Kill Who You Want

Chapter Four

Plot reminder: The victim's husband, Adam Butterfield, is claiming to have received a threatening letter some weeks earlier. Handed to him by a complete stranger as he was leaving for work, it was written in fountain pen on lavender-coloured stationary.
Maureen Booth, who features in this chapter, was first introduced in chapter 1. She is an English teacher at the local comprehensive school.

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A Google search of the name Ravensby was unlikely to throw up much in the way of historical interest. It was true that the strange hillocks aligned to the eastern edge of Meadows Park - conspicuous amidst such a flat, featureless region - were believed by many to be ancient burial mounds; the local council, fearful of destroying the town's only real green area, was reluctant to let anyone find out for sure however. It was true also that St Frideswade's represented a fine example of saxon architecture, and that the animated flutter of birdlife which could often be spied amongst the tower ramparts had probably given rise to the town's name, but for all this was no more noteworthy than countless other churches across rural England. Claimed links to Hereward the Wake, a legendary resistance leader during the Norman Conquest, were meanwhile deemed by most experts to be just a little spurious; as with Nottingham and Robin Hood, it seemed he had in fact operated further to the north. Much more recently, the nearby RAF Base had played a significant role during the Battle of Britain; taking its name from the neighbouring village of Manningham rather than the town, few outside the immediate area were aware of the link however.

The post-war decades had been less than kind, the developing national infrastructure seeming to have deliberately and somewhat spitefully circumvented the town. A much-needed industrial injection never arrived. The nearest motorway passed more than forty miles away. The town's railway station had been closed in the late-60s. For all the technological advancements of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, Ravensby had become more isolated than ever.

It was a seclusion inevitably reflected in the town's population figures. The previous four censuses had all recorded steady drops, the most recent dipping below twenty thousand for the first time in eighty years. With production having increasingly been outsourced to the Far East, all that remained of the once proud Maddoc's Agricultural Machinery was a skeleton-staffed administrative centre. The town's largest employer was now Findlay Fine Foods, a processing plant producing frozen vegetables and pre-packed salads for supermarket chains. A working life spent chopping up cauliflowers or shredding lettuces a far from enticing prospect for any school leaver blessed with ambition, the downward population trend seemed set only to continue.

With successive councils having failed to get a much mooted bypass project beyond the planning stage, the High Street remained treacherously unpedestrianised. Glancing idly from their windows, passing motorists would note a handful of the nation's most ubiquitous chain stores, the usual smattering of pubs and disco bars, two Indians, a Chinese and an Italian. This plus a growing number of boarded-up shopfronts where family butcher's and baker's had once been, their former customers now drawn one or other of the two edge-of-town supermarkets. If the lights were kind, a motorist could hope to pass through in less than five minutes. Blink, and they'd miss it.

Unremarkable, yes - this was the adjective which sprang most readily to people's minds when attempting to describe the town of Ravensby. There were uglier, grimmer places, true, but much prettier, more dynamic ones also. Crime, house price and income levels all hovered on or around national averages. The comprehensive school was placed roughly midway in the school league tables. Even voting habits tended to reflect wider trends, the local constituency ranking amongst the top fifty key marginals.

Excitement was as relative as it was rare, a straw to be desperately clutched at. The beer-tented July fete on Meadows Park was often a well-attended event, for example, though as always with such things the capriciousness of the English summer would often conspire against best organisational efforts. Towards the end of November some low-level soap or reality star would usually be offered enough readies to make the trip over for the turning on of the Christmas lights; the weather again, however, could play a decisive role in the size of the turnout. Other than this, the older folk had to content themselves with their bridge evenings or 50s-themed evenings at the Community Centre; the late-teens and twenty-somethings with the usual pub crawl followed by a boogie at Tiffany's nightclub; their younger brothers and sisters with their bottles of cider and 'teenths of weed behind the burial mounds.