Page 73 of Blow Down (The Plumber's Mate)
Uh-oh.
Vi’s voice got louder suddenly. I guessed she’d picked up the phone again. “It came off in my hand.”
Flippin’ marvellous. “I’ll be there in ten,” I said, adding a bit of a sigh in the hopes she’d appreciate she was messing up my plans for the evening something chronic.
Okay, so I hadn’t actually had any plans. She didn’t know that, did she?
“Just got to let Phil know where I’m off to, and I’ll be on my way,” I added, ’cos while I might be a sucker for an antique wood floor in distress, I’m not daft. Not that I really reckoned Vi had done her stepmum in, but there was no harm in letting her know Phil would know where I was and who’d called me over.
His phone, typically, went to voice mail, so I left a message, then pulled out of the dark lay-by, still miraculously un-murdered, and set off back to St. Leonards.
Vi looked severely frazzled when she opened the door of the farmhouse to me. “Oh, thank God. Come on in. It’s this way.”
She led me down the hall to a utility room, housing the boiler, a top-range washer and matching dryer, as well as an old-fashioned butler’s sink for hand-washing. The last of which I wouldn’t mind betting hadn’t seen a lot of use since the demise of the first Mrs. Majors, and maybe not even then.
I didn’t need my spidey-senses to locate the problem. Mainly because Vi had already found the leak herself and made a sad little attempt at stopping the leak with what had probably once been a very expensive scarf. It was right up by the boiler, on a junction, unsurprisingly.
She’d also thrown what looked like the entire contents of the family linen closet on the floor in an attempt to soak up the water. I’d have to scale the sodden pile to get at the leak, but first things first. “Right, let’s get that water turned off,” I said briskly.
The tap she’d broken turned out to control the water supply to the dishwasher. I hoped for the sake of any antique china in the house that she wasn’t as ham-fisted with the washing up as she was with the plumbing. Then again, I did have a spare in the van.
I was planning to wait and see whether Vi was still apologetic after I’d fixed her pipes before I mentioned it, though.
First things first. I needed to locate the stop valve—which, to be fair to Vi, wasn’t under the sink at all. Once again, my psychic gift was about as much use as that silk scarf had been at stopping the leak, but I eventually tracked it down near the front door, under a loose floorboard cunningly hidden by the welcome mat. I was just glad I didn’t have to go rooting around for an outside stopcock in the dark. ’Specially seeing as a property like this might not even have one.
The stop valve turned easily, which was a relief. In a hard-water area, things seize up quick from the limescale and can be a bugger to get loose. It couldn’t have been all that long since the last time they’d had a plumber round.
I’d expected Vi to go off and put her feet up while I got on with the work, but instead she dogged my footsteps and asked so many questions, you’d have thought she was thinking about a change of profession. (And yeah, all right, I made sure I didn’t turn my back on her any more than I could help, especially with some reasonably hefty tools lying around. Like I said: not daft. Or suicidal, for that matter.)
Working the leaky junction loose was less effort than I’d have expected, given the age of the plumbing. I saw the problem straight away. “Blimey,” I muttered, more under my breath than to Vi. “Never seen one that bad before.”
“What is it?” Vi asked, poking her nose up to the pipe.
“Washer. It’s corroded.”
“Where? I can’t see.”
“Yeah, that’s your problem, right there.” The washer had corroded so much it literally wasn’t even there anymore. “Don’t worry—I’ll just go and grab a spare from the van.”
It was full dark when I got outside. Darker than I expected, I mean. It took a mo for me to twig that the security light hadn’t come on. Houses like this? There’s always a security light. It seemed a bit dodgy it’d chosen tonight of all nights to break down—but then, maybe it’d been down for months and they were just really bad at getting round to fixing it. I shivered and didn’t hang about any longer than I had to, just grabbed the washer and a new tap head from the back of the van.
I was about to leg it back to the front door when it opened, light hitting me from inside. Vi stood there. “Why isn’t the outside light on?” she asked, frowning.
“Search me,” I told her. “Come on. Let’s get this sorted.”
I went back to the utility room, fitted the washer, tightened the join, sorted the tap under the sink, and turned the water back on before checking there were no more leaks.
By the end of it all, Vi was still frowning. “All right, love?” I asked, half my mind on totting up the bill and adding extra for the emergency call-out, not to mention the nerve.
Course, that could have been what her mind was on too . . . Nah. She wasn’t the sort to get in a tizzy over a couple of hundred quid.
“It’s just odd. I’m sure Daddy had a plumber in here only a couple of months ago.”
“Yeah, thought you might’ve,” I muttered distractedly.
“Yes, but you see, I’m sure that was a washer too. I wasn’t here, but Daddy was talking about it at lunch on Monday. He thought the plumber he’d called in had ripped him off—that’s why I didn’t call him tonight.”
I shrugged. “Old systems like this, you’ve got to expect them to need a bit of care and attention from time to time. And if the washers were the same age, it’s not surprising they went one after the other.”
