Small Town Christmas (Some Very English Murders Book 6) Page 4

  They all nodded in slight acknowledgement.

  Haydn spoke first. “They just had me in for questioning,” he said, dully. He was as crumpled as ever. He shook his head. “Me. And I know that I look as guilty as it’s possible to look.”

  Linda stared at the glass of pale liquid in her hands. It had a lemon in it, so Penny guessed it might be gin and tonic. She looked like a G-and-T sort of woman. “And me,” she said. “I’ve never set foot in a police station before in my entire life. Now I’m tarred with it. People are going to talk. And I cannot abide talk. I shall never shake the associations off.”

  Jared shrugged but he looked very miserable. “Me too. They had me in. And you, Penny?”

  “Yup. I’ve just been interviewed too. Mostly, I think, because of the ladder. The ladder had been left out. And I should have put it away.”

  “You argued with him, too,” Linda said. “Clive. It’s not just about the ladder.”

  “We’re not even supposed to talk about this,” Penny said, her hackles immediately rising at Linda’s accusation.

  “Can I get you a drink, Penny?” Jared asked.

  “Go on, then.”

  “I owe you one, too,” Haydn said from the far end. “I have a hazy recollection of acting like a complete boor in The Green Man when I saw you last. I had been drinking, but I know that’s no excuse.”

  He looked so hangdog that Penny smiled. “It’s okay. Thank you for acknowledging it.”

  She moved to the bar, but Jared shot Haydn a dirty look. To Penny, he muttered, “I’ll keep an eye on him.”

  She felt faintly embarrassed. “Thank you.”

  There followed a strained silence as they were all mindful of the instruction to not speak about the investigation.

  Penny was thinking, It could be one of us. If it’s not an accident, then it’s one of us. One of us! And she was sure that everyone else was thinking that, too.

  What had Clive been doing up the ladder? She knew she was negligent if she had left it out, and if it had been faulty. But why on earth had he gone up there in the first place? You couldn’t kill someone by forcing them up a ladder.

  By rights, she reasoned, there was no grounds for the police to talk to anyone else – but her.

  He hated the lights, of course. Maybe he had been sabotaging the lights. If I get prosecuted for having left out the ladder, even though he chose to go up there, Penny thought, then there is something wrong with the system.

  “Hey, cheer up,” Jared said. He was looking at her with concern.

  “I’m sorry. It just seems like a dreadful accident. I don’t even know why the police are interested in all of you guys.”

  “They’re just looking at people who argued with him most recently, in case someone has pushed him off the ladder,” Jared said. “I suppose they have to cover all the bases. Don’t worry.”

  “I can’t help it. A man is dead.”

  “The problem is to do with our alibis, as well as our motives,” Haydn said. “As in, I don’t have actually an alibi.”

  Penny nodded. “Me neither. I was walking the dog, but my dog can’t prove that.”

  Linda spoke up. “I went off for a drive. I honestly did. No witnesses.”

  “I was out for a run,” Jared said. “Everyone knows that … but no one can say that they saw me.”

  There was a pensive silence.

  “Look,” Penny said. “It’s silly of the police to expect none of us to talk to one another. We all live in the same place.”

  “I don’t,” Haydn said. “I live in Lincoln.” He said it as if it was a badge of honour.

  “I thought you had a house in Glenfield,” Penny said.

  “I have a few. I let them out.” She could almost hear the unspoken addition: I wouldn’t live in Glenfield.

  “Oh.” He was a landlord. That would explain the skip outside the house she’d seen Haydn leave.

  Jared drank down his lemonade. “Penny, I promised to show you some tricks with photo editing, didn’t I?” he said.

  “You did.” One of us, she thought, her mind still whirring along that unsettling track, and she decided she didn’t want to meet him alone. It could be him. She had planned to invite him to her house. One of us… “When are you free? We could use the community hall when Reg is there with his silver surfers class.”

  “I can extend my lunch hour tomorrow. Is he there on a Tuesday?”

  “I think he does most days now. That would be great.” She put her diet soda down, half-finished. “I’m sorry. My stomach is in knots. I can’t drink anything. I feel ill.”

  “It’s the stress,” Linda put in. Penny had thought she’d been uncharacteristically silent for too long. “Some people just aren’t cut out to handle it.”

  Penny idly wondered if she could take Linda down in an actual hand-to-hand fight, but restrained herself. “Quite,” she said, in the most cutting way she could. Ah, the glory of British insults.

  Linda’s brows lowered. She had felt the bite.

  “Anyway, I am going to head home,” Linda said suddenly, standing up.

  Haydn, too, pushed his mug aside. “This day can’t be over quickly enough, as far as I’m concerned.”

  They ended up all moving to the pub’s doors at the same time. The cold air hit them like a blast. Penny juggled her large bag from her elbow to her wrist, searching for her gloves which she remembered too late that she did not have, and in her fumbling she managed to tumble her phone out onto the top of the steps.

  They all stopped and watched the plastic and metal shear off as the phone bounced down to the pavement.

  Penny could have cried. It was the last straw. She bit her lip and threw her head back, and stalked down, collecting the debris as she went. She shoved the mangled bits into her bag.

  She had a feeling it wasn’t simply going to pop back together like a jigsaw.

  She didn’t turn around to wave anyone goodbye. She’d had enough. She was stretched thin, like a piece of elastic. She heard Haydn say to the others, “We must stick together.”

  She could barely hold herself together. She held back the tears of frustration and fear, and headed for the bus station.

  Chapter Five

  When Penny woke up on Tuesday morning, she knew she was ill. She lingered in bed, wrapped in the heavy, warm blankets, until she heard the thudding paws of Kali as she blundered up the stairs. Penny liked to think that the dog had some kind of sixth sense and was deeply in tune with her owner, but the reality was probably more to do with food.

  As in, the current lack of it.

  Kali pushed the door open and stood there, staring at Penny hopefully.

  It was no good. She had to get out of bed, for her dog’s sake.

  Her head spun and throbbed, and her throat was raw and prickling. If she was lucky, it was just going to be a cold. She fed Kali, and then raided one of the kitchen cupboards in search of early remedies. She found half a packet of lozenges that had welded themselves together, a bottle of Echinacea that had gone out of date three years past, and some floury-looking paracetamol.

  It constituted an unusual breakfast, but she washed it all down with some strong coffee, and contemplated her day.

  Since the accident the previous day, her smartphone had become transformed into a thickphone, and was unusable. She needed to organise a new one, and had to dig out the paperwork to see if she was eligible for a free replacement or not. Right now, the thought of even trying to touch a piece of official documentation, never mind read it, make her hurt.

  “I’ll walk you in about an hour,” she told the dog, who had food halfway up her muzzle. “Oh goodness. Then I’m supposed to meet Jared at the community hall. Ahh, bother.”

  * * * *

  Somehow, she managed to get to the community hall on time. As the day had worn on, many of her worse symptoms had eased. She wrapped up well, shoved her cold hands into her pockets, and shuffled across town, carrying her laptop in a large black bag.

&
nbsp; She was amused to see Reg Harris apparently surrounded by groupies. He ran the town’s community website, which had grown out of his rather more basic local history site. With Jared’s help, he had turned it into an online hub. Now Reg ran sessions to teach computing skills to the over-fifties, the so-called “silver surfers”. Not a single one of the glamorous older ladies had “silver” hair. In fact, Penny was hard pressed to say for certain that they were all over fifty. They were immaculate, stylish, and gathered around Reg in his dapper suit like they were a flock of giggling schoolgirls.

  Which they probably still were, on the inside, Penny thought. She was feeling rather more like she was an octogenarian. She blew her nose and hunted around for Jared.

  He was sitting at a folding table at the back of the hall, and he waved to her. She staggered over, and his first words were,

  “You look awful.”

  “I know.”

  Then he realised what he’d said, and blushed. He knotted his bony fingers together. “I am so sorry,” he stammered. “I am an idiot when I talk to people, I really am. No wonder I’m single. Am you okay?”

  “I’ve got a cold,” she said. “I feel grim. But let’s have a look at these photos, eh? Just don’t touch anything that I touch, or you’ll get it too. I’m a walking plague-pit.”

  She flipped open her laptop and let it fire up. Jared had his laptop already running, and he brought up the section of the community website that allowed people to upload their own photographs. She couldn’t help peeking as he logged in.

  “Oh! So you’re WhiteDeer,” she said, spotting the prefilled section of the login screen. “I always wondered who that was.”

  He grimaced and twisted his hands so she could not see his password, and she looked away. “Sorry,” she said. “Everyone else has such boring usernames. I’m PennyWithADog; it’s bonkers. I tried to get something normal, but ‘PennyM’ was taken and I can’t imagine by whom! I went through loads of possibilities and then gave up and suddenly I was PennyWithADog. I should change it. Anyway, whenever I see a photo uploaded by WhiteDeer, I imagine it’s some shaman sitting in the woods with a laptop on his knees.”

  “Nah, nice idea but it’s just me. Right. Are you ready?”

  “Yup.” She opened the photograph that had been the basis of the poster to advertise the Christmas market. “I want to improve this one.”

  “It’s the one that Clive didn’t like.”

  “Yeah. I know it’s stupid but it feels like a mark of respect to him. Not that I’m using something he hated. I mean, that I am trying to make it better, into something he would have liked. Do you get it?”

  “Yes. I understand. Right, this is the set of actions. Let me email this straight over to you…”

  Penny blinked, coughed, blew her nose and settled down to an hour of fuzzy-headed image editing.

  * * * *

  “Oh, I can’t do a single thing more,” she said at last, and slumped back in her chair.

  Jared looked at her in concern. “I think you need to go home to bed,” he said.

  “And I think you’re right.” She rubbed at her itchy eyes. “I’ll call at the pharmacy on the way home.”

  “I don’t think they can sell you anything that will actually get rid of the cold,” he said. “Science still can’t cure it. It’s all just symptomatic relief. Try eating a clove of garlic.”

  “That’s for vampires, not colds!” She couldn’t help but laugh at him.

  He remained very serious. “Honestly, it does work, at least to ease the symptoms. Or try cinnamon, honey and cloves in a tea.”

  “I didn’t have you pegged as a herbalist. I’m impressed.”

  Jared shook his head. “I’m interested in everything. An omnivorous autodidact, that’s me.”

  “A what?”

  “I read anything, and I teach myself. I’m the original uber-geek.”

  “Well, thank you for sharing your knowledge with me. But I have to get going.” She packed away her things, and pulled her heavy coat on.

  “You’re not walking home, are you?” Jared leaped to his feet. “Let me drive you.”

  “No, no,” she said, waving at him. “I need the fresh air. Honestly, it does me good. Oh!”

  “What?” he asked in concern.

  “I forgot. Could you do one particular favour for me, please? I shouldn’t ask because you’ve been so nice to me already.”

  “No, please do. I’m always happy to help.”

  “I am supposed to be meeting Drew tonight, out at the footpath that leads from the far end of the slipe. There’s a stile there. He’s going there from work, and we’re supposed to be going badger watching.”

  “It sounds delightful,” Jared said. “But with your cold, it also sounds like a bad idea.”

  “Exactly. But I broke my phone, you remember, yesterday, and Drew hasn’t got a landline because he’s up at the woods the other side of the road opposite to the industrial estate. They are setting up a Forest School there, as an extension of The Acorns. It’s not far from where you work.”

  “I’ve seen them.”

  “Right. So can you call over there and tell him I can’t make it tonight?”

  “Of course. Anything for you, Penny. All you need to do is ask.”

  She grinned. “Thank you so much.”

  He walked her to the door. “Are you sure you don’t want a lift?”

  “No, but thank you. I am going to the pharmacy and then to bed. I hope I’m better soon. I’m in the choir now, and we’re practising nearly every other evening for the carol concert. You know, it’s got so big that we have to use the High School hall!”

  “I bet you walk there, too,” he said.

  “Of course.”

  Reg was standing nearby, and he was watching her intently. Penny felt funny. He had probably heard about the allegations.

  They might not be allegations, Penny remembered miserably. The whole thing might actually be my fault.

  I might be a murderer.

  She swallowed, and waved goodbye, and made her way home with a heavy heart and a thumping head.

  Chapter Six

  Why was Clive up the ladder? The question plagued her. It seemed like a simple solution – he was trying to sabotage things, and lost his balance. The obvious answer must be correct.

  Why was the ladder accessible? She had to accept that it was her fault. She had left it out.

  Penny felt sick.

  She let Kali out into the back garden for a run around, while Penny stood at the back door and threw the ball for her, half-heartedly. Then she dragged herself back inside, and made a cup of tea, which she didn’t want to drink.

  She could not fight it any longer.

  She wanted to be comforted.

  She wanted to be safe.

  She was going to do it.

  She was going to put a onesie on.

  * * * *

  If you had asked her later if she had slept well, she would have said that she did not. She felt as if she was floating in and out of a dream-state, where every bone in her body ached.

  Yet she must have been deeply asleep because she was jerked awake, quite late, to a hammering on her front door.

  She groaned and grabbed her head. Kali was barking, but the tone of her bark was not alarmed. In the same way that a parent can often distinguish between their baby’s different cries, it was possible to identify various meanings to a dog’s bark.

  So it wasn’t anything terrifying, Penny told herself.

  She rolled out of bed and padded down the stairs. She ordered Kali into the living room, and pulled the interior door closed, before she let the visitor into the hallway.

  “Oh! Hi, Drew. What’s up?”

  Drew seemed enormous. He was bundled up in many layers, and she could only see his eyes and the tip of his nose. Even filtered through the scarf over his face, his breath hung in white clouds in the freezing air.

  “I was waiting for you,” he said, and there was a new
tone she had never heard before in his voice. He was annoyed.

  She stepped back. “Come in, out of the cold,” she said.

  He shrugged. “I’ve been in it for two hours. I am used to it, now.”

  She snapped. She was feeling too ropey and unwell to put up with any childish sniping. “Why on earth did you stay out so long? For goodness’ sake, come in and let me close the door.”

  “I was waiting for you,” he said, but he accepted her invitation and followed her into the kitchen, grumpily shedding layers of clothing as he went.

  “But … oh. I’m sorry.” She sat down heavily at the kitchen table. It was chilly and she folded her arms over her body. “I asked Jared to call by the Forest School and tell you that I couldn’t make it.”

  “I was there all afternoon but I didn’t see him. Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I’ve broken my phone. I dropped it yesterday. Oh, goodness. I haven’t even told you what has happened. It’s been a blur. I’m ill. Yesterday … it all went wrong.”

  “Is this about Clive?”

  She nodded miserably.

  “How did I know you were mixed up in this?”

  Penny felt her bottom lip begin to tremble, and she was mortified. She didn’t break down in front of people! She hung her head.

  Immediately, Drew was at her side. He dragged a spare chair around so that he could sit next to her, and he embraced her, pulling her close. She began to sniff, and then it all poured out – the questioning, the accusation, and her monumental mistake with the ladder. The fact that she didn’t have her nice warm walking boots, that she needed to buy a new phone, and she had waved goodbye to her decent gloves, too.

  And she also told him that she thought she was coming down with a cold.

  He sighed. “Well, that’s me infected now, isn’t it?”

  She leaned into him harder, and sniffled. “Yes, sorry. I would have thought your immune system is impervious, though, what with you working outside all the time.”

  “I thought so, too, until I started working with kids. Honestly, they are walking germ-factories.”