Chapter Five
From the Hollinby Quernhow Village Facebook Page:
VILLAGE FESTIVAL UPDATE: Due to the heat and the lack of numbers, the children’s sports event has been replaced by a Fun Paddling Pool Challenge.
‘I’m a bit bothered.’ Liz fumbled in her bag for a tissue; her gung-ho curiosity of the night before had faded sometime in the hot small hours as she’d vainly tried to find a cool part of her bed. ‘I mean if Ffion was shouting at Nev—’ Her worried comment was broken off by an explosive sneeze.
‘What’s to stop her coming and shouting at us?’ finished Pat, taking a bite of millionaire’s shortbread. ‘What I’m thinking is if she’s been lying to the police, and it’s all round the village, surely someone’s going to say something to them?’
‘If Ffion has been lying,’ said Thelma mildly.
‘You think she wasn’t shouting at him?’ asked Pat.
Thelma shrugged noncommittally. ‘That’s what we’re here to find out,’ she said.
Liz blew her nose and tried not to stare too longingly at Pat’s rapidly melting cake. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It just feels like we’re, well, nebbing in—’
‘Which is because we are,’ said Pat through a mouthful of chocolatey crumbs. ‘Anything to get Ms Shally off our backs.’ She looked round the rather sparsely peopled village green. ‘What bothers me is exactly how we go about nebbing in. There’s not many people about for a village fete.’
They were standing in the shade of one of the oaks fringing a village green.
Across the road in the car park of the closed and boarded pub a brass band could be heard discordantly tuning up, rather outnumbering the actual visitors.
At first glance Hollinby Quernhow had looked idyllic: bunting and stalls brightening the browning twin triangles of grass that formed the centre of the village, with more stalls outside the individual houses.
The archetypal English fete on an archetypal English summer day.
Closer inspection, however, revealed a somewhat different story.
The main feature of the festival – like so many other village festivals – was that locals were free to run their own stalls outside their houses, a system that worked very effectively in most places.
Hollinby Quernhow, however, where almost every other house was a holiday let or second home, was not most places.
Here the net effect was too few stalls, spread widely and awkwardly – too few beads on a too long string.
And – glaringly apparent to Liz, Pat and Thelma as ex-teachers – was the marked lack of the young.
There were only a couple of chocolate-stained toddlers, very few youngsters pitching wildly at the stacked tin cans and no teenagers moodily showing off on the Whack-a-rat.
‘But the stalls outside the houses are going to be manned by the people who live here,’ said Thelma. ‘And I did notice there’s a couple of stalls down towards the end of the village where Neville lives—’
‘Lived,’ corrected Pat, scrubbing chocolate off her sticky fingers with a napkin.
‘But are people going to want to talk?’ persisted Liz. ‘I mean a stand-up fight between husband and wife? And then the husband dies – it’s a bit of a personal thing.’
‘Are you kidding me, Liz Newsome?’ said Pat, fishing for the coral-pink handbag fan. ‘In a village? I’m surprised there isn’t a display stand about it, even if hardly anyone lives here.’
‘If there was a fight,’ pointed out Thelma.
‘You think Zippy Doodah got it wrong?’ said Pat.’
‘She’s not what I’d call reliable,’ said Liz, casting uneasily about as if the mere mention of her name could somehow conjure up that mountainous presence.
‘What I mean,’ said Thelma. ‘It’s all hearsay about this “argument”. Your friend – she didn’t actually see this row herself?’
‘She’s not my friend, just someone from pre-diabetes awareness,’ said Liz firmly. ‘And she heard about it from someone called Judy Bestall – she was the one who saw it.’
‘Exactly,’ said Thelma taking a final sip of her lemonade. ‘Hearsay. And we all know how these things get blown up.’
There was a pause as they considered the truth of Thelma’s words, remembering various times over the years when the most apocalyptic of tales had turned out to have a much tamer reality behind them.
Screaming rows that were in fact tense words, cases of measles that turned out to be slight temperatures, that famous time when a burning building proved to be merely a pan of unattended playdough.
‘So what’s the plan?’ said Pat, stuffing the napkin in her bag. ‘Find out if Ffion was telling a load of porkies to the police about not being in Carlisle?’
Thelma nodded. ‘And see if we can find out a bit more about Neville. What people here thought of him.’
Liz and Pat looked at their friend; even in the baking afternoon heat she looked as calm and self-possessed as ever.
‘What are you getting at?’ said Pat.
‘I mean,’ said Thelma. ‘If Ffion was screaming at him loud enough for people to hear, it’d be interesting to know why.’
Some ten minutes later, the band were striking up the theme to Jurassic Park, to rather desultory applause from some two dozen wilting onlookers.
Outside the white stucco cottage – the Old Post Office – an elderly man and an elderly woman were presiding over a plants stall.
With his black visor and her red sun hat, they put Pat in mind of the figures on a weather house.
She flashed the man one of her best smiles as she cast her eye over the various yoghurt pots of drooping seedlings.
‘These look great,’ she said enthusiastically, having no idea whether they did or not. If only Liz was with her.
‘It’s the watering that’s the beggar,’ said the man. He looked gloomily up at the blazing sun. ‘The rain butt’s been dry for three weeks now. If it keeps on like this, I’m going to lose half my planters.’
‘I keep telling him,’ said the woman. Was she one of those people who sounded perpetually exasperated or was it the effect of Pat’s smile? ‘He needs to be using the bathwater.’
‘And I keep telling you,’ said the man, ‘no way am I heaving great buckets of bathwater through the house.’
The woman looked at Pat, raising her eyes as if to say, ‘What can one do?’ Pat extended the smile to the woman and decided now was the time to cut to the chase.
‘I was thinking how lovely all the gardens were looking when I came through here last week,’ she said. ‘Only I was going to Neville Hilton’s funeral and didn’t get a chance to take a proper look.’
The look shared by Mr and Mrs was both immediate and significant. ‘You knew Nev Hilton?’ said Mrs, trying (and failing) to sound casual.
Pat nodded. ‘I worked with him – well, his wife. His first wife. But of course, I knew Nev …’ She paused, aiming the coral-pink hand fan at her neck.
‘A bit of a … funny onion.’ The inflection in her voice was expertly pitched.
Pat was getting the non-too-subtle feeling that here were two people who relished a bit of local gossip and she wanted to signal that whatever gossip there was, she was well up for hearing it.
‘A funny onion?’ said the man. ‘I’d put it somewhat differently.’
‘Donald,’ said his wife, but rather perfunctorily, Pat thought.
‘Jean,’ said Donald. ‘Don’t give me all that guff about not speaking ill of the dead. You know as well as I do that that playing field would be up and running if it wasn’t for Nev Hilton putting his spoke in.’
Jean looked wistfully at Pat. ‘This village used to have a cricket team and a football team. Some of us were thinking that if we could get the field sorted, get them going again, it might bring a bit of life back into the place.’
‘And Nev stopped it?’ asked Pat.
‘His Lordship objected,’ said Donald. ‘The field’s behind his house, see. Big letter of complaint to the parish council. His back gate gives on to the field, says it’s a security hazard, too much noise – like there aren’t some right old hullabaloos coming from that holiday let of his!’
Pat seized her chance. ‘Like the one going off the night he died?’ Again, that expert inflection in her voice. Again, significant glances were exchanged.
‘That wasn’t anything to do with the holiday let,’ said Jean. ‘That was Neville Hilton himself. Out in the garden for the whole world to hear.’
‘I’m not surprised the man had a heart attack,’ said Donald. ‘I certainly wouldn’t fancy my chances against her.’
‘By her you mean his wife?’ asked Pat.
Donald nodded. ‘The not-so-merry widow herself.’
‘But didn’t she tell the police she was in Carlisle?’
‘She might well have told them that,’ said Jean. ‘But according to Judy Bestall, she was out in the garden giving poor Neville a right old doing.’
Donald nodded in confirmation. ‘It’s a foolish man who attacks Ffion Hilton,’ he said.
‘Attacks?’ said Pat. ‘Neville was attacking his wife?’ Pat pictured that smug figure with the toothy grin.
Both of them nodded. ‘Fair going for her he was,’ said Jean.
Pat was having great difficulty picturing this. ‘And this Judy saw it?’ she asked.
‘It’s not what Judy saw as what she heard,’ said Jean. She paused dramatically. ‘First of all, she shouts out, “That’ll teach you.” And then she screams at the top of her voice, “Have pity on me.” You don’t say that unless someone’s doing something you want them to stop, do you?’
‘“You need to go to a charm school!”’ The plump lady nodded avidly at Liz. ‘Then she says, “For pity’s sake!”’ She cast a nervous glance at the honey-coloured barn conversion directly across the lane. ‘And now—’ Her voice changed, became sadder. ‘And now she’s on her own like me.’