The Food Detective (27 page)

‘Not physical?’ Evans pressed.

‘As a personality he was as inconsistent as they come. My theory, for what it’s worth, is that someone found out he was popping whatever and blackmailed him. And because he was hard up he got involved with this bad meat brigade – I don’t know, perhaps at one time they wanted him to forge paperwork, only to find people didn’t care two hoots where the meat had come from so long as it looked and tasted good – and was cheap. But all this is supposition, isn’t it? Since I couldn’t get in for a fossick round.’

‘You did before, though.’

‘Yes. And scarpered like a guilty schoolgirl caught scrumping. OK if I get some food now? Soup? Or sandwiches? Or something more substantial? Go on, it’ll be better than your canteen fare.’

While they considered, the phone rang. I answered. It was Sue, almost gibbering. ‘Josie – Josie. About Fred. Do you think I ought to confess?’

Chapter Twenty-Nine

However much I hunched over the phone and cupped my hand round the mouthpiece, I wasn’t going to stop Evans and Short hearing our conversation. Sue’s phone volume was always moderate to loud; now she was stressed, it was
fortissimo
.

They’d probably hear the word ‘confess’ anyway. All the same, I urged her, ‘Don’t do anything without taking legal advice. Please.’ Having no idea what else I could say, I cut the call. ‘Sandwiches?’ I repeated brightly.

But the three men were already on their feet. Evans and Short I could understand – but Nick?

‘Someone has to be there for her,’ he apologised quietly to me. ‘Find her a solicitor and so on.’

‘At least have a glass of milk before you go. Help yourself from the fridge.’ Out loud I added, ‘Sue’s not going anywhere – you’d do better to accept my offer. Think ulcers,’ I said darkly.

They were tempted, no doubt about that. But even as they dithered, there came the sound of a car driven fast, turning into the back yard. I think we all braced ourselves for the sound of metal on metal. None came. Someone banged furiously on my back door.

‘That’ll be Sue,’ Nick said unnecessarily.

‘She’s come to see me, not the police – or you, Nick,’ I said. ‘You should let me speak to her first. On my own. You lot make yourselves scarce – oh, go and help Lucy read bedtime stories or something – until we’ve finished.’ Impatiently I added, ‘Oh, she won’t get away from you. Think she’d take you on in a car chase? Well, she might,’ I conceded, ‘but I wouldn’t bet on the outcome.’

I ushered Sue into the pub kitchen, dishevelled, her ponytail escaping its elastic band, a torn Tesco’s carrier in her hand. Every bit as wan as Lucy, she didn’t remark on the poor hospitality or the smell of wine on my breath, but did seem relieved when I asked nothing, simply filled the kettle and busied myself with coffee.

I heard movement behind me. She was opening the carrier.

‘These were in Fred Tregothnan’s surgery,’ she said.

Only then did I turn, nodding at an A4 record book I
presumed
was his drugs ledger or whatever its official name. There was what looked like a receipts book, too, A5 or smaller.

It wasn’t really my job to ask when she’d acquired them, though I’d have liked it to be. Her head hung as if she were one of Tony’s gofers caught with his hands in an off-limits till. Perhaps it would do her good to get it all off her poor concave chest.

‘Under your coat that morning in the rain?’ I prompted, passing sugar and milk.

She nodded. ‘I’d promised him, you see.’

Nodding her to a chair, I sat too. The table between us spoke of decades of hard use, and I loved it for each herb chopped, each apple peeled and turned into pie.

‘Odd promise.’

‘Not at all.’ Her head shot up. ‘I can’t tell you why he wanted them concealed. The confessional.’

‘I never realised –’

‘The C of E permits; it doesn’t insist.’

‘OK. But he asked you to hear his confession.’

‘Maybe it was more a confidential heart-to-heart. I don’t know.’

But it would make a lot of difference in a court of law. And to her conscience.

‘And you concealed them. But now you’re giving them to me.’

‘No. Not giving. Showing. You’re a businesswoman. You must understand figures and things like that. Could you glance at them and see why – see if they give any hint why he might have disappeared?’

I sipped my coffee very slowly. Without thinking, I’d used the after-dinner roast and it was too strong and bitter on an empty stomach. Putting my hand on the books as if to keep them closed, I said hesitantly, ‘I can’t be bound by the same promise as you made. If I see he’s been fiddling his books, I’d have to say something. And I think it’s worse than fiddling his books. I suspect he’s been taking illegal drugs and trying to square the
entries.’ From her wince I might have scored a direct hit. ‘Is that what he was talking about, drug addiction?’

‘You know I can’t tell you.’

‘It’d be the most likely thing anyone would want to confess. Or an addiction to hard porn, which a police geek would find on his hard disk in five seconds flat. But for either to be a problem, someone would have had to find out and be blackmailing him.’

Stony-faced, she stared at her coffee, as if she found it as unpalatable as the truth she was confronting.

‘One thing I always found strange about Fred,’ I continued, conversationally, but keeping to the past tense, as if to confirm I was sure he was dead, ‘was his tendency to mix with the village lowlife. People like Ted Gay and the other fire-hoggers. The ones who made Nick Thomas’s life such a misery. Fred was a
professional
man, after all. Middle-class. The sort who’d more naturally mix with GPs or teachers or clergymen, in the old days, anyway. Perhaps we’re just less hierarchical now.’

‘And you show me a GP or schoolmaster or clergyman for miles around. He loathes Aidan – I’m afraid he’s really quite homophobic. And he seemed to take an immediate dislike to poor Nick.’

Poor Nick?
But I wouldn’t be sidetracked. ‘So did he have any other friends?’

‘How would I know?’

‘He must have got…close…to you, even in your church capacity,’ I inserted quickly, ‘to make his confession. Or have his confidential heart-to-heart.’ Maybe it was time to turn up the heat. ‘I think he’s dead. I don’t think his body will ever be found, because I think he was disposed of in that rending plant where Nick and I were nearly killed. I’d dearly love to find who killed him.’

‘In that case, why don’t you ask the ones who attacked you?’

It was, of course, the obvious response – from someone with something to hide. ‘One’s not going to be doing any talking for a long time. The side of his face was shot away. I hit the other one so hard the last I heard he’s still unconscious. The police know who they are, but they haven’t told me. Well, the bloke I knocked out could still sue me for assault, in this topsy-turvy world, on
the ground I used unreasonable force.’

Damn, I’d diverted her again. ‘And did you?’

‘Sue, if someone was charging towards you ready to kill you, someone who’d been torturing another human being with the threat of a killer dog, how long would you take to work out how big a swing to take and when to pull back? A nano-second, I’d think. I just walloped, I make no bones about it.’ I winced at the unintended pun but didn’t explain. ‘Tell me – are you doing what the Law may do: taking the side of the criminal against the intended victim? Because if you are, I’d like you to leave, now. And you can take those ledgers with you to show the police when they turn up.’

‘You mean you’d –’

‘After what I witnessed today? In thirty seconds flat I’ll be spilling every bean I know. I’d rather you did, of course. And I’d rather you were rather more frank than you’ve been with me. I know the village has a culture of secrecy the Mafia would envy, but you shouldn’t endorse it. For God’s sake, Sue – you won’t even be able to read the funeral service over him, because he’s so much blood in a black pudding!’

Her own blood drained from her face. At last I might be getting through to her. Through white lips she said, ‘The person who could have told you most can’t any more. He’s dead.’ She gathered up the precious ledgers and stowed them in the deplorable bag. ‘Ted Gay. Yes, Lucy’s father. The man who blew himself up.’ She stood up, ready to depart in umbrage.

I flapped her down again and leaned towards her confidentially. ‘I know he blew himself up. But I don’t know the whys and wherefores. Even the hows. Except that was fertiliser, wasn’t it? But how could even a dimwitted alcoholic blow himself up with his compost heap?’

Her snort might have been laughter. ‘Fertiliser’s used for other things beside crop improvement, as even townees like you should know. It’s used for bombs, Josie. And that’s what he was making this afternoon. A bomb. And because you’ve been so lovey-dovey to young Lucy, no one’s quite got round to telling you who it was for, have they? That bomb was meant for you, Josie. It was meant for you!’

‘I’d no idea they hated me so much,’ I said, still battling with what Sue had said and how I was to digest it. I fended off the glass Nick was pressing into my hand.

‘Don’t be so daft,’ he said. ‘Did Tony hate the people he had dealt with? Of course not. It was a business he was running, something he did with rivals and subordinates. They wanted to take you out because you were too damned close to a lucrative business and none of the other hints had worked. Come on, think about all that cash in the Wetherall office. It wasn’t Monopoly money. It was real. Like the guns.’

Maybe I nodded, but, like all the other little warnings, it felt personal. ‘Shopping Sue won’t have helped to re-establish myself, either,’ I muttered.

‘You didn’t shop her. She gave herself away with that phone call,’ he insisted. ‘And as far as you knew, while you had your heart to heart Short and Evans were still ensconced in the comfort of your flat – or reading stories to the kids as you suggested.’

‘Ted Gay, Reg Bulcombe, and those two characters still in hospital – not the nicest selection of neighbours, all the same.’

‘True. What’ll you do? Hitch up your skirts and run?’

‘Not exactly me, that sort of thing. In any case, I don’t have any choice as long as those kids need me. I’ll just run the White Hart as an orphanage till they’re ready to move.’

‘I know Social Services’ll pay their maintenance and board and lodging. But it’s not the same as a lucrative pub, Josie.’

‘The pub never made a bean. The bar food, yes. And there’s nothing to stop my plans for the restaurant. Provided the locals can refrain from vandalising my customers’ cars. And will work for me.’

‘No news of Tom and Sharon?’

‘I still think they wanted to escape Sharon’s incestuous father. Not me. If Lindi comes back – and to give her her due, she’s the sort of kid who may well brazen things out – I may keep Robin. Lucy’ll finish all her school exams, work for me full time and do a day-release course or two. Then university, if I have my way.’

‘All that costs money.’

‘Not a problem.’

‘Tony’s loot?’

It was too late and I was too tired to mess around with tact. ‘One more jibe about that and you’re out. Out of this room, out of this pub, out of my life forever. Final notice. Not negotiable. Do I make myself clear?’ Pity I had to spoil it with a sob I couldn’t quite turn into a yawn. Or a yawn into a sob. Whichever.

Chapter Thirty

It was one of those bright March days that God had
spring-cleaned
especially for me. Now with my own pilot’s licence, I had my usual Friday morning session, but without the services of Piers. He’d had his uses, not least as a repository of photos, many of which were logged as evidence when Luke Greville’s case at last came up before Exeter Assizes. All the roads had led to Greville, him and his duplicitous mother. Police research – how nice to have someone else doing the dirty work – had shown that Wetherall had been one of a chain of once quite legal rending plants right across the country stretched to capacity and beyond so they could undercut competitors and force them out of business.

After seeing all those overflowing, leaking, stinking vats, I could never look at a vitamin capsule or a new lipstick quite the same way. The illicit Kings Duncombe abattoir had been a bonus for Wetherall, springing up in response to food standards legislation all but small, hard-pressed beef producers could see was entirely sensible. And beef consumers, of course, who were unable to pay the sort of prices I felt were justified for organic meat. And the national minimum wage, as Robin pointed out, which was all most of the villagers earned, if that, didn’t run to much in the way of organic anything. He’d stayed, and was
rubbing
his hands with glee at the sight of the new staff
accommodation
, though Lindi had never returned. Rumour had it she was working as a picker on a mushroom farm near Weston-
super-Mare
, which saddened me: she could have done better than that. Lucy was doing just as well at school as she had before her father’s death, and Nick was settling into the role of favourite uncle. Both men had of course been strictly vetted officially, and I kept my beady eye on them all the time. Just in case. You never knew with officialdom. Especially as Lucy was rapidly flowering into a quite lovely young woman.

Any day now my gourmet restaurant would open, with lots of nice media coverage, thanks to Nicola and her friends, who were now regulars. The villagers goggled from behind twitching
curtains
,
and women were herding their menfolk to the new snug in the hope of their getting autographs. In any case the snug, clean but with the antique pub furniture I’d acquired, had started to attract back the men who’d once huddled round the fire to the exclusion of everyone else. Reg Bulcombe wasn’t doing any huddling, not in the pub, anyway, though maybe wherever he was being held pending his trial. It was his fertiliser that had taken Gay to kingdom come, and although the police believed he’d mixed it with the other bomb ingredients on Greville’s orders, doing what you were told was no excuse in law.

Sue had been promoted to another parish, in the time-honoured way in which big institutions deal with troublesome but useful staff. The paperwork she’d produced – and that it turned out she’d planted in my outhouse – made it clear that Fred Tregothnan had been dabbling in a variety of drugs for which he’d forged prescriptions, so he’d have been struck off by the RCVS if his activities had been made known. I don’t know what they’d have made of his visits to hardcore porn sites, but the police wouldn’t have approved. The grass? Bulcombe, for my money, though he was currently denying all knowledge. Sue had been replaced temporarily by a lad who looked about sixteen, who trotted round the parish in his cassock, Adam’s apple a-bobble, demanding to be called Father.

Neither Tregothnan’s Land Rover nor Nick’s rental four-
by-four
had ever been found, despite my inevitable photographic evidence. The trouble was, as I’d once told Nick, Somerset was a big county with lots of remote farms on which a car could be disappeared.

It wasn’t quite by chance I was circling over Exmoor now. I didn’t like loose ends. Never did – any more than Nick does. He’d still love to run to earth Tony’s fortune, which I suspect is on reason why we’ll never progress far beyond our shared-
home-but
-not-shared bedroom status. Another is the fact that though he now has occasional flashes of colour, he’s still only a pale, washed-out shadow of a man. Like a man who’s spent too long in gaol, maybe. No, he can’t help it. That stabbing incident made him more of a prisoner than my Tony ever was.

I can almost feel Tony now, telling me to stop musing and get on with something I can’t do every day of the week – enjoy my flying.

Yes, it’s just like it is on TV. All those fields, with little dark patches where the clouds scud between them and the warm spring sun. The early crops are greening the fields, and Easter lambs are busy preparing themselves for my organic table. But there – yes, down there – is what looks like a graveyard for giants. There they lie, side by side – Gog and Magog, maybe.

Hang on: they were further east. So what on earth would be buried in this corner of an English field, where the tilth merges with the moor? A couple of enormous horses? Or – yes! – a pair of big vehicles, one not missed by its owner, the other still the subject of endless insurance haggles.

I take a couple of snaps, and buzz for home, breathless with delight. Home? To hell with that. I’ve got another ten minutes before my time is up, and I never was a woman to waste anything. I whirl over Barnstable bay, singing aloud. Yes! God’s in His Heaven, all’s well with the world. And I know of a very good way to celebrate my find. The moment I land, I call up Mike Evans. Get yourself back to your flat, I say, and get that champagne on ice.