A Little Bit on the Side (20 page)

With the meal over, coffee taken and a leisurely smoke, he turned to Jimmy.

‘Never been up the church tower have you Jim? Well I think now’s the time. Leave the brandy — you’ll need a clear head.’

Despite Jimmy’s reluctance, Jack was insistent in a way the surprised Jimmy, and stubbornly refused to take no for an answer. Leaving the ladies to linger over a second coffee they made their way to the church, and started the ascent.

Jack knew of old that it was not an easy climb. Two hundred and fifteen worn stone steps, and a narrow winding stairway, built to accommodate the frame of a medieval ascetic, not a twentieth century epicurean. They took it at a speed appropriate to their age, the lunch, and the quantity of beer consumed, but by the time they surfaced on to the leads and into the sunshine they were both short of breath, and Jim was short of temper.

‘Now that we’re here Jack, perhaps you’ll tell me what the hell this is all about. Why spoil an excellent lunch, and why did it have to be now?’

Jack said nothing, but motioned Jimmy to join him where he stood leaning against the west parapet, and then spread his arms wide as if to grasp the whole town in his embrace.

‘Just look at it. I mean really look.’

Before them the uneven roofscape of Barlow’s oldest and best houses fell away down Priory Hill to Packhorse Bridge (the original replaced by a modern structure in 1530) and the river, with the age-ravaged remains of Barlow Priory on the far bank, and beyond the wooded heights through which the road ran towards Wales. Diagonally to their right, the courts and narrow lanes of the old town led to the ancient church of St Botolph and the castle (substantial ruins, but some parts still in use), and behind them lay the market square, and the Georgian solidity of the old town hall. Overall it was a picture of the best of small town living that England in the twentieth century had to offer.

‘Isn’t it bloody marvellous?’

Jimmy cast a jaundiced eye on the panoramic view of Barlow town laid out below them, and gave a grudging acceptance to Jack’s proposition that it was indeed ‘bloody marvellous.’

‘And what would you say if I were to tell you that all these things will soon be given unto me?’

‘Well Jack, like any chap that’s endured a broad Catholic education, I’d say that you’ve been communing with the powers of darkness.’

‘Very close to the mark Jim: communing with Head Office actually, which is pretty much the same.’

As he spoke he passed his transfer notice to Jimmy for him to read, but Jim was still feeling too fractious after his climb to offer his congratulations.

‘And this is what you wanted, is it?’

‘Lusted after Jim. I’d thought I must have mentioned what a cushy little number the present DI has got, and how much I hoped to follow him, but perhaps that was just with Kate.’

‘Well congratulations then Jack. You’re a lucky lad, and now if you don’t mind, I’d rather like to get down to earth.’

‘Keep it under your hat when we get down Jim. I haven’t told Kate yet.’

As they sat at the table with the final round of drinks that Jim felt was essential if he was to recover his composure, Jack asked Kate if she could remember their Parish Pump lunch with Roger, after they had just seen the house up on the hill for the first time. He was surprised when she affected, as it seemed to him, to have no recollection of it.

‘Oh surely you must. We’d been up on the top of Midden Hill, and you and Rog had been niggling away at one another as usual for most of the morning. Then we came in for lunch, and Rog was banging on about The Pump, and telling me what a lucky chap I was. You said you were only too glad it wasn’t just round the corner or I’d be in here all the time. Don’t you recall?’

‘Oh vaguely: something on those lines.’

Jack began to feel that he wasn’t handling the announcement of his second piece of good news at all well. He’d obviously irritated Jimmy by dragging him up the tower, and now Kate, for reasons he couldn’t understand, was being distinctly off-hand. He remembered too, that she didn’t seem quite as elated at his promotion as he had expected.

‘Well I thought I’d mention it before I showed you this.’

He handed her the transfer note, and continued as she read it.

‘We stayed in Barlow for a couple of nights when we were touring on our honeymoon Jim, and fell for it then. It satisfied our joint nostalgia for old, forgotten, far-off things and battles long ago, and that’s Barlow to a T. We’ve always wanted to get in here, but commuting distance has always been the problem. Now this transfer has come we’ve got the chance at last. What do you think love?’

‘Well we can talk it over later. I’ve got a bit of a head right now so perhaps we could have a little stroll down to the river and get some fresh air.’

Jack returned home with the feeling that his celebration lunch had not turned out quite as he had intended, and after one more attempt to engage with Kate on the matter of a move to Barlow, he let the matter drop when she still seemed to be quite unreceptive to the idea. Plenty of time to sort something out, he thought, best not to rush her.

At the office, where the Stevens case was almost ripe for the final interview, Jack decided to drag his feet and leave it for his successor. He would be cursed for the delay he knew, but he had no wish for any further contact with Stevens if it could be avoided. He was altogether too close to the Martindale affair, and Jack would have no idea just how much he knew of its conclusion. As far as the rest of his investigations were concerned, he spent his time simply treading water or tidying up the casework for whoever was to follow him.

At home in Barton, both before and during his negotiations with Stevens and Martindale, Jack had been frequently entertained and occasionally involved and assisted by Jimmy, in Ted Sutton’s dispute with his immediate neighbours Geoffrey and Karen Pratt, who had arrived in the village from Barlow some two years or so earlier, trailing a reputation for trouble that spread rapidly through the village as soon as the family appeared for their first viewing of a Barton property.

As the sons Shane and Jason (now eleven and fifteen) had progressed through the junior school at which Kate worked, their names had become a byword for bullying and disruptive behaviour, just two of the many less desirable characteristics exhibited by their virago of a mother, whose arrival at the school gates was viewed with trepidation by even the stoutest, most experienced stalwarts on the staff. The father was a cipher, neither seen nor heard, and of whom nothing was known except that it was by virtue of his employment on a large estate near Barlow that the family occupied a tied cottage there.

Their translation from a modest tied cottage near Barlow to owner-occupation of the house on an acre of land next to Ted’s smallholding had been achieved courtesy of a substantial inheritance which had mysteriously accrued to Mrs Pratt. Large enough for them to buy the property without a mortgage, said Hilda Genner, although she could not put a figure to the precise amount or name the source. This signal failure of Hilda’s intelligence, which cost her a few points in her rating with the local gossips, led to much interesting speculation, especially when Mr Pratt arrived in a brand new four-by-four, and a local firm with a reputation as jerry-builders proceeded to adorn the house (late nineteenth century) with timber facing and rendering with a result that was variously described as interesting, eccentric, grotesque, aberrant, gross etc, but seldom identified as mock Tudor, the original intention.

Jack first saw the family when Kate pointed them out to him in the village as they passed, the mother in the van and the husband alongside her, but seeming physically always to be half a deferential pace behind, with the two sons scuffling sulkily along in their wake. To be fair to the woman, thought Jack, like the coral snake, she carries her warning colours for all to see.

Despite a seductively attractive head of Titian hair, one look at Karen’s face was enough to make it clear that what you saw was what you’d get if you tangled with her. At any time of day, whatever the circumstances, as all in the village would soon be aware, Karen’s feature’s would be firmly set in the aggressive scowl of one who had already suffered a reverse at the hands of fate that day, and was looking for confrontation to redress the balance; and physically she was probably capable of holding her own with most men if the need arose.

Geoffrey, on the other hand, was in all respects unremarkable. Of average height, average build, average looks, and average (to be generous) intelligence, he was distinguished only by the fact that, flower-power style, he wore a moustache, beard and long hair tied in with a colourful bandana headband: his one bid, it seemed, to stamp some sort of character on the very indifferent blank provided by nature. If his passive features carried any sort of expression when he was encountered, it might have been described as one of baffled melancholy: a cloak for his infuriating readiness to see the world as he would like it to be, rather than as it was.

So it happened that it was Geoffrey, rather than Karen, who initiated the breach in relations with Ted less than six months after his arrival when, during Ted’s absence at work, and without consulting either him or the deeds to the property, he applied his newly acquired chain saw to a flourishing mixed boundary hedge of field maple, hawthorn, hazel and flowering wild and guelder roses (all lovingly planted by Ted some six years earlier) and reduced it from a nicely maturing six or seven feet to a line of three-foot stumps.

That evening, as Jack and Jimmy, sat in the Shagger listening to Ted as he reported his encounter with Geoffrey; it seemed to them that initially he had been remarkably restrained.

‘I mean Jack,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t as if the deeds didn’t clearly show that the hedge was mine. I’m no legal expert and I could see it, and all he had to do was look or ask, but no, he thought it was his, and that was enough. Karen had said it was interfering too much with their view. So he’d cut it down, and then left half the bloody traff from the cuttings on my side for me to clear up.’

‘Did he say he was sorry, or offer to make things good in any way?’ asked Jimmy.

‘Not a word of apology, and what the hell could he offer anyway? Money’s no good. It’s six years of waiting that’s gone to waste, and it was looking lovely last spring.’

‘Well what else did he say?’

‘Next to nothing Jack. All I got from then on was “Oh dear; right, I see, I suppose so.” I might as well have been talking to the side of the barn, and then she appears. Must have been listening I think. Oh I got plenty of old lip from then on. Never mind the hedge, what about all the problems I’d caused her since they moved in. Turned out all she was referring to was the security light which she said was coming on in the small hours and blaring in, as she put it, the bedroom window: all of thirty yards from the light that is, by the way.

When I asked why she didn’t mention it she had the bloody cheek to tell me that they didn’t complain, but just put up with things to make the place a nice neighbourhood.

Put up with having your hedge cut down, I asked her, but I might as well have kept my mouth shut. I got a load of stuff then about people always picking on the boys, and me keeping them waiting for their football when it came over into the garden.

No hope at all of talking to her sensibly Jack, and in the end I was so disgusted I just turned on my heels and went back home.’

From that point relations deteriorated rapidly. Rubbish began to appear in Ted’s front garden overnight which he was sure the boys were throwing there. Their two dogs (night-time barkers according to Ted) produced a litter of puppies that scrambled through the hedge and regularly shat in his garden until they were old enough to be sold off, but the final breach could probably be marked by the occasion when Ted, within their hearing and obviously overheard by them, referred loudly to ‘those Pratts who live next door.’ Unintentional, said Ted, but few believed him.

Not until Jason’s departure from school (unqualified and unlamented) and his immediate engagement in the punk rock scene, coincided with an offer from the water company to provide main sewage connections to those isolated village properties that had missed out thirty years earlier, which included Ted’s, did the situation degenerate into farce.

For more than six months Ted and his wife had endured disturbance from puck rock sessions from Jason and his associates in an outbuilding much closer to Ted than to the Pratts. Over-indulgent and totally uncritical of her son as always: Karen had provided funds and encouragement. They were producing a tape for their agents, she told those who were inclined to listen.

Personal contact having long been abandoned, communications were being conducted by increasingly acrimonious correspondence, when Ted received two letters on the same day the contents of which led him to seek the opinions of Jimmy, and particularly Jack, who still basked in the glow of his success with the Churchill book.

Tucked away in a corner of the Shagger, Jack and Jimmy read the two brief letters.