Small Town Secrets (Some Very English Murders Book 2)

by Issy Brooke

  “We need to talk to him. We need him rather urgently,” she said. “If you have any idea at all, as to where he might be, I strongly advise you to tell me.”

  “I’m not a suspect then?” Lee said, unwilling to let his own fears go.

  Cath snorted without humour. “You? Lee, you’re an idiot in many ways but I think we know, now, that you’re not a killer.”

  “Oh. Right. An idiot?”

  “Could be worse.”

  Penny said, “What new information has emerged? Is it something about Blue?”

  Cath nodded. “We were still curious about his relationship with his dad. So we went to speak to Reg, and it was pretty uncomfortable. He’s a nice guy, you know? There are not many of his calibre still around. And he broke down in tears when we suggested to him, very gently, that perhaps his own son had been behind the campaign of harassment against him…”

  “No way!” Lee blurted out. “Who would do that to their own father?”

  Natasha had come up alongside Lee, and had been listening. She laughed. “What sort of father would spy on their own daughter?”

  “That’s different. I wasn’t harassing you.”

  “Dad … I was scared. And then when no one believed me, I thought … I thought I might be seeing things. They suggested that, you know, that I didn’t know my own mind. I thought I was going mad. Hallucinating. Because I know that I saw you, you see.”

  “What? Oh … honey.” He grabbed her and held her close, frowning. “Oh, no. No, no, no.”

  “Dad, it’s okay. Now I know it was just you being an idiot – the police have said so, so it’s official and I can call you that.”

  “No, you can’t.” Lee rubbed the top of her head. He turned back to Cath. “I know Blue is a bit of a mouthy sort, and he had no good words for his dad, but why was he messing with him?”

  “To be honest?” Cath said. “I don’t know. And that’s why we want to talk to him.”

  “Entitlement,” Penny said suddenly, the realisation flashing into her mind. Everything she’d spoken about with Drew, and what she’d seen with Clarissa, all came together. “It was all about entitlement. It’s like Warren had this sense that women owed him something. That we all ought to have been grateful for his attention and shouldn’t say no to him. Blue’s the same. His dad is wealthy, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah, but his dad worked hard for all his life,” Lee said.

  “But doesn’t Blue feel he ought to have benefited from that? There’s his dad, in a nice big house, and where does Blue live?”

  “A grotty bedsit,” Lee said. “But Blue is lazy. He should work for a living like the rest of us.”

  “I don’t think he feels that he needs to,” Penny said. “Has he got any training? Did he get any qualifications or even pursue a career?”

  “He tried a load of different things,” Lee said thoughtfully. “He started lots of different courses but he always dropped out. He just never liked hard work. He was always full of excuses, though,” he added. “It was always someone else’s fault why things weren’t going well for him. Or the government’s fault.”

  “Entitlement,” Penny said. “There you go.”

  “Yeah,” Natasha butted in. “If you were mega-rich, dad, and you didn’t buy me a pony, I’d definitely throw eggs at your house.”

  “Charming. I didn’t know you wanted a pony.”

  “I don’t, but it’s the principle,” she said formally, and everyone laughed.

  Penny suddenly had a thought. “So if Blue was harassing his own dad, then Warren must have found out.”

  “How so?” Lee asked.

  Cath was nodding slowly. “Yes. If Warren had been taking photos down Cuthbert Road, he might have seen Blue there. And we know that Warren was down there because we’ve seen the images. He had photos of Reg’s house and other houses along the road. And if he saw Blue …”

  “He could have blackmailed him!” Penny finished. “Which would explain the threat on the phone. ‘I know what you are doing’, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, and we know from the top-up services that the credit was paid for with Warren’s bank account.”

  “Would Warren really have been so malicious as to try and blackmail or threaten Blue?” Penny asked.

  “I don’t know,” Cath said.

  “Yes.” Lee was very firm in his reply. “Warren was a horrible and narrow-minded man and I’m not just saying that because of what happened with Kelly. He was vile with women, and he was rude and arrogant in the urbex club, and I hear he wasn’t exactly popular in the camera club, either. He could have let Kelly go with a telling-off but he didn’t. I can totally imagine him using this to try and bully Blue.”

  Bully. Suddenly it clicked into place in Penny’s head. Warren had been a bully, and seen through that filter, yes: he would have tried to gain power over Blue.

  “We’ve got to find him,” she said. “I assume you’ve checked his bedsit?”

  “We have,” Cath said.

  “I know exactly where he will be,” Lee said suddenly. “Come on. You guys drive, and I’ll tell you as we go.”

  * * * *

  Cath drove, with Lee in the passenger seat giving directions. Penny, Natasha, and a uniformed officer called Constable Delaney squeezed into the back.

  “So, there’s this one place that he always goes,” Lee said, in between barking “left” and “right” at Cath. “It’s nothing, really. But I suppose we all get these attachments to places for no reason. This is his place.”

  “How do you know about it?”

  “He takes photos of it more than anywhere else, so I knew there was something about it, but he didn’t ever tell us where it was. Then I found it by accident when he was there. It’s just a shed in the middle of nowhere, near a row of old stables and some fields. I think he camps out there, sometimes. It’s peaceful.”

  Penny thought she understood that. As they drove, they left the town behind and made their way east. Penny hadn’t been this way much. Lincoln lay to the north, and the pleasant, rolling countryside was to the west. East was just flat fen fields and crops and no hedges or trees or boundaries at all. There was an awful lot of sky, and very little else, as far as she could tell.

  “Take the drove to the left, just past the sluice,” Lee said, and it sounded like a foreign language. “Along the rodden.”

  “What?”

  “The road’s raised up,” Cath explained. “Because of flooding. It’s a rodden.”

  Even Constable Delaney shook his head. “Nope, I’ve never heard of that, either. And I thought I was local.”

  “I’ve heard it,” Natasha said, leaning against Penny conspiratorially. “It’s because of all the Dutch settlers, years back.”

  “What Dutch settlers?” Penny asked.

  But there was no time for a reply. They were approaching a ramshackle wooden hut, and Cath stopped quite a way short. “He’s probably heard us,” she said. “Delaney, you’re a good runner. Be ready.”

  As soon as Cath killed the engine, they all piled out. Lee held Natasha back, much to her annoyance. Constable Delaney, Cath and Penny began to move forward as quickly and silently as they could.

  There was no need for their stealth.

  When they reached the shed, the door was standing wide open. Slanted sunlight shone through a broken window and illuminated the figure on the ground inside the otherwise dark interior.

  He looked up as they got closer, but he didn’t try to get to his feet. He was sitting, curled in a ball, his arms wrapped tightly around his knees.

  His face was pale and strained.

  “You’ve come for me,” Blue said.

  Chapter Twenty

  The postman was drenched from head to foot yet he was still wearing shorts. He stood cheerfully in the pouring rain as Penny signed for the parcel. Kali peeked out between Penny’s legs. She normally liked to greet the two regular posties on their street, as they always had treats for her. But the rain hadn’t stopped
for three days now, and both dog and owner were heartily sick of it.

  Penny took the parcel back to the kitchen and used a kitchen knife to score through the brown tape, in defiance of the labels warning her not to use knives. How else am I supposed to open it, she thought crossly. Let the dog bite her way in?

  She folded back the flaps and let her eyes close briefly so she could inhale the scent. Inside the layers of thick cardboard nestled a large proof printing of the calendar for the dogs’ home. It wasn’t finalised yet; she needed to get approval from both the camera club and Marge at the dogs’ home, but she was hopeful it would go through with minimal changes.

  Nothing smelled as good as newly printed things, she thought. Finally she picked it up and thumbed through, looking for any obvious mistakes like February with thirty-one days, August misspelled as Orgust, or December nestling between June and July. It all looked fine, and she wrapped it up again, so that she could take it to the camera club’s meeting in the community hall that evening.

  * * * *

  It didn’t go as well as she had planned. It was the first time she’d met Eric again, since the investigation into Warren Martin’s death four weeks previously, and he seemed as furious with her as ever.

  At first, he blanked her, and that was fine. She passed the calendar around and the various members murmured their approval. But then it came into Eric’s hands, and he flicked through it with a derisory expression on his face.

  “What’s up, Eric?” one older man asked.

  “It’s hardly the professional standard we were led to expect,” he said, refusing to look directly at Penny. “The font choice seems amateur, and the colour of the letters is frankly confusing.”

  “I paid for the licence for that font, specially,” Penny said. “It’s not your standard sort of thing. What did you want? Comic Sans? The kerning took ages.”

  “Not long enough,” he said, and threw the calendar to the woman on his right, who barely managed to catch it.

  “Eric, there are some lovely shots in here,” the woman said in a small voice, holding up one to show everyone. “What a glorious Rottie.”

  Penny quailed inside. The shot was one of her own, and showed Kali standing at the top of a children’s slide. The dogs’ home staff had voted on the best photos to use; it genuinely wasn’t her way of sneaking her own photograph into the calendar.

  She knew, as soon as she looked at Eric’s face, that there was no point even trying to explain. She lowered her eyes.

  “I, for one, am frankly ashamed and embarrassed to be putting my own name and the name of the camera club on that travesty,” he said loudly. People began to shift nervously in their seats and no one looked towards Penny. “And a Rottweiler? In a calendar we want to sell to families? Have you no sense at all? Anyway, the exposure is all wrong. Look at the sky. There’s a patch of white just there. It’s blown. Over-exposed. It’s a basic and very amateur error, and it reflects very badly on us and our group.”

  “Eric…” one man said, but he tailed off. Eric was the club president, after all.

  The woman holding the calendar closed it, and quietly passed it back to Penny. Penny got to her feet and drew in a deep breath.

  To say what? She should act with dignity. The man had been abandoned by both his wife and his daughter. She had to cut him a little slack. The mature and grown-up response would be to smile sweetly, and leave in silence. She should be the bigger person, and all that.

  Ha.

  “Eric Summer, you’re a bully and a fool and a horrible little man.”

  There was more she could say but finally her sense kicked in. She threw her head back and marched out of the room, clutching her calendar to her chest.

  * * * *

  Once outside, she walked quickly, feeling hot and uncomfortable. The past week had been simply endless and torrential rain, but finally the rain had dried up at midday, and now this evening was dry and pleasantly cool. The chilly air helped to relieve her sweaty, clammy skin.

  She was pleased that she’d spoken out, and very proud of herself that she’d managed to stop before she went too far. She’d wanted to say, “I’m not surprised everyone that you love leaves you” but that would have been cruel.

  Be kinder than necessary, she told herself, and then felt a pang of guilt. She probably ought not to have said anything, really.

  Oh well, so the deed was done.

  She resented the insinuation that her dog wasn’t appropriate for the calendar even more than the criticism of her photography techniques. She knew the photo was a little over-cooked. It didn’t matter. It was cute and fun, and the staff had chosen it. She had tweaked it in her image editing software to tone the exposure down a little, but what you saw on the computer screen was never quite the same as what you got back from the printers.

  It wasn’t an explanation she was prepared to go into for the benefit of Eric, though.

  Penny paused when she got to the High Street. All the shops were shut up for the evening except the mini-market. She stood on the opposite side of the road and tried to see who was working on the tills. There was the usual young mother, Becca, who worked evenings so that her partner could look after the kids when he got home from his daytime factory job. She couldn’t see the new manager, an eager man in his thirties who had been on the shop floor for ten years, just waiting for his chance to get out of the uniform and into a suit.

  And she spared a thought for Warren. The unpopular man wasn’t missed by the people of the town, and yet, his presence in the mini-market had been so pervasive and constant that there was a gap there. His absence was still noticed, and that felt right, to Penny’s mind. But there would be no commemorative bench laid out for him in the park, with his name on a brass plate screwed to the back. His small and fractured family all lived in Nottingham now, and had done for years.

  Blue Bailey was in prison now, and would not be out for a long time. His callous and pre-meditated murder had shocked the town but when he had been revealed as the murderer, no one claimed to be surprised it was him. Even his own father had appeared stoical and accepting of his son’s crimes, commenting grimly in the local newspaper that “he always was a bad one, and we were estranged.”

  Blue’s malicious campaign against his father had been motivated by silly, selfish, childish spite. Penny shook her head and moved on, walking slowly along the parade of shops. She thought again of her sister, and realised that it was time she got in touch. Penny had been touched by death – albeit other people’s deaths – too much recently, and it made her regret the arguments between herself and Ariadne.

  Even if she still held herself to be mostly in the right.

  Sisterly spite, of course. Like Blue’s stupid, pointless childish spite.

  And thinking of spite, she had to remember Clarissa. The vile woman was still active online. She’d been taken in for formal questioning – according to Cath, Clarissa had thought she was being investigated for Warren’s death still, and had been shocked into silence when confronted with the evidence of her hacking.

  But no further action had been taken against her. She’d been warned, and notes made, but that was all. The whole episode left a rather bitter taste in Penny’s mouth. She felt more vulnerable online, now, in spite of Taz’s help and direction.

  At the crossroads where the High Street ended and her own road began, opposite, she was just looking to the right when she was startled by someone greeting her from the left.

  “Now then, Penny May,” said Lee, grinning at her.

  “Hi! You made me jump.”

  “Sorry. Is that the finished calendar?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She clutched it tighter to her chest.

  “What’s up?”

  “They hated it.”

  “Who?”

  “The camera club,” she explained. “Well, mostly Eric.”

  “Can I see? Eric is a … well, you know what he is.”

  “He is that, and I sort of told him so, too.�
� She passed the calendar over with some reluctance.

  Lee flicked through it. He grinned at the shot of the terrier puppies in a basket, and nodded at a very arty shot of a pale greyhound languidly lying down in the forge. “These are good. Any of yours in here?”

  “The Rottie on the slide,” she said. “It’s October.”

  He thumbed through and held it out at arm’s length. “She’s a cute one. That’s your dog, isn’t it? Daft looking thing.”

  “You like it? The photo, I mean?”

  “Yeah, it works. It’s what people want, isn’t it? Something a bit different, but not too different. You’ve over-exposed it a bit, you know. Look at that patch of sky. But honestly, I don’t reckon anyone’s going to notice. It’s always tricky when there’s so much lightness in a shot.”

  “Thank you so much. You don’t know how much that means to me,” she said, wanting to hug him.

  He shrugged, embarrassed by her over-enthusiastic thanks. “Well, you know,” he said, meaninglessly. He paused, then said, “Anyway. The camera club are all serious about photography and that, but that doesn’t mean they know what makes an appealing photo. You’ve got a good eye.”

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  “S’all right. I mean, your technical skill’s not there, yet, but I can see what you’re trying to do.” He shuffled his feet, and she got the feeling he wanted to say more, but couldn’t.

  It was awkward. Penny had seen Lee around over the past few weeks, since he led the police to Blue’s hiding place, but she hadn’t approached him to talk to him. Drew’s advice had been to never mention any of it again to him, and to simply treat him as if none of it had happened. “It’s a man thing,” he had said. “We don’t need to rehash what happened, and there’s a lot of stuff that came out that he’s not going to be proud of, so don’t remind him of that.”

  She couldn’t bite her tongue. “How’s Natasha?”