Bumping Uglies

Chapter Seven

I sat in my car waiting for my phone to ring. It was dark and just beginning to rain on an evening that for October was somewhat cooling, but not so much for me.

I was sweating and my heart was beating erratically in my chest. I ran a finger around the inside of the collar of my shirt to ease the passage of air, which seemed somehow restricted within the confines of the car.

I had to call into one of my neighbours within the village to borrow an iron. The shirt I was wearing, one of only a couple that I owned, had been screwed-up in a ball at the bottom of my wardrobe and resembled a well-used and crumpled piece of tin foil. I endured the knowing look of my neighbour when she handed the appliance over after first offering to do my ironing for me.

I had vacillated wildly on the decision to make the call; fighting with a moral code that forbade such things, all the while aware of a gnawing sensation that, perhaps, Priya might be right.

It's hard to make sensible judgements about anything, let alone affairs of the heart, when one's balls are over-riding one's brain.

The turmoil and mental paralysis caused by a kiss with Sophie; a five-second encounter that I knew to be meaningless, was indicative of the kernel of truth that lay at the heart of Priya's arguments. It was getting to the point where I would fuck a crack in the pavement if I thought it had winked at me. That was a state of affairs sorely impairing my decision making.

In the end, I had suppressed feelings of wrongness and dialled the number on the card for The Tunnel of Love.

It rang through to an answerphone with a message in stilted English that requested the caller to state where they found the number and to describe their vehicle. Finally, the message concluded with a postcode.

I don't know what I expected; perhaps a chirpy receptionist and an online booking system, but the cloak-and-dagger nature of the call left me feeling at once both weird and somewhat reassured.

The postcode given for The Tunnel of Love turned out to be an absolute nightmare to find.

I drove from Pebble Deeping through sleepy villages, rolling fields and tree-lined lanes into the outskirts of Wolverhampton, marvelling as I always did at the abrupt change in environment from the Shropshire countryside into the urban tumour of the West Midlands conurbation.

The little-used satnav application on my phone took me through the city centre and across the ring-road towards the Birmingham New Road. Not much seemed to have changed since I left the area to move to the farm at Pebble Deeping. I even had a fleeting notion to drop into my old place of employment, Yeoman Turner Investigations, but that would have been beyond awkward.

The current owners and I were the best of enemies and the only vaguely friendly face would be Joan who had worked there since my father had established the place after leaving the West Midlands Police force. Joan would know something was up as soon as she saw me in a shirt and smelled the aftershave from a sample I had found lurking in the bottom of an old wash bag.

The thought of the old business put me in mind of my father. He had been a legend on the force and had done time working with vice prior to ending up on the notorious West Midlands Serious Crime Squad. That thought, and the memory of his stern face, nearly had me turn the car right around.

Nearly.

He would be spinning in his grave to know what his boy was on the way to. Not disappointing my father's ghost is one of the primary reasons that took me into the detection game in the first place as soon as I realised that joining the police was not for me.

With my mind trapped in the bear trap of the past, I drove on autopilot, instructed by the directions issued by the disembodied female voice from my phone and her occasional scolding criticisms when I ballsed them up.