Chapter Twenty #2
Why would you steal someone else’s inhaler?
For the first time, I googled kleptomania and learned that it is merely the compulsive urge to take things.
It doesn’t have to be valuable, it doesn’t have to be of any use to the thief.
It just has to be not theirs. That is why you would steal someone else’s inhaler.
I wondered if she’d taken the vertebra Mrs. Faulkner said Great Beadington had pilfered from the Bone Bonanza.
“Aaargh!” I shouted, and I threw the paperweight. It bounced off the wall and left a chip in the paint. That infuriated me even more, and I threw my phone across the room. It landed harmlessly on James’s armchair and with it went my fury.
I sat down to think and after some time was able to console myself with the thought that this was just a trial run.
It had gone badly, but I had other items to leave.
Sooner or later something would be flagged as suspicious.
Anyway, the inhaler didn’t exactly scream “Lennie!” I would’ve been lucky if anyone had seen it and made the connection.
On reflection, it was a poor choice. I put the paperweight away and went back to see what else was in his bag.
I still had the sense that this was a realistic way forward.
***
And so it was. For Mrs. B’s next visit, I set out the address book I had found in Lennie’s pocket.
I was hoping it had his own name and address in it, ideally under the heading “property of,” but when I checked, that wasn’t the case.
Never mind, though, it surely wouldn’t take the police too much poking about to find out whose it was.
This time, I left it sticking out from under James’s bed. And soon…
“Lady Langley, love, come and look at this.”
I went through and Mrs. Billings had the book in her hands. She was flicking through the pages. “Looks like Lord James has left this behind,” she said. “Do you think he needs it? Should you give him a ring?”
“What is it?” I asked and she handed it over to me. I spent a minute looking at the names and addresses; they were all strangers. “This isn’t James’s,” I said. “We don’t know any of these people.”
“Well, whose is it?” she said.
“I don’t know, but why would he have someone else’s address book? Where did you find it?”
And she told me she’d found it sticking out from under the bed.
“Maybe it’s been left behind by the previous owners,” she suggested.
“Lord Ashbury? This room’s had a new carpet since then.”
She looked thoughtful. “Whose, then? We should get it back to them; it looks important.”
Mrs. Billings was of the same generation as Lennie, where the loss of an address book could equate to the loss of many of your contacts.
And it was a generation where it was normal to hand lost property in at the local police station.
So, five minutes later, the cleaning abandoned for the day, I drove us into Upper Iffley to the village police station, where young PC Wylie looked at us, bemused.
“It’s only an address book,” he said.
“That’s someone’s world,” Mrs. Billings told him.
“It seems very strange,” I said, “because we found it in my husband’s bedroom at Langley Hall. It doesn’t belong to him, but I can assure you that, aside from Mrs. Billings, no one but him has been in that room for a very long time.”
They both looked at me as I realized what I had just told them about the state of my marriage.
“Don’t you have a lot of ghosts in that place?” PC Wylie asked.
“They don’t usually leave us address books. Mrs. Billings, tell him again how you found it.”
She told him again.
“I just wonder why would someone else’s address book be in James’s room?” I said. “If we find out whose it is, I expect the rest will fall into place.”
PC Wylie looked at me with a “why would anyone care?” expression on his face.
“It just makes me think of something the archaeologists on our estate said,” I told him.
“They said, ‘your instinct is to focus on the big pieces, but the answers are often in the smaller things.’” They said nothing of the sort.
Their pearls of wisdom generally revolved around how long to leave a teabag in a cup of tea.
“I wouldn’t want it to look like we were trying to hide anything.
I’d prefer to hand it all over to the professionals, no matter how innocent it seems.”
“And your colleagues from town have been digging around, looking for clues about Lennie Green,” Mrs. Billings said, which was the way I wanted PC Wylie to be thinking, without wanting to have put it quite as bluntly as that. He acknowledged the point though and took the address book from us.
“Might give Tippington a ring,” he said.
“Thank you. And to clarify, it was Mrs. Billings who found it, in James’s room.”
With that we made our way back to Langley Hall.
As we turned into the drive I had a glimpse of a young woman standing in a field across the road, holding a camera.
Gone was the pink hair, changed to green, but the orange T-shirt had made another appearance and it jarred as badly with the new shade as it had with the pink.
I cursed under my breath and vowed that, if I saw her once more out in the open clashing like that, I was going to give her a color chart and I was going to stand over her until she had learned the lessons on it.
***
One of the frustrating things about planting evidence was that I could never really know what had been said to James by Parker and Khan.
I could only guess from his mood when he came home each evening.
The night after we’d delivered the address book to the police station, he was in a bad one.
I hoped it was due to contact from the constabulary and not just heavy traffic on the Tippington bypass.
My phone rang while I was mulling it over.
“Hello, Daisy?” the voice at the other end said. “This is Tarquin. We have a new development in your case.”
“‘My case’?” I said. “I didn’t know I was a ‘case.’”
“Well, you’re the prime suspect in a hit-and-run killing, so, yes, I think I should keep your file open.”
I had to sit down. It was quite a shock to hear it put so bluntly. “They don’t really think that, do they? Based purely on something they said my husband said. Which I’m sure he didn’t. Don’t they have to go looking for evidence these days?”
“They have some new evidence. They’ve had Mr. Green’s phone details and his phone was in or around your house on the night he went missing. They’d like you to go down to the station tomorrow morning to speak to them. Would you like me to meet you there?”