by Issy Brooke
Destiny and Drew re-entered. Drew said, “I was leaving anyway. I’ll walk you back. I know it’s not far, but it’s late.”
“Thank you.”
Ariadne didn’t make eye contact with Penny. She fled from the house, followed by Destiny. Drew came over and gave Penny a chaste kiss on the cheek, but his hands on her shoulders were heavy and reassuring.
“Remember,” he said. “I’m here for you. I’ll see you at the bonfire night. Don’t forget your camera. And thank you for a lovely night.”
“You’re welcome,” she said, and then he was gone.
Penny remained standing in her living room, staring at the key.
Ariadne, she thought. You colossal idiot.
Chapter Thirteen
Penny put the key in a ceramic bowl that sat on the worktop near the back door, where it joined many other keys and hair ties and sticky tape and unwanted business cards. She wanted to forget about it. It was a silly thing; she should urge Ariadne to come clean to the police.
But she knew that her sister would not.
* * * *
On Tuesday she settled down to do some photo editing. She set her laptop up at the kitchen table, and plugged in a graphics tablet. It was a recent purchase, recommended to her by Jared, who had been helping Reg to modernise the community website. Jared was a keen photographer himself, and encouraged Penny to improve her skills.
Even the Urban Exploration guys had started to upload their strange and eerie shots of tunnels and derelict buildings to the public album-sharing site.
She was just beginning to get frustrated at her poor attempts to add filter effects to an otherwise unremarkable shot of a tree, when someone started knocking at her door, and Kali’s fur rose up all along her spine.
Penny knew from Kali’s reaction that the visitor was not someone who had been to her house before. She shut Kali in the kitchen and went through to the hallway.
She was not prepared to find Kevin on the doorstep. Kali’s barking changed when she heard his voice; she had met him in the past, and clearly remembered him.
“Hi, Penny. Um, I’m not here to have a go at you or anything, so you don’t need to worry. Can I come in?”
She felt reluctant to do that, even with a handy Rottweiler on stand-by. She didn’t move. She said, stalling with politeness, “How’s your ankle?”
“It’s fine, no harm done.” He smiled thinly. “Please, I need to talk to you. I need your help.”
She tried not to let her mouth fall open in surprise. “Is this a trick?”
“No.” He spread his hands wide and put on a pleading expression. “Okay, I get it. You probably don’t want me in your house. I am sorry what I said about your sister. Maybe we could go to the pub and talk about this on neutral territory?”
She relented. “Okay, you can come in.” She led him into the kitchen where Kali greeted him enthusiastically, but when they all sat at the table, Kali put herself in between them. She obviously picked up on some vibe.
Kevin took a deep breath. “Right. Okay, so it’s about this murder.”
She tensed, hoping for a quick confession.
He caught the expression on her face, and grimaced. “You know that I’m the main suspect, right? Goodness knows what they are trying to dig up on me so that they can arrest me. I can’t leave town at the moment. They were very insistent about that.”
“Mm-hm.”
“I also know,” he continued, “that your sister was questioned by them and you are investigating to be able to clear her name.”
“You’re right, sort of,” she said. “She is innocent and I think that even the police know it. But Ariadne herself doesn’t believe she’s in the clear.” Penny tried not to let her eyes stray to the bowl with the key.
“Right, okay. So the thing is, you see, that I am also innocent. There’s been a terrible misunderstanding.”
“Mm-hm…?”
“Yes. And what I thought was, that if you are investigating, then you can help to clear my name, too.”
She burst out laughing. “This is all an elaborate bluff!” she said. Her laughter died instantly as she remembered that she could, potentially, be talking to the murderer.
“It really isn’t,” he said. “I’m desperate. Look, me and you, we were friends, once. I helped you with Kali. She’s looking fantastic, by the way.”
“That was before you started accusing my sister of murder.” But he had a point. The old Kevin that she knew and liked was still there.
But he might be a killer, she reminded herself.
“I know, and I’m sorry. For what it’s worth, I doubt that she is the murderer. I was stressed out when I said those things. I’ll apologise for ever if you want me to.”
Stress did make people act in crazy ways. “I’m still not sure.”
Kevin nodded. “I know. There are some things that I am going to tell you, which might help you. The police don’t seem to believe me.”
“But I will?”
“Yes, I think so. Everyone knows she was killed by a horrible mixture of cleaning chemicals, right?”
“Mustard gas.”
“Actually, it wasn’t quite the same thing. It’s technical. Anyway, yes, I was in the area. And I don’t always lock the back of my van, and I know that I should. I did have a range of chemicals in the back because I don’t just clean windows. I’ve power-washed people’s patios and done deep-cleans of outbuildings and all sorts. Windows are my bread-and-butter but I am adaptable.”
“Did you have the exact chemicals that killed her?”
Kevin nodded sadly. “I had one half of the components needed, and she had the other half in a domestic bottle, which she put down the toilet, obviously not knowing that there was something already down there that was going to reaction quickly. And a bottle of it was stolen from the back of my van.”
“You idiot.”
“I know,” he said. “And there is more.”
“Go on.”
“The window had been locked shut and the key was found on the ground outside. Maybe that was an accident. I am always losing those silly little window keys.”
“William Goodfellow thinks it was an accident.”
“It must be awful for him to think that anyone would want to kill her. She was so good to him. She did everything for him. And Charlotte, too. I heard she had given Charlotte all sorts of help to get her back on her feet. I mean, just because I think she was a nasty piece of work, doesn’t take away the fact that she was essential to William and her niece. Or her daughter. Whatever she was. Anyway, because the window was shut and the door was locked, she choked. She couldn’t get out. She couldn’t get air.”
He paused, and they both shared a respectful silence in memory of Julie. It truly was a dreadful way to go. Penny felt a flash of anger and she glared at Kevin. “You had better not be lying to me,” she said.
“Seriously, I’m not.” He spoke with vehemence. His face was flushed and his hands balled up into tight fists.
“It’s all a bit far-fetched,” she said slowly. “You just happened to leave your van unlocked, and a bottle of stuff just happened to go missing when you were in the area.”
He unfurled one fist and pressed his hand flat on the table. Through gritted teeth, he said, “Precisely. It is far-fetched. And if I was lying to you, don’t you think I would have come up with something better?”
He had a point.
“Let me think about it,” she said, and rose to her feet to signal that it was time for him to leave.
* * * *
Penny sat at the kitchen table on Wednesday afternoon, and thought hard. She was thinking about Julie and Charlotte. Why exactly had Charlotte been raised as William’s daughter? She had heard the gossip through Wolf, but what was the truth? Was it that simple?
She pulled up a recent news story on her laptop and hunted down the ages of the people mentioned. She relied on the local paper’s convention of adding someone’s age to the end of their name, l
ike it was relevant to the story.
Thirty-nine.
It matched what she had already heard. That was no age at all, Penny thought. And Charlotte looked way over twenty years old … yes, maybe it really was that simple. It certainly made the fact that she had been brought up by William more plausible. William’s wife had died a while ago, but at the time they had been a settled family and with Julie unmarried, of course it was the “done thing” to pass the baby to a family who could raise her “properly” – according to the standards of the time.
She sighed, and stood up. She wandered around and ended up standing by the bowl of keys. She picked out the one that Ariadne had left.
She had to get rid of it.
It was cold in her hands, but light and innocuous. She put it on the table and sat back down, this time searching online for ways to destroy a key. Then she became paranoid that her searches would have triggered some alarms somewhere, and she had to spend another hour learning how to delete her search history.
She wasn’t entirely convinced she’d got it right, either.
It had seemed so simple at first. One of her initial thoughts was to simply drop the key into the general household waste.
But they could trace that, couldn’t they? Waste collection day wasn’t for another week; the council had gone onto fortnightly collections, with recycling waste on one week and general on the other. What if the police suddenly came around to search her house before the bins were emptied? It was deeply unlikely but she had seen enough television detective stories to see how they could make a case from the slimmest of leads.
She then thought she’d bury it in the garden. That wasn’t fool proof, either. It would be dug up. Perhaps Kali would dig it up. She imagined Cath calling around for a brew, and Kali bouncing up to her, all wagging excitement, proudly bearing the key in her mouth.
Penny considered dropping it in a public bin. I could be seen, she thought. Who knew what CCTV systems were around.
A part of her brain knew she was being overly worried.
But the other part of her brain wanted to protect her sister at all costs.
“Come on, Kali,” she said at last. “Let’s go for a walk in the woods.” She put the key in her coat pocket.
She had decided to drop it in the woods, far away from the town, where no one would see her.
* * * *
It was a perfectly pleasant ramble through the woods, marred only by her constant paranoia that she was being followed by a SWAT team and had a neon light hanging over her head that said “This woman is planning to dispose of vital evidence!”
“It’s not vital evidence,” Penny said to Kali, and then looked around in case someone had heard her accidental words.
The woods were still and silent. The track was deep with fallen leaves and the trees were half-bare now. The smell in the woods was different in the autumn, Penny thought. She tried to focus on her senses rather than her worries. She had learned to handle stress in her corporate life but she hadn’t expected to have to draw on those skills in her semi-retirement.
Her wellington boots crunched through the leaves and she remembered kicking at great piles of leaves when she was a child. She’d grown up in an unremarkable suburban family, and had been many years older than Ariadne. They had not played together the way that other siblings, who were closer in age, might have done. For the teenage Penny, having a younger sister was an annoyance at best and at worst – to a moody, stroppy adolescent – the ruination of her life, it’s so unfair, you don’t understand and so on.
Kali was at the very end of her lead, sniffing around the base of trees as they wandered along.
They were definitely alone, Penny decided. She pulled a fat glove from her right hand and held it in her left, with the lead, while she dug around for the key.
It was such a plain key. It was just a standard Yale with a rounded end and no fob or ring attached to it.
No one could connect it with her, or Ariadne, or even Julie’s house.
There was a stately-looking oak tree at the bend in the path up ahead. She walked off the path and pushed through some brambles to behind the tree. The nettles were dying back, but the undergrowth was still relatively thick.
She dropped the key in amongst the nettles, kicked a pile of leaf mould over it, and sighed deeply.
“Come on, Kali. Do your business and then let’s get home.”
* * * *
Her feeling of relief lasted for about four hours, which was pretty good going, all things considered.
But as darkness fell, a sense of unease crept over her.
Fingerprints.
She’d taken her glove off, she remembered in a flash. She could see herself doing it. She played it out, over and over again, rehashing the scene in her head.
What had she been thinking! She really would make a terrible criminal. She had been so caught up in not being followed that she had made a basic mistake.
What on earth would remove fingerprints from a piece of metal? Could she just wipe it clean? She stared at her laptop. That would be yet another incriminating search to flag her up to the authorities.
Instead, she bundled herself back up in a thick coat, boots, scarf and hat, and threw Kali a chewy bone to keep her occupied while she was out.
She grabbed a large bright pink bottle of bleach from the bathroom cleaning cupboard, and headed back out into the night.
She only got as far as the edge of the woods.
Chapter Fourteen
She didn’t recognise the police officer who stepped out of the passenger side of the police car that had pulled up alongside her.
She tried to hold the bottle of bleach casually, but let her hand drop to slightly behind her, hoping that her coat would hide the glaringly pink bottle. She was by the last of the streetlights and the sodium glow seemed to pick on certain colours and highlight them.
“Good evening,” she said pleasantly as the uniformed man approached her.
“Good evening,” he said, equally calm and pleasant.
His heart could not have been hammering as hard as hers was doing.
He was a tall man, with broad shoulders and a narrow body, and a face that was entirely angular. He smiled but he was looking at her intently. “I’d like a little chat with you,” he said. “We’ve had a report of suspicious activity along here. What’s your name, please?”
“What suspicious activity?” she asked.
“Name, please.” He spoke firmly.
“I’m Penelope May. I live down River Street.” She hoped her voice wasn’t quavering but her bones were apparently turning to jelly.
“It’s eight o’clock on a dark October night. What are you doing walking into the woods, please, Ms May?”
“I’m just … walking. I’m out for a walk,” she said. I sound like an idiot.
“Can I see what’s in your hand, please.” It was not a question.
She screwed her eyes tight shut as she offered up the bottle of bleach.
“Can you tell me why you’re taking a bottle of bleach into the woods?”
Her mind went totally blank. “No,” she said, honestly.
“Can’t, or won’t?”
“I … can’t.”
There was a moment of stand-off. The driver of the vehicle had wound his window down and he was listening to the conversation.
“Jimmy, I reckon we take her in,” the driver said.
The standing officer nodded. “Ms May. You’re not under arrest but we’d like to pop you up to the station so we can talk about this in more detail.”
“Why?” she said, fear gripping her. She knew she should go along with it, nice and meekly, but it seemed like an overreaction.
“In light of recent events in this area,” the officer explained patiently, “we are alert to all suspicious activity. I am sure that you understand our policing priorities.”
The driver passed a large transparent bag over to the officer outside, and he opened it and held it
towards the bottle of bleach. She understood, and dropped it in. He sealed the bag, and then opened the rear door of the car.
She had no choice.
She slid into the back of the car. With an ominous click, the doors locked automatically as they set off up to Lincoln.
* * * *
“I thought you said I was not under arrest,” she complained. She was feeling hot and sweaty as she stood in the custody suite of the police station. There were two officers behind the desk, and another pair of officers trying to reason with a drunk on the other side of the room.
She was still flanked by the two officers who had picked her up. The first, who she knew now as “Jimmy” but would not have dared to address him as such, spoke to the custody sergeant.
“We have detained this individual for suspicious behaviour. We want to talk with her.”
“There you are,” the sergeant said. “You’re detained, not arrested.”
“What’s the difference?” she demanded.
“We haven’t got probable grounds for arrest at this moment regarding a specific crime,” he said. “Yet.”
The second officer put the plastic bag of bleach on the counter. “But we do have this. And no reasonable explanation … yet.”
So she was forced to run through a list of questions that the custody sergeant asked – name, address, occupation. Something pinged on the computer as he entered the details, and the custody sergeant raised his eyebrows.
“Oh yes,” he said. But he did not clarify what that meant.
There was a flurried debate between the staff, punctuated by shouts from the drunk at the other end of the room, and then she was taken straight through to an interviewing room.
“We don’t want to arrest you,” Jimmy said, sounding almost kind. It was probably because it would cause him extra paperwork. “Let’s just get the facts straight and then you can go.”
She had refused the offer of a duty solicitor. It would have meant waiting in a cell for the person to be called. She didn’t see the point – she was innocent.
