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

and pigs - Colin’s domain. It was the only house that Donny had ever known.

Donny was an only child and a late one at that. Both of his parents had been over forty when he arrived, and both were now well past sixty, and time was beginning to catch up with them. They were finding it harder to get out of bed in the morning, harder to till the land, and harder still to find any motivation.

Yes, Donny did help them on the land where he could, but he also went out to work, a paper shuffling job in some city centre finance company, where he assessed loan applications all day long, a job he hated, but one that paid the bills, or at least, most of them.

Outside the front of the house more often than not was parked an ageing mauve van. It had muddy wheels and doors and a rusty back-end.

Remembrance boasted a large old-fashioned kitchen and in the centre of the room was a vast oak rectangular table that had come with the house. It had probably been too big and too heavy to take out when the previous owners evacuated the place in 1975.

Colin and Chrissie were sitting on one side of the table, Walter and Karen on the other, four unmatched mugs, two chipped, of stewed steaming tea between them.

‘So,’ said Walter, ‘how long has Donny been missing?’

‘Four days,’ said the skinny old man, who wasn’t that much older than Walter.

‘Has he ever gone missing before?’ asked Karen.

‘Sometimes for a couple of days, but never as long as this.’

‘Have you got an up-to-date picture?’ asked Walter.

Chrissie smiled, happy that the question she had anticipated had been issued. ‘This one,’ she said, taking a colour picture from her pinny pocket. ‘It was his twenty-first, he hasn’t changed a bit since.’

Walter and Karen shared the photo.

‘He’s a good looking boy,’ said Karen, staring down into his dark eyes.

‘Oh yes he is,’ said his mother.

‘Does he have a girlfriend?’ asked Walter.

‘He says he likes to play the field,’ said Colin, ‘though he rarely brings anyone back here. Think there was someone at work he was sweet on, but he doesn’t share information like that with us, we’re just his parents.’

Seemed a point of issue there, noted both officers.

‘Has he got worries?’ asked Karen.

‘What kind of worries?’ asked his mother in a rush.

‘Well you know, money troubles, relationship difficulties, lack of friends, does he drink?’

‘He doesn’t drink, none of us do, we can’t afford it for one thing,’ said the father.

‘How are things generally, money wise?’ asked Walter.

‘We’re fine!’ said Chrissie.

Colin pulled a face. Didn’t look fine to Walter, and then Colin said, ‘We’re finding it hard, I’ll make no bones about that, but we are no different to everyone else in the bloody country, what with everything going up all the time, petrol, insurance, car tax, VAT, you name it, but flower prices and fruit prices and pig prices, they don’t ever go up, do they? They go down, so how the hell does that work? We’re getting screwed both sides of the cake.’

Walter and Karen knew he could talk a lot more on the topic if the feeling took him, and they could imagine he did just that when they were sitting alone around that table at night-time.

‘Is there anywhere he might have gone?’ asked Karen.

‘Like where?’ said Chrissie.

‘We don’t know, Mrs Rushnell, you tell us.’

She shrugged her shoulders and turned and looked at her unshaven husband.

‘Did he know any Oriental girls?’ asked Walter.

‘What? Like Chinese?’ said Colin.

‘Yes, that kind of thing.’

Colin shrugged his shoulders and shook his head.

Chrissie said, ‘He likes Chinese meals though, his favourite, we did a Chinese banquet for his twenty-first.’

Walter smiled and nodded.

‘He’s twenty-three,’ said Karen. ‘Do you think he might have found a flat of his own?’

‘What? Without telling us!’ said Chrissie. ‘No!’

‘Sometimes an only child can have problems fleeing the nest, so to speak,’ said Walter. ‘Sometimes they do it in strange ways, sometimes they just decide, almost on the spur of the moment, to make a clean break of things. Maybe, secretly he was a little unhappy and just decided to change his life, hopefully, as he saw it, for the better.’

‘He would have told us!’ insisted Colin, leaving no room for argument.

‘Is there anyone out there who would have wanted to harm him?’ asked Karen.

‘Harm him?’ said Chrissie. ‘How do you mean?’

Walter looked at Chrissie and he knew that she knew what Karen was getting at.

‘We just want him home, Inspector, we just want him home.’

‘Course you do,’ said Karen, ‘we’ll see what we can do.’

‘We’ll go and talk to his employers and see if they know anything,’ said Walter.

‘We’ve rung them, he’s not been to work,’ said Colin.

Walter bobbed his head. ‘We’ll go and see them and find out what we can.’

‘Thanks,’ said Chrissie.

‘We’d like to see his room,’ said Walter.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Chrissie, and she pushed her chair back with a screech. ‘It’s this way,’ and she showed them upstairs.

In the bedroom, Walter said, ‘Do you mind leaving us to it for five minutes.’

Chrissie pursed her lips and nodded quickly once and glanced at Colin.

He said, ‘We’ll be downstairs if you need anything.’

Karen watched them go down the stairs and closed the door behind them.

It was a sizeable room, the second main bedroom of the house. It was situated at the back and looked out over maybe an acre of ground, rows and rows of cut flowers, leeks, runner beans, and Brussels sprouts, if Walter wasn’t mistaken, some of them just starting to go over the top, autumn taking its toll. The rows of plants went all the way down to the canal where a couple of narrowboats could be seen berthed on the far side. No lawn, no patio, no decking, no room for waste ground, times were hard and every square foot had been set to work as if the ground was at war, which in a way it was, economic war.

In the