Page 5

Phyllis

The door swung open, and Phyllis jumped back as PC Khan came striding out. She waited for him to accuse her of eavesdropping, but he strode off without even glancing at her. Not that this was a huge surprise; people rarely noticed her these days, unless she was complaining about something.

Phyllis turned back to the room and made a quick mental note of the tableau inside. Sandy was sitting behind a desk, her face the same color as her bright red hand-knitted sweater. Nova, who was dressed like an extra from the film Grease , had her eyes closed as if she was about to cry, and Lauren was staring at Nova with an expression of concern in her eyes. Phyllis looked down at Craddock as the door slammed shut.

“I told you that Michael was up to something fishy, didn’t I?”

Phyllis prided herself on being an excellent judge of character. Like her heroine, Miss Jane Marple, she’d made a hobby of studying human nature, and as a result she almost always got it right: like the too-chatty postman who turned out to be stealing ladies underwear from washing lines, or the girl in the newsagents who refused to let Craddock in the shop and was caught with her hand in the till. Phyllis had known they were both bad eggs the first time she met them, just as she’d watched Michael Watkins at the book club, with his shifty behavior and refusal to meet her eye, and known he was dodgy too.

“How do you fancy a little trip to Port Gowan?” she asked Craddock, and the dog let out a slow wheeze in response, like air escaping from a balloon.

They had to catch a bus to get there but Phyllis didn’t mind; bus journeys gave her an excellent opportunity to ponder the key questions of the case. Questions such as why would a man from Port Gowan come to a book club in St. Tredock? There must be book clubs in his hometown, which was five miles along the coast and much bigger than St. Tredock. Besides, it wasn’t like theirs was a particularly good one. A few years ago they’d had a decent turnout, but numbers had dwindled as Beryl’s behavior got more erratic, and the book club had stopped altogether after the unfortunate incident involving Eric Forsythe and the women’s toilets. It had been restarted by Nova, the out-of-towner who’d taken over Beryl’s job, wore funny old-fashioned clothes, and looked like she was going to scream every time anyone made a sudden movement. Then there was the teenager, Ash, who barely spoke and gave off an air of indifference, although Phyllis saw that he always paid attention to every word that was said during the meeting. Finally, there was Arthur Robinson, whose over-friendly exterior and forced joviality were obviously covering up some dark secret. In fact, if Michael turned out to be innocent then Arthur was definitely the next suspect for Phyllis to investigate.

She smiled to herself as the bus pulled into Port Gowan. This case might be rather tame compared to those of Miss Marple, a woman who had single-handedly solved dozens of murders and outwitted countless master criminals and chiefs of police. Yet Phyllis still felt a thrill at the thought of catching the person who’d stolen ten thousand pounds before the police. For a brief moment, she allowed herself to imagine the look of admiration in everyone’s eyes when they found out that she was the one who’d apprehended a thief and helped the community center in the process. Not that she would gloat, of course, but it would be nice to get a little recognition for once.

It had stopped raining by the time she disembarked from the bus, and Phyllis consulted her street map and then set off toward Michael’s address. Her pace was slow, thanks to Craddock’s short legs and incontinent bladder, but she studied her surroundings as they went. Port Gowan was modern and considerably less charming than St. Tredock, its high street filled with clothes “boutiques”—not shops—and silly fancy restaurants where fish and chips cost more than ￡20. As they got nearer to Mountfort Close, the houses became bigger and more spaced out. This Michael had obviously done well for himself, not that you’d be able to tell by the state of the man. In his first book club meeting, Phyllis had noted the dandruff on his shoulders and the fact his shirt was buttoned up incorrectly, as if done in a hurry, and last night he’d had what looked like red paint splattered on his shirt. Still, Phyllis had long observed that the richer the person, the more shabbily they dressed. Her own mother, who had been as poor as a church mouse, never left the house without a hat and gloves, and Phyllis remembered once being made to stand in the back garden for three hours in the driving rain, because her mother had caught sight of her walking home from the library with her skirt rolled up above her knees. And yet many of the “Tarquins” and “Amelias” who invaded St. Tredock every summer dressed as if they were vagrants.

“Here we are,” Phyllis said as they rounded a corner and entered Mountfort Close.

It was a cul-de-sac containing twenty or so semi-detached houses, each set back from the road by a wide driveway. There were few cars around at this time of day, and Phyllis imagined the residents commuting to well-paid jobs in Plymouth or Exeter. There were, however, three vehicles parked in Michael Watkins’s driveway: a red MINI Cooper, a black Ford van, and a police car.

“Damn it, Craddock; it looks like PC Khan got here first.”

So much for catching the thief before the cops. Still, Phyllis had come all this way so she might as well stay to watch the criminal being arrested; if nothing else, it would make a good story to tell everyone back at the community center. Reaching into her handbag, she retrieved a woolen bobble hat and a pair of sunglasses. It wasn’t a very sophisticated disguise, but she was confident that if PC Khan glanced over, he wouldn’t recognize her. This was one of the few occasions when it was useful that older people like her were invisible to the rest of the world.

Phyllis adopted a hunched posture and began to shuffle across the road toward number eight, but as she reached the far pavement, the door to the house swung open. Phyllis froze. There was a large black wheelie bin to her right, and she just had time to pull Craddock behind it before someone appeared in the doorway.

They had their back to Phyllis, but she could see it was a man dressed in protective overalls. Was this Michael? No, he looked too young, and his posture was different, taller and more confident. He said something to a person out of view and began to move backward away from the door. How strange, why was he reversing like that? And then Phyllis saw something that made her gasp.

Behind the man was a contraption on wheels, one Phyllis recognized from the countless murder mysteries she’d watched on TV. It was a wheeled stretcher, covered with a long, human-shaped object cloaked in a white sheet.

A dead body.

Phyllis’s heart was hammering so hard she could hear it in her ears, but she kept her eyes trained on the house. A woman was pushing the stretcher from the other end, and the two of them loaded it into the back of the unmarked van. Once the rear doors were shut, the man walked back to the front door and said something to a figure inside the house who Phyllis couldn’t see. She strained round the side of the bin to get a better look and was rewarded with a quick glimpse of a dark-haired woman in her mid to late fifties, her face pinched as she closed the front door. The van engine burst into life, and a moment later the man had climbed in and they were pulling past the police car and out of the driveway. Phyllis ducked low in case one of them spotted her, but the vehicle turned right and drove out of the cul-de-sac before disappearing from view.

Phyllis’s mind was racing as fast as her heart. Who had died and how? Why were the police involved? Was the woman in the doorway Michael’s wife, and if so, where was he? And, most importantly, how was this dead body connected to the community center money?

She inhaled deeply, trying to calm herself; after all, Miss Marple never allowed her emotions to get the better of her. And now, finally , Phyllis had a chance to put all these years of Agatha Christie reading to good use. With a quick glance back at the house, she straightened up and strode across the road, Craddock trotting to keep up with her.