Chapter 90
Connie didn’t have the best sleep that night because she spent a great chunk of it replaying Brandon’s kiss over and over like a favourite part of a film. She didn’t think about being pushed over by Helena. Maybe if his ex hadn’t attacked her, she and Brandon wouldn’t have talked and kissed. She’d love to tell Helena that one day. But the harsh light of day brought with it the realisation that it was going to be awkward seeing him again. He’d be embarrassed, she knew. The best thing to do was pretend it never happened. Men like Brandon Locke didn’t kiss women like Connie Diamond unless it was in a moment of misdirected sympathy. They’d both had their guards down, but today was another day and drawbridges had been lifted, portcullises dropped.
Minutes before she set off to Mr Savant’s house, Connie switched on her secret mobile and found a message that Della had sent her yesterday.
JIMMY ASKED ME IF I’D HEARD OF LADY MUCK
SORRY, JUST SEEN MSG. JIMMY ASKED ME ABOUT LADY MUCK AS WELL. WANTS ME TO DO A SEARCH Connie replied.
CAN YOU MEET ME AFTER WORK? AT HQ. 5.30PM? Della answered almost straight away.
YES. SEE YOU THEN, Connie sent.
Connie bent over to pick up her bucket and winced. She felt as if she had been rammed by a rhino and her fingers were cut and sore too. She was so physically low that she felt her spirits being dragged down and knew it would take all she had to stay strong. Lent was over tomorrow. The thought of Jimmy’s face when she told him that she was Lady Muck had kept her going through all this; she didn’t want to be denied that sublime moment yards before the finish line.
Connie rang four times on Mr Savant’s doorbell but there was no response. She stood back and looked up at the frontage to see if she could see anyone at any of the windows, and it was then that she realised why the house looked ‘wrong’. Inside, the huge bay window of the sitting room was about two foot away from the wall which separated it from the kitchen. In the kitchen, the window was about two or three foot away from the adjoining wall yet the distance between them on the outside was much wider. It would suggest there was an extra room between them, but there wasn’t. There was no door in the hallway between the one that led to the sitting room and the one that led to the kitchen. She was trying to visualise it when Mr Savant opened the front door.
‘Marilyn,’ he said. ‘Do come in, come in,’ and he beckoned her forwards with such an excessive circle of the arm that she instantly knew he was drunk again. This was confirmed when he nearly fell over her in the hall. That godawful soundtrack to Pygmalion was playing again.
‘Marilyn. I believe we didn’t part on the best of terms last week,’ Mr Savant was slurring. ‘I do apologise. Please, please, please.’
‘It’s okay, Mr Savant. Look, let me make you a cup of tea’ said Connie gently.
Mr Savant brightened instantly, as if someone had triggered a change of mood by flicking a switch in his back. ‘Yes, let’s have tea and cake, lots of cake, Marilyn. I have lots of cake.’
‘Well, you sit down in your chair and I’ll bring you a drink and a bun,’ said Connie, motioning him forward.
‘Yes, yes I will do that,’ he said and saluted, then walked falteringly into the sitting room, with Connie close behind ready to make an attempt at catching him if he fell. Mr Savant made it safely to his chair and closed his eyes. Connie made him a cup of tea, and took one of the many usual fat fresh cream buns out of the fridge for him, but it was obvious from his snoring that Mr Savant was fast asleep when she put the tray down on the table at his side. She didn’t wake him; it would be better if he slept off the alcohol, she decided.
With Mr Savant unconscious, Connie was able to check out the strange anomaly with the rooms. There was definitely a section of house that was unaccounted for by the layout of the inside, but she presumed that it was a dead space. It couldn’t have been anything else with no door or even a window serving it.
So Connie got on with cleaning the house and found, to her surprise, that there was more to do today. Mr Savant hadn’t done so much tidying up this week as he usually did. He hadn’t made his bed either, which was a first and he had evidently been sleeping in Mrs Savant’s room on top of the covers as well, as they were in disarray too.
Downstairs the record came to an end and there was blessed silence. Connie hoped he wouldn’t wake up and put it back on again. She brushed the stairs and swept the hallway and that’s when she heard the tapping again. It was coming from the space between the doors of the sitting room and the kitchen.
Connie pressed her ear to the wall. It didn’t sound like water and air rushing through pipes, as she had concluded last time. It sounded like someone hitting the wall with a shoe.
‘Hello, hello, please.’
She heard the voice clearly and jumped back. The ghost. Bang bang, ‘Hello, hello. Please, are you there? Help me.’
Connie rested her ear to the wall again and listened hard. There was someone behind it thumping it to raise attention.
‘Hello,’ Connie called.
‘Hello. Please get me out of here.’
Mr Savant gave a large sleepy snore. He was very much in the land of Nod.
‘How . . . how do I do that?’
‘There’s a switch on the wall in the lounge. It’s wooden. It blends in with the panelling. It’s five squares up, ten squares in from the window.’
‘Okay, I’ll go in there now.’
Connie trod as quietly as she could into the sitting room and counted up and across. Sure enough, there was an almost invisible wooden lever, which appeared at first glance like a split in the panel. Connie jerked it upwards and a door popped open. Connie pushed it to find a room in semi-darkness and a bed and on the bed, swathed in a sheet, was the largest woman that Connie had ever seen in her life.
‘Oh thank God,’ said the woman. ‘Can you get me out of here?’
‘Hang on, I’ll ring the police.’
Connie started to shake with panic. She turned and screamed as she collided with Mr Savant, who pushed her backwards into the room and the panel was pulled shut behind her.
*
Jimmy’s brain was sparking with theories, some impossible, some bordering on lunacy, but he wrote down on a pad everything that crossed his mind. When Della nipped out for a sandwich at lunchtime, Jimmy made sure she had driven off before he went into the main office to speak to Ivanka.
‘Get Wenda on the phone,’ he said. ‘And put the speaker on.’
‘But she will see the number and not answer. Della left lots of messages for her to ring back yesterday.’
‘You try,’ said Jimmy.
Ivanka huffed, found the number in Della’s desk diary and rang. It was picked up after three rings. Ivanka raised her eyebrow at Jimmy.
‘What’s up?’ said Wenda in her rough, scratchy voice.
‘Why didn’t you return the voicemails Della left you, Wenda?’ asked Jimmy.
‘What bleeding voicemails?’ replied Wenda. ‘If you’re ringing about my notice period then you can sod off, Jimmy Diamond. None of us will work with thieves and tramps and—’
‘I’m not. I’ve got to tell the tax people where you’re working for . . . erm . . . tax reasons. P45s and P60s and all that stuff,’ Jimmy said, hoping she’d swallow it.
‘Uh,’ said Wenda.
‘We don’t want you to get in trouble with that lot,’ said Jimmy. ‘They’ll fine you if they don’t know what you’re up to and where you’re up to it at.’
‘S’pose.’
‘So, do I tell them you’re at Cleancheap now?’
‘Cleancheap?’ Wenda laughed. ‘Why the bloody hell would any of us have gone to Cleancheap? Talk about jumping out of a frying pan and into a towering inferno.’
Ivanka’s jaw dropped open.
‘Where are you then?’ asked Jimmy. His adrenaline levels were spiking.
‘You can tell them I’m with Lady Muck.’
That name again.
‘Who else is there?
I might as well tell the tax people for them as well.’ Jimmy pushed down hard on his building fury.
‘Well, Hilda Curry, Sandra, Gemma Robinson, Cheryl, Marilyn Smith – oh hang on, not her. She never worked for you, did she . . .’ Wenda reeled off more names of his mutinous workforce.
‘And where are they based?’
‘Oh ’eck, I haven’t got the address on me. I’ve got the phone number though.’
‘Okay, can I have it?’
‘Well, you can’t have it now because I’m talking on my phone. I’ll have to ring off and write it down and ring you back,’ said Wenda.
‘I’ll call you in five minutes,’ said Jimmy. ‘If you could do that, Wenda, it’ll save you a lot of hassle in the long run.’
‘Aye, okay. If I must.’
He put the phone down. Jimmy slumped to the chair and shushed Ivanka when she started to drown him with questions. He needed to think and he couldn’t do that with her prattling on in the background. He had to herd all the facts into order in his head. The sabotage of the supplies, the doctoring of the website – what if that wasn’t all down to Roy Frog? But why would anyone else do that? Who might want to?
Jimmy gave it five minutes then called Wenda so that she could dictate the number of Lady Muck, a mobile number. It wasn’t Della’s mobile number, he noted. He had been half-expecting that it might be. He rang it immediately but it went through to voicemail. A woman’s silky voice purred that Lady Muck was away from her desk at the moment and to leave a message and contact details. He didn’t.
Jimmy noticed Della’s car pulling back into the car park.
‘Don’t say any of this to Della,’ Jimmy warned Ivanka. ‘Don’t mention Lady Muck.’
‘Why is—’
‘Just do it,’ snapped Jimmy, brooking no further discussion. ‘The fewer people who know about this the better, okay?’
Della going off sick, Della handing over the reins of the company she had more or less run single-handed for fifteen years to a young upstart pup of a teenager without so much as a humph . . . it was as fishy as a four-week-old kipper. But why would Della do that to him? She wouldn’t. It couldn’t be her. But just to be on the safe side, he’d make sure that any investigative work he did on Lady Muck, would only be between himself, Ivanka – and Connie, of course.
Chapter 91
Brandon was making a huge chocolate statue of Marilyn Monroe in his hallway for an event happening within the hour and he was really stretching the deadline. It was almost finished, then he realised that he had forgotten to fill it with all the trays of strawberries banked behind him. Someone rang the doorbell – his guests were arriving and he was thrown into panic. He started to stick strawberries all over the chocolate Marilyn, but she looked ridiculous. More ringing and now hammering at the door too, his guests were starting to become impatient. He could see the door juddering in its frame and his eyes shot open.
He was on the sofa in his lounge where he had dropped off in the wee small hours. He and his sisters had stayed up talking and shared a bottle of wine before they had caught their taxis home. Helena’s ears would have been burning. So would Connie’s, but in quite a different way. His sisters agreed that Connie looked like a total sweetheart and they were giddy that their brother had been caught in flagrante delicto with her. He was looking forward to seeing her again today. He had fallen asleep thinking about her: her smell, her gentleness, her soft grey eyes, her surprising core of steel.
But there really was someone insistently ringing the doorbell, that was what had dragged him from his dream back into consciousness. He sprang to his feet and hoped it wasn’t Helena because it smacked of her impatience.
But when he unlocked it, it was to find an elderly woman in a dark coat holding the hand of a small, blonde-haired toddler with huge, bright eyes.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ she said, ‘but do you have the time please?’
‘Oh, er, yes.’ He absently tilted his wrist to look at his watch but he must have taken it off before he had fallen asleep. ‘Just bear with me one minute,’ he said and darted into the kitchen to refer to the clock on the wall.
‘It’s half past one,’ he said, returning to the old lady.
‘Thank you, so much,’ she said, tugging at the little boy’s hand as he seemed reluctant to leave. ‘Come on, love. Let’s go home.’
That was quite odd, thought Brandon, but then his thoughts were hijacked by the realisation that if it was half-past one, why hadn’t Connie arrived yet? She’d promised she would be here by twelve and they’d talk. Was she embarrassed about last night? Did she think she had told him too much?
He had the number for Lady Muck’s office stored in his mobile phone so he rang it, but it went through to voice-mail. He left a message asking Connie to contact him because he very much wanted to see her, then went to make himself a cup of restorative coffee and waited impatiently for her to return his call. Fifteen minutes passed and he rang again, hoping that nothing was wrong. When he’d seen her after Helena had assaulted her, he’d wanted to scoop her up in his arms and carry her away. The sight of her so vulnerable, her grey eyes bright with tears, had been the moment that fanned the flame of his growing affection for her into something much more raging. He had felt in her kiss that his feelings weren’t running just one way. So where was she?
He recalled a previous conversation he’d had about the client Connie visited on Wednesday mornings who lived in the spooky undertaker’s house. He knew he was being ridiculously dramatic for even thinking about driving past the house to see if she was running late, but still, he snatched up his car keys from the work surface.
*
Connie hammered on the door with her fists, which were now sore from the repeated action.
‘Mr Savant, you let me out now before you get into trouble.’
‘He won’t,’ said the woman on the bed. ‘He’s frightened.’
‘Frightened? Maybe he wants to try being locked up in a room that no one knows about,’ yelled Connie. ‘Is he keeping you prisoner? How long have you been in here?’
‘Oh, I’m not in here all the time. At least I wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago, but I can’t walk any more. I’m too big and too sore.’ The woman had a high, young voice. ‘You’re Marilyn, aren’t you? He talks about you.’
‘Yes, yes I am,’ Connie replied. This wasn’t the time to complicate things by explaining who she really was. ‘Who are you? Why are you here?’ She was annoyed with herself for not acting when she heard the voice through the wall the first time. She’d tried to rationalise it away and look at the mess she was in now. Connie sank down on the bed.
‘I’m Isabel. Isabel Harper.’
The name hit a nerve in Connie’s brain. Where did she know it from?
‘He’s not well,’ said Isabel. ‘I’ve begged him to stop this now, but he won’t.’
‘Stop what?’ Connie’s throat felt constricted with anxiety. ‘Why does your name sound familiar?’
‘I’m a missing person,’ Isabel enlightened her. ‘I was a voluntary missing person for over a year and a half, but then it all started to go wrong.’
‘Voluntary missing person? What do you mean?’ asked Connie, scanning the room for anything she could use to get out of here. She’d smash up the couch if she had to, there would be wood inside it and possibly some metal.
‘I met Julian . . . Mr Savant in a café in Sheffield. I was crying. He bought me a coffee and a bun. He was kind.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-two,’ said Isabel. ‘I don’t want to be here when I’m twenty-three next week.’ Isabel wiped her eyes on her fleshy hand. ‘He’s lonely and I know he cares very deeply for me. I feel so guilty for leaving him, but a few weeks ago I told him that I wanted to go home now.’
‘Were you . . . were you like that . . . ? Er . . .’
Connie realised she should never have started that question. There was no polite way to ask if Isabel had been that size w
hen she met Mr Savant. She couldn’t have been, really. She couldn’t move.
‘I’ve always been big,’ said Isabel. ‘I like food. I take comfort in it. I know you shouldn’t, but I do. My parents aren’t like me at all. We used to argue a lot. One day, we had a huge row. I left home, I wanted to eat and eat until I was sick, eat the pain away. You won’t know what I mean . . .’
Connie reached over for Isabel’s plump hand, a gesture of sympathy, empathy, total understanding. She did know what she meant. She’d had years of attaching emotion to food, confusing love and chocolate.
‘Julian said he needed a housekeeper. I had nowhere else to go so I came to live here. I didn’t tell anyone where I’d gone; I wanted them all to worry. Julian did all the housework though, he just wanted to sit and talk and drink tea and he brought me buns and milk shakes and he loved to see me eat. He enjoyed taking care of me. He treated me like a princess.’
Nausea rocked Connie’s stomach. ‘Were you lovers then?’ She tried not to think about the visuals of that.
‘No, no,’ said Isabel. ‘He tended me. I’d never had anyone who thought I was beautiful before. The more I ate, the more he adored me. It was wonderful, for a while.’
‘Then you changed your mind. You wanted out?’
‘There’s only so long you can pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist, even protected as I am in this house. It was wrong of me to just disappear. The police have spent so much money trying to find me, my family think I’m dead and I need to try and make amends for that. So, I told Julian I wanted to leave and he said that was impossible. He couldn’t live without me. He loves me. He wouldn’t hurt me . . .’
‘He is hurting you, love,’ said Connie. ‘He’s killing you.’ Now she knew where all the cakes came into the equation.
‘I don’t want him to go to prison. He’s a very sad man. He said he’d find me some company. He said he’d find me a friend.’
Jesus, he was trying to fatten me up, thought Connie. He was mad. She launched herself against the wall and screamed.
Afternoon Tea at the Sunflower Café Page 38