The Food Detective

by Judith Cutler

  ‘And you show me a GP or schoolmaster or clergyman for miles around. He loathes Aidan – I’m afraid he’s really quite homophobic. And he seemed to take an immediate dislike to poor Nick.’

  Poor Nick? But I wouldn’t be sidetracked. ‘So did he have any other friends?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘He must have got…close…to you, even in your church capacity,’ I inserted quickly, ‘to make his confession. Or have his confidential heart-to-heart.’ Maybe it was time to turn up the heat. ‘I think he’s dead. I don’t think his body will ever be found, because I think he was disposed of in that rending plant where Nick and I were nearly killed. I’d dearly love to find who killed him.’

  ‘In that case, why don’t you ask the ones who attacked you?’

  It was, of course, the obvious response – from someone with something to hide. ‘One’s not going to be doing any talking for a long time. The side of his face was shot away. I hit the other one so hard the last I heard he’s still unconscious. The police know who they are, but they haven’t told me. Well, the bloke I knocked out could still sue me for assault, in this topsy-turvy world, on the ground I used unreasonable force.’

  Damn, I’d diverted her again. ‘And did you?’

  ‘Sue, if someone was charging towards you ready to kill you, someone who’d been torturing another human being with the threat of a killer dog, how long would you take to work out how big a swing to take and when to pull back? A nano-second, I’d think. I just walloped, I make no bones about it.’ I winced at the unintended pun but didn’t explain. ‘Tell me – are you doing what the Law may do: taking the side of the criminal against the intended victim? Because if you are, I’d like you to leave, now. And you can take those ledgers with you to show the police when they turn up.’

  ‘You mean you’d –’

  ‘After what I witnessed today? In thirty seconds flat I’ll be spilling every bean I know. I’d rather you did, of course. And I’d rather you were rather more frank than you’ve been with me. I know the village has a culture of secrecy the Mafia would envy, but you shouldn’t endorse it. For God’s sake, Sue – you won’t even be able to read the funeral service over him, because he’s so much blood in a black pudding!’

  Her own blood drained from her face. At last I might be getting through to her. Through white lips she said, ‘The person who could have told you most can’t any more. He’s dead.’ She gathered up the precious ledgers and stowed them in the deplorable bag. ‘Ted Gay. Yes, Lucy’s father. The man who blew himself up.’ She stood up, ready to depart in umbrage.

  I flapped her down again and leaned towards her confidentially. ‘I know he blew himself up. But I don’t know the whys and wherefores. Even the hows. Except that was fertiliser, wasn’t it? But how could even a dimwitted alcoholic blow himself up with his compost heap?’

  Her snort might have been laughter. ‘Fertiliser’s used for other things beside crop improvement, as even townees like you should know. It’s used for bombs, Josie. And that’s what he was making this afternoon. A bomb. And because you’ve been so lovey-dovey to young Lucy, no one’s quite got round to telling you who it was for, have they? That bomb was meant for you, Josie. It was meant for you!’

  ‘I’d no idea they hated me so much,’ I said, still battling with what Sue had said and how I was to digest it. I fended off the glass Nick was pressing into my hand.

  ‘Don’t be so daft,’ he said. ‘Did Tony hate the people he had dealt with? Of course not. It was a business he was running, something he did with rivals and subordinates. They wanted to take you out because you were too damned close to a lucrative business and none of the other hints had worked. Come on, think about all that cash in the Wetherall office. It wasn’t Monopoly money. It was real. Like the guns.’

  Maybe I nodded, but, like all the other little warnings, it felt personal. ‘Shopping Sue won’t have helped to re-establish myself, either,’ I muttered.

  ‘You didn’t shop her. She gave herself away with that phone call,’ he insisted. ‘And as far as you knew, while you had your heart to heart Short and Evans were still ensconced in the comfort of your flat – or reading stories to the kids as you suggested.’

  ‘Ted Gay, Reg Bulcombe, and those two characters still in hospital – not the nicest selection of neighbours, all the same.’

  ‘True. What’ll you do? Hitch up your skirts and run?’

  ‘Not exactly me, that sort of thing. In any case, I don’t have any choice as long as those kids need me. I’ll just run the White Hart as an orphanage till they’re ready to move.’

  ‘I know Social Services’ll pay their maintenance and board and lodging. But it’s not the same as a lucrative pub, Josie.’

  ‘The pub never made a bean. The bar food, yes. And there’s nothing to stop my plans for the restaurant. Provided the locals can refrain from vandalising my customers’ cars. And will work for me.’

  ‘No news of Tom and Sharon?’

  ‘I still think they wanted to escape Sharon’s incestuous father. Not me. If Lindi comes back – and to give her her due, she’s the sort of kid who may well brazen things out – I may keep Robin. Lucy’ll finish all her school exams, work for me full time and do a day-release course or two. Then university, if I have my way.’

  ‘All that costs money.’

  ‘Not a problem.’

  ‘Tony’s loot?’

  It was too late and I was too tired to mess around with tact. ‘One more jibe about that and you’re out. Out of this room, out of this pub, out of my life forever. Final notice. Not negotiable. Do I make myself clear?’ Pity I had to spoil it with a sob I couldn’t quite turn into a yawn. Or a yawn into a sob. Whichever.

  Chapter Thirty

  It was one of those bright March days that God had spring-cleaned especially for me. Now with my own pilot’s licence, I had my usual Friday morning session, but without the services of Piers. He’d had his uses, not least as a repository of photos, many of which were logged as evidence when Luke Greville’s case at last came up before Exeter Assizes. All the roads had led to Greville, him and his duplicitous mother. Police research – how nice to have someone else doing the dirty work – had shown that Wetherall had been one of a chain of once quite legal rending plants right across the country stretched to capacity and beyond so they could undercut competitors and force them out of business.

  After seeing all those overflowing, leaking, stinking vats, I could never look at a vitamin capsule or a new lipstick quite the same way. The illicit Kings Duncombe abattoir had been a bonus for Wetherall, springing up in response to food standards legislation all but small, hard-pressed beef producers could see was entirely sensible. And beef consumers, of course, who were unable to pay the sort of prices I felt were justified for organic meat. And the national minimum wage, as Robin pointed out, which was all most of the villagers earned, if that, didn’t run to much in the way of organic anything. He’d stayed, and was rubbing his hands with glee at the sight of the new staff accommodation, though Lindi had never returned. Rumour had it she was working as a picker on a mushroom farm near Weston-super-Mare, which saddened me: she could have done better than that. Lucy was doing just as well at school as she had before her father’s death, and Nick was settling into the role of favourite uncle. Both men had of course been strictly vetted officially, and I kept my beady eye on them all the time. Just in case. You never knew with officialdom. Especially as Lucy was rapidly flowering into a quite lovely young woman.

  Any day now my gourmet restaurant would open, with lots of nice media coverage, thanks to Nicola and her friends, who were now regulars. The villagers goggled from behind twitching curtains, and women were herding their menfolk to the new snug in the hope of their getting autographs. In any case the snug, clean but with the antique pub furniture I’d acquired, had started to attract back the men who’d once huddled round the fire to the exclusion of everyone else. Reg Bulcombe wasn’t doing any huddling, not in the pub, anyw
ay, though maybe wherever he was being held pending his trial. It was his fertiliser that had taken Gay to kingdom come, and although the police believed he’d mixed it with the other bomb ingredients on Greville’s orders, doing what you were told was no excuse in law.

  Sue had been promoted to another parish, in the time-honoured way in which big institutions deal with troublesome but useful staff. The paperwork she’d produced – and that it turned out she’d planted in my outhouse – made it clear that Fred Tregothnan had been dabbling in a variety of drugs for which he’d forged prescriptions, so he’d have been struck off by the RCVS if his activities had been made known. I don’t know what they’d have made of his visits to hardcore porn sites, but the police wouldn’t have approved. The grass? Bulcombe, for my money, though he was currently denying all knowledge. Sue had been replaced temporarily by a lad who looked about sixteen, who trotted round the parish in his cassock, Adam’s apple a-bobble, demanding to be called Father.

  Neither Tregothnan’s Land Rover nor Nick’s rental four-by-four had ever been found, despite my inevitable photographic evidence. The trouble was, as I’d once told Nick, Somerset was a big county with lots of remote farms on which a car could be disappeared.

  It wasn’t quite by chance I was circling over Exmoor now. I didn’t like loose ends. Never did – any more than Nick does. He’d still love to run to earth Tony’s fortune, which I suspect is on reason why we’ll never progress far beyond our shared-home-but-not-shared bedroom status. Another is the fact that though he now has occasional flashes of colour, he’s still only a pale, washed-out shadow of a man. Like a man who’s spent too long in gaol, maybe. No, he can’t help it. That stabbing incident made him more of a prisoner than my Tony ever was.

  I can almost feel Tony now, telling me to stop musing and get on with something I can’t do every day of the week – enjoy my flying.

  Yes, it’s just like it is on TV. All those fields, with little dark patches where the clouds scud between them and the warm spring sun. The early crops are greening the fields, and Easter lambs are busy preparing themselves for my organic table. But there – yes, down there – is what looks like a graveyard for giants. There they lie, side by side – Gog and Magog, maybe.

  Hang on: they were further east. So what on earth would be buried in this corner of an English field, where the tilth merges with the moor? A couple of enormous horses? Or – yes! – a pair of big vehicles, one not missed by its owner, the other still the subject of endless insurance haggles.

  I take a couple of snaps, and buzz for home, breathless with delight. Home? To hell with that. I’ve got another ten minutes before my time is up, and I never was a woman to waste anything. I whirl over Barnstable bay, singing aloud. Yes! God’s in His Heaven, all’s well with the world. And I know of a very good way to celebrate my find. The moment I land, I call up Mike Evans. Get yourself back to your flat, I say, and get that champagne on ice.

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  About the Author

  Prize-winning short-story writer JUDITH CUTLER is the author of nearly thirty novels, including the successful crime series featuring Fran Harman, police woman extraordinaire. Judith has taught Creative Writing at Birmingham University, and has run writing courses elsewhere, including a maximum-security prison and an idyllic Greek island. She now lives in the Cotswolds with her husband, fellow author Edward Marston.

  www.judithcutler.com

  By Judith Cutler

  The Chief Superintendent Fran Harman series

  Life Sentence

  Cold Pursuit

  Still Waters

  The Josie Welford series

  The Food Detective

  The Chinese Takeout

  The Tobias Campion series

  The Keeper of Secrets

  Shadow of the Past

  Scar Tissue

  Drawing the Line

  Copyright

  Allison & Busby Limited

  12 Fitzroy Mews

  London W1T 6DW

  www.allisonandbusby.com

  First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2005.

  This ebook edition published by Allison & Busby in 2014.

  Copyright © 2005 by JUDITH CUTLER

  The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from

  the British Library.

  ISBN 978–0–7490–1669–2