Page 73 of Crazy Spooky Love
He just shrugs it off as nothing, as he always does when we compliment him.
“Right.” I put the cap on the whiteboard pen as Marina shoves Nonna’s empty tin in her bag, ready to be replenished. “So we meet here at six in the morning and get on the road before the rush hour.”
Artie stands up and hands Marina her jacket. As they leave, she winks at me, then gives Artie one of her serious looks.
“Hey, Sausage, it’s going to be a long trip in a confined space, so no egg sandwiches, okay?”
He looks temporarily crestfallen and then brightens. “But I can still bring my jar of pickled gherkins, right?”
After they’ve left for homeI consider my options for the rest of the evening. I could always go eat with Mum and Gran, but they’ll want to know what’s happening with the case and I honestlydon’t think I’ve got the energy to retell it. Besides, I’m sure Mum would have a whole lot to say about us trekking across the country in Babs and I can’t deal with another dressing-down today. I should head upstairs, eat, and then hit the sack early so I can come at the morning bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. This is the sensible plan, because tomorrow is going to be a long and unusual day, even by my standards. Just the driving alone is going to make for a long day, and that’s the bit of the plan that worries me the least.
Am I a sensible person? I think you know by now that the answer is, much as I’d like to be sensible, I’m prone to the exact opposite. That’s probably why I reach for a pair of latex gloves and lay Agnes Scarborough’s final diary on the desk in front of me and start to read.
Holy fucking hell, Batman, Ineed a life-sized tub of Haribos to process this. Sorry to blaspheme, but this situation warrants it. Agnes found the murder weapon.
In November 1922, Agnes Scarboroughdiscovered the knife used to murder her son. She found it quite by accident one day, stashed inside the body of Lloyd’s most beloved stuffed teddy bear, hidden in the attic. He’d recently become a father for the first time himself, and she’d had the wonderfully sentimental idea to patch up his childhood bear to pass on to his new baby. The discovery of the bloodstained knife wrapped inside Lloyd’s monogrammed handkerchief had caused her immense agony; she couldn’t countenance the idea that she’d accused the wrong son of murder. It was of course possible that Isaac had planted the knife there to frame his brother, but the re-stitching of the bear troubled her greatly.
The fact was that Lloyd was pernickety in every sense, most tellingly with his wardrobe. He’d even flirted with the idea ofbecoming a tailor in his artistic youth, and it had gone as far as a family friend securing him a training place with one of Savile Row’s finest tailors. He’d left for London full of pomp and self-importance, only to return from the capital within a few months because all of that infernal needlework had turned out to be a terrible compromise on his fingers, which he couldn’t entertain the idea of because he was, of course, destined to become the next great English playwright. He hadn’t held the trainee tailor position long enough to be able to do anything useful like make himself a pair of slacks, but he’d learned more than enough to be able to mend a shirt, darn a sock, or stitch a murder weapon inside a stuffed toy so meticulously well that it could go unnoticed for over a decade.
And so it was that some eleven years after Douglas Scarborough was murdered, Agnes realized that she’d got everything horribly, awfully wrong.
What could she do? She’d lost all trace of Isaac, and even if she found him she knew she’d never apologize enough to make him forgive her. Lloyd was all she had left, and the new baby symbolized a fresh start for the family after so much heartache. He might not be her first grandchild, but he was the first grandchild she’d be allowed to see, or to love. It was for him that she decided to wait, to hide the bear and allow her only remaining son Christmas with his new family while she decided his fate.
The diary ends abruptly a couple of days before Christmas, which strikes me as odd, and then I feel as if I’ve been kicked in the stomach, because Lloyd Scarborough’s scathing words about his mother come back tome.
“She killed herself on Christmas Day, 1922.”
Two days after she wrote the last entry in this diary. Jesus. She hid the bear, and then rather than tell the authorities what she knew, she took her own life in one final, desolate act of desperation.
I close the final diary with the heaviest of hearts and text Marina.
I know exactly where the knife is.
“Can’t sleep, Ghostbuster?”
Oh fuckety shitballs.“Of all the late-night supermarkets in all the world, you have to walk into mine,” I say, trying not to appear ruffled. My attempt at a Southern drawl sounds more like I’m having a stroke. Fletch all but laughs out loud.
“Not all that surprising, seeing as it’s the only place open at this time of night,” he says, as his eyes take in the several packets of Haribos I’ve piled high on the counter then sweep down my black jersey pj’s. I’d talked myself into thinking they looked like loungewear to avoid the hassle of getting dressed again; the shop has always been deadly quiet on my other midnight sugar runs. “Having a pajama party? I’ll come. I know some really good party games.”
My eyes fall to the bottle of vodka in his hands. “Is that your idea of a balanced dinner?”
His unexpectedly heavy sigh warns me away from that line of conversation. “We all have our secrets,” he mutters. “Although mine don’t involve conning old ladies out of their pensions or swishing around on TV. Some of us have proper jobs.”
“That DIY advice column doesn’t write itself,” I say snarkily. “Sounds to me like someone’s a little bit jealous of Leo’s TV success.”
“I’m jealous of the fact he’s seen you naked.”
The cashier goes from bored to goggle-eyed in an instant. If he had popcorn, he’d be all set.
I reach in my pocket for my phone to cover the fact that Fletch has me flustered, and all I find is a screwed-up receipt and an emergency Werther’s. I sinkingly remember putting my phone down beside me on Babs’s bench seat.
Fletch watches my micro-panic with amused eyes, then slowly places his bottle of vodka beside my five-year-old’s fantasy shop.
“I’ve got these,” he says, reaching across me to tap his phone on the reader.
The cashier leans slightly forward, as if he’s been magnetized by the sex force field that radiates from Fletcher bloody Gunn. The man could never be an astronaut; everything on the rocket would clamp itself onto him until he suffocated beneath the dead weight of technical instruments and cutlery and freeze-dried hamburgers. I let the image settle in my mind for a few seconds, enjoyingit.
“Thank you,” I say, stiffly. I could have taken the high road and refused his offer to pay, but I really don’t want to leave without my Haribos.
