Some years ago, I made my own escape to the country, fulfilling a life-long dream by moving to a charming cottage in an idyllically pretty Derbyshire village. Up to that point, I had lived mostly in cities, and what a revelation village life was. The pub, the post office and the school-gate gatherings were all hotbeds of sizzling gossip: secret affairs which were all too public, bankruptcies and domestic assaults everyone knew about, rumours of corruption in the ranks of parish council.
Happily, there was never murder. Other small towns and villages aren’t so lucky.
The Anglesey village of Llanfair PG (pop 3014) is best known for the long form of its name (Llanfair pwllgwyngyll gogery chwyrn drobwll llan tysilio gogo goch, 58 letters and second longest in the world). But in 2001 it was the scene of a horrific murder, when ninety-year-old widow Mabel Leyshon was stabbed 22 times as she watched TV in her bungalow. Once she was dead, her 17-year-old killer cut out her heart with a kitchen knife before draining her blood into a saucepan and drinking it. In court, the killer was described as obsessed with vampires; he thought the village an ideal hunting ground as there were so many old people who no one would miss. Which might make one question the wisdom of a country retirement.
The murder in my second novel, Innocent, is less bloody, but the setting’s a not-dissimilar country town, where everyone believes they know everyone else’s business. Small towns draw crime writers like bees round honeypots, and with good reason. As Miss Marple knew all too well, all human life – and human nature – is there, and proximity to one’s neighbours seems to supercharge emotions, turning what elsewhere might be mild aversions into bitter hatred and harmless crushes into mad passions.
As I was writing Innocent, I thought long and hard about why that should be so, and to me, the answer came down to the lack of choices in remote communities. If it’s a long drive to somewhere else on a Saturday night, you’ll be going to the local pub, along with your mates and all those people who get on your nerves. If you need bread or milk, you’ll visit the local shop, where you might bump into someone you can’t stand, but for appearances’ sake, you’ll be polite, pass the time of day. If your wife’s been indiscreet, it cuts deep to see her lover walk his dog past your house every day. Undercurrents flow like torrents.
But I loved writing about the shifting sands of small-town relationships: one-time best friends might ignore each other at the Christmas carol service; punches are quite believably thrown by a jealous husband in the golf club bar; whispers follow a young mum, speculating on her child’s paternity. So many motives and opportunities; in small-town settings, the red herrings swim in shoals.
Which is not in any way to denigrate how situations fester and boil over in real-life small towns. Consider the 1988 murder of poor Helen McCourt, who had a very public row with Ian Simms, a married man and landlord of her local pub. Simms had a fancy for Helen, but she had no interest in him. After their disagreement, he told several customers she’d been gossiping about his young mistress, and how he hated her – enough, apparently, to murder her. Traces of Helen’s blood were found in Simm’s flat over the pub, and her blood-soaked clothing was recovered from a riverbank twenty miles away. But the spurned landlord was thorough in his disposal of her body, which to this day has never been found.
As for Mable Leyshon’s small-town killer, maybe the neighbours didn’t know him as well as they thought. ‘He wasn’t a weirdo,’ said one. ‘He didn’t wear black, and neither was he a village bad lad. He was just a normal kid who wore jeans and trainers.’
So if you’re thinking of escaping to the country, be careful not to upset your local landlord, and be sure your teenage neighbour doesn’t have vampires on his mind.
The grass is always greener – except where it’s stained with red.
Innocent by Erin Kinsley (Published by Headline Publishing)
A murder tears a small town apart but who did it? The pretty market town of Sterndale is a close-knit community where everyone thinks they know everyone else. But at a lavish summer wedding a local celebrity is discovered slumped in the gardens, the victim of a violent assault that leads to a murder investigation. As the police search for answers, suspicion and paranoia build - and the lives of the locals are turned upside down. Secrets that lurk beneath the pristine façade of Sterndale come to light as detectives close in on the truth...
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