The Chinese Takeout Read online

  By now I could move forward. ‘That screen!’ I breathed. It was carved wood, black with age. ‘Look at those little figures! It must be – what? Fourteenth or fifteenth century?’

  ‘Exactly. Have you ever seen anything like it?’

  ‘I think you’re about to tell me I couldn’t have.’

  He laughed, the sound ringing through the tiny space. ‘I am. There’s a better known one of a similar age at Buckland in the Moor – Dartmoor, that is. But nothing quite like this. There, you can see the pike marks in the wood – here and here – where the Roundheads tried to chop it down, but for some reason they just stopped in mid-attack. And the glass, apart from that corner there. A miracle. And though they hacked at several of the statues, the locals repaired them – see? The trouble is,’ he continued, setting us gently in motion to look at aged monuments, ‘the present parishioners simply can’t afford to maintain it. Look at that damp.’

  An ominous stain spread across the roof. Come to think of it, there was a sickly sweet smell that wasn’t incense. It wasn’t a corpse either, but dry rot. Worse than death.

  ‘English Heritage? A Lottery grant? Even that lovely Restoration programme on TV?’

  ‘I couldn’t co-opt you on to the fundraising committee, could I?’ he laughed. But he waved his hands as if cutting a camera shot. ‘No! Please don’t think I brought you here with that in mind. I didn’t. I promise you, I just wanted you to see it.’

  ‘Before it falls down,’ I concluded for him. Actually I believed him. ‘I don’t usually do committees, Andy. But I’d stop this place collapsing if I had to take a course in masonry myself.’

  Afraid for a moment he might want to seal our ambiguous bargain with a kiss, or – more, to the point, that I might – I busied myself translating the Latin valediction on a seventeenth-century memorial tablet. No, it was no good: I could only manage about one word in five.

  At last, thinking he’d want to have a word with his Employer, I withdrew quietly to the back pew to wait. There was enough to feast my eyes on, for goodness’ sake. To my amazement, he sat quietly beside me, simply bowing his head. No genuflecting, no breast crossing, no nothing. Tim would have been disconcerted, maybe even outraged by the lack of display.

  When he was ready, we left as quietly as we had come in.

  ‘I noticed,’ he said, replacing the key under the fallen headstone where he’d found it, ‘that you didn’t take Communion the other day.’

  Why had it taken him so long to raise that? ‘I don’t. Not christened.’

  ‘You could be – only we’d call it adult baptism.’

  My normal response was to tell anyone talking religion that mine was my own business and something I never talked about. You couldn’t say that to anyone who’d just shown you St Peter’s in the Combe, could you?

  He took my silence as my reply. ‘Well, if ever you change your mind, I’d… I’d… Nothing would give me more pleasure.’

  ‘There’s only one problem.’ I fended him off. ‘Getting confirmed afterwards and having that creep Bishop Jonathan lay his greasy mitts on my head.’

  To my surprise Malins and his wife were some of the first lunchtime customers. I greeted them as if we were simply fellow churchgoers with no history; he responded in much the same way. Clean consciences all round then.

  At least until I brought them their bill.

  ‘Actually, I was expecting to see the rural dean here,’ he said, looking ostentatiously around the room.

  ‘He might be in the snug,’ I said, off-hand but seething. In fact I had offered Andy lunch, but he’d had a call from a sick parishioner – it seemed he did his deaning as an unpaid extra to being an ordinary parish priest, the Church’s coffers being so empty.

  ‘He’s around here a lot,’ he pursued, to a casual listener not quite insolently.

  ‘He spent a lot of time with Tim’s parents.’ Anyone knowing me better would have been worried by the quietness of my voice.

  ‘Whom you accommodated here.’

  I personified reasonableness. ‘Where else could they have stayed? The rectory isn’t just as cold as charity, it’s as miserable as sin.’

  ‘You wonder how poor schoolteachers could afford to stay in a place like this. En suite and full board, I hear.’

  Should I tip the contents of the water jug over his head? ‘I’m sure you’ll have heard exactly how much they paid, then. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I see I’m needed by some other guests.’

  ‘Ten pounds a kilo! It’s highway robbery, that’s what it is!’

  Pix had summoned me to the office to deal with a furious Dan Tromans. To say I was taken aback by his attitude would be a major understatement. He was waving a page torn from a weekend colour supplement about six inches from my nose, where, these days, I found it impossible to read.

  I pulled my head back and squinted.

  ‘It’s all about people like you buying stuff people like me pick in the hedgerows, right? Foraging, they call it. You come swanning in to my farm and offer to buy it at ten pounds a go. Look what it says here: “a flat rate of fifteen pounds a kilo” – see?’

  My eyes felt as if they were rotating in their sockets as they tried to scan the article. They found a couple of distinguished London restaurants. ‘OK. So what’s the problem?’

  ‘You’re doing me down by a fiver a kilo, that’s what.’

  Neither Pix nor Robin would shed a tear if I told him to put his wild garlic where it would no longer be bothered by sunshine. To be honest, neither would I. It had been accepted with equanimity rather than enthusiasm by my customers, and I knew it would take a long build to make it into an attraction at the White Hart or wherever. But I hadn’t asked him to gather it so much for my benefit as for his wife’s – well, his too, come to think of it: it was a way of guaranteeing them more cash, remember. It was for that reason the White Hart team were baking scones every morning, and why I’d organised the ladies of St Jude’s. And now Abigail was in hospital with pre-eclampsia, probably made worse by worrying about money all the time.

  ‘Does Abigail know you’re here?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  Only a set of expensive nighties she thought he’d bought. And he now seemed to think he’d bought.

  ‘It was she and I who made the deal. But I don’t want anything to bother her in her present state. So as far as she knows everything’s hunky-dory – right?’

  ‘But it’s not, is it?’

  I didn’t have time for such stupidity. ‘Tell you what, you tell me what you charge your other customers and I’ll match it immediately.’ Would he find another Ivy or J Sheekey down here? I rather doubted it.

  He fidgeted like a naughty schoolboy.

  ‘Perhaps you’ve forgotten who they are. No matter. You know where I live: I’ll settle my arrears.’ And thus I let the silly sod off the hook. Nearly. All he had to do was find another buyer. All!

  While he was still letting his features sink into smug mode, I asked, ‘Whom did you tell about the scone deal? When you were asking about cheap chickens?’ I cranked up the anger. ‘It was part of the deal you kept it quiet, remember. But I had these two guys come in to try and trash my kitchen. You and Abby are the only ones who knew about the scones. Correction – were. Because somehow you gave the game away when you were asking about chickens. Who was it, Dan?’

  ‘Why are you so sure it was me? Could have been Abby.’

  I surveyed the sky for flying pigs. ‘Oink, oink? No, I don’t see any either. You go to market, just like the little pigs, come to think of it: Abby stays at home serving wonderful cream teas. Come on, who did you talk to?’

  ‘Well, like you wanted, I asked around for you. Said you’d got it into your head to find a cheaper supplier.’

  ‘Did you mention me by name?’

  He scratched his head. ‘I just said it was someone I owed a favour.’

  ‘And they asked why?’

  ‘Just said someone was h
elping out while Abby was too tired to cook.’

  So someone was bright enough to do a lot of sums. ‘You wouldn’t remember who it was? Tell you what: I’ve got some pictures for you to check out – OK?’

  ‘Haven’t got time to hang about,’ he grumbled, heading for the door.

  If he’d been a dog, I’d have raised a minatory finger and told him to stay. As it was, I simply spread the photos from my clients’ phones in front of him and said, ‘Here they are. Recognise either of them? Or how about these?’ The results of Andy’s little expedition.

  He didn’t want to acknowledge them, that’s for sure, but his eyes gave him away.

  ‘Which one? These or these?’

  He squirmed: I almost felt sorry for him. ‘Like this man. The one in the armlock. Only younger. Young enough,’ he added slowly, ‘to have been his son.’

  I’d always known there must have been something in him to attract Abby. ‘You’re my hero! And a name,’ I prompted, my hand making little pulling movements as if to tug it out of him.

  He shook his head, with such conviction I probably believed him. ‘Only know him as the guy from up Duncombe Trinity way. Do you want me to ask? Only I wouldn’t want to get you into even more trouble.’

  ‘Quite right. Just keep out of it. Because I’d hate you to get into trouble, too. Any more messages in bottles?’

  This time I absolutely believed him when he shook his head. ‘Not with my brother’s Alsatians to keep me company.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  ‘Work is the curse of the drinking classes,’ someone or other once said. Was it Wilde? It certainly wasn’t one of the wits in the bar, though most of them had probably thought as much without exactly putting it into words. Work, which meant satisfying others’ need to drink, was certainly the curse of the would-be investigator.

  As Andy observed over the phone, at round about five on Friday afternoon, we were both coming up to the busiest parts of our weeks. Naturally they didn’t quite coincide. Friday evenings were his time for polishing sermons, and Saturdays slack, unless he was burdened with weddings. He weighed in on Sundays, of course, at a time when, lunch apart, I could run down.

  I was afraid he would try to do a little solo sleuthing, putting himself at risk. He obviously feared I might do the same: he had phoned, ostensibly to make sure his photos had got through, but in reality I suspected to check on me.

  ‘You won’t spend the rest of Sunday hurtling from site to site, will you?’ he pressed.

  ‘What’s the problem? You want to be in on the discovery? Honestly, I’ll be so knackered all I shall want to do is put my feet up.’

  But he was too bright for that. ‘Want, but not necessarily do. I know you, Josie Welford!’

  We shared a laugh, but I added ‘And what about you?’

  ‘Wall to wall weddings. And it doesn’t do for the parson to turn up with missing limbs or black eyes – any more,’ he added with mock severity, ‘than for you to present yourself thus to your guests.’

  I was so disconcerted that a man could shove a ‘thus’ into the conversation like that, that I didn’t point out I’d appeared thus for the last week.

  ‘As a matter of fact—’ he was decidedly hesitant, after his earlier ease, ‘I’m taking evensong in St Peter’s in the Combe on Sunday. They only get one service a month, and the incumbent has flu.’

  ‘Time?’

  ‘Six.’

  ‘See you Sunday, then,’ I said, preparing to ring off.

  But suddenly another thread of conversation started to unravel itself, and before I knew it it was time to change for the evening rush. All hands to the plough time. And absolutely no time to wonder why Andy wanted my presence at St Peter’s.

  Was it to save my soul? Or to save his church?

  Or was it for an altogether more personal reason?

  No, no time at all. Not if I were going to check my emails before helping prepare for the evening, in case there were any developments in the great cheap chicken chase.

  I was greeted by a little flurry of responses from my catering colleagues. Several had now been approached, but descriptions of the vendor differed widely and no one linked anyone to the photos I’d circulated. There was one I read more carefully than most, from Nigel Ho, now back on these shores and interesting himself once more in the day-to-day running of his little empire. Nigel’s restaurants bore no more relation to the average flock and surly-serviced high street Chinese than the White Hart did to a spit and sawdust pub. His were chic, minimalist affairs – OK, with surly waiters, but I told myself that they added to the authenticity. The food was wonderfully varied: it was possible to work your way through his wonderful dégustation menu without coming across a single Peking or Cantonese standard.

  After a tedious preamble suggesting he’d like another non-professional encounter – his place or mine – he started on the interesting stuff. An individual offering chicken at very reasonable prices but with no certification, he said, had approached his Plymouth head chef. He thought I’d like to know. Unfortunately he hadn’t got much of a description because to the chef all white Europeans looked the same. In any case, he pursued, wasn’t it time I gave up my Miss Marple activities, lest they attract the attention of the miscreants who had killed the young vicar and his Chinese refugee?

  ‘Who, me?’ I fired back ambiguously, hoping the response covered both his carnal invitation and his detective suggestion. He was right, of course: had we been able to persuade Tang to accept protective custody, he and Tim would still be alive now. I continued, ‘I’m too busy trying to locate wood sorrel to go with my braised woodpigeons.’ But I pressed him, all the same, for more information about the chicken dealer so I could pass it on to the police. He was welcome to do it himself, of course, but I seemed to have the ear of a senior policeman.

  Who should be dining with a small party at eight, but Mr Corbishley. The table wasn’t booked in his name: don’t think I’d not have noticed something like that. Lorna, Lucy’s younger sister, was doing her best, which was usually very good – possibly better in these circumstances than Lucy, who of course was covering the snug. But they were giving her a rough time, changing orders, calling her back, that sort of thing. Although I was running in a new couple of kids, I thought it behoved me – wasn’t that a word Andy would have been proud of? Or did I mean Tony? – to keep an eye on things. I slipped into the kitchen after her.

  ‘Problems with table 7?’

  ‘And how! I mean, yes, Mrs Welford.’ Bless her, she almost curtsied.

  ‘Why don’t you write it all out again, just to make sure it’s correct? And if you like, I’ll go back to double check. I don’t know what their game is, Lorna, but you don’t have to be part of it. Right: now that’s five starters and six mains. Did someone not want a starter?’

  ‘The thin man – by the window. I don’t think he – but he might.’ Her lip trembled.

  ‘Leave it to me, love. Take extra bread but only margarine to table 2: dairy allergy, remember.’

  Pix looked up from the tomato, basil and mozzarella salads he was already assembling. ‘Trouble at t’mill, gaffer?’

  ‘Not if I can help it. I’m not having them sending back well cooked fillet steak because they’ve changed their minds and want it rare.’

  Nor was I. Sailing back with a sunny beam strapped tightly to my face, I gave the impression of an officious maitre d’ elbowing out a junior. Which, in a sense, I was. But I could greet Mr Corbishley with every appearance of pleasure, and by so doing let him know, I hoped, that I was on to him, telling him, affably of course, that Malins had been in for lunch. I’d have loved to add, ‘but he didn’t find out anything either’, but didn’t have time to play games – not with another party due any moment. The thin man by the window changed his mind yet again while I was checking on the steak orders. Now we definitely did have six starters, so all credit to Lorna for getting it right. And to me, for what should happen but one of the women suddenly deci
de against her oriental seafood salad starter in favour of mackerel pâté. Never once did my smile waver. Even if the seafood was already waiting.

  It was odds on someone else would order it, after all.

  Corbishley made no attempt to speak to me for the rest of the meal, rightly judging, perhaps, that I was simply too busy to engage in light banter or anything else. They were ready to baulk at the dreamy braised wild garlic, and sniffed audibly when they realised the delicate, crisp garnish to their steaks was early chickweed I’d found – unarguably – in my own herb garden. But not a scrap burdened any plate, and I let Lorna loose with the dessert menu.

  No problems.

  No problems with the coffee and liqueurs.

  Were they going to argue over the bill? Refuse a tip?

  None of those things, it seemed. And if it had been Corbishley’s intention to engage me in further conversation, perhaps as provocatively as Malins at lunchtime, then he found me otherwise engaged. Every other table had my assiduous attention, and it was Lorna who took them their bill. To do them justice, though they paid by card, they left a cash tip, thus (how about that, Andy?) making it clear whom the money was to go to. I always did the same myself, after I’d discovered that some establishments used the plastic-paid tips not as a well-earned bonus but simply to raise the staff’s wages to the national minimum wage, rather than pay properly themselves. We bowed stately goodnights across the room and that was it.

  Was I seeing trouble where none existed? Had Corbishley chosen to eat at the White Hart for pure pleasure’s sake, or to stir up trouble? All I knew was that I was vaguely unsettled, and irritated because I suspected that that had been his precise intention.

  Saturday morning brought no response from Nigel, but the ear of the policeman I’d referred to, DCI Burford. I’d had rather more than the ear of a detective chief inspector I’d dealt with before, of course, before he was promoted up north. But, sexy though Burford thought himself, we weren’t about to have anything more than a strictly professional relationship. Burford, as if on cue, was now to be seen, shirt-sleeved, emerging from an innocent-looking Vauxhall. What was it that policemen put in their tea that enabled them to appear, like Saturday night kids at a disco, without decent warm clothes? It might have been bright today, but there was a lazy wind, cutting straight through you, as I’d discovered on my early morning dash for the paper: yes, at long last my limbs were beginning to feel as if they were mine once more. I could hardly wait to embark on the sort of vigorous exercise that I had come to enjoy so much. Walking. What else?