Small Town Secrets (Some Very English Murders Book 2) (18 page)

“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.

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.