The Food Detective

Chapter One

‘He says he only wants a sandwich, Mrs Welford, and can he have just tap water with it,’ Lindi reported, eyes wide. ‘Weird, or what?’ Pity she spoiled the effect by looking over my shoulder at her reflection in the mirror and fiddling with a strand of hair.

I put down my pencil. ‘A night like this and a man doesn’t want a decent drink! What’s wrong with him?’ I wasn’t just
humouring
her: if I’d ventured from hearth and home through this sort of rain, I’d have wanted at least a twenty-year-old malt. In fact, I might just have one now, just as soon as Lindi had dealt with her latest crisis. She liked a bit of drama, did Lindi – in the absence of the real thing, she invented one every night. Though this seemed a mite more genuine than most, on a Lindi scale, at least.

She wound a tendril of hair round her finger. ‘He might have a stomach ache.’ No, not quick on jokes, either. I didn’t know why I kept her on, flashing her boobs in her skimpy tank tops. It
wasn
’t to please the customers. Kings Duncombe was hardly alive with testosterone-fuelled males ready to bed her in the hay. It was an ugly hamlet in the back of beyond, and until I’d started to make changes, the White Hart would continue to be the exclusive preserve of old men with weak bladders and foul teeth.

‘Tell him there’s no one in the kitchen tonight.’

‘I did. But he says all he wants is a sandwich. And a glass of tap water.’

‘Just the regulars in the bar?’

‘Well, there’s Mr Tregothnan, and Lucy Gay’s dad, and –’

‘The usual suspects. How many?’

‘Seven. Maybe eight if you count this man.’ She dropped her voice to a confidential whisper, thick with local burr, though we were the only people in the room, my sitting room, well away from the public rooms. ‘Maybe he is bad, Mrs Welford. He do look ever so pale.’

‘Better get him a bite before he fades away. Make sure
everyone
’s got a refill before you leave the bar, though.’ I wouldn’t put it past them to help themselves otherwise. If they were as
generous
with their measures as they were with their puddles on the
gents’ floor, I’d be bankrupt within a month.

Back to my calculator, then. The White Hart wasn’t going to be a failing country boozer much longer: not if I had a say in it. Alehouse and restaurant was how I’d remodel it. The present snug would become the restaurant, and the filthy storeroom in which rumour insisted the last landlord had kept his prize
shagging
-sheep would do nicely for a replacement snug. Some would say the regulars wouldn’t notice if I left it as it was. But I’d do the decent thing, make it warm and cosy and the sort of place you wouldn’t mind joining the locals in if you were waiting for your table. It wasn’t as if the present snug owed anyone anything. There wasn’t a comfortable chair in the place. The settles were old, which equalled murder for any modern spine, and the plastic patio chairs were almost as horrible as the green aluminium patio tables they were arranged round. Poor sandwich man would no doubt be stuck at one of them – the yokels would be huddled round the fire, their backs firmly to him. Oh, he’d practically feel the draught from their ears as they listened in to any
conversation
he might be having, but that was all he’d feel. Nothing of the fire, what was left of it after Lindi had almost let it go out – she was always surprised when she was left with nothing but ashes – and after they’d coughed and hawked and spat.

She was pithering with her damned hair again. I’d have sacked her weeks ago, except the only other girl in the village interested in working for me was Lucy Gay, and since she was only sixteen I couldn’t let her do more than serve meals and wash up. Oh, yes – the Law and I were Best Friends these days. It had been hard enough work to get my licence – can I help it, I said, an innocent woman, if my husband gets sent down for a few years on some trumped up charge?

‘Lindi! We have a customer, you said!’

She sauntered off.

I was just about to treat myself to that whisky when she came back upstairs again. Anyone else with an expression on her face like hers would have managed a canter, if not a gallop.

‘You should see his hands! All bloody!’

‘Bloody as if he’s killed someone?’

‘Bloody like someone’s had a go at him, more like. And not just any old how – as if, as if they’ve tried to – you know, do what they did to Jesus!’

I awarded marks for imagination. ‘People don’t get crucified in the autumn, Lindi. They do that at Easter. Come on, he hasn’t got bleeding great holes in his hands, has he?’

‘Not as such. But you can see the blood through his plasters. Here!’ She pointed to her outstretched hand. ‘Right in the
middle
, here!’ Hand still splayed, she touched the other palm. ‘And,’ she dropped her voice again, ‘he’s got deep scratches round his forehead. At least they’re not bleeding now. But they have been. Like he’d been wearing a crown of thorns.’

I ought to ignore her, but what else was there to intrigue me on a wet Sunday in the foothills of Exmoor? ‘Has he got sandals, long brown hair and a Che Guevara beard?’

Frowning a little, she said, ‘His hair’s like my dad’s.’

Short back and sides with little pretension to fashion, then. Dead boring too, if he was anything like Lindi’s dad.

‘Palestinian or Israeli accent?’ I pressed. Maybe I shouldn’t have that single malt. They always said landlords drank their profits if they weren’t careful. In any case, that glass of Rioja I’d had with my supper seemed to have gone to my head. I mimed a Shylock shrug: ‘Oy vey?’

She chewed the strand she’d played with before, as if I’d set a desperately hard GSCE question. ‘More like yours.’

Someone from Birmingham! I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that. You come down somewhere as remote as this to leave your past behind you, don’t you? Not that I had a past, of course. Tony did, of course, God rest his soul. The sort of past that might encourage some of his old contacts to look me up, more’s the pity. It’s one thing having your old man being on the wrong side of the law; it’s another finding you’re supposed to be jolly chums with a whole lot of other ex-cons. And their wives, girlfriends and general hangers-on. No, anyone coming to look me up would get the shortest of shrifts. Whatever a shrift is. I’d have to look it up. A very cold shoulder, anyway.

‘He’s not local, then?’ I asked, wishing I hadn’t got into this.
It might have been mildly entertaining, but the last thing I wanted was Lindi getting the idea there was something about me to gossip about.

‘I’d have known him if he was, wouldn’t I?’

I nodded. Round here local meant this village. ‘Better go and keep an eye on things. And if Mr Tregothnan gets too frisky, get rid of him.’

‘Oh, I don’t like to. It’s only a bit of fun. He don’t mean
nothing
by it, does he?’

So fondling the kid’s breasts was only a bit of fun, was it? ‘Don’t they teach you anything about sexual harassment at that school of yours? Arm’s length, Lindi – that’s the best way. Off you go now.’

She set off, but hesitated by the door. No. Not to say anything. To give that hair of hers one last fiddle.

‘Go on! Shoo!’

‘It’s harassment: that’s what it is, Inspector Thomas!’ I stood on the step of his mobile home – one of the fixed ones in the Happy Valley site – and confronted him.

He put his hands up as if to fend off my words. No, let them ricochet round him.

‘Sending the filth down here to check up on me.’ I stepped inside uninvited, just as he must have done countless times when he was a cop.

‘Josie Welford,’ his mouth announced as he backed away. He looked as surprised as I felt. Maybe I was wrong: maybe he
hadn
’t come down here to spy on me. In which case, I gave him
Brownie points for recognising me. I’d lost the best part of four stone, changed my hair from the big brassy with black roots that Tony liked to a gentle bob, silvery gold, the best colour the
priciest
salon in Exeter could manage. Before I’d mostly sported
dramatic
flowing Kaftans, which never did disguise all my flesh; now I was country practical in a hooded waxed jacket and wellies. Most of all I was minus those grotesque fancy specs, more
appropriate
to a stage transvestite. Not only could I see better with my contacts, you could see that I had serious cheekbones.

But I still didn’t buy the coincidence. ‘Harassment!’ I repeated, as if I’d just paused for breath. ‘Typical of the filth, to have the brass neck to send you chasing round after me. You! The one who had Tony sent down. The one who ruined the best years of my life.’ I’d always been known for my swearing, so I slung a few profanities at him, just like the old days but with less venom. Actually, maybe with more style.

He stared, his face working. Any other man, any other time, he could have laughed and got away with it. It was hard to take myself seriously, when each swear word was accompanied by a drip from a Barbour. But to laugh at the old me was to invite a kick in the balls and a crack on the skull as you went down. Unless I laughed at myself first.

‘Twenty years. It must be all of twenty years,’ he said. ‘Birmingham Crown Court.’

I almost pitied him. Those days I was a big-haired,
big-mouthed
virago, calling down all the curses of heaven on him for what he’d done to my man. ‘Fifteen years!’ I’d screeched. ‘Fifteen bloody years! For a man Tony’s age. A decent man! Now he’ll never go to his son’s wedding, never see his grandchildren.’ Blame the Gippo blood a couple of generations back for the bad language. Tony had hated it and made me clean up my act, except, he said, when circumstances merited it.

It had been teamwork, of course: I knew it even as I cursed him. The Drugs Squad; a bright young forensic scientist; a good prosecution lawyer; a jury brave enough to withstand the threats exuded by Tony’s henchmen surveying the court (they’d made even me feel sick, and I was on their side); a judge handing down
the long sentence. But it was easier to pick on one man as the
villain
. So I’d followed him all the way down Corporation Street hollering and shouting. I’d thrown more than words: I’d pulled off my stiletto shoes (quite a relief – the damned things always did cripple me – and hurled them at his head). I must have run fifty yards on the wet pavement before I’d realised I was
barefoot
.

On bad days, the really bad ones, maybe he’d remembered those curses. In detail.

He probably remembered how I’d had to stop and peel my
laddered
stockings – no, not tights, which Tony loathed – and rip them off and sling them too. He’d insisted on returning the shoes. Quite a nice grin and a courtly bow. He’d had a little bit of style in those days. These days? Something seemed to have taken the heart out of him. It was as if someone had rubbed him out and forgotten to colour him in again. Apart from the deep scratches on his forehead, that is.

And all that must have been – what? eighteen? twenty? – years ago. Tony Welford, love of my life for all he’d been old enough to have been my father, grandfather even, had been gone eight years now. And not a day when I didn’t miss him, even if it was only to thumb my nose at his memory when I did things he’d have hated. Like losing my blubber.

‘What about a bucket?’ I waved my golfing umbrella at him. Not that I played, you understand. But the weather they got round here you needed all the protection you could get. If I
didn
’t need the brolly, I carried a useful walking stick, to fend off overenthusiastic dogs and brambles.

‘Bathroom,’ he said, taking it and disappearing.

Protection like wellies, for instance. Tony would never have had a woman of his seen in wellies. Maybe he’d have thought the Barbour was a way of getting in with the local hunting and
shooting
toffs. More like he’d have thought it showed solidarity with his beloved monarch. Yes, he kept a photo of Her Maj on the wall of his Long Lartin cell. He’d been known to land men in hospital for expressing republican views.

When Nick got back I was still in his living room, half-sitting
on the arm of the settee, trying to push one boot off with the other foot. I’d slung the Barbour across a standard household remover’s cardboard box. I had my choice of a dozen or more, some already opened, the rest still taped closed. Where on earth could he possibly hope to stow so much in a place as small as this?

He’d always been the man to offer civilised gestures. Today he didn’t look as if he could remember any.