A Village Feud Page 8

  Beth wouldn’t let the matter go, and Dottie wished she would because it was getting too deep for her.

  ‘But what if someone wanted to kill your own sister?’

  ‘Ah! Well, that’s different, I suppose. In any case, it’s something you’ve got no need to worry about because, (a) you’ve no sister and (b) there’s not much chance anyone you know would want to kill her if you had, so just let the matter rest. There’s no need to be depressing yourself about it, now is there? It’s a lovely morning. You should be out in the garden or something. Must go, or your mother will be after me.’

  Beth cleared her dishes away while Dottie collected her cleaning things.

  ‘Your mum would love some of them late roses in a vase. Why don’t you go cut her some, there’s a good girl. There’s some nice vases on that shelf in the cupboard under the stairs. Cheer you up.’

  Dottie fled upstairs to the attic with the vacuum and her cloths to escape the interrogation. What the dickens was the child worrying herself about killing people for? She’d have to stop having cups of tea with her. She’d come to clean not be a psychiarisk or whatever. Out of the window she saw Beth taking her advice and stayed to watch her.

  There was such precision in the way Beth cut the flowers. She’d got the secateurs and was choosing the roses slowly, one by one, so tenderly, admiring each one, lost deep in a world of her own. Dottie was going to open the window and say something but changed her mind, Beth was best left alone to work things out, whatever it was that was worrying her.

  She finished dusting the window-sill and turned away to find Caroline also in the attic watching Beth from the other window.

  ‘That’s the first time Beth’s gone outside the house on her own. Thank you for that.’

  ‘I only suggested—’

  ‘I know you did, don’t apologize. And don’t feel unable to talk to Beth because you have work to do. She urgently needs someone to talk to and if you’re the one that’s all right by me. Thanks.’

  So their chats over Beth’s breakfast continued each of the three mornings in the week that Dottie went to ‘housekeep’ as she called it. Sounded good, that did. She’d quickly mastered the art of saying casually, ‘oh! I’m housekeeper at the Rectory now.’ True she got some sceptical sideways looks when she said it but she didn’t care. She knew people thought her an ageing trollop. So what? She’d had a great life and comforted more than she could remember.

  But now things were on the up. She fervently hoped that Beth would soon be going to school and then the Doctor would go back to doctoring and maybe Dottie Foskett would be at the Rectory to overlook the twins coming home from school and making them a drink or something when they got in. She could fit it in very nicely with cleaning for Harriet Charter-Plackett and the odd morning doing for Louise and Gilbert. She was earning more money than for a long time and feeling her weekly pay from Caroline in her pocket she spotted Jenny Sweetapple’s board outside her house and decided to give it a go. What had she to lose? Could be fun. But should she? When she needed a new washing-line and certainly a winter coat of some kind. She’d be an idiot if she … why not be an idiot? Treat herself now she was on the up.

  She rang the bell full of confidence, only to be brought up short when Andy answered her ring.

  ‘Good morning. Can I help you?’

  ‘Well, I wanted to make an appointment with Jenny. Is she in?’

  ‘She is. Come in. She won’t be a moment. Jenny! Client for you.’

  There sounded to be a deal of running about and cupboard doors shutting and then down the stairs came Jenny in a short white coat, white trousers and smart white shoes, looking just like an up-to-the-minute American nurse.

  What a get-up, thought Dottie.

  Jenny smiled beguilingly. ‘Yes, how can I help? It’s Dottie Foskett, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. I’d like a massage. That’s if you’ve time. Perhaps I should come back.?’

  ‘I’ll just check the appointments book. I think I’ve a cancellation, … yes, here we are. I can fit you in but it’ud have to be right now if that’s—’

  ‘Yes, please. Never had a massage before, but now I’m housekeeper at the Rectory I’ve to keep myself in trim. Can’t be doing with a bad back and let Doctor Harris down, now can I?’

  Jenny’s appointment book was entirely empty of names but she wouldn’t let on, it was still early days. She had hoped to attract a much higher class of clientele than Dottie but her money was as good as anyone else’s. First she’d give her a cup of herbal tea.

  ‘Drink this before I give you the massage. I like my clients to be relaxed and comfortable before we begin. It’s camomile tea, have you tried it before?’

  ‘No. Thank you.’ Dottie took a sip of the tea and almost choked. She spluttered, ‘It’s very different.’

  ‘Yes, but very relaxing. Soothes the nerves, you know. I drink it all the time.’

  ‘Have you got bad nerves, then?’

  ‘Anyone living with Andy would have bad nerves.’ Desperately trying to think of something else to say Jenny blurted out, ‘Is your husband easy to live with?’

  ‘Never had one, so I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh! I beg your pardon, with you being called Mrs … I didn’t think.’

  ‘That’s all right. You don’t have to have a husband to live satisfactory, do you?’

  ‘Well, no, you don’t.’

  Dottie put down her cup. ‘There, I’ve had enough. I’d like to start my massage now. I’ve to be at the Charter-Placketts in an hour and a half. I can’t afford to be late.’

  ‘Righteo. Pop into the cubicle and take off everything except your panties, then wrap yourself sarong-wise in the towel and come and lay face down on the bed.’

  This was the embarrassing bit for most people, contemplating nakedness in front of a stranger, but not for Dottie. It had all been part and parcel …

  ‘Here I am.’

  Jenny began the massage with sweet-smelling oils that were almost intoxicating so beautifully perfumed were they. Her hands were firm but persuasive, strong but comforting, and before she knew it Dottie was completely relaxed.

  ‘That’s it! Gently does it. You’ll feel a million dollars when I’ve finished.’

  She didn’t exactly fall asleep, but dozed, kind of and Jenny began talking to her, asking her about the Rectory and the Charter-Placketts, and especially Jimbo, but didn’t seem very interested in Louise and Gilbert. Before she knew it, while luxuriating in the feel of Jenny’s hands pressing and manipulating her back, she was telling her about the Rector and his magnetic personality and how everyone adored him without exception and how women fell completely under his charm, though he didn’t encourage them, and about Jimbo and how he got his broken ankle and did she know they were having to operate on him because the ankle wasn’t setting right, and how he’d had the poison pen letter and how angry it had made him.

  Jenny hesitated for a moment, then continued massaging. ‘Really? A poison pen letter? Do they know who it’s from?’

  ‘No, well, you don’t with a poison pen letter, do you? That’s part of their game, you see. Apparently they’re wanting to ruin his business, they said so in the letter. He’s biding his time about this, waiting to see what happens next, which is a surprise because Jimbo can be very hasty and lose his temper in a second. Dreadful, isn’t it, how could anyone threaten to finish his business? We all appreciate his shop. Well, he calls it a Store, which sounds more classy. He’s given work to dozens of people baking cakes and puddings for the freezers and making jam and chutney and outside catering jobs. My cousin Pat says he’s one of the biggest employers in the district. But I wouldn’t like to be in the shoes of the poison pen writer when Jimbo finds out. Hell, but he’ll be wild. Been to Cambridge, so he’s very clever, you know. Might only own a village shop but he’s no fool. A very sharp businessman. Oh, yes.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’ Jenny kneaded and pummelled, soothed and pressed.

  ‘But they mu
st be evil, mustn’t they, honestly.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Jenny finished by firmly massaging each of Dottie’s vertebrae. ‘There. That’s it. Feel better?’

  ‘Feel as if I’ve been through the wringer, but yes, I think I do feel better. It is for bad backs, then?’

  ‘It can help. Sometimes bad backs are caused by serious tension. Relax the muscles and hey presto! You can get up now.’

  Dottie was so relaxed she almost forgot to pay Jenny and had to be asked for the money.

  ‘Sorry. Look at the time. Oh my word! I’d no idea I’d been here all this while. Your next client will be here any minute. I’d better get off. I might come again. It’s been very helpful, I’m sure. I’ll see what I’m like when tomorrow comes. Just lucky you had a cancellation.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Tell everyone about coming, will you? Help spread the word.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Dottie grabbed a giant sausage roll in the Store, ate it and washed it down with a cup of Jimbo’s free coffee, then ambled off to Harriet’s, where she regaled Grandmama and Harriet about her experiences in the massage parlour.

  ‘She tells lies, though. Kidded on she’d had a cancellation and could fit me in but she hadn’t a single name in the diary. She thought I didn’t realize, but you can’t catch an old bird with chaff, can you?’

  Grandmama agreed. ‘What did she talk about?’ she said hoping to find out something to assist her campaign to get Jenny closed down, as well as some ammuntion to rid the village of that creepy-crawly so-called husband of hers.

  ‘Nothing really. I talked about Jimbo’s ankle – how is he, by the way? – and about that letter, but she didn’t let anything slip. But the massage was divine. I’m walking on air.’

  Disappointed, Grandmama lost interest and asked Dottie to start on her bedroom as she needed her afternoon rest.

  Back at Cottage Beauty Jenny flew into a rage. Andy was seated at the kitchen table, idly going through files from the office. He didn’t know what had hit him. Well, he did, but it was the suddeness of it that startled him and caused him to lose his temper.

  ‘That’ll do. Stop it! Stop it, will you?’

  Jenny kept hitting him with the rolled-up glossy beauty magazine, half angry half laughing, till finally he was so exasperated that he got to his feet and pushed her away quite violently.

  ‘That hurt me! Don’t you dare do that again. Dottie’s been here saying someone’s sent a poison pen letter to Jimbo. Is it you?’

  Andy by now had sat down again. ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t think you realize who you’re dealing with. He’ll have you, he will, you know.’

  ‘Did Dottie say I’d sent it?’

  ‘No, but it was you, I knew straight away. Apparently he’s been persuaded to take it calmly but Dottie says he hasn’t half a temper when he gets going.’

  Andy nodded. ‘Not guilty of the poison pen letter, certainly not.’ He sat back with a satisfied smile on his face, unperturbed about the lies he was telling. ‘One day I’ll have him in the palm of my hand without being anonymous.’ He extended his fingers and curled them together tightly as though crushing Jimbo inside his clenched fist. ‘That’ll teach him for looking down on me at college. Oh! Very superior he was. He doesn’t recognize me now because he never really considered college servants worth looking at.’

  ‘Time you knocked that chip off your shoulder. It’s pathetic for a grown man.’

  ‘You haven’t thrown away that oak smoked ham I bought in Culworth, have you?’

  ‘No, but I shall be soon, it’s stinking the fridge out. By the way, don’t tell me anything more about what you’re doing, then I can truly say I knew nothing about it when you’re arrested and thrown into jail.’

  The phone rang and it was for Andy. When he put down the receiver he felt uncomfortably close to discovery, as though someone somewhere in the higher echelons at the office had tippled to his ploy and a net was beginning to close around him.

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Only the office.’ He applied himself slightly more diligently to the files and made a few phone calls to plug a couple of gaps due entirely to his lack of attention to his job. But the panic soon wore off. He wrote out a few cheques for the water and the gas and such, and felt virtuous and on the ball. But he did go into the Store that afternoon and bought some oak smoked ham and stood chatting to Tom, Bel and Dottie for a while to make sure his presence would be remembered.

  Dottie went home with her frozen shepherd’s pie and as she popped it into the microwave she shuddered. That Andy was a nasty piece of goods and not half. Slimeball, he was. She shuddered again. The massage had been good, though. She’d have another one very soon, it had lifted her spirits so much. Such a pity that someone like Jenny was saddled with that creep.

  On the Friday morning Dottie had her routine talk with Beth at the kitchen table. This time she was still in the killing vein but it was about capital punishment, and did Dottie approve of it?

  ‘No, I don’t. Neither should you as a good Christian girl.’

  ‘Are you a good Christian girl, Dottie?’

  There was a pause before Beth got her reply. ‘Well, maybe not. I don’t go to church reg’lar as I should, that’s certain.’

  ‘Neither do I at the moment. Ever since Africa I can’t manage to go out.’ Beth said this with her head down and her toast dripping honey on to the table.

  ‘Here, let me do that, you’re dripping all over the place.’ Dottie skilfully wiped up the mess with a piece of wet kitchen roll. Matter-of-factly she commented, ‘You will one day. One thing’s for absolute sure: you can’t stay in this house forever and a day. What would you do if your dad moved to another parish, eh? Stay on as a lodger? Right fool you’d feel.’

  She grinned at Beth in a conspiratorial way and Beth had to laugh. ‘I would wouldn’t I?’ They both giggled about it and somehow Beth’s load seemed to have become marginally lighter.

  By the time Dottie had finished her Friday chores Beth was waiting for her in the hall. She took a deep breath and asked, ‘Dottie, could I walk with you to the church? Not to go in, just to walk there and then I’d come back home?’ There was something so anxious and so intensely sad about Beth that Dottie couldn’t have refused her if she’d wanted to. Caroline gave Dottie a discreet nod of encouragement from behind Beth, so Dottie put her wages in her bag and the two of them set off.

  The first step Beth took over the threshold, other than going into the garden to choose flowers for her mother, was the most desperately important step she’d ever taken in her life. Her breathing became far too fast, too loud, too rasping, but she forced her feet to move and when she was standing outside on the road she grasped Dottie’s hand. Head down, she walked past Willie and Sylvia’s, past the gate to the church hall and as far as the lychgate, no distance at all, but to Beth it was a million miles. By the time she arrived there she was trembling from head to toe, her grip on Dottie’s hand was fierce and somehow she couldn’t let go.

  Beth didn’t appear to be setting off back, so Dottie asked, ‘Shall I walk you back again, love?’

  Beth nodded. ‘Thank you, thank you very much. I thought I could do it on my own but I can’t. On Monday I might go in the church if I feel well enough. Would you come in with me?’

  ‘Well, now, that’ll be a turn-up for the book, but yes, I certainly will, only because you want me to, though. Right?’

  Beth leapt back over the Rectory threshold, overwhelmed with relief to be safe home again.

  God! thought Dottie. What damn well happened to that child in Africa? Something too terrible for her to tell. Yet Alex was going to school as though nothing had happened. Maybe making life normal was his way of dealing with whatever it was.

  At home in her old cottage that crouched squat and neglected at the very bottom of Shepherd’s Hill, Dottie had to laugh to herself at the idea of her going into church. ‘What are things coming to?’ she said out loud. ‘Dottie Foskett, lo
ose woman extraordinaire, going to church. Oh, my. Oh, my.’

  Chapter 7

  Andy strolled into the Store two days later carrying a small parcel contained inside a freezer-bag. ‘Jimbo in?’ he called out cheerfully to Tom.

  ‘In the back with a rep and not to be disturbed, but he won’t be long.’

  Andy acknowledged the information with a thumbs-up, and began to roam the Store, picking up this and putting down that after a thorough inspection. He bent down to sniff the cold meats as though suspecting they might walk off the counter so full of maggots were they. Tom, beginning to resent this assiduous inspection, unlocked himself from his ‘cage’ and went to have a word. As an ex-policeman he had a good line in questioning people.

  ‘Excuse me, are you a food inspector or from health and safety? If so I need to see your authorization.’ He put his reading spectacles on and held out his hand.

  Andy muttered something incomprehensible so Tom asked him, ‘I’m waiting. I have a right.’

  ‘No, I’m not. Just whiling away the time until Jimbo comes through.’

  ‘Well, why not have a coffee and sit down in the corner with a magazine. We keep them up to date.’

  ‘I have rights, too. I can look if I want.’

  ‘So you do, but not to give a demonstration of complete disgust at the products we have for sale. I’ll pour you the coffee. Black or white?’

  ‘White, no sugar. Thanks.’

  Despite the ham being in a plastic bag Tom could smell it and felt angry. So he was coming in for a further complaint, then? The coffee was stewed and strong but Tom didn’t care if it poisoned him. Andy Moorhouse deserved it.