Just Desserts Read online

  ‘They must have been cheaper than the local ones then. You said the company was struggling financially.’

  ‘No, I said it ought to be. But it isn’t. And these contractors are more expensive than the local ones, which makes it even stranger that they are being used. There’s something else I don’t understand. Why is the cover-up such an open secret?’

  She shrugged. ‘Can’t keep much to yourself in Salthaven.’

  ‘The government can if they really want to. There could be something going on in the house next door to you, you could have lived there twenty years, holidayed with your neighbours, and been godparents to each other’s children and you’d never know.’

  Penny felt a tiny rush of impatience. ‘So?’

  He smiled and spread his hands. ‘So it’s a decoy,’ he said softly. ‘And somewhere in Salthaven is the real top-secret lab.’

  Chapter Two

  Penny felt her mouth drop open. ‘A second secret lab in Salthaven? Leo, are you taking some kind of medication? These things simply don’t happen! What would be the point?’

  ‘Misdirection. My point is that a proper secret research centre really would be secret, even in busy, nosy Salthaven. I’ve been able – or more likely, been allowed – to gather information indicating that whatever is going on at the Lowdale Screw Fittings warehouse is covert. Now, much as I’d like to put that down to my considerable investigative skills, it’s too easy. I think it’s a decoy, Penny, a sacrificial ‘undercover lab’ to focus attention there and not on the real one, wherever it is. In which case, why are Lowdale Screw Fittings building an extension that they can’t possibly need?’

  ‘Now you’re outsmarting yourself.’ She patted his knee. ‘Still, it’s nice for a man to have a hobby.’

  He got to his feet. ‘Nothing like a vote of confidence. Let’s go up to Lowdale again. It there isn’t anything there, they won’t mind us looking.’

  ‘I can’t. Sorry, Leo, but I’m busy for the rest of the day. I can take you tomorrow, if you want. There’s no hurry, is there? It’s not about to run away.’

  He looked at her sadly. ‘No sense of adventure, that’s your trouble.’

  ‘But I do have sense. Shoo, I need to go home and book Lucinda and Tom a nice restaurant for her birthday. Dinner out will do them the world of good.’

  That was a nuisance, but Leo allowed that Penny did have a life of her own to get on with. Full of frustrated energy, he hurried back to the newspaper office and up to the archives floor. He’d put in a couple of hours digging around on the Andrew Collins plane crash. As always, just breathing in the scent of old newsprint awakened his hunter-gatherer instincts. He loved the whole business of sleuthing through reports for clues, letting his mind expand as he read, his brain on a hair trigger for that tiny paragraph or throwaway sentence that would tug him in a different direction. And then tallying the reports with interviews – the huge, glorious mish-mash of facts which, given the right twist, would suddenly fall into place and call itself a story.

  Jack Scrivener. A local man called Jack Scrivener had seen the plane crash. Leo read again the succinct few lines that had started him off on this quest, cursing the unimaginative, long-departed reporter. The man didn’t deserve the job-title. The Fifties might have been times of austerity, but surely planes falling out of the sky weren’t common enough that the local paper would make so little of this one? Why was there no follow up?

  He closed his eyes, picturing the scene. It had been a dark wet autumn day, Jack hadn’t heard anything due to the crashing waves, but he’d seen the glint of a plane overhead and then felt the ground shake as it came down into the tarn in a boiling, hissing burst. Leo sat back, tapping his fingers on the desk. Something didn’t add up. Something was wrong.

  He rang Penny. ‘Do you know of a Jack Scrivener?’

  ‘I don’t think so. The name doesn’t ring a bell. Hold on.’ A timer sounded in the background. There was a pause and the sound of clattering metal.

  ‘What are you cooking?’

  ‘Dundee cake for the Salthaven Show next week.’

  ‘Cake? Will it last until next week?’ said Leo, fascinated.

  ‘It will if I don’t tell anyone I’ve made it. Who is this Scrivener chap anyway?’

  ‘The witness to Andrew Collins’s plane crash.’

  ‘So he’d be, what, eighty or so by now? Ask at the Over-60s tomorrow. They’ll be a lot more likely to remember him.’

  Tomorrow! Leo ground his teeth. He wanted to find out now.

  ‘Jack Scrivener?’ The name caused a tiny ripple of interest. Eyebrows were raised. Significant looks were exchanged. Leo felt a tingle of excitement in his blood – he was onto something!

  ‘Bit of a scoundrel, was Jack,’ said Mrs Lane. ‘Didn’t do poor Margery any favours. Been gone these thirty years or more.’

  ‘Passed away?’ said Leo. ‘That’s a shame.’

  ‘I didn’t say that, but he might have done by now for all I know. No, they emigrated. Margery had family in New Zealand to speak for them. She was a good girl, but I often wondered if her family knew what they were taking on with him.’

  ‘Not one of the world’s grafters, then?’

  ‘Ha! He’d have anything off you if it was free and he didn’t have to work too hard for it. Mind you, he could charm the trout from the stream and the rabbit out of its hole. They didn’t go hungry.’

  In other words, Jack was just the sort to be loafing around on the fells ready to witness a plane crash. Leo gave his most winning smile and set about finding out more.

  Penny cleared her regular Tuesday morning chores and then turned her attention to where to book dinner for Lucinda and Tom on Friday. She hoped she hadn’t left it too late. She’d told Leo she was going to do it yesterday, but had got cold feet and had a flurry of baking instead. She wasn’t used to this – her eldest daughter never had problems. Lucinda had always looked coolly and dispassionately at life and been one step ahead of it. Even puberty hadn’t caught her unprepared. She’d provided Penny with a shopping list of ‘women’s things’ at the age of eleven and simply ticked the milestone off when the day came.

  Penny was not an interfering mother, but she knew something wasn’t right with Lucinda’s marriage and it was more than she could do to stand idly by without making a push at a remedy. Her mind boggled at the thought of sitting down with her daughter for a cosy chat about affairs of the heart – the way she would with Frances, for instance – so subterfuge was the only answer.

  She rang up their favourite restaurant without ado and – ducking out of a personal conversation – emailed Lucinda letting her know of her surprise present.

  Twenty minutes later she had a reply saying thank you and they really appreciated it, but Tom wanted a quiet evening at home that day so Lucinda had changed the booking to the following week if that was all right with her.

  Penny sat back, dumbstruck and thwarted. How on earth was she to get the pair of them in a mellow mood together? Then she had a truly brilliant idea. She’d go to the Dun Cow and buy a range of their fabulous small ice cream tubs. Lucinda adored ice cream. Penny would hand-deliver them along with a nice bottle of wine on her daughter’s birthday morning. Nobody could claim that was interfering!

  Leo reviewed his notes as he sat on the wall outside the library waiting for Penny. He was nearly onto something, he knew he was. Maybe this return to Lowdale would crystallise it. They could start with the Enterprise Park, then work slowly outwards.

  ‘Morning, Leo,’ called the waitress from the riverside pub near his boat as she hurried past. She had a copy of today’s Salthaven Messenger sticking out of her tote bag. ‘When are you going to write about the Crown and Anchor, eh?’

  ‘Whenever my editor coughs up the expenses,’ he called back cheerfully.

  Other people smiled or waved to him. He realised he was becoming known here. Settling down. It felt strange, gave him a tug of pleasure. It also gave him a sense of all the time he’d wasted
in London, when his job had been all important. He hadn’t lost this sense of belonging somewhere when his former life had crumpled – it had never been there in the first place.

  ‘Leo!’ Penny was parked precariously half in and half out of the crowded layby. ‘Hurry up.’

  He strode across the pavement.

  ‘Anything useful?’ she asked as he folded himself into the car.

  ‘Bits and pieces. Jack Scrivener was a right rascal. When are you going to get a car with a sensibly sized front seat?’

  ‘When are you going to start driving yourself?’

  He grinned and took out his map, telling her what he’d found out. After a while he fell silent, looking at the coastline. When he’d visited his great uncle as a boy, he’d taken the scenery for granted – now he looked with new eyes. Below him on his left as Penny drove along the coast road was a low-lying stretch of grey-green land between the cliff and the sea, perhaps a mile wide, ribboned with silvery streaks of water. On their right rose a gentle roll of hills, a promise of the heights to come further inland. ‘Do you still see it?’ he asked Penny. ‘Do you still see the beauty?’

  She flashed him a quick smile. ‘I do when I’m with you. Other times I know it’s there, but I don’t always appreciate it.’

  Just for a moment Leo felt oddly warmed.

  ‘By the way,’ she added. ‘You will have noticed that rain cloud, I assume?’

  He waved the weather away as an irrelevancy, continuing to gaze around. ‘I still don’t see how anyone, even a devil-may-care test-pilot, could crash into somewhere he must have visited a thousand times.’

  ‘He might not have visited it a thousand times by air,’ pointed out Penny. She frowned. ‘Or maybe he had. Was he actually on a job or had he just borrowed the plane? Was he treating it as a sort of company car to come home in for the weekend?’

  Leo was jolted out of his musings. ‘That’s an interesting thought.’

  ‘I was watching an air force documentary last night. Did you see it? It seems they often used to do that kind of thing. If Andrew Collins was originally a WW2 pilot, the habit might have stuck.’

  Leo felt that stirring of instinct again. ‘Except this time, instead of a tried and trusted workhorse, he was flying an overbred, hair-trigger stallion. You might have something there.’

  ‘Can you find out if he was on a job? Did they keep records?’

  ‘The company went bust. All the interesting bits were sold to one of their rivals, which in turn was swallowed up by a bigger player again.’ It wouldn’t stop him trying to find out though. He’d just have to dig a little deeper. He jotted bullet points down on his pad, possible lines of enquiry, places he could ask.

  Penny said, ‘It’s going to be a lot of work. Is it worth it? A sixty-year-old story for a small regional newspaper.’

  He sat bolt upright. ‘Are you mad, woman? What sort of fully paid-up member of the puzzlers’ guild are you? It’s always worth it. You can’t just leave a story.’

  ‘I’m not saying I don’t want to know,’ said Penny. ‘But when does the effort taken become too great for the result?’

  Inside him, something twisted. ‘Never. The story is always king. Besides, what else have I got to do with my time?’ He looked to his left again, at the coastline, at the long strip of beach that the outgoing tide had uncovered. His son would love it here if Kayleigh ever allowed him to come. Leo pictured the pair of them, exploring it together, Daniel digging in the sucking wet sand as he had once done himself – and experiencing the shivery awe of seeing the hole he’d made fill up with seeping water from below. Oh, Daniel. Leo ached with the sense of loss.

  ‘And of course,’ said Penny, breaking into his thoughts, ‘if people think you’re an amiable loony with nothing better to do than ferret around about the old days, they won’t notice that you’re searching out the big stories at the same time.’

  ‘Ha!’ Leo’s mood lifted, just like that. He glanced fondly at Penny’s profile as she slowed down for the turning to the disused road just before the Enterprise Park. He really would have to do something nice for her one of these days.

  ‘Right,’ he said once they were parked in the lane, leaning against the bonnet of her car, eating the filled rolls she’d brought with her, and drinking thermos tea. ‘What can we see?’

  ‘The sea,’ said Penny. ‘Also that dark cloud getting bigger and closer.’

  ‘And forklifts trundling innocuously between the Screw Fittings warehouses with varying numbers of pallets. And a dumper truck that went into the furthest one ten minutes ago and hasn’t come out again.’

  ‘Probably sheltering from the rain,’ murmured Penny, pulling up the hood of her coat.

  Leo ate his roll without tasting a single bite. Every sense was telling him he was right. The plane crash story from the Fifties was temporarily forgotten. This was present day and bang up to date. Desultory activity was going on all around the Lowdale Screw Fittings building as a digger levelled the site for the new extension, but an empty yellow dumper truck had definitely gone into that far building and hadn’t come out, and a blue one had come out that hadn’t gone in. The blue one was obscured by a lorry now, but Leo was sure he’d seen a flash of lifting steel as it emptied its contents on the ground. ‘It wasn’t raining ten minutes ago,’ he said, arguing her point about the yellow dumper truck.

  ‘It is now. And there’s the lightning.’

  Out at sea a vivid jag of pure white froze the scene. Beside him, Penny counted, ‘One mile away, two miles away, three …’

  Just before the thunder rumbled around them, Leo felt the ground vibrate beneath his feet.

  ‘That does it,’ said Penny. ‘I’m getting into the car until it blows over.’

  The visibility had gone right down. Leo could barely make out the buildings now, let alone the vehicles. He slid thoughtfully into the passenger side. His earlier reflective, borderline-sentimental mood had disappeared. He made rapid shorthand notes, barely aware of Penny beside him. ‘On to the farm then,’ he said, putting his notebook away. ‘I’ll ask Grandad Fell about Jack Scrivener.’

  Arriving at Fellrigg in the driving rain, the welcome was definitely less serene than it had been the week before. Rachel was pleased to see them, no doubt about that the way she ushered them quickly into the warm kitchen, got out cake, and poured tea, but there was a very twitchy air to her. ‘I need to pop back to the dairy, Grandad,’ she said as soon as they were settled. ‘You’ll be all right with your friends to talk to.’

  Glancing through the window, Penny saw her hurrying across the yard looking rattled and feeling around in her pocket. That was interesting. She wondered if she could manufacture an excuse to go back out to her car for something.

  ‘Drat,’ said Leo. ‘I’ve left my map in the glove compartment. Could you do me a favour and fetch it, Penny? Not being a local like you, it’s easier if Mr Fell points out the places he’s telling me about.’

  She looked at him, startled. How had he known what she was thinking? But he hadn’t, of course. He’d noticed Rachel hurry past the window too and was simply using Penny as an extra pair of eyes and ears, trusting her to use them without him spelling it for her.

  She slipped out into the yard – and heard Rachel’s voice coming from the dairy. She was evidently talking into a mobile phone.

  ‘Listen, Tom, you’ll have to come over …’

  Tom? Penny’s blood turned to ice. It was one thing to suspect her son-in-law of dalliance, quite another to hear confirmation with her own ears. Rachel’s voice sounded again, edging towards frustration.

  ‘How can I? I can’t get out until it’s time to do the school run.’

  She was obviously busy in the dairy, her voice came and went, interspersed with the opening and shutting of fridge doors, bursts of mixers, and running of taps.

  ‘Yes, well it’s been a shock to me too! Neither of us expected this, did we? I can’t believe it’s happened so fast. It’s got to the stage where I
just can’t – Oh Tom, it would be so much easier if we could tell everyone.’ There was a long pause and then her voice again, sounding defeated. ‘OK, we’ll leave it until after Friday. I’ll manage until then. Somehow. One thing’s for sure – we can’t stop now. We’re in too deep.’

  Penny’s feet seemed to be rooted to the concrete strip by the outer door. She realised Rachel’s voice had stopped. She pelted for the car, grabbing the map and getting back indoors before the young woman was any the wiser.

  She hardly heard any of Leo’s conversation with Grandad Fell. She couldn’t believe it was true. Rachel Fell was involved with Penny’s son-in-law. She felt numb. How on earth was she to deal with this? As soon as they got clear of the farm, she stopped the car by the side of the road and poured it all out to Leo.

  He was silent for a moment. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I just don’t buy it.’ He looked at her, his eyes honestly puzzled. ‘In my line of work I’ve seen a lot of marital breakdowns, I’ve known a number of cheating men – and Tom doesn’t seem one of them. Tell me again what you heard Rachel say?’

  Penny repeated it. ‘She used his name twice, Leo. And she agreed to hang on until after Friday. That’s Lucinda’s birthday. They’ve got to be having an affair.’

  He shook his head. ‘He’s a better actor than I took him for.’

  ‘It makes it even more important for us to go to the Dun Cow. It won’t take long, just in and out. I was going to get little tubs of their ice cream to put in my freezer for Lucinda’s birthday anyway. Now they might give her a bit of comfort as her marriage falls apart.’

  The Dun Cow’s car park was packed. Penny stared in amazement. ‘I’ve never seen it like this before. Never ever. What’s happening?’

  Even more astonishingly, when they got inside, the restaurant was full! Had the whole of Salthaven had a taste bypass?

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Penny when the barman told them with morose pleasure that it would be a half-hour wait for a table. ‘We don’t want to eat here. Once was enough. I’d just like to buy some ice cream tubs to take away, please.’