Page 64 of The Impossible Fortune (Thursday Murder Club Mysteries #5)

Joyce

I’m watching Flog It! – it’s about antiques before you get any ideas – but I’m not really concentrating. Something very strange has happened, and none of us is quite sure what to do about it.

Ron and Connie had gone down into the mine to open the safe. We have the codes, at least we think we do, and we have the order of the codes, at least Ibrahim thinks we do, and we all felt he was due a win.

The rest of us stayed on the clifftop. Tia and Kendrick and I had an ice-cream from the van in the car park.

We sat on a bench overlooking the English Channel.

Tia had never had a chocolate flake in her ice-cream before, which I found very hard to believe.

I asked if they didn’t have ice-cream vans where she grew up, and she said that they did have one, but the ice-cream man also used it to sell crack, and one day somebody shot him and set fire to the van, so I can see why her mother might not have been keen.

The ice-cream man who lived in my village when I was little ended up in prison, but not for selling crack.

Different times.

Seagulls were circling in the sunshine. I do love their salty cries carrying on the breeze. It always lets me know I’m home.

There’s a lady on Flog It! who thinks her vase is an original Troika, but I’m certain I saw the same thing in IKEA in Croydon.

Coopers Chase laid on a day trip there in the minibus.

I had heard a lot about IKEA, but had never visited one, because you don’t without a car, do you?

Anyway, it was everything I imagined and more.

I lay on all the beds and sat in all the armchairs, and then in the end I bought a candle, and some meatballs in the café.

It was a thoroughly good day out and I would recommend it.

Ah, it turns out the lady on television was right, and her vase was worth fourteen thousand pounds. That will teach me.

But I’m getting away from the point. Tia, Kendrick and I were on the bench. Elizabeth and Ibrahim were strolling up the coastal path, plotting something or other, and Jason and Bogdan were taking it in turns doing press-ups, and then discussing their press-ups with each other.

I was glad to have a bit of time alone with Kendrick and Tia, because I’m still not quite sure what they are both doing here, and I’m beginning to feel left out. Ever since the explosion it feels like something else is going on.

Something is happening with Kendrick, that much is certain.

Jason has been looking rattled, which he never does.

Even on Celebrity Watercolour Challenge you could tell he’d held his nerve.

Thirty minutes to paint Corfe Castle? Rather you than me, Jason.

Tia appeared with Connie Johnson, which can’t be a good sign, but seems a delight.

Kendrick has clearly taken a shine to her, and I have too.

The two of them both need somewhere to stay for a few days, and, if you can say one thing about Coopers Chase, it’s that it is a nice place to stay for a few days.

If you ever feel in need of being looked after, come and pay us a visit. Tell them Joyce sent you.

The official line is that Ron’s daughter, Suzi, is away at a friend’s, and that Tia is the daughter of one of Connie’s old schoolmates, and needs a place to stay while her accommodation in Brighton has some building work done.

The woman on TV has just said she won’t sell the vase, and I believe her about as much as I believe those two stories.

I asked Kendrick if he was worried about his grandad being in the mine with a murderer.

I should have phrased it a little better than that, but, you know Kendrick, he takes these things in his stride, and said that no one would dare kill his grandad, and I said Elizabeth would dare, and Kendrick said that his grandad versus Elizabeth would be like Iron Man versus the Black Widow, and I didn’t get the reference, but I got the gist and we had a good laugh about it.

But all the time I was thinking that Ron really had been gone for some while. I trust my friends, of course I do, but, you know, it’s Ron , isn’t it?

I saw Elizabeth and Ibrahim wandering back towards us, Elizabeth looking at her watch.

She had said this was a bad idea from the start, and you could see her face was a combination of worry and annoyance, along with some happiness that she might be proved right.

Elizabeth is capable of holding many emotions at once, while I prefer to concentrate on one at a time.

Right at that moment my primary emotion was protectiveness towards the two children eating ice-creams with me.

Tia said she thought whoever killed Holly would try to kill all of us, because it really is an awful lot of money, and they’d proved they were happy to kill people before.

I saw that she had a point. Then Kendrick said, ‘Do you know in Italy, ice-cream is called gelato?’ and I said I’d never been to Italy, but I’d seen it on television, and that I had been to France, if that was of interest, and Kendrick said it was of interest and what was the best thing about France, and I said I once found a shop that sold English food and bought some digestives, and he nodded as if that was a perfectly good answer because he’s very polite.

Someone brought him up well, and I suspect it wasn’t his father.

I have to tell you what happened next, but on Flog It! somebody just brought in some Victorian pornography. I’ll let you know how that goes.

I have said that I don’t know where Tia has sprung from, but that I warm to her, and that she reminds me a little of Elizabeth. A little. Without looking at Kendrick, she said, ‘It’s only me and Joyce here – does your dad hit your mum?’

The arm around the shoulder is something that I would do, and Elizabeth wouldn’t.

Asking that question is something that Elizabeth would do, and I wouldn’t.

Kendrick nodded that he did, and Tia nodded too, both still not looking at each other, and Tia asked if that made him sad or angry, and he said a mixture of both, and she asked where his mother was, and he said he didn’t know, and she asked if he was frightened for her, and he said he was.

She did the whole thing with such gentleness, and allowed him such dignity.

I put my arm around him too, and we watched a container ship on the horizon, and then I thought I should take a leaf from Tia’s book.

Because I had known, hadn’t I? Known that must be what was behind Kendrick’s sudden appearance, but a sort of embarrassment had stopped me from asking.

Stopped me from helping this kind, clever and scared little boy.

That’s a fault in me: sometimes I don’t want to know the truth, because it’s too painful. I didn’t want that to be the story.

And so I asked him if he really was scared about his grandad being in the mine, and he looked at me, shook his head and said, ‘Grandad? No. Grandad can do anything.’

And I thought about Ron, with his knees and his ears and his eyes, and I wanted to tell Kendrick that maybe there was a time when his grandad could have done anything, but that time was gone, and that, right now, he was an old man in a deep hole, and that with every minute that passed I was more and more scared for him.

But honesty only goes so far and so I gave him a squeeze and agreed that his grandad could do anything.

And then I realized that Ron must have known for the last two weeks what had happened to his daughter, and had kept it tightly locked up inside him. I needed to give him a squeeze too, but he was nowhere to be seen.

Right on cue, Elizabeth and Ibrahim joined us.

Ibrahim looked at his watch, and then at the ice-creams, and then said that ice-creams are around sixty per cent air, so we were eating air that we had paid for, and I asked him if he wanted an ice-cream too, and he thought for a moment and said that he did, and headed over to the van.

Elizabeth asked us what we had been talking about, and Kendrick said ‘dinosaurs’, and Tia said ‘ice-cream men who sell crack’, and I said ‘nothing really’, and I asked Elizabeth what she had been talking about and she said ‘nothing really’ too.

And then she added that Ron really had been gone a very long time indeed, and it was at that point that Ibrahim returned from the ice-cream truck and said he’d received a message from Ron.

The codes had been correct, the key was in their hands, the mission had been successful.

Which begged the question where on earth was Ron? Because he hadn’t returned.

And, writing this some six hours later, he still hasn’t returned.

It was Elizabeth who asked another question that hadn’t occurred to me but should have.

She asked, ‘What does he mean it’s in our hands?’ Because if Ron hadn’t returned, that meant that Connie Johnson hadn’t returned either.

So that’s where we stand. Either Ron has the key, or Connie has the key, or they both do. And we have no idea where either of them is …

Forgive me, Joanna is calling, and I have a lot to tell her.

I’ll just finish by letting you know that the expert on Flog It! has said that there are a lot of ‘avid collectors’ of Victorian pornography out there. ‘Avid collectors’? That’s what we call them now, is it?