To Love and to Perish

by steve higgs

  Still looking confused, Mindy said, ‘Okay,’ and gave Tamara the professional smile I’d been teaching her.

  ‘We never did get to discuss the dress yesterday, did we,’ I gave her my most excited eyes. If there is one thing I know for absolute certain: every bride on the planet wants her wedding dress to be amazing. If you can sell a client on the dress, the rest of it is easy.

  Tamara’s eyes were alight with excitement.

  I took my tablet from my bag and handed it to Mindy. I wanted her to feel useful even if this was a task I could easily do for myself.

  ‘When do you want to visit the dress shops and when can we schedule a proper discussion about your dress?’ The salesrep, seeing that he need play no part in our conversation, drifted back to the display he’d been working on when we arrived. ‘I have several shops at my disposal, all of which will give you a private appointment. We’ll need to schedule in half a day for each one we plan to visit, which is why we have the meeting to discuss your desires first. That way we can narrow it down and hopefully find what you want more quickly. We are pushed for time, after all.’

  ‘Why the hurry?’ asked Mindy. ‘You don’t look like you’re up the duff.’

  I closed my eyes in abject horror just as Tamara gave my assistant a surprised expression.

  ‘I’m not,’ the bride-to-be choked out, ‘thank you very much.’

  Pinching the bridge of my nose between thumb and forefinger, I swivelled on my heels to face Mindy. I found myself wishing it were twenty years ago when I carried a clipboard and bits of paper. I could have whacked her over the head with it and not felt too bad.

  ‘Mindy, we do not question our clients about their motivations. Ever,’ I added. ‘We most certainly do not ask them if they are up the duff.’ I was growling by the end of the sentence.

  Mindy at least had the sense to look embarrassed. ‘Sorry?’ she tried. I bugged my eyes out and flicked them in the direction of our bride to be. ‘Sorry,’ Mindy addressed her apology to Tamara this time.

  Tamara accepted it with a nod. ‘If you must know, my dad has been really ill. I begged Tarquin to bring the date forward so dad might still be well enough to walk me down the aisle.’ She skewed her lips to one side, thinking private thoughts before adding, ‘I guess I thought we were going to lose him.’

  ‘I ran into your mother at the hospital,’ I told her, thinking Tamara probably didn’t know. The doctors seem quite confident that he will regain consciousness soon.’

  Tamara brightened. ‘I know. I went there first thing before I came to work. They said his skin is improving too.’

  ‘They did?’ I questioned her without thinking.

  She nodded her head vigorously. ‘There was a consultant in his room when I got there. Some old guy in his fifties.’ I refused to react to her comment about age or point out that I am already in my late fifties. ‘He said he couldn’t work out why dad’s skin was so bad. He said it was just dermatitis. The worst case he had ever seen, but just dermatitis. He said much the same about his joint pain and made it sound like Doctor Kimble had failed to provide proper care for dad. Not that he said those words,’ she added. ‘Do you think he might get better?’ she asked me.

  How was I supposed to answer that? I went with a non-committal, ‘God willing.’ I said the words, but my brain was elsewhere. Derek was getting better. He’d only been in hospital overnight and his condition was already improving. That meant something. It had to. Now I had to try to work out what.

  Tamara looked into the middle distance for a moment, a thoughtful expression on her face. Then she shook her head as if trying to rid it of whatever images might have been plaguing it and looked at me with a smile.

  ‘When can you fit me in?’ she asked. ‘For the dress consultation, I mean.’

  I allowed myself a small chuckle. ‘You have that about face, Tamara. It is I who wish to know when you can fit me in. You are the bride; this is all about you. However, I will say that we should attempt to get together soon. In the next day or so ideally, so I can make arrangements with the establishments that will best suit your needs.’

  ‘Oh,’ Tamara made a concerned face. ‘Well, I really need to commit to work at the moment.’ She made a pained face, and her lip began to wobble unexpectantly. The next second, far too fast for me to be able to react, her face folded in on itself and she started crying.

  Mindy’s eyes went as wide as saucers and she backed away just as I went forward.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tamara sobbed as she stepped forward into my embrace. ‘It’s so strange being here without John. I just … I just can’t believe he’s gone. I know he might have hurt dad, but now John’s dead and …’ Whatever she planned to say next got lost as emotions she’d been keeping in check spilled out in a torrent.

  For the next minute, I did nothing but hold the young woman upright. She leaned into me; a head taller but in need of my support as I became the rock she could anchor to. Just like I had with Joanne a few hours ago, I soaked up the tears and waited for her self-control to return.

  When she was ready, Tamara started to apologise again, pushing herself away to get out of my personal space. She exhaled deeply as she tried to rid herself of the shudders her tearful fit left behind.

  ‘Oh, goodness,’ she sniffed and blew her nose. ‘I don’t even like John. He was never very nice to work with. It was always business, business, business with him. I’m sorry,’ she said for the fourth or fifth time. ‘You probably have other things you need to do.’

  I did, but I wasn’t going to say that. Remembering my conversation with Joanne, I thought about what I came here to find out. I wasn’t going to ask Tamara about crooks in the business though. Not given her delicate emotional state.

  Instead, I asked, ‘Is Tarquin here? I have a few groom-related questions for him.’

  Tamara shook her head. ‘No, sorry. He went to London first thing this morning. He’s trying to land a new big client.’

  I sucked on my teeth for a second while I weighed up my options and glanced around for any sign of Amber. I expected to see her sitting on top of a filing cabinet somewhere inside the office, but if she was here, she was hiding well.

  A tinge of worry lit in my core.

  Tamara was waiting for me to say something and making it clear with her body language that she felt a need to get on with other things.

  ‘We should get out of your hair,’ I announced, but as I did so a fresh option occurred to me. ‘We could schedule your dress discussion for before or after office hours if that helps. I can fit you in this evening.’

  Tamara’s beamed with excitement. It was like watching a bulb get switched on inside her face. Then the smile fell as if the bulb had just blown.

  ‘I can’t. I’m having dinner with Tarquin tonight,’ she explained.

  Undeterred, I tried again. ‘How about tomorrow?’

  The bride-to-be cast her eyes skyward, checked her mental diary. Then the smile returned.

  ‘Sure. Does six o’clock work?’ she asked. ‘I can come straight to you from here when I finish work.’

  I confirmed that was fine by me, had Mindy make an entry in my diary, and finally let Tamara get back to work.

  Total Badass

  Back at the car, I had another scout around for Amber. I knew I shouldn’t worry; cats are so independent and Amber especially so. I really didn’t like not knowing where she was though.

  Mindy plipped the car open so I could get in and folded the driver’s seat forward so Buster could clamber through to the back seat. Once the doors were closed, I started talking.

  ‘I think John might have been tampering with Derek’s medication.’

  Mindy had a finger half an inch from the car’s start button and a thoughtful expression on her face.

  ‘You mean like swapping it for something else or adding something to it? Do you think that is why his skin was so bad and not getting any better?’

  I pursed my lips, checking my thoughts. John
went to the house all the time. Derek’s condition probably started naturally enough, but John could have added something to the cream at any point. Joanne would have been diligently applying it to her husband unaware that she was the one making his skin worse.

  ‘I think we need to go to John’s house,’ I murmured as much to myself as it was to Mindy.

  Mindy tilted her head. ‘To do more snooping?’ She sounded excited at the prospect.

  I didn’t want to call it snooping, but what other word could I come up with?

  ‘More like investigating,’ I tried. ‘I doubt we will find anything, but maybe there will be a clue in his trash.’

  ‘His trash?’ Mindy made a disgusted face.

  I’d seen detective shows where they went through a suspect’s rubbish to find vital clues. Maybe that would work for me too. Would he shred his paper waste? Remembering the pages I took from John’s car, I had to wonder if there might be more in his trash. They were important enough for him to have scribbled notes on with lots of exclamation marks.

  I nodded to myself. ‘It’s bin day tomorrow. We have one chance to see if there is anything to find. There is something going on at Orion Print. Something that made John want to kill Derek and in turn got John killed.’

  Mindy’s eyebrows bunched together. ‘I thought his brakes failed due to poor maintenance?’ she questioned. ‘Wasn’t that what you said earlier? That’s why the police let you go.’

  ‘It was. You are right. I also heard a different story. Vince,’ Mindy knew him from the previous weekend at Loxton Hall, ‘said it was more likely the brakes were tampered with. Also, I … um. I sort of broke into their office last night and overheard a man talking about destroying evidence.’

  Mindy was gaping at me. ‘Auntie, you are a total badass! You broke in!’

  My cheeks went red. Even if Mindy did think I was cool, criminal activity was not something I wanted to endorse or be praised for.

  ‘Well, in truth, Vince broke in and I went with him. Look, the point is I am sure someone has been up to something and I think John discovered it. His car crashing like that is just too much coincidence. The more I think about it, the less willing I am to believe it was an accident.’

  Mindy stabbed the start button with a determined finger and the engine roared to life. ‘Right then, Auntie. Where to?’

  In the Rear-View

  John Ramsey was a life-long bachelor so there was no danger of finding his grieving widow at home. His lack of family was one of the things that made him so good at his job, but also so hard to work with, I suspected. He had no distractions. His work was his life and while it could be said that he’d done well as a businessman, no job will ever love you back. I imagined he had an empty life outside of work.

  Finding his address was easy enough, I looked it up on Companies House where my own address is also listed as a minor shareholder.

  Mindy needed to use the motorway to get there, which allowed her to once again see if she could accelerate off the side of the planet. It wasn’t so much the top speed she achieved, which was over the seventy limit, though not by a scary amount, but more the rate at which she got there.

  ‘Mindy, please slow down,’ I begged as she swung around a truck and floored the pedal yet again.

  She flicked a glance in her rear-view mirror. She’d been doing it a lot recently.

  ‘Auntie, I think we are being followed.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ I countered without giving any credence to her claim. ‘Why would anyone be following us?’

  ‘I’m not making it up, Auntie,’ Mindy argued, her eyes checking the rear-view again. ‘There’s a black BMW back there and it’s been behind me since we left Aylesford. I think I saw it before that too.’

  ‘Go faster, see if you can lose it,’ barked Buster. I pretended I hadn’t heard him.

  Twisting in my seat, I craned my neck to get a look back down the motorway.

  ‘Don’t look, Auntie! He’ll know we are onto him if he sees you looking.’

  ‘You’re just being paranoid,’ I replied, hoping I was right.

  ‘I bet it’s the killer,’ said Buster. ‘He knows you’re onto him and he’s worried my alter ego, Adventure Dog, will track him down and beat him to a pulp so the police can arrest him.’

  ‘Is Buster all right?’ asked Mindy, sounding worried. ‘He doesn’t need to go potty, does he?’

  I ignored them both for a second, staring at the black BMW. It was thirty yards behind, steadily tracking us, but the same could be said for the car behind that and the car behind that. We were on a three-lane motorway so all the cars were going in the same direction at more or less the same speed.

  ‘I’m going to try something,’ Mindy announced.

  I got enough warning to form a sentence asking what she had in mind, but not enough time to pose it.

  My niece cranked the steering wheel to the right, swung out to pass an articulated truck while simultaneously blasting her car from seventy miles per hour to over a hundred in the blink of an eye.

  ‘Yeaaahhhh!’ whooped Buster. Pressed back into my seat I flicked my eyes around to look at him. You know how people look when they are subjected to extremes of gravity and their skin all pulls backward away from their face? Well, Buster looks like that all the time. Even so, he was also pressed back into his seat but unlike me he was loving it.

  Mindy came past the lorry, gave her rear-view a quick check, and shouted, ‘Hold on to something!’

  What? What was I supposed to hold onto? A bible? A cherished picture of Archie so they could find it clutched to my dead chest?

  The moment she was clear of the truck, she threw the wheel hard left and I saw what she had in mind. To a blast of deep bass horn from the truck driver, she crossed all three lanes and shot down an off ramp. It wasn’t the exit we wanted, but the black BMW shot by and whether the driver had been following us or not, he certainly wasn’t now.

  I drew a breath and relaxed my jaw when pain from it told me I’d been clenching my teeth.

  Mindy was smiling. ‘That got rid of him.’

  With eyes like saucers, I tried to get my pulse back under control. ‘How do you know it was a man driving?’ I asked her. I hadn’t been able to see anything other than an indistinct figure through the tinted screen.

  Mindy shrugged. ‘He drove like a man?’ she hazarded. ‘You think maybe it was a woman?’

  I was still far from convinced we’d been getting followed at all, but I didn’t have the energy to argue.

  ‘Let’s just stick to country roads now,’ I suggested. ‘And please drive sedately. I’m not sure how much more of your adventurous driving my heart can take.’

  The rest of the journey was conducted at a pace I felt happy with though I was still glad to get out of the car when she pulled it to a stop.

  John Ramsey’s house is in the small village of Godsmersham not far from the city of Ashford where the Eurostar train makes its final stop before crossing to France through the tunnel. He owned a modest semi-detached place that was neither cherished nor abandoned. The two-story structure needed a lick of paint on both the masonry and the window frames. The roof showed several broken tiles and the guttering and soffits had seen better days. Still, it was tidy, and the front lawn was cut short.

  I had Mindy park down the street a little so we could watch for a minute and see if there was anyone about.

  ‘I don’t see his bins,’ Mindy pointed out.

  I didn’t either, but then he wasn’t here to put them out. ‘I guess they’ll be around the back. I’ll go find them; you don’t want to go through his trash anyway, I’m sure. You walk Buster and keep an eye out for … well, anything. If you see neighbours’ curtains twitching, let me know.’

  ‘I’ll call you,’ she promised, and we set off. Mindy going first with Buster, and me doing my best to act naturally as I turned up his driveway and went straight down the gap between his house and the detached garage.

  My heart started to
pound in my chest again. What the heck was I doing? I felt like I ought to run back to the car, go back to the boutique and focus on the things I am good at. However, when I got to the two wheelie bins parked around the back of his house, I knew I was going to at least take a look.

  Telling myself I needed to see this through for all the reasons I’d already listed, I flipped the first bin open and pulled out a black sack.

  It was tied at the top, but as I pulled it clear, which at my height required me to get my arm way above my head, the bottom of the bag gave out and the contents poured to the ground. On the way there, they ejected various liquids, semi-solids, and things that were sticky onto my boots and skirt.

  I jumped back but not nearly fast enough to get covered in all manner of grungy, horrible gunk.

  Horrified and wide-eyed, I said, ‘Ewwww,’ and did a little dance because I wanted it all off me and didn’t have anything with which to clean myself.

  There was something that was probably yoghurt stuck to my left shoe and what appeared to be soggy cereal stuck to the hem of my skirt.

  Looking around in what felt like futile hope, I found a shrub with some broad leaves. It was the best I could do, and they were effective at getting the soggy cereals off at least.

  I was so preoccupied by trying to de-gunk myself, I failed to hear someone unlocking the backdoor from inside.

  B & E

  From the corner of my eye, I saw the back door swing open. I swear my heart simply stopped beating and I could feel the colour drain from my face as the horror of getting caught hit me like a wrecking ball.

  At once I felt sick and weak and wished I’d chosen to just stay at home today. Who on Earth was in John Ramsey’s house? Was it the police? Shane said the chief inspector would be watching me. Had Quinn anticipated that I would come here? Or was it one of John’s relatives? I didn’t think his parents were still alive but maybe he had a sibling who was now left with the task of sorting their dead brother’s estate.