The Food Detective (6 page)

Chapter Six

Friday morning was Josie-time, my own private quality time. Each week I left the village at eight thirty-five prompt. If I passed anyone – and today it was Fred Tregothnan apparently arguing the toss with Nick Thomas as they stood outside the village shop – I waved, but no one in the village knew where I went. Maybe they thought I had an assignation with a secret lover – and I was happy to keep it that way. Actually, they’d have been half right. Piers, the instructor, and I did have the odd highly pleasurable shag, and it was always nice to know I could pull a bloke half my age, but the main business of the morning was a flying lesson. I’d gone on the principle that if Sarah Ferguson could fly a helicopter, so could I. I’d no ambition, as she did, to write children’s books about choppers. Certainly not
children’s
books about
choppers
! I just did it for the pleasure. It invigorated me for the whole of the next week. Well, the flying or the recreational sex.

I always got back in time to open up the bar, remind Lindi exactly what she was supposed to be doing and get into the kitchen. There was more passing trade on Fridays, people nipping off to their holiday homes or heading back to the city a day early to beat the weekend M5 jams. Today I was gratified to have quite a run on the organic steak I’d brought back with me, and plenty of favourable comment. I’d made sure I marked it up as a Special, lest people compare the price with the one in the menu. When I had a new menu printed, the prices would be even higher, so I could sell it at a profit, not just little more than cost.

As soon as Reg Bulcombe registered the offer on the
blackboard
, he strode over to me, jabbing at my chest. I stared down at his parsnip of a finger.

‘Yes, Reg. What can I get you?’ I asked before he could speak. ‘Your usual?’

‘I can’t have my usual, can I? ’Cos you’ve slapped a fancy great price on its head. Going organic, are we? We’ll see about that. You mark my words we’ll see.’

‘If you mean to get rid of the Portaloos again, you’ll find I’ve trumped you. Now, do I draw you a nice cool pint or are you
going to throw your toys out of the pram and stump off with your thirst still raging?’

There was a murmur from his cronies. His round, was it? I filled half a dozen glasses, some scrumpy, some bitter, passing them over in pairs.

As he took the last, he hissed, ‘You turn your nose up at good meat at my prices – you’re off your head, woman.’

‘I told you, Reg – I need paperwork for my accountant. You come up with the documentation: I might do business with you again. We’ll have to see, won’t we? After all, like it says on the board, this is an unrepeatable offer. Or did you leave your
reading
specs at home?’

‘Your fancy writing, that’s the problem. That and the fancy prices.’

‘He’s right,’ Fred Tregothnan, who’d just appeared, butted in. ‘You need to keep your prices down, if a man’s going to eat and pay his vet’s bills before Christmas! You’ll just have to get in the queue, Josie.’ His tone was jocular enough, but I fancied the
message
wasn’t. Reg’s farm never had paid well, according to the
village
, which is why he’d turned the flattest of his fields –
coincidentally
the one most prone to flooding - into the mobile home site. I didn’t know how campers rated such facilities, but I
couldn
’t imagine Reg earning the equivalent of a Michelin star. His preferring the foetid old privy to the Portaloos didn’t augur well, did it?

Fred had his usual brandy and soda. It was unlike him to drop in in the middle of the day, still less like him to order food and sit on his own to eat it. He had the last of the organic steaks.

‘So is there any real difference,’ I asked as I took it to his table, one of the patio ones, ‘between organic meat and your bog
standard
commercial stuff?’

He shook his head. ‘Some folk even think ordinary
husbandry
’s better for the animals, because they get more preventive medicine –’

‘As in antibiotics,’ I put in.

‘– and I’d be hard put to tell the difference between the two. But I can tell the difference between any meat and that from
beasts given Angel Dust –’

‘Angel Dust?’

‘It’s highly illegal, so you won’t be asking me to prove it with a blind tasting.’

‘Where did you have it?’

‘Over in the States. It’s a hormone-based growth accelerant, banned throughout Europe. They even have the sense to ban the US meat produced with it. It makes the animal grow very quickly, and to my mind gives nasty, spongy meat. Pap.’

‘But you won’t be top of the queue if I go completely organic.’

‘There are good organic farmers and bad organic farmers. A lot depends on the butcher, too – how long he hangs his meat, and in what temperature. Beef, now, it needs to go really dark, not this bright red stuff people like from their supermarkets.’

I didn’t point out I’d spent more years at college than I liked to recall learning about the colour of meat. Customers liked to think they know best. ‘These new suppliers said they knew every animal by name – oh, I know they were playing the
sentimentality
card – and had them slaughtered locally. At least they died happy.’

‘That’s a factor. The enormously long journeys the poor beasts make to slaughterhouses – they’re unforgivable. But that’s the government’s fault, all this bloody red tape they tie us around with.’

I nodded. I’d come across Compassion in World Farming
during
my travels on the Net.

By now he was well into his stride. ‘No wonder more and more vets are turning away from large animal practices and
sticking
to tabby cats and terriers. Which reminds me,’ he said,
smiling
ironically, ‘will you be serving the stirrup cup to the hunt this year?’

But at that point one of the walkers asked for his bill, and I didn’t quite hear Fred’s question. Accidentally on purpose. I still hadn’t made up my mind. But if Sue could refuse to bless them, I was that much closer to refusing to serve them. Why didn’t they do what other hunts did, gather at some big house? I could have volunteered Mrs Greville as hostess there and then.

Now, why hadn’t Fred joined his mates? For all he was a
professional
man, educated and not short of a pound or two, he
usually
mixed with the settle crowd. It was their highest praise, that he didn’t have a bob on himself. Maybe that quip about money had offended them. Maybe it wasn’t a quip at all. Both Reg and Ted Gay had got up to lean over his table, talking earnestly. Or was it meanly? Gay was jabbing the air, his dirty finger an inch from Fred’s nose. How on earth had dear little Lucy managed to spring from loins like those?

Fred managed to ignore any threat, smiling and leaning back in his chair as the others slouched off.

Lindi began to saunter round collecting glasses, and, even as I watched, what did the bloody man do but put his hand up her skirt and goose her?

I was at his table before he could remove it. ‘Mr Tregothnan, if you can’t treat my employees with more respect I shall have to ask you not to patronise this pub. Lindi, there are people waiting to be served.’

‘But it was only a bit of fun, Mrs Welford,’ she bleated.

‘It may be, until you decide to sue me for not protecting you from sexual harassment. Off you go. And you, Mr Tregothnan, have to choose whether to keep your hands to yourself or drink elsewhere.’

I wasn’t surprised when there was a thundering on the kitchen door five minutes later. I hadn’t seen him off the premises,
nothing
confrontational like that, so I should imagine this was his way of proving he wasn’t going quietly. I stepped out, closing the door behind me. No rows in my food preparation area. Not with all those knives ready to hand.

‘How dare you, you cow?’ he began.

I summarise: every word was accompanied by a profanity. Not that I could complain. I was about to use quite a few myself.

‘I’ll tell you how I dare,’ I said. Years before I’d heaped curses on Nick Thomas’s head. I repeated them now with interest. My voice never got above a quiet monotone. I might have discussed the weather with more animation. But he got my drift: you
didn
’t mess with Josie Welford. ‘So now you know,’ I finished.
‘You’re welcome here any time, any day. But you do not lay a hand on my girls. Ever again. Now, go and castrate a cat and chew on my words.’

I turned on my heel and returned to the kitchen.

A few minutes later Lindi appeared, lower lip trembling. ‘All those things you said, Mrs Welford – did you mean them?’

‘Of course not. But he needed scaring. Men have to learn that “no” means “no”, Lindi, and we’re the only ones to teach them as far as I can see. And that means some of us have to learn to say it. Go on: have a try. Go on. You don’t have to be rude. But you mustn’t giggle and wiggle your bum while you’re saying it. “Stop that, please. I don’t like it.” Go on. I mean it, Lindi.’

I was out and about early on Saturday too, equipped with
secateurs
and leather gloves. Sue had persuaded me against my better judgement that I had flower-arranging skills that could be used by the women decorating the church. Women? Silly me. Ladies, of course.

In the summer most of the flowers came from local gardens. At this time of year they came from a flower wholesalers in Exeter, Sue setting out well before six every Saturday morning to collect them. We tended to work in threes, the rota apparently having been worked out at random. But Jem and his wife had decided to sneak a rare weekend away from the shop so I’d been pulled in as substitute for Molly.

Sue had put the flowers – gladioli, asters, dahlias and chrysanths – in a couple of deep black plastic buckets that could, with the addition of a wodge of Oasis, double as vases. More than half, a vivid mix of colours with Michaelmas daisies and some of those imported daisies, turquoise and orange and bright blue, which always reminded me of a child’s scribble, had already been removed and lay on a groundsheet. You’d need sunglasses to work with them.

We had three or four displays on ordinary Sundays, and they’d usually last, with a bit of judicious dead-heading, for a couple of weeks, and maybe, in chilly weather, even longer. Our church didn’t, after all, run to much in the way of heating.

I checked the vase on the altar – no, nothing could be retrieved
from that. And the water was so rank it turned my stomach. Out to the compost heap, then. I propped the empty vase under the stand-pipe we use, hoping the force of the water would wash away some of the green sludge, and wandered off to look at the graves, pulling weeds here and there as I went. My route took me down towards the stream I’d walked beside earlier in the week. How many folk had died in times past because they drew their water from a stream polluted by the graveyard, innocent, clear water, but far from pure? I leaned on the wall and peered.

Pink water? Not pink as in strawberry ice cream, but pink as in the water left when I soaked Tony’s handkerchiefs he really should have thrown away after one of his nosebleeds. Why should the stream be any sort of pink? It wasn’t as if we’d got any industry to turn it that colour. I’d once been to some ancient abbey up in Yorkshire only to get hay fever from the river – it ran past a shampoo factory, and frothed myriad bubbles, giving off the richest of pongs. Unforgivable, of course, but in those
innocent
days before tight environmental controls it was almost funny. Our stream didn’t smell, though.

The altar vase still did, but not so much. I gave it another swirl, resolving to bring rubber gloves and a scourer next time.

By now the other lady was back from wherever she’d gone. No explanations for arriving, sorting flowers and then popping out again.

‘Those are my flowers,’ she greeted me, flexing her secateurs.

I didn’t need to ask which. ‘Very well. And where are they to go?’ Though I could have put money on the answer.

‘On the altar, of course. Where is the altar vase?’

I passed it to her; it was still dripping, of course. How she’d deal with the wet bottom and the altar’s pristine white linen cloth, I had no idea.

‘I don’t know you, do I?’

How could some only five foot two look down her nose at me? ‘Josie Welford.’ I put out a friendly hand, ready to shake hers. She neither shook it nor responded with her name. ‘And you’re…?’ I prompted.

‘Mrs Coyne. You’re from?’

From? Ah, which house! Brean Park or Teign Court, that sort of from. ‘The White Hart.’

‘The publican! What on earth are you doing here?’

‘Arranging the flowers beside the lectern.’ I suited the deed to the word.

‘A publican. Arranging flowers.’

The conversation didn’t develop much. I didn’t know my Bible well enough to tell her exactly what dealings Christ had had with innkeepers, but I did want to mouth words like ‘pharisee’ and ‘whited sepulchre’ under my breath. Anyone else I might have made a quip about water and wine and the pink stream, but any more snubs and I might forget Whose house I was supposed to be decorating.