Seventy Summers
Amy and her best friend Alice are seventy. It’s 1989 and the world has changed out of all recognition from when they were growing up together in the old town of Spinton in Kent.
This new series will detail the daily lives of the two friends as they reminisce about their earlier lives. Amy will also record some of the shorter mysteries she was involved in. Mysteries that never made the Amy Rowlings Golden Age crime series.
So, here’s chapter one to give you a taste of what to expect. There will be two short mysteries per book. The first is The Jazz Singer.
Seventy Summers
Chapter One
Reunion
‘Mollison Farm, Alice speaking.’ A series of beeps sounded in her ear, then a female voice was heard.
‘Hello Alice speaking, this is Amy speaking.’
‘AMY!’ Alice almost shouted. ‘Have you come home? How long have you been back? When can you come to see me…? Or I’ll come to see you… it’s been so long.’ Alice’s voice cracked as she spoke.
‘One year, two months and six days, not that I’ve been counting,’ Amy said. ‘How are things at the farm?’
‘Oh, never mind the farm. I’ve got so many questions.’
‘I don’t have enough change for questions, dear heart. I’m using my last twenty p coin. I just wanted to wish you a very happy birthday.’
‘At least tell me where you are. Are you back home in Nottingham? No, of course you aren’t or you wouldn’t be calling from a telephone box… How is Alicia? Has she rec…’ Alice stopped speaking as she heard a series of pips, then the line went dead.
‘Damn,’ Alice said as she replaced the handset on the base.
I’ll wait a bit. She might call again if she gets hold of some change.
Five minutes later, she got to her feet as she heard the back door open. Hurrying through the kitchen doorway from the lounge, she threw her hands up in delight as she saw her lifelong best friend standing by the big oak table in the farmhouse kitchen. ‘Is it really you?’ she yelled as she scurried across the kitchen and threw herself into Amy’s open arms.
‘I’ve missed you so much,’ she sobbed.
Amy squeezed tight as her own tears rolled down her cheeks. ‘I’m sorry it’s been so long. I’ve thought about you every day.’
It was a full three minutes before the two women let go of each other and began to wipe the tears from their faces.
‘Happy seventieth birthday, dear heart,’ Amy said, patting the gaily wrapped present she had placed on the table. ‘Is the kettle on? I’m parched.’
Still dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, Alice crossed the kitchen, picked up the electric kettle and shook it. Then, deciding it needed a top up, she filled it at the tap above the big Belfast sink that had been in place for over sixty years. ‘It’s not fair. I didn’t get to see you on your seventieth.’
‘I was hoping to have been back for that, but Alicia’s recovery took longer than they thought it might. She was in a bad way after that road accident.’
Alice dropped three tea bags into the pot and tapped her foot as she waited for the kettle to boil. ‘Is she all right now? I so wanted to fly out to see her myself, but I couldn’t leave the farm. I was in the middle of negotiating selling off the top pastures to the council. They want to build a new school.’
‘Alicia’s made a remarkable recovery. She won’t play netball at top flight level again though, but as she said, that’s a small price to pay. She was lucky to survive the impact.’ Amy’s face lost a lot of its colour as she thought about how close to death her daughter had come.
As the kettle finally boiled, Alice poured water into the teapot, carried it across to the table, then picked up two large, striped mugs from the draining board.
‘Those Aussie trucks are huge, aren’t they? It was a miracle she survived at all.’ She paused as she took in her best friend. Age had hardly seemed to touch Amy. Her hair was now white/grey instead of the flaxen tone she had kept well into her fifties. Her face was unblemished, with just a few laughter lines around the eyes. Figure-wise, she had hardly changed at all. Alice was sure she could still have slipped into one of the summer dresses she had bought from the Brigden’s second-hand fashion store, where she used to buy all her clothes before the Second World War changed everything. ‘You will be in the country come January for your seventy-first, won’t you?’
Amy nodded. ‘I’m back for good. Alicia came home too. No more globetrotting for me.’
‘I’d love to see her. I could come up to Nottingham when you’re settled.’
Amy smiled. ‘That would be lovely. I know she’s looking forward to seeing you.’ She paused for a moment, then went on. ‘How are things here? Do you see much of your granddaughter?’
‘Nicola? Not really. She only pops in when she wants something. She’s going out with a right toerag at the moment. He’s a taxi driver, but he spends most of his waking hours in the bookies. He’s in there after every fare. I’ve had a strong word with her about him, but she won’t listen to me. She’s very strong-willed. Just like her mother.’
‘How is Martha? Does she ever get in touch? What about Marjorie?’
‘Martha has never changed. She only ever thinks about the day I die so that she can get her hands on what’s left of the farm, but, as you know, because it’s in a trust, she never will. We don’t speak. I send her a birthday card with a tenner in it every year and she uses the money to get a taxi over here so she can return the card through my letterbox. As for Marjorie. She’s living in one of the farm’s trust owned houses, though I never get any thanks for it. She’s still very much under Martha’s influence and wouldn’t dream of getting on the wrong side of her by dropping in to say hello to me.’
Alice poured the tea, then tipped in milk from a white jug. ‘It’s shop-bought, I’m afraid. I let the last two cows go in March.’ She sighed. ‘It’s only a farm in name now. There’s nothing much left of the original hundred acres that Dad left me when he died.’
Amy leaned across and patted Alice’s hand. ‘And you enlarged it to a hundred and fifty acres during the war.’ She looked at her friend with sad eyes. ‘It would be too much for you now, dear heart. I know you don’t look a day over fifty, but you’re seventy now. You can’t do the things you once did.’
Alice smiled softly. She was still a beautiful woman and had always been compared to the Hollywood actress Rita Hayworth. Her hair, once a rich chestnut colour, was now steel grey and was tied at the nape of her neck. Her lips were full and her almost unblemished skin was stretched tight over her high cheekbones. A lifetime of getting up before dawn to fulfil her duties on the farm had meant that her body was still in wonderful condition for her age. Her green eyes were dimmer though, a result of the cataracts she had been diagnosed with the previous year.
‘I still get up at five,’ she said. ‘You can’t break a lifelong habit like that. I’m always tucked up by ten at night, but I have to have an hour on the sofa in the afternoons.’ She paused as she took a sip of tea. ‘There’s only the house, the barn, the old milking parlour and the paddock left now. I sold the rest off in packets.’ She took another sip. ‘I’ve done well out of it, though it still seems strange to look out from the yard to see a housing estate on what were my most productive fields in the middle acres.’
‘Things have changed so much,’ Amy said, ‘but some things haven’t changed at all. I slowed to a crawl to have a look at our old cottage on my way down the lane. There’s a For Sale sign outside. It brought back so many memories. Mum’s been gone ten years next month. Dad’s been gone for twenty. I still feel so guilty about selling the place, but we needed the money at the time. Bodkin’s nursing home fees weren’t cheap, even though the police federation chipped in.’
‘Poor Bodkin,’ Alice said quietly. ‘It was such a shame to see him fade away like that.’
‘Dementia stole him from me,’ Amy replied with a crack in her voice. ‘He didn’t know any of us in the end.’ She sniffed as she reached for her handkerchief. ‘Still, he had seventy-five good years. It was funny, you know, although he didn’t know who I was, he could remember virtually every detail of the cases we worked on together.’ She cleared her throat. ‘He used to talk about me as though I was someone else, but he always said he couldn’t have brought so many villains to justice without my help.’
Alice got to her feet and was about to comfort her friend, but Amy waved her hands in front of her. ‘It’s all right, Alice. It’s been four years now. I’ve learned to live with it.’ She picked up her cup and drained it. ‘That one hit the spot,’ she said.
She pushed the gaily wrapped present towards Alice. ‘Happy birthday, my darling. I hope you enjoy using this as much as I think you will.’
Alice slowly pulled off the ribbon, then, using the end of her teaspoon, she slipped it into the folded wrapping paper and eased it apart. Inside, she found a box containing the latest Sony Walkman.
‘What’s a Sony Walkman when it’s at home?’ she asked, opening the top of the box and pulling out the cassette player.
‘It’s a personal tape player,’ Amy explained. ‘Look, there are some headphones in there. You can listen to music when you’re on your daily walks now.’
‘Blimey,’ Alice said, holding up the headset. ‘So I can listen to my Frank Sinatra cassettes as I walk up Long Lane?’ She put the headphones on the table and picked up the unit to study it. Pressing a button, the front of the casing flipped open, revealing a cassette deck. ‘It’s so small, it will easily fit in my pocket.’
‘And you can fast forward or rewind the tape if you want to listen to a particular song again,’ Amy said.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Alice said, looking from the Walkman to Amy, then back again. ‘But what made you think of this? You know I have a hi-fi kit.’
‘Ah, but you can’t carry that all the way up the stairs when you go to bed and you can’t cart it all the way along the lanes when you’re out and about.’
‘That’s true,’ Alice said. ‘It will come in very handy, although I don’t listen to music in bed.’
‘Ah, but that’s the clever part,’ Amy replied. ‘I wondered what could be done when you told me you were struggling to read in your last letter.’
Alice picked up the player again and frowned. ‘You can read with it?’
Amy laughed. ‘Pretty much. You can get audiocassettes from the library. There are even a couple of companies that do mail order rentals. Books have been recorded on audio for years now. They’re for the blind really, but you’ll come into that category until you get your operations booked to sort out your eyes. When are you having them, by the way?’
‘It would be in ten years’ time, the way the NHS is at the moment, but fortunately I have the money to pay privately for the operations. I’m going under the knife or whatever they use next spring.’
‘Well then, this will keep you going until you’re fully sighted again.’
Alice grinned. ‘I’m going to the library tomorrow as it happens. I’ll see what they’ve got.’
‘You can order them up or put your name on a list just like you can, print books,’ Amy said excitedly. ‘If you haven’t read it, try Stephen King’s ‘IT’ but don’t take that one to bed with you.’ Amy laughed, then went on. ‘The Colour Purple is brilliant too.’
‘You can help me make a list,’ Alice said, picking up the big pot and pouring Amy another cup of tea.
Amy took a sip and pulled a face. ‘Stewed,’ she said.
Later, Alice filled Amy in on all the local gossip, which included a story about Big Nosed Beryl, the bane of Amy’s life when she worked at The Mill clothing factory. ‘She’s seventy-two now, and she’s still as bad as she ever was, making stories up without a smidgeon of truth behind them. She was spouting off in the Old Bull as usual last weekend, but she picked on the wrong person. Unbeknown to her, Mavis Pringle was standing behind her when she told the whole snug that Mavis had run off with her toy boy. A young man of fifty years old. “It just shows you what you can get if you have money,” she said. Anyway, Mavis taps her on the shoulder and introduces her nephew, Bryan, the man she’s supposed to have run off with. Beryl nearly choked on her half pint of Guinness and tried to make out she hadn’t been talking about Mavis but some other woman with the same name who lives on the old Ebenezer estate.’
‘Good old Beryl,’ Amy said with a laugh. ‘She’ll go to her grave, insisting that the Grim Reaper told her a secret a few seconds before she died.’
Alice nodded. ‘And we still get the same sort of silly criminals that you and Bodkin used to chase. You remember Don Two and Back Door Billy.’
Amy laughed out loud. ‘Oh, I used to love following their exploits. There was one chap who tried to hold up the chip shop with his son’s toy cap gun. The lad reported him to the police for stealing his toy.’ She laughed again. ‘What’s the latest one been up to?’
‘A peeping Tom who used to climb a tree to look into the upstairs window of a night shift worker nurse and her lover. A young postman who nipped in for a cuddle when her husband had gone to work.’
‘Really? What did they call him?’
‘Sleeping Tom, because he used to climb the tree in her garden and watch through his binoculars. But he fell asleep up there one morning and the gas man discovered him when he came to read the meter. He was her next-door neighbour.’
Amy laughed again. ‘Oh dear, Bodkin would have loved him.’
‘I’ll tell you what I’d like,’ Alice said as she lifted her cup, but instead of taking a sip, she wrapped both hands around the mug and held it in front of her.
‘What’s that, darling?’ Amy replied.
‘I’d like to hear you talk me through some of your old mysteries. The ones you were involved in either during the war or just after. There were so many that I can’t remember a lot of them.’
Amy pursed her lips, then looked up at the big clock on the wall. ‘I’m game, but I’ve got to be going in about an hour. I told Alicia I’d be home before seven.’
‘Oh, I don’t mean now. I mean, so I can listen to them on my new toy.’
‘You want me to record my old cases on tape?’
‘If you wouldn’t mind, dear. I was going to ask you before you went out to Australia to be with Alicia, when my eyes first started to play up, but there wasn’t time and my eyes aren’t good enough to read anything that’s not written in super large print now. To be honest, I even struggle with that.’
‘Okay,’ Amy said. ‘I’m going to have a lot of time on my hands once Alicia gets a job and is settled again. I’ll make a list of some of the shorter ones, but won’t they sound a little flat? I’d just be listing a load of facts about the cases?’
‘You could be a bit more adventurous with them,’ Alice said.
‘But I’m not an author, dear heart. You’re a far better writer than me. You’ve had your diary going since before the war.’
‘I’d still like to hear your voice explaining the mysteries to me. I’m pretty sure there are a lot of cases I never got to hear about. I’d like to refresh my memory with some of the ones from when you first started out, too. They don’t have to be too long, but… but do you suppose you can read them as though you were narrating one of those audiocassettes you mentioned?’
Amy frowned, but then nodded. ‘I’ll give it a go, seeing as it’s you. Would you like them read in third person or in first?’
Alice thought about it. First is more immediate but most things I read are written in third person… I honestly don’t care, Amy, whichever suits you best.’
‘I’d better get my novelist’s head on then,’ Amy said, waving her empty cup at Alice as she got to her feet. ‘Now, I need to visit the little girl’s room. My bladder’s not what it was.’
Later, as the pair were walking arm in arm along Long Lane, they slowed as they approached Amy’s old cottage.
‘It looks so unwanted lying empty like that,’ Amy said as they stopped next to the For Sale sign that had been screwed to the fence post. She nodded to the cottage next door. ‘Remember Mrs Dormer? She used to hang her head out of the window and tell us to hurry up with the canoodling as she was trying to get to sleep and we were being too noisy.’ She smiled at the memory. ‘Bodkin used to call her Mrs Dormouse.’
Alice laughed. ‘The old girl’s long gone. There’s a woman called Golightly living there now. Her husband was in the army and served in the Falklands. He was never the same when he came back. He’s in an institution now. She lives here with their two sons.’
Amy looked up and down the lane, then flicked the latch on the gate and stepped into the small front garden. Hurrying along the path,, she shielded her eyes from the glare and looked in through the front window. When she turned back, she had a look of pain on her face. ‘I hate to see it empty like that. It should be full of life. There ought to be toys on the floor, or bookshelves on the walls.’
Alice stepped away from the gate as Amy came back out. ‘I’m sure someone nice will buy it,’ she said.
Two hours later, the friends held onto each other tightly as they hugged and said their goodbyes on the asphalt track that ran alongside the farmhouse. After a few minutes, Alice walked back into the farmyard and closed the big triple barred gate. ‘Let’s not leave it another fifteen months,’ she said as she wiped away a stream of tears. ‘I can find my way to Nottingham, even with these eyes.’
‘I’ll call you at the weekend and we can make arrangements,’ Amy said. ‘Meanwhile, I’ll get started on those tapes. It will keep me busy in the evenings. Alicia will spend most of her time catching up with the boyfriend she’s hardly seen for the last eighteen months.’
‘What’s he like? He must have missed her when she was away for all that time.’
‘Oh, he made three trips and stayed for a month at a time. They’re an item. It would take more than a car crash and eight months in the hospital to split those two up. They’re joined at the hip.’
‘Drive safely,’ Alice called as Amy reversed the car onto Long Lane. ‘Call me when you get back, even if it’s only to say you arrived safely.’
She stood at the gate waving until Amy’s car was a dot in the distance.
At eight-thirty that evening, Alice picked up the phone to hear Amy’s voice on the line.
‘I’m back,’ she said. ‘Hang on, Alicia wants to say hello.’
Alice and her goddaughter spent the next five minutes catching up, then Amy came back online.
‘I checked out the price of our old house at the estate agents in Spinton on the way home. They want fifty-seven thousand pounds for it. I couldn’t believe it. Mum and Dad inherited it back in the day, but I remember him telling me it was worth about five hundred pounds. I know that was a lot of money back then, but almost sixty thousand? That’s just ridiculous.’
‘Were you tempted, then?’ Alice asked.
‘I’m not going to lie, I was. But I was so disappointed when I found out the price. Even if I sold the place I’m in now and chucked in all my savings, I wouldn’t get close to that amount. I’m a pensioner too, so there’s no way I’d get a mortgage for the rest of it.’
‘Oh, that’s such a shame,’ Alice said. ‘It would have been lovely to have you living so close again.’
‘That’s what was in my head all the way home.’
‘What about Alicia? Can she help? She’s going to be looking for a job, isn’t she? Maybe she could take on a small mortgage?’
‘She’s got her heart set on working up here. Douglas, her boyfriend, is a home bird anyway and his mum has MS, so he has to live close to her. They’re going to look for a place together this weekend. They want to rent while they save up for a deposit on their own house.’
‘Good luck to them,’ Alice said. ‘I hope they find somewhere nice.’ She paused. ‘That would mean you will be living alone. How do you feel about that?’
‘I like my own company, so it won’t be too bad, and Alicia will drop in to see me regularly.’
‘I know what you mean about living alone. It does have its upsides. You don’t have to worry about what other people expect of you. You can come and go as you please.’
‘There’ll always be a bed made up for you when you’ve had your operations. You’ll be like that Bionic Woman from the TV… what’s her name… Lindsay Wagner? You won’t be in danger of catching the wrong train with those eyes.’
Alice laughed. ‘Seriously though, Amy. Would you really have bought the cottage if you had the money? You’re not tied too tightly to the area you live in now? I know it holds good and bad memories for you, what with Bodkin’s illness and everything.’
‘I’d have come down like a shot,’ Amy said. ‘And Bodkin would come with me. I keep him in a jar on the shelf.’
Can’t wait for this one , Trevor, as well as the latest Amy and Bodkin and Relative Strangers – you’re spoiling us with all this fine fare – good job books are calorie-free!