The Thursday Murder Club

by Richard Osman

  A question has been nagging at Donna throughout lunch. ‘So, if you don’t mind me asking, I know you all live at Coopers Chase, but how did the four of you become friends?’

  ‘Friends?’ Elizabeth seems amused. ‘Oh, we’re not friends, dear.’

  Ron is chuckling. ‘Christ, love, no, we’re not friends. Do you need a top-up, Liz?’

  Elizabeth nods and Ron pours. They are on a second bottle. It is 12.15.

  Ibrahim agrees. ‘I don’t think friends is the word. We wouldn’t choose to socialize, we have very different interests. I like Ron, I suppose, but he can be very difficult.’

  Ron nods, ‘I’m very difficult.’

  ‘And Elizabeth’s manner is off-putting.’

  Elizabeth nods, ‘There it is I’m afraid. I’ve always been an acquired taste. Since school.’

  ‘I like Joyce, I suppose. I think we all like Joyce,’ says Ibrahim.

  Ron and Elizabeth nod their agreement again.

  ‘Thank you, I’m sure,’ says Joyce, chasing peas around her plate. ‘Don’t you think someone should invent flat peas?’

  Donna tries to clear up her confusion.

  ‘So if you aren’t friends, then what are you?’

  Donna sees Joyce look up and shake her head at the others, this unlikely gang. ‘Well,’ says Joyce. ‘Firstly, we are friends, of course; this lot are just a little slow catching on. And secondly, if it didn’t say on your invitation, PC De Freitas, then it was my oversight. We’re the Thursday Murder Club.’

  Elizabeth is going glassy-eyed with red wine, Ron is scratching at a ‘West Ham’ tattoo on his neck and Ibrahim is polishing an already-polished cufflink.

  The restaurant is filling up around them, and Donna is not the first visitor to Coopers Chase to think this wouldn’t be the worst place to live. She would kill for a glass of wine and an afternoon off.

  ‘Also, I swim every day,’ concludes Ibrahim. ‘It keeps the skin tight.’

  What is this place?

  3

  If you are ever minded to take the A21 out of Fairhaven, and head into the heart of the Kentish Weald, you will eventually pass an old phone box, still working, on a sharp left-hand bend. Continue for around a hundred yards until you see the sign for ‘Whitechurch, Abbots Hatch and Lents Hill’, and then take a right. Head through Lents Hill, past the Blue Dragon and the little farm shop with the big egg outside, until you reach the small stone bridge over the Robertsmere. Officially the Robertsmere is a river, but don’t get confused and expect anything grand.

  Take the single-track right turn just past the bridge. You will think you are headed the wrong way, but this is quicker than the way the official brochure takes you, and also picturesque if you like dappled hedgerows. Eventually the road widens out and, peeking between tall trees, you will begin to see signs of life rising on the hilly land up to your left. Up ahead you will see a tiny, wood-clad bus stop, also still working, if one bus in either direction a day counts as working. Just before you reach the bus stop you will see the entrance sign for Coopers Chase on your left.

  They began work on Coopers Chase about ten years ago, when the Catholic Church sold the land. The first residents, Ron, for one, had moved in three years later. It was billed as ‘Britain’s First Luxury Retirement Village’, though according to Ibrahim, who has checked, it was actually the seventh. There are currently around 300 residents. You can’t move here until you’re over sixty-five, and the Waitrose delivery vans clink with wine and repeat prescriptions every time they pass over the cattle grid.

  The old convent dominates Coopers Chase, with three modern residential developments spiralling out from this central point. For over a hundred years the convent was a hushed building, filled with the dry bustle of habits and the quiet certainty of prayers offered and answered. Tapping along its dark corridors you would have found some women comfortable in their serenity, some women frightened of a speeding world, some women hiding, some women proving a vague, long-forgotten point and some women taking joy in serving a higher purpose. You would have found single beds, arranged in dorms; long, low tables for eating; a chapel so dark and quiet you would swear you heard God breathing. In short, you would find the Sisters of the Holy Church, an army which would never give you up, which would feed you and clothe you and continue to need and value you. All it required in return was a lifetime of devotion, and, given there will always be someone requiring that, there were always volunteers. And then one day you would take the short trip up the hill, through the tunnel of trees, to the Garden of Eternal Rest – the iron gates and low stone walls of the Garden looking over the convent and the endless beauty of the Kentish High Weald beyond, your body in another single bed, under a simple stone, alongside the Sister Margarets and Sister Marys of the generations before you. If you had once had dreams they could now play over the green hills, and if you had secrets then they were kept safe inside the four walls of the convent for ever.

  Well, more accurately, three walls, as the west-facing side of the convent is now entirely glazed to accommodate the residents’ swimming-pool complex. It looks out over the bowling green, and then further down to the visitors’ car park, the permits for which are rationed to such an extent that the Parking Committee is the single most powerful cabal within Coopers Chase.

  Beside the swimming pool is a small ‘arthritis therapy pool’, which looks like a Jacuzzi, largely for the reason that it is a Jacuzzi. Anyone given the grand tour by the owner, Ian Ventham, would then be shown the sauna. Ian would always open the door a crack and say, ‘Blimey, it’s like a sauna in there.’ That was Ian.

  Take the lift up to the recreation rooms next. The gym, and the exercise studio, where residents could happily Zumba among the ghosts of the single beds. Then there’s the Jigsaw Room for gentler activities and associations. There’s the library, and the lounge for the bigger and more controversial committee meetings, or for football on the flat-screen TV. Then down again to the ground floor, where the long low tables of the convent refectory are now the ‘contemporary upscale restaurant’.

  At the very heart of the village, attached to the convent, is the original chapel. Its pale cream stucco exterior makes it look almost Mediterranean against the fierce, Gothic darkness of the convent. The chapel remains intact and unchanged, one of the few covenants insisted upon by the executors of the Sisters of the Holy Church when they had sold out ten years ago. The residents like to use the chapel. This is where the ghosts are, where the habits still bustle and where the whispers have sunk into the stone. It is a place to make you feel part of something slower and something gentler. Ian Ventham is looking into contractual loopholes that might allow him to redevelop the chapel into eight more flats.

  Attached to the other side of the convent – the very reason for the convent – is Willows. Willows is now the nursing home for the village. It had been established by the Sisters in 1841 as a voluntary hospital, charitably tending to the sick and broken when no other option existed. In the latter part of the last century it had become a care home, until legislation in the 1980s led to the doors finally closing. The convent then simply became a waiting room, and when the last nun passed away in 2005, the Church wasted no time in cashing in and selling it as a job lot.

  The development sits in twelve acres of woodland and beautiful open hillside. There are two small lakes, one real, and one created by Ian Ventham’s builder, Tony Curran, and his gang. The many ducks and geese that also call Coopers Chase home seem to much prefer the artificial one. There are still sheep farmed at the very top of the hill, where the woodland breaks, and in the pastures by the lake is a herd of twenty llamas. Ian Ventham had bought two to look quirky in sales photos and it had got out of hand, as these things do.

  That, in a nutshell, is what this place is.

  4

  Joyce

  I first kept a diary many years ago, but I’ve looked back at it, and I don’t think it would be of any interest to you. Unless you’re interested in Haywards H
eath in the 1970s, which I am going to assume you’re not. That is no offence to either Haywards Heath or the 1970s, both of which I enjoyed at the time.

  But a couple of days ago, after meeting Elizabeth, I went to my first ever meeting of the Thursday Murder Club, and I have been thinking that perhaps it might be interesting to write about. Like whoever wrote that diary about Holmes and Watson? People love a murder, whatever they might say in public, so I will give it a go.

  I knew the Thursday Murder Club was going to be Elizabeth, Ibrahim Arif, who lives in Wordsworth, with a wraparound balcony, and Ron Ritchie. Yes, that Ron Ritchie. So that was something else exciting. Now I know him a bit better, the shine has worn off a little, but even so.

  Penny Gray also used to be part of it, but she is now in Willows, that’s the nursing home. Thinking about it now, I fitted right in. I suppose there had been a vacancy, and I was the new Penny.

  I was nervous at the time, though. I remember that. I took along a nice bottle of wine (£8.99, to give you an idea), and as I walked in, the three of them were already there in the Jigsaw Room, laying out photographs on the table.

  Elizabeth had formed the Thursday Murder Club with Penny. Penny had been an inspector in the Kent Police for many years, and she would bring along the files of unsolved murder cases. She wasn’t really supposed to have the files, but who was to know? After a certain age, you can pretty much do whatever takes your fancy. No one tells you off, except for your doctors and your children.

  I’m not supposed to say what Elizabeth used to do for a living, even though she does go on about it herself at times. Suffice to say though, that murders and investigations and what have you wouldn’t be unfamiliar work for her.

  Elizabeth and Penny would go through every file, line by line, study every photograph, read every witness statement, just looking for anything that had been missed. They didn’t like to think there were guilty people still happily going about their business. Sitting in their gardens, doing a sudoku, knowing they had got away with murder.

  Also, I think that Penny and Elizabeth just thoroughly enjoyed it. A few glasses of wine and a mystery. Very social, but also gory. It is good fun.

  They would meet every Thursday (that’s how they came up with the name). It was Thursday because there was a two-hour slot free in the Jigsaw Room, between Art History and Conversational French. It was booked, and still is booked, under the name Japanese Opera – A Discussion, which ensured they were always left in peace.

  There were certain favours both of them could call upon, for different reasons, and all sorts of people had been called in for a friendly chat over the years. Forensics officers, accountants and judges, tree surgeons, horse-breeders, glass-blowers – they’d all been to the Jigsaw Room. Whomever Elizabeth and Penny thought might help them with some query or other.

  Ibrahim had soon joined them. He used to play bridge with Penny, and had helped them out once or twice with bits and bobs. He’s a psychiatrist. Or was a psychiatrist. Or still is, I’m not quite sure. When you first meet him you can’t see that at all, but once you get to know him it makes a sort of sense. I would never have therapy, because who wants to unravel all that knitting? Not worth the risk, thank you. My daughter, Joanna, has a therapist, although you’d be hard pushed to know why if you saw the size of her house. Either way, Ibrahim no longer plays bridge, which I think is a shame.

  Ron had all but invited himself, which won’t surprise you. He wasn’t buying Japanese Opera for a second and walked into the Jigsaw Room one Thursday, wanting to know what was afoot. Elizabeth admires suspicion above all else and invited Ron to flick through the file of a scoutmaster found burned to death in 1982, in woodland just off the A27. She soon spotted Ron’s key strength, namely, he never believes a single word anyone ever tells him. Elizabeth now says that reading police files in the certain knowledge that the police are lying to you is surprisingly effective.

  It is called the Jigsaw Room, by the way, because this is where the bigger jigsaws are completed, on a gently sloping wooden table in the centre of the room. When I first walked in, there was a 2,000-piecer of Whitstable harbour, missing a letterbox of sky. I once went to Whitstable, just for the day, but I couldn’t really see what the fuss was all about. Once you’ve done the oysters, there’s no real shopping to speak of.

  Anyway, Ibrahim had put a thick perspex screen over the jigsaw, and this is where he, Elizabeth and Ron were laying out the autopsy photos of the poor girl. The one who Elizabeth thought had been killed by her boyfriend. This particular boyfriend was bitter at being invalided out from the army, but there’s always something, isn’t there? We all have a sob story, but we don’t all go around killing people.

  Elizabeth told me to shut the door behind me and come and take a look at some pictures.

  Ibrahim introduced himself, shook my hand and told me there were biscuits. He explained that there were two layers, but they tried to finish the top layer before they started the bottom layer. I told him he was preaching to the converted there.

  Ron took my wine and put it by the biscuits. He nodded at the label and commented that it was a white. He then gave me a kiss on the cheek, which gave me pause for thought.

  I know you might think that a kiss on the cheek is normal, but from men in their seventies it isn’t. The only men who kiss you on the cheek are sons-in-law or people like that. So I had Ron down as a quick worker straight away.

  I found out that the famous trade union leader Ron Ritchie lived in the village when he and Penny’s husband, John, nursed an injured fox back to health and called it Scargill. The story had featured in the village newsletter when I first arrived. Given that John had been a vet and Ron was, well, Ron, I suspected that John had done the nursing and Ron had simply been on naming duties.

  The newsletter, by the way, is called Cut to the Chase, which is a pun.

  We all crowded around the autopsy photos. The poor girl, and that wound that should never have killed her, even back in those days. The boyfriend had bolted from Penny’s squad car on the way to a police interview and hadn’t been seen since. He had given Penny a belt for her troubles too. No surprises there. If you hit women, you hit women.

  Even if he hadn’t run off, I suppose he would have got away with it. I know you still read about these things all the time, but it was even worse back then.

  The Thursday Murder Club wasn’t about to magically bring him to justice; I think everyone knew that. Penny and Elizabeth had solved all sorts of cases to their own satisfaction, but that was as far as they could go.

  So I suppose you could say that Penny and Elizabeth never really got their wish. All those murderers remained unpunished, all still out there, listening to the shipping forecast somewhere. They had got away with it, as some people do, I’m afraid. The older you get, the more you have to come to terms with that.

  Anyway, that’s just me being philosophical, which will get us nowhere.

  Last Thursday was the first time it was the four of us. Elizabeth, Ibrahim, Ron and me. And, as I say, it seemed very natural. As if I was completing their jigsaw again.

  I will leave the diary there for now. There is a big meeting in the village tomorrow. I help to put the chairs out for these sorts of things. I volunteer, because (a) it makes me look helpful and (b) it gives me first dibs at the refreshments.

  The meeting is a consultation about a new development at Coopers Chase. Ian Ventham, the big boss, is coming to talk to us about it. I try to be honest where I can, so I hope you don’t mind me saying I don’t like him. He’s all the things that can go wrong with a man if you leave him to his own devices.

  There has been a fearsome hoo-ha about the new development, because they’re chopping down trees and uprooting a graveyard, and there’s a rumour of wind turbines. Ron is looking forward to causing a bit of trouble, and I am looking forward to watching him do that.

  From now on I promise to try to write something every day. I will keep my fingers crossed that something happe
ns.

  5

  The Waitrose in Tunbridge Wells has a café. Ian Ventham parks his Range Rover in the last empty disabled bay outside, not because he’s disabled but because it’s nearest to the door.

  Walking in, he spots Bogdan by the window. Ian owes Bogdan £4,000. He has been stalling for a while, in the hope that Bogdan is thrown out of the country, but thus far, no luck. Anyway, he now has a real job for him, so it’s all worked out OK. He gives the Pole a wave and approaches the counter. He scans the chalkboard, looking for a coffee.

  ‘Is all your coffee fair trade?’

  ‘Yes, all fair trade,’ smiles the young woman serving.

  ‘Shame,’ says Ian. He doesn’t want to pay an extra fifteen pence to help someone he’ll never meet in a country he’ll never go to. ‘Cup of tea please. Almond milk.’

  Bogdan isn’t Ian’s biggest worry that day. If he ends up having to pay him, then so be it. Ian’s biggest worry is being killed by Tony Curran.

  Ian takes his tea over to the table, spotting anyone over sixty as he goes. Over sixty, and with Waitrose money? Give them ten years, he thinks. He wishes he’d brought some brochures.

  Ian will deal with Tony Curran as and when, but right now he has to deal with Bogdan. The good news is that Bogdan doesn’t want to kill him. Ian sits down.

  ‘What’s all this about two grand, Bogdan?’ Ian asks.

  Bogdan is drinking from a two-litre bottle of Lilt he has smuggled in. ‘Four thousand. Is pretty cheap to retile a swimming pool. I don’t know if you know that?’

  ‘Only cheap if you do a good job, Bogdan,’ says Ian. ‘The grouting’s discoloured. Look. I asked for coral white.’

  Ian takes out his phone, scrolls through to a photo of his new pool and shows it to Bogdan.

  ‘No, that is filter, let’s take off filter.’ Bogdan presses a button and the image immediately brightens. ‘Coral white. You know it.’