The Vacant Casualty
Read The Vacant Casualty Online
Authors: Patty O'Furniture
The Vacant Casualty
is not prepared, authorized, licensed, approved, or endorsed by the author or the publishers of
The Casual Vacancy
.
Prologue
M
RS
E
LIZABETH
B
OTTLESCUM
always pottered around the garden in the very first moments of the day.
Primarily this was because she always woke so early, but it was also due to the little gossipy titbits she could glean while she watered the azaleas.
For there was much gossip to pick up in the small town of Mumford. On the surface it might appear a sunlit vision of English perfection, a sleepy idyll of old-fashioned good taste and family
values, but if one knew where to look it was packed to the rafters with rotters of the first water.
It had been many years since Mr Bottlescum passed away, and left her alone in this little house. She often thought of him now, not because he had been particularly interesting, or because he had
any even mildly pleasant personality traits, but because he’d been in possession of an absolutely colossal wanger. On warm summer evenings, she often daydreamed about it for hours.
The beauty of this setting could not be denied. The early sun rose slowly in the East over the hilltops, glowing pale orange. In the narrow streets, the cottages with their thatched roofs and
whitewashed walls slumbered in silence. Ducks fretted playfully in the millpond, while a gentle morning wind drifted with dandelion seeds. And from the freshly tilled fields that surrounded the
town at not a quarter of a mile’s distance drifted the aroma of twenty thousand tonnes of cow shit that had been spread there the previous afternoon. It was the country. What can you do?
In just over an hour the local little darlings would be threading their way happily down the hill towards Pigfarts, the exclusive local school – and at the sight of them Mrs Bottlescum
would wonder for the hundredth time why they always carried broomsticks and had what looked like gunpowder stains on their uniforms. The pips signalled the end of
Farming Today
on Radio 4
and the beginning of the morning in earnest.
The blessing of being awake at this time was in the comfort to be taken from the various routines that one could always observe so early. First, one saw Mildred Penstroke’s dog, Glands,
taking a colossal dump on the neighbours’ lawn, as she had painstakingly trained it to do. Then came Hetty McBride sneaking back from Bill Strange’s house, where she had spent the
night, and pretending not to notice Mrs Bottlescum’s bald gaze. A minute later Hetty’s husband, Lionel, came out of the next-door-but-one house and scurried ashamedly in through his own
back door.
‘So it begins. Do you know what, Pocket?’ she said to her cat, which purred quietly by her ankles, ‘I think it’s getting warm enough for us to crack out the old
deckchair, you know . . .’
And so she toddled off to the shed and shortly returned, set out the aforementioned apparatus and sat back in it with a deep sense of pleasant relaxation and a quiet thrill at the entertainment
to come.
Moments later, Mrs Glendinning from number 47 peeped round the door of the Smythington abode before making a dash back to her own house, shortly followed by three other women, who all dispersed
in different directions.
‘Lesbo tryst,’ muttered Mrs Bottlescum, returning from the kitchen with her breakfast on a tray.
Next it was Reggie Farmhurst and Oliver Patchbury who snuck out of the disused windmill, no doubt woken from their carnal slumbers by the crowing of the cock.
‘Gayers,’ said Bottlescum, munching a bit of toast. ‘They tie each other up in there, you know, Pocket.’
She finished off her tea as she saw the entire local fire department abseil via their hose from the bedroom window of one of the town’s more notorious teenage girls – followed
shortly afterwards by the first fifteen of the Mumford rugby league team.
‘Good Lord, how does she fit them all in that tiny bedroom?’ Elizabeth wondered. It brought to mind an incident from her own childhood in a similar rural village, when she had
celebrated St Swithin’s Day 1944 by entertaining a dozen members of the Airborne 353rd Regiment of the United States Air Force. ‘The young do have to try and take things
further
these days,’ she tutted. ‘Perhaps young Penelope could hold one of her soirées in a Mini Cooper – invite a brass band along to play “Abide with Me” and we can
get someone from
Guinness World Records
along. Hah!’
The morning’s amusement was nearly at an end. Almost everyone in the town was now safely returned to their own beds. There were only a few last stragglers remaining – the local piano
teacher sidling from the pet shop wearing a nasty smirk and some mysterious stains on his waistcoat, and someone in a nun’s costume leaving the Catholic church. But then, she supposed, it was
possible that it was actually a nun.
‘Stranger things have happened, Pocket!’ she said, and her cat assented with a mew.
At last, with nothing remaining of her breakfast but an empty cup and saucer, and some breadcrumbs scattered down her blouse, she was about to pack up her things and go upstairs to wake up the
major and tell him to get back to his wife when she spotted something that was, for once, out of the ordinary.
Down the lane that led out of town was tripping that man from the Parish Council. The nice one, what was his name? – Terry Fairbreath. He was known thereabouts as just about the only
person who could be relied on to give an issue a fair hearing, the rest of the council being filled with ancient madmen, cranks and troublemakers. He was handsome too, and considered quite the
catch by the local females (even the group Mrs Bottlescum had referred to under the appellation ‘lesbo tryst’ had considered making him the first male member of their little gathering),
yet he always remained single, was always composed, thoughtful, polite and well turned out. It was a mystery to everyone.
‘Well, not
that
much of a mystery. Gay as a peacock, no doubt. But then the gayers had no luck with him either . . .’
After re-entering the house she washed and put away her breakfast things, and it was only on the stairs that it occurred to her there was something strange about his appearance. It was not
simply the fact that he was out so early, although that in itself was unusual. Perhaps it was that he had been carrying an axe.
Was that it, she pondered, or was there something else as well?
Yes, surely it was that he had been dripping blood from a conspicuously large wound in his back. But there was something else . . .
Was it that he had been carrying a smoking shotgun under one arm? Well, he had, but that wasn’t what was niggling at the back of her mind. Was it that glimpse she had caught of someone
leaning out from the bushes, pointing a bow and arrow at him? Perhaps. But there was another detail that lingered there, waiting to be found.
Maybe it was that his coat flapped open and she had caught sight of what looked like a fat pack of dynamite strapped to his chest, with a jolly modern-looking digital countdown, and a string of
hand grenades.
‘Yes, that was it,’ she nodded to herself. ‘It was that, and the fact that he was sprinting fast as he could go, screaming, crying and begging for his life. That was definitely
what caught my attention . . .’
She pondered this strange circumstance for a moment before shaking her head. It was all too much for a sex-mad septuagenarian like herself to take in.
‘Ah well, I’m sure there’s a perfectly innocent explanation,’ she said quietly, hoisting herself up the few final steps before entering her room and slapping the
major’s backside with all her might.
And yet, when the town’s citizens rose (again) from their beds later that morning and went about their business, they would find that not only had Terry Fairbreath gone missing, but that
his disappearance was just the beginning of the terrible sequence of events that would result in catastrophe.
T
HE POLICE STATION
in Fraxbridge received the call at eleven o’clock on the Monday two weeks following. Mr Fairbreath’s cleaner, Mavis
Ritter, had gone as usual to let herself into his home and discovered the front door wide open. Feeling somewhat concerned, she decided she ought to check with Mr Fairbreath that there was nothing
amiss and so, once she had taken her customary four shots of gin from his ‘secret’ bottle in the airing cupboard and (after whipping her duster quickly across the top of the microwave)
put in a couple of hours at The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on his Xbox 360, she took the five-minute walk round the corner to the architect’s office where he worked. On enquiring after his
whereabouts, she discovered that he had not been into work for ten days, and was not answering his mobile phone. She decided to put the matter in the hands of the police.
Mumford itself had the smallest possible police station a village could have, a cubicle adjoined to the Town Hall not much larger than an old-fashioned police phone box. In fact, this is exactly
what it had been until the town’s sole part-time community officer, PC Staplethorpe (in whose person was also made up the body of Mumford’s traffic police and its Territorial Army),
converted it into a small kiosk in which he could sleep off his hangovers under the protection of the law, and away from his wife, Angela. The station was, therefore, so unused to receiving
allegations of serious crime that when he got Mavis’s report, Staplethorpe had no choice but to give it pride of place in the centre of the orange plastic ‘My First Business desk’
children’s accessory, which was all that could be fitted into the office space underneath his hammock.
This was Staplethorpe’s personal technique, which had until now proved 100 per cent effective. All crimes in Mumford came face to face with the complete indifference of the law, and
eventually turned out not to be crimes at all (cats returned home, surreptitiously borrowed items were replaced in the dead of night), or were retaliated against in a petty enough way to teach the
perpetrator a lesson.
Thus Mavis’s report of the missing Terry Fairbreath remained under the scrutiny of the law (in the shape of PC Staplethorpe’s backside as it swung to and fro) until two weeks had
passed, when, having achieved no results from the local force, Mavis deemed it advisable to put a call through to the police station in Fraxbridge, the next town across.
Mumford, as I have attempted to convey, was a sleepy little town hardly worthy of the name – a swollen village, really, of perfect Englishness. It had a millpond; it had a cricket team; it
had an ancient abbey that required millions of pounds for its upkeep, for no visible benefit; it had quaint thatched buildings, winding streets, curious little shops and hundreds of white-haired
denizens who tended their gardens, waved happily to one another in the street and considered their lives to be blessed.
Fraxbridge, by contrast, but five miles away, was considered by the upstanding citizens of Mumford to be a plague-ridden city of vice and corruption. It had, after all, a railway station, by
which undesirables could come and go as they pleased. It boasted also a chain bookshop (‘The one that begins with W’, Mumfordians would tell you darkly, disdaining to actually say the
word), and a
Marks & Spencer
. All these things placed the town beneath contempt and of course contributed to its need for a substantially larger police force.