Before I even reached for the Laphroaig, I checked the answerphone. No. Nothing from Nick. Bugger him. What the hell was he playing at? I phoned again, pushing a nail back painfully in the process: it was a good job for him I didn’t break it. This time the message was clearer. ‘If you don’t contact me I shall spill every single bean about our activities to the police. And I won’t be able to keep your name out of it. And they’ll want you to explain why you didn’t go straight to them with information and asked me not to. Get back to me. OK?’
Thursday morning made me realise I’d have to go for a walk, weather or not. My knees and hips, the parts I’d put so much pressure on in my overblown days, were aching enough to wake me up on a day I’d much rather have slept in. Or it might have been the moan of the wind or the smash of rain against the window. Yes, the weather was back. The sort my joints liked least.
The nearest to a ball I could manage these days, I pulled the duvet right over my head. I’d stay put. No. I wouldn’t lie on the floor and stretch until my joints and muscles squeaked, I wouldn’t haul myself up by scrabbling on to all fours and then heaving myself vertical. I wouldn’t turn the shower on maximum and spray each ache in turn. I wouldn’t have a miserable low calorie good-for-me breakfast and most of all I wouldn’t open the front door – or the back – to find what the latest offering might be. No.
Except I needed a wee. And once up I might as well stretch. Well, it’d take the poor back altogether too much effort to lie down again. And then the shower would be a real boon. As for breakfast, I had to start the day with something, and might have to prepare food for Robin, too.
And then I’d have to check what lay beyond the doors.
It wasn’t often I put my head down and howled, there being not a lot of point in it when there wasn’t an audience to leap into action comforting me and offering me consolation and maybe consoling goodies. I’d cried far more when Tony was at home than when he was doing his time. So why was I standing there in the shower with tears pouring down my face, snot mingling with the shower gel? The last way I wanted to greet my latest employee was with bloodshot eyes. No one would know how the meat treatment was getting to me. In fact, today I’d bloody well do something I should have done when the donations started coming. I’d wring from Reg Bulcombe the name of his meat supplier and go and challenge him straight.
‘It’s all done by arrangement, see,’ the old bastard whined, trying to inch back into his cottage. It wouldn’t have done him any good, since my foot was already in place.
‘I don’t see. Any more than I ever saw any paperwork, Reg Bulcombe. But I do see offal appearing on my doorstep with irritating regularity and –’
‘You don’t know it’s him,’ he put in, too quickly. ‘You never seen him.’
‘And never saw the men on the moon, but I know they were there. Evidence, Reg. Circumstantial, I grant you. So you’re going to take me to see Mr X and I’m going to tell him to his face to stop messing me around. Otherwise,’ I added limpidly, ‘you can tell him I’ve got friends who’ll stop him for me.’ Mistake. I meant some of Tony’s lads, who smashed kneecaps as easily as I shelled peas. But the way his cunning little eyes narrowed he might well have thought I meant Robin and Nick. Would it do them harm or give them street cred?
‘You mean now?’
‘Why not? We wouldn’t want him to go to the trouble of baking a cake for us, would we?’
I waited while he fetched a Barbour I could smell from two yards, and then watched while he locked his front door. Locked. Not the sort of thing folk did round here, remember. He headed for his utility truck.
‘Uh, uh. My car.’ Even though I’d want the interior valeted before I next used it.
I couldn’t read his look. ‘Likely you’ll get stuck in that.’
‘Good job I’ve got you to push!’ I laughed as if I were only joking. I wasn’t. Letting him in, I started the engine, rolling down my window not just to clear the condensation but to let out the rich pong of his jacket and boots. So where were we bound? Some remote farm, moss growing on the thatched roof, or a classy country house à la Greville?
Neither made any attempt to break the silence. I didn’t know what he was thinking, of course, except, judging by the way he cracked his knuckles from time to time, they weren’t thoughts full of sweetness and light. I was puzzling over why he’d come so quietly, why he hadn’t insisted on phoning ahead. Puzzling, and making damned sure I remembered every twist and turn in an exceedingly twisting and turning road. I might know the area well; he knew it like the back of that gnarled and tattooed hand. And I suspected he was leading me in circles. No, I’d never been up this particular lane, I was certain of that. Lane? Track, more like, the sort they use on car rally special stages, usually on Forestry Commission Land. I was plunging into woods now – deciduous, not coniferous. So in addition to the mud washed down from the steep banks, there was a thick overlay of nicely rotting leaves. The car didn’t like it at all: I was hard pressed to maintain traction.
Suddenly he pointed. ‘Over there. Pull in over there.’
I braked and pulled the car into a small clearing. Hell. There was no house, no car, to pull in for. My plan had backfired horribly, hadn’t it? Especially my little quip about him pulling me out of mud. Even as I tried to reverse whence I’d come, my wheels spun helplessly. Forward, backward – I dug myself deeper in.
Cackling with laughter, Bulcombe heaved himself out. For a big man, he was surprisingly lithe. He was free of the mud and up a steep bank like a goat, merging into the woodland and disappearing.
My mobile announced it couldn’t get a signal. What a surprise. Almost laughing at the ease with which I’d been taken in, I decided to do the obvious thing – walk. I teetered round to the tailgate to dig out my spare walking boots. As I bent to tie the first, I sensed rather than saw movement. There was a rush.
‘I think I’ll take that!’ he crowed, grabbing my spare boot.
Mistake. Big mistake, Reg, as Tony could have told you. You never gave advance warning, even a second’s. At least, not to someone whose reactions have been speeded by anger. Not to anyone carefully coached in the principles of retaliation first, as I had by Tony’s minder.
Reg screamed twice, once as I made him drop the boot, a second time as I kicked him in the balls. I was tempted to go for a third when I saw my boot upside down in the mud, but mature reflection told me he couldn’t have meant to drop it that way up. Or could he? Even as I reached for it, he kicked it from me. OK, he’d asked for it. I turned him over and smashed his head down into the mud. Retrieving the boot, I shoved my foot into it. I’d even started lacing it when I realised something was wrong. His arms were flailing, dreadful muffled grunts bubbling in his chest. The bugger was only drowning in the mud.
I yanked him up and turned him on his side. Recovery position, that was the term. He sank down, his mouth soon level with the ooze. Another yank, so this time he was supported by the car bumper. Damn and blast him – if I knew my back, I’d pay for all this lifting. Yes, he was breathing again. Any moment he’d throw up and I didn’t intend to minister to him. So I tipped his head forward so I could lock the tailgate and, removing an in-car OS map and anything of immediate value, locked up and, without the proverbial backward glance, set off whence I’d come. As soon as I could I started picking up landmarks to work out what I pompously, but possibly accurately, called my coordinates. A church here, a stream there. Yes. I should be able to guide the AA rescue truck after lunch. No time before. If I was to get back in time to cook lunch. I’d have to send Robin into Taunton with a list of things vital for the evening. Even as I steamed along I reviewed the contents of freezers and cupboards and worked out menus – after all, you couldn’t carry all that much on a motorbike, not his sort.
The recovery people thought it would be altogether easier if I went in the cabin with them. I couldn’t argue. Robin had been delighted with the extra responsibility, no doubt seeing it was a step closer to a perm
anent job. He even offered to start preparing vegetables, an offer I immediately accepted. So here I was with Des and Pete, bumbling along lanes so narrow we could have reached out and touched the sides.
‘Just stop here a moment,’ I said at last. ‘I just want to make sure we’re in the right lane.’
We were. There were my recent wheel tracks, and the clear imprints of some very irate walking boots. But a couple of turns later, when we should be turning off, the tracks stopped abruptly. Weird.
‘We need to back up,’ I said apologetically. ‘Must have missed a turn.’
Des trundled us back. And forward. And back again. In the fast falling mist, we couldn’t see what had happened to the car. I had to give Reg marks for trying. He – and to judge by the footprints – several cronies – had given up trying to move the car. Instead they’d yanked a great pile of young trees across the entrance to the clearing.
Des put it succinctly. ‘Looks as if someone doesn’t want you to get that back in a hurry.’
Pete was already out, pulling on tough gloves and wrestling with the wood spaghetti. Someone had added odds and ends of barbed wire, damn them.
‘And of course,’ I panted, joining in as soon as Des had thrown me a spare pair of gauntlets, ‘even if we get rid of all this, there’s a good chance the car still won’t come unstuck.’
‘It’ll come all right,’ he said, with quiet confidence.
And it did, ten minutes later, with a plop straight from a children’s comic. It was so foul with mud that I agreed the safest thing was to take it straight to a garage so that the underneath could be checked.
Which was how I now came to have a hire car. Which I pulled up nose to nose in the back yard with a four-wheel drive that looked vaguely familiar.
No, they all looked the same, didn’t they, these big silver-finished monsters? I bent to lock my titchy little job – nothing as sexy as a zapper – braced myself for an hour of real cooking pressure, and marched in.
Chapter Twenty
‘There you are!’ Lucy sounded as exasperated as if I were one of her siblings, late after school. ‘We’re rushed off our feet and there’s no one except us to cook. Robin’s doing his best but he can’t be in two places at once. Though,’ she added, pulling herself together with a ghost of a grin, ‘you seem to manage it.’
I dropped my jacket and bag on top of my walking shoes and donned my pinnie. A quick – OK, thorough – scrub of the hands and I was ready. ‘Get me up to speed,’ I said, leafing through the orders. ‘Most of these are specials, so we should be able to knock them off in no time. Start up the deep fryer.’
‘It’s on. And Robin prepared a load of potatoes this afternoon.’
‘Chip them then. Now, chicken, lamb steaks – moussaka? How the hell did we get an order for moussaka?’
‘It’s on the specials board.’ She looked as scared as if she’d written it up in error herself.
I sniffed. ‘And I’d say it’s in the oven. Well done, Robin.’
‘Bloody butcher delivered lamb mince, not beef,’ Robin said, erupting through the service door with another order. ‘He’d really cocked up – it was all really weird cuts and joints I didn’t recognise. When I said I wouldn’t pay, he threatened to take everything away. I said fine, but leave the lamb, which I did pay for, because moussaka’s one thing I can do well. And, hey presto, when I did the supermarket run, there was an offer on aubergines and mushrooms.’
My organic butcher messing up? I’d have thought he was one person I could have relied on. Unless someone had phoned through a false order. Not impossible when I thought about the Portaloos. But I didn’t have time to worry about that now. ‘Good lad. But why all this activity?’ I wondered aloud. ‘It’s Thursday. Bell ringing night. There’s usually no activity at all till nearly ten and then there’s a rush on pints.’
‘Half the village seems to be here. All the regulars are back,’ Lucy said.
‘We’ll worry about this later,’ I said. For ‘we’ read ‘I’. ‘OK, team: you’re working wonders. You know where you are. Just tell me what I can do that’ll be most useful. When there’s a break, we’ll take a breather and regroup. OK? No arguing, I mean it.’
Robin blinked. ‘Could you – would you mind manning the bar?’
I didn’t even correct his sexist language.
If I was front of house, as it were, I wasn’t going to appear like a river-cooled hippopotamus. Somehow I’d managed to get mud in my ears, up my trousers and even my sweatshirt, as well as more obvious targets. I stripped down in two minutes flat, dived under the shower and was back grabbing clothes before I was properly dry. The first top I reached happened to show my décolletage, so I added a glittery necklace. OK, it was your classic barmaid look, so just to improve the shining hour I added frosted eye shadow and particularly glossy lipstick. The hair was rapidly becoming a disaster so I mussed it vigorously and went wild with the spray. Diamanté mules completed the ensemble. Tony would have smacked my bum and told me I looked a right trollop.
Perhaps I did. After all, something about me made Reg Bulcombe drop his pint glass. Literally. It must have been almost full, too. The fire simply died, and wet ashes splattered all over his feet and those of his cronies. Magic.
It was worth the effort of fetching first the broom and shovel and then the mop and bucket – all that power walking over hill and dale had found me out more than I cared to admit. One or two of the more brazen men stuck out their legs so I could mop the worst off their boots and jeans. Reg Bulcombe, to catcalls and jeers, none of them mine, strode out and would have slammed the door behind him, I’m sure, had he not run smack into Nick Thomas.
No, I didn’t drop the mop. I nodded him to a table and carried on with what I was doing. Dumping the regulation Wet Floor easel near the epicentre of the erstwhile flood, I scanned the floor for further splashes. The floor and customers. One woman, a smartish townee about my own age, was vainly mopping her tights. Her escort didn’t know whether to laugh with the others or get outraged in a suitably alpha-male way.
‘Why don’t you come up to my private bathroom?’ I whispered discreetly.
There’d be some tights somewhere in one of my drawers, much cheaper than the free meal I probably ought to be offering.
‘I got the impression,’ Nick said mildly, over a mug of my finest organic drinking chocolate, not the normal tipple for the bar but one we could all share, ‘that something upset our Reg.’
He’d got back in time for bell ringing, he said, but found it cancelled. Well, it would be. Reg had called a celebration of my humiliation. Yes, in my own bar. Lucy had got wind of this, and, to my eternal gratitude, sacrificed her one evening of self-indulgence to help Robin, hoping the two of them could wing it. Without the men and Lucy, and with Mrs Greville mysteriously absent too, there’d been nothing for it but for Aidan to call off the session. He’d given Nick half an hour of private coaching, that was all, which pleased Nick because his jauntering around the countryside had made his stomach play up and he needed food. All this came out in a rush, as if he were a naughty school kid trying to fend off a bollocking he knew was due to him.
As if I’d given him cause! I had raised one eyebrow as I’d taken his order, and he might well have perceived it as ironic and even accusing. But I’d said nothing I wouldn’t have said to my other customers, nor that I wouldn’t have wanted overheard. I suppose you might say I’d rather kept him in suspense, a state that pleased me since it gave me my preferred upper hand.
‘Upset?’ I pulled a face as Lucy and Robin tittered.
Robin licked a chocolately moustache, put down his empty mug and coughed delicately. He and Lucy had already heard all about my day, it was late and it was more than time for Lucy to be home – after all, it was a school day tomorrow and since she hadn’t had time to do any homework tonight she’d no doubt have to be up at the crack of dawn to deal with it.
I nodded, getting up to shoo them out, stopping Lucy only to stow the r
emainder of the excellent moussaka in my favourite basket for her to carry home. ‘You’ve both worked wonders,’ I said for the umpteenth time. Fishing in my pinnie pocket, I pressed a twenty-pound note into her palm and another into Robin’s. ‘For you, not the taxman. Nor anyone else,’ I added to Lucy.
Not that she’d take any notice. I waved them off. The yard was still blessedly free of offal.
‘Robin seems a decent kid,’ Nick began as I returned to the snug to find a skin growing over my chocolate.
Excellent. I dipped my little finger in to swish it out and relish it. The best part, in my opinion. And it always makes grown men shudder, for some reason.
‘A real find,’ I agreed. ‘He’s only supposed to be a barman, but he turned his hand to everything this evening.’
We could have gone on like this all night, two middle-aged folk having a pleasant meaningless chat. That’s probably what Nick wanted. At least until he could decently yawn and back out gracefully, escaping before breakfast the following morning because of pressure of work.
I’d got too much adrenaline still sloshing round my veins to be able to sleep. Besides which, I went nowhere until Robin got back in. Should we talk about the news item I’d found in Brum or the goings on down here? Or, as Robin slammed the back door and audibly bolted it, should I let Nick off the hook? After all, there was nothing to be done about anything till tomorrow afternoon. Friday morning was chopper lesson morning and nothing would make me miss that. And there was no doubt he’d be on tenterhooks until I had said something. Perhaps I’d just leave it at that.
The Food Detective Page 17