by Issy Brooke
Penny gave her name and address, though she still had to stop and think what her postcode was. “I’ve only been here a few weeks,” she admitted.
“And where were you before?”
“I lived in London. I was a television producer.”
The detective constable’s neat dark eyebrows rose up. “Oh, really? Ah, that’s why you were filming in Europe, then. It all sounds very glamorous. I bet you’ve met some amazing people. I only meet people in distress. Or drunk. Or dead.”
“It was stressful, demanding and tiring,” Penny said. “That’s why I’m here, in Lincolnshire. It all got a bit much after … too many years.” Decades, in fact. She was the wrong side of forty and beginning to feel it. She’d worked hard to achieve what she thought she wanted and once she’d got it … it wasn’t enough.
“Are you here on holiday then?” the constable asked.
“No, I’ve retired.”
“You’re far too young to retire! I guess I went into the wrong job.”
Bless her. “Thanks. It’s sort of a retirement but mostly just a change of scene while I work out what I really want.” I left it a bit late, she thought. I should have scheduled my mid-life crisis to happen when I had more energy to deal with it.
Cath’s eyebrows quivered, but she drew a line in her notebook and didn’t pursue the matter. “Okay. And your date of birth, please?”
Penny gritted her teeth and told her, adding, “Yes. I’m forty-five. And single. No emergency contact details, no.” She could put her sister, or her parents, she thought. But what use would they be, so far away? It was easier to deal with things on her own.
Cath nodded. “So can you tell me what you were doing out here on private land?”
Ahh. So it was private. Penny looked down at the dog who was apparently licking a stone. She gave the lead a tug. “It’s not that I am saying she’s a dangerous dog,” she said slowly, mindful of the law. “But she’s a little, ah, unreliable, when she sees other dogs. And I had no idea how many dogs there were in the world until I ended up with one that doesn’t like others.”
“She’s fine with people, though?”
“She is. She recognises people as walking potential food-dispensers.”
“Right. Were you aware you were trespassing, as it happens?”
“No… am I in trouble for that?”
“Only if the landowner presses charges.” They fell silent as the body was carried past them, covered discretely. “And I suspect that is highly unlikely.”
* * * *
Penny made it back to the cottage with only one further incident. As she had approached the turn for River Street, an elderly man and his terrier had appeared without warning from the churchyard. Penny had taken immediate evasive action, darting behind a large skip that stood outside the school gates. She had held Kali’s collar tightly, peeping over the top of the skip until the man and his dog had disappeared. She hoped no one was watching her. Now she’d be known as “the crazy London woman with the barking dog who goes eating out of skips.”
“Come on, you,” she said to Kali. “Let’s go home.”
Back in her cottage, she released Kali and the dog repaid the kindness by barking at a corner of the hallway for about a minute before wandering off to the kitchen for a drink of water.
Now it all seemed very quiet.
She had expected to be inundated with work colleagues and friends from London; they’d all promised to come and visit her new life in the country.
No one had. Few had even kept in contact, and the sporadic one-sided phone calls soon died away. Without the gossip of London life and work to glue the conversations together, it was obvious how little Penny had in common with her old acquaintances.
“I’ve had more contact with a dead body than my so-called friends of twenty years,” she said to Kali as she followed her into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. “Friends? Huh.”
But surely it was partly her own fault that she hadn’t yet made any new friends. She’d had to creep around with the dog, skulking in shadowy corners, so she wasn’t meeting people that way. She didn’t go to any clubs or groups. She’d even been shopping in the nearby city of Lincoln rather than visit the local butcher’s and greengrocer’s places in the town.
Kali cocked her head to one side and looked at her, her brow furrowed. “Yeah, I know how you feel,” Penny told her. After her brew she would have to trap Kali in the living room and head up in her car to Lincoln to make her statement to the police.
Then what?
She was here to make big changes in her life, she reminded herself. She had to move on from the shallow city stress that was dragging her down. Reconnect with her careful art student self who had dreamed of rainbows and unicorns. She needed to get rid of her black and grey suits, her kitten heels, her severe hair style, her hour-by-hour plans for her days.
She needed to be free and happy and relaxed and “find herself.”
It was a shame that she had found a corpse instead.
Chapter Two
It was only Monday morning and Penny was already exhausted. These were not the relaxing retirement days that she had planned for. At this rate, she’d never get her blood pressure down to a sensible level.
Penny had woken at silly o’clock and taken hyperactive Kali for a quick scoot out of town, although she stuck to the roads this time. It didn’t seem like enough exercise for the buoyant dog, but how else could she do it? She looked at Kali’s sad face as she pulled her back into the cottage again. Her whole body was saying, “Let’s go out again! Let’s climb hills and chase rabbits and bark at shadows and have fun all day long!”
“Maybe it would be fairer if I took you back to the rescue centre,” she said sadly, unclipping the lead. Was it selfish of Penny to keep her? She had to do the best thing for the dog, regardless of whether she felt as if she had “failed.”
Kali froze. She didn’t understand words but she could certainly tell if something was wrong. Her eyebrows furrowed and she looked scared.
Penny sighed and rubbed the dog’s head. “I’m sorry. I need to learn how to handle you, don’t I? They did say you could take a few months to settle in. But will you ever stop trying to attack every other dog that you see? They don’t mean you any harm. I promise.”
Kali sneezed, licked her own nose, and wiped it on Penny’s hand as a gift.
Penny shuddered and straightened up. Maybe there were dog training classes locally. She had no idea what went on in the town – and yesterday’s melodrama had convinced her that she needed to get more involved in the community. She didn’t even know who the dead man was. At the police station, they’d given his name as a local farmer called David Hart. Cath Pritchard, the kind plain-clothes police officer, had mentioned that she lived in the town, too. So Penny knew the names of two local residents … but one didn’t really count any longer, being recently deceased and all that.
Kali gave her another baleful look as Penny left the house. “I’m sorry,” she said to the dog, with genuine feeling. Dogs came programmed to cause maximum guilt, apparently. “We’ll go out in the car later, maybe. Okay?”
Penny walked down along River Street. The terraced cottages were long and low, built in the local yellow stone, with cramped on-street parking outside. Along the back of the cottages’ gardens was an alleyway, which gave all the residents access to sheds and garages. She had a small brick-built outbuilding which held her new – yet old – M21 motorbike. It was a classic, and something she’d lusted after for years. When she’d moved out of London, she’d impulsively bought it; it even had a sidecar, but her dreams of persuading Kali into it had not yet come to fruition. What if Kali saw another dog as they rode along? The image of a Rottweiler launching itself off the back of a motorbike was an alarming one.
At the end of the narrow road, she came to a cross roads. Going right would take her along Church Street, south out of the town past the church and the primary school, over a small bridge and to the Spinney
and open farmland. That was her usual dog-walking route.
Left, the road wound through some more modern housing developments with their twisty-turny cul-de-sacs and paper-thin walls. At the northern end of the town was a roundabout with a twenty-four hour fast food place and a petrol station.
Straight on was the High Street which had the shops, the town centre and further along there was the industrial estate. Penny passed the Green Man pub and crossed the road onto the High Street. There was an open area on the right for the weekly market but she had not visited it yet. On the left was a parade of small shops – the post office, a small mini-market food store, a greengrocer that seemed to have twenty different types of potato but no oranges, a butcher with an intimidating display of knives in the window, a florist and a hairdresser. The hairdressing salon had the inevitable bad pun for a name: “Curl Up and Dye.”
Under the circumstances, Penny didn’t find that very funny.
She’d not experienced much death in her life, which was unusual for someone of her age, she thought. She’d lived a self-contained existence that focused only on work, and the people she met through work, and consequently she’d never grown close enough to anyone to miss them when they went. Her parents were still alive; though elderly, they got on with active lives quite far away. She visited them at Christmas but their social lives left her feeling quite tired as they explained to their daughter that she could only come up and stay at certain times – when they weren’t on cruises, they were on walking holidays, or city breaks, or coach tours, or hedge-laying weekends. She suspected they were both bionic now. They’d had that many spare parts replaced and upgraded – hips, hearing aids, eye laser treatment – they were officially cyber-people. They’d last forever.
There was her sister too, of course. And she was only about an hour away. But Ariadne had made her lifestyle choices, and Penny didn’t understand them. They had argued so many times, with so many hurtful words. She preferred to push that from her mind. They’d both made the sort of mistakes in their sibling relationship that seemed too difficult to put right, now.
Or too much effort.
Penny stopped at the end of the parade of shops. The road continued past the busy industrial estate, and up to the High School. She didn’t fancy running the gauntlet of walking past a gaggle of sullen teenagers so she turned and made her way back to the mini-market.
It was a mini supermarket with all the basics that you needed from day to day. There was a noticeboard in the entrance with various posters and papers pinned to it, which she skimmed past. She browsed along the fruit and vegetables, heading for the bakery aisle at the back.
She knew why they put the bread and milk furthest away. Shops banked on the fact that people came in for the essentials, so they wanted to ensure that the customer passed as many tempting things as possible on the way through to what they actually wanted. By the time Penny reached the bakery section, she had already picked up a chocolate bar and some interesting pesto sauce in a jar, and then forced herself to put them back again.
She was hoping to see if they did freshly baked baguettes but her way was blocked by a woman as wide as she was tall, with the most amazing sixties-inspired hairdo that she’d ever seen. The backcombed black beehive shone with artificial glossiness, and it was teetering on the top of a face that was almost entirely a wide, red smile. The woman had another woman virtually pinned to the racking by her verbal onslaught.
“Dead! Yes! Very dead! But now I do wonder, you know, how his brother is taking it. You know.” The beehived woman wiggled her immaculate eyebrows. Her smile was one of the joy of gossiping, not some inappropriate glee at another’s demise. Or so Penny hoped. “You know…” the beehive woman repeated. “Eh?”
“Thomas? Oh my. Well, he’d be relieved, I imagine, but you can’t really say that, can you?” the other woman said. “Not that I am relieved. God rest his soul and all that. But Thomas…”
“No love lost between them, was there? Now then, that was a bad business. Eh!”
“I was talking about that to my Barney. It strikes me that he’d probably offed himself. Farmers. There’s a high suicide rate with farmers, isn’t there? Milk prices. Guns, my Barney said. They have access to guns, you see.”
Beehive woman sucked in her cheeks, her smile temporarily fading as a mark of respect to the dead man. “David Hart never did seem like a man who’d take his own life. Too stubborn, eh. What with the paths and his selfishness and that business with them lot. Now, as for that brother of his…”
“Thomas wouldn’t commit suicide!”
“No,” the beehive woman said, her eyes alight with mischief, “not at all. I mean that Thomas might have done David in! Eh?”
“No! He never would…” her companion said, delighted with the shocking gossip.
Penny browsed along a display of mysterious Lincolnshire plum bread that she had no intention of buying. Was it just bread with plums in? She pretended to study the ingredients. She really wanted to be part of the conversation. Eavesdropping was the next best thing.
“He might of done him in,” the beehive woman said. “People are strange. I seen it on the telly.”
“No, surely not. My Barney said that it was suicide. My Barney knows stuff. David had been quite odd lately. I mean, that new woman he was seeing – you know who! – you’d think he’d be happy, even with her, but he wasn’t, he was all strange.”
Beehive woman tutted. “No woman was ever going to make him happy. That’s why he went through so many of them, eh. Or that’s what I heard.”
“I dunno that he had that many women. No, but my Barney said that he wasn’t even going to darts!”
Now it was beehive woman’s turn to be shocked. “Not going to darts!” she repeated in horror. “Not. Going. To. Darts! Eh? Eh!”
Penny wondered what was so important about not going to darts. Was it code for something? What nefarious practices was this sleepy Lincolnshire town really hiding? She couldn’t hold her tongue any longer. “What’s the deal with not going to darts?” she asked, smiling hopefully at beehive woman and her slender companion.
Beehive woman’s eyebrows nearly crawled off the top of her forehead. Her thinner companion answered for her. “His team lost because he wasn’t there!” she said with indignation. Both women made eye contact with one another, and flared their nostrils.
Penny felt excluded. She muttered a meaningless acknowledgment, and put the packet of plum bread back on the shelf. The two women had half-turned away to continue their gossip more privately.
After all, it would not be right if just anyone could hear the rumours they were discussing, would it, Penny thought as she gave up on her baguette hunt. She foraged her way along the aisle back towards the till area.
She had decided not to buy anything, so she nodded at the cashier as she sidled past the line of people waiting to pay for their goods. She felt awfully guilty, as she always did, as if she were under some obligation to buy something lest she be thought of as a shoplifter. She stifled the terribly British urge to apologise for her empty hands.
“Were we not able to meet your grocery needs today, madam?”
It was every shopper’s worst nightmare. There was a painfully keen and helpful member of staff, looming out in front of her, sporting the name badge “Warren.” He was dressed in a tight beige shirt that did not flatter him; he was a tall, stocky, fleshy sort of man, the type of man who hunches his shoulders to seem less intimidating, but then immediately counteracts that by standing way too close to people.
Penny stepped back.
He moved into the gap she had left.
Ugh. She could smell his shower gel. She said, “Ahh, sorry, I was just browsing. I’ve just moved here. Just looking.” Just repeating just over and over again. Aargh. She felt pinned to the spot by her own politeness.
The man smiled, his pale eyes crinkling at the corners. He wasn’t pretending to be happy to help. He really was very, very happy to help. “Welcome to U
pper Glenfield!” he boomed. “We’re a local shop but we’ve got all the big-name brands. Everything you could need! Even marmite! Do you like marmite? I’m the store manager. Warren Martin. Call me Warren. And if there’s ever anything you think we should stock, do let me know! I’m always here!”
I bet you are. “Thank you. That’s good to know.” Help. Let me out. No. I loathe marmite. Her gaze slid past the stocky manager to the door behind him.
But he was immobile and blocked her exit, looming over her with a happy smile. “So you’re living in Glenfield, then…”
“Yes.” She had just told him that, hadn’t she? He was smiling in an increasingly unnerving way. She had to fill the expectant silence. “On River Street.”
“Lovely cottages, them, I’ve always thought. I sometimes go down there early in the morning to take photographs. I go there when no one is around. It’s the light, you see. Such wonderful morning light.”
“Er … yes.” Nothing creepy about that at all, nope, not at all.
His gaze flickered from her face to her left hand and back. Her heart began to sink as his intentions registered in her mind. He took a deep breath and made his move. “Small cottages, too. Not big enough for a family… on your own, are you? So, if I might ask, if I might be so bold, ahahaha, what brings you to Glenfield?”
She wondered, briefly, if she ought to meet his expectations. She could spin a heart-rending tale of failed love affairs, maybe a marriage break-up, how she was fleeing some dreadful past and was looking only for a new shoulder to cry upon … his wolfish look was certainly hoping for all that.
“I’ve retired,” she said, sharply, and stepped to one side. She was being rude by walking away but then, she reasoned, he was being rude in preventing her from moving on.
“Goodness me. You’re far too young to retire,” he oozed. “Now then. I wonder if I might be allowed to help you to settle into the area? I’ve been a long standing resident for many years. I know everyone. I am sure I can help you to get to know people…”