The Trouble on Regency Road by Emmy Ellis

Author:Emmy Ellis [Ellis, Emmy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Billy sighed at the knock on the door. Sherry had just been giving him an earful about the eggs in the fridge being off, so maybe the distraction of a visitor was welcome really. First thing, she’d muttered something to herself about trying to give him some leeway and stop nagging, but the egg discussion had disproved her claim.

She needed to try harder, and he needed to stop griping back at her. They’d never get to how they used to be if they kept doing that.

Yeoman stood at the door, Tanner by his side.

“Morning, Billy. Can we have a word?” Yeoman’s lips stretched into an apologetic smile. “Out here will do.”

Ah, that was better. Sherry couldn’t earwig then, although he swore the window was open a crack yesterday when Yeoman came. Did she think he was yakking about women to the coppers?

Billy stepped out onto the pavement and closed the door to. “What’s up?”

“Do you remember Oliver Elford?”

Billy nodded. “Yeah, he was the odd job man at Arms. Everyone knows him as the paedo weirdo now, though.”

“Yeah, we just found that out this morning, that he worked there. What was he like back then?”

“Nice fella as far as I recall. That paedo charge he got stuck with surprised me. I’d never seen him being funny like that with the girls there.”

A flash of suppressed memory came. His hands tied. A sock in his mouth.

Morgan frowned. “Well, he was bang to rights on that, so he must have behaved himself while at Arms. Not so much in Pinstone with that girl, though.”

“No.” It had been difficult to match the paedo side of Oliver to the one Billy knew as a kid. How did you get over a shock like that?

Back in the day, Oliver was fun, did all the washing, and he fixed the house up that time. New taps and pipes, and once Noah came, the pair of them got the place painted up nice. Helen had made new curtains on her sewing machine, Noah helping. Billy’s were navy-blue and had red cartoon aeroplanes all over them. As he always kept them open, he never got to see the planes fully, just glimpses of them on the pleats.

“Then you’d know him if you saw him again?” Yeoman asked.

“Yeah. I’ve spotted him around recently. Didn’t speak to him, though.”

“So it wasn’t him who possibly went to Fay’s then?”

“Nah, this one was much older. Like, seventy.”

“What about Noah Tate?”

Billy’s heart rate scattered. He had mixed feelings about Noah. The man had been kind to him, one of the adults he’d actively sought out, but something in the back of his mind prodded now, that things weren’t as wonderful as he remembered, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

“He was nice, too. Did the veg patch and the gardening, helped Oliver.”

“We heard you spent a lot of time with him.”

An uncomfortable feeling crept up Billy’s back. Who’d been gossiping about him? It can’t have been Fay because she couldn’t talk. Helen? “Yeah.

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