Read Chapter 7: The Missing Handyman

The garden gate creaked before Martha saw who was on the other side. A woman in her seventies, hair pinned in a neat silver bun, stood on the path holding a basket of windfall apples.

“You’re Edna’s niece, aren’t you?” the woman called. “I’m Peggy from the lane’s end. Thought you might like these before the wasps get them.”

Martha took the basket, smiled her thanks, and was about to invite Peggy in for tea when the woman’s gaze drifted past her shoulder toward the cottage. Her expression flickered.

“Terrible business with that poor woman,” Peggy said. “Emily Ford. Kept herself to herself, but still. And now Mick’s gone missing, and nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him since it happened.”

Martha’s hand stilled on the basket. “Mick?”

“Her handyman. Did odd jobs for half the village, Emily included. Was at her place every Tuesday without fail — fixed her fence, mended her guttering, that kind of thing. My Albert saw his van parked up there the morning it happened, matter of fact.”

“The morning of the attack?”

“Aye. Early, before the police tape went up. Van was there, and then it wasn’t. Haven’t seen him since.” Peggy clicked her tongue. “His cottage is down by the old mill stream. Rent’s cheap, which is why he could manage it on what folks pay for odd jobs these days.”

Martha’s mind turned the new information over like a stone in a stream, watching the edges catch light. A handyman who worked for the victim. Present the morning of the attack. Gone since.

“Did you mention this to the police?” she asked.

“I told that young constable when he came round asking questions. Hartley, is it? He wrote it down, nodded nicely, and that was that.” Peggy shrugged. “Don’t suppose they think much of handymen one way or another.”

Martha thanked her for the apples and went inside, the name already pulling at a thread she hadn’t known was there. She called James before she could talk herself out of it.

“Mick Treadwell,” she said when he answered. “Does the name mean anything to you?”

A pause, then: “Emily’s handyman. Quiet bloke. Did some work on my surgery roof last spring.” Another pause, longer this time. “Why?”

“Because he’s been missing since the morning Emily was attacked, and apparently nobody’s thought to look into it.”

Twenty minutes later, James’s muddy Land Rover pulled up outside her cottage. He’d brought the dog — a scruffy terrier mix whose name Martha still hadn’t caught — and the animal bounded out of the back seat and straight to her, tail whipping.

“Jasper,” James said, reading her expression. “Emily’s dog, actually. I’ve got him for now. She can’t look after him while she’s recovering.”

Martha crouched to scratch behind the dog’s ears, and Jasper leaned into her hand with a whimper of pure contentment. She looked up at James. “You said he was shut in the house during the attack.”

“That’s what Emily told the police.” James opened the passenger door for her. “Which is odd. Jasper’s never been a house dog. Emily walked him three times a day, every day, rain or shine. Everyone in the village knew it. For him to be shut up indoors at that hour — something wasn’t right.”

Martha climbed in, and Jasper settled in the footwell with a grunt. The drive to the mill stream took less than five minutes, down a lane so narrow that hedgerows scraped both sides of the Land Rover. Mick’s cottage sat at the end of a dirt track, a squat brick building with a sagging roofline and curtains drawn tight across every window.

No van. No movement. A milk bottle sat on the doorstep, a second one overturned in the grass beside it, the milk long since curdled in the heat.

James killed the engine. “That bottle’s at least four days old. Maybe five.”

They got out, Jasper padding ahead of them to sniff at the doorframe. The cottage had an air of abandonment that went beyond emptiness — a stillness that had settled into the bones of the place, the way a house feels when no one has breathed inside it for days.

Martha tried the door. Locked. She stepped back and looked at the windows.

“There’s a back door,” James said. “Handymen usually keep their own locks. If he was planning to come back, it’ll be secured. If he wasn’t —”

They went around the back, past a patch of nettles and a rusting wheelbarrow. The back door stood ajar. Not forced, not broken. Just open, as though someone had left in a hurry and never thought to close it properly behind them.

James pushed it wider with the toe of his boot. “Hello? Mick? Anyone here?”

Silence. Jasper slipped past them into the gloom, and they followed.

The kitchen was clean. Too clean. No dishes in the sink, no food left out. The countertops had been wiped down so thoroughly that they gleamed. Martha ran a finger along the edge of the stove and found not a speck of dust.

“He cleaned before he left,” she said quietly. “That’s not a man who expected to be back soon.”

They moved through the cottage room by room. Living room sparse, a single armchair facing a small television, a stack of newspapers neatly tied with twine by the fireplace. No photographs on the mantelpiece. Personal effects so minimal they were almost surgical.

The bedroom was where the story fell apart.

The wardrobe stood open and empty. Hangers clinked together softly in the draught from the open window. The drawers of the bedside table had been pulled out and left on the mattress, their contents gone. A single sock lay crumpled on the floor, the only sign that anyone had ever lived there at all.

James picked up the sock, turned it over, set it down again. “This wasn’t a man packing for a holiday. This was a man who meant to disappear.”

Martha crossed to the window and looked out over the mill stream, the water moving slow and brown between mossy banks. The view was peaceful, untroubled. The scene of a life abandoned mid-stride.

“Come and look at this,” James said.

He was standing by the bed, holding something that caught the thin light from the window. Martha crossed to him and saw what he’d found — a scrap of paper, half-hidden beneath the mattress where it had slipped and been forgotten. It was crumpled, creased along old fold lines, and covered in a neat, careful handwriting that didn’t match what she’d expect from a handyman who worked with his hands.

She smoothed it out and read the single line written there:

*It’s not too late to tell the truth about 1934.*

“That’s the second time that year has come up,” Martha said. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears, thin and tight.

James was quiet for a long moment. “Your aunt’s will. The Hepworths. The scarf in your garden.” He shook his head slowly. “Everything in this village keeps coming back to the same place.”

Martha folded the note carefully, slipped it into her pocket. From somewhere outside, a car engine turned over — not on the road, but closer, down by the stream. She moved to the window again, but saw nothing through the tangle of willows at the water’s edge.

Jasper’s ears went flat. A low growl rumbled in his chest.

“We should go,” James said quietly. “Now.”

But Martha was looking at the space where the sound had been, at the way the willows had been disturbed — a gap in the leaves, a pathway just wide enough for a man to slip through unheard.

She checked her pocket, felt the folded note still there, and heard in her mind the words Peggy had said not an hour before: *Haven’t seen him since.*

No, she thought. But someone had been watching this cottage. And whoever they were, they’d been standing outside that window long enough for a dog to know the shape of them.