The Crown pub on Market Street was never quiet on a Thursday.
It was the kind of pub that had been there so long it had become part of the town's furniture it had low ceilings, sticky tables, a jukebox that hadn't been updated since 2009 and nobody complained about. The regulars came the way they came everywhere in Ashford Hollow out of habit, out of the particular need that small town people had for a room full of familiar faces at the end of a long day.
Tonight the room was fuller than usual.
People had come for the same reason people always gathered in the wake of something terrible not to process it privately but to process it together, out loud, in a room with other people who were also trying to make sense of something that didn't make sense.
Nadia Petrova's name moved through the pub the way names moved through small towns, low voices and urgent, changing shape slightly with each retelling.
"I heard she'd been there since Saturday," said a woman at the bar wearing a red coat, the same woman from the park gate on Monday morning, though she didn't know that most of the people around her had been standing in that same crowd.
"Saturday," said the man beside her, "that's two days, two days? and nobody noticed."
"Her building isn't that kind of building," said someone else. "People keep to themselves there, I know someone on the second floor says he goes whole weeks without seeing another tenant."
"Still," said the woman in the red coat "two days."
The word two days moved around the bar like something contagious.
Danny Cole was in the corner.
He had come because he couldn't stay in his flat any longer he made attempts at watching television, two fiddling with his phone, one at actually cooking something that had ended with him standing at the hob staring at an unlit ring for four minutes before putting his coat on and leaving.
He was on his second pint.
He hadn't tasted either of them.
He was looking at the table.
Thinking about the grey coat.
Thinking about Bridge Road in Coleford because he had looked it up, he didn't know why exactly, some itch he couldn't leave alone and thinking about the fact that Bridge Road was fourteen miles north and the man in the grey coat had been walking toward Clover Street like someone who knew exactly where he was going and Danny had been inside a shop buying pasta for fifteen minutes and when he came out
"You alright mate?"
Danny looked up.
The man from the bar probably in his early fifties, he had a familiar face, one of those Ashford Hollow faces you knew without knowing where from. He was holding his pint and looking at Danny with the mild concerned expression of someone who had noticed another person sitting alone looking at a table for too long.
"Fine," Danny said. "Just tired."
The man nodded, he looked like he wanted to say something else, but decided against it and went back to the bar.
Danny looked at the table again.
He had called the non-emergency line at five in the morning, he had said what he knew. He had done the right thing, he kept telling himself that.
It kept not being enough.
James was still at the station at eight o'clock.
Everyone else had gone home.
Peters had left at six with his coat and his car keys and a look in James's direction that said go home, it'll still be here tomorrow without saying any of it out loud. Yemi had left at six-thirty after asking twice if James needed anything and being told twice that he didn't. Sara had stayed until seven-fifteen, working quietly at her desk in the way she did when she didn't want to leave but knew she couldn't stay, and then had put her coat on and stood for a moment.
"James," she said.
"Go home Sara," he said.
"I was going to say the Harton file came through," she said. "Reeves emailed it over. It's in your inbox."
He looked at her.
"Go home," he said again. "Thank you."
She left.
He opened the email.
The Harton file was forty-three pages.
DI Reeves was thorough Peters had been right about that, the report was detailed, well organized, professionally written. The woman's name was Catherine Doyle, Thirty-one year old, lived alone in a first floor flat on Marsden Street, Harton, and was found at the bottom of her stairs on a Tuesday morning by her downstairs neighbor who had come up to return a borrowed book,
cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head consistent with a fall and there was no signs of forced entry, no signs of struggle. Toxicology had shown a small amount of alcohol in her system a glass of wine, nothing more.
Accidental fall.
Closed in eleven days.
James read it slowly , turning every page. every note, every attached photograph.
He found the moth on page thirty-one
scene photograph number fourtee at the hallway at the bottom of the stairs Catherine Doyle visible at the left edge of frame, and in the right corner of the photograph was a small, dry, wings flat
A moth.
Not mentioned anywhere in the report because it was not considered relevant.
Just a moth on the floor of a dead woman's hallway that nobody had thought to think about.
James sat back in his chair.
Looked at the ceiling.
Looked at Nadia Petrova's name on the whiteboard.
Looked at the words he had written in the corner Harton district, three months, moth.
He picked up his pen.
Added two words underneath.
Catherine Doyle.