‘As long as we can hear you,’ said Thelma placatingly, but Liz wasn’t listening. The picture juddered crazily, tilted, froze and unfroze showing blurred, tipped images of her hallway, stairs and landing. Finally, the picture settled and resolved, showing an expanse of white candlewick bedspread.
‘I’m in the spare room,’ announced Liz tetchily. ‘Hang on whilst I pull the curtains.’
Pat could sympathise with her friend’s frustrations. This Zoom ‘debrief’ had been urged by Thelma as an alternative to the garden centre, bearing in mind the temperature was forecast to, once again, nudge the forty-degree mark. Both Pat and Liz’s reaction to her idea had been along the lines of ‘so what?’ but Thelma had been so grave, so insistent that the simplest thing had been to go along with the suggestion.
The picture of the candlewick bedspread shuddered, tipped and finally settled to reveal Liz in front of the drawn spare room curtains, pink with the sun behind them.
‘Can you see menow?’ she demanded in an irritated voice, which implied she’d rather face the heat than do battle with this means of communication. Both her friends responded in the affirmative and neither mentioned that in plain view behind her was an airer draped with Derek’s powder-blue boxer shorts.
‘So where were we?’ said Pat. Behind her was a virtual backdrop showing one of the chateaus she and Rod had visited earlier that year. Not because she had any drying underwear to hide, but her kitchen counter was set up with an arrangement of fat, lavender candles, which Tiffany was planning to photograph, and Tiffany-Jane was a subject she wanted to keep her friend’s thoughts all the way away from. There had been more raised voices last night after Justin had got home, following which she’d seen neither her son nor his girlfriend – not even ducking in and out the bathroom.
‘The A171,’ said Thelma. ‘I was wondering just where Davey Fletcher was driving to when he had his accident.’ Behind her could be seen the sober, olive-green tones of her living room, with Snaffles the cat eyeing them fixedly from a patch of sunlight. It looked the epitome of tidiness and order, but to move the laptop slightly to the left would reveal a whole stack of Teddy’s parcels waiting to be entered in his WAMMP app.
‘The A171,’ said Liz in brisk, business-like tones. ‘I’ve been checking. I reckon the poor lad would have been heading toWhitby or Scarborough, or even Bridlington – anywhere round those parts. Any place else and he’d have taken the York road.’
‘Did he have to be going anywhere?’ said Pat. ‘Maybe he just wanted to drive?’
‘In a blizzard?’ said Liz, incredulous.
‘Maybe,’ said Pat. ‘If he was upset.’ She thought about her own periodic sojourns to the lay-by above Borrowby when life got fraught. ‘It was the day before the Ofsted report came out, remember.’
‘He crashed at a place called Wentworth Bank,’ said Thelma. ‘A bit of an accident black spot apparently. Hang on.’ Deftly, she operated the screen share and a page from theCleveland Heraldappeared showing an image of a stretch of snowy road, taped off with a number of attendant police vehicles parked at angles. WENTWORTH BLIZZARD CRASH. LOCAL TEACHER KILLED. HOW MANY MORE? SAY APPALLED RESIDENTS. Pat and Liz read the brief summary of the crash, the fourth in sixteen months, plus a police appeal for careful driving in bad weather.
‘It doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know,’ said Pat.
‘I wonder,’ said Liz, ‘why Neville Hilton was writing to complain about the same road.’
‘If itwasthe same road,’ said Pat. ‘You said yourself you only got a quick look.’
‘A171,’ said Liz stubbornly. ‘I remembered the 171 because that was my code for the photocopier.’ There was a momentary respectful acknowledgement of this from her former colleagues. Evidence of this nature was, Pat and Thelma both felt, as watertight as it got.
‘It’s a long road, the A171,’ said Thelma. ‘Some fifty-odd miles.’ She killed the sad image, and the three faces appeared once more on the screen. ‘It doesn’t have to have been that particular bit.’
‘Well, one thing’s certain,’ said Pat, ‘it wasn’t Davey Fletcher who was in Hollinby Quernhow shouting the odds at Neville.’
‘No,’ said Thelma. ‘The question is who could it have been?’
‘Caro Miranda,’ said Liz promptly. ‘Hold on.’ There was a pause as she shared a picture. The first attempt showed her Amazon Primepage (low-sugar salad cream), but the second showed the lady herself, smiling a rather glacial smile. ‘It’s from the school website.’
‘So, you think it’s the Reverend Nemesis in the Snuggery with the attitude,’ said Pat. ‘Dreamy Pete said how hostile she got. She certainly looks as if she’s got an axe to grind.’
‘Maybe,’ said Thelma neutrally.
‘Come on,’ said Liz. ‘You saw how she was. Really angry. You can’t discount her just because she’s a vicar.’
‘That’s nothing to do with it,’ said Thelma shortly. ‘Like you, I saw an angry, upset woman. But it doesn’t necessarily follow she was angry and upset enough to track Neville down to his house and confront him.’
‘Talking of confronting,’ said Pat. ‘There’s that Chloe you met. She sounds a right piece of work.’
‘She was really upset,’ said Liz, sounding slightly defensive. ‘Sticking up for her friend who hadn’t been given a job.’
‘She was still angry,’ said Pat. ‘And by the sounds of it angry enough to have a go at Nev.’
Thelma said nothing. She was remembering that glinting kitchen knife in the dishwasher in amongst the jumble of plates and serving tureens. Those plates – three plates …Why three?
‘I’ve been wondering about Davey’s Son,’ said Liz, breaking into her thoughts.
‘His son?’ said Pat. ‘I didn’t know he had any kids.’
