The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike) Part 1995 by Angharad Copyright © 2013 Angharad All Rights Reserved.

We drove back from the woodland with me worrying what Mr Sanson would think of us–he probably has us down as a bunch of weirdos–which probably isn’t too far off the mark. The problem is that Trish sometimes enjoys playing the freak, but if people called her that, she’d be mortified. The, ‘I see dead people,’ is straight out of the that Bruce Willis film, The Sixth Sense. As far as I’m aware she hasn’t seen it, least I hope not because it should be a category older than she is.

Once back at home, the three gigglers, Danny was as bad as the two girls, ran into the kitchen to tell Stella about how the surveyor ran away. I sat and waited for the kettle to boil, then made some tea, by which time Stella was ready for one as well, having coped with Trish’s ghost story. She shared my concern about Trish coming over as strange. She also told me that James had called and was coming this evening to see me, so she invited him to dinner.

I expected him to be giving me a rundown on what happened in France, but I hoped as well to hear about his exploits in South America. The afternoon seemed to pass very quickly–in fact too quickly for my liking, especially as I was cooking that evening I didn’t really need another mouth to feed.

After changing from my woodland walking apparel I set to in the kitchen. There was large bag of minced beef in the freezer, so I nuked it in the microwave, then turned it into a bolognaise sauce to pour over a large pan of pasta, spaghetti in particular. The kids were quite pleased to hear what we were eating, so I made sure they were all wearing clothes which either didn’t stain or didn’t matter if they got sauce on them.

Daddy was first home, he’d been in to check the dormice with Neal, Phoebe’s brother–they were all okay as far as they could see–still asleep in their subterranean nests. It was important that as many survived as possible because these would be the breeding stock for release into the wild–the previous wet season having taken a toll on the numbers of wild dormice in the survey areas. Some quite possibly drowned in their hibernation nests.

Next were Phoebe and Julie who were both angry with being told off for being short with a client who’d apparently asked them an improper question, so they thought. I didn’t bother getting involved unless they asked me to. Then came James and finally Simon and Sammi. I waited for everyone to get comfortable before dishing up the dinner and passing round a lump of Parmesan and a grater. The dessert was a cop out, a serving of ice cream or cheese and biscuits–or in Simon’s case, some of both.

After dinner, the younger children were given half an hour before being put to bed, then an hour after that the next lot went to bed with Tom reading them a story. Simon and I were in my study with James.

He reported about France first. It appeared the two men weren’t gay, so the rape of the two boys was done by heterosexual men. That in itself didn’t surprise me, as I think statistically most sex offences are committed by heterosexual men, but being the largest group of male adults by some margin, it almost becomes obvious, even though the number committing sexual assaults is small, but significant.

The two were known to the French police for drugs offences and they think this was why the shooting started–they had quite a quantity of cocaine in the house when the police arrived; though it was only discovered after the shooting by a sniffer dog, it was very well hidden.

I told James about Peter and his self mutilation and James went white. “He did that because he seemed to enjoy it?”

“So he said, yes.”

“Oh my giddy aunt, what a tragedy.”

“I couldn’t agree more–and I think it could be compounded by his parent’s narrow thinking. They seem to think that anyone without a penis must be female.”

“They must be crackers and homophobic,” he declared.

“I’m actually inclined to agree with you, and I told Peter that he might well be gay rather than gender dysphoric.”

“He could be, or perhaps his body just enjoyed a one off physical event–though I would hope it wouldn’t set his orientation to enjoying rough stuff.”

“Oh my goodness, I hadn’t even thought of that,” I felt myself go cold. I knew that a sexual assault can have lifelong complications, but the thought of Peter only enjoying rape fantasies made me feel quite ill.

“Who was the third body in the house?”

“The mayor’s brother who’d been an embarrassment for a number of years. He’d been in and out of prison for dealing drugs, running people trafficking, and various other nasty projects. I think the mayor was relieved when it was all over, and it saved him worrying about the future and what his brother might cause him to have to pay off or bribe to avoid the publicity.”

I wasn’t sure what I thought about that, it seemed the mayor should have pulled the plug on his brother long since, not bailed him out.

“Now, James, you must tell us about South America,” I insisted.

“There isn’t much to tell other than we tracked your friendly neighbourhood loan shark across three countries, through rain forest, city centres and suburban areas. He must have been paying out a fortune for intel because he always seemed to know when we were just a day behind him. We nearly caught him twice, because we anticipated his move–but the bugger just managed to slip away an hour before we got there.”

“I thought he was supposedly shot in Brazil?”

“If you believe that you’ll believe anything. We weren’t allowed to examine the corpse, so it could have been anyone and I believe his face was shot away to make it extra difficult to identify him one way or the other. I bribed one of the coppers from the squad that supposedly killed him and his description bore no resemblance to Cortez in any way, shape or form.”

“So he could come back?” I said feeling less than happy about the prospect.

“Yeah, he could–but it’s deemed very unlikely as we let it be known the UK government had sanctioned him being categorised as deserving extreme prejudice.”

“They’d never do that,” I challenged.

“Hopefully he doesn’t know that, he also discovered that you had more in your petty cash than he had in all his resources, and had paid a hit team to terminate him if he showed his face, here or anywhere else, and that they hadn’t given up trying to earn their money.”

“What if he tries to do the same to us?”

“I don’t think he’d be up to doing that, much more likely to run away and hide. I did post a reward for his confirmed demise.”

“That must make us look as bad as him.”

“Not really, it’s an old ruse to make him keep his head down, especially if now and again you pay someone to act as if they were trying to find him. As long as he gets to hear about it, he’ll run off again and spend all his time hoping he wasn’t followed.”

“It sounds a bit crude to me, James.”

“Oh it is but very effective all the same.”