The Mysterious Miss Mayhew

by Hazel Osmond

  ‘Terrapins?’

  ‘Too snappy.’

  ‘Rats? Baz keeps rats in his shed.’

  ‘No. Baz has rats in his shed – as in, it’s overrun. Come on, Hattie, guinea pigs are my best offer. And not till your birthday. And you have to clean them out and feed them.’

  Hattie looked unimpressed. Guinea pigs were nowhere near exotic enough.

  ‘Tarantula?’ she tried, ending with a melting smile.

  ‘Not in a million years.’ He slowed the car. ‘I did put your PE kit in the boot, didn’t I?’

  She nodded vigorously. Good, no need to execute a U-turn and hare back to the house.

  Hattie was now practising her karate moves as much as she could while being strapped in, which seemed to signal the end of this particular episode of Pets I Want and You Won’t Let Me Have.

  As he parked the car outside school, he was a bit heavy on the brake and a large brown envelope fell from the dashboard into the footwell. It was addressed to his in-laws and contained two sets of photographs – one for Caroline and Geoffrey and one for Steph. There were some of Hattie holding the de-dinosaured bag and wearing the dress (cut down the back and pinned to a vest to make it look as if it fitted and to keep it in place). And some of Hattie in shorts and T-shirt. Tom liked the ones where Hattie was being herself, but he knew Steph would prefer the ones where she was trying to be someone else.

  Also winging its way to Steph, via her parents, was a letter asking her, once more, to get divorce proceedings restarted and a briefer note setting out his plans to bring Hattie to Italy in December. He wasn’t looking forward to the phone call he was going to get when she read either.

  When he arrived in the office, Liz had taken to heart his plea not to leap on him as soon as he got in. It gave him the opportunity to turn on his computer and trawl for information on the play he was meant to have seen in Newcastle the evening before. He made some notes from the theatre’s website and scanned their Twitter stream to make sure Benedict Cumberbatch hadn’t made a surprise appearance. With some judicious knitting, no one would be any the wiser that he’d had a really, really obscured view of the performance.

  He didn’t allow his mind to roam back over that room or Grietje – he wasn’t that man here, although his muscles kept reminding him something spectacular had happened to them.

  Liz, having obviously decided that it was safe to disturb him now, was standing in the doorway holding what he thought of as her little paper hand grenades.

  ‘You look perky,’ she said, coming in and sitting down. ‘Obviously enjoyed the play.’

  He kept his eyes on the computer screen. ‘Yes. Very interesting. Very … challenging.’

  Liz made a noise that could have meant anything and he stopped looking at the screen.

  There seemed to be something sluggish about her this morning. Even her curls looked less bouncy.

  ‘Rough night?’ he asked, and she screwed up her face.

  ‘Waited up for No. 1 to come in.’

  Tom wondered how someone with as keen a sense of humour as Liz could refer to her daughters as No. 1 and No. 2. Still, that was less wince-making than how she referred to her ex-husband.

  She might have said more if Victoria had not appeared. She leaned against the door frame, all bright-eyed and wide-smiled.

  ‘Got some lovely pieces from that new jeweller who’s going to move in next to the post office.’ She must have seen his expression, because she added, quickly, ‘It’s OK, she does a range of prices.’

  ‘Great. Good work.’

  Victoria pushed herself off from the door frame, did an elegant turn and was gone.

  Liz was able to convey the words ‘brown-noser’ in a variety of facial expressions. Today she chose to let her mouth drop open and cross her eyes.

  Tom looked past her out into the office where he could see Monty. He actually appeared to be typing.

  ‘See Monty’s out-of-body experience is continuing,’ he said.

  Liz turned to look. ‘He’s finished one of his pages. It’s on my desk now.’

  ‘That’s very worrying.’

  Liz faced him again. ‘Yup, and you know what else is worrying …?’ One of the pieces of paper was handed to him. It was headed up Thailand for all budgets and he guessed it was something Jamie had written.

  ‘Hard to believe English is his first language, isn’t it?’ Liz said as Tom scanned through it. He could only agree.

  ‘You got time to help him?’

  Liz’s look suggested she didn’t. ‘I’ve given him some old copies of the mag and told him to read, learn and rewrite.’

  Tom put that problem to the back of the queue and turned to the more pressing one. ‘Any breakthrough on the illustrator?’

  ‘Felix is interviewing the last one now. Said could you pop up and discuss options. Half an hour or so?’ She stood up and put her hand over a yawn. ‘Other than that, things are peachy.’

  ‘Peachy and perky, what a great team we make,’ he said brightly, knowing it would get Liz out of the office like a shot. He followed her, noticing how Kelvin was, as usual, in orbit around Victoria’s desk like some priapic moon.

  Upstairs, he could tell by the expression on his Creative Director’s face that the interview had not gone well. The polar opposite to Liz, Felix was unerringly upbeat – from his cheery T-shirt and jeans, to his face like a big-eyed open book with spiky cartoon hair on top. Felix’s section was like a playpen; a couple of young designers, noses to Apple Macs, bright posters on the walls and silly gadgets on the desks.

  ‘No go then?’ Tom said, perching on the edge of Felix’s desk.

  Felix’s earring danced with the ferocity of his head shaking. ‘His work was great.’ Tom was shown a photocopy of a drawing of a red squirrel.

  ‘But?’

  ‘But you would not believe what he wanted to be paid.’ He named the figure and Felix was right, Tom didn’t believe it.

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘To stick his drawing of a squirrel where it’ll always be near some nuts.’

  ‘Good man. So … our options are …?’

  Felix held up his index finger and thumb in a big ‘O’ shape and Tom went to the window and looked out into the square as he tried to think of a way through this problem. He watched the woman from the art shop cross to the post office and he was still standing at the window when she came back out. Something prodded at his sub-conscious.

  He turned back to Felix. ‘Borrow your computer a minute?’

  He typed a name into the search engine. A quick double-click and he was looking at a website.

  ‘Now that,’ Felix said, peering over Tom’s shoulder, ‘that’s more like it.’

  CHAPTER 17

  As Tom turned down the track, he saw the white four-wheel drive squatting there like a puffed-up Imperial Stormtrooper. It had Greg Vasey written all over it, literally. Greg Vasey Estate Agent.

  Greg Vasey was nowhere near his favourite person and Tom hadn’t yet managed a conversation with Fran that ended well. Put the two together and he saw only irritation ahead.

  And what if they were together together? Going for a drink with Vasey was one thing, inviting him back to where you lived was something else. Maybe Fran was the kind of woman who could grit her teeth and shag someone she thought was a creep, just to get a bit off her rent.

  And even if she agreed to do a piece for them, could they afford her? She’d worked for some pretty heavyweight magazines and book publishers.

  Come on, Tom, where’s your fighting spirit?

  He got out of the car and thought about his fighting spirit. That was actually the problem where Greg Vasey was concerned. He rarely bumped into the guy these days, but if he did, the years since school melted away. Shaggy’s ‘Boombastic’ was in the charts, his mother was being embarrassing about Colin Firth’s white shirt and Tom was dragging Vasey across the Tarmac behind the Science Building by his school tie.

  Pathetic. Nearly twenty
years had passed. Rob had let it all go; so should Tom.

  He could hear the sound of a lawnmower, but there was no one in the front garden and no reply when he knocked, so he went around to the back of the bungalow. Which was where he saw a sweating Greg Vasey pushing an ancient petrol mower, wet patches under his arms and his shirt open to show a damp-looking chest. His hair, which was normally strand perfect, looked as if something large and spitty had licked it to his head. Tom was pleased to see all these things. If Greg could actually run over his own toes with the mower, he’d have been even more pleased.

  Back at school, Vasey had looked like an undernourished weasel, complete with sandy hair and overbite. His role had been to stand beside the school bully, supplying encouragement. He’d filled out a lot since then, muscle mainly by the look of it.

  Vasey stopped pushing the mower and gave Tom an unfriendly, shifty stare that showed he still harboured a grudge about having his nose rubbed, literally, into the school Tarmac.

  Tom knew that he not only had to ignore all signs of hostility, but also fight his own impulse to deliberately wind Vasey up. So he did not ask, ‘This a new skill of yours? Selling and renting properties and sweaty lawnmowing?’

  ‘What do you want?’ Vasey said, as if Tom were trespassing, and turned off the mower with a showy twist of his wrist.

  ‘I’d like to see Fran. She in here?’ Tom indicated the back door and started to move towards it, but his question was answered by the appearance of Fran carrying a glass and bottle of beer. He did a quick scan of what she was wearing – another of those 1940s-type dresses, no shoes. Her hair was loose. Was it bed-head hair?

  She made an ‘Oh’ sound and he waited for her to ask him if he had come round to pee in her garden again.

  ‘Lovely day,’ he got in before she could speak.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ she replied with a smile that had a bit too much width to it, as if she was forcing herself to be jolly. Her eyes didn’t look fully engaged with that smile either.

  ‘That for me, doll?’ Greg walked towards the beer and Fran’s smile solidified. She held the bottle and the glass out – really held them out, as if she wanted to keep Vasey as far away from her body as possible.

  ‘You two know each other, I expect?’ she said.

  Neither of them answered and she looked quizzically at Tom. He figured that saying, ‘Yes, I know him, he’s the bastard who helped make my brother’s first year at senior school a nightmare,’ was not going to get the visit off to a relaxed start.

  Vasey suddenly said, ‘Still running that little magazine?’

  Tom let it lie and turned to talk to Fran, but Vasey was speaking again.

  ‘Suppose you saw in the paper, I’m about to open my second branch? Newcastle.’

  Tom let that bit of one-upmanship lie too. He even, when Vasey went on with, ‘Your Rob still at Wheatley’s?’ ignored the sneering undercurrent.

  ‘Yes,’ he simply said, ‘my brother’s done well. Thank you for asking.’

  The urge to vomit in his own mouth because he’d been pleasant to Vasey was offset by the satisfaction of seeing the sly bugger realise that his efforts at baiting had failed. Perhaps he’d also heard echoes of the past in Tom’s ‘my brother’ – as in ‘touch my brother one more time and it won’t just be your face I’m smearing over the Tarmac’.

  ‘Any chance of a chat about the magazine?’ he was able to finally ask Fran.

  She led the way to the house and only on the threshold of the kitchen did she turn to Vasey. ‘You’re doing a wonderful job, Greg,’ she called and, by the time they were in the kitchen, the mower had started up again.

  Natalie had called the place a ‘dump’, and there was a frowsy air to the room. Everything looked shabby, although an effort had been made to brighten things up with jam jars and jugs full of wild flowers. The only plus point was the view over the back garden to the fields beyond and even that was ruined when the figure of Vasey, trudging along with the mower, cut across it.

  ‘Come through to the sitting room,’ Fran said. ‘It’s no more palatial, but at least it’s away from that noise.’

  As he followed her, he noticed a cooling rack bearing two sunken halves of a sandwich cake. ‘Been baking?’ he asked, remembering he was meant to be buttering her up.

  ‘Yes. I was inspired by the county show, but it’s harder than it looks. Especially in that brute of an oven.’ That earnestness of hers was suddenly lightened by a laugh. ‘Although a bad workman always blames his tools, doesn’t he?’

  The sitting room looked over the front garden and the old-fashioned three-piece suite had been pushed back to make space for a square table in front of the window. On it sat a board and some coloured paper, a ruler and a scalpel. There was more paper piled up in one of the corners of the room. Propped against the legs of the table were a number of box frames and Tom guessed they contained some of the work he’d seen on the website.

  ‘Would you like to sit?’ she asked, while she perched on the arm of the sofa.

  He noticed that she didn’t offer him a beer.

  ‘So …?’ She folded her hands in her lap like a child waiting to be told a story.

  ‘Well … do you remember I told you about Charlie Coburg?’

  ‘The gentleman who used to do nature drawings and notes for you?’

  ‘Ye-es,’ he said, trying not to stumble over Charlie being called a gentleman. ‘And I think I told you that we haven’t been able to find a replacement for him? Which is a big shame because our readers loved his stuff. The countryside plays a huge part in people’s lives round here, so a magazine without a proper nod to the wildlife feels out of balance.’

  ‘Very nicely put,’ she said and then frowned and tilted her head. The noise of the mower had suddenly got louder, as if Vasey had also moved to the front of the bungalow.

  Tom tried to ignore it. ‘Anyway, I remembered seeing you come out of the art shop with all this paper and so I had a dig around on the Internet and saw your pictures.’ He was having to raise his voice over the sound of the mower. ‘Is it pictures or sculptures? Sorry, I don’t know how to describe them.’

  Vasey walked past the window and turned and peered in. It would have been comical if it wasn’t getting in the way of Tom’s mission.

  Tom got up and walked over to the box frames. ‘May I?’

  Fran nodded, and as he bent to pick one up he saw she had turned her face back towards the window. It looked as if she was sucking in both her cheeks.

  The frame he was holding contained a paper sculpture of a fox, the different shades of paper cut and layered so beautifully that you felt you could reach through the glass and stroke fur. The snout had a delicate fold to suggest the skull underneath and the thinnest of tendrils were whiskers. The fox was standing in a forest where the trees and even the brambles were cut from paper. Tom could imagine disappearing into the picture. To get such intricacy and depth from something that had started out flat seemed incredible to him.

  ‘This really is beautiful,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you.’ A tone in her voice made him turn and he saw that she was beaming. Her eyes were definitely caught up in this smile.

  He put the fox back and picked up a grey seal in an even greyer sea. The markings on its skin, the ripples of the water, all done in paper. There was a rock with tiny limpets off to the seal’s left; the grey sea bleeding into the many blues of a horizon off to its right.

  Even the readers who usually flicked past the nature pages would stop and linger over this.

  Tom ignored yet another reconnaissance trip by Vasey and said, tentatively, ‘I know you’ve done work for magazines before, so I was wondering—’

  ‘No. Absolutely not.’

  The sharpness of that response made him blink. ‘No? Just like that? Before you’ve even heard what I was going to ask?’

  ‘You were going to see if I’d produce something for your magazine?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘There y
ou are then.’

  ‘Can I just ask why?’

  ‘Not really.’ She paused as the noise of the mower stopped. ‘I’m sorry that I can’t help you and your readers, but it would be … difficult.’

  ‘Because we’ve had some sticky conversations?’

  ‘Literally,’ she said, looking at his shirt.

  Yup, she was starting to irritate him again. He tried to remember that he was an editor desperate to solve a problem.

  ‘Look, you wouldn’t be working with me,’ he said, ‘it would be our Creative Director, Felix …’

  Tom trailed off as Vasey had appeared in the doorway, flicking some grass cuttings from his arm. He might as well have been wearing a T-shirt with I am checking up on you written across it. Tom tried to find the fact that Vasey considered him a threat amusing. Until Vasey said, ‘How long did you work in London, then?’

  ‘About twelve years.’ Tom knew where this was leading.

  Vasey nodded. ‘Travelled all over, didn’t you? Where did you live?’

  ‘Yes, I did travel all over. And Fulham. That was the last place I lived.’

  ‘Good part?’

  Tom nodded and waited.

  ‘Divorced yet?’ Vasey jabbed at him.

  ‘Not quite. Takes time.’

  There was a snort from Vasey. ‘Wouldn’t know,’ he said and, with a smile, left the room again.

  A few moments later, the sound of the mower started up once more.

  ‘Oh, really!’ Fran crossed to the table and looked out of the window. ‘Such an annoying man. Look, shall we go through to the kitchen? It’s so hard to hear oneself talk in here.’

  So, she was just playing Vasey for what she could get. Good luck with that.

  In the kitchen, Tom had one last try at persuading her, ending with, ‘And Mrs Mawson would see it as a huge favour.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Definitely. She’s Charlie’s daughter – you probably weren’t aware of that.’

  Fran was looking over at the cakes on the cooling rack.

  ‘I think,’ Tom went on, ‘she finds it painful to see Charlie’s work every month when he’s no longer around.’