‘No,’ said Liz, pointedly getting out her car keys. ‘I had to get off.’
‘You missed a good do.’ A faraway look came into Zippy Doodah’s eyes and her voice dropped to an appreciative monotone. ‘Vol au vents, crab pâté, these little meringue thingies. And I tell you something, I didn’t put any ofthatin my food diary!’ She nodded grimly and Liz looked instinctively over her shoulder as if expecting Harvey to bear down on them with a wide smile and a sugar-count chart.
Zippy looked at Liz. ‘So how comeyouknew Nev Hilton?’
‘My husband knew him through Rotary,’ said Liz. ‘And I knew him slightly through working with his wife – his first wife.’ Shecame to a stop, aware that Zippy was giving the sort of stare that made her wonder if her blouse had come unbuttoned. ‘It was very sad,’ she added uncertainly, wondering what it was she’d said.
‘Sad and sudden.’ A definite timbre of something significant had entered Zippy’s voice and all at once Liz felt if she had to, she could always go to Tesco first thing tomorrow.
‘It was a heart attack I heard?’ she said.
‘That’s what they said.’ Zippy’s gaze didn’t falter.
‘Do people think maybe it wasn’t?’ ventured Liz.
‘I don’t know,’ said Zippy Doodah, who obviously felt that she did. ‘After all, the police should know what they’re talking about. What people are wondering is what brought the heart attack on in the first place.’ There was a pause and despite the heat of the evening Liz shivered slightly.
‘Surely anything could,’ said Liz, remembering her words to Chelsey, ‘if the heart’s not that strong.’
Zippy nodded. ‘Including a screaming row with his wife.’
‘Arow?’ Liz frowned.
Zippy nodded. ‘According to Judy Bestall.’
‘Judy Bestall?’
‘Lives in the village. She was walking her dog past the house and heard them – going at it hammer and tongs. Fair screaming at him she was.’
‘She? You mean Ffion?’ An image of that taut black and purple figure rose in Liz’s mind and she felt a sneeze brewing. What was it Thelma had told her earlier? ‘Didn’t she tell the police she’d gone away? Some horse do – Carlisle or somewhere?’ she asked.
Zippy Doodah rolled her eyes. ‘She might well have done. All I’m saying is, according to Judy Bestall, at seven o’clock the night Neville died, Ffion Hilton was in their garden screaming blue murder at him.’
Chapter Five
Saturday 12th July
From the Hollinby Quernhow Village Facebook Page:
VILLAGE FESTIVAL UPDATE: Due to the heat and the lack of numbers, the children’s sports event has been replaced by a Fun Paddling Pool Challenge.
‘I’m a bit bothered.’ Liz fumbled in her bag for a tissue; her gung-ho curiosity of the night before had faded sometime in the hot small hours as she’d vainly tried to find a cool part of her bed. ‘I mean if Ffionwasshouting at Nev—’ Her worried comment was broken off by an explosive sneeze.
‘What’s to stop her coming and shouting at us?’ finished Pat, taking a bite of millionaire’s shortbread. ‘What I’m thinking is if she’s been lying to the police, and it’s all round the village, surely someone’s going to say something to them?’
‘If Ffionhasbeen lying,’ said Thelma mildly.
‘You think she wasn’t shouting at him?’ asked Pat.
Thelma shrugged noncommittally. ‘That’s what we’re here to find out,’ she said.
Liz blew her nose and tried not to stare too longingly at Pat’srapidly melting cake. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It just feels like we’re, well, nebbing in—’
‘Which is because weare,’ said Pat through a mouthful of chocolatey crumbs. ‘Anything to get Ms Shally off our backs.’ She looked round the rather sparsely peopled village green. ‘What bothers me is exactly how we go about nebbing in. There’s not many people about for a village fete.’
They were standing in the shade of one of the oaks fringing a village green. Across the road in the car park of the closed and boarded pub a brass band could be heard discordantly tuning up, rather outnumbering the actual visitors. At first glance Hollinby Quernhow had looked idyllic: bunting and stalls brightening the browning twin triangles of grass that formed the centre of the village, with more stalls outside the individual houses. The archetypal English fete on an archetypal English summer day. Closer inspection, however, revealed a somewhat different story. The main feature of the festival – like so many other village festivals – was that locals were free to run their own stalls outside their houses, a system that worked very effectively in most places. Hollinby Quernhow, however, where almost every other house was a holiday let or second home, was not most places. Here the net effect was too few stalls, spread widely and awkwardly – too few beads on a too long string. And – glaringly apparent to Liz, Pat and Thelma as ex-teachers – was the marked lack of theyoung. There were only a couple of chocolate-stained toddlers, very few youngsters pitching wildly at the stacked tin cans and no teenagers moodily showing off on the Whack-a-rat.
‘But the stalls outside the houses are going to be manned by the people who live here,’ said Thelma. ‘And I did notice there’s a couple of stalls down towards the end of the village where Neville lives—’
