After a while, Lisa stuck her head round the kitchen door a couple of times to look at me. I caught her expression one of these times, and expected it to be a bit of irritation about this obnoxious bloke idling about on his backside while she did the cooking, getting inside her house and straightaway taking her for granted as the skivvy. But that wasn’t what I saw on her face at all. It was something much more worrying. I missed half of what Anna Ford was telling me about the latest Middle East crisis while I turned the subtleties of that expression over in my mind. Impatiently, I thumbed the remote and got a load of adverts about cars and clothes and electrical gadgets that we really had to own. Then it came to me. That was the expression on Lisa’s face — possessiveness.
I nearly walked out of the house right then. Any self-respecting bloke who values his independence would feel the same. But, to be honest, I was getting a bit peckish and the aroma from the kitchen was starting to smell pretty good. It even overpowered the pot pourri.
I hit the remote again and went back to Anna. In Scotland, a gang had raided the Microsoft factory and nicked half a million quids’ worth of software CDs. That’s something I’ve never got into. None of the lads round here would recognise Windows from a wildebeest.
Later, we sank a bottle of wine with our meal and chatted about this and that. The fate of Lord Byron’s Newstead Abbey, where old mining activity was likely to send the building crumbling into a big hole, tourists and all. A scheme to plant millions of trees on the slag heaps to restore some of the old Sherwood Forest. I can talk quite intelligently on subjects like this with Lisa. Especially when she doesn’t mention Michael Cavendish once.
I looked out of the little front window into the street. The terrace opposite was starting to disappear as dusk fell, and lights were coming on in the houses. I could hear Lisa washing up in the kitchen, singing quietly to herself. The pot pourri was starting to beat back the scent of pasta and Liebfraumilch. Porcelain nicknacks and dried flower arrangements stared at me from every corner of the room. The rug looked so comfortable in front of the gas fire that it ought to have a sleeping cat on it. Upstairs, a teddy bear waited.
“Lisa?”
“Yes, Stones?”
She pulled her hands out of the sink. She was wearing yellow plastic gloves covered in green suds, and the kitchen smelled of artificial lemons. A tea towel with greetings from Edinburgh hung invitingly over a chair, waiting for someone to pick it up and start drying.
“Can I borrow your car for a bit?”
“Well... yes, I suppose so.”
She waited for me to tell her where I was going.
“The keys are on the sideboard, aren’t they? I noticed you put them there.”
“That’s right.”
I pulled my leather jacket on and collected the keys. There was an old dog lead lying next to them on the sideboard, and it seemed to be attached to the key ring. I recalled that Lisa had once owned a dog, a cocker spaniel, but it had got the push for disturbing the scatter cushions or something. I couldn’t get the lead free from the keys, so I took it with me.
“Will you be long?” Lisa had picked up the tea towel and followed me to the front door with it, as if offering an irresistible temptation.
“Just a bit of business I have to see to.”
We kissed on the doorstep, and she watched me as I drove away, back towards Medensworth. On the way, I finally managed to get the dog lead untangled from the keys and shoved it in my pocket. I immediately felt better.
I got hold of Dave straightaway on the mobile. I don’t know what he does with his spare time, but if it doesn’t involve food, then it’s probably an activity unknown to anthropologists. When he answered the phone he sounded as though somebody had just switched him on and his valves were still warming up.
“Donc, it’s Stones.”
“Lo.”
“Are you doing anything?”
“Nope.”
“Can you meet me in about ten minutes?”
“Yeah.”
“Not at my place or at the Cow. Outside the churchyard at St Asaph’s.”
“Right.”
“You know where I mean, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“And Donc?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t go shooting your mouth off to anyone about me, right?”
I was at the churchyard first. I parked Lisa’s Fiat on the little lane that runs up the side of the church and killed the lights. Dave was pretty recognisable, and I wanted to be able to see him coming, in case he had unwanted company. It was a dark spot here, with no street lights past the last cottage across the road. In the churchyard, there were plenty of shadows to lurk in.
I got out to stretch my legs for a few minutes while I waited. The church is built on a mound above the level of the street, and I could easily see in the direction that Dave would come from as I walked past the porch towards the graveyard. Dark graveyards don’t hold any terrors for me. There’s only one ghost that I’m ever likely to meet here, and it doesn’t frighten me.
But where was Dave? I looked down into the street. No sign of him. Then I looked the other way, and forgot about Dave for a second. There was a car outside the vicarage. Not the Rev’s puke-coloured Metro, but something bigger, flashier, with tinted windows. When I got closer I saw that it was a Jaguar, lovingly polished and with a pony-tailed thug sitting tapping his fingers on the steering wheel.
I thought of Eddie Craig, and it wasn’t a nice thought. If Craig was in the vicarage talking to the Reverend Bowring, it was a fair bet he wasn’t there to ask for the Rev’s advice on filling a yawning spiritual vacuum in his life. Craig had so many sins to confess that hearing them would take a regiment of Revs working twelve-hour shifts until the next Millennium.
I suddenly had a cold feeling in my stomach. Whether Craig was in there himself or not, there would be at least two of his louts. I didn’t think he’d want the Rev hurt too badly. It was information he was after — information about me. He wanted to know where to find me. And if the Rev had any sense, he’d tell what he knew rightaway, before the knuckle dusters came out and ‘love thy neighbour’ degenerated into a bit of Old Testament brutality.
But hang on, this was the Reverend Gordon Bowring we were talking about. Sense didn’t come into it. This was the bloke who was stupid enough to give me an alibi whenever I asked for one, because he thought I was ‘good at heart’. This was the same brainless jerk who went round to visit Badger Watts in his sick bed when he got both his legs busted by three blokes with baseball bats — even though the Rev knew perfectly well it was Badger who’d smashed in the vestry door two weeks before and nicked all the collection plates.
Well, you don’t talk sense to this man — he works by some mysterious rules of his own. Chances are he’d refuse to tell Craig anything on principle. Principle? That’s a word I’ve heard him use sometimes. I’m not sure what it means.
When the Rev eventually came round in hospital, he’d probably be pleased that he’d done his Christian duty. Just how stupid can you get? But if that was what he wanted, then where was the point in me trying to stop him? Let the fool get his head kicked in if he liked. He ought to know better after all this time living on the Forest. There was no sense in me walking in and getting my head kicked in as well.
No, the only thing to do was to slip quietly away, pack a bag and spend a few nights at the Travel Lodge in Blyth. You can’t get more anonymous than that. When things had quietened down a bit, I might drop by one night after dark and offer to push the Rev’s wheelchair round the churchyard for a while, as a way of saying thanks.