by Issy Brooke
It was him! Nina’s father! Yes, it was all solved already. Case closed.
Penny picked up the pace as she left the countryside and entered the small agricultural town of Upper Glenfield. Drew’s house was along a narrow road past the Spinney, a stand of trees by the river. As she left the main road and turned into the smaller road that led to his row of houses, she saw the police car approaching her. She waved frantically at it, and it slowed down as it came alongside her. She peered in, and saw Drew in the back seat.
“Have you been arrested?” she babbled in horror.
“No! I told you, the police need my help.”
The police officer driving the car made a tutting sound. “You shouldn’t have told her anything. I know this one. You’re the Londoner, aren’t you? The David Hart case?”
“Yes.” The Londoner? Well, she reflected, they could be calling her “the mad southerner with the crazy dog” still. Things were improving.
“I’m sorry,” Drew said, leaning forward to peep between the two front seats. He was an ex-blacksmith, broad-shouldered and rugged with piercing eyes. “About the meal, and about telling you anything, and all that. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“But why do the police want to talk to you?” Penny cried in frustration.
“Because … uh … officer?”
The police officer driving the car sighed dramatically. “Because a person has been found in an unusual location and Mr Harker is a specialist in the knowledge that we might find very useful. That is, if we can get there in time while the evidence is still intact,” he added pointedly.
Drew sat back and shrugged apologetically.
The car pulled away, and Penny had no choice but to stamp home, feeling left out.
* * * *
Penny’s cottage was in the middle of a terrace along a dead-end street. The long, low houses were built from a warm yellow stone that came from a local quarry. They glowed richly in the low sun. Lincolnshire, she was discovering, had far more sky than anywhere else she’d ever been. The clouds and the light and the shapes and the colours were a changing landscape with as much power to stir the soul as a panoramic mountain range. And at night, the great dark bowl of sky was untouched by orange light pollution. The stars made a silver ceiling of slowly spinning pinpricks, dazzling in their number.
Alas, she was feeling far from poetic as she unlocked her door and released Kali, who skittered down the hallway and into the kitchen at the back, where she would sit by her food bowl and await her dinner. Penny kicked off her sandals and rubbed her hot feet. She was decidedly out of sorts.
“I was looking forward to that meal,” she told Kali as she walked into the kitchen, relishing the feeling of cool lino against her bare skin. “Now what? Oh, you don’t care as long as you get your kibble, do you?”
Kali didn’t shrug, exactly, but Penny shook her head. “Thanks for the sympathy, dog. Okay. Let’s get you fed, then.”
While Kali chomped on her dry food, Penny dragged a pizza out of her freezer and put the oven on to warm up. Her kitchen table was covered in drawings and sketches. When she wasn’t volunteering at the dogs’ home, she was attending craft fairs and selling her designs.
It was all a far cry from her decades of focussed career-building in the not-so-glamourous world of television production. She’d taken early retirement when she had realised the stress and constant pressure was turning her into someone that she didn’t like. Her blood pressure and her doctor were both warning her to make changes. Eventually, she did, and now she was relaxing in the Lincolnshire countryside.
Mostly. Apart from the dead farmer she found when walking her dog, and the threats she’d received from the murderer, and all those things. Well, it could have happened anywhere.
And now, the strangely cut-throat world of craft fairs, where she had quickly discovered she was very much at the bottom of the pile.
She pushed that aside. It would take time to be accepted on the small and closed circuit, she told herself. Patience.
There was no space at her table to eat, so when the pizza was ready, she took it through to the cosy, square living room and balanced a tray on her knees. She was about to tuck in, decadently refusing to use a knife and fork – she was alone, and it was pizza, yet she still felt slightly naughty – when her mobile phone began to ring again.
She resolved to ignore it until she saw from the caller display that it was Cath.
Detective Constable Cath Pritchard, to give her the full title. She was calling from her personal phone, so Penny had to assume she was calling as a friend, not on work related business. She put the tray to one side on the sofa beside her, and grabbed the phone.
“Hi, Cath!” Penny said. She was hoping that Cath was calling to let her in on all the gossip – namely, what on earth was going on with Warren, and why had Drew been hauled in to help out.
“Hi, Penny. So, how are you?” Cath asked. It sounded as if some kind of war was going on in the background. Either she was in the custody suite of Lincoln police station, or she was at home with her husband and two children. The situations were pretty similar.
“I’m fine…” Penny said. Cath wasn’t usually so polite and restrained when calling as a friend. “And yourself?”
“Good, good.”
There was an awkward silence. Well, I’m not going to be the one to ask, Penny thought. Three seconds later, she broke under pressure. “Tell me about Warren!” she blurted.
Ugh, I am an idiot, she thought.
“Penny, I’m just calling to tell you not to be an idiot,” Cath said.
Bother.
“All I did was go to see Drew when the police were taking him off!” Penny said in protest.
“That’s all you’ve done so far. I thought I’d give you a quick call before all the gossipers get onto the case. Yes, Warren has been found dead. But it is nothing to do with you.”
“I never thought it was!” Penny said. “What, am I a suspect or something?”
“No, of course not. I’m just warning … no, that’s unfair. I’m simply advising you to leave all the investigation to the police.”
“Yes, of course.”
“No poking and no meddling.”
“No. I never dreamed of it,” Penny said, and she was being totally honest.
“Really?”
“I resent this!” Penny said. “I had no intention of getting involved in any way at all. I didn’t find the body this time, did I? It’s nothing to do with me.”
“We thought that you might take it upon yourself to look into it,” Cath said.
We? They are talking about me? Penny’s hand tightened on the phone. “Well, I won’t. You don’t need to worry. I’ll leave it completely to you. And Drew,” she added.
“Good, I’m glad to hear it! Hey, we should do lunch again sometime.”
“We should,” Penny said mulishly, refusing to concede any more than that.
Cath rang off, and left Penny staring angrily at her cooling pizza. Why did people jump to such conclusions? She felt like she was getting told off for something she hadn’t done. It wasn’t fair.
* * * *
Sunday dawned bright and clear, and Penny knew it was going to be another hot day. She resisted the urge to eat ice-cream for breakfast, and after a quick bowl of sensible, grown-up and unsatisfying muesli, she took Kali out for a walk.
They had barely got to the end of her road, River Street, before the first person had stopped her to talk about the news that was buzzing all over town: Warren’s death.
“Have you heard?” said the woman who would have been a foot shorter were it not for her impressive black beehive. Agatha ran the hairdressing salon in town, and was responsible for the succession of colours that Penny sported in her hair. At the moment, she was various shades of red and orange. She had asked for “vibrant and flame-like” and Agatha had certainly delivered.
“Have I heard about what?” Penny asked, just in case it was a different topic of gossip.
“Warren!” Agatha exclaimed. “Warren, found dead, eh?”
“Ah yes. I did hear that last night. Do you know where he was found? I didn’t think he ever left the mini-market. Was it there?”
Agatha sucked in her cheeks. “Oh, no, apparently he was lying out in the middle of nowhere, in a shed! Shocking, isn’t it, eh?”
“Deeply sad.” Penny meant it.
“But the thing is,” Agatha went on, “what about the list of suspects, eh? Eh?”
“What list of suspects?”
“That’s the point!” Agatha said. “Pretty much every woman in Upper Glenfield had a reason to want to do him in!”
Penny shook her head. “Ah, no, that’s not fair. Well … okay, yes it is. He was a bit hard work. But if we women went around killing everyone who flirted with us when we didn’t want it, they’d need to build some huge prisons to contain us all.”
“It was probably some kind of assignation that went wrong.”
“Out in a shed? He has his own house, and he lives alone. Why would he meet someone in a lonely shed?”
Agatha clicked her tongue. “There’s no accounting for people’s strange little ways, though, is there? I was reading a magazine last week where the woman had a deep and abiding … fascination, if you get my meaning … with balloons. They had photos. They had to black bits out. Makes you think, though, doesn’t it? Eh?”
It was something that Penny was absolutely sure she did not want to think about. She shuddered. She was about to make her excuses and move on, when Agatha stopped her.
“Anyway, Penny love, what are you going to do about it?”
Penny’s foot paused in the air. “Me? Nothing.” Apart from get hold of Drew at some point and press him for all the information, she thought.
“Well, after the David Hart case, we all assumed you’d be looking into this one.”
“I found David Hart. That’s all. Everything else just happened accidentally. I’m sorry, I need to get on. Kali wants to get to the fields to, um, you know.”
Agatha waved her on. “Of course, of course. Time waits for no dog, isn’t that what they say? Eh?”
It was not. Penny smiled. “Yes. See you later.”
One hundred yards later and Penny was accosted again, this time by someone from the ramblers’ group, who fell into step alongside her and opened the conversation with,
“So, who do you think did it?”
“Kevin, I assume we’re talking about Warren. And I have no idea. And anyway, we don’t even know how he died.”
“Wasn’t he found with his throat cut in a hay barn?”
“I don’t know. Was he?”
“So they say!”
And on it went. No sooner had she shaken off Kevin that Sylvia descended upon her. “Poisoned!” she declared by way of hello.
“I doubt it.”
“Oh yes, with a bottle of paraffin next to him, they say.”
Penny sighed. “And was this in a shed or a hay barn?”
“Who said that?” Sylvia wanted to know. “They’re wrong. It was in a crew yard.”
“I don’t even know what a crew yard is.”
“Horses. But do you know who did it?” Sylvia asked eagerly.
“No! And it’s up to the police!”
It was a tedious and frustrating walk, with rumour piled on rumour, and the belief throughout the whole of Upper Glenfield that Penny was somehow able to work out what had happened, who had done it, and why.
“If only I knew the lottery numbers, too,” she grumbled to Kali as they got back to her cottage, much later than planned.
She had work to do. She had a craft fair coming up in a few weeks’ time, and she had a roll of linen that needed stencilling and making up into bags. There were sketches to mount and frame, cards to make, and bookmarks to laminate.
But as she sat at her kitchen table, the back door propped open and Kali dozing in a patch of sunlight, half in and half out of the room, Penny’s mind kept drifting back to Warren. And, more importantly, to Drew.
She had expected him to call her that morning. But the clock ticked past midday and there had been no word from him.
It’s not like we’re in a relationship, she told herself. Not exactly. We have an understanding. Although maybe I understand something different to what he understands, or he would have phoned me by now.
Maybe he was working. Weekends were his busiest time, now he was taking out groups of holidaymakers and guests from The Arches Hotel. He also had corporate midweek sessions from time to time. He seemed to be always on the go, these days.
Penny hadn’t seen much of him at all, lately. And she missed him.
She sighed.
She hoped he wasn’t going to end up in the overworked and stressful position she had been in; but no one had been able to warn her, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to get it through to the stubborn Drew, either.
Her phone began to ring and she nearly stabbed her own hand with the scissors that she forgot she was holding. She was thinking about Drew so she decided it must be him.
It was not.
It was just another neighbour wanting to know if she had solved the crime yet.
At this rate, she thought, I will have to do so, just to shut everyone up.
Chapter Three
It was carnage.
The hot, sultry weather had continued and the ground was baked hard. Somehow, things had come together, and the first photoshoot for the dogs was organised within a week, in spite of Penny’s reservations. It was Saturday, and seven days since Warren had been found dead.
And the newspapers had printed “foul play” and the whole town was deep in speculation.
Penny congratulated herself on managing to avoid as much gossip as she could. She walked Kali early in the morning, telling herself it was to “avoid the heat of the day” when in fact she was staying away from everyone who was keen to tell her to investigate. Then she spent the rest of the day in her cottage, the blinds down to keep the rooms cool, working on her art and craft.
Now she was surrounded by people and dogs, and cameras and large parasols and bowls of water to step into accidentally, and it was a noisy chaos.
They had set aside a shady end of one of the exercise fields, where it was cool and the dogs could rest. By nine in the morning, everyone had arrived, and the plan was to complete as many shots as possible before the day got too hot.
Well, Penny thought as she watched a portly man carrying a very large camera lumber across a field in pursuit of a hyperactive Jack Russell with a doll in its mouth, well, I will be surprised if we get any decent photographs at all.
She was glad that she had left Kali at home, happily gnawing on a rubber toy stuffed with frozen sugar-free peanut butter.
The dogs’ home was going to open to the public at eleven o’clock, as it did every weekend. Lucy and Marge were already on hand to help out, as were a plethora of other regular staff and volunteers. Because of her background, Penny had been asked to deal with design queries. She readily accepted and was looking forward to putting the photographs together in the calendar. She was going to be in charge of the layout and dealing with the printers. It was nice to have a role in the community.
It was not so nice when it appeared to make her a target. She could hear someone, a male voice, demanding to know where “Penny May, that London woman” was.
She tried to spot the man before he spotted her, but their eyes met at the same time. He was tall, with black hair and deep grooves in his cheeks. Not, she guessed, from doing too much smiling.
“Are you her? Penny May? That London woman?” he asked gruffly.
“I am. Hi. How can I help? Are you from the club?” she said as he strode over to her. He was wearing a crisp white shirt and jeans, and terrible brown deck shoes with little tassels on them.
“So you’re in charge of things this end, are you?” he said, ignoring her question.
If he could ignore her question, then she
could ignore his. “I’m sorry, I don’t know your name…?”
He glared. She glared back. She hadn’t survived years as a television producer without learning to be utterly unfazed when someone tried to stare her down. She’d been glared at by police officers in Nigeria, a camel herder in Morocco, a militant traffic warden in Los Angeles and a herd of goats somewhere in central Europe where the borders were hazy.
And he broke, and she did a little internal whoop of triumph. “I’m Eric Summer. Yes, I’m the president of Upper Glenfield Camera Club.”
She thrust out a hand. “I’m Penny, and I’m going to be doing the layout for the printers. I’m not really in charge of things here, though…”
“You’ll do,” he barked gruffly. “We need to get started before the sun goes too high and ruins all the shadows.”
“Of course. Over there, Vicky has those two terriers all ready to go. If you will come along with me, I’ll introduce you.”
He was not the sort of man to follow someone. Instead, he surged ahead of her, and Penny rolled her eyes at his back. But he was only halfway across the field before Marge approached them, and as she was the manager of the dogs’ home, Eric had to stop as she planted herself in front of him.
“Eric!” she said, all warm matronly smiles hiding the core of steel that Penny knew lurked beneath her floral print summer dress. “I am so glad you could come. As, indeed, are we all. Now tell us! What happened between you and Warren, then?” She winked at Penny as if they were in cahoots together.
Penny’s mouth dropped, as Eric half-turned, glowering over her. “Oh yes! I remember. You’re the one who couldn’t stop meddling in the David Hart case, aren’t you? Well, you can take me off your list of suspects for a start. Did I end up here under false pretences? I’m here to photograph dogs, not answer to some silly woman who isn’t even local.”
“Of course you are! Come on, let’s go and meet the terriers,” Penny said desperately, pushing past Marge.
But Marge tagged alongside. “They say you argued,” she said to Eric. “You and Warren.”
