by Heide Goody
“Temperature…” Jimmy looked at the large chimney that went up through the roof of the shelter and smiled. “Oh, this is perfect.”
He hurried back into the clinic, where Wayne was still watching the live transmission from inside Sacha’s skull case.
“We doing my eye now, Jimmy?”
“Yeah.” He searched cupboards until he came up with a roll of bandages. “Here,” he said and began to wrap the bandages around Wayne’s head like an eye patch. “Just pop … pop that bit of your eye back in and … yeah, that’s it.”
Jimmy wrapped it round a half dozen times to hold it in place.
“Will I get a bionic eye too?” asked Wayne.
“Later, mate.” Jimmy indicated Sacha’s body. “Can you help me with this first?”
“Sure.” Wayne climbed down from the table. He looked a little shaky, but Jimmy steadied him.
Jimmy pointed at the horse inseminator. “We need to pull this out first of all.”
Wayne grasped the trigger and pulled. “Pe-yow! Oh, hey…!”
On the screen the video feed showed something cream-coloured mingling with the gore on screen. Jimmy wished he could unsee it.
“I just spunked in his brain,” said Wayne, awestruck.
Jimmy helped Wayne pull the gun out from Sacha’s mouth. It gave a long sucking slurp as it emerged, inevitably followed by gushes of blood pouring over the dead vet’s chin and onto the floor. More cleaning up.
“Can you pick him up?” said Jimmy. “We need to take him somewhere.”
Wayne bent over and plucked Sacha off the floor. “Here we go Sacha,” he said conversationally to the corpse.
Jimmy led him out and across to the shelter. It took him a moment to work out how to open the hood. He spotted a hoist above it, understanding why it was designed like that.
“What is it?” asked Wayne, nodding at the machine.
“It’s an animal incinerator,” said Jimmy. “I reckon you can get a whole horse in here, so this should be a doddle.”
Wayne dropped Sacha inside and Jimmy shut the hood. He studied the controls. There was a timer. Was an hour enough? The temptation to google for an answer was powerful, but it didn’t do to leave traces of your presence all over the internet.
55
Marvin brought dinner to Sam in the living room.
“Is it your turn to cook?” she asked.
“Do we have a rota?” he said with a shrug. “You look busy.”
She had, she realised, been sitting with a laptop in front of her ever since she’d returned home in the late afternoon. And now the sky was dark and the local evening news was on the TV.
“Sorry. Miles away.” She looked up but couldn’t see over the tray. “What is it?”
“In honour of your day at the beach,” Marvin declared and put the tray on the settee next to her. Toasted cheese sandwiches, a circular formation of them around a mound of salad.
“Sandwiches,” she said. “Side-splitting. You should have had a stage career with material like that.”
“If only,” he sighed. He positioned himself on the settee on the opposite side of the tray and took one of the toasted sandwiches.
“Did you know that E-type Jags can go for fifty thousand, even if they’ve not been serviced?” she said.
“Is that what you’ve been doing all evening?” he said. “Looking at how much money you’d get for my car?”
“How much money you’d get.”
“I’m not selling it.”
“You said you would.”
“In my own sweet time.”
She could feel the argument brewing and consciously stopped herself. “I was just looking. I’ve not been doing it all evening. No, I was frustrated by this other thing.”
“What thing?” said Marvin.
“Edith Vamplew.”
“Nice name.”
“Except I don’t think she exists.” She looked at her dad. He was watching her, probably watching the cogs go round in her brain (or perhaps wondering why she had a swollen bump on her forehead). Sam closed her laptop and swivelled round to face him. “A customer of mine… She’s gone missing.”
“Did you personally lose her? Like an escaped prisoner?”
“Nothing like that,” she said, “and we call prisoners ‘service users’, not customers. This is just a meals on wheels customer who vanished in the night. There was this list of names in boxes, in rows, on a notepad, and it went missing too. And I’ve remembered one of the names, only because I did a house check for a man with the same surname. Edith Vamplew.”
“The man was called Edith?”
“The name in the box.”
“Sounds quite an old name,” said Marvin.
“Maybe.” Sam took a bite of sandwich and was surprised. It was easy to forget how delicious hot melted cheese could taste. “Mmmm. If she’s old that would explain why I can’t Google her. No Edith Vamplew on Facebook.”
“We older people aren’t into your Facebook stuff.”
“There’s nothing but old people on Facebook,” Sam countered. “Young people wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole. Soon be more dead people than living on Facebook.”
“Is that so?”
Sam took another bite. “She doesn’t come up in searches for local news stories. Which is odd. All you have to do round here is attend a charity event or jumble sale, and they’ll have your face and name in the Skegness Standard.”
“Have you tried looking her up in the telephone directory?” he suggested.
“When did you last see a telephone directory, dad?”
He munched on his toasted sandwich and thought. “It’s been a while since we’ve had a Yellow Pages delivered, too.”
Sam gave him a look. “I think they stopped printing those years ago.”
“Is that so?”
She sat back in the settee cushions. “Maybe I remembered her name wrong…”
“Of course, there is another avenue of enquiry,” said Marvin.
“Yes?”
“Vamplew’s an unusual name, isn’t it?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“And you say you met a man called Vamplew.”
“Ah.”
“You could just – gosh, I dunno – go and speak to an actual human being.”
“Ask him,” she said.
“Might be his aunt or his cousin or…”
Sam looked at the time. Too late to be making house calls now. “That’s actually a very sensible idea, dad.”
“I have them from time to time.”
Sam looked at her schedule for the following day. It looked pleasantly light and definitely had enough gaps to allow her to visit Mr Vamplew.
“It’s a good plan,” she said and ate the final toasted sandwich. She needed a fork for the salad and her dad had neglected to bring cutlery through. She pushed herself off the settee to go to the kitchen. “Cup of tea?”
“Sounds smashing,” he said.
She made for the kitchen for cuppas and cutlery. “I’m just going to take a photo of the car too,” she called back.
“I’m not selling it,” Marvin replied.
“Just for valuation purposes.”
The garage was attached to the side of the house. A stubby branching off from the long and winding bungalow. It was accessible through an unutilised utility room: a sort of twin-tub graveyard where household appliances went to die. It was a room Sam had yet to tackle in her zeal to sort out the house and she had to squeeze through a minor maze of clothes horses, defunct hoovers and old mops before reaching the garage door.
“I said…” Marvin called after her, loudly.
Neatly avoiding putting her foot in a Vileda Super Mop bucket, she reached the far door, unlocked it and felt around for the garage’s light switch. The strip light inside flickered as Marvin pushed and shoved his own way through the utility space behind her.
The garage, built in an age when cars were narrower and apparently in need of a room to call the
ir own, was a dusty space with large wooden folding doors she assumed hadn’t been opened in a decade. Brick dust and cobwebs and ancient oil spills covered the floor. The garage was otherwise empty.
Marvin stood in the doorway next to her.
“The car,” she said. “It’s gone.”
Marvin nodded. “Sold it two years ago,” he said quietly.
“But…”
He patted her arm. “As you said, I needed the money. Bills to pay.”
“Oh, dad.” Sam stared at empty floor.
Marvin turned away. “Come on. Your salad’s getting cold.”
56
Thank you for buying the Helios 5000 top-loading high capacity incinerator with integral secondary chamber. The Helios 5000 is DEFRA ‘Type Approved’ and conforms to EU safety regulations (142/2011). The arched lid and low-level loading bed make this model ideal for equine or bovine cremation, or for multiple medium-sized pet carcasses.
Jimmy turned the instruction leaflet over. “No indication of cooking times for people,” he noted irritably.
“Whack it on high,” suggested Wayne.
Jimmy turned the oven up to maximum. His hand paused over the start button. “There’s room for at least another person in there,” he said.
“What?” said Wayne.
“We could put Mrs Skipworth in there too.”
“Be nice,” said Wayne. “Company.”
It was hard to be sure with Wayne, but Jimmy thought his mental faculties were definitely deteriorating.
“We would clean up the evidence in the clinic,” he mused out loud. “Then we could collect the old lady from the ghost train.”
“Won’t it be closed for the night?” said Wayne.
“That’s sort of the point,” said Jimmy.
Jimmy spent half an hour cleaning the clinic rooms. This was made all the easier by there being mops, buckets, bleach cleaners and handwipes aplenty. By nine, they were in the van and on the road back to Skeg.
Jimmy parked on Scarborough Esplanade and walked past the entrance to the funfair. The gates were closed. Everything was dark and silent. The nearest signs of life were from the burger drive-thru up by the main road. The locks on the fairground gates looked formidable, and there were at least two CCTV camera looking down on from on high.
Jimmy could see the ghost train from the fairground gate. It was secured with a padlock on a fairly lightweight hasp. Wayne would have that off in seconds with a crowbar. Jimmy sniffed the air. Could he smell the decomposing body from out here? He thought perhaps he could. It was definitely time to sort it out. Jimmy reckoned they could use the van to block the CCTV overlooking the site. If they moved quickly there was a good chance they could be away without anyone bothering to check.
“Spooky out here, isn’t it?” said Wayne at his shoulder.
“Christ!” Jimmy hissed. How was it possible for a one-eyed, one-legged man to sneak up on him?
Jimmy moved along the bar and retail units surrounding the fairground until he came to a tattoo parlour. It was one of the row’s few unshuttered premises. Maybe they thought they had nothing worth stealing.
“There,” he said, pointing.
“We getting tattoos?” said Wayne.
Jimmy tutted. “The shop has two entrances. One this side, and one in the fairground. And—” he gave the place a cursory glance. “—no burglar alarm. We can sneak through and bypass the main gate. Get a crowbar. And the roll of bin bags.”
Jimmy’s housebreaking skills were crude but effective: punching out enough of the glass door to gain entrance, then repeating at the back.
“I could get an alligator tattoo on my leg,” said Wayne as they moved through the darkness. “Or a tiger.”
“Shush,” said Jimmy.
“I don’t remember the tiger all too clear anymore. Was there a tiger?”
Jimmy ignored his ramblings and led the way through the dark and silent fairground, up to the locked ghost train.
“We need to get that padlock off so we can go and get Mrs Skipworth,” said Jimmy, handing the crowbar to Wayne. He held it gleefully, but staggered back and forth a few times, waggling it ineffectually. He looked as if he was having problems focusing on the doors, never mind the padlock. Eventually, he had it inserted it at the back of the hasp. He pulled down and snapped it away from the door, bringing chunks of part-rotten wood away with it. He grinned at this minor achievement.
Jimmy turned on his phone torch.
They soon found Mrs Skipworth. As the light hit her body, a cloud of flies rose up.
“Wayne, do you reckon you can fit her into these bags?” Jimmy asked, opening the first bin bag wide.
“Sure, Jimmy.”
Jimmy held the light. It didn’t matter if he looked or not. The sounds of squelching, dragging and crunching were unavoidable.
“Something went on my hand, Jimmy!” complained Wayne.
“Never mind,” said Jimmy. “Get it in there.”
Wayne folded and stuffed. Jimmy unspooled a second bag to get the feet end.
The corpse was tidied away into the bag, leaving only a broad, glistening stain, with some unidentifiable, gloopy fragments on it.
Wayne picked up the bag and lumbered out of the ghost train. Jimmy steered him towards and through the tattoo parlour, trying to stay upwind of both the corpse and Wayne. They loaded the bag into the van without incident.
As they drove away, Jimmy wound down the window. The smell was overpowering, and he knew it would linger in the van for days. He wondered if he could create a worse smell to mask it. If he got Wayne to soil himself, maybe? No, that wouldn’t be bad enough. If he could get hold of a skunk with halitosis, feed it kippers and laxatives for a week before having its anal glands squeezed in the back of the van, it still wouldn’t be enough.
Jimmy’s conscious mind retreated and let Cold Jimmy take over. Cold Jimmy didn’t mind the smells. He was too far down in the dark to notice them.
Cold Jimmy drove them back to Hogsthorpe, an eye on the wing mirrors at all times just in case, for some inexplicable reason, the police were onto them. He slowed as he neared Sacha’s clinic, checking to see there were no more vehicles parked up there before turning in and driving round to the shelter out back.
“Let’s get her loaded in,” said Jimmy.
“Right-o, Jimmy,” said Wayne.
Jimmy opened all of the doors of the van wide to let the smell out, while Wayne carried the bag into the shelter.
Jimmy raised the hood of the Helios 5000. Sacha was still there, which was both comforting and horribly unnerving at the same time. Sacha’s mouth and eyes were wide. Messy red blood coated his lips, like he’d been surprised in the act of eating a jar of strawberry jam.
“Pop her in where there’s space,” said Jimmy, with a vague wave of his hand.
Wayne placed the wrapped corpse on the oven bed. “Lots of room in here for both of you,” he said, cheerily.
“You want to jump in with them?” said Jimmy, offhand, wondering if Wayne was so delirious he might even consider it.
Wayne wobbled, a grin on his sweating face. “Good one, Jimmy.”
“Yeah.” Jimmy fastened the door closed and set the controls. Full heat, four hours. That’d be enough.
57
Friday morning. After a team briefing with Doug in the DefCon4 office, Sam decided to pick his brains over the thorny issue of her dad’s finances.
“It’s not as if I really know why he’s got these money problems,” she said. “I can see his incomings and outgoings. His investments and pensions just aren’t covering the bills and repayments. Maybe he was mis-sold payment protection insurance.”
Doug Fredericks, being a cactus, considered this stoically and didn’t hurry to give an opinion.
“Got caught in some BitCoin scam?” she said. “Made friends with the wrong Nigerian prince?” Sam shook her head. “I always assumed he was too clever to fall for that kind of thing.”
Doug said nothing.
>
“But the thing is, am I actually damaging our relationship by sticking my nose in? He’s getting on a bit, but maybe he can make decisions for himself still? What do you reckon?”
Sam’s mobile rang. It was Delia.
“Good talk,” she said to Doug and answered the call. “DefCon4, clown control and mine-clearing our speciality.”
“Oh, good, I hope you can help me,” said Delia deadpan. “I’ve got some out of control clowns down here.”
“Fancy French ones with conical hats, or nightmare grinning ones with red noses?”
“Does it matter?”
“Different rates for different clowns.”
Delia broke first and laughed. “I assume you’re not having a very busy day.”
“A shocking accusation. I have written a detailed report on the effectiveness of the drone tests, and later on I am going to represent the company at a local awards ceremony.”
“Ah, yes, I wanted to ask you about that.”
Sam noted Delia’s tone. “You don’t want to go?” she asked. “We only signed you up a few days ago.”
“I just— I just don’t know if I fit in. Is it going to be glitzy affair?”
“Glitzy? This is Skegness. All we do is superficial shine.” Sam sat back in her chair and stretched. “You think you don’t fit in? It’s not the Oscars. It’s not even Crufts. It’s a bunch of caravan salesmen and pub landlords making an excuse to get togged up in their finest, eat vol au vents, quaff cheap fizz, and pretend they’re business moguls.”
“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.”
“Good,” said Sam firmly. “Cos you’d better bloody go since I voted for you.”
“Did you?” said Delia in squeaky delight. “Oh, I’ll get my best frock on then.”
“I said I voted for you. Not sure anyone else even knows who you are.”
“Yeah, but yours is the vote that counts.”
“Don’t think that’s how democracy works…”
