The Whiskerly Sisters (21 page)

For a split second, all was still and, in the same instant, time grabbed her by the shoulders, shunted her backwards and dumped her where she did not want to go. Back to an oak-panelled dining room, a table littered with half empty wine glasses and cups of stale coffee, a roomful of silent, shadowy faces and those patronising, humiliating, demoralising words, “Lovely little Tiff.”

Her stomach dropped into her hips and lay heavy like granite against her pelvis. She felt a cold flush slowly creep into her armpits and the beginnings of a blush began to warm her face. She struggled to take in air. She was lost in an old nightmare. Her saviour came in the form of metal butting against her thigh. In a flash, Tiffany was back, fast forwarded to the present as the door of the black Audi in front of her began to open. She became aware of the feel of the sun on the back of her neck and the smell of leather in her hand. He was trying to get out of the car. Pulling herself together, she rallied. She was not a helpless, put down Training Manager now. She was a member of the Police Force at work on the beat with a job to do. He was reaching out towards her, repeating his earlier plea. He needed to get going, could she speed through the formalities; he had a job to do. There’s a pet. There’s lovely. Lovely little Tiff. There it was again. No need to consider what to do next; he was making the decision for her.

Straightening herself up, Tiffany forced herself to look the overweight Welshman in the eye and then frowned, shaking her head from side to side as she did so. Keeping a tight hold on his driving licence, she began a slow, a very, very slow tour of his vehicle. She took a good look in the boot and poked around its space. She checked each of his tyres and took her time inspecting the general condition of the Porsche. Her partner, astonished at her diligence for what would almost certainly yield diddley squat, went back to the police car and began working through some forms. In the end, Tiffany made certain she did a thorough roadside check, deliberately keeping him standing by the roadside a full thirty minutes.

After the first five minutes, he stopped trying to sweet talk her and instead began following her, trying to convince her that she was wasting her time. She wasn’t going to find anything. It was a brand new car for pity’s sake. After about fifteen minutes, his frustration was beginning to reach boiling point and she had to warn him about his language. By the end of the exercise, he had shut up altogether, returned to his car and was slumped in the driving seat, eyes closed and foot tapping. The message had sunk in; there was absolutely nothing he could do, but wait so Tiffany gave him plenty of time in which to do just that.

Throughout the entire check, Tiffany ensured that she exuded an air of relaxed, polite indifference. She made no apology for her actions, nor for holding him up. When she was quite finished, she ended the driver’s torture by wishing him a good evening and enjoyed the unexpected pleasure of watching him pull away from kerb kangaroo-style, thus evidencing his feelings.

Tiffany checked her watch. It was time to return to the station for her rest break and a soothing cup of Earl Grey Tea. Whenever she recalled the incident, and she chose to remember it frequently, she always remembered it as one of the highlights of her career.

The day she gave some back to Fat Taff.

Tiffany sat curled in one of Celia’s big armchairs, toying with her glass of Merlot and pondering on the state of her love life. Across from her, sitting on a pouffe, Jax was entertaining the Whiskerlies with a funny tales about the fire safety lecture she had attended a few evenings previously. The trainer had arrived late and full of apology. In his haste to make up for lost time, he had tripped over himself, trying to reach the small stage and had ended up sprawled across it. He had followed that by dropping all his brochures on the floor. During his presentation, he was so stressed that he stumbled over his words and kept repeating himself. As if that wasn’t enough, when it came to the short video, he couldn’t get the projector to work. After faffing around for a few minutes, a member of the audience had stepped in to rescue him by simply plugging the damn thing in.

For the joy of it, Jax again went over the delicious moment when the bumptious, overweight fireman had fallen over his great big feet onto his great fat arse. Jax thought that, as a training office, he made a great comedian, especially given his strong Welsh accent.

Deep in thought, Tiffany was only half listening, but somehow the essence of the story percolated some remote part of her brain and made the connection. She sat up, tilting her head towards Jax and listened more closely. She felt sure she was hearing something important, but was struggling to catch the thread. It couldn’t be – surely it was too much of a coincidence.

Fully concentrating now, Tiffany asked Jax a few pertinent questions and suddenly everything clicked into place. The lecture had taken place the very evening she had been on traffic duty and doing roadside checks. It had taken place in a village hall on the right side of town and the lecturer was an overweight Welshman but, and at this point Tiffany balked, eighteen months previously, if her assumptions were correct, that same trainer had been at the top of his game, lecturing on catastrophe management to gold level command at comfortable hotels up and down the country. To Tiffany, it now seemed that her former tormentor was reduced to delivery routine fire awareness training in unheated halls in backwater villages to the lowly homeowner.

What a come down!

The Whiskerlies were eager to know why Tiffany had suddenly shown such an interest in Jax’s story and so she told her friends all about her recent, unwelcome reunion with the Welsh bully from a previous career and explained that, if she wasn’t much mistaken, the bumbling, stumbling lecturer, who had so entertained Jax a few nights ago for all the wrong reasons, were one and the same.

“How could that have happened?” mused Tiffany, almost to herself. “He was one of our shooting stars, one of a small, elite group of experienced officers with a remit to deliver top level training in a very specific field.”

“A shooting star, who shot you down without a second thought,” Celia reminded her.

“It must be a one off,” decided Tiffany. “Perhaps they all have to take turns doing the shit jobs.”

“Must it?” asked Sly. “Maybe he didn’t get away scot free after all. You don’t know what happened after you quit your job. You may have left before they could convene the tribunal, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t complete the investigation and maybe, just maybe, some of the mud stuck. Perhaps some of the questions that were asked didn’t quite get answered in the way Fat Taff would’ve liked.”

“You never know, someone might have come forward after you left and supported your side of the story or perhaps, they reasoned that there’s no smoke without fire and, given your exemplary record up to then, they might have decided it was unlikely that you just had one too many, decided to tip the contents of your glass over your respected colleague’s head and call him a prick for the hell of it,” suggested Jax.

“An intolerable prick, actually,” replied Tiffany, smiling at the memory.

“From the sound of it, I’d say you were pretty damn spot on,” remarked Fresna. “I’d give a hundred to one that he is very definitely the owner of one intolerable prick.”

At that offensive remark, the entire group crumbled into snorting fits of laughter and only managed to restore order by drinking several more glasses of wine.

“I want to know what happened to him after I left,” said Tiffany, resuming the conversation.

“Of course you do,” replied Bex.

“Okay, so what do we know?” asked Izza, getting straight to the point.

“More to the point, who do we know?” replied Charley, sagely.

“More to the point, who do YOU know?” remarked Sly because it was astonishing just how many contacts the fitness instructor had.

After a brief discussion and a little online investigation, it transpired that the County Fire Service was indeed hosting a series of early evening safety awareness lectures around the area. The very next one was taking place the following week in a village nearby. It was agreed that Sly should go and check it out. For the hell of it, their chosen sleuth decided to go in disguise. At the very least, it might make a potentially boring evening much more fun. In any case, taking on another character might make the whole thing far more believable and it would give him a chance to legitimately go out in public as his alter ego and, in the unlikely event of Fat Taff meeting him at any future point in the company of Tiffany, he most definitely would not be recognised.

If Fat Taff was surprised to see a flamboyant, scarlet haired hippy marching towards him at the end of his next lecture, he didn’t show it. After all, there was always someone ready to hold him back with a question or two, usually about fire alarm testing or escape plans, normally the elderly or lonely and, almost always, a woman. It often amused him that people behaved in this way. There was always ample time for questions from the floor at the end of his lectures but, no matter how much time he offered his audience, there would always be one or two introverted individuals hanging back at the end of the evening, waiting to ask him a question in private. Unfortunately for Taff, most of them were either plain, homely-looking ladies or white haired old women, but every now and again he got lucky and something much more attractive would seek him out. If the climate was right, he was never averse to a little light hearted banter but, given his previous experience, he was always very careful not to let matters get out of hand.

This particular evening, his luck was out. The lady striding towards him from the back of the hall was just not his type. Overly tall for a woman, somewhat muscular and clearly struggling to walk in her killer heels, she hurried towards him. In a low, throating and somewhat unpleasant voice, she began by praising him for what she called his inspiring workshop and then launched into a series of rapid fire questions about his lecture tour. He informed her that he was the lead for this particular series and that he had been touring for about twelve months now, following a continuous circuit around the county. Somehow he found himself telling this strange woman all about his previous careers. After twenty five years as a fire fighter, he had gone on to become a successful trainer. In fact, only a short while ago, he told her that he had been at the peak of his career, but had been forced to give it up on account of a prolonged period of poor health. He had had to take six months off, having discovered that the constant travel up and down the country, was proving too much of a strain. When prompted, he offered her a leaflet on fire safety and a poster detailing the rest of his courses. She told him she would come again and bring some of her friends with her; she had found the whole evening most interesting. She then offered to help Taff load his car, thanked him again for an inspiring night, turned on her deadly heels, tossing her brightly coloured poncho over her broad shoulders and strode off towards her car.

The following evening, the Whiskerlies couldn’t wait to meet to find out how Sly had got on. Bex sat back in her chair, watching them and smiling to herself. When she first told them her secret, she had not envisaged that this would be the outcome. Here she was, acknowledged leader of the pack, assisting her team to what they all hoped would be another successful sting.

“So, it seems your man didn’t get away unscathed after all?” remarked Fresna, sitting at their usual table in the upstairs room of the Lord Nelson pub.

“Possibly not,” agreed Tiffany, sitting opposite her, “but he most certainly is not MY man,” she added pointedly, her blue eyes flashing.

“Calm down, Tiff,” said Bex, “you know Fres didn’t mean it like that. Besides, I have some information that will knock your socks off. I wasn’t going to say anything, but, well, now it seems relevant.”

The band of friends turned to look at Bex expectantly, so she wasted no time letting them know that Fat Taff was a keen golfer, a member of a rival club and that Malcolm had played against him many a time. Under careful probing from Bex, Malcolm had revealed to her that Taffie, as he was known to his friends, had been the unfortunate victim of a vengeful vixen at work, who had taken it upon herself to accuse him of inappropriate conduct and all because he had refused to respond to her advances. To top it off, the bitch had publicly humiliated him in front of his peers at a top notch dinner. Of course, she had been outrageously drunk or she wouldn’t have got away with it. In the end, common sense had prevailed and she found herself hung by her petard, left out to dry by her managers and had resigned like the coward she was. Despite the fact that she had slunk away to lick her wounds in another job, he had been left with a question mark over his head for the rest of his career because some fool of a director had chosen to believe that there was no smoke without fire. A whispering campaign had begun in the office and he had found himself the target of smart remarks, sidelong glances and increasing isolation. In the end, Taffie had decided he could no longer cope with what he considered to be poisonous gossip and continued victimisation. His doctor had agreed to sign him off sick with stress. He had returned to work several months later and had been given something significantly less taxing. Malcolm had informed his wife that he felt sorry for the poor bugger and had insinuated that some women were born teasers and, as such, deserved all that was coming to them.

So now the team new Fat Taff’s side of the story at the end of which, Tiffany sat pinched and white with rage. The Whiskerlies had to work hard to calm her down.

“That is not what happened,” she insisted over and over again. “Wanker!”

“Reading between the lines, it sounds like Fat Taff didn’t get everything his own way,” soothed Charley. “What we do know is that he is now the county lead for fire safety and that is one spectacular come down.”

“He took six months off work with stress,” added Sly now wearing a more masculine style of dress.