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  ‘You’ll be okay,’ he told him soothingly. ‘It’s just a hangover. You’ll be fine by lunch.’

  ‘I’ll be dead,’ said Bradley.

  ‘Here are your breakfasts,’ announced the waitress cheerfully, setting down plates laid out like faces, with eggs for eyes and curled sausages making smiley mouths. With his fork Sam turned each of the sausages the other way round, so they were less mocking. Little if anything was spoken for the next ten minutes, save for single-syllable grunt-like requests for sauce or condiment, and gasps of appreciation and relief.

  At the next table the artist they had seen at the meeting yesterday, Walerian Exosius, was looking even more mournfully hungover than they were. Sam watched wearily as he devoured his vegetarian breakfast, then staggered to the curb, threw it up into the gutter and began to weep uncontrollably.

  At this sight Sam moved his plate away, unable to face any more, and drank his cooling coffee as if it were life-giving serum.

  ‘So you say you’ve read lots of detective novels?’ asked Bradley, when he could speak again.

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘And seen lots of police dramas?’

  ‘Lots. Why?’

  ‘You’ll keep on giving me tips, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course I will, you lunatic, Detective Bradley, but I’m supposed to be asking you for tips, you know. That’s why I’ve come down here!’

  ‘Well, yes, I know,’ said Bradley, looking abashed. ‘But the reason I’m here is really to do with Mrs Detective. She loves the idea of being married to a detective.’

  ‘And you want to learn from the guys off TV?’

  ‘The boys in the office don’t seem to respect someone coming from out in the sticks like me. I mean, further out in the sticks. They haven’t given me much other guidance . . .’

  ‘Okay,’ said Sam, rubbing his hands. ‘Then I have lots of advice to give you.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, you’ve got to be a hard-boiled motherfucker,’ said Sam. ‘Yes, two more coffees, please,’ he found himself saying a moment later as he saw the waitress was hovering.

  ‘Hard-boiled,’ said Bradley. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means you don’t take no for an answer from nobody.’

  ‘You mean I do take no for an answer from somebody?’

  ‘No. I mean not even from me. You’re a proper detective, you’re headstrong. You don’t give a fuck what no motherfucker thinks.’

  ‘Right,’ said Bradley, nodding with concentration as though someone had just explained a specifically difficult method of parking. Behind them both, Walerian Exosius had taken out his camera and was photographing his ex-breakfast, while still weeping.

  ‘You don’t care,’ said Sam.

  ‘Right,’ nodded Bradley.

  ‘If I argued with you right now you’d have a fit and handcuff me to the table, even though we’re friends. That’s how tough you are,’ said Sam.

  ‘Right,’ said Bradley, closing a metal cuff over Sam’s wrist and linking it into the arm of his chair before he could protest. ‘I’m going to the loo.’

  Sam swallowed several violent compound expletives as he watched his companion rise and go inside.

  ‘I can’t even reach my iPhone with my spare hand,’ he muttered. ‘This would make a great tweet.’ He leant forward to see if he could pluck it from his top pocket with his teeth just as the waitress arrived again.

  Raising his startled face to see hers as she took the plates, Sam realized that for once in his life he had the chance to give the impression of being a dangerous young man (locked as he was to the furniture). Trying to make this impression while having a brain that felt like it was filled with cotton wool and shattered glass, he succeeded only in simpering pleasantly while she picked up the plates, refusing to meet his eye or acknowledge his existence but, as she turned away, giving the artist a cheery little wave.

  ‘See you tomorrow, love!’ she said.

  ‘Cheerio,’ said Walerian, wandering off, mopping his tears with his neckerchief.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Sam whispered viciously as Bradley sat back down. ‘I’ve been humiliated in front of that deliriously beautiful waitress, you pig! Did you see her hair? It cascades!’

  The detective unlocked the handcuffs with slow clumsiness.

  ‘Okay,’ said Sam, rubbing his wrist, ‘I have to admit that was an excellent first step. You have to take that attitude into literally every walk of life. You don’t take no for an answer from nobody. But let’s make me the exception . . .’

  With one of his freed hands he took a pepper cruet and stuffed it up Bradley’s nose.

  ‘What-AHHH-ah-ah-AAAH-AHCHOO! I’m sorry about that, Sam – ahCHOO! I wasn’t sure I’d have the courage to try it out on anyone else.’

  ‘If you want to get more advice along those lines, I’m the one you’re protecting, you understand? I’m Al Capone. Or . . . Well, the protected one, whoever that would be. Come on, let’s walk. Wash that!’

  His last words were addressed to the waitress, who had reappeared from within the cafe and to whom he handed the pepper cruet wrapped in a tissue.

  ‘We’ll be back!’ he added, pointing at her in what he realized was a not very charming and possibly somewhat threatening way. ‘Okay, style it out,’ he said to himself, turning back round and brushing down his jacket and tie.

  They were only halfway up the street towards the small car park where Bradley’s police carpool vehicle was parked, but the detective now put a hand on his arm.

  ‘I can’t drive it,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, come on, Cinderella,’ said Sam, before he felt the tremor in Bradley’s arm. Then he saw the man was standing stock still. He recognized what was going on, and he knew what to do.

  First, he sat the detective on a low, thick stone wall from which he would find it nearly impossible to fall. He spoke to him as loudly and clearly as to a child trapped in a lift.

  ‘THIS IS THE FIRST MAJOR SYMPTOM OF YOUR HANGOVER KICKING IN,’ he said. ‘THEY ARE REALLY RATHER UNPLE— Wait a minute, I can’t keep shouting like this, I’ll give myself an aneurism.’ He sat down next to the detective instead and held his hand.

  ‘You see, you have much too much alcohol in your bloodstream. Now you’ve eaten, you’re starting to metabolize some of it, and it feels like a real bastard.’

  The detective nodded stupidly, as though his body was a clumsy suit worn by some smaller intelligent creature within.

  ‘You’re lucky, I know what you need,’ said Sam, looking encouragingly into his eyes.

  ‘You’re the reason I need it,’ whispered Bradley vaguely.

  ‘Come on, Goldilocks,’ said Sam, ‘I’m just trying to make you a real detective. Just stay here and I’ll be back.’ With that he let go of Bradley’s arm and vanished round the corner, for all the detective knew, to catch a bus to Heathrow, or fetch a camera. But sooner than he expected here was the young lad back again, with a white plastic bag full of encouraging bulges.

  ‘Eating that breakfast helped you begin to get lots of stuff out of your system,’ said Sam. ‘There are a lot of things you don’t understand about the hangover.’

  ‘I’ve been hungover,’ protested Bradley.

  ‘In 1996,’ said Sam. ‘Things have come on. Look here.’ He held up the bag. ‘At least this place has a working pharmacy and newsagent.’ He performed each of these operations twice: taking out a bottle of spring water, opening it, taking a long sip and then tipping in a couple of Alka-Seltzers. Then cracking open a second can of fizzy orange-flavoured drink and setting it on the wall alongside the first before opening another bottle of water and mixing in a diarrhoea cure, which (he had been told) contained many of the essential body salts that are sacrificed by a night’s drinking.

  Sat on the wall, the two men doggedly drank through all three containers until they were empty. They sighed, and gulped and gawped; they stretched, liquids fizzed in their stomachs and various facts of the worl
d seemed a bit more realistic and manageable. Bradley tried to work out whether he could dry his clothes and where, or when he might get other clothes while these ones dried.

  ‘Why did you let me sleep in that fishpond?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t remember having much of a choice,’ said Sam. ‘The last I remember you were kissing me and telling me that I really have to follow my dream, that I really, really have to follow it. Then I sang “Suzie Q” by Creedence Clear-water Revival and we got chucked out. That was a karaoke night, wasn’t it? Not just someone else’s table we invaded?’

  ‘Okay, that’s enough,’ Bradley said. ‘What was that we were drinking, by the way?’

  ‘Sambuca, for the most part.’

  ‘Well, it’s revolting. I can practically taste it in my ears. Is there a dry-cleaning place in this town?’

  ‘Dry-cleaning places don’t actually dry your clothes for you,’ said Sam, sitting heavily back down on the stone wall. ‘Oh, crap, you know what? Your hangover is about to lift and mine’s about to start. Come on then, Tinker Bell, where are we going next?’

  Chapter Five

  SAM AND DETECTIVE Inspector Bradley visited the two Miss Quimples next. It so happened that the Miss Quimples were twins, and as we have seen they were both on the Parish Council, where they sat alongside each other, dressed identically. It didn’t come as a huge surprise, therefore, to discover that Miss Emily Quimple and Miss Cecily Quimple lived beside each other in perfect picture-box cottages on the south-facing upper slopes of Church Lane, which was marginally the poshest of the town’s nine streets.

  The two men approached the left-hand cottage and after knocking on the door were received by a little old woman wearing a cream blouse and black skirt, who regarded them with a shrewd eye.

  ‘Come about Terry, have you?’ said Miss Emily Quimple, and walked through to the living room, allowing them to follow her. ‘I’m afraid I’ve very little to offer you.’

  Sam was just thinking that if he saw any food he was likely to chuck up, when he discovered that this wasn’t true. He saw what she meant by ‘very little’ when the little old lady brought through a plate with an iced gingerbread on it, followed soon after by another tray containing a large pot of tea.

  ‘I’m sure I’m just a silly old biddy,’ she said. ‘But you were here to ask about that fellow Terry Fairbreath, who went missing?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Bradley. ‘What can you tell us about him?’

  ‘Well, he was a prostitute,’ said Emily Quimple. ‘Is that the word I mean?’

  The two men looked at each other.

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Sam.

  ‘I’m sorry, who are you?’

  ‘Me? I’m a writer.’

  ‘Oh, a writer,’ said Emily, welcoming one of her cats onto her lap. ‘So not a policeman, then.’

  ‘No,’ said Sam.

  ‘So you don’t really have a reason to speak at all?’ she asked, with a friendly smile.

  ‘None,’ admitted Sam, taking a slice of gingerbread and turning to Bradley. ‘Your witness!’

  ‘Can you think of anyone who had a grudge against Terry Fairbreath?’ asked the detective.

  ‘Yes,’ said the old lady in a considered tone, looking up at the coving. ‘Anyone would. He had . . .’ she thought about the phrase for a long time before looking them both in the eye, one after the other: ‘. . . no morals.’

  ‘You mean because he’s gay?’

  ‘He’s what?’ she said, and Bradley could see he had soured her day all the way through, simply by mention of the word. By his side, Sam (who was enjoying an excellent slice of gingerbread) wondered for a moment if she was going to deny knowing what the phrase even meant.

  ‘Well, we don’t know that for sure,’ said Bradley, rapidly trying to recover his composure. ‘I was just asking if you thought he might have been. He led a secret life . . .’

  ‘It’s mere conjecture,’ said Sam. ‘Writers use it too, to explore how people will react to questions.’

  ‘He was a friendly young man,’ said the old woman, making herself appear friendly by a visible force of will. ‘But he had strange ideas.’

  ‘Such as?’ asked Bradley.

  ‘Go on, Bradley,’ Sam was thinking. ‘Keep asking, man. This cake is delicious. Don’t let me ever stop eating this cake . . .’

  ‘He brought in lots of new concepts to this village that we would rather have kept outside.’

  ‘Like broadband?’ asked Sam, chewing.

  ‘Yes, exactly. We’re old, and we don’t like having to deal with new words on a weekly basis. Broadband! What does it mean?’

  Sam made a shallow nod that he hoped expressed that she had uttered a profound rhetorical question, and took another bite of cake.

  ‘And rimming,’ she went on.

  At this, Sam’s oesophagus went through a sequence of sudden violent oscillations, and a small piece of gingerbread wedged itself firmly in the middle of it.

  ‘Rimming, dogging, barebacking. We don’t like these things,’ she said equably to Bradley, as Sam coughed so violently into his napkin he felt his vocal cords might snap. ‘We’re an old-fashioned village, you see.’

  ‘Rimming, dogging,’ noted Bradley, quite innocently, as Sam began to cough blood. ‘Sounds like a load of hyperbolics to me. And I understand he moved the flower show from June to August.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Scandalous,’ said Sam, just about squeezing out the word while clutching his throat.

  ‘We think so. The flower show has been in June since I was a little girl.’

  ‘And that must be . . .’ said Bradley, before allowing his thoughts for once to go a little ahead of his mouth, and trailing off.

  ‘Go on, Detective,’ said Sam, before washing down his ravaged throat with a full cup of tea, and then throwing three more pieces of moist gingerbread (with its delicious crème fraîche icing) onto his plate.

  ‘Well, some time ago, I suppose,’ the detective said. ‘By “we”, do you mean you and your sister?’

  The little woman’s features sharpened. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘No. “We” means the council. Not her. Not . . . the other one.’

  Bradley looked bemusedly over at Sam, who was doing his best to appear thoughtful while trying to make his mouth large enough to admit two squares of gingerbread at once. ‘I always thought that identical twins had a special . . .’

  ‘No!’ shrieked the little woman, looking at Bradley without noticing her outburst made Sam choke on an even larger slab of cake. With her spare hand she unconsciously plucked two knitting needles from a ball of yarn and stabbed them deep into the upholstery with a squeaking sound. Then, at the thought of her sister, some awful emotion overcame her. The men exchanged a glance, wondering whether what they were about to uncover might have anything to do with Terry Fairbreath’s disappearance.

  ‘You see,’ said Emily, ‘my sister is a terribly vicious bitch!’ And she kicked the air with one of her sharp little feet. Sam’s eyes bulged stupidly and he made gasping noises as Emily tottered to the window.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘It started with the objects being thrown over the fence – a dead cat, a rusty wheelbarrow, the Mayor of Oxley. Then she paid ruffians from the slaughterhouse to scatter animal entrails all over the garden.’

  ‘Ruffians?’ asked Bradley.

  ‘Slaughterhouse?’ croaked Sam.

  ‘Entrails!’ whispered Emily. ‘The shitguts!’

  Sam threw himself over the back of his chair and coughed a chunk of cake across the room into the glowing fireplace, where it landed with a sizzling splat. ‘How absolutely offal,’ he said, looking unduly pleased with himself for a second as he straightened up, rubbing his diaphragm before falling back, wheezing, onto the seat. ‘Offal, eh?’ he repeated, looking around, disappointed with the reaction.

  ‘Hmm,’ he thought. ‘I think I may still be drunk from last night.’

  ‘Look,’ said Emily.

  ‘Oh
,’ said Sam, joining her at the front window.

  ‘She tries to ruin everything I do.’

  In the carefully tended garden outside, which was divided up into neat squares and oblongs devoted to separate fruits and vegetables, a number of plants had been gouged out of the earth in an aggressive fashion, then smashed up. The whole production might have been intended at first to indicate that it was the handiwork of an animal, but it seemed the person responsible had enjoyed themselves too much, for shoe prints were clearly visible in the mushy remains of a particularly large and fleshy marrow.

  Looking Emily up and down and judging that she wouldn’t see seventy again, Sam suddenly pictured a bitter history of sibling hatred that spread back to the second Churchill government at least. He surmised that her sister’s vindictive act could not be the first, and almost certainly there had been retaliations. ‘You take this sort of thing lying down?’ he asked.

  ‘Christ, no!’ declared the old lady. ‘I had a male rattlesnake imported from New Mexico last spring and let it go in her house but she got lucky and trod on its head with her stiletto. Slut!’

  ‘So your vegetables are important to you?’ asked Bradley. ‘You enter them in competitions?’

  Emily simply looked at him.

  ‘That’s a yes,’ said Sam in his ear. The writer, ever intrepid and eager for danger, was already chewing another slice of ginger cake. ‘Local flower show, you know.’

  ‘I’m not averse to a bit of gardening myself, Mrs Q, I don’t mind telling you,’ said the detective. ‘I’ve had some melons in my time . . .’

  This was, however, but a hollow distraction from the sight now unfolding in front of them, for a truck was unloading what looked like ten or twenty tonnes of compost directly onto Emily’s garden. Both men stared open-mouthed, but as the oozing brown liquid cascaded down and squeezed among the trellises and pots and nets, the old lady was no longer watching. She had turned away and tapped a speed dial on her phone.