Gareth headed off to buy another round of drinks and everyone shuffled around to make more room. Renelle sat with Helen, and Mitch plonked himself down in a space by Lexie. She introduced herself again, as Eden’s round of people and names had been hasty.
‘You’re friends of Gareth and Helen, aren’t you?’ said Mitch.
‘Yes, we met them when we first moved to Nettleford just over two years ago.’
‘They mentioned you the last time they stayed with us.’ He grinned at Lexie’s quizzical expression. ‘Nothing bad. Your name came up when Helen talked about things she’d done since we last saw each other.’
Work was always an easy topic of conversation between new acquaintances. When Lexie asked, Mitch told her about his consulting company and some of the projects he’d worked on with companies. The talk rolled along easily compared to her brief conversation with Xena and Lexie thought he would be very good at his work.
Before she knew it another hour had disappeared. Her days of drinking more than the occasional glass of wine with lunch were behind her and she was pleased when Eden suggested they’d spent long enough at the pub, especially as she followed that with a mention of a new development of boutique shops in the village. Lexie was happy to go and check them out while Nathan visited the small village museum which held more information on the Little Stillford stone circles. Along the way they split into smaller groups and after Nathan went into the museum Lexie was on her own.
She sauntered along the uneven cobbled pavement, enjoying the afternoon sunshine, until she spotted an art and craft gallery and went in to find something to give her mother as a thank-you for having the girls and Max. Her mother would declare it wasn’t necessary, but Lexie wanted to show her appreciation for the weekend away without the children.
Hanging on the walls was a glorious mix of styles from abstract paintings through to rural and coastal landscapes. Lexie spent some time gazing at a more structured abstract painting. She didn’t know how it would be described, but she loved the blocks of deep autumn colours complemented with snatches of what appeared to be hieroglyphics in gold and bronze. Eventually, she dragged herself away from the painting and wandered into an area filled with pottery and wood carvings. Until she had met the artist Dominique Santos the previous year, she had never been that interested in paintings. Perhaps it was part of getting older. Sometimes mid-thirties still felt young, and at other times she thought she was hurtling through the years.
She found a narrow, rectangular metal sheet with a cut-out of a fern frond under a garden-art label which she decided to buy her mother and on impulse she bought a similar one to hang on the outside wall of their house.
‘These are becoming more popular,’ said the woman behind the counter. ‘People like to hang them in sun rooms or on patio walls. Would you like either of them gift-wrapped?’
‘That’s a nice idea. The larger of the two is a gift for my mother, the other one’s for me so don’t worry about wrapping it. You have a lovely selection of items.’
The woman cut a length of gold paper from a large roll on the shelf behind her. ‘Thank you. Are you visiting for the weekend?’ She turned and placed the gift wrap on the counter.
‘Yes, it’s a beautiful area.’
It was a good job Lexie wasn’t in a hurry as the woman folded her arms over her chest and gave Lexie the run-down on the best places to eat and drink. The woman looked to be in her fifties, smartly dressed in a black skirt and an orange blouse. Lexie guessed the matching necklace and earrings were ones sold in the shop as they looked a similar style to some she had checked out. A thought crossed her mind.
‘Thanks for the recommendations. You certainly know the area well.’
‘Both my husband and I was born here. We moved away for a while after we were first married. Oxford. It was good for a few years but we like it here and came back.’
‘We live in a smallish town. I like the feeling of community you get.’
‘Oh yes, the city doesn’t give you that.’
Lexie decided to take a chance and stretch the truth to see what she might discover. ‘We were here a number of years ago. I remember it clearly as it was the weekend after a young teenage girl was killed in a hit and run accident. I didn’t have children then but now that I do I often think about that. I don’t know how I’d cope.’
The woman straightened her back, a piece of sellotape stuck to her finger ready to place on one end of the package. ‘That was an awful time. I don’t know how folks can do something like that and not stop. Poor Cathy, and her poor parents.’
Lexie didn’t say anything. The woman had the unfocussed stare of someone lost in memory.
‘Everyone in the village helped. You know, taking food to the family, running the other two to school activities, even things like mowing their lawn when it was needed.’
‘Small towns and villages have a great sense of community.’
‘That’s very true.’ She tutted, shaking her head and stuck down the end of the parcel with the sellotape. ‘Nothing like that had ever happened before in the village, and I knew the family, well, we all did. You could ask anyone and they’d remember. That and what happened later.’
What happened later Lexie wanted to shout. Using every ounce of her willpower she kept quiet, hoping the woman would carry on with her story.
She turned the package around to tape the other end but her gaze was on the far distance again. ‘The person that killed Cathy might just as well have killed her parents. Rose was never the same, she had the other two but Cathy’s death just sucked all the life out of her. Depression I guess they’d call. She killed herself before the end of the year.’
‘Oh my goodness, that’s awful.’ Lexie couldn’t help her exclamation.
The woman behind the counter nodded. ‘Jack had a heart attack the following spring. Those poor children, within a year they’d lost their parents and youngest sister, and as far as we know no one ever owned up to killing Cathy.’
The doorbell chimed as two customers walked into the shop. Damn. The woman became more efficient, folding the other end of the package and sticking it down before placing the two items in a grey paper carrier.
‘I hope you have a lovely weekend,’ she said.
‘Thank you. Oh, I wonder if you have a local newspaper?’
The shop owner shook her head. ‘Unfortunately that got taken over by a larger company who bought a number of the local papers. They amalgamated them, but what that meant was we never really got any of our news and then I think they went broke back last year.’
‘That’s a shame. It’s so good to have these records of our history.’
‘Ah well, if you’re looking for the archives, we do have those. My sister’s the local librarian, though we’ve had a fight on our hands to keep that open. Reduced hours and so on. It’s in the same building as the museum. Lily will be there now, just tell her I sent you.’
After thanking her, Lexie hurried out of the shop with her parcel and along the street to where she’d left Nathan at the museum. At the far end of the building there was another door and a sign for the library showing the opening hours. Three days a week, and thankfully, as she’d been told, today was one of those.
Behind the counter, sorting through returned books, was a dark-haired woman around Lexie’s age. She looked up as Lexie approached.
‘Hello,’ said Lexie. ‘I was looking for Lily.’
‘I’m Lily,’ said a voice behind her.
Lexie turned, the woman was possibly a few years older than the owner of the gift store. Her grey hair was pulled back into a bun and with her tortoiseshell glasses and pastel twinset she looked every bit a librarian.
‘I’m Lexie Wyatt. I was discussing newspaper archives with your sister and she mentioned that you have some of the local ones here.’
‘Yes. It’s one of my projects. I help out in the museum and I also run our local historical society.’
Lexie noticed the younger library a
ssistant smiling as she carried the returned books over to the shelves. She guessed the history of Little Stillford was more of a passion for Lily than just a pet project. Thank goodness for people like her.
‘Are you interested in seeing some of our archives?’ asked Lily.
‘If you don’t mind, that would be wonderful.’
‘We’ll just be through in the back room,’ Lily said to the other librarian. ‘Of course, it’s very recent history compared to what we have in the museum and obviously the circles themselves.’ It sounded like a witticism the woman had created herself but didn’t use much.
‘Do you have many people looking through the archives?’
‘No,’ replied Lily sadly. ‘Not many people are interested these days. Occasionally after one of our historical society meetings, or sometimes a visitor like yourself, but they don’t get used much.’
Lily opened the door of a room next to a tiny kitchen and switched on the light. It was a little larger than Lexie had expected and looked to be used as a storeroom with shelves and cupboards on three of the walls.
‘I really had to push hard to get the money for the equipment. So many people don’t care about the past. I suppose we’re fortunate that with our history and the stone circles the government and local councils were a little more forthcoming for us than for many other towns and villages.’
‘I expect your passion and commitment also had a lot to do with that as well,’ added Lexie.
Lily’s cheeks turned pink. ‘I’m sure anyone would have done the same.’
‘I don’t think so. I hope people here appreciate the effort you’ve put in.’ Lexie meant the praise. She hadn’t yet found anything but without archives like this discovering information of a local but not national interest was almost impossible before the advent of the internet.
‘Thank you. Are you looking for anything in particular? Do you have some dates? Checking through the microfiche can be very time consuming if you don’t have any specific information.’
Lexie gave her the dates of the weekend that the group had been in Little Stillford. ‘I’ll need to check the archives for the weeks just after that. Was the paper published weekly?’
‘Yes, it was.’ Lily looked at her, a frown rumpling her forehead. ‘Are you searching for information about the vehicle incident?’
Lexie hadn’t wanted to mention the hit and run as it might appear rather voyeuristic and she didn’t want to alienate Lily. Obviously not too much happened here that Lily could remember the date. Lexie hurriedly repeated the same story she’d given to her sister in the shop. ‘I’m interested purely because we were here just after the incident.’
‘It’s a good thing I recognised the date as it makes things much easier,’ said Lily. She bustled over to one of the deeper shelves and started checking through files. ‘We don’t have the space to keep all of the physical papers, but I have kept copies of those where…’ She stopped and turned to Lexie. ‘This makes me sound terrible, but if I’m honest in a little village like this the news is mostly about the school sports teams and local competitions. So I kept copies of the newspapers for some of the more major events, like the visit by Princess Anne and when Tony Blair came here. I didn’t mean that Cathy’s death was...’
‘I know you didn’t mean it in an awful way.’
‘It’s just that things like that don’t happen here and so I kept a copy of each edition containing anything associated with the incident. I don’t know. I thought that perhaps one day the police might need something from them, but they never found out who was involved. Here it is.’ She pulled a large file off the shelf and flipped through it.
‘This is the edition with information about the accident and the ones behind contain anything that’s related to it.’
‘Lily, could you help me here for a minute with a request,’ called the other library assistant.
‘I’ll be fine here,’ Lexie assured her. ‘And I’ll take care not to damage anything.’
She couldn’t believe her luck. In the past she’d had a number of occasions when she needed to search through microfiche archives and it was a painstaking business. Lily had made things much easier for her.
The front page of the newspaper had a school photo of Cathy Doyle, her mouth upturned in a wide smile and a sprinkling of freckles across her nose.
Lexie read the start of the report under the photo and turned the page to find the rest of the story. Cathy had spent the evening at a friend’s house, finishing off a school project. Her parents weren’t expecting her home as she was staying with her friend, but for some reason she left to go home. Poor kid, what rotten luck.
The local reporter had interviewed Cathy’s friends and classmates and quoted some of their schoolgirl comments about Cathy. She was popular… captained the school netball team… we called her the star girl because of the star stickers she put on her cycle helmet and bicycle… she played the flute in the school orchestra. And from the girl she’d spent her final evening with: we were best friends and went everywhere together… she decided to go home and not to stay the night… Perhaps the girls had argued about something and Cathy stormed off to ride through the dark, narrow lanes, but never reached home.
The next report, a few weeks later, was of the funeral. They printed a photo of the poor girl’s parents – the mother inconsolable in her husband’s arms, his gaze blank as he held his wife and stared into the distance, face white and pinched.
Beneath that image was a different shot of Cathy, presumably a family photo, sitting on a stone wall skirting a beach. The sea crashed against the rocks of a cliff on the right. It could well be a Cornish beach. Cathy wore shorts and a spaghetti-strap top with long dangly earrings and a necklace in the shape of a lopsided heart. The girl was attractive, her head thrown back laughing at a joke or something the photographer had said.
In the obituaries was a notice from Mum, Dad, Cliff, Jackie, Auntie Sarah and Uncle Lew. How awful to lose a child in such a way. The last item Lily had kept to do with the incident was a column rehashing the information around the incident that killed Cathy Doyle and a mention of Mrs Doyle’s suicide. Someone had offered a small reward for any information on the hit and run. While the papers were in date order, Lily had grouped the ones about Cathy’s death. Presumably it was one of the few incidents that merited more than one mention. Lexie flicked through the rest of the archived papers for that year, and the following one, but there were only a few with items Lily had deemed important enough to include and Lexie could only assume there hadn’t been anything else reported locally.
She pulled out her phone and took photos of all the relevant pages and then replaced the file back on the shelf. Lily was just coming to find her as she exited the room.
‘Thank you so much for your help. I replaced the file on the shelf.’
‘I’m just happy when someone is interested. Although that whole business was so sad.’
‘I believe Mr Doyle died not long after his wife.’
Lily nodded.
‘So sad for Cathy’s siblings, losing all their family.’
‘Terrible for them. They had an aunt and uncle and went to live with them. Local to the area but not from the village, although I think they moved away sometime afterwards.’
‘Thank you again.’
As Lexie left the library, she noticed Eden and Spike wandering along the opposite site of the road, deep in conversation. Spike was gesturing as he talked and Eden smiled at whatever he’d said. Lexie wasn’t sure if his relationship with Eden had ever been sexual, but they were obviously closer than many couples. She carried on with her walk in the opposite direction. At the end of the main street, she turned into a park and wandered through to a wooded area running parallel to the main street.
The sun, shining through the rustling branches, made stippled images on the grass. Lexie leaned against the broad trunk of an oak tree and lifted her face to the sky. A few yards away she heard a voice.
‘What on
earth are you doing here? I just about choked on my drink when I saw you, especially after telling you not to come.’
The speaker was definitely Hunter but she couldn’t hear the reply. She crept forward a few paces, trying to get closer to where she thought he stood.
‘But I told you I’d be here and not to come.’
Hunter again, but they must have moved further away. Lexie tried to catch up, moving as quietly as she could but that also meant slowly. Stuff it. She had every right to walk through the woods. It was Hunter and his as-yet unknown companion who didn’t want to be noticed. She sped up while still trying to be quiet, but they must have moved in a different direction.
As she came closer to the circles there were more people around, but no sign of Hunter. Nathan stood between the two rings studying the layout of the stones and the compass entrances.
A smile curved her lips as she watched him, and her body warmed. Her life would be so different without him. She couldn’t even bear the thought. As she glanced at the fallen stone her thoughts moved to Gareth. How had he felt about Madelaine? About Helen? Before she met Eden, she hadn’t considered Gareth’s romantic life in depth. There was no doubt in her mind that he loved Helen, but he and Madelaine had been together for a number of years, so they too must have had a strong relationship. Finding her dead in their flat must have been terrible for him.
‘This place is fascinating,’ said Nathan when he caught sight of her. ‘The museum isn’t large but has lots of information. There’s a lot of research on other stone circles in England.’
The Worst Lie Page 10
