Sweet Treats

by Christine Miles

  “Thanks,” Bryn said. “Very complimentary. Shhh. He’s close.”

  *

  Mrs Potts tried to concentrate on the docu-drama but it was useless. A faint tremor shook all through her body. Anybody looking in would think she sat on one of those dreadful massage chairs. Anybody looking in … she flung herself from the armchair in a panic. Nobody, surely, could possibly see through the tightly-pulled curtains.

  But maybe they could. She imagined she felt eyes on her, so she fled the living room to the only place in the house where she knew she could not be spied on. She locked the toilet door, then slid to the ground, leaning hard against the smooth wood, feeling the draught blowing beneath the door and the cold from the lino floor rising up through her bones. Her feet, pressed against the toilet bowl in their fluffy slippers was the only part of her remotely comfortable. It didn’t matter. If she couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see her. The flawed logic tore at her stomach but courage seeped through the fear and left a thin trail of obstinacy. Let him try. She’d fight him to the end.

  *

  Miss Clapham knew Sweet Treats had been burgled the minute she pushed open the door. “Nina,” she called. “Nina!”

  There was no response. She shut the door and wondered what to do next. She supposed she had better go back in, make sure Nina truly wasn’t in the back of the shop bound and gagged. Maybe it had been wrong to go away. Laud Mayor would not have dared make a move if she’d been here.

  But she knew even as she thought it that it was not true. Laud Mayor had been setting himself up for a showdown for months.

  She didn’t even know that Laud Mayor had done the damage. She had to give him the benefit of the doubt. She returned to her car. Took her new cell phone from the glove box. Called the police.

  “Is the burglar still there?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll send a policeman around in the morning.”

  Goodness, Miss Clapham said to herself as she stared at the bright screen of the phone. I hope the burglar spends the night making himself sick on sweets. I hope he’s not pillaging anyone else.

  She’d go see Mrs Potts. While they’d never been such good friends as they could have been, there was still a healthy respect, a mutual unspoken admiration. Mrs Potts would tell her if any other untoward activity had taken place in her absence. Mrs Potts might even give her a bed for the night. She didn’t particularly fancy sleeping in her own bed until she’d seen the state of affairs in broad daylight.

  *

  The gate creaked open. It creaked shut.

  “Hands up. You’re under arrest.” Nina shone her torch in Laud Mayor’s face. She could see everything; he could see nothing.

  Laud Mayor dropped the pictures. He raised his hands. “I arrest you on the grounds of breaking and entering, taking goods which are not your own, and vandalism of another’s property.”

  Laud Mayor jibbered. “It wasn’t me,” he protested. “And anyway, she deserved it.”

  “Anything you say will be provided as evidence,” Nina said, grateful that Laud Mayor had had little previous opportunity to hear her voice. She hoped he would not recognise it.

  Bryn came up behind Laud Mayor. He wrapped his belt tightly around Laud Mayor’s wrists.

  “That’s not handcuffs,” Laud Mayor shouted.

  “You’re dead right,” Nina said. “But it will do.”

  “You can’t arrest me.”

  “Citizens arrest,” Nina said. “As we don’t have a jail, I will unfortunately have to attach you to an immovable object for the night. Perhaps the fence will do.”

  “The fence won’t do.” A car had pulled up, and a voice spoke with authority. “I doubt the belt will even do. Here. Use this.” And she gave Nina a length of tubing. “Just happened to have it in the car. What are you doing here, Bryn?”

  “Not a lot,” Bryn said. “Unfortunately. It’s a good moment to be a knight in shining armour but the gorse bush got me.”

  “Hmph.” Miss Clapham took her phone from the car. “Use this. I’m going in to see Nellie, perhaps put the kettle on. You could attach him – pointing to Laud Mayor – to the handrail on the back steps.”

  “She’s bought herself a phone.” Bryn’s voice was barely more than a whisper. “She who has no electricity in Sweet Treats and not even a landline has gone the whole hog and bought a cell phone.”

  “Have you called the police on it yet?” Nina was sarcastic. “I don’t want him escaping now that we’ve got him.”

  The police came and took Laud Mayor away. Bryn returned to Maudie and regaled her with a much-toned-down version of events, then took himself off to bed. Nina sat with Mrs Potts and Miss Clapham at the kitchen table and untangled the nasty web which was the doings of Laud Mayor.

  Chapter 73

  c. AD 1850, ENGLAND: doctors discover adding metals to colour boiled candies is dangerous and the practice ends.

  “He was nothing but a bully,” they were to say in later days, when the excitement and embarrassment had died down and the whole messy situation able to be looked at constructively. “Clearly he felt threatened by us, but that was his problem, not ours.”

  “But what about the pictures?” Nina had to ask. “Mrs Potts and Laud Mayor were so interested in them. Why?”

  Miss Clapham winked. “There was an original oil painting,” she said. “Nellie and I had bought it as an investment.”

  “And Laud Mayor thought he had some claim on it.”

  “Only because of his false idea that we owed it to him from our days in the city. He thought he would take a share in everything we had, as far as art was concerned, but that painting was nothing to do with him, and everything to do with Nellie and me. We may have struggled with our friendship over recent years, but neither of us would have diddled the other out of one single cent if that painting had to be sold.”

  “And was it sold?” Nina said. “None of those pictures was an oil.”

  “You’re half-right,” Miss Clapham said. “I’d swapped the original with a print. Nellie suspected I’d gone away because of the painting – to update the insurance, or get it reframed or such-like. She looked because she wanted to be sure it was gone. Laud Mayor thought it the perfect opportunity to help himself. He looked because he wanted to steal it.”

  “But you had it.”

  “Oh no!” Miss Clapham said. “You had it. It was here all the time.”

  “It wasn’t,” Nina protested and Miss Clapham frowned.

  “You can do better than that, girl,” she said, and Nina was reminded of the terseness of Miss Clapham’s correspondence. “Don’t give up so soon.”

  Once, she would have been irritated by Miss Clapham’s remark. Now she merely began to consider her surroundings once again.

  “Home,” Miss Clapham said. “Off you go to Nellie.”

  “I’m making dinner,” Nina said. “Bryn’s got a nice bit of salmon in the shop.”

  “Off you go and buy it then,” Miss Clapham said. “Six o’clock start tomorrow.”

  *

  Bryn sold the salmon to Nina, giving her a hefty discount off the price, which Nina knew nothing of. “Nice night for a walk on the beach,” he said.

  “It is,” Nina replied, and Bryn was left wondering if he should have actually invited her to walk with him instead of casually waving the idea in the air.

  *

  When the cat yowled, Nina woke, sharply awake with only one thought in her head. The painting. She knew where the painting was. Miss Clapham would be up. She wanted to drag it from its hiding place herself, not watch someone else do it. She pulled her shorts on, tying her shoelaces as she ran down the path, through the gate, and to Sweet Treats.

  “You know where the painting is?” Miss Clapham said as Nina burst through the door.

  Nina nodded, inhaling air already sweetened with Miss Clapham’s early morning preparation. A slow smile spread its way across Miss Clapham’s face.

  “I knew you’d figure it out,�
�� she said.

  Nina climbed on the chair and took down the butter churn. Its insides rattled gently. She paused, her hand on the lid. “You were lucky I didn’t try to make butter,” she said.

  “I hoped you’d be smart enough that if you found the painting in an unusual place, you’d take measures to protect it yourself.”

  Nina nodded. Of course she would have. Anybody would have.

  “Not everybody would have.” Miss Clapham tucked a strand of hair beneath her cap. “Go on. Open it.”

  *

  The picture was perfectly wrapped. Nina held it carefully, fingertips resting on its edges. A spark spat onto the hearth; Miss Clapham dealt with it efficiently.

  “It’s been days,” Nina said. “Days since you came back, but you haven’t used the butter churn.”

  “Oh, I learned a thing or two while away.” Miss Clapham gestured at the package. “I wanted you to find the painting yourself so I could hardly move it. Anyway, it seems no one can tell if fudge is made using homemade butter or shop-bought stuff.”

  Miss Clapham would not want to go down the sentimental path with Nina. It was enough for her to acknowledge a relaxing of standards, an easing of the demands she put on herself.

  “I’ve learned a few things too,” Nina said, “but I’m yet to learn how to churn butter.”

  When they closed Sweet Treats at the end of the day, instead of returning to Mrs Potts’, Nina took herself to the beach. She sat on the sand, scraping her fingers through the damp sand as she watched the tide go out.

  It had been one of the good days. But even the bad days ahead would still be better than the awful days she’d gone through. “Not so desperate any more.” She scratched the words into the sand with a shell, before siphoning little piles of sand through her palms, sweeping the sand to and fro, obliterating the letters.

  She had friends. She had her family. She had, it seemed, a job with Miss Clapham at Sweet Treats. When the campground owners returned, the little village would once again hum with holiday fervour. She intended to hang around to experience a holiday atmosphere.

  And the cat that yowled? He’d stopped yowling when Laud Mayor, or Mr Laud as he was now known, was taken away. Instead he brought offerings of rats and stoats and weasels to Mrs Potts’ back door, appearing to enjoy the shriek which began their day.

  “He loves you, you know,” Nina said.

  “It’s not me he loves,” Mrs Potts said. “It’s you.”

  And Nina, not seeing what other people believed they saw, understood Mrs Potts to be speaking of the cat.