Chapter Thirty-Five
Ten days later, Kim was in Spice Route, the Indian Restaurant in Budleigh Salterton famous for its car park.
It was drenched in summer flowers, and the customer joke was always that if the cooks swapped places with the gardener, the place would win a Michelin star.
She had a text from Edward’s new number:
Ten minutes sorry. Order me the Chicken Disaster.
Disaster already ordered
She tutted and asked for more poppadoms. On her phone was an email notification: ‘Thirdfield Terrace & Slater-Glynne’.
What was that thing men used in a marriage that kept appearing as a hashtag on Instagram: ‘Weaponized incompetence’? Where the guy kept saying, ‘Oh luv, I’m no good with the dishwasher, I’ve just broken another three plates’, and the wife is forced to take over all the chores?
Well, it was working a treat with Tank and Fire, the suspect buyers.
Kim had made up her mind, and she rarely changed her view when she did that.
She did not want their dirty money or their filthy lies, and so she had got Emily, a crinkle-haired puffball of bespectacled McFlurry, who took at least four days a month off sick with anxiety, to do the sale ‘as a priority’.
Emily had many good qualities – she volunteered with rescue animals and had all the time in the world to listen to her colleagues’ troubles – but she had no future as an estate agent.
Every bank account number was transcribed wrong, every phone number in her notepad was missing a digit.
She had once sold a couple the wrong house by making a mistake with the Land Registry filing.
Emily’s incompetence was as weaponized as a scrambled SAS unit.
But the delays did not put off Tank and Fire, and no other offers had come in.
Tank and Fire just kept pushing the price higher, as if bidding against themselves.
The vendor was in no rush because the leasehold on the apartment block was owned by an investment syndicate.
‘Hey, lovely.’
Stevie peered at Kim as she sat down at the table.
‘Kim, you were a million bloody miles away.’
Without even thinking, Kim asked: ‘How do I put off two dodgy buyers who want to buy the most beautiful flat in Sidmouth? I’ve tried assigning the slowest person in the office, and all that happens is that I get emails saying the sale is getting closer.’
‘You should put me onto it.’
‘That’s not such a bad idea.’ Kim put her phone back in her handbag, then had second thoughts. ‘Might keep this visible. Hoping Edward will text us his ETA.’
‘Why are they dodgy?’ Stevie asked.
‘Lots of cash, second home, pretending to be lovers when clearly they aren’t. Plump guy, ravishing Indian lady, from Kerala if I remember rightly. Oh, and Edward heard them talking and it was weird.’
‘Why? What did they say?’
Kim racked her brains. ‘Damn. If only I could remember. He was underneath my car, looking for a spare tyre that wasn’t there.’
‘Innuendo much.’
‘Stop it. It was the day we all met at Nine Chairs. Something about the parachutes. No – parachute singular. “Is the parachute through?” Something like that. Edward will remember.’
Stevie held her phone to her mouth. ‘Ask ChatGPT what “parachute” is slang for.’
The phone responded a second later. ‘Please explain the context of this question so I can answer you.’
‘Useless twit. Okay. Ask ChatGPT what illegal thing parachute is slang for in Kerala.’
The phone thought about it for a moment, evidently not in the least offended by Stevie’s bad language. The robotic voice returned. ‘In Kerala, India, crystal meth is described as “parachute” because the drug is commonly crushed and wrapped into small paper bulbs which look like parachutes.’
Kim sat in silence for a minute. She shook her head occasionally, and once murmured, ‘Shit.’
‘I feel like I brought you bad news.’
‘Your phone did, yes.’
‘You don’t use ChatGPT?’
‘I should.’
‘I’m sorry it gave you that info, don’t want it to wreck the night. It does tend to blurt stuff out.’
‘No filter.’ Kim brightened. ‘It’s nothing I couldn’t have guessed. Well, in a way you’ve helped me. I can’t accept dirty money.’ She looked at Stevie and put the Thirdfield Terrace sale out of her head. ‘You seem happy, Stevie.’
‘“Seem” is one of those rumbly words.’
Kim looked quizzical, but Stevie did not elaborate. It was the first time Kim had met her since the wedding. Kim and Edward had got into the habit of making inverted commas with their fingers whenever they talked about that day – ‘the wedding’ – and Kim felt suddenly guilty about that.
‘I’ve left you alone,’ she said. ‘I thought you might be on honeymoon.’
‘Ha!’ said Stevie. ‘With myself? No, right back at work.’
‘Still part-time?’
‘I told you I’m doing a criminology course, didn’t I?’ It came over as a challenge: How could you have forgotten? Kim shook her head. ‘Oh, maybe I kept it quiet. Forensics sort of. No dead bodies yet so I’m thinking I should go missing during a module and see if they can trace me.’
Her last word coincided with Stevie karate-chopping a poppadom, then taking both halves.
‘Why criminology?’
‘Can’t you guess, lady? Didn’t we three investigate something and weren’t we good at it?’
‘Ha, I guess so. Funny seeing Jordan at your wedding,’ said Kim.
‘Edward brought him. Luckily he found some non-cop clothes in his car boot or I would have assumed we were being raided.’
‘He came in handy.’
‘I actually wrote a letter of whatdyacallit to the chief constable of Devon—’
‘Commendation?’
‘—yep, a letter of commendation about Jordan Callintree because I thought Jordan was bloody superb, protecting us, getting Roddy in a headlock and disarming the bottle.’
‘I hate to disappoint you, but Jordan is now chief constable. So your letter about Jordan will have gone to Jordan himself.’
‘What? Knock me down with a feather.’
‘What sort of phrase is “Knock me down with a feather”, Stevie?’
The young woman looked surprisingly cheerful.
‘I’ve been having some counselling about my Tourette’s because it lets me down in appraisals and suchlike.
I don’t even know if it is wanker fucking Tourette’s, and pardon my French.
It’s just random filthy language that comes out as easily …
as easily … I nearly did it there. “As easily as fucking breathing”.
The counsellor says I need to try something called “substitution”, where I swap the swearword just as it travels along my tongue.
It’s helped me stop saying the word “cunt” quite a few times. ’
‘What do you say instead?’
‘Anything. I try “lemon”. That creates a problem ordering cocktails, I can tell you.’
‘You really are in good form, Stevie. Happiest I’ve seen you for a good long while.’
‘You were right. I’d rather be with myself than with any Roddy.’
‘Down with Roddies.’
‘Utter scumbag.’
‘Are you talking about me again?’ said Edward, arriving at the table and dropping a battered brown briefcase on the couch beside him. ‘Sorry, I thought I heard my name.’
The women laughed.
‘Did you get my message?’ Edward asked Kim. ‘I have something important for you both.’
‘I replied!’
He looked at his new phone blankly.
‘Oh,’ said Kim, realizing. ‘Maybe I replied to your old number.’
‘Somewhere on the rocks at the bottom of the Ladram Bay cliffs, a mobile just beeped.’
‘That sounds like the start of a novel,’ said Stevie. ‘Somewhere at the foot of the Ladram Bay cliffs, a mobile just sang to a seagull.’
‘I wouldn’t read any further if that was the first line,’ said Kim.
Stevie asked, ‘How come your old phone fell down a cliff?’
Kim glanced at Edward, and saw him deciding to avoid Stevie’s question. ‘Your wedding was lovely,’ he said, the most blatant evasion.
‘My “wedding”,’ repeated Stevie sarcastically, doing exactly the same as Kim and Edward had done privately, raising her hands and making rabbit’s-ears with two pairs of fingers.
Kim gulped at her own hypocrisy as she chided: ‘Hey, it was a real wedding! None of that, naughty.’
‘I took myself as my “lawful wedded wife”, according to that young curate chap, who did the whole bloody thing at a kind of lean, and who – by the way – I think may have an intimate relationship with the kind of gin that is odourless.’
‘Thank God for Jordan Callintree,’ said Edward, inadvertently taking the conversation back to where it had been five minutes earlier. ‘He’s the reason we’re here, by the way.’
‘Oh!’ said Kim. ‘I thought it was because you wanted the disaster.’
‘Did you order it?’
‘What’s that?’ asked Stevie.
‘It’s what he calls the jalfrezi.’
‘The car park’s nice though,’ said Stevie.
The curry came in stages. Edward drank too much. Tongue loosened by the Kingfisher, he told Kim and Stevie: ‘Pretty much everything I report is from Jordan. He would normally be discreet. But he can’t get his officers motivated on the case. He’s lost the dressing room.’
He could have listed the scoops. He had had chapter and verse on the speed of the Met’s withdrawal.
A little more was known about the isotope, Actinium-224, although it wasn’t good news.
Anyone could have made it: there were now centrifuge machines you could store in a garage, but it was a dangerous game.
‘That’s the first report I ever broadcast which I couldn’t understand myself.’
The view being taken by Devon Police was that this was not terrorism.
The motorbike rider was transporting dangerous material (yes, it was still very dangerous) for some illegal private purpose.
They had found drugs paraphernalia in the flat (bloodstained tubes).
But none of it led to any firm conclusions.
They wondered if a farmer was using unconventional means to destroy a herd, but the carcasses would still have to go to an abattoir, surely?
‘And those bloodstained tubes were for drugs?’ repeated Stevie.
‘They had some sort of taps on them, blue and red, to control the … what, heroin going into the vein, I guess.’