Dying For a Cruise

J
ENNY STARLING PULLED
her rather distressed-looking but nearly always reliable cherry-red van to a halt on the crest of a hill and turned off the engine. She removed the ignition keys and put them in the pocket of her lightweight linen jacket, then walked to the edge of the road and looked down at the winding River Thames below.

It was July, and in the fields the barley was just beginning to think of changing its mantle of green for a more mellow hue. The sun shone high and powerful overhead, and somewhere in the distance a church clock struck one. She hoped that it was the church clock in the village of Buscot, which, so her map assured her, was positioned just down the road.

Beside her, in a hawthorn thicket, a yellow hammer whistled merrily for his bread-and-cheese, whilst corn buntings trilled cockily from the highest bushes in the hedges that ran in patchwork lines across the valley. Dog roses and wild poppies bloomed like mad things.

Jenny took a big breath of fresh air and smiled with satisfaction. It was nice to leave the city of Oxford behind every now and then, although she was quite content with her present job as head chef at St Baptista’s College.

What she wasn’t so happy about was the two weeks’ holiday she was being practically forced to take. Union rules, or so the college bursar had said.

She sighed glumly.

Jenny didn’t particularly approve of the – to her mind – somewhat ludicrous habit her fellow holidaymakers had of flocking to some foreign coast every summer in the hope of turning lobster red in the sun. She didn’t find the prospect of getting sand in her shoes exactly appealing, she objected to children depositing sticky ice creams on chairs and benches, and, most of all, she disliked having to eat somebody else’s cooking. All of which meant that Jenny inevitably stayed firmly put during the annual summer migration of the great British public. And usually became thoroughly bored in the process.

Which was why she was always on the lookout for the odd strictly temporary job, to tide her over the slow, boring weeks of her supposed vacation time.

She straightened her majestic shoulders with another sigh. Wallowing in the pastoral beauty around her was all very pleasant, she supposed idly, but she had an appointment at 2.15 with a certain Mr Lucas Finch, who was in need of a cook for the weekend, so she couldn’t dawdle about indefinitely.

A light breeze lifted a few dark glossy curls across her broad forehead as she walked back to the van. At six feet tall, and with a figure that could best be described as Junoesque, she had some difficulty in squeezing her curvaceous frame behind the steering wheel and not for the first time promised herself that she’d look around for a bigger van. One that could hold even more of her catering equipment, and perhaps even come with power steering, air conditioning that worked and, best of all, more leg room for plus-sized drivers!

She steered the old van (which now had painted on one of its panels a very twee scene of unicorns and fairy-tale castles, courtesy of her artistically frustrated mother) slowly down the narrow country lane. She hadn’t passed a single vehicle since turning onto it, and it had a little-used and rather forlornly neglected air.

She had gone only about half a mile down the hill when, coming up the other way, she noticed a man on a rusty and badly squeaking bicycle, who was pedalling away with something less than enthusiasm. He was wearing a personal stereo system and some kind of classical music, leaking past his earplugs, was keeping an eerily accurate tempo with his squeaking front wheel. A moment later she pulled up in front of him and once again switched off the engine and got out. Her van’s ancient internal combustion system was apt to be very loud and noisy and wasn’t above giving the occasional backfire, which tended to make people jump. Herself most of all. The cyclist’s head was well down as he attempted to urge his squeaking steed up the hill, and at first he simply didn’t realize that she had stopped right in front of him. A bag of what looked like groceries lay firmly strapped across the handlebars, which were wobbling rather alarmingly.

Jenny coughed. Loudly.

The man’s head jerked upwards and the handlebars corkscrewed, promptly pitching him head first off the saddle. He landed, rather artistically Jenny thought, right at her feet. He looked as if he were coming up to retirement age, with a small white moustache and more wrinkles on his face than a candlewick bedspread.

She quickly moved her considerable frame into action and went to see if he was all right.

‘Hell’s bells and buckets of blood,’ the man muttered, but the lack of heat in his tone made it sound more like a greeting than a curse. No doubt, Jenny surmised, pedalling for miles on a reluctant bike in the hot summer sun would sap the passion out of anyone. But at least he wasn’t hurt.

As she knelt down beside him, the man rearranged himself so that he was sitting on his bottom (as opposed to his elbow and nose) and stared at the fallen bike in the road. The front wheel was still spinning jauntily, if rather uselessly.

‘Damn the useless piece of junk,’ the cyclist huffed. ‘I’d be better off walking.’ He took off his headphones, and Jenny recognized a passage from Dvorak before he switched the CD off.

And then, as if suddenly remembering the cause of his downfall, his head turned and swivelled sharply upwards, the visor of his cap shading his eyes. What he saw was a wonderful figure of a woman. She was dressed in a very long, very sensible summer dress of cornflower blue with a matching jacket that perfectly complemented the shade of her large and quite beautiful eyes.

The man blinked.

The last time he’d seen a woman of this shapely a size was in the far-gone days of his youth when women had hips and breasts, and the hour-glass shape that made a man’s mouth water.

‘Excuse me,’ Jenny said politely, looking down at the man who happened to be sitting on one of her feet. ‘Could you tell me if I’m anywhere near Buscot?’

The cyclist blinked again. Then, rather reluctantly, he struggled to sit upright, grunting and groaning with theatrical vigour as he did so. He put his hands in the small of his back and stretched. Then winced. Then nodded.

‘Buscot’s just round the bend … er … love. You can’t miss it.’

Since Jenny hadn’t actually considered the possibility that she
might
somehow manage to drive through an entire village without noticing it, she gave him a brief smile of agreement.

‘Thank you. Now, could you tell me how to get to—’ She quickly stood up and delved into the van’s small glove compartment and withdrew a letter ‘—Wainscott House?’

The old man, forgetting his various bruises for a moment, gave her a rather odd look.

‘You’ll be wanting Lucas Finch then?’ he asked. His eyes, which the cook guessed were rather short sighted, narrowed ominously.

Jenny, as a rule, didn’t go about discussing her private business. But since she had – albeit unintentionally – been the cause of his rather abrupt introduction to the tarmac, she supposed that she owed him at least a little something by way of recompense. Besides, she might learn something about her erstwhile employer. She nodded, briefly. ‘That’s right.’

The old man suddenly shrugged. ‘Wainscott House is the last house in the village, right next to the river. Big, square, solid lump of a place it is. You can’t miss that, either.’

Jenny smiled, and almost knocked the poor man flat for a second time. She had, the cyclist mused with a wistful sigh, the loveliest smile he’d ever seen on a woman. Including those of his favourite screen goddesses of yesteryear such as Rita Hayworth and Veronica Lake.

Then he shook off such silly maundering and reached for his bike, hefted it onto its wheels and stared glumly down at it. ‘Another two miles to go,’ he muttered and sighed so heavily that Jenny thought he’d pop the buttons off his shirt. He set about readjusting the shopping bag onto the handlebars, and Jenny bent to retrieve a small jar of instant coffee from the roadside verge that had escaped from between the knotted handles of the carrier bag.

He thanked her for it, shoved it back inside, then turned rather abruptly and gave her a very long look. ‘Lucas Finch ain’t all that popular around these parts, love. Just thought you should know that.’

Jenny, who’d just started to lift one foot in the direction of her van, put it very firmly back onto the ground. ‘Oh?’ she asked, her voice arch and just inviting confidences or downright gossip.

Jenny had had quite a few experiences with people who weren’t ‘too popular’. And sometimes, those occasions had ended in murder.

‘Ahh. A bit of a villain, we reckon.’

Jenny’s left eyebrow began to elevate towards her hairline. ‘Oh? How so?’

The old man sniffed. ‘Well, he’s a cockney for a start,’ he said judiciously. ‘Everyone knows what them big city fellers can get up to. You can’t trust even the so-called professional classes neither nowadays. I blame the bankers for the mess everyone’s in now, I can tell you.’

Jenny bit back a smile and the urge to say ‘Don’t we all?’ but nodded gravely. ‘Anything else?’

The man took off his cap to reveal a sparse crop of grey hairs, and scratched his scalp. ‘Oh, there’s rumours all right. He reckons he grew up in a poor slum, but now he’s rolling in lolly. Well, how did he get it all, hey, if he’s not crooked?’ He thrust his jaw out pugnaciously. ‘That’s what we’d all like to know.’ He sniffed again. ‘‘Sides, he’s got a parrot. One of them big, colourful things, with a long tail and a vicious beak,’ he added ominously, as if that somehow clinched matters. ‘You just watch yourself, love, that’s all,’ he finished, giving her a concerned look. ‘You just watch yourself.’

Jenny smiled again, and the cyclist reared back. He’d managed to stay a bachelor for all of his life precisely because he’d avoided women with lovely smiles. ‘Well, I’d best be off,’ he muttered hastily and gave his bike an experimental push. It squeaked like a mouse catching sight of a pound of cheddar.

Jenny winced and quickly set off in the direction of the village.

The old man, after a few moments’ thought, turned to watch the woman in the oddly painted old van disappear into the distance. She’d climbed into her seat with that very fetching kind of grace that some very large women seemed to possess. She’d walked well too. Almost flowed across the road.

The man frowned. He rather liked the gal. She looked like a good, honest sort. He only hoped she knew what she was doing, getting herself mixed up with the likes of Lucas Finch.

He shrugged, and pushed his complaining bike all the way to the top of the hill, before re-mounting it and wobbling his way precariously to the next village but one, where he had his home.

Wainscott House was indeed situated less than a stone’s throw from the wide River Thames. Jenny parked her van off the road under the shade of a tall horse chestnut tree, locked it up carefully and walked to the white picket gate.

It was not that she suspected that anyone would want to steal the old clunker, especially since her mother and her paintbrush had vented their spleen upon it. But she did have a lot of cookery equipment stored in it, and it would break her heart to lose it if some drunken louts took the van for a joyride and wrecked it.

The house was a solid, square structure, no doubt an old farmhouse in former days. It had a delightful front garden; a ‘proper’ garden, as her grandmother would have said. At the side walls grew hollyhocks and delphiniums, foxgloves and Canterbury bells. A stone path led straight down the middle to the front door, and was edged by pansies, marigolds, love-in-a-mists, feverfew and Sweet Williams. A honeysuckle grew up the front porch, framing the old wooden door with fragrant blooms. Bees and butterflies wove their happy pollen-drunken way through the warm air, filling it with sound and fluttering colour.

Jenny sighed in rather envious bliss at the picture-postcard perfection of the scene, then glanced at her watch. She was early. Too bad. She marched up the path, set down her small case that she kept permanently packed for such short-term assignments like this one, and very firmly thumped on the door.

And Jenny
could
thump very firmly when she needed to.

A moment later the door was opened by a tall, thin, grey-haired man, with watery blue eyes. On his left shoulder sat a large blue and scarlet macaw. Its yellow and black beady eyes settled on her as the bird cocked its head curiously to one side.

‘Hello,’ it said. Quite clearly.

Jenny smiled at it.

Lucas Finch gaped rudely at the shapely giantess in front of him, and his jaw fell comically open. ‘Bugger me,’ he said at last.

Jenny, not a whit put out by the rather unconventional greeting, smiled politely and held out her hand. ‘I’m Miss Starling,’ she said firmly.

As if she could be anybody else.

Lucas started, making the parrot’s tail upend in an effort to keep his balance, and then thrust out his own hand to take hers in a hearty grip. ‘Lucas Finch,’ he said jovially.

‘I wrote in answer to your advertisement for a cook for the weekend?’ she prompted, when he made no move to either speak or invite her in.

Lucas blinked, then suddenly seemed to recover his equilibrium. ‘Oh, right. Yes. That’s right. Er … yes. Er … won’t you come in?’ He stepped back, and led her into what, just forty years ago, people referred to as the front parlour. It was now decked out to be something of an office-cum-study with a splendid view across the river and to the copse of trees on the opposite bank.

‘Er … won’t you sit down?’ he asked. He looked for all the world like a man who, having got what he wanted, now hadn’t the faintest idea of what to do with it. ‘Er … drink?’

Jenny smiled. ‘A cold glass of squash would be nice?’ she asked, hopefully.

‘Squash?’ Lucas, who had gone automatically to the drinks cabinet, put down the decanter of whisky he was holding, and half turned. ‘Er … right. Squash.’

He was indeed, as her cyclist friend had informed her, most definitely a cockney. His words came down his nose with a cockney twang that would tarnish silver. ‘Squash,’ he said again, and stared forlornly at the drinks cabinet.