Angie smiled. ‘Until next time.’
‘Obviously.’
She left Angie to it and went home.
Home was on the other side of town, but since Dodbury was quite a small town – not much more than a large village, to be fair – it was only a half hour’s walk. Nowhere near enough of a decent stretch for Viggo, but she promised him a good run around in the park that afternoon just as soon as she’d had a chance for a bath. She wouldn’t normally have one in the morning, since an overnight in the shed was nothing unusual and she was way past the age where she felt the need to be fragrant for anyone, but being so close to the Neary plot had left her feeling itchy and unclean.
Briar Hill was a sunny rise on the north side of the village, so it was a pleasant amble downhill past the older and well-established houses of Greenlea to the crossroads which marked the top end of the High Street. There she stopped at Partridge’s Butchers, their sign boasting that they were the oldest family butcher to still be ‘preparing’ their own meat in the county, and picked up a bone for Viggo as he’d been such a good boy. She endured the standard banter from Phil Partridge about whether he could tempt her from her vegetarianism with his pork buns. Further down the High Street, past where it became pedestrianised and every other doorway was a charity shop, the street market traders were setting up under their green-and-white-striped council awnings. With Christmas long over and Easter a distant dream, they were resigned to trade being thin. There had once been a proper indoor market right at the bottom of High Street where it became fast-food outlets and hairdressers – a part of town known as Dogtown for no reason that she’d ever been able to discover – but that had been demolished in the age of austerity to make way for some urban regeneration project that had never got further than an enthusiastic councillor’s PowerPoint presentation. The resulting and perpetually empty lot was still called the Marketplace, and from time to time different enthusiastic councillors would propose revolutionary schemes to ‘revitalise the flagging fortunes of our once vibrant market town’ but nothing ever got built. Still, at least it gave the old men who wrote to the local newspaper letters of frothing indignation (and dubious grammatical accuracy) something to complain about other than fly-tipping and outrageous car parking charges foisted upon old-age pensioners.
Nothing was going to revitalise Dodbury, Dennie knew, for the simple reason that there had never been anything particularly vital about it in the first place. It was why she and Brian had chosen it as a home to raise their family. It was unexciting, quiet, and safe – for the most part.
Why the Neary plot, of all places?
She shifted uneasily in her clothes and scratched.
Left, then, at the top of High Street, past St David’s with its blocky Norman tower, and then the pub that wasn’t a pub – it had been the Hundred House for years before her time but when the brewery had gone to the wall it had been bought and transformed into an Indian restaurant called the Imperial Mint. Brian had hated it. Complained about how ugly the green neon and the Asian-style lettering sat against the old Victorian brickwork. ‘I like a curry as much as the next man,’ he’d said. ‘But why can’t they serve them up somewhere more appropriate?’ By which he didn’t just mean the architecture.
It was the Handsworth riots of ’81 that had been the final straw for him. From their first flat just off the Lozells Road they’d been able to watch the fires and hear the police sirens screaming for three days, trying to explain what was happening to seven-year-old Christopher and his five-year-old sister Amy (little Lizzie was two at the time and only interested in chewing clothes pegs). Afterwards Brian had found Chris playing riots by smashing one of his toy cars into a Lego building; he’d cut out some tiny paper flames and coloured them in and stuck them to the car with Sellotape, and that was that. Within six months they had moved to a nice ordinary semi-detached in Dodbury which was quiet, safe, and came with a hefty mortgage that they had both worked hard to pay off, though to give him his due Brian had shouldered the heavier burden of it – a burden which had obviously been too much for his heart, however. A month to the day of their final payment he suffered a massive cardiac arrest and dropped dead in the middle of their driveway while taking the bins out.
Up that driveway now, past the spot where she’d found him, his face grey, but don’t think about that, it’s not for now, through the side gate (never the front door, not with Viggo’s feet), tossing the bone to him in the back garden so that the great lolloping idiot could enjoy it in peace, and through the back door and into the kitchen. She stripped right there and stuffed all her clothes into the washing machine, and who cared if anyone in the houses behind her back fence was in a position to get an eyeful of this stringy old bird? Let them look. Then she went upstairs to run a bath.
While the water was running she quickly checked in each of the upstairs bedrooms. Not that she was checking for anything,
