by Agatha Frost
“But what about my steps?” Dot cried as she shook the watch against her ear again. “If I don’t complete my steps goal, I don’t get the little medal on the screen. I haven’t missed a day!”
“You know if you shake your arm, it clocks up the steps?” Jessie offered as she walked by.
“But that’s pointless.”
“It works,” she said with a shrug. “You’re the sucker who’s letting a watch control your life.”
Before Dot could launch into an impassioned rant about why the watch was the best thing she had ever bought, the bell above the café rang out, and Shilpa Ahmed from the post office next door walked in.
“Afternoon, all,” she said. “We appear to be matching today, Dot.”
Shilpa motioned to her green sari, which was a similar shade of green as Dot’s sweatband, but somehow looked much more delicate with its embroidered white floral pattern and flowing design. Dot didn’t seem to take the compliment well. She tore off her sweatband, ripped off the watch, and tossed them both to the floor. Using her heel as a weapon, she stomped down on the watch, cracking the screen. As a final act of defiance, it beeped back at her, causing her to stomp down until she was looking at a pile of grass and microchips.
“Are you happy now?” she screamed at the top of her lungs at the mess on the floor. “Will you leave me alone?”
“Is it something I said?” Shilpa whispered to Julia.
Julia shook her head as she cut a large slice of the cake. Before she could stab a fork into it, Dot snatched the cake from the plate with her fingers and crammed it into her mouth. Her eyes rolled back into her head and for the first time since starting her fanatical health kick, she looked peaceful.
“You’re free now,” Jessie said as she massaged Dot’s shoulders. “Congratulations.”
“S’good cake,” she mumbled through half-closed lids as the sugar surged through her body. “S’good.”
Julia chuckled at her gran, glad that she was back. She had always thought her gran’s stiff white blouses, held under her chin with a brooch, and pleated calf-length skirts were a little old fashioned, but she was looking forward to getting them back if it meant she never had to see her gran decked out in neon ever again.
“What can I get you, Shilpa?” Julia asked. “I have some of those red velvet cupcakes you like.”
“You know how to spoil me,” she said as she glanced through the cake display case. “I’ll take two. One for now, and one for later.”
“Good idea,” Dot said wisely, wagging her finger at Shilpa. “I like your style.”
Julia reached down to pluck the two cupcakes out of the counter display. As her fingers closed around the first cupcake, something burst through her café’s window, sending shattered glass flying through the air. Dot and Shilpa both let out wild screams as a chunk of Cotswold stone rolled across the floor, stopping when it snagged on Dot’s sweatband. They all peered through the fresh hole in the window and onto the village green, where Billy Matthews was standing in his red tracksuit, his hands firmly in his pockets.
“I’m gonna kill him!” Jessie yelled as she ran for the door.
Billy set off running but Jessie was hot on his heels. As the pair disappeared from view, Julia pulled her phone from her bag under the counter, her hands shaking out of control. Staring down at her screen, she wondered if she should call the glaziers or the police first.
“Is everybody okay?” Julia asked, looking up from her phone as she dialled ‘999’.
“I’m fine,” Dot said as she resumed her cake, which was much more important to her at that moment. “Honestly, that boy is nothing but a menace.”
“I’m surprised he’s walking around the streets, considering he was one of those three people on that security footage I gave to the police,” Shilpa added.
Julia pressed the phone against her ear and listened to the dial tone. Somebody answered, asking what emergency service she wanted, but all she could do was stare at Shilpa, unsure of what she was even supposed to be saying to the operator on the other end.
“Wrong number,” Julia mumbled into the handset before tossing it on the counter and looking directly at Shilpa. “Did you say three people?”
“Well, yes,” she said, almost unsure of herself. “How do you know about that?”
“I was shown the footage. I saw Jeffrey, and I saw Billy.”
“And the third person,” Shilpa said, nodding surely. “The third person dressed all in white.”
Julia’s heart stopped. She looked through the broken window, suddenly feeling the world grinding to a halt around her. In her mind’s eye, she could see Barker alone, and probably still asleep in bed.
“Do you still have that footage?” Julia asked, already grabbing her coat from the hook in the kitchen.
“Of course,” Shilpa said. “We keep all security footage for thirty days. I merely gave the police a copy. Is it important?”
“Very. I think it might just prove who really killed Jim Austen.”
Leaving her gran in charge of the café, Julia followed Shilpa into the post office next door. Her son, Haaken, was behind the counter, but when he saw his mum return, he grabbed his coat and headed for the door.
“Don’t forget it’s your uncle’s birthday tonight!” Shilpa called after him. Haaken waved his hand over his head, his headphones already in his ears.
After Shilpa punched in the code to unlock the door, they both walked behind the counter and towards a small computer crammed between a tall filing cabinet and a basket full of parcels.
“Let me see if I can remember how this thing works,” she muttered to herself as she hovered over the keys. “It was a Monday, wasn’t it?”
“The day after the beer festival.”
“Ah, yes,” Shilpa said with a nod. “I remember, not that I drink. I think this is it.”
Shilpa clicked a file and a video jumped up on screen. She pressed the play button and started fast-forwarding through the clip. Julia watched as the sunny morning turned into the dull afternoon. When the storm clouds appeared and prematurely darkened the village, Shilpa slowed the footage down to normal speed.
Julia saw Billy Matthews, just as she had before. He walked up the lane, staring down at his phone, and only looking up when he was outside of Barker’s cottage. She realised the footage she had seen had been cropped so that Barker’s cottage had been cut entirely out of view.
“Here’s the next one,” Shilpa said, tapping her finger on the screen.
Jeffrey Taylor came into shot, running across the village green. He turned onto the lane, only slowing down when he reached Billy. They hugged and then turned in the direction of Barker’s cottage. Julia’s heart stopped, but to her surprise, they climbed over the wall and disappeared into the fields surrounding their cottages.
Seconds later, a car pulled up outside of Barker’s cottage and a man jumped out. He locked the car over his shoulder and walked towards Barker’s front door.
“This is when it started raining,” Shilpa said just as the rain began to fall. “Gets a little trickier to see, but if you look closely, you can see the white figure.”
Julia leaned into the screen, the distance of Barker’s cottage already difficult to see without the added difficulty of the rain blurring the footage. Just when she thought she wasn’t able to see whatever Shilpa thought she had seen, something large and white stepped out from the side of Barker’s cottage.
“I thought it was a ghost,” Shilpa whispered. “Creepy, isn’t it?”
Julia squinted, her nose practically touching the screen. Through the blurry pixels, she watched the ghostly figure walk to the door, and then suddenly walk away and hop over the same wall Billy and Jeffrey had. She pulled back when she realised she had just witnessed Jim’s murder through the blur of the rain. If she hadn’t have known what had happened, she would never have been able to tell what she was looking at, but because she had been able to think about nothing else since that dreadful night, somethi
ng in her brain suddenly clicked and the door blocking her logical mind from truly figuring things out unexpectedly burst open.
“That’s not a ghost,” Julia whispered, taking a step back from the screen. “It’s a forensics suit. I need to go. Thank you, Shilpa.”
Before Shilpa could ask her any questions, Julia ran out of the post office, ignoring the small crowd that had formed around her café’s broken window. With Barker’s life more at stake than ever, shattered glass was the last thing on her mind.
She set off towards Barker’s cottage, relieved when she saw DS Forbes out of the corner of her eye drinking a pint outside of the The Plough.
“Julia!” he beamed over his pint, froth in his moustache. “Join me for a pint?”
“It’s you who I need to join me, DS Forbes,” she said hurriedly. “There’s not a lot of time to explain, but we need to get to Barker’s cottage right now. His life might be in grave danger and I don’t trust anybody else other than you right now.”
“Grave danger, you say?” Bradley asked, a brow arching curiously as he stood up. “Lead the way, young lady!”
Thankful that she didn’t have to explain herself any more, she set off towards Barker’s cottage with Bradley hot on her heels.
Chapter 14
Bradley banged on the door, calling out for Barker through the wood. They both listened, but they couldn’t hear a thing. Julia stepped over Barker’s weed-infested flowerbed, and then cupped her hands up against the sitting room window.
“I can’t see him,” Julia whispered.
“Maybe he’s not home?”
“Or maybe we’re too late.” Julia climbed back over the flowerbed and dove into the hanging basket next to the door, her fingers closing around something cold and metal. “For emergencies.”
She shook the dirt off the key and crammed it into the lock. To her relief, the door opened with ease. They both looked at each other before stepping into the dark cottage.
“Barker?” Bradley called out. “You home?”
“I’ll check the bathroom,” she said. “He sometimes likes to take bubble baths with the radio on. You look in the bedroom.”
“Gotcha.”
When they had both finished checking the rooms, they met in the hallway, neither of them having found Barker. Julia pushed her fingers up into her hair and turned on the spot.
“Why do you think he’s in danger?” Bradley asked.
“Somebody tried to kill him, and it wasn’t Jeffrey,” Julia said as she pulled her phone from her handbag. “Jeffrey might have left the wreath, but he didn’t commit murder. I’m going to try and call Barker.”
Julia tapped a couple of buttons on her screen and put the phone to her ear. She waited a moment before tossing the phone down onto the side table.
“He’s not picking up,” she said as she clipped her handbag shut. “Maybe we should just wait for him to get back?”
“How do you know Jeffrey isn’t the murderer?” Bradley asked, looking as confused as ever. “We charged him yesterday morning.”
“Has he confessed?”
“Well, no, but murderers don’t tend to when they don’t want to go back to prison.”
“I have proof Jeffrey didn’t kill Jim. Somebody tampered with Shilpa’s security footage, cutting out a crucial piece of evidence. In its entirety, it proves Jeffrey and Billy’s innocence. Why did you crop yourself out of the video, DS Forbes?”
Silence fell on the cottage, perhaps the whole village, and Julia was sure she could hear a pin drop. She dropped her smile, tilted her head forward and stared at Bradley from under her brows.
“Excuse me?” he spluttered, forcing a laugh through his reddening face. “Are you insinuating that I tampered with evidence?”
“I’m implying that you murdered Jim Austen and you went to great lengths to conceal your tracks.” Julia’s heart pounded as she glanced down at the phone. She felt every detail of the last two weeks flooding to the forefront of her mind. She couldn’t believe it had taken her so long to figure it out. “You never wanted to kill Jim, did you, DS Forbes? Your tears at his funeral were real, but they weren’t tears of grief, they were tears of guilt.”
Bradley’s expression darkened as he glared at Julia, the air around them turning cold as gloomy clouds rolled over Peridale, casting out the little afternoon daylight that was reaching them in Barker’s hallway. With his back to the front door, dark shadows cast down Bradley’s face, his plump cheeks forcing his eyes deep into his skull.
“Why would I kill Jim Austen?” he mumbled, droplets of sweat forming on his brow. “He was the best Chief Inspector this town has seen.”
“Because you thought he was Barker,” she said, the veins in her temples throbbing. “All of your little comments about taking Barker’s job and becoming a DI weren’t jokes, were they? You wanted his job so badly that you would kill for it. Barker told me people in the station resented him for moving into the village and filling the position. You might not have been vocal about it, but you resented him more than most.”
“I’ve worked my backside off in that station!” Bradley cried, spit flying from his mouth as his usually squeaky voice deepened. “I have given them forty-one years of my life! I’ve worked in that station since I was eighteen-years-old and I’ve been held back at every turn! Every man in my family for generations has been an inspector, and they’ve kept me stuck as a sergeant doing the grunt work. Do you know how embarrassing that is for me? I thought I was getting that job! I figured it was finally my time to go through my inspector’s exams and prove everybody wrong! I retire in seven years. I’m running out of time! I have to go home and look my wife in the eyes every day and tell her ‘not today, but maybe tomorrow’. I thought my tomorrow had come, and then Barker Brown moved to the village and snatched my chance from under my nose!”
“It’s not Barker’s fault you didn’t get promoted.”
“But Barker is so perfect!” Bradley cried as he started to pace from side to side. “He’s handsome, slender, has a full head of hair, a beautiful girlfriend, a lovely home, a great salary, and he’s twenty years younger than me! I’ve put in my work. What has he done to get here? He’s coasted through! His suspension was my time to shine! It was my day!”
“Why not just wait for the outcome of his investigatory hearing?” Julia asked, squinting into the dark as the clouds thickened. “There was a chance he wasn’t even going to keep the job.”
“Jim was pushing him through,” Bradley sneered through gritted teeth as he slammed his fist into his palm. “Jim was a good man, but he was blind. He thought Barker was the fresh breath of air this village needed. Ha! What’s wrong with the old ways? What’s wrong with helping out your own? Before Jim came here that night, he told me he was coming to let Barker know about his hearing, and that he was going to try his best to get Barker his job back. Why? He didn’t deserve it! I deserved it.”
“So you thought you would stop Barker before he even had a chance to hear what Jim had to say?”
“The timing was just too perfect!” Bradley cried, a sinister laugh forcing its way through his lips. “Do you know who the most successful criminals of all time are? The ones who strike when the timing is right! The wreath was too perfect. Murder had never even crossed my mind until then, but it was an opportunity I had to take!”
“So you took a forensics suit and waited behind his cottage for him to come home,” Julia offered. “You know better than anyone how easy it is to leave behind trace evidence. You waited for Barker, and you hit him with a rock from his garden, except it wasn’t Barker.”
“It was dark!” he snapped, suddenly standing still and pointing a finger in Julia’s face. “People always used to say they looked the same from behind. I never saw it until -,”
“Until you saw Jim’s face.”
“I tried to save him,” he cried, his voice cracking. “He was dead in seconds.”
“You took his wallet and phone to make it look like a mugging
gone wrong, and you dumped them somewhere obvious so somebody would find them and strengthen your plan.”
“Billy finding the phone was a stroke of pure luck! I knew I could get away with it. When Shilpa handed me that security footage, I thought I had been caught. Turns out she didn’t know what she was looking at. Who knew cropping a video could be done on a phone? I never even submitted that evidence, but I knew you were sticking your nose in, so I showed it to you so you would push yourself towards Jeffrey and Billy. I knew you of all people wouldn’t be able to keep your nose out, and if anybody was going to help me frame them, it was Julia South, baker extraordinaire!”
“And it almost worked,” Julia agreed with a nod. “Everything I found did lead me to Jeffrey and Billy, except one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“My gut instinct,” Julia said, taking a step towards the man in the dark. “I assumed Jeffrey was guilty because I wanted to believe Barker was safe with him out of the picture, but something didn’t sit right with me. Looking back now, it’s so obvious. You couldn’t help but keep slipping in how much you wanted to be an inspector. Your ego let you down.”
Bradley continued to pace back and forth, his eyes trained on the ground. He darted his fingers up to his head and rubbed the bald patch, disrupting the faint strands of hair that remained. He mumbled to himself, nodding his head and laughing sinisterly under his breath.
“Too bad nobody will believe you,” Bradley said as he tapped his finger on his chin. “You’ve already caused enough trouble. Nobody is going to take the word of a baker over a Detective Sergeant, and soon to be inspector! There’s no way Barker is getting his job back now, and after I arrested Jeffrey, they have to let me take the exams.”
“And you’ll let an innocent man spend the rest of his life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit?”
“He’s done it once!” Bradley cried. “What’s another life sentence? He has no life here. He’s going to rot behind bars, and I’m going to get away with this! It’s the perfect crime!”