Hallowdene

by George Mann

  The station was buzzing with people. A young mother was attempting to get past with her buggy, looking harassed. Her child had abandoned its perch and was halfway across the concourse to WHSmith, attracted by the colourful display of bagged sweets by the side of the counter, giggling and waving his arms. Elspeth pulled Abigail to one side so the woman could pass. She smiled gratefully and charged after her wayward toddler, calling his name in exasperation. “No, Charlie, leave those alone.”

  “Come on, I’ve made plans for lunch,” said Elspeth. She stooped to retrieve Abigail’s bag. “The car’s just out there.”

  They wandered out towards the car park. “I thought I’d treat you to a takeaway tonight,” said Abigail. “What do you reckon? Girls’ night in?”

  “Ahhh,” said Elspeth, ducking into the car and starting the engine. “I might have promised my mum I’d take you round there for dinner. And then on to meet Peter for a drink afterwards…?”

  “Oh, now that is interesting,” said Abigail. “The mysterious policeman. I’ve been looking forward to meeting him.”

  They pulled away, the satnav chattering on in the background as Elspeth attempted to find her way back to the main road.

  “He’s hardly mysterious,” she said.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Tall, handsome stranger turns out to be childhood sweetheart, and walks back into your life after nearly twenty years. I’d say that was pretty mysterious. I mean, what’s he been doing all this time? Waiting for you to come back?”

  “Don’t be daft. Anyway, it’s not like that.”

  “Then what is it like, Ellie?” There was the hint of a playful tease in Abigail’s voice, but an undercurrent of concern, too. After everything that had happened in London with Andrew and her job, and then the Carrion King case, Abigail was worried that Elspeth was getting involved with Peter on the rebound. She’d said as much on the phone.

  “Oh, I don’t know. There’s clearly something there. I guess in some ways there always has been, even if we were too young to know it. But I don’t know. Something seems to be holding him back, and I suppose I’ve started to wonder, did we miss our chance? Stupid, really, but I can’t help overthinking it all.”

  “It’s not stupid,” said Abigail. “It’s natural. All I’ll say is that you shouldn’t rush into anything. Perhaps it’s a good thing that he’s holding back a little. It’ll give you time to decide what you really want.” She paused for a moment. “Look, don’t be mad at me…”

  “What have you done?” said Elspeth, her heart sinking.

  Abigail laughed. “Don’t worry so much! There’s a job going, at my place. An editorial position. Nonfiction. Just your sort of thing.”

  “And…?”

  “And I had a word with my boss. Recommended you for the position.”

  “You did what?” Elspeth was more surprised than angry. “What did they say? Do they think I’ve applied for it now, or something?”

  “The editorial director wants to meet you. Nothing formal. I’ve made it clear you don’t know anything about it, that I was the one who put you forward. But you’re perfect for it, Ellie. And it would get you back to London again. We’ll set you up with a new place. It’s just what you need.”

  “I have a new place here,” said Elspeth. “A lovely little flat. And besides, I’m practically living at Peter’s these days.” Although she had to admit, there was a certain appeal to the idea. An editorial job. London. Abi and her other friends.

  “You’ve gone quiet. Have I done the wrong thing? I’m sorry if I have, I was only trying to help. I wanted you to have options.”

  “No, you’ve done nothing wrong. I appreciate it, Abi. I really do. It’s just… there’s so much going on here. My freelance work is taking off, there’s Mum, the new flat, Peter… I’m starting to feel settled.” Could she really consider giving all of that up, going back to London, where everything had gone wrong? She did miss the convenience of it all, how easy it was to get about, to see friends and visit new places. But the thought of all the stress of a London-based job, with the terrible pay, the late nights and the lack of prospects wasn’t particularly appealing. She hadn’t even really considered it… until now.

  “Like I said, it’s just an option,” said Abigail. “I’ve told Simon – that’s my boss – that we’ll be going to a launch party later in the week. You can meet him there. No strings, no interview. Just a chat and a drink at a nice little do.”

  “A launch party, in London?”

  “Yeah, you know, one of those things I’ve dragged you to before. Some new thriller.”

  Elspeth shook her head. “All right, if it means we don’t speak about it again until then, I’ll go.”

  Abigail gave a little triumphant snort. “I knew it!”

  “Don’t start.”

  “I’m saying nothing. Not a jot. Quiet as a mouse, me.” She paused. “Anyway, you still haven’t told me how you and Peter got together. I want all the details.”

  “There’s hardly anything to tell,” said Elspeth. “It just sort of… happened.”

  “Oh, come on! You can do better than that.”

  Elspeth laughed. “I suppose it was everything that had happened to us during the Carrion King case. We’d been thrown back together after all these years, and were in each other’s pockets, and in danger together, too.”

  “But there has to be more than that,” said Abigail. “The way you talk about him.”

  “Well, I mean, he’s very attractive,” said Elspeth, feeling her cheeks redden. “The thing is, we just kind of carried on after the case had finished. Living in each other’s pockets, I mean. Neither of us wanted to stop. We were seeing each other most nights, just chatting, meeting in the pub, going back to his place to watch films…”

  “And?”

  “And when I moved into my new place I invited him over.”

  “You pounced on him?” said Abigail, her tone full of mock scandal.

  “I’d hardly put it like that,” said Elspeth. “But I decided I didn’t want to wait for him to make the first move. I grabbed him as he was sitting at the dinner table and didn’t let go.”

  Abigail laughed. “Good for you! I’m looking forward to meeting him, now.”

  “You’d better not tell him I told you,” said Elspeth.

  “Brownie’s honour.”

  Elspeth pulled the car to a stop by the side of the road and cranked the handbrake. “Come on, then. There’s a pub around the corner. Let’s grab some food and you can tell me about what you’ve been up to.”

  * * *

  “I’m sorry,” said Elspeth. “I thought it looked cosy from the outside. I should have checked with Mum; she’d have probably told us to avoid the place. We can drink up and go somewhere else if you like?”

  “No, no, it’s fine,” said Abigail, accepting her large glass of white wine. “We’re here now, and I’m sure it’ll be all right. Plus, there’s wine.”

  She was putting on a brave face. Elspeth could tell. Abigail was used to trendy London restaurants and pizza places, not country pubs out in the wilds of Oxfordshire. Even Elspeth, who’d grown used to such places, felt this had a particularly rustic feel. Two large men in ill-fitting football shirts were sitting behind the bar, mumbling to one another while one of them was attempting to complete the crossword in a tabloid newspaper. A further two were sitting at the bar, nursing half-empty pints. An open fire blazed in the grate, but it was still cold, with the rear door propped open, allowing the chill air to gust in. The carpets were faded, the bar needed a good clean, and she had a sneaking suspicion that her food order was going to be prepared out the back by one of the two men, just as soon as they’d finished their conversation.

  “I like the décor,” said Abigail, indicating a leering fox head mounted on a wooden plaque behind Elspeth’s head. “Very authentic.”

  They both spluttered in laughter. She’d seen the place as she’d driven by the previous day, and had been attracted by the setting: besi
de a low stream, the apple trees in the front garden, the ivy growing carefree over the brickwork and around the windows. As they’d got closer, though, they’d realised almost immediately that whatever the Rowan Tree had in roadside appeal, it was severely lacking inside.

  Still, like Abigail had said, they were here now. How bad could it really be?

  The bar area was spacious, giving the impression that the place was more sparsely populated than it was. She regarded the two men sitting at the bar, a few feet apart from one another. One was an old man with nicotine-stained fingers, grey hair and glasses, and few, if any teeth. He was wearing a shiny two-tone tracksuit in red and blue, and looked half asleep over his pint of lager. The other was Christian Jameson, Sally Jameson’s son, whom she’d seen confronting Lee Stroud the previous day before disappearing into the kitchen to argue loudly with his mother. Today he looked thoroughly dejected, sitting alone with a pint of beer, flicking idly through whatever he was looking at on his phone screen. He’d seen her come in, and she thought she’d caught a glimpse of recognition in his eye, but he hadn’t acknowledged her.

  The only others in the bar that lunchtime were the television crew she’d seen at the dig. She knew the woman to be Robyn Baxter, the presenter of Countrywide, a rural-affairs programme that aired on Sunday evenings on BBC 2. She’d watched it on occasion, mostly to see the weekly weather forecast, but she recognised the woman, who was usually seen talking to camera as she walked across a field or shoreline, hair rippling in the wind, still somehow managing to look fabulous despite whatever inclement environment she found herself in. She looked the same now, digging into a plate of chips. Elspeth had no idea how she managed to pull it off.

  The two men with her were silently munching on burgers. One was the tall, burly chap she’d seen handling the camera at the dig. The other was an Asian man in his mid-thirties, who she’d gathered was some sort of producer or showrunner.

  He glanced up and saw her looking. “Hello,” he said, after swallowing a mouthful of burger, “don’t I recognise you from the dig yesterday?”

  Elspeth smiled, embarrassed. “Yes. Hi, I’m Elspeth Reeves, a local journalist. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to stare. It’s our first time in here and I was wondering what the food was like.”

  “Pretty good, actually,” said the other man. “Considering.”

  Robyn beckoned them over. “Come on, join us.” She lowered her voice. “If you’re local, maybe you can recommend somewhere a little more salubrious for dinner later.”

  Elspeth glanced at Abigail, who smiled indulgently and picked up her wine glass. They moved over, pulling up a second table and properly introducing themselves.

  “So, we’re here until the fayre is over, and we’ve eaten in all of the two places in Hallowdene – here and the tearooms. You have to rescue me. Where can I get something that hasn’t been deep fried?” said Robyn.

  Elspeth laughed. “I’d take a drive over to Heighton. It’s a town about twenty minutes from here, and you’ll find pretty much all the major food groups – Thai, Indian, Mexican, fish and chips. Failing that, if you’re after proper fine dining, Oxford itself is your best bet.”

  “Heighton. Right.” Robyn looked from Avi to Steve. “Tonight, we’re getting out of here.”

  “I do empathise,” said Elspeth. “I suppose I’m used to it now, but when I lived in London I used to love being able to get whatever I wanted to eat, whenever I wanted it. Me and my ex made a pact never to eat from the same place more than once per month – we’d catch a tube into town and find somewhere new every time. We must have spent half our wages eating out, but it was worth it. You miss that in a place like this.”

  “Especially when you’re confronted with a menu of cheap burgers and deep-fried everything,” said Robyn.

  “You don’t think much of the place, then?” said Elspeth.

  “Oh, it’s not that. It’s just, when you’re used to basically living on the road, it can drive you a bit stir crazy to stay in one place for too long, if you see what I mean? Especially a little village like this, where everyone knows each other and you can’t help but feel you’re getting in the way of something.”

  “Still, it’s anything but quiet,” said Avi. “I mean, we hadn’t been here five minutes before there was a bloody murder!”

  Elspeth laughed. “How’s the programme going? You getting everything you need?”

  Steve rocked his hand back and forth. “I think so. The stuff at the dig was good. And we’ve been interviewing all the people involved in the fayre. Now we’re really just waiting for the main event.”

  “Twenty-five years this year,” said Abigail. “That’s how long it’s been running. The fayre, I mean. I read something about it on a flyer, earlier.”

  “Twenty-five years since it was reinstated,” corrected Avi. “It’s a tradition that dates back a few hundred years, first recorded about five years after Agnes Levett’s death. It petered out in the nineteenth century when people started to acknowledge that the whole era of witch trials and executions was an embarrassment from a more unenlightened time. Then Sally Jameson and Iain Hardwick started it up again in 1993 as a way of trying to bring the villagers together, and they’ve run it every year since. That’s what they told us, anyway.”

  Elspeth had met Sally at the tearooms, but she’d yet to speak to Iain in person, having exchanged only a handful of emails with him to arrange an interview. He worked in IT, apparently, a systems analyst, which seemed to Elspeth like an odd occupation for someone so engaged in the revival of a pagan festival. She was seeing him tomorrow for a more detailed interview about the origins of the fayre.

  “Yeah, I feel sorry for those two,” said Steve. “The amount of crap they have to put up with.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, you know, everyone’s got an opinion. Just this morning, a fella was kicking off while we were trying to film an interview segment on the village green. Kept shouting about how the fayre was disrespecting the true history of the village, that they were dabbling in dangerous things they couldn’t understand. You wouldn’t believe how many takes we had to do, and we’re still going to have to piece it all together in editing.”

  “That’ll be Lee Stroud,” said Elspeth. “I met him yesterday. I gather he’s a bit of a local character, but he seemed all right when I talked to him. He’s got it into his head that we’re putting everyone in danger by allowing the excavation to go ahead.”

  “Pfft,” said Robyn. “Really? In this day and age?”

  “He’s not the only one,” said Elspeth. “I think a few people around here are nervous about what it means.”

  “Fascinating, isn’t it,” said Avi, “how superstitions manage to persist and pervade. Although I think most folk see it for what it is – a chance for their village to get a bit of national attention.” He was grinning again. “Although I suppose it’s a little different in Agnes’s case. She was accused of murder, too…” It was clear to Elspeth that he was the one with the real interest in the subject, here. The others were nice enough, but they were here to do a job. To Avi, this sort of stuff was his lifeblood.

  “Scampi and chips and a burger,” came the dulcet tones of one of the barmen. Elspeth and Abigail turned, taking their plates from the man and sending him away to fetch ketchup. She’d ordered the scampi and was now regretting it; it looked far from appetising.

  She pushed a bit of scampi around with her fork. “Help yourselves if you’re still hungry,” she said.

  Robyn laughed. “So we’ll be seeing you in Heighton later, then?”

  “Probably,” said Elspeth, with a chuckle.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Elspeth felt guilty for leaving Abigail in the Rowan Tree, especially after the others had finished lunch and gone back to their rooms to prepare for the next shoot – it turned out they were actually staying at the pub, too – but she’d assured Elspeth she had plenty of work to do. Elspeth had left her to it, meandering up through the w
inding roads of the village to Richmond’s in the hope of both catching Daisy and finding something more palatable to eat.

  She found the place near-deserted after the lunchtime rush, and chose a table in the bay window at the front, with a nice view out along the lane. The cottages here were all stone, dating back centuries, and they listed and leaned against one another like dominoes that hadn’t quite gathered enough momentum to fall. Thatched roofs and smoking chimneys, bulging walls and leaded windows completed the picturesque scene. No wonder the tourists loved it here. It was a slice of ‘olde worlde England’, perfectly preserved – even down to its summer rituals and parades.

  There were only two other people in the café with her, aside from Daisy, Christian and Sally – an elderly man and woman; a couple, she presumed. The man sat with a stooped posture, hunched over the table. His skin was yellowed and liver-spotted with age, and his eyes were rheumy. Patches of silver whiskers erupted unevenly from his chin, and just under his nose. When he smiled at Elspeth, she saw he was missing two teeth. He looked happy, though. She could only see the woman’s back, but she watched as she fussed over the man, dabbing at his chin with a serviette and holding his hand across the table top.

  “I hope I can find someone like that to grow old with,” said Daisy, wandering over with her order pad, smiling in amusement at the old pair. “Gives you hope for the future, doesn’t it?”

  “I suppose it does,” said Elspeth, not adding the rejoinder that went through her mind: and fear for the present, too. “Hello again.”

  Daisy grinned. She looked absolutely exhausted, with dark rings beneath her eyes. Her hand was bandaged, just like Peter had said. “Have you decided what you want? Only, once I’ve seen to this, I can knock off for the rest of the day.”

  Elspeth nodded. “Just a pot of tea, and a piece of that lemon cake,” she said, pointing to the glass cabinet by the door where the cakes were on display. “And if you’re knocking off, how about you take the weight off for a bit and join me?”