Relief Valve: The Plumber's Mate, Book 2 (18 page)

His face went purple, and he turned on me. He was still holding his box of Waitrose Ceylon teabags, and I winced a bit as it crumpled in his hand. “I’ve changed my mind. I no longer wish to allow this imposition. You can leave, now.”

“What?” Seriously, what? “Sorry if I said something to upset you—”

“Do you want me to call the police? Get out!”

“All right, I’m going!”

I scuttled back to the van with my head in a whirl. How the hell had I buggered that up so badly? Not to mention so bloody quickly. I’d barely been in the place five minutes.

I was
not
looking forward to letting Cherry know about this little fiasco.

Chapter Thirteen

After the wasted morning at Mr. M’s, I had a pretty busy afternoon, work-wise. What with getting home, having a shower, feeding the cats and even grabbing a bite myself, it was well on the way to seven o’clock before I knew it. I thought about ringing Phil and telling him I was off to see the literary crowd, but it seemed a bit, well, unnecessary. I might be a short-arse with a dodgy hip, but I can take care of myself. I shoved my phone back on the table.

Then I remembered what’d happened to six-foot, able-bodied Phil when he’d turned up to a suspect’s house on his tod back in Brock’s Hollow, and decided it wouldn’t be a bad idea to text him the address at least. I picked my phone back up again.

Secure in the knowledge that if Morgan Everton battered me to death with a typewriter tonight, Phil would at least be able to find the body, I set off for the Lit fest just after seven. I wanted to make sure I could find the place all right. Yeah, I know I could’ve just borrowed the satnav from the van, but I don’t like relying on it all the time, ’specially when I’m going somewhere local. Anyway, I’ve got GPS on my phone if it all goes tits-up.

Actually, I’m pretty sure Gary thinks I’ve got GPS implanted in my brain. He’s never really
got
how my finding-things talent works.

As it happened, I found the place with no trouble and got there with ten minutes to spare. So I sent Phil another text—
was nice knowing you, pls look after cats
—and got one back saying
wankr
. Then another that said
call me when ur out
.

It wasn’t quite
I love you
, but it showed he cared, right? Anyway, time to get out of the car.

Morgan’s place was big, but there was something about it I didn’t much like. It was right on the edge of Redbourn village, and I’d passed a lot of nice houses on the way—I couldn’t see them very well, as it was pitch-black right now, and the place had the sort of street lighting you get in the countryside, meaning practically none—but I knew they were there. I’d been a bit disappointed to pull up outside this mock Tudor monstrosity, tall and austere looking, with square, unfriendly pillars holding up the porch. A security light flashed on when I got out of the Fiesta and nearly blinded me as I crunched up the drive to the front door.

There was one of these big brass knockers on the door, which was probably supposed to look grand and imposing but just made me think of Mrs. L in Sandridge. I would’ve knocked, but despite all the coloured blobs floating in my vision courtesy of that bloody security light, I could just about see that the front door was ajar. Talk about sending out mixed messages. After a moment’s dithering on the doorstep I walked straight in, trying not to look like an opportunistic burglar. The hallway was in darkness, which didn’t help one bit.

If I’d got the wrong house, this was going to be really embarrassing.

Thankfully, I could hear voices down the other end of the hall, coming from another door that was open just a crack to let the treacley glow of a low-wattage bulb spill out.

I was under strict instructions from Phil to use any opportunity to have a nose around the place, and I wondered if now would be a good time. Trouble was, I hadn’t expected Morgan to make life easy for nosey parkers, so if I took time out now, I’d be late. Margaret would probably stab me with a fountain pen for that even if I didn’t manage to get caught sneaking about. I had a feeling it wouldn’t make a great first impression with the group.

I walked down the hallway, wincing a bit as my boots clattered on the tiles and trying to tread more lightly. No wonder Morgan felt safe leaving his front door open. His whole bloody hallway was an early warning system. Just as well I hadn’t tried any sneaking.

I knocked lightly on the door at the end and poked my head into what turned out to be a large sitting room, the dim light seeming to soak straight into the antique furniture. Perched uncomfortably on various hard-looking chairs and horsehair-stuffed sofas were a motley bunch I guessed must be the writers’ circle. There were five of them in the room, which to my mind made a pentagon, not a circle. It also made me wonder if there were any Satanic rites about to be performed—no, hang on, that was pentagrams, wasn’t it?

I still wouldn’t have put it past this lot.

Morgan Everton was in the far corner, heads-down over a wodge of dog-eared papers with a skinny young Asian bloke. Neither of them looked up when I spoke, but three faces turned my way with varying degrees of welcome.

“Hi, I’m looking for the Literati?”

“Yes?” The woman who spoke was in her fifties, thin and beaky, and I had a feeling I’d seen her before somewhere. At Cherry’s do? Maybe. Or maybe she just reminded me of one of Greg’s cathedral ladies. I tried to picture her with a plate of sausage rolls but came up blank.

If she’d seen me before, it looked like she hadn’t enjoyed the experience. “So is that you lot?” I prompted when nothing else was forthcoming.

“Oh yes.” The breathless voice came from a washed-out looking, forty-something woman draped in fifty shades of grey. I was betting it wasn’t ironic. “Are you here to join us?”

“That was the plan. Hi, I’m Tom.”

“Hannah.” Grey-Lady turned a bit pink as she took my outstretched hand in her warm, plump little mitt. “And this is Margaret, and Peter.”

“Margaret, hi! We spoke on the phone? I’m Tom.” Beaky looked down her considerable nose at me and gave me a damp, bony handshake.

“You found us all right, then?” She sounded disappointed.

I flashed her a winning smile, as if to suggest it was all down to her address-quoting skills. “Yeah, thanks. No problem.”

She sniffed.

Peter, although younger, was as grey-looking as Hannah. But where she was soft, he looked hard as ice. He had a sharp, ferrety-looking face, and a jerky way of moving as if he’d been filmed in stop-motion like a cut-price knock-off of Wallace and Gromit. He didn’t take my hand, just nodded, the stuck-up sod.

“And over there are Morgan and Raz. Raz is a poet,” she added in awestruck tones.

“Yeah, me and Morgan have met. It’s how I heard about you lot.”

Finally, they looked up. Morgan’s eyes were shifty, like he wasn’t too keen on owning up to the acquaintance. I imagined Margaret flashing him a look of triumph behind my back, in an “Ah, so he’s
your
fault” sort of way. “Ah, yes,” he admitted finally, under the weight of their collective stare. “Tom. Good to see you again.”

He didn’t ask how Cherry was, which might have been an important clue but more likely just meant he was a thoughtless bastard. I thought about shouting out a progress report on her to annoy him, but I was supposed to be in stealth mode and that probably wouldn’t have been very stealthy. “Yeah, cheers for telling me about this group.”

Morgan glared literary daggers at me. “I didn’t know
you
wrote.”

“Oh, it’s a new thing. See, I was talking to this lady—Edie Penrose, she’s a lovely old girl—and she reckoned I ought to get a hobby. Something intellectual. So I thought I’d give writing a go.” Not bad, I thought, for a total bit of improv. Maybe I’d fit in better here than I’d thought—I seemed to be a natural at making stuff up.

“And what do you write?” Margaret demanded. I snapped out of the self-congratulations and general musing. With a nose that sharp, she’d stab me if I didn’t stay on my toes.

Excrement, meet air-moving device. “Gay literature,” I said with a smile, and braced myself for the outrage.

It didn’t happen. All around the room, heads were nodding in, dare I say it, approval.

“Oh, excellent. Such a rich vein of tragedy,” Margaret murmured with a suitably mournful expression.

What?

“I take it you are, yourself, of that persuasion?” she carried on.

“Er, yeah.”

A sort of collective sigh went around the place. With a kind, almost motherly look on her face, she took my arm. “Do come and sit down.”

She led me to a seat next to Grey-Lady, who gave me a sad smile. “You must have a great deal of tragedy in your own life to draw upon,” she said in a barely audible voice.

“Er, yeah? Still, mustn’t grumble.” They were all so bloody sombre and sympathetic I felt I had to be extra bright and breezy to compensate.

“Do you write poetry too?” Raz asked, pushing his glasses back up his nose and staring at me with big, earnest eyes. He had the sort of beard that looked like it had started out as designer stubble and still wasn’t sure it hadn’t preferred it that way.

“Does the odd naughty limerick count?”

They all laughed politely, despite the fact I hadn’t been joking. “So tell us about your novel, Tom,” Morgan demanded.

Bugger. I hadn’t expected anyone to actually want to know more about gay literature. “Well, it’s about this plumber, see,” I began. They always said you should write what you know, didn’t they? So that probably applied to making up stuff on the spur of the moment. “He shows up at this bloke’s house to fix the washer, and of course, the bloke’s not got any clean clothes because his washer’s kaput, so he’s just wearing a tea towel…” Too late, I realised I was reproducing the plot of one of Darren’s pornos.
The Plumber Always Comes Twice
, if I recalled correctly.

Luckily, it didn’t look like anyone here had seen it. They were still nodding along in unison like a row of those dogs you see in the backs of people’s cars. Half of them even had the jowls to complete the illusion. I breathed a sigh of relief.

“And what’s the central theme?” Margaret asked, jabbing her beaky nose in my direction.

Theme? I thought fast. “It’s, um, about the shallow, empty nature of casual relationships?”

“I imagine the washing machine is just a metaphor, then?” Grey-Lady suggested timidly.

“I like that,” Raz threw in while I was still struggling with that one. “Like life, it goes in cycles. And you could go one of two ways with it. Either the machine gets fixed, or it doesn’t. Whichever you choose, it’s a strong statement.”

“No, no.” This was Morgan Everton, butting in with an air of authority. “The machine has to be fixed. Otherwise it’s just too obvious. And I think the tragedy is more poignant that way.”

Nods all round. Even from Raz.

“So,” Hannah asked hesitantly. “Do we ever find out what’s wrong with the machine?”

“I’m still working on that bit,” I said firmly. “So what’s everyone else writing?”

Everyone else, I discovered, was writing literature. Funny how nobody could actually define it for me. There was a lot of woolly bollocks about themes and allegories. Oh, and none of their books had made it into Waterstones yet, although some of them had had some really encouraging rejections.

I was still trying to wrap my head around this last concept when Margaret announced it was time to break for a cuppa and some biccies. Not that she put it that way, obviously, but that was what “refreshments” turned out to mean. Morgan’s tea, I noticed as he took hold of my arm, had a bit of a funny smell, as if he’d somehow managed to slosh some rum in on the sly. He certainly didn’t offer any to the rest of us.

“I wonder if I might have a word?” Morgan murmured in my shell-like. Or, to be more accurate, seeing as he was so much taller and stooped with it, he murmured it into the top of my head.

“Course,” I said, although I’d been hoping to nip out for a bit of snooping around. Not a lot of chance with old Morgan’s iron grip on my sleeve.

He steered me to a corner, presumably so he could loom over me more effectively. Then he coughed. “I felt it would be better not to advertise your connection with Cherry. The other members of the group are…unaware of the circumstances of her departure from our circle.”

“Right…” I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. Or why, for that matter.

“I thought it best you weren’t plagued with questions that would only serve to embarrass your sister. What’s done is done, and I don’t believe in giving a dog a bad name and hanging him. Or her, as it might be.”

Had he just called my sis a dog? I frowned.

Morgan straightened his cuffs. Even in his own house, he was wearing the tweed jacket. I wondered if he had little tweed jim-jams he changed into for bed. “We’ve always kept to first-name terms within the group, and I feel that’s a tradition that should continue.”

“Fine by me, Morgan,” I told him breezily.

His eyes got a bit of a pinched look, like he was wondering what the world was coming to when oiks like me called him by his first name. Maybe I’d try shortening it to Morgs next time. “Excellent. Well, I must move on.”

“Yeah, don’t let me keep you,” I agreed. I stayed in the corner a minute, watching him. Both Margaret and Hannah, the Grey Lady, seemed to want to speak to him, but he blew them off and headed back to Raz, who was apparently the golden boy right now. Margaret had to make do with Peter, and they bent their heads together, muttering occasional words to each other I didn’t catch and wasn’t sure I wanted to.