Page 64 of Autumn at the Oak Leaf Café
‘Right now?’
‘Right now. We’ll take them a couple of slices of cake to say thanks.’
Lizzie, the blonde-haired young librarian, was all too happy to take them upstairs to a back room, where Lawrence, an older computer technician with speckled grey hair asked them to sit on a ring of chairs around his oversized computer screen.
‘We have three cameras,’ he told them., ‘One that covers the library floor and the counter, one that faces out of the main lobby, and one that faces across the front courtyard towards your café. After Lizzie told me what happened, I had a look back over the digital footage, and this is what I found.’
He clicked a button and a grainy, odd-angled view of the front of the library appeared. The camera was high up on one wall, looking down across the library’s entrance. In the top back corner, beyond a line of trees, the side of the Oak Leaf Café was poking out. You couldn’t see the entrance, but you could see the side wall with the windows that faced the park.
‘As you can tell,’ Lawrence said, ‘this doesn’t show the broken window, so I think you’d struggle to use this as part of a court case. However, take a look at this.’
He pressed a button and the video playback began to reverse. People walked backwards at rapid speeds and the glow of the sun weakened as it retreated back below the horizon. Darkness fell in reverse, until Lawrence paused the video again.
‘Wait,’ he said.
The café area was dark, the video lit only by a single streetlight outside the library. A figure walked past, clearly a woman, but walking unsteadily on high-heeled shoes.
‘It appears that she’s had a little too much to drink,’ Lawrence said.
The figure, stumbling from side to side, walked across the courtyard and disappeared into the gloom. Then, a few seconds later, a light flashed on outside the café, illuminating the figure standing outside.
‘That’s the outside light,’ Madeline said. ‘It has a motion sensor.’
‘Watch her now,’ Lawrence said.
The figure stumbled against one of the outdoor tables. Then, leaning against it, she pulled off one of her shoes, lifted it like a club, then charged out of sight around the corner. She appeared again a couple of seconds later, the shoe still lifted over her shoulder. A couple more times she disappeared from sight, then finally, putting the shoe down on the tabletop she hobbled to the side of the café and appeared to pick something up off the floor. With the object in her hands, she disappeared around the side of the café again.
When she returned, she picked up her shoe and put it back on. As she started to walk, however, it became clear the heel had broken off, and she disappeared into the gloom, walking with an exaggerated limp that would have made any pirate proud.
‘TikTok will go crazy over this,’ Ruby said. ‘Especially if we put it to some decent music.’
‘Do you know that person?’ Lizzie asked, turning to Madeline.
Madeline stared at the video as Lawrence wound it back to before the woman’s unprovoked attack. She thought about it for a few seconds, then nodded. ‘I’m pretty sure I do,’ she said. ‘That was my former therapist, Doctor Janine Woodfield. She also happens to be my ex-boyfriend’s fiancée.’
‘It looks like she bashed the window in with her shoe then pushed a rock through the gap to make it look like that was how she had done it,’ Ruby said. ‘What a total fiend.’
‘She has plenty of motive to dislike me,’ Madeline said. ‘I’m her fiancé’s ex-girlfriend, I cancelled my sessions with her, and she also has this chip on her shoulder about our school days, when she claims I bullied her. It’s not true, by the way. We didn’t really have much interaction. I probably could have been nicer to her, but I just kind of ignored her like everyone else.’
‘This alone might not be enough to have her convicted of anything, but I imagine the police would be interested,’ Lawrence said.
‘Let me think about it,’ Madeline said.
Having copied the CCTV footage onto a USB, Madeline and Ruby thanked Lawrence and Lizzie and headed back to the café.
‘What are you going to do?’ Ruby asked.
Madeline just smiled. ‘I’m still thinking about it,’ she said.
28
Happy Autumn, Everyone
Jonas was sittingin front of the TV when he got home, watching the news, an excited look on his face.
‘You’ve got them,’ he said, pointing to the news segment, which, on first look, appeared to be something boringly political. ‘Trading Standards have opened an investigation into Snide and Company for shady business practices.’
‘Really?’
