The Inspector Walter Darriteau Murder Mysteries - Books 1-4 by David Carter (best finance books of all time .txt) 📕

AFTER six by the time he arrived home. He had made Pauli Leishman’s day by stopping off and buying two bottles of his perfumed Chianti, a drink that Walter imagined Galina might enjoy.

Galina the cleaner had become, for one night only, Galina the cook, and she was already in the house, and amazingly, the old house felt more like a home, because of the presence of a young woman he barely knew.

Maybe it was her quiet perfume, maybe it was the occasional foreign song that slipped from her lips, and the aromas she brought with her, or maybe it was simply because of the energetic, youthful movement she brought that is always associated with vibrancy and happiness.

She was in the kitchen, still in tight jeans, ponytail alive and kicking, up to her arms in flour and pastry, and she smiled at him through her big blue eyes, as he ambled in.

‘Hi, Mister Darto!’

‘Hello Galina, call me Walter, how’s it going?’

‘All goes well. Should be ready for seven fifteen. Seven fifteen OK?’

‘Perfect,’ he said.

There was an old fashioned brown cane basket set on the end of the worktop, the kind of thing his Aunt Mimosa would have used forty years before. He didn’t think modern women were still using such things. Maybe Ukrainian women thought they were trendy. The top was covered with a patterned red cloth. He went to lift it, to look inside.

‘Ah ah!’ she said. ‘No! My secrets, not for you, you must wait!’

Duly admonished he grinned and limped away and went upstairs to find some hot water and a clean shirt.

It was half an hour before he came down. Fine aromas were seeping from the kitchen and drifting into the hall and sitting room. Pastry, dumplings, meat, cheese, they were all there, Walter detected that, and all were very much on his list of must haves for dinner.

He ambled into the sitting room.

Toward the rear of the room, set in front of the window, was a drop leaf table. He rarely used it, sat in front of the TV most nights, with his ready meal on a tray on his lap like so many others, but there was something good about raising the leaf, fixing the table, finding the white tablecloth that hadn’t been unfolded for more than a year, and setting out two places.

There was a fat candle there too, in the tall and narrow cupboard hidden within the end of the oak table, still two thirds remaining, and once it was lit no one would ever know it wasn’t new. Walter felt good. His nose twitched. It was driving him batty. He’d go and investigate.

His large pan was bubbling, maybe some kind of pasta, no, dumplings more like, and he adored spicy dumplings, and she had mentioned dumplings, he was sure of it. Another pan definitely had meat on the go; he could detect that from two thousand yards, boiled beef maybe, tender and juicy, while oil was coming to the bubble in the frying pan and garlic going in, as he shared a smile with the pretty woman.

‘Ready in ten,’ she said.

‘What are we having?’

‘Borscht to start.’

Some kind of soup, he thought, he’d have to find soup spoons.

‘Then Varenyky,’ she said, ‘with sauerkraut, cheese, cabbage, and meat.’

‘Varenyky?’

‘My special dumplings, you will love, you go, I busy,’ and Walter got the message and headed back to the table to find the soup spoons and light the candle.

‘Nearly ready,’ he heard her call through from the kitchen. ‘You sit down,’ and then she was in the doorway looking in, at Mister Darto sitting, waiting, opposite the candle, opposite another empty place.

She came to the table, smiled down, glanced at the vacant place, ‘You ask someone else? You expecting someone? There is enough. Your pretty friend from work, maybe?’

‘No, no,’ said Walter, beckoning to the empty chair. ‘That’s for you, your place.’

She gasped. ‘Oh no, Mister Darto, I not eat! I cook, I serve, I wash, but I not eat, I eat before, I not hungry, I not eat, no, no, no, all for you,’ and she turned and headed back to the kitchen.

Walter’s shoulders slumped.

He put his right elbow on the table and his chin on his hand. He was apparently expected to dine alone. He ate on his own every bloody night when he stayed in. He’d even prefer to eat with Austerity Hayes than eat on his own, and that was saying something.

Truth was, he hated eating on his own, and though he tried one more time to persuade Galina to sit opposite, even if it were just to watch him eat the fine food she had prepared, she point blank refused to sit, and served him his dinner in a cold atmosphere that neither of them could miss.

‘What a fool I’ve been,’ he said aloud, an hour later, after she had gone.

Forty-Eight

All through the following day the dentists reported in, by phone, email and fax, all reporting that the teeth did not belong to one of their clients, or former clients, some adding, thank goodness for that.

The info was drip-fed into the monster and it seemed happy with that, oblivious to the fact that all the data was negative. It seemed to Walter that so long as it was fed, it was happy. By the end of the day almost two-thirds had reported back. Mrs West told the team to remember to thank the dentists for their help and cooperation, though she didn’t elaborate on how they were supposed to do that.

It had been a dead day on every front.

Walter went home at six and re-heated what remained of the Ukrainian fare. An hour later the phone rang. Call box by the sound of things, plenty going on in the background.

‘Mister Darto! Mister Darto!’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s Galina, the cleaner.’

‘I know who it is, Galina, what’s the matter?’

‘Dimitri, he sick.’

‘Your son?’

‘Yes! Radioactivity sick, they say he better, but he much worse. He bad. I have to go. I’m at airport. I fly