A Winter Flame (18 page)

‘Could you give me a clue as to which one it is?’ asked Eve.

‘Yes, sorry, of course. It’s the one with the red top. I keep all my keys on the one ring for convenience sake – even if they do take up half my pocket.’

All of his keys? Including his house keys, that must surely mean.

You’re joking, thought Eve to herself. He was handing over the bullets which she was going to use to shoot him.

‘No worries,’ she said, with an inner Dick Dastardly laugh. ‘They’re in safe hands.’

‘I won’t be back before lunchtime. I’m going to have to hang around with Effin at a builder’s merchants.’ Jacques sighed, but his eyes were sparkling with mirth.
‘I hope he keeps his temper. He threatened to eat Arfon’s liver earlier on. I was tempted to send out for some fava beans and a nice Chianti.’

‘Enjoy,’ said Eve. ‘By the way, when do we have the pleasure of meeting Santa Claus?’ She wanted Phoebe to vet him. There would be no more stringent test for Santa than
meeting Phoebe May Tinker.

‘Nick is coming over on Saturday,’ said Jacques.

‘Nick?’ Eve rolled her eyes. ‘Is he really called Nicholas? Have you picked him just because that was his name?’

‘I didn’t choose him, your aunt Evelyn did,’ replied Jacques. ‘And yes, he really is called Nick. Nick St Wenceslas.’

‘No.’

‘Yep,’ smiled Jacques, with that lop-sided easy grin he always had. ‘Okay, not really. He’s called Nicholas White. Santa Claus extraordinaire. He said he’s looking
forward to meeting you too. Again.’

‘What do you mean, “aga—”,’ but Jacques had gone with his customary door slam. What a stupid, immature man, thought Eve. ‘Again’, as if it was the real
S. C. and he was going to remember what she used to want for Christmas, like they did on those schmaltzy films. The thing she used to want most at Christmas, which she would never have admitted to
anyone, for obvious reasons, was for her mum to fall a bit ill so they could move to Auntie Susan’s for the whole week.

Santa was quickly forgotten as Eve picked up the keys and examined them. She heard Effin’s voice call out to Jacques and wondered which one of them would come out the winner in a noisy
competition. She watched Jacques climb into Effin’s truck and it drove off. Then she zoomed out of the Portakabin in the direction of the ice-cream parlour.

Violet looked a little glum when Eve opened the door. She was staring into space and looking as if the cares of the world, wearing weighted boots, had settled on her
shoulders.

‘V, you okay?’

Violet forced on a smile. ‘Yes, I’m fine. Just deep in thought,’ she fibbed.

‘Where’s Pav?’

‘Don’t know,’ replied Violet, shrugging her shoulders. He was disappearing more and more these days without saying where he was going. She wanted to ask him who Serena was, but
she was frightened. So she bottled up her fears and they fermented and fizzed horribly inside her.

Eve, however, was too focussed on the opportunity which she had been offered that morning to notice the extent of Violet’s angst.

‘Violet, I need your help. It’s an emergency.’

‘Okay,’ said Violet, pushing her own problems away. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Just sit in the Portakabin and wait for a garage mechanic, whilst I slip out for an hour. Ring me immediately if Jacques comes back but don’t tell him where I am, for God’s
sake.’

‘Eve, what are you up to?’ said Violet, narrowing her eyes.

‘Can’t tell you,’ said Eve.

‘Can’t or won’t?’

‘Won’t.’

‘You’re going to Jacques’ house, aren’t you? Eve . . .’

‘Violet,’ Eve grabbed her small cousin by the arms. ‘This is really, really important. I have to know more about Jacques Glace. If I can’t find anything, I promise you
I’ll let it drop.’

And because Violet was a soft touch and because she needed something to fill her mind other than the awful thoughts that insisted on forcing themselves into her head, she sighed in a very
resigned way and said, ‘Okay then, what do you need me to do?’

Eve stripped the car key from the ring and handed it to her. Then, after leaving Violet in position in the Portakabin, she set off for Outer Hoodley with a clipboard, a set of curtains, a white
overall, a pair of Harry Potter wire-framed glasses and a long black wig, left over from a Halloween do. All this had been collected over the weekend and put in Eve’s car, ready and waiting
for the perfect moment.

Eve pulled in just outside Outer Hoodley so she could dress up. The old lady who lived next to Jacques was like Cerberus, but with only one head, and she didn’t want to be recognized. Eve
checked her appearance in the wing mirror and found she looked as much like an interior designer as Mr Bean looked like a lifeguard.

Then she drove on into the village car park, picked up her clipboard and the curtains and locked up the car. She tried to walk confidently and innocently towards 1, May Green, with the chutzpah
of a person going through customs with twelve bottles of brandy stuffed down their pants.

Eve stole a glance through her wire rims at number 2, but no curtain was twitching. She strutted around to the back of number 1 and tried a key in the lock, taking a deep breath and then
another. She didn’t know if an alarm was going to go off but would have to risk it. If it did, she would calmly walk back to the car and get the hell out of there.

She twisted the key and the door opened silently.

Eve entered quickly and closed the door behind her, locking it in case the neighbourhood witch came a-knocking. So far so good.

The inside of the house smelled of polish and some sort of spiced-apple air freshener. It was so tidy. There wasn’t much furniture, yet it felt cosy and comfortable. The beamed ceiling
looked very low; Eve wondered how many times Jacques had cracked his head on it. There were some sealed boxes in the corner. Evidently he hadn’t been living in the cottage very long and was
still in the process of unpacking.

‘Right, no time to lose,’ said Eve, slapping her hands together and then opening the single drawer in a long trestle table. There was nothing of interest really: two pens, a plain,
unused notepad, a book of stamps, and an electricity bill in the name of Mr J Glace.

There was a file of Winterworld business on a shelf underneath the coffee table and a well-worn copy of the Robert Harris book
Fatherland
. But on a small wooden tray on the deep window
sill, Eve found a hospital appointment card. Apparently, Jacques had been to see a Dr C Khan in August at Norgreen, which was a private hospital in Sheffield. Or was it O Khan? She would google
that name and hospital when she got home.

There was nothing at all in the kitchen cupboards and drawers other than what one would expect to find in there, so Eve tried upstairs. The small bathroom was glaringly clean with a residue
scent in the air of an expensive manly deodorant. The mirrored wall cabinet housed toothpaste, one toothbrush, soap, razor, shampoo, aftershave and some ibuprofen. Towels, folded to
Benetton-standard, resided in a long cupboard alongside a huge, blue fluffy robe. There was a family of yellow rubber ducks sitting in a line on the side of the bath –
typical.

There were richer pickings in the bedroom. Again, there were things in boxes not yet unpacked, but still, there was a veritable treasure trove of information available from what was.

‘Oh, this is more like it,’ laughed Eve, opening up a huge chunky wardrobe and seeing his clothes. Because on one side were shelves of jeans and jumpers, and on the other side were
military uniforms encased in plastic. ‘My God, would you look at this?’

She lifted a red uniform out of the wardrobe. It weighed a ton. The word
Major
came hurtling back to her mind with all the force of a landing airplane. What on earth was he doing with
this in his wardrobe? She recognized it as an officer’s ceremonial uniform. A very large uniform which must have fitted him.

Eve shuddered as the vision of Jacques Glace strutting up and down in front of the mirror dressed as an officer rose in her head. And oh boy, what was this? She replaced the uniform and lifted
out another encased in plastic also: a green, female officer’s uniform. It looked very sizeable too. There were other uniforms in there as well, all military ones, but Eve had seen all she
needed to of those. She moved over to the chest of drawers at the side of his bed.

The top drawer was full of underwear – very male underwear – no sign of very large stockings or suspenders, thank goodness. The second drawer housed socks, a small box with a watch
in it, and some cufflinks. The drawer below though was much more interesting because it was full of military memorabilia. Caps, hats, flat boxes, which Eve opened to find an array of old medals
– and in a beautiful red box on a bed of velvet was a new shiny one: a cross suspended from a ribbon of white and purple. She wondered what the story was behind that one. And most worrying of
all, underneath the cross, she found an instantly recognizable battered brown box.

Eve’s fingers started to tremble as she opened it up, but she knew what was in there already: Stanley’s medal. Why would Jacques Glace have this?

Why weren’t there any photographs anywhere? she mused, too. She wondered if they were in the sealed boxes, but they would have been impossible to open secretly. Then again, she had seen
quite enough for one day. She
had
been right, surely. The presence of Stanley’s medal alone proved that. Talk about catching someone red-handed.

She checked that all was as she found it, wiped as many touched surfaces as she could with her sleeve, just in case Mr Glace wore a detective’s uniform at weekends and did a spot of
fingerprinting, and exited quickly with her head bowed and the curtain over one arm and the clipboard in the other hand.

Back at Winterworld, Violet was disappointingly dismissive about the ‘evidence’.

‘It’s Stanley’s medal, Violet,’ Eve emphasized. ‘Why would Jacques Glace have it?’

‘Well, Evelyn obviously gave it to him,’ said Violet.

‘She wouldn’t have given it to him,’ growled Eve. ‘She would either have given it to me or to the military museum at Higher Hoppleton. He has to have stolen it – I
bet you anything.’

‘Oh, now, wait,’ said Violet. ‘You don’t know that for definite. And just because he collects all this memorabilia, doesn’t make him a charlatan – or a
cross-dresser.’

‘Oh, come on, V, even you have to admit that there are some things that just don’t add up.’

‘Have you considered that he might have been in the army and those uniforms are his?’

‘Even the female one?’

‘Apart from the female one,’ huffed Violet.

‘Violet, we’re talking about a man who keeps his phone in a SpongeBob SquarePants sock.

‘It still doesn’t prove anything.’

‘I’ll tell you what I think, shall I?’ Her theory had come to her on the drive back to Winterworld. ‘I think he managed to worm his way into Aunt Evelyn’s
affections using some military knowledge. Look.’ She opened the locket around her neck and showed Violet the faded photograph of Stanley. Don’t you think there’s more than a
passing resemblance between him and Jacques?’

Violet looked at the picture and yes, she could see that. Both Stanley and Jacques had very short hair, big shoulders and large bright eyes.

‘Someone as lonely as Aunt Evelyn would have been putty in his hands,’ said Eve, nodding to herself in a self-congratulatory manner. Move over, Hercule Poirot.

Eve then went over to her computer and googled Dr Khan at Norgreen hospital to find there were actually three Dr Khans working up there – a Dr C Khan in the prosthetic limb department, a
Dr C Khan in gynaecology – so that ruled both of those out – but the third, a Dr G Khan was a psychiatrist. Why would Jacques be going to see a psychiatrist? Was he a nutter or a con
man? Or perhaps both.

‘The plot thickens, Violet,’ Eve beckoned her cousin over to look at the screen. ‘And I’m telling you, if this plot gets any thicker we’ll have to hack it with a
chainsaw.’

After work that night, Eve called in at Alison’s house to drop off her birthday card. It was bitterly cold and there was some light, slushy snow on the road. Alison
answered the door looking like a sumo wrestler. She seemed to have doubled in size in the six weeks since Eve had seen her last.

‘My God,’ gasped Eve, pointing at the huge mound pushing out the material of Alison’s maternity dress. ‘Where did that come from?’

‘I honestly don’t know,’ laughed Alison, leaning over to receive the kiss from her friend. ‘Rupert reckons the baby’s going to come out riding a horse. Rather
worryingly, he’s finding me very attractive at the moment, if you know what I mean.’

‘Well, of course he does.’ Eve followed Alison into her beautiful home. ‘You’re absolutely blooming.’

‘Blooming knackered,’ said Alison. ‘He’s told me I should aim to keep a few of these pounds on when little Lone Ranger comes out. I think he’ll be devastated if my
boobs shrink back to nothing.’

‘If only all women could find a man who tells them stuff like that,’ smiled Eve. ‘I presume he’s still slaving away in his laboratory earning a crust?’

‘Well, he’s due back within the next hour or so. He’s trying not to work late whilst I’m in my advanced state,’ said Alison, opening the door to her amazing
window-heavy, south-facing kitchen. The room was bigger than the whole of the downstairs of Eve’s house. ‘Tea, coffee, glass of wine?’

Eve was going to plump for a tea, but she found herself asking for a glass of red. Alison poured her one whilst having a glass of Sprite herself, and a Gaviscon chaser.

‘I tell you, the worst thing about pregnancy is the bloody heartburn. It’s a killer,’ said Alison. ‘I can put up with having to be rolled down to the bathroom fourteen
times a night for a wee, and the niggles in my back, but the heartburn is something else.’

‘Well, you don’t look as if you’re anything less than in sublime good health,’ said Eve, lifting up a strand of Alison’s long golden hair. Would I have been so
serene and beautiful carrying Jonathan’s baby? Eve thought then. Would Jonathan have put his arms around me and squeezed me, his hands resting on my giant tum, loving us both? She blinked
quickly as the vision crumbled as quickly as it had formed.