Snowball
by Reginald Hill
Writing under his own name and three pseudonyms, Reginald Hill combines genres with great originality and success. The Patrick Ruell novels, with equal dashes of romance, espionage, and adventure, are practically a genre unto themselves, while the Dalziel and Pascoe detective novels under his own name have a distinguishing philosophical slant. Running through almost all Reginald Hill’s work, however, is a thread of humor and a touch of bawdiness that make him a continual delight to read...
Alice had been baking jam tarts. If there was one thing Alice could do really well, it was bake. If you wanted another thing she could do really well, you were in trouble. But she was certainly a great baker.
I smelt the tarts even before I entered the kitchen after my morning walk. I always took a morning walk when I stayed at Rose Cottage, not because I liked the exercise but because it gave me a chance to get rid of Alice’s breakfast out of my Times. Normally I’m a Mirror man, but a tabloid’s no good for concealing a breakfast. Alice’s jam tarts were superb, but her fried eggs defied description. Or dissolution, as I had discovered after an unhappy half-hour trying to flush one down the loo on my first visit the previous summer. So I had had to seek other methods of disposal and now the countryside round the village of Millthwaite was littered with caches of Alice’s fried eggs.
I could, of course, merely have rejected the breakfasts, but Alice was a very touchy person. She distrusted me on principle, as she distrusted all men who showed an interest in her poor widowed niece, Sally. But if distrust ripened into dislike, I was finished. So I praised the breakfasts and ordered the Times whenever I came to Millthwaite.
I stood and looked at the tarts cooling on the kitchen table. There were two dozen of them, intended, I surmised, for the Women’s Institute Fete that afternoon. I breathed in the rich seductive smell of warm pastry and hot jam. And I was tempted.
Why a man as eager to be liked as I was should have let himself be tempted is hard to explain. All I can say is four-and-twenty looks pretty like an infinity of tarts, and also I was very hungry. After all, I’d had no breakfast.
I picked one up. It made a single delicious mouthful. I had a second in my hand when I realized I was being observed.
Standing outside the window was the monster, Lennie. His wavy jet-black hair curled down over his brow, almost hiding the cold grey eyes which I felt rather than saw staring at me accusingly. At five years old, Lennie gave every promise of becoming as morally unscrupulous as his father.
I smiled reassuringly at him and offered him a tart. He was, after all, Sally’s son and the apple of Alice’s eye and I would do well to keep in his good books. But the little monster shook his head and said, “Fete” — or it might have been “fate.” Either way, it sounded like a threat.
With a sigh, I reached into my pocket and found it was empty, an all too common discovery of late. I had never realized how much our little contracting business depended on my partner, Leonard, until he fell off the scaffolding. I had tried to keep Sally’s share up at the old level, as I didn’t want Alice to get a sniff of my inefficiency, but it left me perpetually short.
Young Lennie didn’t have the mien of a child ready to be fobbed off with promissory notes. Debating what was best, I glanced idly round the kitchen and my eyes fell on a fifty-pence piece in a saucer on the shelf behind the cellar door. I picked it up. Lennie brushed his black locks aside to get a better view, and when I lobbed it through the window he plucked it out of the air like an on-form slip fielder. Then he was gone.
Just like his father, I thought as I went upstairs. You didn’t have to spell things out for him.
I met Sally coming out of the bathroom. She liked rising late when she could, which was useful to me as it meant I could breakfast alone. Sally was almost as sensitive on Alice’s behalf as the ancient beldame herself, and I wouldn’t have cared for her to catch me at my sleight of hand with the Times. I’d never thought of Sally as a particularly “loyal” person; in fact, as far as Leonard went, my experience had pointed quite the other way. But it turned out that she was a scion of one of those old blood-is-thicker-than-water bucolic families and after Leonard’s death she hadn’t hesitated to accept Aunt Alice’s invitation to come and stay till she “got herself sorted.” I had done all I could to help Sally bear her tragic loss and would have done a great deal more, but her sojourn at Millthwaite had somehow reawoken a whole ocean of sleeping Krakens, notably a sense of family and (worse still) a sense of propriety.
No, she hadn’t gone off me, she explained, as I tried to arrange a tryst in her bedroom on my first visit, but it wasn’t right, not here, in Aunt Alice’s house. And when I suggested what Aunt Alice might care to do, our relationship almost came to a close there and then. Left to herself, I had no doubt that in the end she would marry me. But Leonard’s death hadn’t left her to herself. It had left her to Lennie and to Alice and I wasn’t about to get my share without their express approval.
There was, besides, a more comfortably mercenary motive. Alice’s small fortune (“in the funds,” would you believe?) was going to come Lennie’s way, via his mother — but not if she rushed into a foolish second marriage. And even after three visits to Millthwaite, my suitability was still very much under scrutiny — and (though it hurt to admit it) not only by Alice!
Sally looked very fetching in her nightie and I couldn’t resist giving her a passionate embrace, which she permitted only because we could hear Alice in the hall below trying to make contact with the idiot girl who looked after the village’s tiny telephone exchange. My own recognition of the need for caution couldn’t survive such close contact with that soft flesh and I was trying to maneuver Sally back into the bathroom when Alice’s voice rose sufficiently to penetrate even the drumbeat of hot blood in my ears.
“Constable Jarvis!” she bellowed. “That’s who I want! No reply? What if I was being assaulted? — No, I’m not! I’ll try later!”
She slammed the phone down as I descended the stairs, having abruptly abandoned my assault on Sally much to her surprise and, I hope, disappointment.
“Anything wrong, Alice?” I asked casually.
She regarded me with distaste. She was a big-boned, grey-haired countrywoman in her late fifties and anger turned her face a greyish-purple and drew the sides of her mouth down till they almost touched her chin.
“You didn’t eat any of my tarts, did you?” she demanded.
No one in his right mind would have admitted it at that moment.