Cold Blood by Jane Heafield (great books to read txt) 📕

they were violent and breaking things. And he was only staying that one night anyway. When the director came back to my hotel after the Lion, I confronted him. I told him he wouldn’t get much out of anyone here and his best bet come Monday morning was to leave.’

‘But he left that night.’

‘I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know. He told me he was sorry for hiding who he really was, but that he’d expected such cold treatment before he even came here. That was why his people were staying somewhere else, but he didn’t say where. Or why he’d rented a hotel room. Then they’d met up and gone into the Lion, hoping to blend in and try to get to someone with a loose tongue. So I think he came to get his stuff because it was time for them all to leave. I think he was worried about further action from the people who threatened him in the Lion.’

‘Blending in didn’t work. And you honestly didn’t meet the people he was with?’

‘Honestly, I didn’t. When he checked in, he didn’t mention friends.’

‘Did you suggest the back door so he wouldn’t be seen?’

‘No, no, he wanted to go that way. Maybe it was to avoid being seen, like you say, but he didn’t seem that scared. In fact, I think he said something about a wall of silence being a good angle. I assume he meant for his documentary.’

Bennet wondered if he should hunt out more CCTV. He might witness a scene like something from Frankenstein or a Greek tragedy: the village folk marching the streets with torches and pitchforks, the Keys all robed and Richard Turner carried on a sedan chair. He wouldn’t put it past these people.

‘You’ve been here years, Gemma, and you run the only hotel. Why aren’t you a Key?’

Gemma tapped her wheelchair. ‘Not an all-commanding powerful look, is it?’

‘Arseholes.’

She patted his arm. ‘Do you want your girlfriend back, is that it?’

He gave a little laugh and shook his head. ‘No, it’s not that. It’s complicated.’

‘You didn’t really fit in here, did you? Didn’t want to be here? Did your relationship fall apart because you left?’

He shrugged. She got that he didn’t want to talk about it. ‘Wait here a moment.’

She wheeled off, subject forgotten. But not by him. He’d avoided every village meeting, never joined a local club or society, and, bar Gemma and the Argyles, had barely gotten to know anyone beyond the circle of Lorraine and her friends and family. Why? One foot out the door, dragged across the threshold by his career.

He’d met Lorraine at a Sunday market in Doncaster. At that point her parents had moved south from Lampton and she’d been renting it from them. Once she was pregnant with Joe they decided to move in together, but not here. He hadn’t been willing to think about swapping his life to another city, but he’d expected Lorraine to do so. And she had. She had given up all her friends and the place she knew, to be with a man who lived his job even when not on the clock. How much had that contributed to their downfall, like Gemma had suggested? Bennet had always assumed they’d simply run their course. Sometimes he’d wondered if Lorraine had rapidly grown weary of being attached to a man who put more time into his job than into her. But one thing he’d never considered was that she’d resented his dragging her out of a comfortable life in Lampton that she’d reluctantly given up.

Something else Gemma had said worried him. He’d thought he’d accepted the end of he and Lorraine, but had he? Had he really come to terms with it even now, a decade on? How much of this silly mission to find her was actually about Joe reacquainting with his mother? Was part of it a deep-down hope that they could be a family again? Even Turner had asked if he wanted Lorraine back.

No, that was stupid. He wouldn’t have waited ten years to try to get her back. And she had another family now.

But why hadn’t he ever found another partner?

He cut these silly thoughts as Gemma returned with a laptop, which she put in front of him at the table. She put her wheelchair right by him.

‘If all four of the crew planned to have hotel rooms, it makes no sense for all of them to not stay here,’ she said. ‘Ground zero for their documentary. And if there were just four, it’s doubtful they had a separate shooting unit somewhere. At some point between the Lion and my hotel, they split up. If the director went out the back of my hotel, it means his friends weren’t waiting outside in a vehicle.’

He nodded. Very good. Maybe Gemma wanted to be a detective for real, not just writing about them in fiction. He watched as she loaded Google Maps and an aerial view of Lampton and a portion of the countryside.

‘If they accompanied him to the hotel to check out, it would be hard for them to access the back field. It would mean going down a side street and through someone’s backyard, and over a fence. So it makes more sense that they split up at the Lion. But if so, it means his friends walk a mile through the dark fields, to then stand around waiting for him out the back of my hotel? That doesn’t make sense.’

She seemed pleased with her logic. He couldn’t fault it.

‘So they must have planned to meet at a specific place,’ she continued. ‘Perhaps where the other three were staying the night. Somewhere close, given they were on foot and it was cold and dark.’

Gemma shrank the map to a zone about the size of a half hour’s walk. Various pins and icons showed places of intrigue and user photographs, as well as hotels. When calling hotels, Bennet and Gemma had worked outwards from Lampton, and