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  ‘She thought we’d come about a hedge. I thought she was just rambling, because of her age and lack of hearing, but I did notice that she had a neat little privet hedge, and Mrs Beeton had a fence, so I just dismissed what she’d said. And then, both nights at the weekend, I dreamt I was being consumed by a giant hedge, and I couldn’t find any way out of it. It wasn’t like a maze, you understand: just a huge hedge.

  ‘Well, then I remembered that, at Mrs Beeton’s house, the hedge between her property and the one on the right was a huge monstrosity of Leylandii, and that her side of it grew right across the pathway, but on the other side, it was carefully trimmed and kept in shape.

  ‘Did Mrs Hare think we were from the Council, I wondered, and today, after I’d made a few other calls, I phoned up the local authority, and got myself on a real merry-go-round of extensions, until I found out that a complaint had been lodged some time ago.

  ‘I’d already phoned the tree surgeons I was able to find in the Yellow Pages, and, on the fourth call, I found one who had an appointment to go to Mrs Beeton’s house this week and cut down a hedge of Leylandii. The council had told me there was nothing they could do for the woman, and advised her to go to the Citizens Advice Bureau. It wasn’t her hedge you see.

  ‘They’d told her she could trim the offending branches, and even put the cuttings on to her neighbour’s land, to prove that she hadn’t stolen his property, but she wanted to find a way to get rid of the hedge altogether, because it blocked so much light from the front of her house, and it looks like she was willing to pay to get the job done without permission.

  ‘A further search of her house produced a file of letters between their solicitors about removing the light-blocking eyesore. They were in that sideboard I called you away from, when I mistakenly thought there was nothing there for us. The situation had come to an impasse, however, and another visit to Mrs Hare, with the word ‘hedge’ shouted very loudly, produced the information that they – Mrs Beeton and Mr Mortimer – were frequently going hammer-and-tongs at it about the hedge, out on the street.

  ‘Mortimer said – you heard him yourself – that she told him this morning that she was ‘going to have the bloody things cut down and burnt’, and she’d like to see him stop her. He spent a couple of hours working himself into a real rage and downing shots of scotch, then went round to the chip shop and confronted her, and that was that. What a waste of both lives! And the fool had left his fingerprints all over the chip scoop, so there was no chance of him bluffing his way out of it.’

  They were just passing the end of the pedestrian High Street, when Carmichael suddenly yelled, ‘Stop!’

  Falconer did a fairly good impression of an emergency stop, and looked at his partner quizzically. Whatever is it, Sergeant? What’s the matter?’

  ‘I just fancied a bag of chips, and there’s a chip shop on that corner back there. I might even have a battered burger with it.’

  ‘Well, it has been at least two hours since your breakfast,’ replied Falconer, then leaned out of the car window and shouted, ‘Could you get the same for me as well; and lots of vinegar, Carmichael.’

  THE END

  Toxic Gossip #4

  DI Falconer becomes involved in a gossip-fuelled hate crime, only to find himself questioning his own judgement when it comes to protecting Miriam Darling from her anonymous persecutors …

  Chapter One

  Friday 6th August

  Miriam Darling stood in her new sitting room, missing suddenly the hurly-burly of the removal men and their cheery banter as they had transferred all her worldly goods into her new home.

  Since yesterday afternoon, her world had been filled with these energetic and talkative men. First, as they packed her precious breakables, and loaded most of her furniture into their large van, leaving her only a bed and the means of making them all a cup of tea in the morning, and again today, as they moved her two hundred miles to her new address.

  At first, she had found their inconsequential chatter a nuisance, and had taken herself off to the garden to sit on an old stool on the patio, but, as the afternoon wore on, she had found herself going indoors more frequently, coming, little by little, to enjoy the sound of life in the home that she would be leaving the next day, for ever.

  By mid-afternoon, she found herself in the kitchen, brewing a pot of tea, and scrabbling round in her almost bare cupboards for a packet of biscuits. Sugar for energy, she thought, as her searching hand fell upon a packet of chocolate digestives she didn’t realise she still had.

  A tea-break meant a sit-down, and they settled themselves happily on the sitting room floor, now bare of its furniture and all its decorative trappings and pictures. She was just about to leave them to enjoy their tea and biscuits in peace when one of them called to her to join them if she wanted to, and, quite unexpectedly, she found that she did want to sit down with them, and engage in a normal conversation, for the first time in months.

  They really were a jolly crew, who clearly enjoyed their work and their travels, and got on well with each other. As she sipped at her hot drink and nibbled on a biscuit, they regaled her with tales from their various trips together, exaggerating the mishaps and disasters to such an extent that she found herself laughing, and was grateful for their happy banter.

  When they finished for the evening and took a taxi to a local public house to eat their evening meal, she threw the last of her left-over food together for a make-shift meal and contemplated the fact that, after today, this house would no longer be her home. That a new start was a good idea, she had no doubt, but she had lived at the same address for so long that not having the address any more would feel like an amputation – a new telephone number in her head, like a betrayal of who she was and how she had got to be this woman called Miriam Darling.

  A new area would allow her to become someone new – someone whom nobody pitied and no one sought to comfort, or pointed out in the street, whispering to their companion about her history. Somewhere else, she would just be ‘that woman who’d just moved into the house on the corner’. She could be anonymous, and start life afresh, with a clean sheet, provided she could banish the memories and, somehow, suppress the nightmares.

  Today had started in a whirl of activity, making sure that the old house was in a fit and presentable state to greet its new owners, and that nothing had been forgotten. At the last minute, she had grabbed the old kitchen clock from the wall, where it had been abandoned for no good reason, and carried it out to her car, to put it safely on the back seat where it would not be jostled around too much.

  And then they were off, at six o’clock on a Friday morning, heading for pastures new; leaving everything familiar and previously comforting behind. Following the removal van, she let her mind wander as she kept the vehicle in easy sight, due to its sheer bulk. She tried to remember all she could of the town and street she had chosen for the next phase of her life, and the few people she had met so far in her visits to the new address.

  These, given the distance between the two places and the infrequency of her visits, consisted only of the estate agent and his assistant, and the two next-door neighbours, one beside her new home, the other round the corner, on the rear perimeter of the garden. They had seemed nice enough, and she supposed that people were the same just about everywhere. It was one’s attitude to them, and theirs to you that really decided whether you sank or swam in a community. Then she nearly bit off her tongue at the inappropriateness of the wording of her last thought.

  Silently chiding herself for being over-sensitive, she focused on the rear doors of the van, once more, and made her mind a blank for the next fifty miles. It was suddenly catapulted back to the present as she saw the van indicate to turn left. It pulled off up a slip-road towards a gathering of establishments that comprised a service stop with wide swathes of parking spaces, and a variety of eating places.

  The removal men had had only a cup of tea from her this morning, and she presumed they were hungr
y and in need of a proper breakfast. She didn’t feel in the least like eating, herself, but knew it would make good sense to put something in her belly, to give her some energy for dealing with the unloading and directing at the other end. Thus decided, she joined them in the queue for the till with a tray loaded with a full English breakfast, a pot of yoghurt, and a mug for tea.

  She initially seated herself at a separate table, but was urged, before she had even sat down properly, to come and join the merry gang at a larger table at the rear of the dining area. Since their arrival the previous day, this small group of strangers had offered her a re-entry into human affairs, and she realised how much she appreciated it, when, on joining them, the ‘head honcho’ and owner of the van said that he had a bottle of champagne in his cab, to be cracked when all her possessions were in the new house.

  He was of the opinion that all house moves should be celebrated as a moving on in life, and did this on a regular basis, unless he suspected that the couple were breaking up, or moving down-market due to financial problems. This gave her another reason to be glad that she had chosen this one-man-band to move her, and not one of the faceless large companies.

  The last half of the journey passed without mishap, and it was only eleven o’clock when they pulled up outside number 45 Essex Road, in Market Darley. She had realised, about forty or fifty miles ago, how beautiful the countryside was becoming, and reached the town, from which she would commute to her job the three days of the week that she worked, with thoughts of appreciation of its architecture and surroundings.

  It was an old market town, with a market cross and square, and many of its shops, if one raised one’s eyes above display window level, clearly advertised their age. It looked like a place she could learn to forget and start life anew, and this made her smile, as the two vehicles in the tiny convoy pulled up outside her new home.

  The rest of the day had been a whirlwind of activity for, although she was not involved in the unloading or transfer of her furniture and the boxes containing her smaller possessions, she was the one ‘directing traffic’, as it were. Yesterday afternoon, she had tried to keep abreast of the efficient and swift packing, to mark each box before it was loaded on to the van, but she had not managed to label them all, and she also wanted the furniture to go into the correct rooms while she had sufficient muscle to put it in place. Once they had gone, and she was on her own again, anything heavy in a wrong room would have to stay there until she had got to know someone with enough muscle-power to help her shift it to its correct position.

  At lunchtime – about one-thirty, by choice of the removal men – she drove off to the local parade of shops which she had discovered on a previous visit, and bought enough fish and chips to feed them all, no matter how big their appetites proved to be. It was the least she could do, after all their friendly overtures to her, and she was saddened to think that she would never see those same faces again. They would just retreat into her past, after today, for they were not local, and would become just another memory, but a happy one this time.

  Even her reception in the chip shop had been positive, with the man behind the counter, who turned out to be the owner, spotting a new face and asking her if she was just visiting – then wishing her the best of luck when she explained that she was only that day moving to the town.

  When she arrived back with the food, the removal men had set up the dining table, attaching the top to the legs after its journey, had rooted out the dining chairs, and escorted her to what they had assumed (correctly) would be the dining room. They received their parcels of greasily steaming sustenance with suitable gestures of appreciation and gratitude, and set to, to make short work of her offerings.

  As she scrunched up the empty papers to put in a black plastic bag from a roll she had, with forethought, brought with her in the car, she called out to see who wanted tea, and, after receiving a volley of affirmatives, entered the kitchen to find the kettle in pride of place, together with the box packed last, with mugs, tea, coffee, and sugar in it, waiting for her on the work surface. The milk, they had thoughtfully removed from the box in which it had been packed, and put into the newly brought-in and connected fridge.

  After a flurry of, ‘Left hand down a bit,’ ‘No, lift, not push,’ ‘Twist it so that we can get it through,’ and ‘Mind the doorframe, you donkey,’ while the tea brewed, they came to collect their steaming mugs with gratitude, and not a little horse-play, more for her entertainment, she thought, than their own.

  She had wondered if cold drinks would be more appropriate on an afternoon in August, but the British weather was behaving true to form, and a thick blanket of clouds hid the sky and smothered the heat of the sun, so it was quite a cool day, a good prod to her to check out the central heating system before autumn arrived, as it was likely to do, well before its traditional date, in this country.

  The men had finally left at seven-thirty, wishing her good luck to a man, and waving frantically out of the cab window as the van drove away, an almost intimate part of her life for a day and a half, and she hadn’t even known their names. And suddenly she was alone again, in a strange town where she had no friends or relatives, and just herself to bother about.

  Chapter Two

  Friday 6th August, 2010 – evening and onwards

  Shaking herself back to the present, she began, slowly, to move from room to room, inspecting her new home with a critical eye. All in all, it was a good house, although just a bit too big for her on her own, but it was in good decorative order, if not to her taste, and it had been well maintained by its previous owners.

  It had also been left immaculately clean and for this she was grateful. Her energy levels had been sapped and she no longer had the enthusiasm for the mundane jobs previously undertaken without thought. She considered that it was possible that she would be happy here, and looked forward to the time when this would be so, and she could feel like an ordinary person again.

  Maybe she should get a dog or a cat, she wondered, just so that there was an extra heartbeat in the house, and something to talk to, so that she didn’t feel as if she were going mad any more, when she talked to herself. A cat would be best, she decided, with her having to go to work three days a week. Dogs needed to be exercised, but a cat, although it walked to the beat of its own drum, could come and go as it pleased, with the addition of a cat flap, and would be an additional comfort to her on cold evenings, sitting on her lap and purring.

  Oh! There was already a cat flap in the kitchen door, something she had not noted on any of her trips to view and measure up. Well, that was that decision made, then, and she determined to look in the Yellow Pages to try to locate a rescue centre from where she could choose a homeless animal to take in, and give the love and care it needed. Two waifs and strays together. What a team they would make!

  Having ended her tour in the kitchen, having ascertained that all the bulky items of furniture were where they should be, she remembered that there had been a portion of chips, a saveloy, and a battered burger left at lunchtime, and she was glad she had not thrown them away. It was too late to look for shops open, and she was physically and emotionally exhausted from the rigours of the day. A few minutes on a plate in the microwave, and she could eat good old English comfort food, and go up to make up her bed for the night.

  As she finished eating, however, there was a sharp rap at the front door, and she opened it to find the woman she had met previously, from the house next door, on her step. Introducing herself as Carole Winter, she extended an invitation to come round to her house for a glass of sherry.

  Miriam was taking her first step into what was to be a period of whirling activity, as she was rapidly introduced by Mrs Winter, to the Women’s Institute, where a young-for-her-years lady called Mabel Monaghan showed her their programme of events for the following autumn, and urged her to attend the special summer-break meetings. These were all talks by local people, about their particular interests, including local history, and the d
ecline, rise and decline again, of agriculture in the surrounding area.

  This sounded a good way to learn about where she was to make her new life, and she agreed, with alacrity, to attend the meetings, and join as soon as she was given the opportunity.

  A meeting of the local book club, which this month was held at the home of a woman in her mid-thirties called Justine Cooper, introduced her to women a little closer to her own age, and she was fascinated that their list of books for the coming months included some quite racy titles.

  She sat with them for two hours while they discussed the current volume under scrutiny, and found their impressions and insights intelligent and informative. Invited to the next meeting, she accepted immediately, and made a note of the book they were discussing earlier, so that she could get a copy, and add her own impressions to the general pot of opinions.

  The ladies of the library, Liz and Becky, bade her a similar welcome to their world of literature, and provided her with a temporary ticket on the spot, informing her that she would receive her permanent ticket through the post, and telling her that they looked forward to seeing her again in the near future

  In that first week, Carole was very dedicated, taking her to many other organisations, introducing her each time to the individual who ran it, and making her head spin with the plethora of new names she felt she needed to commit to memory. Mrs Winter seemed to know everyone in Market Darley, and so she should have done, having moved there from the north thirty-five years ago, on her marriage. She had lost almost all the accent that had identified her origins up until her move south.

  Carole had also insisted on taking her to the local church on Sunday to meet the congregation, even introducing her to the members of the choir. The vicar welcomed her warmly to his parish, expressed the hope that she would become one of his flock, and join in with all the parish activities, which didn’t seem impossible to Miriam, once she had met everyone that morning. His congregation was young, and the notice board in the entrance filled with notices of meetings, groups and social events. Maybe life would be kind to here, in this, her new start.