“So if I wanted my Easter egg to go to, say, the children’s ward at Sanford General Hospital, I couldn’t do it?”
Quigley’s malleable features fogged. “I don’t think I know Sanford General Hospital.”
“You wouldn’t,” Joe assured him. “It’s in Sanford; where we come from.”
Quigley leapt upon the admission. “But we’re working specifically in the Avon and North Somerset area.”
Now Joe sighed, muttering, “Give me strength,” under his breath. Aloud, he said, “Just humour me for a minute, will you?” He moved closer to the stack and reached up to lay a hand on Diane Shipton’s giant Easter egg, its smooth, gold foil perfectly marking out the hexagons of chocolate beneath. “Suppose this was mine, and I wanted it delivered to a specific institution. You’re telling me that I couldn’t do that by leaving it with you?”
“No, sir, you could not. The only way you could ensure that would be by delivering it to the hospital, whether by parcel post or by hand, to the intended recipients.”
“Thank you.”
As he removed his hand Joe applied just enough pressure on the egg’s outer case to topple it. It came crashing down, knocking over several soft toys and smaller Easter eggs, which scattered across the polished floor. Quigley appeared fit to have a heart attack, Brenda and Sheila both tutted loudly, and Joe promptly apologised.
“I am a clumsy bugger.”
He bent to begin picking up the loose items. Sheila and Brenda moved to help him. Sheila grabbed the giant egg he had deliberately dropped. Joe snatched it before her and there was a brief tug of war before a warning glance from Joe persuaded Sheila to let go. Meanwhile, Quigley flapped frantically around them.
With a practised eye, Joe examined the packaging around the egg. It appeared undisturbed. He pressed a finger gently against one corner of the gold foil, which also appeared undisturbed, and rather than the pliable feel of chocolate beneath, found it hard, unyielding.
Standing upright, he made to replace it on the stack, and surreptitiously rattled the box as he did so. Notwithstanding the outer packaging declaring the egg to be full of milk chocolates, there was, as far as he could judge, nothing inside.
He put the egg back on the display and turned to find Brenda holding two smaller eggs, both badly squashed.
“I am a berk,” he chortled and dug out his wallet. Taking out a five-pound note, he handed it to Quigley. “Will a fiver cover it? With my apologies, of course.”
Quigley gazed snootily down his nose, but he took the money anyway and Joe and his two companions left the hall, making their way to the coffee room next door. As they left the Prince Consort Room Brenda began, “What was that—” before Joe cut her off with a finger to his lips and a determined stare.
With the sun now shining, Joe secured a table outside, while Brenda and Sheila queued for food and drink.
The metal frames and polished, wooden seats of the chairs were still wet from the earlier rain. Joe spent a few minutes drying them off with paper napkins and his handkerchief before Sheila and Brenda joined him carrying trays of tea, coffee and cakes.
Helping himself to a cup of tea and an iced bun, Joe basked in the rising temperature and warm sunshine. Whenever he thought about the Sanford 3rd Age Club outings, this was the image he held in mind. Thanks to the vagaries of British weather, especially in recent years, it was rare that the image translated to reality, but when it did, he revelled in it.
“There may be something to be said for packing it all in and moving to the Costa Fortune, you know.”
Sorted with their coffee and cakes, Sheila and Brenda took a less philosophical view.
“Never mind Southern Spain. What was that little farce about, Joe?”
In the face of Brenda’s demands, he put on an unconvincing display of innocence. “Farce?”
Sheila waded in on the attack. “In all the years I’ve worked at the Lazy Luncheonette, I’ve never known you drop so much as a teaspoon, never mind knock down a display of Easter eggs and toys. In fact you spend most of your time telling Lee off for dropping plates.”
“Lee deserves it. He is a clumsy so-and-so. Always has been.”
“There you go again,” Brenda grumbled. “Trying to sidetrack us. Forget Lee and tell us what you were doing in there.”
Joe grinned. “Testing out our theory, and finding it wanting. There’s something not right about the big Easter egg Diane placed on the stack. It doesn’t feel right. To be honest, it feels more like a display model.”
The women exchanged glances. “A what?” Brenda asked.
Joe bit off a mouthful of iced bun, chewed and swallowed it. “They were quite the thing when I was a lad helping my old man in the café. You’d store your chocolate bars behind the counter, and the stuff out front, the display stock, were what looked like the real thing, but were actually wooden blocks supplied by the manufacturers, in the real wrappers.”
“And you think this is one?” Sheila demanded.
Joe shrugged, and finished off his bun. Taking out his tobacco tin, he said, “All I’m saying is, it didn’t feel like an Easter egg. Let’s think what Diane may have hidden. Details of all their crimes, maybe? We said earlier that she wouldn’t get away with murder, but she might sneak off on blackmail charges if she could persuade a jury that it was her husband who pressured her into doing it. Even if she did go to prison, as long as she could persuade the jury she was acting under duress, she might get a light sentence. Eighteen months, say, and with remission, she’d be out in nine months, while Gil goes down for at least ten, possibly longer if they can pin Ginny’s murder on him.”
Brenda chewed on a cherry Bakewell, her brow knitted in thought. Alongside her, Sheila put down her Danish pastry, licked the cream from her fingers and took a sip of coffee.
“That wouldn’t get her husband back, though, would it?”
“The way I overheard the conversation, she doesn’t want him back. It’s not his malarkey she’s complaining about. It’s the woman he’s fooling with.”
“And who’s she?” Brenda asked through a mouthful of Bakewell tart.
“I don’t know. They weren’t using names. Probably worried about people earwigging.”
Brenda swallowed the cake. “People like you, you mean?”
Joe chuckled and rolled a cigarette. Putting a light to it with his brass Zippo, he said, “Let’s get back to what I was saying. She has the information which can send them all down, and she’s hidden it. Next thing I learn is she’s put a display egg up on the stack here.” He waved up at the building behind them. “What’s the betting that the information is hidden in that fake egg?”
His rhetorical question was greeted with more, thoughtful silence.
Eventually, Sheila pouted eruditely. “It makes sense I suppose.”
“Not very clever, though,” Brenda said. “Putting it right there where anyone could get hold of it.”
“But it is clever,” Sheila said. “We saw how protective Robert Quigley was about the gifts. It’s right there, in full public view, and I’m willing to bet she is the only one who could go anywhere near it before it’s shipped off to the sorting depot on Sunday.”
“Correct,” Joe said. He took a deep drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke out with a satisfied hiss. “Except that it isn’t.”
Sheila turned sharply on him and Brenda laughed.
“What?”
“Come again?”
Joe took another drag on his cigarette. “When I took the egg off you, Sheila, I checked it. I pressed the corners. That’s how I knew it wasn’t real. As I put it back up, I also shook it. You know how, if you shake a real Easter egg, you can feel the sweets inside moving around. Well I couldn’t in this one. There’s nothing in it.”
Sheila appeared furious, but Brenda saw the funny side of it.
“You never miss a trick, do you, Joe? Only this time you have.”
He took instant umbrage. “What? How?”
“All t
hat paper,” Brenda said. “There must be pages of it, and if she jammed it in there properly, it wouldn’t move around.”
Sheila expressed her satisfaction with the explanation. “There you are. Simple.”
“Just like you two.” Joe ignored their irritation, sat forward and drank more tea. “When are you going to come into the twenty-first century?” He reached into the pocket of his ubiquitous gilet, and came out with a memory stick. “Two gigabytes. A couple of pounds in the local supermarket. You don’t store documents on paper these days. You store them digitally on something like this. And if it’s sensitive information, you use your nut and lock it up with a password. That wouldn’t matter to Gil. He’d simply destroy it, but if the filth got hold of it, they’d have a hell of a time cracking the password.”
Sheila considered the information. “It could still be in the fake egg, Joe. I’m assuming those things come apart?”
Joe shrugged and stubbed out his cigarette. “I don’t know. It’s probably moulded plastic. Even if it doesn’t come apart, it wouldn’t take a genius to cut it in half to stash something inside. Why do you ask?”
“I’m thinking she may have packed it in cotton wool, or something. That way, if anyone did shake the egg, like you did, they’d detect nothing.”
Joe shook his head. “You think that would stop Gil ripping the thing to pieces? No. I don’t believe it. That egg is a fake, and it’s been put there as a decoy. Gil is probably convinced that the information is in it, and he can’t get at it. Meantime, she’s stored the real thing somewhere else.”
“Where?” Brenda demanded.
“How the hell should I know? It could be at her place, at her bank, anywhere. All I’m sure of is that Gil will pull his hair out trying to get to it and if and when he does, he’ll come up empty-handed.”
***
Running a brush through her dark hair, checking it in the dresser mirror, Brenda said, “There’s something nice as well as naughty about making love in the late afternoon.”
Perched on the edge of the freshly made bed, rolling a cigarette, Joe grunted. “It may be the knowledge that you can go out and get plastered tonight without having to worry about your performance later.”
Brenda chuckled. “It’s you men who worry about performance. We women don’t need to.” Her brown eyes gazed back at her through the mirror. The smile faded, and she turned to face him. “Sheila knows. I told her this morning while you were taking a bath and thawing out.”
Still with his back to her, finishing off rolling his cigarette, Joe responded only slowly. “Huh? Knows? Knows what?”
“About us.”
“Oh. Right.” Stirring himself, he turned to look at her. “Yes, I know. We were talking about it when you went for the Easter eggs.”
“You don’t approve?”
He shrugged and dropped the cigarette in his shirt pocket. “I don’t really care one way or the other, but at the same time, I don’t see what business it is of Sheila’s.” Brenda was about to reply, when he held up a hand for silence. “It doesn’t matter, Brenda. What we get up to is our affair, no one else’s. I can appreciate why you told her, and I don’t mind, but I won’t have anyone, not even Sheila, sitting in judgement on me… or you.”
“You want to call it a draw, then?” Even as she asked, Brenda was unsure why she was asking.
He did not answer for a moment. When he did, there was no emotion in his voice. “No. Not unless you do. Do you?”
“Come on, Joe, no one’s fooling anyone here. I’m not looking for anything permanent, and I don’t think you are. I just need to be sure we’re not all going to fall out over it.”
Joe slipped his feet into a pair of soft leather, Wrangler loafers. “I see no reason why any of us should fall out, and you’re right, I’m not looking for anything permanent.” He leaned back against the headboard, hands clasped behind his head, and threw his feet up on the bed. “You know, one of the big problems between me and Alison was the way she tried to interfere in the business. She wanted it shut half a day during the week and on Saturdays.”
Brenda could not help but agree. “Sensible woman.”
“No,” Joe argued. “Not sensible. She wanted the best of both worlds. She wanted the money from the café, but she didn’t want the work and responsibilities that went with making the money. And that’s the problem with permanent. Listen to me, Brenda, because I know what I’m talking about. I’ve worked in that café since I left school forty years ago, nigh on. Longer if you count the part time work I did before I left school. I know what it makes. I know how much we’ll take on any day, any hour of the week, and I know what I need to do to make the living I want from it. And it’s not just me, is it? I have you, Sheila and Lee to pay. You two may not rely on the place for your living, but Lee does. When you start fooling around with the opening hours, you threaten the reliability and stability of the business, and that could see all of us out of work.”
Brenda was puzzled. “Was there a purpose behind that little lecture?”
“Yes. You. You’re not altogether different to Alison. You like a good time, you like time off work to have a good time. And I’ve never yet stopped either of you from taking a day off here and there. But if we were thinking of something permanent, that would have to change, and with that change comes instability; the same instability which sent Alison off to Tenerife. What we have now is fine. It’s fun, it’s satisfying, but I’m in no rush to move it forward.”
Brenda checked her watch. “Good. Because that’s just the way I feel, too.” She smiled encouragingly at him. “It’s almost six and time we were getting down to dinner.”
Rolling from the mattress, he picked up his gilet, slipped his tobacco and lighter into the pockets. “I hate eating this early.”
“No choice, Joe. The Neil Diamond tribute starts at eight and we have to get there.”
Checking that he had everything, picking up his cagoule, he opened the door and ushered her out.
“You know Joe,” she said as they waited for the lift, “I never realised how much you truly know about the Lazy Luncheonette.”
He frowned. “It’s a nightmare sometimes. Competition is increasing. We have takeaways on every other corner of the street, the drivers are always under pressure to get on with their work instead of spending their time in the café, and the retail park draws more passing trade from us every day. I have to know everything.”
The lift arrived. Joe opened the gates and let Brenda enter first.
“You’re not just a pretty face, are you?” She watched his wrinkled features screw up as he closed the gates. “In fact, you’re not a pretty face at all.”
Chapter Eight
With the last chords of the final number still reverberating around the hall, a huge round of applause erupted for Nathan Webb, and Joe checked his watch. As the applause died off, people stood and began to file from the rows of seating to the exit aisles.
The show had been excellent. Even Joe had admitted during the interval that it was the perfect aid to digestion after the pepper crusted filet mignon they had enjoyed for dinner at the Leeward. Starting with America, concluding with Crackling Rosie and a reprise of America, Nathan Webb had spent almost two hours on stage running through a repertoire which included all Neil Diamond’s greatest hits, with other numbers from artists like Frank Sinatra, Matt Munro and Engelbert Humperdinck.
Aged only about thirty, tall and dark haired, Nathan dressed like Neil Diamond, right down to the dark blue, spangled shirt.
“But he doesn’t look much like him,” Joe had noted during a twenty-minute interval which had given them time to visit the toilets and grab a quick drink.
“He sounds like him, though,” Sheila had commented. “I recall Peter and I went to see the real Neil Diamond in Manchester about ten years ago.” She gave a heavenly sigh. “A wonderful evening.”
The second half of the show had proved just as lively, as Nathan, accompanied by a guitarist, drummer, and bac
king tapes, picked up the pace. Towards the end of the show, some people were dancing in the aisles in front of the stage, until the final number when he took the accolades.
“Quarter past ten,” Joe said as he shuffled along the line of seats in row G. “We still have time for a couple of beers when we get back to the Leeward.”
“Make mine a Campari,” Brenda said.
Waiting for Les Tanner and Sylvia Goodson to move into the crowded aisle ahead of her, Sheila looked back over her shoulder. “And I think a nice drop of brandy would serve as a nightcap.”
“Sounds like it’s my round again,” Joe commented.
“Really, Joe, I thought when you said we had time, I thought you were inviting us.”
Joe glanced at his watch again, then at the slow moving wedge of people leaving the hall. “At this rate, we may have to think again. It’ll be midnight before we get out of here. Hey, Les, get a bloody move on, will you?”
“We’re doing our best, Murray.”
“Some of us are thirsty. Pretend it’s Sword Beach and you’re trying to batter your way through the German defences.”
Tanner cast a bilious eye on Joe. “One of these days, Murray, I’ll demonstrate a bayonet charge on you.”
The line shuffled forward, and at length, after some delay, they emerged into the Winter Gardens lobby area.
Joe checked his watch again. “A snifter here, or at the Leeward?”
“It’s not half past yet, Joe, and the bar at the Leeward is open until eleven.”
“The Leeward it is, then.”
Joe stepped out into the warm night, where the departing crowds thinned, going their separate ways. He turned right and walked briskly across the front of the Winter Gardens, towards the busy, open seating area of The View bar. Sheila and Brenda were several yards behind, following at a more sedate pace, talking between themselves, casting satisfied eyes on the vista across the bay towards the lights of the Grand Pier.
The Chocolate Egg Murders Page 9