Chapter Six #2
I was getting away from the point. I scrolled through more articles, looking for a clue as to what the police were thinking, but the pieces were all the same. I needed to see for myself: I was feeling the pull of the crime scene.
I’d heard about it many times on my dramas, the urge criminals have to revisit the site, and now I was experiencing it for myself.
I needed to know what was and wasn’t there.
After all, even now, the police might be peering at a pile of teeny, tiny headlight shards and asking themselves, “What happened here?”
Or they might be picking his phone out of the hedgerow and saying, “Oh, here it is, no more need to search this area.” Whichever it was, good or bad, I needed to know.
It was a risk James would almost certainly forbid me from taking if he knew; after all, there was nothing normal about me poking around on the shoulder of the road just outside Great Beadington, but if my mission were successful, the rewards would be immense.
If I found the phone, I could kick it into view, to be found soon after by an unconnected passerby.
If I found headlight pieces, I could scatter them to the winds.
Eyes fixed firmly on the prize, I grabbed the keys for my own Fiesta that James supplied me with, so that I could run errands for him, and headed out.
***
Great Beadington is our neighboring village, of a similar size to Upper Iffley but less attractive. It only has a handful of thatched cottages, whereas Upper Iffley is stuffed full of them—the whole village is an absolute fire hazard.
Great Beadington has a large village green, but the surface is so uneven, you can hardly step on it without twisting your ankle. Its folk dancers can’t move to a rhythm, its cricket team can’t guard a wicket, and its amateur dramatics society can never remember their lines.
The village pub quiz team can’t even beat ours when the subject is themselves. The question that stumps them is: “Who is believed to have stolen the third of Upper Iffley’s original five church bells?”
The answer is: Great Beadington! In a scandal that must have rocked the South West of England back in the fourteenth century, natives of Great Beadington broke into Upper Iffley’s church tower and stole one of the bells.
That is why there are only four bells in our church and therefore a note missing from the scale.
The Upper Iffley church bell fund, which was constantly running, was an effort to remedy this.
There was no recorded instance of anyone from Great Beadington ever having contributed to it.
I drove along the road that we had driven down on the night of the accident. This time it was lined with media vans, stretching some way out of Great Beadington.
I made my way through the middle of the village and found a side street to park on.
Before I left the car, I pulled my hair back and hid it under a cap.
I wasn’t well known there, but I was aware that Mrs. Faulkner, from the Upper Iffley newsagent’s, had a Beadington cousin, and Mrs. Chambers, from the small shop, knew another local business owner there.
So, you never knew who you were going to run into, and my hair is quite distinctive.
I wore sunglasses as well for good measure.
It was a sunny day, so there was nothing strange about that.
Then I walked toward the center of the village, nodding and exchanging “Afternoon’s” with strangers who were wandering aimlessly about, presumably looking for clues or news.
I walked until I saw a media van parked outside the school.
Farther down, I could see the beginning of the cavalcade I had passed on my way in and members of the press, congregated opposite one house.
I crept toward it and stood behind a van.
This must be Lennie’s abode. It was an old stone cottage in a terrace of cottages, all with large, well-tended front gardens.
Lennie’s had a cheerful red front door, but all the curtains were drawn, giving it a dour aspect.
It wasn’t far at all from the spot where we had run him down.
I stayed where I was for a moment, wondering how I was going to get past them all and out to the scene of the crime. I didn’t want to get myself on TV; that would certainly give rise to a comment from James when we watched the news that evening.
Then I had a stroke of luck; it was home time at the village school. Within minutes, I was surrounded by primary school children and parents, some of whom were heading in the direction of the media vans.
I didn’t go entirely unnoticed. Some of the mums glanced at me as they passed, and I heard comments such as “ghoul” and “rubberneck.” But to the media personnel, I was just a middle-aged woman doing women’s things. None took any notice of me.
I carried on, out of the village, keeping behind the news vans that lined the road. As I left the safety of the school crowd, I stopped and looked behind me every few paces. So far, so good, they were all looking in the opposite direction.
I stopped at the spot where I thought it had happened, or as near as I could get.
There was no forensics. Whatever they had been looking for, they must have either finished or looked in the wrong place.
Instead, there was a van parked there, crushing any pieces of headlight it crunched over better than I could have done.
I looked up and down the road, to check that no one was watching, then I crouched down and began to search for the phone.
I looked around the vans and along the path.
No sign of it. I looked in the long grass and under the hedge, automatically scanning for plants fit for foraging as I did so.
It was a habit left over from childhood, but there is little on offer until autumn; I found nothing you can eat and I found no phone.
I eased myself into the small ditch that ran below the hedge.
I emerged with wet trainers but still no phone.
I searched a longer stretch of road, in case it had been thrown in the air when we hit him, and I looked under the vans but no sign of it.
I crossed the road and did the same on the other side, unlikely though it was to have made its way over there.
On that side I found a broken umbrella, a pen, and a water bottle, but no phone.
I picked them up to throw away and looked under the vans again. Nothing.
It was time to give it up as a bad job. I was reluctant to leave without achieving what I had gone there to do, but the fact was the phone wasn’t there; I could search for days and still leave empty-handed.
I wished then that I hadn’t gone. If I hadn’t gone, I could still imagine it was there, dropped by Lennie when he got off the bus, and that there was nothing for us to worry about.
Now, I felt sure he had it with him when we arrived back at Langley Hall, and Mrs. Billings was looking more and more likely to be the last person to have seen it.
I tried to console myself with the knowledge that the news vans had probably neutralized any threat from the smashed headlight, but it was a scant consolation. Disquieted, I prepared to head home.
I looked back toward the village, remembering the dense clump of journalists outside Lennie’s house.
Not wanting to pass them again, I opened the gate and took the scenic route, through the fields, the sprouting acres of wheat and barley, and the bright yellow of oilseed rape, around the perimeter of Great Beadington, my trainers still wet and now uncomfortable.
By the time I got back to civilization, I was gasping for a drink, so I hobbled into the village shop for a bottle of water. On the way out I bumped into a young woman with bright pink hair, wearing a red T-shirt that clashed with it.
“Sorry,” I said, stepping backward to let her in.
“No problem,” she replied. “We’ve all got our minds on other things at the moment, haven’t we?” She nodded her head in the direction of Lennie’s street.
“I know,” I said. “It’s all I can think about.” Which was true. I moved to step past her, but she shifted slightly, so that I would have had to touch her to get by.
“Did you know Mr. Green?” she asked.
“Not as such,” I said, then, regretting that: “I suppose we all knew him in our way.”
She nodded sadly. “It’s been a shock, even for those who aren’t from round here. Are you local?”
I shook my head. “Upper Iffley,” I said, wishing straightaway that I hadn’t.
“Local to the area, then,” she said, although I couldn’t really agree that I was anything but alien in Great Beadington. She handed me a business card.
“Emma Beddoe,” it said. “Junior Reporter, Crime, The Western Bugle Online.”
“Crime?” I said. It sounded like the press were one step ahead of the police.
“I cover anything,” she told me. “I put crime on there because it’s the most interesting thing I do. What do you think happened?”
“Abducted by aliens,” I said; it seemed reasonable to think she wouldn’t follow up on that. “I have to get going now.”
“Let me know if you have anything you want to talk about,” she said, finally stepping out of the way. “Love your T-shirt, by the way.”
It was one I’d made myself, but it looked fairly normal. It was stitched from one of James’s T-shirts and the only eccentricities were the orange panels I’d added along the sides, bright against the original deep blue, where I’d taken it in to fit me.
I drove home wondering whether to tell James or not to tell James about my afternoon. In the end there was so much I hadn’t told him: the priest hole, Mrs. Billings’s kleptomania, my plans to kill him, the bag, the surveyors, why break the habit now?