Small Town Secrets (Some Very English Murders Book 2) (13 page)

“It is. He’s done a good job, that lad.”

She gazed at it and smiled. There was a hint of bindweed
about the curling scrolls.

The man dipped his brush into the pot that was on a wooden
stool next to him, to save himself the hassle of bending to the ground each
time.

“Are you Reg Bailey?” she asked. This looked like the sort
of area where people employed gardeners and handymen, so she didn’t want to
make assumptions.

“That I am. And you are…?”

“Penny May. I moved here a few months ago but I haven’t
been down this road yet. It’s nice.”

“And you know Drew,” he said.

“Yes. He’s been really helpful and friendly. Well, everyone
has, really.”

“
Most
people in Upper Glenfield are decent sorts,”
Reg said, drawing the wide paintbrush slowly and carefully along the top edge
of the gate. “Drew deserves to do well. I don’t know much about this new thing
of his, taking rich folks on country walks or whatever he’s doing, but he seems
to be doing well.”

But
you
are “rich folks”, yourself, Penny thought,
living here. Maybe Reg didn’t see himself as the same as them. “What are your
neighbours like? I’ve never met anyone who lives down this way.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t,” Reg said with a snort. “They don’t shop
in Glenfield and they don’t work here, either. Except for the doctor. She
actually lives and works here, but she gets those online shopping deliveries.
That lorry comes and parks outside twice a week, sometimes. She’s all right but
some of them that lives along here, well, they seem to make money without
working.”

“Criminals?”

“Bankers, which is much the same thing. Working in
‘finance’ or ‘information technology’ or ‘public relations’ – they’re not jobs,
they’re really long dinners that happen to make money.”

“I imagine that you’ve worked hard all your life,” Penny
said mildly.

“That I have! Oh, I did. That was what we did in them
days,” he said. “We worked and we earned what we got. Not like now. Even if you
set a good example, kids these days just ignore it.” He shook his head, and
jabbed his brush into the paint pot again. “They bring shame on their parents,
they do.”

“Do you have any children?”

It was the wrong thing to ask.

Reg’s pale eyes turned on her, and his face grew red.
“That’s who I’m talking about! My son, John!”

“I’m so sorry…”

He flared his nostrils and began to wheeze. She stepped
back. “I’m so, so sorry,” she repeated. “I didn’t mean to upset you.” This was
what Drew had warned her about, back when she’d first moved to Upper Glenfield
– he’d reminded her that she didn’t know enough about people’s histories to
avoid asking painful questions.

Reg looked away. “I need to get on with my gate. Good day,
Miss May.”

She decided not to correct him to her preferred ‘Ms’. Reg
was clearly a man of old traditions, and she was going to respect that.

Poor Reg, she thought. And she wondered what his
disappointing son, John, did. Or didn’t do.

* * * *

She pondered small town life as she wandered home. There
was a core of Upper Glenfield residents whom everyone knew, but there were so
many others who simply lived there but didn’t take part in the town life. Maybe
they did, she thought as she walked past the Church, but in different circles.
She began to see it like a Venn diagram, those mathematical pictures from
school, where groups were put into circles and in some places, those circles
overlapped.

And with the murder, she thought, she needed to look at
Warren Martin’s circle, and see where it overlapped with other circles. He
overlapped into the camera club – Eric. And Nina, she added to herself. That
young woman had a strong centre, standing up to her father as she did. Warren
overlapped into the urban exploration group – Lee and Blue, who didn’t like him
but didn’t seem full of enough hate to kill him. And he overlapped into the online
dating world, and more specifically Clarissa de Castille, who was positively
repellent and also something of a mystery.

Her head was clouded with it all. Kali greeted Penny
enthusiastically when she entered her cottage, and she let the dog out into the
back garden for a good sniffing session amongst the dehydrated plants. Penny
brought her laptop outside to a small round table. She also fetched her folder
of passwords and administration information, and decided she needed to tackle
the issue of her website. First, though, she needed the information sent to her
by the hosting company that should be enough to get her back into the admin
panel online. She opened up her email.

Except that she couldn’t.

“Please re-type your password,” the pop-up box instructed.

There’s no need, she thought. My browser has it saved. But,
to humour the humourless machine, she typed it in anyway.

“Please re-type your password.”

With gritted teeth, she tried a third time, deliberately
and slowly slamming each letter and number into the box.

“Login attempt failed.”

And that was it. She was locked out of her email account
now.

Penny shivered. This was a clever and concentrated attack,
and even Drew’s CCTV on a stick couldn’t help her.

She felt nervous and violated, and the nausea began to
return.

Drew called her later on Tuesday but she wasn’t in the mood
for talking, and after a few polite sentences, she excused herself, claimed to
have a headache coming on, and he withdrew from the conversation gracefully.
Then she felt even worse for having taken out her grumpiness on him. That
night, she rang Cath, and let rip.

After listening to a non-stop tirade for three minutes,
Cath butted in. “So, how is your blood pressure these days?”

It brought Penny up short. One of the reasons she’d left
London and her career, and taken early retirement, was because the stresses of
the job was changing her into someone she didn’t like. Just like she was
behaving now, in fact. She drew in a deep breath. “Sorry. Pretty high, I’d
imagine, at the moment. But I feel so–”

“Exposed and vulnerable, yes, yes, you said. Many times. I
agree with you. You’ve annoyed some of the bigger fish in the regional craft
world and one of them is out to get you. Don’t forget, Penny, this is your
hobby but it’s a livelihood for some of these people. Their families depend on
their income.”

“It’s a business for me, too. I take it seriously.”

“I know you do,” Cath soothed. “But consider what’s at
stake, okay? Don’t take it as personally as it seems to be.”

Penny was slightly mollified, and went to bed early, but
could not sleep.

* * * *

She felt rubbish on Wednesday morning. The successive
nights of poor sleep were beginning to tell on her, and her eyes were gritty
and her mind seemed fogged. When she got back from the early morning walk with
Kali, there was a message waiting on her mobile phone. She’d left it on the
kitchen table in her half-awake confusion.

It was from Cath. “I told the Inspector about your website
issues and he wants to look into it a bit more. He’s sending one of our techy
whizzes down. Taz. About midday, but can you send me a text to confirm that’s
okay? I’ll be in court this morning so don’t bother trying to ring me.”

“Ugh. I’ll have to tidy up,” she said to Kali, as she
hammered out a confirmatory text and prepared for the arrival of the technical
man.

* * * *

Except that the techy man was a woman, and a very girlie
girl at that; Taz turned up in a short, floral dress of stunning pinks and
reds, with her long blonde hair cascading in curls over her shoulders. She
carried a large, functional black rucksack, and smiled broadly. She was the
sort of woman who could get away with wearing glittery, metallic make-up even
in her mid-twenties.

“Come on in!”

“Thank you. Shall I take my shoes off?”

“I have a dog. You might want to keep them on for your own
protection.”

Kali burst through the kitchen door. She’d been in the back
garden, distracted by butterflies, and was distraught at being late to meet the
guest.

“What a sweetheart!” Taz exclaimed as Kali rolled over to
proudly show everyone her belly. Penny decided that she liked Taz, and offered
her a range of drinks as she led her to the kitchen, where her laptop was set
up on the table.

“Okay. So I’ll get my stuff out, and then you can show me
what the issues are.”

While Penny set about with the kettle, and broke open a
nice new packet of biscuits that she had been saving for a special occasion,
Taz unloaded her own laptop, and a small square box that plugged into the mains
and into her laptop, an iPad, and an array of small thumb-drives.

“Okay,” Penny said, sitting down at last. “I had a website,
and my business email attached to it, and my personal web-based email, and
they’ve all … gone.”

“Show me.”

There followed a tedious and confusing and sometimes
infuriating hour. Penny could only sit, helplessly, as Taz stared at the
screens, clicked buttons, plugged things in, asked complicated questions, analysed
whole walls of code that flickered over the laptops, and occasionally sighed.

“Well, I can tell you that you have been systematically
hacked,” Taz said at last.

“I did guess that. I mean, I’m no expert, but…”

Taz shook her head. She wasn’t finished. “It was a seasoned
hacker who did this to you, you know. Cath mentioned you thought you’d made
enemies in the crafts world. Do you know of any of them that might be capable
of this?”

“Seriously? No. I barely know any of them, full stop,
though, so maybe. Anyone can be capable of anything, can’t they?” She was
thinking of secrets and the murder case.

“This is plain malicious and it’s by an expert. They are
good. They’ve left very little trace. But I just want to follow one thing up …”
Taz tapped furiously, swapping from Penny’s laptop to her own, and back again.

“Okay,” Taz said. “What are your online names? Screen
names?”

“Penny May Designs, but all one word.”

“Anything else? Have you signed up to any sites like
twitter?”

“No, not twitter. I’m on a photo site, but I’m PMDesigns
there.”

“Okay.” Taz stared thoughtfully at a pad of paper where
Penny had written her email addresses. “And these are your only emails?”

“Yes.”

“So who is MzzRazzr?”

“Wait. What did you say? Let me see. How are you spelling
that?” Penny leaned over, and Taz wrote it on the pad of paper.

“Is it yours?” Taz asked.

“No. But I know who it is. Can I have my laptop? Okay.
Thanks.” She called up her history and found the entertainment blog that
Clarissa de Castille ran.

“Who is that?” Taz peered at the screen and her face
twisted in distaste. “Oh, why do people enjoy being so nasty about other
people? Sorry – is this your blog? I thought you didn’t have any other sites…”

“I don’t, and it’s not, and don’t apologise. The woman who
runs this is a right nasty piece of work.” Penny sat back and felt her face
slacken. “Oh. Oh, wow. So here’s the link … MzzRazzr is Clarissa de Castille.
Do you know of the Warren Martin case that Cath is investigating?”

“Yes; we’ve all read the bulletins.”

“Clarissa went on a date with Warren. They met online.”

“Really? The impression I got of Warren was that he was a
bit of a bumbler, if you know what I mean. Did he get many dates?”

“Only this woman, and she was totally not his type. It was
very odd indeed.”

Taz’s fingers flew over the keys, and her hand darted back
and forth to the mouse she’d plugged into the laptop. “Well, this MzzRazzr – or
Clarissa – is quite the competent geek, I have to tell you.” She grinned. “It’s
always nice to see women doing well in the technology field.” Her smile faded
as she dug deeper and deeper into Clarissa’s online activities. “Wow. She’s
raking in the money, you know.”

“How? We did wonder about that, when we met her. She looked
awfully high maintenance.”

Penny then got a crash course in the monetization of blogs
which made her head spin. “And look here,” Taz said, after a long explanation
of affiliate links, “she’s got a YouTube channel. Oh … my goodness. Look at
this.”

Penny and Taz sat and stared in horror at the segments of
spite that were paraded in front of them. The videos on Clarissa’s channel were
all apparently taken by hidden camera, and they were of dates.

Dates with men.

Dates with men like Warren.

“There – click that one,” Penny said as they scrolled
through the available content. “That’s him. That’s Warren.”

It was excruciating to watch. Warren was dressed in a white
shirt that was a little too small for his fleshy frame. He had dark circles of
sweat under his arms. They appeared to be in a swanky restaurant, but it was
hard to make out the details. A neatly-dressed and dapper waiter floated behind
them from time to time. The camera must have been hidden on Clarissa’s person,
somehow, as it only showed Warren. Taz turned the sound up and they could hear
his awkward bad jokes and attempts at ingratiating himself with Clarissa.

Watching anyone have a rough time on a date was hard.
Clarissa, however, had gone further. She had added little boxes of text on the
video at certain points; they were mean, spiteful and nasty comments, designed
to hurt and to mock. Penny knew better than to ask to see the comments by the
general public that would be listed below the video.

“This is horrible. Please stop it,” Penny said, and Taz
closed the whole browser down.

“So that was Warren, was it?” Taz said, her mouth twisted
with distaste. “Was that their date, do you think?”