Just Desserts

by Jan Jones

  One of the men flicked a tiny, lightning-sharp, assessing glance at her. In that moment she was quite sure they weren’t tourists. She opened the carrier bag she’d pulled at random from the car and almost laughed aloud. Inside was the end of a loaf of bread that Leo’s mother had been going to throw out. Penny had said she’d take it so her grandson could feed the ducks. Now she pulled off a few bits and lobbed them at the water. Instantly, two arrows of fast-moving waterfowl scooted towards her, quacking loudly, drawing attention from passers-by. Penny threw more bread. The men conferred, took one last look at Leo’s boat, and walked away. Penny casually got out her phone. Leo, she texted. I’m at the boat. You might want to get back here.

  Leo hadn’t even had to argue with his editor to push Mrs Ingle’s story up in importance. Harry knew the value of a local rallying cry in a regional paper. ‘Nice tight copy,’ he grunted, scanning the report. ‘She was a game lass, wasn’t she? Got a photo?’

  ‘I emailed it already.’ His phone beeped. He read the text.

  ‘Trouble?’ asked Harry shrewdly.

  ‘Maybe. Or maybe chickens coming home to roost. Do you mind if I give Penny your number? Just in case.’

  He hurried back to the boat, texting Penny as he walked. He saw the two men standing by the bridge. Stay there, he added to the phone and prepared to climb on board.

  ‘Nothing,’ he reported a few minutes later, sitting on the next bench along from Penny’s one. ‘I don’t think anyone’s been inside. Maybe one of the phone calls I made regarding the unlikely expansion at Lowdale Screw Fittings has alerted someone in the wrong place. Or quite possibly the right place.’ He glanced at the bridge. ‘Oh dear, they’ve gone. Shame. Talking to them might have told me where they were from.’

  There was a look of dawning suspicion on Penny’s face. ‘Leo, can you possibly be pleased about this?’

  He grinned at her. ‘Oh yes. It means I’m right.’

  The day of the Salthaven Show. Leo arrived at St Mary’s church hall to be greeted by Penny run off her feet due to stewarding all the extra entries generated by the Messenger’s ‘Famous Daughters of Salthaven’ piece.

  She squeezed his arm. ‘It’s really worked. Brilliant idea, Leo. Thank you so much.’

  Leo felt a surge of pleasure quite different from the satisfaction he always felt in tracking down information for a story. He was even more pleased, when going down the tables noting the names of all the winners, to see Penny’s Dundee cake adorned by a ‘First Place’ rosette.

  ‘And fortunately Lucinda’s scones made with local Fellrigg Dairies cheese won too,’ said Penny. ‘It’s very important to keep family honours even.’

  The hall filled up with people viewing, sampling, and buying – and raising a satisfactory amount for the library. An old hand at town events, Leo’s photographer turned up just in time for the announcements. ‘Jam section,’ he said. ‘Always have to have a shot of these.’ He lined up the winners of the raspberry, the strawberry, the blackberry, and all the other single-fruit jams, then the free-choice combinations. Finally the overall winner: Mrs Lane for her damson & apple, with Rachel Fell’s hedgerow medley a close second.

  Mrs Lane accepted the congratulations of her peers with a stately inclination of her head. Leo was amused to see that Rachel received a rather more guarded smile until it was remembered that her mother-in-law had achieved several highly commended certificates in years gone by.

  Tiny spoonfuls of jam were tasted. ‘Very nice,’ said one of Mrs Lane’s friends. ‘But I reckon Mrs Scrivener’s blackberry jelly would still have the edge. Do you remember?’

  There were collected sighs from the older generation. ‘Ah,’ said Mrs Lane reflectively. ‘That was a rare grand jam. No one ever did find out where Jack Scrivener had his famous secret blackberry patch. You’d think he’d have passed on the knowledge before he emigrated, wouldn’t you?’

  A secret blackberry patch? Jack Scrivener? Leo was hit by an enormous, story-busting idea. It was all he could do to politely ask for a few words about the secrets of Mrs Lane’s success, then report on the auction-of-produce at the end, before following it through.

  ‘Penny,’ he said urgently. ‘I think I’ve solved it. Can you drive us up to Lowdale?’

  She widened her eyes. ‘Are you nuts? Before I’ve helped tidy up? I’d be ostracized by the committee for ever.’

  So he sat impatiently in the corner, writing up the event and reading over all his assorted notes on the aeroplane crash. By the time Penny was ready he was ninety-nine percent certain that he’d got the solution. It all depended on one crucial thing.

  ‘Park in the lane,’ he said. ‘Would you recognise a blackberry bush if you saw one?’

  Penny laughed out loud. ‘Well, of course I would.’

  ‘Thank goodness for that. Can you see any here?’

  Penny stared at him as if he was mad. ‘Lots. All those on the scrub land next to the Enterprise Park, for a start.’

  ‘Bingo,’ said Leo softly.

  ‘Leo, what is this?’

  He got out of the car. ‘How do we get over there?’

  ‘I’m not sure we do. The land will be owned by Lowdale, won’t it?’

  ‘Not this side of the wire fence.’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘This side of the wire fence just past the blockade with the notice saying WARNING – DANGER OF COLLAPSE. That one?’

  ‘It’s a bluff,’ said Leo confidently. He swung his bad leg over the stile and made his way across the uneven ground, keeping a sharp lookout. He studied the nearest bush. Childhood memories came back to him, of scrambling up and down cliffs, of sneaking off to his great-uncle’s fruit cages while the gardener was taking his afternoon nap. Avoiding the stinging nettles winding through the stems, he picked a handful of fruit and returned to Penny. ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘Congratulations. Definitely blackberries.’

  ‘Are they the sort of blackberries to win prizes for jam?’

  Understanding shot into her face. ‘Oh, I get you! You think this might be Jack Scrivener’s secret cache?’ She tasted one. ‘Flavourful. You can’t really tell how they’ll turn out until they’ve been cooked. It’s possible.’

  ‘It’s more than possible. Listen. What can you hear?’

  ‘Nothing. Unless you count the seagulls and the waves.’

  He grinned. ‘And what couldn’t we hear at Long Tarn?’

  He saw the answer in her eyes. ‘Waves,’ she said. ‘Of course! We couldn’t hear waves.’

  ‘And that’s what I’ve been missing,’ said Leo. ‘Jack’s account said he couldn’t hear anything over the sound of the waves. Then he saw a shadow overhead, something broke off it, then the plane came down hissing and boiling into the tarn.’ He swivelled to look over the hedge at Deep End Farm. ‘Not Long Tarn. This one. Deep Tarn, right on the coast.’

  ‘It fits. It fits a whole lot better. But why didn’t he say?’

  ‘Because he wasn’t supposed to be here. He was a scavenger, remember? He’d been collecting blackberries for his wife to turn into prize-winning jam.’

  Penny looked horrified. ‘But the pilot! Andrew Collins! He just left him?’

  ‘I imagine it would have been obvious the he was already a goner. They seemed to be a lot more pragmatic about life and death then. Maybe as a result of going through the war.’

  ‘Poor things,’ said Penny soberly. She rubbed her eyes as she stared through the hedge at Deep Tarn. Then she stiffened. ‘Leo, the men from your boat have just appeared through the door of that ramshackle barn.’

  A surge of adrenalin went through him. ‘One of the Deep End Farm buildings? Where?’

  ‘They’ve gone inside again. But it was them, I swear it.’

  ‘Out in the open? How indiscreet – unless it was on purpose. Were they looking this way?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Leo, what’s going on? I’m getting scared.’

  Under their feet, the ground shook slightly. ‘I think
I know,’ said Leo. ‘Quick, drive us around to the Enterprise Park as if we want to look at the bushes there.’

  She was already scrambling into the car. ‘Why?’

  ‘Just do it. Now.’

  Urgency pumped through him. Throughout his professional life he had pursued stories regardless of his own personal safety. But this time he’d involved Penny. This was her car – easily traceable. What he was about to do would have been unthinkable a few months ago. He was going to give those men – whose identity he strongly suspected he knew – a chance to save face. He was going to protect Penny at the cost of the story.

  Penny didn’t understand what was going on, but the grim set to Leo’s normally pleasant face had her reversing down the lane at speed and hurtling round to Lowdale Enterprise Park.

  ‘Park openly near where they’re doing the work on the Lowdale Screw Fittings extension and we’ll walk across to the bushes together. The only thing we are thinking about is the Jack Scrivener story.’

  ‘That is the only thing I’m thinking about,’ muttered Penny, as they hurried over to the tangle of brambles on this side of the wire fence.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Leo loudly. ‘Is this a prize-winning bush?’

  Penny gave up. He was playing some sort of deep game but she trusted him. ‘Difficult to tell,’ she said. ‘The birds have had most of the fruit.’

  ‘In Jack’s day, he’d have made sure to get here first.’

  ‘I don’t know about the quality of these blackberries for making jam. There isn’t enough to try. But the location fits.’

  ‘So all we have to do now is ask whether Deep Tarn can be dredged,’ said Leo cheerfully.

  ‘You are aware this is private property?’ said a voice behind them.

  Penny turned round, her nerves jumping. The two men from the boat were striding over from the Screw Fittings building! Her head spun. How had they done that? They’d been at Deep End farm on the other side of the lane!

  Leo wrinkled his forehead. ‘Really? Sorry, it didn’t look as if anyone owned this part. I’m Leo Williams, journalist with the Salthaven Messenger. I’m sorting out a story that took place sixty years ago. A local character gave an eyewitness report about a test plane flown by Andrew Collins crashing up here. The strange thing is that nothing was ever found. If it’s private property, then that explains it. He must have changed his story as to which tarn the plane crashed into to hide the fact that he’d been here.’

  The two men didn’t even exchange glances. ‘Sixty years ago is a long time,’ said the one who had spoken before.

  ‘Certainly,’ agreed Leo. ‘But it’s amazing how long bits and pieces can survive. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were sections of fuselage buried under all this scrub. It would be interesting to find out.’ He smiled ingenuously at the two men.

  ‘You don’t want to go looking,’ said the second man. He gestured towards the edge of the cliff. ‘Subsidence danger.’

  ‘That’s a pity. It would have been good to find a conclusive end to the story before the paper prints it.’ He wrinkled his forehead. ‘It’s not my business, of course, but shouldn’t there be more warning signs if it’s dangerous around here? I’m just thinking of sightseers, you see. Once the story is printed. There is a lot of trade in vintage aircraft souvenirs.’

  There was a tiny silence. Leo could see the implications of his artless observation sink in. It seemed to him that the men considered and discarded several courses of action all without saying a word. ‘How about,’ said the first man slowly to the second man, ‘if we ask the team working on the new extension if they’ve found anything?’

  The second man nodded. ‘That would do it,’ he replied in a measured fashion.

  ‘Would you? That would be really helpful,’ said Leo, smiling. ‘Thanks. I appreciate it. Here’s my card.’

  They walked back to the car. Penny could feel the men’s eyes on her. ‘Are you going to tell me what all this is about?’ she murmured.

  ‘Not until we’ve put at least a mile between us and them,’ Leo murmured back.

  ‘How about as soon as we get back, once you have emailed your boss and I have put the kettle on?’

  ‘That could work,’ said Leo.

  ‘Give,’ said Penny as soon as they got home and she had shut her own front door safely behind her.

  Leo sat forward, his hands loosely clasped in front of him. ‘I started with two stories. There was Andrew Collins’s plane crash in the fifties, and what was really going on at Lowdale Screw Fittings today.’

  ‘It’s a secret research lab. Everyone told you that.’

  Leo smiled at her. ‘And I said that if the powers-that-be wanted to keep it secret, they would have done. This was too easy to find out about.’

  Penny turned away, busying herself with cake. She was becoming a little bit alarmed by the way Leo’s smiles sometimes affected her.

  ‘But on the other side of a supposedly unsafe, blocked-off lane was Deep End Farm,’ continued Leo. ‘Reclusive farmer, tatty yard, a few sheep, a few hens, overgrown hedges, ramshackle outbuildings … and a security system to die for.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Penny, pouring the tea.

  ‘Twice in that lane I’ve felt rumbling under my feet. Several times I’ve seen activity at Lowdale that can’t be explained away by the building of a simple extension. I think there’s a tunnel leading from the Screw Fittings warehouse to the real secret site underneath Deep End Farm. I think there always has been, right back from when the aerodrome was first taken over, maybe even before that. I think what they are actually doing now is extending the Deep End facilities without anyone knowing.’

  Penny sat down heavily in a chair. That would explain the sudden appearance of those two men today. Her mind tallied the other small puzzles, the use of out-of-town companies, the watchfulness of the Screw Fittings employees. ‘You think they covered up the plane crash?’

  ‘I’m sure of it. I just couldn’t believe in Long Tarn as the crash site. It’s too peaceful, too open, too convenient. Not to mention the fact that they dredged it at the time and found nothing – much to the locals’ amusement.’

  ‘Plus, none my family ever told me about it or stopped me swimming there.’

  ‘Deep Tarn, however, is another matter entirely. It’s out of the way, on private property, so once Jack Scrivener had been paid off and persuaded to change his story it would have been relatively simple to clear up any fragments of fuselage. But there didn’t seem to be a reason for the evasion. The mission wasn’t sensitive, the plane wasn’t secret. So it had to be where it had happened that was significant.’

  ‘Near your tunnel.’

  ‘Precisely. I reckon Deep Tarn could be very close indeed to the underground passage. They couldn’t risk too much attention around there.’

  ‘And now?’ Penny was troubled. Menacing figures taking steps to safeguard national secrets was way out of her comfort zone. ‘They know where you live, they know where you work.’

  Leo covered her hand with his. ‘They will also know by now that I have an ingrained, very well-documented habit of recording every single thing I find out and lodging it in several different places.’

  ‘All the same, your boat is quite exposed on the river. Do you want to stay in the spare room here tonight? Just long enough so they know you’ve had time to record all these things and made copies of them.’

  She had made the offer without thinking. His fingers had been rubbing hers comfortingly, now she felt them go still. ‘I would,’ he said. ‘But I won’t. I’ll beg a sofa from my editor instead. Harry will be fine with it and if they are watching, they’ll be pretty sure I will have told him the lot. It’ll be OK, Penny. You’ll see. It’s enough for me to know I’ve solved the puzzle, that I can still do it, that I haven’t lost that edge. I don’t need to publish the story.’

  ‘But how are they going to know that?’ asked Penny, still troubled. ‘How are they going to know you’re safe? I get the
impression you didn’t used to have a very mellow reputation.’

  His hand was still over hers, his fingers still warm against her skin. Now they closed in a strong, fearless grip. ‘And you’d be right. But they know I recognised them for who they are. They are used to people backing down, Penny. They expect it. It’s the effect they have. There really isn’t any need to worry.’

  From the next issue of the Salthaven Messenger:

  ‘In a post-script to the above article, it has been confirmed that fragments of a post-war test plane similar to that believed to have been flown by Andrew Collins have been found during excavation work for the new extension at Lowdale Screw Fittings.

  ‘The cliff area has been unsafe for many years. It will never be known what went wrong with Collins’s final flight on that fateful night, but it is clear that he died while flying one of the breed of aircraft that led to the supersonic travel we know today. He was a true hero of Salthaven.’

  The Jigsaw Puzzle –

  Book One in the Penny Plain Mysteries

  For more information about Jan Jones

  and other Accent Press titles

  please visit

  www.accentpress.co.uk

  Copyright © Jan Jones 2014

  The right of Jan Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ISBN 9781783751051

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers: Accent Press Ltd, Ty Cynon House, Navigation Park, Abercynon, CF45 4SN