A Whiff of Scandal

  There was only one way to stop this. He groaned as enthusiastically as he could through his parcel tape and shuddered violently against the Garden of Romance sheets. Melissa smacked him soundly for the final time and then flopped off him with a heavy sigh. ‘Was that nice?’ she asked sweetly.

  He nodded weakly. It was difficult for a man to fake an orgasm and he hoped that Melissa would be too preoccupied with packing away her spatula to notice. He didn’t want to offend her, after all.

  Melissa rolled off the bed and began to get dressed. There was a wistful, far away look in her eye as she pulled on her leggings and T-shirt and Bob Elecampane’s heart lurched with love for her. What price would he pay to see her smiling sleepily with the contented flush of afterglow, hair across the pillow, her full rounded body curled against his? Certainly more than £69.99. Perhaps it was a gift so priceless that it couldn’t be bought. A muffled sigh escaped from his lips. Melissa turned round. ‘Sorry, I forgot about you.’

  She peeled the tape from his lips, taking tiny shreds of skin as she went. He wished he had the courage to tell her to rip it quickly and get it over with, but he couldn’t bring himself to voice it. ‘You looked miles away,’ he said rubbing his lips together to ease the pain.

  ‘I was just thinking.’ She smiled but it was a sad smile.

  As she undid his bonds, he took her hand. ‘Après l’amour, les animaux sont toujours triste.’

  Melissa looked blankly at him. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s French,’ Bob said earnestly. ‘After love, the animals are always sad.’

  ‘What animals?’

  ‘Well,’ he hesitated. ‘I think it means us – we’re the animals.’

  Melissa was affronted. ‘You might be an animal, but I’m bloody well not!’

  ‘I was trying to be romantic.’ Bob was deflated. ‘Perhaps I didn’t explain it right.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said uncertainly. He was encouraged to see that she looked somewhat placated. ‘That’s nice, then.’ She still sounded cagey. ‘I didn’t know you spoke French.’

  ‘I save it for special occasions.’ He’d loved French ever since he heard Maurice Chevalier singing ‘Sank eavon fur leetle gels’. It gave the ordinary things in life a certain je ne sais quoi and sent a shiver down the rigid spine of the mundane. Let’s face it, if a scrawny little git like Charles Aznavour could manage to pull gorgeous, sexy birds, then speaking French must count for something. And Robert Elecampane was at that stage in life where he was prepared to give anything a try.

  Melissa pulled her hand away from his and began brushing her tousled hair. The brush had sharp spikes and made a rasping sound and he hoped that she would never be tempted to make the connection between it and his bottom. He fixed his bashful look to his face and tried to attract her attention again. ‘There’s a lot about me you don’t know,’ he said sincerely. ‘I’m a man of many talents. Unfortunately, most of them are hidden. There have been very few women to whom I’ve revealed myself.’

  ‘I should think so too,’ Melissa said, putting her brush back on the dresser out of harm’s way. ‘There’s a law against that sort of thing, as well you should know being a detective.’

  ‘I don’t mean like that.’ It was hard not to become exasperated when Melissa was being obtuse. He sighed and tried again. ‘I want to tell you things about myself.’

  ‘But you’re too shy?’ Melissa ventured.

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Well, I also do mucky phone calls for some of my clients,’ she said brightly. ‘It’s cheaper, only £29.99 an hour, but we have to have a fixed time so that Frank isn’t here. And I like it to be when I do my ironing – it helps to pass the time.’

  ‘But I thought I was “the ironing”.’

  ‘Silly,’ she giggled. ‘You’re only the ironing in code. This is the ironing for real. I take in for three or four houses in the village, so I have a lot to do. It can get a bit tedious.’

  Is that what their purpose in life was, Melissa’s clients? To relieve the tedium of her ironing? ‘How can I make a dirty phone call to you when I know you’re doing the ironing? I wouldn’t have your full attention.’

  A flash of surprise crossed Melissa’s child-like face. ‘What do you expect for £29.99?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Bob was heavy of heart. ‘You’re right, it’s very good value.’ There was a chill spreading over his body, now that the numbness was disappearing from his limbs, and he started to get dressed. ‘I didn’t actually want to make a telephone call to you, I wanted to talk to you face to face.’

  ‘But you said you were too shy,’ Melissa said reasonably.

  ‘That’s just the way I am.’ He paused with his trousers round his ankles. ‘I might come across as a rough, tough, man of the world, but inside I’m nothing more than a lost little boy.’

  Melissa didn’t look convinced.

  ‘Perhaps we could do next week a bit differently.’ Bob cleared his throat. ‘I feel the enjoyment of being beaten by household objects has run its course somewhat,’ he said hesitantly. ‘Maybe we could have a quick, ordinary sort of session – you know, me on top, you underneath – without the compulsory use of corporal punishment and then we could spend some time just talking.’

  Melissa laughed. ‘I’ve never had anyone who wanted to pay just to sit and talk.’

  ‘Well, I do, Melissa,’ he said gently. ‘And I don’t want to talk about sex either. I want to talk about ordinary things. The things that make you cry. The things that make you laugh.’

  ‘You’re making me laugh,’ she said in alarm. ‘Why do you want to know about me?’

  Bob took a deep breath and zipped up his flies. It was an intimate movement, zipping up one’s flies in front of a woman. He felt it showed a trust and a willingness to be open that he had never been able to achieve before. In the past, he would have turned away fumbling, furtive, and the moment would have been lost. ‘I am beginning to care for you, deeply,’ he said. ‘I don’t simply want to share your body. I want to drink tea and eat custard creams or bourbon biscuits with you and discuss why, after years of being a treasured institution, Coronation Street has suddenly become so naff.’

  A look of fear had settled on Melissa’s face and he wondered whether perhaps he had gone too far. But there was no turning back. She must know how he felt. ‘I don’t want to talk to you merely as a client. Talk is cheap.’ Although at £29.99 a go it wasn’t exactly dirt cheap. ‘Hopefully, you can think of me as more than a client, more than someone to share your body with, more than a pile of ironing in your little black book. I want you to consider me as a friend.’

  Melissa swallowed deeply and he tried unsuccessfully to push all thoughts of Linda Lovelace and her obliging throat out of his mind. She sat on the edge of the bed. ‘This has come as a bit of a shock to me,’ she said. And, indeed, Bob felt she sounded slightly dazed. Although, he was beginning to realise, this wasn’t uncommon with Melissa.

  He shrugged his shirt on to his shoulders and fastened his buttons as nonchalantly as he could with trembling fingers. ‘I’ll leave it with you till next week to think about.’

  Melissa pulled her diary out of the bedside drawer.

  ‘Same time?’ he suggested.

  She opened it at the relevant page.

  Bob raked his hair nervously. In for a penny, in for a pound – or £69.99 in Melissa’s case. He licked his tongue across his lips, which were still raw and peeling and would probably scab. ‘Perhaps you could write me in as something nicer than the ironing? What about changing the sheets?’ he offered tentatively. ‘That would make me feel a lot better.’ More desired. More wanted.

  ‘Why changing the sheets?’ She paused with her pencil, puzzled.

  ‘Well, everyone likes nice clean sheets,’ Bob explained. ‘It’s something to look forward to.’

  Melissa looked up from her diary. ‘You’re asking a lot of me this week.’ Her voice was harsh and it made him jump. It didn’t suit her at all.

&nb
sp; ‘I’m sorry.’

  She slammed the page shut. ‘I can’t do you next week,’ she said tightly.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m busy.’ She threw the diary decisively into the bedside drawer.

  ‘Doing what?’ Bob was aghast.

  ‘We’re having a Viking supper to save the church hall. I’ve got some cooking to do.’

  ‘What do Vikings eat?’

  ‘A lot. It’s going to take me ages,’ she snapped in a tone that brooked no discussion.

  ‘And that’s more important than I am?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Her face was flushed and her lower lip was quivering and it looked suspiciously as if she was going to cry.

  ‘I’d better go,’ he said hastily, slipping with equal haste into his shoes and jacket. ‘Perhaps you’ll change your mind.’

  ‘I might,’ she sniffed.

  ‘You know where I am. Just let me know if you can fit me in.’ It was the sort of comment that he would normally have followed with a hearty guffaw, but it didn’t seem appropriate in the circumstances. He moved to the door. ‘I’ll let myself out.’

  Melissa stared, unmoving, at the wallpaper – Garden of Romance, again – except that the wallpaper bore only tiny tasteful sprigs of co-ordinating flowers rather than the profuse riot of blooms that covered the duvet, the curtains, the cushions and the lampshades.

  Bob hurried to the front door. His radio was squawking, bringing him back to the sane, safe world of criminals. Mainly male criminals. Thankfully. Would he ever understand women? It had taken him long enough to understand French and look where that was getting him. Nowhere. Fast. It looked as if he was going to be hurt again. He should have been happy with the Spanky Panky, but it was too late now. Sensible men always listen to their mothers. He was in too deeply. The scars that he would bear from this would wound more cruelly than anything a spatula from a Kenwood food processor could ever inflict.

  It was only when he was back in the safe cocoon of his car driving back to the concrete urban jungle of flat-roofed, flat-faced houses and bleak, straight, unpeopled roads that made up the south side of Milton Keynes that DC Elecampane realised that in his haste to depart, the bill for services rendered hadn’t been paid. A smile spread across his face. It was a thought that cheered his pained soul immensely.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Basil was trying to repair the damage Anise had done to the leylandii with the pinking shears. It was a frightful mess. Snipping neatly with the secateurs, he tried to blend in the great gaps that she had hacked in the luxuriant dark green foliage. Good heavens, she was wonderful when she was angry. The sap must have been rising forcibly within her when she set about this hedge. The thought made Basil shiver with pleasure.

  Standing back to admire his handiwork, he suspected that Suzette of Suzette’s salon never took so much trouble with her clients. Whenever he had availed himself of her services, he came out looking like one of Great Brayford’s cornfields in the autumn, a quarter inch of chewed stubble sticking out unattractively from the surface after it had been slashed erratically by a combine harvester. He hadn’t visited Suzette recently and, therefore, relied heavily on his trilby and the glossy accompaniment of Brylcreem to perform all of his hairdressing requisites.

  Basil stacked the leylandii trimmings tidily in the ancient wheelbarrow and contemplated his role as gardener. He had always hated gardening but he had always done it because his mother insisted. This had, over the years, given him a certain reluctant knowledge of plants and lawns and bonfires that had allowed him to ingratiate himself with the Misses Weston, with the main aim of getting to know one of the Misses considerably better than the other. So at least he had something to thank his mother for there. Mind you, one didn’t really have much choice with plants, throw a bit of water and fertiliser on them and they either grew or died. There was very little else you could do to influence them.

  He wished it had been the same way with women. There seemed to be so much else to do in order to get relationships with them to grow into anything remotely resembling a healthy shrub. Only once or twice had there been anything like the promise of a green shoot of romance, but they had very quickly become sickly saplings and had withered and died despite his best efforts. Relationships, it appeared, had to be constantly nurtured like hothouse flowers and he wasn’t sure he had the patience any more – or, indeed, the time. He was not green-fingered when it came to the girl department.

  It was his mother’s fault. She had lived far longer than was reasonable for a woman in her condition, enjoying, as she always had, a certain robust strain of ill health. Basil had never thought to leave her and, even though she had outstayed her welcome by at least twenty years, he had cared for her meticulously, alone. For most of his life he had viewed her as the prime cause of his enforced bachelorhood. What woman in their right mind would want to take her on? He had even tried a few that weren’t entirely in their right mind, but still no joy. When she died he missed her bitterly. Perhaps that was what had brought him back to gardening, the need to care for something small, helpless and fragile again. Shooting squirrels had also proved very therapeutic.

  Anise was coming through the front door bearing a silver tray with a mug of tea and some sort of stodgy-looking cake. She had taken to doing this for him on the days that he tended their garden and he had seen it as an encouraging sign. Normally, she didn’t strike him as the type of woman to carry a tray for anyone, let alone a torch. He straightened up and massaged his lower back, thinking that the sympathy vote wouldn’t go amiss either.

  ‘Basil.’ She nodded curtly as she approached with the tray. ‘Fine weather.’

  ‘Indubitably so, good lady.’ He took the rake and leaned on it at what he calculated was a rakish angle.

  ‘The weathermen said it would rain.’

  ‘If I had my way, I’d hang the bastards,’ he said pleasantly.

  ‘They’re so often wrong,’ she agreed.

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Tea?’ She offered him the tray. ‘Angelica has made the cake. It’s barely edible. Mr Kipling makes a much better job of it, but she won’t be told.’

  Basil took the tray and balanced it precariously on the edge of the wheelbarrow.

  ‘If you want to throw it on the compost heap, I shall understand perfectly. But do make sure that it’s under the leylandii clippings. Angelica would fall apart if she saw you had discarded it.’

  He wanted to say, she isn’t strong like you, but felt it was too early in the scheme of social foreplay to offer such flattery. ‘Will you be attending the Viking supper at the church hall, Anise?’

  ‘Unfortunately so, Basil. I’m in complete opposition to the whole project and I feel I have to make my presence felt. There are so few of us left who are concerned with standards these days.’

  ‘I trust I may be counted among them.’

  Anise looked surprised. ‘It hadn’t occurred to me, Basil.’ She twisted the string of pearls at her throat. ‘A man that can wear a lilac shell suit with brogues doesn’t strike me as being overly concerned with standards.’

  Basil raised one eyebrow enigmatically. ‘Standards, like still waters, run deep,’ he informed her. ‘Clothing is mere frippery for the flesh.’ He leaned forward seductively on his rake. ‘Unlike manners, dear lady, they do not maketh the man.’ He resisted the urge to wink.

  Anise licked her lips nervously and glanced back at the house. ‘Well, yes,’ she said, a modicum of fluster peeping through her bravado.

  ‘I’d like to assure you of my utmost support,’ Basil continued.

  ‘Well, that’s very nice to know.’ Was he mistaken or was there a girlish flush to her cheek? ‘Leadership is sometimes a very lonely place.’

  ‘Margaret Thatcher said the very same thing,’ he declared.

  Anise was taken aback. ‘Did she?’

  ‘If she didn’t, then I’m sure that on many an occasion it was merely a hair’s breadth from her lips.’ He tried an ingrat
iating smile, which seemed to hit the bullseye.

  Anise looked coy. ‘Chairperson of the steering committee for the Viking evening can hardly be classed as the same thing.’

  ‘Nonsense. Two women trying to uphold standards against cruel odds. I’d call you kindred spirits.’ And Thatcher was a right old battleaxe too, he thought.

  ‘You’re very kind, Basil.’

  It was time to make his move. ‘Perhaps you would permit me the honour of a dance at the Viking supper.’

  There was a definite reddening of cheeks. ‘I’m afraid the organisation of the entertainment is in the hands of the Reverend Allbright and Melissa. Goodness knows what we shall get. The word “discotheque” has featured. I fear there’ll be no room for a foxtrot.’

  ‘There’s nothing that John Travolta can do that I can’t.’ He smiled beguilingly. ‘I can assure you that you’ll be in safe hands.’

  ‘Well, that remains to be seen.’ Anise fanned herself vigorously with her hand and he hoped that he hadn’t leaned too close with garlic breath. ‘I’m co-ordinating the food, so at least there’ll be something to eat.’ She turned round, checking either side of the garden before she spoke again. ‘Tell me, Basil. How are you getting on with that young woman across the lane?’

  ‘Rose?’

  ‘Yes. I understand Angelica has cajoled you into a spot of gardening for her.’

  ‘We get along perfectly well. She’s very charming, if a little lax with her horticultural habits.’

  Anise’s face shaded with disappointment. ‘Haven’t you noticed anything unusual going on in her house?’