11. CHOP SUEY

An exploded caravan and a non-grieving husband.

The uninitiated non-caravanner may not fully understand that caravans carry with them a supply of gas in a cylinder, and that gas it conveyed by perfectly safe pipes via a valve to where it is needed, usually the heating appliance, the cooker and maybe a refrigerator. And to underline the safety bit, it is all perfectly safe unless someone does something foolish. Then there might be trouble. Gas, after all, enjoys exploding when mixed with air. So it’s best not to do anything foolish.

Like hacking away at a perfectly safe pipe.

Or leaving the tap of an unlit appliance in the “on” position and going away for a cup of tea with a neighbour.

And that last thing is certainly what someone had done in the expensive caravan owned by Tom and June Coppleby, probably some time before June Coppleby, frustrated by her husband’s intractable insistence that he drive hundreds of miles on the following day, decided to calm her nerves by lighting a cigarette. She usually got her dose of nerve therapy from an electronic cigarette, but this time felt so deeply frustrated that she turned to the real thing.

You might have expected her to have smelled the gas in the air, but for some reason she didn’t. It is true that she had recently recovered from a summer cold, and in that may lie the explanation for her failure to notice that the air inside that expensive caravan was saturated with propane, a gas which has the tendency to go bang when it is sufficiently concentrated and responds to a spark with delicious violence. June’s cigarette lighter sparked. It was a good one. Like most things Coppleby, expensive.

Whatever the reason, the explosion was magnificent and blew the roof off the caravan, which would probably have been acceptable had it not taken June’s life with it before she could change her mind and discard the unlit cigarette.

“Well blow me!” ejaculated Tom in the sort of voice you might have expected him to adopt if he’d just stubbed his toe or done something equally insignificant.

“What on Earth...” shouted Rosie, and she ran down the caravan steps and onto the grass. Joe’s caravan, with the exception of a relocated roof, looked very much the same as it had a few moments before. The awning was intact though the ultra-critical might have pointed out that it was slightly awry.

She ran across to see if there was anything she could do, and when she got there it was quite obvious that June had suffered more than anything in the van. Most of the furniture looked little more distressed than being only slightly ruffled. A pillow on the bed was smouldering and promised to burst into flames if the smouldering wasn’t attended to, and a couple of wine glasses had been blown into the sink and lay smashed. On the floor there were dozens of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that had been swept by the blast off the table it had been partly finished on. An almost empty wine bottle was on its side on the carpet and was dripping its last drops silently into its pile. Yet taken all-in-all nobody would have believed, if told, that there had been a major explosion.

“The gas hob is on and not lit!” shouted Rosie, turning the taps off. “All three of them!” she added. Then she turned to Tom. “This was no accident,” she said. “And June is dead.”

“You reckon she committed suicide?” asked Tom.

“You mean, rushed in, turned on the gas and tried to make it explode? Hardly! The gas will have taken some time to build up to the point of it being an explosive mixture with the oxygen in the air,” she said patiently, as if explaining something very obvious to a stupid child. “You can’t just turn a tap on and expect everything to go pouf, or it would be happening all the time and none of us would be safe. No, the gas had been on for quite some time.”

“I don’t know...” stammered Tom, who had followed her to his van and was looking around in horror. “I didn’t expect this...” he muttered.

“Didn’t expect? You mean you did expect something?” demanded Rosie, and then: “you knew the gas was on? You knew it was getting dangerous? And you knew June smokes, especially if she’s upset or under pressure?” she asked, her eyes firmly on his. She’d known Tom for years, but suddenly, now, she was seeing him in a totally different light. There was, in her opinion, something deeply troubling in his failure to respond properly to the death of a wife he had professed to have loved.

“She was cooking a chop suey...” he gabbled, “she said it would be delicious and it was in the wok, ready to be cooked, but I’m fed up with Chinese food. She’s always cooking it. I want proper food for a change. Something with real chips. I didn’t want the cooker to work. I wanted to get a take-away!”

“So that could be why there was no light under the wok, but why were there three rings turned on?” demanded Rosie. “Tom, you’ve got a lot of questions to answer before the day’s out!”

“I’m not talking to you!” he spat at her. “You’re not a proper copper! You don’t know anything about… about … about...”

“Murder?” asked Rosie, almost gently. “Are you trying to say I know nothing about murder?”

“You’re not even white!” he spat at her, “proper coppers are British! Not … go back to where you were born!”

“You mean Brumpton?” almost whispered Rosie.

“Mummy, why is he being so rude?” asked Jill, perplexed, “I don’t like it when people are rude to you.”

The situation might have started to get out of hand but a flashing, wailing blues and twos heralded the arrival of a fire engine, ambulance and accompanying police car. Constable Allsop hadn’t been slow in reacting to the explosion and fortunately Twelve Trees had a first class mobile signal. He had called in help.

There was little the firemen could do. Rosie had already discarded the smouldering pillow and poured enough water on it to extinguish every vestige of fire. They looked around, and examined the caravan and soon concluded, after Rosie told them how she had found things, that some idiot had turned the gas taps on without applying a flame to light them.

They left soon after that. Sorting out who had or had not done what, whichever the case might be, would be down to the police.

The ambulance paramedics confirmed that life in June was extinct, and disappeared with their lump of still death to the mortuary in Seaholme where June would be subject to a detailed post mortem examination.

The police in their car were a little harder to get rid of. Rosie left the enquiry to them because she knew the Coppleby twosome personally. She did, though, offer her opinions.

“His reaction was all wrong,” she said, “it was as if he knew the van was tantamount to being an unexploded bomb yet he was a little shocked when it exploded and even more shocked when he saw the damage it had done. I mean, the roof…

“But when it came to his wife I saw no grief, no mourning, just relief that he wouldn’t have to put up with her chop suey!

“This needs very careful examination.”

TO BE CONTINUED….

© Peter Rogerson 31.03.17