by Heide Goody
“I have you two to thank for the latest upcycling idea,” said Delia.
Sam prodded one of the decapitated Capitalist Whore heads. It tinkled lightly. “It’s amazing! There’s something I don’t quite understand, though. Aren’t windchimes normally metal things that hit other metal things?”
“Yes,” said Delia, “but obviously that wasn’t going to work here. I bought some little bells and popped them up inside the neck holes.”
“Huh,” said Sam, peeking inside. “Clever.”
“Well, I hope so, because I bought a thousand bells.”
“What?”
“I need to make a profit from these. Economies of scale. You have to take risks to expand your empire. One of these days I might even end up taking the right risk at the right time.” Delia gave a small helpless shrug. “I can’t help it if the world’s not ready for some of my top innovations. I brought musical plant potholders to the people of Skegness, but I think it’s fair to say they did not embrace them. I brought them crisp packet holders, but they ignored those too. So now it’s the turn of Capitalist Whore windchimes.”
“You might want to re-think the name,” said Marvin.
“Wait, go back to the crisp packet holders,” said Sam. “What on earth were those?”
“Ah!” said Delia. “It’s a well-documented problem in coastal towns that seagulls nick your food, right?”
“Right.”
“So, my working hypothesis was if you took a shiny, crinkly packet of crisps, which the seagulls recognise as a tasty snack, and disguised it with a velvet pouch, it would throw them right off the scent.”
“So, does it work?” asked Sam, fascinated.
“I used it lots of times, and a seagull never stole my crisps,” said Delia proudly.
“What did other people think?” asked Marvin. He’d put down the drone parts to listen.
“Dunno, never sold one. Not a single one. Like I said, the world is not ready for that kind of innovation.”
“It could be a very niche product,” said Sam, trying to imagine a world where she would carry round a velvet pouch just in case she wanted to enjoy a bag of crisps. “I think the windchimes are a great idea, though.”
“I need to sell quite a few to use all—”
“Eighty odd—” chipped in Marvin. “You’ll need to sell just over eighty windchimes to use up all those bells if you bought a thousand.”
Sam stared at him. How was it possible that her dad, who feigned deafness or senility in the face of his mounting household bills, was clearly capable of mental arithmetic faster than she could pull out her phone and use the calculator?
Delia had obviously already done the maths because she nodded glumly. “I haven’t even got enough dolls’ heads, if I’m honest.”
A thought struck Sam. “Are you part of the Skegness and District Local Business Guild?”
“No. Why?”
“They might be able to offer you some services. They’re supposed to help businesses like yours.”
“They’re like freemasons, aren’t they? Always been a bit nervous of joining stuff like that to be honest. Same with the Women’s Institute.”
Sam looked at her. “How are those things even a little bit alike?”
Delia put down the windchimes and used her hands to form an imaginary bubble. “It’s like you have these people over here. They are the ones who know what they’re doing and join clubs and stuff to prove it. Then you have these people over here,” she made another bubble with her hands, “and they are the ones like me. They are doing their own thing and basically just pretending they know what they’re doing.”
“I have a working hypothesis about that,” said Sam with a small smile. “I think the reason the people over here seem to know what they’re doing is that they join clubs so they can learn from each other.”
Delia did not have an immediate response to that. She gave a small shrug. “Maybe.”
“Listen,” said Sam. “There’s a meeting tomorrow night ahead of the business of the year awards on Friday. I’ll be going. Come with me. Just have a look.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Buy you a drink?”
“Are you a guild recruiter?” said Delia. “You have to tell me if you are.”
“Maybe,” said Sam. “Or maybe I just want to take a friendly face along with me to the meeting.”
“Implying the others are unfriendly…?”
“You won’t regret it.”
“Let me work out where to hang this delightful thing,” said Marvin, picking up the windchime and taking it out to the garden.
“And I’ll make us a brew,” said Sam.
“Trying to sucker me in with your offers of tea and your folksy charm,” said Delia.
Sam filled the kettle. Delia looked about.
“And your gorgeous house where there aren’t children’s toys on the floor everywhere. And no one’s screaming or yelling at each other.”
“Is it that bad?” said Sam.
Delia grunted. “Swap. Find out.”
Sam put the kettle on the stand. Every family, every house, had its attractions and its secrets. She wondered if Delia would be so keen to swap if she saw the state of her dad’s finances and the hard choices that lay ahead. She took down three mugs and looked at them.
“Are you busy at the moment?” she said.
“Define busy.”
“Take a ride with me. I need to go look at something.”
Delia nodded wisely. “You see, this is how it goes. First you join the guild, then you’re going for a car ride. Next thing you know, you’ve got blood on your hands and you’re putting horses’ heads in people’s beds.”
“The local business guild is not the mafia.”
“And the mafia is just a family business association, sure.”
39
They were halfway to Welton le Marsh before Delia twigged where they were going. “The old lady’s house?”
Sam nodded. “Something’s not right.”
“Poking around old lady’s houses isn’t right. I thought you went to the police.”
“I did. The trainer they found in the alligator pool at Seal Land is a match for that print by the churchyard wall.”
“And?”
“That idiot, Cesar Hackett, has refused to investigate the matter.”
Delia winced at her harsh comment. “If the police don’t think this trainer thing is significant then—”
“Cesar doesn’t think anything’s significant. He thinks crimes are like chicken pox. If you don’t scratch it, it’ll just go away by itself.”
“Whereas you can’t resist scratching an itch?”
“Ha ha,” Sam huffed, then gave a genuine laugh. “Okay, so I’ve got a curious streak. I can’t leave a job half done.”
“Job?”
“I can’t leave a mystery unsolved.” The fifth car in a row overtook her slow Piaggio van, beeping as it accelerated past. “On my eighth birthday, I had a cake with candles. And I remember blowing the candles out and my dad asking me what I’d wished for. I said ‘To know who Jack the Ripper was.’ They laughed and gave me funny looks.” She looked at Delia. “I just wanted to know, I guess.”
Delia’s expression was doubtful but sympathetic. “Fine, we go visit the old lady’s house again. As long as we’re not breaking in to poke around.”
“Then you stay outside as lookout while I break in and poke around.”
Delia groaned.
At Mrs Skipworth’s cottage, Sam knocked on the front door again, just in case the woman had returned, and the mystery of her disappearance was nothing more than a last minute coach trip to Scarborough. When there was no reply, Sam went round the back, pushed through the carboard taped over the back door window, and let herself in.
“You’re just contaminating the crime scene, if that’s what it is,” said Delia at her shoulder.
“I thought you were staying round the front as lookout,” said Sam.
“You said that. I just said it was a bad idea to break in and poke around.”
Sam went to the shelf of stern-looking cat mugs. “It occurred to me while I was making tea.”
“What did?” said Delia.
“There’s four mugs here. There were six previously. There’s two missing.”
“That’s some expert arithmetic you’re doing,” nodded Delia. “And?”
“There’s two missing,” Sam repeated.
Delia tried to look supportive. “A lost trainer. Two missing mugs. This isn’t exactly coming together as solid evidence. Not unless you think a one-legged man broke in here to steal some rare and valuable cat mugs.”
Sam took one down. “Are they valuable?”
Delia looked at the underside. “Modern factory-made stuff.”
As Sam put it back, Delia flipped open the bin by the sink. “They’re in here. Broken. The one-legged man came in, broke some mugs, and left.”
Sam rushed to the bin. She half reached in to scoop up the shards. “Let’s—”
“Glue them back together?” said Delia, reading her thoughts. “Why? What’s going through your brain, Miss Marple?”
Sam sighed wearily. “Don’t you just think something is a bit … off?”
“This…” Delia waved her hands about, fingers splayed. “Creeping round old lady’s kitchens. Yeah.”
Irritated, by herself more than anything else, Sam walked through to the living room.
“I came here on Thursday,” she said, narrating her actions rather than speaking to anyone in particularly. “She was sat by the window, looking out.” Sam peered out the gable window, past the Piaggio and over to the church yard. “She wanted the cottage pie. She was doing the crossword. She was talking about Bradley Walsh and Bradley Wiggins and the seating plan for something or other.”
Thursday’s Telegraph paper, folded to the crossword page, was in the magazine rack next to Mrs Skipworth’s armchair. The notepad was still on the arm of the chair. The top page was blank. Sam picked it up. The page above, the one with the names, had been ripped off.
“Huh.”
The tear across the top didn’t run through the holes for the spiral binding. It was a sloping tear a centimetre underneath. Sam recognised it would be easy to get paranoid and read secret meaning into any detail, but it struck her that Mrs Skipworth had been fussy enough and organised enough that she wouldn’t have ripped it off like that.
“Where is it?” she muttered.
She looked in the wastepaper basket by the chair. It contained nothing but a screwed-up tissue. She went back to the kitchen and the bin.
“Oh, we are going to glue them back together,” said Delia as Sam pawed through the bin, sifting contents onto the table.
“It’s not there,” said Sam.
A dash upstairs, a look in the tiny pink bin beside the bathroom sink, an inspection of the council wheelie bin outside and it was confirmed.
“You’re being weird,” said Delia. She corrected herself. “More weird. Weirder. What’s going on?”
Sam stood beside the kitchen table, closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “There was a notepad,” she said calmly, eyes still closed. “She’d drawn boxes on it. A dozen, a couple of rows. Several names. Like a seating plan for dinner or … I don’t know, names in tents.”
“What names?”
Sam could see them in her mind’s eye. She could see the shape of them. But like written words in dreams, the more she tried to focus on them, the less certain they became. “I can’t remember.”
“And why is this list important?”
“It’s gone. It’s definitely gone.”
“So? Why is that significant?”
“No reason,” said Sam. “Except it has gone. A woman who hardly ever leaves the house has gone and that list of names has gone with her.”
“Which means?”
Sam clutched at the air but she had nothing.
40
Murder – or death at least – had done something to Jimmy. It had touched him in a way few other experiences had. It was a door he had walked through and now there was no way back. There were few other things he could compare it to. Sex, maybe. That day after Mandy Yaxley’s fifteenth birthday party, after those ridiculous fumblings on the floor of her parents’ conservatory, he had been changed. Not in some stupid ‘Now You Have Become A Man’ way but he had shed the skin of childhood and entered a world of sin and furtiveness and dirty biological urges, and he hadn’t seen anyone or anything in the same way again.
The death of Mrs Skipworth had done something to him, and he’d never see anyone or anything in the same way again. Wayne, popping pills and mints indiscriminately, had the air – the stink! – of death on him. The fat idiot not only had a sickly feverish sheen about him, but his sickness oozed through his pores, hung about him. Like the rot of death had already moved in.
And most disturbing about it all, Jimmy didn’t care. In the immediate aftermath of Mrs Skipworth’s death, he had retreated into the dark cave in the seabed of his mind. He had become Cold Jimmy, operating only as needed. Perhaps he’d been in shock, but the changed mental state hadn’t dissipated. As the days went on, he found himself retreating further. He had shed another skin of innocence. There was still the outer shell of Jimmy, walking, talking, getting the job done, but the true Jimmy was now way down inside, wrapped in the tentacles of his own certainty, watching the discarded skin, the outer shell. Cold Jimmy, going about the business of putting things right.
They had spent the day at the Welton le Marsh construction site. Jimmy set Wayne up in one of the houses, with a kettle and a radio, and left him there while he got on with work. Genuine work that needed doing around the site. He had brickies and roofers and sparkies lined up to get on with finishing the houses, but for today it was just him. He had things to attend to before allowing the lads back on site.
When evening fell, he drove to the nearest corner shop and picked up some snack foods for a miserable dinner. He returned to find Wayne in a folding chair in the half-finished house, sat utterly still, gripping the arm rests. He stared at Jimmy, high on painkillers or delirious with pain.
“Will you put me in the ghost train, Jimmy?” he whispered.
“What?”
“When I’m ready, will you put me in the ghost train too?”
“What are you on about?”
“I think I’d be dead good at it.”
Wayne inhaled deeply, then saw the bag of food. Jimmy gave him an unheated chicken tikka pastry slice and a bottle of Vimto. Wayne scoffed the slice like he hadn’t eaten in days.
Now it was dark outside Jimmy headed to the edge of the building site, and the access track that was still fifty centimetres too narrow. With a headtorch and a shovel, he set about changing that. Cold Jimmy set about changing it. Old Jimmy hid, skulked in the cave of his mind and watched.
41
Over the next day, the mystery of what had happened at Mrs Skipworth’s house gnawed at Sam like a toothache. It didn’t help that her DefCon4 app had updated several times during the last day so that it could prioritise the drone tasks. She had the rest of the day to assemble and prepare it, and because her dad was doing that at home, it left Sam with plenty of time to just sit in the DefCon4 office, stare at the wall, and think about questions that had no answers.
To distract herself, she reorganised the office. She did some cleaning: dusted the two empty desks, then cleaned around Doug Fredericks, even giving his needles a little light dusting. Doug Fredericks was, as best as she could tell, a powder puff cactus, a tall rotund thing, seven inches in height and covered in sharp yellow spines. He didn’t need much looking after, but she carefully dusted him nonetheless.
When she’d done all the dusting she could usefully do and stuck down the loose carpet tile yet again, she reorganised the filing in the filing cabinet. This did not take long as the filing (in a slightly sticky filing cabinet) consisted of three sections: Sam’s e
xpense receipts, a sealed plastic folder entitled Operation Budgie – Do not remove or destroy, and DefCon4 employment records for the office staff. These records included the real Doug Fredericks and other former office staff Sam had never met. Despite her natural curiosity she never browsed through them, not wishing to disturb the ghosts of the past.
Unable to let the matter of the shoe and the missing woman go, Sam phoned the Pilgrim Hospital in Boston, Grantham and District Hospital and Lincoln County Hospital, and asked if anyone had been treated in the past week with a missing foot. Unsurprisingly, each hospital told her they weren’t permitted to give out such information. The operator at Lincoln County suggested she should take her enquiry to the police. That, Sam thought (but did not say), was not going to help.
Bored beyond reason by late afternoon, Sam even had an office fire drill. This involved shouting “Fire!”, running to the top of the stairs, looking back forlornly at Doug and calling out “I’ll send help!” before hurrying downstairs and assembling at the fire drill muster point. Which just happened to be Cat’s Café. Sam sat in the window table and drank a hot chocolate while she ticked off fire drill and emergency procedure training checklists on her app. Cat tried to engage her in a conversation about her latest improvised theatre project, but Sam ignored her.
When Sam returned to work, she found Delia and a heavy rectangular parcel on her office doorstep. “Okay, I’ll come,” said Delia.
Sam blinked at her.
“The local business guild event thing,” said Delia. “Tonight, yeah?”
“It is,” said Sam. She picked up the parcel. “Want to come in and see the nerve centre of DefCon4’s regional operation while you’re here?”
Together, they went upstairs.
“Say hello to Doug,” said Sam, gesturing at Doug’s desk.
