The Little Village Christmas

by Sue Moorcroft

  Falling into a chair, Alexia was no nearer knowing how best to approach Jodie than when she’d left The Angel.

  Thankfully, Gabe took the lead. In his deep, precise tones he explained to Jodie what had happened at The Angel.

  Slowly, Jodie sat up, belting her dressing gown more tightly, frowning. ‘So someone’s broken in and stolen the old radiators and tiles? They’ve taken the slates off the roof?’

  ‘We can’t tell if they broke in, or whether they had a key, as the door’s gone.’ Gabe’s voice held the cautious note of someone pussyfooting about a subject.

  Jodie’s gaze flicked between Gabe and Alexia. ‘What do Shane and Tim say? Have they seen anyone lurking around?’

  Gabe fidgeted. ‘We haven’t been able to contact them. Have you heard from Shane?’

  Jodie shook her head, but slowly, as if moving it too decisively might disturb something delicate.

  Gabe glanced at Alexia but Alexia felt frozen, as if she were watching an oncoming car speeding towards them and was unable to suggest they jump out of the way.

  Gabe turned back to Jodie. ‘I’m afraid there’s worse to come,’ he said gently. And he told her about the missing money. ‘I take it you have no knowledge of these transactions?’

  Jodie gasped, clutching at the neck of her dressing gown as if holding herself together. ‘I haven’t had any reason to look at the accounts for days. How can the money have gone? Who’s taken it? It’s nearly £30,000 altogether. It can’t be gone!’ She scrabbled in her pocket for her phone and began to stab wildly at it.

  Slumping more deeply in her chair, Alexia watched hopelessly, letting Jodie have her moment of denial but miserably aware that no amount of checking the bank balance was going to make the money miraculously reappear. She felt exhausted. It wasn’t until Jodie lurched into a high, keening sobbing as she tried fruitlessly to ring Shane once more that Alexia dragged herself over to the sofa to slide her arm around Jodie’s quaking shoulders.

  ‘What are we going to do? How can it have happened?’ Jodie wailed.

  Alexia felt hot tears ooze from her own eyes. Whether they were for Jodie, Gabe or herself, she couldn’t have said. But, used to Jodie’s emotional reactions, Alexia patted her back while Gabe made hot drinks and fetched tissues. There was nothing to do when Jodie was locked in grief but to allow her to cry it out.

  Eventually, when the storm had lessened, Gabe accessed the recent bank account transactions to show them that the money had disappeared in a series of withdrawals – cheques on Friday, when they’d all been preoccupied with preparing for the wrecking party, and the rest via Internet banking either side of midnight Saturday/Sunday.

  ‘You can see the name of the payees!’ crowed Jodie, hope dawning on her red and blotchy face. ‘Look, this one’s a company called Oatwood 2k Ltd. And this one’s —’

  But Gabe was already shaking his head. ‘Don’t get your hopes up. Whoever did this is clever. They’ll have hidden their tracks. It will lead to a dead end.’

  ‘But how can it?’ Jodie demanded, expression bewildered. ‘It’s there, the name of the company—’

  Gabe’s lips thinned. ‘If my experience is anything to go by the money will have been transferred out already and will have disappeared into a network of companies and individuals. The addresses of some will be rental properties and the current tenants will never have heard of Oatwood 2k or any of the others. Some will be legitimate entities, often blissfully unaware that their identities have been stolen and used to open bank accounts. Somewhere along the line the money will be drawn out in cash.’ Jumping up, he started to pace around the room. ‘There’s a very practised hand on the tiller during this voyage of deception, let me tell you. They knew precisely which gambles were worth taking. I, for one, was kept very busy on Friday and Saturday and had no reason to check the accounts.’

  ‘Same,’ said Alexia, picturing Shane ‘marshalling the troops’ as he called it while they’d all helped to get ready for the wrecking party. She curled up on the sofa as Jodie tried over and again to ring Shane. Alexia might not have Gabe’s banking experience but she was shrewd enough to know that whoever took the money must have had an in. ‘Jodie,’ she began gently. ‘Do you have an address for Shane?’

  Knuckles whitening around her phone, Jodie began to bluster, brown eyes furious. ‘Honestly, Alexia, I can’t imagine why you’d bring up such a random question now, when we’ve got this to worry about. He lives in Manor Road in Bettsbrough, but I’ve only been a couple of times and I didn’t exactly note down the door number.’

  Alexia glanced at Gabe. He gazed gravely back, compassion in the depths of his eyes. She tried again. ‘The police want to know. Someone has taken this money. Shane isn’t answering his phone so they need to find him—’

  ‘What?’ Jodie physically jumped away from Alexia. ‘Are you accusing my boyfriend? The bank accounts have been hacked. Obviously! It happens all the time. It’s random! Don’t you dare—!’

  Gabe interrupted, voice soft. ‘But slates and doors, fireplaces and tiles … how could a hacker remove those?’

  Jodie stared at him dumbly, horror written on her face.

  Alexia swallowed painfully. ‘Has Shane had access to your Internet banking app, Jodes?’

  With a wail, Jodie leapt up and fled from the room.

  Alexia covered her eyes. Could this day get any worse?

  That night, Alexia tossed and turned long after Jodie had shut herself in her room and Gabe had gone home. Though she was exhausted, her gritty eyes refused to stay closed and her brain wouldn’t sleep. It flipped from anxiety to disbelief to guilt. She was one of the people the village had trusted with the money they’d raised. And now the money was gone.

  With a need to do something constructive, she sat up and switched on the light, then balanced her laptop on her legs to type an exhaustive list of what had been stripped out of The Angel. Together with the ‘before’ and ‘during’ photos she’d taken of the building, the list would go to the police, and to every reclamation yard she knew of in Cambridgeshire.

  As she laboured on in the still hours, the phrase ‘All the money’s gone’ echoed through her mind, last heard fifteen years ago in her mother’s horrified whisper. They hadn’t needed the police on that occasion. The culprit had been well known to them. Alexia’s dad, Cliff, had run up debts faster than Heather, Alexia’s mum, could pay them off.

  To prevent his credit card companies taking the family home Alexia had had to stop attending uni and let her mum use her student loan. A debt Alexia was still repaying as Heather wasn’t well-off and Clifford was on to a whole new lot of debts, probably. Unless his current wife had him well in hand.

  Her parents’ marriage hadn’t made it past the crisis and Alexia and Reuben had been more relieved than distraught when Clifford had moved out. They’d all suffered by being hitched to the same financial wagon as him but at least he’d accepted Heather’s rejection, just at he’d later accepted Grandpop leaving his cottage to Alexia and Reuben, philosophically acknowledging his total lack of money management. It was an endless mystification to his children that he could apparently see the truth yet never mend his ways.

  Alexia and Reuben heard from him mainly on birthdays and at Christmas now.

  Last night had felt like a return to the old financial nightmare and as Alexia grimly tapped at her keyboard she made a series of fruitless wishes.

  That Jodie had never met Shane. Jodie might have been resolute in refusing to join the dots of the money and goods disappearing at the same time as Shane and Tim, but Alexia didn’t believe in that kind of coincidence.

  That Alexia had never agreed to Shane and Tim being the main contractors at The Angel. But once they’d shown her their work was good enough she’d decided to give them a chance. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask for evidence of their honesty.

  If she had access to unlimited wishing wells, fairy godmothers and wishbones, top of her wishiest wishlist would be the wish that she ha
dn’t spent Saturday night in Ben’s bed. On his rug. In his bath.

  She so wished that.

  But he’d seemed likeable in his offbeat way – what was it he’d called himself? An oddball? – and she’d been attracted to his dishevelled good looks and slightly brooding air. The tenderness he’d exhibited with Barney had made her feel all warm and fuzzy, as had his vulnerability over his divorce and bashful confession that he’d forgotten how the seduction game went – though he’d pretty quickly got the hang of it again.

  Alexia had been a prize fool. Carefree with singledom, she’d seen no reason for caution. She’d never before indulged in a one-night stand but, hey, they were adults.

  It had felt like a triumph every time she’d made him smile. He hadn’t looked at her then as if he didn’t know who she was. It had been a special connection! It had! Though new and exciting, they’d seemed to know each other in the private world they’d created in his cottage in the woods. It had even led her to assume there would prove to be a perfectly good reason for him leaving before she woke.

  That should have been a clue to what kind of man he was, because who did that?

  Benedict Hardaker. That was the name he’d provided to the police officer. His relationship to Gabe Piercy must be on his mother’s side. Fancy him being related at all to lovely warm Gabe, familiar to everyone as he clippity-clopped through the village with his blue cart and little black pony, Snobby.

  Benedict gitty shitty Hardaker, she typed into her list after 4 Victorian toilet cisterns, black, thumping the keys so hard it made her fingertips burn. Then she went back and deleted the words with slow, deliberate taps. Gone. She wished he’d go as easily from Middledip, or at least crawl back into his lair in the woods so she never had to see him again.

  It was light by the time she’d finished so she gave up on sleep, freshened up under the shower and trailed downstairs to make a huge mug of tea.

  She tried to put some hours in on her real job, the interior decorating she actually charged for and which paid the bills, but couldn’t concentrate. She should be putting the finishing touches to the scheme of works for a basement kitchen-diner conversion with utility room and shower room, the old ground-floor kitchen being knocked through to the sitting room to make ‘a generous living space’. She’d thought it would be the last substantial job she’d schedule before leaving the village, but now she wondered if what had happened to The Angel would put her new role with Elton back a bit.

  In any event, her heart wasn’t in it today. She grabbed the key to The Angel’s temporary front door, which Dion had dropped off, picked up her jacket and went out.

  She found The Angel dreaming under a sun that glowed through the merest suggestion of September mist and paused outside. The front view was misleadingly intact. The thieves had been smart enough to resist even the beautiful moulded brickwork between the windows so their crime wouldn’t be immediately obvious. She supposed she ought to be grateful for small mercies instead of standing in the road, her heart a tonne weight. Now she was here she found it hard to go inside and confront again the indignity the gracious old building had suffered.

  She reversed her route and crossed back to Main Road, ignoring her own home and taking instead the track that led to Gabe’s.

  Gabe was feeding his chickens and collecting eggs, a waistcoat over a shirt that used to have a collar. He took one look at her and said, ‘Want to take Snobby a couple of carrots for me? He’s a good listener.’

  Alexia laughed. ‘Do I look woebegone enough to need Snobby’s listening ear?’ But she took three carrots from the feed store by the back door and set off for the paddock. Snobby, black all over, his long mane blowing in his eyes, looked like the pony equivalent of an emo. Planted in the middle of the field he regarded her unmovingly until she waved his snack and he knew it was worth the trip to the gate to meet her. He arrived with his neck extended and his mouth already open.

  ‘Life sucks,’ she told him, holding a piece of carrot in her palm and feeling his velvet muzzle shiver over her skin as he hoovered it up. ‘And I think it’s going to get a lot suckier.’ Breaking the carrots into the smallest pieces she could, she fed the thick-coated pony slowly, running her free hand down his smooth neck, letting his coarse mane slither soothingly between her fingers as she told him her woes. Snobby’s ears flicked back and forth as if paying close attention. Until the carrot supply dried up, then he tossed his head out of her reach and ambled back into the middle of the field to graze.

  Alexia sniffed. ‘So now you’ve had what you want, you don’t want to know me? Reminds me of someone else I know.’ She stayed for a while, deriving comfort in Snobby’s serenity as he tipped up one hoof to rest his leg, tail streaming in the quickening breeze.

  At length she headed back, finding Gabe still in the chicken run. He passed her a rake. ‘And how’s Snobby?’

  She surveyed what had once been grass before the chickens got at it. ‘Behaving like a man.’

  Gabe grunted as he scraped the chicken litter from the hen house into a bucket while Alexia raked up chicken droppings, wishing she could rake up the poo in her life and discard it as easily. Then she took the bucket out to Gabe’s compost heap while he dusted disinfectant powder around the hen house and added fresh bedding.

  Accepting her help unquestioningly as he moved through his morning’s chores, Gabe didn’t ask Alexia why she was there. It wasn’t because he didn’t care, she knew. Gabe just had an uncanny knack for letting people be.

  It wasn’t until they stopped for elevenses of homemade mint tea with Eccles cakes, consumed leaning companionably on Snobby’s gate, that he enquired whether Ben had spoken to her again. Snobby rested his head on Gabe’s arm because Gabe was the one person he’d come to without a bribe.

  ‘Nope.’ She sipped her steaming drink and stroked Snobby. ‘Looks like his coat’s thickening for winter already.’

  He nodded. ‘Probably it will be a hard one.’ He sighed, making Snobby sigh back. ‘Alexia, I’m not excusing Ben’s clumsiness but he has had a dreadfully shitty thing happen to him. He pretends he’s coping but I can’t tell you how unBen-like it is to isolate himself in the woods.’ He gave Alexia a nudge to encourage her to look at him. To read the sincerity in his brown eyes. ‘All the people he loved most let him down. He’s full of anger and he doesn’t know how to let it out. I think I understand why he was so maladroit yesterday and then didn’t seem able to retrieve the situation. It was like he was a boiler with a tiny crack. The steam that escaped was under pressure.’

  Alexia put down her Eccles cake as she relived the stomach-plummeting feeling of being made to feel like a criminal by the man whose body she’d caressed. ‘Are you talking about his divorce?’

  Gabe hesitated. ‘It’s a hard thing to face, not being able to keep your wife. But there’s so much more to Ben’s situation than that.’ He finished the final bite of Eccles cake before continuing. ‘I’ve always had a special relationship with Ben. I see him as a bit of a kindred spirit. For most of my life I tried to conform. I let my parents influence me into joining the bank, a very stuffy institution in those days, just because I was good at maths. I tried to give my wife the kind of marriage she wanted, with dinner parties and a modern box of a house. I was thrilled when the bank gave me the opportunity to retire early but she was horrified that I wanted to get an allotment and animals. I wasn’t trying to winkle her out of her precious six-bed detached in Orton. I would have carried on with all that nonsense if she’d given me a bit of understanding, but she wanted me to fritter away my days on bridge parties and coop myself up on cruises. We had the most extravagant rows about it.’

  His laugh held an echo of an old relief. ‘When we finally gave up on the marriage, I came here to the simple outdoor life I’d always wanted and my wife was happy with that as long as she got the lion’s share of the money in the divorce settlement. Ben was the only one of my family who seemed to understand, who glowed as he explored every inch of the place, ask
ing question after question. The rest of our family looked down their noses and said they were wearing unsuitable shoes.

  ‘In time, it was me who supported Ben’s wish to study arboriculture instead of whatever boring subject my sister Penny had earmarked for him. Because I recognised a square peg in a round hole when I saw one.’

  Despite herself, Alexia was interested. She still tried not to show that her interest extended to Ben, though. ‘Do you think of your wife much?’

  He gave her a wink. ‘I called my pony Snobby, didn’t I?’ With a last squeeze of her hand he rose. ‘Shall we pick those beans?’

  Before they could, his phone began to ring and he slid it from his pocket. As he listened, the laughter died from his face. Presently he said, ‘Hold on a moment. Alexia Kennedy is with me. I’ll ask her.’ He took the phone from his ear. ‘A detective constable from Bettsbrough Police. Would we like to go in and make our statements this afternoon?’

  The sun went behind a cloud as reality made itself felt again. Alexia sighed. ‘I suppose. Let’s go together. Get a time and I’ll pick you up, because I don’t suppose the police station has a hitching rail for Snobby.’

  Chapter Five

  Ben remembered Alexia telling him she lived in Main Road, but not the number of the house. As he didn’t particularly want to ask Gabe in case it provoked another lecture, he asked at the village shop.

  ‘Number forty-four, blue door,’ the well-upholstered lady behind the counter responded promptly. ‘Caught your eye, has she?’

  ‘Um, thanks.’ Put off by such outright nosiness he hurried out before she could invade his privacy further.

  When he located Number 44 he realised it stood quite close to the entrance to Gabe’s track. He must have passed it dozens of times. Squaring his shoulders, he strode up the path and rapped with the black doorknocker.

  The door was opened by Jodie, wearing a tatty cardigan and a half-hopeful expression. ‘Oh. Hello,’ they said in unison, each sounding disappointed to behold the other.