Cheryl wished she could tell Della all this. She could imagine the conversation her frosty-knickered boss must have had with Mr Morgan on the phone, with her talking about his Wurlitzer and him talking about his todger, both of them blissfully unaware they were on different score sheets.
‘It was just sex,’ he said.
‘I’m sure it was,’ said Cheryl, although she was pretty sure that Jock Fallis wouldn’t quite see it that way. Mr Morgan had just handed her a perfect bullet.
Chapter 45
When Cheryl got off the bus and rounded the corner to her house, she could see that more eggs had been thrown at her door and dog muck had been smeared all over her window into the bargain. Calmly, she got out her house key, went inside, deposited her cleaning stuff and then rang for a taxi. Cheryl had a bellyful of guts and a head full of ammunition. Oh boy was she ready to face Ruth Fallis head on.
*
It felt a little bit stalkerish to look up Brandon Locke on the internet when she got home, but Connie couldn’t resist. She found the article in the archives of Yorkshire Fayre magazine which was headed ‘The Yorkshire Willy Wonka’ but there wasn’t much personal information about him other than he was married to a physiotherapist wife and, like the real Willy Wonka, had no children. Then she found a mention of Madeleine Locke with her brother Brandon Locke and clicked on it to find a Facebook page and the profile picture was a woman with long hair, wearing a graduation outfit and standing with Brandon. The accompanying top comment read, ‘World, let me introduce you to my wonderful brother Brandon. Dad left two months before I was born and I never met him and my mum fell ill when I was a toddler but we managed because we had my amazing big brother to look after us. He helped us with homework, he ironed our school clothes, he fed us and put up with our cheek and we all turned out pretty okay. I would never have gone to university had it not been for Brandon because I was being stupid and lazy. But I came to my senses because I didn’t want to let him down and hey, this is me showing off my master’s degree in Economics, Accounting and Finance (I know, so borrrring!) If ever there was a master’s degree, nay, doctorate in being the best brother in the universe, then please someone award it to our gorgeous Brandon. (Mark – you’re the best little brother in the world, better mention that one.) See you soon, peeps, for celebrations.’
What a man, thought Connie, blowing out her cheeks. She hoped one day she’d find someone just like him, if there were any drop-dead gorgeous, selfless hunks with fantastic bums who had a penchant for middle-aged dumpy women out there. The odds, it had to be said, were against it.
Chapter 46
‘What do you mean that you do not want new cleaner instead of Astrid? We have other good cleaner for you,’ barked Ivanka down the phone.
Oh, she really did have an awful telephone manner, thought Della as Ivanka became more and more annoyed and aggressive.
‘But you can’t have her, she has left . . . Look, if you want cleaner, then you will have to take another . . . you can’t have Astrid . . . yes, I know she has left, that is what I am trying to tell you. But we have better cleaners anyway. Hello . . . hello?’
Ivanka slammed down the phone. ‘Stupid thick horse, she has hanged up. That was the last of Astrid’s clients. They have all left now.’
‘What was that?’ Jimmy’s head popped around his office door.
‘Astrid’s clients have all said they don’t want another cleaner,’ said Ivanka. Della waited for Jimmy to erupt, but he surprised her with a laugh.
‘Offer the daft cow her job back,’ he said. ‘She’ll snatch your hand off.’
‘I rang already and she told me to piss off and that she has other job. Oh and Gemma has left also.’
Surely that would send Jimmy over the edge, Della thought, but no, he continued to smirk.
‘I am very cross for you,’ huffed Ivanka, doing her best knotted eyebrows.
‘Don’t be,’ said Jimmy. ‘There is no other firm around but Cleancheap. And as we know in this room, but no one else does, I’ll soon be head of Cleancheap, so Astrid and anyone else who goes looking for greener grass in a sewerage pipe will be shocked to find themselves back working for me. Then I will sack their sorry arses before the ink on the deal is dried if I feel like it. That’s why there’s no point in getting myself in a knot about it.’
Ivanka clapped her hands together in admiration.
‘If only they knew the truth,’ she said.
If only you knew the truth, thought Della, as she smiled along with them.
*
Ruth Fallis’s house was easy to find. Just as Hilda had said in the Sunflower Café, it was in the grounds of a scrap yard with a corrugated iron fence. From behind it, two mangy-looking Rottweilers barked at Cheryl, unable to get to her, but she would have taken them on if they had. And, in the mood she was in, she would have obliterated them. There was a 4 x 4 parked at the side of the house and the number plate was F4LL 1S. It was the same vehicle which Cheryl had seen vroom away from her house last Sunday morning. Jock Junior had no doubt been driving it, because neither his mother nor father could have dived into it at such speed when they saw her curtains open.
Cheryl rapped on the door, her mouth juicy with the rush of angry adrenaline which increased when she saw a grubby lace curtain twitch in a downstairs window, but no one came. She hurt her knuckles with the strength of her next knock, then for good measure bent to the letterbox and shouted through it, ‘I’ve got a message for you from Mr Morgan, Ruth. Or would you like me to tell it to Jock instead?’
That did the trick. Within seconds Ruth had thrown open the door, her face a halloween mask of annoyance.
‘What’re you doing here?’
‘I want your son to stop throwing eggs and dog shit at my house or I’ll have to tell his dad that his mother has been shoving feather dusters up the local church organist’s arse. Is he the only one? Or are there more clients that you call upon with your cleaning kit of perversion?’
‘Shhh!’ Ruth furiously flapped her hand for Cheryl to lower the volume.
‘I had a lovely little chat about what you and Mr Morgan and his organ used to get up to every Wednesday,’ said Cheryl, folding her arms and smiling dangerously. ‘Fifty pounds an hour, minus what you hand in to the office of course, to cover your tracks – that’s a nice little number you’ve got there. Oh and talking of nice little numbers, that is a bobby dazzler of an outfit you wear, Madame Ruth. You did know that Mr Morgan has a CCTV camera in that room, didn’t you? Great footage – and so much of it.’
That last bit was a lie, but Ruth swallowed it whole. Her face didn’t know whether to go drip-white or bright red and so did a mixture of both, giving it a curious raspberry ripple effect.
‘What do you want?’ she said, her voice the low growl of a cornered dog.
‘I’ve told you, I want you lot nowhere near my house again or Jock will see what his wife gets up to behind his back. Oh, and I’ll have twenty quid for a taxi that’s brought me up here and I’ll have another twenty quid for all the products I’ve had to use to clean up the mess your son made. Make that a straight fifty quid for my trouble.’
Ruth’s hairy lip curled but she didn’t protest as she disappeared back into the house and returned with two creased twenty pound notes and a ten which she held out begrudgingly to Cheryl.
‘Here.’
‘Ta,’ said Cheryl, riding on a rare crest of empowered amusement as she took it from her. ‘Pleasure doing business with you. Is that what you used to say to Mr Morgan, Ruth?’
Ruth took a step forward. ‘You say anything to Jock and I’ll . . .’
Cheryl took one forward too so their noses were almost touching. Cheryl’s green eyes were neon with energy and bored into Ruth’s. ‘You’ll do what, Ruth? I’ll tell you, you’ll do nowt. Because you’re not in a position to threaten anyone. Now if any of you lot so much as look down my street in future, I’ll make sure that CCTV footage is projected onto the frigging town hall. Do you u
nderstand?’
Ruth chewed on her lip, knowing she was stuffed. She edged backwards and gave the briefest of concessionary nods. But it was enough to convince Cheryl that it was over.
She walked towards the waiting taxi, feeling like a victorious warrior, floating above the ground with wings on her heels.
‘I’m not surprised you’ve turned feral,’ Ruth called behind her. ‘Anyone would who’d been dumped for a Clamp.’
Cheryl spun around. ‘What?’
Ruth realised she should have overridden her insistence on always having the last word. Especially as she could tell from the look on Cheryl’s face that she hadn’t a clue what she’d meant and was marching on her again with a murderous look on her face.
‘What do you mean by that, Ruth?’
Ruth lifted her hands defensively.
‘I don’t know the full story. I just heard that your Gary was seeing one of the Clamps. There was something in the paper.’
‘What paper?’ Cheryl felt as if some drug had whooshed through her system that made every nerve she had twang painfully. ‘What do you mean “there was something in the paper”?’
‘Shhh.’
‘Don’t you shush me,’ Cheryl yelled at her, teeth bared.
Ruth cast a nervous glance back at her house. ‘Look, I didn’t get the chance to read it all. I was in the doctor’s and they called my name out to go in.’
‘Tell me or I’ll make so much noise that Jock comes out,’ growled Cheryl, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice.
‘I’ve told you as much as I know. Honest,’ gabbled Ruth. ‘There was your Gary and a blonde holding glasses of champagne on the front cover and something about a sausage. I didn’t get a chance to read the full story. I swear. That’s all I can say.’
They heard a man’s voice from inside the house shout Ruth’s name.
‘Just go, will you,’ whimpered Ruth.
‘You really had better not be lying to me, Ruth Fallis.’
‘I’m not, please.’ Ruth was desperate for Cheryl to clear off. She didn’t know any more, Cheryl was convinced of it.
Cheryl felt sick as she strolled back to the taxi, no longer feeling as if she was flying, more like she was sinking – and sinking back lower than she could ever remember being before.
Chapter 47
Cheryl couldn’t remember getting out of the taxi or paying the driver. She’d known that the day would come when she would hear about Gary and another woman but she’d hoped it wouldn’t be this soon. She was on automatic pilot as she fired up her ancient laptop and waited minutes until it felt ready to present her with the homepage. She typed Gary Gladstone into Google and the machine whirred and deliberately took its time in presenting her with a list of news items pertaining to a Gary Gladstone who was a serial killer on Death Row in the US, an author, some LinkedIn professionals by that name, various Twitter and Facebook accounts but she knew he didn’t have either of those. Adding the word ‘Clamp’ didn’t throw up anything fresh. Neither did ‘sausage’, though she didn’t think it would.
Why were they drinking champagne? Tears jumped to Cheryl’s eyes – had he got married after a whirlwind romance? Had he been carrying on with someone behind her back from day one of their split – or even before it – and that’s why he hadn’t been in contact? What other reason could there be that he and a woman were in the newspaper drinking champagne?
Cheryl typed in ‘marriage – Gladstone, Clamp, Barnsley’. No results of weddings, but plenty of snippets about various assorted crimes of the Clamp tribe. It might have helped if she’d known which paper it was and what day. Think, Cheryl, think. If he’d got married, it wasn’t likely to be in a national paper, so she tried the more local Northern Star’s website first. She pulled up all the front covers of the newspapers for the last two weeks but there was no picture of any smiling couple with champagne to be found. Frustratingly, the Chronicle’s website was down for essential maintenance so there was just the Daily Trumpet to try. The Daily Trumpet made the National Enquirer look like The Times, but she tried anyway. ‘Gladstone, Clamp, marriage’ – no results. She found a page full of thumbnails of front covers from the past month. There on the Wednesday 12 March issue she saw a couple in the top right-hand corner. Cheryl’s heart appeared to be crawling up her throat because there was a lump there that she couldn’t shift. She pressed the tiny square to enlarge it and there was Gary, her Gary, and a toothy blonde with her hair scraped back so tightly it stretched her eyes into long almond-shaped slits.
‘How a Battered Sausage changed my life’, see page 5, was the wording at the side of the photo. Cheryl’s hands were trembling as she pressed the link saying ‘read articles now’ then sat back in her chair with frustration as she was advised that the item was archived and she’d have to pay by credit or debit card to access it. She typed in a million registration details, gave her debit card number and was told that activation might take twenty-four hours. Some bastard in the skies above hated her, it couldn’t have been more obvious. She kept pressing the button to ‘read this edition now’ in the hope that the malignant entity might take a tea-break, and six minutes later it did, because the front page of the Daily Trumpet filled her screen with page-numbered tabs at the bottom. She pressed ‘5’ and was greeted by a bigger, more detailed picture of Gary, the blonde, the champagne glasses and them both holding a piece of card between them.
LUCKY BARNSLEY BARRY SCOOPS £50,000 ON SCRATCHCARD
By Beverley Stockwell
Lucky Barry Gladwyn bought a £2 scratchcard yesterday and scooped the jackpot. Barry, 32, was with girlfriend Chartreuse Cramp, 22, in Cod’s Gift fish shop, Pennywell Road, but when they were told they would have to wait over five minutes for a battered sausage, they decided to go into Shirt’s Newsagents next door and buy a couple of scratch-cards to pass the time. ‘Chartreuse won a tenner on hers and she said she’d buy the sausage and chips with it, then I scratched mine off and nearly fainted. Mr Shirt had to fetch me a chair,’ said Barry. ‘We were going to buy some lagers but we said sod it, we’ll have champagne, but Mr Shirt only had Cava so we had that instead,’ said Chartreuse. So what is Gary going to spend the money on? ‘We are going to Meadowhall and I’m going to treat Chartreuse big time,’ said Barry. ‘We haven’t been together long but she’s my good luck charm. I think a nice sunny holiday is on the cards for us.’
Bloody Daily Trumpet, that’s why the search hadn’t worked, because it had called him by the wrong name: Barry Gladwyn. He might as well have been Barry Gladwyn, thought Cheryl, because he was a stranger to her. It was as if she had been snatched out of her life for someone else to take her place – sleeping with her man, planning a holiday in the sun with him, going to their places. Ridiculous as it might seem to be possessive over a fish and chip shop, why did he have to go to that one with Chartreuse Clamp?
Suddenly, Cheryl’s brain was swamped with horrible thoughts. Is that what Ann Gladstone meant when she said something like ‘we know now that you were bad luck for Gary’? Surely she didn’t think that’s why Cheryl had been asking after him? Ann knew her better than that – didn’t she? Maybe she did know that but chose to believe a different truth. One which puts her precious son in the best light, said a voice in her head.
Gary hadn’t been round with the money he owed her, so Cheryl knew that she could wave goodbye to that debt ever being repaid. If that didn’t tell her what sort of man he was, nothing would, said that gentle, caring voice in her head that was looking out for her. That was the trouble: she did know what sort of a twat he was, but still it was torturing her that he was touching someone else at night, kissing them, eating fish and chips with them.
Cheryl closed down her laptop and went to fill her bucket with soapy water so she could wipe the eggs and the dog crap off the outside of her house. As the dribbling tap made its best effort to fill the bucket, the flow of rain outside increased abruptly, throwing itself against the glass. It was as if the bastard in the sky fel
t as if he had gone too far recently and decided to help her out for a change.
Chapter 48
Jimmy lay in bed, wide awake again. He used to sleep like a log but more and more, since getting engaged to Ivanka, his nights were restless and full of anxiety dreams about feeling trapped. He was on edge more often than not and sleep and consciousness no longer came in clearly defined blocks of time. He’d taken to having the odd cat nap in his office, which he’d never had to resort to before.
He switched on his bedside light and looked over at Connie sleeping beside him. Once upon a time she was the one who was up and down all night, unable to drift off. She’d had so many years of looking after everyone but herself it was a wonder her body hadn’t forgotten how to have a solid kip for more than four hours.
She looked different, he thought as he studied her, but couldn’t put his finger on how. She was dreaming, because her eyelids were flickering, and he marvelled at how long and thick her lashes still were. Lying there, lit with the soft glow of the lamp, she appeared half her age. Her skin was smooth and so soft for a woman in her forties. Poor old Ivanka was going to have terrible acne scars, but Connie had skin like cream. His finger came out to touch her cheek; then he pulled back, remembering his promise to Ivanka not to have any sort of intimate relations with Connie.
He tried to imagine life without her and found that it was uncomfortable to do so. They’d been together since she was seventeen and he was two years older; he’d taken her virginity and he knew that she’d stuck to her marriage vows, unlike him. They’d been through the sickness and health and poorer – and he’d been through the richer part alone. He hadn’t played fair at all.
He remembered seeing Connie for the first time. He liked tall, slim dark-haired girls and there she was, a blonde on the short side with curves, but her eyes lured him in. Large soft wolf-grey eyes with jet black lashes they were and she had absolutely no idea how pretty she was. She was chatty and funny – a proper prize, though she’d never seen herself as one. Things had moved too fast for them to take a breath, though. They’d planned to travel on the same road through life but he’d used what had happened twenty-four years ago as an excuse to keep disappearing off on a secret path that took him to party-land. They’d both had it rough in the beginning and, though his good times were rolling, she’d continued to have it rough. He’d make it up to her in the divorce settlement. She could have the house and he’d make sure he put new windows in for her.
Afternoon Tea at the Sunflower Café Page 20
