*NEW* Dinah & Shaw 17 – Suspicious Curtains (A Night Out – part three)

…Dinah stared at the woman on the other side of the table.  She tried to sip the tea that had been prepared for her, but it tasted like the perfumed dregs of a thrice used bag strained over a slice of wilting lemon and wilfully kept away from both milk and sugar.  She was pleased that she hadn’t had to pay for it – nor, now she came to think of it, pronounce it.  Neither woman spoke: the celery woman (let’s call her Hermione) because she was marshalling her answers together for when the questions started; Dinah because she was marshalling her questions together in a way that tip-toed around her boiling rage.  Displays of temper in public were not usually Dinah’s thing.  In her head she was a Ninja detective, calmly ready to demand answers, ready to use extreme force if necessary, certain that she would leave no physical scar; but only in her head.  Her face, she decided, was suitably inscrutable, which was just as well because, truth be told, she was trying to decide what she would do if the woman turned violent and attacked her.  Cry, almost certainly.

She took another sip of the tea (it did not improve for being cold) and decided to start asking her questions.  Hermione looked at her watch and, as far as Dinah could see, prepared to stand.  “Look,” she said, “If you’re just going to sit there, I have work to do.”
“No,” said Dinah as the door behind her ‘pinged’ to announce the entrance of a customer.  “You owe me some answers.”
“You?” said Hermione.  “I owe you?  I don’t think so.  I put five thousand pounds in your ‘partner’s’ pocket when I returned him to you.  What more do you want?”
Dinah didn’t like the emphasis placed on the word ‘partner’ and determined to pursue that with her a little later.  She opened her mouth to reply…
“It was twenty short,” said a voice from behind her.
“Shaw?” exclaimed a startled Dinah.  “How?”
“Oh, I followed her,” said Shaw, indicating a woman perusing the menu at the counter.  “There was something about her duffle bag.”
For the first time since Dinah had confronted Hermione there was a subtle hint of panic in her eyes.  She looked suddenly fragile.  She had appeared supremely confident one on one, but now she was outnumbered.  How had they found her?  She had been so careful.  “Look,” she turned a rictus grin on Dinah, “get… him… to sit down and I’ll explain.  What does he drink?”
“I can answer for myself, you know,” said Shaw.
Hermione looked doubtful.  “Ok,” she sighed, “go on then.”
“Well I’d like… I… well… what do you do?  I mean, I can’t read the menu from here, what with my double vision and everything.”
“He’ll have an Americano,” said Dinah, “with lots of cold milk, otherwise he burns his tongue, and three sugars.”
“What she said,” said Shaw and joined Dinah at the table.

“My husband is CID,” said Hermione, placing Shaw’s coffee on the table with something as close to a thump as the cup would stand, “and having an affair.  I wanted some evidence, but I didn’t want to use anyone he could possibly have heard of.  I Googled ‘Private Investigators’ and went as far down the list as I dared before I started getting the really weird stuff, and that’s where I found you: 5 stars on Trust Pilot and dozens of glowing reviews, every single one of them with the same spelling mistake…”  Shaw tried very hard to think what word it might be, but decided it was probably not the right time to ask.
“…I thought I’d better set you a simple task, just to see if I could trust you.  Obviously I discovered that I couldn’t and I was just about to tell him so when idiot boy here ignored my warning and got himself whacked on the back of the head by a drone.”
“A drone?” asked Dinah and Shaw as one.
“Yes,” answered Hermione.  “My husband, who can be, at times an even bigger tit than him, had tasked one of his junior officers with keeping an eye on the man on the corner who had been reported to the police by just about every householder in the neighbourhood…”
Dinah started to ask ‘Why?’ but the question was anticipated by a now exasperated Hermione.
“…Standing on the street corner directly under a street light, dressing like a Goth Steptoe, pulling the crusts off his sandwiches and putting them down the drain, peeing on the community veg garden, exposing himself to any number of dog walkers… obviously not someone I could even think about employing.”  She took a long, deep breath and Shaw determined to point out that a) he had no idea whatsoever that the patch of overgrown weeds behind the hedge were any kind of veg and b) he had actually only exposed himself to one elderly dog walker who had threatened such retribution that he had actually done himself quite severe zip damage, but Hermione, sensing that she was about to be offered pointless excuses, merely held a finger up to ‘shush’ him.  “Miss Stubbins is a pillar of our community and whatever the extent of her familiarity with male genitalia she was, in her own words, ‘unwilling to have it thrust down her throat at five in the morning.’  Obviously she reported you to the police.”
“So why the drone?” asked Dinah.  “Why not a squad car and a day in the cells for him whilst I tried to explain what was really going on?”
“Well, my husband is paranoid and he thought our flat was being watched by organised crime bosses…”
“Well, it was being watched, thanks to you,” said Shaw.
“…I know.  He decided that he wanted to get a proper idea of what was going on before he jumped in, but the PC he got to fly the drone had no idea what he was doing and flew it straight into the back of your head while trying to read the instruction manual.  My husband couldn’t own up to that one could he?  And, as for me, I certainly didn’t want him dragging you in for questioning if there was any chance of him finding out what you were actually doing, so I managed to persuade him to get a ‘visible police presence’ promised for the area to pacify the residents and to slip you five grand…”
“Four thousand nine hundred and eighty,” corrected Shaw.
“…in the hope that the money would keep you quiet and the beat coppers would keep you away.”  She turned to Dinah again.  “I had Michael there…” she indicated Avocado Man “…bring him back to your office with a cash payment that is probably more than you actually take in a year, so that’s it.  You’ve had all you’re having from me.  Don’t think you can pressure me into paying more because it won’t work.”

Dinah was, quite frankly, more than a little irked.  How dare the damned woman accuse her of extortion?  She thought about throwing the money back at her – but only very fleetingly – she was actually not too far off in her estimation of their annual takings – and anyway, they’d earned it.  “He wouldn’t have taken the case anyway,” she said defiantly.  “Far too mundane for a man of his talents.”  She stood without breaking eye contact and prepared to perform her very best flounced exit whilst Shaw, uncertain of whether he might yet be offered cake to go with his coffee, remained seated, before turning dramatically, like Columbo in leggings and a sports bra, back to face Hermione.  “Of course, if you want him to find your missing cat…”
“I don’t have a cat,” she said.
Dinah raised a single eyebrow – a trick she had learned thanks to a very ill-advised hairstyle in the noughties – and smiled enigmatically leaving Hermione questioning herself: could she possibly have forgotten owning a cat?  Could she be blocking it out in order to cope with the loss?  With a glance that looked suspiciously like triumph, Dinah pulled open the door and exited spectacularly via a triple somersault over a small cluster of dropped avocados.  Hermione sighed loudly.
“I’ll take my partner home,” said Shaw, rising finally to his feet.  “She has six grand to spend and expensive underwear to buy.  And if you want to find out where your husband actually goes in the afternoon,” he continued, “try the woman at 27.  She has very suspicious curtains…”

Episodes 15, 16 and 17 came as a single story, but I could not in all conscience test your patience for that long, so one became three.  I am quite aware that continuing stories tend to stall badly and quickly here.  Nobody will read a part two if they have not read part one and there will always be people who simply did not like the first instalment and are buggered if they are going to waste five minutes of their precious time on another one.  I completely get it.  Unfortunately for me, I have to wait for these two to let me in before I can start to write and once I’m there, I have to take things as they come.