fact. Rhoda had been fast asleep and snoring louder than Lottie when he finally stumbled through the door.
‘News?’ Andy said, reaching for the lifebuoy of the coffee pot. He inhaled the scent of frying bacon as if it were oxygen. His brain was still bleary with sleep, not to mention a slow-developing hangover. ‘News about what?’ News was rarely good, in Andy’s opinion. News invariably carried consequences with it.
He tried to pinch some bacon from the frying pan to make a sandwich but Rhoda slapped his hand away. She was already bombarding him with a list of commands. ‘Can you keep an eye on the sausages? I’ve got eggs three-ways to see to. And get some toast on, will you? The couple in Fastnet are having the full English – fried eggs for him, scrambled for her. The man in Lundy is having the full English as well, but his wife only wants poached eggs. And the vegetarian lesbians in Rockall are now claiming to be vegans. There’s veggie sausages in the freezer – get four out. And open a tin of baked beans.’
‘What news?’ Andy persisted, resisting Rhoda’s onslaught.
‘About Wendy,’ she said, cracking eggs into a pan of spluttering fat.
‘Wendy. Wendy Ives?’ Andy puzzled. ‘Or Easton, or whatever she’s taken to calling herself. What’s she done now?’
‘Only gone and joined the dead wives’ club.’
‘The what?’
‘Murdered,’ Rhoda said, making a meal of the word.
‘Murdered?’ Andy’s alcohol-addled brain wandered around the word, trying to make sense of it. ‘Murdered?’ Repeating it didn’t seem to help much.
‘Yes, murdered. Killed.’ Rhoda took a moment to consult her inner thesaurus. ‘Butchered,’ she retrieved, slicing through a black pudding. ‘Slaughtered,’ she added with some satisfaction. ‘Don’t just stand there, get the sausages.’
‘How was she murdered?’ Andy asked. The bacon no longer smelt so appetizing. (Slaughtered?) ‘When? And who by, for heaven’s sake? I don’t understand.’ He vaguely remembered hearing something on the local news on the car radio on the way home last night. A woman has been murdered … But not a name, not Wendy – Vince’s wife, for God’s sake! He got the sausages out of the freezer and read the ingredients on the packet. ‘Says they contain egg white,’ he said.
‘Too bad, that’s all I’ve got. The lezzies won’t be able to tell.’ Rhoda had quite a few gay friends, of both denominations, but it didn’t stop her using derogatory language about them behind their backs. She wore the men of that persuasion on her arm like designer handbags – of which she had several criminally expensive ones that Andy had bought her for birthdays and Christmases. A couple of watches, too. It was a way (pretty insignificant in the bigger picture) of spending the money that was piling up. There was only so much cash he felt safe hanging on to. It was in the roof space in the attic. And there was only so much he could pass through the business or offload on a nail bar. He didn’t think of the bags and watches as laundering, just a kind of safekeeping, and they had resale value if push came to shove. He told Rhoda that the Rolexes and the Chanel bags were fakes, when in fact they were genuine. It was a topsy-turvy world he inhabited these days.
He’d given her a Patek Philippe last year for her birthday, the real McCoy, bought it in a jeweller’s in Leeds. The man behind the counter was suspicious of his cash, but he explained it away by saying he’d won on an accumulator bet. ‘A Yankee at Redcar,’ he felt it necessary to elaborate. The watch cost a small fortune. You could have bought a whole terrace of houses in Middlesbrough for the same price. Could probably have bought Middlesbrough itself, if you’d been so inclined. He told Rhoda it was a fake that a client had brought back for him from Hong Kong. Rhoda had only worn it once, said it was too obvious that it wasn’t genuine. (‘And stop buying me watches, for heaven’s sake, Andy. I’ve only got one wrist and it’s you that has the problem with timekeeping, not me.’ She had two wrists, he thought, but didn’t point that out.)
‘Oh, and by the way,’ Rhoda said, ‘I forgot to tell you, because you came in so late last night …’ She paused to make the point.
‘Yeah, yeah. Very sorry, etcetera. What?’ he prompted. ‘What did you forget to tell me?’
‘The police were looking for you yesterday.’
‘The police?’