Page 42 of The Taskmaster
But I wasn’t ready to expose myself just yet.
The first thing I did when I left her apartment and found a place to wait in a maintenance closet in her building was to trawl through the CCTV from the night before. I wanted to see if I could pull a license plate from the black Mercedes I’d seen driving away. To look for any clues about who the guy was that was trying to break into her apartment, but I couldn’t find anything. He was a generic dark figure on the screen and the car’s registration was hidden. I had nothing else to go on, and that pissed me off.
I continued to watch her through my camera, but I was aware I’d left Tolley in a tank of water, abandoning my game just when things were getting interesting.
So, I accessed my warehouse cameras, and there he was, blue, bloated, laying in the water with his head immersed. Fucker had died before I got the chance to finish things, probably from hypothermia, seeing as the water was icy and it’d been cold last night. That warehouse would’ve been freezing.
Did you know that hypothermia can develop in less than five minutes, and that people die faster in water than they do in the freezing air?
Water has a high thermal conductivity that can cool a person at least twenty-four times faster than if they were out in the open. Immerse someone in freezing water and they wouldn’t survive for longer than forty-five minutes.
I couldn’t deny, I knew all that, so it was no surprise to me that he’d died. But it was a no-brainer last night. She took precedence over everything. I’d find out who this Q was without his help. I’d find out everything. But not from that useless fucker. He’d reached his usefulness. It was time for him to go.
The bus stopped at the lights, and I waited behind, thankful for my helmet to hide my face.
Where the fuck was she going?
I knew she’d rung in sick today. The drugs in her wine had made her feel like shit, and she’d made up some bullshit story about having the flu. I’d poured the rest of the wine in the bottle away before I left. I didn’t want her to drink anymore, or find out in some way that it’d been tampered with. I had to destroy the evidence and avoid anything like what’d happened last night from happening again.
Now, Abigail appeared to be on a mission. The groggy haze from earlier had lifted. Her stance, when she’d queued for the bus, was forthright. Her eyes were alert, and she looked readyfor whatever she was about to face. But this bus was going in the opposite direction to her parents’ house.
So where the fuck was she going?
The bus made a few stops, but she didn’t get off, and I managed to maintain my distance on the road behind so I could keep following, stopping when the bus did and pretending to look at something on the front wheel of my bike so I wouldn’t look suspicious.
Eventually, the bus headed out of town, and when the roads became less busy and the streets more deserted, I saw her stand up and walk towards the front of the bus. This was her stop.
I pulled to the side of the road, a short distance away from the bus stop, and watched her get off. I decided to follow her on foot from herein, so I turned my engine off, but I kept my helmet on. She stayed on the main roads this time, no ducking down dark alleyways. But she did keep checking her phone, and I guessed she was using Google maps to navigate her way to where she needed to be, judging from the way she held it up and kept turning her body to assess the right direction.
She turned into a small avenue, which became a tiny country lane the farther you walked down. And at the end of it, hidden from the rest of the lane by overgrown brambles and hedges, was a rundown little cottage.
Abigail ducked down behind a stone wall, and I stayed back, watching what she’d do next. She waited, peering over the wall a few times, then crawled around the perimeter of the property to the back.
I saw her stand up slowly, then open the back gate and let herself into the garden. She walked up the small path and peered into a window at the back, then she tried the handle for the back door, but it was locked. She began taking photos of the building with her phone, glancing around and then tapping away on the screen. She bit her lip as she proceeded to move slowly aroundthe outside of the cottage, peering through windows, pressing against them to check their security, and then she arrived back at the front door.
I was close now, hiding behind the wall as she muttered to herself, “No ring doorbell, no CCTV, no house alarm, weak window frames and cables I can easily cut through if needed. It’s perfect.”
The place looked deserted.
Why did she think it was perfect?
What was she planning on doing here?
It appeared to be a dilapidated old shack to me.
I took my phone out and googled the address. After a quick glance through the property records, I found out it belonged to an Angela Maynard. I did an online search of that name to see what I could find, but there was nothing, no social media or reference to an ex-employer. I’d keep digging. I wanted to know why Abigail was so hyped about this place, but I had to abandon my online research. Abigail was leaving.
I followed her back up the lane and onto the avenue, then she turned down a street that was a little busier, and at the end was a coffee shop. She went inside, and so did I.
She stood at the counter, peering up at the menu on the wall behind the barista, and he stared at her, rolling his eyes as she took her time to decide what she wanted. I stood a short distance away, glancing over the selection of cakes behind the glass to give me a reason to watch and listen without looking like a creep.
“Can I help you?” the barista asked, looking anything but helpful as he quietly huffed to himself and tapped his fingers on the till.
“Ermmm,” she said, still indecisive, and then she asked, “Could I have a small latte, full-fat milk, please.”
“Is that all?” he drawled, and I wanted to grab him by the scruff of his neck and pull him across the counter, smackhis head against the glass and tell him to show some fucking manners.
“Yes, that’s all,” she replied politely.
