“You still looking for help at lunchtime, Jack?”
“I am. There’s folk that are willing, but not folk that are suitable.”
Peggy looked in Dick’s direction and winked.
“Oh aye?” said the landlord, interested. “Maybe we could have a chat later, young man, after your meal.”
And so it was arranged. The talk was businesslike and decisive: Dick would come down the next couple of nights to learn the business, get into the routine, then he’d start work proper at the weekend. Peggy would look after Malcolm in the middle of the day — “It’ll be a pleasure,” she said, though she did wonder how she’d cope with the unaccustomed situation. The money was far from wonderful, but it would be welcome. Dick only worried about how much he seemed to be putting on Peggy.
“When we’re well settled in, we’ll start looking for a play group for Malcolm,” he said.
“If it goes well, I might even start one myself,” said Peggy.
It certainly went well at The Cornishman. Dick was a good worker and a good listener, and the pub’s routines went like clockwork when he was on duty. He never mentioned his hotel training, but it showed. Jack thought he was manna from heaven and tried to press him into doing longer hours, but Dick was unwilling. The boy came first, he said, and he did. Nobody asked too much about his background. Everyone in the West Country is used to people passing through, casual temporary residents who come from heaven-knows-where and soon pass on. People knew that Dick had lost his wife, because Peggy had revealed that in conversation with a friend and it had got around. Nobody displayed curiosity beyond that.
Dick slept with Peggy the night he got the job. The mutual agreement was silent, and Peggy knew she had to go along with any conditions Dick attached to the affair. She knew already that Malcolm would always come first with Dick — and second and third as well. Dick stayed in her room for an hour or so, then went as usual to sleep beside the little boy in the two twin beds put together under the window.
The routine continued when he and Malcolm went to live and fend for themselves in the tiny cottage the other side of the back lane. The boy was used to finding himself alone at nights, and didn’t worry about it. He knew it wouldn’t be for long. Dick and Peggy developed a code between themselves. When he collected Malcolm, or when he met Peggy casually on his days off, he would say “See you soon” as they parted. That meant that he’d be up that night. Perhaps Peggy should have felt that she was being used, but she didn’t. She was happy to have her hours with Malcolm, which were working out better than she could have believed possible with her lack of experience of children. She found him an enchanting child, and she was happy to have the all-too-brief time with Dick at night. She had expected little of her widowhood, and Dick was a wonderful and unexpected bonus.
By the middle of June they were a settled thing, or felt like it. Peggy was refusing all potential summer tenants for the cottage, and had managed to transfer the first bookings she had already accepted to another landlord in the area. Her friends knew what the situation was, and accepted it. Summer would be a lovely time, she knew. It was the time of year she had always enjoyed most, especially as Briscow was that bit off the tourist map. Colin would be working, of course, but he was still resisting the offer of extra hours because he didn’t want to leave his son for most of the day. Malcolm was regaining his equilibrium, she felt, though it gave her a start one day when he said: “I haven’t spoken to Mummy for ages.” It wouldn’t be long before he forgot her, she thought.
Dick was happy, too. He knew he had landed on his feet. But always in Eden there lurked the serpent, in wait to spread his poison. Dick knew he was using Peggy — not sexually, because if anything, she was using him that way. But he knew he was getting a free childminder, lots of free meals, and he knew Peggy would be charging a lot more for the cottage if she was letting it on a weekly basis to her usual casual tourist clientele.
It irked him to be dependent — because that was what it was. It had been that that had started the rot between him and Selena. He was old-fashioned, he knew, but that was something he would never apologise for. He’d known when he planned to snatch Malcolm that his feelings for the boy were old-fashioned. And it was the same for his sense that he was becoming too dependent on Peggy.
The truth was, he could do with more money.
“It follows the pattern,” said Inspector Purley. “Retired people, away from home, poor security, a nice little haul of jewelry, cash, and small household things — nothing spectacular, but worth having. And it’s West Country.”
“What if the next one’s John o’ Groats?” asked Lackland. “That’s been the pattern so far — zigzagging all over the country.”
“Ah, but it won’t be from now on, you of little faith.”
“Seems to me you’re looking at it arse up,” countered Lackland. “You decided he was headed for the West Country, and now we’ve got a possible case there, you take it as confirmation, even though we’ve had other possible cases all over the country. Dick Randall’s not the only crook to target respectable retired people.”
He did not dent his superior officer’s complacent view of things.
“You mark my words,” Purley said. “He’s come to rest in the West Country, like all sorts of other people — artists, retired people, ageing hippies, travelling people, and all manner of rag-tag and bobtail. And having come to rest, he can’t leave little Malcolm alone for long. The cases we think he was involved in were all over the country because so were they. Now the cases will all be in the West.” He walked over and looked at a map on the wall. “This one was in a small village called Monpellon. The area includes Launceston, Bodmin, Padstow — places like that. That’s where we’ll be looking to, because that’s where the two of them will have slung their hook.”
“Well, I admire your confidence,” said Lackland, who secretly, or not so secretly, did not.
“I’m so certain I’m right that I’ll risk ridicule if he does turn up in John o’ Groats and I’ll alert the local police down there that I think that’s where he is. One more strike and he may have given himself away.”
Dick was his usual efficient and sympathetic self at lunchtime in The Cornishman, pulling pints now with the sure hand of an expert, bringing three or four laden plates at once from the kitchen into the bar and remembering who had ordered what. But at the back of his mind there was a niggling worry.
Peggy had not been quite her normal self when he had delivered Malcolm that morning, not quite the same in her manner. There hadn’t been anything that you could pin down: You couldn’t say she’d got the huff, decided she’d gone off him, was feeling she was being exploited. She was minding three or four other toddlers now — children whose mothers had got summer jobs when the holiday season had come upon them. The arrival of one of them at the door had covered over any awkwardness, but also prevented any attempt to sort things out. Dick was sure there was something: an alteration in her manner, a slight access of remoteness, even coldness.
“One chicken and chips, one roast pork, one steak-and-kidney pie, and one vegetable bake.” He had a cheerful air as he served one of the families who had once been regulars of Peggy’s, but had been found an alternative cottage this season. They were a fleshy, forceful family, and they took up their knives and forks with enthusiasm.