A Murder at the Village Book Club

The kettle had just begun its low complaint when Margaret Penhallow noticed that the lane outside Quill Cottage had gone the particular silver-grey of a Cotswold evening turning to dusk, and she set out the seven cups regardless, because the Thursday Book Club arrived at half past six whether or not the light agreed to wait for them. She liked this hour best — the bell of St. Aldhelm's settling over the rooftops, woodsmoke threading up from chimneys, the low hills of Lower Wisbeck folding the village in like a hand around a warm thing. For eleven years the club had read its way through the gentle end of the shelf: village comedies, a little Austen when the winters turned cruel, the occasional weepy biography that left them all dabbing their eyes over the Madeira cake. Nothing had ever happened in Lower Wisbeck that a second slice could not soften.

Which was precisely why the true-crime book had felt, to Margaret, like a small and harmless mischief. The Hollow Man — a real case, a real unsolved killing two counties over in the seventies — had been Verity's suggestion, of course; Verity Goss who ran the post office and liked, she said, to be provoked, and the others had laughed and agreed because it was July and the evenings were long and everyone fancied a little frisson with their tea. Margaret had read it twice through, which was more than she could say for most of them. She had not enjoyed it. There was a chapter — the ninth — that had stayed with her in the small hours, the author's cool forensic description of how the victim had been found: seated upright in his own armchair, a book open and face-down across his knees, the room arranged with a dreadful, deliberate tidiness, as if death were a thing one could be tucked into.

Tonight they were meeting at Hugh Ashby-Vane's, up at the Old Rectory, because Hugh had insisted — had practically crowed about it at the fête — that a true-crime evening demanded a proper setting, and his drawing room with its dark beams and its decanter of something peaty was as proper as Lower Wisbeck got. Hugh did everything with a flourish. He had been an actor, briefly and unsuccessfully, in London, and had retired to the village to be its largest personality, hosting and toasting and reciting, beloved and faintly exhausting in equal measure. Margaret had her coat half on before she remembered the cups, and put them away again with a small private sigh, and walked up the hill in the gloaming with Verity's torch bobbing somewhere ahead.

The Old Rectory's front door stood open. That was the first wrong thing, though Margaret would not name it as wrong until later — Hugh always flung the door wide for his guests, it was theatre, it was welcome. But there was no music tonight, no smell of the mulled cider he'd promised, only a hush in the hall that seemed to thicken as she stepped inside, the kind of silence that has a shape to it, that has only just stopped being a sound. "Hugh?" called Verity, too brightly, and her voice came back off the flagstones and died. The drawing-room door was ajar. A wedge of amber lamplight lay across the floorboards, and within it, very still, the back of an armchair, and the crown of a familiar grey head tipped just slightly to one side.

Margaret went in first. She would wonder, afterward and for a long time, why it had been her — why her feet had carried her across that threshold while the others hung in the doorway like figures in a frieze. Hugh sat upright in the wing chair by the cold hearth, his hands resting on the arms, his chin lowered as though he had merely fallen asleep mid-anecdote. And across his knees, open and face-down, its spine cracked at a chapter she did not need to check, lay a book. The room had been arranged around him with a dreadful, deliberate tidiness. She had read this before. She had read it twice.

It was not until Verity finally screamed that Margaret understood she was looking at chapter nine — staged, to the last terrible detail, by someone who had been sitting in this very room a week ago, drinking Hugh's tea and turning the same pages she had.