AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Is Kevin Branston married?”
Mullen felt very stupid. He hadn’t thought of that. But he knew the answer to her question. “He wears a wedding ring.”
“So put yourself in the Reverend’s shoes. She’s fallen for a married guy. They are sleeping together. Every Sunday she stands up in the pulpit and preaches the ten commandments and all that jazz. Then Chris and Janice find out and they decide to apply a bit of
blackmail. ’Woman Vicar is a Marriage Wrecker!’ You can imagine the headlines in the Daily Trash, can’t you? So Reverend Downey tells Kevin it’s all over and she tells him why. But Kevin is obsessed with her. No way is he going to let her finish with him. He’s going to sort the two of them out permanently. So he arranges two very different ‘accidents.’ Maybe he doesn’t even tell Diana.”
She downed the last of her coffee and put her mug on the side. “Well?”
“OK,” Mullen said. “You’ve made a good case. But where’s the hard evidence?”
“You’re the private eye, buster.”
* * *
Mullen’s intention had been to get to the Meeting Place early and in some way or other confront Kevin Branston. He hadn’t worked out the details in his head when he left Boars Hill. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, as the saying goes, especially on the Oxford ring road system on a Friday, when the rush hour begins midway through the afternoon and lasts forever — or so it seemed to Mullen as he sat fuming in his car on the slow drag towards the Heyford Hill roundabout.
So Mullen actually arrived five minutes late, which put him at an immediate disadvantage. Branston was onto him within seconds, even though he had tried to slip in unobtrusively.
“What time do you call this, Mullen?”
“Sorry, the traffic was really bad.”
“The traffic is the same for everyone,” Branston snapped. Mullen was tempted to argue the toss on that. Branston was within cycling distance, so of course queues of stationary vehicles weren’t going to affect him significantly. But he merely apologised again.
“I’m really sorry, Kevin. It really was just a misjudgement. I’ve moved house and didn’t realise quite how long it would take me. I’ll allow more time next Friday.”
“Good.” Branston seemed to be mollified. He switched into his more normal organisational mode. “We’re one down in the kitchen. So keep an eye on the food queues. Hungry people don’t like to be kept waiting. And of course England are pretty much down and out of the World Cup, so who knows how that will affect people’s mood.”
“Sure.” Mullen moved off through the scrum of people. He had noticed on the BBC website that England had crashed to their second defeat the previous night. What with everything else going on in his life, it seemed totally irrelevant. But he knew from his own brief footballing career in the army how easily passions were raised and how much it hurt when your team lost.
“See the game last night?” It was Brian. Mullen liked him. He and his wife Jean were there every Friday doing their bit. He had a pack of loo rolls under his arm. “Urgent delivery!” he laughed. And then he was gone.
It was a subdued crowd that evening. Mullen put it down partly to depression resulting from England’s World Cup disaster. It had been a lovely day, the warmest of the week, and although that meant people were very happily smoking and chatting outside, everyone seemed rather flat. The only person who got excited about the food being slower than usual was a man called Terry who had diabetes and hence a very short fuse at meal times. Mullen got a roll off Jean and made him chew on it. He suspected that Terry was making the most of his condition to try and jump to the front of the queue. He wasn’t having that, but equally he didn’t want unnecessary trouble. He’d bring it up at the end-of-day team meeting in case there were better ways he could have handled it.
But apart from another blockage in the gents loo — this time a combination of a pair of pants and two plastic bags — it was a pretty uneventful evening. After the punters had gone and the clearing and cleaning up had been completed, the team settled down with cups of tea and debriefed.
Terry and Jean complained about the shortage of cloths and cleaning materials, but in general everyone seemed to be keen to get off home. Branston, who had been yawning intermittently through the meeting, called Mullen back as he prepared to leave.
“Hey,” he said. “I understand it was you who found Chris dead in the river.”
“Yeah.” Mullen could hardly deny it. That sort of information was bound to come out eventually, though he was surprised. No-one else at the Meeting Place had mentioned it, which meant that it surely wasn’t public knowledge. He wondered who Branston’s source was.
“That’s quite a coincidence,” Branston continued, looking askance at Mullen. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
Mullen shook his head. “Not really. Maybe after the coroner has passed judgement.”
Branston gave another yawn. His breath smelt of garlic and mints. But he hadn’t finished. “It must have been quite a surprise for you.”
“Looks like you need an early night,” Mullen replied, trying to change the subject.
Branston yawned again. “Ten out of ten for observation, Doug.” He pressed his shoulders back, flexing his arms. “Gina, my wife, wakes me up. She’s always waking up and then she turns on the lights and fusses about getting cups of tea and scanning the internet on her tablet. So I wake up too and then I can’t get back to sleep either.”
“Can’t the doctor prescribe something for her?” A thought was flitting elusively round Mullen’s brain.
“Of course. And they have done. But it’s a dangerous road. I don’t approve myself. You can easily become dependent on them. So Gina saves them for when she’s feeling desperate. As for me, I just move into the spare room when I need an uninterrupted night.”
Mullen paused. He was tempted to ask what drugs the doctor had prescribed for Gina Branston, but something held him back — caution or intuition — and then the opportunity was gone.
