by Peter Boon
There was obviously much more to this. As I was thinking how to approach this next, Alfie spoke up. ‘Look, I know this is difficult and a little awkward to talk about.’ He looked at me and gave a small smile. ‘But you have to trust my brother. You’re not betraying anyone if you just tell us the truth about the Flowers and what you know. Even something small might be important.’
The couple met each other’s eyes again, this time nodding to each other. ‘The thing is,’ Claire started. ‘The thing is, that lately we’ve been a bit uncomfortable with -’
‘We hate them all!’ Kimmy blurted out before putting her hands over her mouth in a cartoon way.
‘We don’t hate anyone,’ Claire clarified, sounding panicked. ‘And we did like Frances, very much, she was a lovely lady and a good friend of ours.’
‘Why don’t you tell us about it?’ Alfie said gently. ‘What have you been uncomfortable with?’
There was a moment’s silence, when all I could hear was the sound of Kimmy nervously eating the last bite of her cupcake. Until Claire spoke again.
‘We’ve been friends with that group for a couple of years or so now, since we moved to the village. At first it was nice, we were all in couples: me and Kimmy, Gloria and Pedro, the Reverend and Frances.’ It occurred to me that everyone always called him the Reverend or Reverend Flowers, and never Allan – not even his close friends.
‘I liked those days,’ Kimmy said sadly. ‘We’d just moved from Brighton and it was so lovely to make friends in the village.’
‘What changed?’ Alfie asked. I knew what their first answer would be.
‘Gloria and Pedro splitting up was the first issue. It was such a bitter break-up and it cut through our friendship group,’ Claire said.
‘We felt like we were back at school,’ Kimmy added, having stopped crying now. ‘Having to take sides like that. We tried to stay friends with Pedro, but Gloria was having none of it, and Reverend Flowers agreed. As soon as he said that, it was decision made.’
‘And I know what Pedro did to Gloria was awful, cheating like that. But he didn’t do it to us, and -’
‘We prefer Pedro to Gloria anyway!’ Kimmy cut in, interrupting her wife.
‘You’ve got to stop doing that, baby,’ Claire said back to her, but it was with warmth and they both laughed. ‘Let’s just say that we don’t quite enjoy the friendship group as much as we used to.’
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who didn’t exactly take to Gloria. ‘Why did you prefer Pedro?’
‘He’s just very kind and very funny,’ Kimmy replied. ‘We got on well with him.’
‘And you don’t with Gloria?’ I probably knew the answer to that already. I could see from both of these meetings today that they were completely different women from Gloria. But they were too polite to say that outright.
‘She can be a nice lady,’ Claire explained. ‘But the break-up hit her hard and she’s not really been the same since.’
‘In what way?’ I asked. I hoped I’d remember all these comments. I needed Noah here to take notes as I knew he’d get away with it; it seemed rude me or Alfie doing it.
‘She can be quite bitchy.’ Kimmy blurted out quickly before covering her mouth again, with only one hand this time. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say that.’
I couldn’t stop myself from grinning. ‘It’s okay, I spent an hour with her before I came here.’
‘See, he knows what she’s like then!’ Kimmy directed her words to her wife, who reached out and put her hand on her shoulder.
‘As you’ve probably seen for yourself, Gloria is a big character,’ Claire said. ‘Which means she can be quite bossy sometimes.’
‘We’re not allowed to be friends with Pedro!’
Claire rubbed Kimmy’s shoulder to comfort her. ‘She’s right. Reverend Flowers had a word with Pedro and told him it was best if he stopped socialising with everyone. But we just took that to mean the whole group when Gloria was there, so we still met up with him a few times.’
Alfie asked the question this time; I’d already guessed the answer. ‘And Gloria found out and didn’t like it?’
‘You know what this town is like, you can’t go to the toilet without everyone knowing,’ Kimmy said.
‘It’s interesting, though, it wasn’t just Gloria who told us off,’ Claire said. Again, I guessed where this was going, and I could tell by Claire’s tone she wanted to move the conversation on to this topic. ‘Reverend Flowers and Gloria both sat us down together to speak to us. We could tell that Gloria wanted to read us the riot act, but the Reverend did most of the talking in his usual calm, measured way: explaining how we must stick together as a group of friends and not betray the trust of our dear friend Gloria.’
‘Making it clear, without saying the actual words, that it was either Pedro or them,’ Kimmy added.
‘I would have chosen Pedro,’ my brother remarked.
‘It wasn’t as easy as that, I’m afraid.’ Claire’s reply didn’t surprise me; I was starting to realise the level of influence Reverend Flowers had. ‘It would be very difficult for us not to be friends with Reverend Flowers.’
‘In what ways?’ Alfie asked. I had an idea what ways. With the influence the local Vicar had in a tiny village like ours, I expected that he could make or break small business holders like Kimmy and Claire. Luckily for Mum, who prided herself in not being one of ‘the Vicar’s cronies,’ the Chalk had been long-standing as the only pub in the village for so long, that the Vicar’s machinations probably couldn’t have much effect on it.
‘We love our B&B so much, we couldn’t bear to lose it,’ Kimmy whined, confirming the answer I expected without actually answering it directly.
‘Surely you weren’t just friends with the Reverend because of the influence he had?’ Alfie asked.
The room went quiet and I could tell they were both thinking of how to answer this. ‘No, and it isn’t fair of us to suggest that,’ Claire finally said. ‘Reverend Flowers is, I think, ultimately a good man. He’s very kind, does wonders for the community and has helped us out a great deal over the years.’
If this was the clearly more naïve Kimmy speaking, I might have doubted this, but Claire’s softly spoken but assertive words seemed honest and astute. ‘What more can you tell us about him as a person, then?’ I prompted.
‘He cares about this village and all of his parish so much, and he would do anything to help anyone in need. And he loves all of us close to him,’ she continued.
There was a ‘but’ coming, I could tell, but I wasn’t sure if it would come without prompting. ‘But?’
‘He likes to keep his family and close friends very close to him, and be very involved in all of our lives, but…’ I could tell she was choosing her words carefully as she looked at Kimmy. ‘But sometimes that can be a little over-bearing.’
Reverend Flowers’ controlling tendencies were evident, but I needed to find out if it was significant where it mattered. ‘Do you mind if I ask, what was the Reverend’s relationship with his wife like? Do you think they were happy together?’
The two went quiet again and looked at each other. I really admired their loyalty to him, even though the friendship was obviously rocky.
‘I’d say they seemed happier when we first met them,’ Kimmy answered this time.
‘Yes, the trouble they’ve had with Jacob in the last year or so hasn’t helped,’ Claire added.
This was intriguing. I’d felt like Jacob was a factor in this case, and I’d already seen his angry, unpredictable ways. ‘How so?’
‘He just really started going off the rails,’ Claire replied.
‘Refusing to go to lessons at the sixth form, angry all the time, really into this goth stuff. But it all got worse when he got obsessed with a girl in his class. He was infatuated with her, he almost got kicked out of school over it,’ Kimmy explained. ‘Gloria sweet talked Pedro into giving him a job at the restaurant to try and distract him, help mature him a bit.
That was going well and he really liked it there, but as you saw this morning, he’s been fired from there now.’
And the poor teenager had also just lost his Mum, which wasn’t going to help his mental health at all. ‘What about the Reverend and Frances specifically? Was she always so quiet around you all?’
‘Yes, she was,’ Kimmy said.
‘She never used to be, actually,’ Claire clarified. ‘But the last year or so we’ve noticed the difference.’
‘Is she quieter when she’s around her husband?’ I asked.
‘We never really saw her without her husband.’
We’d been talking for a long time and I still had to see the Vicar himself, Jacob, Pedro and Everest, as well as check in with Appleby and see if we had any update on them getting through the snow. I was getting a good idea of the Flowers’ marriage as I thought of my last few questions.
‘Do you mind if I ask, what do you think of Pedro’s accusation? Do you think Reverend Flowers and Cherry are having an affair?’
The couple both looked at each other yet again. They’d clearly not decided beforehand exactly how much they were going to disclose. ‘We should tell them what we think,’ Kimmy said to her wife.
‘Yes, I think you’re right,’ Claire replied, taking her hand. ‘You see, Edward, yes we do. We’re pretty sure that, yes, Reverend Flowers is having an affair with Cherry. But we know something else too, that no one else does. Pedro and Cherry actually got married earlier this year. They’re husband and wife.’
16
‘Wow, that’s a crazy group of friends, Edward.’
Alfie and I were outside the B&B, having just left. We were faced with almost waist high snow now, as it had continued to fall in full force during our early afternoon tea. Claire had lent us both a shovel each to help us get back across to the pub. I could see various volunteers still shovelling away on the main high street road, but they looked no further on than they were an hour ago. The village was in crisis, even without the murder, and I hoped that our older and more vulnerable residents were safe, and had everything they needed with help from all the volunteers.
But my focus had to be the murder. I needed to contact Appleby to update each other, but it was helpful for now to discuss the latest turn of events with my brother while we started to shovel our way home.
‘It’s not looking good for the Reverend, is it?’ He remarked as we tried to dig our way through the wall of snow.
It wasn’t. I was starting to think we wouldn’t learn much more than supposition from Kimmy and Claire, but their revelations at the end were very interesting indeed. It turned out that they’d secretly remained friends with Pedro, and this was the source of most of their information.
Pedro had married Cherry in the summer in secret, in a small ceremony at Eastbourne town hall with Kimmy and Claire as witnesses. Getting a divorce from Gloria had been easy; neither of them had much money to settle, but Pedro’s agreement to cite the affair in the divorce and sign over half the restaurant (with Gloria silent partner) made her sign things quickly and quietly.
It had seemed that Pedro and Cherry were very much in love before the wedding. Claire and Kimmy were surprised to see how well they got on; Cherry seemed to genuinely care about Pedro, despite being only in her early twenties and therefore half his age. They knew that people round the village thought she must be a gold-digger (‘people’ such as Mum), but Pedro was pretty much broke outside of his struggling restaurant, and Cherry herself apparently came from a wealthy family.
However, in the last couple of months, Pedro had taken to coming over to the B&B alone, full of suspicions that Cherry was having an affair: she was out a lot, had become distant and was always on her phone. He followed her one afternoon last week when she claimed to be going shopping in Eastbourne, and saw her go into the Vicarage. Frances Flowers was in the flower shop and therefore not at home, so he soon concluded that Reverend Flowers was the mystery man.
Claire and Kimmy agreed to do some digging of their own, and when Kimmy – in her ever so diplomatic way – deliberately mentioned Cherry’s name, Reverend Flowers became very flustered and went red in the face. This had been enough for the three of them to conclude that Flowers and Cherry were guilty.
‘Claire and Kimmy don’t miss a thing, do they?’ Alfie said as he laughed, casting a pile of snow aside. ‘They’ll give you and Noah a run for your money as the next crime-solving duo. Don’t tell him, he’ll have the four of you teaming up.’
Joking aside, they had provided us with a very important lead, potentially allowing us to eliminate a suspect. I must admit that I’d considered Pedro a possible suspect after I saw how angry he was on the square, especially now that I knew that the affair rumours seemed to be true, and that the stakes were much higher than I thought in that he was actually married to Cherry. He could have confronted Reverend Flowers, found Frances instead and it had gone horribly wrong.
So I was surprised when Claire revealed that Pedro had been with her for the remainder of the 45 minute window of Frances’ murder. As I already knew, Claire, Kimmy and Gloria left the Vicarage when the Flowers’ were still arguing, and Kimmy had been roped into helping Gloria sell her sweets round the square. Claire had returned to the B&B to find a distraught Pedro sat on her doorstep, so she invited him in for tea and he stayed there for over an hour.
Kimmy and Claire also noted that it was unlikely to be Cherry herself who’d murdered her alleged love rival, as Pedro had kicked her out the night before, before the snow started, and he’d watched her leave. He’d got blind drunk afterwards and passed out, and come to confront Reverend Flowers when he woke up in the morning.
Therefore, with Kimmy and Gloria, and Claire and Pedro, giving each other alibis for the murder timeframe, that only left Reverend Flowers, Jacob Flowers (and I didn’t see why he’d kill his own mum), Everest Brown (who I’d forgot to ask Claire and Kimmy about) or persons unknown. My brother was right, that it wasn’t looking good for the Reverend (not to mention Mum with her earlier ‘it’s always the husband’ comment), but I knew enough about murder – even fictional murder – to not go with the obvious conclusion just yet.
We were digging across the square when I heard a voice calling my name behind us. ‘Edward! Excuse me, Edward, my friend!’
I turned to see Pedro calling us. He was further down the high street, walking towards us via the road itself rather than the pavement, using the path that had already been cleared to move faster than he would through the snow. ‘My friend, Edward, wait for me – I need to speak to you!’
For some reason - it might have been the quiet, subdued atmosphere caused by the snow – his accent sounded much thicker than I’d noticed it this morning. Keeping myself to myself as I do, Pedro was another villager I knew by sight to say hello to, with details added from Mum’s gossip. Thus, I’d not had many conversations with the man and hadn’t heard him speak much before. Patrick, who is also Spanish, has lived in England most of his life and doesn’t have a noticeable accent, but Pedro certainly did.
We stopped and waited as he caught up to us, and as he stumbled along I noticed his appearance for the first time. He appeared to be wearing over-head wireless headphones in place of ear-warmers (Noah later told me they were called Beats), a skin fade haircut that looked out of place on his middle-aged head, along with a neat looking blue bomber jacket, skinny jeans and large, white Adidas trainers that seemed to announce his feet loudly to all around, despite them being the same colour as the snow all around us. And maybe the most peculiar, his skin had the clear orange glow of fake tan, despite the natural shade of his Spanish nationality. It was fairly evident that his young wife had a significant influence on his dress sense.
‘My friend, my friend!’ He repeated as he approached us. ‘I want to talk to you. I heard you talked to my ex-wife today. I know you are investigating the murder, I don’t want you to get a bad impression of me.’
We’d barely left the B&B; had they been on t
he phone to him as soon as we left? That was quick work. ‘Hi Pedro, don’t worry, I like to make my own impressions,’ I reassured him as he reached us. ‘How did you know that, have you spoken to Kimmy and Claire?’
‘No, no, I haven’t been friends with them for over a year!’ He declared as he held his chest, catching his breath, obviously going along with the official version that they’re no longer friends. ‘I saw you together with her earlier, when I was clearing snow. I can guess what she has been saying.’
‘Don’t worry, Pedro, I took it with a pinch of salt,’ I told him again. ‘I do want to speak to you, though. I’m helping the police until they get here, so I’m speaking to everyone who was in the square this morning.’ I’d decided to be upfront with why I was talking to everyone, seeing as they all seemed to be guessing anyway.
‘Such sad business, poor Mrs Flowers,’ he said, taking his headphones off as if it was a hat and he was showing a moment of respect. ‘Of course I want to help. How about I walk with you both and we can go for a little drink? I’ll tell you everything you need.’
I didn’t want to spend yet more precious time consuming food and drink, and I’d hoped to find Reverend Flowers next, but I did need to speak to Pedro so I decided to seize the opportunity. ‘Thank you, Pedro, that will be great.’ I gestured to Alfie. ‘You know my brother, Alfie, don’t you?’
He laughed and grabbed Alfie’s gloved hand, shaking it warmly. ‘Of course I know Alfie, your family’s pub is my favourite place in Chalk Gap! After Pedro’s of course.’ He winked and started to trudge towards the square.
He’d reached the end of the road and had to join the pavement where the square starts, which of course was still knee high in snow. ‘I don’t have a shovel I’m sorry, so you two will have to dig for us all if you don’t mind.’ To say he wasn’t dressed for this weather was an understatement; I wondered how his skin tight jeans and ridiculous trainers would survive the depth of snow ahead of us.