ILLUMINATION BOOK CHAPTERS (UPDATED LIST OF CHAPTERS HERE) … ROMANTIC COMEDY — QUIRKY ROMP — CO-STARS MOOCHER THE DOG

‘White Lies and Custard Creams’ — Chapter Twenty

Trying to fit it together. And failing …

When she got back, followed shortly by Simon, Melanie very kindly made coffee and the three them sat around the front room trying to work out what the hell was going on.

Melanie said, “You know, I’m awfully confused still.”

“We’ve been over it and over it,” Liz said. “We should have the picture by now for Pete’s sake!”

“Let’s try again.”

Liz sighed. “Okay. Here we go. The Vincent Banton person was Lydia’s brother — don’t know where he fits in yet. Lydia, who we now think is fine and dandy and making phone calls to the police quite happily, used to have Mark Scotter as her toy boy, hard though that is to imagine. Mark Scotter just happens to be Betty Needles’ nephew, the Once in a Lifetime Kevin. Somehow Lydia knew that Mark Scotter was about to call on her place so she rang the police to shop him.”

She scratched behind Moocher’s ears and turned them inside out so he looked like a hairy model with a new style hat on. He shook his head so they bounced the right way out, and begged her to do it again. “Mark Scotter did a job of some sort that resulted in a lot of missing money. He’s also a drug dealer and stashed his stuff at the Cakehole Caff. Which wasn’t a very bright thing to do when you come to think of it and it also explains all those ‘dry’ provisions we spotted the other day when we raided it. It doesn’t explain why the caff wasn’t even locked, which I still find very odd. Anyway, his fingerprints were on the note on that last brick through the window…”

“Do you think this Mark Scotter could tie up with Julie’s father?” Melanie suggested. “Do you think he is Julie’s father?”

Liz stared at her in amazement. Why hadn’t she thought of that? Then she remembered Simon’s yearning for a family, although why he should want to be associated with Miss Poison she couldn’t imagine. As for Clive, she didn’t feel she could give him away until she knew more than she did at that time.

So she said, “Trouble with that is that Simon’s her father.”

“Thanks, Liz, but not any more,” he said. “Not since the whole thing with Moocher. She’s just not my type of daughter.”

Oh! So much for that. Liz wondered, briefly, if one could throw off one’s sister as easily if they weren’t one’s type. “Um, okay, so we have Mark Scotter as Julie’s father — although he must had sired her when he was three. I’ve never been very good at guessing age, though. But maybe that’s why Simon was kidnapped. They think he’s the robber and maybe that’s what they want — the money he’s supposed to have stolen. By the way, why did Julie kidnap Moocher and threaten dismemberment?” She looked around for enlightenment, but none came her way. “What about the gun? Where did she get that? And where is she now anyway? Okay, Tony’s her adoptive brother — where’s he?”

She almost choked on a mouthful of coffee when a voice said, “I’m here. What do you want to know?” Tony strolled into the room and lowered himself onto the sofa.

Liz was pleased to see him. “We’re trying to work out what’s going on,” she explained. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand to get shot of the coffee moustache that must have appeared. The way Tony watched her do that made her feel suddenly shy. But there was definitely no room in her life at the moment for anything of that nature. Well, not with anyone other than Hugh, anyway. “So, why are you here, Tony? Why were you so desperate to get into this house?”

It felt like years since he’d arrived.

He leaned forward, his elbows on his thighs and his hands clasped loosely together, a slight frown wrinkling his forehead. “My idea, originally, was simply to try and keep Julie out of trouble,” he said. “But then, I’d always been a bit suspicious of her. I know she’s not the sweet little thing that her parents seemed to think she was. Take, for example, the ill-advised business of kidnapping Moocher. But even so, she is my sister. However, when I realised there was a lot of money at stake, I decided there was no reason why I shouldn’t help things along a little. After all, who wouldn’t?”

“I wouldn’t, not if it meant forcibly relieving people of their fingers and paws,” Liz snapped. “Anyway, what do you mean? How did you help things along a little?”

“I employed the part-time thugs,” he said.

Simple. He employed the part-time thugs. Just an ordinary, everyday activity. Why should her eyebrows be half way down the back of her head? How does one go about doing such a thing anyway? Does part-time thuggery enjoy its own section in the yellow pages?

“What, to get Clive’s finger? To kidnap Simon?”

Simon got up and sat on the other side of the room. He fished a large not-so-white handkerchief from his pocket and feverishly polished his glasses, shooting sorrowful glances at Tony as he did so. The top of Liz’s head started to warm up. She wasn’t going to have someone make her oldest lodger’s life a misery. It wasn’t on. She assumed Simon wanted to be her lodger again, given his sudden antipathy to his long-lost daughter who wasn’t his daughter after all.

At least Tony had the grace to look uncomfortable. He lost his relaxed air and attempted to sit upright on the sofa. “Well, they didn’t succeed in kidnapping Simon, so what’s the harm?”

“What’s the harm?” Liz stared at him. She was constantly amazed at how it was that people could walk the same earth that she did, breathe the same air she breathed, and yet think in such a completely different way. They might as well be a different species. Was it her, or was it them? “You petrified Clive next door — he’s still living in fear, for all I know, of your lot coming back to get his finger…”

“What do you mean, ‘coming back to get his finger’?”

Well, it was take-your-breath-away-time. She’d forgotten Clive had entered into an agreement with the part time thugs about that particular item of information. “You mean you still don’t know that they didn’t get his finger? That makes you even worse. You’re a lodger in my house, you’re sitting in my front room, you’re stroking my dog… Moocher! Come here!” She leapt up and examined Moocher’s ears. Yes, he still had two. “And yet you’re capable of paying someone to cut off someone else’s finger with a power tool! And you can sit there being so casual about it…” She was seriously running out of breath, unable to get to grips with the enormity of it.

“Now, calm down, Liz,” he said. “I’m bound to be interested, aren’t I? For one thing, that means that I paid them for nothing. Now I know, I shall set about getting my money back. And for another thing, that means that the finger in the fridge didn’t belong to the person I thought it did. So, who does it belong to?”

“I don’t know,” Liz said. What else could she say? “I don’t even know how it got in there.” She crossed her fingers behind Moocher’s head and hoped Simon would stay silent. Maybe they’d learn something.

“Simon put it in there,” Tony said, very patiently, as though she was being particularly slow to pick up on the obvious.

“Give me strength,” she muttered, resisting an almost overwhelming urge to bury her face in Moocher’s neck. She remembered how he smelt. “How do you know that?”

“I saw him do it.”

“Why would he do such a thing?” asked Melanie.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Tony said. “Simon lives to his own plan, don’t you old chap?”

Simon flushed slightly and raised a hand, briefly, as if in acknowledgement.

“But if you saw him put it in there, why did you let your poor little sister open the fridge the following morning. You must have known she would pass out.” (Yeah. Poor Julie. What a shame. What a cow.)

“Ah, well. That was a bit awkward, I’ll admit. As she assumed, obviously, that it was Clive’s, she couldn’t very well take responsibility for it at that stage. And, anyway, I can assure you there was no guarantee that Julie would pass out. She really isn’t the passing-out type, believe it or not. I had no idea what she would do.”

“Where did you think it came from, then? The finger.”

“It was on the brick. The brick that came through the window. I thought it was a novel delivery method employed by the thugs. I wasn’t that impressed, tell you the truth. But that was one reason why I got the window fixed — to save too much thought on anyone else’s part. I was going to deduct the cost from their wages.”

“Why would anyone, even a bunch of amateur thugs, chuck a finger on a brick through my window? And where did it come from if it wasn’t Clive’s?”

“I have no idea why they would do that. I don’t know them at all. I only hired them. Maybe they could think of no other way of proving they’d done the job. But we’re going to have words about it. One of them dropped out early on and now the other two have packed it in. And I’m just left with the new one who seems to be several planks short of a floor. He’s probably now being picked up for having a broken brake light. It’s hopeless trying to get staff these days.”

“Yeah. You have my sympathy. It’s much the same trying to get decent, straightforward, you-are-what-you-seem lodgers, too.”

“There’s no need to be like that,” he said. He seemed quite affronted, but she couldn’t be bothered with him anymore. She was much more interested in what she didn’t know. “So we still don’t know where the finger came from,” she said. Well, Simon had given her a theory, but she didn’t want to involve Stella either.

“Doesn’t matter now, does it?” Tony said. “Moocher’s kindly disposed of it for us, so its presence won’t make life awkward for any of us. And even if it did, it’s nothing to do with me anymore as Simon claimed it as his own and wrapped it and put it in the fridge. So I’m in the clear anyway.” He beamed at them. Melanie uncrossed her lovely long legs and shifted away from him. “And,” he continued. “Simon did the right thing with regard to fridge hygiene. No one’s suffered any unfortunate after effects. No, it’s not a problem any longer.”

He sat there with a silly smile on what she’d previously thought was a good-looking face. He wore the air of one expecting praise for his thoughtfulness, but it was beyond her. It was apparently beyond Simon and Melanie too, who both stared at Tony as though he were something Moocher had dragged in. He really was way outside their experience of life, which, up until now had obviously been far too narrow.

“Do you know why Julie kidnapped Moocher and threatened maiming?”

He smiled at her. “I think it was just to put some pressure on you. You would have shopped Simon and told everyone his secrets before you’d let something happen to that dog.”

I glanced at Simon. He said, “Don’t worry about it. It didn’t come to it, so it doesn’t matter.”

What a hero! She still felt ashamed though. Just in case Tony was right, which he probably was… Not that she knew any of Simon’s secrets to tell, but if she did then she probably would if that was the alternative to hurting her Mooch.

“No,” Tony said. “I fancy you ruined Julie’s plan by finding Moocher so soon.”

“Hmmm. I think I’m going to bath the dog,” Liz said. She was fresh out of patience with it all and wasn’t much further on with getting things sorted. And Moocher still stank enough to make any woodworm in the vicinity crawl out of their planks in surrender. First things first and to hell with severed fingers, abductions and all these dodgy people she suddenly found herself surrounded by. “And by the time I’ve finished I want you out of here, Tony. I don’t care where you go, I don’t want to know, just go. Good bye.” She supposed people can’t really be locked up for intending to do something, if they were actually prevented from doing it. Pity.

“Don’t I get any brownie points for telling you everything I know?”

“Just exactly why have you told us everything you know?”

“Why not?”

He was incredible, but she’d thought of something that would deflate him. “Did you know that the latest thug you’ve hired is a well-known and much wanted drug dealer, Tony? You’re going to be in the sticky brown stuff when your part in his employment comes to light.”

But he shrugged it off. “That’s his problem, not mine. I don’t know anything about his business.”

Liz heaved herself out of her chair and made a dignified exit, only slightly marred by tripping over the mug she’d left on the floor and spilling the dregs over the carpet. She didn’t look back. Moocher followed her out with no thought in his head at all as to what was in store for him. If he’d had the slightest inkling he would have been out there packing his bags in company with Tony. He would have left without leaving a forwarding address, too. Moocher did not like having a bath.

Chapter Nineteen of ‘White Lies and Custard Creams’ is here!

Chapter Twenty-One of ‘White Lies and Custard Creams’ will be here next week!

All ‘White Lies and Custard Creams’ chapters to read are here.

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‘White Lies and Stakeouts’ follows on from ‘White Lies and Custard Creams’, although, it too, can stand alone.

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