LITMIR.BIZ

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fingertip beside an eye, dipping an eyebrow to signify shrewdness. ‘Nothing wasted on this boy. Chief Inspector Mowbray, the early years. You were there.’

      ‘Yes, OK. What was it?’

      ‘An item from Peggy’s purple shelf. Debbie Does Dallas.’

      ‘Who’s Peggy?’

      In the drive, under a sort of extended porch, there is a new Mazda MX5, gold. ‘This’ll be hers,’ Ian instantly concludes. ‘The master vehicle is in the garage, bet you. Kev’s more a Mercedes kind of guy. This dinky wee machine is the lady wife’s.’

      ‘Who’s Peggy?’

      Ian gives the Mazda a once-over. He peers through the windscreen at something on the front seat, putting the finishing touches to his profile of the Fazakerlys. ‘Granny Thistle,’ he answers. ‘She’s on the list for tomorrow morning,’ and then he explains.

      The first thing you need to know about Peggy Thurlow, says Ian, is that she regards it as a point of honour never to be nice to tourists, no matter how servile they may be. She’s never been known to smile at anyone who is clearly Not From Around Here, and has a reputation for being less than overwhelmingly warm to most non-outsiders too. Peggy’s views on citizenship are hardline: you don’t really belong to this town unless you have roots that go back three generations or more. Peggy’s roots reach back to the nineteenth century and the family of her husband – the late Mr Thurlow, a cheery old fellow by all accounts, whose love of Peggy was for many people one of life’s great mysteries – have been here since the Jurassic era. Pure-bred indigenous customers are generally on firmer ground with Peggy, but she’s prone to sudden reversals. Just because you’re in her good books on a Tuesday, there’s no guarantee that you’ll still be in favour come Friday, because Peggy is a gossip magnet and as changeable as a baby. Peggy has something on everyone and you’re guilty until proven innocent in her private judicial system. She’s either for you or against you, with very little in the way of middle ground. Someone passes on a rumour that you’ve been hitting the bottle and yelling at the kids – you’re cast out into the darkness, pending evidence to the contrary. The warmth of human kindness is buried pretty deep within the heart of Peggy, but if you’re one of the happy band that has earned her approval, she couldn’t be nicer. You want a box of grade-A Cuban cigars for your recently promoted husband? Peggy will get them for you. You need an obscure magazine, Peggy will supply it for you: Japanese Malt Whisky Review, The Kite-Flyer, Canoes and Canoeists – no problem. She also has a sideline in personal finance, for those of the favoured few whose pay packets occasionally fail to meet outgoings. Rumour has it she once loaned a client a couple of grand, at very advantageous rates, to subsidise the acquisition of an E-Type Jag. Then again, woe betide anyone who doesn’t repay on the stipulated date. Some hapless sod once settled up a couple of days past the deadline and Peggy burned his ears off with a lecture on the virtue of thrift.

      When we walk into Peggy’s shop the next morning, her reaction seems to suggest that she thinks she might recognise Ian, but she holds back the half-smile until he flips the badge. Ask a little kid to describe a lovely old granny and Peggy is more or less what you’d get: about five-one, approximately oval in silhouette, purple-grey candy-floss hair, soft fat face, tweedy skirt and chunky cable-knit cardigan with big leather buttons. ‘And what can I do for you gentlemen?’ she asks, and her eyes have the look that you see in people’s eyes when they learn that some unexpected money is coming to them. She’s standing behind the counter and right behind her head, at eye level, is Peggy’s purple shelf. There’s a tray of batteries and a selection of key rings and cigarette lighters, and alongside them there are Peggy’s adult videos. The slipcases have been removed and masking tape stuck on to the spines, and Peggy has written non-offensive versions of the titles on to the masking tape – or rather, that seems to be the idea, but the lettering is in thick inch-high capitals, purple, and even a ten-year-old slow-wit could work them out: S ME, F ME; EBONY GANG-B; SURFER F-FEST. It’s hard to imagine how it goes. What do the grubby punters say to her? ‘Box of matches, packet of extra-strong mints, Exchange & Mart. Oh, and Butt-F Bonanza up there, next to Keep on F-ing. Any good? Really? OK, I’ll take that as well, while you’re at it.’ Perhaps the cuddly little old porn peddler assigns you to the ranks of the damned if you ask.

      Sure enough, Peggy has something on Henry – not much, but more than anyone else so far. Every twenty days, ‘regular as clock-work’, Henry would come into the shop to buy a packet of twenty cigarettes. Surprisingly, given Henry’s rootless status, Peggy seems to have been well disposed towards him: he was her only customer for unfiltered cigarettes, she says, and she always made sure she had a packet in stock, just for Henry. His name was Henry Yarrow and he used to be an engineer, but what kind of engineer, and where he was an engineer, and when, she couldn’t say. He was from Minehead, she knew that much. Earlier that morning we’d been talking to a neighbour of the Fazakerlys and she’d said that she’d heard from someone that Henry’s name was McBain, or McCain, or McSwain, or something like that. Beginning with Mc and ending with -ain, anyway. Had Peggy heard that his name was Yarrow or had he told her himself? ‘He told me that was his name,’ Peggy replies, the implication being that she is not the sort of person to pass off mere hearsay as fact.

      ‘Definitely Yarrow?’ asks Ian, making a note.

      Peggy bristles at this, as if she’d been accused of lying. Offended, she locks her arms across her chest, a picture of indignant rectitude, with her library of red-hot muck behind her. But Ian soon wins her round, thanking her for her valuable information, nodding at the name he’s written on his pad, as if it’s a word in code and any minute now the letters will rearrange themselves and give us a vital clue. Gratitude accepted, Peggy gives us her personal impressions of Mr Yarrow: very polite, always cheerful, didn’t smell at all, except sometimes in summer, but we’re all a bit ripe then, aren’t we? Then she starts on the questioning. Where exactly was he found? When? Who found him? What did we think had happened? Any leads? Ian fends her off, with heavy use of boyish charm. In the end she settles for knowing that Henry wasn’t freshly dead when the unfortunate member of the public stumbled across him. ‘Poor man,’ Peggy laments. ‘Poor poor man.’ And her head does this slow sad shake as if her good angel is whispering in her ear: ‘Shake head sadly now.’ More than anything, you know she’s irked at not having winkled more information from us.

      We resumed the house-to-house trudge and Ian soon had another case for his gallery of the weird. Within sight of the Fazakerlys’ palace there was the home of the hearty Miss Ryle, who had turned her residence into something out of Heidi. On the outside all was normal: an ordinary pebble-dashed semi, with a neat little garden out front. Inside, it was all wooden walls, wooden ceilings, damned great cowbells hanging in the hall and on the landings, photos and terrible paintings of snow and ice and rocks in every room, and all the way up the stairs. In the kitchen there were dozens of bits of cloth in frames, stitched with rustic sayings and proverbs in German and French, with borders of tiny flowers. Most of an entire wall was taken up by a huge aerial photo of some mountain-top hut, with glaciers left, right and centre, and above the fireplace in the front room there was an enormous curved horn, a monster trumpet, as long as an oar. ‘Makes your head swim when you blow it,’ grinned Miss Ryle, as if confessing to a penchant for cocaine. Miss Ryle knows nothing about Henry. She was in Switzerland for much of December, she told us. ‘I’m always in Switzerland,’ she admitted cheerily, waving a stout arm in the direction of the mighty trumpet.

      And down the road, three minutes’ walk from the Heidi house, there lived Miss Leith, similarly nearing fifty, similarly single, but with a liking for inappropriately vivid make-up and fuchsia-coloured shoes. Miss Leith also had a prodigious fondness for those disgusting little porcelain figurines of cheeky shepherds wooing busty peasant lasses, and cute old hobos offering roses to winsome young lovelies on park benches, and rosy-cheeked moppets with baskets of kittens. It was like sitting in a souvenir shop, surrounded by display cases full of heart-tugging tat. From Miss Leith, however, we learned that Henry’s name was Henry Ellis, or so she’d heard from someone. She can’t recall who that someone might have been.

      Not far from Miss Leith and Miss Ryle lived

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