The Village Fate

by William Hadley

  On Sunday, Maggie was up early. At half past seven she went into the gym dressed for a workout and followed it with a few lengths of the pool. She always swam in the mornings but on this day she was naked. Angus wondered if she regularly did that when he was away. When she was finished she went into the house, she wasn’t seen again until nine fifty when she left for church in her shiny black Range Rover.

  The cameras were dull viewing for the next couple of hours, but speeded up this only took a few seconds to watch. Angus checked the time that Maggie got home from church, it was a little before twelve. She was in the house just a few minutes before emerging from the kitchen door and once again crossing to the gym for another work out. His wife had showered, dressed and was sitting on the patio with a drink when Claudilia arrived at three. This was different though, they were off script. It was not what she’d told him and the police at all.

  Angus got up from the chair. He went to the kitchen and made coffee while Hamish fussed around his feet. It was past his dinner time, and even if Angus had no appetite the little Westie still needed to eat. Angus felt guilty for making his best friend wait, he forked the contents of a small tin into Max’s tartan bowl. He put it on the floor and ruffled the little dog’s hair as he tucked in.

  Back at the computer, Angus watched his wife and Claudilia on the patio. They were obviously talking about the garden and Maggie flung her arms out as she pointed this way and that. The ladies spent some time admiring the lawns and the pool, then Claudilia got up and let Maggie guide her across to the gym. Angus stopped the replay and studied the screen.

  Four camera feeds were visible on the screen, but there was also a small camera icon in the bottom right hand corner. He’d installed the original set with the alarm, but were there more devices he didn’t know about? He clicked the icon and the screen changed to a longer list. Now there were six cameras shown; House front, Garden, Garage and Path were what he had been watching. But now, under the original four, had appeared a further two. One said “Gym”, the other “Sauna”. Angus clicked on Gym.

  The screen filled with a new image. This time it was inside the gym, an image from the back wall, it looked across the room towards the entrance door. Although the picture was quite dark he could just make out the shape of trees in the garden beyond.

  Angus clicked on the timer, rewinding it to Saturday morning, he watched as Maggie and Tish entered the exercise room, Maggie came to the camera and blocked it’s view. The image on screen was blurred for a few seconds before it cleared, Maggie had stepped back, and he watched his wife walk away from wherever the device was hidden. For the next two hours the women were in and out of shot, sometimes lifting weights, sometimes doing aerobic exercises. Their stamina was impressive and they didn’t stop for the whole hundred and twenty minutes.

  Angus clicked on the icon marked “Sauna” then ran the timer back to late Saturday morning. When the screen filled he was looking at an unlit room, straight down from the roof and onto the wooden benches. The image was brighter at one end, Angus assumed that was caused by light coming through the window in the door. He ran the timer forward until the lights came on. Angus watched as his naked wife, and her trainer, also naked, walked in and stretched out on the benches directly below his viewpoint.

  Angus had only been in the sauna a few times but he remembered the light fittings recessed into the ceiling. There had always been one that didn’t work as it should, he assumed that was where the camera was, probably concealed inside a fake bulb. As Angus watched he couldn’t help himself admiring Tish’s body. She was stretched out below him, glowing with perspiration from their workout or maybe from the heat of the sauna. Tish was not as bony as his wife and she had rounder hips, her breasts were more full and her pubic hair was trimmed to a tidy triangle. It was all in stark contrast with Maggie’s full shave and sticking out bones.

  Without sound Angus couldn’t know what they were saying, but they were laughing about something and seemed to be having a good time. Now and then Maggie spooned on extra water and the room filled with steam. Eventually they got up and left. The time coincided with when he’d seen them go for lunch on the garden camera.

  Angus sipped his lukewarm coffee and rolled the timer forward. He didn’t go back to the gym view, assuming that when the gardener arrived they would go straight to the sauna, he was right. Initially they were just kissing, but it escalated quickly.

  Angus sat at the desk, sipping coffee and watching his wife have sex with another man. He felt nothing, if it had been two strangers he might have felt excited, perhaps even aroused. But it wasn’t two strangers, this was Maggie and the gardener. He should at least feel angry shouldn’t he? He didn’t though, he just felt numb. Was this normal? He didn’t know, and he shore as hell couldn’t ask a friend. “Tell me, how do you feel when you see your wife being jumped by a stranger?” Not the sort of conversation you’d have over a pint. Not if you didn’t want a flat nose and a few less teeth.

  Even at a speeded up setting the sex went on for a long time. Angus saw Maggie doing things with Giles which she would never consent to with him, at least he’d assumed she wouldn’t, he’d always been too polite to ask. Some of what they did he hadn’t even thought of, but Maggie performed with enthusiasm, obviously an old hand at several positions and acts she’d never shared with her husband.

  Angus changed the view to the camera in the gym. As expected he saw Claudilia enter and leave again. She had caught the lovers in the act, she’d fiddled around with the door but gone away with them none the wiser. Very British of her he thought. Angus watched Maggie and Giles leave the sauna. He guessed they were now swimming in the pool before going inside for another romp, this time in her bed.

  A thought occurred to Angus and he minimised the current screen. He’d not fitted these cameras and he hadn’t known about them until an hour ago. Which meant they must have been put there by Maggie, or by someone else on her instruction. If she was worried about security the camera looking at the door of the gym made sense, but why would she record inside the sauna. Unless it was to relive the experience later, for her own private enjoyment perhaps. Very little surprised him about Maggie now. He wondered if she got a thrill from watching herself having sex while Angus was in his office, he would have been just the other side of the trees, he could have dropped in at any time.

  Angus looked through Maggie’s desktop icons and clicked one called “my documents”. He scanned the subfolders and opened “stuff to keep”. A new list of folders appeared. After trying a few and finding them empty of anything interesting he changed the view to show the size of each folder. The largest was called “family”, inside that he found “old photos and movies.” Angus clicked it open. He found a list of movies titled sauna one, two, three, all the way up to sauna twenty six.

  After a few he stopped opening files. The view were always the same, just the participants changed. Maggie and the gardener, Maggie and a young man from the dealership on the day she got her new car, Maggie and Tish but not just lounging, Maggie, Giles and the older gardener, a couple of Maggie and men he didn’t recognise and one of Maggie and Tish and Giles together.

  Angus sat back. How could this have gone on for so long? She was doing it right under his nose and he didn’t have a clue. He’d been shunted off to sleep in the spare room while Maggie laughed behind his back. Meanwhile she was screwing anyone and everyone who came to the house. Angus felt sick, betrayed, belittled and sick.

  But he’d started so he’d better finish, he said to Hamish. No matter how distasteful the images were, he needed to know the truth about his wife. He returned to the gym camera and rolled it forward a day. He slowed it down just after three o’clock, it was still running fast, but not so fast you would miss any movement. He watched and, as expected, he saw Maggie and Claudilia enter the gym. The time was eleven minutes past the hour. Angus slowed the playback even more, he saw his wife beaming as she pointed this way and that, obviously proud of the equipment she wa
s showing her visitor. They moved in and out of shot a few times, they must have gone to see the sauna, because they disappeared in that direction for a while. Then Maggie was back in full view, she loaded a long bar with some weights and carried it just out of shot to the pressing bench. Angus could see her left foot as she sat, then laid down on the bench. He knew the layout of the gym and the bench press was just to the right of the door. Looking closely he saw the end of the bar, it sat on it’s rests above where his wife’s head would be.

  The bar went up and down a few times, then it stopped back on its rests. Claudilia walked into view and around to the far end of the bench. She was out of shot again but she’d be standing near Maggie’s head Angus realised. The bar came up, just a short distance as it was taken out of the rests. It went all the way down and back up again, once, twice, three times it went through the cycle before its progress slowed, his wife was getting tired. The fourth time the bar went down Angus could see a new hand in the frame. It was a lady’s hand no doubt, but bigger than that of his wife. This hand wasn’t lifting, it was pushing, pushing down, fighting against his wife’s effort to push the bar up. Maggie’s leg came into view. It was flailing around in mid air, up and down it kicked, kicking out at nothing but still desperately kicking. An arm and a hand joined the leg in its mid-air dance, Maggie had let go of the bar. Angus watched as Maggie desperately thrashed around, trying to fight off Claudilia and move the bar from across her throat. Seconds past, perhaps even thirty, the arm and leg lost momentum, they went limp and flopped down. The bar came up and returned to its rests, Claudilia stepped away from the bench and was clearly in view. She stood still, and looked down at Maggie. With her hands on her hips she was perfectly framed by the gym’s patio doors and garden beyond. She stood there and surveyed her work, surveyed it in clear and crisp technicolour, all caught on camera and saved to the cloud, at least for the next twenty eight days.

  Angus sat back in shock. Now he knew what’d happened to his wife, or at least part of it, but what next, where was Maggie’s body, what about the police investigation and what was he going to do. This was going to need more than just coffee. Angus went to the kitchen and poured himself a large whisky.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Angus ran the timer back a few minutes and watched it all again. Maggie set up a bar and got onto the bench, the bar went up and down a few times before Claudilia repositioned herself. After a short recovery rest the bar was raised and lowered a few more times. Then it came down with more force, a leg and arm could be seen struggling. The limbs went still and Claudilia walked back into shot, she surveyed the scene, as calm as if she’d just disposed of a spider or shooed a fly out the window.

  There was no doubt in Angus’s mind about what he’d just seen. There had been no accident, no slip, no trip or stumble. It was simply murder. Mens Rea, Actus Reus – a guilty mind and a guilty act. Something Maggie had said or done brought forth from Claudilia such violent a response. Angus could not believe she’d gone to the Manor intending to kill his wife. So what had been the trigger…bad choice of words. What makes a normal, rational middle aged person resort to the ultimate act of violence.

  How did she get rid of the body? The patio hadn’t got any bigger, there was no Maggie shaped lump in the lawn and no recent digging in the flower beds. Oh, God. She’s not still in the gym, or lying in the sauna is she? Angus dismissed this idea, he was sure DS Robinson and the Constable would have commented on a corpse if they’d seen one. They’re trained to notice that sort of thing after all.

  One thing the film did explain was why Claudilia’s earring had been in the gym. On running the last few moments again he could see that Maggie had reached up towards her killer’s head. She probably caught the earring with a nail and tugged it loose.

  Angus ran the recording forward. He saw Claudilia leave the gym, then return a few minutes later. She lifted the body and carried it outside. Sitting in his wife’s office, his dead wife’s office, Angus switched views and watched Claudilia put the lifeless body into a wheelbarrow. She pushed it down the path and through the gate. He switched cameras to his business portal and picked her up again. Claudilia was pushing the wheelbarrow through the trees along the path which ran from the house. She crossed the angle of view for the camera and went out of sight.

  Angus sat back. He was horrified. He thought he knew what was about to happen but he could hardly believe it. He flicked through the available cameras but Claudilia was nowhere to be found. She’d disappeared into a blind spot. He knew she was in the area where the chipper had been set up, but the nearest view he had was the silage hopper. Angus opened that camera and moved the timer back to mid-afternoon Sunday.

  Everything was still. The hopper could hold twelve tonnes and was still about one third full. When it emptied to a pre-set weight a conveyor from a reserve tank would deposit the next load, which in turn would be fed into the digester. It consumed about a tonne an hour. Angus watched as the huge fingers pulled lumps of silage towards the screw auger going up into the tank.

  The time stamp crept forward; Angus wanted to stop watching but he couldn’t pull himself away. He’d sat there for several agonising minutes before something red began spraying into the hopper. Whatever was being added wasn’t coming along the conveyor, it must have been delivered via the chipper spout. In the first few moments he could only see odd lumps of food waste, things that might have been caught in the funnel at the end of their recent test. Then a stream of dark red and slimy material started to come through. It was delivered in spurts, spurts which seemed never ending, but eventually there was a pause, followed by a small burp of something more solid. The metal fingers never stopped, they teased at the slime in the hopper, dragging it forward and mixing it with the silage before another steam of material was added on top. This load was clearly kitchen waste and it had come from the spout of the chipper. It must have been the load Claudilia owned up to, thought Angus. It would have been used to disguise any traces of the human so recently processed by the chipper.

  So that was the truth of it. Claudilia had killed Maggie. She’d choked her with her own gym equipment and disposed of the body like a bag of potato peelings, fish bones and over-ripe fruit. When the body was gone she’d purged the equipment with a mixture of silage and vegetables.

  He rolled the footage forward. Claudilia returned along the path with an empty barrow. On the home cameras she could be seen clearing up and going into the house. Later she emerged at the front and cycled away with a basket of things she’d not brought with her.

  If this was shown to the police, thought Angus, Claudilia would have some difficult questions to answer.

  Angus had no thoughts of bed. He wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway . He’d watched and re-watched the footage several times, with the use of a notebook and pen he pieced together the chronology of the weekend. It basically ran as Claudilia had said on Tuesday evening. She’d just left out the bit about killing Maggie and feeding her into a vast composting tank, even now it was par boiling her remains at thirty eight degrees …It’s easy to overlook a little thing like that.

  What he wasn’t sure about was how he felt, and what he should do. The right thing would be to go to Stratford police station, see DS Josie what’s-her-name and show her how to access his CCTV account. Claudilia would be charge, found guilty and go to jail for life. If he was to do that it would probably irritate Hubert …Getting his sister banged up for life, I bloody well hope it’d irritate him. He’d lose their investment in the anaerobic plant, and he’d never find another backer who fitted the business as perfectly as the Belchers.

  On the other hand, Angus had to admit he’d quite enjoyed himself while Maggie was “missing”. But he’d thought it was just a matter of time before she resurfaced somewhere and spoiled his fun. He’d already decided he wanted a divorce. He’d give her a small cash settlement to go away quietly and she could keep the money from her parent’s house. He could prove she’d never contributed to his busin
ess and, with the aid of the sauna’s camera, her adultery was a matter of record. They had no children to fight over. Apart from misery and humiliation he could think of nothing she’d brought into his life.

  Next Angus turned his thoughts to Claudilia. Should she or should she not be punished? There was no question that she’d committed a murder, but it looked like the perfect crime and it was in his power to let her walk free. Angus leaned back in his chair to think. In the end he decided he liked Claudilia too much to see her banged up for the rest of her days. She may not have Maggie’s looks, but what you saw was what you got. And what you saw was quite a lot. …Are you calling me fat?

  Yes thought Angus, Claudilia was an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth sort of person. But in the end she was basically good and she’d introduced him to riding which he’d greatly enjoyed. Angus squirmed in his seat at the thought of Rosie. His testicles appeared to have returned to the right place but they were still very tender. It would be days before they were the right size again. If she was going to hold on to her freedom Claudilia would need his help. Sooner or later some clever cop would spot the cameras and asked to look at the footage. If that happened Claudilia would be sunk. He needed to act now.

  First he found a USB stick and copied all the footage from the cameras, everything from Friday afternoon to Sunday evening when Claudilia left on her bike. Next he moved clock back to midday Sunday, he flicked through all the cameras and deleted everything from there forward. Maggie would be seen coming back from church, going into the house and a moment later the screens would go blank, it would be assumed that she had turned off the cameras as part of her preparation to leave. Angus went to the control panel under the stairs and pulled out the plugs.