S am received an urgent and unexpected message from Delia.
Closing shop. No time to lose. Come and pick me up!
Sam stared at the message for a full three seconds before rushing outside and driving straight round to Delia’s junk shop. Delia was waiting on the pavement.
“I’m impressed you came without asking what I wanted,” said Delia, as she climbed in.
Sam shrugged. “I trust you. Where are we going?”
“Head out to Park Avenue. I’ve had a tip-off.”
Sam started driving. It was more than a little cosy for two in the cabin of the Piaggio Ape, but the highly-caffeinated working mum lifestyle seemed to keep Delia on the trim side so she didn’t take up too much room. Pressed up close, Delia gave off a scent that combined furniture polish, strong glue and detergent cleaner. Sam could probably get high by just sniffing her, not that Sam was in the habit of sniffing her friends.
“If I phoned you in the night and asked you to help me bury a body would you come?” asked Delia
“Are we burying a body?” said Sam.
“No. I’m just saying you came quick, without question.”
Sam sighed. “You’ve called me about bodies before. It was a turkey body, but still.”
Delia sighed. “Poor Drumstick. I miss that goofy bird. Twizzler misses him too.”
Delia had owned two turkeys. Christmas dinners that she couldn’t bring herself to kill. Sam had investigated the poultrycide or murder-most-fowl or whatever it was, as a favour to Delia. The perpetrator was currently in prison. The man had actually been sent to prison for certain bomb-making activities and the turkey incident hadn’t even been mentioned in court, but Delia had felt vindicated.
“Turn here,” said Delia.
“Here?”
“Here. At the sign that says no entry for unauthorised personnel.”
Sam raised her eyebrows. “Are we authorised?”
“Hm.” Delia paused in thought. “It’s more like we have a moral imperative. That’s like authorisation, isn’t it?”
“Are you going to tell me what we’re doing here, before we get apprehended?” asked Sam. The little road looped around Skegness police station and various local council offices.
“Drive round. We’re looking for East Lindsey District Council’s offices. My contact told me they’re replacing dozens of chairs. The old ones are going in skips.”
“Because they’re broken? I can’t use broken chairs, Delia.”
“Sam, you know I’m a veteran skip diver, yes? There will be chairs in there that are broken, yes. What’s a dead cert is that there will also be chairs in there that someone spilled a yoghurt on and couldn’t be bothered to clean, or chairs that got stuck in a corner and everyone assumed were broken. There will be gold here, I can feel it in my bones.”
“Is that what we’re doing? Skip diving?” It sounded grubby.
“Look! Skips!” Delia was bouncing with excitement. “Park next to them.” Delia leapt out. “Come on, let’s get a wiggle on, Sam.”
“Are we allowed to do this?”
“Better to seek forgiveness than permission,” said Delia, already ahead of her.
Some of the chairs stood on the ground by the skips, so they were easy to access. Sam began to test them, sitting down and making sure levers adjusted as needed. “This one seems perfect,” she said.
“Expect they all are,” replied Delia. “Let’s see how many we can get in your van. There are flipcharts too and some bins and stuff. I bet they just got fancy new ones.”
They squeezed as many chairs as possible into the Piaggio and then slotted smaller items into the gaps. It was absorbing and fun. A sort of Tetris, but with spindle legs and levers as a complicating factor.
“What are you doing?”
Sam looked round the skip at the approaching police officer. The man had a black Labrador police dog on a lead at his side. It didn’t look like the kind of police dog that might savage your ankles on command, but you never could tell.
“We’re just taking some rubbish,” Delia said.
“I can’t permit that, I’m afraid.”
“Why not? It is rubbish, isn’t it?” Delia said.
The police officer rocked on his heels. The dog licked its lips.
“Private road, therefore this is technically trespass. And those items remain the property of the original owner while they’re on this land. Do you have permission to take them?”
“Um, no.”
“And what if you do take some of those chairs and then someone gets hurt? Are you going to blame the former owners of said chairs? It could leave them open to liability.”
The dog pulled forward and sniffed at Sam’s ankles.
Delia was momentarily lost for words. Sam jumped in. This was classic DefCon4-style nonsense, and she had more experience than her friend. “I could create a waiver document attached to an asset recycling receipt. Which would mean that no one would be held liable and the former owners would be able to demonstrate their ecological credentials.”
The policeman watched his dog sniff her trousers turn ups. “Are you a recycling company?”
Delia scoffed and waved at Sam’s van. “This is an ‘everything’ company.”
“Sadly true,” Sam agreed.
“Scooby seems awfully interested in your trousers there,” said the policeman.
“Um. He has excellent taste in clothing?”
“Would you be carrying anything that you need to tell me about?”
“What kind of sniffer dog is he?” asked Sam.
The policeman gave her a look as though he had caught her in a trap and she was about to admit to carrying Semtex and half a pound of cocaine. True, she had been wearing these trousers when Weenie White had lit his joint the other day, but surely the dog couldn’t smell that?
“Oh, it might be one of those cancer sniffing dogs,” said Delia.
Sam gave her a look. “A – why would the police use cancer sniffing dogs?”
“As a public kindness.”
“And B — I do not have trouser cancer.”
There was the thunk of a fire exit door and a woman in a thick cardigan and a council lanyard came out, clearly on her way home.
“Hey, Maureen,” said the policeman. “These people don’t have permission to go through this skip, do they?”
“We don’t care,” said Maureen. “Really don’t care. Just don’t fall in and die.” And she kept on walking.
The police officer gave Sam and Delia stern and knowing looks. “Don’t fall in and die. You heard her. These things can be a hazard.”
Sam hesitated. Delia paused beside her.
“Does… does that mean we can take the chairs?” said Delia, uncertainly.
The police officer puffed out his cheeks. “You’ve been warned about the dangers, yeah?”
Sam bent to pet the dog. The dog licked her hand, wagged his tail and went off with his handler.
As they drove away, the Piaggio van wallowing on its suspension under its load, Delia was animated. “That was just like magic. Waiver recycling document or whatever. You must teach me some of this stuff.”
“It’s just corporate-speak BS,” said Sam. “We’re not done yet, though. I still need to know how we get yoghurt stains out of upholstery.”
“And you have to tell me if you’re carrying drugs.”
“I am not carrying drugs. Or bomb-making equipment.”
“Oh, I’m the one with the bomb-making equipment,” said Delia. “You’ve seen my shop? I could rig up landmines, timebombs and rocket launchers with all the crap I’ve got in the back office.”
That evening, as Marvin was preparing dinner, Sam received a phone call from Lucas Camara. Marvin was preparing what he described as “a beef tataki Mikado like Vincent Price used to make.” Sam didn’t know if Vincent Price had personally taught Marvin the recipe or indeed what beef tataki Mikado was, but apparently it involved repeatedly whacking slices of beef with a heavy wooden mallet.
Sam stepped outside to take the call. The night was mild and the smell of the sea carried far inland.
“Lucas, sorry,” she said. “Had to get away from my dad. He’s doing some noisy cooking.”
“How is life living in holiday accommodation?”
“It is far from a permanent holiday.”
Detective Constable Lucas Camara was an intermittent feature of Sam’s life. Not quite close enough to be a friend, not nearly close enough to be potential boyfriend material, not officially a work colleague, although she had leaned on him for help more than once. Sam would have been happy to for him to be at least one of these things if not more. He was intelligent, kind, only a little older than she was, definitely a lot taller, and — and this was truly key — one of the few genuinely sane human beings she knew in this town.
“What can I do for you?” she asked. “Finally plucked up the courage to ask me out?”
She had no idea where that had come from. Well, she totally knew where that had come from — from thinking about his kind face and that gangly frame and those expressive hands and sometimes — constantly — questioning the nature of their relationship.
“Oh, um, is…?” he stammered. “I mean I wasn’t, but… if… were you expecting…?”
“I was joking!” she said quickly, and immediately wished she hadn’t, even though she had no idea what else she was going to say. Now she had probably killed off any chance he was ever going to ask her out.
“Oh. Yes. Of course. You’ve totally thrown me now,” he said. “Oh. Yes.”
“Yes?”
“I was just calling up to say hi, really.”
“Oh. Yeah. Hi.” So, it had been a social call and she’d brutalised it with her awkwardness. “It’s been a while.”
“Been a while since you dragged me into some criminal caper,” he said, lightly.
That’s it, she thought. Get the conversation back on track. Don’t spook the timid creature with any sudden movements. Coax it out.
“I’m sure you’ve been busy without me,” she said.
“Non-stop. I hear you bumped into one of my colleagues earlier on.”
“Ah,” she said. So, that had been the pretext for this little chat.
“Officer Scooby thought he had found a major player on the local drugs scene.”
“Officer Scooby is the dog, right?”
“Yep. He’s aptly named.”
“Always solving mysteries?”
“Will do anything for food. He’s pretty useless. I take it you were just enabling your friend, um, Delia, with one of her mad arts and crafts projects?”
“Other way round. I have to furnish this office.”
Across the way, there was the whine and clunk of a crane as a new static caravan was hoisted into the air. The workmen were going to be working into the night again. From inside the caravan, Marvin had started to sing. It sounded like Gilbert and Sullivan. Sam sighed.
“Work getting on top of you?” he asked.
“Oh, work is work,” she said. “Getting a good night’s sleep is the problem at the moment. You don’t live with your dad, do you?”
“Hey, I lived with my mum until last year. I understand your pain.”
“But you escaped.”
“It can be done.”
“Then there’s hope for us all.”
“Doesn’t mean I don’t have to go round for dinner five nights a week,” he said. “Fact, I’d better get off.”
“Catch you later, Lucas.”
“Night, Sam.”
The lifting crane and the comic operetta fought with one another, each trying to drown the other out. Sam didn’t know which she wanted to win.