The Long Call (Two Rivers #1) - Ann Cleeves Page 0,29

for us both. Other evenings he disappeared into his room. Caz might know if he had pals in Lovacott. She sometimes gave him a lift into Barnstaple.’

‘He never had any visitors?’

‘I never saw anyone.’ She paused. ‘Someone phoned for him once. We’ve got a landline but we hardly ever use it. We’ve got our mobiles. One day, I decided to check the landline messages and one had been left for Simon.’

‘Can you remember any details? The name of the caller? A number?’

‘Nothing like that. It was as if the guy on the other end of the phone assumed Simon would know who he was. Hi, Si! How’s this as a blast from the past. But I tracked you down in the end. I told you I would. You can’t escape your old buddies after all.’ She turned sharply, so she was facing him. ‘It sounds a bit sinister now, doesn’t it? But the tone wasn’t like that. It was friendly. As if they were old mates.’

‘When was the call made?’

‘I picked it up a couple of weeks ago. It could have been made a few days before that, though. Like I told you, we don’t use the landline much.’

‘Did you save the message?’ Matthew thought they needed to trace the caller whether he was a friend or an enemy. They knew so little about Walden’s past.

‘Of course! Because I told Simon it was there so he could hear it. He might have deleted it afterwards, though.’

‘Were you there while he listened to it?’

‘No!’ Gaby was firm. ‘None of my business.’

There was a moment of silence. Matthew texted Ross to get a trace on the phone and to pass a message to Jen to listen to the call. She might still be on the coast. He’d asked her to go to the hotel where Walden had worked once she’d finished with Caroline and he’d send her back to the house. Gaby had given them a spare key the night before. He felt a bubble of excitement rising in his stomach. The phone call might be an important factor in the investigation. This was why he loved the work.

‘Where were you yesterday afternoon?’

‘I was out on the coast,’ she said. ‘Making sketches for a painting I was doing.’

‘Where exactly on the coast?’

There was another moment of silence. ‘Not far from where his body was found. I wasn’t there to kill him, though. He bugged me, but it wasn’t as if he planned to stay in Hope Street indefinitely. According to Caz, he was starting back at the hotel once the season had started. He’d be living in.’ She stared at Matthew. ‘Come with me!’ Her voice was insistent and demanding. ‘I can prove what I was doing on the shore.’ She stood up. Without comment, he followed her.

She led him up two flights of stone steps to the top of the building without speaking. Refurbishment had ended at the lower floors and the steps were bare and uneven. When she threw open the door to a large room, he saw stained floorboards, crumbling plaster and old brick. It was flooded with light through sash windows on two sides. There was a filter coffee machine on a window ledge with a few dirty mugs, an easel, a pile of canvases leaning against one wall. Otherwise the space was empty, echoing. She nodded to the coffee machine. ‘Do you want one? I made it this morning, though, and it’ll be stewed by now.’

‘I’m caffeined out, thanks.’

She seemed a different woman in this space. The flip, easy-going Gaby of Hope Street was gone. She showed him the painting on the easel. A seascape, with a shimmering promontory of land. Crow Point, not where they’d found Walden, but seen from the other side of the marsh. There were bare patches of canvas.

‘It wasn’t going well,’ she said, ‘so I went back to do some sketches. I didn’t go through the toll road. I parked by the marsh and walked from there.’ She got out her sketchbook and held it out for him to see. Rapid pencil drawings that captured the movement of waves, the wingbeat of gulls. He recognized the shape of Crow Point in the distance.

‘These are very good.’ The words came out without thought.

‘That’s why I’m at the Woodyard. Because it gives me the time and the space to paint. The work is mostly mind-numbingly dull, like the class you just saw. A bunch of bored middle-aged and middle-class people, who think they have