The reporter turned to a young man, standing next to him. The caption on the screen said: “Anthony Green. Son of Lennie Green.”
“If you’re watching this, Dad, please get in touch,” he said. “If someone’s kidnapped him, please let him go. He has children and grandchildren.”
“He has children and grandchildren,” I repeated to James, who didn’t react. Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, my thoughts turned to Lennie himself, how nice he’d seemed at the party and how it had all ended for him, as he was on his way home for hot chocolate and slippers.
“Slow news day,” James replied, unconcerned and unremorseful. “Who would kidnap him, for god’s sake? We’re safe. Even if that phone turns up, it’s not been here; we would’ve seen it if it had. So why would they link it to us?”
When they finally did shut up about Lennie, the next item on the news was an in-depth analysis of an under-elevens football fundraiser, so James may have had a point about the slow news day.
The wallet and the address book stayed on the coffee table for the rest of the evening, while we flicked from channel to channel, never settling on anything, and I drank a couple of glasses of wine to relieve my stress. It went to my head, and it made me go to the loo three times, as they were quite large glasses.
Eventually, around midnight, James looked at Lennie’s property and said, “We can’t leave these lying around. Put them in the casewith the car keys while we decide how to get rid of them.” He meant the case where the keys for his classic cars were kept. It had a lock, so no one—and by that I mean Mrs. Billings—would come across them by chance. I swayed my slightly drunken way over and did as he said. Then we both went to bed, at which point, I couldn’t find my hairbrush. I never did see it again.
Over the following days we learned, via the local news, that the police really didn’t have a clue where to start. No one had noticed Lennie leaving the party that night. He was caught on camera walking down the drive, his bag over his shoulder, and turning left into the street. He had later been seen, on CCTV, cutting across the high street toward the bus station, where he waited for the late-night bus that ran from Tippington all the way to Bristol, with Great Beadington in its path. From the camera on the bus, we saw him boarding and chatting with the driver as they drove along. At one point, he put his hand in his pocket and took out his phone, so we knew he had it then.
He alighted just outside the village, not far from where we had hit him; we must have been close at the moment he was stepping down from the bus. That was where the trail went cold. It was a short walk to his house, but there was no CCTV in that rural spot. Hooray!
As a result, the police were concentrating their efforts in the small area from the bus stop to his house. That made sense, but I hoped they weren’t going to be searching the ground too closely. We’d picked up as much of the smashed headlight as we could, but in the dark, in a hurry, on that night, pieces must have been missed. I had no doubt a forensic search, if they chose to do one, would find more. I wondered how many pieces they needed to be able to identify the make and model of the car.
It all left me feeling slightly queasy. When I went to bed, I dreamtabout folk in white suits crawling around the bus stop and finding…Lennie’s phone!
***
The phone was all I thought of over the weekend. I continued to think about it as I waved James off to work on Monday morning and took stock of my snacks.
If Lennie had dropped his phone somewhere between the bus stop and his house, it would remove it from our list of things to worry about. It wouldn’t matter if it was found or not. It was easy to believe a man walking along that path, in the dark, after a few drinks, could have dropped it into the grass that lined either side of the path, and it was just far enough from the first row of houses for the ringtone to go unheard when his friends and family tried to call him.
Was it? I wondered. Was I right about that? I clicked on to the online news for an update. I knew that didn’t match my usual search history, but if the police came asking, would it really be so strange to look up a local celebrity who had gone missing? And if we had covered our tracks so well, why would they come anyway?
“Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst,” James said of the matter. “It’s the Cub Scout motto.”
I didn’t think it was, but I took his point.
There was nothing on the news that hadn’t been there before. There was nothing new about Lennie, nothing about debris from a smashed Audi headlight cover, and nothing about the phone.
I typed Lennie’s name into the search bar and hovered my finger over the “go” button. I pressed it.
The first few links were the same news articles I had just lookedat. I worked my way down to the Wikipedia page, tapped on it, and looked at the information at the top: Leonard Patrick Green, born on 7 April 1949.
Now I knew his middle name was Patrick and that he was an Aries—useful to know for the mausoleum wall. I scrolled down to the personal section and read that he had been married for nearly forty years and had four children, he played in an amateur skiffle band, and was a member of CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale.
I was getting away from the point. I scrolled through more articles, looking for a clue as to what the police were thinking, but the pieces were all the same. I needed to see for myself: I was feeling the pull of the crime scene.
I’d heard about it many times on my dramas, the urge criminals have to revisit the site, and now I was experiencing it for myself. I needed to know what was and wasn’t there. After all, even now, the police might be peering at a pile of teeny, tiny headlight shards and asking themselves, “What happened here?”
Or they might be picking his phone out of the hedgerow and saying, “Oh, here it is, no more need to search this area.” Whichever it was, good or bad, I needed to know.
It was a risk James would almost certainly forbid me from taking if he knew; after all, there was nothing normal about me poking around on the shoulder of the road just outside Great Beadington, but if my mission were successful, the rewards would be immense. If I found the phone, I could kick it into view, to be found soon after by an unconnected passerby. If I found headlight pieces, I could scatter them to the winds.
Eyes fixed firmly on the prize, I grabbed the keys for my own Fiesta that James supplied me with, so that I could run errands forhim, and headed out.
***
Great Beadington is our neighboring village, of a similar size to Upper Iffley but less attractive. It only has a handful of thatched cottages, whereas Upper Iffley is stuffed full of them—the whole village is an absolute fire hazard.
Great Beadington has a large village green, but the surface is so uneven, you can hardly step on it without twisting your ankle. Its folk dancers can’t move to a rhythm, its cricket team can’t guard a wicket, and its amateur dramatics society can never remember their lines.
The village pub quiz team can’t even beat ours when the subject is themselves. The question that stumps them is: “Who is believed to have stolen the third of Upper Iffley’s original five church bells?”
