And so I have not updated, and you have been lacking in stories.
However here is, finally...
Tarine Coutomaine and
the Fortune Cookie of Doom
‘So… Who’s paying?’
Tarine propped her elbows on the table, laced her fingers
together to make a suitable support for her chin and fluttered her improbably
long eyelashes at her husband.
Nat returned her look with an easy grin. ‘Who always pays, Tee?’
She smiled and dimpled, the skin at the sides of her eyes
creasing into laugh-lines as she looked around at the rest of her family; two
sons and a daughter, all grown up now.
Not that you’d know they were grown up to judge from her
daughter’s excited squeal as the Fortune Cookies arrived
‘No, thank you,’ Tarine waved hers away. ‘I prefer life to
surprise me!’ But the waiter ignored her and tumbled the last one onto her
plate. She sighed and broke into the cookie as around her the rest of the
family read out and pondered their fortunes.
Her own wasn’t quite what she’d expected…
“Your life is in danger. Say nothing to anyone. You must
leave the city immediately and never return. Repeat………..say nothing.”
Really? Tarine sighed,
picked up her handbag and pushed her chair back, passing behind Nat’s seat to
press her hands on his shoulders for a moment.
‘Just going to powder my nose, dearest,’ she said. Passing the adjoining table, she saw two
young men trying to pretend they hadn’t seen her, which was odd because they’d
been looking at her all evening… not that she wasn’t worthy of looking at, with
her striking auburn hair back-combed into a post-modernist beehive, and she
didn’t look her age… but something about their eyes hadn’t suggested
admiration…
Smiling so hard she dimpled, Tarine leaned between the two
men so they were intimidated by the sight of her still-formidable cleavage.
‘I think this one was meant for you,’ she said, and picked a
victim, depositing her fortune cookie of doom in front of the darker-haired
one. ‘You’d better hurry.’
Job done, she trotted past them, heading through the swing
doors to the toilets and ducking quickly into the ladies’, where she locked
herself in a cubicle and opened the window.
It wasn’t the first time she’d had to make a hasty exit, and
she made a point of reconnoitring every restaurant in advance, just in
case. So she knew that the window in the
ladies’ opened just wide enough to admit a human body but had a nasty drop down
into a locked yard which held the bins; the only hiding places were obvious,
smelly and unpleasant.
The gents’, however, accessed an alleyway, and once she had
slithered under the cubicle (they made the dividing walls as short as possible
to save on costs and materials these days) and escaped the ladies’, she ducked
into the gents’, and was out of the window before the swing door had had time
to stop swinging.
It was a warm summer evening, not late enough for it to be
properly dark or for the buses to have stopped running, so she headed out of
the alley and straight towards the bus stops.
While she waited she pondered the message. ‘Your life is in
danger…say nothing to anyone… leave the city… never return…’
‘Nonsense!’ Tarine said aloud, drawing wary glances from the
others in the queue.
But it was nonsense! There was nothing worse, to Tarine’s
mind, than a badly-worded threat!
Although it could be a warning… In any case ‘Say nothing’ was ambiguous;
did it mean about the danger? About her leaving? It was impossible to say
nothing; one had to say please or thank you, and then Tarine was not naturally
the silent type…
A bus arrived and she got on, buying a day ticket so that
she didn’t have to decide where she was going yet. A seat at the back offered
the best cover, and she sat neatly with her handbag on her lap, thinking.
She allowed herself a small smile as she remembered the
expression on the young man’s face as he read the fortune cookie; as
distractions went, it had been a good one.
She hoped he was naïve enough to believe the cookie really was for him,
that he was running, even as she was, although hopefully in the opposite
direction…
As the bus growled along, she realised she’d have to choose
a destination soon… turning alternatives over in her head, she discounted one
after another…
Oh, yes, of course.
Perfect.
She got off the bus at the next stop and waited ten minutes
on the edge of a sink estate for another to take her a mile up the road to
where she could disembark and head through the back streets and ginnels of East
Leeds to a slightly run-down park.
It was a dark, unlit wilderness, but Tarine knew it of old
and headed across the grass towards a stand of trees where there was an old oak
with nice, wide boughs. She shimmied up,
secured herself tightly in a wedge of the branches, and settled in for the
night.
The Morning Chorus sounded exceptionally loud to Tarine,
from her vantage point in the middle of the tree. The sky had that thin, milky quality of the
very early morning and she guessed she’d had about three or four hours rest;
she couldn’t really call it sleep. Her
eyes felt scratchy and fuzzy and she ached in places she didn’t know existed…
Stretching carefully, she opened her handbag and made a
swift inventory of her weapons… a metal tail comb (vital for backcombing neatly
and equally good for stabbing an enemy in the eye with), a pair of nail
scissors, a plastic-coated woven tape measure which could function as either
bindings or a garrotte… a fountain pen and a propelling pencil… yes, you could
tell she’d retired, there was hardly anything in here these days.
Mind you, with everything else she carried round, the bag
was heavy enough to make a useful cosh…
It is a matter of record that the building at the bottom of
York Rd in Leeds is based on Ceausescu’s palace. It is less well known that several different
planning applications were made, all with variations, and nobody is quite sure
exactly which plan was followed.
Nobody except Tarine, of course.
Six thirty a.m. and she entered the building with other
cleaning staff and set about her apparent duties. It wasn’t long, however,
before she ditched her overall and found her way up a set of back stairs to a
small office on the third floor that was, apparently, a toilet, a stationery cupboard,
or a kitchen, depending which plan you looked at.
In reality, it was none of those things, but a rather lushly
appointed office.
Tarine ensconced herself in the swivel chair, tucking her
feet up and swinging it round so she couldn’t be seen from the door.
She dozed for an hour or so until the rattle of the door
woke her. She timed her swivel for
maximum impact and met the astonished stare of the Head of Department.
‘Good grief! What are you doing here, Tarine?’
Tarine raised an expressive eyebrow.
‘Good question, Tremayne. “Leave the city and never return”?
Tremayne grinned.
‘You never could follow orders!’
‘I have followed orders – I have left the city – according
to its mediaeval boundaries, that is.
Really, if you are going to write instructions and hide them in Fortune
Cookies, you should be more explicit! Now, Tremayne, what are you playing
at? I am, after all, retired… or I
thought I was…’
‘Ah.’ Tremayne looked
at his shoes. ‘Yes. You see, we needed to show some of the young
chaps how it’s done and…’
‘And you didn’t ask me first?’
‘Well, no; we knew it was your birthday and you’d have
declined. This way…’
‘This way, how could I refuse the challenge…?’ She raised an amused eyebrow. ‘I hope, after I left, someone told Nat what
you were up to?’
‘Well, eventually…’
‘Eventually?’
‘Yes. Our two
trainees panicked; one of them got as far as Bradford before we picked him up. It took an hour of patient explanation before
he believed that Fortune Cookie hadn’t been intended for him…’
Tarine shook her head, laughing. ‘You really can’t get the staff, these days,
can you?’
‘Well, no,’ Tremayne said.
‘Why else do you think we needed you?’
He grinned. ‘You know, your
husband said you seem bored lately… he also said he wouldn’t mind if you came
back… on a part-time basis… and I thought perhaps training up the new young
operatives might be of interest…?’
Tarine’s eyes danced and she locked her fingers together and
dimpled at him. ‘Go on?’
‘An increase of salary, of course… due consideration for family…
it would be much more nine-to-five…’
‘Three,’ she said.
‘Nine-to-three. Actually,
nine-thirty-to-three is good. Occasional out of hours, perhaps.’
‘Excellent!’ Tremayne stepped forward to shake her
hand. ‘When can you start?’
Tarine raised an expressive eyebrow. ‘I started last night,
didn’t I?’ she said.
G - I really liked this one. Just one thing - never give me a fortune cookie!!!!
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