“I'll try. This coming Friday, we’ll pay him another visit.”
He grunted his acknowledgement.
- 3 -
The Rising Sun was a flourishing example of business diversification, according to Laura, after she’d milked all the humour out of it being the only pub within nuclear striking distance I’d never been in.
“They’re into so much,” she explained. “They do breakfast in the morning, takeout coffee and sandwiches throughout the day, Thai takeaway in the evenings.”
“And still it calls itself a pub?”
“Because at heart it is. You walk in, there's a traditional bar, stools all round with regulars balanced on them, tables with couples at them. They even have an open log fire in the Winter. Why the sudden interest?”
We were on the sofa in the living room at Beech Tree, her body slumped against me, a recently applied squirt of perfume working its magic. I had an arm round her shoulders, my fingers stroking her hair. My free hand held the one and only scotch and ice of the day. And yet, for all that atmosphere, the beams, the inglenook, the leaded windows, furniture acquired by my late wife’s great grandfather, we'd chosen to discuss a bad tempered old man who was destined to cause me enormous grief.
“I went to see Tom Manners today. I’m still trying to work out which of us is the nutter: him for obsessing about a missing watch, or me for saying I’ll help him find it.”
“You believed his story, then?” she said. “Even the Heinrich Himmler part?”
“I believe he believes it. Some flibernite antiques dealer saw him coming and charged him 200 quid for a watch worth 50. Was it stolen in the Rising Bloody Sun? Probably. And by this girl who bumped into him.”
“He should’ve gone to the police?”
I shrugged. “Wouldn’t have done him much good. They’d have filed a report. If it turns up they’ll get in touch.”
She sat up straight, swivelled to face me, clasping her hands round her knees.
“So, it’s the girl...?” she said, beaming as if we were about to investigate the crime of the century.
“I wouldn’t mind a word with Leonard Blake, the stallholder. Tom reckons she works for him, fetching and carrying...”
“What does he sell?”
“Bags. Sports bags, shoulder bags, shopping bags, handbags...” I broke off. “Why am I even thinking about this? At best it’ll turn up in the chaos he calls home, at worst it’s petty theft.”
“Not petty to Tom Manners. Maybe you’re just ... doing the right thing. Heaven knows you go on about it enough.”
I reached out and pinched her foot for making me sound self-righteous and she dug me in the ribs with her toes. I took a final swig of my drink and answered my own question.
“Truth is the still small voice at the bottom of this glass is telling me there’s more than a lost watch to all this. Or is that just wishful thinking...”
“Did you like him?”
“Tom? Yes and no. But I took it as a warning for the future: don’t wind up as a hostage to the past, dusting off china horses.”
***
Maybe that consideration prompted me to go up to my log cabin once Laura had gone to bed. I hadn’t been there for nearly a week. I’d been kidding myself I hadn’t needed to.
Most of my friends and neighbours believe the world’s getting smaller by the day, fault of the internet. I say they don’t understand the real meaning of distance. If your four children have flung themselves around the world you keep chewing at two questions: one, what have I done wrong and two, will I ever see them again? Both have no substance, they’re more self-pity than genuine concern. Besides, I knew I could email my kids, right there and then and get a damn near instant reply from two of them and for the last couple of months I’d had a ... significant matter that I wanted their opinion about.
I couldn’t properly explain my reluctance, but felt that I should try, in case it had a bearing on the next ... however many years of my life. Here I was on the verge of a new case, albeit one that involved an old man’s gold watch, feeling as though I could put my intentions lucidly and deal with my kids’ adverse reactions equably. I decided to start with Fee. She’d have been offended had I done otherwise and the others reluctant to speak without her lead. There was the added bonus that she’d be awake, probably in the office, standing at her desk. It was eight in the morning in Tokyo where she was sales director of a company owned by her partner, Yukito Kagayama.
Why then, with a fair wind behind me and a just cause ahead, had I opened obliquely with,
“How's Yukito's lawnmower going? Dad x.”
Yukito had designed a robotic lawnmower, fuelled by the grass it cut transformed on the run into ethanol. You could set the mower to perform its task unaided, then go indoors and ... what? Take pictures of it through the living room window, put them on Facebook and send them to your friends? It didn’t take a gang of Luddites to pull Yukito’s project apart. There was Tom Manners with his push-along, fit as a fiddle in mind and body, and 6000 miles away was a man, a third of his age, who’d never cut grass in his life yet planned to make the task obsolete and the people who no longer wanted to do it seize up. That said, his mowers were going down a bomb all over the golfing world.
Fee replied almost immediately in a manner I’d come to expect.
‘Why do you ask? What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing wrong,’ I wrote back. ‘I was just asking about the lawnmower.’
But for some reason I left it at that when in truth I didn’t give a toss about Yukito’s lawnmower. Fee was pretty scathing,
‘At midnight, GMT? Don’t mess me about, Dad, if there’s a problem, out with it.’
I sat back to compose an email on the back of a Telecoms envelope, one that would be more a statement than a question, but the doubts about my well-being were already circling the world. Half an hour later another email dropped into my inbox. Unopened email from people you know, a torturer’s dream. This was from Ellie, my other daughter, who was in Nepal, running an orphanage with a boy she’d met on a plane, for God’s sake. ‘Terrific’ Rick, so christened by me for his excessive use of the word terrific.
‘Dad, Fee reckons the lawnmower email’s just a cover and there's a problem. Give!’
I decided to save the task for the following morning when I would be fresher, brighter ... perhaps even more courageous.
Over breakfast, I got an email on my phone from my son Jaikie in Ireland where he was filming a much vaunted historical romance, starring alongside Keira Knightly. His message began rather sensibly, for Jaikie.
‘Is there or isn’t there something wrong? Fee reckons yes, Ellie no, I say you should ask a doctor, one called Laura. Get her to examine you in minute detail!’
Then he turned to his favourite subject, himself.
‘Listen, Dad, when you had hair at what point did it start going grey? Only I’ve found the odd one or two and they’ve set me thinking. Jodie was out here last weekend and she and Keira ganged up on me, took the piss basically. Their verdict? I should either live with it or buy a bottle of hair dye. I’m going to send you some recent photos of me. Dropbox. Honest opinion. How old do I look?’
At least we were talking, the four of us, though I hadn’t broached the real subject I wanted their thoughts on. It lay, with its many alteration, on the back of the envelope which I screwed up and chucked in the waste bin. At which point I began to consider the fifth member of the family, Con, whom nobody had heard from in three months. Presumably, he was still in Hawaii with his creole beauty, Marcie, a woman we were all suspicious of even though we’d never met her. Poor girl didn't stand a chance.
- 4 -
Laura was dead right about The Rising Bloody Sun: diversification everywhere you looked while still retaining the feel of an English pub even though most of the bar staff were Australian. Landlords have been replaced by managers, all over drinking Britain, and the Sun’s boss was a woman of forty with a girly smile that could break in
to a reprimanding glare at the drop of an olive by one of her employees. No doubt she'd intended to slim down to the jeans she was wearing, but the process hadn’t begun yet and a roll of flesh was tyring above the waistband. I imagine most people didn’t notice it, distracted as they were by the coin slot cleavage.
“What can I get you?” she asked.
It was lunchtime and I hesitated before asking for a double scotch, tall glass, ice all the way to the brim. It was the first time I’d broken the seven o’clock rule in a month and it tasted bloody wonderful.
I settled on a bar stool and looked round the place. It was set out in an L-shape, with the Thai takeaway right at the far end, round the corner. It boasted a bar all to itself beyond which you could see into the kitchen, bristling with hygiene, health and safety, the staff of young Thai men and women already preparing for the evening rush. The decor in the main bar was just as you might expect, black painted upright and crossbeams supporting low ceilings and walls. The light fittings were B & Q, the prints on the walls straight from a car boot sale, some of prize cattle and sheep, others black and white photos of Thame down the years.
It was a busy pub, even at this midweek lunchtime, so on market day it would be a pick pocket's dream: low lighting, plenty of murk from where to choose your target, swoop in, dip and be gone.
The manageress finished serving another customer and turned her attention back to me.
“You passing through?” she asked.
“No, I'm local, here on behalf of a friend."
She smiled. “That sounds mysterious. Who is she?”
“It’s a man.” I let her make of that what she wanted to for a few moments. "He was in here last market day and reckons one of your customers lifted his pocket watch.”
“Tetchy Tom, you mean?”
I nodded. “You obviously know him.”
“On behalf of, you said. How does that work?”
I explained that I’d offered to help him find the gold hunter and, given that suspicion fell on a girl who’d bumped into him accidentally on purpose, here in this very bar, I thought I’d come and check.
“So you’re like a ... private detective.”
“More nosy acquaintance. Nathan Hawk.”
I reached across the bar and shook her hand before she had chance to object to me being in her pub.
“He was sat over there by the window with a couple of cronies.” She nodded to a table with a view out onto the High Street. “First I knew he’d lost his watch was when he came back to look for it, half an hour later.”
“And the girl? Do you know her?”
"She’s been coming in for, what, month or so on market days. Coffee and sandwiches for the stallholders. Her name’s Marianne, said the French way. Mine’s plain old Mary - Mary Parker.”
The French thing might’ve had a bearing. First Saturday of the month a band of traders brought in produce from France and sold it at overblown prices. It was a quid pro quo arrangement. Middle Saturday of the month some of the English traders went over to France to return the favour - to Saint Omer or Abbeville.
"You reckon she comes in with the French traders, maybe stays ... couple of weeks?"
She leaned forward as if to reveal the secret of the century. "Marianne. Sounds French, but she isn’t. Careful, I’m going to shout.”
It was a timely warning. She turned and bellowed across the bar in a voice that rattled the glassware.
“Steve! Moment!”
The place fell quiet for a second and a young man who’d just brought a crate of bottled beers up from the cellar, set it down on the floor and approached his boss.
“Yes, ma’m?”
“Steve, this gentleman has an interest in Marianne.”
He looked at me, then reached across the bar with a grab loader hand and introduced himself.
“Steve Bellamy. How's it going?”
He was straight out of a Fosters lager ad, blonde hair, sun tan and a bulging torso. To his credit he didn’t use the word ‘mate’ on me once but he spoke in the manner of his fellow countrymen, every phrase ending with a rising inflexion? Like he was asking a question? And expected an answer?
“You passing through, Steve, or what?” I asked.
“Doing Europe, but the World Cup got in the way. I wound up at Twickenham...”
“Where you thrashed us, if I remember? 33 something...?”
“33 – 13.”
I beckoned him to lean across so that we could lower our voices. “Your guvnor says Marianne wasn’t French. Can you help us with that?”
He laughed. “I did French at uni, so I started a conversation with her. She didn’t understand a word.”
“Maybe she spoke a different dialect. I mean I have to put subtitles on when a Geordie comes on telly these days.”
He glanced at Mary, then back at me. “What’s a Geordie?”
“You didn’t get a surname, by any chance?”
“Negative. Why the need to know, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“I think she nicked a customer’s watch. Tetchy Tom’s.”
He seemed genuinely surprised by that. “Christ, she looked so bloody ... butter wouldn’t melt.”
“Pretty?”
He knew why I’d asked and glanced away in mock coyness.
“You could call her that, yeah.”
“You were hitting on her.”
He straightened up with a sigh. “The old charm fell on deaf ears. In both languages.”
“So, she ordered coffee. How many?”
“Three cappuccinos, three pastrami on rye.” He smiled, Australian teeth. “She had it written down on a piece of paper. I filled the order, took the money and she left.”
“Via Tetchy Tom,” I said, nodding to where he’d been sitting.
“If you say. I was onto another customer by then.”
“Describe her to me.”
“Close cut brown hair, dark eyes, couple of tattoos...”
“Thin,” Mary added, disapprovingly. “Jeans and a sweater. Grubby.”
I thanked them and with a nod from his boss Steve went back to work, toting crates of beer. Once he was out of earshot, Mary asked if he’d been any help.
“Not much, mainly because he didn’t tell me everything he knows.”
She was on the verge of defending him and drew herself up to her full height, five feet two inches at most. “How can you tell?”
“Long hours, talking to people with secrets.”
She didn’t understand so I made myself clearer.
“Copper. Was. If she comes in again, will you give me a call?”
I handed her a so-called business card. On it were my name and number, nothing else.
- 5 -
Thame market is one of the reasons I steer clear of supermarkets. That isn’t much of a recommendation, I know, until you start doing the sums. You can buy most of what you need on Thame market and if it’s fruit or veg it’s usually fatter, fresher and half the price. If it’s meat, fish, bread, the same applies and I never come away from the place without feeling I’ve poked a finger in the eye of grasping supermarkets. And nobody asks me if I need help packing my bag. Nobody hopes I have a great weekend.
The market takes place on the car park, dead centre of town, and as well as those selling food there’s the usual array of other pitches. An Indian family sells clothes, cheap and cheerful, bright and light in the summer, heavy and waterproof in the winter. Another woman sells fabric from great rolls and is never without a stream of customers. Nearby, her son sells rugs, all shapes and sizes, probably made in China by robots but good enough for most people to walk on. Business diversification? I’m not sure if this counts or it’s just a keen eye for the main chance but I was there three years ago when it started raining, slung it down like gravel. The rug man went to his van and brought out two dozen umbrellas. He sold the lot within an hour. I was one of the buyers. Six quid.
Then there’s the once a month French contingent, all of them s
elling foodstuff and set apart from the English competition in the shadow of the town hall. At eight in the morning the tables are heaving with everything from wines to saucisson, terrines to foie gras, and a hundred cheeses with an ‘e’ on the end of their names. There are vegetables I can’t identify and fruit I’ve never tasted, but by five o’clock not one item is left.
When I told Laura I was going on Friday to see Leonard Blake, the bag man, and I was taking Tom Manners with me, she asked if she could join us. She had things to do in Thame, some dry cleaning to collect, a few cheques to pay in and a pair of oven gloves to buy from the Aga shop.
When we picked up Tom at Birds Eye View he was dressed in what I'd come to realise was a kind of uniform: lace up boots, suit trousers and the collarless white shirt. This time he’d brought the suit jacket along for company, slung over one shoulder. He’d shaved earlier with a cut throat razor, according to the cotton wool on his chin. He’d also had a bath and smelled of carbolic.
To say that he was excited would be to overstate the case so I’ll call his attitude disgruntled optimism that he might ... just might get his watch back. He was suspicious, though, and made no bones about it.
“You’ve brought the doctor with you, I see.”
“She’s got things to do in Thame.”
He was in the back seat of the new old Land Rover, leaned forward and asked the back of Laura’s head if that was true.
“Yes, yes...” said Laura.
He sat back again nodding but disbelieving. I glanced briefly at Laura. She was smiling benignly and I found myself wondering if it might be Tom Manners’s head I pulled off today rather than Leonard Blake’s. Decapitation aside, I had to remember that at worst we were talking about a stolen watch, not a multiple murder.
The rest of the conversation en route involved subjects that not even Tom Manners could blame us for: the weather, for example, the traffic and the number of road signs between Chearsley and Thame. He’d counted them on one occasion. Seventy-two. Bloody ludicrous for a trip that involves one right turn at a main road and a roundabout at the other end. We didn’t argue.
Jericho Road: A Nathan Hawk Mystery (The Nathan Hawk Mystery series Book 5) Page 3