The World's Finest Mystery...

by Ed Gorman

  The Allotment

  Peter Crowther

  Perhaps the only person in Luddersedge who hadn't known that Maureen Walker was fed up to the back teeth of her husband Stanley was Stan himself. But then there were many things that life, in its infinite and capricious wisdom, blew past Stan's eyes and even right under his nose… just like the tick-tock, tell-the-time dandelion seeds forever airborne around the hummocks and holes of Stan's beloved allotment.

  It wouldn't be fair to say that Stan didn't care for Maureen, although to suggest that he actually loved her possibly stretched the truth a jot. He cared for her in his very own special way, even though she wasn't the be-all and end-all of his life (she did turn out to be one of those, but that's jumping the gun a little).

  The truth was that the two things which probably came closest to earning Stan Walker's affection— aside from his allotment— were (a) watching football on the TV and (b) the Black Sheep brewery up in Masham, to whose continued financial success and security Stan had contributed more than his share over the years.

  Stan's only other weakness was a seemingly endless stream of ideas for how he and Maureen could get rich quick, such as the specialist sweet shop in Tod-morden or the mobile dating agency he set up in Rochdale: Stan was always promising his wife that the next one would be The Big One— that once-in-a-lifetime golden opportunity to make money— but each scheme had come and gone with little to show for its passing but another hole in their meagre savings.

  All of these were thorns in Maureen's side but, in aggravation terms, it was the allotment that took the biscuit.

  The allotment— one of six in a stand-alone patch of land on Honeydew Lane, edging onto the lane itself as well as onto Smithfield Road, Carholme Place, and Carholme Drive— was an eighty-square-yards rectangle of vegetable-festooned soil interspersed with narrow grassy "tending" paths. The allotment's main border, Honeydew Lane, one of the town's primary vehicular arteries and site of the notorious Bentley's Tannery, was an area blighted by such permanently pungent fumes that, or so local legend had it, the infamous Hounds of Luddersedge— an itinerant canine pack of all shapes and sizes (though mostly of a common variety: Heinz 57) given to defecating on the pavements of the town— were drawn to the locality, frequently depositing turds of varying consistency in and around the carefully and even lovingly cultivated plants and produce.

  It was here that Stan spent increasing amounts of his time. Since his retirement (aged 52, now some four years ago) from the buses (a mobile and carefree life wandering the lanes between Rochdale and Burnley and Halifax), he had spent the hours and days and weeks (not to mention months, seasons, and years) dreaming of The Big One— the idea that would make them, their millions (or at least a few thousands) —and tending his prided potato crop.

  There had been a time, in the late fifties, when the streets of Luddersedge had been an olfactory grotto of the smells of Yorkshire-pudding mix and quietly cooking joints of meat and pans of vegetables on a Sunday morning, and the allotments had been well tended and picturesque. The young Stan had gone there to help his father every week. But those were the old days. Now, two of the other five allotments had gone to weed and a third one, Maureen had noticed one day when she walked down to the shops, was already showing signs of neglect. Stan would regularly come home looking glum because he'd found half-squashed empty beer cans jammed in amongst his sweetpeas… and, on one occasion, a used condom beside a flattened section of potato plants.

  "Some folk'll do it anywhere," Stan announced on his return from that particular Sunday visit to the allotment, wafting straight to the sports pages of The News of the World as he sat waiting for his dinner. "I don't know what's happening to the world, I really don't."

  Serving the mashed potatoes out onto her best blue-flowered plates using an ice cream scoop bought for her at the massive Ikea warehouse on an all-too-infrequent outing to Leeds by Stan for her birthday, Maureen quietly but fervently wished that her husband might introduce a similar element of adventure and spontaneity into their own love life. At fifty-three, and still in the prime of her life (as she delighted in telling anyone who would listen), Maureen Walker craved some excitement. The truth was, she craved anything at all that would break the humdrum of the life she had somehow drifted into without even seeing it coming towards her. But such was not to be the case.

  Stan Walker was not an adventurous man. Nor was he spontaneous, affectionate, interesting, learned, amusing, successful, or even (much as Maureen didn't even like to think it) handsome. And while her husband had probably never been any of these things even when he was running around the streets and lanes of Luddersedge in his short trousers, playing hide-and-seek or looking for conkers in the cool autumns of the Calder Valley, Maureen firmly placed the blame for her current situation at but one door: the allotment.

  As far as Maureen Walker was concerned, it was the allotment that was the villain of the piece… and so it was, on one of those lonely, empty summer mornings when Stan had already left the house, that the arrival of an official-looking letter from the local council provided her with what she considered to be a neat solution to her problem.

  In those days when the pair used to go out together of an evening— usually down to the Conservative Club on Eldershot Road but more often to The Three Pennies public house on Penny-pot Drive, where Stan could get his fix of Black Sheep— Maureen used to joke, though somewhat without humour even then, that Stan's "other woman" was a piece of ground filled with cabbages and carrot tops. It used to get a laugh for a time, from whoever might be sitting with them… and even from Maureen herself, though Stan would never respond. He would simply throw an occasional nod into the conversation, a distant half-smile on his face that suggested he had been drugged or was pulling out of a long coma into a world that he neither recognized nor cherished. And all the while he would repeatedly lift the ever-present pint glass of Masham's finest for a series of life-renewing slurps.

  Unable to get much out of her husband, Maureen took to laying it on the line as far as her home life went with anyone who would take the time to listen— and as far as Luddersedge went, that was a lot of people.

  Maureen would bemoan her lot to Joan Cardew and Miriam Barrett— of numbers 10 and 14 respectively— over the rickety fence that separated her and Stan's house from Joan's and Eddie's and the shock of privet that formed an unkempt but effective barrier with the widowed Mrs. Barrett's threadbare patch of grass.

  With clothes hung freshly out to dry in the wind blowing through the Calder valley— predominantly Stan's voluminous Y-fronts and Maureen's no-longer-very-lacy bras and panties from Marks and Sparks— Maureen would, at one time, in the early days, tell either Joan or Miriam that she was nearing the end of her tether. That if he didn't leave her then she would take the bull by the horns and leave him.

  She would tell the same thing to lisping Bert Green at the greengrocer's on the High Street, as Bert watched her pressing the sides of his avocados with undisguised annoyance; and to young Kylie Bickershaw with the bitten-down fingernails who worked the checkout at the Netto's behind the station car park and seemed to make a habit of shortchanging everyone; and even to Billy Roberts, the quiffed and always-tanned would-be gigolo who carved a mean rack of chops in his father's butcher's shop at the corner of Lemon Road and Coronation Drive.

  Sometimes, when Maureen was watching young Billy— some thirty years her junior— carve a joint or pound beefsteak, it was all she could do to keep from openly drooling… watching those biceps work, and those thighs balloon out to fill his tight black trousers. One time, when he caught her and saw the naked desire on her face, Billy said, "Looks to me you could pop it into your mouth right here, Mrs. Walker," and Maureen readily agreed, blushing faintly at the idea that Billy might well have read her thoughts… not one of which had anything to do with meat (at least, none of the stuff being turned around on Billy's slab). Needless to say, Billy knew that just as well as Maureen did.

  And so it was t
hat word spread around Luddersedge the way it will spread around any small town, sometimes reaching the far end before the person who set it off even gets there. Not that Maureen actually wanted everyone to know her business— she didn't.

  It was simply a release valve and, anyway, subconsciously, she considered service people and neighbours to be the souls of discretion— but, of course, things don't always work out the way we intend them. And when a release valve becomes blocked, the pressure has to escape somewhere.

  "I hear things aren't so good with you and your Stan," Mary Connaught said to Maureen one day, groaning with relief as she switched the straining net carrier bag from her welt-disfigured left hand into the right. "Is it that you're getting sick of waiting for The Big One?"

  Maureen decided to ignore the remark about Stan's schemes— "treat it with the contemp it dizzerbs," her mother would have said in her characteristic pidgin-English dialect. "Whoever told you that?" she asked, feigning surprise and even a dose of healthy indignation, one hand lifted to fiddle with the cameo brooch that Maureen's Auntie Lillian had bequeathed to her the previous year and the other laid spread-fingered on her hip.

  Mary Connaught shrugged. "A little bird," she said.

  The confidant in question was neither a bird nor was it little. It was, in fact, Jim Fairclough, with whom Mary had been having something of a hot-and-sweaty flirtation since the departure of Mary's husband Thomas— Thomas having fled the family nest not only with the contents of his and Mary's joint account at the building society over in Hebden Bridge (amounting to some £16,000 when interest had been added) but with the cashier who served him to boot. The pair were said to be now living in Ibiza— where Thomas and Mary had spent their summer holidays for their entire married life of eight-getting-on-nine years ("…adding insult to injury," was how Miriam Barrett had summed it up… an opinion undoubtedly echoed by Mary) —and, for a time, Mary had considered trying to track them down. But then she started the relationship with Jim and all other things just kind of got pushed to the back of her mind.

  Jim Fairclough's brother, Martin, was a regular feature wherever Billy Roberts appeared— there were some about town who said the two of them were like one person and that person's shadow, though who was which was a debatable point— and so Mary had heard all about Maureen's looks and the perspiration that always appeared on her top lip while Billy was pounding his meat. She heard about them on Jim's now frequent visits to her house— always under cover of darkness… though that did not matter a jot to Harriet Williams, the eagle-eyed sentinel of number 41 (Mary's house was number 43) who, in turn, was spreading the news to any who would stop and listen.

  The conversation drifted to other things— a move started with Maureen's wide-eyed and innocent enquiry as to whether Mary had heard anything from her errant husband— and then pulled to a close with both women suddenly remembering other places they had arranged to be.

  As Maureen watched Mary Connaught walk purposefully across the road, pausing only to give a wave to Pete Dickinson in his customised Cortina (Pete was the mechanic at Tony Manderson's garage over on Eldershot Road), she realised just how incestuous Luddersedge really was. It shouldn't really have taken her so long: After all, Miriam Barrett had said once that you couldn't break wind in Luddersedge without folks stopping you in the street to ask if you were having tummy problems. But you rarely saw the whole picture when you were only one of the characters painted into the scene.

  However, there were other things that the momentous encounter with Mary Connaught brought to the fore: The main one of these was that Maureen could go on no longer talking behind Stan's back. She frowned at this thought. And why is that? a small voice enquired from the deep recesses of her head.

  Yes, why was that?

  Maureen looked up at the stone buildings that hemmed her in, imagining the roads that lay beyond them— roads that led to other towns, other cities, even other countries— and she suddenly yearned for them and for the freedom to travel them, with the wind in her hair and not a care on her shoulders.

  Mary Connaught reached the pavement at the other side of the road and looked determinedly in the Oxfam shop window.

  And why couldn't she do that? Maureen wondered to herself— fully knowing the answer even before it came. Why couldn't she drift along the great Highway of Life with carefree abandon? Just one reason: Stan.

  Exactly! said the small voice.

  So why did she need to keep her own counsel after so many years of simply telling things the way they were?

  Because, the small voice whispered (with Maureen suddenly realising that it was her own innermost thoughts given a kind of vocal substance), if she were going to get rid of him, she needed to appear in harmony with her husband in order to avoid attracting undue attention.

  She was momentarily shocked. And then, slowly, a smile pulled at her mouth. The phrase "get rid of" was somehow exciting… as if Stan was no more than a troublesome rash that needed only a spot of Clearasil to banish forever— and Maureen nodded to herself, watching Mary Connaught reach the double frontage of Luddersedge Bakery and turn to give her a glance. Maureen waved, gave a big smile, and turned around, her back feeling straighter than it had done for some time.

  A decision had been made… or, more accurately, acknowledged: It had actually been made a thousand trips to the allotment ago; a million snores ago; and a hundred unexciting and demeaning sessions of her husband's clammy and clumsy explorations of her body ago.

  The truth was, indeed, out there: Stanley had to go.

  And if he wasn't going to go of his own accord— which he clearly wasn't— well… then she would have to give him a helping han d.

  * * *

  Deciding to kill her husband after years of unconscious vacillation was like the sudden arrival last autumn at a decision to shift the sofa from against the back wall of the drawing room— where it had languished for as long as she could remember— over to beneath the window.

  Complacency and a lack of adventure were the prime offenders and, just like it had been with the sofa, Maureen now saw lots of reasons why this was the obvious thing to do. More than that, it provided her with a frisson of excitement that had been missing from her life more or less since she and Stan had married in 1967.

  The newspapers had called it the "summer of love" —either that year or the one before or after: Maureen couldn't exactly recall which— but for the newlywed Walkers it had been the year of "business pretty much as usual." In other words, the spectacle of the panting, groaning figure of her husband (slimmer then, it had to be said, but still carrying a stone or so too much flesh) climbing on board the good ship Maureen for a quick launch before rolling over into a sleep promoted by Black Sheep and interspersed with raucous snoring.

  The snoring had sometimes grown so loud that Maureen had taken to pinching her husband's buttocks between her fingernails to interrupt his slumber. It proved to be highly effective and— Maureen now realised in the flush of her decision to do away with her resident market-gardener (who now carried some four stones more than was ideal for his age and height) —it was strangely enjoyable in a kind of sadistic way.

  So, there was the snoring: that would end; and there were the monosyllabic conversations in the Conservative Club or The Three Pennies— those would stop. And all the half-baked get-rich-quick schemes and the long-promised Big One that would keep them in clothes-pegs and manure for the rest of their empty lives. Not to mention, of course, the daily intake of Black Sheep, the constant loamy smell of earth and outdoors that Stan wafted in front of her when he deigned to return home for his food, and— worst of all, she now realised— Stanley's occasional need to remove his striped pyjama bottoms and claim his conjugal rights while Maureen stared over his thrusting shoulders at the bedroom curtain blowing in the breeze from the open window… imagining, lying there with her legs spread wide, she was Tinkerbell in the Peter Pan story, preparing to fly off into the night and over the spires and sooty roofs of Ludderse
dge into a new and distant morning somewhere far away. Somewhere better.

  Yes, it would be just like moving the sofa.

  But how to do it was the question.

  Eventually, having discounted garroting and knifing (she didn't have a gun, so shooting was a nonstarter), Maureen had almost lost hope— already starting to convince herself that the whole thing had been a pipe dream… the naive whimsy of a bored housewife, like something out of a macabre version of Mills & Boon— when BBC2 ran a film about a hit man hired to murder the wife of a wealthy industrialist.

  The film was complex— all the more so because Stan spent the entire duration of it slouched in the easy chair by her side snoring so loudly that she kept missing pieces of dialogue— but it was the basic principle that attracted her. For the first time in a long time, she felt randy— really randy: not the dull ache she got watching Billy Roberts but something almost primal… accentuated by the fact that Stan was right by her side, oblivious to the drama unfolding before his closed eyes.