Small Town Shock (Some Very English Murders Book 1) (2 page)

“It’s a bag of feed or fertilizer or whatever it is that
farmers leave lying around,” she said crossly as she half-climbed, half-fell
down the slope to reach her dog.

Kali was now frantic with barking, foam forming along her
lips as she bounced.

Penny’s breath caught in her throat as she got closer. She
knew what she could see, now. Her palms went slippery with sweat. She knew it
was a body and she didn’t want to know that it was a body. Instead she focused
on Kali, calling her back with increasing desperation in her voice.

Maybe the man lying sprawled on his back was just stunned.
He was next to an electric fence. Maybe he’d wake up in a moment.

Though if Kali’s barking hadn’t woken him by now…

Feeling sick, Penny reached Kali and grabbed hold of the
lead again. She
had
to look.

The man was in his late fifties, wearing a dark green set
of overalls tied around the middle with orange baler twine, and he had an
open-eyed, alarmed expression on his grey face.

He was definitely not just stunned.

Panic rose up in Penny. She dropped the lead again and
forced herself to approach, reaching out gingerly to feel for a pulse in his
neck. She couldn’t run off. She had to do the right thing. “Sir? Sir?” she heard
herself jabbering. “Wake up!”

The skin was cold and felt almost rubbery to her touch, and
she recoiled, rocking back on her heels in horror, wiping her fingers on her
jeans. She pulled out her mobile phone and turned away to make the call she
knew she had to make.

* * * *

“It’s always the dog walkers, isn’t it?” Penny said. She
knew she was talking too quickly; she could hear her words tumbling out in a
stream as soon as the friendly police woman had led her away by the elbow. She
wasn’t in uniform; she wore sturdy walking trousers and a quilted jacket in
shiny blue. Emergency services swarmed over the area, and a four-wheel drive
vehicle was on hand to ferry the personnel to the remote spot. “It’s always the
dog walkers. I’ve seen the news. Body found by dog walker, that’s what they say.
Oh my. I’m going to be a suspect, aren’t I? I didn’t kill him, you know.
Although of course I’d say that. Who was he, anyway?”

The police officer was very short, quite round, and very
firm. She smiled. “This way, please, Ms May. Let’s go back up to the road.
We’ve got a vehicle there where we can have a little chat.”

“Oh no, oh no, a little chat, that’s code for…” Stop
talking, Penny wailed in her head. I’m driving myself mad, never mind anyone
else. She was terrified of what she’d found. She’d touched him. She’d
touched
him. She tried to wipe her hand on her trouser leg without looking like she was
trying to wipe away evidence, somehow.

“Don’t worry!” The police woman began to laugh. “I’m not
going to bash you over the head for a confession.”

“Are you even allowed to say that? There was one time, we
were filming in a country in Eastern Europe, my goodness, I don’t even think
the country exists any more, and we had to … oh, sorry. Sorry. I am nervous.”
State the obvious. Way to go, Penny! She would laugh at herself … in the
future.

The police woman shrugged. “I know. It’s okay.” They were
still at the bottom of the slope and they walked away from the scene, soon
picking up a farm track. More police vehicles were arriving and parking up.
Kali went ballistic once more, and Penny hung on, but she wanted to throw the
lead to the floor and simply cry. Everyone would judge her. It was all too
much.

The police woman caught her expression, and said, very
calmly, “It’s going to be all right. Here. Give me the dog.” She held out her
hand for the lead.

“She’s crazy…”

“Hush, now. Come on.” The woman bent and reached into the
passenger seat of a police car. Her other hand held onto Kali’s lead with a
rock-like grip. Kali strained to get away, and then stopped, her senses alert
to something new.

Ham. The pink tasty nectar of the god of dogs.

The police woman fumbled with one hand, awkwardly tearing
the meat from her sandwiches into tiny squares and flung them to the floor,
saying, “Find it. Find, it, girl!” Kali was delighted, and while she was
occupied with her nose to the ground, the police woman was able to introduce
herself.

“I’m Detective Constable Cath Pritchard. I just need to
take some basic details from you, but under the circumstances, I’ll ask you to
come up to Lincoln police station later on today, when you can, and give a
fuller statement there.”

“The circumstances being that my dog is uncontrollable?”

“Yes. Well, no, I mean, because you’ve had a terrible shock
and everything.” Cath smiled again. “Finding bodies in the fields is not an
everyday occurrence around here.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

The police woman offered Penny control of her dog again. “If
you can take her lead again please, now she’s calmer, and I’ll make a few
notes.”

Penny gave her name and address, though she still had to
stop and think what her postcode was. “I’ve only been here a few weeks,” she
admitted.

“And where were you before?”

“I lived in London. I was a television producer.”

The detective constable’s neat dark eyebrows rose up. “Oh,
really? Ah, that’s why you were filming in Europe, then. It all sounds very
glamorous. I bet you’ve met some amazing people. I only meet people in
distress. Or drunk. Or dead.”

“It was stressful, demanding and tiring,” Penny said.
“That’s why I’m here, in Lincolnshire. It all got a bit much after … too many
years.” Decades, in fact. She was the wrong side of forty and beginning to feel
it. She’d worked hard to achieve what she thought she wanted and once she’d got
it … it wasn’t enough.

“Are you here on holiday then?” the constable asked.

“No, I’ve retired.”

“You’re far too young to retire! I guess I went into the
wrong job.”

Bless her. “Thanks. It’s sort of a retirement but mostly
just a change of scene while I work out what I really want.” I left it a bit
late, she thought. I should have scheduled my mid-life crisis to happen when I
had more energy to deal with it.

Cath’s eyebrows quivered, but she drew a line in her
notebook and didn’t pursue the matter. “Okay. And your date of birth, please?”

Penny gritted her teeth and told her, adding, “Yes. I’m
forty-five. And single. No emergency contact details, no.” She could put her
sister, or her parents, she thought. But what use would they be, so far away?
It was easier to deal with things on her own.

Cath nodded. “So can you tell me what you were doing out
here on private land?”

Ahh. So it was private. Penny looked down at the dog who
was apparently licking a stone. She gave the lead a tug. “It’s not that I am
saying she’s a dangerous dog,” she said slowly, mindful of the law. “But she’s
a little, ah, unreliable, when she sees other dogs. And I had no idea how many
dogs there were in the world until I ended up with one that doesn’t like
others.”

“She’s fine with people, though?”

“She is. She recognises people as walking potential
food-dispensers.”

“Right. Were you aware you were trespassing, as it
happens?”

“No… am I in trouble for that?”

“Only if the landowner presses charges.” They fell silent
as the body was carried past them, covered discretely. “And I suspect that is
highly unlikely.”

* * * *

Penny made it back to the cottage with only one further
incident. As she had approached the turn for River Street, an elderly man and
his terrier had appeared without warning from the churchyard. Penny had taken
immediate evasive action, darting behind a large skip that stood outside the
school gates. She had held Kali’s collar tightly, peeping over the top of the
skip until the man and his dog had disappeared. She hoped no one was watching
her. Now she’d be known as “the crazy London woman with the barking dog who
goes eating out of skips.”

“Come on, you,” she said to Kali. “Let’s go home.”

Back in her cottage, she released Kali and the dog repaid
the kindness by barking at a corner of the hallway for about a minute before
wandering off to the kitchen for a drink of water.

Now it all seemed very quiet.

She had expected to be inundated with work colleagues and
friends from London; they’d all promised to come and visit her new life in the
country.

No one had. Few had even kept in contact, and the sporadic
one-sided phone calls soon died away. Without the gossip of London life and
work to glue the conversations together, it was obvious how little Penny had in
common with her old acquaintances.

“I’ve had more contact with a dead body than my so-called friends
of twenty years,” she said to Kali as she followed her into the kitchen to make
a cup of tea. “Friends? Huh.”

But surely it was partly her own fault that she hadn’t yet
made any new friends. She’d had to creep around with the dog, skulking in
shadowy corners, so she wasn’t meeting people that way. She didn’t go to any
clubs or groups. She’d even been shopping in the nearby city of Lincoln rather
than visit the local butcher’s and greengrocer’s places in the town.

Kali cocked her head to one side and looked at her, her
brow furrowed. “Yeah, I know how you feel,” Penny told her. After her brew she
would have to trap Kali in the living room and head up in her car to Lincoln to
make her statement to the police.

Then what?

She was here to make big changes in her life, she reminded
herself. She had to move on from the shallow city stress that was dragging her
down. Reconnect with her careful art student self who had dreamed of rainbows
and unicorns. She needed to get rid of her black and grey suits, her kitten
heels, her severe hair style, her hour-by-hour plans for her days.

She needed to be free and happy and relaxed and “find
herself.”

It was a shame that she had found a corpse instead.

It was only Monday morning and Penny was already exhausted.
These were not the relaxing retirement days that she had planned for. At this
rate, she’d never get her blood pressure down to a sensible level.

Penny had woken at silly o’clock and taken hyperactive Kali
for a quick scoot out of town, although she stuck to the roads this time. It
didn’t seem like enough exercise for the buoyant dog, but how else could she do
it? She looked at Kali’s sad face as she pulled her back into the cottage again.
Her whole body was saying, “Let’s go out again! Let’s climb hills and chase
rabbits and bark at shadows and have fun all day long!”

“Maybe it would be fairer if I took you back to the rescue
centre,” she said sadly, unclipping the lead. Was it selfish of Penny to keep
her? She had to do the best thing for the dog, regardless of whether she felt
as if she had “failed.”

Kali froze. She didn’t understand words but she could
certainly tell if something was wrong. Her eyebrows furrowed and she looked
scared.

Penny sighed and rubbed the dog’s head. “I’m sorry. I need
to learn how to handle you, don’t I? They did say you could take a few months
to settle in. But will you ever stop trying to attack every other dog that you
see? They don’t mean you any harm. I promise.”

Kali sneezed, licked her own nose, and wiped it on Penny’s
hand as a gift.

Penny shuddered and straightened up. Maybe there were dog
training classes locally. She had no idea what went on in the town – and
yesterday’s melodrama had convinced her that she needed to get more involved in
the community. She didn’t even know who the dead man was. At the police
station, they’d given his name as a local farmer called David Hart. Cath
Pritchard, the kind plain-clothes police officer, had mentioned that she lived
in the town, too. So Penny knew the names of two local residents … but one
didn’t really count any longer, being recently deceased and all that.

Kali gave her another baleful look as Penny left the house.
“I’m sorry,” she said to the dog, with genuine feeling. Dogs came programmed to
cause maximum guilt, apparently. “We’ll go out in the car later, maybe. Okay?”

Penny walked down along River Street. The terraced cottages
were long and low, built in the local yellow stone, with cramped on-street
parking outside. Along the back of the cottages’ gardens was an alleyway, which
gave all the residents access to sheds and garages. She had a small brick-built
outbuilding which held her new – yet old – M21 motorbike. It was a classic, and
something she’d lusted after for years. When she’d moved out of London, she’d
impulsively bought it; it even had a sidecar, but her dreams of persuading Kali
into it had not yet come to fruition. What if Kali saw another dog as they rode
along? The image of a Rottweiler launching itself off the back of a motorbike
was an alarming one.

At the end of the narrow road, she came to a cross roads.
Going right would take her along Church Street, south out of the town past the
church and the primary school, over a small bridge and to the Spinney and open
farmland. That was her usual dog-walking route.

Left, the road wound through some more modern housing developments
with their twisty-turny cul-de-sacs and paper-thin walls. At the northern end
of the town was a roundabout with a twenty-four hour fast food place and a petrol
station.

Straight on was the High Street which had the shops, the
town centre and further along there was the industrial estate. Penny passed the
Green Man pub and crossed the road onto the High Street. There was an open area
on the right for the weekly market but she had not visited it yet. On the left
was a parade of small shops – the post office, a small mini-market food store,
a greengrocer that seemed to have twenty different types of potato but no
oranges, a butcher with an intimidating display of knives in the window, a
florist and a hairdresser. The hairdressing salon had the inevitable bad pun
for a name: “Curl Up and Dye.”