Page 69 of Blow Down (The Plumber's Mate)
“Mr. Paretski?” Sharp said. Sharply. I realised I’d been sitting there staring at the thing like it was my long-lost cousin, now tragically deceased.
“Uh. Sorry. No. Hadn’t seen it before. We didn’t have a lot of time to set it all up, yeah? But, I mean, I know where it came from. There was a stall. Brownies, right?”
“Girl Guides,” he corrected me, because apparently it was an important distinction.
He must have caught my look. “I’ve got daughters. You try suggesting to my eldest she’s still in the Brownies, she’ll have you with a tent peg.” There was the actual ghost of a smile hovering around his lips. Then he stood up. “Right, Mr. Paretski. That’ll be all for now. Thank you for your time.”
“That’s it?” I asked stupidly.
“Well, unless you’d like to have a look at the dripping tap in the gents’ . . .”
I fixed the tap. It seemed like the polite thing to do.
I gave Phil a bell when I finally got out of there, just to reassure him I hadn’t been read my rights and sent down for the foreseeable. “What are you up to?” I asked.
“Following some financial leads. You still in St. Leonards?”
“Yeah, just about to leave. Why?”
“How do you fancy giving the old Paretski charm a workout? If you haven’t got a job on,” he added. I was touched he remembered I actually had to make a living at this plumbing lark.
“Nah, had to cancel everything for the afternoon, didn’t I? Could’ve been in there hours. Who d’you want charmed, though? You don’t mean Frith, do you?” With Amelia dead and Vi hating us, I couldn’t think of anyone else involved in the case who was likely to be susceptible to my dubious charms.
Phil huffed. “Not likely. Elizabeth Fenchurch.”
Huh. I’d sort of forgotten about her. “Let me guess—you want me to ask her about him indoors?”
“Yes. Specifically, while he’s not indoors. See if you can find out anything about his relationship with his sister and the Majors family.”
“And where he might have been and who he was doing at the time of the murder?”
“You might want to be a bit more subtle about that.” Phil sounded amused.
“Oi, subtlety’s my middle name.”
“You? You can’t even spell ‘subtlety.’”
“Course I can. I just don’t want to right now, that’s all. So, just to be clear, you want me to go poking my nose in about this case we’re not actually employed on anymore?”
“That’s the one. And don’t forget to do a bit of psychic snooping while you’re there.”
“What, you reckon after he made the fake necklace, he might have forgotten to return the real one?”
“You never know, although my money’s on whoever had it having sold it already. Cash is a lot harder to identify than stolen property. Unfortunately.”
“Yeah? Would it be old Arlo’s finances you’re digging into?”
“Among others. Just see what turns up.”
Phil gave me the address, and directions—apparently Arlo’s gaff was so posh it wasn’t satnav-able. It wasn’t that far from Alex Majors’s house, as it happened, on the same side of St. Leonards but just a bit further out into the sticks.
I found it without too much difficulty, despite almost missing the turn-in when I got there, it being just a gap in a line of tall trees that completely shielded the house from the lane. I whistled when I saw the place.
The Arlos—sorry, the Fenchurches—had a house just as expensive looking as old Alex’s, if not more so, but that was where the similarity ended. Far from a listed building with more history than an entire box set of Vikings, this place looked like it’d been built yesterday from a kit that consisted entirely of plate glass and white-painted boxes. You could pretty much see right through it, which I suppose wasn’t a problem if you had extensive grounds and no neighbours within a stone’s throw.
Given all the glass, that last bit was probably just as well.
It was set in a bit of a dip, and I realised even if you chopped down all the trees, you probably still wouldn’t see it from the road. Somebody was very keen on their privacy.
