Page 37 of The Dead Come to Stay
“Oh. I’m not ordering. I just had a question.” Jo was, in fact, trying to formulate a question just then, but it was hard to know how to begin.Were you parked up at a murder scene yesterday?didn’t seem like a good opener;Have you seen the vanishing hiker?didn’t strike her as much better.
“Closed, I said.” He reached for the sliding glass door—and Jo did something drastic and more than a trifle embarrassing. She blocked it with the bone-shaped dispenser for tiny dog-poo bags she’d been carrying around. That made him shove all the harder, but he’d been thwarted by femoral knob.
“Please, I really just—”
“Look, ye nebby hinny, go off. We ain’t selling today.” With that, he wrenched loose the blockade, shut the window and put up the official closed sign. Jo stared at it, wondering what had got into her lately. The van wasn’t her problem. The hiker wasn’t, either. She had enough mystery women to track down without adding new ones to her repertoire.
And anyway, she needed to prepare for an art opening. She opened a text window and searched for Gwilym. It was time to divide and conquer.
I need everything you can dig up on Augustus John.
The ellipsis of creation appeared immediately.
You’re the boss, he wrote.
***
When MacAdams and Green returned to Abington CID, Gridley and Andrews met them at the door.
“About our burner phone,” Andrews said, waving a sheaf ofpaper. “Guess what? Most of the calls go toanotherburner, or several—”
“Which you are also tracing,” MacAdams interrupted.
“Yes, sir. But we did get a bit of good news. The reports show a series of calls to a landline, every few weeks over the last six months. The Abington Arms.”
That got MacAdams’s attention, and Green’s, too, he noted.
“Wait just a minute,” she said. “Arianna said he’d never called before, that she didn’t recognize the name.”
MacAdams responded by putting Arianna and Evans back on the incident board in the Active category.
“We’ll get them in for questioning. What about Sophie Wagner’s charity?”
Gridley hopped up from the table she’d been sitting on. “That checks out; cleared with Home Office and registered for community sponsorship. Not as big an organization as something like Citizens UK, but they seem to have helped resettle a few dozen families.”
“Is that a lot?” Andrews asked.
Gridley picked up a marker. “You bet. It’s thousands of pounds per person. If—super conservatively—we say 5K per, that’s over 130,000 sterling.” She wrote that on the board. “But that’s not even the biggest part of it. There’s finding the right housing, getting it approved, sorting the paperwork, job center training, language classes. That’s why it’s usually a communal effort.”
“And not usually attached to a country club,” MacAdams said.
“Fair,” Gridley agreed. “But even though Sophie started the Fresh Start charity, she has a board of directors. It’s not under the business she operates; they just happen to be licensed for job placement. FYI, though. Burnhope is on the board. So is Ava.”
Burnhope had said as much to MacAdams. Tight little family, they had there. Each standing in as supportive alibi for the rest.
“It might be worth looking into the club, anyway. It’s called Lime Tree Greens. Wagner’s son works there, too.”
“Are they suspects?” Gridley asked.
“Not yet. But add them to the list of people surrounding Foley. Where are we on next of kin for Foley?”
Andrews waved a hand. He was nosing over his tablet and chewing his bottom lip. “Nothing. I mean,nobody.No mother, no father, no siblings. Actually, no Ronan Foley earlier than 1998.”
MacAdams picked a stale doughnut, then put it down again.
“Explain.”
“Well, his ID card tells us he was born in Belfast in 1962. I put in a call to Ireland’s General Registry Office, but they don’t have a birth record for a Ronan Foley in Belfast.”
