The Visiting Hours of Mr. Pellew
The milk was still on the doorstep at half past nine.
Agnes Holt noticed it on her way back from the post box, the bottle sitting in its usual spot outside number fourteen Coldharbour Lane, the foil cap undimpled, a thin rim of cream settled at the neck. Gerald Pellew collected his milk by seven. Everyone in the village knew that, the same way they knew he kept his curtains drawn until noon and never answered the door without first calling through it.
She stood on the pavement and looked at the bottle for a long moment. Then she walked on.
It was the district nurse, Bev Catchpole, who found him two hours later. A brief announcement at the post office counter followed by afternoon whispers in the churchyard. Gerald Pellew, seventy-three, found in his armchair. Heart, most likely. A quiet end for a quiet man.
Agnes attended the small gathering that assembled outside St. Bartholomew’s that evening, as villagers do, drawn by something older than curiosity. She listened. She ate one of Dorothy Fenn’s almond slices, which tasted of marzipan and damp paper, and she watched Councillor Royce standing slightly apart from the others, his hands deep in his waxed jacket, turning something over in his right pocket.
“Dreadful business,” said Royce, when he noticed Agnes looking. He had the red-threaded complexion of a man who walked a lot in cold wind, and eyes that moved quickly for a man who appeared to be standing still. “Lived alone all those years. No family to speak of.”
“He had a visitor yesterday,” Agnes said.
Royce stopped turning whatever was in his pocket. “Did he? I hadn’t heard that.”
“I’m not certain I heard it myself.” She smiled pleasantly. “These things travel in fragments.”
She said goodnight and walked home through the lane, past the dark window of number fourteen, the milk now removed by the police or perhaps by Bev, and thought carefully about what she knew and what she only suspected.
The following morning, Agnes knocked on the door of Mrs. Idris Farrow, who lived opposite Gerald Pellew’s cottage and grew runner beans on a frame visible from three gardens in each direction.
“I’m not one for gossip,” said Idris, pouring tea the colour of autumn bracken and sitting down before Agnes had finished taking off her coat.
“Nor am I,” said Agnes, which was mostly true.
“I saw Martin Royce at Gerald’s door yesterday afternoon.” Idris set a plate of digestives on the table between them. “Around four o’clock. Gerald let him in. I only noticed because the runner beans are done for the year and I had nothing else to look at.”
“How long was he inside?”
“Twenty minutes. Perhaps a bit more. Gerald saw him out. Seemed fine. Both of them.” Idris wrapped both hands around her mug. “Why?”
“I’m not sure yet.” Agnes picked up a digestive and did not eat it. “Did you notice whether Royce was carrying anything when he arrived?”
Idris thought about this with the seriousness it deserved. “A folder. One of those cardboard ones. Buff-coloured. He had it tucked under his arm.”
“And when he left?”
The pause was small but full. “He didn’t have it.”
Agnes thanked her for the tea, left the digestive on the plate, and walked directly to the village hall, where the planning committee kept its records in four grey filing cabinets that smelled of old rubber bands and somebody’s forgotten lunch.
She was not on the planning committee. She had, however, served as its secretary for eleven years before retirement, and the deputy clerk, young Simon Briar, had never in his life refused her a reasonable request.
“Just the recent applications for the north field,” she said. “Nothing sensitive.”
The north field backed onto Gerald Pellew’s property. Agnes had known this since the summer, when Gerald had mentioned over the fence at Dorothy Fenn’s garden party that he’d had a letter asking about access rights. He’d been annoyed about it, in his contained, precise way. Said he hadn’t signed anything and didn’t intend to.
The application was stamped with a date from three weeks ago. The supporting correspondence included a letter of no objection, supposedly from Gerald Pellew. Agnes read it twice. The signature at the bottom was formed with a backwards lean to the capital G, the letters bunching slightly at the end of the surname.
Gerald Pellew wrote with a forward lean. She had marked enough of his son’s school letters, forwarded through the school office over a decade ago when the boy was at university and Gerald was on the governors’ board, to know that without any doubt whatsoever.
She photographed the letter on her telephone, a skill her niece had insisted she learn, and she walked back to Coldharbour Lane, and she rang the non-emergency police number from the bench outside the church, sitting in the thin October sunlight with her coat buttoned to the collar and the smell of woodsmoke coming from somewhere down the hill.
The constable she spoke to was patient and polite and almost certainly younger than her kitchen table.
“The letter is forged,” she told him, “the access rights to the field are worth a considerable sum to the development company named in the application, Councillor Royce visited Mr. Pellew the afternoon before his death and left something behind that he had carried in, and I would suggest speaking with the coroner before assuming the cause of death is straightforward.”
She heard him typing.
“Your name, madam?”
“Agnes Holt.” She glanced across the lane at number fourteen. The doorstep was clean and bare and ordinary, the way it would never quite look to her again. “I taught in this village for thirty-one years. I know everyone’s handwriting. That is rather the point.”
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