by Heide Goody
Sealfinger
Heide Goody
Iain Grant
Copyright © 2021 by Heide Goody and Iain Grant
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Afterword
About the Authors
Also by Heide Goody and Iain Grant
1
“There’s a bearded lady in the loft, dad.”
“A bearded lady?”
“A bearded lady.”
“In the loft?”
“I don’t know which part of that sentence you’re having trouble with.”
“All of it, frankly.”
Sam stared down at her dad.
Marvin Applewhite, Mr Marvellous himself, stood at the bottom of the loft ladder with a cup of tea and a faintly uncomprehending look. “I don’t own a bearded lady,” he said. “I’d remember something like that.”
“You’d think,” said Sam, doubtfully. She picked her way through the low attic space through the mountains of props, posters and memorabilia, a hoard of magical tat that never seemed to shrink no matter how much she cleared.
She brushed aside cobwebs real and imaginary, her wobbling torch aimed at the bearded woman. When she neared, she realised her mistake. “Ah.”
Minutes later, she had manhandled it down through the loft hatch and carried it along to the kitchen. “There,” she said, standing it by the breakfast bar.
Marvin made a show of looking at it, squinting and widening his eyes. Even in his mid-seventies, he didn’t wear glasses except for reading the finest of fine print. And by the looks of some of the red bills Sam had squirrelled away in her own private filing, Marvin Applewhite was not one for bothering with fine print.
“That’s not a bearded lady,” he observed.
“I can see that now,” said Sam.
It was actually a mannequin, and might once have lived in a shop window, or been constructed by one of Marvin’s prop-makers back in the day. She had killer cheekbones, sharp grey eyes and heavy eyeliner. And a beard.
Sam touched the papery mass. It flaked under her touch.
“What is that?” said Marvin.
“Wasps, I think.” The paper nest covered her chin and neck, and had eaten away most of her lower face. There appeared to be a couple of desiccated insect corpses in there.
Marvin tutted. “Poor Consuela.”
“Consuela?”
“Well, she had to have a name, didn’t she?”
“But not any clothes?”
“She wore a spangly leotard, usually identical to whatever Linda was wearing. It must have perished.” He tilted his head, a sure sign he was going off into some reverie. Sam indulged such things, but would have to snap him out of it before too long. It was gone eight o’clock and she needed to be at the DefCon4 office by nine.
“It was part of my version of the shell game trick,” he said. “Three boxes on castors. Consuela went into one. Linda in another. A member of the audience or a celebrity guest in the third.” He chuckled and sipped his tea. “I had Cilla Black in a box one night.”
Name-dropping was always a sign of an oncoming anecdote. As Marvin took a breath for the next sentence, Sam leapt in. “There were some other wasp nests up there.”
“With wasps in?”
She shook her head. “But I think there might be some rot. We’ll have to look at it once we’ve cleared the loft.”
He gave her a worried look and cast about at the boxes already cluttering one surface of the huge kitchen. This clutter was of her making, a work in progress. Items from his lifetime of hoarding, silently sorted by her into three groups: eBay, junk shop, and bin.
“You don’t have to clear out this stuff.” He placed a hand on a felt covered thing poking out the top of a box. “There are a lot of memories attached to these items.”
“Dust, dad,” she said. “The word is dust. This place needs to be tidy. People might come round.”
“We’ve got guests?” he said.
Surveyors. Valuers. Estate agents. Hardly guests.
Duncastin’ was an eight-bedroomed bungalow mansion at the end of Albert Road. It sat in several acres of land, bounded by high hedges on the road side, and a fence and dunes on the seaward side. So surrounded, it was hard to know it was there despite its size. It was an odd building: a curving snake of a house built around a winding hallway. Not even a proper bungalow, with its lumpy upper floor stuck onto the far end, as though the snake was sticking its head up to say hello. The white walls, the amount of exterior wood used in its construction (so vulnerable to rot and the sea air) and the veranda running along its entire length gave it the feel of a chain of holiday chalets which had huddled together for company.
“Danny La Rue was sick on that counter,” said Marvin.
Unthinking, Sam lifted her elbow away. She doubted celebrity vomit anecdotes would add much value to the poorly maintained property. If her dad’s debts were anything as bad as she suspected (and she had yet to get to the bottom of that), they would need every penny they could raise.
Maybe, just maybe, there would be something of value among the stage paraphernalia. Not enough to undo a lifetime of poor financial management, but enough to stave off the debt-collectors for a while.
“I’ve got the use of a bigger van later,” said Sam. “Doing meals on wheels. I’ll be able to take our bearded friend to the tip.”
“Not Consuela,” said Marvin, clasping the dummy with b
oth hands. He saw where he had placed one of those hands and adjusted it appropriately.
“No one wants a bearded lady around the house,” said Sam.
“But it was a stunning trick.”
“I’m sure it was.” Her phone buzzed: a work e-mail, a scheduled delivery, a parcel. “Parcel…”
“Three boxes,” said Marvin. “Let me show you.” He started looking through the plastic recycling box on the drainer.
“No time, dad,” she said. “Duty calls. Someone’s got to earn the pennies.” She kissed him on the cheek. “Back later for her.”
“I’ll put something in the microwave for tea.”
“Not tonight. I’m out.”
He made a silly face, waggling his eyebrows. “Out courting?”
“No one calls it courting anymore,” said Sam.
“What do you call it?” said Marvin.
“What I’m doing tonight? Sheer tedium. StoreWatch meeting with bloody Sergeant Hackett at Carnage Hall.”
“You might meet a feller,” he suggested optimistically.
“Why do I need a man to be a drain on my time and resources? I’ve got you.”
“Ha ha.”
She kissed him again and left the house.
2
DefCon4 provided Sam with a company vehicle. When initially deciding to provide their regional offices with Piaggio Ape 50 vans, the wise heads at DefCon4 had perhaps asked for a vehicle which was cheap, economical, capable of transporting both people and cargo, and able to deal with both narrow streets and the crowded urban landscape. What DefCon4 purchased was a fleet of tiny three-wheeled Italian vans which drew amused looks. If it wasn’t for the DefCon4 logo emblazoned on the sides, it could easily be mistaken for a miniature ice-cream van. In many ways, it reflected Sam’s job: slow-going; while an outside observer would be hard-pressed to say what its main purpose was, or what it was generally for.
Sam drove from Albert Road, down Drummond Road, and cut through Barbara Road to the South Parade. The sun was rising over the sea, the line of wind turbines five miles out was a picket fence of silver spikes in the still-lifting haze.
As she drove up to the clock tower roundabout, the town was visible in all its early morning glory. Skegness. Skegvegas. Bright lights, small town. In the off-season, it was home to twenty thousand locals and retirees. In holiday season, home to over four million visitors, stuffed into crumbling Victorian B&Bs or caravan parks so big they had their own postcodes. Skegness: a mecca to the roll-up-your-trousers-and-paddle brigade of Nottingham, Sheffield and Leicester; to the fat, tattooed and (if they were lucky) sunburned, with a screaming toddler in one hand and a two-for-one cocktail voucher in the other.
To be thirty, single and living in Skegness was not something Sam had expected. To be thirty, single and living in Skegness without kids, a drug problem or incipient type 2 diabetes was perhaps something of an achievement.
She turned into Lumley Road, the main shopping street, and from there round the island by the train station to DefCon4’s office. DefCon4’s entrance was the narrowest of doors between the Who Do You Ink You Are? tattoo parlour and Cat’s Café. She parked the Piaggio on the pavement directly outside. One of the few advantages of a vehicle which wasn’t much bigger than a mobility scooter was no one was sure if it was allowed on the pavement or not.
She was required to check in at the office because the DefCon4 calendar app on her phone demanded it. Web-based calendar systems and GPS meant her employers could direct her with the minutest detail, even if actual human employers were never to be seen.
She unlocked the door and went upstairs to the first floor office. It was pretty large, containing four desks. All empty apart from hers. Well, one of the desks had a little name plaque on it for a Doug Fredericks, and because having a name plaque without a person to apply it to felt too much like having a ghost in the room, Sam had put a dusty cactus on the desk and silently declared both plaque and name belonged to it.
The loose carpet tile by Doug’s desk had come unstuck again. Sam was sure she’d trip on it one day and brain herself on the edge of his desk, and that would be the end of her. She pressed it down with the ball of her foot. The residual tackiness of carpet glue held it in place, for now.
Her phone buzzed. The calendar item Team briefing – Skegness Regional Office went from red to green.
“Morning, Doug,” she said to the cactus. When Doug Fredericks understandably failed to reply, she gave him a little fist salute. “Good briefing, Doug.”
The rest of the day ran as follows:
* * *
11:00 – 14:00 – Meals on wheels – contractual obligation
16:00 – 17:00 – Receive parcel consignment – beta testing
18:30 – 21:00 – StoreWatch briefing – promotion and upselling opportunity
* * *
Meals on wheels was an easy and infrequent part of her job. The parcel was a mystery. StoreWatch was a chore, during which she was supposed to pretend that she cared about local business security, then try and sell DefCon4 alarms, CCTV and other ‘security solutions’ to business owners in attendance. There were tougher and weirder days.
Sam drove the mile to the vehicle depot. DefCon4 contracted its vehicles out of a no-frills van and lorry hire place next to the town tip. She parked the Piaggio next to two vans outside the portacabin. She instinctively parked it next to the smaller one, to put them in size order. She wasn’t a control freak or a neatness nut, but to do otherwise seemed deliberately perverse. In minutes, she’d be out again in the Transit van and no one would be any the wiser.
She went into the portacabin. The clerk was deep in heated discussion with a customer in a Seal Land staff shirt, seemingly about missing paperwork.
“And this is your new pre-hire damage check,” said the clerk, sliding a sheet over to the man.
“Which shows no damage on the vehicle,” said Seal Land. “What about pre-existing damage? There’s a couple of dents in the side.”
“So, you have damaged it?”
“No. They were already there. If you still had the original pre-hire damage check then—” He tapped the new sheet angrily. “This is a mid-hire damage check at best, mate. I’ve come all the way up from Cornwall. I’ve only got to drive five miles up the coast and I’m done. Me coming in, this is me doing you a favour.”
Sorry,” said Sam, cutting in. “Meal delivery. Usual van?”
“Take the Bipper,” said the clerk, without even looking at her. “Keys are in the ignition.”
Sam’s heart sank. The Peugeot Bipper outside was a much smaller van. Consuela the mannequin would not easily fit inside, and definitely not alongside the meals on wheels trays she had to take. Yes, her dad had a car at home, but the E-type Jaguar in his garage probably hadn’t passed an MOT this century and was far from ideal for transporting inflexible model assistants.
“Can’t I take the Transit?” Sam said to the clerk.
“It’s out.”
“It’s there,” she said, pointing towards the car park through the wall.
“I can’t let you take a vehicle without a pre-hire damage check,” the clerk said to Seal Land.
“You didn’t. And if you take a look at your pre-hire damage check—”
“This is a pre-hire damage check.”
“—Without the damage marked that was already on it when I picked it up.”
“And I’m supposed to take your word that the damage was already there?”
“No! That’s what a pre-hire damage check is for!”
The clerk tapped the sheet again. “And this is yours.”
“Look, sorry,” said Sam, cutting in again. “If the Transit is back…”
“It’s still out,” said the clerk.
“But now it’s back.”
“Just take the van.”
“Thanks. That’s great.”
Seal Land picked up a biro and started drawing vicious circles on the picture on the damage check sheet. “Dent. D
ent. Dent.”
Sam decided to leave them to it.
“Keys are in the ignition,” the clerk called after her.
She gave him a wave, went round to the Transit and, prompted by the argument that the two men had been having in the portacabin, gave it a quick check-over.
Four wheels.
Only superficial marks on the body.
Nothing in the back but a weirdly fusty odour and a tarp over a large box, probably a tool locker, next to the partition between front and back.
Petrol gauge at least halfway full.
She was good to go, and still mostly on time.
The meals on wheels food came from a caravan park out to the south of the town, down a narrow road between cabbage fields which, shortly after the caravan park, gave up pretending to be a road and just petered out into nothing at all.
The caravan park’s kitchens were used to cook the food for meals on wheels, although ‘cook’ was perhaps too generous a word. Much of it was long-life pots of a dubious substance which came from a distant factory. On several occasions Sam had asked why they didn’t just make more of the meals they served in the holiday park’s restaurants and bars. The answer was obvious of course: nearly all of the meals they served in the holiday camp were fried things with chips, and in the provision of meals on wheels guidelines, chips were forbidden. Sadly, glutinous mess from a foil packet was not.
