Half a Pound of Tuppenny Rice

by David Coubrough

  ‘Well, I’d say she followed her mother by becoming a nurse.’

  ‘Yes but it was her father she adored. Apparently there were reasons why Suzie couldn’t train to be a doctor, despite doing very well in her A-levels. I’m sorry, Grant, I know this is a difficult subject for you, but Suzie really thought her father was Jesus Christ Almighty.’ Caroline spat this out with a trace of venom.

  ‘So did he,’ replied Grant with more than a little bitterness. ‘But he’s been dead for years, thank God – and what real damage can be done now?’

  ‘Well, quite a lot actually. He was far too casual with the worm eggs, and he was indirectly responsible for Tom’s stroke.’

  ‘Yes, but he didn’t have any involvement in Hector’s drowning, and that seems to be the remaining issue now.’

  ‘Didn’t he?’ Caroline stared ahead at the road as she pronounced this.

  ‘What! I mean, did he?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, Grant. All I know is they – Suzie and Danny – are going to great lengths to stop Trevor Mullings from talking, and I keep thinking there may yet be some revelation of great significance that, if it were to become known, could have devastating consequences.’

  ‘Well, let’s think what that could be. Say that Mullings reveals, in confession, that over forty years ago he helped get a man blind drunk and encouraged him to go for a late-night swim, taking messages in bottles, promising an encounter with a mermaid, and the following day the man is found washed up naked and dead on the beach. He relates that he was on an earner from a bent London businessman who told him that if he played his cards right and did as he was told he’d be cut in on a significant amount of dosh along with his mate Ivan Youlen. While this is all probably true and rather distasteful, Richard Hughes-Webb doesn’t seem to have been involved in any way.’

  ‘No,’ admitted Caroline, ‘but Suzie is obsessed with stopping Mullings from saying anything. Why else has she been so quick to organize the trip to Cornwall, talking about arranging an accident? This is the woman who was the catalyst for Alison Galvin trying to poison her husband. She is ruthless, Grant, really ruthless.’ Her voice now took on a harder edge, causing him to glance across at her as she drove even faster.

  ‘I thought you were friends. You were going to be her bridesmaid.’

  ‘We were. I mean, to an extent we still are, but we are very different. Also, as I said, I have my own reasons for wanting to stay close to Mrs Suzanne – née Hughes-Webb – Barber.’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ Grant commented absent-mindedly.

  ‘No, I mean, I need to be involved. There is real danger now. You and I now know the extent of the subterfuge, all the shenanigans about the tapes, and you know about the DVDs, the theft at Heathrow that didn’t happen and the way she delayed you because she needed to meet Danny prior to your arriving at her aunt’s flat.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘I’m afraid she’ll stop at nothing now.’

  ‘But it’s the Galvins who have the most to fear.’

  ‘Is it? Who arranged for the poison, and where did it come from?’

  ‘I still think, Caro, that if Danny’s mother wasn’t still alive he wouldn’t be so uptight about all this. I now think his hostile behaviour towards me over the past few weeks was designed to protect his mother.’

  ‘I agree, but don’t underestimate Suzie’s influence over him. She adores him, but she wants to control him. I think she’s still a bit obsessive about him, even now – in fact, particularly now.’

  ‘Well, you would know, but ultimately it’s all played out on a platonic level, and that must frustrate her. But, whatever, how are we going to handle the situation? They don’t even know we’re in Cornwall heading towards them.’

  ‘OK, I’ve been thinking about this. Let’s say they both have guns …’ She left the foreboding words hanging in the air.

  ‘Let’s say they are walking into a trap,’ suggested Grant mischievously, ‘and when they get to Ivan’s cottage they are ambushed by him, Trevor Mullings or even conceivably Ken Holford.’

  ‘What?’ said Caroline, stepping on the gas again as the Porsche ate up the A30. ‘That’s a bit unlikely, isn’t it? Didn’t he die years ago?’

  ‘There is no evidence, no evidence at all, no cause of death revealed or final resting place identified. We only have Youlen’s word that he is dead at all, although a local in a pub did refer to Holford in the past tense …’

  ‘I think we can assume he won’t be there. But as for the other two, I reckon we should text Suzie now to say we are on our way and we fear they’re walking into a trap.’

  ‘Let’s not. I know where they’re going, and if anything untoward happens we’ll only be forty minutes behind them.’ He checked his watch; it was now twelve-twenty, so the meeting should have started. Besides, it quite appealed to him to let the two of them have some aggravation; he had been on the receiving end of enough of it from them.

  Caroline smiled in a way that revealed empathy mixed with affection, but she also seemed happy not to text Suzie. Grant found this somewhat disconcerting, ominous rather than comforting; he enjoyed neither her acquiescence nor her defiant grin, which lingered rather too long.

  39

  PRESENT DAY

  ‘West is where all days will some day end; where the colours turn from grey to gold …’

  Some strange music was emanating from Ivan Youlen’s cottage, number 85 on a little cobbled square that looked as though it had been laid with pebbles from the beach. After climbing up the narrow path from the harbour Suzie and Danny turned into the square, away from the sunshine that rippled light on the water below, which was enjoying an unusually high tide in Mevagissey Harbour. The music was not only loud, it was menacing – sufficiently so as to make Danny and Suzie pause a moment before knocking on the front door. They listened some more, and Danny noted the lyrics ‘Into the West, smiles on our faces, we’ll go’. He had an inspired thought and found Justyn’s phone number on his mobile.

  Followed by Suzie, he retreated several doors down the cobbled street and, relieved to get a signal, made the call. ‘Justyn, Danny here. Suzie and I are about to go and see Ivan Youlen at his cottage. Don’t ask why.’ Justyn, sensing the urgency in Danny’s voice, dispensed with his usual flippancy and on being quoted the lyrics recognized the song.

  ‘It’s “Refugees” by Van der Graaf Generator, a cult band of some distinction from the late 1960s and 1970s. They were great, one of my favourite bands, but it sounds to me as if Ivan might be expecting you, setting a bit of mood music,’ warned Justin. ‘I should be careful. The song continues along the lines of “West is where you shall spend the final days of your lives”.’

  Danny appeared shaken as he returned to Suzie.

  ‘What did he say?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘We could be walking into a trap. Justyn warned me that this music might have been deliberately chosen by Ivan to set the stage for us.’ The silence that fell between them was dominated by the strains of ‘Refugees’, now even louder and more threatening than before, as they heard a chorus about ‘Mike and Suzie’.

  ‘In the summertime the August people sneered,’ went the song.

  Danny thought he had heard the words before. ‘That must have been us,’ he said, recalling how Ivan would have viewed them back in the old days: the grockles and other holiday-makers of yesteryear that invaded his county every August. They moved slowly back to the front door, still unsure of their next move.

  ‘Let’s wait a moment,’ urged Suzie as she saw a vision that drained the blood from her face and filled her with astonishment and horror. She had been half expecting an ambush of sorts, maybe Trevor Mullings lurking around the corner or even the reappearance of Ken Holford, but never in her worst dreams had she expected to see the shadowy, skeletal figure she was sure she had spotted through the half-open front door.

  It was her father’s dreaded first wife. She had last seen her collapsing in the front hall at
her family’s holiday hotel back in 1972, and now she was here. She thought how unfair life was: Father long dead and Estelle still breathing. For Suzie, Ivan’s modest home now resembled a cottage from hell.

  ‘Give me strength,’ she muttered before regaining control. ‘Sssh, they don’t know we’re here. The volume of the music has seen to that. Let’s move back down the street and wait and see what else Ivan might have in his horror show today.’

  While Suzie and Danny were biding their time, Caroline and Grant had turned off the A30 and were hurtling at break-neck speed down the winding roads from Indian Queens towards St Austell. They were no more than twenty minutes away when Caroline dropped her bombshell. ‘You know, Grant, I have my own reason for pursuing this. I need vengeance, too.’

  ‘What? What? I mean, tell me.’ He was all too aware that they would very soon be in Ivan’s village. This was a very strange and inconvenient time for Caroline to bring something up he was fairly sure was going to be significant. He recalled the foreboding he had experienced as a child on being prepared for very bad news, such as before being told of the death of his grandfather. He saw that disconcerting look on her face was leading somewhere, a place he instinctively knew he didn’t want to go. His fears were to prove only too real.

  ‘Yes,’ Caroline continued, now in a distinctly dark mood. Grant had always considered her a very cheerful character, almost to the point of blandness, and he was alarmed. ‘You see, Grant, it was Richard Hughes-Webb who suggested Daddy’s electroshock therapy.’ She said this in a girlish ‘hey-diddle-diddle’ sarcastic sort of way, and Grant feared a storm coming.

  ‘Well, he didn’t administer it. He would only have been trying to help,’ he suggested lamely, although why he should now seek to defend Hughes-Webb fairly shocked him.

  The Porsche swept through the winding roads to Mevagissey, still travelling far too fast for Grant’s liking. Caroline negotiated the bends at alarming speed, seemingly oblivious to danger. Grant gripped his seat, captive and fearing a further onslaught.

  ‘No, he was playing God.’ Her voice was hard and sharp. ‘Richard Hughes-Webb talked to the doctor who arrived at the hotel, the doctor he summoned when Mummy couldn’t get Daddy out of bed, and he kept looking at that depressing poem, and he suggested the treatment.’

  ‘Well, he couldn’t have known that it would …’ ‘Couldn’t he?

  Couldn’t he?’ Caroline had been transformed into some kind of demented force, the threatened storm now unleashing hell fire. ‘He should have known that Ernest Hemingway committed suicide in 1961 after receiving the same treatment. Just read what Sylvia Plath said in The Bell Jar about how the treatment affected her: how two metal plates on either side of her head were buckled with a strap that dented her head and how she had to bite on wire and how great jolts seared through her body, making her feel her bones were breaking. And didn’t you see One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?’ she yelled.

  ‘OK, OK, I’m so sorry. I had no idea you carried …’ Grant had never seen Caroline like this and feared she was out of control. He thought of asking her to pull over so that he could take over the wheel.

  ‘Baggage,’ she responded, finishing his sentence for him as she floored the accelerator to overtake a tractor just ahead of the next hairpin bend. Grant, held his breath, terror-struck, as she completed the manoeuvre.

  He recovered his composure and tried to sound calm. ‘No, well, yes, but I understand. Just as I’ve spent forty years fearing my mother was implicated, possibly involved, in a murder because of a man with whom she had an affair as my father lay dying of cancer, you have spent forty years thinking Hughes-Webb helped kill your father. I do understand. I really do.’ Grant knew he had to express sympathy while being assertive. She had released an elemental force that had raged away inside her for forty years. Why had she never mentioned it before? Why did she wait until now when they were almost upon the scene of a showdown?

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, calming down a little. ‘Yes, you got it.’

  Grant was palpably relieved as Caroline relaxed her foot on the accelerator, regaining a modicum of control. He sensed the storm had moved away, but he still feared her mood and now understood her motive for wishing to join him in Cornwall. For an uncomfortable moment he wondered whether she carried a gun as well.

  ‘Just one thought,’ he continued, aware that he could still be treading on eggshells. ‘How come you could be friends with Suzie after what her father helped to do?’

  ‘Keep your friends close but your enemies closer. I stayed in touch with her because I wanted to find out the truth, Grant. Just as you did. It’s just that now you’ve got yours. I don’t have mine. When you started this whole private investigation I didn’t want to get involved. I thought I had moved on, but as it’s unravelled I discovered I have the same fixation. You see, I had buried my resentment of Daddy’s treatment for a long time. I was in denial, but I had always thought Suzie must know the truth – she was so close to her father. So now, here, today, I will get my confirmation one way or the other.’

  ‘And that’s why we are hurtling down to Mevagissey together?’

  ‘Yes, I must find out. I must know why Daddy died!’ Caroline was close to breaking down again, but she drove more calmly through the villages left ravaged by the closure of the china-clay pits. Grant decided diplomacy was not only the best but the only option.

  ‘I understand. We are peas in a pod. We have both suffered torment. We both had to know, but we are very nearly there, and we need to think how to play this when we arrive.’

  Caroline, calm once more, was mute. Grant was relieved that she appeared to be concentrating on the road.

  40

  PRESENT DAY

  Outside the Youlen cottage Suzie and Danny were still undecided as to their next move, their minds filled with fearful anticipation. The glimpse of Estelle Hughes-Webb in the doorway had changed the game. Suzie, normally so decisive in thought and action, was dumbfounded. She and Danny sensed they were walking into a trap. Although they had arrived ten minutes early, it was surely no coincidence that Estelle was there, even if she had not planned to be seen until later. And why was Youlen’s front door open? The loud music continued unabated, and while the song had changed the band had remained the same. Danny, who had been feeling quite useless and was sweating profusely, dreading the confrontation he was sure lay ahead, decided to key in Justyn’s number once more and relay the next song to him over his phone.

  ‘On a black day in a black month at the black bottom of the sea,’ boomed the lyrics.

  Justyn urged caution. ‘It’s still Van der Graaf Generator, and this song is “Killer”. There may be a clue here about Hector’s drowning.’ At that point the song became more frenzied. ‘Death in the sea, death in the sea, somebody please come and help me …’

  ‘Don’t worry, and thanks, “Whispering” Bob Harris.’ Danny hoped his reference to the veteran BBC disc jockey might ease the tension. At any rate he felt more in control for having made the call and having done something. ‘I have a gun in the car,’ he whispered to Suzie.

  ‘So have I,’ she replied, to his utter shock.

  Feeling a bit like a latter-day Bonnie and Clyde, they raced back to their car to arm themselves with what turned out to be identical Colt 45s. Such was their conviction that they were entering a trap that they initially resisted asking one another why each had felt the need to bring firearms along. However, Danny’s curiosity got the better of him. ‘Where on earth did that come from?’

  ‘Let’s say it’s another of Father’s legacies.’

  Slowly they walked back up to Youlen’s half-open front door and after a moment’s hesitation Suzie pressed the bell. Ivan appeared, unshaven and unkempt, wearing an ancient black roundneck sweater with holes at the elbows. His faded jeans were also well past their use-by date, but his ragged appearance belied an alertness more usually associated with a wild animal circling its prey. ‘So you’re here,’ he said.

&nbs
p; The visitors crossed his threshold in silence, and after refusing his offer of coffee they sat where he beckoned in his front room.

  Suzie was the first to speak. ‘Yes, Mr Youlen, we’re here, and you know why.’

  ‘Well, hum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum,’ started Ivan in an eerie vocal; it made no sense to Suzie, who just stared blankly. He continued, ‘And now Trevor says he’s found God.’

  At that moment a thin and rather rheumy-eyed woman of advanced years, with a surprisingly nimble gait, walked into the room. She fixed her gaze on Suzie as she walked towards her.

  ‘Don’t you dare touch me!’ yelled Suzie, jumping from her seat as Estelle approached.

  ‘Well, still Daddy’s spoilt little rich girl, are we? And still as brazen as ever!’

  ‘Up yours,’ said Suzie with a thunderous glare that meant more than Estelle could have known.

  ‘Now now, manners, please. Daddy wouldn’t appreciate you being so foul-mouthed.’

  Suzie felt like slapping Estelle hard in the face but resisted, deciding to refrain from talking or even moving a muscle for a good half-minute while she fixed a steady and disdainful stare on the old woman. What struck her most forcibly about Estelle was the remarkable fact that she appeared completely sober, an unusual state of affairs. Estelle moved closer and leant over to whisper something in her ear. Suzie initially bucked half a step back then opted to listen. Danny was alarmed and wondered whether to intervene, but Suzie, observing this, made a calming gesture with her hand.

  Ivan had been no more than a spectator until now but chose this point to break his silence. ‘Welcome to the house of fun.’ All three turned their attention to the clown-like figure, now wearing a frazzled straw hat that looked as if it had been in his family for generations. ‘You see, the sins of the past have arrived at your gates.’ Ivan calmly set out his demands to ensure that everything remained hunky-dory, as he put it. He wanted money of course, large life-changing quantities of it. It was blackmail by any name, and his trump card was not Trevor Mullings but the antique first Mrs Hughes-Webb standing before them.