Sealfinger (Sam Applewhite Book 1)

by Heide Goody

  “Sometimes I will buy things from people. I’ll warn you though, I’m cheap. Nobody ever got rich from selling me their stuff. I tend to take the things that people are glad to get rid of.”

  Sam looked up at the wall and nodded. “Fair enough.”

  “The other thing that I do here is rent cabinets. You see over on the other side?”

  Sam looked: there were some tall glass cabinets. One had displays of jewellery and the other had camera equipment.

  “I rent those out for forty pounds a month. When something sells from out of your cabinet, you get the money.”

  They looked well-suited for things that were small and valuable. None of her dad’s stuff really fell into that category.

  “I think we’re probably looking at the scenario where I don’t get rich,” she admitted. “I’ve got a bunch of my dad’s things in the van. I’ve got a ton more at home.”

  Delia took a moment to conjure a solemn face. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “He’s not dead—”

  “Oh!”

  “—I’m just getting rid of his junk.”

  “His nineteen fifties porn collection?”

  “Ew! No.”

  “Shame. That stuff is worth something.” The shopkeeper shook her head. “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “If you’re in the town I can come out and have a look, give a valuation. Some stuff I can sell for you. What I can’t, I can upcycle.”

  Sam frowned. Delia beckoned her over to another room. Sam hadn’t spotted the entrance as it was behind a beaded curtain and assumed it was off-limits.

  “My upcycling room.” It looked a bit like a workshop and a lot like a dumping ground for items that didn’t make it into the display cabinets at the front of the shop.

  “I do projects of my own,” said Delia. “Make things to sell in the shop and on-line. I also run workshops, but the magic all happens right here.”

  Sam was aware of upcycling. From what she’d seen before, it mostly seemed to involve taking perfectly good wooden furniture and painting it in ugly shades of chalky paint. This was different though. She peered at the piece of furniture closest to hand. It looked like a coffee table made from a vintage suitcase. It turned out to be exactly that. The lid still opened when she tried it.

  “Handy for storing bits in,” she observed.

  Fairy lights featured in a good many things. There was a hanging light fixture that was surely the glass door from a washing machine hanging from chains, with coiled-up fairy lights twinkling magically inside it. There were interesting, tactile rugs draped across the larger pieces of furniture and hanging from the wall. Sam realised, on closer inspection, they were woven from strips of fabric that had once been clothing.

  “I like it,” said Sam.

  “Like it?” said Delia. “That’s … polite.”

  “No. Really. I mean, it’s crazy, but I love it. What are you working on at the moment?”

  “Well, I’m mulling over some new treasure,” said the woman. “It seems these things have been washing up all along the shore. I’ve had them brought to me by several people and I’ve got loads of them now.” She opened a massive plastic storage box which was filled with dolls. They all had the same face, although the hair and outfits differed.

  “Can I interest you in a Capitalist Whore, madam,” said the woman.

  “Um, what?” said Sam.

  18

  It took Jimmy a full minute to realise why his mobile phone wasn’t working and he couldn’t call the Odinsons. He’d taken the SIM out at Mrs Skipworth’s. He’d stuffed it in his pocket. He’d stripped off his clothes when they cleaned out the van.

  “I’ve burned my SIM!” he hissed.

  “What you do that for?” said Wayne.

  “Not on purpose! Give me your phone.”

  Wayne slowed as he fished around for his phone.

  “Keep going,” said Jimmy. “Head to Elysian Fields!”

  19

  “Capitalist Whore,” Sam read the logo stamped into the back of the doll’s neck. “Not the greatest marketing line ever.”

  “It might account for why they all ended up in the North Sea, though,” said Delia the junkshop owner.

  “But they’re so realistic,” said Sam, sarcastically. “Works of art.” The faces were a sort of Disney-Manga-Kardashian concoction of giant bambi eyes and bouncy-castle lips. “Sorry - North Sea?”

  Delia shrugged. “I collected at least a hundred while on the beach with Milly and Alfie this morning.” The way she said it, Sam wasn’t sure if Milly and Alfie were dogs or children. “Maybe fell off a container ship somewhere.”

  Sam couldn’t deny she was curious. “What are you going to do with them?”

  “I have a few ideas. Obviously, there will be a light fitting. A bicycle wheel. Hang the heads from the spokes and interlace with fairy lights.”

  “Obviously.”

  “I also have a picture in my mind of a translucent resin toilet seat with these dolls swimming around in a circle. I’ll need to press them a little bit flatter, but I think it will work if I use heat.”

  “You’re going to press a doll to make it flatter?” Sam asked, trying not to sound too judgy.

  “I am.”

  “Can I watch?”

  “Sure! Pop through there and put the kettle on, will you? Let’s mess up some Capitalist Whores!”

  It turned out the kettle boiling was for doll-squashing.

  “Go and find a shallow dish that looks like a couple of dolls could lie down in it,” said Delia. “Bonus points if you find a plate to fit inside.”

  Sam went to mooch through the crockery. She quickly found a Pyrex casserole dish and a transparent Pyrex plate that would fit inside it.

  “Ooh,” said Delia, “I love that you found a plate we can see through, and monitor progress. Now we pour the boiling water onto the dolls and squish them good.”

  “Got it. The technical term for what we’re doing is ‘squishing them good’. I’ll be sure to remember that.” Sam leaned on the plate, but it soon became quite hot.

  “Let’s pop a weight on there,” said Delia. “Look! I can see they’re already softening into something new and interesting.”

  “New and interesting indeed.” Sam stared at the dolls’ flattened faces, looking very much as if they were screaming in anguish at the torture being inflicted upon them. “It’s a shame really. First forced to be sex-workers and now this. Some women just can’t get a break, can they?”

  “Necklace?” Delia asked. Off came the heads of several dolls. Delia used an awl to make holes in them so that they could be threaded onto a strip of cord. They each put one around their necks.

  “Cool! Do you have any ideas for the bodies?” asked Delia.

  “Can we link their arms together?” Sam picked a couple up and tried it out. “Maybe a toast rack from their legs? We get them all to lie down in a line and kick up like synchronised swimmers.”

  “Hah! Love it.”

  They fiddled around for a few minutes. What they eventually ended up with looked like a very impractical toast rack.

  “Yeah, maybe I wouldn’t trust Capitalist Whores with my toast anyway,” said Sam.

  “So quick to judge your fellow woman,” Delia tutted.

  “You could give them colourful body tattoos and sell them as wine glass markers.”

  “Wine glass markers?”

  “At a party everyone has one, so when they put their glass down they know which is theirs. Mostly they’re little circles of wire with beads, but a Capitalist Whore could work – like a pole dancer on the stem of the glass. My dad’s got a load of wine glass markers, still in the packet would you believe?”

  “Ah, would that be some of the stuff you want to sell?”

  “It would,” said Sam, carefully. “But that might be considered normal. Most of it is quite … unusual.”

  “Oh, I’m intrigued already,” said Delia.

  20

&n
bsp; “Foot down, we need to catch him!” Jimmy hissed.

  “It’s a forty limit here,” said Wayne, “and the sign says there might be horses and carriages as well.”

  “Wayne, I need to stress to you that carriages will be nothing compared to what will happen if Yngve Odinson dumps that body like he dumped those dolls. It’ll be washed up on the beach before you know it and the police will have a party with the forensic evidence we’ve wrapped up in that bag for them.”

  “But he said he was going to make it disappear.”

  Jimmy could have slapped him. He could have slapped himself. “I guess the Odinsons aren’t as clever as they think they are when it comes to disposing of unwanted rubbish!”

  They had raced to Elysian Fields and managed to get through on the phone just as they drew up at the chain gate in front of the Odinson compound. They quickly learned that Yngve Odinson had driven off with the plastic-wrapped Mrs Skipworth. It taken an extra ten minutes and a fistful of bank notes to ascertain that Yngve had driven south, to the village of Friskney, and the long track leading down to the coast. They set off in hot pursuit.

  “Van.” Jimmy pointed at a Vauxhall van ahead.

  “Is that them?” said Wayne.

  “Could be.”

  Jimmy leaned over to flash the lights and sound the horn. The Vauxhall kept moving.

  “Fuck’s sake,” muttered Jimmy, and leaned on the horn, flashing the lights repeatedly. Eventually the Vauxhall stopped and they pulled alongside it.

  Wayne lowered his window. The face looking out at him was extremely alarmed, glancing nervously between Jimmy and Wayne. It wasn’t Yngve and it certainly didn’t have the Odinson ‘look’ about it.

  “What’s your game?” said the driver.

  “Jimmy, I think this might be the wrong van,” said Wayne.

  “Window up, drive on,” said Jimmy through gritted teeth. He should be tearing Wayne a new arsehole right now for using his name in what might turn out to be an incriminating exchange, but he knew the idiot would take ages to cotton on. What’s more Wayne was absolutely guaranteed to simply forget and do it again, the next time.

  Wayne accelerated round the Vauxhall. They passed through Friskney village and down the sea lane. They scanned the horizon for the Odinson’s vehicle.

  “Is he going to Jacinda’s house?” said Wayne.

  “Or nearby,” said Jimmy.

  Jacinda Frost’s house was out this way, on the edge of the Wash in a landscape entirely reclaimed from the sea, where the world was flat and featureless. The kind of landscape that made farmers (and builders, it turned out) start to question their life choices and look at their shotguns in a meaningful way.

  There was a dirty white speck near the horizon.

  “There!” said Jimmy. “Floor it!”

  Flooring it on the narrow sea lane was potentially dangerous. They could end upside down in a dyke wide enough to swallow the van whole. Although if they drowned that would be the end of their problems. Jimmy held onto the door handle as the van bounced along at fifty, sixty, sixty-five….

  Ahead, the Odinson van had reached the end of the tarmacked road and was heading across a grooved track towards the sea. As Wayne followed, Jimmy saw Ministry of Defence signs staked into the ground but was jolting around too much to read them.

  Wayne flashed his headlights. Jimmy honked the horn. The van ahead stopped.

  The man who jumped down was wearing a red bandana. Jimmy nearly vomited with relief.

  Yngve Odinson had a joint hanging from his fingertips. “Is there a problem?”

  Jimmy walked up to him. Wet sandy soil clung to his shoes. “For one, I don’t want you smoking that shit while you’re working for me,” he said.

  Odinson shrugged.

  “Need that package back,” said Jimmy.

  “But tha’ said…”

  “We’ll talk later about why that is. Open the back.”

  He turned back to Wayne and gestured for him to get the van open.

  Yngve opened his own van. Jimmy was looking once more at a wrapped body he thought he’d seen the last of.

  “Wayne, move it over.” Wayne lumbered round. “Make sure there’s nobody coming, for Christ’s sake.”

  Wayne picked the body up effortlessly and put it back in their van. There was a Tesco bag for life in the way, but Wayne shoved the body in regardless. It ended up wearing the bag like a pair of boots, or maybe a hat. Jimmy wasn’t sure which end was the head. That small act of carelessness grated on Jimmy’s nerves, but Wayne didn’t even notice.

  Sea birds wheeled overhead, cawing. Jimmy looked round in case anyone was watching. There wasn’t another soul in sight, probably not another human being for miles. If Jimmy knew which direction to look, he’d probably spot Jacinda’s house on the horizon. He could see why it made an ideal fly-tipping spot.

  “No one ever comes down here,” he said to Yngve.

  “No. All used to be an RAF bombing range. Public can’t come down here. Unexploded ordnance.” Yngve wandered over to a brown lump in the mud and kicked it. Jimmy flinched.

  Yngve grunted, as though when the whatever it was didn’t explode it was a major disappointment.

  “Jesus,” said Jimmy.

  Yngve took out a cheap lighter and lit his joint.

  “I told you not to smoke that shit,” said Jimmy.

  “Not working for thee now, am I?” Yngve shut up the back of his van and got in.

  21

  “This house is amazing,” said Delia. “It’s like someone had a bunch of cute bungalows and squashed them all together into one mad building.”

  “Mad is about right,” said Sam.

  She had driven Delia back to her dad’s house, shown her the boxes of oddments set aside for the junk shop. While her dad made tea for them all, she had taken Delia deeper into the house to point out some bits of furniture she was fairly certain her dad didn’t really need. Sam would have to work on him a bit before he’d give them up, but it didn’t hurt to start the conversation.

  “So why the big clear out?” asked Delia, while they were away from the kitchen.

  “Oh, you know,” said Sam. “I want to make dad’s life a bit easier for him. It’ll be much easier to clean if it’s de-cluttered.”

  She liked Delia a lot, but she’d only just met her, and wasn’t ready to share her suspicions that her dad was having some financial trouble. He was evasive when she asked him directly, but the running costs for this place had to be a major drain on his pension. She had no idea how bad the financial situation actually was, but if he needed to downsize his house, he’d never sell this one while it looked like the cluttered home of an eccentric who’d been collecting magical paraphernalia for decades.

  “Your dad’s really into his stage magic,” said Delia.

  “It was his job.”

  Delia paused, frowned. “I thought I recognised… Marvin Applewhite?”

  “That’s him.”

  Delia mugged in delighted surprise. “Mr Marvellous himself.”

  “I tend to call him ‘dad’,” said Sam.

  “He looked different on the telly.”

  “Well, he was younger then, wasn’t he?”

  Delia chuckled. “So, tell me about this,” she said, pointing at a low table which had symbols carved around the sides.

  Marvin entered the room carrying a tray set with tea things. “Ah, a woman with an eye for an interesting piece! Let me tell you about the time I won this in a bet with a man from Haiti.”

  “Ooh, please do!” said Delia.

  “Kerry Packer had a private poker game at his hotel in London,” said Marvin. “Everyone else had folded, and there was just me and this quiet Haitian man in a Panama hat. I couldn’t get a read on him at all. It was very tense. The stakes just kept going up and up. I had an E-type Jaguar at the time and the keys to that went on the table against the promise of this piece of furniture.” He patted the table. “Luck was on my side that evening and I went home
with both Jag and the table. It’s ebony of course, and much older than the town of Port-au-Prince where he came from. He told me it belonged to a friend who was a houngan, a priest in their Vodou religion. He used it for various rituals and—”

  “It’s a nice table, dad,” said Sam. She couldn’t be sure, but wasn’t this one of the pieces that he’d had made back in the day for his stage act?

  “So much history,” said Delia, running her fingers across the carvings. “Are you very attached to it?”

  “I’m very attached to all of my things,” said Marvin with a smile. “But of course I can’t keep them forever. When I die it will be a nightmare for Sam if she has to deal with all of—”

  “Dad,” said Sam reproachfully. “That is not the reason for sorting things out. We need to make life simpler for you where we can.”

  “Well, I can definitely help you with the boxes of things in the kitchen,” said Delia. “Take your time with the other things.”

  “Those boxes have real magic in them, you know,” said Marvin. “Be careful they don’t fall into the wrong hands, won’t you?”

  Sam rolled her eyes and nudged her father. “You’re not on stage now! I think Delia can handle them.”

  “I will take great care,” said Delia solemnly. “I might concentrate on selling some of the costumes first then build up to the magic things.” A thoughtful look came across her face. “You know what, though? There’s so much stuff here, it might be worth setting up a temporary online store, selling to the nostalgia crowd.”

  “Is that a thing?” asked Sam.

  “It certainly is. You must have seen how popular those tribute band nights are at Carnage Hall. A little trip down memory lane is worth money to people. The only magic tricks you can buy in the shops these days are hopeless plastic novelties.”

  “Ah, it’s an underappreciated skill set, that is very true,” said Marvin.

  “We could even make some little videos of Marvin demonstrating how a thing works,” said Delia, taken with her own idea. “Give people a direct link to someone they recognise from back in the day. You’d definitely get a lot more money for these bits and bobs online if we did something like that.”