Gentleman's Relish by Patrick Gale Page B

taken her on to theirs. Someone’s birthday. I went back on my own.’
    â€˜Talk to anyone at the pub?’
    â€˜Er…’ He cast his mind back to smoke, music, turned backs around the television. ‘No.’
    â€˜Did anyone see you get back?’
    â€˜No. There’s just the two of us and I was asleep when Val got back.’ He remembered her drunken curses as she stubbed a toe on one of the bed’s sticking-out legs.
    â€˜What time was that?’
    â€˜I was asleep. Past midnight.’
    â€˜How well did you know Ms Thomas?’
    â€˜We were at school together. You remember that, Garth. You were there too.’
    â€˜Sorry, Perran,’ Garth sighed. ‘We have to do this by the book.’
    â€˜Okay. Sorry.’ Toffee whined and Perran settled him back on the sawdust. The wind was rising again, whistling round the barn roof and flapping a loosened tab of corrugated steel. ‘I was at school with her so you could say I’d known her all my life, but we weren’t friends. Of course I had dealings with her later, through Proveg. She buys…I mean she bought our broccoli and crispers. Pushed a hard bargain. Did with everyone. She won’t have many friends, I reckon.’
    â€˜You harvest your own broccoli?’
    â€˜Yeah.’
    â€˜What with?’
    â€˜Knives. Same as everyone else.’
    â€˜Stainless steel?’
    â€˜No. Proveg have been on at us to change. New rules. Supermarkets don’t want rust on their precious broccoli stalks. But there’s nothing wrong with the old ones if you look after them. Dry and oil them. Keep them sharp with an angle grinder. And they’re not brittle. The stainless ones get chipped on all the stones.’
    He had been cutting broccoli since he was twelve, and in that time had seen the move from boxing them up in hessian-lined wooden crates that were taken to Penzance Station on a trailer to bagging them individually and arranging them in supermarket crates on the spot. There were health and safety regulations now. Knives had to be signed out and in by the cutters and so did any (regulation blue) sticking plasters, for fear someone get a nasty shock of finding a bloody bandage in their cauliflower cheese. Other Proveg rules forbidding smoking, eating or dogs and insisting that in the absence of a chemical toilet, allowable where teams number five or less, antiseptic wet wipes are to be handed out to workers needing to relieve themselves in the field he and Val blithely ignored. They had even discovered that, once the tractor had driven down a row once or twice so that tracks were wellcut into the mud, it was possible to send the tractor slowly through the field without a driver, thus freeing up an extra pair of hands to cut while Val rode in the makeshift rig at the back trimming, bagging and packing. Health and safety regs would surely have outlawed this but Val kept a weather eye open and if she saw a Proveg four-wheel-drive in the distance could tip him the wink to down knife and drive for a while.
    Garth Tresawle made an extra note and underlined it. He looked up.
    â€˜How many do you have?’ he asked.
    â€˜Four.’
    â€˜Where d’you keep them?’
    â€˜In a shed. And no. It isn’t locked.’
    â€˜How many men work for you?’
    â€˜On the broccoli?’ Garth nodded. ‘Two. Ernest Penrose and Peter Newson.’ He gave their addresses, as best as he could remember them, and his own, and that was all.
    They would have a hard time pinning charges on the mere basis of a knife. West Penwith was bristling with knives at this time of year. The daffodil and broccoli harvests brought crowds of itinerant workers into the area in search of hard labour and tax-free bundles of earthy notes. There was some resentment among the local hands, jobs being scarce, but Eastern Europeans would always be prepared to work for that little bit less than Cornishmen,especially with