Page 15 of Worse Than Murder (DCI Matilda Darke Thriller #13)

M ay told me to pop along to the offices of the local newspaper, Cumbria Today , and speak to the editor, Tania Pritchard, who, apparently, came with her own dark past. I’m starting to wonder if anyone in this country is truly happy.

According to May, Tania had planned on working for the local paper to learn her craft, then up sticks and move to the bright lights of a bustling metropolis where she’d be the first to attend any crime scene, desperate for the scoop on a pub brawl that had got out of hand, a domestic between husband and wife with a bloody ending, or the latest victim in a chilling serial killer investigation.

She’d marry, obviously, but she wouldn’t have kids, and when she retired, she and her husband, with their huge amount of disposable income, would spend their twilight years seeing the world while she wrote her scintillating memoirs.

* * *

I open the door to the newspaper office, a former charity shop in the High Street, and look into the back office.

I expect to see a hive of activity as reporters race to meet a deadline.

What I actually see are five empty desks and a thin woman leaning over a laptop, her grey hair piled on top of her head in an untidy fashion, a vape sticking out of her mouth and a whirl of fake smoke with a smell of strawberries drifting around her.

She must have heard me come in as she holds up a finger to tell me she’ll be with me in a minute and carries on with her typing.

I look around the room. It looks what it is– sad.

I suppose local media is dying a death. Most local newspapers are owned by larger organisations who are also struggling to keep afloat.

Many have disappeared or merged in order to save money, and more and more pages are filled with advertisements than stories.

The property sections disappeared when Rightmove and Zoopla came along.

The personals were lost to Tinder and Grindr, and people find out about births, marriages and deaths by what people post on Facebook.

Eventually, she gets up from her chair and puts down her vape. She wipes crumbs off her bosom and smooths down her trousers as she comes to the front desk.

‘Good morning. What can I do for you?’ she asks. Her voice is gravelly, and she speaks with a thick local accent.

‘I’m looking for Tania Pritchard.’

‘You’ve found her.’

‘I’m not local. I’m visiting for a while. I’m staying with the Meagan family who own Nature’s Diner?—’

‘I know the Meagans,’ she interrupts.

‘I’m also a detective. I’m…’

‘You’re DCI Matilda Darke,’ she says, her face suddenly lighting up. ‘I wondered when I was going to clock eyes on you. Your stay has certainly got people talking.’

‘Has it? Why?’

‘Why? Seriously? You’re the biggest piece of gossip our sleepy little village has had since the vicar’s two poodles disappeared.

Spoiler alert, they were found safe and well two days later.

’ She pauses to take a breath, and I can feel her eyeing me up and down.

‘Now, some are wondering whether you’re going to have brought the killer with you and if he’s going to start picking us off one by one, or if you’re here undercover to expose some kind of terrorist cell we didn’t know we were part of,’ she says with a wry smile.

‘Oh, and I’ve had a call from one little old dear who thinks you might be a decoy. Don’t ask me in what regard.’

Wow. I had no idea I’d been the focus of so much gossip.

‘Well, I’ve never been undercover in my life. I’m pretty sure I haven’t been followed by a killer and I’m no decoy. I can show you my driver’s licence, if you like.’

‘If I took every crackpot theory that came into this paper seriously, I’d contact the local water company and ask what they were putting into our supply.

’ Tania pushes some free copies of the paper to one side and lifts the flap in the desk.

‘Come on through. You’re the highest-ranking officer I’ve ever had in this building.

I’m not having you standing there as if you’re about to ask me to print a feature about a seventeen-year-old cat who’s just died.

Let’s get the kettle on and you can tell me why you’re here. ’

Most of the journalists I’ve met over the years are of the cut-throat variety who would climb over the dead body of their own mother to get a juicy story.

I’m not getting those vibes from Tania, and I instantly warm to her as she leads me through into the main open-plan office.

Tania pops into a small alcove and flicks on the kettle while I peruse a wall of framed first-page prints and maps of the local area.

‘You’ll see my byline a lot,’ Tania says, coming back into the room. ‘I write practically every single story.’

‘You’re the only journalist here?’

‘The only full-time one. We’ve got three others.

One’s a trainee doing work experience, who I keep telling to choose a different career because he’s bound to be jobless before he’s thirty.

One’s the former editor who’s an alcoholic and submits a story once every blue moon that I usually end up rewriting, and the final one is a mother of three who writes a regular feature on the life of a single mother in twenty-first-century Britain.

She’s the dullest woman I’ve ever met. I’ve told her to go out and get laid just to give her something new to write about, but she’s not keen.

She’s discovered jam-making,’ she says, pulling a face.

‘So, you’re the only one doing news?’

‘News?’ she says, as if the word is alien to her.

‘I seem to remember a time when that word meant something.’ The kettle boils and Tania trots into the back room to make the tea.

She returns with two mugs on a tin tray with an unopened packet of Bourbons.

‘There’s no money in local news these days.

I even have to buy my own tea and coffee.

I tell you something, when I do eventually retire– if– this office will be empty.

Even the sodding desk is mine from home. ’

I pull out a chair and sit down. ‘There doesn’t seem to be many laughs in journalism these days.’

‘It’s all podcasts. There was a time when the ambition was to work for the BBC.

Now, even their most experienced reporters are leaving to set up their own news podcasts.

That’s not going to catch on around here.

So, what’s the great Detective Chief Inspector Matilda Darke doing in our comatose village and is there a final stab at the big time in it for me? ’

Tania’s personality is infectious. I find myself wanting to open up a detective agency with her and for both of us to bring down the government. As she opens the Bourbons, I tell her about my visit from Alison Pemberton and the research I’ve done online.

‘I know I shouldn’t say this,’ she begins with a mouthful of biscuit. ‘But I milked that story for all it was worth. Not much happens around here. I knew at the time it was going to have a massive impact on the community, so I interviewed anyone and everyone I could get my hands on for their POV.’

‘What do you think happened to Celia and Jennifer?’

‘I think the father did it,’ she says straight away.

‘Jack? Why?’

‘It’s nearly always the father. Don’t get me wrong, he put on a good act for the police and the media, but that whole getting swept away in the storm business, I didn’t buy that for a minute.’

‘You think he faked his death?’

Tania turns to her laptop and begins scrolling through as she talks.

‘Back in the day, we were an important institution in the community, and we had a bigger staff number than we have now, though that’s not difficult.

We had someone covering sport, news, weather, events and features, the lot.

We even had three full-time photographers.

Anyway, the day after the storm, when we found out Jack Pemberton was missing, I was first out there.

I had a shitty little camera with me, and I took a few snaps.

They were useless. I can’t take a good pic to save my life.

Even now, with everything going on in an iPhone, I can’t get the focus right.

Thank goodness for Photoshop– something else I’ve had to pay for myself.

Here they are,’ she says, finding what she’s looking for.

She angles the laptop so I can see the screen.

‘These are the photos I took of Jack’s car the morning after the storm.

They’re blurred so they were no good to print, but you can see what’s there.

Now, the water was nowhere near the car.

If Jack had got out during the storm and it blew him about, there’s no way it would have thrown him out into the lake.

And why did he have to get out? The water wasn’t anywhere close to the car.

You can’t tell on the photos, but you could see the tideline where the water was at its highest.’

‘So, Jack’s car didn’t get into difficulty?’

‘I’m no mechanic, but if it did, there’s no reason for Jack to have gone near the water’s edge.’

I frown as I glare at the three photographs on the screen. ‘Do you have a magnifying glass?’

Tania produces one from her top drawer and hands it to me. ‘It won’t do you any good apart from give you a headache. Trust me, I speak from experience.’

She’s right. I blink hard a few times but all I’m looking at is enlarged blurred pixels. ‘Was the car locked or unlocked?’

‘Unlocked. The driver’s door wasn’t fully closed either, I remember that.’

‘Keys?’

‘Still in the ignition.’

I shake my head.

‘What are you thinking?’ Tania asks.

‘No parent, no matter how depressed, would leave their daughter in the back of the car with the door open and the key in the ignition, especially during a storm, especially when goodness knows what could happen to her. Given Jack’s mental state at the time, he would go one of two ways.

He’d either protect her at all costs, or he’d take her with him. ’