All Bones and Lies (23 page)

‘Yatter, yatter! I could have grown a beard down to my feet by the time she took breath.'

Tammy looked fascinated. ‘Well, there you go,' said Colin diplomatically. ‘Lots to catch up on.'

‘I honestly thought the woman would never go!'

It was, he told himself, quite understandable. To pick up even the most casual of friendships after so long would
have been tiring. To see a daughter after five whole years—

‘Nosy, fat cow! Sat in that chair, proud as a bump on a log, and still wearing that nasty green bogey.'

‘Oh, you mean
Elsie!
'

‘Who did you
think
I meant? I don't think that black-hearted goblin on the other side is likely to visit – unless it's to bring me a bowl of poisoned soup.'

Tam's eyes were huge. Ladies with beards down to their feet. Fat cows and bogies. And now goblins bringing poisoned soup! She clutched at Colin's fingers – a solid comfort as his spirits sank.

His mother didn't miss the tiny gesture. ‘I see Miss Kitty Knickers thinks you're something special.'

Again, Tam's face went rigid.

‘Yes,' Colin said, suddenly certain from the shape of a long dark absence just what a father ought to be. Exactly what he'd been wanting all those years he sat like Tammy with his lip trembling and his eyes too bright. What Tammy needed now. Simple as that.

‘Yes,' he said, scooping her up again. ‘She thinks I'm the bee's knees. And I think she's pretty special. And you're just jealous because you don't have beautiful new knickers with spotty yellow kittens.'

That easy. You'd think he could have done it years ago, just for himself.

Dismissing him for a madman, his mother went back, unruffled, to the subject in hand. ‘Ghastly woman, sat in that chair there, so fat she looked practically upholstered, turning the neighbours' whispers into shouts. The way she has it, even Ruby is complaining.'

‘What? About Flossie?'

‘I suppose so. I couldn't bring myself to listen. She wittered on and on. I thought Christians were supposed to bring comfort to the sick, not simply drone on interminably about dirt and mess and noise.'

His heart stopped. Dirt and mess and noise?

Oh, this could be disastrous. This could upset the applecart and have her out of bed a day too early.

‘Noise?'

His mother reached for the topmost magazine and flicked through the pages. ‘Noise, indeed! Why, the poor lambkin has barely the strength to whimper these days, let alone bark.' She settled on a double page, and, suiting her actions to the last words she bothered to bestow on him, said rather distantly, ‘Well, naturally, as you'd expect, I just stopped listening.'

And thank God for that.

They had their first real spat on the steps to the nursery. ‘I want to come with
you
.'

‘No,' he said, strapping Val's advice over his anguished heart like a breastplate. ‘You have to stay here. I have to go to work.'

The face went pouty and the voice resentful. ‘I want my
mummy
and I want to go
home
.'

What had Val said? ‘Try not to argue. Just tell her firmly how things are. She'll feel much safer.' Then she'd let fall that last small droplet of advice that kept him staring at the ceiling almost till dawn. ‘And don't, for God's sake, tell her her mum's coming home today, in case she doesn't.'

Now Tam was setting off purposefully back down the steps. Catching her sleeve, he asked her, ‘Don't you want to show everyone at nursery your nice new frock?'

‘No,'

‘Or your nice new hairslides?'

‘No.'

‘Or your nice new knickers?'

For just a moment, she was torn. Then, with an equally petulant, ‘No!', she pushed him away, to carry on stomping down the steps. Val had warned him to use bribery only
in extremis.
Was this
extremis
yet? He hurried to get further down, to stop Tam in her tracks, eyeball to eyeball. ‘What say we make a deal? I'll give you something nice, and you go into nursery like a good girl.' A wave of shame swept over him. Could Mel herself have cracked any faster or acted more craven? ‘Sweeties? How about sweeties?'

She could have been some mafiosa spitting out her last offer. ‘
Chocolate
.'

Chocolate? Anything chocolate in the back of the van would be courtesy of Betta-Shoppa and months past its date stamp. But Clarrie would kill him if he was late again. Sighing, he led Tam to the back of the van. How could good intentions take a dive so fast? Was this what dragged Mel down – her pristine, hopeful mornings dissolving into threats and bribery before the two of them had even made it up the nursery steps? Decanted with such swift ease onto the path to sloppy parenting, he made a massive effort to change course. ‘Right, then,' he backtracked. ‘You let me take you into nursery where you'll have a really good time. And when I come to pick you up, I'll bring you an apple.'

He might have said he was about to boil her in oil. Outrage pumped through her. Out of her scarlet face came a screech that would have incapacitated even his department's impressive new noise monitor. A passing car braked in alarm, and heads turned down the street. What should he do? Clap his hand over her mouth? Give an urbane fatherly chuckle? Or simply flee? ‘
Sssh!
' he hissed desperately. ‘Sssh, Tam! All
right
! I give in. You can have chocolate.
Lots
of it.
Now
.'

The cheeks were still sheeted with tears, the lip a petulant shelf and the look chillingly baleful.

But she'd at least gone quiet.

Trembling, he flung open the van doors. Which were the boxes impounded from Betta-Shoppa? That one? No. That was the one with the toaster, surely. But, shoving it aside, he had doubts. It seemed far too heavy. Raising a flap, he caught sight of a furred paw and leaped back, startled, before realizing one of his mix-ups for once had proved lucky. Rather than poison his darling with gangrenous chocolate, he would be able to let her take her teddy to nursery.

‘Look, Tam – Tam?'

The patter of footsteps stopped his heart. The world bleached round him. ‘
Tam!
'

Oh, Christ! Oh, Christ Almighty! Had she slipped round the van doors? Was he about to hear the sickening screech, the skull-splitting crunch of all his old nightmares? Where in God's name had—?

‘No point in
calling
.'

He spun to face a woman struggling backwards up the steps, dragging a pushchair. ‘Sorry?'

‘They've both gone.'

‘Gone?'

The woman nodded upwards. Sure enough, round the fluted pillars two little figures weaved a complicated skipping path towards the door. How could a child's mood switch so fast from murderous to merry? And what was that wafting back so cheerily? Was it
singing
?

He could have cried himself into a pulp from sheer relief. My God. Did poor Mel have to ride this roller-coaster every day? Small wonder she preferred the terrors of mere gravity.

‘Bugger!' The woman was still struggling to tug the chubby pushchair wheels up the steep steps. ‘I have to go in anyhow. Do you want me to take up Tam's lunchbox for you?'

Lunchbox?

‘Save you a couple of moments . . .'

His senses returned and he sprang up the steps to grasp the foot bar under the shoe of the sleeping toddler and help her to the summit. Lunchbox? Another bloody mystery of life! And yet another half an hour gone, chasing up foodstuffs. Would it be totally out of line to arrange for delivery of a pizza? And he'd been so proud of himself, following all Val's advice to the letter. Now look at him.
Shattered
. In the last sixty seconds he had sailed close to being responsible for his small charge's death by apoplexy, street collision, chocolate poisoning, and now, it seemed, lunchtime starvation. Oh, it was very much a chastened Colin who crept past Clarrie's desk nearly half an hour later – over an hour late – vowing that he would never again think ill of any pre-schooler's
mother for profanity, carelessness or alimentary dereliction.

Clarrie was standing admiring her nails in the light from the window.

‘I see you're still being followed by that horrid Braddle man.'

‘Followed?' Had all the fiends from hell been offered some day out to torture him? He hurried over. ‘Where?'

‘Inside that van.'

She pointed. Just the other side of the gates, a perfectly normal dark van was parked on the double yellow line. It was the sort of van seen fifty times a day, in front, behind, parked on a side street, swinging round a corner.

‘
Following
me?'

Like the one that had pulled out behind him when he was leaving his mother's . . . Like the one he'd suspected of harbouring robbers . . . Like the one that housed perverts in Chatterton Court car park . . . The sort he'd seen only that morning when he was dropping Tam at nursery, and again as he drove round the Stannard Street roundabout.

‘Are you
sure
?' He was terrified. ‘For Christ's sake, Clarrie! Why on earth didn't you
tell
me?'

‘I like that! I told you for about the millionth time only yesterday morning!'

‘You did not! If you had mentioned I had a thug on my tail, I think I'd have remembered!'

‘I
told
you,' she insisted. ‘I was standing here at the window when he rang, and I distinctly remember saying, “No point in your pretending you're not here.”'

‘You didn't tell me that was because you could see
the bloody man phoning from some van outside!'

‘What difference did that make? He's been phoning you from everywhere else in the world for
weeks
.'

‘My God!' For a moment he stared down at the van in a paralysis of terror. Then he made shift to save his own bacon. ‘Well, whatever it is the man wants, we had better get on with it right this minute.'

‘Don't drag me into this. I'm not working through my coffee break. I've done my bit. I've taken all his nasty phone calls and put dozens of notes in your in-tray. It's not my fault that all you've ever done is push them away or tear them into pieces.'

He felt a worrying stir of memory. Fishing in his jacket pocket, he fetched out a handful of torn scraps. Ignoring Clarrie's self-righteous look, he pushed the papers on his desk aside to spread them out, only to stare at them helplessly till Clarrie softened and came over to help him. ‘Well, that bit obviously goes there. And that joins up with this bit. And though you've lost a corner here, I reckon—'

Fright turned him snappy. ‘You
wrote
the bloody things! Can't you
remember
?'

‘Well, this one was something about warning you, I do remember that.'

‘
Warn?
' He stared down. ‘I thought that word was “
warm
”.'

‘No,
warn
. I definitely remember that.' Her fingers whipped the scraps round on the desk. ‘That bit here, and that there. There's a patch missing, but that's sort of what it looked like.'

He peered at the little he could read of his fate.
Something deeply disquieting about ‘
seeing to it
'. And could that bit say ‘
fired
'?

‘I shouldn't worry,' she consoled him. ‘No one will fire you. After all, you've spent enough time trying to sort it out.'

Desperate for comfort, he asked her, ‘Have I?'

‘Of course you have! Only last Monday you were gone for hours.'

‘Was I?'

‘Of course you were. Don't you remember? After the police rang.'

‘That was the
restaurants.
This is Mr
Braddle
.'

‘No,
Haksar,
' she corrected, pointing. ‘See? “Phone Mr
H
.”'

‘You just said “Braddle”.'

‘No, I didn't.'

‘You did. I
heard
you. You've been saying “Braddle” all along.'

‘No need to
snap.
It's just I always mix up things like that a bit.'

‘For Christ's sake! Things like
what
?'

‘You know. Spanners and braddles and haksars and stuff.'

Could she mean
bradawls
? And
hacksaws
?

The coldest of lights dawned. ‘Clarrie! Are you trying to tell me that ever since this row between the restaurants blew up, it has been Mr
Haksar
who has been phoning to threaten me?'

Clarrie was back to inspecting her fingers. ‘Well, to be fair, not
openly
. Not till he said what he did by accident while Shirley was still listening.'

He stabbed his finger along the scraps of paper, making the closest he could come to sense of them. ‘“I
warn
you . . .” “
see to it . . .” “fired”
. That's bloody open enough, isn't it?'

She gave him one of her baleful don't-you-get-ratty-with-me looks. ‘What I mean
is
, he never actually lets on it's him. It's just I recognize his voice from when you sent me there to steal those poppadoms.'

‘Not “steal”,' he reproved her automatically. ‘“Legitimately purchase for the purpose of testing” . . .'

But she'd turned sullen now. ‘It's not as if cumin seeds even
look
like mouse turds.'

‘If someone makes a complaint, then I'm obliged—' He broke off. ‘For God's sake, what's
this
got to do with any of it?'

‘It's just I'm not surprised the man's fed up with you, that's all.'

The icy fingers of terror slid back round his heart. ‘
How
fed up?'

Embarrassed, Clarrie went back to scratching at an invisible blemish on her top coat of varnish. ‘Do you mean, what's he been
saying
?'