‘What other secrets have you kept? I need to speak with Chloe again. I need to see if she’s remembered anything else about who Beth might have been meeting. Where was Chloe when Davy was at your place? Was she out with Beth?’
She paled. Walked around the counter, narrow-lipped, and grabbed my elbow, leading me to a table in the corner. Glenn followed, silent, and we all sat down.
Ursula leaned forward. Conspiratorial, low-voiced. ‘If you must know, Davy didn’t come round until later. After Chloe had gone to bed. Having an affair while my daughter sleeps upstairs isn’t something I’m particularly proud of. So yes, I have been trying to keep it quiet! But, well, I was lonely, and we were used to snatching what brief chances we had to be together.’
‘So Chloe was in the house the whole time?’ I checked.
‘We had a girls’ night in, watched crappy films, ate popcorn. Then she went to bed, none the wiser that I’d be staying up for a bit longer.’
Beth, she didn’t even look ashamed of what she had done. Just worried people might overhear and discover her dirty secret. I’ve known Ursula all my life. She has always worried about what other people thought – caring too much about appearances instead of substance, that was her problem. As long as her life looked perfect, who cared what crap was going on behind the scenes? That was her mindset. But I’d thought she was a nicer person than to cheat on her husband; she had always struck me as fiercely loyal.
‘So Steve knows all of this? No wonder you split up,’ I said, disgusted.
Ursula had been holding my forearm urgently, but she let go and sat back in her chair. Tossed her glamorous hair and held her chin high. Less spaniel, more Dobermann.
‘You don’t go anywhere near Steve. He knows everything. Everything. And he doesn’t need it rubbed in his face. The same goes for Chloe; you stay away from her. I’ll do whatever it takes to protect my family, Melanie. And if that means getting that injunction out against you, then that’s what I’ll do.’
‘Handy, having a lawyer for a husband,’ I scoffed. ‘Mind you, if you divorce, you’ll get screwed over, I’d imagine.’
‘As an adulterer,’ Glenn added.
A huff of surprise from Ursula. She soon gathered her thoughts, though.
‘Melanie, I meant it about that injunction. Leave my family alone. I’ve put up with today’s visit because of our history and what’s happened to Beth, but this is your final warning. Keep away from me and mine.’
Fifty-Seven
I watched Melanie as she stomped from Seagull’s Outlook Café. Oh, dear. It was so funny seeing her running around, accusing people, pointing the finger left, right and centre. The fool. She had no idea what was going on.
Maybe I should have held a sign up, then she might have got the message about what was really happening under her own nose.
Even if she did manage to discover the truth, no one would believe her. She had become the woman who had cried wolf too many times, accused too many different people. She was a drunken hysteric.
The police were probably as sick of her as the rest of us. I was sure they loved her calling them every five minutes to tell them her latest theory and advise them on who they should investigate next.
Still, she may have been unpopular with everyone else, but I was enjoying her crazy, drunken performance. It was so entertaining being able to sit back, put my feet up and watch it all play out.
It kept the bloodlust at bay. For the time being. It was becoming increasingly hard to ignore, but I was slowly putting things into place for a big kill.
This one would be so perfect that I’d be able to play it in my mind for all eternity.
Fifty-Eight
‘Blimey, you didn’t need me there at all,’ Glenn laughed, giving a deep belly rumble. ‘You more than held your own.’
‘Yeah, but having backup there really helped – besides, you didn’t exactly sit back and do nothing. You got the ball rolling.’
‘Pub for a debrief?’
Tempting, but I fought the urge. We couldn’t stay where we were, though. Despite the wind picking up and the drizzle beating a faster tempo, Jill Young was sweeping the pavement outside the store and café and straightening up as if to say something. Something I almost certainly didn’t want to hear. Davy lurked down the side of the shop, biting the inside of his cheek. Alison Daughtrey-Drew walked by on the opposite side of the road, glancing at my flushed face curiously. And Ursula glared through the window at me, making my hands itch to slap her.
I made a quick decision. ‘Marsh. It’s easier to talk out there. Call me paranoid, but it feels like the whole village is watching us.’
We grabbed Wiggins from the house, hurrying out just in time to see Aleksy striding away from James Harvey, who took one look at me and hid inside the shop. Everyone was here in one place, watching me watching them. If I didn’t escape from under the microscope I’d go mad.
At the marsh, for ten minutes we simply sat watching the rain pelt down and obliterate the view through the windscreen, listening to it roaring on the van’s roof. Finally it eased off and we jumped out. Wiggins gave a joyous bark and bounded ahead, stopping at all his usual places for updates on which other dogs might have passed by this way since his last visit.
As he ran back and forth, Glenn and I brought up the rear, walking at a more relaxed pace, braced against the wind which tried to push us over in gusts. After dissecting Ursula’s reaction, and the fact that my temper meant I had well and truly burned my bridges with her, we had to accept that there was no prospect of us getting near Chloe ever again.
‘Chances are she doesn’t know anything more, anyway,’ consoled Glenn.
True. And although what Ursula was doing was morally wrong, it was none of my business. Talk gradually turned from our investigations, which had come to a dead end for now, to childhood memories.
‘My dad would go fishing for eels in the huge drainage ditches that criss-cross the fens, you know.’
‘What? Even that one over there?’ Glenn asked.
‘Yeah, all the time. He’d catch loads. And here, on the marsh, he’d roll up his trousers and walk through the shallower creeks with a trident, like this.’ I did a funeral march, head down, making a jabbing motion downward every couple of steps. ‘It’s called butting. There are flatfish that lie hidden on the bottom of the creek because of their camouflaged scales. He’d step slowly along, stabbing blindly down with a trident, and sometimes he got lucky and caught one.’
I laughed. I’d never done it myself, and neither did your Grandpa Mick any more, after one too many lectures from you about how eels were becoming rarer.
‘My dad never did that. But he always had a rifle in the car, to shoot rabbits and pheasants.’
‘Poaching, you mean?’