Granny Smith and the Deadly Frogs or The little old lady solves another crime

by G. M. Dobbs

  Following the conclusion of the pursuit of the yellow fiesta, Granny and Twice had been brought to the station where they had been marched into Miskin’s office and subjected to a good twenty minutes of red faced, veins bulging, yelling from the chief inspector.

  And then Granny had been thrown into the cell.

  And for what?

  As far as Granny was concerned she had done society a service by stopping the teenagers in that yellow car before they had killed themselves, or worse someone else, some innocent pedestrian perhaps. And yet Miskin seemed to have forgotten all that. He didn’t take any of that into consideration and had shouted, yelled and screamed about - driving without a licence, driving while disqualified, breaking the speed limit on multiple occasions, taking a police vehicle, impersonating a police officer, reckless and dangerous driving, criminal damage and several other smaller offences, the details of which Granny couldn’t quite recall.

  Somehow Granny didn’t think she was going to escape with a caution this time.

  Not this time.

  Nineteen

  ‘Come on,’ Twice said.

  Granny looked up at Twice.

  He was standing in the doorway of her cell and was still wearing his uniform, which was a good sign. The way Miskin had acted Granny had been sure Twice would have been thrown out of the force, his uniform torn from him and his warrant card revoked. The fact that he still had the uniform on seemed to indicate that was not the case.

  ‘What for?’ Granny asked. She was in no mood to spend any more time with the chief inspector. He could go and find someone else to yell at. If he was going to charge her and haul her through the courts then so be it, but she didn’t see why she should spend another minute with the obnoxious twerp of a man.

  ‘Because you are free to go,’ Twice said, smiling.

  ‘I can?’

  Twice nodded.

  ‘I’ll take you home,’ he said and held up the small plastic bag he carried. ‘I’ve got your belongings here.’

  Granny stood up, worked a kink out of her back and walked over to Twice.

  ‘They’re letting me go?’ she asked, not really daring to believe it. Miskin had been absolutely livid and had promised her a long prison term.

  ‘They are,’ Twice said.

  Granny took the bag from Twice and looked through it. Her phone, tobacco and pipe, as well as a box of matches were there but the handcuffs had not been returned to her. Ah well, she supposed, must be thankful for small mercies. It didn’t look as if they had gone through her phone and discovered the pictures of Carol’s body. Surely if they had done so then she wouldn’t be getting the phone back.

  ‘How come we can go?’ she asked.

  Granny had been half expecting it to be a couple of years before she got to see home again. At one point during his tirade Miskin had threatened holding her under the Mental Health Act. She was clearly suffering from extreme mental problems or as the chief inspector had tersely put it, - “you’re as nutty as a fucking fruitcake!”

  ‘Come on,’ Twice said. ‘I’ll tell you on the way home.’

  Granny shook her head, smiling to herself.

  ‘Well well,’ she said. ‘After all that shouting and screaming, after all the hours spent in the cell with nothing to do but read the wall, and Miskin couldn’t find it in himself to apologise in person.’

  ‘I’d think yourself lucky,’ Twice said as he turned the police car into Granny’s street. ‘I think we were both lucky. Extremely lucky.’

  ‘It seems to me that some of us have been luckier than others,’ Granny said.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ Twice asked. Though he knew only too well what Granny meant, but it was not as if his fault he was going to get the credit for the drug bust.

  Granny smiled, said nothing.

  The way Twice had explained it was that the men in the car they had been chasing had both been high, having taken a mind bending cocktail of hallucinogenic drugs as well as a copious amount of amphetamines. Not only that but the vehicle they had been driving had been stolen. That itself was enough to justify the chase and eventual stopping of the yellow car, but there was more. In the boot of the car was a case containing over a hundred ounces of prime grade marijuana. On top of all that the two occupants of the car, who even in their drugged conditions had realised that they were facing long prison sentences and that helping the police was in their best interests, had been talking freely for most of the afternoon. Already had divulged the location of two large scale marijuana factories in the Rhondda as well the names and addresses of several street dealers responsible for pushing large amounts of weed, cocaine and worse of all, heroin.

  Twice told Granny that he had been convinced his career as a special constable was over, but with each new revelation from the two prisoners, Miskin had mellowed. Eventually he had tapped Twice on the shoulder and congratulated him on a job well done. The official line was that Twice had been driving, taking a member of the public (Granny) home, when he has spotted the yellow vehicle driving in a fashion he considered likely to cause injury or even death. It had been a split decision to give chase with the civilian (Granny) in the police vehicle but one that had resulted in the yellow car being stopped safely and a large haul of drugs seized. There could be no mention that Granny had in fact been driving, had been the one to stop the yellow car. She was a civilian, not qualified, nor authorised, to drive the police car and there was also the small matter of her actually being disqualified from driving after accruing more than a dozen penalty points on her licence. This was the official stance and the way it had to be. The alternative was for Granny and likely Twice to face criminal charges which would very likely result in a period of imprisonment for them both.

  Twice pulled the car up outside Granny’s house and engaged the hand break.

  ‘Let’s just keep out of trouble now,’ he said. ‘We’ve had a lucky escape and I think we should leave it at that.’

  ‘What about Carol?’ Granny asked. ‘What about her marriage to Tudor Lewis? What did Miskin say about that?’

  Twice frowned.

  ‘You’re not going to let it rest,’ he said with a sigh.

  ‘What did he say?’ Granny prompted Twice who, she felt, was being evasive.

  ‘He didn’t say anything.’

  ‘Nothing al all?’

  ‘No,’ Twice shook his head. ‘He didn’t say anything because I didn’t tell him we’d visited Carol’s mother.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I didn’t think it wise,’ Twice said. ‘In the first place Miskin was yelling fit to bust, he’d already thrown you into the cells and was all ready to strip me of my uniform. When the news of the drugs in the car came to light I didn’t want to push my luck.’

  Granny nodded, supposing that made some kind of sense.

  ‘But have the police spoken to Tudor Lewis,’she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Twice said, growing annoyed with the old woman. He considered himself very lucky and no longer wanted to be involved in Granny’s amateur investigating. ‘I’ve not been told anything about the murder investigation.’

  Granny shook her head, said nothing. Already she had moved on from the events of the afternoon and was contemplating her next step.

  ‘From now on let’s leave it to the professionals,’ Twice said.

  ‘Sure thing,’ Granny said and stepped from the police car, leaving Twice with the horrible feeling that Granny Smith was far from done with the case.

  Twenty

  The following morning Granny was up and about at the crack of dawn, leaving Arthur to snore away in the one bedroom while Gerald did likewise in the other. She made herself a breakfast of lightly buttered toast and a mug of tea and afterward sat on the sofa, smoking a pipe, her usual morning blend of burley and Kentucky tobaccos, while she considered her next move.

  Obviously the news that Carol and Tudor had planned marriage made him more of a suspect than ever, and Granny was now working on the
theory that Tudor had killed Carol in a jealous frenzy after finding out about her fling with Mark. That would make some kind of sense if it turned out to be true that Tudor and Carol were engaged, but Granny was still troubled by the revelation of the forthcoming marriage. She was certain that if anything had been going on between Tudor and Carol then it would have been public knowledge.

  It didn’t make any sense.

  Why would Carol tell her mother that she was getting married if it wasn’t true?

  Another thing that made no sense was that Carol would have a one-night fling with Mark, especially if she was engaged to be married. Why would she do that? Maybe she couldn’t help herself, couldn’t control her sexual urges, Granny thought and recalled the sex toys back at Carol’s flat, not to mention the reading material. Though lots of women had sex toys and it didn’t make them raging nymphomaniacs, but the handcuffs, fetish wear and whips did suggest that Carol’s sexual tastes stretched to the exotic. From what Granny knew of Tudor Lewis, which admittedly wasn’t that much, she wouldn’t have thought kinky sex was his thing. Try as she might she couldn’t imagine Tudor Lewis, leather clad and wielding a whip. Nor did she think he would allow himself to be handcuffed.

  The next move, Granny decided, was to talk to Tudor Lewis.

  That was the only thing to do.

  She had to establish the true facts of his relationship with Carol.

  Yes, that’s what she would do.

  Granny knew that there was no point in telephoning Twice and asking his help, not after all that had gone on. Granny didn’t want to drag him along in any case. He would be more concerned with avoiding any further trouble than uncovering Carol’s killer. No, Granny, decided. From now on she’d leave Twice out of it. She’d get Gerald to drive her over to Tudor Lewis’s place.

  Granny looked at the wall clock and found that it was just nudging nine. Soon Arthur and Gerald would be getting up, and looking for their breakfast. She got to her feet and went to the cabinet that housed her extensive CD collection looking for something to wake her up. She selected Piledriver by Status Quo, slipped it into the player and then went through to the kitchen to get the breakfast going.

  ‘That’s the one,’ Granny said. ‘Pull up outside.’

  She was glad they had finally arrived. It had not been a long drive to Tudor’s place, no more than a couple of miles, but the journey had seemed endless to Granny largely because of Gerald’s insistence on playing his Abba CD. The old woman had no idea where her son got his musical tastes from since Arthur wasn’t at all musical and she herself would never play such saccharine pop music.

  Gerald, humming along to Mama Mia, pulled his shocking pink car into the kerb and looked at the large house.

  ‘Very posh,’ he said.

  ‘Turn off the engine,’ Granny said. ‘Don’t want to bring attention to ourselves.’ She obviously hadn’t considered the fact that the vivid pink car was enough to set them apart almost anywhere. Well, they could likely blend in at the car park of a Village People concert but that was about it.

  Gerald did so. He took a lingering look at the house and then switched off his music, which provoked a smile from his mother who suddenly realised that silence was indeed golden, and came without a Swedish accent.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ Gerald asked, looking across at his mother. He wasn’t at all happy with his mother getting him involved in this madness. If she wanted to run around acting like Miss Marple then he was fine with that, but he didn’t see why he had to be involved. He had a wedding to plan and really didn’t have time for this but, as Gerald knew only to well, there was no reasoning with his mother when she’d set her mind on something.

  ‘You stay here,’ Granny said. ‘I’m going to talk to Tudor Lewis.’

  Gerald nodded, pleased to be staying in the car. He took the latest issue of The Bride from his dashboard and starting flicking through the glossy pages.

  Granny got out of the car and lingered on the pavement for a moment, looking at the impressive house. She had been here once before, as a child. Then the house had stood in ruins, its dignity ravaged by the uncaring hands of time. Once the house, erected at the outskirts of the village, had sat alone, surrounded by fields of heather. It had been built as a home for Christmas Evans, one of the first mine owners to make his fortune from the coal that rested beneath the ground. However over time the village of Gilfach had grown around it, terraced houses had replaced the fields and a modern road lay across what had once been nothing more than a dirt track. During the Second World War the house had suffered considerable damage from a German bomb, dropped randomly by the pilot on his way back to Germany. After that it had stood empty for a great many years. There had been talk of demolishing the building but the council couldn’t decide if the house was of historic importance or not. And so it had remained empty until Tudor Lewis purchased it in the early Nineties and transformed it to its current glory.

  Granny paused again at the front door and took a deep breath before reaching out and pressing the bell.

  The door was opened by Tudor Lewis himself. He looked at Granny for a moment before recognising her.

  ‘You’re one of those frog people,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Granny smiled. ‘Though I wanted to talk to you about something else.’

  ‘I don’t know if I have anything to say to you people,’ Tudor said. ‘Nothing but a damn nuisance. Firstly you hold up my work because of some bloody rare frog that isn’t even there, and now the police have cordoned off the area as a crime scene.’

  ‘I want to talk to you about the murder,’ Granny said, moving forward and putting a foot against the door so that Tudor couldn’t close it. This was all very strange and from the way Tudor spoke Carol’s murder was little more than an inconvenience to him, and yet the victim had supposedly been his fiancé.

  ‘I’ve already talked to the police about the murder,’ Tudor said. ‘If I had my way I’d murder the bloody lot of you.’

  ‘Carol,’ Granny said. ‘Told her mother that you and her were to be married.’

  ‘What,’ Tudor Lewis did a double take and Granny was sure that the deep surprise that registered on his face was genuine. ‘Carol bloody who?’

  ‘The murdered girl,’ Granny said. This was not the way she had expected the conversation to go and it was clear to her that Tudor Lewis didn’t have the faintest idea what she was talking about.

  Tudor Lewis started to laugh then and he went right on laughing for several moments before looking down at Granny and: ‘I’m not getting married to anyone and if I were it certainly not be to one of you crackpots. I never really knew the woman, she was half my age and besides she was a raging bloody lesbian.’

  Granny took a moment to compose herself.

  ‘Lesbian?’

  ‘Yes,’ Tudor said. ‘Her and that other woman. I saw them together.’

  ‘What other woman?’

  ‘One of you lot. The one with red hair.’

  ‘Sue?’ Granny looked hard at Tudor Lewis. ‘You saw them? Sue and Carol?’

  ‘I did,’ Tudor Lewis nodded. ‘Behind the Bully one night. Tongues in each other’s mouths, hands on arses. Bloody disgusting.’

  ‘And you weren’t going to marry Carol?’

  ‘I told you. I hardly knew the woman,’ Tudor started to push the door closed. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got work to do.’

  Granny nodded, stepped back and Tudor Lewis closed the door.

  Granny, her head swimming, not knowing what to think made her way back to Gerald’s car.

  ‘Well?’ Gerald prompted.

  Granny looked at her son.

  ‘Take me home, ‘ she said.

  As soon as they reached the house Granny went straight through to the kitchen and located Carol’s address book. She found the entry for Carol’s sister and went through to the living room, picked up the phone and dialled the woman’s number. She had thought about getting Gerald to drive her, see Carol’s sister face to f
ace but she decided that this time she’d telephone in the first instance.

  The woman answered almost immediately and Granny introduced herself, told her that she had been a friend of Carol’s and didn’t think the police were doing enough to solve her murder. To Granny’s surprise the woman had been talkative and didn’t seem at all put out by the telephone call. When Granny had mentioned the fact that Carol had told their mother she was getting married but that it looked as if that was untrue, she had laughed, told Granny her sister had always been a fantasist. ‘Half the time you couldn’t believe a bloody word she said’, the woman told Granny.

  It was clear to Granny that Carol’s death hadn’t hit her sister that hard, and she had the feeling the two women didn’t really have much to do with each other. She wasn’t going to mention Tudor Lewis’s claims that Carol had been a lesbian but in the end she decided to put all her cards on the table.

  ‘Carol wasn’t a lesbian,’ the woman had replied. ‘She was a slut.’

  That shocked Granny and if there had been any doubt that the relationship between Carol and her sister had been strained, it quickly vanished. More than strained their relationship had been damaged beyond repair. Carol wasn’t yet cold in the ground and her own sister was calling her a slut, and from the tone of her voice she didn’t seem sorry that she was dead.

  ‘I,’ Granny said but her words trailed off into nothing.

  ‘Let me tell you something about my sister,’ the woman said and went on to tell Granny in salacious detail exactly what sort of woman her dearly departed sister had been. It was a sordid tale and depicted Carol as having been a scheming, manipulative and above all evil woman. The telephone conversation ended with the woman telling Granny that if the police did discover who had killed Carol then he should be given a medal rather that go to jail.

  Twenty-One

  That night Granny sat up alone long after Gerald and Arthur had gone to bed. She had an Iron Maiden album, Piece of Mind, playing in the background but the volume was turned right down, and Granny wasn’t really listening.