Murder on the Menu

by Fiona Leitch

  ‘But can’t we – I mean, you – at least find out what he’s up to?’

  ‘No, not really.’ Withers was starting to get irritated. ‘Not unless his dodgy business dealings with the council are directly linked to Mel’s death, and I don’t see how they can be. He runs campsites, for God’s sake.’

  I stared out of the window. I hated to admit it, but he was right. Which didn’t help Tony. He must’ve known what I was thinking because his tone softened.

  ‘Look, I know you’re trying to help your friend, but I’ve followed up the lead you gave me and it’s a dead end. There’s no real motive for Roger Laity to kill Mel, and there’s nothing to implicate him in Cheryl’s disappearance. We’ve searched her belongings and as far as I can tell there’s nothing there that could embarrass him or get him into trouble. He’s just a concerned uncle.’

  ‘I know…’ I said. But there had to be something.

  ‘Tony is still our chief suspect as far as I’m concerned,’ said Withers gently. ‘I’m sorry, but there’s still so much more that points to him than to anyone else. And the information you gave us about the dog, well, that just makes it more likely that Mel was killed on Friday night, around the time we’ve got witnesses seeing him go outside.’

  ‘I know he didn’t do it,’ I said firmly. He sighed and shook his head.

  ‘If he didn’t do it then he’s got nothing to worry about, has he? I’m not trying to fit him up; I’m trying to find the truth. The evidence is there that will either put him in the clear or convict him, and either way I will find it. But you have to leave me and my officers alone to get on with it. You’re not a cop anymore, Jodie. Get used to it.’

  Get used to it. That was easier said than done while Tony sat in a police holding cell. I watched Withers drive away, then went indoors.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Daisy was on me the minute I walked through the door and I immediately felt awful.

  ‘Sorry, darling, isn’t Nana here?’

  ‘Yes, she is,’ said Mum, bustling into the hall. ‘But I should probably go home…’

  ‘At least stay for dinner,’ I said. ‘It’s getting a bit late.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, and Daisy and I exchanged glances; we both had the feeling that Mum was actually really enjoying having company again.

  I walked into the kitchen and began to look through the fridge.

  ‘Sorry about being out so long,’ I said, pulling out some chicken breasts that only had one day left before they went out of date, and some cauliflower and various other veggies that needed using up. ‘DCI Withers wanted a chat with me.’

  Mum looked smug. ‘I told you he was her type,’ she said to Daisy.

  ‘Erm, I am here, you know,’ I said, getting out a chopping board and beginning to chop up veg. ‘It wasn’t a social visit; it was about the case. Can you get me some garlic and olive oil?’

  I set them to work, and soon the three of us were crushing garlic, tossing vegetables in olive oil, and bunging them in the oven to roast. I took another chopping board, cut the chicken breasts into chunks, and sprinkled them with ground cumin and coriander, then Daisy threaded them onto skewers with hunks of mushroom and red onion. I smiled, the stress of the last couple of days fading away; cooking always did that to me. It took me to my happy place.

  I’d always enjoyed cooking – if, like me, you enjoy eating, it pays to know how to cook – but it had really come into its own after a few years in the force. I’d started to get more responsibility and with it, more stress. I’d found that the simple act of preparing a meal – a proper meal, not just piercing the film on a microwave lasagne – did wonders for my mental health. Putting on some music, dancing around the kitchen and following a recipe, even one that you knew off by heart and didn’t have to read anymore, helped to clear the mind.

  We sat down forty minutes later to eat a delicious meal of Moroccan chicken kebabs, roasted vegetables, through which I’d then mixed a spoonful of spicy harissa paste, and the Israeli couscous that I’d not used at the wedding. Mum tried at first to ask me about DCI Withers, but eventually she gave up and just enjoyed her meal. I even opened a bottle of wine, given to me by the estate agent when we’d moved in, and it wasn’t half bad.

  It was exactly what I needed – a good meal with the people I loved best in the world, in our new home. Germaine sat under the table, whining occasionally for scraps, and despite all of us saying we wouldn’t give in to her emotional blackmail as it would only encourage her, she seemed to be very well fed by the end of it.

  We sat and watched the telly afterwards, some comedy movie on Netflix that we all enjoyed at the time, although the next day I’d have been hard pushed to tell you what it was called or who was in it. I made some hot chocolate and Daisy snuggled up to me on the sofa, which hadn’t happened for some time. I knew as she got older these snuggles would get less and less frequent, so I made sure to enjoy this one.

  Mum hadn’t mentioned going home again. I was quite happy for her to stay the night again, but I made a mental note that tomorrow I should take her home, if only for her to get some more clothes if she wanted to stay longer.

  She took a sip of her cocoa and raised the subject I’d been avoiding even thinking about all evening.

  ‘So why are you so set on clearing Tony’s name?’ she said.

  ‘Because he didn’t do it, of course!’ I said, thinking, Let’s not talk about this now…

  ‘But why does it have to be you?’ said Daisy. ‘We moved down here to get away from all this police stuff.’

  I reached out and took her hand. ‘It’s not like that, darling. I’m not about to do anything dangerous or risky. I promised you I wouldn’t, didn’t I? I’m just helping out an old friend. It feels like the right thing to do.’

  Mum shook her head. ‘We get that, but even so … why not leave it to that dishy policeman?’

  ‘He might be dishy but he’s convinced Tony’s guilty,’ I said.

  ‘But if he’s innocent, they won’t be able to charge him, will they? I know there’s all these things on the telly where they convict the wrong man and then he gets out and he’s out for revenge and it’s a bloodbath’ – I tried to think what Mum could possibly have been watching – ‘but you told me yourself, even in the Met stuff like that doesn’t really happen. Guilty people are more likely to get away with it than innocent ones are to get sent down.’

  That was true, but it was no consolation when it was one of your friends who was in danger of being the exception to the rule. Not when it was on my manor…

  Maybe that was it. Who was I kidding? That was definitely it. Except it wasn’t my manor; it was my dad’s.

  I sighed. ‘I never noticed it before, but there are echoes of Dad everywhere in this town.’ Mum didn’t speak, but she nodded. ‘I mean, at the station, there are still some of his recruits there. I thought they’d all have retired. Even Withers has heard of him. If Dad was still here, he’d be helping Tony, he’d know he was innocent. It feels like I need to make sure there’s no miscarriage of justice on his patch.’

  Mum shook her head. ‘You don’t have to prove anything to Dad, sweetheart.’

  ‘I kind of do,’ I said. ‘I always wanted to be just like him, but I wasn’t, was I? I left the job. I didn’t get as far as him. The whole point of going to London was to make something of myself, to make him proud of me, but I was in the Met for seventeen years and I never got past sergeant.’

  ‘I didn’t think you wanted to,’ said Mum, and I was momentarily irritated because that was true and I just wanted a good wallow. ‘You told me you liked being out on the beat too much. I remember you moaning about having more paperwork and less legwork even when you made sergeant. Exactly like Dad, in fact. He enjoyed his job but he did get frustrated being stuck behind a desk.’

  ‘Yeah, but…’

  ‘Grandad was well proud of you,’ said Daisy. I looked at her in surprise.

  ‘He was?’

  ‘Yes. We came
down here the Christmas before he died, do you remember? He read me a bedtime story and I don’t know why we started talking about it but I told him you put bad people in prison, and he said he knew and he was very proud of you. I was only little but I always remember him saying that because he made me feel proud of you too.’ She looked at me warily. ‘You’re not going to cry, are you?’

  ‘No,’ I lied, sniffing furiously. I hugged her tightly, and then Mum came and sat next to me and joined in, and then the dog decided she didn’t want to be left out and jumped up and joined in too, and I thanked my lucky stars that Tony had delivered me a sofa that was big enough for a family love-in.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I woke up the next morning feeling … well, I wasn’t entirely sure how I was feeling. Part of me felt a little happier about DCI Withers; he had taken my lead about Roger Laity seriously enough to go and see him, and I couldn’t really deny that it seemed unlikely Laity had killed Mel, whom, as far as anyone knew, he’d never even met. His surprise upon hearing that she’d made allegations about his business also seemed more and more genuine, the more I thought about it. And yet…

  Roger Laity was definitely hiding something, and without investigating it, was there any way of knowing for sure that it hadn’t somehow contributed to Mel’s death and Cheryl’s disappearance? He’d also looked really uncomfortable throughout our visit, and that sports bag… I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it now because (like Withers) I was trying to wrangle the evidence into fitting some kind of theory, but he’d subconsciously shifted the bag around in his hands the whole time they spoke. I knew from my experiences on the beat that if someone was carrying something they didn’t want you to know about, or if they’d hidden drugs or illegal goods in their home, at least seventy-five per cent of the time they would inadvertently give it away by a tell-tale flick of their eyes, or by standing in front of it or something. The trick was in being able to spot it. What was in the bag? Where had he been going?

  Of course, I was probably reading far too much into all this. His wife was away, and he probably was genuinely going to see a friend, or even a mistress; maybe his bag had been full of saucy underwear! I shuddered at the thought of Roger Laity in a pair of budgie smugglers. Maybe the guy I’d bought my van from should’ve opened his fetish shop in Boscastle instead.

  You’re not a cop anymore; get used to it, I told myself. I should just let Withers get on with it. He knew what he was doing. He wasn’t out to get Tony; he was just using his own experience to go with the most likely suspect first. And when they couldn’t find enough evidence to charge him (because he didn’t do it), they would have to let Tony go. I hoped to God they didn’t have enough evidence, because although I had told my mum in the past that innocent people don’t tend to get put away, it did happen. Not often – although prisons are notoriously full of ‘innocent’ people, and maybe more of them than we realise actually are – but it did.

  But, assuming they did let Tony go, would they ever find out who the real murderer was? The longer an investigation goes on, the less likely it is to be solved. There’s a ‘golden hour’ in any investigation when the evidence is fresh, the crime scene uncontaminated, and potential witnesses and suspects haven’t had a chance to forget things, concoct alibis or generally make stuff up. The police had moved quickly once Mel’s body was found; they’d protected the scene, done forensics, taken DNA samples, got statements from everyone at the hotel, and taken someone into custody. But it was now forty-eight hours since she’d been discovered, longer than that since she’d been killed, and with Withers still convinced Tony was the murderer, to my mind they were looking in the wrong place. By the time they started looking in the right place, the trail would have gone cold. And then there would be no justice for Mel, or Cheryl if she actually was dead, about which my mind changed almost on the hour. I couldn’t see how she could be alive and not contact Tony or her uncle and aunty to let them know she was okay, but then, if she was dead, who had killed her and where was the body? And without finding the killer, the shadow of suspicion would forever be upon Tony. There’s that old saying, ‘There’s no smoke without fire’, which is absolute rubbish – you only had to witness some of my cheating ex-husband’s attempts at cooking to realise that – but people still believe it.

  I should leave the police to investigate. It wasn’t my job anymore. That little voice in my head – the one that had gone oooohhhh when Withers winked at me or flexed his muscles, and was therefore not really to be trusted – said, Yeah yeah, we both know you’re not really going to leave this alone. And this time it was right.

  I dropped Mum off at her house. She’d not been back for about three days and had run out of clean undies, and she had stuff to do, so Daisy and I left her to it with instructions to call us if she wanted some company.

  I took Daisy and Germaine into Penstowan. The holiday season was just kicking off, which made it difficult to park, and I knew that the locals would soon be moaning about all the ‘emmets’ who had flocked to our little town from all over the country, getting in the way, leaving their cars in stupid places, dropping their litter… They would moan quietly, though, as half the town’s residents were originally from places other than Cornwall (it had grown massively over the last twenty years, as people got sick of high house prices in other parts of the South), and, of course, the tourists had plenty of money and were happy to spend it on beach inflatables, ice-creams, and fish and chips on sunny days, and in the tiny local cinema and the bowling alley on rainy ones. For many of the local shops and businesses, a good summer season meant they could relax through the winter. A bad summer season meant sampling the delights of the local dole office and surviving on baked beans from Lidl. I knew plenty of people who had done it.

  We walked along Fore Street, Germaine stopping to sniff every now and again. I couldn’t blame her. The street outside Rowe’s Bakery smelt delicious; they made the best pasties anywhere, ever, and I really would fight anyone who said otherwise. We looked in the window at the saffron buns and the different types of pies and pasties, and wondered if it was too early for lunch. It was a bit, but we could always come back this way…

  We passed Penhaligon’s. The store was open as usual, as if nothing had happened. If everything had gone as planned on Saturday, they wouldn’t have been expecting the new Mr and Mrs Penhaligon at work anyway; they would have been off on their honeymoon. I felt a protective wave sweep over me at the thought of Tony at the police station. Withers would have been questioning him relentlessly, trying to get a confession out of him if possible (always the easiest way to secure a conviction). I looked at my watch; Tony had been arrested yesterday afternoon at around 1pm, and the police could only hold him for twenty-four hours before either charging him or letting him go. So Withers only had three hours to come up with something that would make the charge stick. Unfortunately, I didn’t put it past him. And of course there was nothing stopping them extending those twenty-four hours or even re-arresting him at a later date if new evidence came to light…

  I put it out of my mind and laughed as Germaine got herself and Daisy tangled up in the lead. Daisy squatted down and lifted her paws (the dog’s, not my daughter’s) through the madly woven web of nylon leash, and I thought, Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive… This case was a tangled web indeed.

  It might be too early for a pasty, but it’s never too early for an ice-cream, so I bought us both a double scoop from a local ice-cream maker (forest fruits made with clotted cream for me, and chocolate fudge brownie swirl for Daisy) and we sat on a bench, away from the madness of the street and overlooking the sea. I looked at my beautiful daughter as we both slurped indelicately at our ice-creams, and my heart did a big happy flip at the look of pure and unadulterated joy on her face. I knew it had been a big wrench, leaving London; she had friends, and her waste-of-space dad, back there. But we’d lived in a cramped and ridiculously expensive two-up, two-down terraced house with just a tiny
patch of grass for outside space, and she’d always been an outdoorsy type. We’d gone on day trips out to the countryside, or to the coast, and even as a toddler she’d loved to walk through the woods and chase squirrels (at one point she’d wanted to be a dog). It wasn’t as if she didn’t know Penstowan; we’d visited her grandparents as often as we could, whenever I could get away from work. But despite being convinced that this was a much better environment for her to grow up in, I’d still worried. Ninety per cent of parenting seems to be worrying about how much you’re screwing up your kids, but today, looking at her expression, watching her laughing as the dog licked ice-cream off her leg where it had dripped, I thought maybe I was doing a pretty good job after all.

  Daisy waved to a couple of kids walking towards us – a blonde girl of about her age and a boy of about seven or eight, who looked like your typical younger brother, tagging along and being just about tolerated.

  ‘You know them?’ I asked. They looked vaguely familiar.

  ‘They live in our road,’ said Daisy. ‘I spoke to them yesterday when I was walking Germaine. They seem nice.’

  The kids reached us.

  ‘Hello!’ The girl had an open, friendly face with a smile that made you want to smile back. She squatted down and stroked Germaine. ‘Aww, she’s so cute! We’re going to the beach. Do you want to come?’

  Daisy looked at me, unsure. We were having a nice time, just the two of us, but she needed some friends of her own age and, with any luck, this girl might go to the same school she was due to start in September.

  ‘Fine by me,’ I said, and she smiled. After making her promise to phone me if she needed anything, and slipping her a £10 note so she could buy herself and her new friends a pasty or a bag of chips for lunch, I watched the three of them head down onto the sand, the little brother running ahead while the two girls chatted. Germaine whined and strained at her leash. I bent down to pat her, almost head-butting her as she stood on her hind legs to try and lick my face.