“I didn’t know you were allowed to shoot them. So much the better. When’s it all happening?”
“Tonight—that’s why the announcement was made this morning, to make sure nobody would worry if they heard the shots.”
“A wise precaution. Any unexpected disturbance like that here could create havoc.” Gladys Lancashire crunched the sides of the paper she was reading, pushed it down into her lap and adjusted her glasses. “Mind you, of course, even if they get rid of the first lot, others will come in to replace them.”
Her friend, Cynthia Tilling, who was sitting next to her, looked crestfallen. She had made it her business to be in the hall to hear a tall red-faced man dressed in tweeds announce that the recent influx of foxes into the grounds was about to be dealt with and was recounting it all to Gladys, who hadn’t got there in time. And that had been the punchline, that foxes once entrenched are devilishly hard to shift.
Gladys gave her a comforting pat on the knee. “I heard that somewhere, dear. It’s good the powers-that-be are taking some action though. That screeching during the night was just too much.” She grabbed at an errant page which was about to slide on to the floor and stuffed it back in with the rest. “These big papers are so difficult to control,” she complained. She folded the paper in half and flattened it down on the table in front of her.
“Have you found something interesting?” Cynthia shifted a little closer as she made the enquiry on the premise that there might be a story to share. This was part of their normal morning routine—meet at around eleven in the main hall next to the restaurant, so there was time beforehand to get the chores done. Then they sat down to relax with coffee and papers for an hour or so. Today the timing had been put out by the fox announcement, but it was elastic anyway depending on what they found of interest in the papers to read. Nothing in their lives was precise anymore, apart of course from lunch and dinner when the hours were one o’clock in the case of the former and seven for the latter.
Cynthia and Gladys had been friends for as long as they could remember. When Cynthia had been widowed and lost David after forty years, Gladys, who had never been married, was there for her every day. They had bought their bungalows in the Village on the same day almost exactly a year ago with trepidation on their part at the change in their lives but with solid encouragement from their close relatives. Thus far the move had been an unqualified success. They didn’t miss all the responsibilities their houses had carried with them before. In the Village there was instant help on site with any problems and the bills came in monthly slugs which they knew they could afford thanks largely to the return from money realised from the sale of their houses. Their nest eggs were managed by a private bank located by Cynthia after careful research examining returns and stability. There was no shortage of activities provided with regular excursions, a bridge club and even a pool but there was also the space to do things themselves if they wanted that. The mid-morning coffee meetings with the papers had become a treasured part of their day where they read and talked, often at the same time.
“I certainly have,” Gladys replied to her friend’s query with her head bowed and glasses firmly perched on the bridge of her nose. “Rather juicy this one—it’s a murder.”
Cynthia instantly forgot about the foxes. “Where?” she enquired.
“Here.”
“Here?” Cynthia, who was by far the smaller of the two, moved her head round in small, bird-like movements staring at each corner of the big room. She pushed back a strand of silver hair into the tightly bunched bun on the back of her head. Her kindly eyes looked troubled.
“Not here in the Village, silly.” Gladys put heavy emphasis on the word ‘Village’ as though it were their country estate. “On the common out there.” She pointed to the tall windows following each other in a regular sequence along the wall of the main hall through which the tops of the trees marking the edge of the nearby common were visible.
“That’s still rather close by, isn’t it?”
Gladys shifted her large frame in the chair she was occupying and shook her head. “This all happened thirty years ago. There’s no need to worry.”
“Why are they reporting on it now?”
“It’s part of an occasional series they do, dear. But this one is of special interest to us, it’s the Richard Pennington case—you must remember it.”
Cynthia nodded her head vigorously. “Oh yes, I do. Wasn’t he the man on the bike?”
“That’s right.” Gladys used the palm of her right hand to smooth out creases in the paper and then her forefinger followed the printed lines. “It was on Christmas Day 1979 when it all started—a winter wonderland it says here, frost on the ground, light snow.”
“He knocked over the little girl and she hit her head on the path.”
Gladys looked up. “You’re getting a little ahead of me, dear.”
Her friend’s face turned a shade of pink. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean…”
“That’s all right.” Gladys’s eyes moved back to the paper. “He came up behind a family who were out walking, tried to get past them and the little girl went over. The father became threatening so Pennington took off. He handed himself into the police afterwards. There was a court case and the magistrate found in favour of the family but he acknowledged that Pennington did all he could to warn them he was coming by ringing his bell and so on. The family was awarded one pound in token damages. They were seriously upset.”
Cynthia built up her courage to intervene again, despite her previous admonishment. “The little girl died soon after, didn’t she?”
“She did—from a brain haemorrhage three days after the end of the court case. There was another trial with Pennington being accused of manslaughter. The medical evidence for the prosecution was that there was almost certainly a causal link between the incident on the path and the death but the defence came up with another doctor who cast doubt on that. Eventually the judge stopped the trial, saying the prosecution case was too weak for any realistic chance of a guilty verdict and he denied any possibility of appeal.”
“I remember that bit very well—the father threatened Pennington in court.”
“Yes.” Gladys put her finger back on the page. “Hassan Iqbal was his name. The judge told him to watch it—well, that was the gist of what he said in legalese, if you know what I mean. And three weeks after that…”
“Pennington’s body was found…”
“Laid out on exactly the same spot where the original incident with the bike took place. He’d been stabbed many times in a frenzied attack.” Gladys’s tone contained relish. “Well, obviously the police went straight for the Iqbal family. He was a taxi driver and the firm he worked for had a sheet of fares for the whole period when the police estimated the time of death. All the fares checked out. Iqbal’s wife was a hospital cleaner and she was at work, a fact testified by her colleagues. His children were at school and his sister also had a watertight alibi. Iqbal had been seen hanging around the Pennington house but he explained to the police that he had wanted to confront Pennington in the hope of getting him to admit he was responsible. He just couldn’t bring himself to knock on the front door. The police couldn’t find anyone else with a motive and the crime has never been solved.” She pushed the paper to one side. “You know, it all happened on the last trail.”
The puzzlement on Cynthia’s face caused the criss-cross lines on her forehead to deepen. “What’s that?”
Gladys smiled. “That comes from my golfing days. I’ve played that nine-hole course on the common a few times. You have to go round twice to make eighteen and that path is called the last trail because it follows the fairway up to the ninth green. If you get your shot right to the green you can avoid the trail. If you don’t, you’re on the trail trying to find your ball. And it was along there where the body was found. I tell you what…” She turned to face Cynthia. “What if instead of having coffee tomorrow we take a turn out there and have a look?”
“Well—all right.”
“The professional at the golf club has been there for donkeys’ years. He probably knows the exact place on the trail. I’ll pop out and see him this afternoon so we know.”
“What if it’s raining?”
“If it’s raining, we’ll go on the next day. All the days are the same here. It’ll be different, won’t it? Something we’ve decided for ourselves. We’re becoming very institutionalised here, you know.” She touched her friend on the arm. “The coffee and the papers will still be here when we come back.”
Cynthia just about stopped herself pointing out that the coffee got cleared away at midday. She forced a smile. “Sounds good,” she said.