A Taste of Death

by H. V. Coombs

  Then again, she had told me about her past. What sort of things did I expect to find out? I was an exotic dancer cross-addicted to coke and alcohol. That’s what she had told me. She was guilty of what, telling me the truth? It was maybe my fault I had raked it all up.

  What had I expected to find? I was hardly going to a strip club to discover that she had been living the life of a nun and helping out at Sunday schools. Like Bluebeard and his locked room, I’d been warned not to go in, and I had. Maybe she would answer my prayer and sort it all out, put her side of the story. After all, Cliff Hinds was a fifty-five-year-old hardened criminal, he was not the Dalai Lama.

  Time to drop my bombshell.

  ‘I was at Caramel Rosa’s today.’

  Her face hardened, her body stiffened.

  ‘Oh were you? Why’s that then?’ Her voice became as hard as her face, I had never heard her sound like that before. I think it was at that point that I knew all that Cliff had said was true.

  I ignored the question.

  ‘I know about you and Whitfield and I know about you and Luke Montfort too,’ I said. ‘Please, Naomi, tell me what on earth is going on?’

  ‘OK,’ she said, in a kind of defeated way, ‘I will.’

  She stood up. ‘Christ, I need a drink,’ It was a very un-yoga teacher like thing to say.

  ‘You’ve got tea,’ I pointed out. I drank some of mine. ‘It’s very calming.’

  ‘A proper drink,’ she said, scornfully. I suddenly did not like the tone I could hear in her voice. It wasn’t the Naomi that I knew.

  She crossed the room and went to a cupboard, pulled out a bottle of Absolut.

  ‘You think you’re so funny, don’t you?’ She glared irritably at me and poured a large vodka into a glass. ‘Want some?’

  She looked furious – it was an amazing transformation. It was also quite disturbing. I could almost imagine her glassing that girl. At least that wasn’t going to happen to me, I could certainly take care of myself.

  ‘I’d like answers, Naomi,’ I said, drinking more tea, ‘not booze.’

  ‘Well, you can wait a minute while I get some ice.’

  She went into the kitchen and I heard the slam of the freezer compartment door, the tinkling sound of ice in a glass, and then she returned and resumed her place at the end of the sofa. She took a big swig of her vodka.

  ‘Right, now I’ll begin.’ She looked at me defiantly and took a deep breath. ‘Craig Scott had a lot of money, mostly in cash, that he needed to get rid of.’

  ‘Drug money?’ I said brightly.

  ‘No,’ Naomi said sarcastically, ‘from a matured ISA. Of course it was drug money. Where else would it have come from? I’ve known him for ages, he used to be my coke dealer when I was at Caramel Rosa’s.’ Another pull of vodka.

  This was not what I wanted to hear. Please tell me you were an unwilling/unwitting accomplice, I silently pleaded …

  ‘Who did you talk to when you were there, by the way?’ She regarded me in a hostile way from over the rim of her glass.

  ‘Cliff Hinds.’

  She snorted contemptuously. ‘Cliff Hinds. Well, you’ll know everything about me then. Not that it matters. Anyway, I introduced Craig to Dave Anderson, and together they created Arcadia. They bought the land off the Earl.’

  ‘Why did they need those idiots from Chandler’s Ford, Farson and Musgrave?’ I couldn’t see their part in it, why would they be needed?

  ‘It gave the illusion of a community bid,’ Naomi explained. ‘The Council are big on being seen to favour local enterprise – inclusivity – and the Earl wouldn’t have sold them the land otherwise.’

  ‘That’s not what he told me,’ I said. ‘He said he was trying to rip them off.’

  ‘Is that what he said?’ Naomi shrugged. ‘It’s hard to know with him. He pretends he’s Mr Nasty but he does all this local charity shit. He’s the reverse of most people who pretend they’re nice and aren’t. Maybe I should just have shacked up with the Earl. Like Bryony did; she knows which side her bread’s buttered, as my mother would have said.’

  She sounded for a moment like she genuinely regretted it. I was certainly beginning to regret coming. It was becoming increasingly apparent that the sweet, caring Naomi that I had fallen in love with didn’t actually exist. They say that the truth makes you free, not that it’s an enjoyable experience.

  She carried on. ‘Then Dave, of all people, gets cold feet. Slattery has been nosing around.’

  I was confused. ‘But I thought Slattery was part of Arcadia. I thought he was on the take.’

  Naomi looked at me from over the rim of her glass. ‘You know what your problem is, Ben?’ Her voice was full of scorn. ‘You’re an idiot. Slattery is as straight as they come and he really does care about this poxy village. He’s had Craig Scott in his sights for ages. He found out that Craig was funding Arcadia, laundering his money. He was going to pull Dave in and Dave had never been inside and he would be terrified of going down. If Slattery had leaned on Dave he would have crumbled like a biscuit. That’s why Dave had to go, to shut his mouth.’

  ‘So Craig killed him?’ I said. ‘But who poisoned Craig and who killed Montfort?’ I shook my head. ‘I can’t imagine Farson was up to it, he’s so …’ I tried to think of an adjective.

  ‘Inconsequential?’ suggested Naomi. ‘Thick? Untrustworthy?’

  ‘Quite,’ I agreed. ‘That’s what he is, so who?’

  ‘Well,’ said Naomi, finishing her vodka, ‘that’s indeed a question.’ She stood up and stretched luxuriously. Her chest pushed against the thin, stretchy fabric, she looked fantastic.

  I put my cup on the floor which seemed unaccountably far down. I felt quite lethargic, she was right, the tea was very relaxing. Oh, God, I thought. Something must have shown in my face.

  ‘You can almost see the wheels turn—’ she shook her head pityingly ‘—like I said before, you’re an idiot. Who do you think could get close enough to Dave to carry his shotgun? Who do you think had drunk sex with Craig Scott and kept topping his vodka and coke up with methanol and who, when he started to cramp up, suggested to him he had food poisoning from your place?’ She carried on. ‘Who do you think saw you go into the Three Bells from their upstairs window and who do you think called Farson?’

  She walked over to where I was sprawled and stood over me like a huntress standing over a piece of dying big game. She looked down at me contemptuously.

  ‘And you, Ben, you moron, thinking you’re so clever with your pathetic restaurant and that posh, slut student waitress of yours and that dimwit kitchen porter – you’re the one that will take the rap for Montfort. That’s why I slept with you. To get the things I needed to make you a fall guy. Your knife killed him, and in my garage I’ve got one of your T-shirts with his blood on it. I’ll put that back in the Old Forge Café tonight.’

  She really hates me, I thought. And that was almost crueller than anything.

  She carried on talking but I seemed to be sliding mentally into a dark tunnel. I was fighting a losing battle to stay awake and not to sink into unconsciousness. I thought, I’m not going to wake up.

  My last coherent thought was: I know what my problem is, I’m an idiot.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  I came to as I was being dragged out of the back of a van by Farson and Hat Man. It was like I was drunk and they were helping me home. But I wasn’t drunk, and this wasn’t my home. The rain poured down around us, driven into our faces with stinging force by the high wind. I think that’s what had revived me. I looked around. I was in Chandler’s Ford. We made our way – me in the middle, them on either side supporting my weight – into the back garden of the Greyhound, the grass of the scabby lawn submerged by the flooding river.

  Near the rear wall of the pub was a semi-circle of sandbags put there in a vain attempt to keep the water out from the beer cellar trapdoor where the barrels were delivered by the draymen. The two heavy doors of the cellar, like a double trapdoor
, were flush with the sodden ground. They dropped me down on to the grass where I lay. I felt too weak, too enfeebled by whatever Naomi had drugged me with to move. There were two recessed handles in the iron flaps and, bending their knees, Farson and Hat Man heaved them up, one at a time. Each door was a two-man job.

  They dragged me to the gap that they had opened up. I could see the beer cellar was nine-tenths completely flooded, a couple of beer barrels were floating in the water, no wonder the bar had smelled damp.

  ‘Time for your swim, Gordon Ramsay,’ said Farson, and they threw me in. I gasped as the icy water embraced my body. The cellar must have been deep, because I couldn’t touch the floor. Momentarily I sank. I gulped water and inhaled some and came up coughing, my legs and arms thrashing around. I was still woozy and not really in control of my body, then my foot made contact with the body of one of the beer barrels that must have been completely full and was still resting on the floor of the cellar. I stared up at Farson and Hat Man who were grinning down at me, their heads silhouetted against the lowering sky. As I looked helplessly up at them, the heavens opened even more and it started to rain in monsoon like strength. I narrowed my eyes against the torrential downpour.

  ‘Sweet dreams,’ said Farson and they heaved the doors over. They fell with a heavy crash and all light was extinguished. I was alone in the darkness in the flooded cellar.

  I crouched on top of the barrel. The top of my head was pressed against the ceiling of the cellar and the water reached to just below my upper lip. Another few centimetres and I would be submerged.

  There was no shortage of it seeping in through the cracks between door and brickwork.

  The water stank. And it was bitterly cold. But above all was that overpowering smell. There was the beer that had leached from some of the real ale casks that were down there and there was a smell of sewage and rotting vegetation. I made my way, half swimming, my lips clamped shut against swallowing any of the foul liquid I was immersed in, until I was under the trapdoor.

  I could see an outline of light that marked the edges. There was a kind of chute or slide, running from door to floor, where the delivery men slid the barrels up and down but it was at a steep angle and under water and I couldn’t get any purchase on it. Every time I tried to stand on it to try to push the doors upwards, my feet slipped and I fell forward. I swallowed a mouthful of river and retched. Water – its quantity increased dramatically by the apocalyptic downpour, I could hear it thundering against the metal above my head – cascaded through the edges of the cellar trapdoor and the central gap where the two doors met. The top of my head was pressed against the ceiling and the water was up to above my upper lip. Three or four more centimetres and I would start drowning.

  I thought gloomily of the cards I had turned over for Anna Bruce: the Devil or Typhon, betrayal, The Moon, a snare or death. Well, I had been well and truly betrayed, ensnared and now it looked like I was going to die. She had been right.

  I promised I would never sneer at fortune telling again.

  I thought of the list of the dead that had brought me to this place: Whitfield, Scott, Harding, Montfort. Dead men’s names, I saw their faces, saw their hands beckoning me to join them. Dead men’s hands, dead men’s fingers.

  Drowned in a beer cellar, and in a pub that did crappy all-day fry ups.

  Despair, blacker than the cellar, washed over me.

  I was going to die down here.

  Down where the barrels roll.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  I tried again to lift the heavy doors, but it was impossible. The only other option was the door that led to the bar. I crossed the flooded cellar, paddling through the foetid, freezing darkness, my feet using submerged barrels as stepping stones. The water was now so high I had to move with my head tilted back at an angle, my nose now occasionally brushing the rough, irregular roof. I found the stairs and the trapdoor that led up to the bar. Securely closed.

  Slattery’s words, ‘don’t even think about going anywhere near the Greyhound,’ came back to me. Musgrave would probably say that he found me bobbing around in the cellar. He’d say I must have been trying to snoop around his pub again, got into the cellar and got trapped.

  Slattery would believe him.

  I thought about Naomi.

  I thought about why Naomi had hired me to find Whitfield’s murderer. As she had told me, it was to set me up as Montfort’s killer. So now I knew what they were looking for. And hiring me as an investigator was a stroke of genius. My blundering investigations had served to fuel Slattery’s suspicions that I was up to no good. I was certainly an obvious distraction to him in his quest to nail Craig, the local Mr Big. Oh God, I thought.

  Craig had been the house dealer at Caramel Rosa’s. I had been there today, chatting to Cliff. Naomi would tell Slattery and he’d almost certainly add that to his dossier against me. Slattery might well think I was working for the Anderson crime family. I was a convicted criminal, maybe a criminal rival of Craig Scott’s money laundering gang. Maybe I too was connected with drugs and money laundering. I had certainly violently assaulted one of Slattery’s suspects, Eamonn Farson.

  Naomi could go to Slattery, tell him that I was a known figure from Caramel Rosa’s, a London gangland figure. I had the jail sentence to prove it.

  And how neatly she had set me up. It was almost certainly her who had taken my keys out of my pocket as I lay unconscious, taken a knife and my T-shirt and then replaced the keys. Running back across the green in time to meet Anna.

  My head was tipped virtually completely back, my nose against the ceiling. What was it like to drown, I hoped it would be quick …

  Why had Naomi done all this? Killed three people and caused the death of a fourth, Paul Harding? Oh, and me. That made five. Money, I guessed. No wonder she didn’t want me around the night before, she was sleeping with Montfort. And I’d told her that he was seeing me in the morning. I’d signed his death warrant.

  If Whitfield had talked to Slattery and the scam had come to light, then he could well have ended up doing time for facilitating money laundering of Craig Scott’s ill-gotten gains. And bribing a council official. With Whitfield in prison, no more alimony, no share in the Arcadia profits which would never have materialised.

  All the attacks on Whitfield were little reminders of what might happen if he didn’t toe the line. My bet was that Naomi was the brains, the leader, behind the whole operation. Farson wouldn’t be able to find his own arse without directions. The other two were nobodies, you only had to look at Musgrave’s terrible pub and Hat Man’s Johnny Cash outfit to see that much. But with Whitfield dead, Scott dead, Montfort dead, all their money would have come to her. How much? Several million.

  How could she kill so many though? I suppose it’s like olives. The first time you eat one you think yuck, then you develop a taste for them. She’d developed a taste for killing. A taste for death.

  Then I heard the sweetest sound I had ever heard in my life.

  Over the sound of water running into the cellar I heard a voice shouting through the metal doors, a voice I knew well, ‘Are you in there, chef?’

  It was Francis, of all people.

  ‘Help!’ I shouted back. Then I coughed as water flooded my mouth and my windpipe. I was frantically dog-paddling my way back to the metal trapdoor so I could bang on it. My head was thrown back, my nose scraping the rough bricks of the ceiling as I moved towards Francis’s voice. There was only a centimetre or so gap now before the water flooded the cellar completely. I felt a sense of panic that they might go away. I only had minutes left to me.

  ‘Shout if you’re in there!’

  I realised, to my horror, that whereas I was in a relatively quiet place, the only sound the water flooding in, outside it was windy, pouring with rain and I couldn’t be heard.

  Then came Jess’s voice: ‘Francis, the police are coming, they’ll get that door open.’

  Please don’t listen to her, I thought. I’ll be dead. I c
an’t wait. The tip of my nose was now resting against the metal of the trapdoor, the cold, filthy water practically at nostril level. I tried to slam my knuckles into the metal flap but all it did was produce a kind of dull thud that they would be unable to hear.

  Then I heard Francis say, ‘Jess, they said they’d be here ten minutes ago, they’re as much use as a chocolate teapot. Move out the way.’

  It had taken two strong men to lift each of the two cellar doors, a job that they had barely managed. A job normally done by two large draymen who spend all day moving eighty-kilo beer kegs around and are built to handle it, not by one man aided by a petite, non-weight-lifting girl.

  But it wasn’t a normal person outside the beer cellar. It was Francis doing the lifting. The metal door rose steadily, effortlessly and slowly upwards as if pulled smoothly by a machine. The crack of silvery daylight grew steadily wider and wider, until the flap was at ninety degrees and then Francis let it go and it crashed down with a thud that seemed to make the cellar shake. My head broke fully free of the foul, scummy water and Jess and Francis peered down at me from above in astonishment, their heads framed by the grey sky.

  I looked up from my watery tomb. I thought of the card I had turned over for Anna. The Last Judgement. Resurrection!

  I felt like an aquatic Lazarus. Go, Anna! I thought.

  Francis beamed at me and I said, ‘Could you give me a hand out, Francis?’

  He grinned at me. ‘Yes, chef!’ He leaned forward and extended a large leathery hand. It was like being enfolded by a wicket-keeper’s glove.

  He pulled me up in one massive jerk, and I stood shivering in my sodden clothes. I felt ecstatically happy to be alive.

  I looked around me: the river which had spread over the Arcadia development fields and the pub garden. The bare trees, and my saviours, Francis with his blond hair for once not sticking up but flattened against his head by the rain and Jess peering out at me from under the hood of her parka.

  ‘Francis,’ I said solemnly. ‘I love you.’