Small Town Christmas (Some Very English Murders Book 6) (5 page)

What else could she do? She thought about calling Ariadne
but she didn’t want to trouble her sister. There was her friend Francine, too.
She was about to call her when she looked up the street and noticed a
friendly-looking pub, the upmarket sort that served decent coffee. A familiar
figure was disappearing inside. It was Jared.

She needed any friend she could get, and he was closer than
Francine right now, so she followed him into the warm and welcoming interior.

Jared stopped a few feet into the pub, and she caught up
with him. She was about to say hello when she saw what had brought him up so
short.

At the bar stood Haydn, although he was holding a large mug
of tea rather than a pint of beer. At the other end of the bar was a
haggard-looking Linda.

Everyone’s eyes met, ping-ponging from one to the other.

They all nodded in slight acknowledgement.

Haydn spoke first. “They just had me in for questioning,”
he said, dully. He was as crumpled as ever. He shook his head. “Me. And I know
that I look as guilty as it’s possible to look.”

Linda stared at the glass of pale liquid in her hands. It
had a lemon in it, so Penny guessed it might be gin and tonic. She looked like
a G-and-T sort of woman. “And me,” she said. “I’ve never set foot in a police
station before in my entire life. Now I’m tarred with it. People are going to
talk.
And I cannot abide talk. I shall never shake the associations off.”

Jared shrugged but he looked very miserable. “Me too. They
had me in. And you, Penny?”

“Yup. I’ve just been interviewed too. Mostly, I think,
because of the ladder. The ladder had been left out. And I should have put it
away.”

“You argued with
him
, too,” Linda said. “Clive. It’s
not just about the ladder.”

“We’re not even supposed to talk about this,” Penny said,
her hackles immediately rising at Linda’s accusation.

“Can I get you a drink, Penny?” Jared asked.

“Go on, then.”

“I owe you one, too,” Haydn said from the far end. “I have
a hazy recollection of acting like a complete boor in The Green Man when I saw
you last. I had been drinking, but I know that’s no excuse.”

He looked so hangdog that Penny smiled. “It’s okay. Thank
you for acknowledging it.”

She moved to the bar, but Jared shot Haydn a dirty look. To
Penny, he muttered, “I’ll keep an eye on him.”

She felt faintly embarrassed. “Thank you.”

There followed a strained silence as they were all mindful
of the instruction to not speak about the investigation.

Penny was thinking,
It could be one of us. If it’s not
an accident, then it’s one of us. One of us!
And she was sure that everyone
else was thinking that, too.

What had Clive been doing up the ladder?
She knew
she was negligent if she had left it out, and if it had been faulty. But why on
earth had he gone up there in the first place? You couldn’t kill someone by
forcing them up a ladder.

By rights, she reasoned, there was no grounds for the
police to talk to anyone else – but her.

He hated the lights, of course. Maybe he had been sabotaging
the lights.
If I get prosecuted for having left out the ladder, even though
he chose to go up there,
Penny thought,
then there is something wrong
with the system.

“Hey, cheer up,” Jared said. He was looking at her with
concern.

“I’m sorry. It just seems like a dreadful accident. I don’t
even know why the police are interested in all of you guys.”

“They’re just looking at people who argued with him most
recently, in case someone has pushed him off the ladder,” Jared said. “I
suppose they have to cover all the bases. Don’t worry.”

“I can’t help it. A man is dead.”

“The problem is to do with our alibis, as well as our
motives,” Haydn said. “As in, I don’t have actually an alibi.”

Penny nodded. “Me neither. I was walking the dog, but my
dog can’t prove that.”

Linda spoke up. “I went off for a drive. I honestly did. No
witnesses.”

“I was out for a run,” Jared said. “Everyone knows that …
but no one can say that they saw me.”

There was a pensive silence.

“Look,” Penny said. “It’s silly of the police to expect
none of us to talk to one another. We all live in the same place.”

“I don’t,” Haydn said. “I live in Lincoln.” He said it as
if it was a badge of honour.

“I thought you had a house in Glenfield,” Penny said.

“I have a few. I let them out.” She could almost hear the
unspoken addition:
I wouldn’t live in Glenfield.

“Oh.” He was a landlord. That would explain the skip
outside the house she’d seen Haydn leave.

Jared drank down his lemonade. “Penny, I promised to show
you some tricks with photo editing, didn’t I?” he said.

“You did.”
One of us
, she thought, her mind still
whirring along that unsettling track, and she decided she didn’t want to meet
him alone.
It could be him.
She had planned to invite him to her house.
One
of us…
“When are you free? We could use the community hall when Reg is
there with his silver surfers class.”

“I can extend my lunch hour tomorrow. Is he there on a
Tuesday?”

“I think he does most days now. That would be great.” She
put her diet soda down, half-finished. “I’m sorry. My stomach is in knots. I
can’t drink anything. I feel ill.”

“It’s the stress,” Linda put in. Penny had thought she’d
been uncharacteristically silent for too long. “Some people just aren’t cut out
to handle it.”

Penny idly wondered if she could take Linda down in an
actual hand-to-hand fight, but restrained herself. “Quite,” she said, in the
most cutting way she could. Ah, the glory of British insults.

Linda’s brows lowered. She
had
felt the bite.

“Anyway, I am going to head home,” Linda said suddenly,
standing up.

Haydn, too, pushed his mug aside. “This day can’t be over
quickly enough, as far as I’m concerned.”

They ended up all moving to the pub’s doors at the same
time. The cold air hit them like a blast. Penny juggled her large bag from her
elbow to her wrist, searching for her gloves which she remembered too late that
she did not have, and in her fumbling she managed to tumble her phone out onto
the top of the steps.

They all stopped and watched the plastic and metal shear
off as the phone bounced down to the pavement.

Penny could have cried. It was the last straw. She bit her
lip and threw her head back, and stalked down, collecting the debris as she
went. She shoved the mangled bits into her bag.

She had a feeling it wasn’t simply going to pop back
together like a jigsaw.

She didn’t turn around to wave anyone goodbye. She’d had
enough. She was stretched thin, like a piece of elastic. She heard Haydn say to
the others, “We must stick together.”

She could barely hold
herself
together. She held
back the tears of frustration and fear, and headed for the bus station.

When Penny woke up on Tuesday morning, she knew she was
ill. She lingered in bed, wrapped in the heavy, warm blankets, until she heard
the thudding paws of Kali as she blundered up the stairs. Penny liked to think
that the dog had some kind of sixth sense and was deeply in tune with her
owner, but the reality was probably more to do with food.

As in, the current lack of it.

Kali pushed the door open and stood there, staring at Penny
hopefully.

It was no good. She had to get out of bed, for her dog’s
sake.

Her head spun and throbbed, and her throat was raw and
prickling. If she was lucky, it was just going to be a cold. She fed Kali, and
then raided one of the kitchen cupboards in search of early remedies. She found
half a packet of lozenges that had welded themselves together, a bottle of
Echinacea that had gone out of date three years past, and some floury-looking
paracetamol.

It constituted an unusual breakfast, but she washed it all
down with some strong coffee, and contemplated her day.

Since the accident the previous day, her smartphone had
become transformed into a thickphone, and was unusable. She needed to organise
a new one, and had to dig out the paperwork to see if she was eligible for a
free replacement or not. Right now, the thought of even trying to touch a piece
of official documentation, never mind read it, make her hurt.

“I’ll walk you in about an hour,” she told the dog, who had
food halfway up her muzzle. “Oh goodness. Then I’m supposed to meet Jared at
the community hall. Ahh, bother.”

* * * *

Somehow, she managed to get to the community hall on time.
As the day had worn on, many of her worse symptoms had eased. She wrapped up
well, shoved her cold hands into her pockets, and shuffled across town,
carrying her laptop in a large black bag.

She was amused to see Reg Harris apparently surrounded by
groupies. He ran the town’s community website, which had grown out of his
rather more basic local history site. With Jared’s help, he had turned it into
an online hub. Now Reg ran sessions to teach computing skills to the
over-fifties, the so-called “silver surfers”. Not a single one of the glamorous
older ladies had “silver” hair. In fact, Penny was hard pressed to say for
certain that they were all over fifty. They were immaculate, stylish, and gathered
around Reg in his dapper suit like they were a flock of giggling schoolgirls.

Which they probably still were, on the inside,
Penny
thought. She was feeling rather more like she was an octogenarian. She blew her
nose and hunted around for Jared.

He was sitting at a folding table at the back of the hall,
and he waved to her. She staggered over, and his first words were,

“You look awful.”

“I know.”

Then he realised what he’d said, and blushed. He knotted
his bony fingers together. “I am
so
sorry,” he stammered. “I am an idiot
when I talk to people, I really am. No wonder I’m single. Am you okay?”

“I’ve got a cold,” she said. “I feel grim. But let’s have a
look at these photos, eh? Just don’t touch anything that I touch, or you’ll get
it too. I’m a walking plague-pit.”

She flipped open her laptop and let it fire up. Jared had
his laptop already running, and he brought up the section of the community
website that allowed people to upload their own photographs. She couldn’t help
peeking as he logged in.

“Oh! So you’re WhiteDeer,” she said, spotting the prefilled
section of the login screen. “I always wondered who that was.”

He grimaced and twisted his hands so she could not see his
password, and she looked away. “Sorry,” she said. “Everyone else has such
boring usernames. I’m PennyWithADog; it’s bonkers. I tried to get something
normal, but ‘PennyM’ was taken and I can’t imagine by whom! I went through
loads of possibilities and then gave up and suddenly I was PennyWithADog. I
should change it. Anyway, whenever I see a photo uploaded by WhiteDeer, I
imagine it’s some shaman sitting in the woods with a laptop on his knees.”

“Nah, nice idea but it’s just me. Right. Are you ready?”

“Yup.” She opened the photograph that had been the basis of
the poster to advertise the Christmas market. “I want to improve this one.”

“It’s the one that Clive didn’t like.”

“Yeah. I know it’s stupid but it feels like a mark of
respect to him. Not that I’m using something he hated. I mean, that I am trying
to make it better, into something he would have liked. Do you get it?”

“Yes. I understand. Right, this is the set of actions. Let
me email this straight over to you…”

Penny blinked, coughed, blew her nose and settled down to
an hour of fuzzy-headed image editing.

* * * *

“Oh, I can’t do a single thing more,” she said at last, and
slumped back in her chair.

Jared looked at her in concern. “I think you need to go
home to bed,” he said.

“And I think you’re right.” She rubbed at her itchy eyes.
“I’ll call at the pharmacy on the way home.”

“I don’t think they can sell you anything that will
actually get rid of the cold,” he said. “Science still can’t cure it. It’s all
just symptomatic relief. Try eating a clove of garlic.”

“That’s for vampires, not colds!” She couldn’t help but
laugh at him.

He remained very serious. “Honestly, it does work, at least
to ease the symptoms. Or try cinnamon, honey and cloves in a tea.”

“I didn’t have you pegged as a herbalist. I’m impressed.”

Jared shook his head. “I’m interested in everything. An
omnivorous autodidact, that’s me.”

“A what?”

“I read anything, and I teach myself. I’m the original
uber-geek.”

“Well, thank you for sharing your knowledge with me. But I
have to get going.” She packed away her things, and pulled her heavy coat on.

“You’re not walking home, are you?” Jared leaped to his
feet. “Let me drive you.”

“No, no,” she said, waving at him. “I need the fresh air.
Honestly, it does me good. Oh!”

“What?” he asked in concern.

“I forgot. Could you do one particular favour for me,
please? I shouldn’t ask because you’ve been so nice to me already.”

“No, please do. I’m always happy to help.”

“I am supposed to be meeting Drew tonight, out at the
footpath that leads from the far end of the slipe. There’s a stile there. He’s
going there from work, and we’re supposed to be going badger watching.”

“It sounds delightful,” Jared said. “But with your cold, it
also sounds like a bad idea.”

“Exactly. But I broke my phone, you remember, yesterday, and
Drew hasn’t got a landline because he’s up at the woods the other side of the
road opposite to the industrial estate. They are setting up a Forest School
there, as an extension of The Acorns. It’s not far from where you work.”