Small Town Secrets (Some Very English Murders Book 2) (7 page)

“Oh.” Penny could see the problem. “And what about local
knowledge and connections?”

“Exactly my point,” Cath said. “Oh, they are trying to claw
it all back now, with community support officers and all that, but it’s too
late. We’re fragmented. We’ve lost touch. And we’ve lost the respect and
support of the community, I think.”

“And that’s where I come in. Basically I’m going to be your
informant.”

“Yes, but not so underhand. Everyone knows you’re on the
side of justice, after all.”

They came to the central market area, a large covered space
with a plethora of stalls inside. “I’m going to pop in for some new pyjamas for
my boys,” Cath said. “Coming for a browse?”

“Ahh – no. I think I’ll head home,” Penny said. “I’ve got a
lot to think about.”

“You know where I am if you need me,” Cath said. “Oh! That
online dating thing. So, have you made a profile? Have you had any hits yet?”

Penny backed away, leaving Cath standing frustrated by one
of the doors to the market hall. “No. And no,” she said, laughing.

“No? Why not!”

“I’ve got work to do,” Penny said.

“Go on with you.”

Penny waved her hand and turned away. She wasn’t going
straight home. She’d had an idea.

* * * *

She found just the place she needed, tucked down one of
Lincoln’s many side streets. It was an independent camera shop. She browsed the
window outside but the acronyms – and, indeed, the prices – made her feel
dizzy. She sucked in a deep breath and jangled the door open.

The sales assistant was a young man, mid-twenties, with
dreadlocks piled up and secured behind a colourful bandana. His skin was
startling white but his eyes and hair were jet black, and the contrast was
stunning, in a proper glossy magazine model sort of way. Penny told herself to
behave. She wasn’t quite old enough yet to flirt shamelessly with young men;
another decade and she could be as scurrilous as she liked.

“Good afternoon,” the man said. “How can I help you?”

“I would like to buy a camera.”

“You’re in the right place. What sort of photography are
you hoping to do? Do you already have a camera?”

He was understanding and approachable as she explained that
she had been using a small compact digital camera for her artistic reference
work, but now she felt she wanted to take the next step. He carefully told her
about the options she had, and she was pleased to discover she understood what
he was talking about. His friendly nature disarmed her completely and she was
soon handing over her credit card and agreeing to a much larger sum of money
than she had intended on spending.

But now she was the proud owner of a DSLR – a digital
single lens reflex camera, with a proper lens that went in and out like they
did on the movies, and a flash on the top that popped up with a satisfying mechanical
clicking sound. She also somehow bought a bag, some filters, a cleaning kit and
a beanbag that she was told was just like a tripod, only more beanbag-ish.

“What’s the first project going to be?” the sales assistant
asked cheerfully as he bundled up her purchases.

Now was her chance. “I want to get into urbex,” she said,
trying to sound as if it was completely normal.

“Never heard of it,” the man said after a brief and telling
pause. “Now, landscapes, they are always popular. Where do you live?”

“Upper Glenfield.”

“It’s lovely countryside around there. You’ll get some
great skyscapes, too.”

“There’s an urbex group there. That’s urban exploration,”
she added helpfully.

He bent down to pull some sticky tape from a roll under the
counter, hiding his face. “Nah. Sounds dodgy to me.”

“Have you really never heard of it?” she asked.

He straightened up, his face blank. Too blank, she thought.
He taped up her bag and passed it over. “Nope. I’d stay out of all that if I
were you.”

“I like the idea of charting the decay of our industrial
heritage,” she said, staring quite intently at him. Eye contact could be
intimidating, she was finding.

The man sighed. “Look. I don’t know anything about urbex or
any of that. Trains, that’s what I photograph. I like trains. But Upper
Glenfield … urbex … well, be careful, that’s all I’m saying. If I
had
heard of it … which I haven’t … I’d tell you to watch out for that pair, Lee
and Blue. I mean, they are okay guys, don’t get me wrong. Nice guys, the both
of them. No harm at all. It’s just that … the law’s their own, if you get my
meaning.”

“So you do know about the urbex group.”

“Nope. Nothing. Thank you for your custom.”

His pretty face was closed and blank, and she had no choice
but to leave, clutching her bag, and knowing a big, fat lie when she heard one.
He’d practically put a flag on it.

The rest of Tuesday was spent in a flurry of unpacking on
the kitchen table, reading the hundred-page instruction manual and waiting for
the camera battery to charge. Then she whiled away the evening exploring the
menus and taking random shots of the kettle using different settings. Was
“portrait” really so different to “macro”? She soon discovered that it was.

Kali obligingly ran up and down the back garden as Penny
played with the “sport” mode until she had three dozen photographs of a dog’s blurred
bottom and tail.

Photography was hard.

She barely slept, with “f-stop this” and “Warren Martin
that” whizzing around her brain until she was in a half-dream where she was
chasing a police officer while wearing nothing but a balaclava and shouting,
“I’ve lost my aperture!” When she woke in the grey dawn, and the threads of the
dream unravelled, she hoped they were just a product of the past few days, and
nothing Freudian.

Kali was sitting beside the bed, staring at her. Penny sat
up a little, and thought about Warren.

So, who were the suspects? She discounted the “every woman
in the area” theory.

Eric had argued with him at the camera club, possibly
because of his daughter Nina. Eric was a strange one, and Penny felt a dislike
for him. Was Nina a suspect, she wondered. There was more to investigate,
there, and it was lucky that she had an excuse – the calendar.

“I wonder if their photos have turned out all right,” she
said aloud, and Kali pricked up her ears in case the jumble of noise meant
something like, “I must feed the dog a massive breakfast right now.”

The members of the camera club were supposed to upload the
photographs to an online album that one of them had created, and then Penny
would pick from it to begin mocking up some potential layouts. Some of them had
scoffed at the need for a designer, until she had begun talking about fonts and
kerning and spot colour and so on. Then they shut up, and she was allowed to
get on with her job.

Penny stumbled through Wednesday in a daze as her brain
sorted out what she knew about Warren Martin. She spent a little longer online,
finding herself on the edges of forums dedicated to urban exploration, but some
of the rhetoric was alarming and she didn’t stray in too far. She went back to Warren’s
online dating profile, but there was nothing new to learn there. Yet she lingered,
as if she could read between the lines of what he said about himself.

“I am a traditional, old-fashioned gentleman,” he declared
as his opening statement.

What did that mean? More importantly, she thought, what did
it mean to him?

He had asked every woman he met out on a date. And had been
mightily offended when they said no. He was traditional. Did he see
“traditional” in the sense of the man being the leader, and the woman
following? Penny tapped her fingernails on the table top as she stared at the
laptop screen. There was nothing wrong with that, if both parties were happy
with it. She’d known many couples who quite happily lived that “traditional”
lifestyle.

But Warren didn’t allow for other points of view, she
realised. It was his way or nothing. He never took “no” for an answer. There
was an arrogance there, she decided.

“I long to care for a wife and a family,” he later said,
and she felt sad for him, then. That was really all he wanted to do. He’d never
do it now. What a waste.

Her sense of injustice flared in her belly. No one was
mourning him, the inspector had said. That was wrong. Nothing, no one, should
die without some acknowledgement. She’d get to the bottom of this case – for
Warren, for a man she didn’t even like, for the principle of it.

She looked at his profile picture, and he stared back,
passive, unchanging, and frozen in time.

* * * *

When Penny’s mobile phone rang on Wednesday night, she was
playing with her camera, trying to capture candle flames and smoke against a
black background, and it was not going well. Answering the call was a welcome
relief, until she saw the caller display.

She forced her voice to remain light. “Hi, Drew.”

“Penny! Hi, Penny. How are you?” He sounded casual and –
well, infuriatingly normal.

She frowned. She pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down.
“Not so bad. Yourself?”

 “I’m doing great. It’s been so busy, it’s insane. I love
it. I’m really sorry about that dinner cancellation the other night. I’ve got
to make it up to you.”

“The other night? It was over a week ago and I haven’t
heard from you since!”

“Really?” He sounded surprised. “That long? It feels like
yesterday. Time has flown by, hey? There was that police thing, not that I was
any help, and then a sudden rush booking of my courses at the hotel. And then,
oh yes, I haven’t told you – that school for naughty kids got in touch, because
they want to do some outdoor sessions with the lads. And lasses. I’ve been in
meetings. Me! Proper meetings where people wore suits!”

Penny found herself smiling. The burly ex-blacksmith was at
his happiest when rambling over the hills or messing about in woodlands, not
sitting in conference rooms. His wonder and delight was infectious. But she
wasn’t about to let him off the hook quite so easily. She spoke straight. “Drew,
I was upset that you didn’t get in touch for so long.”

“Oh. Sorry. Did I miss your calls? I wondered if my phone
was playing up…”

“No. I didn’t ring you, but…”

“Then … uh, then I didn’t know that you were upset.”

“No, but…” Penny sighed. This conversation was going
nowhere if she pursued this. They were just a few sentences away from saying
“I’m not psychic” and “you should have known.” She sat up straight and moved
on. “Yeah, I should have called you,” she said. “Anyway, tell me about this stuff
with the school! What school?”

“I have so much to say,” Drew said. “We’ve got loads to
catch up on. What are you doing tomorrow…?”

* * * *

One of the advantages of getting older, Penny thought as
she followed Drew along a narrow and lightly-trodden grass path, is that you
get over things much more quickly. Penny did not hold grudges. Once you passed
the age of forty or so, and you began to lose your contemporaries, and friends
and family fell increasingly quickly into the clutches of sickness or death,
you gave up feeding resentment and bitterness. Life moved faster and she was
not going to waste it by fretting about what should, or should not, have been
said.

And anyway, it was a pleasant day, and not too hot, and
they had the woods to themselves, and all was right with the world. Birdsong
and wildflowers could do that to you, if you were open to it.

Her camera swung against her hip. The dappled light and
shade under the canopy of trees was confusing both her, and her camera’s light
meter. She had played with the manual settings and tried various exposures. But
she wouldn’t know until she got home and loaded them onto the computer whether
her shots were any good or not.

Drew was pointing at the trees and chattering about bark.
She was trying to listen, but she kept getting distracted by scenes that looked
like they might make a good photograph, until she held the camera up and it
suddenly all went bland and boring.

“What do you think?” Drew asked, stopping suddenly.

“I’m worried about my depth of field,” she said.

“What field? We’re in the woods. But we’re coming out onto
the fields in a minute.”

“No … oh. It’s a technical term.”

“Which means?”

“Er…” she stumbled over her explanation. “Er, how much of
it is blurry or not.”

“You don’t want any of it blurry, I would have thought. No,
what do you think about the Sculpture Trail?”

“What Sculpture Trail?” she asked in confusion.

“I’d have thought you would have been all over it, being
all arty and that. The town council have a grant to create a trail of artworks
along some popular local walks. Are you going to bid to be involved?”

She shook her head. “It’s the first I’ve heard of it. And
I’m strictly two-dimensional. In art, I mean. Not, you know. I hope. If you
know what I mean.”

“Nope, you’ve lost me. What about the Warren Martin case,
eh?” Drew said. He squatted down and began to study some small plants at the
base of a tree while she fiddled with her camera.

“Yeah,” she said. “So, what about it? Where was he found?”

“Mm. They haven’t revealed it in the newspaper yet, have
they?”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m kind of working with the
police. Unofficially.”

He laughed and shook his head. “What?”

She had to explain three times and even then, he seemed to
think that she was misleading him slightly. But he did confess that Warren had
been found in an abandoned farmhouse about five miles from Upper Glenfield.

“An old farmhouse?” she asked.

“I suppose so. He was in the kitchen area, near the range.
There are no windows or doors. It’s been empty for decades. It’s unsafe, and it
needs knocking down.”