Quid Pro Quo

Chapter Two

The journey back to the office did nothing to improve my mood.

Traffic queued to get into queues, and those who got tired of waiting forced their way into non-existent gaps, further snarling it up for the rest of us. During rush-hour in this part of the world, it takes so long to drive anywhere that I sometimes think I might die of old age before I get there. Archaeologists of the future will dig up my skeleton, still strapped into my seat belt, my forehead leaning in silent desperation on the horn in the centre of the wheel.

I was feeling somewhat nervous about what awaited at the office. Grabbing another job as quickly as possible to give myself another chance of chalking up a win was uppermost in my mind. I always said job rather than case. The term seemed so pretentious for the almost entirely menial nonsense that we typically had to do. That didn't stop both Yeoman twins, my invertebrate partners, from referring to everything as a case as if they were Sam-fucking-Spade.

I parked on the tiny company car park next to the sky-blue Fiesta that belonged to Joan, our receptionist. She had been with the company since my father and his friend Alfred Yeoman had jointly founded it. Rumour had it that Joan provided more than administrative support to my dad, but rumour was all it was.

By all accounts, Alfred Yeoman had been a good policeman. He served with my dad until they both left the force for reasons that were never spoken about. Faced with a future as night watchmen earning little enough to feed themselves, let alone their families, they went into business together and formed Turner Yeoman Investigations.

They never made it big, but they provided. Using a simple mixture of their experience, and some friends still in uniform, they brought successful conclusions, one way or another, to the vast majority of work they took.

Now they were both six feet under and had passed equal shares in the business on to their children. The death of my sister Mary had changed all of that. The Yeoman twins had somehow convinced Mary to sell them her share of the firm a couple of months before her accident. I hadn't had the money to do it, and Mary hadn't offered it to me in any case.

I had never asked Mary why she had done it, and I wasn't going to get the chance to rectify that any time soon. I felt guilty for carrying the anger of that betrayal all the way to the crematorium.

Now the Yeomans spent their days freezing me out and conniving to give me the shittiest of missing cat investigations in the hope I would leave.

They would have a long wait.

The office is on the first floor of a converted town house, a comfortable bus ride from the city centre. We have a brass plate on the door and a cobweb-filled intercom that works only intermittently and even then makes your voice sound like a Dalek from a Bulgarian remake of Dr. Who.

I blundered up the stairs and into the foyer, brushing the raindrops from my shoulders before they had chance to settle into my coat. Joan looked up from her Woman's Weekly and regarded me with her implacable gaze, like a carpenter sizing up a sheet of ply that needed crafting.

"You're here late, Joan," I waved in greeting, avoiding eye contact and instead regarding the distinctly dead fern in the corner.

"So are you, Satchmo," she replied with an arched eyebrow that could have supported a decent aqueduct.

Touché I thought. She doggedly refused to call me Mr. Turner; I guess there was only one Mr. Turner for her, and he died three years ago.

"...As is Anthony," Joan continued, her voice carrying a veiled note of caution.

Shit. Anthony, the more obnoxious of the twins, was here. His brother was more odious than obnoxious. It was a toss-up which of the two was the bigger twat.

"Yes, well. I finished the Welfare job, turns out he actually is sick, and his boss is trying to screw him," I replied, looking around for warning of any approach by Anthony.

"Not the outcome that the client was looking for," Joan confirmed my feelings on the matter. "I guess you'll be wanting the next file then. Don't forget your report on the last job. Noon tomorrow, if you please," she said curtly and not at all in a tone that suggested that she was making a request.

"Joan..." I flashed my most winning smile at her, the one I imagined melted hearts and attracted puppies "...do I ever let you down?"

Judging by the wrinkling of her brow, our definitions of what constituted letting her down differed somewhat.

"Noon tomorrow! Here's the next one." She passed the plastic ring binder across her desk.

"Anthony was expecting that file, but as you're here first I suppose it's yours," Joan said. "At least until the AGM, at any rate," she added, as if I had forgotten that the Yeoman twins were close to enacting their plan to deprive me further of decent jobs in the hope that it would strain my finances to the point where I would have to sell up.

I'm glad Anthony 'call me Tony' Yeoman was expecting this case. It gave me a small amount of satisfaction to fuck up his upcoming morning, however trivially.

I tucked the folder under my arm and was turning to leave when a voice boomed across the foyer.

"Turner!"

I turned to face the owner of the voice and hid the file behind my back in the same motion. Anthony Yeoman was striding toward me, the breast of his suit jacket flapping in response to the exertion, his murine face sniffing at the air as if scenting something irresistibly distasteful.

"Anthony," I responded with barely concealed opprobrium, "how are you?" We both knew that this was rhetorical. I didn't care one way or the other.

"Finished the last case, have you Turner? I imagine that you've come to file the report, though I wouldn't bother taking the next one if I were you," he smirked.

"Oh?" I wasn't in the mood to exchange epithets.

"Yes, Joan tells me that it's a missing person job, and we all know that you need both hands to find your own arse, let alone anything else." He laughed at his own joke with a sort of wheezing hiccupping noise that put me in mind or a cat choking on a chicken bone.

I bit my tongue, knowing that it was only tenuously connected to my brain and lacked any semblance of a filter.

"So, how is our friend at Chow Down? I imagine he will be delighted with your report and grateful to you, personally, for succeeding where others had failed?" Yeoman's smirk widened to a grin.

"Nothing like closing a case to give the old metrics a little boost, eh, Turner?" he giggled, issuing a little wink.

He knew, I thought. He had stitched me up with a job in which there was no chance of the outcome that the client wanted.

If that was their game, I was glad that I had intercepted the next file that Anthony was expecting. This one, at least, ought to have the potential of a positive result.

With my brain struggling to construct a snappy reply that did not contain the word fuck, I opted instead to stalk away. I left Anthony Yeoman accepting a case folder from Joan, the pair of them laughing about something, as I squeezed into the cupboard that passed for my office.

Tidying my desk was a major operation, so I didn't bother.

My tray of pending paperwork was brimming, and my phone was covered under a multi-coloured plethora of sticky notes bearing numbers, thoughts and chores, most of which were obsolete, their relevance long since forgotten. My bottle of water rested at my right hand, leaving a wet little ring on a sheaf of invoices.

The scene was lit by dim light that forced its way in through a tiny pane of glass just below the roof; a window so small that Houdini would have rejected it as an escape route.

Having sat, I opened the cover of the file Joan had passed to me. It was a missing person job, a Mr. T. Edge.

Oh well, I sighed. Sod's Law dictated that the folder Anthony had just picked up from Joan involved a stunning blonde nymphomaniac with a weakness for private detectives. That's the way it goes, I guess.

I read the file, though there wasn't much to it. Nevertheless, I went over it twice in the course of thirty minutes.

We were being retained by a firm of solicitors who were acting as the executors of the last will and testament of one Morgan Edge. The estate was all to be inherited by Morgan's nephew, Tyrone, but the will made provision for funds to locate Tyrone.

Odd, I thought.

I checked the clock. There wasn't much I'd be able to do on this Edge job that night. I could, and should, have written-up the report for the prick at Chow Down. However, the thought of putting the facts down in black and white seemed to accelerate the prospect of his penning a complaint in response, so instead I packed up and headed out.

"Off home, Satchmo?" Joan asked needlessly as I strode out of the door, the notes for the Edge case under my arm.

"Yes, I'll make a fresh start in the morning," I replied, trying to at least sound cheerful.

"Report. Noon," she chirruped as the door swung shut behind me.

*

My flat very much resembled my office, the only difference being the bed tucked into one corner of my living room, as if cowering away from the detritus filling the rest of the space.

The space consisted of three rooms: a tiny kitchenette, a filthy and disease-ridden bathroom in which one was likely to become dirtier upon use than when one had entered it, and a part separated living/bedroom.

I didn't spend a lot of my day there, and that I did was mostly taken up with sleeping, eating or tending to my pets. Consequently, the place was in a near-constant state of dishevelment and looked more like a crime scene than a habitable space. It's not that I liked it like that per se, just that I disliked it less than the prospect of doing anything about it.

I changed immediately out of my work trousers into a pair of comfy jogging bottoms, swapped my shirt for a baggy T, opened a tin of beans, and toasted some slightly furry bread for my evening meal. Not wanting to dine alone, I roughly chopped a handful of wilting lettuce for Rommel, my tortoise, and blew the fluff and droppings from the top of Fang II's food bowl.

Having made everyone's dinner, I put the radio on and relaxed on my unmade bed with my beans on toast and a bottle of water from my fridge. I propped open the Edge job folder by leaning it against my raised knees and began to re-read.

The clients were Reeman & Reeman; solicitors we had dealt with before on several similar small jobs. The surviving and eponymous Reeman was a good man and unusually honest for a member of his profession, though it could be argued that his honesty has placed something of a constraint on the size and turnover of his business. Perhaps that is just me being overly cynical.

It was pretty strange that the major beneficiary of the will in question, the deceased's nephew Tyrone Edge, had not come forward and could not be found by the solicitor's usual channels.

It was stranger-still that, by provision of the will, a high proportion of the estate had been made available to ensure that the transfer of deeds be made from uncle to nephew. Of course, this included a sizable lump sum to the executors on the successful completion of this inheritance.

I thought it weird that Morgan Edge should feel the need to leave funds to find his named heir. It implied that he knew his heir might not be forthcoming, or indeed easy to locate.

Morgan had left a description of his heir as part of the will which was, again, a most unusual thing to do. It read:

Tyrone Edge, D.O.B. 10/10/84,
Height: 6" 2', Weight: 13 stone (approx),
Eyes: blue,
Last known hair colour: chestnut brown,
Occupation: nil.

There was nothing too striking there; Mr. Slightly-Taller-Than-Average.

I laid the folder flat on my stomach, bent over the edge of the bed and scooped Rommel out of his box and placed him onto my chest.

"This shouldn't be too hard, should it mate?" I stroked the reptile's soft underbelly gently until his lined little face emerged from the comfort of his shell. I gave his head a playful scratch. It was as wrinkled as bag of prunes and felt like perished leather.

He fixed me with his beady little eyes as if to say don't be too sure.

If only I had had the foresight of my tortoise.