CHAPTER 2 #2
‘Jesus Christ!’ she exclaimed, and leapt in her seat, smacking her knee on the underside of the desk.
‘Almost!’ replied a familiar voice.
‘Come in! The door is open.’
‘Here I am!’ announced her friend and near neighbour Prichard Knowles, as if she’d been waiting for him for hours, days, indeed her entire life. ‘And I bring libations.’
‘Oh great,’ replied Pat, her shoulders sinking a little in anticipation of the thunderous hangover that would inevitably wake her like a hammer to the head at 3 a.m. ‘What is it this time?’
‘Well,’ said Prichard as he stepped inside with a flamboyant flick of his lengthy hand-knitted orange scarf, ‘it’s a bit of an experiment.
I know!’ he added, one of his hands in the air like he was stopping traffic.
‘A word one never wants to hear when it comes to a beverage, but bear with, bear with. This one,’ he pulled a sturdy bottle containing neon-pink liquid from his duffle coat pocket, ‘is strawberry vodka. And this coquettish piece of quelque chose is pineapple and cheese – wait for it – gin!’ He plonked both bottles down on Pat’s desk.
She recoiled as if faced with an unexploded bomb.
‘Boom!’ added Prichard for good measure, his machine-gun laugh erupting. ‘Hahaha.’
‘Cheese?’
‘Cheese!’ His long nose curled in amusement; a paintbrush of short grey hair shot out of each nostril. ‘Who knew!’
‘No one. And there will be a sound and solid reason for that,’ replied Pat, inspecting the bottle. There appeared to be yellow crumbs swilling around at the bottom – quite possibly small hunks of Cheddar sediment.
A bit like the son of the Good Lord, Prichard Knowles could apparently conjure up alcohol out of anything.
Most ingredients were fair game as far as he was concerned.
He had yet to turn his hand to water, but so far he had produced beetroot wine, rhubarb wine, turnip wine, dandelion wine and – the least successful of all – nettle wine, which had brought them both out in some sort of allergic reaction and made their lips swell up so that they looked like Love Island contestants.
It was one of those lockdown experiments that was never to be repeated.
‘I’m not interrupting anything, am I?’ he asked, scouring the hut for evidence of activity. ‘You look busy.’ He nodded at the open file on Pat’s desk.
‘One of my clients has just been found dead on the beach,’ said Pat, swiftly shutting the folder.
‘Goodness!’ Prichard perched, half-buttocked, on the fat armchair, where Dave was now staring at him with murder in his yellow eyes. ‘That sounds bad.’
‘Well, it’s certainly not good. Especially for his mother.’
‘A young chap, then?’
‘Early thirties.’
‘What a waste.’
‘It is a waste. A terrible waste. And what’s making me angry is that the police don’t want to investigate it. They’re writing it off as a suicide.’
‘Suicide? Well, he’s in the right place.’
‘Surely not every bloody person who dies off the sodding Seven Sisters is trying to kill themselves!’ replied Pat irritably. ‘There are accidents, and then of course there’s …’
‘Murder!’ Prichard’s brown eyes were spherical as he filled the empty space of her words. He blinked slowly behind his smeared specs. ‘D’you think your client was murdered?’
‘I believe it to be a possibility, as does Sue,’ Pat replied solemnly.
Prichard sat back in the armchair, prompting Dave to leave with an outraged meow, and exhaled loudly. Then he leant forward and grasped the stubby bottle of vodka. ‘Well, stone the starlings!’ He popped the cork. ‘Nothing like this ever happens in a sleepy vicus like Westlinke.’
‘Vicus?’
‘Latin, keep up, hahaha.’
He picked up Pat’s half-empty glass of stale water from the desk and chucked its contents into the pot of a parched spider plant before filling it with the pink drink.
‘What do you think happened?’ He took a swig, and his dark eyes watered.
‘Someone might have pushed him, I suppose. An argument, maybe? I don’t know.’ Pat eyed the pink liquid with increasing suspicion.
Prichard raised his eyebrows, then took another shot. Pat quickly followed suit. She coughed and rubbed her nose, her throat on fire. Shaking her head, she admonished herself for such foolishness. Surely she should know by now not to drink anything that came out of Prichard’s kitchen.
‘Granted, it needs finessing,’ agreed Prichard, his voice suddenly raspy. ‘But I find it tastes better the second time.’
‘It’s like drinking Calpol,’ Pat said. Prichard looked at her blankly. ‘It’s what you give children when they’re ill.’
‘Obviously I wouldn’t know, being delightfully devoid of progeny.’
Pat took the glass out of his hand and took another swig. ‘You’re right.’ She inhaled through her back teeth. ‘It does taste better after a while.’
‘So who do you think did it?’
‘The murder?’
‘The deed.’ Prichard took another virulent sip. ‘Is there a lover? A girlfriend? Something like that? It’s normally them, isn’t it?’
‘There’s an on-and-off boyfriend.’
‘Well, it’s him then, obviously.’ He drained the glass and wiped his lips on the back of his hand. ‘You should tell the police.’
‘They’re not interested. They’re convinced it was suicide.’
‘Maybe it was.’
‘I have a persistent feeling it wasn’t.’ Pat got up abruptly, pushing her chair back.
‘Now what?’ asked Prichard, confused.
‘Follow me,’ she commanded. ‘And bring those bottles with you!’
Back in the kitchen, the cold half-drunk mugs of tea were still on the table, along with the open tin of stale biscuits. Dave was nowhere to be seen.
‘Right,’ said Pat, clapping her hands together with sudden determination, ‘help me clear this noticeboard.’
‘What are we doing?’ asked Prichard, putting his two lethal bottles on the table with a clatter.
‘I’m making a crime chart of suspects.’
‘Like they do in Silent Witness?’ he asked with an excited grin.
‘Like they do in every television drama and true-crime documentary.’
‘Like a Pinterest board of villains?’
Pat grabbed her noticeboard from the kitchen wall. ‘Probably.’ She shrugged. ‘Don’t throw anything away,’ she added as she unpinned a postcard of a Santorini sunset that Sue had sent her back in 2010.
Pat loved her noticeboard. It was organised chaos; she knew exactly what the story was behind every photograph or card or theatre ticket that might otherwise have seemed like random memorabilia. They each conjured up a memory, a moment.
‘Oh, she was a gorgeous girl back then, wasn’t she? Fearless,’ she said, taking down a faded baby photograph of her daughter, Sofia, with cherubic blonde curls, up to her knees in a rock pool. She placed it carefully on the table.
‘I didn’t know you were a pot-smoking, drug-taking hippie, Pat! You dark cheval, you!’ exclaimed Prichard, waving a piece of paper close to Pat’s face.
‘I’m not,’ said Pat. ‘Dulls the brain. Anyway, what’s that?’
‘Glastonbury tickets.’
She laughed. ‘Glastonbury! I went with a corporate client back in my solicitor days, in 2002. I think I drank three Coronas, listened to Rod Stewart and witnessed a group of middle-aged men in a state of arrested development. Their nostrils were frosted like margarita glasses. Probably trying to recapture their youth.’
‘Sad.’
‘Very.’
‘Although to be fair,’ admitted Prichard, ‘I am a fan of our Rod.’
Tickets, photographs, drawings in wax crayon, an amusing birthday card or two, Pat and Prichard piled them all on the worktop, next to a pouch of Dave’s special organic chicken liver paté, and set about organising their crime board.
‘Henry is in the middle, I presume,’ suggested Prichard, smoothing down the yellow Post-it in the centre of the board.
Pat looked up and nodded. A heavy black marker pen was sticking out of her mouth like a cigar. ‘And let’s put Derek right next to him,’ she mumbled.
‘Who’s that?’
‘The boyfriend. Our prime suspect.’
‘Great!’ enthused Prichard. ‘I had no idea this amateur sleuth thing was so easy. Who needs Poirot when we have you, Pat! Now all we need to do is prove it’s him.’
‘Or possibly not. It’s important not to jump to conclusions.’
‘Jump!’ said Prichard, before letting out another of his machine-gun laughs.
‘Not funny,’ said Pat.
‘No, it isn’t, sorry.’
Prichard stood back from the board and ran a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair as he admired his handiwork.
In his mid-sixties, he still had quite a thatch in comparison to the gleaming billiard balls that Pat mostly saw in the Green Lion.
Prichard Knowles MBE had probably been quite dapper in his day.
He was good company, enthusiastic and well read.
He had quite a collection of shoes. But now that he’d retired from his trucking business, where he’d been known as ‘the Eddie Stobart of the south’, he had gone to seed a little.
He spent most of his time cooking, eating, watching daytime quiz shows and sporting flamboyant knitwear, the majority of which he’d crafted himself.
Pat was not a big fan of the home knits, which did have a tendency to unravel, nor of his dangerous alcoholic concoctions.
But there were many things that she did like about Prichard.
‘What we need is a map,’ he pronounced, tapping an index fingertip repeatedly against the corkboard. His love of maps was another thing she couldn’t really buy into.
‘I’m sure we don’t,’ she bristled.
‘I think we do. How else are we going to know if he took the M23, the A22 or the A27 to the crime scene?’
‘I’m not sure that matters.’
‘Ooh, Pat, everything matters,’ opined Prichard.
Neither did she enjoy his love of pedantry. ‘Moving on,’ she said briskly, ‘are you willing to help with all this?’
‘Tracking down a murderer? I should think so.’ He nodded vigorously. ‘Just so long as it doesn’t involve violence, blood or huge amounts of physical activity. Like running of any kind. Or jogging. I might cope with a lively walking pace.’
‘Fine.’
‘And we might need a safe word?’
‘What for?’
‘In case we see something or … well, I don’t know. A word that means we have to get back to yours. Or a red alert!’ Pat looked even more puzzled. ‘If we spot a clue.’
‘OK. Like what?’
Prichard puffed his lips. ‘Um. Chilli con carne?’
‘Why chilli con carne?’
‘CCC – can’t converse calmly.’
‘If we have to.’ Pat shook her head.
With his terms and conditions set and agreed to, Prichard sat down at the pine table while Pat paced around the kitchen and explained why she had not come to the same conclusions as the police.
Dave reappeared and curled up on Prichard’s lap, ready for his forgiveness to be bought with a few head scratches.
‘They’re not asking the right questions,’ she said. ‘In fact, they’re not asking any questions at all. Like why was Henry on the cliff? How come he ended up on the beach? And what was he doing in Westlinke hours before he was due to see me?’
Prichard did his best to keep up. But his home brew was beginning to make his temples throb, and his mouth was increasingly claggy and dry. He glanced up at the wall clock.
‘Are we going to this thing?’
‘What thing?’
‘At the posh house. Mal and Fi’s. Drinks.’ He nodded out of the window towards a row of newly planted leylandii. ‘I came to collect you. Remember? Or have you blanked it out like everything else you find trop difficile?’
‘Trop boring, Prichard. Not difficult.’
‘So, are we going?’
‘With everything that’s happened, I’d forgotten about it, but I suppose I must.’
‘Well, I hope you’re going to change?’ He looked her up and down. ‘You can’t go in a dryrobe.’