‘I think John might have been tampering with Derek’s medication.’
Mindy had a finger half an inch from the car’s start button and a thoughtful expression on her face.
‘You mean like swapping it for something else or adding something to it? Do you think that is why his skin was so bad and not getting any better?’
I pursed my lips, checking my thoughts. John went to the house all the time. Derek’s condition probably started naturally enough, but John could have added something to the cream at any point. Joanne would have been diligently applying it to her husband unaware that she was the one making his skin worse.
‘I think we need to go to John’s house,’ I murmured as much to myself as it was to Mindy.
Mindy tilted her head. ‘To do more snooping?’ She sounded excited at the prospect.
I didn’t want to call it snooping, but what other word could I come up with?
‘More like investigating,’ I tried. ‘I doubt we will find anything, but maybe there will be a clue in his trash.’
‘His trash?’ Mindy made a disgusted face.
I’d seen detective shows where they went through a suspect’s rubbish to find vital clues. Maybe that would work for me too. Would he shred his paper waste? Remembering the pages I took from John’s car, I had to wonder if there might be more in his trash. They were important enough for him to have scribbled notes on with lots of exclamation marks.
I nodded to myself. ‘It’s bin day tomorrow. We have one chance to see if there is anything to find. There is something going on at Orion Print. Something that made John want to kill Derek and in turn got John killed.’
Mindy’s eyebrows bunched together. ‘I thought his brakes failed due to poor maintenance?’ she questioned. ‘Wasn’t that what you said earlier? That’s why the police let you go.’
‘It was. You are right. I also heard a different story. Vince,’ Mindy knew him from the previous weekend at Loxton Hall, ‘said it was more likely the brakes were tampered with. Also, I … um. I sort of broke into their office last night and overheard a man talking about destroying evidence.’
Mindy was gaping at me. ‘Auntie, you are a total badass! You broke in!’
My cheeks went red. Even if Mindy did think I was cool, criminal activity was not something I wanted to endorse or be praised for.
‘Well, in truth, Vince broke in and I went with him. Look, the point is I am sure someone has been up to something and I think John discovered it. His car crashing like that is just too much coincidence. The more I think about it, the less willing I am to believe it was an accident.’
Mindy stabbed the start button with a determined finger and the engine roared to life. ‘Right then, Auntie. Where to?’
In the Rear-View
John Ramsey was a life-long bachelor so there was no danger of finding his grieving widow at home. His lack of family was one of the things that made him so good at his job, but also so hard to work with, I suspected. He had no distractions. His work was his life and while it could be said that he’d done well as a businessman, no job will ever love you back. I imagined he had an empty life outside of work.
Finding his address was easy enough, I looked it up on Companies House where my own address is also listed as a minor shareholder.
Mindy needed to use the motorway to get there, which allowed her to once again see if she could accelerate off the side of the planet. It wasn’t so much the top speed she achieved, which was over the seventy limit, though not by a scary amount, but more the rate at which she got there.
‘Mindy, please slow down,’ I begged as she swung around a truck and floored the pedal yet again.
She flicked a glance in her rear-view mirror. She’d been doing it a lot recently.
‘Auntie, I think we are being followed.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ I countered without giving any credence to her claim. ‘Why would anyone be following us?’
‘I’m not making it up, Auntie,’ Mindy argued, her eyes checking the rear-view again. ‘There’s a black BMW back there and it’s been behind me since we left Aylesford. I think I saw it before that too.’
‘Go faster, see if you can lose it,’ barked Buster. I pretended I hadn’t heard him.
Twisting in my seat, I craned my neck to get a look back down the motorway.
‘Don’t look, Auntie! He’ll know we are onto him if he sees you looking.’
‘You’re just being paranoid,’ I replied, hoping I was right.
‘I bet it’s the killer,’ said Buster. ‘He knows you’re onto him and he’s worried my alter ego, Adventure Dog, will track him down and beat him to a pulp so the police can arrest him.’
‘Is Buster all right?’ asked Mindy, sounding worried. ‘He doesn’t need to go potty, does he?’
I ignored them both for a second, staring at the black BMW. It was thirty yards behind, steadily tracking us, but the same could be said for the car behind that and the car behind that. We were on a three-lane motorway so all the cars were going in the same direction at more or less the same speed.
‘I’m going to try something,’ Mindy announced.
I got enough warning to form a sentence asking what she had in mind, but not enough time to pose it.
My niece cranked the steering wheel to the right, swung out to pass an articulated truck while simultaneously blasting her car from seventy miles per hour to over a hundred in the blink of an eye.
‘Yeaaahhhh!’ whooped Buster. Pressed back into my
