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I drain the remains of my hot chocolate and stand up. ‘Thank you for this. I ought to be heading off now. I’m just going to take a quick look at Fred’s flat before I go.’
‘Would you like me to come with you?’
‘On one condition. No more tricks!’ He laughs, takes my mug from me and follows me back downstairs and outside.
‘The entrance to Fred’s flat is at the front,’ Matt explains, as he leads me through a dark passageway between two of the other units. We emerge at the front of the building, and he shows me which key to use to open the external door. Once we’re inside, a staircase leads up to a small landing with a door on either side. He indicates the door on the right and once again shows me which key I need. The flat is dark inside, mainly because all the curtains are closed. It smells musty and stale.
I draw the curtains to let in the light, and the sight that greets me is depressing, to say the least. Unlike Matt’s spotless flat, this one looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in an age. Every surface has a thick covering of dust, and there is stuff everywhere, on the surfaces and piled on the floor. I pick my way through to the kitchen, which is the same as Matt’s, only filthy. The bathroom is worse, with thick black rings around the bath, and I can’t even describe the state of the toilet. It’s no wonder the café was allowed to deteriorate, if this is how Fred was living.
‘Fred was a bit of a hoarder,’ Matt explains. ‘I think it might have been a grief thing. He wasn’t very sociable when Nora was alive, but he pretty much became a hermit once she was gone. He’d drive to the supermarket once a week, and to the chemist to collect his prescriptions, but apart from that he stayed holed up in here. I think he used to spend a lot of time on eBay, mainly buying stuff that he thought would become a collector’s item one day. I used to come up here once a week so he could go through the takings with me, and I think I was his only social contact most weeks. There would be something new in here pretty much every time I came, although it was always junk. The only decent thing I ever remember him owning was a Rolex, which Nora bought him not long before she died. It’s probably in here somewhere, but goodness knows where.’
‘I’ve got it,’ I tell him, and show him my wrist.
‘He got himself in such a flap about that. She bought it online and he was convinced that she’d been done over and it was a fake. In a funny way it was good, because it made him go out. He had to go all the way to Bluewater to get it authenticated, and he was happier than I’d seen him in ages when he found out it was kosher.’
I look around me. There’s just so much stuff everywhere I wouldn’t know where to start. There might be other things of value in here, but I doubt very much that I’d have a clue what they were.
‘Can I make a suggestion?’ Matt asks.
‘Go on.’
‘If I were you, I’d get the house clearance people in here to take everything away, and then get some cleaners in. You could be going through this stuff for years and not find anything useful.’
I sigh and turn to leave. As I do, a large book with a floral cover in one of the bookshelves catches my eye. I pull it out and discover that it’s not a book, but a binder. I open it and find pages and pages of recipes inside. Some are handwritten, while others have obviously been cut out of magazines. Many of them are annotated, in a neat cursive script. I hand it to Matt, who whistles as he turns the pages.
‘I didn’t even know this existed,’ he breathes. ‘I’d recognise that handwriting anywhere, though. This is the motherlode, Daisy. This is Nora’s recipe book! It’s almost as if she wanted you to find it.’
Oh, great. On top of Matt’s thinly concealed sales pitch earlier, I’m now up against a ghost. Thankfully, I don’t believe in any of that woo-woo nonsense. If any of it was real, I’m sure Mum and Dad would have found a way to contact me by now, wouldn’t they?
My bigger problem, I realise, is that I am going to have to go through everything in this flat to make sure I don’t miss anything else.
15
I’m up ridiculously early for my shift at the café. I wasn’t going to do it, but Nan, Grandad, and Katie all thought Matt was right that I should get a feel for the place in order to be able to decide what best to do with it, so in the end I’d texted Matt and said I’d come after all. He’d texted back to say that they opened at 7.30 a.m., but he would be there from just before 7.
‘I assume you’re coming too? After all, it’s half yours,’ I’d said to Katie, before sending the confirmation text to Matt.
‘Nah,’ she’d smiled. ‘You can tell me about it. I trust your judgement.’
Sometimes, I wonder how we manage to stay as close as we are. I could happily smother her with a pillow, I think, as I pad down the dark corridor to the shower. I’m supposed to be on holiday, relaxing before going back to work on Monday, not stumbling about before six o’clock in the morning getting ready for an unpaid shift at a shitty café. I’m tempted to wake her up anyway, just so she knows what it’s like, but decide to bank the injustice for future use instead. Her time will come.
At least the car parking space behind the café is empty this time, and I park next to Matt’s van at a quarter past seven. The back door is open, and I wander into the kitchen to find Matt hard at work already, a chef’s bandanna fastened around his head.
‘Morning,’ I say, sounding surlier than I ought to.
‘Hi! I’m just prepping. I’ve put fresh oil in the fryer, and I’ve got some of the new sausages under the grill. Can you do me a favour and keep an eye on that thermometer there? When it gets to one hundred and eighty degrees, we need to turn it off unless we’re actually cooking.’
He indicates a large thermometer sticking out of the oil in the fryer.
‘Doesn’t it have a built-in thermostat?’ I ask.
‘It does, but it’s broken. I tried to get a replacement, but the fryer is so old that nobody makes the parts any more, and Fred said we couldn’t afford a new fryer. So, I get it up to temperature using the thermometer and then turn it off until I need it. It retains the heat pretty well, so it usually only needs a minute or so before it’s ready again.’
‘That’s a massive fire risk, isn’t it?’ I remember going to a fair once, where the Fire Brigade were doing demonstrations of kitchen fat fires. The speed at which the oil went from merely smoking to burning, and the intensity of the flames, have haunted me ever since.
‘Only if you forget to keep an eye on it. Oh, by the way, if you’re going to be in here, you need to cover your hair. I think there are some hair nets in the cupboard, hang on.’
He disappears into the storage cupboard and reappears holding one of those hideous nets that the dinner ladies at my school used to wear. Today is just getting better and better, I think, as I ram it onto my head and tuck my hair up inside it.
