Small Town Secrets (Some Very English Murders Book 2) (5 page)

“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.”

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 colours 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.