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“You’d better not be in at those madeleines, Johnny!”
In the kitchen, mid-bite around the stern of a cooling madeleine, MacTavish froze. Cringing, mouth full of cake, he managed a muffled and slightly distorted, “No?”
A long, nasal growl sounded from the dining room, like an angry bull rousing itself to charge. MacTavish glanced towards the doorway nervously, and carefully, like a grave-robber disturbed, replaced the tea towel shroud back over the rack of cakes and smoothed it carefully into position.
“How many have you had?”
MacTavish swallowed guiltily, and brushed away the crumbs from his chin. With the remainder of the offending madeleine hidden behind his back, he stuck his head through the doorway and with what he hoped was a nonchalantly shrug in the face of Ghost’s furious expression he replied, “One or two?”
Ghost stared at him, and for a moment, MacTavish held his ground, but as Ghost’s trained interrogator’s glare intensified, the muscles of his jaw bunching as he pursed his lips to suggest that the question could be answered the easy way or the hard way, and that MacTavish did not want to know anything about the hard way, he buckled.
“Okay! Okay!” MacTavish held up his hands in surrender. He remembered the half-eaten madeleine in his fist too late, and winced. In a small voice he guiltily admitted “Four.”
Ghost’s face twitched like he’d been slapped, and his expression darkened.
“What?” MacTavish protested. He waved the remains of the madeleine in Ghost’s face in protest “They’re delicious! I couldn’t help myself!”
Ghost glared flatly at him, and then, in the elongating silence, the hard edge of his stare softened. Flattery had apparently won him reprieve. Wordlessly, Ghost turned back to appraise the fabric scraps sorted before him on the table, shook his head and let out a disgusted snort.
“And anyway,” MacTavish continued, “You’ve made about fifty of them!” Seeing that Ghost wasn’t looking, he shoved the rest of the half-eaten cake in his mouth.
“Forty-eight.” said Ghost, absent-mindedly as he began to lay out the cloth on the table before him like he was dealing a spread of cards. “It’s twelve in a pan.” Then he came to his senses, and his head snapped up to glare, pointedly, at MacTavish. “Forty-four, now.”
“Christ on a bike!” MacTavish snapped, spraying crumbs, “You’re like NASA with the tampons! How many do you think she’s going to eat?”
“I don’t know!” Ghost pulled another piece of cloth and laid it out against the others. He frowned at it, picked it up and picked at the edges before he finally tossed it aside across the table with a dissatisfied grunt. It slid off the edge and landed on the carpet, joining the rest of the reject pile. “What if she’s hungry?”
MacTavish waited to see if Ghost would make any move to pick it, or any of the other off-cuts and tangled, frayed ribbons of fabric that surrounded the dining room table in a huge debris field, up. He didn’t, so instead MacTavish himself bent to a crouch with a grunt and began to gather the detritus that littered the floor, tutting as he did so. “If she’s hungry, then I’ll make her a piece.”
“What kind?”
“Ham? Ach! Ya bastard!” He snapped upright at a lancing pain in his hand and smashed his head into the underside of the table. He yelped with pain, and collapsed back onto his knees. “Will you stop dropping these bloody pins!” He rubbed his aching head with his good hand, wincing “We’re supposed to be demonstrating a safe, nurturing environment for a child, and that doesn’t involve them being stabbed!” He slammed the pin down on the table above him.
“Leave it alone." said Ghost, “I’ve still got the sky to cut out. I’ll hoover up later.” Above MacTavish’s head, the soft scraping of shuffled fabric paused and Ghost’s face appeared, upside down, over the edge of the table, a concerned frown distorting his features “Ham? What if she’s vegetarian?” His troubled expression deepened, “Or vegan?”
“Guess I’ll be finishing off your madeleines myself then!” MacTavish replied, cheerfully. He pushed himself to his feet, dusted off his jeans and saw the horrified look on Ghost’s face. “She’s not vegan, ya weapon! She’d just tanned a sausage roll out of Heggies when we met her the last time. There were pastry crumbs all over her desk and she kept apologising and saying she’d no time for lunch. Do you not remember?”
Ghost frowned, chewing his lip thoughtfully, “Maybe I should get a backup option. Just in case.”
“The madeleines are fine.” said MacTavish “There’s no need to complicate things by making up a whole five course tasting menu.”
He dumped the handful of ragged fabric scraps in a pile on the edge of the table and sighed. “What was it you used to say: less points of failure is the key to a succession mission?”
Ghost let out a snort of annoyance, and MacTavish knew he’d made his point.
“We just need to keep telling ourselves that we’re two respectable, decorated veterans, hard-working and gainfully employed…” he paused and looked out over the spread of material before him “Well, I’m gainfully employed.” He picked up a piece of fuzzy cloth and flipped it over between his fingers “What is this, anyway?”
“It’s a stegosaurus, Johnny!” Ghost snapped, snatching it back “It’s a dinosaur-themed quilt!” He waved his hands at him in a shooing motion, “Leave them alone! I’ve counted them all out already.”
MacTavish rolled his eyes, “As long as it’s finished by one o’clock, and you hoover up after yourself.” He picked up the abandoned mug Ghost had left on the table, and waved it in front of him pointedly “Place needs to be spotless.” He paused, and frowned. “In fact, talking of hoovering, I’m going to give those stairs a going-over again.”
“I thought you did that yesterday?”
“Ach! I know but… MacTavish paused in the hallway, looked twice at what he saw lying on the doormat and groaned in exasperation “Not again, Maggie!”
“What is it this time?”
“Just more cheese,” MacTavish made his way along the hall to the front door and crouched down to stare at a bag of mini Babybels atop the middle of the mat.
“There’s something definitely wrong with that cat.” he heard Ghost say behind him. “When the woman said you had to watch for her getting in at the milk or she’d have the lot, I thought that made sense at least. That’s your traditional relationship there: cat-milk, milk-cat. But cheese? What’s more, cheese that’s still in the bloody packet? I mean… what’s that about anyway?”
“Ach! I don’t know.” said MacTavish. He scooped up the cheese and held it to his face for closer examination.
“Is it more of those edam slices? We’ve had two of them already this week: Morrisons and Waitrose. I thought maybe she’d got them out of Mrs Wainright’s. I’ve met her in there a few times, but she wasn’t in when I went round to ask.”
MacTavish glanced through the glass pane of the storm doors at the house opposite. “Do you think I should chap the door?”
“I think she’s away. She said she was going to visit her sister soon when I saw her last week. You know, the one that lives down in Cardiff? I said I’d do the grass for her. Oh! I like Babybels. Can you put them in the fridge?”
“Whit?” MacTavish snapped round to stare at him, aghast. “You’re not eating these!”
“Why not?”
“Simon: you can’t eat cheese the cat’s brought in! Creepin’ bloody Jesus! You don’t even know where she gets it! Where it’s been. It’s going in the bin!”
Ghost pursed his lips, muttering. “Spoilsport.”
MacTavish rolled his eyes, and pushed past him into the kitchen. He dumped the cheese into the bin, and then, thinking the better of it, tied up the bin bag and headed out to drop the whole lot into the wheelie bin outside instead, just to make sure.
Abimbola “Just-call-me-Bimi” Ololadei, nominated representative of Hereford Council’s Children’s Services, arrived five minutes late, in a whirlwind of pastel satin and vanilla scented perfume.
Ghost, both suspicious of the local authority since the debacle over the missed bin collection, and exhausted by MacTavish’s Sisyphean efforts to perfect the house in preparation for her arrival, had taken to staking out the road out from the town to watch for her approach. From his vantage point on the roof, hidden from view behind the chimney stack, he had been watching the rise in the road for the last hour, whilst the voracious howl of the vacuum cleaner sounded intermittently through the open windows below. About five minutes after he’d settled in, there’d been a yelp, a screeching yowl and a crash from inside, followed by a stream of curses, and the sight of a flat ginger shape streaking over the front lawn. A further five minutes after that, Maggie had sprung up to join him and they’d been refugees of MacTavish’s war on imaginary dirt ever since.
When the yellow car had appeared on the horizon, he shouted warning, slid back down the ladder and whipped through a quick-change act into his best smart casuals so that the two of them could present a united front at the end of the path as if they were aiming for first prize in a most-nonchalant-pose competition.
Ghost, his freshly pressed polo shirt collar scraping his neck, brand new beige chinos chafing in places that he felt really should not be chafed, MacTavish a tightly-coiled, vibrating mass of chirpy anxiety beside him, tried his best to stay calm. Two respectable, decorated veterans, looking forward to fatherhood. He swallowed nervously, his heart pattering anxiously against his ribs. It suddenly all seemed very real, very quickly.
They’d met Bimi several months before, as MacTavish had reminded him, in a slightly chaotic meeting where, after smothering them in delighted, saccharine enthusiasm she’d thrust an alarming number of forms in their direction and packed them off to a course for prospective adopters. She was brisk, efficient, and spoke with the sort of affected, received pronunciation of the expensively schooled. As a result, Ghost disliked her instantly, but he’d bitten his tongue, clenched his jaw, squeezed MacTavish’s hand and got on with it in the same way that he had every other unpleasant job he’d had forced on him over his military career. Fatherhood. Right. Let’s do this!
Greetings over, they led her on a tour of the house. Every room, no matter how mundane, was greeted with another delighted observation in her breathy, cheerful voice, every word grating on Ghost’s frayed nerves like sandpaper. When she greeted the sight of the downstairs toilet with an enthusiastic “How wonderful!” he began to yearn for the good old, less stressful days of the past, fighting close quarters, clearing buildings room by room, wondering if behind the next door was the bullet with his name on it.
Finally, they made it to the garden, and in the fresh, warm air, he relaxed a little. He was proud of his efforts, and in the warmth of a fresh, Spring afternoon, the early flowers were in full blossom. He had just managed to take enough deep breaths to calm his galloping heart when MacTavish spun on his heel and bustled off into the kitchen to make the tea, leaving him alone with Bimi on the patio.
“I adore foxgloves!” she exclaimed, gesturing at the blooming spears poking up from the patio border. “The name! It’s so perfect! You can just picture a darling little fox cub wearing them like little mittens!”
Ghost stared at her, appalled. She let out a tinkling laugh that scraped across his ears like a cheesegrater.
“I can just imagine all the little fairies living in amongst the flowers, or those little mice with their little frilly dresses in their little houses.”
He stared cautiously at her, wondering if she was suffering some kind of stroke in front of him, but she merely let out a contented sigh, clasped her hands together and exclaimed “Simply gorgeous!”
An awkward silence descended, and after a few excruciating moments of breathy sighs as she admired the flowers, she spoke.
“So… you’re quite the creative type?”
A soft, delicate giggle punctuated the beginning of her question, running through Ghost’s ears like barbed wire pulled through his skull, and it took him a moment to parse what she’d said.
“You what?” he replied, when he finally understood. Then he let out a disparaging snort. “Johnny’s the artist.” He gestured towards the house “He done that picture in the hall.”
“But your beautiful quilt!” she said, her round face distorting into a soft frown, as if he just suggested tormenting kittens for entertainment “And all this.” she gestured at the garden in bloom around them, staring up at him with the troubled expression of an injured fawn.
“Uh…” Ghost reached up and scratched at the back of his head nervously. He disliked talking about himself under normal circumstances, let alone discussing his hobbies with nauseatingly twee social workers “Well…”
Bimi smiled at him, inclining her head curiously, as if she expected him to perform some kind of amusing trick. When he didn’t, she blinked a few times like she was resetting, turned away and looked expectantly round the garden. “And what’s this to be?” she asked, pointing to the gaping wound in the patio where the southernmost corner had once been minding its own business, until MacTavish had accidentally dropped a grenade onto it.
“A water feature.” said Ghost, looking daggers at MacTavish through the window. He waved back cheerfully.
Repair, as replacement slabs were no longer made, was not an option, so he’d spent the last two months slowly enlarging the crater to form a wide, shallow basin, repeating “For better or worse.” in his head like a mantra with every back-aching swing of his pickaxe whilst MacTavish watched his efforts from a sunlounger, with the occasional encouraging wolf-whistle when he lifted his t-shirt up to wipe his brow.
“I’m waiting on the pond liner coming next week.” he said, feeling at least that here, was a solid, sensible subject of conversation to get back on track. Remembering the purpose of her visit he added “I thought that would be nice, you know, for a kid. Tadpoles. Newts and things.”
“Oh! How wonderful!”
They regarded the hole for a long moment, whilst Bimi let out what Ghost had come to understand was a trademark wistful sigh, when then she turned to him and cheerfully asked “How are you feeling about being a Dad?”
“How… what?”
“Well, your husband’s been pretty effusive on the matter!” She let out another tinkling laugh “But how do you feel?”
“Well…” He groped for something to say, his stomach knotting.
He thought about the baby Johnny had brought back home for a few hours for emergency babysitting, and how her fat little hands had grasped his fingers, and felt something ache inside his chest.
“I mean, Johnny… Uh… of course, not just Johnny, obviously, um… well…” he trailed off into awkward silence. She smiled encouragingly at him, and he wished the hole in the patio would swallow him.
He thought about how, the last time he’d seen Johnny’s little nephew walking, holding his parents' hands, every step a journey, and the swelling heave he’d felt inside as he watched.
He felt beads of cold sweat forming on his forehead and nervously he wiped his face. “How am I… am I feeling?”
He felt himself floundering, unable to stop his mouth opening and closing like a drowning fish as he tried to find the words, feeling the start of a rising panic as they slipped from his grasp.
“I-”
A ghost of a memory, faded and eroded by the long passage of time, an echo of the childhood he’d been trying his whole life to forget, floated behind his eyes and he felt his stomach clench. The watery platitude he’d been trying to speak into existence stuck in his throat.
He swallowed, clenching his eyes shut for a moment to catch himself and blew out a long, measured breath.
Bimi stared at him expectantly.
“I- I think I’ll see what’s keeping Johnny.” he stammered, and fled towards the house.
“What the bloody hell’s keeping you?” Ghost hissed.
MacTavish swallowed the last of the barely chewed madeleine, grimaced as it scraped his throat, and tried to settle his face into a nonchalant expression. “Why? What’s the matter?
Ghost glared at him, gripping the doorframe as if his life depended on it. “She’s asking me about my…” he trailed off, screwing his face up in disgust “...my feelings.”
MacTavish rolled his eyes “Of course she’s asking you about your feelings!” he snapped. “That’s her job, remember? Figure out if we’re the sort of sensible people that you can trust a wean with?”
“We’re supposed to be doing this together!” Ghost shot back. He stabbed his finger at the coating of crumbs over MacTavish’s t-shirt accusingly “And you’re in here stuffing your face with cake!”
“I’m letting it brew!” MacTavish gestured at the teapot, snuggled beneath a misshapen tea cosy that was the sole success of Ghost’s abortive foray into knitting. “I can’t be serving her weak tea!”
Ghost pursed his lips, unimpressed “You’ve been ages! I’m having to listen to her witter on about fairies and mice and now she wants to know how I feel about being a Dad! You’re supposed to be helping!”
MacTavish looked at him flatly. Ghost’s face had taken on a slightly desperate, pleading expression that he rarely got the chance to see, and he suspected that this was the crust holding a full on nervous breakdown from exploding out. He sighed, thinking about the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross gathering dust in its frame in the downstairs toilet. Charge intae heavy fire an’ drag oot the wounded on yer tod? Nae bother! But a wee chat about yer feelings?
He sighed, stepped forward and put his arms around his husband, feeling the tension of his body beneath his hands, the anxious shudder as he pressed his face into MacTavish’s neck.
They embraced for a long moment, and just as MacTavish drew breath to gently call Ghost an idiot, a scream pierced the air.
Both of them started.
“What the bloody hell was that?” exclaimed MacTavish.
Another scream, followed by the sound of running feet, and then a flash of pastel streaked past the window.
He looked at Ghost; Ghost looked at him, and then as one they turned and sprinted down the hall. MacTavish had just opened the front door when Bimi’s car burst out of the verge and onto the road in a screech of burning rubber. They stared after it.
MacTavish turned to Ghost “What the hell was that about?” he demanded. “What did you do?”
Ghost stared after the accelerating car, his mouth agape.
“I- I didn’t do anything.”
Half an hour later, as Ghost was washing up the tea-set, and MacTavish was patiently working his way through the labyrinthine voice-activated call handling system of Hereford Council’s social work department with increasing frustration, Ghost heard the first of the sirens.
“Six hours!” Ghost kicked open the door and staggered through “That’s six hours of my life I’ll never see again!” He slapped his hand across the lightswitch and flooded the hall with light. “If they hadn’t seized that cat as evidence I’d wring its bloody neck!”
“You don’t mean that!” said MacTavish, pushing the door shut behind him, “It’s not her fault.”
Ghost rounded on him “Get a cat, you said. Keep you company! Solve all your problems with that twat bird!” He gestured towards the garden “And what does she do? Sits there. Sits there on that bloody bistro set and watches them twitter like it’s Last Night of the Proms!”
MacTavish rolled his eyes. “Well I never made any promises.”
“I was expecting mice!” Ghost continued, yanking off his hoodie and impaling it on the coatstand “The odd vole left at the back door, but what does she bring us? Three of the vicar’s bras, six unopened packs of cheese slices, and now, half a bloody dead body!”
“Ach! It was only her hand!” argued MacTavish. “It could have been worse!”
Ghost stared at him, slack-jawed “Could have been worse? That poor social worker’s traumatised for life!”
“At least we recognised the hand! Poor Mrs Wainwright!” he shook his head, sadly “If it had been her foot or something we’d have never figured it out.” He kicked off his trainers without bothering to untie them and shoved them aside with his foot. “Thank God that ring was in the regimental colours is all I can say, otherwise it would have gone right by me.” He shuddered at the memory, and followed Ghost through to the kitchen. “Still, I suppose it’s better that the cops found her, and not you when you went over to mow the lawn.”
Ghost stared at him in flat disbelief “Every cloud’s a silver lining with you, isn’t it?”
MacTavish made a face “Well, it was that or her family came looking for her and stumbled across her lying there face down in the begonias half-eaten by the village cats.”
Ghost sighed. “Well, at least it was sudden. I’d hate to think about the alternative.” He shuddered. “What did they say, probably a stroke?”
MacTavish shrugged. “Probably. She was old enough. Ninety-two last year, if I remember right. And still pretty spry.” He tutted despondently. “Still, like you say, at least it was sudden. That’s what I would want.”
Ghost sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose between his pinched fingers, not wanting to dwell on the subject, for he’d liked Mrs Wainwright, who had, for all her rural conservatism, generally been a decent neighbour. “Well, we’re free men now at least, and with any luck, they won’t count it against us. I mean, it’s not like it’s our fault.” He sighed. “I suppose I’m not going to be able to show my face in the quilting guild for a couple of weeks.”
He rubbed his eyes and they stood in silence as the kettle wobbled towards a climactic boil, until MacTavish spoke.
“Tell you what,” he said, keen to change the subject “That new grip on the MP5 looks good.”
“Fod God’s sake, Johnny!” snapped Ghost.
MacTavish shrugged “I just thought you’d be interested.” He pulled two mugs from the cupboard and set them by the kettle. “I mean, do you not miss it sometimes?”
“Of course I miss it, Johnny!” snapped Ghost, whirling round to face him. “I’ve spent more time with my hand on a gun than I have anything else in life, but if West Mercia’s finest are pointing assault rifles at my undefended body my first instinct is not to ask them if I can have a go of one!”
MacTavish snorted disparagingly, “Ach! I just wanted a wee shot! And anyway, at least I wasn’t trying to give them pointers!”
“Look,” Ghost stabbed his finger into the kitchen table for emphasis. “If I’m getting shot by some backwater plod, the least he can do is do it properly! Bloody disgrace the way he was aiming that!”
MacTavish set the mugs down on the table and pushed the teapot along towards Ghost. He sat down heavily in the chair beside him and sighed.
“What did you do with the rest of the madeleines? I’m starving!”
Ghost looked around properly for the first time, and spotted the wire rack on which he’d left the cooling cakes on the kitchen counter, the covering tea towel ripped off and discarded, the rack empty. He stared, open-mouthed.
“Where the hell have they gone?” He demanded, jumping to his feet “There were forty of them here!” He glared at MacTavish.
“Don’t look at me!” MacTavish retorted indignantly “I only had a few.” He shrank back under Ghost’s darkening glare. “Okay, five… six or seven… maybe eight? No more than nine!”
“Johnny!”
He spotted a piece of headed paper that had been left on the kitchen counter, and snatched it up. “Dear Mr Riley,” he read aloud “We have been required to seize your baked goods under section 19 of Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 as part of our ongoing investigation…” he trailed off, staring at the paper in his hand. “I don’t believe it! Those bastard coppers have confiscated my madeleines!”