The Food Detective (16 page)

‘None at all. Like I said, all I wanted was nice legitimate
paperwork
for my nice legitimate business. And when it didn’t appear, I changed to a supplier who practically bakes his beasts birthday cakes he knows them so well. And he knows the slaughterhouse, too,’ I added, wondering if they were bright enough to take the bait.

‘Why did you do the research?’ Short asked, surprising me.

‘I just happened to be surfing the Web one day and saw an item on this young man with – what to they call it? CJD? And I took it from there.’

‘But why?’

‘Serendipity,’ I said, still preferring to keep Nick out of this.

‘And do you reckon,’ Evans jumped in, ‘that it was serendipity that brought all that – that
matter
– to your doorstep?’

I sensed a trap. ‘Like I said, ask Reg Bulcombe.’

‘Is this Mr Bulcombe’s handwriting?’ He flourished a scrap of paper torn from an exercise book.

‘I’ll need my reading glasses. Could you pass me my bag? Thanks. There.’ I read the words aloud.
‘You nozy bastared, I warned you to clear out or you’re lanlady’ll get a nasty surprise.’
Where did this come from?’

‘Someone had tucked it under a windscreen wiper.’

Hell and damnation! OK, some of Nick’s activities might have to come into the open. But fancy him just clearing off like that, in that cowardly, supine way, without a word to me! I’d have stood up to whoever it was, you bet I would. I supposed I should say something. ‘Yours?’ As he nodded, I mused, ‘So all that
wasn
’t
meant for me!’ I ought to feel happier than I did.

‘Only indirectly. So who would the nosy bastard be?’

‘I can only think it must be my temporary lodger. Nick Thomas. But why they should leave a note on your car…’ I feigned innocence. ‘Ah, I suppose you wouldn’t drive a dirty great gas-guzzling four-wheel drive? Silver? That’ll be it, then. They thought it was his.’

‘So why should they wish to get rid of him?’

‘I’d tell you to ask him yourself, but he’s left a phone message saying he’s working in the South East for a bit. He’s some sort of civil servant,’ I added carelessly, leaning back and crossing my legs above the knee. How much had Sue, not to mention the villagers, said about him?

Whatever the effect on Short, Evans didn’t buy my ignorance. ‘What sort?’

‘I’m sure he’ll tell you when you talk to him. He’s definitely coming back, he says.’ The men exchanged glances – so they did know about him. To clarify, I added, ‘He’s paying me to keep his room. He’s based in Taunton, mostly.’

‘And has now conveniently decamped.’ I couldn’t tell who Evans was more irritated with, Nick or me.

‘I’d have thought,’ I objected, for both our sakes, ‘that you need to talk less to Mr Thomas than to the guy who threatened him, wouldn’t you? And I don’t know Mr Bulcombe’s writing, but I’d say whoever wrote it spelt the way he speaks, and that certainly doesn’t rule him out.’ To mark a change of subject, I recrossed my legs. ‘What are you proposing to do with my gift? I take it whoever it was committed some sort of offence to dump it there? It’s not exactly good for public health or the environment.’

‘I’ve already arranged for its disposal,’ he said stiffly. ‘And here are a couple of industrial cleaners we sometimes have to use.’ He flicked two business cards. ‘The caravan site, you said.’

‘Yes, just down the road here. While you’re at it, you could even ask him why his field’s flooded and nowhere else is. No, better not. Because he’ll know who tipped you off. I saw him loading waders and shovel into his car the other day and we
exchanged a couple of sentences. I think he must have gone off to reorganise a watercourse. The stream next to the post office virtually dried up while the caravan field flooded, you see. Now the stream’s running as usual, and the field’s conveniently recovered.’

‘That’ll be for his insurance company to sort out,’ Short said, his face lifting with relief: someone else would get to do the paperwork. ‘I’m sure they’d be grateful for a tip-off too.’

How much else should I reveal? Damn and blast Nick.

I checked my watch. ‘I’m afraid I have a pub to run, gentlemen.’ And a call to make to my insurance company, for the cost of cleaning and a fresh carpet and a spot of redecoration.

‘You reckon you’ll have any customers?’ Evans demanded, taking the hint and getting to his feet.

I looked him frankly in the eye. ‘To a large extent that depends on you. If you let it be known that there’s actually no sign of Mr Thomas, they may come flooding back, keen to show me all is forgiven. On the other hand, they might not like me either. We shall see.’

‘We shall indeed. Now, the council should get that lot clear by nightfall.’

‘Nightfall!’ I squeaked.

‘You might try soft-soaping them. The men might even hose the place down if you slip them a fiver.’ He took a step forward. ‘I reckon it’s Mr Thomas they’re after – don’t take kindly to strangers, round here.’

I looked him straight in the eye. ‘What are you and I, Mr Evans, if not strangers?’ Perhaps that was why I’d told him more than I’d meant; perhaps that was why I’d formed that unlikely alliance with Nick – because however much they might need someone to run their waterhole, the villagers certainly didn’t want an incomer like me to do it, no, nor any other incomers around the place either. If they were feuding with me, I’d make my alliances where I could.

Like any good hostess, I saw my visitors out – through the main pub door, that is – walking courteously with them to their car. It was actually a twin of the first one Nick had tried, gross in
the bodywork with huge wheels and, no doubt, a full complement of bells and whistles within. I wasn’t the only one to have taken umbrage. Someone had taken a set of keys to the paintwork and slashed all the tyres. But I didn’t think it was the aesthetics of the thing or the harm it did to the environment that had offended them. ‘You’re right,’ I said quietly, while the men sounded off. ‘The villagers don’t like strangers.’

Chapter Sixteen

Monday always was a slack pub day, closed at lunchtime and open just for drinks in the evening. No, not my idea: the previous
landlord
’s. He’d needed time to breathe occasionally too. But there wouldn’t be much breathing till they’d lugged the guts to another place. The phrase was irritatingly familiar, more irritatingly
elusive
when I tried to track it down. Maybe it’d come to me if I drove into Taunton to clear my head. Actually to check with the employment people about possible bar staff: they should have had time by now to respond to my fax. There were a couple of possibles, both, fortunately, with their own transport. I’d try the first on Tuesday lunchtime, the other on Tuesday evening, I said. Hang WeightWatchers, just this once. There was no fee to forfeit, since I was on their Gold Standard: I never lost less than my
target
, and often lost more. Apart from the first vulnerable weeks, I’d never hung round for the pep talk and socialising. My own scales told me I’d lost another couple of pounds, and that would have to do. So I set off briskly to collect my photos and have the current lot developed. As before, negatives and a set of prints would go to Piers.

And I – would go to Birmingham.

No, not so mad. The industrial cleaners couldn’t make it till tomorrow morning, though the council had promised to remove the waste by the end of the day. And I couldn’t face a day and night of ever-increasing pong. I had to go somewhere, and why not Birmingham, my home town and proud possessor of the
central
library which Prince Charles had described as a place better suited to burning books than to storing them? And if the library’s archive failed, then I could always go to the offices of the local papers and ask to see their back numbers. I hadn’t packed an overnight bag, of course, but had no intention of
wasting
time going back to get it. A spot of retail therapy in a city with decent shops was called for, and, the way the city was
changing
, a bit of sightseeing. Selfridge’s, the new Bull Ring – here I come.

I never liked going back, as a matter of fact. Too many
memories
. OK, there were good ones as well as bad, but my philosophy
has always been that you should always move forward, never back. And, despite myself, I’d become a countrywoman. The traffic, the fumes – I felt totally bombarded. And it wasn’t just traffic noise – it was people noise too. Unwilling to fight through roads I’d once laughed at, I checked in at a hotel in suburban Edgbaston and caught a bus. Not a single passenger seemed to be sitting silently or even talking quietly to a neighbour. Every
conversation
was at maximum volume, with the odd one not joining in adding to the mêleé with overloud personal stereos. No
wonder
someone was smoking pot to calm their nerves – I wouldn’t have minded a spliff myself. But not in a bus plastered with no smoking notices. I looked around – no, no furtive fags cupped in hands. Except one in the driver’s.

At least none of the librarians were smoking, not visibly at least. I made my way to the sixth floor. What I remembered, probably wrongly, as a silent place of study, now seemed to be a dating agency for kids for all the ethnic backgrounds under the sun, their voices rising like those of the flocks of starlings that had once ruled the city centre. I could be an old codger and remind the librarians of what seemed like baby-sitting duties. Or I could concentrate hard on what I was putting through the microfiche and maybe I wouldn’t hear.

There was a lot to concentrate on in 80s Birmingham – race, politics, pollution, unemployment. But nothing seemed to fit the bill. Not until I came across the magic headline,
KINGS HEATH SIEGE
. Hallo, hallo, hallo, as Dixon of Dock Green might have said.

Kings Heath was not one of my regular stamping grounds though in fact not all that far from Bartley Green, the suburb that Tony had for some reason made his base. Bartley Green included a reservoir where nice people sailed little boats and a lot of
high-rise
council flats, latterly home to a lot of cheap-skate drug-dealers Tony wouldn’t have given the time of day to. We’d had a top floor flat in one of them. Don’t ask me why he was taking up cheap accommodation meant for the poor and homeless when we were spectacularly neither. Tony could have afforded to buy the whole block, several times over. Well, he owned enough overseas,
ones he’d always meant to use as bolt holes when the Law got after him. None of them was in his name, of course, and it would have taken more dedicated forensic accountants than the West Midlands Police had ever had at their disposal to trace them back to him. They were in quite different names now, many quite
legitimately
since I’d sold them and bought other things, including my education. Not to mention my pub and my flying lessons, of course.

My memories of Kings Heath were mainly of streets and streets of Victorian terrace housing, some better than others. There was some more recent stuff, and one or two grander Victorian houses, many now multi-occupied, of course.

Once upon a time, mentally ill people had routinely been crammed away in remote institutions, long ago even used as objects of upper-class amusement. Under Thatcher, two initiatives changed this. One was a realisation that in many cases this was plainly unsuitable for many, unnecessary, even. Another was a more pragmatic need for health authorities to clear old institutions to sell them and raise funds. So it became fashionable to turf out institutionalised folk and call it care in the community. Fine if there’d been any care in place and readily available. There were a number of highly publicised cases where innocent men and women were killed by mentally ill people who really should have been locked away for life – but whose hospitals were now bijou housing. One case was in Birmingham: it was all coming back to me now, courtesy the fuzzy pictures now on the pages I was now scanning.

A kind and loving young man had been returned to the community and popped into a Victorian bed-sit. He’d decided that his pregnant sixteen-year-old girlfriend was carrying the Antichrist. He proposed to stab her to death and crucify the foetus. Fellow lodgers overheard her screams and his rantings, and called the police.

The evening, but not the lunchtime, edition carried the story, which seemed to be ongoing. For some reason there’d been some delay in bringing in the officers used to dealing with what rapidly turned into a siege. I knew that by that stage police had actually
started to train teams – one of Tony’s less likeable associates had been talked out of shooting his mother-in-law, though I hadn’t liked her much either. And there were certainly armed response units in the force, because they’d started to arrive suspiciously promptly at bank hold-ups and the like. But on this particular day ordinary local officers were involved. Maybe there simply wasn’t time to bring the experts in. Who knows?

The following day’s lunchtime edition carried the grim news. Someone had taken the decision to rush the young man, who’d slit the girl’s abdomen in front of them. As she lay dying, the young man turned on the officers, some of whom had also suffered terrible injuries. At last a sharpshooter had arrived and the man was killed. No police names were given. All this in a quiet and uninteresting suburb, known to people like me more for the number of charity shops on its high street than for anything else. What I needed now was the report of the inquest, which would no doubt appear in greater detail in the
Evening Mail’s
more sober morning stable mate, the
Birmingham Post
.

‘You want it
now?
’ the librarian asked. ‘We’ll be closing in five minutes.’

And so they would. Doesn’t time fly when you’re enjoying yourself? And, damn it, I couldn’t come back for more. I’d got a pub to run, remember, and a new bar-person to try out. So I had to be on the M5, scene of all those lovely Midlands traffic jams, by five at the latest. Hell and damnation. But at least I could take advantage of Birmingham’s culinary excellence. Not for nothing did the natives regard it as the curry capital not just of the UK but also of Europe.

The industrial cleaners did a wonderful job, inside and out, and I rewarded them with on the house food. The new barman, an affable young man from Southampton called Robin, clearly thought it an unusual way to run a pub, but handed across pie and chips and engaged both them and the other customers – passing trade to a man – in pleasant football chitchat. So why did I have reservations about him?

‘A motorcycle’s a pretty vulnerable form of transport,’ I said awkwardly. I didn’t want to spell out my fears about tripwires and attack by four by fours.

‘Very green,’ he countered. ‘And cheap.’

‘All the floods we’ve had –’

‘The rain’s easing off. And I really need the work.’

I took a deep breath. ‘The village doesn’t always take to grockles – I’ve had a bit of trouble myself. Hence the cleaners.’ I explained. ‘Though I think the entrails were meant for one of my guests, not me.’

‘I noticed the vacancies sign. It could do with a bit of a clean up.’

‘It could do with taking down. Until the refurbishment’s over, anyway. The furniture and décor’s out of the ark.’

He looked wistful. ‘I suppose there’s no chance of accommodation?’

‘Thrown in?’

‘I could pay.’

‘Not much on the wages I advertised at. And you can see from today there’s not much in tips. None from the locals, should they deign to turn up.’

He put down the glass he was polishing and regarded me steadily. ‘Why don’t you tell me straight I don’t get the job? And could you tell me why?’

It was hard to lie to such clear grey eyes. And perhaps it was better for us both to be quite honest. ‘I think you’d be brilliant and I’d throw in accommodation for free. But I’m afraid for you, Robin. Seriously afraid.’

‘Will you be afraid for the person you’re interviewing this evening?’

The answer was that the evening’s candidate – Dec, a shaven-headed Irishman in his forties – could have used his head to knock in nails and never even blinked. And he smoked more than an unswept chimney. It might have been prissy to object when he was to work in a room where you could have cured kippers on the leftovers of previous cigarettes and pipes still floating in the atmosphere. But I did. And I didn’t like the way he hummed silently and kept time with his clicking fingers to a tune I couldn’t hear. As for his communication skills, there was little chance for him to practise, the only ones in the bar being a party of French tourists who preferred Lucy’s tortured attempts at their
tongue to attempting to break through the language barrier. Was it that that made matters tense between her and Dec? No, Dec was almost certainly off my list. Was it back to Robin?

Or should I rethink the whole thing? Should I try once more in the village? I could ask Sue to exert some pressure. Yes, and put her in an awkward position. A toss up between Robin, whom I liked, and a Neanderthal I didn’t. One for the ethicists, that.

‘I’ll get back in touch with you as soon as I’ve seen everyone else,’ I told Dec lamely.

‘Suit yourself. Not much custom, is there? Hardly worth having anyone else except that cute kid working here.’

‘If Lucy were eighteen, I wouldn’t have anyone else. But since she can’t serve drinks –’ I stopped short, looking at him closely.

He became so blasé I knew what the spat must have been about.

‘You didn’t make her, did you?’

‘Oh, she offered – said you let her.’

Which, in view of the chicken pie, I didn’t believe. So Robin it would have to be.

He seemed over the moon when I phoned him.

‘You won’t be welcomed in the village, remember. And being sent to Coventry may not be the worst you get. Think guts, Robin.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘And you’ll let me have cheap accommodation?’

‘I told you, I’ll throw it in for free. So long as you promise me to lock your motorbike away every moment you’re not using it. I’ll clear one of the outbuildings for you.’

‘No. That’ll be my job. Least I can do.’

‘See you tomorrow then.’

Wouldn’t it be nice to have fallen on my feet?

Especially when the following morning’s post – oh, not the official one, the sort that left parcels anonymously on the doorstep – was a polythene bag, a label round its neck, full of bulls’ eyes.

Yes. Eyes from bulls.