by Oliver Tidy
He Made Me
The Second Booker & Cash Story
Oliver Tidy
Copyright 2015 Oliver Tidy
Find me at http://olivertidy.wordpress.com/
This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please download an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any persons without the permission of the author.
Oliver Tidy has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead is purely coincidental.
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Table of Contents:
Chapter1 Chapter2 Chapter3 Chapter4 Chapter5 Chapter6 Chapter7 Chapter8 Chapter9
Chapter10 Chapter11 Chapter12 Chapter13 Chapter14 Chapter15 Chapter16 Chapter17
Chapter18 Chapter19 Chapter20 Chapter21 Chapter22 Chapter23 Chapter24 Chapter25
Chapter26 Chapter27 Chapter28 Chapter29 Chapter30 Chapter31 Chapter32 Chapter33
Chapter34 Chapter35 Chapter36 Chapter37 Chapter38 Chapter39 Chapter40 Chapter41
Chapter42 Chapter43 Chapter44 Chapter45 Chapter46 Chapter47 Chapter48 Chapter49
Chapter50 Chapter51 Chapter52 Chapter53 Chapter54 Epilogue
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1
Of all the coffee shops in all the seaside villages in all the UK she had to walk into mine. I was at my usual table. And I mean my table. They were my chairs too. One of the nice things about owning your own place is the opportunity to designate seating for your exclusive use, if you choose. I chose. Bogart I could never be but as a big fan of Casablanca I understood Ric better for these new feelings of proprietorial snobbery. And there had to be some benefits for being solely responsible for a shot-in–the-dark business venture.
We’d been open a little over a month. The place still had that new smell to it – paint, plastic, coffee and confidence, although the last, as with many things misplaced, had to be sniffed hard for, like the last few scattered grains of cocaine on a glass-topped coffee table.
I’d inherited a small fortune from book-dealing relatives who’d had their lives prematurely and violently ended by a trio of small-time psychotic, paranoid, vintage machinery enthusiasts. The desperate acts of desperate and deluded men that I still struggled in vain to begin to understand – men who thought that torture and the taking of life was a justifiable reaction to a little harmless eavesdropping. In a reactionary fit of sentimentality, I hadn’t taken the money – sold my relatives’ bookshop, their stock, and liquidated their investment portfolio – so that I could go and lie on a beach drinking cocktails for the rest of my life. Having lived in self-imposed exile abroad for a number of years, and having sworn an oath never to reside there again, I had decided to give living on Romney Marsh – my homeland – another roll of the dice. I’d invested a chunk of my windfall into renovating and converting the downstairs of the property and turned their bookshop in Dymchurch high street into a book-themed coffee shop. Like most CEOs’ decisions, it hadn’t been an idea that I could take credit for. But, like most CEOs, I was where the buck stopped. It was still feeling like a good idea. Just. I had hopes that given time one day the place might break even.
Normally, I have no objection to tall, green-eyed women with flowing flaxen locks seeking me out but we had Closed up on the door and it had been a long day.
Mel, one of my ladies, came out from behind the counter to block the woman’s way, handling her mop like a policeman at a G8 summit wields his riot stick.
‘We’re closed,’ she said. ‘It’s on the door.’ She pointed.
The woman stopped in her tracks and without condescending to look down in Mel’s direction, said, ‘Are you the owner?’ Those pools of electric green were turned on me, like they were lit from behind. I had been poring over some invoices, wondering where all the money was going and why not enough of it was coming back.
‘Yes.’
‘David Booker?’
I nodded.
‘I need to talk to you.’
I made a sympathetic face towards Mel and gestured to the empty two-seater leather Chesterfield opposite me. Mel gave me her ‘you typical man’ look and went back to the floors.
I set my pen down on the bills and reclined in the matching leather wing-back. The boss is entitled to nice chairs.
‘What can I do for you? Mrs...?’
‘Swaine. Rebecca Swaine.’
The name Swaine rang a bell. It wasn’t common on Romney Marsh. I wondered if she was related to the Swaines of Aldington. Old money and most of it gone. Or so rumour had it.
‘I need to talk to you on a private matter, Mr Booker.’ She glanced in Mel’s direction.
‘Then you’d better keep you voice down, Mrs Swaine,’ I said.
She didn’t look happy. ‘I have a matter of a delicate personal nature that I need to discuss with you. Don’t you have an office for this sort of thing?’
I realised her mistake. ‘You’re not looking for me,’ I said. ‘You’re looking for Jo Cash. She has an office upstairs. The coffee shop is mine. The investigator work is hers.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry. My mistake. I was told to ask in here.’
‘No problem. If it helps, you’re not the first. I’ll give Jo a call, see if she’s in. You want something to drink?’
She smiled tightly, like maybe it hurt her. ‘No, thank you.’
I took out my mobile and called Jo. Jo used to be police – a DC working out of Folkestone police station – but she got carried away saving my life and killed two men – one with bullets the other with a monkey wrench. They were both French – which somehow didn’t make it so bad – and killers themselves, looking to up their tally at our expense. Despite the obvious self-defence element of her actions, her employers took an unsurprisingly-dim view of that sort of thing, especially as she’d gone off the procedural straight and narrow. They also frowned upon officers thinking outside the text book. It could have been her police work rather than her handiwork that pushed them into their decision to let her go. At least she avoided prison.
I said she saved my life, twice actually. I felt the debt. When she lost her job and her source of income it seemed the right thing to offer her help. Suddenly I could afford it and if it hadn’t been for her I’d have been dead. With no income and the bailiffs and mortgage lenders waiting in the bushes with their repossession orders, she’d accepted. And we had an arrangement. The place I’d inherited had many rooms above the business premises. She rented a couple for accommodation and one for an office. She’d gone freelance.
We’d started out in our new ventures at similar times and we were experiencing similar stuttering beginnings. It was to be expected. We both had to get known. Fortunately, money was not a problem for me and because money was not a problem for me I wasn’t going to let it be a problem for Jo. Like I said, I owed her. That’s not to say she milked it. She kept accounts and knew to the penny what she owed me. It didn’t matter to her what I owed her.
‘David.’ She sounded occupied.
‘You in?’
‘On my way out.’
‘Got a client in the shop looking for you. Got time?’
‘You know I have. Give me two minutes.’
To Mrs Swaine, I said, ‘She’s on her way down.’
Mrs Swaine stood and flicked something off her nice overcoat. ‘This is new, isn’t it?’ she said, letting her gaze roam around the inte
rior.
‘It is.’
She gave no impression of being enamoured. ‘You think you can make something like this work in Dymchurch?’
‘Not a chance. I only opened the place because I need to lose some tax money.’
She gave me a sharp look and had her mouth open before she realised I was being funny. We were saved further awkwardness by Jo pushing through the front door. She waved to Mel and crossed the very expensive industrial grade laminate wooden flooring in our direction. She was looking good in a casual dress down sort of way. She’d lost some weight with her worries and she was working out hard in her spare time. She had a lot of spare time.
I said, ‘Mrs Swaine, this is Jo Cash. She’s the one you’re looking for.’ They nodded to each other and I made a note to speak to Jo about her people skills. A smile and a handshake wouldn’t kill her. To Jo I said, ‘We’re shut so you can talk down here if you like.’
To Mrs Swaine, Jo said, ‘OK with you? I have an office upstairs if you’d prefer.’
‘Over there will be fine, I suppose,’ said Mrs Swaine, indicating with an upward jerk of her fine chin a secluded group of furniture behind a low divide and a pot of indoor shrubbery.
‘You sure you don’t want something to drink?’ I said. ‘It’s on the house.’ I got another no thank you from Mrs Swaine and an order for a fresh orange juice from my tenant and saviour.
Mel was all but finished. I told her to go home and I’d lock up. I took the juice over to Jo, came back and poured myself another mug of the black stuff. Another benefit of owning your own coffee shop is that you can help yourself to good coffee any time you feel like it. I sat back down with my bills and tried not to listen to what was being discussed a few tables away.
A few minutes later I heard a chair push back and I turned to see Mrs Swaine getting to her feet. The women shook hands, which I took as an encouraging sign. Mrs Swaine walked over to the long wall of bookcases. She tilted her head this way and that as she examined some of the spines through the safety glass. I let her. It’s what they were there for.
When she came back past me she stopped and said, ‘I heard you have every one of the Booker Prize titles. Is that true?’
‘Every one from every list,’ I said.
‘We have books and a library too,’ she said.
‘They certainly furnish a room,’ I said. ‘Every home should have some.’
‘Good luck with your shop. I think you’ll need it.’ She didn’t say it meanly.
I watched her walk away and she must have known I would. She let herself out into the miserable, darkening January afternoon, pulled the door firmly shut and then her collar up. Without a backward glance, she walked off.
Jo came to sit in the two-seater opposite me.
‘Job?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Want to talk about it?’
‘Client confidentiality. Sorry.’
I waited. She was going to tell me. I knew it and she knew it. That’s how close we’d become. Not lovers. It seemed we would never be lovers. And sometimes I was strangely glad of that. Sex ruins everything, eventually. In my experience, it’s the beginning of the end. What Jo and I had was an honest friendship borne out of our shared near-death experience and nurtured in the bosom of our recent companionship. We were equals but not partners. We shared a roof but not a home. And we never shared a bed. Not once. Harry and Sally we were not.
‘She wants me to find someone.’
‘A missing person?’
‘Not exactly. She says someone’s blackmailing her husband. She’s not supposed to know. She found out by accident.’
‘For how much?’
‘She didn’t say.’
‘Blackmailing him over what?’
‘She didn’t say.’
‘For how long?’
‘She didn’t say.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She said someone’s blackmailing her husband.’
***
2
I asked Jo where she thought to start with that. She said she was going to go and see the woman the following afternoon. Her husband would be out.
‘Aldington?’
‘Yes. How did you know?’
‘Lucky guess. Swaine’s an unusual name on the Marsh. In fact, the only ones I know of live at Goldenhurst Manor up Giggers Green Road.’ I thought I’d show off a bit. ‘It was once owned and lived in by Noel Coward.’
Jo gave me a blank look. ‘Who was Noel Coward?’
Sometimes she could disappoint me horribly. ‘Only one of the finest playwrights this country has ever known.’
‘Oh. The theatre.’
‘He acted in films too.’
‘Such as?’
‘Our Man in Havana.’ Nothing. ‘Paris, When It Sizzles.’ I might as well have been talking to a potato. ‘The Italian Job.’
‘With Mark Wahlberg?’
‘No. The one from the sixties.’
‘I didn’t know there was one from the sixties.’
I changed the subject to something less sad for me. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Mind your own business.’
‘What time will you be back?’
‘Mind your own business.’
‘I’m doing a curry tonight. Want some saved?’
She smiled at me for that. ‘What time’s it ready?’
‘Sevenish.’
‘I’ll be here. Want me to pick anything up? Booze?’
I shook my head. ‘I’ve got it.’
She left. I locked up after her and went back to my bookwork and my coffee.
I soon tired of that. I tidied the piles of invoices, pushed them to one side for paying and filing and took out my new project – something that held far more interest for me.
A couple of months before, I’d done a man a favour. I’d kept him out of something and probably out of jail. His only son had been murdered by the same men who’d killed my aunt and uncle. He had known I was looking for them and had offered me a piece of land that joined the property I’d inherited if I kept him in the loop. He didn’t just want to be in at the kill – he wanted to be part of it. I’d kept him ignorant of my progress and he’d ended up more grateful. They got what was coming to them and that’s what mattered. There was also the not inconsiderable matter that his son was one of them and had been involved in the deaths of my relatives. He’d given the land to me anyway to show his gratitude and his regret for the actions of his wayward offspring.
It had been about an acre of overgrown builder’s yard, littered with the rusting, rotting surplus of his business. It wasn’t now. He’d had plans to develop it for residential property one day. My plans were a little different.
Six months before I’d been an unhappily married ex-pat living in Turkey and working as an English teacher. I owned nothing that meant anything to me and nothing of value. My material situation shaped my outlook. Now I had money and property and my outlook had changed. I was no longer feeling transitory – a migrant worker. These days I was feeling the need to root myself somewhere and establish something. I had to hope this wasn’t the male biological equivalent of nest building. As far as I was aware, my biological clock either hadn’t been wound or was missing its battery. Oh, and my Turkish wife had divorced me for an infidelity that never was.
My plans for the yard were to develop it. I wanted a home for myself – nothing ostentatious or expensive. I nurtured a great interest in a having a small cabin-type home made using sustainable products, employing energy-saving systems and being something entirely remarkable for the village. I had been interested in renewable energy as a concept for a long time. I could only ever dream about being in a position to realise my fantasies. Well, now I was. Solar panels, wind turbine and an ecological footprint about the size of a toddler’s slipper. Jo referred to the idea as my eco ego.
I wanted to plant trees and I wanted free-to-roam farmyard animals: a rescue donkey, a few chickens, ducks, maybe a friendl
y pig. I could have been turning into a hybrid fantasy lovechild of Johnny Morris and Steve Irwin, without the shorts.
On the patch of land immediately behind where the old concrete panel fence had been, and which had separated the property I had inherited from the yard, I wanted an area of outdoor seating and an all-weather children’s playground to go with the business. I also had plans for extending the back of the coffee shop to provide a further enclosed seating area for my potential ‘c’ word customers.
From my coffee shop’s opening day, children had been an issue. Or rather their parents were. Despite being a teacher of young learners by profession, I don’t hate kids. But it has been my sad experience that too often too many parents don’t want to play the responsible adult when they take their offspring out to eat and drink. Too many parents made Edward VIII’s wayward idea of duty and obligation pardonable.
I wanted my coffee shop to be an oasis of peace and tranquillity in a seaside village that rejoiced in its reputation as ‘The Children’s Paradise’. I wanted it to be a haven, a sanctuary, a place of refuge for those wishing to escape the omnipresence of the little shrieking blighters and enjoy some time away from them.
As it was, refusing entry to people on the grounds that they had kids with them in the same way that I might refuse entry to someone with a snarling, leashed pit-bull made me morally uncomfortable. It made me feel like someone Roald Dahl could have written about. It also could have been actionable in the European Court. I didn’t know and I didn’t want to find out the hard way. But I’d had too many well-deserved and much-looked-forward-to coffee shop breaks ruined by parents who either could not control the fruit of their loins or couldn’t be bothered to try. And when it came down to it, this was my place and, within certain limits, I made the rules.
I wanted to cater to families for the sake of the business and my conscience. I also wanted to give those who didn’t want to suffer other people’s screaming children tearing around and ruining the ambience of a place somewhere they knew they could get what they were looking for. My plans for out the back signalled my intentions for the long term. I longed for the day I could offer the choice to my customers: children or non-children.