Small Town Shock (Some Very English Murders Book 1)

by Issy Brooke

  Small Town Shock

  Issy Brooke

  Text copyright 2015 Issy Brooke

  All rights reserved

  Cover credit: background vector illustration Denis Demidenko via 123rf.com

  Cover design and dog illustration by Issy Brooke

  Author’s Hello

  Just a quick heads-up on the whole spelling and grammar thing. I’m a British author and this book is set in England. Sometimes, British English looks unfamiliar to readers of other variants of English. It’s not just spelling (colour and realise and so on) and not just the vocabulary (pavement for sidewalk, mobile for cell phone) but there are differences even in the way we express ourselves. (In the US, it is more common to say something like “did you see Joanne?” whereas in the UK we would say “have you seen Joanne?” and so on.) Also, my characters do not speak grammatically correct sentences - who does? Not me. Rest assured this book has been copyedited and proofread (errors, alas, are my own and I won’t shoot my editor if you find any.)

  And another thing - locations. Lincolnshire is real. It’s a massive rural county in the east of England, with a sparse population. It’s mostly agricultural. Upper Glenfield, the town in this tale, is fictional. Lincoln, the main city nearest to Glenfield, does exist and it’s worth a visit. The only thing I’ve fictionalised in Lincoln is the layout and situation of the police station.

  You can find out more about Lincolnshire and the characters in Glenfield at my website, http://www.issybrooke.com

  Why not sign up to my mailing list? You get advance notice of new releases at a special price - but no spam. No one wants spam. Check it out here: http://issybrooke.com/newsletter/

  Chapter One

  Though it was May, the air was cool at seven o’clock in the morning, and Penny May wrapped a brand-new bright red scarf around her neck and face. It had been carefully chosen to remind her of the cheerful clothes she used to wear before she was sucked into decades of corporate greyness. It also served to disguise her appearance somewhat, which could only be a good thing. She wanted to be incognito.

  She crept to the front door of her recently-purchased cottage, and opened it slightly, just enough for her head to peek out. She looked left and right, and strained her ears. River Street was a dead-end to the left, and all was quiet where the street met the crossroads to the right. Suddenly, a milk float buzzed past. Then, silence once more.

  It was safe to leave.

  “Come on, you,” she muttered, and as she stepped back to open the door fully, her wildly over-excited dog barged past her, flinging herself into the street with her legs and tail making windmills. Penny was dragged out, and she hauled back as hard as she could to stop the dog in her tracks for long enough that Penny could lock her door. Why was it that the harder Penny pulled, the more the dog would pull back? Contrary animal.

  But anyway … now the door was secure, the mission was on.

  Mission “Avoid All Other Dogs”.

  All dogs.

  And possibly men in hats.

  And carrier bags.

  And invisible things that only the dog could see.

  The dog was large, and tall, and broad, and black with tan legs and a tan muzzle. The rescue centre had muttered something about her being a cross-breed but it was obvious to anyone who vaguely knew dogs that she was a Rottweiler.

  Sad to say, but when Penny had taken her on, she couldn’t even claim to “vaguely” know dogs. But she was on a crash course now.

  Penny lurched along behind the dog as she lunged and sniffed her way along the street, moving by stops and starts, heading towards the centre of the small Lincolnshire town of Upper Glenfield.

  Penny had only lived in the area for four weeks but she had already established that the town “centre” was a handful of small shops, “rush hour” was when a tractor prevented the fuel tanker getting to the petrol station, and “community spirit” meant that every other dog walker she saw wanted to talk with her.

  And that would have been fine.

  Except when she’d gone to the animal rescue centre asking for a “friendly” dog, she had not thought to specify that the dog be friendly to other dogs.

  She’d owned Kali for a week and she imagined that the whole town already knew her as “that Londoner with the crazy hound.” Kali would happily lick anyone to death – the postman included, unless he was wearing a hat – but the minute she saw another creature on four legs, she became a howling, barking, lunging, foaming whirling devil of sheer terror. If she had been a terrier, Penny could have picked her up. But she was not about to snatch a five-stone Rottie up under her arm. Instead, Penny would try to distract her, cajole her, and wrestle her away from the situation. In the one short week of dog ownership, she’d been dragged on her bottom along a grassy bank, leaped behind a pile of rubbish in an alleyway, hidden in someone’s front garden, and squatted between two parked cars while singing lullabies to draw Kali’s attention.

  Penny dug in her heels and hauled back on Kali as they neared the end of the street. Her heart was pounding as she looked up and down, trying to see around corners and predict what was coming. She wasn’t sure what she was most afraid of. It was a mix of fear that Kali would get loose and attack another dog, as she seemed to want to, and also the humiliation that she looked like the worst dog owner in the world.

  There was a car pulling into the primary school on her right, and someone walking through the churchyard opposite, but there were no dogs. Hot relief washed along her spine as she turned right and let Kali walk as quickly as she liked, south along Spinney Road and out of the town towards open fields.

  * * * *

  How had it come to this? Penny asked herself that question a lot. She walked briskly and was soon too warm in her scarf. She pulled it down a little, and inhaled the air – she told herself that the tang of muck-spreading was simply the sweetness of rural life. She walked straight on past a tempting open area to the left. It was called the Slipe, and it was meadow land that bordered the river; apparently “slipe” was a local Lincolnshire word to describe a patch of land that would flood when the river was high. She had never realised that Lincolnshire had an accent, never mind its own dialect, until she moved to the area. It had shades of the rounded vowels of the West Country, with a Yorkshire tinge and some odd Norfolk inflections too. When she overheard older men talking to one another, it sounded like a stream of eee and ooo and aaaa spoken with a mouthful of pebbles.

  The Slipe was a popular spot for people to let their dogs run free. Therefore, Penny could not go there, unless she wanted to see carnage and disaster. Instead she had to head for the lesser-used footpaths.

  “I was supposed to be here to unwind and leave stress behind,” she said to Kali, who had stopped to sniff a particularly interesting patch of grass that looked – but clearly didn’t smell – exactly the same as all the other patches of grass beside the road.

  Kali’s ears swivelled around but she didn’t move from her task, her nose buried among the stalks of grass.

  “And I wasn’t supposed to end up with a dog like you,” she added darkly. She’d intended to get something small and cute and happy that would bound along playfully and frolic with other dogs as she watched from a bench. In these fantasies, it was always a warm summer’s day and she was inexplicably holding a glass of wine.

  She’d need a bottle of the stuff at this rate. Maybe a bottle a day.

  Kali suddenly tensed, her head and tail high in the air, her nose wrinkling as some invisible information came to her on the wind. Penny tensed too, and she shortened the lead. She couldn’t see any other dogs on the lonely road, but s
he’d heard that they could smell each other for miles.

  Which begged the question quite why they needed to get so close to each other’s bottoms when they met.

  Kali shook herself and sprang forwards unexpectedly, jerking Penny off balance. She gathered herself, and sighed, following on behind.

  * * * *

  The road went past a small stand of trees, known locally as the Spinney. A track wound off to the left, called Manor Lane. She could see a smattering of cottages along it, and some large wrought-iron gates at the end, hiding what she assumed was a large house. She hoped an enigmatic and slightly mad Lord lived there. That would be fun.

  She continued south. This was a quiet back road, with occasional farm traffic and one or two cars. She wanted to get off the highway, though, and as soon as a path opened up, she took it. She followed it along the edge of a field of unknown crops. Potatoes? Beans? Corn? She had no idea. There was never any sign of life in the arable fields, unlike the picture books of childhood where the farms were brimming with flat-capped men and their plump wives baking cakes. The landscape undulated, rising and falling with gentle hills. She’d thought Lincolnshire was flat but it wasn’t. There were some surprising pockets of actual picturesque landscape dotted with an assortment of pretty stone-built farms and huge, industrial barns. She was longing to peep inside one of those vast structures.

  The path began to peter out as the gradient increased. She pressed on. She hadn’t come this way before, and Kali was eagerly embracing all the new smells. She was following a rough, scrubby hedge along the edge of a field of something short and green and quite leafy. Cabbage, she guessed.

  There was definitely no path any longer. This was probably – no, certainly – private land, she thought to herself. I’m going to be shot by an angry farmer, aren’t I?

  Well, at least I can set the dog on him.

  As long as he looks like a dog. Or he is wearing a hat and carrying a bag. Otherwise she’ll be no use. She’ll run up and make friends and demand treats.

  Is this private land?

  She could feel her negative thoughts spiralling around her brain again and she sought to stop them. She was here to chill out and calm down, not find new things to worry about. No farmer was going to shoot her, and no pack of dogs was going to spring out of the hedge and attack them, and it might not even be about to rain. She squinted at the low, grey clouds, daring them to try. Once, she had been a wild and confident young woman. She was no longer young, but by goodness she was going to reclaim her youthful fire. It was partly for the sake of her blood pressure, but mostly because … well, increasing age brought increasing clarity, and she had begun to realise that she was working hard simply for the sake of working hard, and one day she would be no more, and what, exactly, had it all been for?

  She needed to be the free, happy, wild artist that she had been, so long ago. Hence the red scarf, the new house, the dog, and the strange shade of green that she had painted her fingernails the previous day.

  “Bring it on,” she said to the world at large.

  The gaps in the hedge widened and the crops grew sparse and scrubby at the edges of the field. Now she was walking along a rough ridge, and to her right, the slope was steep as it plummeted downwards. Kali began to pull forwards, hard, and Penny’s feet slipped and scrabbled in the mud.

  “Wait! Stop! Halt! What word did your previous owners use?” she said though gritted teeth, knowing it was useless. The only commands Kali seemed to know were “sit” and “food” and those meant nothing when she was outside and over-stimulated. Maybe the dog spoke German. It was a German breed. “Sitzen?” she hazarded. For all she knew, that was something terribly rude in German, and didn’t mean sit at all. “Achtung?” The only other word she knew was “schnell”, from war films, and telling the dog to go faster was not what she wanted to do.

  Penny pulled back hard on the lead, but five stone of enthusiastic Rottie was no match for the mud and her flowery, smooth-soled wellington boots, and she hit the ground in a flurry of muffled curses. The lead slipped right out of her grasp and Kali bounded off down the slope, tail held high like a triumphant flag. She almost heard her cry “Freeeeedom!”

  “Ugh.” Penny sat up, and tipped her head back, closing her eyes for a brief moment. It was Sunday. She should be in bed, reading the newspapers, drinking proper filter coffee, and feeling smug as she planned a lazy weekend of sketching and relaxation.

  She shouldn’t be feeling mud ooze between her fingers while her idiot dog barked her head off at the bottom of a slope.

  Her eyes opened with a snap. What was Kali barking at? She stumbled to her feet and peered through the light mist that coated the valley bottom. She could see Kali as a dark blur at the bottom of the rough hill, her tail swooping from side to side, as she jumped, stiff-legged, back and forth. Her yelps echoed across the empty fields. It wasn’t a snarling, “let me rip your face off” bark. It was a series of short, sharp yelps. More a “hey, hey, you, look at this!”

  “It’s a bag of feed or fertilizer or whatever it is that farmers leave lying around,” she said crossly as she half-climbed, half-fell down the slope to reach her dog.

  Kali was now frantic with barking, foam forming along her lips as she bounced.

  Penny’s breath caught in her throat as she got closer. She knew what she could see, now. Her palms went slippery with sweat. She knew it was a body and she didn’t want to know that it was a body. Instead she focused on Kali, calling her back with increasing desperation in her voice.

  Maybe the man lying sprawled on his back was just stunned. He was next to an electric fence. Maybe he’d wake up in a moment.

  Though if Kali’s barking hadn’t woken him by now…

  Feeling sick, Penny reached Kali and grabbed hold of the lead again. She had to look.

  The man was in his late fifties, wearing a dark green set of overalls tied around the middle with orange baler twine, and he had an open-eyed, alarmed expression on his grey face.

  He was definitely not just stunned.

  Panic rose up in Penny. She dropped the lead again and forced herself to approach, reaching out gingerly to feel for a pulse in his neck. She couldn’t run off. She had to do the right thing. “Sir? Sir?” she heard herself jabbering. “Wake up!”

  The skin was cold and felt almost rubbery to her touch, and she recoiled, rocking back on her heels in horror, wiping her fingers on her jeans. She pulled out her mobile phone and turned away to make the call she knew she had to make.

  * * * *

  “It’s always the dog walkers, isn’t it?” Penny said. She knew she was talking too quickly; she could hear her words tumbling out in a stream as soon as the friendly police woman had led her away by the elbow. She wasn’t in uniform; she wore sturdy walking trousers and a quilted jacket in shiny blue. Emergency services swarmed over the area, and a four-wheel drive vehicle was on hand to ferry the personnel to the remote spot. “It’s always the dog walkers. I’ve seen the news. Body found by dog walker, that’s what they say. Oh my. I’m going to be a suspect, aren’t I? I didn’t kill him, you know. Although of course I’d say that. Who was he, anyway?”

  The police officer was very short, quite round, and very firm. She smiled. “This way, please, Ms May. Let’s go back up to the road. We’ve got a vehicle there where we can have a little chat.”

  “Oh no, oh no, a little chat, that’s code for…” Stop talking, Penny wailed in her head. I’m driving myself mad, never mind anyone else. She was terrified of what she’d found. She’d touched him. She’d touched him. She tried to wipe her hand on her trouser leg without looking like she was trying to wipe away evidence, somehow.

  “Don’t worry!” The police woman began to laugh. “I’m not going to bash you over the head for a confession.”

  “Are you even allowed to say that? There was one time, we were filming in a country in Eastern Europe, my goodness, I don’t even think the country exists any more, and we had to … oh, sorry. Sorry.
I am nervous.” State the obvious. Way to go, Penny! She would laugh at herself … in the future.

  The police woman shrugged. “I know. It’s okay.” They were still at the bottom of the slope and they walked away from the scene, soon picking up a farm track. More police vehicles were arriving and parking up. Kali went ballistic once more, and Penny hung on, but she wanted to throw the lead to the floor and simply cry. Everyone would judge her. It was all too much.

  The police woman caught her expression, and said, very calmly, “It’s going to be all right. Here. Give me the dog.” She held out her hand for the lead.

  “She’s crazy…”

  “Hush, now. Come on.” The woman bent and reached into the passenger seat of a police car. Her other hand held onto Kali’s lead with a rock-like grip. Kali strained to get away, and then stopped, her senses alert to something new.

  Ham. The pink tasty nectar of the god of dogs.

  The police woman fumbled with one hand, awkwardly tearing the meat from her sandwiches into tiny squares and flung them to the floor, saying, “Find it. Find, it, girl!” Kali was delighted, and while she was occupied with her nose to the ground, the police woman was able to introduce herself.

  “I’m Detective Constable Cath Pritchard. I just need to take some basic details from you, but under the circumstances, I’ll ask you to come up to Lincoln police station later on today, when you can, and give a fuller statement there.”

  “The circumstances being that my dog is uncontrollable?”

  “Yes. Well, no, I mean, because you’ve had a terrible shock and everything.” Cath smiled again. “Finding bodies in the fields is not an everyday occurrence around here.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  The police woman offered Penny control of her dog again. “If you can take her lead again please, now she’s calmer, and I’ll make a few notes.”