by Wendy Holden
Something practical, something outdoors. A building site, that sort of thing. Straightforward but boring and with a hard, backbreaking aspect to it. Dylan was reluctant to relinquish the idea of suffering.
He looked down at his plate, and was surprised to see both the salad and the sandwiches gone. He had finished the lot.
Warmed by sunshine just the right side of hot, Dylan now felt pleasantly full and sleepy. The air was full of soothing noises: birds singing and leaves sighing, people on the terrace talking softly and sounds of sheep from the surrounding fields. He could smell cut grass and deep honey scents from the flowers in the cottage gardens. It would be so easy to rest his head on his arms and go to sleep . . .
But no. Dylan roused himself. He was not here to enjoy himself. He needed to find something to do. Something hard, outside and boring.
A newspaper lay on the table and he reached for it. It was a local freesheet, the Edenville Advertiser. Papers like this often had job sections. He could do worse than have a look.
A rustling noise now attracted his attention. A man was sitting himself down at the next table and removing what were ostensibly home-made sandwiches from a supermarket carrier bag. Behind him, affixed to the pub’s sunny front, was a sign: ‘These Tables Are Reserved For Customers Eating Pub Food Only’, exquisitely lettered in white on a sage green background.
Dylan continued on to Situations Vacant. Till Operatives were needed at the supermarket and there was a caretaking opportunity at a primary school. They both sounded quite boring, which was good. But also quite indoorsy, which was bad.
‘Lookin’ fer a job?’ enquired the man with the sandwiches.
Dylan, who had previously merely glanced at his neighbour, now found himself meeting a pair of deep-set eyes. His gaze widened to take in a pair of enormous shoulders. This guy was huge.
‘Er, maybe,’ Dylan admitted. He would have preferred the man to mind his own business but you didn’t tell someone this size something like that. He looked as if he could wrench trees out by their roots and toss them effortlessly up in the air. As if he could pick up a tractor in each hand while balancing an articulated lorry on his head.
Flashing across Dylan’s mind came the possibility that he had been recognised. But just as quickly he dismissed it. The stranger didn’t look like the literary type. Besides, Dylan knew, he now looked quite different from the author picture in the back of his novels. He had maintained his clean-shaven chin and allowed his hair to grow longer. He had also, since the accident and despite his mother’s efforts to feed him up again, lost a considerable amount of weight.
‘What sorta job?’
The gaze of the huge stranger was trained intensely on him. An answer was evidently expected.
‘A kind of, um, outdoorsy job,’ Dylan said hurriedly.
‘I do gardens,’ the other offered, through his sandwich. ‘Gard’nin’. Could do wi’ some ’elp. You any good at gard’nin’?’
‘Gardening?’ Dylan repeated. He’d done a bit of it, he supposed. Occasionally, driven to distraction by his father’s cajoling, he’d reluctantly gone outside to mow the lawn. He’d done the odd spot of weeding. But he’d never thought of doing gardening as a job. And yet it wasn’t a bad idea. He knew more of the basics than he did about, say, building. And it would obviously be outside, very physical and presumably pretty boring, weeding and mowing all day. Exactly what he was looking for, in other words.
‘Yeah, I’m OK at it.’
‘Pay’s not brilliant,’ the other said shortly, naming a sum so pitiful Dylan was unsure whether to laugh or be shocked. But money, of course, did not matter. He had loads of the stuff.
Hang on a minute, though, he told himself. Being paid, even at these rates, might mean answering questions. Filling in forms, handing over numbers. Revealing the identity he wanted to put behind him. Dylan began to silently construct a defensive sentence about being ideologically opposed to giving personal information. If the guy didn’t buy that, he’d have to turn it down.
‘It’s cash in ’and,’ the other remarked, as if reading his mind.
No questions asked then, Dylan realised, with cautious relief.
‘Reckon you’re on for it?’ He was being looked at questioningly.
Dylan reckoned he probably was. Apart from anything else, there was something appealingly rash about throwing his lot in with a stranger, particularly one like this. The guy was about as far as it was possible to imagine from a fashionable, neurotic London literary hipster.
‘When do I start?’
The other finished chewing, screwed up his plastic bag and stuffed it in a back pocket. He rose to what, to the seated Dylan, looked like his full ten feet and picked up, from the bench beside him, a dirty denim baseball cap. He clapped it on his head and said, ‘Monday. ’Arf seven. Meet you ’ere.’
Dylan blinked. He hadn’t started work at seven thirty in his entire life, let alone for such bad pay.
‘Or are yer livin’ somewhere else?’ his large new employer enquired, misunderstanding the hesitation.
He wasn’t actually living anywhere, of course. Dylan’s only permanent address was his car. He had noticed the pub had rooms; he could book into one of those.
‘Here’s fine,’ Dylan assured his new employer. ‘Seven thirty, Monday, then.’
He felt his right hand crushed in a painful grip. ‘The name’s Dan. Dan Parker.’
Dylan hesitated before giving his own name. He was no longer Dylan Eliot, the well-known writer, the literary enfant terrible. He was . . . who was he?
His eye caught one of the trees around the pond on the green. Huge trees, billowing with leaves.
‘Greenleaf,’ Dylan said.
‘Greenleaf?’ The big guy laughed. ‘Good name for a gardener.’
‘Yeah. Isn’t it?’ He was racking his brains for a first name. ‘Adam,’ he added, as it came out of the blue. ‘Adam Greenleaf.’
It sounded quite plausible, he thought. Possibly even more than Dylan Eliot. Perhaps, in reality, he had always been Adam Greenleaf.
Dan nodded. ‘Good stuff. See yer ’ere Monday, Adam.’
Dan was striding away on his enormously long legs when a flurry of activity from the pub entrance attracted Dylan’s attention. The manager in the tight trousers now came skittering out in an obvious state of agitation. ‘Excuse me,’ he shouted, after Dan’s vast retreating form. ‘Could you please read the signs and not eat your own sandwiches at our tables?’
Dan gave no sign of having heard. Instead, he swung himself into a battered red van and shut the passenger side door with a mighty slam. After a couple of stutters, the vehicle spluttered into life. Dylan watched it exit the car park with a screech of brakes and a spray of gravel.
CHAPTER 19
Jason returned to his cubbyhole feeling intensely irritated. Quite apart from Dan Parker eating his sandwiches on pub premises again, the ladies and their daughter hadn’t arrived yet.
This latter in particular concerned Jason. If the girls – as he’d started to think of them – didn’t come, he would have nothing to tell Angela about. And given that she might still be angry about the Ros Downer business, he might be in for a bumpy ride.
There was a commotion in the doorway and Jason looked up. To his horror, Angela herself now came clomping in on her trademark six-inch heels. Her hot-pink mini wrap dress was yanked tightly round her waist and her thickly made-up black eyes sparked with fury.
Jason, frozen with fear, could only stare helplessly as Angela bore down on him like a juggernaut on a headlight-fixated rabbit. ‘I’ve just missed him. His bloody van’s just driven off.’
Jason realised that the object of the Director of Human Resources’ ire was not himself but the jobbing gardener she had in her romantic sights. He hurried to redeem himself by assuring her that Dan
Parker was plainly unworthy of her affection. ‘He’s just been eating his sandwiches outside again,’ Jason reported, pursing his lips with disapproval.
He was perturbed when, instead of joining in his dissatisfaction, Angela looked indignant. ‘Yes, but it’s hardly his fault he does that, is it?’
Jason was confused. How could someone eat sandwiches in blatant contravention of the stated rules of the premises and it not be their fault? ‘So whose fault is it?’ he asked.
‘That stupid old sod George Farley’s, of course,’ stormed Angela, tossing her stiffly sprayed ebony curls.
Jason was puzzled. George Farley was a widower in his late eighties who lived alone at the end of the village. He was quiet, law-abiding and fond of his garden, in which he spent long hours working. On no occasion, when Dan had been eating his sandwiches, had George been anywhere near the pub.
‘That’s the whole point,’ Angela snapped accusingly, when Jason pointed this out. ‘He never comes here any more. Dan says all the old guys think they’re not welcome.’
Jason felt, inside his head, the clatter of a very big penny dropping. Angela was referring to the consequences of his new managership.
The Edenville Arms had, until last year, been a run-down village boozer with the letters falling off the sign. Its main customers had been ancient men who sat all night by a badly smoking fire cradling a half-pint of mild and playing dominoes. There had also been a widespread practice of locals using the outside benches to eat food not bought in the pub. Jason’s instructions on the assumption of his duties had been to address both issues.
‘Are you telling me,’ Jason asked Angela, ‘that Dan Parker’s sandwich-eating has a political dimension?’
‘Something like that,’ Angela replied acidly. She turned her glittering eyes challengingly on his. ‘And I have to say, I admire his commitment.’
Jason had to hold his jaw to stop it dropping. Admire Parker’s commitment! In opposing a rule that Angela herself had wanted enforced!
It had been her idea, especially about the outside tables. Personally, Jason was happy to leave that arrangement the way it was. Most people with their own food at least drank his beer and wine, which was where the profit lay.
‘Goodness,’ he said, summoning up a tone somewhere between regret and admiration. ‘I didn’t realise Dan had such strong principles.’
‘He’s got strong everything,’ Angela burst out longingly, with flared nostrils. ‘I don’t know what he sees in that Turner woman! How could he prefer her, when he could have me?’ Her eyes filled with tears and her nose turned red.
Jason waited a couple of beats before saying anything else. He made a ‘glass’ gesture at Ryan, the handsome new barman.
Ryan looked puzzled. ‘Wine!’ Jason hissed urgently and was rewarded by a broad, understanding smile, brilliantly white in the middle of Ryan’s lush dark beard. The sight of it filled Jason with a sudden, powerful joy.
‘I was thinking,’ Jason ventured later, when Angela had recovered somewhat and was halfway down her second large Chardonnay. ‘Maybe we can do some offers for locals. It’s a shame the old blokes don’t come in any more. George especially. He’s a nice old thing.’
‘Troublemaking old bastard,’ corrected Angela.
That seemed a bit unnecessary to Jason. George, or so the manager had heard, was a war hero. He had been a Dambuster, or something.
‘Not a troublemaker?’ Angela exclaimed, flashing her sharp yellow teeth. ‘He made life hell for Ros before she left.’
Jason felt himself warm to the old man still more. Anyone who made Ros Downer’s life hell was a friend of his.
‘And Iggy’s!’ Angela added indignantly.
Iggy, Ros’s partner and a house husband and part-time chainsaw artist, was someone the pub manager had found deeply irritating. He was always badgering Jason to let him cut down the trees in the Arms’ car park – a row of fine, shady limes – so he could sculpt the stumps. Jason loathed chainsaw sculptures.
He wished he had known George Farley had upset these ghastly people. He would have given him a bar table all of his own. As well as free beer. ‘So what did George actually do to make their lives hell?’ he asked, doing his best to sound disapproving.
Angela began a heated account of the octogenarian’s crimes. It was all about gardens, apparently. Jason knew the gardens involved. While George’s was notable for its neatness, the Downers’, from which it was divided by a broad leylandii hedge, was a chaos of hacked-up wood stumps and faded plastic play equipment for their absurdly named daughter, Rapunzal.
‘But when Ros told him to cut down the hedge, he refused!’ ranted Angela.
As well he might, thought Jason. Removing it would mean an unrelieved prospect of the Downers’ mess. ‘Well, surely it was up to him, if it was in his garden.’
‘It was blocking the morning sun from their sitting room! Ros suffers from seasonal affective disorder! Selfish old sod,’ was Angela’s response.
Jason was relieved when, now, they were interrupted. The skinny, lank-haired young man who’d ordered the ham sandwich had reappeared.
Jason eyed him cagily. He’d observed that the young man had been talking to the troublesome Dan Parker.
‘I hope the sandwiches were satisfactory?’ he enquired, in a bid to draw attention to the Edenville Arms’ strengths. The plate had been shining when it came back in; he’d eaten every last bit of pepper. And to noticeable effect; Jason was struck by how much better his customer looked. A sandwich and a beer had made all the difference.
He was actually rather handsome, with very good cheekbones and nice full lips. Now that awful, gaunt, drawn look had gone there was something appealingly soulful about those dark eyes, with their hint of tragedy.
‘Very nice,’ Dylan said, disconcerted by the other’s stare. ‘Er, do you have a room?’
Something now inserted itself between Jason and his customer. Something in a hot-pink dress with wild black hair. Angela pressed her buttocks against Jason’s wooden flap, spread out her arms and faced the young man as an opera singer faces her audience: chest heaving, eyelids fluttering. ‘Of course we have a room,’ she declared huskily.
This was not the case, Jason knew. Every room at the moment was completely booked. But he did not dare gainsay Angela.
‘Which room’s free?’ Angela hissed over her shoulder to Jason. ‘Quick! Before he goes!’
Jason realised that, to add to his other challenges, the Director of Human Resources had fixed on his customer as an outlet for her thwarted, Chardonnay-fired affections. Perhaps it was just as well that he did not have a room. He leaned forward. ‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured into Angela’s plump back. ‘We’re completely booked.’
Angela whipped round and the glare she now turned on him was vengeful and infernal. There would, Jason knew, be zero value in pointing out that filling every room of the inn was what he had been employed to do.
‘What about the honeymoon suite?’ Angela snarled. ‘Those lesbians haven’t come yet, have they?’
Jason regretted letting this slip earlier. He wished the lesbians – if they really were lesbians – would arrive soon. Where were they? He was under serious attack and wouldn’t be able to hold the fort much longer.
CHAPTER 20
The Edenville Arms was not proving the easiest of places to find, especially with Google Maps constantly crashing.
They had turned off the motorway a while ago, but the countryside wasn’t looking as it should. The mellow green fields Nell recalled from the pub’s website hadn’t yet put in an appearance.
Instead, they were going down ever narrower roads between stretches of moorland dotted with stunted trees and limping, blighted sheep with daggy bottoms. It was a landscape that seemed gloomy even in bright weather, absorbing the sunshine like a black hole, just as a s
eries of enormous potholes threatened to absorb the Land Rover. Each one was filled with viscous mud which seemed to leap up of its own accord and spatter itself liberally over every window.
‘Are you sure we’re going the right way?’ Rachel asked, wrenching the wheel round a steep corner and wincing as she hit yet another hole.
Nell frowned at the small screen in her palm, following the wiggling track. ‘It should be somewhere around here.’ She raised her head and looked round doubtfully. The countryside was as empty as it was desolate.
The Defender suddenly jerked to a halt, its engine juddering. Rachel leaned over the steering wheel. ‘You’re not seriously saying it’s that place?’
At first glance it looked like a ruin, dark and half-collapsed. But more careful consideration revealed that the upstairs windows did have glass in them, albeit of a matt filthiness. And the rusty sign in front of it, hanging unpromisingly from a post shaped like a gallows, bore the remains of some complex illustration which might once have been a heraldic device.
‘Evil Arms!’ exclaimed Juno excitedly.
‘What?’ Nell gasped. But Juno was right. Nell found that if she really squinted hard, the remaining letters E VIL ARMS could be seen at the bottom of the sign.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Rachel.
Nell could not, for the moment, frame speech. Her gaze was fixed on the dirty upper casements. They were booked in the honeymoon suite, but this place didn’t look as if it had any kind of suite. Even an en suite. ‘It’s gone downhill a bit since they took the website picture,’ was all she could say.
Only Juno seemed inclined to look on the bright side. ‘It’s like The Hound of the Baskervilles,’ she said happily.
It was, indeed, easy to imagine some bloodthirsty animal bounding towards them, jaws open and dripping with murderous intent. The Evil Arms, Nell thought, looked like a place where even the pub cat could kill. Except that there didn’t seem to be one of those either. There was no sign of life whatsoever. She remembered the friendly, capable – if, as regarded the booking, disappointingly firm – manager. Where was he amid all this desolation?
