by M B Vincent
Above it all drifted Prosecco bubbles burped out by a machine clamped to the grade II-listed ceiling. The distant braying of the Lady Mayoress could be heard above the saccharine pop music and the whoops of people who really should know better ricocheting around the bouncy castle.
Familiar faces abounded; the gene pool in Castle Kidbury was small. The same folk went to all the parties, all the funerals, all the whatever-this-was. It was unfortunate, then, that the first person to say hello was Steven Norris.
‘What was it you called me, your honour?’ Norris scratched his head, pretending to think. He took the ever-present lollipop out of his mouth and pointed it at the Judge. ‘Oh yeah. That’s right. A threat to society who lacks conscience or decency. Well, here I am, out and about, threatening society left, right and centre.’
‘The aim of prison is rehabilitation,’ said the Judge. He moved so that he was slightly in front of his daughter. ‘You have the opportunity to rebuild. It’s a shame to throw it away for the sake of leaving me and my family little gifts.’
‘Gifts?’ The lollipop went back into Norris’s mean little mouth. ‘I wouldn’t give you the steam off me piss, Judge.’ He looked at Jess. ‘Make no truce nor treaty with foes, eh?’
Transfixed by the way the lollipop bobbed, it took a second for Jess to recognise the quote from the Edda. She answered with another. ‘Talk sense or be silent.’ That lollipop was a signal. It was talking to Jess but the translation was tantalisingly out of reach.
‘You should dress up, love,’ said Norris. He took the lolly out of his mouth and gave it a languorous lick. ‘You might be halfway fanciable if you showed a bit of flesh.’
‘Oh fu—' began Jess, but the Judge cut her off.
‘Mr Norris, we have no more to say to each other.’ He steered Jess away.
‘What a pig!’ she said, loud enough for Norris to hear.
‘I can’t disagree,’ said her father. ‘But the best way to deal with him is to ignore him.’
Such stoicism didn’t come easy to Jess. She would have liked to rugby-tackle Norris there and then, but instead she said, ‘Dad, can you see Eden anywhere? I have to speak to him.’ That lollipop had unleashed something. She pushed away from her father through the crowd.
She passed Meera hanging upside down from a plastic tree. She pushed a pensioner on a swing. She saw the back of Eden’s head and pressed on.
She didn’t get far. A figure came down a bright red slide at speed and landed in a crumpled heap at Jess’s feet. ‘Squeezers, you all right?’
‘Yes, Jess, super fine I am.’ He jumped up, holding back tears. ‘It’s more slippy than I was led to believe.’ The dirty streak he’d left along the slide had the adults at the top backing down the stairs rather than risk following him. ‘Your daddy is here, is he?’ Squeezers had added a top hat to his ensemble. A filthy top hat, it goes without saying. ‘I want to sketch him and his lovely ladyfriend.’
‘Dad doesn’t have a—' As she spoke, the crowd parted long enough to offer Jess a glimpse of her father. He was laughing; she barely recognised him. Looking up at him, also laughing, was Patricia Smalls. There was lipstick on her teeth and a gleam in her eye.
The flowers he’d carried the other morning made sense. The brunch he’d arranged in order to tell Jess something only to get cold feet. Worse, much worse, than the blood-soaked wig was the spectre of Patricia Smalls as Stepmother.
She’s reeling him in at last.
The tide of Kidburyites swept Jess away and washed her up on the shore of a giant climbing frame. She heard a familiar laugh. Way up among the beams, Mary sat astride the frame. She dangled her legs, nonchalant, despite being fifteen feet up in the air.
‘Come up, y’old tart!’ she called.
Beside Mary, anything but nonchalant, Rupert had wrapped himself around a yellow pole. Savile Row suits are not climbing gear. He managed to smile, but it was gruesome.
‘I see Jack’s let you out to play,’ shouted Jess. ‘Literally.’
‘Mmhmpf,’ said Rupert, every iota of his concentration already in use.
The nails-on-blackboard sound of microphone feedback made the whole room cringe, and a strident voice said, ‘Testing! Testing!’
‘Oh God, speeches,’ groaned Mary, and shimmied down a pole to land beside Jess.
Left alone up near the ceiling, Rupert whimpered.
‘Welcome, thanks for coming, blah blah blah.’ Gillian, up in the minstrels’ gallery, tore through the niceties. She was in full business armour, grey suit and assassin heels. ‘Let me explain the ethos of BiGrKid.’
Suspicious of anything with an ethos, Jess exchanged a wry look with Mary. She would have exchanged one with Rupert as well, but his eyes, twenty feet above her, were squeezed shut.
‘We all lead stressful lives. Modern life’s a bastard.’
‘Naughty!’ Susannah spoke for them all. Castle Kidbury was not accustomed to their public figures using what Susannah referred to as ‘bad words’.
‘We’re all under pressure. We juggle jobs and families and we go to bed at night exhausted. Do you ever find yourself yearning to be a kid again, when everything was simple?’
A sympathetic groan or two suggested Gillian had struck a nerve.
‘Now you can do just that. Let yourself go. Regress. Clamber up the climbing net or whizz down the slide.’
Jess had clocked the stack of disclaimers by the door. Gillian had no intention of being liable for arthritic knees broken on the trampoline. She turned away from the mini Mussolini on the balcony and continued her slow progress through the crush towards Eden.
‘Only me!’ Patricia Smalls appeared on the minstrels’ gallery. ‘I know my dear friend Gillian won’t mind me interrupting.’
Gillian did mind. ‘No friends in business, Patricia,’ she snapped. ‘Get on with it.’
‘Two dear faces are absent from this happy occasion. We recently lost our brave florist, Denis Heap, and now Timothy Wong, a genius with the noodle, has been taken from us.’
Jess was closing in on Eden.
‘Our thoughts and prayers,’ simpered Patricia, who rarely thought and never prayed, ‘are with the families.’
‘Yes, all very sad.’ Gillian wrested back the spotlight. ‘But all this fuss about two murders!’ Evidently unable to read the room, she ploughed on through the polite shock. ‘Domestic violence claims the lives of two women every week!’
Jess stopped and looked up at Gillian, absorbing that horrible statistic.
‘It’s time we did something about that.’ Gillian was enraged. ‘Or are men more valuable than women?’
Patricia Smalls crept away backwards. The mayoress steered clear of controversy at all times.
‘But for now,’ said Gillian, as if remembering where she was and what she was supposed to be doing, ‘enjoy yourselves!’
A muted ‘Hurray’ went up.
Rupert fell off the climbing frame and made a soft splat on the cushioned mats.
Jess tapped Eden on the shoulder.
‘The lollipops,’ she said, ‘are important.’
‘Explain.’
Jess loved how he plunged straight in; hellos, in her experience, were overrated. ‘The placement of the lolly is the sacred part. That’s the ritual. Not the slaughter. Not the burning of bits. The placement of the lollipop is an arrow straight to the heart of the killer. The placement at both crime scenes is very precise, and therefore significant. But it’s not pagan. It’s a reward for being a good child.’ She tripped over her words, as if the old gods were at her elbow, urging her on. ‘Thor’s father was Odin, a divine ruler and a bit of a git. He favoured Baldr, Thor’s brother, who was a bit of a golden boy. Not only was he loved, literally, by every living thing, which must have got right up Thor’s nose, but their parents travelled the world extracting a promise from everybody never to harm Baldr. So the pressure to please his parents was strong.’
‘But,’ said Eden, who used the word a lot, ‘Norris doesn�
�t have a brother.’
‘Or a father.’ Jess smirked; she hadn’t yet got the hang of not being smug about her breakthroughs. ‘What if Norris is desperately trying to please the father who abandoned him?’
‘Interesting.’
Jess smirked harder. This was a huge compliment from her mentor. ‘There’s more. Wong did have a beef with the Norrises.’ She relayed Iris’s gossip/vital intel.
‘Good work,’ said Eden.
You look tired, thought Jess, who knew Eden saw himself as a sentry. Two of ‘his’ people were dead. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about finding the entrails at Kidbury Henge?’ Jess caught his arm as he turned away. ‘Am I a consultant or not?’ She hadn’t meant to sound hurt; she’d meant to sound professional.
‘I asked Knott to contact you.’
If Jess had been in a movie she would have turned knowingly to the camera; instead she just harrumphed. ‘Another thing,’ she said. ‘Not sure if it’s important.’
‘Sometimes,’ said Eden, ‘they’re the most important things of all.’
‘Tru dat,’ said Jess, and regretted it. ‘Gillian Cope, I know she’s not a suspect, but she has a hell of a grudge against Jolly Cook.’ She took Eden’s interest as an invitation to go on. ‘Some sort of business deal went wrong, and she feels sore about it. Reckons they cost her a ton of money.’
‘And was humiliated, which is often even more of a motive than money. I’ll have a word with her. Or get Moretti to do it. If he can take some time off from grooming himself.’
Squeezers went by on a Spacehopper. He mowed down Graham from Dickinson’s Books. Mary felled an inflatable unicorn with a taekwondo axe kick. Bigrkid was one big cheese dream.
To add to the surreality, Jess found her father in a ball pit. She got in, and they faced each other, knee-deep in, well, balls.
The Judge studied a small pencil drawing. ‘Do I really look like that?’
Jess was studying him. Trying to perceive him as a man, not just her father. A man capable of a relationship, a love affair. ‘How much did you give Squeezers?’
‘He estimated a value of ten thousand dollars. I gave him a couple of pounds.’
You gave him more than a couple, Dad. Jess relished such glimpses of his softer side. ‘You were right – this is fun.’ Jess tried to sit back. Lost her balance among the balls.
A Prosecco bubble popped on the back of the Judge’s head.
The Judge adjusted his position. Grimaced. ‘How long is one expected to spend in these things?’
Jess needed her father’s attention a little longer. For the briefest of moments, she was a tot again, and back in his study. The solid sureness of his legs behind her back, the gold of the carpet, and the dancing colours of the fire. ‘Sitting here makes me feel like a kid again,’ she said.
‘Can’t think of anything further from my childhood. My memories are cold showers, dorm beatings, and the smell of TCP.’
‘Why don’t we ever talk about David?’ With no easy way to bring up such a topic, Jess plumped for the brutalist approach.
‘There’s not much to say. It was an unfortunate accident.’
‘You sound like a coroner’s report.’
The Judge pulled out his reading glasses. Polished them. Said nothing.
‘Why do we never discuss it? Like we never discuss Mum.’
‘We do discuss your mother!’ The Judge was prickly.
‘You might think we do, Dad. But we don’t. Not really.’ Not in the way Jess craved. A way that kept Harriet woven into the family fabric. A way that kept her memory warm, rather than revered. She heard Patricia Smalls neigh in the distance. ‘David is—’
‘Such an interest in David, all of a sudden. I can’t be expected to indulge all your short-lived obsessions.’
How to explain her feelings to a man with no shared vocabulary? Jess couldn’t describe her complicated sense of being bound somehow to her dead cousin. Exasperated, she threw a ball in the air and caught it. ‘Why am I surrounded by people who don’t want to talk to me? You. Iris. Rupert.’
‘Rupert?’
‘He only ever talks about Edinburgh. Or he’s in Edinburgh. Bloody Edinburgh. Bloody Jack.’
Bloody everything.
***
November turned seven p.m. to midnight. The woods were indistinguishable from the fields, which were indistinguishable from the riverbank.
In Harebell House, the central heating hummed. The ugly little china fox her mother had inexplicably adored sat on the table by the front door. The Judge was in his study. Door closed. Vivaldi leaking through the keyhole. Jess had caught Bogna googling ‘llama mating habits’. There was much noise and scuttling in the undergrowth, and a police car sat in the drive.
The house was waiting.
Jess was restless. There would be a welcome for her from Mary, but Jess couldn’t face the mosh pit of the Druid’s Head.
She could go to Iris for one of their special suppers. Foie gras for Iris. Mint Magnum for Jess. But Iris was testy.
Jess snatched up her car keys. Sanctuary can beckon from the most unexpected places.
***
‘I know, I know, you were expecting me!’ said Jess as the front door swung open. ‘What can I smell? Something gorgeous.’ She swung her bag off her shoulder and took the tiny hall in two steps. ‘Oh.’
On the small table, on top of the inevitable embroidered cloth and in the shade of the bushy plant, sat a cake stand.
‘Chocolate fudge cake?’
‘Like your ma used to make.’ Abonda took out a knife far too savage to cut a cake. ‘Only better.’
They were silent as they ate. Sorry Mum, thought Jess, accepting another slice. It really is nicer than yours. ‘I bow down to you, Abonda,’ she said eventually. ‘You did know I was coming.’
The radio was tuned to static with the occasional burst of R‘n’B. The cat was absent. The tarot pack sat on a copy of The Sun.
A thump overhead made Jess ask, ‘Are we alone?’
‘Does it matter?’
Abonda’s evasion confirmed Jess’s suspicion that Norris was at home. ‘What’s in the oven? Jog-jog?’
Abonda very nearly laughed. ‘You and your gypsy lore,’ she tutted. ‘I’ve never eaten a hedgehog in me life. It’s a Tesco cottage pie.’ She seemed more vast than ever, in a dressing gown pulled carelessly together over tiers of faded floral shifts. When she sat, it was with a loud exhalation. ‘You knows where the word “gypsy” comes from, I bet. Egyptian. Back when everybody thought we was from Egypt. I ain’t never been past Dover.’
On a shelf sat a concise row of books. The Alchemy of Herbs, bound in green linen. Medicine from the Hedgerow. And on the end, with a bookmark sticking out of it, was Cooking from the Heart.
Abonda had claimed never to use recipes, but Jess accepted veiled half-truths from the peculiar woman. Besides, if this was Nic’s recipe Jess could only be grateful. She pointed with her fork at the shelf, and said, ‘I expected you to have a book of spells.’
‘Who says I cast spells?’
‘I heard you did one for Timothy Wong.’
An appraising look crept over Abonda’s face. As if to say, ‘Well played’. ‘Man’s a cheat. He swindled me.’
‘He was a cheat. What was the spell? Herbs? Oil and water?’ Jess hesitated. Took up the last fragment of cake. ‘Fire?’
‘Flesh,’ said Abonda. ‘Burnt flesh.’
Jess made a small noise.
‘Just roadkill, mind. Abonda don’t take nothing’s life.’
‘Where did you burn it?’
‘Somewhere special.’
‘Such as . . .?’ Poundham Apostles?
‘If Abonda blabs about it then it ain’t special no more.’
‘The spell worked; Timothy Wong got his planning permission.’
‘All my magic works, Jess.’
Jess thought of Barbara Singleton being helped to her seat at the Town Hall. She picked up a shiny red bead that lay on the tabl
e.
Abonda reached over and slapped Jess’s hand. Hard.
‘Hey!’ Jess scraped her chair backwards.
‘This ain’t no toy.’ Abonda picked up the bead in a handkerchief. Showed it to Jess. ‘It’s a seed.’
‘It’s poisonous?’
‘It’d only give you a rash. If Abonda wanted to kill you, I’d cook it up and feed it to you.’
Fork halfway to her mouth, Jess held Abonda’s challenging gaze. The woman’s eyelids were heavy, wrinkled like crepe. She carried on eating. If she’s poisoned me, least I’ll die happy.
‘You know why you come here,’ said Abonda.
‘For the cake.’
‘Somebody’s calling you, Jess. From the other side. Let me put you in touch with them.’
‘I have enough trouble communicating with people on this side, thanks.’ Despite herself, despite her clear grasp of what was and was not possible, Jess didn’t want to dwell on the notion of somebody ‘calling’ her. She wiped her nose with a jaded tissue. ‘Where can I . . . ?’ She looked around. ‘I can’t see your bin.’
‘Why would I keep rubbish indoors?’ Abonda seemed offended. ‘You heard of marime?’
Until hearing Abonda say the romany word, Jess hadn’t known how to pronounce it. ‘It means unclean.’
‘It means disgusting. Wrong. People can be marime.’ Abonda was stony. ‘We like to keep everything vuzo, clean. You gorgers,’ said Abonda, rising with difficulty. ‘You like to say the Roma are dirty.’
‘When in fact you have tons of rules about hygiene.’ Jess had noted the cloth on the table, the separate towels for crockery and hands. ‘You gave me a special plate that you never use for yourself.’
A stunted laugh. ‘This one, thinks she knows everything. Then you should know we don’t keep bins indoors. Why keep your rubbish in a special box, like it’s precious?’ She held out a Sainsburys bag for Jess to toss her tissue into. She lumbered outside with it. ‘It’s a bad night out there.’ Abonda shivered as she sat down again.
‘Can people be vuzo?’ Jess fancied being vuzo.