Free Loose Head by Jeff Keithly Page A

standing invitation to join Brian and his wife, Fiona, and their daughters, Rose, 10, and Kate, seven, for dinner. Fiona, tall, well-fleshed, with sharp, laughing brown eyes enlivening a sculpted oval face, met me at the door of their Southwark row-house; I handed her two bottles of Oddbins’ best and gave her a wet one on the cheek. “Sorry to be such a bachelor,” I said. “Is there enough for me?”
    “Need you ask?” she said wryly “– Brian’s cooking.”
    My partner was sweating over the stove when I arrived, a well-splattered “Shag the Cook” apron straining to protect his ample girth. “Smells lovely,” I observed. “What’s on the menu tonight, then?”
    “Roast loin of pork with apples and cream, Potatoes Anna and veggies, with a greengage cocagne and cream for a sweet.” He wiped the sweat from his massive brow. “I forgot to get wine. Did you bring some?”
    Dinner was a great success, as always; the pork was roasted to a sweet aromatic perfection, crisp and fatty outside, tender and juicy within. Brian harbors a deep distrust of anyone else in his kitchen; he fervently believes that if you love to eat, as he does, you’d better learn to cook yourself. He’s a brilliant cook, and has often avowed his intent to open an unpretentious but hideously expensive restaurant, specializing in the cuisine of Normandy, when he tires of policework.
    As always, I felt a familiar pang as we sat around the scragged-up old pine dinner table, a part of their merry and contented domesticity, but an outsider as well. Brian adored his girls, and the feeling was obviously mutual. Tonight, Fiona was wonderfully sarcastic, as always, and Katie and Rose were in rare form as well. 
    “Uncle Dex, have you and daddy ever arrested a cat burglar?” Rose asked me, as Fiona served up the cocagne, still warm from the oven and drowning in cream custard.
    “Matter of fact I have – bloke by the name of Peter McCaffery. He was ever so clever, and robbed lots of nice houses while the people inside were sleeping. But he wasn’t as clever as your dad, and one night, when he climbed out the window with his bag of loot over his shoulder, we were waiting for him.”
    “Why was he called a cat burglar? Did he have a tail and whiskers, like Tabby does?” And then, with the wonderfully mercurial mind of a 10-year-old, “I used to wish I had a tail, when I was a baby like Kate.”
    “I’m not a baby, Rose!” Kate cried in a wounded voice.
    “But you do have a tail,” I told her seriously. “It’s called a coccyx. It’s all that’s left of the tails we used to have, ages ago when we were still swinging through the trees.” She turned to have a look. “You can’t see it,” I smiled “– it’s under your skin, at the very end of your backbone.”
    “Uncle Dex, are you having me on?”
    “Daddy has a tail,” Kate interrupted brightly. “Only it’s on his front, and you can see it. When he’s in the bath. It’s called a penis.”
    “Oh, lovely,” said Fiona drily. “Pity your parents aren’t here tonight, Brian.”
    When we finished, I borrowed Brian’s apron to do the dishes. Fiona went to give the kids their bath; Brian joined me in the kitchen, and set a cup of coffee on the drainboard at my elbow. “Ta,” I said. “By the way, I may have found your motive.” I scrubbed energetically at a roasting-pan.
    “Are you going to dazzle me with your wisdom, then, or make me guess?”
    The random bits of evidence that had stuck in my brain had begun to come together, like the seemingly-unconnected lines on the easel of a portrait sketch artist I had once stopped to watch in Venice. “I saw Artemis Paul this afternoon. You remember my mate Bernie? Lord Delvemere? Paul said he was being blackmailed. He didn’t know who the blackmailer was. But I think I may.”
    Brian leant forward. “I’m listening.”
    So I told him about my conversation with Bernie, and his cryptic comment about Suite 455. “I thought