Broken Crockery: The Dinner Party From Hell

Broken Crockery

- The Dinner Party From Hell

A West Wales Odyssey – Book Two

by David Parkins

Copyright © 2017 by David Parkins

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Published by David Parkins

The cover image is courtesy of Shutterstock, under license

This book is a work of fiction. The characters depicted in this book are also fictional and any resemblance to real people, either living or deceased, is entirely coincidental.

WARNING -

This book contains very strong language and racist opinions, as expressed by some of the fictional characters in the story, and which many readers will find offensive.

It is stressed that these are the opinions only of these fictional characters and should not in any way be taken to imply that they are those of the author.

Contents

Author’s Note

Part One – The Dinner Party

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Part Two – Digesting The Meal

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Epilogue

Author’s Note

To steal and alter an old saying ‘there is no such thing as a free dinner’ and most of us have been to at least one dinner party. It might follow an invite from friends or from neighbours just trying to be friendly, and they almost always seem to fall on a night when that new ‘Scandi-Thriller’ you are following is on TV. The worst thing about them though is that you don’t know who else your friends may have invited!

Now I’m prepared to admit that you can meet some very nice people at dinner parties. There can be good conversation over the meal itself and afterwards, as the wine begins to flow. New friends can be made and a great evening can be had by all.

Sometimes though, things can go very differently and a passionate Jeremy Corbyn supporter or a Green Activist can find themselves seated next to, or opposite, a UKIP voting Brexiteer. A very ‘Hard Brexit’ supporter at that!

The conversation might get a little heated and that’s fine, except that more might be said than was intended – and these things might then be remembered, and even acted upon afterwards, when other factors may also bring their influences to bear. Events may be further exacerbated if you happen to live in the neighbourhood of an all-seeing loner who is ‘talked’ to by his cat.

Now me, I’m a restaurant man. Not only can you choose what you might actually want to eat from the menu, but if you read on – you’ll see that it can also be a lot safer too!

Bon appétit,

David Parkins

West Wales

January, 2017

Part One

The Dinner Party

Chapter One

Simon and Arabella

Arabella was feeling very low and she just couldn’t concentrate on the pot she was working on. It ended up eccentric when viewed from above. A bit like me, she thought. Another reject! What was playing on her mind, and that of her husband Simon, was the recent murder in the village.

Not half a mile up the road their neighbour Marshall had been found with several stab wounds in his throat!

Arabella had not really known him, though Simon had talked to him a few times when they had bumped into each other on the beach, whilst Marshall was walking his dogs. He had once designed a leaflet to promote Simon’s art gallery. It was really good and he had not charged Simon a penny for it.

Marshall had only been discovered after the postman had reported that he had been trying over some days to deliver some packages that would not fit into the letterbox and had left cards about them which were not responded to. With Marshall’s vehicle in the drive he felt that he must be at home but that all might not be well. His concerns grew further after he looked through the kitchen window and noticed that the dogs had no water left and were looking somewhat emaciated.

When the police gained access to the cottage following a call from the postman, they immediately detected a strong smell of decay coming from upstairs in the main bedroom. Apparently, Marshall had been dead for over three weeks. One policeman that Simon knew a little had told him unofficially and off the record that there might have been sexual aspects to the murder. Apparently, he had been naked and chained to the bed in a spread-eagled position! Who said that everything was dull and uneventful in rural Wales?

As far as Arabella was concerned though, this was all too much information. What people got up to in their own bedrooms was their business as far as she was concerned. She had no reason to hold any negative feelings towards Marshall and was genuinely sorry for what had happened to him.

The police had also called the RSPCA and all of Marshall’s pets had been taken away in crates. There were his border collies and his three cats – at least they could only find three cats, though Simon had told Arabella that Marshall had four. One must have gone off to fend for itself, as cats sometimes do.

The whole of Marshall’s property was still a crime scene - the entrances sealed off with police marker tape. So far there had been nothing in the local papers or on the news about any arrests being made. It was all very grim and not a little intriguing! Worrying too - were they safe? Was the killer still among them?

These were all factors contributing towards Arabella’s downcast mood and her eccentric pot. That reminded her – she really could do with a joint to relieve her stress.

As she relaxed with her spliff – only the second of the day! – She roamed through her inner landscape. It was comforting there and she thought that as she had gotten older it was her very favourite place. She was finding herself increasingly out of step with today’s world.

True, living down here in the west of Wales was easier than in London, where she had lived from the mid-1970s right through to 2002. She doubted she could ever cope with city life again though and was sure that the decision Simon and her had made to ‘head west’ was the right one. For fourteen years, they had lived in Pembrokeshire and never regretted the move for a moment. The murder of Marshall was all the more shocking because of that, she reflected. They thought they had left all that kind of shit behind them in London.

Arabella remembered her childhood in Dorset with much affection. Living not far from Lyme Regis and an only child, she would spend hours on the shore of what was now dubbed the ‘Jurassic Coast’ soaking up the atmosphere, and thought of herself as a latter-day Mary Anning. Not that she ever did much fossil hunting! But she fancied she might, one day.

One of her favourite singers was Polly Jean Harvey and she had fallen in love with her song ‘White Chalk’, capturing so well, as it did, her feelings about her ‘home’ county and her early years there. Yes, that would be one of her eight ‘Desert Island Disc’ tracks for sure, should she ever be invited to appear on the programme. Now why would that happen? She was hardly famous for anything.

She went to an evening class back in her teens to learn the basics of pottery. It was run by a well-known local potter who was content to make hundreds of high quality pots without ever putting any effort into actually selling them! Having borrowed heavily from the bank to keep living, they eventually foreclosed on him. He had told Arabella’s father that the bank manager had been quite brutal, saying that he had no divine right to be a potter and that he had to show some financial results. Another reason for favouring life in your own inner landscape, she reflected.

Looking at herself in the hallway mirror she concluded that the intervening years had not been too unkind to her. She had recently celebrated her sixtieth birthday and was still of the slender build that she’d always been. Her eyes were a quite striking blue/green and her blonde hair had stood up well to the passing of the years. Sometimes she still wore it with plaits in; just as she had done as a young woman in the 1970s. She had no health issues she was aware of other than a somewhat loose interpretation of time – due to the cannabis, she imagined. Not that she was about to give that up! Yep - All in all – not too bad, she thought.

Over the years, she had developed her own ‘quirky’ style for the pots she made and had begun to sell a few to friends in London. Now she sold some to tourists, displaying them in Simon’s gallery. She looked at her watch – 4.30pm – Simon would be back from his studio soon.

____________________________

Simon decided that he had had enough for the day. He was close to finishing yet another coastal landscape but he really was beginning to tire of painting these, and it was hard to prevent them from becoming too formulaic. Still, they were what the tourists wanted to buy and anything too stylised would not sell so well. His latest effort would then be scanned and reproduced as prints, postcards and greetings cards for sale in his gallery and other local ‘touristy’ outlets. The original, would be framed and offered for sale in the gallery at a slightly inflated price – just high enough to make a gullible Lib Dem voting tourist think he was buying into something that bit special. Any lower and it would not be deemed exclusive enough.

He looked at his watch – 5.10. About this time of day when it was out of season he found himself looking forward to getting home and seeing Arabella, after being in his own company for several hours.

They had been married since 1988. Twenty-eight years now, and he still loved her as much as he ever had. OK, she was something of a ‘Space Cadet’ for more of the time than he would like but he accepted that this was unlikely to change now! She had lots of other redeeming qualities and he still felt very lucky that she had come into his life.

He had not had a particularly happy childhood, growing up in Hertfordshire. He considered it bland and ‘nowhere in particular’ and he was dominated by his older brother Ben, who appropriated for himself any new toys or other possessions that Simon might be given and that he took a liking towards.

Simon did remember with affection the family holidays they had in Cornwall, Devon and Dorset though and this included one at Charmouth, which, as he would find out later, was very near where Arabella had grown up. He had often wondered if he had seen her wandering on the beach during this holiday. He thought it quite romantic that he might have seen his future wife as a child, without of course knowing it at the time.

He went to art school after his main education had finished and begun to sell a few of his paintings at the open-air art markets in London at weekends. These were mainly portraits of friends or their various pets. He also painted his girlfriends. He tried to make this almost a rite of passage for each of them. Preferably, he liked to depict them disrobed, for art’s sake of course! Later, when he had met Arabella, he painted her and her naked image still hung in their lounge – a talking point for guests.

By the time he was in his late twenties he had a job in an art gallery in London, at first commuting each day until he found a flat to rent. When he met Arabella at an arts fair, he asked her out to dinner. They hit it off instantly, began seeing each other almost every evening and at weekends, and it was not much more than two months afterwards that she moved in with him.

They drunk much wine together and smoked copious amounts of ‘shit’. The latter he had given up in more recent years, unlike Arabella. Both had had other relationships before of course but they decided not to talk about them. This was mutual as they felt it would help in not bringing any baggage into their new life together.

When they married, Simon felt he truly was both the happiest and the luckiest man in the world. Children had been discussed of course, but they were both of the same view. They were too inward looking and each-other-obsessed to do justice to any offspring they might produce. The world was overpopulated enough anyway, and Arabella in particular had thought it best to leave childbirth to those women far more passionate about it than she was.

Tiring of London, they had taken a long holiday in Pembrokeshire in the early 1990s. They walked a considerable section of the coastal path and fell under its spell. They camped out most nights on beaches and the whole experience left an indelible mark on them. Afterwards, they discussed moving there and the practicalities of it. These all seemed to be surmountable, as both felt they could pursue their creative activities in a new place and sell these creations to tourists.

It was, however, not until 2002 that they made the move and now, all these years later, here they still were. A nice cottage and a nearby gallery/studio – both with a sea view. The council had re-banded the cottage for council tax, the valuer telling them it had to go up a band precisely for that reason. The politics of envy? Simon had said rhetorically to the guy. A blank look was returned.

He locked the gallery/studio and walked back up the lane to their cottage. It was dusk but the western sky was still streaked in a rich pink afterglow from the sunset. A damn site better than commuting home through London, he reflected. They lived in this beautiful place, had no money worries and most of all, they were still in love. He and Arabella had much to be thankful for, he concluded.

There was only one thing that had been getting him down in recent days and that was the murder in the village. He hadn’t known Marshall that well, but the time that he had spent talking to him was enough for Simon to have decided that he was a decent sort of guy - the stories that were circulating about his possible sexual proclivities notwithstanding.

When he entered the cottage, Arabella was in the kitchen cutting avocadoes in half for their starter. In the slow cooker, there was a delicious looking thick veggie soup. French bread was on the table already and Simon realised how hungry he was.

After a brief hug, they sat down at the table to eat their meal.

Arabella said, I’ve been wondering Simon. Do you think we ought to throw a dinner party to take our minds off recent events?

We could, he said, but I bet we wouldn’t get more than five minutes into the meal before the subject of the murder came up! Still, go for it if you want to. How about this coming Saturday?

OK, said Arabella. We could invite that new couple who have just moved in – Kyle and…

Sounds like someone from Twin Peaks, interjected Simon.

That’s going back a bit! Kyle and…and Deni. That’s it, Deni. I don’t know anything about them, do you?

Not a thing but put ’em on the list.

I suppose we ought to invite Huw. I mean we can’t have a dinner party without him, can we?

Regrettably, no! Old Captain Bombastic himself. We’ll never hear the last of it if he finds out that we’ve had a dinner party and not invited him, said Simon. At least it will give him yet one more excuse not to do any painting. We could invite that