Murder on the Menu

by Fiona Leitch

  He shook his head. ‘Not really…’

  ‘Tony, tell me.’

  ‘Nothing much to tell.’ He stretched out his legs. ‘What you said, about Cheryl being after the shop? Well, I know that’s nonsense, because the shop doesn’t belong to me.’

  ‘It’s still your dad’s?’

  ‘It’s not even his, really. He used to go on about giving me the shop when he retired, so I suppose that’s where Mel got the idea from that it’s mine, but he just meant handing over the reins so I can run it. The actual physical store – the building – is owned by a family trust. If I ever wanted to sell it I’d have to run it past everyone named in the trust: my mum and dad, my uncle and aunty in Newquay, my sister, even though she’s in New Zealand and shows no sign of coming back or having any interest in it; I’ve got some cousins somewhere as well who I barely know. The building is probably worth quite a bit of money but by the time I’d paid everyone their share… Anyway, Cheryl knows that, so she wasn’t after the shop or my money or whatever Mel thought, because I don’t have enough to make it worth her while.’

  ‘There is something though, isn’t there?’ I wasn’t going to let this go.

  ‘You’re like a dog with a bone, aren’t you? You haven’t changed.’

  ‘No point changing if you’re already perfect,’ I said, and he laughed.

  ‘If you say so, love…’ He looked up at the full moon, and for a moment I thought he was going to throw back his head and howl. But he just turned back to me. ‘It’s a bit … vague. It’s probably nothing. I’d forgotten about it, really, until this morning.’

  I smiled encouragingly at him but didn’t speak. I’d found over the years that people quite often want to tell you things, but if you push it they clam up. Best to just sit quietly and wait.

  ‘About two months ago, things started disappearing,’ said Tony.

  ‘Disappearing? What, from the shop?’

  ‘No, no, from home. Nothing of mine; I’m not talking about stealing. I’m not sure what I’m talking about. The first thing I noticed was this figurine of Cheryl’s. Hideous china thing. Her uncle gave her it for her twenty-first and it was worth quite a lot of money.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘I dunno, £500? £600? Anyway, I hated it but she was very fond of it and insisted on keeping it on the mantelpiece, and then I came home one day and it wasn’t there.’

  ‘Did you ask her about it?’

  ‘Yeah, she just said she’d knocked it off while she was dusting and it had got broken. I did think it was a bit weird, because she was so fond of it that I would’ve expected her to try and stick it back together, but she said she’d chucked it in the dustbin.’

  ‘Okay… And then other things went missing?’

  ‘Yeah, but stupid things like kitchen stuff. The blender and the food mixer went, and the juicer, but we never used that. She said she’d taken them to the charity shop because we’d probably be getting newer ones as wedding presents, but they were all top of the range and fairly new. And I didn’t want people buying us presents anyway because I’m forty years old – I’ve got everything already – but I thought maybe she’d made a gift list or something.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yeah. This was the weirdest one. She asked to borrow my laptop because she said hers was broken and she’d taken it to be repaired. Of course there’s only one place in town to take stuff like that—’

  ‘Wonnacotts,’ I said, and he nodded.

  ‘Yeah. I was going past it a few days later, so I thought I’d go in and ask when it would be ready, and they said they didn’t have it. She’d never taken it in there.’

  ‘You think she sold it?’

  ‘I think she sold all of those things. I didn’t mention it – I didn’t want her to think I’d been checking up on her – but why would she be selling stuff like that? If she needed money, she knew she only had to ask me and I’d have given her what I could. I wondered if she was trying to raise money to buy … this’ll sound stupid, but you hear about people selling everything they can get their hands on to buy drugs…’

  ‘Cheryl was on drugs?’ I knew you couldn’t always tell; there were plenty of people out there with hidden addictions who managed to function quite normally (as long as they got their fix), but I could not imagine Cheryl being a junkie.

  ‘Sounds stupid, doesn’t it?’ Tony said. ‘I don’t seriously think she was on anything. I thought maybe she was trying to do something nice for me, maybe buy me something without me noticing the money leaving our bank account. But after I found the note this morning, I thought maybe she was getting an escape fund together?’

  ‘Escape fund? Escape from what?’

  Tony turned away from me. He had kept himself together so far, but as I looked at him it was just like someone – okay, me – finally unzipping a pair of very tight jeans: everything that had been held back by that thin strip of material suddenly came bursting out and it wasn’t a pretty sight. He put his head in his hands and sobbed and I only just heard his voice, muffled as it was by tears.

  ‘Me.’

  Chapter Nine

  I left Tony on the doorstep of his parents’ house. He’d had a good cry, which had left him exhausted but calm. As I walked up the road I looked back and saw the front door open, and Brenda pull her troubled son into her arms for a hug. I was glad I’d insisted on him going back to the family home and not to his own empty house, because you’re never too old to occasionally need a hug from your mum.

  All that emotion from my old friend had worn me out too and I could barely keep my eyes open as I brushed the sand from Germaine’s coat with a soft hairbrush. I made a mental note to add a proper dog brush to the long list of things I needed to get from the pet shop the next day. I turned off the light, intending to shut her in the kitchen-diner overnight (I’d purloined the beanbag from Daisy’s room for her), but she looked up at me so beseechingly that I couldn’t close the door.

  I sighed. ‘Come on, then.’ I climbed the stairs to my room and flopped onto the bed, and fell asleep with Germaine snuggled onto the duvet by my feet.

  I slept much better than I’d expected and woke at 8am (which is late for me; I’ve always been an early riser). I looked down at the end of the bed but Germaine wasn’t there and for a moment I thought I’d dreamt the whole thing. But a woof from downstairs and a high-pitched giggle soon told me otherwise.

  Mum and Daisy were in the kitchen. The back door was open so Germaine could trot in and out as she pleased, but as the human occupants were currently cooking bacon for breakfast, the canine one was definitely more interested in what was happening indoors.

  ‘I’m not sure we should be giving her bacon,’ I said.

  Daisy shrugged. ‘It’s just meat, innit? Dogs can eat meat.’

  ‘I know, I just meant there’d better be enough left for me to have a butty!’ I flicked the kettle on to make tea and smiled as Daisy hunkered down and taught Germaine to shake hands. The dog quickly responded to Daisy’s outstretched hand and lifted her own paw for a handshake. I got the feeling my daughter wasn’t teaching this dog any new tricks but she looked so happy that I wasn’t about to burst her bubble.

  ‘You went out late last night,’ said Mum, flipping bacon over in the frying pan. I normally grill it because it gets rid of more fat, but you can only get it really crispy in a pan.

  ‘Yeah, I just took Germaine for a walk round the block before bed,’ I said. I don’t know why but my meeting with Tony felt a bit clandestine for some reason and I decided to keep it to myself for the moment. ‘You having a butty? Sauce? Brown or red?’

  ‘Brown, of course,’ said Mum.

  I shuddered in mock disgust. ‘Heathen.’

  I buttered some bread (for a proper, authentic bacon butty you really need floury white bread but I only had wholemeal, which makes better toast) and sent Daisy off to wash her hands, then we sat down and ate our breakfast. That luscious, fatty bacony goodness, dripping with
melted butter and ketchup and combined with a good night’s sleep, made me feel marvellous (if slightly greasy), until I remembered that I had to go down the police station at some point to give them a DNA sample, and I really needed to sort out all the food that was left at the hotel.

  My phone rang. I expected it to be Tony but it wasn’t a number I recognised.

  ‘Hello?’ I answered with a mouthful of bacon.

  ‘Is that Jodie?’ A man’s voice with a thick Cornish accent spoke on the other end. I didn’t have a clue who it was.

  ‘Yeah, who’s that?’

  ‘It’s Cal.’ The caller obviously recognised the puzzled silence that followed, as he clarified it for me. ‘Callum Roberts, from school?’

  Oh my God. Callum Roberts might not have been my first boyfriend (that had been Tony, for those short-lived two weeks) but he’d been the first boy I had been absolutely madly and unrequitedly in love with. He was gorgeous. Thick, dark hair that had a tendency to curl when it got a bit long, which he hated but which all the girls had thought was lovely, and the brightest bluest eyes you’ve ever seen. They’d had a real cheeky twinkle in them.

  Lots of boys tend to go through a geeky phase where they’re a bit skinny and gangly, a bit pimply and hopeless, before getting past puberty and into manhood. Callum had skipped all of that and almost overnight had turned into a fully-fledged actual man with muscles, hair in unexpected places, and, I dunno, sex appeal. Which seems yucky, me saying it as a forty-year-old, but as a sixteen-year-old it had been enough to set the hormones of every girl in the Fifth Year aflame. It was like going to school one day and amidst a sea of Adrian Moles finding George Clooney. Where’s Wally, the X-rated version.

  I combed my hair with my fingers before remembering that I was talking to him on the phone and he couldn’t see me, and found my voice.

  ‘Callum! What a lovely surprise! How are you?’

  He sounded a little bit taken aback by my enthusiasm and I made a note to dial it back a bit.

  ‘Yeah, I’m good, thanks, Jodie. I thought I should give you a call so we can sort out the stuff at the hotel for Tony.’

  ‘Oh, right, that’s nice of you.’

  ‘Well, I’m meant to be the best man…’ Oh, you ARE the best man, Callum – or you always used to be, anyway. I had to remind myself that I hadn’t seen him for twenty years; he’d completely dropped off my radar after I’d moved to London. ‘So what you up to today? Can you meet me at the hotel?’

  I closed my eyes. After the upset and aggravation of the previous day, a rendezvous at a hotel with Callum Roberts sounded good to me. The police station could wait.

  ‘Of course. What time?’

  ‘I dunno, an hour?’

  I smiled. ‘It’s a date.’

  Now, I don’t want you to think that I was desperate for a man.

  I mean, yeah, I occasionally noticed hunky men when I came across them in my day-to-day life (DCI Withers was a case in point; nice to look at, nice to imagine what was under that shirt, which was a little too tight-fitting, but far too smug to actually want a relationship with), but I was actually very happy with the way my life had turned out – current murder situation notwithstanding. However, I was intrigued to see what had become of Callum, because I’d spent several of my teenage years daydreaming about him and imagining myself as Mrs Jodie Roberts, and sometimes – normally when things are turning to custard all around you and you’re berating yourself for the dodgy life choices you’ve made – sometimes you can’t help wondering what your life would have been like if those early daydreams had come true, or those stupid mistakes hadn’t been made. I’d often wondered what I would have done if I hadn’t had a policeman father. If he’d been a bricklayer, or a barber, or a fisherman, would I have wanted to follow in his footsteps then? And if I hadn’t, would I still have moved to London?

  So I turned up at the hotel, having made possibly a little more effort than usual (though not much) in honour of those teenage daydreams, burning with curiosity about how my teenage crush had turned out, and about how my life might have been different had he just bloody well noticed me at the school leavers’ disco in 1996.

  I parked the Gimpmobile and went into the foyer. There was a family waiting by the reception desk, the wife chatting loudly to the receptionist in a Northern accent – Manchester, I thought, although I’d been brought up in a part of the country that thought of anything past Dorset as ‘the North'. The children – a boy and a girl of about seven and ten – were laughing and whirling each other around, quite violently, and I knew at some point one of them would let go of the other and it would all end in tears. The dad, who was what you might diplomatically call well-built and whose bald head was shiny with sweat, stood looking at his phone.

  No sign of my childhood stud muffin there. I walked through to the dining room, which was still half-set for the wedding; the hotel had cleared away all the cutlery, plates, and glasses, but the floral table decorations and cake (both of which belonged to Tony and Cheryl) were still on display.

  I turned as I heard someone enter behind me. The fat, sweaty bald guy (oops, there went my diplomacy) was in the doorway.

  ‘Jodie?’ he said, in that strong Cornish accent.

  ‘Callum?’ I tried to keep the amazement out of my voice. I’m not sure I succeeded.

  ‘Well, I’ll be jiggered, Nosey Parker, you ain’t changed a bit!’ he said, striding over to shake my hand heartily.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘nor have you…’ I was still trying to get over the fact that not only had Callum become at least twice the man he used to be, apparently he was also now the type of person who said ‘jiggered’.

  ’‘Ere, Debs, this un’s Jodie! Come and say hello!’ he called over his shoulder. The Northern woman from the foyer, who was blonde and had more make-up on than the cosmetics counter at Boots, came over and looked me up and down, then gave me a big smile and shook my hand. She might be a bit brash but she was open and friendly, and I immediately liked her.

  ‘Hiya, I’m Debbie,’ she said. ‘Married to this one, for my sins.’ She gave Callum a warm smile.

  ‘It’s lovely to meet you,’ I said. Just then, Callum’s phone rang and he wandered off a little way to answer it. Debbie looked at me again and grinned.

  ‘So, don’t tell me, you’re another one of his schoolgirl groupies,’ she said, amused.

  ‘No, not really,’ I protested, but she could see I was lying so I gave in and laughed. ‘Yes, I have to admit I did have a massive crush on your husband twenty-odd years ago, along with most of our year.’

  ‘And he hasn’t changed a bit,’ she said, still smiling.

  ‘No, he hasn’t changed a bit; he’s changed a lot,’ I said before I could stop myself, and she laughed.

  ‘Oh, I know he has.’ She watched him affectionately. ‘We met years ago when he came up to Manchester to work on the children’s hospital; he’s in medical gases, engineering, that sort of thing. I don’t understand any of it… Anyway, I was a nurse and he turns up with this gorgeous head of dark, curly hair, those beautiful blue eyes, and that lovely accent. Swept me right off my feet.’ She sighed melodramatically. ‘The only thing he sweeps off these days are quarter-pounders.’ She noticed my look of discomfort. ‘Oh, don’t worry, I still love him. He’s still got the beautiful blue eyes and the accent.’

  ‘He’s definitely got the accent,’ I said, and we both laughed. ‘I’m glad Tony chose him to be his best man. He needs some good friends around him at the moment.’

  ‘Yeah, he does.’ Debbie looked serious. ‘What do you think’s happened to her? Do you think the same person that killed Mel—’ She broke off as Callum approached.

  ‘Tony’ll be here in about twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘He just wants to swing by his house first. He says we need to get rid of all the flowers and the cake.’

  ‘We could drop them off at the one of the local nursing homes,’ suggested Debbie.

  I nodded. ‘Yes, that’s a lovely i
dea. Or the hospice. They’d really appreciate the flowers. And there’s tons of food in the kitchen, too. Is there a food bank round here? Anything that’ll keep for a while could go to them.’

  We talked for a while longer and Callum proudly introduced me to their two children, Matilda and George, then I left them in the dining room and headed for the kitchen.

  Chapter Ten

  I started off by getting everything out of the fridge and making a list of what was there. Luckily, the guests had eaten most of the canapés and starters, as we’d ended up giving them out while the police were questioning everyone. But I’d ordered 200 sausages for the main course and, although they could be frozen, there wasn’t room for that many in my freezer. Maybe we could give them to the Salvation Army for their food bank? They must still have a few days before they had to be used or frozen. Or maybe we could sell them on to one of the pubs; they all did food, and tourists to Cornwall always loved local, organic produce (as did the landlords, because it meant they could charge two quid extra per sausage). I also had ten parmesan-crusted aubergines, which had to be eaten today, and apart from the vegetarian wedding guests, who had now all gone home, there wasn’t much call for aubergines in Penstowan – certainly not ten of them in one go. I hadn’t made up the couscous to go with them, so that was easily dealt with, but Daisy and I had peeled most of the potatoes (which had been destined to be turned into truffle mash to go with the bangers). They were now chopped up and waiting in the fridge in some big empty ice-cream tubs I’d found in the back of a cupboard and filled with water. I hate throwing food away, but what else was I going to do with them?

  I wondered if the hotel chef would take them off my hands but when I’d briefly met him the day before, he had been surly and unhelpful. It seemed that he had taken the decision to hire me as a personal slight and a slur on his cooking abilities, which, to be fair, it might have been; I’d not had a chance to sample his work. He was conspicuous by his absence from the kitchen, and I suspected he was keeping out of my way. All in all I doubted he would do anything to help with my predicament. First of all, though, I really needed to talk to Tony…