Blow Down

by JL Merrow

  “Just checking.” Still hoarse. Okay, so my throat wasn’t that much better.

  “Nobody’s here but me. And now you two.” She gave me a look. “Oh, for God’s sake. You can’t possibly think I’m a danger to a couple of strapping men.”

  I was touched she’d included me in the strapping category.

  “You don’t seriously think I tried to kill you?” Vi went on. “I brought you flowers.”

  “Yeah. Cheers, love.”

  She frowned at me. “Should you be speaking so much? You still don’t sound very good.”

  “Miss Majors,” Phil interrupted. “Can I ask you about your relationship with Lance Frith?”

  “What relationship?” she snapped back way too fast to be convincing.

  I cleared my throat. Ow. “Gonna take another look at the plumbing.”

  Phil glared at me. “Not on your own.”

  I glared back. I was a strapping bloke, all right? Vi said so. Then I sighed. “Fine.”

  We all trooped into the utility room. It was looking a lot drier than the last time I’d seen it, although there was still a pile of wet towels on the floor. I guessed Vi had been too busy to catch up on the laundry. “That’s it,” I told Phil, pointing out the offending junction. He had a look; tried to loosen it with his fingers. Failed.

  Hey, when I tighten stuff up, it stays tightened.

  I hadn’t really expected to see anything that might give us a clue as to who’d done the tampering, and I didn’t. Still, for completeness, I thought I might as well check out the stop valve under the floor. “Catch you up,” I said, as Phil and Vi filed back out towards the living room—Vi first, ’cos Phil’s not daft. “Gonna check by the front door.”

  We already knew no one was lurking there.

  Phil turned. “Just a mo.” He trotted down the hall and stuck his head in the kitchen and the dining room. “Fine.”

  They disappeared into the living room while I peeled back the rug and lifted the floorboard.

  The valve was still there, but no answers. Of course, if Vi had sabotaged her own plumbing, would she have let it get so bad? Would she have bothered to pretend she didn’t know where the stop valve was while water was pouring out onto her floors?

  Maybe, I supposed, if she wanted to play up the I’m-so-helpless thing and make it seem less likely she’d been the one to cause the problem. I was still staring into the hole in the floor when I heard a key turn in the front door, barely audible over the sound of voices from the living room. Had the plod let Alex go?

  I looked up to see Uncle Arlo walk in.

  Well, that cleared up the question of whether he had a key or not. I stood up quickly, wishing I’d brought in a monkey wrench or something equally hefty. He didn’t seem surprised to see me, which bothered me.

  Then I told myself not to be so daft. “Looking for Vi?” I asked, feeling uncomfortable under the weight of his steady gaze.

  Finally he spoke, his voice quieter than I expected. “Well. I must say you look the part now. Positively possessed.”

  “They’re in the living room,” I said shortly. “Her and Phil.”

  And I’d be bunging the floorboard back in place and joining them sharpish. I know they say the more the merrier, but I’m not sure that really applies to murder suspects. Arlo nodded, gave me another searching look, and padded slowly past in his soft-soled shoes. As he did so, I got a faint metallic whiff, as if he’d spritzed today with eau de workshop.

  Then it clicked. When I’d been attacked, I’d thought I’d tasted blood. Except there hadn’t been any blood. My mouth had been open, gasping for breath. I hadn’t bitten my tongue or my lip or anything like that.

  And it hadn’t been a taste. It’d been a smell, only I’d been too preoccupied at the time with almost dying to notice the distinction.

  The metallic smell, not of blood, but of Uncle Arsehole’s workshop.

  I couldn’t stop a sharp intake of breath. My veins filled with ice as I stared at Arlo—and he wheeled to stare straight back at me.

  He knew. Christ, he knew.

  “Phil?” I croaked, but it wasn’t sodding loud enough. The murmur of voices coming from the living room didn’t falter.

  “Oh, you don’t need Phil,” Arlo said quietly, walking towards me with an unhurried tread.

  I unfroze and darted past him—or tried to. A massive weight hit my thigh, and I went down hard. My hip screamed, the pain so bad I was winded by it.

  He’d rugby tackled me, the bastard, and now his weight was pinning me, the metallic smell stronger than ever. I tried to wriggle out from underneath him, but, Jesus, he was twice my size. I drew in a shaky breath to have another go at calling out for help—and then his big hand was over my mouth, covering my nose as well.

  Christ. He was insane. There were two other people in the house. He couldn’t mean to—

  Suddenly I could breathe again. It wasn’t good news. As I gasped for air, he grabbed my head with both hands—and banged it hard on the wooden floor.

  My vision went. I heard a distant voice calling, “Phil? Tom’s fallen.”

  Next thing I knew Phil’s face was all I could see. “Tom? Tom?”

  I tried to speak. Something I had to tell him . . . Then I saw the blurry shape of Arlo behind him. “Arlo,” I gasped.

  Phil turned, thank God. He threw up an arm as something came down—cried out when it hit, and fell on top of me. Christ. Arlo had the loose floorboard. He was swinging it again.

  The bloody stupid bastard on top of me was trying to shield me with his body. I tried to shove him off, get him out of the way, but my arms were made of limp spaghetti.

  Fuck it. Adrenaline kicked in, and I made a superhuman effort to twist my body, rolling us over, me on top.

  Who needs an intact skull, anyhow?

  There was a bang like the end of the world.

  Phil swore and pushed me off him.

  I blinked. Arlo had fallen back against the front door clutching his side. His shirt was blossoming red stains that spread from beneath his hands.

  I looked behind me to see the barrel of a shotgun with Vi Majors on the other end of it, her hair wild and her bosom heaving. She looked like some kind of primeval spirit of the hunt. I half expected to see a parked-up chariot pulled by monstrous foxhounds. “You bastard,” she screamed. “I can’t believe I used to have sex with you!”

  Arlo? She’d had sex with Uncle Arlo?

  What about Lance?

  This was doing my head in worse than the floor had.

  Suddenly weak, I lay back on the floor again, misjudging it badly and almost knocking myself out completely. To be honest, I’d have been just as glad not to have to listen to the constant stream of obscenity spewing from cuddly old Uncle Arlo, most of it directed towards Vi. But then again, Ow.

  “Tom!” Phil’s voice was louder this time. I really wanted him to let me rest, but he insisted on pulling me up into a sitting position. He wasn’t gentle, which I realised after a mo was because he was only using one arm.

  Shit. “Phil? Your arm?”

  “I’m okay.”

  He wasn’t. “Vi?” I croaked. She was just standing there, gun raised. Would it still be loaded, or had she shot the lot?

  Did I feel lucky?

  “Miss Majors, please put the gun down,” Phil said in what I like to think of as his copper voice.

  Vi blinked and seemed to realise what she was doing. Or, more specifically, what she’d just done. “Oh my God.” She put the gun down shakily on a side table, where it snuggled up to a photo of her dad with his arms around Amelia and a big smile on his face. Her hands crept to her mouth. “Oh God.”

  Phil struggled to his feet, which I was pretty sure he’d have found a damn sight easier if he hadn’t insisted on holding on to me the whole time. “We’d better call an ambulance,” he said with a definite grudging note in his voice, and grabbed his phone.

  “Must be crazy,” I gasped. “Witnesses.”

  Phi
l turned to me. “Probably planning to frame Vi for it somehow. Just like the other attacks.”

  A chill ran over me as I worked out what that would have meant.

  He’d been planning to kill Phil too.

  Christ.

  “Me?” Vi sounded indignant. “He was blaming me?”

  Dear old Uncle Arlo let out a string of obscenity that, roughly translated, indicated that if he had his way, his darling step-niece would die a withered old hag in jail, the stupid, useless, fat lady-part. Not that he actually used the word lady-part.

  Still, to be fair, she had just shot him in the gut.

  “So,” I said to Vi, trying not to fall over. “You and Uncle Arlo?”

  “He just seemed so . . . Oh, I don’t know. Fun.”

  Really? Arlo Fenchurch?

  We’d moved to the sitting room, me and Vi, leaving Phil to watch over Uncle Arlo and make sure he didn’t bleed out on the antique wood floor before the emergency services got here or, more to the point, take advantage of the fact he was leaning against the front door and make a break for freedom.

  Phil was favouring his right arm, which I hoped to God wasn’t broken, but insisted he was up to it and would yell for help if he changed his mind. He’d refused Vi’s offer to reload the shotgun for him. He hadn’t said that was because he didn’t have a clue how to use it . . . but I was starting to seriously consider Gary’s join-a-gun-club suggestion.

  Vi had found me a bag of frozen peas wrapped in a tea towel to hold against the lump on my head. I’d managed to prop ’em up on the back of the sofa and was using them as a pillow. It wasn’t all that comfy, but it had the big advantage of taking zero effort on my part.

  “And it was exciting,” Vi carried on. “You know, meeting in secret. He’d pretend he was taking a business trip up to Birmingham, and we’d meet at a hotel. Just like a proper, old-fashioned affair. He’s very old-fashioned in lots of ways, really. He has this way of really making you feel like a lady.”

  Couldn’t say he’d ever made me feel like one. “What about Elizabeth?” I had to ask.

  Vi rolled her eyes. “She’s just so . . .” She waved her hands and made a sort of ugh noise. “They haven’t slept together for years.”

  Right. Because no cheating husband in the entire history of the world ever told porkies about that.

  “Look, I felt bad about her, okay?” Vi insisted, maybe sensing she was losing her audience. “But Arlo would’ve divorced her years ago if she hadn’t been ill. He was just too kind-hearted for his own good.”

  Seriously?

  Vi must’ve caught my expression. Her face fell. “Oh God, he was lying to me, wasn’t he?”

  “Based on the evidence? Probably.” I closed my eyes briefly, felt like I was drifting off, and reluctantly opened them again. “You see him the day of the fayre?”

  “No.” She shrugged. “I was supposed to, but I rang him and told him I thought we should stop seeing each other. He said we should talk about it, but we never did. Everything got a bit forgotten when Amelia died.”

  On her side, maybe. I was betting not on Arlo’s. He struck me as something of a vindictive bastard.

  “Why’d you dump him?” I asked. I mean, she hadn’t known he was a murderer.

  Well, potential murderer, at that point.

  “It was . . . He had a bit of a temper, you know? It made me feel uneasy. And, well, I’d been spending some time with Lance—he was helping me with my business ideas. I mean, I didn’t really have any ideas, but he’s so full of them. I was a bit resistant at first, but, well . . .” She blushed as she smiled. “We’re seeing each other now. He’s really keen on everyone reaching their full potential. So inspiring.”

  I wondered if she’d still think that if she’d heard the way he’d spoken to us about her. Then again, hadn’t his main criticism been that she was wasting her potential? “Why’d you keep it a secret, you and Lance?” Her and Arlo’s little bit of adultery, yeah, she wouldn’t want to brag about that, but Lance?

  She stared at me. “Daddy was in mourning. I didn’t want to be insensitive.”

  Uh-huh. “And neither of you twigged it might look a bit suss, meeting in secret after a murder?” I took another sip from the glass of water Vi had got me. Talking too much, again.

  “But we didn’t do it,” she said, like miscarriages of justice were something that only happened to other people. She shook her head. “But why would Uncle Arlo kill his own sister?”

  “Not sure. The necklace?”

  “Maybe.” She bit her lip. “Are you sure it was Uncle Arlo who killed Amelia?”

  “Pretty sure. Think he’d risk jail to protect anyone else?” Then I frowned. “How,” I began, and coughed. Vi topped up my glass of water from the jug on the table. For someone who’d just shot a bloke, her hands were pretty bloody steady. Then again, the wound looked far from fatal, more’s the pity. “Cheers. How did Arlo know we were gonna be here?”

  Vi looked away. “Um. Well, you see, he called me while I was with Lance. He asked me to let him know if I had any more contact with you.”

  “What?” My voice cracked. “You mean you told him I’d be here?”

  “Well, I didn’t know he was going to try to kill anyone! He said he just wanted to talk.”

  Jesus.

  I was glad to hear the sirens at that point.

  It was a long, long time later before me and Phil got to go home, what with all the police and paramedics who all wanted a piece of us.

  Alex Majors got home before we did—apparently they hadn’t charged him with anything yet, seeing as Sharp had been on the ball enough to smell a rat in his sudden confession. Alex seemed a bit bemused to find us in his house, but I reckoned he didn’t much care about anything other than being back home with his surprisingly non-matricidal daughter.

  “Oh, Daddy,” Vi said, giving her dad a fond but exasperated look as he sat next to her on the sofa, still wearing the rumpled clothes he’d been arrested in. “How could you possibly have thought I killed Amelia?”

  He clutched her hands. “Darling, I’m so sorry. So very sorry. I didn’t want to believe it. But I realised, after the marriage, how much you resented Amelia. I . . . I didn’t do things very well. I should never have given her your mother’s necklace. I . . . I loved her very much.” He hung his head for a long moment, and when he looked up again, his eyes were wet with tears. “I hoped you would one day warm to her. I prayed you would. But then she died, and Arlo . . .”

  He didn’t finish.

  “What about Arlo?” Vi demanded for all of us.

  “He seemed so kind. So regretful. He said he couldn’t stand to see me nurse a viper at my bosom.” Alex had to stop for a mo and take a few deep breaths before he could carry on. “He took me in completely. He told me he saw you going into the tent. Where Amelia was . . . Where it happened. And then when Tom was attacked after you called him here . . .”

  Christ. It must have seemed to confirm it. But . . .

  Vi beat me to it. “How did Uncle Arlo manage to get here before you? Hadn’t you only just left him when you came home?”

  “No.” Alex ducked his head again and shook it gently. “I visited the garden of remembrance at the cathedral on the way home. It was Arlo’s suggestion. He said it would help me find peace.”

  Bloody hell. It had damn near helped me find peace and all. Of the Rest In variety.

  I wouldn’t mind betting Arlo had been the one to bring up the subject of plumbers in general, and one Tom Paretski in particular, at that prefuneral lunch, as well. Still, that wasn’t important anymore, seeing as we had him bang to rights. And at least his diversion of old Alex had come with a built-in time limit. I mean, there’s only so long you can stand around in the dark being all remembrance-y, which was probably all that’d persuaded Arlo to scarper instead of having another go at yours truly and doing the job properly that time.

  “What I can’t understand,” Alex went on, “is how he could be so heartless
as to try to blame you for poor Amelia’s death.”

  Vi blushed like a beetroot and glared at me and Phil as if daring us to say anything about her quasi-incestuous little fling. And while we were on the subject, what was with her still calling him Uncle Arlo, even after she’d shagged him and he’d tried to frame her? That was well weird, that was.

  Phil coughed. “Probably because of the hold it would give him over you. I imagine he was hoping your association would be very lucrative for him.”

  Yeah. Nothing to do with Arlo being a vindictive bastard who couldn’t stand Vi dumping him. Nothing at all.

  “What if Vi hadn’t called me in that night?” I asked as we drove back home in Phil’s Golf. I’d had to leave the van there after all, what with the borderline concussion and general shakiness. Just as well Phil’s arm had turned out to be just bruised, not broken, or we’d have been leaving the Golf to keep it company and getting a taxi back to mine. I noticed he rested his hand on his leg as much as he could. “What if she’d just looked up the nearest plumber on her phone?” I had a nasty thought. “I mean, it was dark out, and he came at me from behind. Christ, some poor bastard could’ve ended up getting strangled instead of me.”

  Phil gave me a look. “Because it’s not like your average plumber has his name all over his van in big letters? Like, say, one Thomas Paretski?”

  “Oh, shut up. Okay, so he wouldn’t have killed the wrong bloke. He still wouldn’t have got his grubby mitts on me.”

  “Then he’d have tried something else. Maybe tried to lure you out some other way that couldn’t be traced back to him—borrowed someone’s phone, maybe, or found a payphone.” Phil huffed. “Maybe he’d just have asked Vi to call you over for him.”

  Christ. Yeah. “Must’ve been pissed off when it didn’t work. After all that effort, with the plumbing and the security light and all.”

  Phil looked thoughtful. “Maybe. On the other hand, he had it in for Vi Majors, didn’t he? Probably got a kick just from picturing her alone in the house with gallons of water pouring onto the floor. Anyhow, you’re talking too much.”

  “Nah, ’s fine.”