Small Town Secrets (Some Very English Murders Book 2) (11 page)

Penny spotted the waitress and another member of staff standing
nearby. She said, very loudly, “What a cute dog you’ve got in your bag, Clarissa!”

The other member of staff by the waitress was a woman in a
severe suit, who looked rather managerial, and she descended upon them
instantly. “Madam, this is a food establishment and–”

“I’m going.” Clarissa shot Penny a venomous look.

“I must insist that–”

Clarissa pushed past the manager and clattered down the
stairs, ignoring everyone.

“If you come back–”

“I’m sorry,” Penny said immediately. “It didn’t achieve
anything but I wanted to show her up in front of everyone.”

“That’s okay,” Cath said grimly. “So did I. And it seems to
have achieved something,” she added as the manager came back up the stairs and
approached them both.

“Your
friend
has left without paying,” the manager
said.

“Yes, I thought she might. Add it to our bill, please,”
Cath said.

“I already have.” She swept away, and nodded to the
waitress, who remained in the corner, watching them in case they decided to do
a runner as well.

“My goodness,” Penny said, leaning forward to peer out of
the window. “There she goes.”

Cath peeked out as well, and they watched Clarissa stalk
down the busy street, her slender back straight and firm. “What a nasty piece
of work.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being high maintenance,” Penny
said, “and I think I had elements of that when I was working in London. But
there’s no need to be such a stuck-up cow about it all. Did you see how she
looked at people?”

“Yes. Like we were all dog dirt. Some things don’t add up,
but I can’t think why.”

“Same here. What do you think? What doesn’t add up for
you?” Penny asked.

Clarissa was out of sight now, and they both sat back. Cath
said, “It’s like you just said. She’s high maintenance. That bag wasn’t a cheap
knock-off from the market, I would bet. She was wearing a few hundred pounds’
worth of clothes and a few
thousand
pounds’ worth of jewellery. And she claims
that she works part-time?”

“Yeah, in ‘media’. What does that even mean?”

“We did some background research on her. It doesn’t mean
anything. She’s actually a junior office admin for a local company that
produces those advertising brochures that get delivered free.”

“Junk mail?”

“Just about. Junk mail dressed up as information. The
company operates out of a tiny office in Lincoln. It’s called LocalNews4U and
it’s struggling.”

Penny said, “So she must have investments or a rich family
or something.”

“Perhaps, but nothing that we could find. What didn’t add
up for you?”

“The way she was dripping with money, I suppose. I wondered
if she was a gold digger. But more importantly, it’s what she said about
Warren’s profile.”

“How so?” Cath asked.

“I’ve looked at it. You have, too. She said it was
sophisticated and that’s what attracted her. But come on, seriously? I know
he’d smarted himself up and made himself sound interesting, but there was
nothing I’d call ‘sophisticated’ about it. It was still Warren, just Warren
with a bit of polish.”

“You’re right.”

“What’s her last name?” Penny asked.

“She’s Clarissa de Castille.”

“Very fancy.”

“Hmm.”

They lapsed into a thoughtful and mutual silence.

 * * * *

Penny made a mental note of her full name, and as soon as
she got home, she got online and looked Clarissa up using a few different
search engines. She also logged back into the dating site and tried to find
Clarissa’s profile by guessing at what she would put for her interests and so
on.

She couldn’t find Clarissa on the dating site, but she did
come across a web of blogs which she was convinced were hers. Penny had soon
learned that you could find out who had registered a domain by searching
certain websites. She found one of the possible sites that Clarissa owned, or
ran, was devoted to entertainment gossip of the most virulent sort, with most
of the blog posts authored by a “MzzRazzr”, and there was another about make-up
with lots of links to sites where you could buy the products. When Penny
followed one of the links, she was then plagued with pop-ups appearing on her
screen until she signed up to some newsletter using a throwaway email address.

That was what Clarissa was doing with her spare time, Penny
thought. She was building some kind of online empire. People can make money
that way, can’t they? She only had the vaguest notions of how one made money
from writing a blog, but maybe that was how she earned enough money for her
fancy clothes.

So that explained one of their queries, but it didn’t
explain what Clarissa had seen in Warren in the first place.

It made no sense at all.

Exasperated, Penny glanced at Kali. “Come on. Go fetch your
lead, and let’s go for a walk.”

* * * *

It was ten o’clock at night, and Penny retired to bed with her
laptop and a hot chocolate. It wasn’t a summer drink, but it was a comforting
one, and she wanted something to ease her mind before she went to sleep.
Clarissa de Castille had unsettled her.

She knew that browsing around on the internet wasn’t the
wisest thing to do before trying to sleep, but she had run out of books to read
and needed to visit the local library soon. She decided she would contact the
spinner she’d met at the last craft fair, and thank her for her support. And
ask her, maybe, how long the other craft workers’ unfriendliness would last
for. She didn’t want to end up permanently ostracised. She’d heard of a local
sculptor called Alec who no one ever spoke to, and she was afraid that might be
her future.

She flicked onto her email.

Her inbox was full to overflowing with every manner of
unpleasant spam, and more pop-ups spiralled across her screen. She frantically
clicked all the red crosses, trying to get them to stop, and eventually forced
her browser to close and re-open.

She never had that much spam. What was going on?

This time she went into Facebook. There were over a hundred
notifications, and her stomach began to clench. She didn’t understand what was
going on. Somehow, she’d become friends with dozens of people that she didn’t
know, and half of them were tagging her in photos offering cheap shoes for
sale.

She closed it down.

Then, with a cold trickle of fear on her skin, she opened
the browser again, and checked her craft website. She didn’t log into the admin
side. She just visited it as a general member of the public would see it.

Gone! All her photos, all her carefully thought-out bits of
text – all gone now, and replaced by some cheap and tacky photos advertising
fake designer clothing.

She logged out again and slammed the laptop lid closed.

Who
exactly
were her rivals in the local craft
scene? She tried to remember their names.

Things had just become personal.

Penny was up early on Tuesday after a fitful and
unsatisfying night’s sleep. Of course, the local arts and crafts world was as
cut throat as anything she’d encountered in her television career in London;
people were people, with the same jealousies and ambitions, wherever you went.
It was saddening and it was maddening. She should have expected it.

But it was upsetting. “I tried to log into the admin
panel,” she told Cath on the phone. She had the phone clamped to one ear, and
the other hand held Kali’s lead as they walked along the slipe in the early
morning. She nodded and waved at the other regular dog walkers that she
recognised, although she knew the names of their animals more reliably than she
knew the names of the owners.

“Could you get in at all?” Cath asked. She was on her
hands-free set, driving up to work in Lincoln, and occasionally her side of the
conversation would stop as she had to concentrate more fully on driving.

“Nope. Whoever did it had hacked their way in and changed
my password! I then had to jump through hoops with tech support, except they
all seem to be based in America and they are all in bed at the moment. I’ve got
to scan and email some proof of identity or something. It’s a nightmare!”

“I’m really sorry to hear this. Any ideas? Could it be a
random attack?”

“It’s personal and it’s targeted,” Penny said. She stamped
angrily along the hard-baked earth. Kali was looking longingly at the river,
and Penny tugged her away before she launched herself into the water. “Now I’ve
started to go to craft fairs that are further afield, I’m coming against people
who’ve been in the business for longer, and they don’t like newcomers. And the
thing is, using floral motives and nature images – like I do – is hardly
original. I mean, there’s no copyright on a cowslip, is there? But people do
get resentful. And when I turn up at a fair, with my bags selling more than
their horrible creations, they get jealous.”

“Ouch. I thought it was all a lovey-dovey world of women in
floaty skirts wearing crystals.”

Penny laughed. “I can assure you it’s daggers drawn,
sometimes.”

“Well, I’ve got news about the murder case that might take
your mind off it,” Cath said.

“Oh! Really? Go on.”

“Well, I thought about Eric, because I know you’re quite
concerned about him. We wanted to know where he was on the night of Warren’s
murder. He said he was at home, but he didn’t have an alibi, because his wife
was at a party in Lincoln and Nina was at a friend’s house. We did the routine
checks, of course. Nina and her friend had gone to a take-away and there is
CCTV confirming that. But when we went to the host of the party that Eric’s
wife, Jane, was supposed to have been at…”

“What? Go on.”

“Jane wasn’t at the party at all,” Cath said.

“Okay, so where was she?”

“We don’t know. But we are going to talk to her today.”

“Did Eric really know that Jane wasn’t where she said she
was?” Penny mused. “Or is she having an affair, perhaps?” Penny felt
uncomfortable. “It’s pretty horrible how these secrets come out like this.”

“There’s nothing to say one way or the other yet,” Cath
said with a note of caution in her voice. “Don’t jump to any conclusions. There
are a million reasons why Jane might have been somewhere else. Perhaps she went
to see a friend in crisis.”

“True, true. On the other hand,” Penny said, “if I were
married to Eric I’d have an affair.”

“Penny!”

“Sorry. But it is true.”

“Look, I’m getting to Lincoln now, so I need my wits about
me. I’ll call you tonight and let you know if anything new has come up.”

“Okay.”

* * * *

Penny didn’t want to look at her website again for a few
hours. The whole thing was making her feel ill. Instead, she prowled around her
back garden and half-heartedly tidied up the herbaceous borders, with Kali
lying under a shady bush and watching with interest.

Her thoughts kept returning to Eric, and Nina, and the
niggling doubts she was having. Nina had been living in Scotland, with a
partner and a good job, after completing her degree. She seemed to be a mature
young lady with a good outlook on life.

Her father was exactly the sort of overbearing man that
daughters moved away from, Penny thought. Although Penny herself had moved away
from her own parents; so it was a natural thing, too, she told herself and she
probably ought not read too much into it.

She’d received a postcard from her parents the previous
week which showed a cruise ship and a backdrop of idyllic-looking Greek
islands. It had been sent before their email declaring that they were home for
a while. She was delighted for them. She imagined they would still be
travelling the world when they were in motorised wheelchairs. She certainly
hoped so.

Nina was an only child, as far as Penny knew. Sometimes
Penny felt like an only child, too. Her younger sister, Ariadne, had been born
when Penny was eleven and just starting high school. Penny had been a keen,
over-achieving sort of student and Ariadne was an uninteresting ball of crying
and leaking for the first few years. By the time Ariadne was walking and
talking, Penny was getting caught up in the heady and all-consuming task of
being a teenager, which was a full-time job involving crazy make-up, loud
arguments, slammed doors and music with swearing in.

Penny straightened up, and her back sent a ripple of pain
through the muscles. It was still a surprise to her, now, when she found that
her body wouldn’t do what it always used to do. She took her time getting to
her feet, and brushed the earth from her hands as she surveyed her handiwork.

There were fewer weeds, but other than that, the border
didn’t look much different.

Ariadne, she thought as she turned to go back into the
kitchen. She only lived an hour away, with her sullen husband who made Penny’s
flesh crawl, and the brood of children that seemed to span all the ages from
toddler to young adult. She’d never understood Ariadne’s choices.

No, that wasn’t quite true. Ariadne seemed to think that
Penny looked down on her for becoming a homemaker  – she’d said as much, in a
shouted argument, two years ago. That was the last time they’d spoken to one
another.

But Penny didn’t have an issue with Ariadne wanting husband
and family and home and children.

But why
that
family,
that
husband,
those
children?

Kali nudged the backs of Penny’s legs. “Manners,” Penny
said, stepping aside to let the dog into the kitchen. Penny looked at the bread
in its plastic wrapper on the counter.

She didn’t fancy sandwiches for lunch.