The Vacant Casualty (7 page)

The two men approached the left-hand cottage and after knocking on the door were received by a little old woman wearing a cream blouse and black skirt, who regarded them with a shrewd eye.

‘Come about Terry, have you?’ said Miss Emily Quimple, and walked through to the living room, allowing them to follow her. ‘I’m afraid I’ve very little to offer
you.’

Sam was just thinking that if he saw any food he was likely to chuck up, when he discovered that this wasn’t true. He saw what she meant by ‘very little’ when the little old
lady brought through a plate with an iced gingerbread on it, followed soon after by another tray containing a large pot of tea.

‘I’m sure I’m just a silly old biddy,’ she said. ‘But you were here to ask about that fellow Terry Fairbreath, who went missing?’

‘That’s right,’ said Bradley. ‘What can you tell us about him?’

‘Well, he was a prostitute,’ said Emily Quimple. ‘Is that the word I mean?’

The two men looked at each other.

‘I doubt it,’ said Sam.

‘I’m sorry, who are you?’

‘Me? I’m a writer.’

‘Oh, a writer,’ said Emily, welcoming one of her cats onto her lap. ‘So not a policeman, then.’

‘No,’ said Sam.

‘So you don’t really have a reason to speak at all?’ she asked, with a friendly smile.

‘None,’ admitted Sam, taking a slice of gingerbread and turning to Bradley. ‘Your witness!’

‘Can you think of anyone who had a grudge against Terry Fairbreath?’ asked the detective.

‘Yes,’ said the old lady in a considered tone, looking up at the coving. ‘Anyone would. He had . . .’ she thought about the phrase for a long time before looking them
both in the eye, one after the other: ‘. . . no morals.’

‘You mean because he’s gay?’

‘He’s
what
?’ she said, and Bradley could see he had soured her day all the way through, simply by mention of the word. By his side, Sam (who was enjoying an excellent
slice of gingerbread) wondered for a moment if she was going to deny knowing what the phrase even meant.

‘Well, we don’t know that for sure,’ said Bradley, rapidly trying to recover his composure. ‘I was just asking if you thought he might have been. He led a secret life . .
.’

‘It’s mere conjecture,’ said Sam. ‘Writers use it too, to explore how people will react to questions.’

‘He was a friendly young man,’ said the old woman, making herself appear friendly by a visible force of will. ‘But he had strange ideas.’

‘Such as?’ asked Bradley.

‘Go on, Bradley,’ Sam was thinking. ‘Keep asking, man. This cake is delicious. Don’t let me ever stop eating this cake . . .’

‘He brought in lots of new concepts to this village that we would rather have kept outside.’

‘Like broadband?’ asked Sam, chewing.

‘Yes, exactly. We’re old, and we don’t like having to deal with new words on a weekly basis.
Broad
band! What does it mean?’

Sam made a shallow nod that he hoped expressed that she had uttered a profound rhetorical question, and took another bite of cake.

‘And rimming,’ she went on.

At this, Sam’s oesophagus went through a sequence of sudden violent oscillations, and a small piece of gingerbread wedged itself firmly in the middle of it.

‘Rimming, dogging, barebacking. We don’t like these things,’ she said equably to Bradley, as Sam coughed so violently into his napkin he felt his vocal cords might snap.
‘We’re an
old-fashioned
village, you see.’

‘Rimming, dogging,’ noted Bradley, quite innocently, as Sam began to cough blood. ‘Sounds like a load of hyperbolics to me. And I understand he moved the flower show from June
to August.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Scandalous,’ said Sam, just about squeezing out the word while clutching his throat.

‘We think so. The flower show has been in June since I was a little girl.’

‘And that must be . . .’ said Bradley, before allowing his thoughts for once to go a little ahead of his mouth, and trailing off.

‘Go on, Detective,’ said Sam, before washing down his ravaged throat with a full cup of tea, and then throwing three more pieces of moist gingerbread (with its delicious crème
fraîche icing) onto his plate.

‘Well, some time ago, I suppose,’ the detective said. ‘By “we”, do you mean you and your sister?’

The little woman’s features sharpened. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘No. “We” means the council. Not her. Not . . . the
other
one.’

Bradley looked bemusedly over at Sam, who was doing his best to appear thoughtful while trying to make his mouth large enough to admit two squares of gingerbread at once. ‘I always thought
that identical twins had a special . . .’

‘No!’ shrieked the little woman, looking at Bradley without noticing her outburst made Sam choke on an even larger slab of cake. With her spare hand she unconsciously plucked two
knitting needles from a ball of yarn and stabbed them deep into the upholstery with a squeaking sound. Then, at the thought of her sister, some awful emotion overcame her. The men exchanged a
glance, wondering whether what they were about to uncover might have anything to do with Terry Fairbreath’s disappearance.

‘You see,’ said Emily, ‘my sister is a
terribly vicious bitch
!’ And she kicked the air with one of her sharp little feet. Sam’s eyes bulged stupidly and he
made gasping noises as Emily tottered to the window.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘It started with the objects being thrown over the fence – a dead cat, a rusty wheelbarrow, the Mayor of Oxley. Then she paid ruffians from the
slaughterhouse to scatter animal entrails all over the garden.’

‘Ruffians?’ asked Bradley.

‘Slaughterhouse?’ croaked Sam.

‘
Entrails!
’ whispered Emily. ‘The shitguts!’

Sam threw himself over the back of his chair and coughed a chunk of cake across the room into the glowing fireplace, where it landed with a sizzling splat. ‘How absolutely offal,’ he
said, looking unduly pleased with himself for a second as he straightened up, rubbing his diaphragm before falling back, wheezing, onto the seat. ‘Offal, eh?’ he repeated, looking
around, disappointed with the reaction.

‘Hmm,’ he thought. ‘I think I may still be drunk from last night.’

‘
Look
,’ said Emily.

‘Oh,’ said Sam, joining her at the front window.

‘She tries to ruin everything I do.’

In the carefully tended garden outside, which was divided up into neat squares and oblongs devoted to separate fruits and vegetables, a number of plants had been gouged out of the earth in an
aggressive fashion, then smashed up. The whole production might have been intended at first to indicate that it was the handiwork of an animal, but it seemed the person responsible had enjoyed
themselves too much, for shoe prints were clearly visible in the mushy remains of a particularly large and fleshy marrow.

Looking Emily up and down and judging that she wouldn’t see seventy again, Sam suddenly pictured a bitter history of sibling hatred that spread back to the second Churchill government at
least. He surmised that her sister’s vindictive act could not be the first, and almost certainly there had been retaliations. ‘You take this sort of thing lying down?’ he
asked.

‘Christ, no!’ declared the old lady. ‘I had a male rattlesnake imported from New Mexico last spring and let it go in her house but she got lucky and trod on its head with her
stiletto.
Slut
!’

‘So your vegetables are important to you?’ asked Bradley. ‘You enter them in competitions?’

Emily simply looked at him.

‘That’s a yes,’ said Sam in his ear. The writer, ever intrepid and eager for danger, was already chewing another slice of ginger cake. ‘Local flower show, you
know.’

‘I’m not averse to a bit of gardening myself, Mrs Q, I don’t mind telling you,’ said the detective. ‘I’ve had some melons in my time . . .’

This was, however, but a hollow distraction from the sight now unfolding in front of them, for a truck was unloading what looked like ten or twenty tonnes of compost directly onto Emily’s
garden. Both men stared open-mouthed, but as the oozing brown liquid cascaded down and squeezed among the trellises and pots and nets, the old lady was no longer watching. She had turned away and
tapped a speed dial on her phone.

‘Terence,’ she said sharply, ‘we have a code red. That’s right – the eagle must raid the nest. I REPEAT,’ she repeated, ‘THE EAGLE MUST RAID THE NEST!
We have go!’

Sam had by now discreetly coughed up his latest piece of cake in anticipation of its getting stuck in his throat, and despite the ravages of his hangover, was starting to have a bit of fun as he
watched the detective try to get out of the old lady what the purpose of her telephone call was. Bradley, for his part, asked with more than a touch of misgiving.

Emily showed no stress or anxiety at the depredations of the filth spread over her front yard. She did have, after all, as Sam saw through a window on the other side of the room, a back garden
of about twenty acres. But there was something in Emily’s eyes as she stared dreamily out over the rooftops that made him think she had either just ingested a mood-controlling drug, or, more
surprisingly, that she was capable of focusing on an object in the middle distance. Sam became sensible of a strange thudding noise just as her phone rang. Without moving her eyes from the heavens,
she answered it.

‘That’s it, Terence, my lad. You’ve got it. You
are
a good boy! Yes, that’s the one. Try not to hit the next-door house – the one with the garden covered in
sewage – that’s my place and I’d hate to miss the show by being collateral damage.’

‘My godson,’ she said, ringing off, and looking blithely at the men. ‘He’s stationed at the military airbase a few miles south of the town. He assured me that if it was
needed, he could loose off a few rounds and blame it on a malfunction.’

Emily’s face had taken on an almost beatific aspect by this point, staring out of the window as the thudding noise grew to a pitch that defied speech and a gigantic helicopter lowered into
view through the window, its wings under-clustered with tree-trunk missiles and fridge-wide rocket launchers.

‘I think we should leave,’ said Sam, much too late, as bright shimmering blasts were followed by clods of earth being flung up in the air, accompanied by the noise of the garden next
door having a sequence of three-feet-deep holes plunged into it and its vegetable contents distributed all over the surrounding streets in fine ash.

Sam, witnessing these events and unsure for a moment which of his many reactions he should act upon, at last rugby-tackled Emily to the ground, and in one diving movement first swallowed, then
choked on, and at last ejected a final chunk of cake.

Emily responded gratefully, by kneeing him at once hard in the bollocks and jumping back up to watch the carnage, shouting encouragements at the window, and shielding her face from the
shattering glass with the lace curtain.

Looking around, Sam saw that the detective was well ahead of him in escaping this mad scenario – he had crawled to the back door, and was gesturing for him to follow.

‘S
O
,’ B
RADLEY SAID
once they had crawled to safety, waited for the gun smoke to lift and at last regained their car.
‘Village life is boring, is it?’

‘Yes,’ said Sam, whose adrenalin, now he was comfortably sitting down, had most definitely ebbed, to be replaced by his hangover. And a good deal of irritation. ‘Yes, it
is
boring. With the occasional exception of sudden episodes of psychopathic lunacy. Don’t try and teach me a lesson – I feel like shit. Give me that bottle . . .’ He
swigged three painkillers with some water and then stared out of the window, putting on a more than slightly childish expression.

Bradley was in contrast temporarily bucked-up by his near-death experience, and his realization that there were plenty of motives in the town that might have contributed to Mr Fairbreath’s
disappearance, from the Quimples’ insane drop-of-a-hat murderousness, to the potentially life-changing issues at stake in the Parish Council vote, in which he was the lynchpin. He was
starting to feel as though he could be on the scent.

‘There’s an emergency council meeting at three p.m. today,’ he said. ‘They’re going to discuss Terry’s replacement. It might give us an insight into other
people’s feelings about him.’

‘Right,’ said Sam grumpily. ‘Why do they have to act so fast?’

‘There was a big meeting that came up the week he went missing – they were to vote on a series of very important issues. Apparently Terry had the “swing” vote, so to
speak. The future of the town may be at stake.’ Bradley consulted his watch. ‘But we’ve got lots of time before then. We should speak to a few more of the council
members.’

‘So who next, then? The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker?’

‘Apparently the candlestick maker is in the South of France at this time of year, so he’s out. Lord Selvington mentioned we should visit Major Eldred,’ said Bradley, suddenly
becoming much quieter. ‘He’s a bit potty, but I suppose we should strike him off the list. And you never know what mad people are ready to tell you, that ordinary people
wouldn’t.’

‘Yes, good point,’ said Sam, at first not listening, but then realizing the detective’s voice had fallen to a whisper.

‘I don’t remember feeling this vile since my wedding day,’ said Bradley, holding his leather-gloved hands up so they shook violently.

‘Your mates gave you a pretty heavy stag do, did they?’ asked Sam, smiling.

‘Stag
what
? No, certainly not,’ said Bradley, irritated, and gunning the engine, he took them in a sickeningly swerving route to the major’s house.

Even if the two men weren’t already feeling somewhat weary from last night’s consumption of alcohol, after the major’s performance at the council meeting the previous day they
would still have had heavy hearts when they found themselves pulling the bell of his diminutive cottage. This sensation grew even worse when the sound greeting them was the blast of a foghorn that
scattered all the birds from the copse of ash trees at the summit of the hill half a mile away.