Felix Francis - Guilty Not Guilty

Tell me about it.

The two women had been best friends ever since we had first arrived in the village. I had also become friendly with her husband, Dave, a London-based jewellery dealer, and the four of us had regularly had boozy suppers in each other’s homes, and had even once rented a villa together for a week in Greece.

‘Won’t you come in?’ I said.

Nancy hesitated again and I wondered if she was worried about coming into a house alone with someone that everyone else in the village was calling a murderer. Hence I didn’t push the point, remaining standing in the doorway.

‘Amelia told me on the day before she died that she was going to have a drink with you at the pub.’

‘Oh, yes, that’s right,’ Nancy said. ‘She called me. But we only had a quick one. I had to get back to finish cooking supper for Dave. I asked her to join us, seeing that you were away, but she refused. She said she had some things to do and she wanted to have an early night.’

‘What did you talk about?’

‘Oh, you know, the usual.’

The ‘usual’ was the state of Amelia’s health. Nancy and Dave had been there for us during the bad times as well as the good. Indeed, Nancy had been Amelia’s rock and mainstay even in her darkest hours, and she was also well up to speed with all the problems between the Bradbury siblings.

‘Was there any specific reason why she wanted to meet you that particular evening?’

‘I don’t think so.’ She put her head on one side as if thinking back. ‘We initially chatted about all sorts of mundane stuff but I now remember that there was one thing she told me as we were walking back that I thought was quite interesting.’

‘Which was?’ I asked.

‘She said that her brother would soon be getting his comeuppance. She was convinced that he’d stolen some money from his mother during the sale of their family home. Something about him and the estate agent conspiring together to lower the reported sale price so that they could pocket the difference.’

Wow! Now, that really was interesting.

‘I wonder why she didn’t mention it to me.’

‘She said was going to just as soon as she was sure of it. Seems she didn’t want you going off half-cocked before she had the proof.’

‘Did she tell you how she knew?’ I asked.

‘Not exactly,’ Nancy said. ‘It was something to do with a couple who were her parents’ old neighbours in Surrey. Seems they came to visit her mum and it was something they said that made her wonder, but I don’t know what it was.’

‘Did you tell the police about this?’ I asked.

‘The police?’

‘Yes. They told me that you were interviewed on the morning they found Amelia.’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘So they did. A man in uniform knocked on our door to ask if we’d seen anyone unfamiliar in the village during the previous twenty-four hours. Or anyone at all near your house.’

‘And had you?’ I asked.

‘No. We’d seen nothing. Not until an ambulance and the police turned up anyway. I remember asking him why he wanted to know but he wouldn’t say. I only found out what had happened to Amelia much later, when all the TV people started arriving.’

I thought she was going to cry again.

‘But you didn’t say anything to the police about Amelia’s suspicions that Joe Bradbury stole the money?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even tell Dave. It didn’t seem important compared to...’ She tailed off.

I personally thought it might be very important but I didn’t say so to Nancy. She was distressed enough.

‘Do you think that I should tell them?’ she asked.

‘No, not just yet,’ I said. ‘I’ll do a bit of digging first and find out if there’s anything to it.’

She seemed relieved. ‘I don’t want to make an unsubstantiated accusation to the police, now do I?’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘You don’t.’

We’d had quite enough of those already.

But what if this one wasn’t unsubstantiated?

What if it were true?

Nancy never did come in. Instead, she made her excuses and went back across the road to her own house, no doubt to prepare a sumptuous supper for Dave, for when he came home from work after another busy day buying and selling jewellery in Hatton Garden.

Her obsession with food preparation had been a source of secret amusement between Amelia and myself but there was no question that she was an excellent cook, and I greatly enjoyed some of her delicious sponge cake while I continued to watch afternoon TV.

But I found I couldn’t concentrate on anything except what Nancy had told me.

What if the hundred thousand shortfall in the sale price of Mary Bradbury’s home had not been down to Joe’s incompetence, as I’d imagined, but was really due to him stealing the difference?

I wanted to believe it. Of course I did. But I couldn’t see how it could have been done without the collusion of both the purchasers and the lawyers. Not that that would stop me investigating.

I had nothing else to do.

There was no sign of any paid employment coming my way. My email inbox, as accessed via my new phone, remained stubbornly empty, and the old phone, with the number that everyone knew, resided unanswered in some police forensic laboratory.

And on this day, I had originally been scheduled to be acting as a steward at Stratford-on-Avon Races, but I feared that that aspect of my life had now gone forever. Even if I could establish my innocence beyond any doubt, and find the true killer of Amelia, the horseracing authority was looking for a way to ‘retire’ most, if not all, its volunteer honorary stewards and to make the whole thing appear more businesslike, and I was likely to be a permanent casualty of that plan.

It was a move that many people in racing had been trying to resist, not least the honorary stewards themselves. It was felt that we brought a wealth of different experiences to the sport but, while there was no suggestion that our integrity was in question, the powers that be had decided that full-time ‘professional’ stewards were the best way forward.

I, personally, thought it would be a shame and a major loss. Many of the honoraries, myself included, had been former active participants in the sport rather than purely lifelong administrators, and I believed that a combination of the two should be the preferred solution, whether or not I was involved.

So here I was at a loose end, flapping wildly in the wind, and anything I could get my teeth into would be a distraction from the dreadful heartache in my chest.

I ate another slice of Nancy’s cake but I was still hungry. I’d had no lunch, and breakfast seemed nothing more than a distant memory. I went back into the kitchen and opened the fridge, but I was out of luck. There was very little and what there was had a ring of green mould round the edges.

The freezer was not much better.

As I’d told the detective, Wednesday had always been Amelia’s favourite day for food shopping. She would maintain that, by then, all the supermarket shelves had been restocked after the previous weekend’s rush and it wasn’t yet close to the following weekend to make the store too busy.

Hence, the fact that she had died early on a Wednesday morning meant that the cupboards, while not being totally bare, were severely limited.

I took out a frozen loaf and put it on the worktop to defrost, but man shall not live by bread alone, nor even by cake, so I backed Amelia’s much-loved cream Fiat 500 out of the garage and went into Banbury for some fish and chips.

Early on Saturday morning I went to see Mary Bradbury after yet another restless night.

I had, of course, often slept alone in our house, not least when Amelia had been in hospital, but this time it was totally different. There had been no one to call to say good night to, no loving moments on the telephone to make up for her absence, no warmth in my bed, or in my heart.