Terror on Tuesday
Lois Meade #2
2003, EN
? Terror on Tuesday ?
One
“I used to carry a knife,” Lois said conversationally, “when I was at school.” She had not bothered to lower her voice, and grinned at Derek’s expression.
He looked at her across the pub table. Lois Meade, his wife of nearly seventeen years, still a smart girl and making heads turn, and still with the same challenge in her eye as when he’d first seen her serving in Woolworths. She’d just left school then, to the relief of her parents and teachers, and it had been instant lust on his part. He knew she’d had a fairly wild youth, but this latest revelation was new. They’d been talking about the lawlessness of today’s kids, and about their own, who were safely at school, when Lois dropped her carefully calculated bombshell.
“No need to tell the whole pub,” he said calmly, rising bravely to the challenge.
“Yeah, well, things don’t change all that much,” said Lois, downing the rest of her beer. She looked at her watch, and stood up. “Time I went,” she said, and leaned across to kiss Derek firmly on the cheek. “See you later, then.” She walked across the bar with her loping stride, and was gone.
“Ahem,” said a tall, soldierly man standing at the bar. “I could not help overhearing Mrs Meade, and I must disagree. In my view,” he added, clearing his throat again, “today’s youngsters are totally out of control. Quite different from my day.”
Derek did not answer, but nodded and finished the ploughman’s he had shared with Lois. He was rewiring the Waltonby pub, a long job, and she had joined him for his lunch break.
However, the barmaid, a confident, chatty nineteen-year-old, dark and quick, laughed. “That was a long time ago, Major,” she said. “Things are bound to change. Now then, drink up and have another to give you strength.”
She straightened her short skirt, turned to refill his glass from the Teacher’s optic, and winked at the delivery man who was dumping crates in the storeroom behind the bar. “Hi, Darren!” she called. “Time for a quick one?”
The bar was not full, being a weekday, but half a dozen or so people looked up and smiled. The unmistakable innuendo was to them an extra something to brighten the day. But the major, standing so straight, banged his hand down on the bar and said loudly, “That’s quite enough of that, young lady! This has always been a respectable pub, as our landlord should have told you.” He sniffed, turned around on his heel, and walked out, followed obediently by a small, brown terrier, one ear up and one down.
“What’s eating him, Hazel?” said Derek, looking across at the barmaid. He’d seen the major in here most days since he’d started work on the rewiring, but had not taken much notice. One of those retired military blokes with not enough to do, he’d reckoned. Now he was curious; Lois had obviously roused him from his usual dignified silence. Derek waited for Hazel to finish dealing with the delivery, then asked her again, “Funny kind of bloke, isn’t he?” he said.
She laughed. “Oh, he’s all right. I expect I annoyed him, reminding him that he was old. Quite fancies himself, does the major! Likes to chat us girls up, in his slimy way. We go along with it, so long as he doesn’t go too far. Geoff doesn’t mind, do you?” she added, addressing the landlord, who had just come in with a plate of cod and chips.
The conversation became general, and Derek gathered that the major was called Todd-Nelson, lived alone in the village, came into the pub most days, and enjoyed the company of the young barmaids. He seldom talked to anyone else, and was very much a creature of habit.
Huh! thought Derek, not nasty habits, I hope. He didn’t really approve of these young girls serving behind the bar, especially late at night when things could get rough. His own daughter, Josie, now fifteen, was already talking about the time when she’d be able to earn a bit of money serving drinks. “Everybody does it,” she’d said. Like going clubbing, another of Josie’s goals in life. He sighed, then put it out of his mind. Lois would handle it, when the time came. He was confident of that.
“Right, Geoff,” he said. “Back to work.” He took his plate over to the bar, and Hazel smiled at him.
“Cheer up,” she said. “It may never happen.”
¦
Lois Meade sat in her small office, chewing the end of a pen and studying a list she had made on a piece of paper in front of her. The office had once been a doctor’s surgery in a big, solid house, four-square brick, with a small garden fronting Long Farnden High Street. Lois had been the doctor’s cleaner, and now here she was, moved from a council house in nearby Tresham, settled with her family, who had spread gratefully into the unaccustomed space. There was even a large garden at the back where Derek grew vegetables, and escaped from the usual turmoil of family life with three growing kids.
Josie, the fifteen-year-old, was first, then Douglas, nearly thirteen, and Jamie had been the last. Now eleven, he went with the others to school in the nearby town of Tresham. He sometimes called on his grandmother, who still lived on the estate and claimed she missed them all more than they missed her. “Your Lois has got ideas above her station,” an elderly neighbour had said to Lois’s mother, but she’d received a dusty answer, and Gran had encouraged Lois and Derek to make the move.
The telephone interrupted Lois’s thoughts. “Hello?” It was Derek, wondering if he should pick up anything on the way home. “No, I don’t want anything. Been to the village shop today. But listen, Derek, what time will you be home? I need some help, choosing a name.” She looked at the list in front of her. “I don’t like any of ‘em at the moment. Perhaps you or the kids can think of something better.”
Derek had originally suggested Careful Cleaners for the business Lois was setting up, but she had shaken her head and said she could do better than that. Now she was having trouble. Farnden Cleaners? Superclean? Clean-up Squad? No…none of them was right.
“We’ll do some brainstorming later, then,” she said.
“We’ll do
“Never mind, see you,” she said, and put down the telephone.
Lois Meade had cleaned houses in Long Farnden for several years before coming to live in the village. It had been an odd story, sad in a lot of ways. The doctor’s house, for instance, had come on the market because he and his wife had more or less run away from the great scandal. A woman had been murdered in the village, and he had been implicated. It had been enough of a stigma to put off purchasers, and the house was left vacant for months, the price sinking lower and lower, until Lois and Derek had looked at it, decided to ignore the bad luck name it had acquired, and bought it. Lois had liked the doctor, and felt no bad vibrations. On the contrary, as she went around the house she often thought of the good side of Dr Rix.
She had decided that on moving to Farnden she would no longer clean houses there, and had given in her notice all round. She knew only too well how enmeshed a cleaner can get in the private lives of her employers. It had helped, of course, when she’d been needed to assist the police with their enquiries…
But the children were still growing and ever more expensive in their demands, and she and Derek had pooled all their savings to raise a large mortgage. Lois decided to set up a business around the work she knew best, employing several girls to do cleaning on a proper, professional basis. She would fill in herself when the need arose, but in other villages, not her own. “Cleaning people’s houses,” she said in explanation to Derek, “gives you a special place. They talk to you, you see things, private things, and it’s best if they’re not too close to home.” Derek knew
