The Food Detective (13 page)

As I dialled, there was a noise in the bar. I froze. What were they up to now? Grabbing a bottle as a weapon, I tiptoed through.

Lucy was placidly raking the ashes and adding wood to the fire.

It would have been easy to get very emotional. Instead, I tried to be breezy. ‘You’re nice and early!’

She shrugged. ‘Don’t know how you’ll manage if I don’t come,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘And that’s what I told my dad when he said I shouldn’t. He knows about all what you send
pretending
it’s left-overs, though his pride tells him to say nothing. Knows when he’s on to a good thing, my dad. But truly, Mrs Welford, what I get here is the only decent food the kids get to eat. All this good fresh produce in the fields round here, and the school meals are just junk. I don’t know what they think they’re doing.’

I let her gabble on, pretending not to see how embarrassed she was. But sooner or later we both knew I’d put a simple question to her. It might as well be now.

‘Why doesn’t your dad want you to work here any more?’

She stood – God, I wish I were that lithe these days – wiping her hands on a tea towel she’d tucked into her waistband.

‘Well? The whole village is sending me to Coventry – not speaking to me.’ Funny she hadn’t recognised the idiom. ‘Any idea why I’m suddenly so unpopular?’

She shook her head. ‘Not exactly. They know I like you so they don’t spell it out, not when I’m around. But they say you’re too nosy for your own good, sneaking round people’s property even when it’s raining.’

So it wasn’t a particular problem about sneaking into
Tregothnan’s house. ‘I’ve always gone for walks on my own in the rain. They didn’t mind before.’

‘They’ve always minded. But then you brought your boyfriend down and he’s a sly old bugger too. Never stops asking
questions
.’

‘Boyfriend! I haven’t got a boyfriend!’ I was surprised my squeak didn’t crack the glasses.

She looked reproachful. ‘You have that, Mrs Welford. Mr Thomas. One look at him and you can see he’s smelling of April and May. You can’t look me in the eye and tell me he didn’t come down here to be with you.’

‘I can and I will! It’s true I met him once before, but it was in most unfortunate circumstances and I certainly never wanted to see him ever again.’

‘First night he’s down here you’re out there at that caravan of his.’

‘Correction. First night he’s down here I recognise him and the following morning I go out to his caravan to tell him to shove off.’

‘So how come he’s living with you now?’

Jesus, was it something in the water or was it all the
inbreeding
? ‘Come off it, Lucy,’ I said. ‘You know as well as I do he was flooded out. Damn it all, it was you who gave him the room! I’d have left him to fight his way through to a motel in Taunton.’

She turned her eyes, huge in that underfed face of hers, full on me. ‘But seems to me he’s got his feet well and truly under your table. Doesn’t eat down here like any other guest.’

For answer I took a deep, deep sniff. ‘Tell me honestly, Lucy – would you ask anyone to eat a meal in here?’

‘Well, it’s all according, isn’t it? Seems to me the food side of the business is really taking off.’

‘It is indeed. Anyway, Mr Thomas isn’t here any more. He’s working in another part of the country. I’ve no idea when he’ll be back. And as soon as he’s got that caravan of his sorted out, he’ll be out of here. Or go somewhere else if he can’t fix it. Got that?’

Her nod was a bit on the perfunctory side, as if to please me rather than express conviction.

‘And you’ll tell the others.’ Damn, that sounded like pleading.

‘If I see them.’

How noncommittal can you get?

‘Why’s Lindi not coming any more? And before you say I should ask her direct, I can’t get hold of her. And Tom, the chef, has done a bunk too. Next thing I know my builders’ll decide they don’t want the job.’

Head on one side, she considered. ‘No. They’re a Taunton firm. No one from round here. Of course, you really ought to have asked Mr Barnes – that’s Mr Bulcombe’s cousin, on his wife’s side.’

‘George Barnes? I did. He said it was too big a job. And his nephew. He said it wasn’t big enough. But he quoted for it, just on the off-chance, and he was ten per cent higher than the firm that’s doing it.’

‘Ah. Deliberately pricing himself out of the market,’ she agreed. ‘Business Studies GCSE, Mrs Welford,’ she added as my eyebrows went up. ‘But I don’t know why Tom Dearborn should do a flit. He was telling me how much he was looking forward to coming here full-time, ah, and that soft-headed girlfriend of his too. Getting herself in the family way at her age.’

Marvelling how she could veer from a child to a middle-aged matron in the course of a paragraph, I patted her on the shoulder. ‘If you see young Tom, just talk to him, will you? Make him see a bit of sense?’

‘If I see him. Now, was there anything special you needed doing, like, or shall I just see to the kitchen – saw you on TV, I did,’ she added over her shoulder. ‘Reckon you could have done yourself a bit of good there.’

I followed her, wincing at that damned washing up. ‘D’you reckon the other villagers will approve? I said nice things about them, after all.’

Rolling her sleeves, she shook her head. ‘They all watch the other side, don’t they?’

I was showing her how I cook one of my chicken and vegetable pies – and pointing out how many vegetables you could disguise so her family would eat it without whinging – when the door to
the snug clicked open. So surprised I nearly dropped the pie
funnel
, a traditional blackbird that always made her smile, I wiped my hands, and smoothed my apron, for all the world like one of Lucy’s kitchen maid ancestors. Then I remembered it didn’t do to look too eager – too desperate, even – I strolled to greet my only customer so far.

‘Sue! What can I do for you on a night like this?’

She shrugged expressively, looking round the empty room. ‘More like what I can do for you, I’d have thought. Provide you with a customer.’

‘Bless you. But it’s warmer in the kitchen – Lucy and I are working in there.’

Lucy, a smudge of flour on her nose and the deepest triumph in her eyes, was surveying the pie she’d handsomely decorated with leaves cut from spare pastry as she prepared to pop it into the oven. She nodded shyly at Sue, who had the sense to talk bell ringing for a couple of moments.

‘You go and keep an eye on the bar, there’s a good girl. I’ll call you when this is ready,’ I said. ‘If you don’t mind roughing it in here, Sue?’ I added.

‘Roughing it? It’s beautifully warm!’

Yes, her vicarage kitchen was the coldest hole I’d ever been in. ‘What will you drink? There’s a lovely drop of Australian Grenache left over from this lunchtime.’ I showed her the bottle, and reached for a couple of glasses.

As she took the first sip, however, her mouth prissied up. ‘Lucy – are you sure it’s all right for her to work in the bar? At her age?’

I jerked my head towards the door.

Sue accepted the tacit invitation and peeped. ‘But she’s sitting by the fire reading!’ she squeaked, having the sense, at least, to close the door first.

‘Doing her homework, more like.’

‘You pay her to sit her and do her homework!’

‘I pay her to sit there and keep an eye on things. To react in an emergency – take the other night, when Nick Thomas turned up while I was out and she insisted on making him up a bed. She
found the bed linen and towels and did all that was proper.’ Which neatly introduced the topic of Nick, of course. And made Sue blush.

I was too busy stacking newly washed china to notice officially, of course. A tea towel might not be as good as the confession box, but it gave people the idea of anonymity.

‘The police came to see me,’ she said at last.

‘About Fred Tregothnan?’

‘About our going round his house. Someone in the village …’

‘Snitched. Just like them to finger outsiders, and say nothing of their own misdemeanours.’

‘Motes and beams,’ she mused.

‘So what did you say?’

‘That we’d been concerned he might be ill inside and had let ourselves in – and out – without finding him. Or anything else,’ she added with venom. ‘They practically accused me of armed robbery!’

‘Even the police should be able to tell you’re as honest as the day.’ What they’d make of me was another matter altogether, of course. ‘Don’t worry. Here, there’s another bottle of the Grenache upstairs. Or would you prefer white? There’s some cracking Chilean stuff here – also courtesy of the meedya boys and girls.’

‘It was a good interview. Pity no one in the village’ll have seen it. No one would have guessed they were trying to drum you out of town.’

‘
Drum me
– it’s come to that, has it? Whatever did I do to them that they should want to get rid of me?’

There was a long silence. ‘I think it’s got to do with Nick Thomas,’ she said, with something sounding suspiciously like a sob.

Chapter Thirteen

In the end Sue revealed very little more than Lucy had already told me. And it seemed to me that she had introduced Nick’s name into the conversation simply for the pleasure of hearing it. So I was glad I’d made it plain that he’d been staying at Lucy’s suggestion, not mine. ‘You know he’s moved out for a while?’

She winced as if I’d slapped her face. ‘No?’

‘Oh, he’s kept his room on,’ I said as prosaically as I could. ‘But he’s got an urgent job in the South East and says he may just as well stay there until he’s finished. He didn’t actually say it aloud, but he implied that this place was hardly the Ritz and that he might as well have a bit of comfort while he could get it.’ I laughed; she didn’t. ‘Goodness knows why he ever moved down to a place like this in the back of beyond.’

‘His daughter,’ she said. ‘Apparently she always wanted to live in a cottage with roses round the door.’

Ah. The girl in the photographs I’d seen on his very first Monday morning.

‘Was she planning to move down here with him? Not a lot on offer for a young woman her age, is there?’

‘He just hoped she’d come and visit him. She lives with his wife. Ex-wife. They’ve got a son he never sees either. Phiz – some such name. And she’s Elly. The daughter. No idea of the wife’s name, have you?’

Most of this was news to me, of course, but I simply shook my head vaguely as if he’d confided in me all but that. Now, had he discussed those blackouts with Sue? I got on to safer ground. ‘But that doesn’t explain this as his choice of base. I told him to his face he was nuts to come so far off the beaten track.’

She looked wistful. ‘I think he wanted to become part of a community.’

‘He didn’t choose a very welcoming one, then, did he?’ Him and me both. ‘I suppose you had to go where you were sent.’

‘Where they thought I was needed.’ There was a hint of huff.

‘And where they could screw the most work out of you for the least pay.’ I pulled myself to my feet. Wonderful smells were
coming
from the oven, and I didn’t want the pie to burn. Gingerly I peered. No. Another five minutes was all it would need, however. ‘Any comeback about blessing the hunt? You know something,’ I added, ‘I’m beginning to understand why I’m off hunting. I’m beginning to empathise with the fox. Being drummed out of the village indeed.’

Sue changed the subject, but not entirely. ‘I can’t understand Mrs Greville. Suddenly she’s as nice as pie. She’s keen to take on some village girls as waitresses for some function she’s planning – asked who I could recommend.’

‘So you said Lindi and Lucy! Thanks a bunch!’

She looked at me blankly.

‘I’ve not seen Lindi since the Tregothnan business’ I explained. ‘And barmaids, even lazy inept ones like Lindi, don’t grow on trees round here. Though you’d have thought some of the young married women would be glad of the work.’

‘Not if it impugns their husbands’ ability to provide for them. Twenty-first century this may be elsewhere, Josie, but Hardy would recognise some of the folk round here. No, we’re too far west, aren’t we? That man who wrote that book about Exmoor.’

‘R D Blackmore,’ I supplied, catching a glimmer of surprise in her eyes. ‘Not part of my OU course, but I did a lot of reading when Tony was doing bird. Plenty of time, of course.’ It had kept us together, reading the same books: we’d think of each other while we were reading, and as a bonus we had something to talk about, not always easy with men doing stretches like his. OK, you had family news, but I saw as little of my in-laws as I decently could, and there was gossip about friends, but many of his were also doing time and were therefore pretty lean pickings. So there could have been horrible silences like at other tables in the visitors’ room. Instead, we’d talk about Scott or Dickens or George Eliot. It always struck me that with a decent education, Tony could have made as much money doing a legitimate job as being a villain. Well, no. But enough.

Since Sue obviously couldn’t think of anything to say, I got to my feet and summoned Lucy.

Her face was transformed into a series of O’s when she
reached out her pie. As well it might. Between us, we’d done a very professional job. I was going to have to be very strict with myself and inhospitable towards Sue, who was plainly slavering.

I looked at my watch. ‘I’ll keep an eye on the place now. Before you go, is there any chance you could do a couple of extra hours tomorrow and on Sunday? I know it’s usually the day you cook the family lunch but –’

‘No reason why they shouldn’t have family supper instead,’ Lucy observed stoutly. ‘What time do you want me, Mrs Welford?’

‘Potato peeling starts as soon as morning service is over,’ I said, grinning at Sue, ‘for those who ring bells. You’ll be without Mr Thomas, remember.’

Lucy nodded. ‘Mrs Greville said as how she’d be along. But she’s as much use as a chocolate –’ she obviously didn’t want to use my usual crude analogy ‘– chocolate tea pot, with that back of hers.’

‘You’ll find that pie dish just fits into that round wicker
basket
hanging behind the back door. Slip a tea towel in it for insulation first: there. And here’s one to cover it.’

Lucy looked nonplussed.

Sue twigged. ‘Put your jacket hood up and you’ll look like
little
Red Riding Hood off to feed Grandma.’

‘But –’

‘You made it, Lucy. I can’t possibly eat any – not with my diet. All that butter! And it’d be nice for the family to see the whole masterpiece, not just a chunk of it. No, no argument. Pop along, now. Got your torch?’

She flourished the weighty specimen I’d pressed on her when she’d started work here.

I patted her on the shoulder. ‘No talking to strange men.’

She turned. ‘That’d mean most of the village, then!’ And she was gone.

‘And not a word of this beyond these walls,’ I said, my index finger an inch from Sue’s nose.

‘
Do good by stealth
,’ she agreed ‘It’s not a bad maxim. But it wouldn’t do you any harm in the village if your kindness were
known.’

‘The mood they’re in they’d see it for what it may well be – bribery. Or they’d think the pie was full of eye of bat and toe of newt.’

‘Bribery?’

‘Keeping her sweet.’

‘Is it?’

It was hard to bluster when Sue turned her eyes full on you. ‘I never had a daughter. I wouldn’t have chosen one quite like Lucy. But it’s nice to have someone to teach the tricks of the trade to.’

‘You mean take her on in your kitchen?’ Did she sound pleased or reproachful?

‘One day I mean take her on as my manager. Got a wonderful head for figures, she has. And a good grasp of situations. If I want anyone in my
kitchen
at the moment it’s Tom. I suppose no
gossip
’s reached you?’

‘I’m afraid it has. Well, about Tom’s girl’s pregnancy. Sharon, isn’t that her name? Seems the father’s not Tom, but Sharon’s dear old dad.’

I reeled. ‘I knew he beat her up. I didn’t know – oh, my God. So where’s Sharon now?’

‘No one knows for sure. Half the village hope she’s having an abortion and that Tom’s standing by her; the other half say he’s well shot of her and he shouldn’t have got involved with a girl from such a harum-scarum family in the first place.’

‘And you?’

She fidgeted. ‘In an ideal world she’d keep the baby and Tom would still stand by her. But would you take that on? I’m not sure I would. All the genetic risks…’

‘Incest! You can’t imagine it, can you – a man doing that to his own daughter.’

‘Best if he stuck to sheep. Oh, yes: you must have heard the joke that begins, “Me Lud, the plaintiff was quietly grazing in a field…”’ She collapsed in heaving, choking sobs of laughter.

This was a side of Sue I’d never seen before. Maybe that
half-bottle
of lunchtime wine brought it out.

Whatever it was, she seemed scared by its intensity, and
immediately
gathered her things together as a preliminary to leaving. I didn’t argue: I hadn’t eaten and was suddenly tired. But her final words revived me.

‘I suppose I couldn’t ask a big favour? I know you’re not down to do the flowers tomorrow, but with the floods I can’t rely on the usual ladies –’

‘No problem. There shouldn’t be much to do anyway – we started afresh last week, didn’t we, so it’ll be mostly dead-heading and filling in gaps.’

She shook her head shyly but firmly. ‘I’ll bring in plenty of fresh ones. Josie – make it look a bit special if you can.’

‘The best I can. But Sue, God’ll forgive a few tired blooms.’

‘It’s not God I’m worried about. It’s the other ladies. And – well…’ She shifted like a schoolgirl about to meet the pop star of her dreams. ‘Well, the new dean’s going to drop in unannounced, you see.’

Was that the real reason for her visit tonight?

Grinning broadly, I said, ‘I love the concept of unannounced visits being known in advance!’

‘I know his secretary, you see, and –’

‘Sue, it’ll look as good as I can make it look. But for real expertise what about Mrs Coyne or –’

Her jaw jutted. ‘I want it to look like church flowers, not a huge bag of hundreds and thousands.’

‘Mrs Greville?’

‘It’s you I’ve asked, Josie. Get in there and sock it to them.’ So it wasn’t just the dean she was worrying about. She was trying to rehabilitate me. I wasn’t at all sure that pushing me forward would endear me to anyone, but at least her heart was in the right place. On impulse I hugged her.

She was rather too obviously taken aback. Her exit was almost an escape. Well, I didn’t rate Nick’s chances highly if that was how she regarded physical contact. Waving just in case she looked back, I stood in the open doorway for several minutes, breathing in the clean, newly washed air. And presenting a lovely target, Tony’s voice observed dryly in my right ear.

Saturday was a good day for passing trade, so my day started very
early laying in supplies of fresh meat and vegetables. Shortly after eight, Sue and I arrived at the church simultaneously, me cheerful and bustling, her nervy and cautious, as if I’d made a pass at her last night, not just offered a sisterly gesture. She dropped the flowers and, gabbling something about a wedding at one of her other churches, bolted back to her filthy, condensation-filled car, that accident in the making. Nick’d better be back soon and have the guts to do something.

I’d always enjoyed my own company – a good job, in all the circumstances. So the empty building held no terrors, not when I’d shoved the latch down good and hard so I’d get plenty of warning of any visitors. And bullies though there were in the
village
, I’d bet that most of them would have an atavistic respect for the building that would prevent them doing any violence in it.

In the silence, the damp rising almost palpably from the old stone, I could identify with those nuns who did even the most humdrum task for the greater glory of God. AMGD, or
something
like that. I worked quickly, true, as my fingers turned blue, but all the more confidently for having no one looking over my shoulder. I couldn’t believe a few well-placed carnations and ferns would make up for any damage I might have done with my
traveller
’s tongue, but maybe it was a form of reparation, an act of contrition. And I was in a place that spoke of a millennium of forgiveness.

There were two altars, the main one and one in the tiny Lady Chapel, both jealously guarded provinces. I did them first,
risking
Mrs Coyne’s fury as I simply removed her displays and replaced them with very simple ones of my own, white freesias, carnations and gypsophila. The first time I’d been invited, I was just back from Madeira and had brought a huge pack of exotic flowers. In the gloom of the church, they’d simply looked like bad plastic ones. So now I knew better. I couldn’t claim Constance Spry skills, but maybe the bishop couldn’t either. Next to the embrasures and sills, which I filled with slimmed down versions of last week’s, augmented by Mrs Coyne’s
collection
. And finally I swept up, wishing that T S Eliot hadn’t been so smugly patronising about the scrubbers and sweepers of
Canterbury Cathedral.

Accustomed to the dim light, I was almost blinded by the brilliant sunshine I found outside. Not a bad day for a walk today, provided I bore in mind that the ground would be waterlogged. And provided the lunchtime crowd dissipated while there was still enough light – every encroaching dusk reminded me that soon the clocks would go back, and my explorations would be sadly limited. Maybe I should wait till afternoon to collect my paper. And maybe I shouldn’t. Whenever I’d havered, Tony had always quoted an old Midlands maxim to me: ‘Faint heart never shagged a pig.’ Only the word wasn’t shagged. OK, from what Sue had said, antics with animals were more in the villagers’ line than mine, but I took his posthumous point. No, I wasn’t
surprised
he hadn’t communed with me back there in the church – that wasn’t his way at all. The more profane the place the better for old Tony.

The shop was seething with enough customers to bring a smile to Molly’s face, which even my presence didn’t dim. Seizing the moment, I gathered some of the items I’d had to forego the
previous
day, and was gratified to find my
Guardian
waiting for me as I approached the till. So what had yesterday been about? A warning? Or did I owe it to the good offices of Lucy and Sue, busily putting it about that I was a Good Thing, and not connected with that there Nasty Grockle, Nick Thomas? Or had Molly put the fear of God into everyone, lest they damage her business?