Small Town Secrets (Some Very English Murders Book 2)

by Issy Brooke

  Cath frowned, and Penny stuck her tongue out at her, and they both laughed.

  “Ice cream, then?” Cath asked.

  “If you insist.”

  “I’m only ordering some to keep you company with your pistachio thing,” Cath said.

  “Whatever.”

  As they waited for their desserts, Cath struck out on a new tack, and turned the conversation to an uncomfortable topic. “What’s going on between you and Drew, then, at the moment?”

  “Why? What have you heard?”

  “Absolutely nothing, which is why I’m asking.”

  The waitress reappeared with the bowls, and Penny began to push the rapidly melting ice cream around sulkily. “Back at you,” she said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” Penny said. “You’ve heard absolutely nothing because there is nothing to hear. I haven’t heard from him since last week. Since he went off in the back of the police car to help you lot with your enquiries, as it happens. Has he been warned to stay away from me, in case I meddle?”

  “He wouldn’t do as he was told,” Cath said. “As far as I know, no, he hasn’t been warned. Has he really not been in touch?”

  “Nope. I saw him at a distance when I was waiting in the queue to be served in the mini-market, but he was outside and heading over the road to the market, and once I got out, he had gone.”

  “How is his business going?” Cath asked.

  “He’s really busy, and that’s great,” Penny said. “So I don’t want to look resentful or pushy or anything. I’m honestly delighted that his courses are taking off so well. I mean, he’s so good at them. And anyway,” she added, mashing the ice cream into a liquid, “it’s not like we were dating or anything official.”

  “Weren’t you?”

  “No! No.”

  “Really?” Cath leaned forward. “Oh come on. It looked like that to … everyone.”

  “Small town gossip! We’ve gone together on some picnics and to restaurants from time to time, that’s all.”

  “Okay. But did you want more to be happening?”

  “Yes, I think I did. And now it’s very clear to me that I was barking up the wrong tree. He’s just not interested.”

  Cath and Penny fell silent for a short while as they mopped up the last of their desserts. The waitress cleared the table and they opted for another long, cool soda each rather than coffee. They chatted about this and that; Penny’s crafts, the rivalry at the craft fairs, Cath’s kids.

  It was as they left the boat and stepped out onto solid land again that Cath hit Penny with her solution. They walked around the redeveloped marina, dodging groups of office workers who were taking their lunch in the sun.

  “Life is short,” Cath said.

  “It is.”

  “So, grab it. If you actually want someone in your life, go for it. Make a plan. Try online dating.”

  Penny snorted a laugh. “Really? Me? I wouldn’t know where to start. Won’t I get a stream of creepy messages?”

  “There are some more exclusive sites.” Cath named one she could try.

  “How do you know about this?” Penny asked. They were nearly at the parking area where she had left her motorbike. “Is there something you haven’t been telling me?”

  Cath laughed. “No, not at all. It’s sort of come up in our investigation, that’s all.”

  Penny stopped walking, and stared. “What?”

  “Warren was using online dating sites. I guess he ran out of women in Upper Glenfield to bother.”

  Chapter Five

  Penny felt odd, later that night, and she was compelled to walk around her cottage and draw all her curtains and blinds closed before she sat down at her laptop in the living room. She turned it on, and then got up again to check the doors were locked.

  It felt very strange to be looking up online dating. Furtive, almost.

  She had got used to Drew being around. They’d been meeting up a few times a week. Nothing formal. Just dog walks, meals, a little general chat. Even if it had never been more than friendship, things still felt emptier without all that.

  Maybe it would be nice to go on proper dates, she thought. And online dating is just the modern way of the old-fashioned arranged marriage, where rich families would connive and scheme to get their children the best match. All the fuss that some people make about other cultures and their arranged marriages, she thought. All that fuss is nonsense. Forced marriage is one thing, that’s quite abhorrent. But getting suggestions from folks that know you well could save a lot of hassle. She wished her sister, Ariadne, had taken more advice before shackling herself to the lumbering fool she was producing endless babies for.

  In the absence of people that knew Penny well, computer algorithms would have to do. With a glass of wine on the table, and the dog at her feet, she began the excruciating task of creating a profile for herself.

  It was impossible. “I am either going to sound like the most arrogant person in the world, or the dullest,” she told Kali, who thumped her tail on the floor.

  She tried to keep it factual, which made her into an over-achieving career monster with no sense of humour. “Maybe that is who I am,” she said. Kali stretched her head up, demanding an ear rub.

  How did other people do it?

  Against her better judgement, and in spite of everything she had said to Cath and the nosey residents of Upper Glenfield, she searched for Warren’s profile. She discovered she couldn’t do it by name, but by entering certain parameters of “who I would like to meet” she soon found him in a list of potential matches.

  She was surprised his profile hadn’t been taken down. She had a frisson of discomfort as she stared at the photo of a man who was now dead. He was smiling slightly, but his eyes weren’t creased; it was the fake smile of someone who had tried to get the perfect profile picture all day and was now losing the will to live.

  Poor Warren, she thought. He had made a pass at her when she’d moved to the town, and she soon discovered he did the same to all women. Then he would get angry as his increasingly pressured attempts to get a date would be denied. He was his own worst enemy, really, and it was sad. He clearly had only wanted to meet a nice woman. He had been a large, looming, fleshy sort of man, not blooming well in his middle age.

  She was curious about how he would describe his interests. As far as she could work out, all he did was work. As the manager of the mini-market, he spent long hours there, and always seemed happy and helpful when engaged in any work-related matter.

  Oh, but there was the camera club, too, she remembered. And there it was, listed first in his interests: photography. He had a link to an online portfolio and some blurb about landscapes and urban decay and so on.

  Not trains, then? She laughed and clicked through to his public photo stream.

  “Wow.” She had to admit that she was surprised and impressed. Her impression of Warren was so negative that she was expecting some terrible images; out of focus, strange eye lines, bad cropping and maybe overdone post-production and editing.

  “These are good,” she told the unimpressed dog. “They really are.”

  Penny reached out to grab her wine, not taking her eyes from the images that were scrolling across the screen on an automatic slideshow. They were local shots, often taken at dawn and at dusk when the light was low and casting dramatic shadows. And going out at antisocial times would figure, with his demanding job, too. He had obviously been dedicated enough to get up early and wait for the right scene, before heading off for a full day’s work. There was a wonderful photograph of Lincoln cathedral rising above the flat fields around it, with the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight – the Lancaster, the Hurricane and the Spitfire – passing alongside as the sun lit the majestic second world war aircraft from behind. Penny would have willingly paid good money to have that printed and framed on her wall.

  The images flicked on. Next up was a very strange one, and she clicked to pause the show. The col
ours were intense and she suspected he had edited it in some way. The setting seemed to be underground. It was dark, and like a tunnel or a sewer, with black bricks and pale mortar making a striking pattern that drew the eye into the central area of deep blackness.

  Where was this taken? She hovered over the image but the description that popped up was minimal: “Urbex, Lincolnshire, September.”

  She unpaused the show and the next few images were traditional landscapes once more; fields of poppies, stunted barren trees, that sort of thing. Calendar shots, she thought, and felt a pang that he wouldn’t be helping with the calendar for the dogs’ home. He would have been good.

  And then another one showing the interior of an abandoned house. She paused it again, studying the creepy scene intently. The windows were missing and the wallpaper was peeling away in great sloughs from the damp walls. Again the colours were heightened but the overall feeling was one of despair and decay. She hovered the mouse for the description.

  “Urbex, Lincolnshire, August.”

  Where was Urbex? Her first thought was that it was for some kind of exhibition. There was a trend to call things “OutdoorEx” for a walking show, or “CatEx” for some kind of cat exhibition. Urbex? It obviously wasn’t a place name.

  She turned to Google and began a search.

  Oh.

  She sat back on her couch, holding the wine glass to her chest as she read, thought, stared, and read a little more.

  Kali got up and stretched, and began to look intently at Penny.

  “Okay, okay.” Penny carried her wine through to the back door of the kitchen and let the dog out into the yard to do her business, which was mostly sniffing things she had sniffed a hundred times already that day. She stayed in the doorway, leaning on the frame, letting the cool night air soothe her skin. The wine was almost gone, and she was feeling relaxed.

  And intrigued. Urbex was, as far as she could tell if she trusted the internet, “Urban Exploration.” There were various websites, some of which set off her laptop’s virus warnings, and they all seemed to favour black backgrounds and almost unreadable pale text. The participants in “Urban Exploration” had a uniform of army combat gear and balaclavas, and in many cases, old gas masks. They explored abandoned and derelict buildings, gaining access in varied ways. They also crept along sewers and into air raid shelters.

  And their photography was, in many cases, jaw-droppingly beautiful.

  Some of them liked to use props. One photographer, self-styled as “Baz99”, took a human mannequin wherever they went and propped it up in alarming places, giving an eerie cast to the images. Others photographed each other, but in their dark disguises.

  It looked thrilling and sinister and she wasn’t entirely sure of the legalities of it all.

  Was that what Warren did? She tried to picture the man dressed in a camouflage jacket and wearing a mask. It didn’t fit. He was a beige-shirt sort of man, and that shirt would be a size or two small for him.

  But then, she reflected as Kali came back inside and began to stare hopefully at her food bowl, I’m surprised he was online dating, too. So why not urbex?

  “You’ve got no hope,” she told Kali, who did the dog equivalent of a shrug and padded off to the living room again. Penny went to the wine bottle and poured a restrained half-glass.

  He was found in a strange and lonely place, she remembered. The gossips said shed, or barn, or derelict house. Well, that would fit with the urban exploration, wherever it was.

  I’m not investigating and I’m not meddling, she told herself.

  When she went back into her living room, the dog had taken her spot on the couch, curled up in the warm place amongst the cushions. Penny nestled alongside and pulled the laptop over the table. I’m just curious, she thought, as she logged into Facebook and began to do some searches for local groups. Local photography groups. And in particular, local urban exploration photography groups.

  There didn’t seem to be much, so she went back to Google for some more searching, and eventually stumbled across a link to a group on Facebook that hadn’t shown up in the general search there. Maybe it had some privacy settings, she thought. She clicked the “join” button and it went to “pending”, and to assure them she wasn’t a spammer, she sent the admin a message as well, trying to sound keen about photographing local places of interest.

  Kali made a low rumbling noise, the usual Rottweiler purr of pleasure, and Penny stroked her ears and cheeks. The “pending” notification didn’t change.

  Eventually she logged out and closed the laptop, and sat thoughtfully on the sofa with her contented dog and diminishing wine, as the darkness closed down fully outside.

  * * * *

  The wine had been stronger than Penny had accounted for, and she slept in late on Tuesday morning. Kali was, of course, infuriatingly bouncy and eager to get out and about. It was nearly lunchtime before Penny was ready to take the dog for a walk.

  It seemed a fraction cooler, and Penny was relieved. She hadn’t realised how different the climate could be from one part of the UK to another. She’d assumed that everywhere was grey and rainy. Even when London had been blistering in the summer heat, the grey rain was a close memory. But Lincolnshire was parched. The crops in the fields were continually fed by great arcs of water, pumped up high by rotating machines at the end of long, snaking pipes. Where the water did not reach, there was a noticeable line; the crops were dry and dead, and even the hardy weeds seemed leggy and tired.

  They walked south, towards the slipe. This was an area of meadowland beside the river that ran along the southern edge of the town. It was popular with dog walkers and in this weather, it was also a busy picnic site. There was a car park and a children’s playground. In the school holidays, it would be teeming with kids, she predicted.

  Kali trotted alongside Penny, occasionally looking up for a treat. Penny rewarded her each time she chose to look at Penny instead of lunging wildly at another dog. There was a feeling of contentment in her stomach, alongside the festering acid of too much alcohol.

  When Kali had come from the dogs’ home, she’d been embarrassingly and worryingly aggressive to other dogs – “reactive”, the staff had called it, which had led Penny to naïvely downplay the ramifications of such behaviour. But, months of training and behaviour study later, and she finally had a dog that was a pleasure to walk, at least most of the time. Kali didn’t seem likely to ever be one of those dogs who would frolic playfully on beaches with other dogs, but the fact that she no longer tried to rip their throats out was enough.

  It was funny how your aims and ambitious adapted over time, Penny thought. And when you achieve what you want, it isn’t always what it cracked up to be.

  Her phone buzzed and vibrated in her pocket. She pulled it out to see she’d missed a call. Mobile phone reception was patchy in some areas, and she’d often find a notification of a call that had never apparently rung the phone. The number was unfamiliar, but there was a voicemail message waiting.

  She lodged the phone to her ear as she ambled along the path. Swans floated gracefully down the river, and Kali’s ears were pricked forward as she tried to work out whether it was worth trying to chase them. Penny did a quick about-face to avoid them as the voicemail service finally connected.

  It was Cath.

  “Hi Penny. This is a bit strange but … can you come up to Lincoln police station? If you can pop up today, sometime before five, that would be great. Give me a call back on this number if you can’t, though, and we’ll arrange another time. Thanks!”

  Oh, really?

  Penny frowned. Like most normal citizens, she couldn’t help that clutching feeling of guilt whenever she crossed paths with the police. Had her probing on the dating website and then the urbex groups triggered something?

  Was she now on some kind of watch list?

  Did she have the expertise to get home, destroy her laptop in a mysterious fire, move house, and deny all knowledge?

  Unl
ikely.

  She walked home quickly, doubt and worry making her regret having had any breakfast that morning.

  Chapter Six

  The desk sergeant in the public reception area was the same man who had been there when she had gone in to make her great announcement after the murder of David Hart. He was one of those admin staff who usually wore a professionally bored expression, but today he peered at her with curiosity. “Ms May,” he said. “Now then.”

  “Hi. Er, now then. I’m here to see Detective Constable Pritchard.”

  “You said that last time,” he informed her. “It got messy.”

  “Well, this time, she is actually expecting me. She, ahh, asked me to come in. I don’t think I’m in trouble. Am I in trouble?”

  He raised one eyebrow and reached for the internal telephone. “Oh right,” she heard him say. “I see. Yes, that’s what she said, too, but … okay then. Cheers.”

  He looked up and nodded at Penny. “She’s on her way.”

  Penny was greeted by Cath, looking very formal in a dark grey suit, and ushered through a door and along some winding corridors. “Inspector Travis will tell you everything,” Cath said. “So don’t panic.”

  “I’m not panicking.”

  “I would be,” Cath said, knocking on a wooden door that said “Interview Room Four.”

  “You just told me not to panic!” Penny heard her voice rise and end on a squeak. Now she was panicking. Thanks, friend, she thought.

  “Well, no … ah. Bill. Here’s Penny. Penny, this is Detective Inspector Travis.”

  DI Bill Travis had thick features that, individually, would have been too large for his face. Yet they fitted together and formed an appealing whole. He had thick black eyebrows that looked like they had been drawn on with a marker pen, a wide nose, and eyelashes that some women spent a fortune recreating in salons. He grinned broadly.

  “Now then! So you’re the cause of all the trouble!”

  Penny stopped halfway through the doorway. “I didn’t kill Warren! I didn’t like him but then, who did?”