[Brenda & Effie 03] - Conjugal Rites Page 3

  And then a very unexpected voice piped up.

  ‘Hello? Mr Danby?’

  Brenda jolted upright in her armchair. Robert! What was he doing calling in? Oh, help, she thought! Everyone’s at it now. She shifted closer to the wireless to hear what Robert was going to come out with.

  ‘I’d just like to say that what Sheila Manchu was saying earlier this evening, before midnight, it’s all true. Before I worked at Sheila’s hotel, I was an elf at the Christmas Hotel. And Mrs Claus had us drugged, all us elves. We were her slaves because she used to pop noxious substances in our cocoa. I was lucky to get away from that hideously festive place when I did.’

  ‘This is very interesting, Robert,’ Danby broke in pompously. ‘And do you also back up Sheila Manchu’s wild claims of real human flesh in the meat pies?’

  ‘Oh, yes, indeed. We went investigating there, me and my friends Brenda and Effie, at the end of last year, when my Aunt Jessie went missing. And we found dead bodies in the walk-in freezers. We found some pretty revolting stuff, actually.’

  Brenda found herself yelling at her radio: ‘Robert, what are you doing? You can’t go saying that on air!’

  Mr Danby snickered. ‘Investigating with your friends Brenda and Effie, you say? Would that be Effie Jacobs, by any chance? The delectable Effryggia, who has become such a stalwart of this very same humble show?’

  ‘That’s her,’ Robert said. ‘Though she’s more Brenda’s friend than she is mine. Effie can be downright sniffy about people, and she looks down her pointy old nose at me, as it happens. But I don’t care. She’s a witch, you know.’

  ‘Come, come, Robert,’ laughed the host.

  ‘No, I mean it. She’s got a house stuffed with ancient grimoires and all that. All her family were witches, going way back.’

  Brenda was on her feet, pacing up and down, asking her room at large: ‘What’s going on? Why is he saying all these things?’

  Then she was brought up short by Robert saying: ‘But my real friend, of course, is Brenda.’

  ‘Yes,’ purred Mr Danby. ‘Effie herself has mentioned this mutual friend once or twice on my show. What is it about this Brenda, Robert, hmm? What’s the low-down on her?’

  ‘The low-down!’ snorted Brenda crossly. ‘I like that!’

  There was a pause then, a moment of dead air. Robert wavered and made a kind of umming noise. It was as if he was coming to his senses, live over the airwaves.

  ‘Come along, Robert,’ urged Danby. ‘All of Whitby is waiting. Go on. Tell us all what it is about Brenda that’s so amazing. So fascinating. Tell us her secrets.’

  Robert sounded strange. Half hypnotised. He was struggling to make sense. ‘Brenda’s . . . secrets? No, I can’t. I . . .’

  ‘Oh, you can. We’re all friends here.’

  ‘I won’t. I . . . I must go now.’ Then there came the decisive clunk of Robert’s phone being put down. There was another hiss of dead air on Whitby FM.

  ‘Oh dear, listeners. I do believe we have lost young Robert there. Just as he was about to tell us something I believe might have been rather juicy. There’s nothing we like more, is there, than a good bit of juicy local gossip? Never mind. There’s still time for the secrets to come tumbling out. Next caller . . .’

  Good old Robert! thought Brenda jubilantly. Thank Hecate he had managed to come to his senses! She sat back heavily in her armchair. But what on earth had happened to him? Had Mr Danby managed to hypnotise him over the phone lines? Was that what was happening to everyone who rang in?

  She sat there fuming, incandescent with rage. She just knew that, once more, Mr Danby was up to no good. He was poking a big stick into the murky-bottomed waters of Whitby’s social whirl. And he was dredging up the muck. There’d be trouble, she could tell.

  But what for? What was it all for? Why couldn’t everyone be like her, and just relish the idea of an easy life, a quiet life? Why go raking up trouble?

  At least, Brenda reflected, nothing further had been said about her. She gave a huge sigh of relief, then had to have a nightcap to steady her jangling nerves.

  And she slept. Having uneasy dreams, there at the top of her guest house, in her sumptuous attic.

  Quick as a flash, first thing in the morning, she was up and doing her exercises - star jumps and jogging on the spot. Probably she put the fear of God into poor old Mr Timperley, whose room was directly beneath the attic. But she had to be up and doing.

  She had business to attend to.

  Not Everyone is in League with the Devil

  Effie came blearily to answer her door. ‘What is it, Brenda?’

  Brenda was shocked to see her friend standing at her doorway in her nightie. She had never seen Effie looking so dishevelled. She’d obviously not slept a wink. ‘I listened to that programme last night,’ Brenda said, frowning.

  ‘What, The Night Owls?’ asked Effie, with a nonchalant yawn.

  ‘Of course The Night Owls. And I was appalled! Look, can I come in, Effie? It’s freezing out here.’ It was true. Since first dawn the winds had been stiff across the bay. The morning was one of those dreadful soggy ones at the start of autumn, when there was no turning back. The leaves were a gingery mush in the gutters and Brenda’s boot soles were claggy with crushed conkers.

  Effie let her in with, Brenda couldn’t help imagining, less than her usual enthusiasm. The junk shop was dim and felty with dust. It was hard to make out what was on display in that unwelcoming room of heaped and battered tat. As the door slammed behind her, Brenda made her way to the back and Effie’s galley kitchen, where they usually sat to chat. She flinched at her own lumbering reflection in the glass witch balls and flyblown mirrors. Dozens of aged clocks ticked arrhythmically, as if determined to induce heart palpitations. Brenda had never found Effie’s home a very comforting place.

  Once they were sitting on stools in the back room, Brenda waded into the subject in hand: Mr Danby and his indiscreet programme. ‘He’s got everyone under his spell. Even Robert! Did you hear him last night? He was talking away like the rest of them.’

  Effie filled her kettle crossly. ‘So? That’s what people do on The Night Owls. That’s what it’s for. Getting things off your chest.’

  Brenda watched her narrowly as she clicked on the gas ring with unnecessary force. Whoosh went the blue flame. Brenda made her voice gentler. ‘I thought it was horrible. Dangerous, too.’

  Effie tossed her head, and her salt-and-pepper hair fell even more messily about her shoulders. Now she looked more witchy than Brenda had ever seen her. ‘You would feel like that. Did you listen all through the night?’

  Brenda passed her the tea caddy. The kitchen was so small it was like sitting aboard a tiny boat together. ‘I dropped off around three, but I heard enough.’

  ‘Oh . . .’ Effie sighed, peering into a cake tin and producing a mould-spotted wodge of Battenberg. ‘So you never heard me?’

  Brenda blinked. ‘When were you on?’

  ‘Around half five. I believe Mr Danby feels bereft if I don’t make my appearance on his show. So I don’t like to disappoint him. He was very interested in you, as it happens, Brenda. He was asking all about our friendship, and our little adventures . . .’

  Brenda waved away the offer of cake. She stared appalled at her friend. ‘No! You never told him anything, did you?’

  ‘What do you take me for?’ Effie slammed the cake tin away as the room filled with kettle steam.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Brenda muttered. ‘You can be pretty easily led sometimes, Effie. Look at that business last spring up at the Hotel Miramar, when everyone was worshipping that bamboo voodoo god from another dimension. Goomba. You were completely sucked into that.’

  Effie mashed the tea savagely with a silver spoon. ‘I was possessed, along with everyone else. This is different.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ Brenda told her.

  ‘I know what I’m doing. It’s a bit of harmless fun. Just chit-chat.’

  ‘But it
’s Mr Danby!’ Brenda burst out. Effie handed her her tea. It was too strong. ‘He’s bound to be up to no good!’

  Effie perched herself on her own kitchen stool. ‘I think you misunderstand him, Brenda. When he started up The Deadly Boutique, it was with the aim of bringing joy into the lives of the women of Whitby.’

  ‘And it all went to the bad. Never forget that, Effie.’

  ‘You won’t let me, will you? You always look on the darkest possible side of things, Brenda.’

  Brenda balked at this. ‘I do not!’

  ‘Poking into shadows. Thinking the worst of people. Not everyone’s got ulterior motives, you know. Not everyone is in league with the devil!’

  Brenda glowered. ‘I know that.’

  ‘What is it, Brenda? Your own shrouded, miserable, Gothic past? Is that what makes you suspect the very worst about everyone?’

  Brenda slammed down her cup and saucer on Effie’s dirty work surface. She opened her mouth to speak, but thought better of it. Instead she hoisted herself up and turned, with great dignity, to sweep out of Effie’s antiques emporium.

  I Think She’s Been Subsumed

  Brenda stomped up their sloping street, fuming. Absolutely livid. Wondering why it was that she and Effie could never get embroiled in an adventure without having a massive stand-up row. It happened every time. Anyway, she thought, it was unfair of Effie to bring up the past like that. She was privy to very secret, very tender and distressing facts about Brenda’s past. Hardly anyone else knew the truth.

  Brenda was starting to dread the thought that Effie might get on the radio and broadcast the whole lot. She could imagine her closely guarded secrets being spread, like a seeping mantle of mist, across the Whitby rooftops in the middle of the night. Everyone listening, aghast, appalled, as Effie blew her cover. Disinterring the true tale of Brenda’s nature. Her terrible supernature.

  Brenda popped into Woolies for a big bag of pick ’n’ mix. Just the thing to cheer her up. It never failed. She crunched minty bonbons and strawberry fizzers and hunks of cinder toffee as she yomped up the hill to the Hotel Miramar, where Robert was off duty for the morning.

  When she got there, she gave him a very stern look. He gulped and said, ‘I really don’t know what came over me.’

  ‘I was a bit surprised, to say the least,’ she said.

  ‘But I was compelled. I was in my room and I just had to phone in . . .’

  ‘At least you jolted out of it, when he got too nosy. But what’s he trying to do? What’s to be gained from everyone spilling their secrets over the airwaves?’ Brenda sighed and poured their tea from the aluminium pot. Ugh, aluminium. She always had proper china in her guest house, but she knew Sheila Manchu’s standards at the Miramar weren’t quite the same, though she’d never be rude enough to point that out.

  They were sitting in the bay window of the bar at the Miramar, with a view of the rooftops above the harbour. Rain was coming down steadily now, and the sun was struggling to break through. Brenda sipped her tea and found it metallic and stewed.

  Robert was looking gloomy as the shadows of the rain ran down his face in thick grey stripes. ‘There are a lot of secrets in this town,’ he said quietly. ‘We’ve all got them, haven’t we?’

  ‘Of course,’ Brenda hissed. ‘And the way we manage to rub along from day to day is by keeping a tin lid on them. All hell could break loose, what with some of the people who live round these parts.’

  ‘And you say Effie won’t see sense?’

  Brenda tried adding sugar to her thick orange tea. She nodded sadly. ‘I think she’s been subsumed.’

  ‘She’s not been the same since she went into that coma last spring.’

  ‘Don’t. I still feel guilty about that.’

  He swiftly changed the subject. ‘What do you want to do?’

  I need to be decisive, Brenda thought. I need to spring into action. She said, ‘I want to find Mr Danby. Beard him in his den.’

  ‘You want to go to the Whitby FM studios? We could get to him there.’

  Brenda squinched up her face in concentration. ‘Shame we don’t know where he lives. He’s a slippery customer. Last time we met, he was doing everything he could to keep his mother alive. She was a tiny, wizened old thing. A miniature nun whom he carried around in a suitcase like an old vampire.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  Brenda glanced at her friend and for a second thought how nice and smart he looked in his desk clerk’s uniform. Much nicer, at any rate, than the elf outfit he’d been forced to sport when he’d worked at the Christmas Hotel. She nodded firmly and told him, ‘Let’s go tonight. You’re not working, are you?’

  ‘Nuh-uh. Luckily. But it’s been a bit hectic here, with the spillover from the Vintage Costumed Hero Ball.’

  For the past few minutes Brenda had been vaguely aware of people coming into the bar area and standing about chatting. She had been so absorbed in her conversation with Robert that she hadn’t fully taken in their array of strangely colourful costumes. ‘Of course,’ she said, peering about at the early drinkers at the bar. ‘That’s what all these people in Lycra are here for. I wondered.’

  Robert nodded, following her glance. ‘Quite interesting lives, some of them. See her, over by herself at the bar? That’s Mrs Midnight.’

  There was a plump, frizzy-haired woman in a blue satin cape trying to get the barman’s attention. She wore a kind of tiara effect in her white hair.

  Robert continued to explain: ‘In the sixties, Mrs Midnight single-handedly rescued the men on the first failed British Mars expedition. She’s got superpowered lung capacity or something, I believe.’

  Brenda had fallen into a reverie. The sixties seemed such a long time ago. Such adventures! The Mars expedition, of course! And here was Mrs Midnight now, right in front of her. Brenda flattened herself back on the banquette. Would the old woman with the frizzy hair and the cape still remember her? Best not to chance it. To Robert she said lightly: ‘Yes, I remember Mrs Midnight. Reading about her escapades in the papers and so on. Hasn’t she let herself go? She shouldn’t have tried to fit herself back into her old cossie.’ Mrs Midnight was getting served now. Fortunately, she had moved across to the other side of the bar, to be with a gaggle of skinny old men in even odder outfits than hers.

  Lucky escape, Brenda thought. But would she still blame me for that Martian fiasco? All these years later? Surely not. Some of the details were quite hazy in Brenda’s mind, but she seemed to remember that she and the plump superheroine opposite hadn’t exactly seen eye to eye back then.

  ‘That’s the point of them all getting together.’ Robert smiled. ‘Getting back into their old cossies. The convention this weekend is the only time and place these oldsters get to wear their superhero outfits.’

  ‘Who’s she with?’ Brenda was craning her neck. ‘Who’s this who’s come in after her?’

  A tall, stooped figure clutching a Campari and soda had pursued Mrs Midnight to her secluded corner. He was extremely aged and sporting a skintight lime-green costume topped off by what appeared to be a yellow motorcycle helmet with ears.

  ‘That’s Harry the Cat, from Salford,’ Robert said. ‘He was big back in the fifties.’

  ‘He’s definitely shrunk.’

  ‘Lime-green Lycra’s not a good look even on the young and pretty. What does he look like? Well, at least Mrs Midnight seems glad to see him.’ She was hanging off Harry the Cat’s neck and kissing the visor of his helmet. This he removed, revealing a lined and cross-looking face that made Brenda gasp.

  ‘I’ll tell you who he looks like!’ she cried. ‘My guest in room number three! That’s Mr Timperley, in the thigh-high boots and the little cat ears! My goodness! Mr Timperley!’

  ‘Shush, Brenda!’

  She couldn’t quite believe it. Mr Timperley, with his tweedy sports jacket and his careful tread on the stairs. He had seemed such a quiet soul! And all the time he was Harry the Cat, scourge of the Salford gangs!

 
Robert gave a knowledgeable grimace. ‘That’s how it is with secret identities, Brenda.’

  ‘Well, I’m amazed,’ she said, and set down her teacup. For a few moments they continued to stare at the multicoloured personages at the bar. There was something rather pathetic about them, Brenda decided. The British superheroes were never like the American ones, she reflected nostalgically. Rather than being gleaming and buffed up and patriotic like their stateside counterparts, the more homely heroes of the British Isles were a dishevelled and sometimes ineffectual breed. In Brenda’s experience they were more of a hindrance than anything else when it came to adventures. She sighed, and hoped none of them would recognise her this afternoon. She turned back to Robert with a warm smile: ‘Anyway, I’d best get back and have a tidy round and prepare myself for this evening’s rigours.’

  ‘You do that.’ Robert watched her gather her things together.

  Brenda gave a last glance round as the bar continued to fill up. She was careful to stay out of sight of Mrs Midnight. ‘A whole townful of ancient and ineffectual superheroes! Ha!’ she grinned, buttoning her woollen coat. ‘And I thought Goth weekend was weird. Ta-ra, lovey.’

  All Togged Up

  Early evening was coming down when Effie went over to Brenda’s. She gave a worried-sounding knock on the door in the side passage.

  ‘Brenda, I’ve come to apologise.’

  Brenda looked her friend up and down. Effie was in her oldest, dowdiest coat and hat, and she looked suitably contrite. ‘Oh, you have, have you?’

  ‘The way I went on at you before, it was unforgivable.’

  ‘Hmpf. Well,’ sighed Brenda, peering out of the passage at the gloomy blue of the lowering skies. ‘Isn’t it a bit late for you to be out? Shouldn’t you be listening to your tranny?’

  Effie looked completely miserable at this. ‘I don’t care about that. You’re right. I was addicted. I was saying things I shouldn’t. Behaving appallingly.’