“Well, I wouldn’t say it’s lovely, exactly. Not unless the psychology of murder is what passes for lovely around here.”
The woman blinked. “You’ve lost me, dear,” she smiled. She placed a large wooden fob on the counter. “Here’s your key. You mustn’t lose it. I’ll show you up. It’s Bertie’s night off, you see.”
“Bertie?” Cassidy thought of the good-looking young man she had encountered earlier. “Was he the guy -?” She pointed her thumb at the front door as if that would explain who she meant.
“Bertie’s my old man, dear,” the woman laughed. She nodded to a framed picture behind Cassidy’s shoulder. It was black and white and yellowed and depicted a younger version of the woman in a floral 1960s dress, standing next to a man in evening dress with frizzy hair and sunglasses. To his side was a tall man - so tall in fact nothing above his chest appeared within shot. “That’s us, dear,” the woman lifted a flap in the counter and joined Cassidy on the lime green carpet. She looked fondly at the photograph. “Bertie and Edna Box. That’s me on the left. Him in the middle is Johnny Harmony. He was the singer on our caravan site. Our honeymoon, you see. We went all over the shop.”
“I’ve never heard -” Cassidy began but cut herself off, realising this might be a bit of a gaffe.
“Before your time, I expect,” Edna Box murmured. There was a hint of pity in her voice; the American girl had clearly missed out in life. “He was a proper singer. You had proper singers in those days. Nowadays it’s all aggressive, isn’t it? Aggressive poems and noise. Not what I call music. Proper music. I must be getting old.”
“Hmm,” was all Cassidy could think to offer.
“But hark at me!” Edna laughed. “Giving a lecture on the state of modern music. I expect you’re tired out, poor love. You’ve come a long way.”
She moved towards a door opposite the front door and opened it wide. Cassidy took the hint. She picked up her bags and joined the diminutive Mrs Box in the doorway.
“I could do with a bath, I admit,” she smiled. She decided she liked the woman after all. An English eccentric, she supposed she was. Or was that term only applicable if the oddball was wealthy? Typical of the English: bringing class and money into everything.
“Well, you’ve come to the right place, dear.” Mrs Box began to lead her new guest along a corridor and towards a staircase. “Nothing ever happens here. Nothing at all. This way. Don’t want you getting lost, do we?”
Struggling with her bags, Cassidy followed Mrs Box up several flights of stairs. The stairwell was dingy. Wallpaper that must outdate the Boxes’ marriage and yellowed paintwork didn’t inspire Cassidy with confidence. The place seemed to become darker and more decayed the further up they climbed.
Mrs Box scaled the creaking steps with the ease of a mountain goat. She paused at the top of each flight to allow the American girl to catch up before moving off at speed. She clucked all the way to the fourth floor. “Lovely room, you’ve got,” she said again, as though repetition would make it so. “I’m not saying all the other rooms am horrible, but you’ll be all right up there. Nobody will disturb you.”
Cassidy felt like saying she was feeling pretty disturbed already but instead she commented on how it all seemed so... (she chose the word carefully) quiet.
“Ooh, no, dear!” Mrs Box was quick to correct her. “Busy time for us. What with the beer festival on. That’s where they all am. Getting a skinful.” A thought struck her and her face clouded momentarily. “I hope they’m not too rowdy coming back.” Then she dismissed the idea as quickly as it had come. “But you’ll be all right, up at the top. Lovely room.”
“Great,” Cassidy muttered, meaning the opposite.
“It’s only a couple of days,” Mrs Box went on. “Then most of ‘em’ll bugger off back to wherever they come from. They come from all over. North. South. Foreigners, some of ‘em. All sorts. United by beer.”
She laughed at the folly of mankind. In Cassidy’s mind, a penny dropped. The handsome guy must be one of Mrs Box’s foreigners.
“I think I met one,” she nodded. “A young man -”
Mrs Box pursed her lips. “Bit of a fast worker, are you?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Met a young man already!” Mrs Box laughed like a parrot caught in a doorway. She laughed all the more to see the American girl’s face redden.
“No, he was going out as I was coming in -“ Cassidy tried to clarify but Mrs Box waved her quiet.
“Only messing, dear! Pulling your whatsit.” She patted her cheeks as though to calm herself down. “You’ll get a lot of that in this country. Right! Here you are.”
They had reached, at long last, the uppermost floor. A solitary door was set in a recess with a doorstep of its own. Exhausted from the climb, Cassidy let her bags drop to the bare floorboards. Mrs Box held her hand out. Cassidy wondered if she was expecting a tip but then realised she was after the key. She fumbled in her jacket and had some difficulty pulling the unwieldy fob from her pocket. Mrs Box took the key and did, as she said, “the honours.”
Cassidy stepped into a large room with tall windows in two of the walls. An iron bedstead dominated the space, standing on a square of threadbare carpet that was half pattern and half stains. At one of the windows were a small table and a lopsided wooden chair. An incongruously modern bedside table announced itself like the odd one out in the world’s easiest puzzle book.
It could be worse, Cassidy reflected. The walls were brightly painted and the curtains, well, they did seem like someone had tried to frame the windows with migraines, but she could live with them. What pleased her most were the table and the fact that the room was away from the rest of the occupants. Here she would be able to work in peace and get that marvellous, epoch-making thesis finished.
“I’m sure you’ll be very comfortable,” Mrs Box wittered. She adopted a pose not unlike that of a stewardess on Cassidy’s long haul flight pointing out the emergency exits. “There’s your bed. Table. Iron. Through there’s your en suite. You’re highly honoured,” she added in a confidential tone. “Bath and shower!”
“Great,” Cassidy pronounced, and this time she meant it.
“Kettle,” Mrs Box gestured to the appliance as though presenting it on a shopping channel. “Make yourself a proper cup of tea. I know coffee is all the rage with you Americans but we just might convert you, eh?”
“I like tea,” Cassidy defended herself from stereotyping.
“There’s nothing like proper English tea,” Mrs Box proclaimed.
There followed an awkward silence.
“So,” Cassidy spoke up eventually when Mrs Box showed no sign of moving, “what’s the deal? Do I, um, tip you now, or - ? Although, technically, I carried all the bags so...”
Mrs Box waved her hand as though erasing Cassidy’s words from the air between them. “Oh, we don’t do tipping here, dear. We just charge you a fair price. I’m sure you’ll be very comfortable.”
“Well, here’s hoping!” Cassidy clapped her hands together in a bid to bring the exchange to a conclusion. “The bath is through here, you say? Think I’ll run one right now.”
At last, Mrs Box took the hint. She got as far as the door before turning to add, “Right, well. I’ll leave you to it. Leave you to get nice and cosy. And if there’s anything we can do to make your stay more comfortable, anything at all -“
“Well, actually,” Cassidy brightened, “I could murder a sandwich.”
“Hmm?” Mrs Box couldn’t have looked more puzzled if Cassidy had started singing in Martian.
“I’m famished. The food on the train -“
“Oh, no, dear!” Mrs Box cut her short with a peremptory scowl. “Kitchen’s closed.”
She left briskly, closing the door with a bang and leaving a rather bemused American lowering herself onto the
bed.
So much for “anything at all”!
***
Brough stood in the empty living room of his newly rented flat. He was facing the uncurtained window but wasn’t really taking in the view it afforded him of the weed-ridden paved yard with its overflowing bins and the rundown industrial estate beyond the perimeter wall. Light from the screen of his laptop, sitting on the breakfast bar that separated this part of the room from the part with kitchen equipment in it, spread thinly, ineffectually. His inbox was open. Empty.
He was not big on creature comforts. He would acquire the basics: a chair or two, perhaps a table, a bed of course. The flat came with its own fridge, cooker and washing machine. There was a shower cubicle in the cramped bathroom - could you call it a bathroom if it contained no actual bath? But for tonight he would make do. Sleeping bag on the cheap carpet. He wasn’t planning on spending much time in this place anyway. He was one of those who threw himself into their work. Private life, socialising and domesticity were sidelined to the extent that they fell off the edge. But that was how Brough liked it.
He had been burnt before.
He lifted the laptop from the breakfast bar and sat cross-legged on the floor. He pulled up his favourite porn site and scrolled through the first few pages looking for something he hadn’t seen before and someone he liked the look of.
The embarrassment of the afternoon still haunted him. That woman - Miller - had taken him to the common room to “meet the men”. There were balloons and the ruins of a chocolate cake. Brough had thanked them for the warm welcome and cursed the train that had delayed his arrival, forcing them to tuck into the goodies without him. His words had been met with blank stares and puzzled glances among the ranks. Then Miller had pulled him aside and explained the festivities were not in his honour; they were the remnants of the farewell party given to his predecessor. Brough had flushed bright red and suggested she show him where he might find his office. He had swept from the room, giving rise to a tide of derisory laughter in his wake.
Not a good start. Not the kind of no-nonsense first impression he had wished to make.
Shit.
He undid his belt and wriggled out of his trousers. He cast a glance over his shoulder to the bare windowpanes. He calculated that no one, should anyone be on the roof of one of the industrial units across the way, would be able to see what he was up to.
He clicked the triangle at the middle of the screen and his selected video began to play. The screen suddenly went black.
Shit.
He had no idea where the battery charger was.
***
Cassidy was in love with the bath tub. This, of all the things she had seen in England so far, was definitely quaint. It was a hefty beast with clawed feet and, below the thick taps with crust around their mouths, the enamel was discoloured from decades of use.
Up to her chin in hot water and fragrant bubbles, with her hair clipped up haphazardly, she was re-reading the passages she’d marked with post-it notes in her chunky book of forgotten murders. Not for her the frothy frolics of chick-lit or the intricately-plotted puzzles of fictional crime. Her taste was for true stories, the more gruesome the better. It was her entertainment and her research. Why, the basis of her thesis depended on her ability to see beyond the sensationalism and to tease out the psychological -
She sat up with a jolt. It must have been the warm blanket of water that had caused her to drowse. Not thinking about her thesis. Not that at all!
She checked the book - she had saved it from a dunking just in time. Having taken considerable trouble to liberate it from a university library in the Midwest, she didn’t want the volume to be damaged in any way.
She reached across and placed the book out of harm’s way on the closed toilet seat. Sounds from the street wafted in through the open window as the steam from her ablutions wafted out. The raucous laughter and atonal singing of an indiscriminate number of revellers, returning no doubt from the beer festival. Cassidy found memories of Spring Break in years gone by leaping to the forefront of her mind. She shivered - from a combination of her upper torso being exposed to the draught from the window and the recollection of fending off the unwelcome, booze-fuelled advances of meatheads, lunkheads and jerks.
She pinched her nose, closed her eyes tight and submerged herself beneath the foamy surface for as long as she was able.
Breakfast
Cassidy thought she might be too late but, having found her way down to the dining room, she discovered she was the first to show up for breakfast.
The room was crowded with mismatched furniture from every decade of the previous century and perhaps the one before that. Tables of different sizes and shapes were surrounded by chairs of assorted designs and varying degrees of rickettiness. The only uniformity to the place came from the dun colour of the tablecloths. They, and the cutlery and place settings seemed, at a cursory glance, to match, although one might be forgiven for thinking one had wandered into a junk shop by mistake.
Cassidy poured herself a coffee - once she’d figured out how to get the thin, dark liquid from the urn to a cup - snatched a newspaper from the wooden rack on a sideboard, and selected a seat at a central table. She sipped the bitter hot water while she pored over the newspaper. Gee, the Brits love tits, don’t they? If they’re not electing them into government office, they’re plastering them all over their tabloids. Cassidy examined the smiling young woman with a beach ball on the third page.
“Veronica, nineteen,” she read in a low murmur, “is a keen gardener and likes to keep up with world events and environmental issues. But she is never too busy to take time out of studying for her degree in sociology for a game on the beach.”
What a country! Cassidy turned the page. She glanced down at her own modest beach balls. Well, you could manage a game or two of tennis, she supposed, glad that she was of an academic bent. It was not that she was unattractive - quite the contrary, in fact; she had never been short of admirers - but Ma and Pa Whitlow had brought their daughter up to realise there is more to life than the way you look. Ah, Ma and Pa! Cassidy raised her coffee cup in toast to her late parents. Here’s to you guys.
She was startled from her reminiscences by loud crashing and banging sounds from the kitchen. Two voices could be heard but not what they were saying; it was clear there was some kind of heated argument under way and not, Cassidy surmised, about the standards of British tabloid journalism.
All at once, the kitchen fell silent. Cassidy listened in case there was a sequel, another outbreak of hostilities but after a couple of minutes it seemed as though all was quiet on the West Midlands front. Pleased with that little quip, Cassidy returned her attention to the newspaper and a double page spread on which soccer star’s wife has the sweatiest armpits.
She was soon distracted from this earth-shattering exposé when a shadow fell across the page and she was aware that the landlady, Mrs Box, had materialised, presumably from the warzone in the kitchen, although Cassidy hadn’t noticed or heard her come in.
Mrs Box met Cassidy’s gaze with a smile that looked like it had been switched on.
“Morning, love,” she said without moving her mouth and diminishing the smile. “Full English?”
Now Cassidy was aware of this term. It signified a plate of greasy food in a variety of colours, shapes and textures. It was hardly the kind of thing she would seek so early in the day. She shook her head and, having wished the little woman a good morning, asked about the possibility of a croissant.
Mrs Box made an attempt at a joke about the way she walked but this received nothing more than a baffled and slightly panicked look from the American girl, so she cleared her throat and made an alternative suggestion in the form of a potato waffle.
Cassidy marvelled to learn of this innovation in British cuisine. “Potato? In a waffle? Seriously?”
“Or I could do you toast and jam.” Mrs Box was the soul of magnanimity. Nothing could be too much trouble.
Cassidy seized upon the offer of toast and jam as a drowning man might throw himself at a piece of flotsam. Mrs Box was relieved. She headed back to the kitchen door but then stopped and came back.
“Help yourself to the um...” She waved towards the sideboard with the coffee and rack of newspapers. Her face fell. “Oh. You have.”
“Yes,” Cassidy confirmed, but the landlady’s face was a storm cloud. Mrs Box turned away and shoved her full bodyweight, such as it was, against the swinging door. She disappeared into the kitchen rather huffily. The door continued to swing in and out of the room for a few minutes after her departure.
Cassidy made a “whoops” face, and then shrugged. She would soon become accustomed to the quirks and eccentricities of the establishment - unless they became too much and she decamped to somewhere else - but for now, there was coffee, the newspaper and the prospect of toast and jam in her immediate future.
She got up and helped herself to a refill from the coffee urn. She wondered, fleetingly, whether this was another faux pas. Should she be leaving the rest for the other guests? Or would Mrs Box deign to make more?
Whatever. The old bird had invited her to help herself.
A story tucked away on page fifteen arrested Cassidy’s attention. It was a national publication, she understood that, but the nature of the story warranted more attention that the couple of inches it was afforded here.
“West Midlands Man Kills Wife, Turns Whisk On Self.”
Cassidy picked the paper from the tabletop and held it closer to her face in order to read the small print more carefully. A frisson of excitement ran through her. This was exactly the kind of thing she needed! A fresh case to illustrate the main argument of her thesis. She was about to put the paper on the table and tear out the article when she became aware she was being watched. Reddening a little, as though she had actually been caught in the act of mutilating the newspaper, Cassidy bade the fellow grinning at her from across the table a good morning.
Blood & Breakfast, West Midlands Noir Page 2