‘None of them?’
‘Not once.’
Sociable lot, he thought.
‘Was there any bad feeling between them and any of the neighbours?’
‘Nah,’ he said, sitting back in his seat. ‘No issues I know of. Folks just thought they were a bit up themselves.’
‘Understandable,’ Penn said quietly, playing into the mood of the conversation.
‘I mean, some folks had nicknames for them, you know, like Mr and Mrs Snooty Pants but nothing nasty,’ he said as though remembering they were dead.
‘My DI said something about you doing odd jobs for the family. How did that come about?’
‘Mr Daynes put an advert in the local shop. Old school, like details on a card, asking for a bit of labouring, cutting lawns, mending fences, that sort of thing. It was just a phone number. I didn’t even know who I was ringing. I was surprised it was Mr Daynes, and he told me to pop round.’
‘And when was this?’
He thought for a second. ‘Probably about a year ago. He’d just had a hip operation and it was taking longer to heal.’
‘Go on,’ Penn urged.
‘Started off a couple of days a week. They’ve got eleven acres, you see, that they don’t really know what to do with. The area is spread across three fields. They don’t keep any animals or grow anything, but the land needs tending – trees pruning, fences mending, moles trappin’, that kind of thing.’
‘The moles were a problem?’ Penn asked.
‘Oh yeah, but not so much as the rabbits – them little bastards chew through anything. Kept eating the missus’s flower beds, tried everything to keep ’em out, but she wouldn’t hear of trapping. Okay for the ugly moles but not for the pretty bunnies,’ he said ruefully. ‘The mister wanted all the land kept spick and span. It was the look of it, you see. Well, for the most part anyway.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, there was one area that the mister wasn’t all that fussed about.’
The man before him was fully relaxed now, just as he’d intended. Reece obviously thought he was never going to be asked about being found inside a crime scene hiding under a teenager’s bed. Timing was everything.
‘What area?’
‘At the very edge of the property, east side. Told me to dump all the cuttings and grass along that edge. I wasn’t happy about it. I mean, legally you gotta keep the area accessible. You don’t have to put out a welcome mat, but you can’t obstruct it either.
‘The stile had been knackered for years, but folks had made a gap in the hedge to the right of it, and he kept trying to block it up. Kept waiting for the complaints to come, but the mister wasn’t bothered a bit about the Ramblers Association or—’
‘Hang on,’ Penn said, ‘are you telling me that there’s a public footpath that crosses the Dayneses’ property?’
Reece nodded. ‘Been there about two hundred years. Ain’t nothing he could do about it.’
‘So just about anyone can come off the pavement on the main road and find themselves within feet of the Dayneses’ home.’
‘Well, I suppose so, yeah, if they want to.’
‘Shit,’ Penn said, realising what this meant for their case.
Reece shrugged, not understanding the enormity of what he’d just said. ‘So can I go and have my smoke now?’
THIRTY
‘Does he really need water and are you going to drink the coffee I make?’ Rachel asked, turning to face her in the kitchen.
Kim shook her head as she stepped into a kitchen extension that had trapped every ounce of light available from a sheet of glass that led to the patio and a lantern roof above.