Five Stars, With Observations

Chapter One: A Good Day for a Closure

The crab shack at the end of the Cobbleigh Sands promenade had been called The Lucky Claw for thirty-one years, and for thirty-one years it had sold brown crab in a bap to men in fleeces who did not ask questions. Clare Baddeley asked questions.

"Mr Pengilly," she said, "I need you to tell me, out loud, what temperature that fridge is running at."

Denny Pengilly looked at the fridge as though it might answer for itself. "It's cold."

"That isn't a temperature."

"It's cold in there. Put your hand in."

"I have put a calibrated probe in," said Clare, "which is better than my hand, because my hand is not accredited." She wrote 11.4°C in the box, then wrote it again in her own notebook, because carbon copies faded and she had learned that the hard way in 2011.

Outside, the gulls were doing their bin work. It was the second of April, low tide, the sea gone out so far it looked like it had been called away on business. It was also Clare's forty-third birthday, which she had not mentioned, because mentioning it would have been a form of soliciting, and because Denny Pengilly's cooked crab was sitting eight inches from a bucket of live ones in a way that made the whole question of birthdays feel decorative.

"You're closing me," said Denny.

"I'm serving a hygiene emergency prohibition notice on the premises with immediate effect," said Clare, "which you can appeal, and which I will explain to you twice, and then once more on the phone tomorrow when you've calmed down and can hear me."

"My father built this shack."

"Your father built it beautifully. Your drainage is what concerns me." She turned the notice round so it faced him and set her pen on top of it, nib pointing at the signature box, the way you set a knife and fork for a child. "Read the first paragraph. Take your time. I'm not in a hurry."

She was not in a hurry. That was the thing people never expected. They expected a woman in a fleece gilet with a laminated ID and a clipboard to be brisk and cruel and gone in nine minutes. Clare stayed. Clare stayed for forty minutes if it took forty minutes. She had once sat with a Turkish restaurateur while he wept about his mother and then, gently, kindly, without one single milligram of mercy, closed his kitchen.

"Everyone loves this place," Denny said.

"I know. I love this place. I had my sixteenth birthday sitting on that wall with a crab bap and a can of shandy." She tapped the notice. "And in that fridge there is a cooked crab that has been at eleven degrees for at least two days, and if a child eats it and something happens to that child, everyone loving this place will not help either of us." She let it land. "You can reopen. I will tell you exactly how. I'll write it down. I write very clear lists."

He signed. His hand shook, and she pretended not to see, and she waited on the shingle while he locked his own door, and she said, "Ring me Thursday," and she meant it, and he would, and she would talk him through a drainage grille for fifty-five minutes at no charge to the ratepayer.

Then she went and sat in her car.

The car was a nine-year-old estate, immaculate, with a small dustpan brush in the door pocket. On the passenger seat lay a supermarket salad — chicken, no dressing, dressing thrown away in the bin at the leisure centre because the sachet had a slow leak — and a hardbacked A5 notebook with a maroon cover, its corners softened by nineteen years of handling.

On the front, in silver marker, in her own capitals: REGISTER OF GRIEVANCES.

She ate four forkfuls, uncapped her pen, and turned to the index. The index was the thing she was proudest of. Anybody could keep a list of the times people had been horrible to them. Clare had cross-referenced.

2 April. Pengilly, D. Called me a jobsworth vulture at 11:52 hrs in front of two members of the public. Severity 2. (Mitigating: distress; grief for shack; long history of good crab.) N.B. Compare Pengilly 2016 (Severity 1, verbal, tide-related).

Severity ran one to five. Nothing had reached five since 2004, which was the founding entry, and which she did not read any more but knew by heart.

Her phone rang, and the screen said MUM, and Clare looked at it for two full rings the way you look at a wasp in a car.

"Happy birthday," said Sheila Baddeley, "and sit down."

"I'm in the car."

"Perfect. Clare, I'm getting married."

A gull landed on the bonnet and stared in with its horrible orange eye.

"To whom," said Clare, because she had never in her life said who to.

"His name's Bernard Quiddick and he's marvellous and he's got a business, mobility scooters, ever so successful, and he's got a lovely flat with a downstairs loo, and I want you to be a witness. Michelle's maid of honour."

"How long have you known him?"

"Long enough."

"That isn't a unit."

A pause, the small guilty pause Clare had been able to hear since she was six. "Eleven weeks."

"Eleven weeks."

"On Tuesday it'll be twelve, if that helps."

"It doesn't materially help, no."

"We met at the tea dance. He can do a proper foxtrot, Clare, not the shuffling. And before you say anything, I'm seventy-one, I've got a hip that's on borrowed time and a boiler that makes a noise like a cow, and I'm not spending what's left of it being sensible at you." Sheila took a breath. "Eighth of June. Eight weeks Saturday."

"Eight weeks." Clare had already opened the calendar in her head, and the calendar in her head said something inconvenient. The Environmental Health Awards were in Bristol on the twentieth of June — nine weeks from tomorrow — and Clare Baddeley, principal environmental health officer, was on the shortlist for Officer of the Year, and had told exactly two people, one of whom was her line manager and the other of whom was the man at the dry cleaner's.

"Where," said Clare.

"Ooh, now," said Sheila, with relish, "you'll like this. The Grand Marina."

Clare put down her fork.

There are, in the professional life of every environmental health officer, one or two premises that function as a personal weather system. For Clare it was the Grand Marina Hotel: forty-one bedrooms, a ballroom with a sprung floor, sea views from the good side and a view of the recycling centre from the cheap side, and a proprietor called Neville Chatterway who received warning letters the way other men receive postcards. Two years of files. Two lever-arch files, in fact, plus an overflow wallet. She had improved that hotel by increments and by force of will and she had never once got it to the point where she could either be satisfied or, more importantly, close it, because Neville Chatterway had the specific genius of always fixing the exact thing you'd written down and nothing adjacent to it.

Also, there was the peacock.

"Mum," said Clare carefully, "the Grand Marina has an outstanding improvement notice on its ice machine."

"Well, we're not having ice."

"That isn't—"

"Clare." Sheila's voice went flat and warm at once, the way it did when she was about to be unanswerable. "It's the only place in this town with a ramp and a ballroom. Where else am I going to go? The bowls club smells of feet."

"There's the Ocean Rooms."

"Burnt down."

"It did not burn down, it had a small fire in a tumble dryer and it is fully operational."

"It smells of the fire, and Bernard's chest is delicate." A rustle; Sheila was moving to her chair, which meant the conversation had entered its second half. "Michelle's doing the flowers."

And there it was, laid on the table like a lump of raw chicken next to a cooked ham.

"Right," said Clare.

"She's your sister."

"I'm aware of the relationship."

"Four years, Clare."

"Four years and two months."

"You'll come, though." It was not a question, and Sheila had never in her life let a silence do her work for her, so she filled it. "You'll come, and you'll be a witness, and you'll wear something that isn't grey, and you'll be nice to Bernard, because he's had a hard life and he deserves a bit of joy at the end of it, and so do I."

"I'll come," said Clare.

"Good."

"And I'll be doing my own checks."

"Oh, God love you," said Sheila, and hung up.

Clare sat with the phone in her lap and the salad going warm on the seat and the gull still staring, and she thought, in order, three thoughts:

One: eleven weeks.

Two: mobility scooters is a cash-adjacent business with an ageing and vulnerable customer base.

Three: I don't know a single thing about this man.

She finished the salad because waste was waste. Then she drove back to Marine Buildings, went up to the second floor, past the poster about hand hygiene that she had straightened seventeen times that year, sat down at a desk with one framed certificate above it (Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, Diploma, 2004, in a frame she had bought herself and hung using a spirit level), and opened a new folder.

On the front, in her small, upright, appalling handwriting, she wrote:

QUIDDICK, BERNARD — PRELIMINARY.

Across the aisle, her apprentice Toby Dunkerley was eating a sausage roll over a keyboard, which was a matter she would come to.

"Nice birthday?" said Toby.

"Productive," said Clare.