by Issy Brooke
They had discussed whether to alert the police. If she had been younger, it would have been an automatic decision straight away. Ariadne didn’t want any more police involvement; she argued that as she was already under investigation, she didn’t want to draw more attention to herself. Penny protested about the “under investigation” bit. She understood why Ariadne might feel targeted but she also decided her sister wasn’t thinking straight. The welfare of the child was paramount. So she sent a text, secretly, to Francine asking her to alert Inspector Travis and asking what they ought to do.
“He’s out,” was the reply. “You need to phone the local police station, I think.”
Penny had continued to fret.
A little while later, they had received an anxious text from Wolf asking what he ought to do about making the evening meal, and Ariadne collapsed into tears, horrified that she had as good as forgotten about her other child. Penny had helped her to the car, and taken her home.
Now her phone was beeping. Penny rolled over and blinked a few times, trying to clear her bleary eyes to read the text.
It was short, and it meant she could finally go to sleep.
“She’s home.”
* * * *
Penny felt like she was wading through treacle on Saturday. She knew that Ariadne would need to catch up on her sleep so she didn’t phone or call round. Instead she had promised Drew that she would visit the town’s history fair that day, and she wanted to take some photos for the community website. She checked her camera had a full battery, and tucked another one in her inside pocket. The cold weather drained the batteries much more quickly than normal, so she tried to keep them warm. She dithered about lenses, and ended up choosing her standard one.
Reg Harris, the local historian, had started the website and used it to record local history. It grew and soon attracted attention, both negative and positive. The negative comments were based on the fact that the website was optimised for use in about 1998. Modern smartphones and tablets chewed up the bright slabs of text and horrible tables full of images, and put them through the technological equivalent of a washing machine. The result was like washing a tissue with your favourite black jumper. You could tell what it was, but it wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t really fit for purpose.
So a man in his early thirties, Jared Boot, had stepped in to help Reg with the more complicated aspects of the website and it had suddenly grown from a collection of tales about “Neb the joiner who fell in a hole” into a place where the town’s residents could meet online, like a virtual pub. Part of it had linked up to a popular photo-sharing site, and Penny was finding that she was getting a lot of pleasing exposure from uploading her images there. The local and regional papers were far happier to take a free photo from the site than send (and pay) one of their own photographers. And as long as Penny got her by-line, she was happy.
She dressed well for the crisp autumn weather and walked Kali. Wolf would be round later, she hoped, to teach her some more tricks. Once Kali was home and settled with a chew, Penny armed herself with her prepared camera bag and headed into town to find the history event.
There were a few wonkily-painted signs up, pointing the way to the open market area. As it was a Saturday, the regular open-air market was taking place, but over in a far corner, there were some extra stands and the sound of something like an antelope being squeezed. As she got closer, she saw that the noise was coming from a man with a red, sweating face, puffed out cheeks, and a long brown tube that was like a recorder which had gone rogue.
She didn’t make eye contact in case he burst.
Next to him, there was a table with maps showing the development of the town since Roman times, presided over by a jolly woman in a Roman kirtle, wearing a badge which said she was representing Glenfield’s Heritage Preservation Society.
“I didn’t know we had a Preservation Society,” Penny said.
“Most people don’t,” the woman said. “But I carry on anyway.”
“You and…”
“Just me, now my husband’s got into golf.”
“Right.”
Next to the solitary woman was a display board with lots of coloured lines and pins across it. “What’s your surname?” the sandy-haired man said without any other preamble.
“May,” she replied, startled.
He peered at her. “Are you local?”
“No … sorry.” Why am I apologising?
“Hmm. Got any local family connections?”
“Er … no.”
“Oh dear. Maybe you could marry a local man. Are you already married though? That might be a problem. Myers, that’s a good local name. Find a Myers.”
She noted that he was part of the regional genealogical society, nodded politely, and moved on rather quickly.
She noticed Drew at the far end of the row of tables and displays, and would have gone straight to him, but there was someone very interesting between her and Drew.
William Goodfellow was on his mobility scooter, dressed entirely as a Second World War Tommy, complete with a long rifle.
“Is that a bayonet on the end?” she asked incredulously as she approached.
“Yup.” He reached up and twisted it free. “Have a look.”
He handed it to her and she hefted it like a sword. Like a sword, she thought. He was seen carrying this through the town! “This could do some damage,” she said.
“Aye, that it could.”
She passed it back. He had a display next to him. There were some graphic and horrible photos of life in the trenches, but also some jolly propaganda posters which made her smile; cheery Land Girls, housewives digging for victory, the happy Home Guard and so on. It was all familiar to her from endless lessons at school, decades ago.
“Do you specialise in World War Two?” she asked.
“Oh, no, I love all war.”
She stared at him.
“Sorry, love, that came out wrong.” He laughed awkwardly. “I am interested in the past, military history, you know, well, any time period, really.”
Including World War One, she thought. Mustard gas. Oh yes.
Charlotte was coming up towards them, carrying two steaming cardboard cups of tea she’d just bought from the butty wagon on the market. She wasn’t dressed up. She looked as tired as Penny felt, but of course, she’d recently experienced the appalling double-whammy of losing her aunt – and then discovering that her aunt was her mother. Unless she’d already known. But that didn’t make the events any less painful, regardless of the order of them.
“Oh, hi,” she said, as she got closer. “You’re the woman from yesterday, at the bus stop. Did you find her, the girl you were looking for?”
“She came home last night,” she said. “But thank you so much for your help.”
Charlotte jerked her head sideways, a strange tic. “Oh, I didn’t do anything though,” she said awkwardly.
“You did. You listened. It really helped.”
Charlotte had gone quite pink by this time. Penny saw that William was looking at them curiously so she sketched out the previous day’s events for him, and introduced herself.
He shook her hand gravely. “Pleased to meet you. I reckon our Charlotte knows a thing or two about being a troubled teen, eh.”
“Dad!” she said, and tapped his shoulder. “Please.” But she was smiling.
William sipped at his tea. “It’s missing something,” he said.
“Honestly, there’s two sugars in there. I made sure to ask.”
“No, I mean, it’s missing a large burger to go with it. Be a love, would you…”
Charlotte rolled her eyes and headed back to the butty wagon.
As soon as she was out of earshot, William tipped his head back and fixed his gaze on Penny. “You’ve heard, haven’t you? The gossip is everywhere. You gave me a look when she called me dad.”
“Did I? I am sorry. It wasn’t intentional,” she said. “As far as I’m concerned, a father is the man wh
o is there for the child. It’s not a blood thing.”
He half-smiled. “Thank you. That’s what we think, too. Sorry, I might be being over-sensitive about the whole thing at the moment.” His smile faded. “She didn’t know. Charlotte didn’t know a thing until this investigation … until poor Julie …”
“I am so sorry,” Penny said. William’s face was slack and crumpled. She put a hand in her pocket to feel for a tissue, in case he began to cry.
“No, no, it’s okay,” he said, and swallowed. “It’s Charlotte that my heart breaks for, you know? She’s had a rough past. She went off the rails, in one way or another. Ended up in sheltered housing in Leicester for a while. But she came back recently for a fresh start, and it was all going so well. Then this!”
“It does seem very strange,” Penny said. “Do you think the police are correct when they say it was a deliberate act?”
William snorted. “Do I heck as like,” he said, a bizarre phrase that Penny loved even if she wasn’t always sure what it meant. “No, I don’t. It was an accident, plain and simple. Because I know she had her arguments with folks, time to time, as do us all. But who would kill her? There ain’t enough reason, not at all. It’s a nonsense and it’s driving us all up the wall. Charlotte … well, I can’t explain to you how hard it’s been.” William’s face hardened. “But I tell you something, love. If it were murder and that, and I find out who did it and put us through all this, I’ll kill him myself with my bare hands. Won’t need no bayonet, me. Oh no.”
“I am so sorry for everything that you’re going through,” Penny said with genuine feeling. Charlotte arrived back as she was speaking, and she passed a yellow plastic tray to William. He took it and held it on his lap, but he didn’t open it.
Charlotte smiled weakly. “You don’t need to send me on a fool’s errand so you can talk to someone, you know.”
“I don’t want to upset you any more than I need to,” William said.
“You don’t upset me at all!” Charlotte’s bottom lip wavered but she bit it, hard, making it go white with the pressure. Her eyes were watery but not a tear fell as she said to Penny, “I’m sorry. It’s been a strange week. As I am sure you’ve heard.”
“Yes. And that must be hard, knowing that it’s being talked about.”
“Knowing that we are being talked about, yes.” She shrugged. “Same old, same old,” she added, vaguely.
“Well, it was an accident,” William said firmly and he popped open the carton on his knees. “The police are poking around looking for issues where there are none.” He shot a sideways look at Charlotte but she was staring off into the middle distance, her fingers twitching.
“I’ll leave you to your burger in peace,” Penny said. “This display looks wonderful. Well done. I hope you have a good day and lots of visitors.” And lots of things to take your mind off recent events, she thought.
As she walked away, heading towards Drew at the far end, Charlotte ran after her to catch her up.
“I am glad you found your … who was it? Your sister’s daughter?”
“Yes, that’s right. Thank you.”
Now Charlotte was closer, Penny could smell something odd about her. Her dark green parka was old and grubby at the cuffs, and the fake fur around the hood was straggly and matted. But the smell wasn’t just that of old clothes.
Alcohol, Penny thought. Maybe she’d dipped her sleeve in a spilt drink or something.
“I wanted to say,” Charlotte said, “just, you know, about my dad and that.”
Penny stopped to listen.
“Well, it’s been hard on him,” Charlotte said. She twisted her pale fingers in the grubby cuffs of her coat. “I don’t mean just what’s happened with Auntie Julie. Before. And, and, and I know what the gossips say and it’s true. It is all my fault.”
“You know, I haven’t actually heard any gossip about you,” Penny said. “And I don’t listen to them, even if they had said anything, which they haven’t.”
“Thank you. I don’t know what he wanted to talk to you about, but he’s stressed, you know, and not quite in control of himself. He had a stroke, you see. Because of me. Because of me messing around when I was younger. I was awful. I drove him to it. And then I wasn’t there to help him. Auntie Julie stepped in … and did it all for him. But I have to make it up to him, now, you see?”
“I do see. It’s been horrible for you both.”
“Yes, yes, it has. And we want to put all this behind us and move on. So … look, there is other gossip as well.”
“I told you, I don’t listen to it.”
“No,” Charlotte said. She lowered her voice. “I mean, this is gossip about you.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, sorry. I’m talking about the gossip about how you solve the murders and stuff. They say that you’re friends with the police. So can you tell them what dad thinks? He knows it was an accident. We don’t want the bother and the poking and prying. We’ve been through enough. I don’t want …” Her voice choked and she rubbed her face with her sleeve angrily, a curiously childish gesture. “I don’t want any more problems for my dad, you know?”
“Of course. I quite understand,” Penny said as kindly as she could. “But you know that they think it can’t have been an accident.”
“They don’t understand!” Charlotte blurted out. “She had problems. She couldn’t stop cleaning stuff. She had OCD. That was probably my fault too, from all the stress I caused. Of course she was putting this and that and the other down the toilet. Nothing was ever clean enough for her.”
Charlotte turned away and scrubbed her tears away furiously. She half-turned back, her red-rimmed eyes narrow. “Talk to them,” she whispered huskily. “Tell them, tell the police, tell them so it’s all over.”
Penny took a step forward, wanting to enfold the broken young woman in a hug, but Charlotte ducked to the side and was gone, heading back to her father – her uncle, the man who had raised her – without looking back.
Penny felt deeply sorry for her. Charlotte was unravelling with grief.
* * * *
Penny stood frozen for a long moment until William looked past Charlotte and met her eyes. She raised her hand in awkward farewell, and turned to approach Drew.
He was dressed in the same clothes that she had seen him in before, when he’d turned up at Bill Travis’s house. He looked better in the daylight. He had various leather straps criss-crossing his body which seemed to hold a series of wooden bottles, and a sword hung at his side.
He was showing a very long and archaic-looking weapon to a crowd of small boys. She reminded herself why she had come to the event, and pulled out her camera to start taking photographs.
“Got any good shots?” Drew asked once the gathering of lads had gone.
“I think so,” she said. “That thing isn’t loaded, is it?”
He laughed. “No. It’s a single-shot, muzzle-loading musket. Watch. I’ll quickly run you through the loading process.”
“Quickly?”
“Well, it takes a few minutes.”
She grinned. “Go on, and let me take some photos while you do so.”
She moved him so there were fewer cars in the background behind him, and concentrated on focus and framing while he moved through the sequence.
“Thank you,” she said at last.
“I can’t wait to see them,” he told her. “Will you be going to the bonfire next weekend?”
Was he working up to asking her out? That was Francine’s arbitrarily imposed deadline, after all. She said, “Yes, I was hoping so…”
“Excellent,” he said. “It should be a good night if it doesn’t rain.”
She waited for him to say more, but there was a fresh crowd gathering around them. Drew turned his attention to them, and Penny had no choice but to fade into the background. She sent a quick text to Ariadne to ask her to remind Wolf about the event; he would find lots of things to enjoy, she knew.
And then
she made her way home.
Chapter Eleven
Penny spent Sunday in a self-indulgent sleepy heap on the sofa in her living room. The day stayed dark and grey and overcast, and she felt the need to catch up on sleep from the exertions of the previous few days. She didn’t want to admit that age was catching up with her, but it certainly seemed that it was harder to sleep the whole night through – and far easier to cat-nap on the sofa at random points in the day.
Kali was happy to keep her company. She liked going for walks, and learning new things, but she was equally chilled when there was a chance to curl up for hours with Penny. Dogs could teach us many things, Penny thought, but not least among those lessons would be how to slow down and smell the roses.
Or in the case of dogs, smell everything.
And then try to eat those things.
Taking a day to rest seemed to do them both the world of good because Penny was up at stupid o’clock on Monday morning and she took Kali for an extra-long walk. She also took her camera and got some atmospheric shots of the low mist curling around leafless trees and bushes.
She was just pottering around in the kitchen while her laptop warmed up when her mobile phone rang. It was Francine, and Penny answered it eagerly. Francine was on her list of people to call that day; Ariadne was at the top but she hadn’t got around to starting any of the calls yet.
“Hey Penny! How are you? I have news,” Francine went on breathlessly before Penny could answer. “I know who the prime suspect is!”
Penny sat down and immediately jumped up again. This was too exciting to remain static while Francine chattered on.
“Obviously Bill doesn’t bring much work home,” she was saying. “I kind of hoped he would leave some folders lying around, but his bag has been mostly empty except for memos about not leaving dirty plates out on the tables in the canteen. But I’ve been hanging around when he’s taken phone calls and sometimes I can trick him with questions and stuff. So … go on, who do you think is top of the list?”
“I don’t know,” Penny said. “I was talking to William and Charlotte at the weekend. I’m uneasy, actually. William is convinced it was an accident, and Drew thinks so too. Maybe it really was a tragedy, you know?”
