Small Town Shock (Some Very English Murders Book 1) Read Free

ask you to
come up to Lincoln police station later on today, when you can, and give a
fuller statement there.”
    “The circumstances being that my dog is uncontrollable?”
    “Yes. Well, no, I mean, because you’ve had a terrible shock
and everything.” Cath smiled again. “Finding bodies in the fields is not an
everyday occurrence around here.”
    “I’m glad to hear it.”
    The police woman offered Penny control of her dog again. “If
you can take her lead again please, now she’s calmer, and I’ll make a few
notes.”
    Penny gave her name and address, though she still had to
stop and think what her postcode was. “I’ve only been here a few weeks,” she
admitted.
    “And where were you before?”
    “I lived in London. I was a television producer.”
    The detective constable’s neat dark eyebrows rose up. “Oh,
really? Ah, that’s why you were filming in Europe, then. It all sounds very
glamorous. I bet you’ve met some amazing people. I only meet people in
distress. Or drunk. Or dead.”
    “It was stressful, demanding and tiring,” Penny said.
“That’s why I’m here, in Lincolnshire. It all got a bit much after … too many
years.” Decades, in fact. She was the wrong side of forty and beginning to feel
it. She’d worked hard to achieve what she thought she wanted and once she’d got
it … it wasn’t enough.
    “Are you here on holiday then?” the constable asked.
    “No, I’ve retired.”
    “You’re far too young to retire! I guess I went into the
wrong job.”
    Bless her. “Thanks. It’s sort of a retirement but mostly
just a change of scene while I work out what I really want.” I left it a bit
late, she thought. I should have scheduled my mid-life crisis to happen when I
had more energy to deal with it.
    Cath’s eyebrows quivered, but she drew a line in her
notebook and didn’t pursue the matter. “Okay. And your date of birth, please?”
    Penny gritted her teeth and told her, adding, “Yes. I’m
forty-five. And single. No emergency contact details, no.” She could put her
sister, or her parents, she thought. But what use would they be, so far away?
It was easier to deal with things on her own.
    Cath nodded. “So can you tell me what you were doing out
here on private land?”
    Ahh. So it was private. Penny looked down at the dog who
was apparently licking a stone. She gave the lead a tug. “It’s not that I am
saying she’s a dangerous dog,” she said slowly, mindful of the law. “But she’s
a little, ah, unreliable, when she sees other dogs. And I had no idea how many
dogs there were in the world until I ended up with one that doesn’t like
others.”
    “She’s fine with people, though?”
    “She is. She recognises people as walking potential
food-dispensers.”
    “Right. Were you aware you were trespassing, as it
happens?”
    “No… am I in trouble for that?”
    “Only if the landowner presses charges.” They fell silent
as the body was carried past them, covered discretely. “And I suspect that is
highly unlikely.”
     
    * * * *
     
    Penny made it back to the cottage with only one further
incident. As she had approached the turn for River Street, an elderly man and
his terrier had appeared without warning from the churchyard. Penny had taken
immediate evasive action, darting behind a large skip that stood outside the
school gates. She had held Kali’s collar tightly, peeping over the top of the
skip until the man and his dog had disappeared. She hoped no one was watching
her. Now she’d be known as “the crazy London woman with the barking dog who
goes eating out of skips.”
    “Come on, you,” she said to Kali. “Let’s go home.”
    Back in her cottage, she released Kali and the dog repaid
the kindness by barking at a corner of the hallway for about a minute before
wandering off to the kitchen for a drink of water.
    Now it all seemed very quiet.
    She had expected to be inundated with work colleagues and
friends from London; they’d all promised to