Murder on the Menu

by Fiona Leitch

  Withers smiled. ‘Was that the dog sighing or you?’

  ‘The dog,’ I said. ‘But I know how she feels.’

  Withers bent down and made a fuss of Germaine, then sat up. The flirting was over and it was back to business. ‘Anyway, that’s why we’re keeping Tony in custody for the moment. I’m not charging him yet, but I do think we’ve got enough.’

  ‘Then why aren’t you charging him?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to send this case to the CPS before it’s watertight.’

  I looked at him, amazed. ‘You’ve got doubts, haven’t you?’

  He looked at me seriously. ‘No, I don’t. But believe it or not, I don’t want to charge the wrong person. I want to be sure.’

  ‘And you’re not sure.’

  ‘Try and remember that I’m not the enemy here, Jodie. I’m not so desperate for a conviction that I’ll send down the first likely-looking bloke for it. I’m a good copper. I want to know what happened. In an ideal world I’d want a confession.’

  ‘You won’t get one,’ I said.

  He gave an exasperated groan. ‘I know. Are the Cornish all this bloody-minded and stubborn?’

  I thought about it. ‘Yeah, last time I looked…’

  Chapter Twenty

  It had just gone 2pm by the time I finished my lunch. Withers had gulped the rest of his baguette and left about twenty minutes earlier, apologising for leaving me to eat on my own. I really didn’t know how to feel about him. He was a right cocky bugger, but then that kind of came with the territory; you can’t show indecision or uncertainty when you’re a police officer because criminals (or more accurately their lawyers) will spot it a mile off and use it to their advantage.

  But he’d also seemed completely sincere about his reasons for keeping Tony in custody, rather than charging him. I had known detectives who were under so much pressure to get a collar that they really would have moulded the evidence to fit the suspect, just as I had initially accused Withers of doing. The top brass sometimes became so obsessed with crime figures and statistics that it felt like all they were interested in was getting the numbers up, of putting someone, anyone, away, regardless of whether or not they were guilty. Most people, it seemed to me, measured a police force solely by the number of crimes they had solved, which was dangerous; but then, how else were you supposed to do it? Things like people feeling safe in their neighbourhoods? Like kids who might otherwise have turned to crime being steered away from it by community policing? Getting the right people behind bars, even if that meant fewer arrests? To me (and to my dad), these things mattered just as much. How many crimes did we manage to prevent, either by making people aware of keeping themselves and their possessions safe, or by being a visible presence, or by running initiatives that channelled bored kids into productive pastimes rather than leaving them to hang around and fall into trouble? These were just as important, but almost impossible to track.

  I smiled to myself. Rant over. Withers was a good guy, if a little arrogant. But he was still more or less convinced of Tony’s guilt. More or less. I had to work on that ‘more or less’ and give him a few more doubts.

  I was about to leave the pub when the phone rang. Mum.

  ‘Hello, love,’ she said. ‘I’ve done all my chores and I’m at a bit of a loose end. What are you up to?’

  I thought for a moment. I should leave the investigating to DCI Withers. But we all know the difference between should and would, don’t we?

  ‘Fancy a drive out to Boscastle?’ I said.

  It’s only about forty minutes from Penstowan to Boscastle, but if you don’t have a car, it might just as well be on another planet. There are no trains in that part of Cornwall – the nearest station is in Exeter, an hour’s car drive away. I’d made the mistake once of coming down to see my parents on the train, and had just missed the bus that left Exeter St Davids once every two hours and which took nearly that long to get to Penstowan. I’d got a cab instead, which had cost me an eye-watering £85 and been worth every penny. There are buses, except rural buses are like honest politicians (they’re out there, but they are few and far between) and the quickest you could get to Boscastle using public transport was about two and a half hours.

  Mum didn’t drive and consequently she hadn’t been to Boscastle since my dad had died seven years ago. She looked out of the window, enjoying the countryside and pointing out any pretty cottages and gardens we passed, and I realised with a pang just how small her world had become. She had lots of friends – she always had done – but since she’d been on her own she’d made more of an effort to join clubs and community groups and she now had a better social life than me. But it all revolved around Penstowan. Would that happen to me too, now I’d moved back? It was one of the fears that had made me leave home in the first place.

  ‘So,’ she said, as we approached the town. ‘Why this sudden urge to visit Boscastle?’

  ‘I just thought it would be nice—’ I started, but she interrupted me.

  ‘Rubbish,’ she said. ‘Yes, it would be nice to come here for a cream tea one day, the three of us, but a spontaneous drive at three o’clock in the afternoon? Hmm. That Roger Laity lives near here, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Does he?’ I said innocently. I hadn’t told her that Withers had brought me here yesterday. She was already a bit too keen to set me up with ‘that nice young detective’ (or anyone else who had good hair, all their own teeth, and lived locally, probably to make sure I didn’t move away again) and I didn’t want her reading anything into it.

  ‘I told you he did,’ she said, twisting in her seat to look at me. ‘Have you found something out?’

  I thought about denying it for a second, but she was my mum and as such she had an uncanny knack of knowing when I was lying. I’m not sure how it works but I have a pretty good bullshit detector when it comes to Daisy, and my mum has the same with me. We came to a lay-by just before the fork in the road that would either take us down into the town or up towards the Laity house. I pulled in and switched off the car engine.

  ‘Okay. I found some stuff out this morning about Roger Laity’s council dealings. The stuff I’m assuming Mel was talking about.’ I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel, thinking out loud. ‘I can’t see it being a motive to kill Mel in itself, but I reckon it could have put pressure on Cheryl to stay with Tony, so her family wouldn’t have wanted him to find out about her affair.’

  ‘Ooh, it sounds proper juicy,’ said Mum, taking a packet of wine gums from her handbag and offering me one. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Apparently, one of the councillors was asked to resign as there had been complaints that their relationship with Roger Laity was a bit … close.’

  ‘Ooh, you mean they were doing the horizontal foxtrot?’ Mum’s eyes were wide. I tutted.

  ‘No, they weren’t doing the … what are you like, woman? I mean, ol’ Roger the dodger was taking them out for expensive lunches, buying them tickets for the theatre, treating them. Not quite manila envelopes full of cash, although some of the other councillors did accuse them of it, but there wasn’t any proof.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mum, looking slightly disappointed. She carefully selected a red wine gum and began to suck it. ‘Bit of a shame. That Roger Laity was a right looker in his younger days.’

  I shuddered, imagining him carrying that sports bag full of saucy undies, and started the engine again.

  ‘Anyway, I don’t know how relevant any of it is, but if the police aren’t going to question him about it then I feel like I should…’

  We drove along the narrow lane towards the Laity family home. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to say to him but I’d always been pretty good at winging it.

  Just as we reached the driveway into the house, the Range Rover I’d spotted parked outside yesterday pulled out onto the road, with Roger Laity behind the wheel. I quickly passed him – he was going the other way, into Boscastle itself – and drove on, hoping he hadn’t seen me.

&n
bsp; ‘Wasn’t that him?’ said Mum. I nodded. ‘What are we going to do now?’

  I pulled into the driveway of another massive house and did a U-turn.

  ‘I’m going for a nose around.’

  I drove back to the turning and hesitated. If I drove down there and parked, and he came back, my car would be instantly noticeable and I’d have no way of sneaking away. Then again, if he found me wandering around his house, miles from anywhere with apparently no car, I’d look like a spy or something. Best to look completely innocent and open. I turned down the driveway, Mum oohing and aahing at the lovely garden, and parked next to the garage.

  I got out and Mum followed me.

  ‘What are we looking for?’ she asked, and I had to admit I had no idea.

  ‘Suspicious stuff.’

  ‘Like what? Plastic flamingos? Dodgy garden gnomes?’

  ‘Just stay by the car and let me know if you hear him coming back.’ I wandered over to the house and knocked. I didn’t expect anyone to be there; he’d said only yesterday that his wife was away and his stepson had gone home, but with a house this size there was every possibility he had a housekeeper, or at least a cleaner, and I didn’t want them looking out of the window and spotting some strange woman sneaking around the shrubbery.

  There was no answer. Good. I stepped back and looked up at the house. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but … nothing. I looked down at my feet, the gravel crunching as I stepped back further onto the driveway.

  There was a dark patch on the gravel, a stain where yesterday the Range Rover had been parked. It looked like an oil stain or something, and it looked relatively fresh. Hmm. Where had I seen a stain like that recently?

  ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ I said to myself. I walked back over to the garage and peered in through the frosted-glass window in the door. I rubbed at the dirty glass with my hand, but still all I could make out was the vague suggestion of a car.

  I looked around, then down at the door knob. It was an old wooden stable door. Underneath the relatively fresh coat of white paint I could see that the wood was old and splintered. It was, I thought, like the family who lived here; everything looked nice and respectable on the outside, but underneath it was rotten. Hark at me, getting poetic or philosophical or whatever in my old age.

  I put my hand on the door knob, expecting it to be locked, but it moved easily. I looked back at Mum, who was still happily eating wine gums like she was watching something exciting at the cinema, gave her a cheesy thumbs-up, and went inside.

  Inside the garage it was dark, but clean and tidy. There was a work bench along one side, with an array of suspiciously clean and shiny tools, lined up and kept in order of size: secateurs, shears, tree lopper, chainsaw… Either these tools had never been used, or their gardener had OCD, or Roger Laity was a serial killer who was very good at cleaning up the evidence after he’d dismembered his victims. I shuddered, and this time it had nothing to do with the image of him in his pants. Cheryl had disappeared off the face of the earth. What the hell had been in that sports bag yesterday?

  I shook my head, dismissing such ridiculous fantasies. Old Roger liked to style himself as a ruthless and successful businessman, but this was Boscastle, not American Psycho. I turned my attention to the car, which was under a tarpaulin. Like everything else, the tarpaulin was free of dust, spiders, or any of the other detritus that normally finds its way into a garage. So either the car hadn’t been in here for very long, or the gardener with OCD had been at work again.

  I lifted the tarpaulin, expecting to see the sort of car that someone like Roger would have put to bed so carefully – a Mercedes, or maybe a red open-top midlife-crisis-mobile, the type of car that would be his pride and joy. But it was an old banger, a beaten-up Peugeot 205 that was probably about twenty years old. I could not imagine Roger driving a car like this, or letting his wife drive it either; it wouldn’t have fit the image.

  I lifted the tarpaulin further. In the front passenger footwell of the car lay a mobile phone.

  ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ I said again. I tried the car door. It was locked, but on the work bench was a set of keys with a Peugeot key ring.

  I opened the car and picked up the phone (taking care to use the edge of my T-shirt to cover my hand, so as not to leave any fingerprints) and the screen sprang to life; it still had some charge in it, so it couldn’t have been in here long.

  The police hadn’t found Cheryl’s phone…

  Trembling with – nerves? excitement? I’m not sure which – I took out my own phone. I had Cheryl’s number because she had called me several times in the week leading up to the wedding, usually to complain about something on the menu, until Tony had put a stop to it. I dialled her number and looked expectantly at the phone in my other hand.

  It didn’t ring. It wasn’t Cheryl’s. Dammit.

  ‘Ca-caw, ca-caw!’ Mum made a ridiculous bird noise outside. It sounded urgent. Either she was being attacked by seagulls (Cornish ones have a reputation for being badass) or Roger Laity was coming back…

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I threw the keys back on the counter, pulled the tarpaulin over the car, and shot out of the garage, closing the door behind me and joining Mum with an innocent smile on my face just as the Range Rover pulled up by the front door. That was too close, I thought, but I had to admit I liked the thrill of nearly getting caught.

  Roger Laity got out of the car, looking a little flustered at the sight of us. A quick flick of his eyes over to the garage door behind us betrayed his alarm, but he seemed to relax slightly as he saw that the door was shut. The fake smile appeared.

  ‘Afternoon, ladies,’ he said. ‘I didn’t expect to see you here again so soon.’ Mum half turned to me in surprise but didn’t say anything.

  ‘I’m sorry to just turn up like this, Mr Laity, sir,’ I said, in my best, most ingratiating voice. I debated tugging at my forelock but dismissed it; that might be going too far. ‘I just wondered if I could have a word with you?’

  A look of annoyance fleetingly crossed his face, but then he gave a strained smile.

  ‘I am rather busy…’ he started.

  ‘I appreciate that. I won’t take much of your time. I just wondered if you’d heard from Cheryl? I don’t know if you’re aware, but she hired me to do the catering for the wedding.’

  He looked at me in surprise. It was obviously the last thing he’d been expecting me to talk about.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ he said, although he clearly didn’t. ‘So what can I do for you? Did she not pay you? It’s down to Tony to pay you, not me.’

  ‘Oh no, no,’ I said quickly. ‘No, that’s all sorted. It’s a bit delicate, really. Cheryl mentioned that you were hoping to open a hotel in Penstowan, and she said she would talk to you about me running the kitchen. She said the wedding was kind of like an audition.’

  Roger pursued his lips. He seemed unsure of how to react.

  ‘I don’t know where you heard that—’ he began, but I interrupted him.

  ‘I heard it from a friend at the council, same place Mel heard about it. So it’s not true you bought the two buildings next to Penhaligon’s, hoping to turn them into a hotel, but the council refused you permission?’

  Roger was on the back foot, and he reacted defensively. ‘I own those buildings, yes. I rent them out—’

  ‘You mean the shop that mad hippie woman sells her crystals in?’ said Mum conversationally. ‘I can’t see her lasting past the summer season.’

  ‘That one and the book shop,’ I said. ‘But he’s put in a planning application to knock them down and turn them into a car park. I heard it was to service the boutique hotel he wanted Cheryl to persuade Tony to open in the Penhaligons’ building.’

  ‘Malcolm would never go for that,’ said Mum, shocked.

  ‘Not coming from Roger here, no,’ I said. ‘But if it was coming from Cheryl, Tony probably would have done it eventually, and he might have been able to persuade his dad to go into
business with the Laitys. And then of course Roger would do what he’s done in the past – find some way of muscling his partners out of the business.’

  ‘I want you off my property right now!’ Roger was so furious he almost spat the words into my face . I’d hit a nerve.

  ‘There was that guy down Newquay way, wasn’t there, who let you use some of his land for a campsite and suddenly found that he no longer owned it. And the one in Truro with the mobile home park—’

  ‘I want you off my property now, before I call the police!’ Roger took out his phone.

  ‘Cheryl disappearing like that really put a spanner in the works, didn’t it?’ I said. ‘Whoever killed Mel didn’t do it quickly enough to stop Cheryl running away. That’s really mucked up your plans, hasn’t it? And left you with two useless shops that probably cost you more in mortgage repayments and maintenance than they get you in rent.’

  ‘I’m dialling them!’ said Roger, holding up his phone. I doubted he’d actually call the police but I thought it would be best if we left, just in case.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’re going,’ I said, ushering Mum into the car. I opened the car door but stopped before I got in to look back at him. ‘I know you’re involved in this, Mr Laity. I know you’re hiding a lot more than the stuff I uncovered at the council today. The police will find out. Best come clean before they do.’

  I got in the car, started the engine, and drove away, and it was only then that I noticed how much I was shaking. Mum looked at me.

  ‘Are you all right, love?’ she said, offering me a wine gum before adding with typical Cornish understatement, ‘That were a bit intense, weren’t it?’

  ‘You did WHAT?’

  Daisy stared at me, furious, incredulous. We were sitting at the kitchen table eating our dinner and Mum had just spilled her guts about what we’d been up to. Thanks, Mum.