The Notebook in the Nettles
The ducks on Garvey Pond were arguing again. Agnes Bolt stood at the water’s edge in her good wellingtons, the red ones with the crack along the left heel, and watched two mallards squabble over a crust somebody had lobbed from the bridge. The morning smelled of wet soil and bruised watercress. Across the pond, the willow trailed its fingers and the village of Little Cerne sat quietly behind it, chimneys just beginning to smoke.
Agnes had come to feed the ducks. She had brought a heel of brown bread in a paper bag. But what she found instead was a notebook, lying in the nettles at the base of the stone wall, its cover dark with moisture, its pages warped into thick, swollen curves.
She used a twig to nudge it clear of the sting. Opened it with two careful fingers.
The handwriting was small and slanted. Columns of numbers, mostly. Dates going back to January. And at the top of the first page, in blue biro: P. Dunmore. Village Hall Maintenance Fund.
Agnes closed the notebook. She looked at the ducks. She tucked the notebook into her bag.
—
Peter Dunmore ran the hardware shop on the high street and had served as treasurer of the Village Hall Committee for six years. He was a meticulous man. He wore the same oatmeal-coloured cardigan every Wednesday, ironed flat. He always arrived first to meetings and always left last.
Agnes found him behind his counter on Thursday morning, sorting a tray of brass hinges by size. The shop smelled of linseed oil and sawdust and the faint sweetness of rubber washers kept too long in a warm drawer.
“Morning, Agnes. Grout or sandpaper?”
“Neither.” She set the notebook on the counter between the hinges and a coil of picture wire.
Peter looked at it. He didn’t pick it up. He straightened a hinge that didn’t need straightening.
“Where did you find that?”
“By the pond. In the nettles beneath the wall.” She folded her hands on the counter. “You might have put it in the recycling, Peter, but I expect it slipped when you dropped it over.”
He was quiet for a long moment. A car passed outside. The bell above the shop door ticked in the draught.
“You’ve read it,” he said.
“Enough of it.”
He put down the hinge. He was a big man, broad through the shoulders, and he seemed to reduce slightly, as though someone had let a little air out of him.
“It’s not what it looks like,” he said. Then he seemed to hear himself, and stopped.
Agnes said nothing. She had thirty-one years of experience in saying nothing while people filled the silence.
“The boiler,” he said at last. “It went in March. Twelve hundred pounds. I knew the committee wouldn’t vote it through before the summer programme. Mrs. Allard was going to table the whole maintenance budget for review, and the youth club would have lost their Thursday slot, and the toddler group, and the…” He trailed off. He picked up a hinge and set it down again. “I paid it myself. Out of the fund. My own money. I meant to record it properly, but then it looked irregular, and I kept meaning to sort the paperwork, and then Mrs. Allard started asking questions at the April meeting, and I panicked. I moved the money around between accounts to balance the books for the audit.”
Agnes looked at him steadily. “That is what it looks like, Peter.”
He flinched. “I know.”
“You moved committee funds between accounts without authorisation. Even if you replaced every penny, that isn’t your decision to make alone.”
“I know.” His voice was a flat stone dropped into water. “I was going to tell them. At the AGM. I had it all written out.”
“In that notebook?”
He nodded.
—
The emergency committee meeting took place on Tuesday evening in the very hall the boiler had saved. The room smelled of recently used radiators and instant coffee and the ghost of the Tuesday Pilates class. Agnes sat in the back row. She was not a committee member. She had brought the notebook to Reverend Coombe first, and to Patricia Allard second, and had then considered her involvement largely concluded.
It was not concluded, of course. People kept turning round to look at her.
Peter addressed the committee for eleven minutes. He stood very straight and looked directly at Mrs. Allard, who was the sort of woman who could make a person feel the full weight of a gaze without blinking. He confirmed the figures. He confirmed his own account had reimbursed the fund in full. He placed a bank statement on the table.
The committee voted to accept his resignation as treasurer. They also voted, six to two, to note in the minutes that no funds had been misappropriated for personal gain. Mrs. Allard was the more forceful of the two dissenters, but even she signed the maintenance expenditure retrospectively.
Afterwards, in the car park, Peter found Agnes beside her bicycle. The night air was cold and damp, carrying the green smell of the fields beyond the hedge.
“You could have simply handed it to the police,” he said.
“I could have,” she agreed.
She clipped on her rear light. The pond was audible in the distance, a faint busy sound of water moving over the stone lip at the far end, the ducks settled somewhere quiet and dark.
“The youth club still has its Thursday slot,” Agnes said.
She wheeled the bicycle to the gate. Peter held it open. She didn’t thank him. He didn’t expect her to.
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