Chapter Six
It rained toward the end of the afternoon, so I put buckets out in all the top-story rooms where they leaked.
That was the routine when it rained in this house.
Meanwhile, in town, James was unable to get the roof of the Rolls Royce up.
He arrived home soaked through, telling me the upholstery would have to be cleaned, possibly replaced.
Neither of us felt like eating much and the Potato Smiles I’d bought seemed inappropriate now anyway, so we had toast while we waited for the evening news to begin, needing to know where they were with the search for Lennie.
Watching the news was not normal for us, but there was no one around to witness it.
“Where did you find this?” James asked, checking his phone for messages.
“In the mausoleum. You dropped it when you were in there last night.”
“You went down there by yourself?” he said. “Didn’t think you had it in you. What about these?” He was looking at the wallet and the address book.
“Same place. I found them in Lennie’s pockets.”
He spent a moment paging through the address book, then picked the wallet up and looked inside.
He pulled out a bank card, then another, then a library card and a bus pass.
He found a ￡20 note and pocketed it, as a reflex action when he saw money.
Then he put the wallet back down where I had left it.
Then I gave him the bad news about Lennie’s phone being missing, I didn’t tell him I thought Mrs. Billings had taken it.
He didn’t know she stole things, and I didn’t want him to know; it would almost certainly lead to a sacking, and Mrs. Billings needed the job, while I needed our chats and snacks.
“Where have you looked?” he asked.
“In his pockets and in his bag.”
“I’ll look in the car.”
Of course; why didn’t I think of that? We paused the TV and I followed him to the garage. I watched, filled with hope, as he searched the car for a phone. Twenty minutes later the car had been searched several times and there was nothing.
“Don’t panic,” he said. “He could have lost it anywhere. What did you do with that bag he had?”
I hesitated.
“What?”
“I put it with his body,” I fibbed.
“Good. You’re sure the phone wasn’t in it?”
“Absolutely sure.”
We went back to the lounge to watch the local news.
Lennie’s disappearance was the lead story, along with a look back at his career, which was varied and mostly successful, spanning the sixties, seventies, and eighties, with a small blip in the nineties.
Now that he was all over the news, I realized I had seen him on the odd TV show.
He’d fallen out of fashion for a while and had, apparently, been involved in a number of disastrous business deals that, at one point, saw him homeless.
He had a renaissance around the turn of the century, following an appearance on a celebrity reality TV show, but had then drifted into retirement, living in a cottage in Great Beadington.
From there he headed up a number of local charities.
His life after showbiz, it transpired, had been devoted to good works.
In contrast, I divided my time between watching TV and plotting to kill my husband, and James managed investments no one could get their money out of.
His neighbors were out in force, singing his praises and praying for his swift return, harping on about how it was the not knowing that was the worst. I hoped they’d be able to come to terms with the not knowing; the alternative didn’t bear thinking about.
Although we were going to have to atone somehow—you can’t just run someone over and forget about it.
A neighbor wiped away a tear. Did she know something she shouldn’t? “It’s just not like him,” she said. “He’s usually in by ten o’clock with his hot chocolate and his slippers.”
“He’s the center of this community. It won’t be the same if something’s happened to him,” another said.
A man stepped up. “Japanese knotweed in his garden,” he said, “and he’s refusing to do a damn thing about it. It’s taking thousands off the value of my property.”
“Dangerous words,” James said. “If the police decide to progress the case, he’ll be a prime suspect.”
Oh lord, if that neighbor was blamed, it would mean that not only had we killed a local hero, but someone else would go to prison for it. I wondered at what point I would draw the line and confess on behalf of us both.
The reporter turned to a young man, standing next to him. The caption on the screen said: “Anthony Green. Son of Lennie Green.”
“If you’re watching this, Dad, please get in touch,” he said. “If someone’s kidnapped him, please let him go. He has children and grandchildren.”
“He has children and grandchildren,” I repeated to James, who didn’t react. Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, my thoughts turned to Lennie himself, how nice he’d seemed at the party and how it had all ended for him, as he was on his way home for hot chocolate and slippers.
“Slow news day,” James replied, unconcerned and unremorseful. “Who would kidnap him, for god’s sake? We’re safe. Even if that phone turns up, it’s not been here; we would’ve seen it if it had. So why would they link it to us?”
When they finally did shut up about Lennie, the next item on the news was an in-depth analysis of an under-elevens football fundraiser, so James may have had a point about the slow news day.
The wallet and the address book stayed on the coffee table for the rest of the evening, while we flicked from channel to channel, never settling on anything, and I drank a couple of glasses of wine to relieve my stress.
It went to my head, and it made me go to the loo three times, as they were quite large glasses.
Eventually, around midnight, James looked at Lennie’s property and said, “We can’t leave these lying around.
Put them in the case with the car keys while we decide how to get rid of them.
” He meant the case where the keys for his classic cars were kept.
It had a lock, so no one—and by that I mean Mrs. Billings—would come across them by chance.
I swayed my slightly drunken way over and did as he said.
Then we both went to bed, at which point, I couldn’t find my hairbrush. I never did see it again.
Over the following days we learned, via the local news, that the police really didn’t have a clue where to start.
No one had noticed Lennie leaving the party that night.
He was caught on camera walking down the drive, his bag over his shoulder, and turning left into the street.
He had later been seen, on CCTV, cutting across the high street toward the bus station, where he waited for the late-night bus that ran from Tippington all the way to Bristol, with Great Beadington in its path.
From the camera on the bus, we saw him boarding and chatting with the driver as they drove along.
At one point, he put his hand in his pocket and took out his phone, so we knew he had it then.
He alighted just outside the village, not far from where we had hit him; we must have been close at the moment he was stepping down from the bus. That was where the trail went cold. It was a short walk to his house, but there was no CCTV in that rural spot. Hooray!
As a result, the police were concentrating their efforts in the small area from the bus stop to his house.
That made sense, but I hoped they weren’t going to be searching the ground too closely.
We’d picked up as much of the smashed headlight as we could, but in the dark, in a hurry, on that night, pieces must have been missed.
I had no doubt a forensic search, if they chose to do one, would find more.
I wondered how many pieces they needed to be able to identify the make and model of the car.
It all left me feeling slightly queasy. When I went to bed, I dreamt about folk in white suits crawling around the bus stop and finding…Lennie’s phone!
***
The phone was all I thought of over the weekend. I continued to think about it as I waved James off to work on Monday morning and took stock of my snacks.
If Lennie had dropped his phone somewhere between the bus stop and his house, it would remove it from our list of things to worry about.
It wouldn’t matter if it was found or not.
It was easy to believe a man walking along that path, in the dark, after a few drinks, could have dropped it into the grass that lined either side of the path, and it was just far enough from the first row of houses for the ringtone to go unheard when his friends and family tried to call him.
Was it? I wondered. Was I right about that?
I clicked on to the online news for an update.
I knew that didn’t match my usual search history, but if the police came asking, would it really be so strange to look up a local celebrity who had gone missing?
And if we had covered our tracks so well, why would they come anyway?
“Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst,” James said of the matter. “It’s the Cub Scout motto.”
I didn’t think it was, but I took his point.
There was nothing on the news that hadn’t been there before. There was nothing new about Lennie, nothing about debris from a smashed Audi headlight cover, and nothing about the phone.
I typed Lennie’s name into the search bar and hovered my finger over the “go” button. I pressed it.
The first few links were the same news articles I had just looked at. I worked my way down to the Wikipedia page, tapped on it, and looked at the information at the top: Leonard Patrick Green, born on 7 April 1949.
Now I knew his middle name was Patrick and that he was an Aries—useful to know for the mausoleum wall.
I scrolled down to the personal section and read that he had been married for nearly forty years and had four children, he played in an amateur skiffle band, and was a member of CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale.