Val Prentice had never broken the law until she was sixty-one, and she had taken to it enormously.
She was not, she would tell you, a criminal. What she had done was print a lanyard.
You can do it at home in an afternoon, off a template, with the district council’s name on it, and put it in a plastic wallet that comes in a pack of ten. From that moment nobody in Alderford asked her a single question. Nobody ever read it. They read that she was wearing one, which is a shorter job and can be done from a distance while walking.
That is why, at twenty past ten on the last Saturday in June, she was painting the railings outside St Cuthbert’s church with three other offenders and a supervisor who was on the phone.
It was the day of the Alderford Show. It was already twenty-six degrees.
Audrey Frost had two hours left in which anybody in Alderford would see her alive.
She was at that moment round the corner in Sheep Street, photographing a bin that had been put out on the wrong day.
Four people took a break, and four methods.
Val stood with one foot up on the low wall. She had always put one foot on something when she stopped, and did not consider it a method. She was a tall woman who had spent forty years being told she was tall, and she kept her reading glasses on a chain because she had lost eleven pairs and stopped arguing about it.
Clive Bartram found somewhere to sit, checked it with the flat of his hand, took out his second handkerchief, and wiped the spot before sitting on it. Clive was here for contempt of court.
Terry Ellis did not have a method. Terry had an approach. He leaned against something, and if anybody came near it, he moved. Terry was here for a tree, and that was all anybody had got out of him about it.
Dani Sharpe took her break where she had been working, even when everybody else had moved. She was twenty-four, the only one of them who had grown up in Alderford, and she had her sleeves down over her hands in June. Dani was here for parking.
The supervisor was called Gethin Rees. He had a dog called Sandra in the back of his van with all four windows down, and he had been out to her twice. He walked her at six, because there was nobody at home to do it.
“What happens if it rains?” said Clive.
“We get wet,” said Gethin, from somewhere up the path.
“No. What happens to the hours?”
“Leave it with me,” said Gethin.
Dani came back from the shop with Gethin’s twenty-pound note still in her hand and no milk.
“They won’t take it,” she said.
“Won’t take what?”
“Money.” She held up the note. “For a bottle of milk. She looked at it like I’d handed her a mouse. Card only. It’s on the door, and I have been past that door a thousand times.”
“Then use a card,” said Clive.
“I don’t have a card.”
“Everybody has a card.”
“I don’t have a card,” said Dani, and sat down. “I’ve just stood at a counter, holding money, and been told I can’t buy milk.”
“That’s progress, that is,” said Terry.
“Did you photograph the door?” said Clive.
“Why would I photograph the door?”
“Because it is almost certainly unlawful.”
“It’s a shop, Clive.”
“There are four Acts,” said Clive. “The earliest is from 1882, the most recent is from 1954, none of them has been repealed, and I have written to the Bank of England, who replied in twelve days, which I thought was very good of them, and said it was a matter for the retailer.”
Val went and got the milk, paid for it by card, and put it on the wall next to Dani.
“You paid on a card.”
“I wanted a look at that sign,” said Val.
She had read it. It was A4, laminated, and had gone yellow along the top.
“There’s no name on it,” said Val. “It’s a sign telling people what they can and can’t do, and there’s no name on it and nobody to write to.” She wrote something on the back of her hand.
“You cannot write it on your hand,” said Clive.
“There’s nothing in the paperwork.”
“That does not mean you can make up your own system.”
“It’s not a system,” said Val. “It’s a hand.”
She got a tin out of her bag.
“Tin,” she said, and held it out.
“What’s in it?”
“Malt loaf.”
“Val. It is half ten in the morning.”
“There’s butter on it.”
There was a great deal of butter on it. They all had a slice.
She had brought a clipboard as well. It was on the wall beside the milk, unused, and she had had no business carrying it since April.
A lanyard does not get you a key. It gets you the benefit of the doubt. It gets a man on a digger to stop and listen. It gets you a reference number, and once you have a reference number you can ring back. And a person carrying a clipboard is never asked to move. She had tested this at a garden centre, in a hospital car park and once, briefly, at a wedding.
For six weeks earlier that year, Val Prentice was the most effective council officer in Shropshire.
She got the pavement outside the surgery mended. It had been up for seven months. It sat on a boundary, and the county said it was the district’s and the district said it was the county’s, and both of them were right, which is the worst kind. She did it in nine days.
She got the hedge on Chapel Bank cut back after five reports in two months had got nowhere.
She was caught by a compliment.
In February the district council held its Employee of the Year, which is decided by public nomination, and Val Prentice won it by a distance. The council then spent a fortnight trying to establish which of its staff she was. There is a photograph in the Advertiser from that March of the leader of the council holding a trophy with nobody standing beside him. He took it extremely personally.
The magistrate called it fraud by false representation. Val called it the most productive six weeks of her life, and said so, out loud, in the dock, which had not helped.
Alderford has no court, so she was sentenced forty minutes away in Ludworth, in a building with a car park that charges, to community payback.
Dani stood up.
“A woman is coming,” she said. “She’s holding a ruler.”