CONSTABLE VERSUS GREENGRASS a perfect feel-good read from one of Britain’s best-loved authors (Constable Nick Mystery Book 16)

by Nicholas Rhea

  In his old truck, Claude had arrived at Rigg Side Cottage complete with chimney brushes, protective cloths and Alfred, his dog. After consuming several cups of a brownish-coloured liquid prepared by Amelia (Abraham lay on the settee to consume his), Claude had reaffirmed his expertise in coping with rural chimneys and advised Amelia to cover everything in the living room.

  Abraham was compelled to move his twenty-seven-year-old carcass while Amelia in her loose, overflowing purple dress, had draped their sparse furnishings with old sheets. Meanwhile, Claude had positioned in front of the open fireplace, a soot-stained drape with a hole in the middle. His round-headed black brush with one section of its handle attached, was already in position with the handle protruding through the hole. Claude had next secured the cloth to the mantelpiece and floor with bricks, the idea being that no soot would escape into the room.

  Thrusting the head of the brush up the chimney, he had attached further lengths of handle which forced the brush head higher into the great black void beyond. Even at that stage, heavy deposits were crashing into the fireplace behind the cloth. So far, there was no problem, things appeared to be progressing very satisfactorily. Amelia had remained in the living room, Abraham having settled in the adjoining room which, it seemed, he used as a study. It was full of his paintings of wild flowers, which, to the unskilled eye, looked more like the paint-scattering activities of a three-year-old child. It seemed that Abraham hoped, one day, to sell a few of these but in the meantime was lying on an old couch, semi-comatose, dreaming about a society where nothing was killed or destroyed.

  “It’s stuck,” Claude had said to Amelia as he had heaved at the brush. “There’s an obstruction up there, my brushes won’t go any higher.”

  “Oh dear,” Amelia had simpered. “Does that mean you can’t complete the job?”

  “Complete the job? No job is too tough for the chimney sweeping champion of Aidensfield, Mrs Crowberry. Now, it just means a bit more planning.”

  He went outside to examine the structure of the chimney line which ascended the outer wall of the cottage. Amelia was with him and Claude, the expert that he was, had revealed the structure which contained her chimneys. It was shaped like a letter A without the crosspiece, the chimneys from the living room and Abraham’s study rising against the outside wall to come together in a single chimney stack. There were two separate chimney pots, however, so each chimney was independent of the other, but the snag was that neither chimney rose smoothly — each side of the giant A was zigzagged and each rose in a series of small steps to the stack on top. The alignment of those steps was enough to frustrate the through-passage of a chimneysweep’s brush and the interior of each would be like miniature staircases with huge deposits of soot upon each step — all beyond the reach of Claude’s brushes.

  “So if the chimneys are a series of steps,” simpered Amelia, “it means your brushes can’t get through? You can’t reach all that soot that’s collected there!”

  “Greengrass never fails,” Claude had beamed. “I have a second line of attack that is guaranteed. Now, have you a ladder?”

  There’s one in the outbuildings,” she had said.

  “Right, when I give you the word, you go indoors and take my Alfred with you. Place him at the bottom of the chimney, near the brush handles that are there. He’ll know what to do when I shout to him. He’ll hear my voice coming down the chimney.”

  Having positioned the ladder so that he could reach the chimney pots from the outside of the house, Claude had sent Amelia indoors accompanied by Alfred and then went to his old van for a sack; it contained a living thing. A hen, in fact. Clutching the sack, Claude had ascended the ladder, opened the sack and lifted out a large white hen which cackled a lot and flapped its wings.

  “Ready, Mrs Crowberry?” he shouted down the chimney.

  “Yes,” came the faint voice from below.

  “Right, action stations.” And he had thrust the protesting hen down the chimney from the top, shouting at it as it descended, its flapping wings dislodging thick deposits of soot which fell into the depths. The tiny steps were too narrow for the bird to gain a perch; besides, it was pitch black inside and it had no idea where to put its feet.

  “Alfred!” shouted Claude, whereupon Alfred began to bark below. His high-pitched woofing echoed up the chimney as the terrified hen had bounced up and down on frantically flapping wings, flying in alarm from one dark corner to the next, as it dislodged an enormous amount of deposited soot. With Claude bellowing from above and Alfred barking from below, the hen had continued to flap up and down until it seemed that most of the soot had been dislodged. It now lay in a deep pile behind Claude’s safety drape.

  Claude had descended the ladder and entered the living room to find a puzzled Mrs Crowberry and Alfred who was wagging his tail; Alfred found his part in Claude’s chimney sweeping quite exciting.

  “Mr Greengrass,” said Amelia quite angrily, “was that a live bird you caused to enter my chimney?”

  “Aye, Clara Cluck, my old hen, she loves it. Team work it is, you see, me, Alfred and Clara. No job too difficult, no job left unfinished! That’s our slogan.”

  “Mr Greengrass, I think that is disgraceful; it is cruelty. I have a good mind to report you to the RSPCA and to the police, for cruelty to a hen.”

  “It’s not cruel, she loves it! It would be cruel if the fire was on, but it’s not. You’ll see, when I remove that drape, she’ll come out of there bright-eyed and ready for another go. She’ll be there waiting; she knows her job, does Clara. She’s the finest chimney sweeping hen this side of the Pennines.”

  Not convinced, Mrs Crowberry had stood with her arms folded as Claude began to remove the drape; Alfred was waiting too, tail wagging and anxious to share their joy at the return of Clara Cluck.

  “The trick is to catch her before she gets free,” beamed Claude, full of confidence. “Otherwise, she’ll fly about the room and chuck soot everywhere . . . so don’t frighten her and don’t criticise her . . . she takes criticism very personally, and gets into a flap, and in her state right now, that could cause a lot of mess.”

  Gingerly, he had removed the drape, but there was no sign of the hen. Alfred had sniffed and wagged his tail, looking at Claude for guidance, but Claude was puzzled.

  “Clara?” he shouted up the chimney. But there was no response. “Don’t say she’s roosting on one of those ledges!” he had cried, shouting again, “Clara? Have you gone to sleep on the job? Down, down, you daft ha’p’orth . . .”

  Alfred barked his encouragement, so Claude said, “I’ll have to go up the ladder again to shout at her, Mrs Crowberry, Alfred will bark and then she’ll come down . . .”

  “I hope you don’t let that bird make a mess . . .”

  Claude had replaced the drapes just in case Clara made a dramatic return to the living room and went outside to repeat the performance, with Alfred barking from below. But as Claude reached the top of his ladder to peer down the chimney, Clara had fluttered out, dazzled by the light and smothered with soot. She had tried to settle on the rim of the chimney pot for a well-earned breather but her present state militated against her. With soot in her eyes, she could not see what she was doing and had missed her footing to flutter down the chimney — but it was the one which led into Abraham’s study.

  As she flapped and cackled her way down the second chimney, attempting in the darkness to find a foothold on one of the little ledges, so mountains of soot and black carbon debris preceded her. Unfortunately, there was no protective drape in that other room and as the hen’s raucous cackling echoed down the chimney, so Alfred heard her calls and galloped through to the other room. He stood and barked up the chimney as cascades of soot came down to the sound of Clara cackling aloft. And when the soot fell, it had mushroomed into the room to smother the recumbent Abraham, his paintings, the floor and every surface, including the sparse furnishings. Within a very short space of time, the entire room had been filled with a cloud of thic
k black dust. Abraham had coughed and spluttered; Alfred had barked; the hen had cackled and Claude had shouted his distress from above as the hen, fluttering up and down the chimney and performing a first-class soot removal exercise, caused hundredweights of the stuff to fall into the room. She really was doing a first-class job.

  Most of it landed on Alfred, barking his instructions from below. Amelia dashed in to see what was happening.

  “You’ll have to do something about this,” coughed Abraham, his face blackened with two eyeholes peering out.

  “No! You do something about it! I’m going to report that man for cruelty to a hen!” she had snapped.

  “Me?” had responded the sooty Abraham. “Me do something?”

  Leaving Clara stuck up the chimney, Alfred paddling through a mountain of soot, Claude doing his best to persuade Clara to rise from the top and Abraham wondering what to do about it all and whether he needed a brush and shovel, Amelia had come to see me.

  “I want that man reported for cruelty to that hen!” she demanded with all the authority of her own rarefied breeding as she stalked out.

  “I’m not sure the courts would accept it as cruelty.” I tried to explain the difficulties of such a prosecution to her. “Clara is not a wild bird, so the Protection of Birds Act does not apply so we’d have to consider the Protection of Animals Act of 1911, and the offence of causing unnecessary suffering to Clara. Because she is a domestic fowl, she is included within the term ‘animal’ for cruelty purposes so the courts might accept a prosecution . . . it depends upon whether Claude was cruel, though, and . . .”

  “Constable, you must not shirk from your duty!” She was now in full flow. “I shall expect to hear from you in due course, and I shall be a witness for the prosecution. Come to me for a statement when you are ready to proceed!”

  Sergeant Blaketon was most uneasy about recommending a prosecution, thinking he would be laughed out of court, but the threats from someone of noble birth, a wildlife campaigner and conservationist to boot, persuaded him to submit the necessary report to the superintendent for consideration.

  “Go and get a statement from that woman,” he said to me several days later. “The one consolation is that I’ll get Greengrass in court for something!”

  But when I got to Rigg Side Cottage, I found Abraham lying on the settee with the soot solidifying all around him. Nothing had been touched, nothing had been cleaned up and I got the impression my arrival had roused him from his slumbers.

  “Where’s Amelia?” I asked him.

  “No idea, Constable,” he said. “She’s left me. She says she wants a divorce. And if you want to know where she is, I have no idea. She left no address. But you’d think she would have tidied the place up before she went, wouldn’t you?”

  “Will you be a witness against Greengrass, for cruelty to that chimney sweeping hen of his?” I put to him.

  “No way, Constable, I don’t like trouble,” he said, and curled over and went back to sleep.

  Without a witness, we could not hope to prosecute Claude Jeremiah Greengrass for cruelty to a hen, at which Sergeant Blaketon said, “Rhea, if that man ever cleans a chimney again with a hen, let me know! I will get a witness to say it’s cruel . . . I will have that man in court, I will, so help me!”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” I said, wondering about the legal situation if Claude had dropped a pheasant down the chimney. They are not classed as wild birds nor are they domestic — and would a capercaillie or a ptarmigan do a better job?

  * * *

  On another occasion, I received a furious telephone call from Alec Mullen, a wholesale greengrocer in Ashfordly, during which he demanded that I arrest Claude Jeremiah Greengrass and charge him with committing false pretences. It arose from the following incident which Mr Mullen explained to me.

  On a hot summer day, one of Claude’s pigs escaped and made for a nearby patch of woodland where it began to unearth some plants. It worked at a furious rate, grunting and using its snout in what could be described as a frenzy. It was behaving like that when Claude, with Alfred the dog at his heels, located the animal. The moment Alfred arrived, however, he also began to dig nearby at a similarly manic pace with his front paws. Pig and dog seemed to be competing with one another for some prize, each concentrating on its own patch of earth as they dug into the light earth. Alfred was as keen as the pig to reach whatever was hidden below the ground. When Claude entered the fray by recovering one of the objects from Alfred’s jaws, he shouted. “Truffles! They’ve found a truffle patch!”

  The pig was eating them as fast as it could unearth them and Claude then realised that unless he drove the pig from its happy hunting ground, it would consume all the truffles. Finding a stout piece of fallen wood on the ground, Claude managed to drive the pig away, a comparatively difficult task.

  Then, ordering Alfred to “Drop it” and to “Heel”, he succeeded in returning the animals to his ranch, unhappy though they were about being dragged from such an appetising place.

  A truffle is a type of fungus which grows under the ground close to the roots of trees, especially beech trees, and they are to be found in Britain as well as on the continent. It is virtually impossible for humans to locate truffles, therefore animals are used — some animals can smell them from as far away as 100 metres — and Claude knew that they were much sought after by gourmets, restaurant owners and hotel keepers.

  High-quality truffles command high prices because they are valuable additives to top-quality food and even though they do not taste very nice in themselves, they do add an exquisite flavour to the food with which they are cooked. In France, truffles are used to make pâté de foie gras.

  Both pigs and dogs are used to locate them. Dogs, especially Spanish poodles, are favoured as truffle-hunters because pigs tend to eat their finds before they can be retrieved by the human hunters. In Claude’s case, both his pig and his dog were now known to be capable of locating these underground gems and Claude knew that there was money to be made from truffles. Claude reasoned that if he could prevent his pig from eating them the moment it located them, he could deploy both pig and Alfred in frequent truffle-hunting expeditions; working together, they could harvest hundreds of truffles and make a fortune. But who would buy them?

  George at the pub could have only a modest demand for them, and then Claude realised that a wholesaler might provide the answer, bearing in mind that the harvesting and use of a truffle had both to be completed within three or four days. If they are left unused for longer than that, they tend to lose some of their flavour; when underground, truffles appear and ripen within a couple of days or so. The discovery of truffles is indeed a very fine art which requires rapid action.

  There was no time to lose. From the village kiosk, Claude rang Mullens Greengrocers in Ashfordly to ask if they were interested in buying truffles.

  “Truffles?” cried Alec Mullen. “I didn’t know we had truffles hereabouts?”

  “Aye, well, it’s a secret patch, you see, it’s just been discovered,” Claude explained. “My pig found ’em this morning, and my dog. My Alfred’s a highly trained truffle hound and we could fetch a supply this afternoon — for a price that is.”

  “I’ve never dealt in truffles before, there’s not been much call for them hereabouts. Folks seldom eat truffles with roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.”

  “They’re for gourmets, Mr Mullen. Specialist chefs use ’em, the French use ’em . . .”

  “Although I’ve never dealt in truffles, I’ve heard all about them, Mr Greengrass. Look, you fetch me a supply and in the meantime, I’ll have a ring around some of the retailers I deal with to see if we can get ’em interested. How much will you be charging?”

  “Aye, well, that’s summat we’ll have to discuss, you see. I mean, there’s my labour and transport, and they are a bit special; Queen Victoria loved ’em, you understand. You might be talking of two pounds a pound at least . . .”

  “That’s not a bad price for good tru
ffles,” said Mr Mullen. “Right, fetch ’em in and not a word to other greengrocers, right? I want the monopoly on these and I’ll pay extra for the privilege!”

  “My word is my bond,” oozed Claude, replacing the receiver. Outside the kiosk, he turned to Alfred and beamed. “Come on, Alfred, we’ve work to do. I’m not employing that pig, she’ll eat the lot . . .”

  During the course of my duty that evening, I called in the pub and was rather surprised to find Claude buying celebratory drinks for the regulars. It wasn’t often he spent money on other drinkers.

  “So what’s the occasion, Claude?” I asked.

  “I’m in the big time now, Mr Rhea, a touch of class, a new line in business. I’m finding my true vocation now, gourmet foods and all that. Greengrass Gourmet Foods, that’s me.”

  “I don’t believe it! Does that mean you’re selling pheasants legitimately?”

  “It’s nowt to do with pheasants, Constable. It’s truffles. I’ve discovered that my Alfred is a top-quality truffle hound and we’ve located a truffle patch; it’s in a secret location, of course.”

  “Truffles? In Aidensfield? I thought they only grew in France?”

  “Aye, well, that’s where you’re wrong. They used to grow in Wiltshire, see, and now they’ve been found in Aidensfield. My pig found a patch this morning, and Alfred is now chief sniffer.”

  “Alfred, a truffle hound?”

  “The best for miles around, Mr Rhea. By, he does go at it, you’d think he was digging for gold . . . He’s earning me a fortune. I might have to get his nose insured, you need a very delicate nose for finding truffles. Anyroad, I sold five pounds of ’em this afternoon, at two pounds a pound . . . that’s money, Constable, good money.”

  At this news, I turned to George and asked, “Are you using Claude’s truffles in your meals?”

  “I’m not paying two pounds a pound for summat his dog has dug up!” snapped George. “Besides, my customers don’t exactly go in for gourmet meals. They’re happier with chicken and chips in a basket and allus want mint sauce with their mutton, not some wizened old root that Claude wants rid of.”