6

I hated the bloody gym. I really did.

I regarded it with even more loathing than most people. I had been a pudgy kid with pigtails and glasses and weird friends, and that trauma stays with you. Being shunned by the popular crowd in junior high finally drove me to start exercising and dieting in a fanatical way. Nothing at home was under my control except my weight, so I started to keep a diary of every calorie, every sit-up.

But in Weycombe, I just walked. If it was too cold and rainy outside, I would drive over to the gym and use one of the treadmills.

Now it was Anna sent me there. The path I normally would have taken was still taped off with blue-and-white crime scene tape and littered with blue evidence-collection boxes. I lingered a moment to watch the technicians still working the scene before I headed over to Miller Lane. I didn’t see Milo around but that was fine; I did not want to run into him just then.

The spot where the body had lain would be blocked off for several more days. The bicyclists were particularly upset by this; a lot of them commuted to work on that path and they were forced to return to their old car-polluting ways. The fact that Anna was found on protected land, which technically the path was, added a new investigative wrinkle. I gathered that pagans had lit fires, sacrificed animals, and thrown bodies into the river near the spot where she died. A territorial struggle among the various arms of law enforcement and preservationist groups ensued. Even contemporary pagan groups had their say about the desecration of the area but were roundly ignored.

It was finally decided to let the local police handle it unless the help of Scotland Yard was needed. The fear was of dirty tricks on either side contaminating the results of the investigation. Certainly that was the way the FBI and CIA would have managed things. It was not unheard of for evidence to disappear or be misplaced—anything was fair game if it could screw up an investigation for the other side. If you’re planning to kill someone, be sure to do it on a spot of land where jurisdiction is at issue and you might just get away with it.

I walked everywhere in those days, lulling myself into exhaustion. Mostly I would just follow the river, seeing the hours pass and the steps add up on my pedometer.

FitFull Gym was a poor substitute. It was part of a chain that had spread across England in the past ten years. No pun intended on the word “spread,” but the UK had an obesity crisis to rival that in the US, which helped explain FitFull’s popularity. The top floor held the requisite machines and weights, the middle floor was used for classes like yoga and Pilates, and the ground floor housed the locker rooms. I knew no one in Weycombe Court who was not a member, although some rarely showed up while others, the gym rats and yummy mummies, made the most of their monthly, one-hundred-pound fees. One way or another, FitFull had encroached on the role in village life once occupied by the pub and the Women’s Institute, the locker rooms becoming another center where information and gossip were exchanged.

The talk in the women’s locker room that Tuesday was naturally about the murder, and I assume it was the same in the men’s. Even the North Cliff woman who routinely spoke with no one outside her social set could be seen chatting with a group of personal trainers, excitedly discussing the case. Once you know that “we live in North Cliff” is shorthand for “we have money, very old money, and we have weekend houses, too; go ahead, envy us, that’s why we’re here”—once you know that, you will understand how Anna’s demise had upset the social order. Possibly forever. Fear truly had gone viral in Weycombe if it had penetrated North Cliff. Once the plague of random murder burrowed its way in, presumably from London, it was a matter of months before desperate housewives would be found with their pearls missing and their throats cut. Or so the reasoning went.

I did learn that Anna had become a regular at the Pilates classes, part of her sudden devotion to health and well-being. It was out of character and I said as much to Becky, one of the trainers I’d hired for a few weeks last spring to check me out on some new equipment. Anna had gone from drinking red wine for her health to adopting a Hollywood starlet fitness regime.

“You’re right,” Becky said. “We usually get the sudden converts right after the holidays—New Year’s resolutions and all.” Becky was such an energetic, gee-whiz type I could usually only stand a few minutes in her company. She stood feet apart, one hand gripping the other, flexing her biceps, a stance I knew was second nature. She was a devotee of isometric exercise and wasted no time just standing around like a normal person; she always had to be flexing something. She looked like she wanted to punch me but she always looked like that. She wore her hair in a braid that fell over one shoulder and she’d gelled her thick eyebrows into two dark wings, adding to her warrior princess look. She was rumored to be dating Frabizio, another personal trainer at the club. One could only begin to imagine the bouts of gladiatorial coupling that went on between two such perfect physical specimens.

“They say there’s a witness,” Becky added. “God, I hope they catch whoever did this. I told Frabizio I’m not going out at night again until they do.”

Anna had been killed in broad daylight, but I let that pass. Besides, if anyone attacked Becky I had no doubt she could beat them senseless. “Really? Who says?”

She pulled the Chronic out of her gym bag—actually, a new, stop-the-presses flier with “facts” not yet posted on their website. The intern must have had trouble getting his retainer in or something, making him late for work.

“I wouldn’t put a lot of faith in what you read there,” I said. “They don’t have a big enough staff to do anything but rehash hearsay.” Some months before, they had rejected my application for part-time work, so I was not their biggest fan, true. But what I told Becky also was true. As mentioned, the police were not going to confide any juicy clues in those guys.

There had been nothing in that morning’s national tabloids or broadsheets about a witness—I’d already stopped in at the village shop to buy whatever news was going. The bigger news guys had run with a short bio of the victim, with promises of more to come. How strange to hear Anna described as a victim, and stranger still to hear her called a “real property tycooness.” Now here was the Chronic stating that “an eyewitness has reported seeing someone in a blue jacket or short blue coat having words with Anna amidst angry gestures.” Which meant Garvin the tortoise had scooped the hares of London.

Who uses words like “amidst,” anyway? It sounded like something Garvin would say, although I wouldn’t credit he’d actually make up quotes. Mishear them, yes. He was notoriously hard of hearing, a fact reflected in some of his weirder stories, a hardship compounded by his scattershot efforts at proofreading. One locally famous headline had announced a reward for a lost doge.

But who had I heard using the word “amidst” recently? It had been one afternoon in the coffee shop … That’s right: Frannie Pope, the owner of Serendipity, our local little shop of fashion horrors. She was the woman I thought I’d seen at a distance walking her dogs. Surely she had been too far away to see much.

Frannie was rumored to be in some sort of relationship with the doddering Garvin, which I tried not to think about.

I took the paper from Becky and read through it all again slowly. It was no use pretending indifference; I was as keen for news as anyone who knew Anna, which was pretty much everyone in the village. Just as I thought: the bit about the eyewitness was probably the purest wishful thinking on Garvin’s part.

“A woman walking her dogs,” I said. “That could be anyone, of course.”

“You’re right. The only odd thing around here would be to see someone not walking their dogs. Everyone but me seems to have one.”

“And me,” I pointed out. “I never had the time before. Maybe I do now.”

I wandered off to do my routine—a few biceps curls here, and a stomach crunch there, and forty minutes on the treadmill. The dog walker was almost certainly Frannie, and dropping in on her to get her account firsthand would be a breeze.

Across the weight room I spotted our resident professional beauty, Macy Rideout, staring in the mirror as she lifted thirty pounds over her head. Every male eye in the place followed the way the movement lifted her boobs. Either Macy had adopted a “life goes on” attitude or she’d not yet heard about Anna. I thought I might talk with her at some point. She and Anna had once been close, although something had gone off there.

Back in the locker room, peeling Spandex away from my Jockey bikini no-shows, I stopped, one leg hovering in midair. My mind had lighted on the image of Anna as she lay dead, and on that glimpse of lace peeking out of her running shorts. For some reason that old Cole Porter “Anything Goes” song came to mind. Something about stockings …

And I realized what had bothered me about that flash of frilly lace at the time.

Who runs in expensive lace undies?

Where was she running to?

I got showered and changed and left the gym. As soon as I was outside and out of earshot of the late arrivals for the Zumba class (divorcees going through the spin cycle; you can always tell), I rang the person I most wanted to see right then, the one person I called “friend” in Weycombe. A woman trustworthy, reliable, and always up for a chat over tea or coffee and, with any luck, pastry. Rashima Khan.