The Mother of All Christmases

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The Mother of All Christmases Page 32

by Milly Johnson


  ‘I like Effin and I am worried about him,’ said Eve. Jacques humphed.

  ‘I went to see him last Wednesday,’ said Davy, spearing a floret of broccoli.

  ‘Whatever for?’ asked Jacques. ‘I would have thought you’d be the last person he wanted turning up on his doorstep.’

  ‘Obviously I am, but I’ve been doing some investigative work on his behalf.’

  ‘Investigative work?’ questioned Jacques.

  ‘I don’t think Effin’s losing his memory or his mind. I think someone is trying to discredit him.’

  ‘You’ve been watching too many conspiracy films,’ said Jacques, reaching for the apple sauce.

  ‘I’ll tell you why I think that, shall I?’ said Davy. ‘I watch people. And what I see of Effin is someone really conscientious and bloody good at what he does, and then suddenly he’s making mistakes all over the shop. Big ones. Dangerous ones. But something didn’t quite ring right about the whole thing so, when I got the chance to do it without being seen, I checked on a job he’d finished – the snow machines, as it happened. He made a big show of insisting he did them because, he said, everyone else was useless. So, in other words, everybody knew that he’d mended them by himself. I stayed behind that same night and I tested those machines and they were working fine. But in the morning, they weren’t again. They were tampered with, I’m sure of it. The security cameras are always going down and I will bet you anything the ones at fault are coincidentally in areas where Effin was working.’

  Jacques listened to what he had to say, out of respect, but what Davy was implying was ridiculous.

  ‘Why would anyone do that? And, of course, who?’

  ‘I don’t know. But they got what they wanted, Effin trashed and out of the way. I presume he was the target because, as far as I know, no one else has been going around complaining that the work they’ve done has suddenly become undone. Effin said that when he was going home after mending the hole in the grotto floor, he thought he heard someone moving about.’

  ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t—’ Jacques bit off what he’d been going to say, because this was Davy he was talking to and Davy did not make wild assumptions.

  ‘Given a wee bit more time, I could have got to the bottom of it, but there won’t be any more incidents, I reckon,’ Davy went on. ‘Someone very clever and very quick is behind this.’

  ‘And sly, if it’s true,’ added Eve. She didn’t want to think anyone could be so hateful. Then again, she didn’t want to believe that Effin was losing it. She knew he would be out of his head with worry about what had happened to her in the grotto.

  ‘Stanislaw used to work in the circus, didn’t he?’ mused Jacques. ‘On the trapeze. Then again, Arfon’s got the top job now. And he’s like a spider monkey on roofs. Mik and Effin had that massive disagreement at the beginning of the year. Or what about—’

  ‘Oh stop, Jacques,’ said Eve. ‘These people have worked with Effin for a long time. If you start to look at who has had an argument with Effin, everyone has; but they’re like his family.’

  ‘And your Granny Ferrell is your family,’ Jacques threw back at her. ‘Talk about the enemy within.’

  It was a bullseye point. Eve’s Granny Ferrell was the most wicked old bag on the planet. She made the Antichrist look like Anne of Green Gables.

  Davy cut into his giant Yorkshire pudding.

  ‘I’ll keep my eyes and ears open because I want to solve this. Arfon knows what he’s doing but he isn’t half as much fun to work for.’

  ‘If anyone else but you had come up with this theory, Davy, I’d have laughed it out of town,’ said Jacques. But they hadn’t – Davy MacDuff had.

  Chapter 63

  Joe had been furious at what Annie and the Christmas Pudding Club women had done on Saturday, turning up en masse at Tommy’s gym.

  ‘We made a unanimous decision to interfere,’ returned Annie. ‘And it must have worked because he ran straight out.’

  ‘How do you know he went to see Palma?’ Joe said, throwing his hands up in an expansive Italian gesture. ‘He might have gone to throw himself off a cliff.’

  ‘Oh Joe, it was obvious,’ said Annie.

  ‘How do you know you haven’t done more harm than good? Per amor del cielo, Annie, how do you know they are together now?’

  Annie didn’t, not for sure, but she had a feeling that they were.

  Then, Joe’s opinion made her start to doubt herself and she had a terrible night’s sleep. She rang Palma’s mobile on Sunday mid-morning to check on her.

  ‘I’m fine, Annie.’ She was quiet but there was a lift in her voice. ‘Thank you for what you and the girls did yesterday. It was kind of you all.’

  ‘Did . . . did you see Tommy?’ She hardly dared ask.

  ‘Yes, he came to see me. And we talked. A lot.’

  Annie held her breath.

  ‘I should have told him. I shouldn’t have cut him out of what was happening. I know that now. He was lovely to me,’ Palma went on.

  ‘Is he there with you?’ Annie unconsciously crossed her fingers.

  ‘No, sadly not.’

  Annie’s heart fell two feet. ‘I’m so sorry, love.’

  ‘Not at the moment, I mean. He’s training. We have to work out how to combine what is happening for us both, but somehow we’ll manage it.’

  Annie hiccupped and a pocket of tears tumbled out.

  ‘I’ve been so worried about you,’ she said.

  Joe was gesticulating madly behind her.

  ‘Joe’s asking if you’d like to come up and have Sunday lunch with us,’ Annie said.

  ‘Tell him thank you, and I’ll see him tomorrow at work, but I’m packing up the stuff I bought. Most of it is returnable.’

  ‘Can I come and help you?’

  ‘I’m on the last leg. Tommy’s taking the parcels to the post office tomorrow. The things I can’t send back I’ll donate to the hospital. Their gym supports the premature baby unit up there.’

  The sooner all that stuff was out of the way the better, thought Annie. What a terrible situation, to be surrounded by items bought for a baby that could never use them.

  ‘Annie, thank you for caring,’ said Palma. ‘Thank you for the job, the support, the coffee, the laughs – everything. I’m not sure where I would have been if it hadn’t been for your kindness.’

  Annie started to well up again. ‘You know where we are if you need us,’ she said.

  ‘If you can pick me up as usual tomorrow that would be grand,’ said Palma. ‘I think it might be my last week, Annie. I need to . . . get ready.’

  ‘Of course, sweetheart. Whatever you want. You decide. I’ll see you tomorrow. If you change your mind, it’s fine.’

  ‘Annie,’ Palma said again, as Annie was about to end the call.

  ‘Yes, love?’

  ‘I heard that it was definitely the people I told you about who caught up with Clint O’Gowan. They would have done it sooner rather than later, they wouldn’t have let it go.’ It was common knowledge in Dodley what had happened, although no one would be so foolish as to grass on the Webbs. Tommy had told her in confidence what he’d heard from reliable sources, but it wouldn’t have been right to keep it from Annie. ‘He made it too easy for them, turning up on their patch. It was never going to end up any other way for him. One single punch and he was gone, Annie. I thought you might want to know that.’

  Annie did. She would tell Joe and it would be the last time Clint O’Gowan’s name would ever be mentioned in their lives. His memory would be as dead as the rest of him.

  The Daily Trumpet would like to take this opportunity to point out that the notice last week in ‘Lost and Found’ should not have read that ‘Mrs Burton had not seen her Siamese twins for three days, last sighted on Dodley Road’, but her Siamese cat. Fu Manchu has since returned after being found in the neighbour’s garage.

  Chapter 64

  ‘I just need you to tell me what is going on in my head,’ said
Effin as he reclined on Alex Cousins’s sofa first thing that Monday morning. ‘I need an end to all this.’

  ‘Did you try visualising the loft?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I did. I peeled back covers and tried to open boxes and all of them were bloody locked,’ sighed Effin.

  ‘The key is somewhere in that loft, Effin. You will find it.’

  Effin doubted her. All that airy-fairy nonsense wasn’t him at all, but he’d been desperate enough to give it a go. It had worked to a certain extent because he had seen himself climbing into a loft that looked suspiciously like the one that stood over the row of the three cottages where his parents and grandparents lived in in Carmarthen. He’d pulled the dusty covers back from objects in the corners and seen plenty of memories that he’d forgotten were there: the best man at his wedding, Will Davies, spilling red wine all over Angharad’s mother’s pale cream outfit; his dog Hywel dying; Angharad screaming at him when their first-born was crowning. She made that girl on The Exorcist look like Shirley Temple. And lots of other inconsequential rubbish that made him wonder why his brain had hung on to it. The significant stuff was all in the big black sealed trunk standing cocky and proud in the middle of the floor space and no amount of bashing it with his dad’s old sledgehammer – also in the loft – would release the catch and give him access to its contents.

  ‘Tell me about the most traumatic experiences of your early life,’ began Alex. ‘Up to the age of twenty-five.’

  ‘My Grandad Williams dying,’ said Effin. ‘I felt a weight of guilt because I’d always preferred my Grandad Jones and I thought that, now he’s passed, he’d know that and it’d hurt him. I don’t think he was aware of it when he was alive because I made up the difference with pretence, if you like.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Alex, though Effin didn’t know what she meant by that. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Hywel, my dog dying, I wept buckets. Stu and Angharad going off together. And . . . Oh, God.’ He thrust his head into his hands. Alex had to push him to reveal what had triggered his exclamation. ‘It was all my fault that Brynn’s dad hit him that time and damaged his eye. He’d been told he couldn’t go to the visiting fair in case his dad needed him to help with the lambing and I persuaded him to sneak out and his dad lost a sheep and her twin lambs because he wasn’t there to help.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault that he did that, Effin.’

  ‘His dad said it was.’ Effin wiped his face, hoping Alex wouldn’t see the emotional leakage.

  ‘Tell me about some of the happier times that stick in your mind from that period.’

  Effin cheered instantly. ‘The fishing and bird watching with my dad, my mother’s baking, Angharad and I getting back together again after that . . . that Stu incident. We were married the year after. She had a beautiful white dress on and the bridesmaids were all in pink and I had a pink tie on and so did my best man Will, but my dad wasn’t going to wear pink for anyone.’ He chuckled.

  ‘Your best man Will?’ questioned Alex. ‘Not Brynn?’

  ‘No,’ said Effin. ‘We’d started to drift proper apart by then. I did ask him but he wouldn’t.’ He paused, searching his memory. ‘It was lambing season and his dad put his foot down. So I asked Will Davies . . .’ A picture wandered into his mind of he and Angharad planning the wedding. Will had been her suggestion.

  ‘Tell me a little more about Brynn,’ asked Alex. ‘When was the last time you saw him?’

  ‘Oh gad imi weld . . . sorry, let me see, I mean . . . must be seven years ago now. I went to his uncle’s funeral. Lovely man he was.’

  ‘And before that?’

  Effin couldn’t recall. Years before was the nearest he could get to it. ‘The last time I saw him for a proper chat was just after his wife left him. My, she was beautiful. But then, Brynn could be a charmer. He got this one up the aisle and pregnant before she could find out . . .’ He stalled and again Alex prompted him, picking up on his reluctance to be disloyal.

  ‘Brynn could be strange with girls,’ said Effin. ‘His mam had left him and his dad was a control freak. He was desperate for a good woman but his skills weren’t very refined so he put on a front, a veneer, if you like. He was very handsome, strong, but girls didn’t seem to like him and off they all went after only a short time of knowing him. He should have left his dad and come with me to work away but his dad said if he did that, he’d cut him off without a penny. Anyway, Brynn charmed Lin and they had a son but . . . he didn’t treat her with a lot of respect, is what I heard, and so she went off with another fella. Didn’t even try and take the baby with her, so Brynn said, which clearly demonstrated what sort of whore she was.’ Hwren. Brynn had used the word a lot. Every girl that ever rejected him was a whore. It was one of the few words he used in Welsh because he’d taken to speaking English more. He wouldn’t speak Welsh at his uncle’s funeral. He said . . . something about everyone who spoke Welsh being a . . . well, a word beginning with c that not even Effin used.

  Hwren.

  He hadn’t thought much of it at the time. He put it down to sour grapes and saving face, but Brynn got nastier about each girl the more he was dumped.

  Alex’s voice pulled his thoughts back. ‘Did you ever see Brynn’s boy?’

  Effin’s face brightened. ‘I did and I do. I sent him presents every birthday and every Christmas. He’s working with me at the moment. I had hoped that he and my niece would get together.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  Guilt. The word slammed into him from left field and stung him with its harsh impact.

  ‘Because he’s a good boy. Very good worker.’ Something was jumping up and down at the side of his head now, waving madly at him to notice it but it was just out of sight. Something about that word hwren. Something about a dog. Something horrible.

  Alex brought Effin back to his wedding for the rest of the session but there was nothing of significance there. It didn’t matter though, because Effin had felt the lock give on that big black box of secrets. He needed a couple more people to help him heave the lid and then, he knew, it would be opened; but he wasn’t sure if he could bear to see what was inside it.

  Chapter 65

  There wasn’t even time for a mid-morning coffee break at The Cracker’s Yard. Annie and Joe were filling boxes, Palma was on ribbon-tying, Astrid was hand-rolling and Iris was on sticker duty. The Leeds Gentlemen’s Club needed an emergency order of five hundred gold crackers with black and gold hats, male-suitable gifts, dirty jokes and the company sticker on the front. International Crackers had let them down at the eleventh hour and they needed – with a capital N – these for their AGM. Name your price, they’d told Joe on the phone. So Joe did, hoping to put them off because they were working to capacity as it was – and they snapped his hand off. And that was why sweat was pouring off every brow that morning.

  Annie, despite her bulk now, had buckets of energy so she was savouring it whilst it lasted because she knew it wouldn’t go on forever. Securing the Gentlemen’s Club’s order was a big one for them because it was a countrywide concern with money to burn.

  Palma’s fingers were flying. If someone didn’t know what was going on in the background of her life, they would have seen only a pretty young woman concentrating on the job in hand. Secret concerned glances zipped to her often from her fellow workmates but she seemed okay – at least on the surface. She needed to prepare. None of them could help her do that. How could any of them know what it was like to be her and have to go through what she would have to? Not even Iris pretended she could.

  *

  As soon as Effin got into his car, he rang Angharad. Coincidentally she had just come down from the loft with the big box of Christmas decorations.

  ‘What the bloody hell are you doing up there? I’ll be home soon and I’ll get them. You’ll break your neck.’

  ‘Effin Williams. I’ve been getting the decorations in and out of this loft since before I can remember so don’t you go all macho on me all of a sudden,�
�� she snapped, then added proudly. ‘I was up on the roof shifting the satellite dish last week.’

  ‘Pfft, what the . . . ffffbloodpffft . . . ?’ Effin couldn’t get his words out. ‘That’s it. We are moving to a bungalow.’

  ‘I want to move up there to be with you,’ said Angharad. ‘There’s nothing much for me here anymore. The lads have moved away, my family have all passed and I want to see more of you. I love the countryside there. I love it when we go for walks.’

  ‘Really?’ He was surprised by that.

  ‘Yes really. We’ll talk about it at Christmas, eh?’

  How could he tell her that he’d have to leave here? And in disgrace.

  ‘No more climbing.’ He had a vision of her falling through the loft hole and had a momentary flash of how mad the Captain must have gone when the Missus had her accident. The one everyone thought he’d caused. He wanted to be at home with Angharad now but if he turned up, she’d know something was wrong and he couldn’t tell her what had been happening. He felt ashamed.

  ‘Angharad. I have something to ask you and I want you to tell me honestly.’

  ‘Go on,’ she said, warily.

  ‘Why did you and Stu split up?’

  ‘Oh, not this,’ said Angharad with a loaded sigh. ‘I don’t want to—’

  ‘It’s important, really important. I can’t tell you why but trust me.’

  There was a plea in his voice that troubled her so she didn’t cut him off, as she had before.

  ‘He felt guilty. He said that as much as he’d fancied me, he’d crossed a line in friendship that shouldn’t be crossed and he had to get away.’

  ‘But why did you go to Llanelli? You didn’t have to if he’d gone.’

  ‘Because I did, Effin. And that’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘Please. What did Stu do to you? Why did you break it off with him?’

 

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