Chapter Wednesday 25 September 2024 Large
Large
Bill “Large” Wendt watched his wife, Lissa, as she read. She was coming to the end. The pile on the coffee table was growing, and only a few sheets were left in her hands. She’d been at it all day.
Was she reading those final few pages more slowly?
Had he? He didn’t think so—but he’d read the last chapter more than once.
It was hard not to go back, when you reached the end and realized that the writer had neglected to give you the much-needed instructions on what to make of it all.
There was a strong temptation to think that if you looked again with a different mental attitude, all would be clear. Had Connor Chantree felt the same?
Or had Chantree written the document himself?
The previous week Bill and Lissa had watched a new Netflix movie about a missing child whose parents had trudged through dark woods night after night for weeks, calling his name, long after the official search teams had accepted there was no trace of him to be found there.
Bill felt a bit like those parents now—out searching in a forest for the solution to an impossible puzzle—though to an observer he would have looked like a middle-aged man in blue pajamas and a purple paisley dressing gown (from Liberty in London—a thirtieth-wedding-anniversary present from Lissa) having a much quieter evening than usual in his own lounge, watching, from his favorite battered leather chair, his reading wife instead of the television.
What would Lissa make of the manuscript? Had she decided yet? Bill hoped so—she was much better at deciding than he was—and he was ready to agree with her conclusion, whatever it turned out to be. Hurry up, Liss.
Bill disapproved of the old adage about a watched pot never boiling.
Of course it would, assuming it wasn’t prematurely removed from the heat source.
No other equally well known proverb was quite so untrue.
The early bird catches the worm: an undeniable fact; if you turn up first, you’re more likely to get the goodies.
Every year Bill tried to get to the best ripe blackberries growing by the riverbank before the birds or other local pickers did.
First-mover advantage was a real thing, whereas the act of watching a pot did absolutely nothing to cool either fire or water, so—
“Finished!” Lissa cried out. She added the pages she’d been holding to the top of the pile on the table.
“You’ve boiled,” said Bill.
“What?”
“Never mind. Thoughts?” He pointed at the manuscript.
“Connor Chantree didn’t write it, that’s for sure,” said Lissa. “And yet—”
“How sure?”
“Bill, come on!” She stretched out her legs beneath the yellow blanket she’d draped over them hours ago.
Pink-painted toes appeared close to the sofa arm.
“I can’t think of anyone less likely to have come up with all of that than Connor.
Lovely though he is, he’s too normal. There aren’t many people I’d say that about, but he’s one of them. ”
“I suppose it could have been his wife,” said Bill. “The chef. How well do you know her?”
“Flo Chantree? No. Not if she named her own catering business, which I expect she did. Anyone who calls their company Scrumplicious would have written a very different kind of book from the one I’ve just read.
Trust me, Bill, it’s neither of the Chantrees.
My money’s on the mad mum, Sally Lambert, who calls her houses ‘him’ and believes her dogs are her children. ”
“Trouble is, there’s no trace of even the tiniest part of that…book document, or anything resembling it, on any of the Lamberts’ devices,” Bill told her. “Please don’t ask how I know, or what resources I put into finding out, or on what false pretexts.”
Lissa looked worried. “I thought the Large-in-Charge era was steering clear of all dodgy practices?”
“Give me a break.” Bill rubbed the stomach that had earned him the nickname “Large,” realizing he was hungry when he shouldn’t be.
He’d had a second helping of shepherd’s pie only two hours ago.
“I’ve hardly been beating confessions out of people.
If Connor Chantree wrote it, which I think he must have, it’ll be on his home computer. He didn’t do it at work.”
“He didn’t do it at all, Bill.”
“But, Liss, he must have. He lied to me: said he’d found the pages all messed up in a box—dirty, out of their proper order—and all he did was tidy them up to bring and show me. Yet there are chapters written by him—”
“Purporting to be written by him,” Lissa amended.
“—and the pages of those chapters are just as stained and scuffed as all the others. If he’d really written those two sections, why aren’t their pages pristine?
And before the pages got dirty, someone numbered them continuously, and numbered the chapters continuously too: the Sally ones, the dog ones, and the Connor ones.
Which means whoever wrote the other chapters must have written the Connor bits too—and I still say it was him.
Connor. He did it on his home computer, printed it out, and then, for some reason best known to himself, kicked the living daylights out of it to make his found-in-a-box nonsense seem more credible. ”
“Bill.” Liss sat up with a groan, swinging her legs round so that her feet were on the floor.
She looked ready to dash over and inject him with something painful but necessary.
“How much time have you spent on this? Far too much is the answer, isn’t it?
Have you asked Connor if he wrote Chapters 23 and 29? ”
Bill frowned. “No.”
“Sally Lambert might have thought it was fun to use him as a narrator in her story. She turned her bloomin’ dead dog into a narrator, didn’t she?”
“No. Connor would have said something,” said Bill. “He’d have said, ‘Large, there are two chapters pretending I wrote them, and I didn’t.’ He’s pretty thorough in his approach to things. No way he wouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“Ask him,” Liss suggested. “Or, and this is the far better option, forget the whole thing.”
“Forget?” Was she serious? “What if Tess Gavey was murdered?”
“She wasn’t: A coroner’s court has said so.
Bill, come on. If you think a description of Tess having a scary dream is going to cut it in court…
And I mean, the dream’s as ludicrous as it’s frightening, isn’t it?
‘Most of you is fish’ or whatever. Ridiculous!
Someone’s trying to waste your time: Sally Lambert. Don’t let her.”
“I could go round Swaffham Tilney, door to door, ask at every house if anyone knows anything about a book called No One Would Do What the Lamberts Have Done.”
“No, you’re not doing that. I’m not letting you. Bill, it’s a book, not a crime. Ignore it.”
“There’s no point anyway,” he said. “Whoever they are, the culprit will never admit it.”
“Well, that’s culprits for you,” said Lissa. “But please stop suspecting poor Connor Chantree of writing it. He would never describe himself as looking like the brush from a dustpan-and-brush set, and neither would Flo describe him that way.”
“I spoke to the coroner today,” Bill told her.
“There’s no getting round it: Tess Gavey didn’t eat any fish or anything else just before she died.
There was nothing in her system. Yet she had all the same allergic reaction symptoms as if she’d swallowed a whole bucket of mackerel.
Nothing explains it. The only way it makes sense is if… ” He broke off.
“Biii…ill,” Lissa said carefully, as if his name were a ticking bomb that required expert handling. “We know the explanation for her death hinted at in the book can’t be true. Don’t we?”
Did he, though? He was aware that he ought to know it, just like he oughtn’t to be hungry after two helpings of shepherd’s pie.
“For goodness’ sake, Bill. Whatever killed Tess Gavey, it wasn’t a ghostly visit from the vengeful spirit of Furbert Herbert Lambert, and it wasn’t anything to do with ‘fish’ being part of ‘selfish.’ Physical allergic reactions are not caused by wordplay.”
“When you put it like that…” Bill smiled. “Though they could actually be caused by serious psychological trauma. Remember that book I read about how to heal back pain, which said it was all caused by repressed emo—”
“Here’s what I think,” said Lissa. “Sally Lambert probably believes Tess deserved to die after what she tried to do to Champ. Would she admit it, though? Probably not, because…well, a teenage girl is dead. She had her whole life before her and now that’s just gone.
Snuffed out, and no discernible cause. That’s a tragedy, however nasty and conniving Tess’s worst behavior was.
Everyone who hears about her death is going to think, ‘Oh, how awful, poor girl. Poor family.’”
“And…therefore what?” asked Bill. He didn’t have the heart to tell his wife that “What a tragedy” was certainly not what everyone was thinking and saying about the demise of Tess.
“Well, none of that will sit well with Sally Lambert, will it?” said Lissa.
“She might well be keen to control the narrative around Tess’s death, and the story has a clear moral lesson if Furbert heroically punishes Tess and it’s all part of evil being defeated by good.
This version of the story is exactly the one Sally Lambert would want to put out there: her darling Furbert Herbert as an agent of justice. ”
Bill wasn’t convinced. “You may be right,” he said. “But look, whoever wrote it, why toss the pages into a box and bury it first, then dig it up?”
“Was anything printed on the cardboard box? Company name or anything? Stickers? Postage labels?”
“Nothing. Just a plain, brown cardboard box.”
Lissa hauled herself into a standing position. “I need to go to bed, Bill. It’s late.”
“I’m starving. Is there any shepherd’s pie left?”
“Stacks. I’ll put some out for you in the kitchen before I go up.”
A few seconds later she reappeared. “Bill. Don’t just sit there going round in circles all night, fretting about it.
Your brain’ll work better after a good night’s sleep.
And remember: There’s no crime involved—nothing that meets the legal definition of a crime.
You’re not duty-bound to pursue this, and there’s a strong chance you’ll never know the truth, so save yourself the bother. Night!”
Bill thought his brain was working pretty well. He didn’t feel tired. He felt easily up to the task of trying to figure out why the manuscript had been buried in a box and then, later, dug up.
Obviously dead dogs didn’t write books. Bill knew that.
But what if a living person, temporarily possessed by a spirit that’s not his own, could maybe have…
I mean, the Connor chapters contained some words that Bill was sure Connor Chantree didn’t know and would never use.
So what if Connor’s hands did all the typing, but Furbert Herbert Lambert was the book’s true author?
And then maybe… Yes! It made sense: What if Sally Lambert somehow got her hands on the manuscript and read it.
She might have panicked and buried it in her garden to protect Furbert’s reputation.
At which point Furbert, stubborn and proud—also, crucially, spirit rather than flesh and therefore untouchable both by the law and by conventional morality—dug it up and dropped it between Connor Chantree’s car and his garage, believing it deserved a wider audience.
Ridiculous! Bill scolded himself. Utterly, embarrassingly absurd.
How could he be sitting here coming up with theories that involved supernatural possession?
It felt almost as if he’d been possessed himself—by idiocy.
He was supposed to be sensible. He was a senior police detective, well respected by his colleagues.
Lissa was right. Enough of this nonsense.
He stood up and staggered a few paces before his limbs unstiffened and he was able to walk normally to the kitchen. This brought to mind a funny poem he’d read years ago and had remembered ever since:
In youth, before I knew the cares
of middle age, I never dreamt
that getting out of comfy chairs
could take me more than one attempt.
In the kitchen, he found a small peach on the table, positioned at the center of one of his and Lissa’s largest dinner plates. It looked a little like a contemporary artwork of the sort he enjoyed sneering at. He squeezed it and his thumb broke through its furry skin.
No shepherd’s pie in sight.
Bill frowned. He’d told Lissa he planned to return to his healthy eating protocol as soon as work felt more manageable.
He’d meant it, too—there had been no slackening of his good intentions—so there was no need for her to drop pointed hints like this.
Still, this peach needed eating now that he’d tunneled into it with his thumb.
It could be his pre-bed snack starter, he decided.
He’d dig the shepherd’s pie leftovers out of the freezer afterward and heat them up.
There was no defeating Bill Wendt’s appetite at its most determined.
A minute or so later, he descended, with great care, the bumpy stone steps that led to the lower part of the kitchen (Lissa called it “the Galley,” a name that was too pretentious for Bill).
The steps were a disaster waiting to happen, but Bill had been forbidden from doing anything to make them safer.
According to Lissa, they were made from imported Cornish stone and contained fossils.
Why anyone would bother bringing Cornish stone to Cambridgeshire, Bill had no idea—nor why Lissa thought it meant he ought to be willing to risk breaking bones.
On his way to dispose of the peach stone, he caught sight of something silver and shiny in his peripheral vision.
He turned and saw another dinner plate from the too-big-to-fit-in-their-dishwasher set, bearing a mound of something he couldn’t see, wrapped in cling film.
It was sitting across the tops of two of the four rectangular straw basket-drawer things, in the alcove next to the bin, where Lissa kept things like Sellotape, paper clips, and clothes pegs.
Bill threw away the peach pit, reached for the plate, and lifted the cling film. Shepherd’s pie! Joy of joys—even more so because he’d imagined a puritanical attempt to deprive him of it.
Good old Lissa. But why had she put it there, where he could so easily not have spotted it, after saying she’d leave it in the kitchen where the microwave was?
Bill smiled. He knew why. She wasn’t normally absent-minded, but her head had no doubt been too full of Lamberts-related theories and speculation to attend properly to practicalities.
Anyway: shepherd’s pie!