Chapter Twenty-Six #3
“Chilly in here,” Mrs. Billings commented when she arrived on Monday morning.
I’d left every window in the house open since the mummification to try to expunge the smell.
Along with the cleaning I did, it seemed to have worked.
Mrs. B began taking biscuits out of her bag, but this time, I thought she was never going to stop, and I still didn’t feel like eating.
“How many?” I asked her, reminding myself of James and giving myself a flashback.
“This is my redundancy payment,” she said. “I’m not going to be able to work here anymore I’m afraid, Daisy. I’ll do my week’s notice, but after that I’m going to go and clean at the cricket club. They’ve been after me for ages.”
Daisy? What happened to Lady Langley, love?
“Don’t I give you a redundancy payment?” I asked. “I’m not making you redundant.”
“A leaving present, then. My leaving present to you.”
I still thought that went from me to her. “But why?” I asked. “Aren’t you happy here?” I wondered what the cricket club were going to make of her light fingers, lackadaisical work ethic, and flextime.
“They’re paying me 50p an hour more,” she said.
“I’ll pay you 50p an hour more. I’ll pay you 60p an hour more.”
She looked serious. “In honesty, Daisy, I’ve been hearing some things I don’t like recently. Things about you and Doug Newman. I’m shocked, I won’t lie, and your poor mum will be turning in her grave. I can’t work here anymore, not in good conscience. It makes me sick to my stomach.”
If that made her sick to her stomach, she should’ve been here yesterday. But then the sting of what she’d said kicked in: She was leaving because she was ashamed of me. I hadn’t even done what she thought I had, but I couldn’t put the record straight.
“Think of those kids,” she continued. “You tried to wreck their home. Alright for you, up here with not a care in the world, no children to worry about, no one but yourself to please.”
And that stung the most.
“I’ll just do the season at the cricket club, then Eric and I are going to retire. The time has come.”
“Your nest egg?” I asked.
“That’s right,” she said. “Speaking of which, we’ve been trying to get hold of Lord James, but he’s not answering.”
“I haven’t seen him for a couple of days,” I told her. “He hasn’t replied to my messages. Do you think I should be worried?”
“Hmmm,” Mrs. Billings said. “I’ll put word out at Silver Surfers, see if anyone’s seen him.”
She did and they went to the forum and all their social media apps, but no one had any sightings to report.
Meanwhile, in the priest hole, sprinkling James with table salt every day was making him look a bit crusty, and after a week I had to go over him with the vacuum cleaner nozzle to get the bits that had clumped together and the residue that fell to the bottom of the space. But it seemed to be working.
I sniffed the air every time I walked past, never sure if there was a slight smell or if my guilt was making me imagine it.
Just in case, I sprayed a bit of his aftershave from time to time to keep any odor at bay.
This was an all-or-nothing strategy, either it worked perfectly or it failed completely. So far it was working.
Meanwhile, I was wondering how long I should leave it before I reported James as missing.
It was hard to know what kind of time lapse would make me look concerned without jumping the gun.
James was a grown man in good health. If he wanted to ignore a message, he had every right to do so and often did.
Then the situation resolved itself. There was a knock on the door. I ignored it. There was another knock.
“Police!” a voice said. It was DS Khan. “Open up, we can see you.”
Sniffing the air, I made my way down the grand staircase and opened the front door to the familiar sight of Parker and Khan. I stood there, barring their way inside.
“Do you want me to come down to the station?” I asked, unusually enthusiastic about it. “I don’t have a solicitor, so we don’t have to wait.”
“We’re looking for Mr. Dixon, actually,” DS Khan said.
“What for?”
“We just want to ask him a few questions.”
“What about?”
“Oh, the weather, the Little Beadington bypass, the church bell fund. What do you think?”
“I don’t know where he is,” I said. “I’ve been trying to get hold of him.”
“We know. So have we, but he seems to have parted ways with his phone.”
Three cheers for the honest folk of Upper Iffley! And if they had the phone, they had the messages from Lennie. I tried not to smile.
“What’s happened to his office?” Parker asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you mean?”
“It’s gone. He emptied out all the rooms he used and left without paying the rent.”
“He did make the staff redundant,” I said, remembering the tale of Oliver Thrussell. “I suppose then he didn’t need the office, but he didn’t say anything to me.”
They gave me a look that said another interview was in the offing. They probably didn’t realize exactly how separately James and I had been living, but for now they left me alone.
“If you see him or hear from him, please let us know,” Khan said and with that, they left. Was it too much to hope, I wondered, that the tide was turning.