I took a deep breath and tried again. ‘Ollie, they’ll still be open whether it’s four, five or six, and the keys will still be there too.’
‘I’d rather ring, if that’s okay?’ he said tentatively, and as he said it we came to a slip road next to some services and he took the exit, as if we’d all agreed he should do what he’d suggested and call the pub. ‘I’ll do it myself, if you give me the number,’ he said. ‘Sorry, but … I don’t like leaving people hanging or wondering. I don’t want them to worry we’re never going to turn up.’ He laughed nervously, and was clearly doing everything he could to make his unpopular opinion more palatable to the rest of us. ‘Whatif they rent the house to someone else?’ he said. ‘They might have a waiting list. I want to ring, even though I know it means you’re all going to mock me for years.’
Since he’d already taken us off the motorway and was insisting he’d do it himself if I didn’t want to, I rang. I teased him about it afterwards, but I didn’t really mind. ‘Just for the record,’ I said, ‘four o’clock, in this context, means “Not before four” – so that the cleaners can get the place ready. It doesn’t mean, “Turn up at four on the dot or it’s all over.”’ We were all laughing at him now, egged on by my sarcastic tone, which I hope was also affectionate. ‘We’ve paid for the cottage in full, plus a security deposit. They can’t give it to someone else. It would have been fine. God, I bet they wish all their rental guests were as considerate as you!’
I remember thinking that excessive precision about timings and arrangements might be a fireman thing. Sorry – firefighter. If your job was saving people’s lives by hauling them out of burning flames, then presumably if you said you’d be at work at four and turned up at six, some people might end up burned to blistering crisps amid the ashes that were once their homes. Or at the very least, you’d inconvenience your equally life-saving colleagues who had been relying on you to turn up on time so that they could get some rest before their next night-shift.
Speaking of heat, this little episode en route to the Cotswolds made my Christmas so much better. I had a new, warm glow inside me, because Ollie had said we’d all be mocking him ‘for years’. He expected to be around, in my life, for a long time!! This was proof that he assumed he’d soon be a firmly installed part of my family. (I can hardly bear to think of that now, given what’s happened.)
I think it’s because of this – the family thing, how much I wanted him to become part of mine and what I knew about his own awful, neglectful family – that I hated the Tyrant more than I’ve ever loathed anyone before for using this particular story against him.He’d been so thrilled – and by that I mean visibly ecstatic – to be invited to join the Uptons’ Christmas holiday, and would have been horrified if he’d known anything he’d done during that week had been viewed as wrong or creepy by anyone. All he was doing was trying to make everything run as smoothly as it possibly could. And yes, maybe he was a bit ridiculous in his paranoia that our rental house might be given to someone else if we didn’t show up on time. There was probably part of him that could barely believe he was about to have a nice week away with a family he was hoping to become part of soon, and that nothing would go wrong. That’d be totally understandable given that his mum, while she was alive, always palmed him off on her sister and went on holiday without him, and his dad was AWOL from his third birthday until he was seventeen. And when we’re afraid something will go wrong, our fear can make us act like a bit of a fool or a control freak. Poor Ollie!
I can’t work out why the Tyrant thinks that reminding me of how considerate Ollie was that day helps her pro-Paddy campaign in any way. Paddy would never anticipate the hypothetical worries of a pub landlady he’d never met, or think ahead and question whether our amazing Christmas might be ruined by lateness or a failure of a communication. He’d assume it was someone else’s job to take care of all the practicalities.
‘The whole thing was so sinister,’ said the Tyrant, lying through her teeth. I was in that car with her when it happened and she showed no sign of thinking it was anything but sweet and amusing, like we all did. She’s trying to rewrite history. ‘It’s all about control with Ollie,’ she said. ‘You can see that, right?’
I managed not to say, Oh, my God! Never ever in the history of the world has a blacker pot ever slagged off a more innocent kettle.
‘Here’s what I think,’ I said instead. ‘I think Ollie was the one who was starting to worry, and didn’t want to admit it. He knewhe’d be anxious all the way there if he didn’t ring, and he wanted to put his mind at rest. The best bit was that we ended up getting there at five to four anyway.’ I smiled.
The Tyrant glared at me. Once again, I had failed to provide evidence that I had laid down my own thoughts and feelings about Ollie and adopted hers instead.
It simply wouldn’t do. She had no intention of letting me get away with that.
9
Monday 30 October 2023, 7.25 p.m.
SIMON
Simon Waterhouse was curious about this Marianne Upton woman, who more than one person seemed to want to kill. He suspected she was as upper-middle class and well turned out as Jemma Stelling, and it was highly unusual to find ladies of nearly seventy of that sort in the role of murder victim.
He decided he was probably curious enough to drive back to the nick, though he’d only recently left there and was now at home. He stood motionless in the hall of his and Charlie’s house, his coat still on. Did he want to take it off? He didn’t think so. What he wanted was to know more about the attempt on Marianne Upton’s life in 2012.
Maybe he could stay put and make a call … No, he couldn’t.Damn.He’d left his phone and his police radio at the nick, deliberately, so that no one would be able to contact him. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. And he and Charlie hadn’t had a landline phone for years.
He’d told Jemma Stelling he was going home. He’d meant it, too. And he’d done it. So what if he’d spent half an hour sitting alone at a table in The Brown Cow first, with a pint glass full of tap water from which he hadn’t taken a single sip?He’d gone home eventually. Anyway, it was up to him what he did.
You’re cracking up. Get a grip.
Seconds later, he was slamming the front door and jogging back to his car, keys in hand.
By the time he’d got as far as Spilling High Street, he felt calmer. Everything was under control. Indulging his curiosity wasn’t disallowed by the new rules he’d made for himself, though obviously it would depend on what he did with whatever he found out. That was where the breaking of resolutions might creep in, but only if he let it. And he wouldn’t.
Get it together.
Had he really told Jemma Stelling to murder her stepmother if she wanted to? Yes. He had.Good. If he got fired before Sam and Proust left, at least he wouldn’t have to watch them go.
Ten minutes later, pulling up in the nick’s car park, he briefly considered trying to identify the car of the new superintendent, Fran Whittingham, so that he could piss on or otherwise vandalise it. The idea didn’t appeal to him enough to bother. Not his style.
The uniforms’ nickname for the new super – Dooper – had stuck. ‘Dooper, Dooper, why’d they have to hire you?’ Sellers had taken to singing whenever he and Simon walked past her office, to the tune of ABBA’s ‘Super Trouper’. Sometimes, if Sellers had overdone it at The Brown Cow over lunch, he’d throw in another line too: ‘Pooper Scooper, when’s she gonna fire you?’
It was a good question. Soon, probably, now that Simon was encouraging murders. Knowing he’d never be able to prove her wrong in her assessment of his professional shortcomings, he’d found himself fantasising about defeating Dooper some other way. Fat chance. She’d soon have him living on benefits andwishing he’d obeyed more than a handful of orders since the start of his police career.
Luckily, Jemma Stelling was about as capable of committing murder as Simon’s socks were. Dreaming up an oh-so-clever plan was one thing, but she’d never have put it into action. She was a trapped-in-endless-emotional-bullshit person, not an action person. Whatever her manipulation was about, murder wasn’t the aim. Simon’s best guess was that she wanted two things: to make her fantasy feel more real by getting it immortalised in an official police statement, and – most importantly – she wanted to scare Marianne Upton out of her mind.
I’m assuming you’ll be making contact with her and telling her there’s been a threat against her. Isn’t it normal to warn people?
That’s what Jemma had said. She’d made the point twice. She was Simon’s least favourite kind of person: shamelessly telling a tiny fraction of a story and pretending it’s the whole thing, expecting you to hang on their every word and not notice you’re being manipulated.
