Mr Finch
13th June 2025. 15:10. Location: Shrewsbury Police Station. Interview Room B. Subject: Betty Preece (82, Hope Parish Resident, Hon. Sec., Parish Tree-Warden Scheme, retired). Interviewing Officer: DC Sarah Thompson. Subject Cautioned.
(DC Thompson): Miss Preece, you are here today for a formal interview regarding the disappearance of Mr. Simon Finch, age 42, of London. You have been cautioned and are entitled to legal representation, which you have declined. Do you understand your rights?
(BETTY PREECE): (Betty shifts slightly in the plastic chair, smoothing the edge of her tweed jacket. Her grey eyes are cool and utterly calm as she looks at the young detective. She speaks with a quiet, polite intensity.) I understand my rights perfectly, Sarah. Though why one would decline an invitation to an interview is beyond me; one simply loses track of time otherwise. This entire investigation is difficult, when you were the one standing behind the elder bush.
(DC Thompson): You… you saw Mr. Finch?
(BETTY PREECE): It isn’t a crime to be looking out of one’s pantry window. Hope is terribly crowded, Sarah. You just have to know what isn’t moving.
(BETTY PREECE): He had the gait of an off-comer from the start. Town boots. The sort of thin-soled, black leather things that look very smart on an escalator in Birmingham, but turn into oiled butter the moment they touch the lower clay by the kissing-gate. I watched him miss the stile catch twice. A grown man, defeated by six inches of galvanized iron. When he shrieked—“Leave me alone!”—old Mrs Corfield’s collies didn’t even bother barking. They just shifted their haunches on the porch flagstones.
(DC Thompson): What did you do?
(BETTY PREECE): I didn’t step out from the hedge until he’d cleared the second gate and rattled the latch like a lunatic. The brambles had already had a good four inches out of his trousers; one could hear the wool tearing from thirty yards off. A dreadful, rasping sound. By the time he hit the tarmac by the old lime kiln, he was muttering about King Kong. He actually said it out loud. His chest was heaving like a pair of rotted bellows, steam rising off the nape of his neck into the cold fog.
(BETTY PREECE): Sarah, you must know that they always look at the hill as if it’s an escape route. People watch too much television; they think altitude confers dignity. They forget that once you take the top road past Bank Farm, the tarmac gives out at the sheep grid, the lane narrows to seven feet between six-foot sandstone banks, and you are effectively walking into a funnel.
(BETTY PREECE): I didn’t need to run. At eighty-two, running is an undignified enterprise that plays havoc with the hips. I simply took the track through my orchard, where the ground is level and the moss muffles a pair of Dunlop wellingtons completely. When I stepped into the middle of the road forty yards above him, the mist was thick enough that I must have looked like nothing more than an alder stump with a walking pole.
(DC Thomson) What did he do then?
(BETTY PREECE): He stopped dead. The breath went out of him with a wet whistle.) He actually whispered, “You. You were at the church.”
(DC Thompson): What was your response?
(BETTY PREECE): I was checking the latch on the vestry, Sarah. The draft rots the hymnals. I mentioned he’d dropped his papers back by the kissing-gate, and that he was bleeding on the primroses.
(BETTY PREECE): He didn’t look down at his shin. He just stared past my left shoulder, into the grey soup where the road bent away toward the ridge. He tried to sound dangerous by dropping his voice an octave, but he just sounded thoroughly chilled. He said, “They’re behind me. You don’t understand what they’ve brought with them.”
(BETTY PREECE): And I told him: If he meant the planning inspectors from Shropshire Council, they won’t be here before Thursday. And they don’t walk the hill in this fog.
(BETTY PREECE): I said, “Now, Mr—it is Mr Finch, isn’t it? The one who bought the Old Rectory out from under the diocesan trust?—perhaps you’d better come inside before you give yourself a coronary on council property.”
(BETTY PREECE): He didn’t move. But behind him, down in the woods he had just scrambled through, the bell in Holy Trinity’s tower began to toll. Not the Sunday peal. Not the death knell, either. Three short, flat strokes, followed by a pause long enough to make you think it was over—and then three more.
(BETTY PREECE): And I replied, as I will conclude this answer, Sarah: “No. That’s the committee. Come along, Mr. Finch. We haven’t got all afternoon, and the kettle’s already off the boil.”