All That Mullarkey (31 page)

The leather chairs weren’t as comfortable as they looked. Justin took a minute to get settled.

Neil puffed out his cheeks and laid down his pen. His chin and a half wobbled. ‘You’d better shut the door.’

Justin heaved himself back out of the chair, shut the door, and broached the chair again with a suppressed sigh.

Neil slid a letter across to Justin’s side of the desk. ‘What do you make of this?’

The letter was printed on plain white paper.

Dear Sirs,

I feel you ought to know that your employee, Justin Mullarkey, was arrested on Friday night for attacking someone in a nightclub.

It was unsigned.

With sweating hands, Justin tossed the letter down. ‘This is getting beyond a fucking joke.’

Neil took the page back. ‘If one of our employees is arrested, you’ll appreciate that we’re concerned.’ He waited.

Justin massaged his temples. He wouldn’t, as he’d hoped, be able to keep it quiet. ‘It was a set-up,’ he said, flatly. ‘All I did was go out and get bladdered with my mates.’

He had no choice but to tell Neil the whole story. ‘But,’ he concluded, ‘when the cops took me for interview, the complainant and witnesses who’d been waiting out the front had mysteriously scarpered. I had to wait while the police checked it all out, then I was released “refused charge”. I went through the whole process in reverse. And went home. It was a fucking set-up from start to finish.’

Thoughtfully, Neil smoothed the letter in his hands. ‘You’re suggesting that a man must’ve cut his arm purely to incriminate you, then planted the knife?’ His credulity was evidently at full stretch.

Justin let his eyes slide to Neil’s Rockley artwork collection
again. Was it really worth trying to defend himself when he felt
so incredibly weary, when his bruised ribs ached every time he
took a decent breath? He was sick of pummelling his brain over
it, let alone trying to convince Neil. The letter was anonymous,
charges had been refused, all that was left was a nasty taste. Rockley could do nothing. He could just shrug it off.

It was, after all, improbable. Even Drew and Martin looked at him sometimes as if he was fantasising, making remarks like, ‘Justin’s not paranoid, someone really is out to get him!’ If he couldn’t convince them …

But this bastard, whoever it was – who was he kidding, it had to be the lunatic ex-tenants – had written to his workplace. Could do again.

He shuffled in the chair, winced, and embarked on an account of the whole dreary background. Coming home from Boston to find his tenants still ensconced, his do-it-yourself eviction, Jason Blumfield threatening, ‘I’ll getchoo!’

The stuff through the letter box, the fire.

He saw Neil’s soft jowly face sharpen when he got to that bit, the arson being such common knowledge.

‘The police interviewed the ex-tenants but they had alibis. Recently they’ve become cleverer with their nuisance crusade and set things up that they can organise remotely. I get deliveries I haven’t ordered, they ring in the middle of the night, then ring off.’

‘Can’t you ring 1471?’

He resisted the impulse to demand, ‘Do you think I’m too stupid to think of that?’ and said, instead, ‘The calls are coming from an unregistered prepaid mobile, which means they’re untraceable.’ He realised he was rubbing his temples again. He did it so much these days he’d end up with fingerprints in his head.

He clasped his hands together. ‘I’ve been sent enough takeaways to feed a stag party, taxis have turned up on the hour, every hour for an entire night, people phone to buy my car, my flat, my bed, and even my garden shed.’

He stifled a yawn. The disturbed nights were really getting to him.

‘But you don’t have a garden,’ Neil objected.

‘So I don’t have a shed, either.’ Justin groaned. ‘I’m conceding this round and accepting a new phone number – before they begin advertising my services in phone boxes as a rent boy!’

Neil laughed, Justin didn’t. Instead he said, sombrely, ‘It’s a real hate campaign. Ignoring it hasn’t made it go away. I’m going to move out. I don’t want to because they’ll have won and also some other poor sod might inherit my troubles. But I can’t go on like this – I can’t even have my daughter to stay.’ Shona. His blood ran cold at the thought of her being mixed up in some lunatic’s grudge.

Neil locked the anonymous letter in his desk drawer. ‘Why don’t you go to the police?’

Justin climbed awkwardly to his feet. ‘Have done. They’re sympathetic but the Blumfields are getting smart. There’s no evidence to link them to any of it. They were even on holiday in Ayia Napa when some calls were made – presumably having got some other low life to campaign on their behalf. Police say there’s little they can do but advise me to keep an incident log. They’re sympathetic, agree a crime has been committed, but …’ He shrugged.

Cleo glanced through the kitchen window when she heard the gate clatter. ‘Justin’s here,’ she told Shona, who immediately made for the front door.

He smiled and swung Shona up when Cleo opened the door, but he didn’t look good. Recently he’d been too pale, too tired, his smile too forced to be natural. ‘I should’ve rung, but I was around and wondered if I could spend a bit of time with her.’

Cleo smiled. ‘Brilliant. You entertain her, I’ll whiz through my jobs.’

She washed up listening to giggles, happy squeals and deep laughs while Justin rolled Shona round the sitting-room floor. It sounded fun.

She crossed the one-step hall to the sitting-room doorway. ‘Fancy getting her ready for bed and doing the story routine?’

‘Sure.’ His eyes seemed big in his face.

Shona was soon fresh in doggy-embroidered pyjamas, and Cleo blitzing her ironing pile instead of it lurking for later, while Justin’s voice upstairs rose and fell on the rhythms of the bedtime story. He was great at stories, giving the characters ridiculous voices, making Shona breathless with giggles. When Cleo read, it was to continuous interruptions from Shona of ‘Woss zat?’ or ‘Yook!’

Eventually his footsteps returned softly down the stairs. Cleo, breathing in the pleasant warmth of ironed clothes, heard him go into the sitting room.

By the time she’d put the iron away he was asleep in the chair. But his eyes flipped open as she crossed the room.

‘Are you ill?’ she asked, gently.

He sighed. ‘Just sick of hassle.’

She sat down, legs crossed, on the floor in front of him. ‘Tell me.’

He rubbed his forehead. ‘I suppose I’d better, in case any of it affects Shona. It’s mad, it’s incredible – but the nuisance calls and stuff I was getting have got completely out of hand. A funeral director rang today, saying that he understood I had need of his services.’ And suddenly he was like a pot boiling over with a froth of horrible deliveries and calls and stuff.

‘So, having no wish to be arrested again, I’m leaving the flat,’ he concluded. He hesitated, hitched himself forward on the chair. ‘Cleo, we get on OK, reconsider about our buying somewhere together! I want to be near Shona. She’s mine as much as yours, I love her too. It worked OK before, didn’t it?’

Oh no. Hadn’t he got this out of his head yet? This crazy idea that would be great in the short term but probably hell in the end? She tried her best to smile. ‘Like some old brother and sister left on the shelf together? Why should either of us settle for that? We’ve talked about this and it won’t work.’

‘I think it would.’

‘Maybe now, you think that. You’re exhausted and at your wits’ end. You’re not yourself. Once you’re free of all this shit you’ll bounce back, go out on the pull with Martin and Drew, get into all the relationships you deserve. Then sharing a house with me will be a burden. I’ll be in the way.’

She got up, flooding the room with yellow light as she switched on the lamp, making him blink and squint. ‘And anyway, I’ve just started seeing someone. I don’t need you cluttering the place up.’

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Cleo rarely saw Ratty. He’d been kind in an offhand way, renting her a home when she really needed somewhere. The rent vanished from her account once a month and presumably materialised safely in his. But he did call in occasionally to check his asset wasn’t being devalued, stepping in and out of economical conversations without preamble.

‘You’re cramped here,’ he observed, stepping carefully over Shona’s new yellow plastic teapot. He had a black spaniel puppy called Button tucked under his arm, wagging its tail and trying to lick his chin. Button’s black, curly fur was a lot like Ratty’s hair.

Cleo sighed. ‘I know. But there’s hardly anything up for sale in the proper village, only up in the Bankside bit where they’re all too new.’

‘Yeah.’ He pulled a face. ‘I do know an older one that might suit you, though. Elderly bloke called Patrick lives there, but he’s going into sheltered accommodation. I can introduce you if you’re interested, before he instructs agents.’

Her spirits hopped up a gear. ‘Wow, yes!’

‘We can stroll up there.’ He moved towards the front door and Cleo, suddenly realising that he meant now, had to dart around for jackets and shoes and Shona’s buggy while he waited in the garden where he could put Button down to shake his long ears and snuffle at the gateposts.

The house was on the way out of the village, much further up Port Road, on the left. Extended and chopped about in less building-control-conscious times, the add-ons were red brick and not the original russet ironstone. But the modifications were so old that any discord had mellowed. The roof tiles were speckled with moss. The house was just what Cleo wanted: quirky, not conventionally pretty but with its own charm.

A jungle of a garden surrounded the house and backed onto flat farmland.

Cleo gazed about her as she recovered her breath from the pace of Ratty’s ‘stroll’ and they waited for Patrick to answer the door. A big shambling man leaning on two walking sticks, he apologised for not shaving, clucked at Shona and stick-stepped his way back to his tall armchair.

‘Well, now,’ he said, after a knees-locked and obviously painful descent to his seat, peering at Cleo carefully through thick glasses. ‘Well, now. I think you might just look round, eh? That all right? Because I don’t get about like I did. Any questions and I’ll be here, watching the TV.’

Cleo tried to stop Shona tugging herself free of her restraining hand. ‘If you don’t mind.’

He let out a wheezy cough. ‘This is the sitting room, you can see that. This door’s to the dining room, that to the kitchen. Go through the kitchen and there’s another door, that’s your scullery. Do people still call them that? Well, now, young Rattenbury, how are your parents, do you know? This is your new dog, then? And how’s your new wife?’

Cleo left them to talk. Excitement sent butterflies fluttering inside her chest. The house was lovely. Or could be, in time. Warm and welcoming with just a sniff of comfortable old-house mustiness.

She looked around a sitting room crowded with a large blue seventies-type suite plus Patrick’s old-man armchair in a green that didn’t go, a hulking sideboard, a coffee table, two footstools and the television in a cabinet. Rainbows of crocheted throws stretched across chair arms and sofa backs. What could be seen of the carpet was a riot of black and orange circles, pristine, as if no one ever set a shoe to it. Cleo hated the furniture, the carpet and the paisley wallpaper, surely put together by a colour-blind decorator.

But it could be a lovely room.

French doors led into the back garden. Beams supported the low ceiling and the fireplace was stone. Answering absently as Ratty called his snuffly black dog and called goodbye, Cleo pushed open a creaky door into a dining room crowded with display cabinets, dusty silk plants on stands, a single bed with a quilted bedspread, and a wardrobe. Evidently, it was Patrick’s bedroom these days. She backtracked to the kitchen.

Oh dear! Units that must’ve been wheeled in around 1950 had been painted in shades of mud around their reeded glass panes. A pot sink big enough to wash a baby hippopotamus hugged the wall under the window. The cooker – a relic – crouched close by and a fat, white microwave perched incongruously on a table by the wall. The scullery contained an even bigger white sink, maybe in case the mother hippo also fancied a swill, and a huge mangle.

A door beside the mangle led to an up-to-date loo, a welcome late modification.

As she crossed back to the hall and stairs, Patrick warned, ‘It’ll be a bit neglected upstairs, because I don’t get about. I live down here.’ He switched his attention back to the television as the audience erupted amidst wildly flashing lights. ‘There, you see, he’s done it!’ he cried, as a jubilant on-screen contestant accepted congratulations from the presenter. ‘There was one last week, too.’ His watery eyes shone with the pleasure of witnessing some stranger’s success.

Cleo left him to his game show. The stairs, steep and with no handrail, were heavy going with a toddler collapsing tiredly against her shoulder. But apart from dust, thirty-year-old decor and a collection of lampshades like flying saucers, upstairs wasn’t bad. An elderly double bed stood stripped and forlorn in the largest bedroom with a wide oak wardrobe alongside; but the other two rooms were empty. The carpets, in bold colours and sculptured patterns, had obviously been treated as carefully as the downstairs ones. Pity they were so damned ugly.