“Er, I can’t say it is, Rev. I’m not really prepared for the, er...” What was the word I was searching for?
“Commitment?” suggested the Rev.
Ridicule was the word I wanted, actually. But I let him have his own way.
“Perhaps you’d like to come and talk to me about it privately one day,” he said. “You and the young lady together, or just the two of us if you prefer. Man to man, so to speak. I may be able to put your fears at rest.”
He was doing a pretty good job of increasing my fears by the minute. The last thing I wanted was for him and Lisa to get together when this subject was likely to be on the agenda. If marriage was on the vicar’s afternoon tea menu, then Stones McClure was on a diet. Fasting for Lent, in fact.
“I’ll let you know, Rev.”
“Right-ho.”
He actually does say that. Until I met him I thought it was something Leslie Phillips had invented to send up RAF types in all those Carry On films. Right-ho, chaps. Wizard prang. Peppered a few oiks. Tally-ho.
I made to set off back down the path, but the Rev hadn’t quite finished.
“Oh, when you’re here on your mission of goodwill, Livingstone...”
“Yes?” He meant when I was skiving around the churchyard.
“I wondered if you would do me a favour and take a look at the vestry roof.” He gestured up towards the church. “We seem to have suffered a bit of storm damage. I didn’t notice the wind being quite so bad, but sometimes I get a bit absorbed in my work, you know. In a world of my own, so to speak. But it must have been damaged. It seems to be deteriorating rather rapidly.”
I looked up at the roof. There was a bare patch of a several square feet among the ancient brick tiles, and wooden beams and bits of felt were poking through. I looked at the guttering and down at the ground below the roof. There was no sign of any broken bits of tile. Some storm.
“I’ll see to it, Rev.”
“Thank you, my friend. We do need to maintain the fabric of the church as something the people of the village can be proud of.”
In a world of his own was right. When I got back in the car, the first thing I did was make a quick call on the mobile.
“Slow? You there? Do something for me, mate.”
“Yeah, Stones?”
“Find out which pillock has been nicking the Rev’s roof.”
9
Beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes and a mountain of vegetables. Apple pie, cream, cheese, biscuits, coffee and beer. Doncaster Dave was having a snack.
Dave appeared in court once. It was about the time I met him, actually, but that’s another story. He’d got himself pulled in for nicking stuff off the stalls in Mansfield market. Well, nicking was hardly the word for it. When the stallholders saw him coming, they just kind of backed off and invited him to help himself. He only took food, of course. Pork pies and pasties, the odd half pound of cheese or a loaf or two. Even apples and bananas. It’s peckish work walking round a market, and there it was, all set out on display. But then some jerk complained one day, and Dave found himself up before the magistrates. Somehow, assaulting the police got added to the charge sheet on the way there. Must have been a mistake.
I’ve got to know Dave quite well since then — as far as you can get to know anyone who communicates in grunts. And the thing I remember most about his day in court is the moment when the number one magistrate got right up on her high horse and asked him: “Mr Underwood, don’t you know right from wrong?” That was a real laugh. Right from wrong? He doesn’t even know right from left.
“I need your services, Donc,” I said.
“Yeah?”
He waited for instructions, filling in the few seconds by piling more food into his mouth.
“There’s something going on that smells wrong to me. I want to see Mick Kelk and ask him some questions.”
“Yeah?”
He was looking down at the remains of the cheese as if he wanted to ask a question of his own, like ‘where’s it all gone?’
“We may need to lean on him a bit.”
“Yeah.” He nodded. He understood that bit.
“Trouble is, I don’t know where he is at the minute. He might be on a job somewhere.”
Dave looked towards the food counter, where a whole range of desserts were on display. I could see his eyes flicking backwards and forwards across the gateaux.
“We have to go and look for him down at the Ferret,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“As soon as we’ve done that I’ll take you down the Shah Naz for something to eat.”
Dave was on his feet then. “Less’ go,” he said.
If you think the Cow’s Arse is a bit rough, then you’ve never been in the Dog and Ferret. Very wise too, if I may say so. I wouldn’t touch the Ferret with anybody’s barge pole, let alone mine, if I didn’t have to call there sometimes for professional reasons. It’s been closed more often than a cashier’s window at a Post Office counter. It’s usually on the orders of the magistrates after complaints by the police about the amount of trouble there.
And it’s not as if it’s organised trouble. That I could understand, if it was in the course of business. But it’s just general mayhem, people beating each other up as a way of having a bit of a laugh on a Saturday night. Smashing up the bar, turning over a few cars, ripping out the toilets and flooding the car park. You know the sort of thing. It’s so primitive and 1950s. Haven’t they heard of the late twentieth century, these blokes?
In any case, I wouldn’t go in there without Dave at my shoulder and Slow Kid outside with the engine running. Some of the customers don’t know me and might give me a kicking by mistake. Some do know me and might give me a kicking on purpose. Sadly, this is where Mick Kelk and some of the other Medensworth blokes hang out.
When we walked through the door it was almost like one of those Western movies. You know the scene, when the strangers mosey in, call for a couple of shots of redeye and start demanding to know where the sheriff is? And all the customers go really quiet and start twitching their trigger fingers? Well, it was a bit like that. Only there ain’t no sheriff in Medensworth, and the only redeye in the Ferret tonight was the one the lad was wearing who staggered past us out of the door. In fact, his eye was so red the blood was making a mess on his shirt.
Inside, nobody looked as though anything out of the ordinary had been happening. They were just having a quiet drink, as far as anything was ever quiet in the Ferret. The jukebox was on full blast, the fruit machines and video games were bleeping and farting at one end of the bar and a bunch of pool players were arguing about a shot at the other end. In between, everyone was shouting at everyone else to make themselves heard, and those at the bar were having to shout even louder.
As we pushed our way through the crowd, the noise subsided around us, then came back to its full volume after we’d passed. I reckon it was Dave’s shadow falling across them, or maybe they saw him coming and were trying to protect their pork pies and crisps, like starlings with a clutch of eggs when the sparrowhawk appears overhead.
Dave forced his way through to the bar by the simple means of putting a huge meaty hand on a few shoulders, as if he was patting them to say hello. When he arrived, he turned to one side, pushing back the tide to allow me to reach the bar unhindered.
This had the effect of attracting the landlord’s attention pretty quick, and we got served straight away. Somebody grumbled behind me, but Dave moved his head and gave them his low-grade glower. They shut up.
“Who’re you looking for?” The bloke behind the bar certainly caught on pretty quick.