The police tape had disappeared from the end of the road but was still stretched tightly across Sarah Brown’s front door, barring entry.
Fiona and Partial Sue stood outside on the pavement staring at the house, wondering on which side her neighbour June lived. Both homes were strong red-brick houses with large windows and mature, well-tended front gardens, that had never succumbed to the urge to be block paved and were all the better for it, in Fiona’s opinion.
In the end, Fiona and Partial Sue decided to try both, figuring it wouldn’t hurt to question the neighbours each side. There was no answer from the first house they tried, the one on the right, so they trooped around to the left-hand side.
Before Fiona slammed the strong brass knocker against the heavy wooden door, she prepped Partial Sue on her theory about nice people in crime fiction. “If people call her Saint June, don’t be fooled by her kindness. If she’s the killer, she’ll really overdo the Mother Theresa act to throw us off and distract us, especially if she thinks she’s some sort of angel with that number in her profile. We need to stay focused and see through all that, stay cynical.”
Partial Sue nodded. “Don’t worry, I’m as cynical as they come.”
“Of course, I might be jumping to conclusions and all her niceness might be completely genuine.” Fiona thumped the huge metal knocker once more.
A curtain twitched to the side of them, then a few seconds later, a shrill voice came through the door. “Are you Jehovah’s Witnesses?”
“No,” Fiona called out.
“Mormons?”
“No.”
“Seventh Day Adventists?”
“No.”
“Christadelphians?”
“No.”
“Episcopalians then?”
“Epissy-what?” Partial Sue muttered.
Fiona feared that they might have to trawl through the full list of Christian denominations before moving on to other world religions, which could take a very long time.
“Excuse me, are you June?” Fiona asked.
“Who wants to know? I don’t need my double glazing replaced for free. Please take my name off your marketing list and leave me alone.”
“We’ve not been sent by anyone,” Partial Sue informed her. “We’re friends of Sarah Brown.”
There was a pause. “Does she owe you money?”
“Er, no.”
“You know she’s dead, don’t you?”
For someone Sarah Brown had referred to as Saint June, the woman’s blunt responses were currently putting her divine, angelic status in jeopardy.
“Can we speak to you?” Fiona asked.
“That’s what we’re doing now, isn’t it?”
“I mean, with the door open.”
“Oh, no. I know that trick. You get me to open my door, then I end up dead like my neighbour.”
Fiona looked at her friend. She hadn’t considered that June’s curt replies might be coming purely out of fear and shock over what had happened just a few feet from her door. They needed to be more sensitive. Attempting to reassure her, Fiona softened her voice. “Please, we’re friends of Sarah’s. We work at the Dogs Need Nice Homes charity shop. Sarah used to come to our coffee mornings.”
A few seconds later, numerous locks and security mechanisms clunked, jangled and slid back. The door swung open to reveal a sixty-something woman, roughly the same age as Daisy, but as thin as a strip of Sellotape with short-cropped silver hair and a haggard face. A large navy-blue fisherman’s smock hung off her small frame.
With a sympathetic smile, Fiona offered her condolences. “I’m sorry to hear about your neighbour passing away.”
Without making eye contact, June said, “She didn’t pass away. She was murdered.”
“That must have been horrifying for you. Were you in at the time?” Partial Sue asked.
“I was out, running around after people.” June spat out her words, like a mouthful of venom she’d sucked from a wound. “Look, the police told me I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
“Yes, of course,” Fiona said. “What about Sarah’s neighbours on the other side. Did they see anything?”
“Nope. Sylvie is still away on a cruise.” June spoke with more than a modicum of bitterness. Fiona couldn’t tell if she was jealous, annoyed, or both.
“She’s definitely away?” Partial Sue asked.
“Yes,” June snapped. “Got me watering her garden, taking her post in, mowing her lawn. I think I’d know if she was back.”
Her grumpy attitude had wrong-footed Fiona and Partial Sue. Saint June seemed to be the patron saint of irritable neighbours. The conversation faltered, leaving an awkward, pointed silence.
Saint June broke the deadlock. “I suppose I should thank you for those coffee mornings you organised.”
Fiona couldn’t hide the confusion in her reply. “Oh, er, that’s okay.”
“Yes, I was a big fan of your coffee mornings. Only time I got a minute’s peace.”
“Sorry?” said Partial Sue.
“Well, I know you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but when Sarah was at your coffee mornings, she wasn’t pestering me. I didn’t have to go running around after her. Usually it was: June, do this, June, do that. June, put the bins out. June, pull up the weeds in the crazy paving. June, put up a curtain hook for me. June, do my online shop.”
“Sarah wasn’t online then?”
“Oh God, no. It was always up to muggins here. Lucky I don’t drive, otherwise I’d have been taxiing her to the community centre every day. She was a nightmare when the minibus got scrapped. Moping around, never stopped complaining. Gave me earache, that did. Told everyone about how Malorie was the Antichrist. Started calling her Malfunction, she did.”
June described a Sarah Brown that was alien to Fiona. Generous and fiercely independent, the Sarah Brown she knew wasn’t the complaining type, except when it came to Malorie and the minibus. Maybe Fiona had got her all wrong. Did Sarah Brown reserve a cantankerous version of herself for her neighbour and another more reasonable one for everyone else? Or could June be exaggerating, playing the hard-done-by victim for effect?
Across the road, the front door of an elegant Georgian house, complete with thick ivy clinging to its walls, opened. A man in his eighties gradually emerged, not being the quickest on his feet.
June groaned and her face gurned. “Oh, what now?” she muttered under her breath.
With painfully flat feet and a crooked wooden walking stick, the man shuffled to the end of his pathway, clutching a slip of paper as if his life depended on it. “June! June!” he called out dramatically.
Like the abrupt end of a solar eclipse, June the Miserable became June the Joyful, the saint that they had heard so much about. She left her house and hurried across the road to meet him. “Are you okay, Kenneth?”
“I need a prescription, June. My ankles are giving me gyp. I hate being a burden on you, but I need this urgently. Would you mind?”
“Not at all, Kenneth.” June took the prescription note from him. “Now, do you need anything else?”
“Well, now that you ask, I could do with some Alka-Seltzer for the old tum-tum. Last night’s shepherd’s pie is repeating on me.”
“Not a problem. We’ve got to look after you.” She touched him lightly on the wrist to signify all was well.
“Thank you, June. I don’t know what I would do without you.”
“It’s my pleasure.”
She turned to go but was halted by Kenneth, issuing her one more task. “Oh, and when you’ve got a minute, would you mind retuning my digital box? It’s all over the shop.”
“Yes, of course. I’ll be over later,” she said sweetly, but her shoulders, hunched with pent-up frustration, betrayed her.
As she came back across the road, all trace of Saint June disappeared, replaced by a very unhappy bunny, a bunny about to go into meltdown. Her eyes burning with annoyance, she almost crushed the prescription note into non-existence, leaving Fiona to wonder how the pharmacist would read the thing.
“Never a minute’s peace,” she said as she rejoined Fiona and Partial Sue. Huffing and puffing, she pulled a pen from her pocket and straightened out the crumpled prescription. Using a dried-up birdbath to lean on, she filled in the back, scratching the pen hard, almost going through the paper. “You know, before Sarah passed away, I had three of them all pestering me every minute of the flaming day. Sylvie, Sarah and Kenneth. It was like living in a geriatric Bermuda triangle. All of them rattling around in great big houses they’re too old to look after.” She waved the prescription paper around like an angry Neville Chamberlain.
Fiona realised that June was one of those people whose British politeness prevented her from saying no. She’d set a subservient precedent for herself and had gone so far with it that she couldn’t back out. Trapped herself in a self-made loop of agreeableness. A prison of niceness. Constantly saying yes to everything had cultivated an underlying bitterness, spilling out like toxic waste buried in a barrel that had corroded. Did that make her a killer? That was what they needed to find out.
“Excuse me, ladies,” June said through a pair of tight lips. “I’ve got a prescription to collect.”
“We’ll get it for you,” Fiona suggested.
June nearly toppled over with shock. “What?”
“I said, we’ll get it for you.”
June steadied herself. “You will?”
“Of course, why not?”
“Kenneth doesn’t trust anyone to get his prescriptions. Only me.”
Partial Sue drew closer and tapped the side of her nose. “Kenneth doesn’t need to know. We’ll collect it and pop it through your letter box. No harm done.”
A playful smile dared to dance on June’s lips, not quite believing her luck. “What if there’s a problem at the chemist’s? It’s got my name on the back and not yours.”
“What’s your number?” Fiona took her phone out. “I’m sure it’ll be fine, but just in case.”
June didn’t need to be asked twice and gave it to her.
“Maybe give me your email too,” said Fiona. “Just to be on the safe side. Belts and braces.”
June was not about to look this pharmaceutical gift horse in the mouth. “It’s June2111@simbian.net.”
Playing into Fiona’s hands, this gave her the opportunity to delve into the numbers. “Oh, what do the two, one, one, one stand for?”
“That’s my dad’s birthday. Born in 1921 in November.”
“Were they local, your parents?” Partial Sue asked.
“Oh, yes. Southbourne born and bred, like me.”
“Right, let’s leave you in peace and get this prescription for you. I’m Fiona and this is Sue, by the way.”
“Thank you. Both of you. That’s very kind of you. Nobody ever offers to do anything for me. I can see why Sarah spoke so highly of all of you.” June had that pre-tears look in her eyes and was genuinely touched.
Fiona rested a hand on her arm. “It’s really not a problem. I was going to ask, do you know anyone called Ian Richard or Sharon Miller?”
June sniffed back an oncoming tear. “I can’t say I do. Were they friends of Sarah?”
Fiona ignored her question. “No problem. We’ll be back in a jiffy with this prescription.”
As they walked away from a far more contented June than the one they had met, Fiona’s mind was whirring. “What do you think?”
Partial Sue snorted. “She’s possibly the most miserable person I’ve ever met. Wound up tighter than a bad facelift. Not an ounce of sorrow over Sarah’s death. She’s certainly got a motive to kill her.”
“Yes, my thoughts exactly. But there are two problems with her being the killer. One, she’s making no attempt to hide her motives. She’s pretty open about her dislike of running around after her neighbours, which she’s definitely exaggerating for our sake. Following the logic, I can see she has a motive to kill Sarah, but surely she’d want to kill her other two neighbours for the same reason, rather than Ian Richard and this Sharon Miller, whom she says she doesn’t know.”
“Do you think she was lying?” Partial Sue slowed her pace for a moment.
“Not really. I mean, she’s a good actor, good at deceiving people. But it’s more of a polite putting-on-a-brave-face, suffer-in-silence type of lying, rather than lying through her teeth.”
They emerged back onto Southbourne Grove. Filtering between all the hurrying pedestrians, Fiona said, “But if she’s not the killer, I still can’t understand this two, one, one, one business with her online profile and how it ties in with the dominoes.”
“A coincidence?”
“Jack Reacher says he doesn’t believe in coincidence, and neither do I.”
Partial Sue gently elbowed Fiona. “Have you got a crush on Jack Reacher?”
“No.”
“You keep mentioning him.”
“He says a lot of smart things.”
“Unless Reacher says nothing.”
Fiona gave Partial Sue a half-smile at the bookish reference. “I see what you did there. Very clever. Well, if it’s not a coincidence, then what’s the significance of the numbers? Do we believe her story about her dad’s birthday?”
“Can I look at that prescription?” Partial Sue took it from Fiona and read the back. “June had to fill in her details. Her second name is Haricot. I think we can check her story right now. Look at her birth records online.” She handed Fiona back the piece of paper. They found a nearby bench and sat down. Partial Sue got on her phone, pulling up the public records website. “We’ve got her full name and her place of birth, plus we know her parents were born in Southbourne too.”
“I wondered why you asked her that.”
“Ah, here we go — only one entry under June Haricot, born 1955 in Southbourne. Parents Adrian Haricot and Olivia Haricot, maiden name Atkinson. Now we cross-reference her dad’s birth.” She thumbed her phone some more. “Adrian Haricot, born Southbourne, November 1921. Her story checks out. Unless she’s an extremely sloppy serial killer who’s left random dominoes on her victims that she hasn’t noticed coincide with her dad’s birthday, and therefore her online profile name.”
“That does seem a bit of a stretch,” Fiona said. “There is one other explanation.”
“What’s that?
“Someone is setting her up.”