The Inspector Walter Darriteau Murder Mysteries - Books 1-4 David Carter (autobiographies to read txt) 📖

trained his family to do likewise. So far as anyone else was concerned he had been on a cheap package holiday to Benidorm, again. What they didn’t know they couldn’t become jealous about.

Outside of the family no one knew of the existence of il Pratino Del Cielo, the adjoining lawn of heaven, in roughly translated English, though Langley much preferred the Italian version. He had learnt the language. It had taken him some time, but he’d managed it in the end. Il Pratino Del Cielo, the words rolled off his tongue, his Italian home, the epitome of his life’s work.

He was happy there and one day he would retire there too, but not just yet awhile because he still had business to accomplish at home, for he could never lend money in Italia. That would have been beyond the pale.

He was sitting in the courtyard, straw hat on his head to keep off the worst of the midday sun, a half bottle of best Chianti before him, barely touched. He was not a glutton, never had been, preferred to savour the finer things of life in small quantities, figured that was the best way to gain true enjoyment, to take pleasure from anything, sparingly. Pigging out was for pigs, or porco, as he preferred to say in the local lingo.

He was still thinking of the early days.

He was thinking of his forthcoming marriage.

He was just twenty and she almost eighteen.

He was thinking of the McIntyres, and bloody Bobby Watson.

ROSE MASEFIELD WAS Catholic and to keep her sweet the wedding was taking place at Saint Mary’s Roman Catholic Church. Langley’s mind was not on the wedding. He still hadn’t got dressed. He was thinking of Bobby Watson.

The freak had borrowed money from Langley, two hundred and fifty quid, and afterwards he had point blank refused to repay the loan. No one ever refused to repay Langley Wells because most of his customers knew full well they would need to visit the bank of Langley again next week, next month, next year, some time for sure, and they were desperate not to cut off his sure and safe supply of ready cash.

If Bobby Watson was allowed to get away with it, and was seen and heard to be bragging in the Golden Bell about how he hadn’t bothered to repay the strange Wells man, then anyone could. Langley grimaced at the thought, and tried hard not to see the total figure of unpaid loans he now had outstanding. It was vast, stretching to more than two thousand individual transactions. The small red notebook had long since morphed into several vast maroon ledgers that could be screwed open and expanded, into which additional pages would often be added.

What would happen if they all decided not to repay?

He would be ruined.

All his hard work would have been for nothing.

Langley belched. The thought of it was giving him indigestion, and on his blessed wedding day too.

‘Are you ready yet, Langley?’ his mother called through. ‘I swear that boy would be late for his own funeral,’ she muttered.

‘Don’t speak of funerals today of all days, mother,’ said Langley’s father, ‘not on the boy’s wedding day.’

The problem was still in Langley’s head when they finally piled into the car that had been patiently waiting outside. Fact was, he was late for his own wedding, forcing Rose in her larger, smarter, car to circumvent the block three times, as she grew more upset at the thought that the crazy man had grown cold feet overnight. She would remind him of that countless times through the coming years. She forever imagined he had experienced second thoughts when nothing could have been further from the truth, though he wasn’t about to set her straight on that.

The thought of not turning up had never crossed Langley’s mind. He loved Rose Masefield completely, loved her to bits, always had, and had never touched another woman, not in passion, and yet he still couldn’t stop thinking about bloody Bobby Watson.

CAROLE AND NORMAN MCINTYRE had been married for twenty-two years, coincidentally married in the same church. They lived on the far side of the estate and were irregular customers of Langley’s. For once they didn’t owe him a bean and were mighty happy to be that way, and that was solely down to Carole Mac, as her friends called her, because she worked her rocks off.

She started at seven cleaning at the local primary school, washing and polishing the brown square tiled floors. After that, she’d hurry to the kwik discount utilitarian supermarket on the out of town shopping estate, the place where they piled it high and sold it cheap, or at least told everyone they did, where Carole would spend the day working flat out on the tills, often serving many of her neighbours and friends who would smile at her embarrassingly.

She enjoyed her work there. It was interesting to see the rubbish everyone else bought, and the quality of the meals, or lack of it, some of them enjoyed. If Carole Mac had been forced to eat the sludge that some of her neighbours took home, she would have emigrated.

At six o’clock she’d hurry home for a frantic tea, a quick wash and change, and then she’d scurry down to the Golden Bell for half past seven, where she’d turn on her smiley, bubbly head, and face many of the same people she had served earlier in the not-so-super supermarket, as they gazed into their pints, and checked their lottery tickets, and moaned about their lot in life, and threw some cash into the coin eating fruit machine, and wondered where it had all gone so terribly wrong.

By the time they had put the towels up and washed all the glasses Carole would rarely get home much before half past eleven, in time to see her husband ensconced in front of the television set eating cheap crisps and watching football. For the most part the McIntyres kept