents didn’t run the stores themselves but had managers. There were three stores, Chelmsford, Ipswich, and Norwich, at that time. We had a flat in Ipswich for me to stay in, so it wasn’t too hard to go there. The thing was that it was the first time I had been free of my parents, and I got slightly crazy with that freedom.”
“Understandable. In my case, when I moved into my flat, I found out that I had to do my own cooking and housework.”
“That was something I never managed to master, hence the dust around this place. Anyway, I met a nice boy who took my virginity and I found that I liked it. Then Clement came into the store. He was a couple of years older than me, very handsome in an aristocratic way, and was the son of a big landowner. Part of that land is where this place is built. Clement made me flutter inside, and we went out a few times before we ended up in a hotel room where we rutted like rabbits on more than one occasion. I was employed and I was now the woman I wanted to be.”
“Something happened?”
“Shit, yes. I fell pregnant. My mother had never told me about birth control, expecting me to remain a virgin until I was married to a nice Catholic boy. The shitstorm that it created was truly frightening. My parents insisted that we get married, his parents wanted him to settle down, so we ended up walking down the aisle when I was in my third month. We had a short honeymoon, with him getting angrier with every passing day.”
“Bit of a player, was he?”
“You bet. I had stifled his playboy days, I had been stupid enough to get pregnant, I was holding him back from his true potential. No matter what was wrong, it was always my fault. His parents were very nice to me, as I had stopped him from being beaten up by angry fathers around this town. They gave us the place next door to live in. What a dump that was. I was getting sadder and sadder and then I had a miscarriage in my sixth month. He was happy, we could get a divorce and he could revert to his old ways.”
“But you’re Catholic.”
“Exactly! We were bound together until death do us part. Anyway, his family had owned about a thousand acres around this farm, and they lived down the road. They had sold off most of it to other farmers as they aged, and the only properties left was where they lived and the place where we lived, when he was home, that is. By that time, we had separate bedrooms. His folks sold their home to a company that turned the place into a hotel and allowed the farm buildings to decay. They moved into an old folks home a little way to the north.”
She put the tea in front of me and sat down with one, herself.
“That’s when they gave me the money to build this place, which I gratefully accepted. All the contracts were in my name alone, and it became my home. He still lives next door, when he is there, but we live totally separate lives. I have my own car and do my own shopping, and he does whatever he wants.”
“Do you have wills?”
“Yes. We wrote wills when we married, leaving our worldly goods to each other. I have since changed mine, leaving everything to my young brother. He was still in primary when we were at school. I see him, now and then, and we get along quite well. He’s at our old school now, and close to graduating. He, unlike me, will be able to go to university, something that my father thought was not a career path for a mere girl.”
“I expect that he was too lazy to change his will?”
“Yes, it’s in the drawer with my new one. Why I’ve asked you up here is because my husband hasn’t been around for three weeks, and I’m wondering what’s become of him. Can you track him down for me?”
“I can try. Have you been to the police or checked the hospitals?”
“I’ve done nothing. It took a while for me to be worried and I think that I would be suspect by waiting so long to declare him missing.”
“It will be all right. He has a history of not coming home. I will check the police first and then talk to the main hospitals. What was he driving?”
“It changed. He had a friend with a car yard and would drive a car for a week or two to give him some room on his yard. The last one I saw him in was a white Range Rover.”
“Before we go any further. Can you tell me how you make ends meet? If he has the money, what is your position?”
“My in-laws have been very good. As I said, this house has everything in my name. The only land they own is this block and the acreage behind it. They transferred four hundred thousand to my account to build the house and it was a standard build that cost just over two fifty. I used the remainder to level the five acres behind us and put poly over it, planting strawberries. There are a few casuals who come in at picking time to pick and pack. They get picked up by a wholesaler and they pay me for them.”
“What happens when your in-laws die?”
“They have both made wills to leave their estate to each other, with Clement and I sharing remainder after they’ve both gone. He doesn’t know that the money they put in for the house didn’t include any legal ownership other than mine. I’ll get enough to buy the land, with that payment being split in two with half coming back, so I get to own the lot for less than sixty percent of its value. When that happens, I plan to demolish the old place and put up a modern shed.”
“You do realise that it gives you a good motive for seeing him dead. The police will think that you may even have him six feet under the back yard. That’s if you don’t report him missing and someone else does, like his car yard friend. He must have others that he sees regularly.”
“I’ve no idea, that’s what has held me up. Look, I’ll show you your room and then you can get your things in. If you want, I’ll go to the police and report him missing.”
“Tomorrow is the time for that. What I want you to do, while I bring my things in, is to sit here and write me a list of everybody who he knows, and every place you know he goes to, from schooldays on. Then, I want to see his room, you said he lived next door?”
“I’ll give you the keys when you’ve freshened up.”
She showed me the room I would use. It was obviously a guest room and had some things in the wardrobe.
“My grandmother sometimes comes to see how I’m going.”
I got my things in and locked the car. Then I went into the ensuite to have a pee. It took ten minutes with some damp toilet paper before I was happy about sitting down. When I went back to the kitchen, she was still writing. She gave me a ring with a couple of keys on it.
“One’s for the front and the other’s for the back. I haven’t been in there for months, not since this place was liveable.”
I went out the front door and walked to the front door of the old farmhouse, pulling on my gloves. Opening up, I went inside. Thankfully there wasn’t any smell of decomposing human, but a faint whiff of old vegetables, which got worse when I found the kitchen.
Except for the rotting veggies, the place was immaculate, although there was some dust of a few weeks being neglected. Our Clement must be a neatness freak, no wonder he had trouble living with a slob like Susan. Before I did anything else, I put the veggies in a bin, along with the contents of the fridge that had gone off as well. I left the fridge door open to air it out and took the bin bag out the back door and put it in the rubbish bin, after I had a look in that to see if there was anything interesting that he had tossed out.
Back in the house, I found the door that hid the stairs and went up. It didn’t take long to look around as he had obviously not used the upstairs since he lived here on his own. By the state of it, I wouldn’t have used it either. There were no footprints in the thick dust.
Back downstairs, I looked at where he had spent his time. On one side of the front door was a lounge room with a good TV fixed to the wall and a very comfy chair. Along one wall was an office desk and two filing cabinets. Not unusual if he had been managing a large farm, but not what you would expect a fun-loving playboy to have.
I left those for a moment and went to the other side of the front door. He had turned the old dining room into his bedroom. By the single bed, I expect that he never brought his girls home, so I would be looking for his name in hotel registers, unless he had a flat that Susan didn’t know about.
I took my time searching as I had no idea what the guy was like, other than being a sleaze bag. Nothing slipped into the made-up bed. Nothing under the mattress. Two suitcases under the bed, where a lot of people store them. They don’t keep several hundred cigarettes in them though, with packets without the UK warnings. So, he had been involved in smuggling, unless he was a very heavy smoker. The other case contained money, lots of it in pounds, Euros, and Swiss francs. I left it as I found it and moved to the drawers and the wardrobe.
He had been a snappy dresser, with a range of good labels on his things. The odd item was a set of fisherman’s waders. I went back into the lounge room and started on the desk and filing cabinets.
The desk was one of those flatpack things with just two drawers. There was a lead to a power board that ran a lamp and a printer. There was another lead for powering a laptop, which was not evident. I looked in the drawers. The top one had all the usual office accessories, and the bottom one had the handbooks for the printer and an HP laptop.
The two filing cabinets were chalk and cheese. On contained paperwork from way back in the running of the farm when it was in its heyday. I wondered if he showed these to his young girls to prove that he was a man of means. It also had his personal papers, from his birth certificate on. There was the marriage certificate for Susan, and another eight months later, for another woman in Italy. I took a picture of that one and left the original where I found it.
He had no less than three passports, all looking genuine. There was his UK one, and also a French and Italian one. All had the usual stamps in them to show that he had used them all on a regular basis. They were all in the name of Clement Andrew Cornwall. The other cabinet was a wealth of information for the Customs and Excise branch.
It had notes about pick-up of smuggled goods, usually cigarettes and spirits. There were a few which included designer clothing, mainly originating in Italy. On top of that, he had also dabbled in drugs coming in from the Netherlands. There was a map of the offshore wind farms with some marked; no doubt where the shipments were left for later pick-up.
I went back to the drawer with his personal papers and pulled out the certificates and passports. I needed to get some idea of the timeline. When I looked at the passports, I found that he would leave Britain on his English one, and arrive in France or Italy on those passports, then leaving those countries and arriving back in Britain using the English passport to enter. This left no trail of where he had been.
I looked at the Italian certificate and checked the date against the Italian passport. He had been out of the country for three weeks, with the marriage taking place two days after he had arrived in Naples. It had taken place in the Chiesa della Santissima Trinità degli Spagnoli. The wife was Silvana Guiliano, daughter of Salvatore Guiliano, a businessman.
I had a feeling of dread when I checked the surname on my phone. The Guiliano clan had been a prominent member of the Camorra, the Mafia clans that controlled Naples. Salvatore was a son of Pio, the leader of the clan until the seventies. It had been taken over by the eldest son, Luigi, until the turn of the century, when the leadership passed to his sister. Erminia was picked because she was the most level-headed one not in prison, which was rectified when she was arrested less than a year later. It was said that when she was young, and bored, she would announce, “I have to shoot someone!”
Silvana was named after her aunt, one of Erminia’s sisters. I looked at Pio and the main business was cigarette smuggling in the early days. If Clement had unwittingly crossed this family, it was unlikely that we would find his body.
Marianne Gregory © 2024
Chapter 2
When I looked more closely at his Italian passport, he had spent a couple of weeks there starting about five months after his wedding to Susan. It was almost every month for about four months. After the wedding, it picked up at the same rate, once more, until around two months ago, when he was shown entering and exiting the country. If he was hiding his other life by claiming business trips, Silvana would be getting worried by now.
I turned my attention to the few photos on his desk. I had taken them to be from his wedding with Susan. There was one, taken outside an older church, probably local. It had him and Susan, flanked by two couples, which would be both the parents. The other one, now that I looked closely, was him with another woman. She was the spitting image of Susan. There was only one set of parents, both very well dressed. The mother was smiling, the father had a stern face. They were in front of a villa, and I could see men in dark suits in the background, along with some waiters.
There was one striking similarity between the two brides, other than being almost interchangeable. It was that both had opted for flowing dresses that started from under the bust line. I knew that Susan was three months gone, I wondered if Silvana was at the same stage.
I went back to the bedroom and pulled the large roller case from the top of the wardrobe and had a look inside. Wherever he had gone this time, he hadn’t taken his clothes. There was a pocket for small items which had an e-ticket for a flight out of Stansted to Naples which he should have been on, a week ago.
This gave me the time when he had been stopped at between the time he left here, three weeks before, and before the flight. Sometime, within about ten days, he had disappeared. One thing I was certain of, and that was if the Guiliano family had wanted him dead, they would have waited until he was with them to make it happen.
Back into the filing cabinet with the personal papers I examined everything with great care. There was all the paperwork for this house and land, all marked as copies. I expect his parents had the originals. Then I found a single piece of paper with some details in Italian. It was only a telephone account for two mobile phones. If he had one for use in the UK, there should be another waiting for me to discover. That one was with a big bunch of utility accounts in the bottom drawer.
I tried ringing the UK one and got the message that the caller was out of range, or the phone was turned off. I didn’t try the Italian one as I didn’t want to speak to the wife just yet. I had the one here to break some bad news to.
I looked in my contact list on my phone and called someone who may be able to help. Henri had been with the French police and had given some lectures on working with Interpol at Hendon. Although we hadn’t gone to bed, we had become friendly. When he answered I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Henri, it’s Maxine Fawcett. You gave lectures at Hendon when I was there.”
“Maxie! So good to hear from you. Are you a sergeant yet?”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Henri. They chucked me out for a moment of madness with another officer. I’m a Private Investigator now.”
He laughed and faked an American accent.
“So, you’re a gumshoe, baby. Wadda ya’ want?”
“I’m looking into a missing husband, and I’ve discovered that he has a second wife in Naples, she is the daughter of Salvatore Guiliano. He’s gone missing but I have no record of him leaving England.”
“So, he’s unlikely to be fish food in the Bay of Naples. That family was supposed to have broken up after Erminia was put away. It still carries on but is now just an offshoot of another family. Another brother, Nunzio, spilled his guts for the authorities so nobody trusts any of them anymore. How can I help?”
“You just have, Henri. How are you getting on?”
“Comme-ci comme-ça. I’ve retired now, all in one piece, thank goodness. I’m going back to France in a few weeks and putting my feet up, just growing flowers.”
“That’s wonderful, Henri. I wish you all the best.”
“Merci, ma Cherie. You look after yourself. That family may be cut off at the knees, but their hands can still hold pistols.”
When I had ended the call, I sat at the desk and considered my next course of action, I picked up the two wedding photos and went back to see Susan. I put the one with her on the kitchen table.
“I expect that the others are his parents and yours?”
“Yes, it was a nice day and we got married in one of the local Catholic churches. Where did you find this?”
“On his desk.”
“It was nice that he kept it in full view. I didn’t expect that.”
“Not so nice, Susan. This one was beside it.”
She picked up the other one and looked closely at it.
“I didn’t know he had been married before.”
“Actually, Susan, that was taken some months after your wedding. The girl is Silvana Guiliano, the daughter of Salvatore Guiliano, the stern looking man beside her. The guys in the background are armed bodyguards. The family is part of the Camorra, the local Mafia in Naples. Her grandmother had been the leader of the family before she had been arrested.”
She looked at the picture and tears started flowing. I went and held her while she sobbed her heart out. We became more than old schoolmates over the twenty minutes while she let all of her grief for her failed marriage end up in a sodden tissue.
She sat while I put the kettle on and made us both a cup of tea. When I had sat down, she looked me in the eyes.
“All right, Maxie. There has to be so much more to this. I knew he had been away a lot, but never thought he was shacked up with another woman.”
I pointed at the picture.
“Another woman in the family way, I think. You chose a similar dress to hide the bulge as well.”
She wanted to know what I knew, so we sat and sipped our tea while I told her about his smuggling.
“There’s a suitcase full of cigarette packets under his bed, along with one full of money. He had a ticket for Naples in his big suitcase, dated a week ago. Somehow, I don’t think he’s able to move around any longer. He may be a prisoner, but the worst case is that he has been killed.”
“Good riddance. Just find the body, Maxie, and I can get on with my life. Thank you for this. It’s worth the money to know what you’ve told me so far. Show me the case with the money and I’ll give you some now. On top of the cheque that I’ll write out.”
She stood and went to her bag, pulling out a chequebook and writing me a cheque for four thousand, as I had quoted.
“You’ll be earning that in the coming days, while we see the police and break the news to my in-laws.”
I took her into the other house and asked her if she could look in his wardrobe and think of what he may have been wearing when he left.
“The only things that aren’t here are his gardening clothes. That’s what I called them. He would wear a work shirt and jeans with tradie boots when he was going to do any dirty work. He was the opposite of me when it came to being clean. I had let it all slip, but I think that I need to tidy myself up. Show me the money, Maxie! I’ll give you some and you can take me out to dinner. The Wherry at Oulton Broad has a good menu. We’ll have time to glam up if I give them a call to book a table.”
I pulled out the small case, and she took a sheaf of pounds and told me to put it in my bag. I would have protested, but she was insistent. Anyway, it didn’t put a dent into the cash still there. She took the case with her when we went back to her house. She made the call, and we were booked for dinner at seven. That left us time to see her in-laws before coming back to get ready.
When she opened her car, it looked like a tip in the passenger footwell. I refused to even sit in it, so we went to see her in-laws in mine. The trip to the care home didn’t take long and she introduced me to them as Maxie, a friend from high school. We asked them if we could go out into the garden, where we all sat on a bench while I laid out what I knew about Clement, their son. His mother wept, and his father was stoic. I told them that the likelihood of him being dead was higher than us finding him alive. I explained that once his other in-laws found out what he was up to, his life would be measured in days, if not hours, as they had very little feelings of forgiveness.
When we left them, they were making an appointment with their lawyer to change their wills and cut Clement out of the estate. We went back to the farm where we went to our rooms to prepare for an evening out. I had brought a suitable dress with me and was able to look good when we met in the kitchen. She had used her skills from her teenage years to look stunning. She directed me to the Wherry, where we had a quiet drink before sitting down for dinner. She was very quiet for a while, then looked me in the eyes.
“Maxie, while I’ve been living on my own, I’ve got lazy and a slob. I promise that I will start to brighten myself up. I’m good at looking after the farming business, I just have to be good about looking after myself. Tomorrow, I’ll clean out my car and make it suitable to invite others to sit in it. All my early life I was told to be neat and tidy, the only problem was that the only thing I needed to make neat, and tidy was me. Can you help me learn?”
I promised her that my time was hers and we went in for our meal. It was purely a coincidence that they had live music that night. Before we knew it, we were dancing with a couple of guys, and I was enjoying myself. Susan looked like she had already shed her sadness of her missing husband. When the lights were lowered and the music slowed, my guy told me that the two friends were staying at a local motel and had a car in the car park.
In a break, I grabbed Susan and told her of the situation.
“Mine asked me too, but I told him that I would have to talk to you first. I haven’t had sex for two years, it’s about time I started living in the real world again.”
“Don’t forget to tell him to use a condom – or two.”
Back on the dance floor, my guy held me close and asked what the answer was.
“You and I can take my car, and your friend can take Susan in the other. I hope that you have separate rooms.”
“We do. We’re both sales representatives and plan our trips to meet at common calls so that we can have a night out together.”
I gave Susan a finger wave as we left. I could see that the real world was racing towards her at a rate of knots. I drove to the motel and parked. In his room we kissed properly and undressed slowly. He did have condoms, a pack of three, and used them all before we went to the dining room for breakfast.
Susan and the other guy came in as we were having coffee. She looked flushed but radiant. All I could hope for was that it would get her going with a vacuum and duster when we were back at her home. We sat while they had breakfast, and then we both got a nice kiss and left them to go off calling on their customers.
Back at the farm, we both had showers and dressed more normally to go off and report a missing husband. Susan had a dreamy look on her face and just nodded when I asked her if she had insisted on the condom.
“It’s as if I’ve been allowed to start all over again. Only, this time, I’m a business owner with my own house, not some teenager with a sheltered upbringing. Whatever Clement gave me, other than my poor baby, he pulled me into adulthood, which I can now enjoy.”
I went into the other house and picked up a few things before we left. At the police station, we reported her missing husband to the desk sergeant. When she told him the name, he told us to sit and wait for another officer. I watched as he made a phone call. I expected that we would be seeing an Inspector, as the name may have pulled up red flags.
Sure enough, we were collected by a detective sergeant and taken to an office where his Inspector was waiting for us. Susan was asked to relate her relationship with the missing man and the circumstances of his disappearance. Neither of them seemed surprised by anything she said. The Inspector turned to me.
“And where do you fit in, young lady?”
“Susan called me to come and help her. I’m Maxine Fawcett and now work as a PI after some time in the Met, working out of Islington. Can you tell us why you’re so interested in Clement Cornwall? I have discovered some facts which may help you in your investigations. From what I’ve seen, I think we may be looking for a body.”
“Interesting. We have him as a person of interest as being part of a smuggling ring. We haven’t been able to catch him and the gang in the act, but I think that they have been bringing in cigarettes, spirits, and designer clothing to sell in markets.”
“That fits in with what I found. If Susan permits it, I think that you should have a good look at his living quarters. I can give you the keys. I did search it yesterday, wearing the proper gloves, and I have brought a few items to whet your appetite.”
I reached into my bag and pulled on a pair of detectives gloves. The two of them were pulling on theirs as Susan watched, open mouthed. I lifted out three plastic bags with the three separate passports.
“I don’t know if any of these are fakes, but they’re very good if they are. He used each one to check out and in of the different countries, so no one passport had a full sequence of stamps.”
They took the passports out and had a close look.
“Can we hold on to these?”
Susan nodded. I then reached into the bag and pulled out the marriage certificate and the picture.
“I’ve been told that he was a player, with a string of girls before he married Susan. This is a picture, taken, I believe, about five months after they married. Here is the certificate issued in Naples.”
“So, you’re saying that he’s a bigamist?”
“One who has married into a family that would snuff him out as easily as stubbing out a cigarette. Look at the certificate, the girl is the granddaughter of Pio Guiliano. The man in the picture is Salvatore, one of his sons. I expect that you will see the men in the background as bodyguards. Clement Cornwall jumped right into the lion’s den. The family business used to be cigarettes, but I expect that they have a much wider product line by now.”
We sat, quietly, while they looked at the evidence. The sergeant got up and went to one of the desks to look at a computer. The Inspector asked Susan if they could come and search. When she said they could, I reached into my bag and gave them the keys. When the sergeant came back, he just nodded when the Inspector looked at him. We gave them the address and left. Back in my car, we went back to the farm, and I told her to get the case of money to put into the boot of the Cortina just in case the police wanted to have a look in her home.
Ten minutes later, the Inspector turned up with two forensic vans behind him. We sat in the lounge while they went into the old farmhouse, coming out with bags of evidence that was put into one of the vans. We were having lunch when there was a knock on the door. The Inspector asked if the forensics guys could have a quick look through her place. We were still sitting at the kitchen table when he came to tell us that there was nothing found and put a card on the table from a home cleaning service, along with the keys to next door.
He then gave Susan a receipt for the evidence that had been collected and said that anything that she could be given back would be in due course. He also gave her his card.
“This has all the contact details to reach me, Mrs. Cornwall. Have you any idea what he was wearing when he left?”
“Maxine took me in there yesterday afternoon to look in his wardrobe. All I think that was missing was his work shirt, jeans, and boots, what I think of as his gardening clothes, although he didn’t know what gardening is. That was the first time I had been in there since this house was built, and he had never been in here.”
He then gave me a card.
“I checked with Islington, Miss Fawcett. The duty sergeant remembers you fondly. He told me that you were an asset to the force who had been treated badly by your superiors. If you turn up anything that would help me while you’re in the area, please give me a call.”
We sat as we heard the vehicles leave. Susan looked at me and smiled.
“Now, Maxie, this is when you teach me how to use the vacuum. If the police left the one next door, I think we had better go and see what he had been using to keep his home so tidy.”
That afternoon, we went through her house with the dusters, the vacuum, and other cleaning goods I had found in the old farmhouse. I only went in the back door as I expected that everything was more likely to be kept in, or near, the kitchen.
After we had done the house, we worked on her car. By the end of the afternoon, we were tired but now in a clean environment. I took a shower in the newly fresh ensuite, then dressed in my Max Force uniform to be taken down to Yarmouth to a restaurant that she knew of, having been taken there by Clement before they married.
The next day, I looked at her list of contacts and decided to go and see Roy, of Roys Autos. It wasn’t a big site, but full of reasonably decent cars. When he came out, he asked if I wanted to trade the Cortina on something. I asked him about his friend, Clement.
“I haven’t seen Clem for about two weeks. He brought back the Range Rover that he had been using and left in a Transit van. He would take something like the van every month, or so. I had wondered if he was moonlighting as a removalist, but that sort of hard work was never his way. He ran with a bunch of guys who had a couple of boats, they would go out and catch fish for the local restaurants, in spite of the EU rules. I think that he was delivering the catch directly to the end users.”
I asked if he had any other dealings with Clement.
“Not a lot. We were at school together. I watched as he pulled girls like he was some kind of chick magnet. I was never like that and found a perfect girl to be my wife. I did hear that he’d got married, that’s something I thought I’d never see.”
I got the details of the van, which he was starting to worry about, as he had traded it and had not got around to changing the registration. I told him that he may get a call from the police but to be truthful. He confirmed that when Clement had taken a van, he usually came back with it after a few days. He gave me the location where the friends had their shed, so I headed for the harbour.
When I arrived at the shed, it was to a row of police cars, lights flashing, that sat outside it. I was held back by a uniformed officer and asked to speak to the inspector, showing him the card I had been given. I stood by my car until he came out and beckoned me to go into the shed. I pulled on the gloves as I went in, seeing the inspector standing in the middle of the shed, watching as forensics officers worked among the racks that lined one wall.
“What do you have for us, Miss Fawcett?”
“I’ve just spoken to Roy from Roys Autos. He would lend Clement a car which was on a short-term basis. The last one that Susan had seen was a Range Rover which was taken back when he left home. He drove away in a traded Transit and hasn’t been seen since. Roy gave me this address. He thought that his old school friend was delivering fish, caught outside the EU rules, to local restaurants. I expect that he was transporting other items as well, picked up while the trawler was out in the North Sea.”
“I think that you have it right, Miss Fawcett. We got fingerprints from his house that matched a couple of other men we’ve had our eyes on. That, along with the wealth of damning evidence he left for us, brought us here. The trawler isn’t in the harbour, and I’ve got the Coast Watch on the lookout for it. There’s a load of interesting things here, quite possibly oddments from the shipments that have been left over.”
“Any link with the family in Naples?”
“Come and have a look.”
He led me into an office area. In one room was a clothes rack laden with garment bags. He told me to check them as he hadn’t had a chance to, yet. I looked in every bag to see designer dresses, all with the label marked ‘Erminia’.
“That fits with the last known leader of the Guiliano clan. She was his new father-in-law’s sister. These would fetch at least a thousand, if not two, in a good shop. That’s each, by the way.”
“Yes, that label belongs to a company run by his new wife and her sister, Anna. I have to put in a call to Naples and ask how these got here, and also tell Silvana that her husband is missing.”
“I wish you luck, Inspector.”
I gave him the details of the Transit and told him that Roy would be expecting a call. Then I left, peeling off the gloves as I got in my car. Susan had another seven days of my time. As I drove back towards the farm, I wondered if I would be doing anything more than teaching her basic cooking to go with the basic cleaning. When I had looked in her fridge, all I had seen was easy cooking packs. Mind you, if she was paying, I’d be happy to go out for a meal with her any time.
Marianne Gregory © 2024
Chapter 3
Over the next few days, I spoke to as many friends and acquaintances of Clement as I could. All it proved was that he was a man of smoke and mirrors. Everyone had their own likes encouraged and their dislikes agreed with. He was consistently remembered as smooth but untrustworthy by those he had met since he left school. Only his schoolfriends were able to skate over his failings.
Then, the local news broke the story that a trawler had been found drifting close to the Lincolnshire coast. It was towed back to Lowestoft where it was carefully searched. The police were publicly silent, but the Inspector called me and told me that they had found several different bloodstains, which had matched the four men who had owned the boat. One set of mixed stains were at the back ramp, where it was likely that they had been weighted and slid into the sea.
He also told me that there had been no sign of any contraband, or money. The thinking in his office was that they had been killed by their suppliers and dumped overboard. The reason why was still to be discovered. I wondered if the money we had hidden was supposed to have been used, but then thought that Clement had disappeared well before the gang set out.
That in mind, though, Susan and I counted it, converting all the foreign currency to pounds. It totalled just over thirty thousand, with the bit she gave me adding only another fifteen hundred. To my mind, that was nowhere near enough for a drug deal. A low-level cigarette deal, but that wouldn’t be enough to kill for.
I tried to earn my fee by checking the local maps and looking for any isolated site where a Transit could be left and forgotten. I spent three days driving around, but Norfolk is a pretty flat land. Any hiding places would be in copses that were near tourist areas and good for camping sites. I then started thinking about places where it could be left in plain view.
On my second day of looking at large car parks, I found it at Gapton Hall Retail Park, near Yarmouth, parked close to the delivery doors for M&S. I parked near it and called the Inspector. While I sat, waiting for his arrival, I wondered what I would do now. This was my last day of paid work for Susan. If she wanted me to stay longer, it would depend on what was found in the Transit, otherwise, I could just head home.
That thought didn’t sit well with me. I wasn’t one to leave something in the air. Finally, a police car and a forensics van pulled up and the Inspector came up to my car.
“Islington said that you were like a terrier with a bone when you were investigating. I’ll get my boys to have a look at this and we’ll see where it takes us. The case is spinning its wheels, otherwise.”
I stood with him and the sergeant as the forensics guys donned their outfits. Another van from the Yarmouth station had turned up and the officers were putting a bunting barrier around us. One of the men rummaged around in their van and produced a set of car keys, and after about five minutes of carefully trying keys, he opened the back doors of the Transit.
There was only one thing inside. It was a shape, wrapped in black plastic and secured with gaffer tape. To me, it looked very much like a body. They left it as is and opened the front doors. Then the forensic team started taking fingerprints as the Inspector called up a tray-top to take the van away. He turned to me with a grimace.
“If I’m not mistaken, that will be the remains of Clement Cornwall. He’ll be a bit smelly, now having been there for a month or more. You can go and let Susan know that we’re likely to need her to identify him in a day or two.”
As I drove back to Hall Lane, I knew that I would have to stay around until this played out, whether she paid me or not. It was a baffling case, with Clement and his whole gang eliminated without any remorse. No sign of contraband or drugs, or even any money. The guys that had been on the trawler had been identified as some ruffians about the same age as Clement. He may have met up with them while they were still at school. Their homes had been searched and their next of kin advised that they had been lost at sea. There were a few memorial services which I didn’t attend, but the police had looked closely for any known criminals, to no avail.
At the farm, I told Susan that we may have found the body of her husband, but it would take a little while before she would need to formally identify it. I held her as she cried and then she pulled herself together and took her chequebook out of her bag.
“Maxie, you’ve been more than a friend to me in the last couple of weeks, but I know that your time is money. I’ll write you a cheque for another five thousand if you’ll stay and support me through this. As soon as we have confirmation, I’ll organise a funeral in the church where we were married. If everything is finalised before this runs out, you can go back to London and keep the remainder as a bonus. I would never have been able to take this all in without you by my side.”
Together, we went into the main shopping area of Lowestoft, where I banked both of the cheques she had given me, and she went to her bank to deposit a some of the cash we had found as payment for strawberries. The next morning, we drove down to Stansted, where we divided the moderate amount of Swiss francs that was in the case and went to separate money exchanges to get it changed to pounds, using our passports as ID. Hopefully, it would be just another transaction in the thousands that they do. I gave her what I had been given, and we left the terminal like a couple who had just arrived.
She would be paying the pounds into her bank over a period as cash payments for strawberries. I advised her to say that she had hosted a coach load of tourists who were happy to pick their own. It did leave about ten thousand Euro to move, but she had caught on quick. I could see that each day she was further out of the fog that she had fallen into after her marriage. She even thought that advertising ‘pick your own’ was a good idea and set about ordering a signboard.
Later that afternoon she had the call from the Inspector, so made an appointment to view the body the next morning. He said that dental records had been enough, but a formal view by the next of kin would rubber stamp the issuing of a death certificate.
That evening we went and broke the news to his parents, and they agreed that the church funeral would be good, no matter how bad he had been in life. The next morning, after the viewing and a few tears, she was given the death certificate. We then went to the church where we were able to organise the service for the following week. The vicar advised her that she would need to pay cash for the volunteer gravediggers on the day.
After that, it was a simple matter to go to a funeral director and organise the pick-up of the body from the morgue and to deliver it to the church in time for the service. We were sitting at her kitchen table with cups of tea and a fruit cake when the phone rang. Susan answered it and I could just hear her telling the caller that ‘it is all right’ and ‘that would be good’. When she sat down, she smiled.
“That was the Inspector. He had called the other wife in Naples to tell her about the confirmed death of her husband. He said that she wanted to come here. She wanted to know who was organising the funeral and he asked if I didn’t mind him telling her about me.”
“That will be a bit of a shock to her, and her family.”
“I told him the time and place. It will be interesting to see her. She looked a lot like me in the picture.”
We spent the intervening time to put an advertisement in the local paper, and contacting all his friends that we knew from her list. The other important thing was to go and find a couple of black dresses to wear and also take her mother-in-law to her own favourite dressmaker.
On the day of the funeral, it was properly overcast. I stood with her and her in-laws as they welcomed the mourners. I noticed a large car that arrived outside the churchyard gate and watched as two men and a woman got out, one of the men reaching in and pulled a small child out, hoisting it in his arms. The woman was in a similar dress to Susan. I nudged her.
“Looks like the other wife has arrived. She looks a little worried. I think it would be good if you go to them and welcome them personally. The older man with the child could be her father.”
I didn’t say that the younger one made my legs feel like jelly. She nodded and left the porch to walk towards them. They spoke for a few seconds and then the two wives embraced and held each other as tears flowed. The father looked on with a slight smile as he cuddled the child. The younger one looked serious until he looked towards the porch. That’s when his face lit up. She led them all to the porch and introductions were made.
The older man was Salvatore Guiliano, and the child was his new grandchild, Pio. The younger man was her brother, Luigi. I was introduced as an old school friend of Susan, and the investigator who found the body. Luigi took my hand and congratulated me on my powers of deduction. I thought that my second power was working on him as well.
We all made our way into the church and the service began. We had the two front pews, with the original family on one side and the Italians on the other. After about forty minutes, the coffin was carried outside to the gravesite, where the pallbearers lowered it into the ground. The two wives stood side by side as they tossed some earth onto the coffin. Salvatore stood with Clement’s parents, his mother taking over the holding of her unexpected grandchild.
I stood a bit back with Luigi. He whispered that he was glad that he had joined his sister on the trip, even though it was a sad time for everyone. He whispered in my ear.
“My father is sad because he didn’t get to kill the man. It was a great affront to the family when we found out that he already had a wife. Seeing her and Silvana together, you could almost think that they were sisters.”
I turned my head, smiled, and nodded.
“We need to have a good discussion, Luigi. There is a lot about his death that needs looking into.”
He told me the hotel where they were staying and invited Susan and I to join them for dinner that evening, where we could have a quiet talk. After the funeral, Susan went to see the priest to leave the cash for the gravediggers, as well as a donation to the church. Salvatore joined us to give a generous donation of his own.
“It’s what we do, ladies. In Italy we are very generous to the Catholic church, and in return they give us excellent funerals.”
We said cheerio to the in-laws, who had a car of their own, and walked to Susan’s car to go back to the farm.
Back at the farm, we relaxed for a while, and I told her about the dinner tonight. We took our time getting ready to go out again. We couldn’t think of anything that we needed to give the Guiliano family, so were just in good dresses, with coats and bags, when our heels tapped to her car. She drove to the hotel in her heels. That was the one thing she could do that I had never mastered. There, we parked and went in, checking our coats in the reception.
We were led to a table where the two men stood for us, with both giving us hugs and continental cheek kisses. We both bent to Silvana as she stayed seated and gave her cheek kisses. When we were all seated, Salvatore looked at the two of us.
“Ladies, if you have done your research, you will know that Clement would be dead when he got to Napoli, now we know that he was a bigamist, on top of his other lies. Now, no more talk about that until after dinner. I’ve had a look at the menu, and they look as if the chef could be good.”
We had a good meal, with a lot of talk about young Pio, who had been left with a nanny. Salvatore admitted that it was the one good thing from the whole saga. Susan told them about her life, and when she told them that she had miscarried in her sixth month, Silvana stood to go to her and give her a hug. I had to give them a potted history of my own life after I last saw Susan when we left school.
All through the meal I noticed Luigi giving me sly glances, probably because I was returning them. When we had finished, Salvatore led us through to the hotel bar where he had reserved a booth in a quiet corner. We all sat, and he ordered champagne.
“Ladies, this trip has been a great surprise to us. It follows the surprise when we found out that Clement already had a lovely wife. Now, can you tell us about him and what he was doing?”
Susan told them about meeting the man, getting pregnant and getting married, followed by the rejection later. She then told them about building a separate house on spare land and him living alone to come and go as he pleased.
I then gave then a shortened version of my investigations and what I had found in his office. When I mentioned the cigarettes, Salvatore laughed out loud.
“Look, ladies. What you’ve just told me only confirms my ideas about him. He was a small-time crook and a liar. He could have made a fortune if he had concentrated on being a con man; he was so smooth he had us fooled. He told us that he worked for a charity and had been buying some of Silvana and Anna’s old stock to on-sell to shops here in England, with the profits to be split between the seller and the charity. It was a way of clearing the warehouse and we didn’t mind. He did buy a load of remainders two months ago, but only took a few. The rest are still waiting for him to pay for them.”
I remembered what I had seen.
“There was a rack of about twenty dresses, all with the Erminia label, in the shed where his friends had their contraband. I expect that it’s in the local police evidence room.”
Susan looked at Silvana.
“How much does he owe you?”
“How much do you have?”
“We found some money that he had hidden. The police didn’t seem to care. There’s a bit over ten thousand Euro.”
“To you, my sister in grief, the cost for the rest will be just ten thousand Euro. If you bring them here legally, they will cost you import duties, but I’m sure that you will end up making a profit on the deal. Current Erminia items sell for around two thousand Euro each in Rome and Paris.”
They shook hands on the deal and then stood and hugged. Luigi was watching all of this with interest. He then asked the question that was on his mind.
“So, Miss Fawcett. How did Clement die?”
“From what the police told us when we identified the body, he had been shot in the back. He was found, wrapped in plastic, in the Transit van he had borrowed. The odd thing is that he was in a gang with another four guys running the smuggling. There was no sign of their bodies, but their trawler was found north of here, drifting. There was blood stains in it, along with a set of mixed stains on the rear deck ramp, where they used to run out the fishing net.”
He smiled, along with his father.
“You know who we are, and that we have been involved in the Camorra for three generations. What you have just described has happened countless times in Napoli. If it talks like a gang, looks like a gang, it can’t be a duck!”
“I wondered why it looked like a total elimination, but there has been no sign of another gang.”
“What they wanted was to rid themselves of an unwanted itch. I would think that they are heavily into drugs, rather than cigarettes. They may be transporting women for their brothels. It works both ways, you know. English women are much prized in European whore houses. Not that we have anything to do with that side of things. They had no more need to be around once they had scratched that itch.”
After that, the talk turned to how Susan would be moving the goods. She said that her mother had an old friend who ran a small chain of upmarket dress shops. She would get in touch to see if she wanted them. If the deal worked, Silvana insisted that Susan could be their importer in England, seeing that they had only concentrated on about a dozen shops in Europe.
It was decided that Luigi and Silvana would pick us up at the farm in the morning. First so that Silvana could see where Clement had lived, and secondly to go to the police station to see if there was any problems claiming the rack of dresses. When we had claimed our coats, we both got hugs and cheek kisses from the three of them, with Luigi hugging me a bit longer than he had with Susan.
As she drove us back to the farm, I had to wonder about being on friendly terms with a mafia family. Especially the feelings I was having for one special boy. I can’t help it; I always had a soft spot for bad boys.
I had a fitful night and needed some extra concealer when I dressed for breakfast. Susan looked worse than I felt.
“Bad night?”
“A bit. I may have been too hasty last night. I haven’t spoken to my mother in two years, and now I have to be nice to her so that she introduces me to her friend.”
“Why can’t you go directly to the friend?”
“I suppose I could. I’m feeling a bit vulnerable still. I’ll see if she remembers me once we have some more details from Silvana.”
When the brother and sister arrived, we showed them into the old farmhouse. Neither of us had been inside the living area since the police had been. I wasn’t surprised at how they’d left the lounge, with the file drawers empty and hanging open, the desk upended to see if there was a secret hiding place, and smears of fingerprint powder everywhere. The bedroom was no better. I had a look in the new downstairs bathroom to see the cistern top on the floor.
The others acted as if they had seen all of this before, but it made Susan angry. I had to tell her that the searchers were just doing their jobs and Luigi backed me up.
“You will want to pull the place down, Susan, what does it matter how they left it. You’ll just have to clean anything you want to keep.”
Back in her house, we showed them the case of Euro notes. We double checked the amount and Silvana produced a proper invoice listing a hundred and ten dresses, Erminia label remainders, and wrote the amount on it and then marked it as paid and signed it with today’s date. I didn’t have to force my brain – if they were pulling two grand an item, Susan had just purchased two hundred grand’s worth of designer dresses. When she called her mothers’ friend, she would be in a position of power in the deal.
Silvana gave her the invoice, now the receipt, and smiled.
“Of course, Susan, once you start ordering current product the price will be the same as our other clients pay. Then, each dress is a standard twelve hundred Euro. When you get to that point, you should have the money behind you to be able to pay in advance.”
They hugged on the deal and then Luigi drove us to the police station. I asked to see the Inspector and he came out to talk to us. I could see that he was uncomfortable with being too friendly with a known mafia member, but I took his arm and pulled him to one side.
“Inspector, when I was in that shed at the docks, there was a rack with dresses on it. They were an advance shipment of dresses that Silvana and her sister make, all legitimate. Clement had brought them in along with his other contraband. They were a small part of a larger order and we have just completed a deal with Susan completing the purchase of the shipment. She will pay any taxes or import costs on that racks’ contents along with the rest of the shipment. What we are here for is to check that the rack is as it left Italy and that you talk to customs about getting it released.”
“All right. For you, Maxine, we can do it. If all the customs costs are paid, we can overlook that it was brought in illegally by a person now dead. Let’s go and see if we can get it out of the evidence room. It’s taking up a lot of space there, anyway.”
He got everyone ID tags and then led us to the evidence room, where the rack did take up a lot of space. Silvana pulled every zipper to check that the dress was one of hers and we verified that there were twenty on the rack. Susan rang Roy and asked if he had a small van she could borrow for a couple of hours. She and Luigi went off to collect it while Silvana and I organised for the rack to be taken out to the station car park.
It had been the first time the two of us were alone, and we talked as we waited for the others to come back. She admitted that it would have been an embarrassment had her friends found out that her husband had been a bigamist, but his death had solved that problem, and she would be able to carry on with her life as a grieving widow until she found another man in her life. By the time the others returned, we were talking about our favourite clothes and had a lot in common.
When the rack had been put into the van, we all went back to the farm, with Susan driving, Silvana in the passenger seat, and Luigi and I in the back to stop the rack from falling over on the corners. Most of the time he was stopping me rolling around by holding me close.
Marianne Gregory © 2024
Chapter 4
It was a very pleasant ride, despite the lack of comfort, and he asked me if he could take me to dinner that evening. I suggested the Wherry as a good place, and he told me that he would pick me up at seven.
At the farm, we man-handled the rack into Susans’ house and into the spare room. Silvana and Luigi took the van back to Roy and to reclaim the car that they were driving. Susan and I had most of the day looking at the dresses, trying on the ones in our sizes. She declared that there were fifteen that she thought could sell easily and she allowed me to pick two for myself, keeping the other three to go into her own wardrobe.
“If I wear one it will show that the goods are worthwhile. If the others are as good as these, there shouldn’t be a problem moving them. When I get the old house demolished, I can pay some of the workmen in cash, so dropping the amount of pounds in the case. Then I can get an industrial shed erected on a concrete base. It will be split into two halves, one side for strawberries and the other side for my new import business when I get it going. This has been a strange time, Maxie, but I can see it getting so much better.”
That evening, she said that she would call her mother and repair any broken bridges, with the main thing to tell her that her son-in-law was dead and buried. I went and made ready for my date, making sure I was clean and smelt good. With my sexiest undies on, a slip dress and a bolero jacket, I was in my heels and ready when Luigi arrived. I wished Susan good luck with her phone call, and she smiled when she told me that she would see me for lunch, tomorrow.
Luigi had the car that they had hired, and I directed him to the Wherry. We had a lovely meal with some interesting discussion, laced with sexual inuendo. We both had oysters. When the music started, I told him that I wanted to dance, and we grooved to the beat for an hour. At one stage, we were at the waterside of the hotel, looking out over Oulton Broad. He laughed.
“When I learned English, this was said to be a lake, or a body of water. I have seen lakes in Italy and Switzerland and this small pond is not one. So, I will call it just a body of water.”
“In these parts, Luigi, it is called a Broad, which is particular to the area. All the water is filling old peat mines and is a very popular place for boat people who never want to be more than ten yards from the shore. They can spend weeks sailing slowly around. I’m told that it’s very restful.”
“In America, a broad is a woman.”
“Well, we do contain an awful lot of water, if the scientists are to be believed. Actually, I need to rid myself of some of that water and then we can go somewhere romantic.”
“There is a nicely romantic picture on the wall of my room.”
“That’s good enough for me. See you in a few minutes.”
When I got back, he held me close and kissed me passionately. Then he took me to his hotel to see if the oysters we had shared worked. At least three of them were perfect. I had never had an Italian Stallion before, and he made me squirm and squeal. I hoped that the walls were thick enough to dampen the sound I made, more than once. He made many of the men I had slept with seem like hairy apes, he was so smooth and experienced. We finally fell asleep with me not worried about the very damp spot under my butt.
In the morning, I woke him by tickling his morning glory and then sitting on it. We showered together and it was almost good enough to be kissing with the water cascading over us to get us going again. Unfortunately, I think I had drained him, so we just washed each other.
We had breakfast in the room and then he drove me back to the farm. Oddly, at some time during the night, it could have been after our second time, there was a thought that crossed my mind. When we got there, I asked him if he could come with me this afternoon as there was something I needed to ask someone. He told me that his father and Silvana were going to use the car to go and see Clements’ parents in the afternoon, so I told him I would pick him up in the Cortina.
I got the third degree from Susan and told her that she should try her own Italian and see what it was like.
“The only Italian I know of in this town has the chippie by the docks. He’s fat and eats too much garlic.”
“You might want to go and see Silvana in Naples someday. I’m sure that there are lots more like Luigi around.”
“That way I can get laid while listing the trip as a business expense.”
“It’ll be difficult to explain what your business is!”
I got changed into my PI outfit, with the skinny jeans, boots, and black blouse. We had lunch and I got into Tina and drove to the hotel. The reception rang through to Luigi and he came down to give me a toe-curling kiss. When we came up for air he smiled.
“Just love the black outfit, Maxie. Where are you taking me?”
“Something that Roy said has niggled my brain. I want to ask him about it.”
I drove us to Roys Autos, and we went to talk to him.
“Roy, when I first spoke to you about Clement and him taking your cars; you said something about his friends and boats. I seem to remember you saying they had a couple. Is that right?”
“Yes. They had the trawler that was found up the north coast to fish with.”
“What was the other one?”
He asked us to wait a moment and went off to his office, coming back with a postcard.
“Clem gave me this. It’s not kept at Lowestoft but used to run trips out of Yarmouth for the holidaymakers. They’d run up to near Grimsby to see the seals when they’re home. All day trip with plenty of booze. By the time they saw the seals most of them wouldn’t care. The boys bought the boat and the business when the original owners retired.”
We looked at the postcard. It showed a boat that looked like it had started life as a modern trawler, with the rear deck now having a cabin with a railed upper deck.
“Me and the missus took the kids on it once. If it’s blowy you can sit in the cabin in the warm and buy the expensive crisps and drinks. When you wanted to sight-see, you go up on the upper deck. The old crews’ quarters were converted to a large kitchen for the food preparation. The old guy and his missus were good seafood cooks. He’d refitted the original output to give less slow speed torque but a better rate of knots without a heavy loading. It really went well.”
The card said that it could be found on South Denes Road. I asked Roy where it was, and he told me that it was the road that ran along the seaward side of the River Yare as it went towards the sea. The berth was nearly at the river mouth. I had an involuntary shiver when I saw that the boat was called ‘Fates’ Sealer’.
We got back into the car, with me looking at the map and Luigi driving. On the way I rang the Inspector to tell him about the new information. He took it all in and told me that he would meet us there, but not do anything stupid. As if!!
When we got to the berth, it looked as if the deal had included a two-storey building on the end of a line of sheds. The boat was moored off to the right of the entrance where there were car parks. A van was parked between the building and the quayside. We got out of the car and looked at ‘Fates’ Sealer’. It looked similar to the postcard, except that the cabin windows had been painted over. Luigi wandered off to look more closely, while I went past the building to look at the van. It was a Transit, but there were no side windows, although I could see seats in the back when I looked through the front window.
As I went back towards the boat, the door of the building opened and a hand grabbed my arm, pulling me inside. I only got a glimpse of a very large man before he hit me in the head with a roundhouse swing and I saw stars.
When I came round again, I could hear shouts. I was sitting in an armchair, in what looked like the reception lounge of the sea trip business. My wrists were cable-tied in front of me and there was an evil smelling rag stuffed in my mouth. The large man was looking at the scene outside and swearing. When the noise quietened down, he turned to me.
“You bitch! You brought the police here! I was going to add you to the shipment, but now I think that you might be my passport out of here.”
He pulled me off the chair and put his left arm around my body, taking a meaty grip of my right tit. He then took me to the door, which he opened slightly, and then picked up an Uzi machine gun and hustled me outside.
When the police saw us, a call rang out to put down the weapon and surrender. He held the barrel of the Uzi to my chin and told them to back off. He was going to leave in the Transit and if anyone tried to stop us, I would be shot. He backed up towards the van and I heard Luigi call out.
“If it looks like a gangster and talks like a gangster, the only thing left is to call it a -”
I realised what he was telling me and before he could say “Duck” I had pulled my head and shoulders to my left, just before a rifle bullet entered the guys brain. He had pointed the Uzi towards the voice, and he must have pulled the trigger as he died, because all I could hear for several seconds was the sound of the gun firing, smashing glass and a lot of shouting.
I was still being grasped by the tit as we fell in a heap, and he let me go enough to roll away from him. I was hyperventilating as I lay there. Luigi rushed up and pulled the gag out of my mouth and then pulled out a penknife, cutting the cable tie. I put my arms around his neck and sobbed in relief until a couple of paramedics came to take me to their ambulance to be checked out. That’s when I saw my faithful Tina. It looked as if it had taken the full magazine from the Uzi. The windows were shattered, there were holes all over it, and it looked like several rounds had hit the engine bay, as there was both water and oil puddling under the front.
I looked at the boat, to see a policeman with a rifle standing on the small bridge, giving me a wave. The Inspector came over to the ambulance with a big smile on his face.
“You cracked it in one, Maxine. We have the rest of the gang on the boat. They were shackling ten women to the seats in the cabin when we boarded and managed to catch them unawares. There was an armoury in there, and there would have been a hell of a gunfight if they had posted a guard.”
“That may have been who grabbed me. You couldn’t have been far behind us. I was knocked out, but I don’t know how long for.”
Luigi stayed with me as I was checked over. Except for a bruise that was already showing on my temple, and around my eye, I was deemed all right to go, as long as I got checked out by the hospital in a few days, to make sure that I didn’t have concussion. The Inspector told a uniform to drive us back to Lowestoft and then told me that he would organise the moving of my, now dead, Tina.
“I have a few friends who do most of the accident assessments, so, if we can have the insurance papers, I’ll have it listed as written off due to criminal activity.”
I showed him the papers in the glovebox, took my other keys off the fob, gave the steering wheel, or what was left of it, a pat and wished her bon voyage. I went to get my handbag from the back seat, to find it had two bullet holes through it, with my make-up mirror in a thousand pieces. I looked over to the body, now covered in a blanket, and wished him well with his seven years bad luck.
As we left in the back of the police car, we saw a TV truck arriving, along with some reporters. The police took us to the hotel, discussing the implications of the raid between themselves. From what I gathered, there would be some good things coming their way from the success of this afternoon. At the hotel, we went up to the room and I saw myself for the first time when I looked into the bathroom mirror.
The bruising would be tender for days, but that wasn’t the worst. The right side of my head was spattered with bits of skull and brain. I stripped off and had a long shower. After a while, I started feeling better. I was alive, and there was a handsome man in the next room, along with a freshly made bed. When I had dried, I put on the towelling robe, leaving it loosely open, and went into the bedroom. Luigi had anticipated my reasoning and was in the bed waiting for me.
We were drying off after another shower when there was a knock on the door. Luigi put a robe on and went to answer it. He called out that it was Silvana, so I put my robe on to go and see her. He was telling her what had happened and the first thing she did was look at my clothes, draped over a chair.
“You can’t wear these, Maxine, not until they’ve been cleaned. Come to my room, I think I have some things in your size. I owe you, not only for finding my husbands’ body, but for also finding the Bastardo that killed him!”
I put my underwear on and then put the robe on to follow her. She was a few doors further along and when she opened the wardrobe I nearly fell over. If this was what she packed for a few days, I would hate to think what her excess baggage costs were. I ended up with a black silk shirt and a black pencil skirt, both Erminia labels. As we picked them, I had to tell her how I got so scuffed and with the bruising. That’s when she hugged me and told me I was the bravest woman she had met. Then she dropped the bombshell.
“How nice of your British police to shoot that gangster for you, no charge. In Napoli they won’t do that sort of thing unless we pay them!”
Luigi drove me back to the farm. I didn’t feel up to having a dinner with them, tonight. I was also coming down from the adrenalin boost from Yarmouth. He kissed me and then told me that they would be flying out in the morning. He said that he would be happy to welcome me to Napoli if I wanted to go and visit him. I told him that I may join Susan when she does a business trip as her personal bodyguard. We kissed some more and then he was in his car and leaving my life.
When Susan saw me dressed differently and sporting a growing bruise, she had to know what had happened. She put the kettle on as I took my old blouse to the laundry and put it in soak. I read the directions on the soaker, and it said nothing about eliminating brain stains.
Over a hot cup of tea, I told her most of what happened since I left in the Cortina. It was close to six and we put the TV on to see the news. On the local station we saw Tina, in all her bullet-riddled glory, and the report showed the ten girls being looked after by paramedics before leaving the scene in a coach. The odd thing was that they all had just fuzz on their heads, as if they had all been shorn. There was also vision of the dead body with its cover, as well as the arrested crooks being loaded into prison vans. It was spoken of as a police raid, without any mention of either me or Luigi, which suited us both.
I stayed with Susan another two weeks. During that time, she drove me to the hospital to be checked out for concussion. She also drove me to the police station where I was told that my input had brought great kudos to the local force, having cracked a drug and human trafficking gang. ‘Fates’ Sealer’ had given them GPS readings for their delivery that night, and they had now identified the ship they were going to meet, with it to be raided whenever it arrives in territorial waters. The arrested men all said that it was their boss who had done any killings, very handy now he was in the morgue.
I received a cheque for the write-off value of poor Tina. She did, however, get a second lease on life. Roy had made an offer to the insurance for her, and I was still in town to officially open the new-look Roys Autos, with Tina on the roof of the office and a sign that read, ‘Unlike this car, our vehicles are bullet-proof.’ I left him, that day, driving a very nice ‘A’ Class Mercedes with about a tenth of the mileage that Tina had shown. He had given me a very good deal, having chased down the guys who had killed his friend.
The in-laws were also very appreciative of what we had achieved. Clements’ mother confided that Susan was now a much nicer person since I had arrived. The three of us went shopping in Norwich one day, Susan driving us. I bought a new handbag to replace the one that had been shot. I didn’t throw the old one away, though. No, that was coming home with me, to go to a place where I can look at it and remember Luigi. I had a non-musical earworm that came to me before I went to sleep almost every night.
“If it looks like a hunk, smells like a hunk, it must be a Luigi.”
It was going to take me some time before he left my mind. I wondered if I had actually fallen in love, or if I was overloaded with lust. There was no way I would be following him to Italy and becoming a gangsters moll. I had better things to do.
My bruising had started to turn odd colours when I finally said farewell to Susan, loading the Merc with my case and my new clothes. She had grown into a seriously competent woman, a far cry from the directionless slob she was when I arrived. The demolition of the old farmhouse had been arranged and I had helped her clear out the good things, putting it all in one of the old sheds for safe keeping. She now cleaned her place every few days and it would be welcoming to anyone who visits.
Before I left town, Susan and I had a dinner at the Wherry, determined not to be picked up by boys. We both wore our Erminia dresses and stood out among the locals in their more casual wear. We ate well and emptied a bottle of wine between us. We had taken a taxi there and would be taking a taxi home again. Susan asked me if I liked the view.
“Luigi said that it was a pond, rather than a lake. He called it a body of water. I have to agree, as he seemed to know a lot about bodies, even mine.”
Marianne Gregory © 2024