Death in the Sunshine (Retired Detectives Club, #1)(69)
If he keeps hiding the full story from her she’s not sure that their relationship will survive this.
She’s not sure she wants it to.
As Philip walks away from her, Lizzie thinks about the blue metal box file. That’s where Philip kept everything to do with his police career. When they moved here he’d put it in the loft, but she knows, having searched for it last night, it’s not up there any more. Since then she’s gone through the garage and the study, but not found the metal filing box. There’s one more place she can look, and that’s Philip’s bedroom, but she ran out of time before he came back. Now she’s going to need to wait for him to go out before she can search. Whatever happens and whether he tells her or not, she will find out the truth of why he was forced to retire for one error of judgement in an otherwise highly decorated career. And she will discover how that poor child died.
37
MOIRA
She wakes with a start; an unfamiliar movement in the bed jerking her into high alert. It’s too dark to see anything but she can feel something moving, pinning her legs to the bed. Her breath catches in her throat. Her heart pounds almost as hard as the throbbing in her head. Groping around for the light, she switches it on and grabs the glass from the bedside table, ready to defend herself against the intruder.
She laughs when she sees who it is. Pip, her earnest little sausage dog, stares dolefully back at her. He’s lying across her legs. Shaking her head, she puts the water glass back on the bedside table. ‘Did I wake you?’
Pip responds by rolling over on to his back for a tummy tickle. Moira obliges. There’s something so comforting in the feel of a dog’s fur beneath your hands. Slowly her heart rate returns to normal. Pip sighs with happiness. The noise causes Marigold, the young Labrador, to raise her head from its resting place on Wolfie, the terrier’s back. Wolfie doesn’t stir, just snores a little louder.
Moira remembers now. Last night, still feeling woozy and vulnerable from the attack earlier in the day, she’d let the dogs sleep on her bed.
‘Night-night, baby,’ she says to Pip, giving his tummy one last stroke before turning off the light.
Moira lies back on the bed. Her head’s still pounding, and her body feels like it’s been run over by a truck. This isn’t how she’d anticipated her retirement to be. She came here to start a new, less complicated, life. Instead, she’s had the crap knocked out of her and got more injuries in a couple of days than she’s had in the past couple of years. This place is meant to be a safe place – a sanctuary – a place where good things happen. Yet it seems to be more dangerous than the trouble she left London to escape.
She shudders, remembering how when she’d read the marketing material for The Homestead she’d laughed and mocked the advertising bullshit. A place where only good things happen doesn’t exist, yet that’s what the marketing brochure claimed. It’s nonsense, of course – humans always screw things up, no matter how perfect a place is. People are incapable of only doing good.
Yet ever since she’s got here, the overwhelming narrative of The Homestead – in the local news, the community news and the social media pages – has been positive. She’d started to wonder if maybe the security was so good and the vetting process to live here so strict that trouble found it hard to enter. Then the burglaries started, and now there’s been a murder, proving bad things are able to happen here just as much as anywhere else: yet the narrative hasn’t changed. Something weird is going on.
Moira reaches across and takes her phone from the bedside table. Pressing the screen she blinks in the blue light as it illuminates. First she scans the local news sites – radio, TV and web – but finds nothing relating to The Homestead. She switches to The Homestead News website and scrolls through the articles on the pickleball championship series, and the new garden over in Wild Spring Fields. She’s almost given up when she finds a small news article: Tragic Accident in the Park.
She scans the text, picking out the keywords – Manatee Park, swimming pool, young, unidentified woman. The piece is more puff than facts, and passes the incident off as an accidental drowning, but it’s clear from the date given that it’s referring to the murder. There’s nothing about the money or the fact that the woman had been shot. The most important details have been left out.
Moira feels uneasy. What’s reported certainly isn’t anything close to the whole truth. It seems like misdirection or some kind of arse-covering move, but by who and why?
Switching to the Facebook app, she opens The Homestead community page and searches for mentions of the murder or so-called accident. She scrolls through the posts from the various special-interest groups talking about tennis tournaments, quilt-a-thons, the pickleball championships, a trip to a local vineyard and a weekend excursion to St Pete Beach. There are posts from different residents asking for recommendations on local restaurants, home-maintenance help and someone who can install an aquarium. But there’s nothing about the murder. She’s staring at the screen, thinking how odd it is that there’s a total absence of discussion about it, when a new post appears at the top of the feed.
Peggy Leggerhorne to The Homestead community: [PLEASE DON’T DELETE AGAIN] Does anyone know WHAT HAPPENED at Manatee Park? My husband, Dougie, says someone DIED? Is that true? Does anyone KNOW who it was?