“I told you, I found it in a field.”
“But you also said that you gave it to Mr. Dixon and he said he’d hand it in to lost property.”
“So?”
“Doesn’t it seem strange that his fingerprints were nowhere to be found.”
“Not if he wiped them off.”
“You can’t wipe off one set without wiping another.”
Good point.
“I left it on the coffee table for him to pick up,” I said. “I didn’t see him pick it up, so I don’t know what he did next or why he wouldavoid getting his fingerprints on it.” Except I knew very well why he would do that. Under the table, I clenched my fists.
“There’s nothing you’ve said that means the wallet wasn’t found in exactly the way my client said it was,” Tarquin said, and the detectives decided to move on.
“You handed in an address book to your local police station a few days ago. Can you tell us about it, please, Daisy,” Parker said.
“It wasn’t me handing it in, it was Mrs. Billings, I was just giving her a lift down there. She found it in James’s bedroom. I told her it wasn’t James’s because all the people in it were strangers, and we decided the best thing would be to hand it in. You’d have to ask Mrs. B if you want to know any more.”
“You know everyone Mr. Dixon knows, do you?” Parker asked.
“We’ve been married a long time. We know most of the same people.” By that I meant we both knew everyone in Upper Iffley.
“Do you know all his business clients?”
“I’ve met most of them,” I said, feeling a bit defensive. I’d been to a lot of networking dos, but it was probably fair to say James wheeled and dealed with a fair few I’d never even heard of.
“Did it occur to you that address book may just be a backup list for his clients in case the internet went down?”
I thought of the book and I thought of a million and one objections to that idea. “It was full of postal addresses,” I said. “If the internet goes down for a couple of hours, he’s not going to write to tell them that.” Followed by, “There were blank spaces in it. James’s client list would fill that book and a hundred more,” and, “Have you checked the handwriting?”
To which Parker replied, “He likes to be prepared for a major internet collapse. It’s just one of many books, which are confidential, forobvious reasons. We will check the handwriting, but it’s so scrunched up in there, it’s going to be hard to make a valid comparison.”
Tarquin gave a little snort. “Don’t they have magnifying glasses?” he asked. Parker ignored him.
Whatever they believed or didn’t believe and could prove or could not prove, I realized the address book was not the bull’s-eye I had imagined. It was not as good as planting Lennie’s wallet on me.
***
All good things come to an end, and the next morning, Arty called in to tell me that they thought they had collected as many bones as they could and they were expecting to finish by the end of the week.
“They’ll probably be finding little bones around the village for years to come, though,” he added. Then, “We should set a date for my DIY day.”
“We should,” I agreed, although part of me wanted to keep it as something to look forward to in the future.
“It needs to be soon; my girlfriend and I are going traveling afterward. We decided just recently.”
A girlfriend! I don’t know if I kept the dismay off my face when he mentioned her. And not only that, but they were leaving and he would not be around the grounds or coming to the kitchen to boil up. He would not be in the area at all. There would be no chance of bumping into him on one of my rare outings to Upper Iffley or Tippington. He’d be hundreds, maybe thousands of miles away. With his girlfriend.
I’d known the day would come and in truth the archaeologists had been here longer than I had anticipated, but it felt like the end of a happy stage in my life, the end of a time when there were moments Icould forget about James, Lennie, and Mr. Newman for a while. And the DIY day now had a use-by date.
“Could you come on a Wednesday?” I asked, picking a day almost at random. Almost. There would be no James and no Mrs. Billings on a Wednesday.
“Next Wednesday?”
I nodded.
