Small Town Secrets (Some Very English Murders Book 2)

by Issy Brooke

  Her sense of injustice flared in her belly. No one was mourning him, the inspector had said. That was wrong. Nothing, no one, should die without some acknowledgement. She’d get to the bottom of this case – for Warren, for a man she didn’t even like, for the principle of it.

  She looked at his profile picture, and he stared back, passive, unchanging, and frozen in time.

  * * * *

  When Penny’s mobile phone rang on Wednesday night, she was playing with her camera, trying to capture candle flames and smoke against a black background, and it was not going well. Answering the call was a welcome relief, until she saw the caller display.

  She forced her voice to remain light. “Hi, Drew.”

  “Penny! Hi, Penny. How are you?” He sounded casual and – well, infuriatingly normal.

  She frowned. She pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down. “Not so bad. Yourself?”

  “I’m doing great. It’s been so busy, it’s insane. I love it. I’m really sorry about that dinner cancellation the other night. I’ve got to make it up to you.”

  “The other night? It was over a week ago and I haven’t heard from you since!”

  “Really?” He sounded surprised. “That long? It feels like yesterday. Time has flown by, hey? There was that police thing, not that I was any help, and then a sudden rush booking of my courses at the hotel. And then, oh yes, I haven’t told you – that school for naughty kids got in touch, because they want to do some outdoor sessions with the lads. And lasses. I’ve been in meetings. Me! Proper meetings where people wore suits!”

  Penny found herself smiling. The burly ex-blacksmith was at his happiest when rambling over the hills or messing about in woodlands, not sitting in conference rooms. His wonder and delight was infectious. But she wasn’t about to let him off the hook quite so easily. She spoke straight. “Drew, I was upset that you didn’t get in touch for so long.”

  “Oh. Sorry. Did I miss your calls? I wondered if my phone was playing up…”

  “No. I didn’t ring you, but…”

  “Then … uh, then I didn’t know that you were upset.”

  “No, but…” Penny sighed. This conversation was going nowhere if she pursued this. They were just a few sentences away from saying “I’m not psychic” and “you should have known.” She sat up straight and moved on. “Yeah, I should have called you,” she said. “Anyway, tell me about this stuff with the school! What school?”

  “I have so much to say,” Drew said. “We’ve got loads to catch up on. What are you doing tomorrow…?”

  * * * *

  One of the advantages of getting older, Penny thought as she followed Drew along a narrow and lightly-trodden grass path, is that you get over things much more quickly. Penny did not hold grudges. Once you passed the age of forty or so, and you began to lose your contemporaries, and friends and family fell increasingly quickly into the clutches of sickness or death, you gave up feeding resentment and bitterness. Life moved faster and she was not going to waste it by fretting about what should, or should not, have been said.

  And anyway, it was a pleasant day, and not too hot, and they had the woods to themselves, and all was right with the world. Birdsong and wildflowers could do that to you, if you were open to it.

  Her camera swung against her hip. The dappled light and shade under the canopy of trees was confusing both her, and her camera’s light meter. She had played with the manual settings and tried various exposures. But she wouldn’t know until she got home and loaded them onto the computer whether her shots were any good or not.

  Drew was pointing at the trees and chattering about bark. She was trying to listen, but she kept getting distracted by scenes that looked like they might make a good photograph, until she held the camera up and it suddenly all went bland and boring.

  “What do you think?” Drew asked, stopping suddenly.

  “I’m worried about my depth of field,” she said.

  “What field? We’re in the woods. But we’re coming out onto the fields in a minute.”

  “No … oh. It’s a technical term.”

  “Which means?”

  “Er…” she stumbled over her explanation. “Er, how much of it is blurry or not.”

  “You don’t want any of it blurry, I would have thought. No, what do you think about the Sculpture Trail?”

  “What Sculpture Trail?” she asked in confusion.

  “I’d have thought you would have been all over it, being all arty and that. The town council have a grant to create a trail of artworks along some popular local walks. Are you going to bid to be involved?”

  She shook her head. “It’s the first I’ve heard of it. And I’m strictly two-dimensional. In art, I mean. Not, you know. I hope. If you know what I mean.”

  “Nope, you’ve lost me. What about the Warren Martin case, eh?” Drew said. He squatted down and began to study some small plants at the base of a tree while she fiddled with her camera.

  “Yeah,” she said. “So, what about it? Where was he found?”

  “Mm. They haven’t revealed it in the newspaper yet, have they?”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m kind of working with the police. Unofficially.”

  He laughed and shook his head. “What?”

  She had to explain three times and even then, he seemed to think that she was misleading him slightly. But he did confess that Warren had been found in an abandoned farmhouse about five miles from Upper Glenfield.

  “An old farmhouse?” she asked.

  “I suppose so. He was in the kitchen area, near the range. There are no windows or doors. It’s been empty for decades. It’s unsafe, and it needs knocking down.”

  She nodded, and told him what she knew of the urban exploration he had been doing. Drew’s eyes widened. “Do you think it’s linked?”

  “Perhaps. But there’s also angry Eric from the camera club.”

  “What did they argue about?” Drew asked.

  “I think about Warren and Eric’s daughter Nina, and how Warren would have been his usual overbearing self, but that’s only a gut feeling. You know what Warren was like with women, though.”

  “No, not really. What was he like?”

  Penny stared at Drew, open-mouthed. “Everyone knew! He was horrible. He came on to everyone.”

  “Did he?”

  “Oh.” Penny realised that Drew simply wouldn’t have known that. After all, Warren wouldn’t have made a pass at him. “Well, yes, he did. He was well known for it. He did it to me. And he would always get really angry when women turned him down. He had this old-fashioned idea about men being in charge, but it went deeper than just courtesy and good manners. He didn’t think a woman ought to refuse a man a date.” She shivered.

  “Oh, one of them. A man with a sense of entitlement,” Drew said. “I’ve met a few of those in my time. Yes, it fits with what little I knew of Warren. Did he ever force himself on women, though? Properly … you know what I mean. Forcing sort of force.”

  “No. To his credit, he did not. Or at least … not to anyone’s knowledge. So, maybe…”

  Drew stood up, and studied her face for a moment. “You’ve got a problem, then,” he said. “You didn’t like Warren, did you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Don’t let that cloud your judgement. Maybe he pressed himself on Eric’s daughter, and maybe he didn’t. Would that be enough for Eric to kill him? Don’t project your own … uh, well, dreams … onto Eric. It’s not that I am saying you wanted to kill Warren yourself, but …”

  “No, I understand. Come on. It’s actually getting chilly in the shade. You said we were coming out onto the fields soon?”

  “This way.”

  Soon they were at the edge of the woods, and looking down from a high ridge over a vast, open field. There were no hedges or borders; it was just crops, and at the far horizon was a low-flying wide-winged aircraft.

  “What’s that spraying?” Penny asked in alarm.

  “Pesticides, m
ost likely, and no, you’re not going to die from it.”

  She was sceptical but kept her thoughts to herself. She looked down at the field margin. “I thought the weeds were dying from lack of water,” she said. “It’s so dry.”

  “Just wait until some of the fields get harvested and ploughed. The wind will come and whip up the dust into great clouds. Sometimes, we get red Saharan sand dumped on us too; everyone’s cars will be coated in it. Keep an eye on the sky and get your washing in!”

  “Really?” One minute it was black flies coating her bed sheets, and the next it was going to be red sand? Lincolnshire was weird.

  “Yup, really,” Drew said. “I’ll take you out one day, out onto the fens properly. You can see the dust clouds from miles away as they move over the land.”

  “I thought the fens were all boggy.”

  “They were,” he explained, “and they still are, in places. But the peat areas have shrunk as they have been drained and farmed, and now much of it is below sea level. I’ll show you the networks of pumping stations and drains that keep the fields from flooding.”

  “I cannot think of anything less exciting than a trip around some pumping stations and drains,” Penny said dryly.

  Drew huffed. “Well, you just don’t appreciate our local history. There are some interesting buildings out there. You know, for your urban exploration stuff.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m teasing. I’m only getting into urbex to try and find out more about what Warren got up to, anyway. Oh! Look at that plant. Hang on. I want to photograph that. What is it?”

  “Bindweed, that’s all,” Drew said as she hunkered down and started to scroll through the camera’s settings. Where was the “amazing flower” setting? “Macro” would have to do, she decided.

  “It’s really architectural,” she said, zooming in on the curling strands.

  He stepped backwards to move his shadow out of the way of her shot. “I designed some gates for someone once, all based on bindweed. It worked quite well, as it happens.”

  Probably better than her photography, she thought. “Are you still going to keep your hand in, with the blacksmithing?”

  “I think I ought to. Now it’s not my main income, I enjoy it again, too. Not the farrier stuff – no, I never got on with being at the stampy end of a horse. Or indeed the bitey end. But I do like ornamental ironwork. I’ve got a job on at the moment, out of the blue, and it’s fun.”

  “Really? What are you doing?”

  “Well, the situation itself isn’t fun,” Drew said. “There’s an old chap in a house on the far side of Upper Glenfield, and he’s being harassed, so I’ve been putting up a decorative pole that he can have CCTV at the top of. He has a lovely garden and didn’t want to wreck it with some horrible, functional security system.”

  “Oh … Cath told me about someone who was being subjected to harassment. This must be the same man. Ron? Rod?”

  “Reg. Reg Bailey. He’s a military-sounding old stick, very formal and proper and severe, but he’s nice. You know exactly where you stand with Reg.”

  Penny gave up on the photography, and stood up again. “What sort of harassment is it?” she asked.

  Drew sighed with disgust. “It’s really minor but irritating vandalism. You know I said his garden was lovely? So they dug holes in it. They egged his garage door. Cut down his bulbs just as they flowered in spring and arranged the stems on his front lawn to spell out a rude word. Which wasn’t even spelled correctly.”

  Penny was appalled. “How long has it been going on?”

  “Apparently, years, but it has been escalating lately. He was too ashamed to tell anyone for a long time.”

  “That’s sick.”

  “I know,” Drew agreed. “Because although no threats have been made, there’s always that worry, isn’t there? How far will the perpetrator go? And why? He confessed to me that he was beginning to feel vulnerable, and that’s not like Reg. It takes a lot to make a man like that even admit to feeling that way.”

  Penny shivered. She remembered the other case that Cath had mentioned, about the young girl in Lincoln who was also being watched. Maybe it was just some crush from a classmate.

  But what if it wasn’t?

  What if it was linked?

  “I wonder how much stalking actually goes on,” she said.

  “Lots, I’d imagine. I just don’t think it gets reported,” said Drew. “Although I bet most of it is online.”

  She turned away. She’d had three messages to her online dating profile already, but she hadn’t replied to any of them.

  After all, she’d only made the profile so she, herself, could stalk someone.

  Stalking a dead man. Her flesh rose in goose-bumps. “Shall we move on?” she said.

  Chapter Eight

  Penny was in a light-hearted and hopeful mood for the rest of Thursday. Drew went off to plan some “edible wild plant” sessions, and Penny went home to walk Kali. Then, after her evening meal, she settled down with her laptop on the sofa next to her, and her dog at her feet. The room was slowly darkening and she had one lamp lit in a corner, casting a soft glow.

  She felt at home, a feeling that had been growing slowly since she had left London, and it was nice.

  She logged in to her email and deleted all the spam. There was a brief message from her parents; they had landed back in the UK for a few weeks, but were planning on visiting Estonia at some point. She smiled.

  There was also a returned email.

  Francine.

  Penny chewed her lip. Her old London friend had been the only one to stay in touch when she left the capital, and she’d even visited Penny just after she’d moved from London. Though they’d not been close when working together, since Penny retired, she’d valued their friendship more. Yet for the past few weeks, Penny had been unable to contact Francine. At first she’d assumed that Francine was busy – perhaps working away on location. But the email had bounced back as “undeliverable” and that was concerning.

  She’d have to call her, but she’d leave it until the weekend in case Francine was simply out of the country and had let her email inbox somehow fill up.

  She hovered over a notification from the dating website; apparently, Shaun71 wanted to send her a message. Did she want to go and look at Shaun71’s profile? She decided not yet, no.

  She spent an hour sprucing up her own website which she’d been developing since she started her tiny crafts business. She uploaded some of her better photographs and was pleased with how they looked. Framed and arranged, all in a line, she began to see what worked and what didn’t. She felt proud when she surveyed what she had already achieved.

  It was a shame that a handful of the other local craft workers didn’t seem so pleased. She’d been all but cold-shouldered at the last fair, but that was the fault of the organisers. They knew how many fabric artists were coming; surely it had been unfair to let so many attend, with similar products. As the new person on the scene, Penny had been ostracised by the well-established fibre and textile artists on nearby tables.

  Still, she’d made contacts with a picture-framer who could source local wood and create the right sort of frames for her stencilled images, and a friendly spinner had exchanged details and brought her a cup of tea when she’d appeared to be flagging.

  And she’d made a fair amount of money, too.

  The website looked fine, she decided.

  Feeling even more buoyed by that success, she opened Facebook, and found she had been accepted into the local urbex group. One of the admins, “Lee Lincsurbex”, sent her a brief welcome message and outlined the rules of the group.

  Lincsurbex, she thought, staring at it. Oh – that’s not his real name. As she glanced down the list of sixteen members, she saw that the majority of them had fake-looking names. What were they all so paranoid about? Or was it all part of the mystique, she wondered. They were playing at being secretive and edgy.

  Lee’s message also urged her to share h
er photos into the group albums. She felt she had to prove her credentials, so she flicked through her digital folders and found four images that could be considered “urban exploration.” She doctored them a little in a digital editing software program, and then tentatively uploaded them.

  Like, like, like – three notifications popped up in quick succession and she grinned to herself. “Not bad” commented someone calling themselves “Blue Foryou.”

  “Thank you” she typed back, adding a smiley face.

  Then it went quiet for a bit. She decided to introduce herself in the group, and so she posted, “Hi, thanks for the add. New to the area. Hoping to explore and meet some of you soon.”

  Penny’s back was aching from the rather un-ergonomic posture she was sitting in, so she got up and stretched, and decided to make herself a cup of tea while she was up. When she got back to the laptop, her heart flipped in excitement.

  She had been invited out.

  That night.

  By the urbex group.

  * * * *

  Penny’s hands were shaking as she tried to zip up her black anorak. She had dashed upstairs and changed into dark clothing, grabbing her camera and leaving the house before she really allowed herself time to think about what she was doing, and before Kali was alerted to the possibility of a new adventure. Kali was always excited if there was the suggestion of anything novel.

  Penny was usually excited at first … until she let rational good sense kick in, as it began to when she left the house.

  Still, the police were right, Penny thought. She was able to go places that they could not. She had to take this chance. She had to prove Detective Inspector Travis’s confidence in her was well-founded.

  She knew she should tell someone before she went out. Drew? He might not understand, she thought. Cath? She’d be concerned.

  So she simply left a note on the living room table, explaining where she was going and when. If something happened, Kali’s barking would rouse the neighbours after a while. She had to trust that it would be enough.