Read Chapter 5: The Fete Committee

Barbara Chenoweth—“call me Barb, everyone does, except my mother, who insists on the full Barbara, and she’s the only one I’ve ever been afraid of”—had arranged the chairs in the village hall in a perfect horseshoe, which meant everyone had to look at everyone else, and everyone had to look at Barbara. She stood at the apex now, a clipboard pressed to her chest like a shield, and surveyed her committee with the faint air of a woman preparing to command a small, well-meaning army.

Martha had slipped in late, taking a chair near the door. The hall smelled of floor polish and stale tea, and the afternoon light through the high windows caught dust motes in slow suspension. She’d worn her least remarkable cardigan, the oatmeal one, and had rehearsed a pleasant, vacant expression on the walk over. The widow from the cottage, come to volunteer, nothing more.

“Right,” Barbara said, clapping once. “Items on the agenda. Stalls. Raffle. The tug-of-war insurance fiasco—again. And the question of whether we’re allowed to hang bunting from the war memorial this year, which apparently requires a council consultation and a heraldic review, if you can believe it.”

A ripple of knowing chuckles. Martha smiled along, cataloguing faces. Six women, two men. The butcher’s wife, Audrey, knitting something grey and shapeless. A man in a flat cap who owned the newsagents, Mr. Holloway, nodding at everything Barbara said before she’d finished saying it. Martha recognized the farmer—Martin Ackerman’s wife, Susan—sitting at the far end, arms crossed, jaw set. She hadn’t spoken yet.

“First order of business,” Barbara said. “The tombola. Last year we ran out of decent prizes by half past two. I need commitments, not promises.”

“I’ve got three bottles of my sloe gin,” Audrey offered without looking up from her knitting.

“Lovely. That’s not a prize, that’s a health and safety concern, but I’ll put it in the mystery basket.”

The meeting chattered along.

Martha found herself studying the gaps between what people said and what they didn’t. The way Holloway agreed with Barbara even when she contradicted herself. The way Audrey’s knitting needles paused—just for half a beat—when Susan Ackerman shifted in her chair and almost spoke. The village was a text. Martha had spent forty years editing manuscripts, and the principle was the same. You watch for the sentence that doesn’t belong, the word that’s slightly wrong, the thing a character says twice because they're trying to convince themselves.

Barbara moved through her agenda with drill-sergeant precision. She was a tall woman in her late fifties, with silver-streaked hair cut in a practical bob and a voice pitched to carry across a crowded fete green. She reminded Martha of a particular kind of editor: the ones from the hardback houses who’d never once opened a manuscript with joy but could run an acquisitions meeting like a general.

“Right, that’s the stalls sorted,” Barbara said, making a decisive tick on her clipboard. “Now, the more delicate matter. The police presence. I’ve had a call from DI Chen’s office, and they’d like to maintain a small information tent near the lychgate. Discreet. No sirens, no blue tape.”

A murmur ran through the group.

“It’s been nearly two weeks since poor Emily Ford was set upon in those woods,” Barbara continued, her voice dipping into something softer, almost theatrical. “And the village needs its fete. We need to show that we’re not frightened. That we’re still us.”

Susan Ackerman made a sound—something between a snort and a cough—and everyone turned to look at her. Susan’s face flushed beneath the patches of windburn on her cheeks.

“Something to add, Susan?” Barbara asked, the question sharp as a paper cut.

“No,” Susan said. “Nothing. Just my throat.”

Martha noted the lie. The sound hadn’t come from Susan’s throat. It had come from her chest, her belly—a sound of bitter, unfiltered disagreement she hadn’t the nerve to voice aloud.

Barbara smiled a smile that didn’t reach her eyes and returned to her clipboard.

“Now then. Rota for the cake stall. I need three names for the morning shift and three for the afternoon. Don’t all volunteer at once.”

The meeting dissolved into the usual fluster of negotiation. Martha sat, hands folded, letting the chatter wash over her. She hadn’t come to volunteer, not really. She’d come to listen. Gerald had told her, over their second pint at the Stag’s Head, that the fete committee was the village’s true centre of gravity. “If you want to know whose finger is on which scale, you sit in that horseshoe and watch. It’s like reading a manuscript with all the thank-you notes still in it. You learn who was thanked and who was cut.”

Barbara was the obvious edit. She ran the meeting with the authority of a woman who’d never been contradicted in public. But Martha had spotted something else, a small fracture in Barbara’s composure that appeared whenever Emily Ford’s name came up. A tightening at the corner of her mouth. A brief glance toward the window, as if checking that no one outside was listening.

Martha had been an editor long enough to know that a tell like that was a promise. Something was being withheld.

The meeting wound down. Raffle tickets counted. Bunting approved—after a show of hands that Holloway insisted on recording in triplicate. The tea urn was emptied into mismatched cups, and the committee members began to disperse in pairs and clusters, their voices bright with the relief of having done a civic duty.

Martha lingered by the door, pretending to examine a noticeboard covered with flyers for dog grooming and a missing cat called Bertram who had been missing since 2019 and was presumably, as one flyer optimistically noted, “living his best life elsewhere.”

“You’re Martha Pemberton, aren’t you?”

Martha turned. Barbara had appeared beside her, smile fixed, eyes scanning Martha’s face with the rapid, practised attention of someone who ranks strangers on sight.

“I am.”

“Edna’s niece. We were all so sorry about Edna. She was a character, that one. God, she could curdle milk with a look.” Barbara’s laugh was a single, clipped bark. “She came to the fete every year, sat in the same deckchair by the cake stall, went through the raffle tickets like a casino auditor. She always found the discrepancy. Every single time. Made me recount the whole barrel once—turned out young Tammy from the chip shop had nicked two booklets for her boyfriend’s mother. Edna spotted it from thirty feet away.”

“That sounds like her,” Martha said, and meant it, though she hadn’t known her aunt well enough to feel the weight of the compliment she was paying.

Barbara tilted her head. “You’re settling in all right, then?”

“Slowly,” Martha said. “It’s a different pace than London.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know about London. Visited once. Too many people, and they all walk as if they’re on fire.” Barbara paused, then glanced at her watch—a slim gold piece on a leather strap—with a performance of urgency. “Right, well, I must dash. The vicar’s asked me to look at the church hall roof. As if I’m not already up to my ears in—” She made a sweeping gesture that took in the entire fete, the village, the world.

“Barbara,” Martha said, before she could stop herself. “The night Emily Ford was attacked. You said you were at home alone?”

Barbara’s smile flickered. A muscle at the corner of her jaw jumped. “Yes. I was. I was doing paperwork for the fete, actually. Spreadsheets. Boring but necessary.”

“Right,” Martha said, nodding. “Just something the police asked me to check. Witness statements. Cross-referencing. They want to make sure nothing was missed.”

Barbara’s smile had gone brittle at the edges. “I told them everything I knew. Which is nothing. I was in my kitchen, alone, from seven until half past nine, working on the stall rota. No one saw me, which is unfortunate, but there it is. The truth.”

Martha smiled warmly. “Of course. Well, I’ll let you get on.”

Barbara made her exit with the brisk efficiency of a woman escaping a mildly unpleasant conversation. Martha watched her cross the car park, heels clicking on the tarmac, and disappear around the side of the church.

She would have let it go—would have filed it under the general untidiness of human testimony and moved on. But there had been the handbag. Barbara’s handbag, a sturdy tan leather thing the size of a small suitcase. During the meeting, Barbara had drawn her phone out of it several times—checking messages, making a note, once taking a call from the organist, which she’d abbreviated with practiced efficiency.

And Martha had watched her put it back each time. But when Barbara mentioned the night of the attack—"working on the stall rota"—her left hand had drifted to her side, fingers grazing her hip where the bag would hang when she wore it. A subconscious gesture. A woman reaching for a phone that wasn’t there.

Martha pulled out her own phone and opened the notes app.

One line: *Barbara claims she was working on stall rota alone. Phone not in bag that night. Minor? Or the thread that pulls the whole jumper?*

She saved it and pocketed the phone.

The hall was empty now except for Susan Ackerman, who was gathering her coat with slow, deliberate movements, as if she were in no hurry to go anywhere. Susan caught Martha’s eye, and for a moment, something passed between them—a recognition, quick and wordless, of two people who had both held their tongues.

Susan looked away first. She pulled on her coat, rearranged her scarf, and walked out without saying goodbye.

Martha stood alone in the village hall, listening to the hum of the tea urn cooling.

She was beginning to understand the village’s grammar. Now she needed to learn its exceptions.