The Food Detective

by Judith Cutler

  The evening, but not the lunchtime, edition carried the story, which seemed to be ongoing. For some reason there’d been some delay in bringing in the officers used to dealing with what rapidly turned into a siege. I knew that by that stage police had actually started to train teams – one of Tony’s less likeable associates had been talked out of shooting his mother-in-law, though I hadn’t liked her much either. And there were certainly armed response units in the force, because they’d started to arrive suspiciously promptly at bank hold-ups and the like. But on this particular day ordinary local officers were involved. Maybe there simply wasn’t time to bring the experts in. Who knows?

  The following day’s lunchtime edition carried the grim news. Someone had taken the decision to rush the young man, who’d slit the girl’s abdomen in front of them. As she lay dying, the young man turned on the officers, some of whom had also suffered terrible injuries. At last a sharpshooter had arrived and the man was killed. No police names were given. All this in a quiet and uninteresting suburb, known to people like me more for the number of charity shops on its high street than for anything else. What I needed now was the report of the inquest, which would no doubt appear in greater detail in the Evening Mail’s more sober morning stable mate, the Birmingham Post.

  ‘You want it now?’ the librarian asked. ‘We’ll be closing in five minutes.’

  And so they would. Doesn’t time fly when you’re enjoying yourself? And, damn it, I couldn’t come back for more. I’d got a pub to run, remember, and a new bar-person to try out. So I had to be on the M5, scene of all those lovely Midlands traffic jams, by five at the latest. Hell and damnation. But at least I could take advantage of Birmingham’s culinary excellence. Not for nothing did the natives regard it as the curry capital not just of the UK but also of Europe.

  The industrial cleaners did a wonderful job, inside and out, and I rewarded them with on the house food. The new barman, an affable young man from Southampton called Robin, clearly thought it an unusual way to run a pub, but handed across pie and chips and engaged both them and the other customers – passing trade to a man – in pleasant football chitchat. So why did I have reservations about him?

  ‘A motorcycle’s a pretty vulnerable form of transport,’ I said awkwardly. I didn’t want to spell out my fears about tripwires and attack by four by fours.

  ‘Very green,’ he countered. ‘And cheap.’

  ‘All the floods we’ve had –’

  ‘The rain’s easing off. And I really need the work.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘The village doesn’t always take to grockles – I’ve had a bit of trouble myself. Hence the cleaners.’ I explained. ‘Though I think the entrails were meant for one of my guests, not me.’

  ‘I noticed the vacancies sign. It could do with a bit of a clean up.’

  ‘It could do with taking down. Until the refurbishment’s over, anyway. The furniture and décor’s out of the ark.’

  He looked wistful. ‘I suppose there’s no chance of accommodation?’

  ‘Thrown in?’

  ‘I could pay.’

  ‘Not much on the wages I advertised at. And you can see from today there’s not much in tips. None from the locals, should they deign to turn up.’

  He put down the glass he was polishing and regarded me steadily. ‘Why don’t you tell me straight I don’t get the job? And could you tell me why?’

  It was hard to lie to such clear grey eyes. And perhaps it was better for us both to be quite honest. ‘I think you’d be brilliant and I’d throw in accommodation for free. But I’m afraid for you, Robin. Seriously afraid.’

  ‘Will you be afraid for the person you’re interviewing this evening?’

  The answer was that the evening’s candidate – Dec, a shaven-headed Irishman in his forties – could have used his head to knock in nails and never even blinked. And he smoked more than an unswept chimney. It might have been prissy to object when he was to work in a room where you could have cured kippers on the leftovers of previous cigarettes and pipes still floating in the atmosphere. But I did. And I didn’t like the way he hummed silently and kept time with his clicking fingers to a tune I couldn’t hear. As for his communication skills, there was little chance for him to practise, the only ones in the bar being a party of French tourists who preferred Lucy’s tortured attempts at their tongue to attempting to break through the language barrier. Was it that that made matters tense between her and Dec? No, Dec was almost certainly off my list. Was it back to Robin?

  Or should I rethink the whole thing? Should I try once more in the village? I could ask Sue to exert some pressure. Yes, and put her in an awkward position. A toss up between Robin, whom I liked, and a Neanderthal I didn’t. One for the ethicists, that.

  ‘I’ll get back in touch with you as soon as I’ve seen everyone else,’ I told Dec lamely.

  ‘Suit yourself. Not much custom, is there? Hardly worth having anyone else except that cute kid working here.’

  ‘If Lucy were eighteen, I wouldn’t have anyone else. But since she can’t serve drinks –’ I stopped short, looking at him closely.

  He became so blasé I knew what the spat must have been about.

  ‘You didn’t make her, did you?’

  ‘Oh, she offered – said you let her.’

  Which, in view of the chicken pie, I didn’t believe. So Robin it would have to be.

  He seemed over the moon when I phoned him.

  ‘You won’t be welcomed in the village, remember. And being sent to Coventry may not be the worst you get. Think guts, Robin.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘And you’ll let me have cheap accommodation?’

  ‘I told you, I’ll throw it in for free. So long as you promise me to lock your motorbike away every moment you’re not using it. I’ll clear one of the outbuildings for you.’

  ‘No. That’ll be my job. Least I can do.’

  ‘See you tomorrow then.’

  Wouldn’t it be nice to have fallen on my feet?

  Especially when the following morning’s post – oh, not the official one, the sort that left parcels anonymously on the doorstep – was a polythene bag, a label round its neck, full of bulls’ eyes.

  Yes. Eyes from bulls.

  Chapter Seventeen

  No doubt about this one. Not for Nick or Robin. The label made that clear. For Mrs Josie Welford, The White Heart, Kings Duncombe. Damn it, you’d have thought he’d have got the spelling right. All he’d have to do was look up and see the sign. Or maybe he couldn’t spell, like the author of the note on the detectives’ vehicle. Or maybe he wasn’t from the village, though at least he’d spelt that right. Maybe he was an outsider and someone had told him to take the eyes to the interfering bitch at the pub and he’d heard the name as heart, not hart. It was as good a theory as any: you got cross with someone and picked up the phone and gave your orders. That was the way Tony worked. You didn’t do your dirty work yourself; you got someone else to do it. The lower orders. ‘See to it,’ he’d say. And if anyone queried anything, he’d snap, ‘Just see to it, I said.’

  You’d think that after all this time I’d give up aching to hear his voice. I tried replacing it with someone else’s voice. Mrs Coyne’s. I’d have loved King Duncombe’s Mr Big to be Mrs Coyne. Such a nice Dickensian name for a money-grubbing villain. The money-grubbing villain round here was supposed to be Mr Luke Greville, however, son and heir of the lady who’d poached my bar staff from me. Interesting, that. The owner of the land from which the pink water rose. And much other land round here. She wouldn’t by any chance own the land on which the dodgy slaughterhouse sat, or the rending plant? It was worth checking out. I might even float the idea to DCI Evans when I phoned him to tell him about my gift. I could always invite him round and dish them up as a Middle-Eastern delicacy. No, that was sheep, wasn’t it? And I couldn’t see him sitting cross-legged on my floor while, houri-like, I served him. Lucy’d make a better houri, of course. I wondered how she’d get
on with Robin. Which reminded me – I’d better clear at least a space for his motorbike, if not the whole outhouse, which, as he’d said, he could always tackle himself if business were slack. Correction: when business was slack.

  The eyes could wait till I’d changed into my gardening clothes and got a spade with which to carry them. Hell! How stupid could I get? I’d dressed fowl, paunched rabbits, gutted fish. I wasn’t going to let a few dead orbs faze me. I picked up the bag, carrying it as if it contained no more than a dozen eggs, and deposited in the food preparation sink in the pub kitchen. I phoned through a message for DCI Evans. And only then did I get changed and prepare to tackle that outhouse.

  People left keys under flowerpots down here. They didn’t lock things like sheds. Or rather, not till Aidan, the ducky one of the bell ringers, brought his latest squeeze down here, a rent boy with kleptomaniac tendencies. The boy went, and Aidan stayed, now with what looked like a long-term partner, and the system went back to normal. As far as I knew, there wasn’t a key for the door. And if there had been, the frame was so warped a good heave would have got you inside anyway. I’d buy a big padlock and chain next time I went into Taunton.

  Propping the door wide open – no one had ever got round to installing lights – I surveyed the scene. A little of the mess was mine – one day I really ought to return those packing cases to the removal firm and get my deposit back. Most, however, had been bequeathed to me, as it were, by generations of previous landlords. There were garden implements I didn’t even know how to use, and nets and seed boxes and twine and my gardening gloves and —

  I moved closer. A notebook? An A4 notebook, card covers and cloth spine. Where the hell had that come from? And why was it nestling under my gloves? I lifted a corner. Accounts. Not mine. Without a closer look I was only guessing. And I wasn’t going to take a closer look, because I didn’t want my dabs and my DNA all over the missing vet’s property. I had to face it. Someone was framing me. And even as my mind raced, a salient fact obtruded: I’d phoned the police and they might well be on their way.

  Now what?

  Whoever had put it there had wanted it to be found, and not by me. By the police. So if I left it there I’d be incriminated; if I moved it, I’d be writing my arrest warrant, because, as sure as God made little apples, they’d have grassed me up.

  Leaving everything exactly as it was, I withdrew, closing the door behind me. The fewer signs of disturbance the better – forensic scientists would be able to check, for instance, on how many pairs of feet had walked in that aeons old dust. But then I started second-guessing: if someone wanted to entrap me, they might well come in again and disturb what I was now beginning to think of as a crime scene. Bar sitting on my now pristine back-door step, how could I preserve it? I was upstairs and back, clutching my trusty camera before you could say Fox Talbot.

  And then I phoned the police again. Urgent, I said. Dead urgent.

  So I could hardly ask them to stop on the way and collect my paper from the shop.

  Hell, I could understand why people wanted a fag with their coffee. It gave the hands and mouth something to do. My substitute was the ballpoint I held to my lips while I was doing the crossword. The easy one, of course. There were days when I congratulated myself on having done two clues in the serious one, the one Tony had always done. I used to clip a week’s supply for him so he wouldn’t have to spend his cash on buying papers he could read in the prison library. And no, he never got a chance to do the crossword in the library Guardian – one of the screws spotted how much it meant to him and started filling it out himself. Fast. As if he were Mensa level. One day Tony got to look at it – the bastard had filled in letters at random. The whole exercise had been just to get under Tony’s fingernails.

  So who was framing me? Who’d planted Fred Tregothnan’s account ledger? I needed to work out how much to say to the police, who’d be sure to ask me. It was a bit subtle for Reg Bulcombe, though he’d have enjoyed the guts and eyes game. The person in charge of the ad hoc slaughterhouse? It couldn’t have been Nick, having obscure revenge for never having traced Tony’s fortune? There’d been no call from him since he’d bolted, after all. No, I didn’t buy that. What did worry me was a pair of images I couldn’t get out of my mind – Sue rifling Fred’s desk, and Sue clutching her raincoat together as she left the cottage. Not Sue. Surely not Sue. I’d much rather blame the Mr Big who favoured me with offal – and that certainly wouldn’t be Sue’s style. And it was the obvious theory. I’d been sniffing round his enterprises, seen by what I suspected were at least two of his associates, however far down the pecking order they might be. Even the lowliest driver had eyes and ears he might find it profitable to put at his employer’s disposal.

  The question came back to the identity of the man at the top. And whether his minions might even include the detectives even now pulling up outside the pub. Tony had managed to suborn several in the course of his long career: the now defunct West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad hadn’t get their bad reputation for corruption for nothing.

  These two Somerset cops weren’t fools. This time they came in a much humbler vehicle and they parked in the back yard. But were they honest and decent and above corruption? Before I answered the door, I tucked my camera well out of sight.

  ‘Do you want to see my gift?’ I asked as I gestured them in through the nice clean rear hall. ‘Actually, maybe DS Short should stay here. We don’t want a repeat of yesterday.’

  Scarlet to the ears, he mumbled and chuntered.

  ‘The nearest loo’s that Portaloo there,’ I said, cutting him short. ‘Come this way, Mr Evans. This is the pub kitchen, as you can see. When you’re ready, the better coffee is upstairs.’

  Evans looked rather more revolted by the eyes than by the intestinal ooze. Short didn’t even attempt to look, merely holding open an evidence bag for Evans, who, with finicky fingers, slipped off the address label.

  ‘Is there – where would you – er –?’

  ‘There’s a trade refuse bin out there. You can’t miss it. Or if you prefer, I’ll get my chef to deal with it. Me,’ I added, as Evans opened his mouth. ‘But while we’re down here, there’s something else I want you to see.’ Still not sure whether I was doing the right thing, I led the way to the outhouse, pulling open the door but gesturing them to stay back. Even I could see my trail of wet prints across the otherwise dry floor, to the bench and back again.

  Short thought it was time for a spot of bravado. ‘Opening up a museum of country life, are you?’

  Evans muttered something. Short blushed.

  ‘I think you might want to be the curator,’ I said quite kindly. ‘You see where my footsteps lead. To that bench, with my gardening gloves on it. Can you see what’s underneath? A sort of large exercise book? It looks to me as if it’s Fred Tregothnan’s missing accounts, gentlemen. And, before you ask, I’ve no idea how it got there.’

  The men looked at it, each other and then at me.

  ‘Why did you leave it there?’

  ‘What would you have thought if I’d suddenly “found” it?’ I asked, my fingers making little quotation marks for them. ‘You’d have thought it was all a bit too convenient, wouldn’t you? So I left it there for you. You’ll find my prints on the corner where I lifted it up. There shouldn’t be any others. Because, as I told you, I’ve never seen it before.’

  ‘Some people would say it was weird for you to be taking so many precautions – an admission of guilt, say?’ Short chipped in. ‘The lady doth protest too much, and all that.’

  Hamlet! And of course that was where the phrase lugging the guts came from too. Well done, the OU.

  As for Short, I lifted a silent but expressive eyebrow. ‘I’m a woman living on my own, Sergeant. Someone is sending me fairly unsubtle hints.’

  ‘I thought they were for your civil service friend.’

  ‘The guest in my pub. But today’s gift was certainly for me, wasn’t it, Chief Inspector?’ I risked a twinkle o
f amusement at his underling’s expense. ‘It’s all right,’ I added to Short, ‘the label’s not bloodstained.’

  He looked at me and bolted for the Portaloo.

  ‘Is he ever going to make it?’ I asked, serious as an elderly aunt. ‘I mean, you have to see some nasty sights in the force, don’t you? Or is he all right with human corpses?’

  He gave a snort of laughter. ‘Maybe he could do with some of that excellent coffee of yours. See you upstairs!’ he yelled at the Portaloo.

  ‘And leave your shoes on the door step,’ I added. ‘No, not you, Chief Inspector. But I’d be grateful if you’d wipe them thoroughly, this yard being as muddy as it is.’

  Seeing me remove mine, he followed suit. He had nice feet, from what I could see. And his personal hygiene was adequate – a risk you always run in such situations.

  He leaned against my kitchen wall, an ironic smile on his face. ‘Shoes, stockings – what else are you going to remove, Josie? Sorry, only joking! Honestly! I’m sorry, Mrs Welford. That was quite out of order.’

  ‘Yes, it was.’ I nodded curtly. But was tickled pink. So they used that damned expression in real life, not just on fictional police programmes. ‘Are you all right, son?’ I asked over his shoulder. ‘Would you like some brandy in your coffee?’

  Short shook his head. Despite myself I felt sorry for him, and at infinite risk to my diet fished in the freezer for some home-made rock buns. I defrosted a few and set them on a plate. ‘Go on. Help yourself. And you, too, Chief Inspector. To a cake.’

  He obligingly choked. Short didn’t know what the hell was going on.

  I gestured them through to the living room, leaving the cakes on the table next to Short. Excusing himself, Evans stepped into the hall, where I could hear him using his mobile phone. Scene of crime team, eh? I wasn’t at all sure how I felt about that. But I suppose that that was why I’d preserved the scene.