by JL Merrow
By the time we’d decided the price tag wasn’t worth the risk, Oliver had moved on to another lot of customers. Bugger it. “Want to grab a coffee and try again later?” I suggested.
Phil nodded, and we made our way outside.
I took in a deep lungful of earth-scented air as the door of the shop closed behind us. Funny how you don’t realise how claustrophobic some places are until you get out of them. “Fair-trade coffee, here we come. Think they’ll let us bring it outside?”
There were a few wooden picnic tables set up between the café and the car park, but they were damp and forlorn right now. Phil gave them a dubious look, probably worried about marking his posh trousers if he sat down on one of those benches. “Tell you what. You wait out here. I’ll grab the coffees and have a word with the staff while I’m at it. See if they can tell me anything about our Mr. Parrot.”
“Yeah, okay.” I was happy not to be the one doing the grilling.
Of course, that was before he’d been in there fifteen minutes chatting up the staff, with no sign of him coming out again anytime soon and no sign of my flippin’ coffee either.
It’s times like these when a nicotine habit would come in handy. I paced up and down, kicking at the gravel and feeling like a spare part. Thought about playing with my phone, but I’d forgotten to charge it last night and didn’t want to run it down completely. If I’d had a key to Phil’s car, I could have sat and listened to the radio while I waited for my beloved, but we hadn’t quite got to that stage of entwining our lives just yet. On Phil’s side, I wasn’t sure if it was down to him being possessive about his sleek, shiny Golf; complete disinterest in driving my van and/or Fiesta; or if he’d just, like me, forgotten what he’d done with his spare keys.
Sod it. I was sick of hanging around. I turned my steps towards the café—
And slammed straight into a wrecking ball of fury that knocked me off my feet.
Bloody hell. I gasped for air, but fuck it, there was nothing there. My ears were ringing, mostly with shouts of You fucking bastard.
Jesus Christ. I scrabbled in the gravel, failed utterly to get back on my feet and gawped up—and then up some more—at the bloody man mountain who’d just punched me in the gut.
“You bastard!” he yelled again, and took a step forwards. He was a big—very big—white bloke with an earring that glinted evilly in a stray shaft of sunlight. Although possibly I was biased about that last bit.
I was certain I’d never seen him before, so Christ knew why he was so bloody keen to rub in uncomfortable truths while pummelling me into the dirt. Anxious to avoid any further pummelling, I scuttled back like a crab with six wooden legs and a terminal case of dry rot. “Wha—” I managed to gasp out.
Doors were opening; people sticking their heads out and shouting. Not one of them did anything useful like get between me and Tyson Fury’s angrier little brother. Or deck him with that anvil. Inching back further, I hit one of the stone flower pots and used it to lever myself up onto my feet, so at least the git would have to hit me again before he’d be able to put the boot in.
Then Phil burst through the café door like a human cannonball and launched himself at my attacker. Tyson junior swung another pile driver punch, but Phil dodged it and grabbed hold as it went past him. There swiftly followed a twisting manoeuvre he’d taught me a while back. Why for God’s sake hadn’t I remembered that when it counted? It all ended with one angry git face down in the gravel, an arm wrenched up behind his back and my beloved’s not inconsiderable weight pinning him to the ground.
“Wha—” I coughed painfully, and finally got enough air in my lungs to make a whole sentence. “What the bleeding hell did you do that for?” The initial shock was wearing off, and my stomach was hurting like buggery. On the plus side, I’d somehow managed to fall without knackering my hip this time. Go me.
“You shit. You killed him!” Well, it was an answer, although it made bugger all sense.
It ended in a wordless cry when Phil yanked harder on that twisted-up arm and bent closer to snarl in the guy’s ear. “You mind your fucking language.”
I sent him a sharp look. “Oi, not in the police anymore, all right? Might want to ease off on the brutality.” I gave a nervous laugh. It wasn’t funny.
Phil’s face went stony, which was in fact an improvement, and he eased up on the heavyweight wannabe. Very, very slightly. “Name,” he ground out.
“Kelvin Reid. That shit killed my man.”
“What? You got that wrong.” Although at least now the attack made some sort of sense. “All I did was deliver a package.” It sounded defensive even as I said it. Then again, I had a bloody good excuse to be on the defensive right now.
“Shouldn’t believe everything you see on the telly,” Phil growled, but he sounded a little less like he was planning to enact Viking-style vengeance out here. “We need to have a chat. Me and Tom aren’t the enemy here. If I let you up, will you sit down at that table and not do anything stupid?”
“Fine,” the bloke spat out.
And yeah, right, like he was actually going to say No, please manhandle me some more instead. I bit back an instinctive cry of Don’t do it as Phil gave the bloke his arm back and let him haul himself to his feet.
Standing, Reid was a weird study in contrasts. His tall, hefty frame—easily as broad across the shoulders as my Phil, and Reid had a couple of inches on him in the height department—screamed that here was a guy who could do serious damage if he put his mind to it. His face, on the other hand, was soft around the edges, now that it wasn’t twisted in rage, with big, sad eyes that seemed on the verge of tearing up.
If you only looked at his face—and ignored the growing ache in my gut—you could be fooled into thinking that if he hadn’t been in mourning for his lover, he’d have been off rescuing baby birds and helping little old ladies cross the road. After all, he could scoop ’em both up in those brawny arms of his with equal ease, which is far from a foregone conclusion. I’ve had experience with elderly neighbours who’ve taken a tumble, and little old ladies can be surprisingly heavy. Maybe it’s all the bionic hip and knee joints weighing them down.
Okay, I was possibly starting to get a bit light-headed.
“Sit,” Phil barked out, and I nearly dropped bum-first into the pansies.
Then I realised he’d been talking to Reid, who glared at him for form’s sake and then parked his bulk on one of the picnic benches. His shoulders slumped, which hopefully meant the fight had gone out of him.
“Tom, are you all right?” Phil asked, turning to me with a tight expression.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m good,” I lied.
“Let me have a look at your stomach.”
“What, now?”
“Yes. Now.”
“He hit me. He didn’t bloody knife me.” Clearly I was still woozy, though, as I found myself unbuttoning my shirt and pulling up the T-shirt underneath. “Happy?”
As far as I could tell, there wasn’t a right lot to see, but Phil gave it a good long examination. Then he nodded. “Sit down,” he suggested much more gently this time.
I wasn’t all that happy about anything that brought me into closer proximity with Reid, but on the other hand, collapsing where I stood would be painful as well as embarrassing. I sat down at the furthest corner of the picnic table from Reid, and only then realised I had grazes on both palms that were bleeding slightly. Bloody gravel.
Phil took hold of my hands. “We’ll need to wash those out.”
“It can wait.” I was pretty sure Reid wouldn’t be hanging around while Phil stuck a plaster on and kissed me better.
“Sure?”
“Bloody hell, just get on with it before he does a runner,” I muttered under my breath. Phil gave me a grim smile and turned to loom over Reid.
“Kelvin. What are you even doing here?”
He sniffed. “I came to see that bitch of an ex-wife of his. No one answered at the house, so I came to see if she was here
.”
“She was. You missed her.”
I wondered where Lilah was now. For someone who’d recently lost the love of her life, she seemed to do an awful lot of gallivanting around.
“What did you want to see her about?”
“Why do you think? I want her to admit what she did. I want her to look me in the eye and tell me she didn’t have Jonathan killed.”
I wanted Kelvin to make his flippin’ mind up. “Thought you thought I killed him?”
“You’re working for her. Aren’t you?”
“Well, yeah.” Admitting it made me feel weirdly guilty. “But she hired us to find out who killed Jon—Mr. Parrot. And before he died, to deliver a package. And that’s all we did.”
“You said ex-wife. Did he tell you they were divorced?” I thought Phil’s tone was a bit on the sharp side, until I remembered that Kelvin was supposed to be answering our questions and not the other way around.
Kelvin pouted. “Wife, then. But it was nothing, their marriage. She’s all glamour, that one. She’s a witch. She sucked him in and made him believe a whole load of crap, but when he came to his senses, he came back to me. For good.”
“Jonathan told you that?”
“You think I’d have taken him back if he hadn’t? I’ve got my pride.” Then his shoulders sagged. Was he thinking that was all he had left now?
“So you kept in touch with him during his marriage?”
Kelvin looked at the table. “Not at first. I didn’t see him for a whole year. But he came by the market about six months ago. He said it was like he was in a dream, and now he’d woken up. And he was sorry.” Our man Reid could be surprisingly soft-spoken when he wasn’t hurling abuse and trying to kill me.
“And you carried on seeing him after that? As a lover? A lot of people might have moved on by then.”
“Jonathan and me, it was the real thing.”
“Did you have other lovers while you and Jonathan were apart? No one would blame you.”
“Yeah, of course I did. I’m a man, aren’t I? But they didn’t mean anything.”
“So there was no significance in him going to see you at the market rather than at home?”
“No.” Kelvin relaxed visibly from one moment to the next. Like, say, he’d that minute thought of an answer. “He wasn’t sure I hadn’t moved. And he couldn’t get away in the evenings, could he? That bitch kept him on a tight rein.”
If he wanted to be convincing, he really needed to learn to stick to the one excuse and work on the poker face.
Phil didn’t go in for the kill and challenge it directly, just went for slight bruising with a mild suggestion. “Maybe he was trying to keep both sides happy. In case he decided to stay with the wife after all.”
“It was all over between them already.” Kelvin snapped it out. A touch of conscience there? Or maybe he’d realised it made him sound like every bloke’s bit on the side in the history of the world. “He hadn’t slept with her for months.”
Yeah, right. And guess what? She didn’t understand him, either.
Blimey, I was getting cynical in my old age.
Meanwhile, Phil’s brain was still remorselessly on track. “Did he ever say or do anything that made you suspect he was worried about something? Frightened, even?”
“He was scared she’d send someone after him. And she did.” Uh-oh. Sad-eyed Kelvin was gone, and Tyson junior was back with a vengeance. I made sure I hadn’t got my feet tangled round the legs of the picnic bench. Just in case I had to get out of the firing range, sharpish.
“He told you that, did he?” Phil went on, clearly oblivious to my discomfort.
“He didn’t have to. I could tell he was on his guard—always jumping when there was a knock at the door.”
“Could it have been someone else he was worried about?”
“Who?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out. Did he—” Phil broke off as sirens filled the air, lingered for half a minute or so, then stopped.
Kelvin had tensed and half risen, a look of betrayal on his face. “You called the police?”
“I called them.” It was Tallulah’s voice—her poshest one—and I turned to see her standing by the entrance to the café with her arms folded and the café staff peering anxiously over her shoulders. “I want you all off my property, and don’t come back. And yes, that includes you two,” she added, glaring at Phil and me.
Victim-blaming, much?
There was a moment’s stillness—and then Kelvin jumped up from the bench with a grace that belied his bulk, and scarpered in the direction of the car park.
Phil swore, but I couldn’t bring myself to be that upset about the bloke running away from me. Interestingly, Phil didn’t make any attempt to give chase.
“Not going after him?”
“What, and have the police turn up as I tackle him to the ground a second time? They’d arrest both of us and sort it out at the station.”
“I s’pose you’d know. As an ex-copper, I mean, not as an habitual brawler. Unless that’s what you and Darren get up to when me and Gary go for a drink?”
“Tag-team wrestling,” Phil said, straight-faced. “We’re getting quite a following.”
A car door slammed. An engine revved, and we were treated to a front-row view of Kelvin’s van screeching through the car park, taking out the wing mirror of a Ford Mondeo en route. Followed by a godalmighty slam as he drove straight into the police car just turning in.
I winced. “That’s not going to do him any favours.”
After that, it was simply a matter of making sure we got our side of the story over to some not-very-gruntled boys in blue, who took our names, ranks, and serial numbers and then escorted Mr. Reid off the premises in handcuffs. Tallulah looked disappointed to see that me and Phil hadn’t been given the same treatment, so we decided it wasn’t the best time to stick around in the hopes of finally catching Oliver for a chat.
Then we had domestics over whether or not I should see a doctor. You can guess which side of the argument I was on. I’d made the mistake of admitting I was glad I hadn’t had that dessert at lunchtime, which my overprotective fiancé apparently chose to interpret as a symptom of possible internal bleeding, massive organ failure, and impending death.
“I’m fine,” I told him as we drove off from the Old Smithy, getting more narked about it by the minute. “It was just a punch. A punch.”
“That’s all it can take. We’re going to A&E.”
“For fuck’s sake, it’s not like I haven’t had worse.” For starters, I’d been shot, poisoned, bashed on the head, nearly strangled . . . Okay, reminiscing about all that really wasn’t helping me feel any better. But the point was, all that was serious stuff. Not a single punch in the gut.
“I don’t care if you’ve had worse. You’re getting checked out.”
“Jesus, would you stop treating me like I’m some delicate bloody flower?”
“Nausea’s a possible sign of internal bleeding.”
“You always have to know best, don’t you?”
“People have died from being punched in the gut, you stubborn bastard.”
“Name one.”
“Harry Houdini, heard of him?”
Not only that, I’d known how he died. But at this point in the argument, with my pride hurting almost as much as my stomach, I wasn’t exactly thinking straight.
“Fine. Do whatever you want. You always bloody do, anyhow.” I folded my arms and stared out of the side window. I was going to feel a right muppet when the nurses laughed me out of A&E for coming in after the equivalent of a sodding playground fight.
Phil didn’t answer. It was probably just as well.
As it happened, the hospital staff didn’t laugh, but I still felt like it was a waste of their time and mine as they checked my blood pressure (fine) and gave me a scan (ditto). On the plus side, they gave me some painkillers, which were a godsend. Never mind the blunt-force trauma to the gut; after seve
ral hours on those waiting room chairs, my bum wasn’t talking to me anymore.
I’ll say this for my beloved: all through the whole sorry business, there was no trace of anything other than concern in his manner. Not even a smirk and a muttered I told you so as they gave me the works instead of telling me to piss off and stop being a crybaby. As the drugs kicked in and the pain receded, the guilt started to creep in, and I began to feel I’d been a bit of a git to Phil. After all, he’d only been worried about me.
It was just . . . It was humiliating, all right? Like I wasn’t man enough to stand up for myself. Like I needed Phil to rush in and save me, and then coddle me afterwards. The fact that if he hadn’t been there, I’d probably have needed a lot more than a few painkillers to get over Kelvin Reid’s attack only made it all the harder to swallow.
Most of the time it’s fine being a short-arse. No worries about banging heads on doors, and in my profession, the ability to squeeze into kitchen cupboards and under baths can come in pretty handy. But sometimes, I could wish I’d been more gifted in the physically imposing department. Like, say, a certain pigheaded private investigator.
The upshot was, when we got home—not, you’ll note, out to that pub where we’d been planning to go digging for info on our Mr. Parrot—I was in a foul mood.
“I’ll cook,” Phil announced as we walked in the door. “What do you fancy?”
“Not being treated like a sodding invalid?” I asked without a lot of hope.