Back catalogue, p.7
Back Catalogue, page 7
Cain began to whimper.
“No no no,” she cooed. “No, little Cain. Don’t cry. I want us to be friends.”
The baby made an uncertain noise.
Faye smiled down at him, and stroked his chubby cheek with her little finger. Cain began to gurgle with pleasure. “That’s right, little dude,” she murmured. “That’s the way.”
Evie handed the envelopes to Stuart. “Thanks, Evie,” he said, glancing at them perfunctorily and tossing them on to the table. “Did you get the shower fixed?”
“Not yet,” she replied. “The plumber’s coming tomorrow morning.”
“Good,” said Stuart. “Make sure you let me know if it comes to more than the money I gave you, won’t you?”
Evie glanced nervously at Faye, then back to Stuart. “OK.”
Faye was pacing slowly up and down the room, jogging Cain gently in her arms. Suddenly Cain whimpered, and tears started in his eyes. The room began to smell like a farmyard.
Evie held out her arms. “I think he needs changing,” she said firmly.
Faye kissed the baby’s forehead. “Bye bye, little man,” she whispered. “Time to go back to Mummy now.”
Evie gathered Cain close to her. “I’ll be off then,” she said. “See you later, Stuart.”
“Bye Evie,” said Stuart. “Thanks for the post.” He leapt to his feet. “I’ll get the door.”
“Are they your tenants?” asked Faye, once Stuart had closed the door behind Evie.
“Yeah,” replied Stuart. “Evie, little Cain, and Adam, her arsehole of a boyfriend. She calls him Ads. God knows why.”
“Probably because that’s as far as he got in Maths at school,” deadpanned Faye.
Stuart chuckled as he resumed his seat and picked up his bowl and spoon. “Yeah, probably!”
She smiled gently. “Have you lived here long?”
“All my life, pretty much.”
“What? In this flat?”
“No!” laughed Stuart. “This used to be my parents’ house. When they died, my sister and I inherited it. We used the money Mum and Dad left to convert it into flats. My sister Julie lived downstairs in the garden flat, I lived here. Then she got married and moved out. Her husband’s loaded, so she kept the garden flat and lets me rent it out. Or she did, anyway.”
“What happened?”
“They need the money, they say. Her husband’s a Merchant Banker...”
“In which sense?” smirked Faye.
“Come again?”
“Is that rhyming slang, or does he work in the City?”
Stuart thought for a moment. “Both!” he laughed.
Faye smiled affectionately. “Go on,” she said.
“Roderick didn’t get much of a bonus last year, the poor bastard. And Julie’s still on maternity leave, of course, so they’re short of money. By their standards, anyway.”
“So you’re an uncle, are you?”
Stuart nodded and said nothing.
“What’s the baby like?”
“Dunno. Haven’t seen him yet.”
“Why not?”
“Because Julie’s always on at me about money. She wants me to buy out her share of the flats.”
Faye smiled encouragingly and said nothing.
“Anyway, it’s all bollocks. I don’t have that kind of money and never will. And if she sells the garden flat, I’ll have no money coming in.”
She gave him a sympathetic look that caused his stomach to flip. “How long have Evie and Ads been your tenants?”
“They moved in about eighteen months ago.”
“Newlyweds?”
“God, no! Living in sin, my Mum would have called it.”
“And what do you call it?”
“A benefit fiddle, probably.”
Faye chuckled. “I’m beginning to realise what an old cynic you are, Stuart,” she said.
“Less of the old!” he retorted.
“Sorry,” she replied, insincerely. She sat down on the sofa and took a spoonful of cereal. “Ugh!” she exclaimed. “They’re all soggy!”
“There’s an art to eating Sugar Puffs,” explained Stuart. “Never put more in your bowl than you can eat in one minute and thirty-eight seconds.”
“A gourmet as well as a cynic!” laughed Faye. “What other talents do you have, Stuart?”
*
“What happened when you left the Army?” asked Faye, half an hour later. “Did you come back home again?”
“Yeah. Mum and Dad were still alive then, of course. My girlfriend at the time was local, too.”
“What was she called?”
“Deirdre.” Even after all those years, he couldn’t say her name without a twinge of pain.
“What did she look like?”
“Very beautiful. Long red hair. All the boys at school fancied her. But she chose me, God knows why. And I wish to Christ she hadn’t.”
“That sounds serious,” said Faye, a concerned look on her face. “What happened?”
“We got married. That was the first mistake. We’d been going out together off and on since school. Anyway, one time when I came home on leave we started going together more seriously. We got married a year or two later.”
“What went wrong?”
“It’s a long story.”
“So tell me. I’ve got nothing else to do this morning, and I’ll bet you haven’t either.”
Stuart hesitated. If he told her the whole story, would she want to have anything more to do with him?
Faye sat up on the sofa and swung her stockinged feet on to the floor. Then she leant forward and cupped her chin in her hands. “It’s OK if you don’t want to,” she said gently.
“It’s not that,” Stuart replied. “It’s just that – I don’t know – it’s not something I find easy to talk about. And it’s not a very nice story either.”
Faye looked at him steadily. “Look, just tell me what you’re comfortable telling me. I’ll listen, but I won’t pry, and I won’t judge. I promise.”
Stuart stared at her. He couldn’t think how to begin the story, how to tell it without whining. All he could think of was how beautiful Faye was, how he always wanted to remember her looking at him that way.
“Start at the end,” she whispered. “I find that helps sometimes.”
Stuart took a deep breath. “I was in prison, and my wife ran off with my defence brief,” he blurted.
“Wow! That’s a strong ending!” she exclaimed. “How long ago was that?”
“A good few years ago now, Faye.”
“Why were you in prison?”
“I did something stupid. Very, very stupid as it turned out.”
“What?”
“I said I’d do a favour for a mate. Gaz, his name was. Turns out he was involved in a robbery, and the police thought I was one of the firm.”
“And were you?”
“God, no! I was all set to start my own business when it happened.”
“Doing what?”
“A driving instructor. Something I’d always wanted to do. I’d just taken the last of the exams when it happened.”
“Which you can’t do with a criminal record, I suppose?”
“More that I couldn’t do it after I was disqualified from driving.”
Faye frowned. “That’s not the usual sentence for robbery, is it?”
“No,” Stuart conceded, smiling despite himself.
“So...?”
“OK. Gaz was one of a firm that robbed a security van that was collecting money from Safeway’s in Radminster.
“How did you get involved?”
“He asked me to pick up his car from the industrial estate and drive it home for him. He said he was off to do a building job in Ireland somewhere. So I said yes, of course.”
“What happened?”
“I found the car, with the keys in the ignition, and off I went. Ten minutes later, the police pulled me over. They were checking tax discs, and bloody Gaz had let the tax on his car expire, the idiot. By two days!”
“Oh!”
“But that wasn’t the half of it. The police decided to search the car, and found a load of the stolen money in the boot.”
“Oh no!”
“What was worse was that the store manager was a have-a-go hero, and got badly beaten up. One of the firm told the police it was me that did it.”
“And was it you?”
“I thought you weren’t going to pry!”
“Oh, sorry,” she smiled.
“Trouble was,” Stuart continued, “I couldn’t prove where I was when the robbery took place, so I was remanded in custody. I spent eighteen months on remand before the case finally came to court.”
“And that was when Deirdre left you, was it?”
“Yeah! Though she didn’t tell me until after the trial. Just when I thought I was home free, too.”
“What happened at the trial?”
“The judge threw out most of the charges against me. The only one they managed to make stick was Driving Without Insurance. Which was true, technically,” he added, with a forced smile.
“So you were disqualified?”
“Yeah. And I would have gone to prison, too. But the judge said I’d served more than enough time already, so he let me go.”
“What happened to the others?”
“Still inside, most of them. They never caught the guy who was the ringleader, and he ended up with most of the money.”
“Who was it?”
“How should I know? I wasn’t one of the firm, remember!” retorted Stuart.
“Sorry, Stuart,” smiled Faye. “Why did the police never catch him?”
“He was a vicious bastard, they all said. No-one was going to grass him up. And of course, they all wore masks for the robbery itself.”
“What about your friend? What was his name? Gas?”
“Gaz. He got out a year or so ago, and went to live in Spain. I haven’t seen him since.”
“And what happened to you?”
“Deirdre met me on the steps of the court and hugged me. Then she told me she was leaving.”
“Oh no!”
“Oh yes.”
“Did the two of you have any children?”
“Yeah. Well, Deirdre had twins while I was inside. I never saw them.”
“How awful!”
“Not really. They almost certainly weren’t mine.”
“Surely you know whether they were or they weren’t?”
“They were born almost exactly nine months after I was arrested. And I think Deirdre had been seeing someone else for a while before that.”
“Did you ever get to see the twins?”
“No. I didn’t want to see them until I got out. Can you understand that?”
Faye nodded uncertainly.
“And then, when I found out what she’d been up to, I realised they probably weren’t mine anyway,” he went on.
“So you lost your wife, your family, your job, and eighteen months of your life, all for something you didn’t do?”
“That’s about the size of it, yeah. And both my parents died while I was inside, too.”
“Oh my God! That’s terrible!”
“Thing is, the police never managed to find enough evidence to charge anyone with beating up the store manager. But they’re convinced it was me, and they’ve had a couple of goes at me since.”
“They weren’t trying to frame you, surely?”
Stuart shrugged. “Let’s just say they still want to close the file.”
“God!” exclaimed Faye. “And what happened to Deirdre? Does she still live around here?”
“No, thank Christ. She moved to Florida a few years back, with the kids. Went into property, I hear.”
“Just like you,” smiled Faye.
“Yeah,” replied Stuart, with a sardonic grin. “I taught her all I know!”
“And the defence brief?”
“How should I know?” retorted Stuart. “She dumped that poor bastard too, cleaned him out in the divorce.”
“Poor you!” sighed Faye. She reached out to him with both hands, but just at that moment there was a strange buzzing noise. “Sorry,” she said, “that sounds like my phone.”
She fumbled in the pocket of her tracksuit trousers and pulled out her mobile. “Hi Dad!” she said. “What’s up?”
Pause.
“What do mean, where am I? I’m at a friend’s house. I ran into him when I was out jogging...” She caught Stuart’s eye and smiled, “...sorry, I mean running, and we went back to his place for breakfast.”
Another pause. Stuart could hear a tinny, angry voice but couldn’t make out the words.
“Yes, Dad. I’m fine. Honestly... Yes, I know I should have told you, but...” She looked at Stuart and rolled her eyes. “No, it’s not far away... OK, Dad. I will. See you in five minutes. Bye!”
She closed the phone and turned to Stuart. “Sorry,” she said. “I’d better be getting back now.”
“That’s OK.”
“Dad’s fussing about missing his flight, you see. And he didn’t know where I’d gone, of course.”
“I understand. Thanks for listening, Faye. I really appreciate it.”
“My pleasure,” she said. “And thanks for breakfast.”
“My pleasure!”
She flashed him a smile that melted his innards. “Listen, I’ll see you tomorrow lunchtime. OK?”
“OK,” replied Stuart, reluctantly.
She marched straight up to him and kissed his freshly shaved cheek. Before he had time to react she thrust her dirty crockery into his hands and headed for the door. “Bye!” she laughed, as she closed the door behind her.
Stuart carried her mug and bowl into the kitchen, and then sank down on a stool at the breakfast bar. Bloody hell, he thought. What just happened there?
14.
Zac Houston brushed the white powder from Maisie’s Mum’s bottom, zipped up his black leather jeans, and scrambled off the four-poster bed.
“Right then, Miss Maisie!” he declared. “Why don’t you and I head over to the Coach House and see what’s going on. Your Mum needs to get dressed so she’ll have to catch us up in a minute or two. OK?”
Maisie nodded emphatically. She knew everything would be all right, now that she’d told Mr Houston.
Zac sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on a pair of tan cowboy boots. Then he sprang easily to his feet and tied his hair back in a loose pony tail with an elastic band. He stretched out a hand to Maisie, who accepted it gratefully. She always felt safe with Mr Houston. And with Bertie Bear tucked under the other arm, what could possibly hurt her?
At the bedroom door, Zac turned and looked back. Maisie’s Mum was struggling shakily to her feet, wrapped in the brocade bedcover.
“You OK, babe?” he asked.
Maisie’s Mum leant woozily against a bed post, ran a hand through her hair, and smiled vaguely.
Zac smiled down at the couple on the floor. “Bed’s all yours, brother.”
“Thanks!” grinned the bearded man. He leant forward and whispered something in the black girl’s ear. She giggled enthusiastically. Then she stood, wriggled out of her pink leather miniskirt, and bounded eagerly on to the bed.
Zac took Maisie by the hand again and opened the bedroom door. Over her shoulder, she noticed that the couple were lying head to toe across the bed. How could they kiss each other like that? she wondered.
Part 2
Wine and pills won’t cure my ills
Only you can ease my chills
Minister to me
With sweet cruelty
Set my spirit free
Sister Midnight!
from Sister Midnight by Zac Houston.
Lyrics reproduced by kind permission of Palomino Publishing Ltd.
1.
The detective pulled up outside Pembroke Grange, turned off the engine, and looked around. Where the hell was the local plod? Bloody typical! He’d driven all the way from London, through hell and heavy traffic, and still managed to get here early. Why couldn’t the locals do the same?
He sighed. The merry widow is probably watching from inside, he thought. Wondering what’s going on, I bet. Well, let her stew! He reached round and retrieved a bulging file from the back seat of the car, then propped it up on the steering wheel and began to read.
An Astra patrol car pulled up next to his unmarked Ford Mondeo with a crunch of rubber on gravel. A tall, smartly-uniformed young policewoman emerged from the driver’s door and hurried round to his side of the car.
“Inspector Chase?” she asked.
“That’s right,” he replied, his vowels faintly but unmistakably northern. “And you are?”
The policewoman saluted. “Constable Lauren Halshaw,” she said. “Have you been waiting long, Sir?”
Chase was struck by how well-spoken she was. “Just arrived, thank you, Constable.” He closed the file and laid it on the passenger seat. “Ready?”
“Ready, Sir!”
Halshaw watched Chase clamber stiffly out of the car. Her first impression was of a totally undistinguished middle-aged man – medium height, medium build, well-worn blue pinstripe suit, brown hair flecked with grey and starting to recede. But then he turned, and she noticed the keen glint in his weary brown eyes, the hint of a smile playing about his thin lips. He caught her eye, gave her an encouraging look, and gestured towards the front door.
The door was answered by a stocky, middle-aged, oriental woman in a black and white uniform. She stared at them blankly as they held out their warrant cards.
“Is Mrs Soames in, please?” asked Chase.
The maid glared stonily at him and didn’t budge.
“We’re from the police, and we have an appointment with Mrs Soames,” Halshaw said, kindly.
The maid grunted, stepped back, and opened the door wider. “Come in,” she said. “This way.”
She led the way through a broad entrance lobby and ushered them into a large, stylishly minimalist lounge. Light streamed in through patio doors that looked out on to a boarded deck and a well-tended garden. She gestured them to sit on a pale, canvas covered sofa.
“Missis Soames she just coming,” said the maid, then turned and departed.
Chase and Halshaw looked at each other. Halshaw raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Bet she’ll make a grand entrance in a moment,” she said.
