Bragg?’ Reggie asked.
‘Maybe,’ the woman said. Well, you either are or you aren’t, Reggie thought. You’re not Schrödinger’s cat.
‘And is Mr Bragg here?’ Ronnie asked. ‘We just need a quick word,’ she mollified. ‘Tidying up a few loose ends in a historic case. Paperwork, really.’ Ronnie raised a questioning eyebrow at the woman. She was very good at the raised-eyebrow thing. Reggie had tried it, but she just ended up looking as though she were trying to do a poor (really poor) impression of Roger Moore. Or Groucho Marx.
Andy Bragg’s wife conceded to the eyebrow. ‘I’ll go and see if he’s here,’ she said. ‘You’d better come in,’ she added reluctantly, parking them in the residents’ lounge before disappearing into the bowels of the house.
Tourist information leaflets were fanned out on a sideboard. Boat trips, horse riding, local restaurants and taxi numbers. Reggie took a seat on a sofa and picked up a tide table from the coffee table. The cushions on the sofa and the curtains at the window were made from a fabric that was adorned with seashells. Once you started looking you could see that they were everywhere. It was strangely disturbing. Reggie perused the arcane information contained in the tide table. ‘Low tide at three today,’ she said. Neither Ronnie nor Reggie had ever lived by the sea. It was a mystery to them. In and out, out and in, in thrall to the moon.
A dog the size of a carthorse wandered into the room and examined them in silence before wandering out again.
‘That was a big dog,’ Ronnie said.
‘It was,’ Reggie agreed. ‘Almost as big as you.’
‘Or you.’
Reggie looked at her watch. ‘Do you think Mrs Bragg has forgotten that she’s looking for Mr Bragg?’
A man came into the lounge and looked startled at the sight of them.
‘Mr Bragg?’ Reggie said, jumping to her feet.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Have you seen him anywhere? There’s no hot water in the shower.’
The Nineteenth Hole
‘Your round, I believe, squire,’ Andy said.
‘Again?’ Vince said. How could that be? he wondered. Hadn’t he just bought a round? His bar bill must be through the roof by now – Tommy and Andy were drinking double malts. Vince had tried to restrict himself to pints but nonetheless he was feeling woozy with drink.
‘You’re a bit of a lightweight today, Vince,’ Tommy said. ‘What happened to you?’
‘Skipped lunch,’ Vince said. ‘Too busy to eat.’ Hardly true. Well, the lunch part true, but not ‘busy’ at all, because on top of everything else – and he had confided this to no one – he had lost his job a week ago. He had reached the bottom of the curve. Rock bottom. Woe piled upon woe. It felt biblical, as if he were being tested by some vengeful Old Testament God. The suffering of Job, he thought. He had been brought up as a West Yorkshire Baptist and his Sunday School Bible lessons had taken root.
It was a funny coincidence, if you thought about it – ‘Job’ and ‘job’ being the same word. Not that funny when you didn’t have one any more. Redundant.
‘Sorry, Vince,’ his boss, Neil Mosser, had said. ‘But you know …’ He shrugged. ‘The takeover and everything.’ Vince thought a shrug was an inappropriate response to a man losing his livelihood. ‘Cuts were bound to happen as soon as they started consolidating,’ Mosser said. (‘Rhymes with tosser,’ they all said behind his back. It was true. He was.)
And, on the other hand, everyone liked Vince, their faces lit up when he walked in, they were always glad to see him – Can I get you a cup of coffee, Vince? How’s that daughter of yours, Vince? Ashley, isn’t it? Not like Wendy, who for the last year had barely looked at him when he walked in the door. There was one particularly nice woman who worked up in the York office, Heather was her name. On the chubby side, always seemed to be dressed in purple, not that either of those things counted against her. She always gave him a hug and said, ‘Look who’s here, if it isn’t Vince!’ as if no one was expecting him.
‘I’ve worked for the company twenty years,’ Vince said to Mosser. Didn’t it all count for something? ‘And isn’t it supposed to be first in, last out? Not first in, first out?’
Another shrug from the tosser. ‘They want fresh meat, you know. Young and hungry, guys who are prepared to bleed for the company.’
‘I have bled!